Shadow Strike

Artificial border lines drawn a century earlier with a pencil and ruler were proven worthless by a force that used pickup trucks carrying five men dressed in black fatigues and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

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repercussion the previous summer, and while there was talk about coalition airstrikes and the global threat the Islamic State posed Europe, the West had pretty much fallen into a routine. Countries condemned Syria’s leader but never took action. It was still a few months before the US would finally step up its involvement and launch airstrikes against ISIS targets throughout the country.

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But that July, the Islamic State announced that it had completed its takeover of Deir ez-Zor, the primary hub of Syria’s oil and natural gas industry and a place—like many in the Middle East—rich in history, blood and violence. During Roman times, Deir ez-Zor was an important trading post. A few centuries later, it changed hands and became part of the ancient

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The Israeli government was carefully tracking what was happening in Syria. From its perspective, the war there had nothing to do with Israel, and therefore there was very little it could do to make a genuine difference. Yes, it felt a moral imperative to help the people being massacred and, as a result, established a field hospital along the border to treat the wounded. But it knew that it had to be careful not to be dragged into the war over the border. If it was, Israel’s involvement would be used by Assad to claim that the civil war was actually a Zionist plot, which would help him garner greater support at Israel’s expense.

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bribes when he was mayor of Jerusalem, about a decade earlier, and sentenced him to six years in prison. Olmert wasn’t giving up and was in the midst of finalizing his appeal to the Supreme Court.

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what would have happened had he listened to those who had urged him not to act. He imagined how Israeli history would have been changed forever. Israel would have found itself living under an unimaginable threat, and ISIS, he knew, would have come into possession of a nightmarish capability, morphing it from a ruthless terrorist group into an existential threat not just for Israel, but for the entire Western world.

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Today, Israel is surrounded by terrorist organizations with growing weapons arsenals, in countries—like Syria, Lebanon and Egypt—whose regimes are constantly teetering on the precipice of survival. While this has an upside—Israeli territory is less at risk of being conquered—the regional situation carries with it an unprecedented sense of uncertainty

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When protests first broke out in Syria in 2011, Israeli and American intelligence agencies were sure that the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, would not survive: that he would meet the same fate as Mubarak or Gaddafi. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who at the time served as defense minister, said that Assad’s regime was just weeks away from falling. Others believed the same but Assad proved them all wrong, utilizing some of the most vicious military tactics available to ensure his survival, including dropping chemical

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When the war first erupted, Israel’s focus was on how to stay out of the fight with the exception of two red lines that, when crossed, moved the IDF into action. The first was the transfer of advanced weapons—like ballistic missiles and surface-to-air missile systems—from Syria to Hezbollah, Israel’s arch nemesis in Lebanon. The second: when it identified Iranian efforts to establish bases on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. Since 2011, over 200 such Israeli strikes have targeted these bases and convoys. All of the strikes were carried out discreetly, with Israel maintaining a policy of ambiguity. It never confirmed responsibility for the strikes but when asked, Israel didn’t deny that it had been behind them either.

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wreckage, Israel discovered that the drone had been packed with explosives, and was likely on its way to crash and explode on a nearby IDF base. The drone was Iranian and was called Saegheh. It was a copy of America’s RQ-170, an advanced stealth drone made by Lockheed Martin, one of which had crashed in Iran in 2011.

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Israel retaliated swiftly and aggressively. The three remaining aircraft launched the rest of their missiles at a dozen more Iranian and Syrian targets throughout the country, including the surface-to-air missile battery that had downed the F-16. Had the aircrew been killed, had they not ejected in time, Israel might have felt compelled to escalate its response.

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Had Israel not blocked Syria’s nuclear aspirations in 2007, would it have been able to take preemptive military action to stop the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah, or would its hands have been tied out of fear that Assad would retaliate with nuclear weapons? What about his own people? Assad used gas against them. Would he have used nuclear weapons if he’d had them? Despite the years that have passed, even the smartest intelligence

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Then there is North Korea. North Korea helped Syria build its nuclear reactor. The isolated regime in Pyongyang sold nuclear technology to Damascus at the same time as it was conducting negotiations with the world to curtail its own illicit nuclear program.

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we bear witness to the dangers that lurk around the globe; to how radical regimes, without ideological linkage, work closely to proliferate the most devastating weapon known to mankind. And this story shows how two countries—Israel and the United States—joined hands to stop them.

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early years to the rockets and terror threats it faces today along its northern and southern borders. What most people don’t know is that Israel is the only country in the world to have attacked and destroyed two nuclear reactors in two different enemy countries. No other country has taken such action. It is worth keeping this in mind as the world continues to debate how to solve its current challenges.

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In both cases—Iraq and Syria—Israel made use of its Top Gun–style air force to eliminate threats it viewed as existential dangers, doing, in both cases, what military planners and politicians thought wasn’t humanly or technically possible.

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in Israel as the Begin Doctrine, a reference to Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister who ordered the 1981 strike against the Osirak reactor in Iraq. According to the unwritten doctrine, the Jewish state will always use military force to prevent its enemies from obtaining nuclear weapons.

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“Israel cannot afford the introduction of the nuclear weapon,” Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister and defense minister, said after the bombing of Osirak.2 “For us, it is not a question of balance of terror but a question of survival. We shall therefore have to prevent such a threat at its inception.”

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But even if the Begin Doctrine exists, it does not mean that Israel will always be able to implement

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An attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities is not comparable to the two previous strikes against the Syrian and Iraqi reactors that Israel has carried out. In those two cases, the targets consisted of one main facility, aboveground without protection by advanced air defense systems. In each case, destroying that single facility was enough to set back and delay the country’s nuclear program. In Iran, though, the ayatollahs have learned lessons from Osirak and al-Kibar and have scattered their nuclear facilities throughout the country.

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The man the trio had gathered to meet was Meir Dagan, the renowned and feared head of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary foreign spy agency and the equivalent of the CIA. A few days earlier, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had called President George W. Bush and told him that Dagan would be coming to Washington with some important information. “I’d appreciate if you could meet him,” Olmert told Bush.

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leaders, including two prime ministers—Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu. But he didn’t get in, failing to pass the grueling selection process. Instead, Dagan was drafted into the Paratrooper’s Brigade, where he slowly climbed the ranks, earning a reputation as a brave soldier and brilliant tactician along the way. His undercover experience and creative mind soon made him a key player in countering the Palestinian terror threat emanating from the Gaza Strip.

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In January 1971, for example, Dagan—then a young captain—was leading a convoy of military jeeps through Jabalya, a Palestinian refugee camp north of Gaza City. On the way, a taxi passed Dagan’s car. While it drove by quickly, Dagan—whose mind was always sharp and acutely vigilant to his surroundings—was able to identify one of the passengers as Abu Nimar, a known terrorist Israel had been hunting for some time. He caught up with the cab and ordered it to pull over. The soldiers took up positions around the vehicle as Dagan approached the passenger seat where Abu Nimar was sitting. Abu Nimar got out of the car and pulled out a grenade, yanked the pin and yelled: “We are all going to die.” Dagan shouted to his troops to take cover as he lunged directly at Abu Nimar and headbutted him with his helmet. As Abu Nimar fell to the ground, Dagan grabbed the Palestinian’s hand and succeeded in securing the grenade before it could explode, an act for which he was later awarded the IDF Medal of Honor.

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Abu Nimar was arrested and sentenced to a lengthy prison term. A few months after his capture, he expressed willingness to become an informant for Israel but had a condition—he wanted to meet the man who in a singular moment had both taken him prisoner and saved his life. Dagan agreed to the meeting and helped turn Abu Nimar into one of Israel’s most strategic intelligence assets.

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Dagan took that mission statement seriously. After his appointment, reports began to surface of setbacks to Iran’s nuclear program. Scientists began to disappear and equipment sent to Iran for its nuclear program arrived broken, believed to have been sabotaged. Warehouses in Europe where equipment for Iran’s nuclear program was stored mysteriously went up in flames. In 2005, for example, Iran was plagued by a number of mysterious plane crashes, killing dozens of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers and several senior officers. All of the above was secretly attributed to the Mossad.

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Just months earlier, Ehud Olmert, who had succeeded Sharon as prime minister, decided to extend Dagan’s term by a sixth year. In 2008, he would extend it by yet another, making Dagan one of the longest-serving heads of Mossad in Israel’s history.

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diplomat who headed the IAEA from 1997 to 2009. Israel believed ElBaradei was being too soft on Iran, so some agents came up with an idea to deposit large amounts of money in one of his bank accounts and then leak that he was being paid off by the Iranians.

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While Aman is far larger in resources and budgets than the Mossad, it does not conduct covert operations in faraway places like Europe. That

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The suspicions didn’t come out of nowhere. When Libya announced in 2003 that it was dismantling its nuclear program, Israel was completely shocked. It had no clue that Gaddafi was developing a nuclear program, let alone one that was so advanced. A state commission of inquiry was set up by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and it came back with clear recommendations for the country’s intelligence agencies, which were already worried about what else they might be missing.

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When it became clear that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist who peddled nuclear technology around the world, had helped Libya start its program, Israel decided to look back at where else he had visited over the years. One of the countries was Syria.

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“Intelligence work is about putting together a puzzle that consists of 1,000 pieces and all we had at the time was about 100,” one senior intelligence officer involved in those efforts explained. “The picture was far from being complete.”

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The most senior nuclear scientist in Syria, Othman received his doctorate in physics from University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and served for some time as a member of the American Nuclear Society. An expert on radiation protection, Othman at the time had authored more than 50 articles on nuclear safety and was cited in dozens more. In 2004, for example, Othman wrote an article for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in which he called for the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. He issued the typical Arab condemnations of Israel, which he wrote was the primary source of instability in the Middle East due to its purported nuclear arsenal.

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The young men and women sent on the mission to Vienna were part of the Mossad’s Keshet Branch, known for covert overseas operations that involved collecting data and breaking into apartments and hotel rooms.14 Despite the months that had passed since the war, many of them were still frustrated by being left out of it. Many of the Mossad’s operatives

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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, responsible for providing satellite imagery to support US intelligence operations, had classified the building as “enigmatic,” a category within the US intelligence community that meant the target was important but had an unknown and mysterious purpose. With Dagan’s photos, the purpose was now becoming clear.

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then, Hayden had been able to digest his meeting with Dagan and prepare his presentation. Israel, he now assumed, had decided to share the intelligence with the CIA because as much as the Mossad thought it knew, there was a great deal it didn’t. It was a normal facet of the CIA-Mossad relationship. Due to its size and almost unlimited resources and capabilities, the CIA will always be richer and have a wider and more global reach. Smaller partners, like Israel, will always be more focused on their region, more detail-oriented and more adaptable when it comes to the specific linguistics and cultures in the target country. The sharing of intelligence on the nuclear reactor is a perfect example of how that “marriage”—as

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office. “You’re going to be read into an intelligence program,” Gates told him. “You’re going to be looking at intelligence that has been provided to us by one of our allies. This is going to be very, very restricted.” Edelman went over to the CIA, where he signed some papers and received a briefing on the reactor. He later joked that to get the security clearance he had to do everything short of signing away his firstborn child. “Go over this with a fine-tooth comb,” Gates told him.

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scale military strike. The problem, the Israelis pointed out in their discussions with Hayden and members of the Drafting Group, was that a strike against the pumping station would tip off Assad that his greatest secret, his most prized possession, had been discovered. Within hours, buses filled with schoolchildren would be there and then, even 100 UN Security Council resolutions would not be able to stop him. Due to the potential loss of civilian lives, military action would be off the table.

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From the beginning, Cheney felt that America should attack. He was a strong proponent of preemptive military action and pushed hard for the president to approve a strike. He believed that a military strike against Syria would also send a powerful message to Iran, which had its own nuclear ambitions. By attacking Syria, Cheney argued, the US might even be able to get Assad to cut off

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Rice, it seemed, carried some personal baggage from the rocky relationship she had with Olmert. One particular incident was burned in her memory. It took place on July 30 at the height of the Second Lebanon War, when a bomb dropped the previous night by the IAF landed inside a building in the southern Lebanese village of Kana. The bomb had failed to detonate upon impact but exploded hours later.

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Dozens of people, including children, were reportedly killed. Rice happened to be in Israel that day as part of her shuttle-diplomacy efforts to get Israel and Lebanon to agree to a cease-fire. The explosion took place just before a scheduled meeting with Israel’s defense minister at the time, Amir Peretz. But Peretz didn’t say a word about it. Instead, one of Rice’s assistants interrupted the meeting to show her an email he had received from the US ambassador in Beirut. When she asked Peretz about it, the Israeli defense minister admitted that he had known about the attack before the meeting began.

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“Boss,” he said, “let me give you a kind of a condensed version of Israeli military history.” The IDF’s record, he went on to explain, is “one of unremitting failures followed by extremely fast recovery.” There was the expansion of the pre-state Jewish paramilitary force Haganah after the Hebron riots in 1929, the establishment of the elite Unit 101 after the failure of the retaliatory raids against Palestinian terrorism in the 1950s, and more.

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“What you should expect is that after 2006 there will be a really rapid recovery and focus on the basics,” he said. “Besides, in 2006 the Israeli Air Force actually did very well, all things considered, taking down

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the long-range missiles. So actually, I would expect them to perform quite well and I think you’re making a mistake if you think that Olmert won’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

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For Cheney this was ridiculous. Trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, was a “disease” that afflicted all secretaries of state. Each one, he would tell people, thinks they are going to solve the conflict. The problem is that no one ever does. The same would happen in this case, he predicted, and instead of exacting a price from Syria, it would get a free pass because of a cause—the Palestinians—that simply wasn’t worth

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While Gates agreed with Rice in objecting to an attack, his approach was different and was based mostly on a desire to stay out of another war in the Middle East. “Every US presidential administration gets to have one preemptive war against a Muslim state, and we’ve already had ours in this administration,” Gates told Edelman one day. “I don’t think the US should do it.”

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The lesson, Cheney explained, was simple. “Had Admiral Nimitz refused to act on intelligence warnings in the aftermath of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, the outcome of the war in the Pacific may well have been different,” the vice president said. “I was afraid we were doing just that in this case.”9

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But, Hayden continued, there was one major problem. The CIA, he said, could not find the other parts of Syria’s weapons program. They couldn’t find the reprocessing facility or the so-called weapons team, the scientists and engineers tasked with assembling the final nuclear bomb or warhead.

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The moment Hayden said the words “low confidence,” the final decision was pretty much predictable. The war in Iraq, and particularly the intelligence failure that got it started, hung over the people present in the room like a guillotine. No one wanted to be caught again approving a war based on intelligence that ultimately ended with a “low confidence” assessment.

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Bush turned to Gates, who had brought some prepared remarks. Gates’s opinion was strongly shaped by the two wars already raging in the Middle East. The military, he said, was overstretched, and the US was already considered by most countries as being too quick to use military force. “Without specific proof of a state taking hostile action against Americans, I am aware of no precedent for an American surprise attack against a sovereign state,” Gates said. “We don’t do Pearl Harbors.”12

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Gates concluded his remarks by noting that although he agreed the reactor needed to be stopped he thought the US should not assume that it could solve all of its problems in Syria by bombing it. His preferred course of action, he said, was diplomacy. “I suspect no one in the world doubts this administration’s willingness to use force,” Gates told the president. “But better to use it as

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Cheney saw this as his opening. Repeating what he had told Bush during their private lunch a few days earlier, he made the case for US military action. Cheney reminded the group of the marker Bush had laid down after North Korea’s nuclear test six months earlier. “It is extraordinarily important for us to give substance and meaning to our diplomacy and this is a classic opportunity to do that,” he said. “Not only

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would it make the region and the world safer but it would also demonstrate our seriousness with respect to non-proliferation,” he added.

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The vice president argued passionately, stressing that a US strike would enhance American credibility in the Middle East. “Within days of when we captured Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi announced he was going to surrender his nuclear materials to us and he did, and we got centrifuges and the uranium feed stock and the weapons designs which all reside in the United States today,” Cheney said. “That is a direct result of our use of force against Saddam.” If done right, Cheney said, the use of force against Syria’s nuclear reactor could have a similar effect not just on Syria’s other rogue activities but also on North Korea,

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and anyone else thinking of getting into the illegal nuclear business. The world needed to see, the vice president continued, that America meant business and “if you’re gonna proliferate nuclear reactors, or nuclear technology you’re gonna get hit.”

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When World War II broke out, Begin joined the Free Polish Army and was sent to fight in Palestine. A year later, the Nazis arrived in his hometown, rounded up his father and a group of 500 Jews and drowned them in a nearby river. Weeks later, his mother was pulled out of her hospital bed and murdered. By 1943, the 30-year-old Begin had become head of the Irgun, an underground Zionist paramilitary group that had broken off from the Haganah. When he took over, the organization was falling apart. It had few members and even fewer guns. Begin put the organization back on track with a series of deadly attacks, including his most famous—the bombing in 1946 of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people. It was a horrific attack but Begin viewed it as being part of a simple equation—the British had to withdraw from Palestine for Israel to be established. This meant that even devastating attacks like this were legitimate. The Holocaust cast a large shadow over Begin’s political career. It is what is believed to have ultimately motivated him to accept an invitation to Camp David in 1978 and to agree to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula

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size of the river, going on and on as far as the eye could see from a perch in a fast-flying F-16 fighter jet. Israel, he thought, did not have rivers that size. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a group of Iraqi soldiers waving enthusiastically at the low-flying unmarked planes. A few minutes later, Yadlin was diving down toward the reactor and dropping his pair of Mk-84 bombs. The other pilots followed suit and for the first time in history, one country—Israel—had destroyed another country’s nuclear reactor from the air. Israel was once again changing modern warfare.

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Commander of Aman is one of the most important positions in Israel but is, at the same time, also one of the most challenging.

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Already, some parts of Washington were pushing a theory that Israel had pressured Bush to attack Iraq. “Is that what you want?” Bush asked Olmert. “Let us take care of it.” Bush said Rice would arrive in Israel on Monday and hold a joint press conference with Olmert during which the two would reveal the existence of the reactor and set into motion the diplomatic process needed to take it down. Abrams thought Olmert would listen and ask for a day to consult with his staff before responding. He was wrong. Olmert responded immediately and forcefully. “Mr. President,” he started. “I understand your reasoning and your arguments but don’t forget that the ultimate responsibility for the security of the State of Israel rests on my shoulders and I’ll do what needs to be done and trust me—I will destroy the atomic reactor. “This is something that hits at the very serious nerves of this country,” he continued. “I must be honest and sincere with you. Your strategy is very disturbing to me.”

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vent. “Have at it,” he said when wrapping up the conversation. “We will not get in your way.” Olmert had one last request. “Whoever knows, knows,” Olmert said. “But from now on, I urge you to make sure that it will not spread since the only advantage we have is that they do not know that we know. So please, Mr. President, make sure that no one speaks.” Bush completely agreed: “I’ll be buttoned up, my friend.” When the call ended, Bush surprised Abrams and Hadley with his reaction. “That guy has guts,” the president said. “None of this is going to leak. Everybody just shut up.”

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military assistance, no. For Hadley, the reaction was typical Bush. “That is the kind of leader he admired and that is the kind of leader Olmert showed to be,” Hadley explained years later. “Olmert said that this is an existential threat to the State of Israel and the Jewish people and I am not willing to leave the elimination of that threat in anyone else’s hands, even in the hands of the US, Israel’s best friend in the world. Bush’s decision was that he respected that.”

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of destroying the reactor and “I am going to say this again in the middle and at the end.” But, he said, “we need to be smart how we are going to go about doing this.” “We need to do it in a way that there is confidence we will destroy it and, at the same time, allow Assad to pretend nothing happened,” Barak told the forum.

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Meanwhile, at Aman headquarters in Tel Aviv, Yadlin’s top analysts came up with a new concept—“the Deniability Zone.” It was the brainchild of Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, head of Aman’s research department, a brilliant intelligence analyst and

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Baidatz’s idea was simple. If Israel attacked but remained silent and did not “stick the reactor in his face,” there was a good chance that Assad would restrain himself and refrain from retaliating.

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Throughout this period, Aman and the Mossad consulted with expert psychologists and psychoanalysts to try and predict what Assad would do after the bombing. During one meeting with the prime minister, the analysts were surprised to discover that Olmert had actually studied psychology in university. While Olmert’s academic background helped, it was still a difficult prediction to make. Predictions are easy when they are based on facts, not on what a single person will do. “If you ask me technical questions like how many planes does Assad have or how many missiles does he have and what can they all potentially do, I can answer with

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explained to Olmert. But trying to predict what is going on in the mind of a foreign leader is always going to be harder since it depends on so many different factors that are almost impossible to take into account. The dry facts could strongly suggest that Assad would not retaliate, Yadlin later explained. But what happens if he has a fight with his wife the night before? This might motivate him to decide to retaliate without us even knowing why. “To know what a leader, who doesn’t even know that you have discovered his secret, will do is very complicated,” Yadlin said. “We have to be modest.”

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we do and whether we remain quiet. “If you don’t stay quiet you will be responsible for the war that comes,” the IDF chief warned the ministers. “We have to give Assad the opportunity to lie.”

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As the troops were moving into the Palestinian territory, Israeli intelligence managed to locate the most wanted and elusive man in Gaza: Mohammed Deif, the notorious leader of Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam military wing. This was the group behind some of the most vicious terrorist attacks against Israel. Deif had been an Israeli target for years but always managed to slip away. Locating him was one of those rare moments in

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At air force headquarters, the dimensions of the building where Deif was hiding were being analyzed, and experts there were carefully selecting the bomb that would be dropped. It had to be small enough to limit collateral damage but large enough to get the job done and kill the man who for years had managed to elude Israel.

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The intelligence was checked and rechecked. Deif appeared, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be in the building and the commanders were confident enough to go ahead with the strike. The green light was finally given and the F-16 fighter jets took off toward their target, a three-story concrete apartment building in the Gaza City neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan. At 3:00 a.m. the bomb was dropped. It scored a direct hit, demolishing the building. Deif was inside but somehow, despite sustaining serious injuries, emerged alive. Nine others were killed.

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occupied all of the western land of Israel. And then what would happen? We would become one state. But that state would want to be democratic, there would be general elections—and we would be in the minority. Thus, when the question arose of the wholeness of the land without a Jewish state, or a Jewish state without the wholeness of the land, we chose a Jewish state without the wholeness of the land.”

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Olmert went on. “In the near future leaders of this nation will need to gather all of their spiritual strength and Zionist beliefs to determine our future … and justify a painful compromise for peace.”

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minister, and said: “Nu, what you do think? Look who’s become a Ben-Gurionist.”1

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Operation Specific Weight had been in the planning for years. The Mossad had led the charge, gaining access to Hezbollah’s most carefully guarded secret—the location of its long-range rockets. These were not the Katyusha rockets, 4,300 of which would pound Israel during the 34 days of the war, but were Iranian-made Fajr artillery rockets, which had a range of nearly 100 kilometers and the ability to strike deep inside Israel like never before.

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Olmert agreed and the cabinet voted to strike. The operation took place that night. Sixty-eight targets were attacked by dozens of aircraft in an operation that lasted less than 40 minutes. Almost 100 percent of Hezbollah’s Fajr arsenal was destroyed. While the success gave Olmert and the IDF confidence, it also pushed Hezbollah to escalate its rocket onslaught against Israel.

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What Olmert didn’t know at this initial stage was that he would never be able to publicly take credit for the bombing of the Syrian reactor. It would remain an operation that, for more than a decade, Israel would neither confirm nor deny. It was a vow of silence he would personally take and an order he would enforce with others.

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Olmert was facing genuine political trouble, and Israel is a place where, when politicians smell blood, they pounce and rarely leave survivors. In addition, Israeli politicians are known to not be above using security situations for political gain. Olmert was bloody from the war and extremely vulnerable. Taking credit for a successful operation would have given him a much-needed boost. For any politician staying

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For missions of this kind, Sayeret Matkal usually has months to prepare. Sometimes, operators get assigned a mission a year in advance. Depending on the complexity, the operation becomes their lives. They train for it and build mock targets to practice. They live and breathe the operation. But sometimes, the missions get nixed. Military statistics show that a Sayeret Matkal operator usually trains for three or four special operations during his military service. Fifty percent get canceled.

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Sayeret Matkal, which operates under Aman, is known for some of Israel’s most breathtaking operations. During the 2006 Second Lebanon War,

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the commandos ran a number of special operations. One brought them deep into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a known Hezbollah stronghold, where the IDF wrongly thought the two abducted reservists were being held. Other operations included sabotaging Iranian arms convoys en route to Hezbollah.

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For this mission, the battle procedure

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The core part of the mission took just a few minutes. When they were done digging, another soldier walked around with a device that looked like a small broom to make sure that they hadn’t left any tracks. The last thing they needed was a Syrian army patrol discovering the holes a few days later. Nothing could be left behind.

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Shkedi enlisted in the air force in 1975 and became one of Israel’s first F-16 pilots, making a name for himself as a professional and daring combat operator. As head of the IAF, Shkedi helped hone Israel’s targeted killing policy—a method based on a unique combination of quality intelligence and precise airstrikes—later replicated by the US and other Western countries in their own battles against terrorists across the globe.

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accurate, it was capable of blowing up—without harming any bystanders—a single room in a high-rise apartment building or a lone car or motorcycle driving down a busy road.

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Under his watch, intelligence-gathering methods also underwent modifications, with stricter procedures put in place to tighten control over the decision-making process that leads to a targeted killing. It was a unique combination of innovative thinking, accurate missiles, high-quality intelligence and advanced command-and-control systems. With targeted killings, Israel saw a drop in collateral damage and civilian casualties. In 2002, for example, the combatant-civilian death ratio was 1:1, meaning that for every combatant Israel killed, it also killed

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out of sight and make the whole gesture almost meaningless. The day of the flight, though, Shkedi decided that the flight would be below the clouds so the planes could be seen by a group of IDF officers who, at the same time, would be holding a memorial ceremony along the train tracks, which decades earlier had been used to transport over a million Jews to their deaths. The picture of the three F-15s over Auschwitz—a demonstration of Israel’s might and independence—can be found today in hundreds of IDF offices. Most of the pictures were given out personally by Shkedi, who wrote on all of them: “To remember. Not to forget. To rely only on ourselves.”

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In 2003, four F-16s buzzed Assad’s summer residence in the seaside resort town of Latakia in retaliation for the killing of a young Israeli boy by Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon. Israel wanted to humiliate Assad—who was vacationing there at the time—and send him a message to restrain his Lebanese terror proxy. The planes flew so low, they reportedly shattered some of the palace windows. Some months later, the air force bombed an Islamic Jihad training base in Syria in response to a suicide bombing that killed 19 people. And in 2006, after the abduction of Shalit, Israeli fighter jets again buzzed the Latakia residence to remind Assad of the price he would pay personally for giving refuge to Hamas’s leadership in Damascus.

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The War Room, the IDF’s main command center, is where the chief of staff oversees military operations. He has a seat in the middle of a long table lined with computers and phones of different colors, depending on their level of encryption. Each screen shows a feed from a different sensor: naval vessels, satellites or drones.

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brother’s death, which the Syrians later suspected had been orchestrated by the Mossad, in London where he was pursuing a postgraduate degree in ophthalmology from Western Eye Hospital. He immediately returned home to a grieving father who now had to transform his eye-doctor son into a ruthless leader like himself. Over the next six years, Bashar underwent military training and was appointed chairman of the Syrian Computer Society, the country’s domain registration authority and a position once held by Bassel. By 2000, before his father died of a heart attack, Bashar had obtained the rank of brigadier general and was in charge of the Lebanon portfolio. Hafez knew he was dying and wanted to give Bashar the best head start possible. For Michael Hayden, the head of the CIA, the Assads were like the Corleone family from the Godfather trilogy. Bassel, Hayden explained, was like Sonny, the son who was gunned down at the Long Beach Causeway toll plaza. To replace Sonny, Michael returned from exile in Sicily to lead the family, similar to the way Bashar returned to Damascus from London. But unlike in The Godfather, in which Vito Corleone was able to rely on his talented youngest son, Michael, to lead the family, “in many ways, Hafez had to settle for Fredo,” Hayden said, in reference to Vito Corleone’s weaker and unsuccessful second son. The day after his father’s death, on June 11, 2000, Bashar Assad was unanimously nominated

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Baath Party as president. The parliament amended Article 83 of the Syrian constitution, which required that the president be at least 40 years old, to 34, Bashar’s exact age at the time. Three days later, in a national referendum, Bashar received 97.29 percent of the vote. It didn’t hurt that he was the only candidate.1 In Israel, Mossad and Aman were keeping a careful eye on Syria. In the mid-1990s, Israel and Syria had held a number of rounds of peace talks but they all had failed. Consecutive Israeli prime ministers—Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak—had all tried to reach a peace deal with Syria but none had gotten very far. The model was supposed

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group, giving it access to advanced Russian-made weapons, like the guided anti-tank missiles that would wreak havoc on Israeli armor during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. “Bashar Assad rolled out the red carpet for Nasrallah,” one former senior Israeli intelligence officer explained. “He gave him the keys to all his military warehouses and access to his most advanced weapons. He was taken in by Nasrallah and nothing was off limits.”

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When he became head of the espionage organization 37 years later, he asked to see his personal file. In it he found the psychologist’s assessment, which praised his intellect and predicted that he would make a superb analyst but concluded that he was not “command material” and would not climb the organization’s ranks. Halevy was

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gave birth to Arab secular political movements like the Baath Party, which later became the dominant movement in Iraq and brought the likes of Saddam Hussein to power. From Halevy’s perspective, Assad and Hussein were dangerous leaders of enemy states. But they also represented a type of secular Islam that he thought Israel needed to encourage more of in the Middle East. Secularists, he believed, were easier to reconcile with than the religious Muslim zealots.

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For Israeli intelligence, Syria was always one of its most important targets. Over the years, Israel’s efforts varied but the focus remained the same: understanding Syria’s intentions and ensuring that it was always one step ahead in the event that war broke out. In 1962, for example, the Mossad carried out one of its most daring missions known to date in Syria: infiltrating a spy, Eli Cohen, deep inside Damascus.

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During the visit, Cohen was briefed on the fortifications the Syrians had built ahead of a future war with Israel. He looked around and noticed that there were no trees within the base. “Plant eucalyptus trees,” Cohen told the Syrian officers. Due to their relatively large size and long branches, he said, eucalyptuses were ideal for providing shade. The Syrians liked Cohen’s

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addition, the IDF fast-tracked the installation of Tzayad, a revolutionary command-and-control system. Hebrew for “hunter,” Tzayad works like a GPS navigation system in a car, but in this case displays the exact location of all forces in the area, while differentiating between friendly and enemy forces. If a soldier spots an enemy position, all he has to do is tap the location on the digital map and it will appear, immediately, on the screens of all other Tzayad users. This dramatically shortens

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The Mossad’s Kidon Unit, an elite group of expert assassins, was tasked with the actual mission. Not much is known about this mysterious unit, which operates outside the Mossad’s regular framework. Kidon means “spear” and unit members are taught to be stealthy, lethal and precise like a spear. It was Kidon that installed the bomb on Mughniyeh’s SUV and pressed the detonator at the right time.

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Suleiman was surrounded by bodyguards wherever he went—to the beach, the pool or the market. But this night, he was relaxing outside his home, sipping a cocktail on a lounge chair when two men, dressed in black wet suits, came out of the water and shot him at close range, riddling his body with bullets. Before the bodyguards could react, the men had disappeared back in the water like ghosts. They belonged to Flotilla 13, Israel’s equivalent to the US Navy SEALs.9

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Olmert would go down in history as the first Israeli prime minister to be sent to prison. But he would also be remembered as a man of action. When presented with a threat, Olmert never shied away from tough decisions.

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Not even this was enough to stop Bush and Rice from trying to get a deal done with North Korea. In October, they went a step further and removed North Korea—after 20 years—from the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism. Practically, this meant that sanctions and other restrictions the US had imposed on North Korea could now be lifted. (The decision would be overturned in 2017 by President Donald Trump.)

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Some Israeli government officials believed that the US intelligence community had politicized the report to prevent Bush from embarking on another war. Basically, they claimed, America not only refused to attack Syria, it was now trying to stop anyone from attacking Iran. The CIA, some Israeli officials said, should really be called the CPIA—the “Central Political Intelligence Agency.”

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Yuval Steinitz, a future cabinet minister who at the time served as head of the Knesset’s prestigious and discreet Intelligence Subcommittee, claimed that US intelligence services were suffering from the “Pendulum Syndrome.” The US, he explained, was influenced by the trauma it suffered after the intelligence failure with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and did not want to be caught crying wolf again. Israel, on the other hand, was traumatized by its failure to learn of Libya’s nuclear program before it was abandoned in the deal Gaddafi had

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you play with it.”6 Dagan, the Mossad chief, went a step further. “This order is illegal,” he snapped at Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. According to Israeli law, Dagan reminded the two, a decision to go to war can only be made in a vote of the entire Security Cabinet, which at the time consisted of seven ministers. “What you are telling us means we are de facto starting a war with Iran. Get it first through the cabinet,” Dagan said.

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members, including Moshe Ya’alon, a former IDF chief of staff, and Dan Meridor, the intelligence minister and author of Israel’s defense doctrine.

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These limitations will always exist, and leaders will only be able to make decisions based on the information they have before them. They will also always be informed by their life experiences. Menachem Begin faced global opposition and was on the eve of reelection when he sent the air force on an unprecedented mission in 1981 to bomb Saddam Hussein’s reactor. Olmert was under criminal investigation and was facing calls to resign due to the outcome of the Second Lebanon War. Both might have been excused for agreeing to plans to use diplomacy, and not force, to stop Hussein and Assad. But they didn’t back down. Would other politicians have done the same? It is difficult to know. Like any politician or statesman, Begin and Olmert both had their flaws. But they also understood their place in history and the need for action. That is what leaders do. They don’t take the popular route, go with the safe bet or look for the easy way out.

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important, in this story, we are given a glimpse into what makes Israel unique. It is a complicated country, threatened like no one else. But it takes its role—the preservation of the Jewish people—seriously. As the ancient Jewish sage Hillel asked some 2,000 years ago: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

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