A small crowd surrounded the agent in the department’s main nerve center, a room where all intelligence flowed before being distributed to the various case officers. Colonel Avraham Arnan, Brill’s direct superior, was focusing on one photograph.

Next, the Israel Air Force flew reconnaissance aircraft along the border and took pictures of what was happening on the ground. But because of Egyptian surface-to-air missiles, the aircraft had to fly at high altitudes, rendering the pictures of little or no value. That left the IDF with one viable alternative—live agents on the ground in Egypt, pa

The year was 1968, and in the hyper-intensive intelligence atmosphere of the time, this was big news. Brill, a major in IDF Military Intelligence Directorate—known by its Hebrew acronym, Aman—set aside the report he was reading and got up.

The “agent” was one of the first Israeli spies to successfully infiltrate Egypt since the Six Day War had ended, a year earlier. He had photos that were supposed to reveal Egyptian war plans, including possible preparations behind the cease-fire line.

“What do you think it is?” he asked the group of analysts. “It looks like a military bridge.” It was, and Egypt had moved the bridge to less than a mile from the Suez Canal, the strategic waterway that connected the world of commerce but separated Egypt from the territory it had lost to Israel during the Six Day War. The bridge could be used by tan

Five years after the devastating Yom Kippur War, Israel’s diplomats were bracing for their first attempt at peace with an Arab country. Not just any Arab country, but the biggest—Egypt.