Sublime

I was asked by Oded Messer, operation officer of Yitzhak Sadeh, to bring our M-2 mortars to another battlefield, Iraq al-Manshiyya. We fired several shells from this canon, which had a barrel made from a train wagon axle. This weapon was quite effective. It was not heavy and could be carried by hand, unlike the M-3, which was heavy and dangerous. I

According to Asher Asher, Israel Pelach developed an infrared lamp to illuminate targets at night (42).

An Egyptian battleship, The King Farouk, anchored near Gaza, and the Israeli Navy planned to attack it with a torpedo. Yohai Ben-Nun (who in the 1960s became commander of Israel’s naval forces as a rear admiral) volunteered to fire the torpedo. He was certain that the Egyptian vessel would be hit and that its sailors would jump overboard. If this h

SAYERET MATKAL In 1957, Avraham Arnan, an unorthodox and entrepreneurial officer of the HUMINT unit of the Intelligence Corps, established a new unit subordinated directly to the head of AMAN. Designated Unit 269, the innovative new group was Sayeret Matkal, the GHQ Reconnaissance Unit. The personnel of this unit consisted of first-rate warriors, w

During my service as a policeman, I participated in a reconnaissance-commanding course. We surveyed Arab villages near our neighborhood. In those days, we did not have cameras with which to take pictures of enemy “objects.” Instead, we employed the techniques used by Gary Cooper in the film For Whom the Bells Tolls and drew them (Picture 7). This w

This specialist unit, under the command of Avraham Arnan, was subordinated to the director of AMAN and evolved, after a few years, into the elite unit known as Sayeret Matkal.