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
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.
