Between 7:30 A.M. and 7:45 A.M. airfield radar units were at their most vulnerable. In those fifteen minutes the outgoing night staff were tired after their long shift, while their incoming replacements were not yet fully alert, and were often late in taking over due to slow service in the mess halls. Pilots breakfasted between 7:15 A.M. and 7:45 A.M. Afterward they usually walked back to their barracks to collect their flying gear. The average journey took ten minutes. Most fliers spent a further few minutes in the toilets before going to the flight lines. They arrived there around 8:00 A.M., the official start to the day. By then ground crew had begun to roll out aircraft from their hangars to be fueled and armed. For the next fifteen minutes the flight lines were crammed with fuel trucks and ammunition trucks.
A similar detailed itinerary was prepared for the movements of staff officers in the Cairo High Command. The average officer took thirty minutes to drive to work from his house in one of the suburbs. Strategic planners were often not at their desks before 8:15 A.M. They usually spent a further ten minutes settling in, sipping coffee, and gossiping with colleagues. The average staff officer did not properly start studying overnight signals traffic from the fighter bases until close to 8:30 A.M.
Meir Amit told the Israeli air force commander that the time their aircraft must be over their targets should be between 8:00 A.M. and 8:30 A.M. In those thirty minutes they would be able to pulverize enemy bases, knowing that the Cairo High Command would be without many of its key personnel to direct the fight back.
On June 5, 1967, Israel’s air force struck at precisely 8:01 A.M. with deadly effect, sweeping in low over the Sinai to bomb and strafe at will. In moments the sky turned reddish black with the flames from burning fuel trucks and exploding ammunition and aircraft.
In Tel Aviv, Meir Amit sat looking out of his office window toward the south, knowing his intelligence analysts had virtually settled the outcome of the war. It was one of the most stunning examples of his extraordinary skills—and even more remarkable given the numerical size of Mossad.
From the time he took over, Meir Amit had resisted attempts to turn Mossad into a version of the CIA or KGB. Those services between them employed hundreds of thousands of analysts, scientists, strategists, and planners to support their field agents. The Iraqis and Iranians had an estimated ten thousand field agents; even the Cuban DGI possessed close to a thousand spies in the field.
But Meir Amit had insisted that Mossad’s permanent total staff would number little more than twelve hundred. Each would be handpicked and have multiple skills: a scientist must be able to work in the field should the need arise; a
To them all he would be the
Long before the Six Day War he had established Mossad’s ability to strike mortal terror into Israel’s enemies, penetrating their ranks, vacuuming up their secrets, and killing them with chilling efficiency. He had soon made Mossad mythic in stature.
Much of that success came from the rules he laid down for selecting
While much else had changed in Mossad, Meir Amit knew on that March morning in 1997 that his recruiting criteria had remained intact:
