And that was enough. In early 1954, only five months after Unit 101 had been established, Dayan merged it with the Paratroopers Brigade, with Sharon as one of the battalion commanders. Dayan believed that Unit 101 had become a model—of training and discipline, of dedication and skill—that Sharon could replicate with the paratroops and then in the

IN APRIL 1964, AMIT sent Rafi Eitan to Paris, which served as the European nerve center of Israeli intelligence, to run Junction’s operations on the Continent. Up to this point, all of Junction’s efforts to enlist one of the scientists had come to naught, mostly because of the rigid security precautions instituted by Vallentin. From day to day, he

The air force began conducting intensive training in night interception, a difficult operation, given the technological capabilities available at the time. Ben-Gurion and Dayan decided that Israel would do all it could to conceal its involvement, and try to make it look as if the plane had crashed because of a technical fault. The mission was

THE ALLIANCE OF A terrorist organization, a pariah theocracy, and a modernized nation-state allowed a sprawling network of guerrillas, self-styled revolutionaries, and criminal thugs to operate with an unusually robust level of military efficiency. The leaders of the countries and the organization developed strategy and supplied matériel for an

Its fighters were Mistaravim who would work undercover, generally posing as Arabs, deep inside Palestinian territory, and hit the people on the wanted list. The nucleus of Duvdevan comprised graduates of elite IDF units, particularly the naval commandos.

Ben-Gurion had forbidden the employment of any former members of the right-wing underground in government departments, and many of them were jobless, frustrated, and hungry for action. The Shin Bet believed that some of them were dangerous and were liable to start underground movements against the regime. Harel aimed to kill two birds: to set up

Dagan dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and enlisted in Sayeret Matkal, the elite force that carried out secret missions over enemy lines (and was also the forge from which many of Israel’s later military and civilian leaders emerged). Of the thirty IDF recruits who volunteered for Sayeret Matkal in August 1963, only fourteen

Lehi, the most radical of the Zionist underground movements fighting the British in the early 1940s. Though Lehi was the acronym for the Hebrew phrase “fighters for the freedom of Israel,” the British considered it a terrorist organization, referring to it dismissively as the Stern Gang, after its founder, the romantic ultra-nationalist Avraham

IBRAHIM OTHMAN