Sayeret Matkal operative recounts covert fuel theft from Israeli Northern Command before Syria incursion

again. The more I talked, however, the more I sensed that the details weren’t what General Tzur really wanted to know. I think what he actually wanted to gauge was whether / felt confident. He wanted to reassure himself he wasn’t taking any more than the obvious risks in sending us, in Uri Ilan’s footsteps, back into Syria. Fortunately, he didn’t ask whether I was sure we’d succeed. If he had, I would have said, yes, we were prepared. But there was no way we could be certain. Still, he must have got what he wanted. When we reached the edge of Netanya, he shook my hand, wished me luck and went on his way. The rest of the team was waiting at the crossroads for me to join them. Two teams, in fact: mine, with whom Id be crossing into Syria in less than 10 hours’ time, and our hillutz, or back-up. A hillutz was always a part of sayeret operations. The back-up group would stay on the Israeli side of the border. If we got into trouble, they’d come in after us. Even after my briefing for the chief of staff, we had one last stop to make on the way north. It was at the headquarters of the army’s northern command. It was in a Tegart fortress, one of dozens built by the British around the country, with watchtowers on each corner of the outer walls. The northern commander was an equally forbidding figure. Avraham Yoffe had served in the British artillery in the Second World War and the Golani Brigade in 1948. He used to joke with other officers that while they looked like a bunch of kids, he was the only one with the true bearing of a general. He must have been busy when we arrived, because we ended up hanging around in the courtyard for nearly 20 minutes. Just as I was beginning to worry that the timetable for what really mattered — our climb up onto the Golan — was being put at risk, I noticed that off to the side was a beautifully polished jeep. I assumed it belonged to General Yoffe, who was known to be an avid hunter and would later become the head of Israel’s National Parks Authority. It had a padlocked metal grill on the back which held two jerrycans of gasoline. Yori Cohen, the commander of the back-up team, and I spotted the fuel containers at the same time. We couldn’t help smiling. Yes, we were about to embark on an operation which, assuming we didn’t fail, would finally give Israel real-time intelligence from across our border for the first time since the 1950s. But we were still Sayeret Matkal, still chronically short of gasoline for our field exercises. And I still hadn’t forgotten how to pick a lock. As Yori stood guard, I broke into the grill and removed the jerrycans, one for each of us, and closed it again. Then, after briefing the general, we headed to our setting-off point. Yoffe himself left to join Avraham Arnan and Meir Amit’s intelligence deputy, 67 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011538