| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011586)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011586" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2727 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| frustration of trying to convince the generals in the kirya to give us the go- |
| ahead. Some of them agreed Israel needed a specially trained commando force. |
| But not everyone felt Sayeret Matkal could, or should, take on that role. Rafael |
| "Raful" Eitan was perhaps the most strident. He had fought with the Palmach in |
| 1948. He was an officer in Unit 101 and a commander of the parachutists' |
| Battalion 890. He was now katzhar, in overall charge of all infantry and |
| paratroop forces. He insisted that such work required a real sayeret, by which |
| he meant the paratroopers. |
| Yet the need for a special-forces unit was becoming increasingly hard to |
| ignore. By the summer of 1971, a couple of months after I became sayeret |
| commander, King Hussein's army had defeated the insurgency of Fatah and a |
| pair of even more militant partners, the Democratic Front and the Popular 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 within Fatah, called |
| Black September. There was at least some potentially encouraging news from |
| Egypt. When Nasser died in September 1970, he was succeeded by a less |
| flamboyantly militant vice-president, Anwar Sadat. Yet in both Egypt and |
| Syria, a number of our air force pilots were still being held prisoner. |
| I felt an especially strong motivation to help bring the pilots home. They had |
| risked their lives for us. It seemed to me we owed them the same. One of the |
| men being held in Syria, Pini Nachmani, had a personal connection to many of |
| us in the unit. He had worked with us on sayeret missions. I came up with a plan |
| that, while undeniably risky, seemed to me to have every chance of success. It |
| was to abduct a number of Syrians from an officers' club on the western edge of |
| Damascus. We would land in transport helicopters a few miles away and unload |
| a pair of armored cars captured in 1967. But Raful's view prevailed. I could not |
| get the approval of the kirya. I did take heart from Avraham Arnan's support. |
| He was now Golda Meir's counter-terrorism adviser. Also from the fact that |
| Chaim Bar-Lev's successor as chief of staff was an old friend of the sayeret: |
| Dado Elazar, Avraham's Palmach comrade from 1948. Yet winning over the |
| remaining doubters in the kirya was obviously going to take time. |
| As so often during my years in uniform, however, Sayeret Matkal's birth as |
| a special-forces unit came by force of circumstance: not in an officers' club near |
| Damascus, but a few miles away from our base, on a runway at Lod Airport. |
| 115 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011586 |
|
|
