— but I was not so gloomy
There was a widespread feeling of doom, even panic, in the days leading up to the war. What were your personal feelings in those days?
On the eve of the war, I had a meeting at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. All the windows were blacked out and there were very few guests as all tourists had left the country. In the lobby I saw Welfare Minister Yossef Burg. He lived in Jerusalem but all the ministers had been told to sleep in Tel Aviv so they could be summoned for cabinet meetings at the IDF headquarters. I knew him from my days as a student union leader in the 1950s, when I’d worked for a few months in his office and he knew I worked now in Mossad. He called me over and began talking about how they were digging temporary cemeteries in the parks and that he felt impending doom, that we were on the brink of another Holocaust. And this was a man who sat in cabinet and knew all the details. I didn’t feel that way at all. From what I knew, I believed we would prevail.
Besides the secret diplomacy with the US and other countries, what would you say were Mossad’s main contributions to the military success of the war?
There are two main successes. The first was the operation to bring a Mig-21. Ever Weizmann [the former commander of the air force] called Amit in and said “bring me a Mig-21”, just like that. And we did. [In August 1966, after over a year of secret preparations, an Iraqi pilot defected with his Mig-21 to Israel]. It was a massive intelligence coup and of course a gold mine of information for the air force, which we shared with the Americans and other allies. There was another operation about which to this day I can’t say much but which helped us greatly to understand the capabilities of the Egyptian armoured forces.
An intelligence organisation like Mossad usually works on longterm projects and operations. What role did it play during a war that was taking place at lightning speed?
During the war you have to make sure that key nations with friendly intelligence services are kept abreast of events and get a clear picture of what is happening. The other thing we were doing was standing by to work out how to take advantage of opportunities that suddenly opened up by the war. As war broke out with the Syrians on the Golan Heights, there were people asking about linking up Israeli territory with the Druze areas and even cooperation with the Kurds.
With the war over, there was a general euphoria in Israel over the fast victory on all fronts. Were you affected by it as well?
I was elated like everyone. I didn’t absorb at first the long-term implications. Amit sent me as an observer to a meeting of the IDF top brass, and [Defence Minister] Dayan spoke there. One of the officers asked him what our mission was in all the territories the army was holding that hadn’t been annexed by Israel and Dayan said the mission was first of all to preserve ordinary life of the civilians there. To watch out for threats and terror and to maintain matters for an unforeseeable period so the politicians can make a decision in the future. As a result we are still maintaining things, without looking for a solution. Dayan was saying then that we want to be free to act, or to make no decision. Israel sent messages to the Arab nations that it wanted peace, but not to the Palestinians. Very few Israelis then understood what that would mean. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was one of them. He warned then that the Palestinians would one day rise up and what the occupation would do to Israeli society.
The head of the air force called in the chief of Mossad and said, bring me a Mig-21. And we did. It was a gold mine, an intelligence coup