After my return in June 1963, Avraham asked me to share my experiences with the other sayeret officers. I began with the positives. I singled out the sense of self-confidence, allied with individual strength and teamwork, that the French commandos had developed from exposure to almost incredible extremes of danger. I believed that their success depended not on eliminating risk. We all knew that was impossible. It was about professionalism developed over a period of years by men who had served together in the toughest of circumstances. But I also mentioned their darker side, which seemed to me a reminder of the danger of the misapplication of the very qualities which made them a formidable military force. “The ethos of a unit like theirs, and like ours, is essential to making us strong,” I said. “But what I saw in France was an entire ecosystem that these guys had created, extremely patriotic in their own minds, reinforced by one another. But dangerous for society as a whole.”
It would be nearly a decade before Sayeret Matkal became not just a military intelligence unit, but a fighting force, and I would turn out to have a central role in making that happen. But there was an almost equally daunting challenge we were called on to tackle first — a critical one, if Israel was going to be truly prepared in the case of a further war. For while our bugging missions on the Golan had reduced our vulnerability to a surprise attack in the north, the real challenge of Rotem had yet to be addressed. It was Egypt — with its hundreds of battle tanks, and hundreds of thousands of men under arms — that was by far our most powerful Arab enemy. President Nasser wasted no opportunity to flaunt his determination to fight, defeat and ultimately erase the state of Israel. But we still had no reliable, real-time intelligence on his forces.
Fixing that, if such an operation was even possible, would make our bugging operations on the Golan look like mere boy-scout missions. We could not simply walk into Egypt with our backpacks, find a telephone pole on one of the few roads crossing the vast expanse of desert, and attach a bugging device. The idea was to tap into the main military communications cable in the Sinai. That meant using a vastly more powerful, and far bulkier, intercept apparatus, weighing more than half a ton. Even getting it into Egypt would be a problem. We certainly couldn’t carry it our backpacks, or tow it across the sand. Even if we figured a way to get it there, we would still have to dig up the Egyptian
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