Ehud Barak’s New Book Reveals Intelligence Operations, Assassination Plots in Arab Countries
Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently finished his autobiography in which he revealed several Israeli intelligence and assassination operations, as part of his military activity in several Arab countries.
Some of those operations have remained under wraps for over 50 years and are now revealed in his book, “My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace.”
Chaired by Benjamin Netanyahu, the ministerial committee that reviews books by former senior officials allowed their former colleague to go ahead with publishing his memoir.
Sources revealed that the book discusses the story of Israel’s most secret intelligence-gathering operations, which laid the ground for victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and could possibly have prevented its defeat in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
In one of Barak’s personal stories, he recalled leading his first operations deep in Syria and Egypt as one of the first officers of the Sayeret Matkal commandos.
The authorization for the first operation came in August 1963, when Barak was ordered to plan and command an incursion of a five-man team into the Golan Heights to wire-tap a Syrian army communications line.
In his book, Barak gives the first detailed account of the operation that led to a historic and strategic breakthrough for Israeli intelligence. Each member carried an Uzi gun and two grenades, and then crossed the border after nightfall north of Kibbutz Dan.
They had orders to return by 1:15 A.M., but on the way they had to move passed three sleeping Syrian soldiers and the Banias River, which was deeper and wider than expected at the spot Barak had chosen to cross. When the order came over the radio to return, he told his men to switch it off.
Once they installed the device at the top of a telephone pole, they returned to Israeli territory undetected, but three hours late. They were greeted at the border by the Military Intelligence chief, Meir Amit.
The intelligence that would be gathered by the planted devices would be a key factor less than four years later when Israeli forces captured the Golan Heights in the last 36 hours of the Six-Day War.
However, the Syrian front wasn’t Israel’s main concern in the 1960s. Egypt boasted the largest Arab army and a president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was determined to unify the Arab world against Israel.
Tapping into the communications of the Egyptian army deep in Sinai would take a much larger and more powerful device, not one that could be carried on the backs of commandos. At the time, the Israeli Air Force received its first large transport helicopters, Sikorsky S-58s, and it was decided that Barak would lead the Sayeret Matkal’s first major helicopter-borne mission.
“Even now,” he writes, “most of the details of how we planned to tap into the Egyptians’ communications remain classified.”
He still gives a good deal of new details, including the fact that geologists were consulted to help work out the best locations to hide the tapping devices from Egyptian desert scouts.
Barak did not mention how the device was connected to the Egyptian communication line and hidden in early 1964, but he does reveal that all five men made sure it was installed before they had to get back.
This was Barak’s first mission that was approved by the new Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and would be followed by similar operations.
Early 1970, the third secret operation to install listening devices took place. Barak stated that this operation needed larger helicopters and included diversionary attacks on Egyptian installations to hide the true mission.
The helicopters flew over the Suez Canal and installing and hiding the device was much more difficult than expected. The team nearly aborted midway, but the generals radioed that they had more time and the work was completed.
“For the first time since we’d captured Sinai, Israel was again receiving real-time communications from inside Egypt,” Barak wrote.
These devices and others installed were called the "special sources" that Israel used sparingly to minimize the risk of detection.
