Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Kimche’s alarm grew when Sadat replaced his war minister with a more hawkish figure whose first act was to reinforce Egypt’s defenses along the Suez Canal. Egyptian commanders were also making regular visits to other Arab capitals to enlist support. Sadat had signed a new arms-purchasing deal with Moscow.

To Kimche the signs were all too ominous: “It was not a question of when war would come, only the day it would start.”

But the intelligence chiefs of Aman continued to downplay the warnings coming from Mossad. They told the IDF commanders that, even if war looked like starting, there would be “at least a five-day warning period,” more than enough time for Israel’s air force to repeat its great success in the Six Day War.

Kimche countered that most certainly the Arabs would have learned from past mistakes. He found himself branded a member of “a warobsessed Mossad,” an accusation that did not sit well with a man so careful of his every word. All he could do was to continue to assess the Egyptian preparations and try to judge a likely date for an attack.

The broiling heat of that 1973 August in Tel Aviv gave way to a cooler September. The latest reports from Mossad katsas on the Sinai side of the Suez Canal showed that Egyptian preparations had gathered momentum. Army engineers were putting the final touches to pontoons for troops and armor to cross the waterway. When Mossad persuaded the Israeli foreign minister to raise the definitely worrying preparations at the United Nations, the Egyptian representative said soothingly, “These activities are routine.” To Kimche the words had “the same kind of credibility” as those uttered by the Japanese ambassador in Washington on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yet the Egyptian explanation was accepted by Aman. All the more incredible to Kimche was that by October, wherever his probing eyes settled, there were yet more signs of brewing trouble; Libya had just nationalized Western oil companies; in the oil-producing Gulf states there was talk of cutting off all supplies to the West.

Yet the strategists in Aman continued to lamentably misread the intelligence picture. When Israeli air force jets were attacked by MiGs over Syria—resulting in victory for the IDF due to their pilots’ tactical knowledge learned from the MiG stolen from Iraq—the downing of twelve Syrian aircraft was seen by Aman only as further evidence that, if the Arabs ever did go to war, they would be beaten just as soundly.

On the night of October 5–6, Mossad received the most stark evidence yet that hostilities were imminent, perhaps only hours away. Its katsas and informers in Egypt were reporting that the Egyptian Military High Command had gone to red alert. The evidence could no longer be ignored.

At 6:00 A.M. Mossad’s chief, Zvi Zamir, joined Aman intelligence chiefs in the defense ministry. The building was almost deserted: it was Yom Kippur, the holiest of all Jewish holidays, the day even nonpracticing Jews rested, when all public services, including the state radio, shut down. The radio had always been the means used to mobilize reserves in the event of a national emergency.

Finally driven to action by the incontrovertible evidence Mossad presented, alarm bells began to sound all over Israel that a two-pronged attack—from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south—was about to engulf Israel.

War began at 1:55 P.M. local time while the Israeli cabinet was in emergency session—assured by Aman’s strategists that hostilities would still only start at 6:00 P.M. The time turned out to have been pure guesswork.

Never in the history of the Israeli intelligence community had there been such an inglorious failure to predict an event. The mass of impeccable evidence that David Kimche and others had provided had been totally ignored.

After the war ended, with Israel once more snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, there was a massive purging of Aman’s upper echelons. Mossad once more ruled supreme over the intelligence community, though there was a key change there too: Zamir was removed as director general on the grounds he had not been sufficiently assertive against his Aman counterpart. His place was taken by Yitzhak Hofi.

Kimche viewed his arrival with mixed feelings. In some ways Hofi was from a similar mold to Meir Amit: the same erect bearing, the same proven battlefield experience, the same incisive manner and total inability to suffer fools at any price. But Hofi was also blunt to the point of rudeness, and the tension between him and Kimche dated from the days they had instructed recruits, between their other duties, at the Mossad training school. Hofi, with his no-nonsense kibbutz mentality, had shown no patience with Kimche’s languid intellectualism and his refined English accent when addressing students. But Kimche was not only now a seasoned operative but Hofi’s deputy. He had been promoted to deputy director general shortly before Zamir left. Both Hofi and Kimche accepted they must put aside their personal differences to ensure Mossad continued operating with maximum efficiency.

Kimche was given one of the most difficult tasks in Mossad: he was put in charge of the service’s “Lebanese account.” The country’s civil war had begun two years after the Yom Kippur War, and by the time Kimche took charge of “the account,” the Lebanese Christians were fighting a losing battle. Just as years before Salman had gone to the Israeli embassy in Paris to initiate the first steps in stealing the Iraqi MiG, so in September 1975 an emissary from the Christians had gone there asking Israel to supply arms to stop them being annihilated. The request ended up on Kimche’s desk. He saw an opportunity for Mossad to work its way into “the Lebanese woodwork.”

He told Hofi that politically it made sense to “partly support” the Christians against the Muslims who were vowed to destroy Israel. Once more his interpretation was accepted. Israel would give the Christians sufficient arms to deal with the Muslims, but not enough to pose a threat to Israel. Mossad began to ship arms out of Israel into Lebanon. Next Kimche placed Mossad officers within the Christian command. They were ostensibly there to help maximize the use of the weapons. In reality the officers provided Kimche with a continuous flow of intelligence that enabled him to constantly chart the overall progress of the civil war. The information enabled Mossad to launch a number of successful attacks against PLO strongholds in southern Lebanon.

But the service’s relationship with the Christians soured in January 1976, when Christian leaders invited in the Syrian army to lend additional support against the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. That group was seen in Damascus as a threat. Within days thousands of battle-hardened Syrian troops were in Lebanon and moving close to its borders with Israel. Too late the Christians found they had, in Kimche’s words, “behaved like Little Red Riding Hood, inviting in the wolf.”

Once more the Lebanese Christians turned to Mossad for help. But Kimche realized his carefully constructed network to supply arms was insufficient. What was needed was a full-scale Israeli logistical operation. Scores of IDF tanks, antitank missiles, and other weapons were sent to the Christians. Lebanon’s civil war began to rage out of control.

Under its cover, Kimche launched his own guerrilla battle against Israel’s bête noire, the PLO. Soon that had extended to fighting the Lebanese Shiites. Lebanon became a practice ground for Mossad to perfect its tactics, not only in assassinations, but in psychological warfare. It was a halcyon time for the men operating out of the featureless high-rise on King Saul Boulevard.

Inside the building, relations between Kimche and Hofi were deteriorating. There were whispers of violent disagreements over operational matters; that Hofi feared Kimche wanted his job; that Kimche felt he was not properly appreciated for the undoubted contribution he was making. To this day, Kimche will not discuss such matters, only to say he “would never give a rumor respectability by commenting.”