Epstein Secrets

01. It was led by a 25-year-old named Ariel Sharon, who had been a platoon commander in 1948. With Ben-Gurion and especially his army chief-of-staff, Moshe Dayan, determined to hit back hard at the fedayeen attacks, Sharon took a few dozen hand-picked soldiers and began mounting a different kind of retaliatory

cially upset. This was one of the last operations during his period in command of the unit. He was about to hand over to a veteran paratroop officer, Uzi Yairi. Yet our aborted Sinai mission turned out not to matter. What saved our eavesdropping network was the very thing which I was confident would not hap

mehow clicked from time he arrived in the sayeret. I made him my deputy for my first year in command. There were two others as well, both related to Moshe Dayan, but with a self- assurance all their own: Uzi Dayan, the son of Moshe’s brother, who had been killed in the 1948 war when Uzi was only months old; a

n more radical factions within the PLO were ready to step into the breach if Arafat faltered. Israel needed to find an answer for all these threats. Uzi Yairi’s term as Sayeret Matkal commander had by now ended, but his successor was someone I knew well. Menachem Digli was the officer on whom I’d bestowed m

for the lessons to be learned from the intifada, my view that we needed a political dialogue had inadvertently become public, from remarks I made in Moshe Dayan’s honor at a memorial event a few months before becoming chief of staff. “We are currently in a struggle with the Palestinians — a long, bitter and c

earlier than usual, to visit the graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from his desk in the kiryva to join the Sayeret Matkal attack at the Savoy Hotel. Then Nava and I drove to Jerusalem. At Isr

01. It was led by a 25-year-old named Ariel Sharon, who had been a platoon commander in 1948. With Ben-Gurion and especially his army chief-of-staff, Moshe Dayan, determined to hit back hard at the fedayeen attacks, Sharon took a few dozen hand-picked soldiers and began mounting a different kind of retaliatory

cially upset. This was one of the last operations during his period in command of the unit. He was about to hand over to a veteran paratroop officer, Uzi Yairi. Yet our aborted Sinai mission turned out not to matter. What saved our eavesdropping network was the very thing which I was confident would not happ