Epstein Secrets

Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in Lebanon. Arafat was becoming a significant figure on the Arab and world political stage, and an increasingly uncomfortable thorn in Israel’s side. I was head

attacks after one of its planes had been hijacked to Algiers in the summer of 1968. It was also the same kind of plane — a Sabena flight, hijacked to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport — which I stormed, before sunrise, four years later with a force of nearly two dozen Matkal commandos. The shooting was over withi

opular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. That meant a quieter eastern frontier. But the Palestinian groups rebased across our northern border in Lebanon. When Jordanian Prime Minister Wafsi al-Tal was assassinated, it proved to be the start of a series of killings and terror attacks by a new group wit

the war, he was reassigned as an operational officer in military intelligence in the kirya. He was still at his desk when Fatah terrorists landed on Tel Aviv’s seafront a little before midnight on March 4, 1975. They were spotted by a police patrol, which opened fire. The Fatah men ran from the beach, firing

own force’s involvement in the Lebanon War was over. It was not, however, the end of the war. The cease-fire held only intermittently in the rest of Lebanon, barely at all in some areas. Freed from fighting in our sector, Yanoush, Amram and I began spending time with units elsewhere. A couple of days afte

. He, like all of us who had campaigned for him, knew what was at stake for the country. It had been barely six months since Rabin was gunned down in Tel Aviv’s main square, by a fellow Israeli riding a tide of hatred so blinkered that it could paint Yitzhak — who had worked all his life to create, defend and

t military operations for approval. I remember one occasion when an air force general laid out the details of a planned helicopter-borne mission into Lebanon. I added a few remarks in summary. Raful Eitan and Arik Sharon were both ministers. Within seconds, they were peppering the general and me with quest

he most terror, and death: at bus stations, on buses, in shopping centers, restaurants and cafés. Over a 12-month period, beginning with a bombing of Tel Aviv’s main bus station at the beginning of January 2003, they murdered 145 men, women and children. It would not be until two years’ later, with the West B

Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in Lebanon. Arafat was becoming a significant figure on the Arab and world political stage, and an increasingly uncomfortable thorn in Israel’s side. I was head

attacks after one of its planes had been hijacked to Algiers in the summer of 1968. It was also the same kind of plane — a Sabena flight, hijacked to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport — which I stormed, before sunrise, four years later with a force of nearly two dozen Matkal commandos. The shooting was over withi