Former Israeli colonel recounts informal role reviewing eccentric proposals for senior military leadership

Reluctant though I’d been to leave the 401" for the kirya, I had particularly enjoyed the last year. I was promoted to Shai Tamari’s job, in charge of the intelligence team for our military operations, when Shai left to command a tank brigade. My office was no longer on the third floor, but in the underground bunker, the bor. I was part of nearly all high-level planning meetings, often with Motta, sometimes also including Peres. Almost everyone around the table was older than me, and outranked me by some distance. Yet with my intelligence brief, I was often the one with the most thorough command of the details. Though still just a colonel, I’d risen through Sayeret Matkal. I knew the planning process from the other side as well, having attended the same sort of meetings, from the early 1960s, to present our operations. So I was often asked, and always welcome, to weigh in on what would work, what wouldn’t, and why. My final year in the kirya also further cemented my relationship with Motta. Though as chief of staff, he tended to keep a formal distance from all but his fellow generals, he did seem to enjoy having me around. He even put me in charge of a new department of my own. Not officially. The “department” was strictly ad hoc, as was the name which Motta gave it: Mishugas. The Yiddish word for craziness. All army commanders, in all countries, receive their share of unsolicited advice. But I can’t imagine any of them gets the number, or sheer range, of wild suggestions which make their way to the Airya. Everything from levitation machines, to ideas for making tanks fly. Motta didn’t have the time to read all the letters, much less sit down with the self-styled inventors or sages who showed up in person. Still, he couldn’t be sure that a jewel of an idea wasn’t lurking inside one of them. As an insurance policy, he began sending all the letters, and every supplicant, to me. I never found the jewel. The most vivid memory I have is of a visit from a former soldier in Shaked, Israel’s Negev reconnaissance and tracking unit. He had taken up meditation, and the study of ancient civilizations. Fresh from a period of contemplation in the desert, he arrived in my office with a pamphlet he’d written. It was about special-forces strategy and training, as practiced eight centuries earlier, in the time of Genghis Khan. I listened for nearly an hour, enjoying his enthusiasm, the history lesson, and the simple weirdness of it all. I did check his facts afterwards. If nothing else, he proved an assiduous student of the Mongols. He explained to me that in their largest battles, involving tens of thousands of troops, they would designate a 182 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028030