Sublime

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.

I reported to the same jumble of buildings on the same base where I’d arrived a decade earlier as an eighteen-year-old fresh from basic training, when Sayeret Matkal was still a gleam in Avraham Arnan’s eye. Now, I would be the first sayeret commander to have served in the unit as a soldier and young officer. Avraham’s initial ambitions had been mo

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