Shabtai Shavit, displaying the caution of a new man in charge, had said that on what he had been told, to raise the alarm could only create needless panic. Shalom had been given the mission to discover the truth. He had carried out several previous operations in Iraq, once going into Baghdad, where he had posed as a Jordanian businessman. In Baghdad there had been sayanim who could have helped him. But here, in the vast, empty desert, he had to depend on his own resources—and the skills his instructors had once more tested.
Shalom had undergone survival training in the Negev Desert, mastering “memory training,” how to recognize the target even in a sandstorm; and “self-image protection,” how to blend in with his surroundings. He wore his garments day and night to give them a lived-in look. He spent a full day on the shooting range, demonstrating instinctive and rapid-aim firing for close-quarter combat. An hour was spent with a pharmacist learning when to use his emergency medicine in the desert; a morning was devoted to memorizing the maps that would lead him across the sands.
To all his instructors he was identified only by a number; they neither demeaned him nor offered praise. They gave Shalom no clue as to how he was doing; they were like robots. Part of each day was given over to testing his sheer physical stamina with a forced march in the fierce noon heat, carrying a rucksack weighted with rocks. He was constantly on the clock, but no one told him if he was meeting his times. Another test was to haul him out of an ongoing exercise to get his responses to such questions as: “A Bedouin child spots you: do you kill her to preserve your mission?” “You are about to be taken prisoner. Do you surrender or kill yourself?” “You come across a wounded Israeli soldier who has been on another mission: do you stop to help or leave him, knowing he will certainly die?” Shalom’s answers were not intended to be definitive: the questions were designed as another way to test his ability to decide under pressure. How long did he take to respond? Was he flustered or confident in making it?
He ate only the food he would live on in the desert: concentrates that he mixed with the brackish water he could expect to find at watering places in the sand. He had attended a one-to-one class with a Mossad psychiatrist on handling stress and how to relax. The doctor also wanted to make sure Shalom still thought for himself, so that he could draw on the right amount of resourcefulness and ruthlessness for the unpredictable situations he would encounter in the field. Aptitude tests determined his present emotional stability and his self-confidence. He was assessed to see if he had developed signs of becoming a “lone wolf,” a worrying trait that had ended other promising careers for
A dialect coach sat with him for hours, listening to him repeat the Sufis’ patois. Already fluent in Farsi and Arabic, Shalom quickly grasped the dialect of the tribesmen. Every night he was driven to a different part of the Negev to sleep. Burrowing into the ground, he would rest for a short while, never more than dozing, then move to another place to avoid the instructors he knew were hunting him. Discovery would almost certainly mean his mission would be either postponed for further training, or assigned to another
Shalom had escaped detection. On the evening of November 25, 1990, he had boarded a CH-536 Sikorsky helicopter of the Israel Defense Forces Central Regional command.
Its crew had also been separately trained for the mission. In another area of the Negev base, they had practiced low-level weaving through an aerial obstacle course in the dark. Turbines had blasted the chopper with sand so that they could improve their techniques for flying through the unstable air currents of the Iraqi desert. The pilot had continuously stayed as close to the ground as he could without crashing. In another exercise, instructors had straddled the landing struts, firing weapons at target silhouettes, while the pilot kept his machine steady. In between, the crew had studied their flight path.
Only their commanding officer, Major General Danny Yatom, knew the route they would fly to the border with Iraq. Yatom had been a member of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Israel’s Green Berets, who in 1972 had successfully stormed a hijacked Belgium airliner at Tel Aviv airport. Other commandos in the operation included Benyamin Netanyahu. The friendship with Israel’s future prime minister would lead to Yatom later being given command of Mossad, a position that would also end his relationship with Netanyahu. But that was all in the future.
On that December morning, while Shalom continued to peer out over the rim of the wadi, he had no inkling that the long and dangerous journey that had brought him deep into hostile territory had been decided in a conference room in the Kirya, the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv.
