No Mission Is Impossible (12 page)

The day after the operation, the newspapers went out of their way to sing its praises: “An event that will be remembered for generations . . . A story that will become a legend . . . A raid on a steep-walled fortress built on stone and coral . . . An event comparable to the story about the British raid on the island of Navarone in the Aegean Sea, during World War Two. ‘The Guns of Navarone' is a myth invented in the writer's imagination, but the guns of Green Island are a real-life legend whose story will one day be told.”

The Egyptians also treated the operation with gravity. Dr. Mustafa Kabha, in his study “The War of Attrition as Reflected in Egyptian Sources,” wrote that “this operation constituted a turning point in the war of attrition. It symbolized the start of a new phase in the war that most Egyptian researchers called ‘the counter-attrition stage,' in which the military initiative passed from Egyptian hands to Israel's.”

   
ADMIRAL AMI AYALON, LATER COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE NAVY

          
“I get to the roof and it becomes clear that, in contrast to what we prepared for, there's no cover, and I'm completely exposed to continuous Egyptian gunfire. I raise my head and the bullets are whistling over me, the ricochets are grazing my forehead, and I realize that I'm in a life-or-death situation. . . . I decide to charge, my friend Zali charges after me, and both of us burst into the position. I eliminate two Egyptian soldiers and Zali another two, . . . From there we continued fighting toward the other positions. . . .

              
“In today's terms, there's a big question mark about whether this operation should have been carried out. I don't think it brought about a reversal in the war of attrition, nor did it demonstrate a professional capacity or special level of performance, as was said after the mission.

              
“But, in those days, the operation had a dramatic impact on the IDF, on our faith in ourselves, on the morale of Israeli society and also on the Egyptian forces along the canal.

              
“I have to admit that, from the Shayetet's point of view, this exposed our professional shortcomings, because it was the first operation of its type in the world, the first time in the history of war that a force of divers used the cloak of diving to reach an enemy target underwater, and to start a gun battle the moment it pulled its head out of the water.”

Israel's relations with the United States dramatically improved after the Six Day War. Under Presidents Johnson and Nixon the U.S. has become the main supplier of weapons to Israel after De Gaulle's embargo. That embargo is tightened further by De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou
.

December 24, 1969

T
he owner of the Café de Paris in the French port city of Cherbourg was tossing anxious glances at the entrance. The numerous clients visiting the restaurant this evening had eaten, drunk and sung, but fourteen guests who reserved a table for the Christmas meal had lagged in coming, and now it was after midnight. Foie gras, roasted turkey and champagne had been left orphaned. The unhappy restaurateur didn't know that these same fourteen men, along with 106 of their friends, were spending the evening in the belly of five state-of-the-art missile boats in the city's civil port, attuned to the howls of the raging storm outside and praying to the God of Israel that it would pass quickly. The tremendous storm threatened to sink one of the Israeli Navy's most important missions, officially called Operation Noa but later seared into the public lore as the “Boats of Cherbourg.”

The affair had begun two and a half years earlier, in June 1967. On the eve of the SixDay War, the president of France, Charles de Gaulle, had abandoned his pro-Israel policy and imposed an embargo—a total ban—on the sale of weapons to Israel. Emissaries of Israel's defense ministry, along with their allies in the French Army, were laboring night and day to smuggle vital arms from France to Israel. But several orders at French factories remained incomplete, including an order of fifty Mirage fighter jets and one of twelve fast missile boats at the Cherbourg shipyards. The shipyards were managed by a friend of Israel, Felix Amiot. About two hundred Israelis had settled in Cherbourg, including naval personnel and their families; they had been received with affection, unsurprising given that the boats' construction provided a livelihood to a thousand French families.

There were still a few cracks in the French embargo, and through them, Israel had received five of the twelve boats immediately after their construction was completed. But on December 28, 1968, the situation changed completely. Following an attempted attack on an El Al plane in Athens by terrorists coming from Lebanon, Raful Eitan and his paratroopers landed at Beirut airport and blew up thirteen planes belonging to Middle East Airlines, stoking de Gaulle's fury because the paratroopers used French-made Super Frelon helicopters. Telegrams were immediately wired to all the French factories building weapons ordered by Israel, principally in Cherbourg. French friends of Admiral Mordechai (“Moka”) Limon, the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry delegation in Paris, informed him of the telegram to Cherbourg, and he ordered the officer responsible for the missile boat project, Colonel Hadar Kimchi, to immediately send a recently completed boat, the
Akko,
to Israel. Another boat, the
Tempest
(“
Sa'ar”
), was still in the final stages of construction, but Limon, a former commander in chief of the Israeli Navy, ordered that it be loaded with fifty tons of fuel. Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Tabak outfitted the ship with everything required and “went out for drills in the ocean.” A few days later, the
Akko
and the
Tempest
arrived in Israel.

The missile boats had a special status: they had been paid for almost in full (except for the five vessels which had not yet been completed),
and they effectively belonged to Israel; nevertheless, their departure despite the embargo enraged de Gaulle. Cherbourg's French officers decided to punish the Israeli Navy by banishing it from the port's military section to the civilian area. It also became clear beyond any doubt that the embargo would be applied to the five remaining boats, which were in advanced stages of construction. This policy would continue even into the days of de Gaulle's successor, President Pompidou.

The missile boats in Haifa Port.
(Moshe Milner, GPO)

Israel's war of attrition with Egypt, then at its peak, had increased the urgency of supplying the navy with state-of-the-art weaponry, and pressure grew for the acquisition of the five missile boats. Limon, a calm, composed man, flew to Israel and presented the heads of the defense establishment with three ways to bring them over. The first: to wait patiently, perhaps for years, for the embargo to be lifted. The second: to smuggle the boats out of Cherbourg illegally. And the third: to formulate a legal plan to deceive the French government and get the boats to Israel, namely through Israel's theoretical surrender of the boats and their sale to a third party—who would then send them to Israel.

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and his deputy, Tzvi Tzur, were inclined to take the third route, to avoid breaking the law. The commander in chief of the Navy, General Avraham (“Cheetah”) Botzer, and his deputy, Brigadier General Benjamin (“Bini”) Telem, dealt with the planning. It would be necessary to wait until all the boats were ready before bringing them out. Zim, the Israeli shipping company, put two boats, the
Dan
and the
Leah,
at the operation's disposal. Large fuel tanks were installed in the belly of both ships, and they performed fueling drills at sea with the navy's missile boats. The refueling ships would meet the flotilla of missile boats during its voyage from Cherbourg to Israel; one boat would wait next to Gibraltar, and the other south of Malta. Zim made two more ships, the
Netanya
and the
Tiberias,
available for the operation in case of a serious accident at sea: one had been outfitted to tow a damaged missile boat, and the second, to aid in the getaway of naval crews.

By the end of August 1969, construction on four of the five boats was complete: the
Storm
(“
Sufa”
), the
Spear
(“
Hanit
”), the
Volcano
(“
Ga'ash”
), and the
Sword
(“
Herev”
). The fifth boat, the
Arrow
(“
Hetz”
), was going to be delivered in November.

In September, Limon met with his friend Mordechai Friedman, the CEO of Netivei Neft, an Israeli state company that pumped oil in Abu Rudeis, in Sinai. Limon and Friedman were looking for an intermediary who would buy the boats from France and focused their attention on Akers, a Norwegian firm that searched for oil. At its head stood Martin Siem, an engineer and World War II hero who had led the anti-Nazi underground in Norway and was a good friend of Friedman's.

Limon had reached the conclusion that the best date for taking the boats would be Christmas Eve, 1969. That night, the French would be celebrating, and their level of vigilance would be low. By then, the
Arrow
would be ready to sail.

In October, Limon and Friedman met with Siem in Copenhagen, where the Norwegian gave his approval to the fictional purchase of the missile boats. However, he wouldn't be able to conduct the acquisition via Akers but through a subsidiary under his control, Starboat, which was registered in Panama.

Operation Noa was under way. Starboat contacted Amiot and expressed interest in acquiring between four and six fast boats that could be used in the search for oil in the North Sea. “Purely by chance,” Limon later told us with a wink, “Starboat's requirements matched the specifications and performance capacities of the boats of Cherbourg.”

Amiot replied that he had a customer for whom he was building such boats, but if the customer relinquished the vessels, Amiot would sell them to Starboat. The French Defense Ministry was enthusiastic. If Israel would agree to give up the boats and they were sold to a third party, the bothersome issue would be solved. Limon, for his part, pretended to be dubious about the desirability of the deal, and only three weeks later did he accede to the French request. The deal was completed and the papers signed. Wood signs bearing the name S
TARBOAT
were placed next to the missile boats, and with considerable generosity, Limon agreed that Israeli crews would man the boats for the time being. In secret, Limon and Siem had signed an agreement that voided the entire deal with the French.

According to Kimchi, the operation's commander, the contract was long and detailed but noted that the boats' final destination was “a company that dealt with the search for oil in the Gulf of Suez”—in point of fact, Israel. Consequently, before the contract could be investigated in depth by the French bureaucracy, it would be necessary to speed things along and get the boats out of France.

In total secrecy, eighty of the Israeli Navy's best officers and sailors were brought to Cherbourg, flying to Paris in civilian attire and arriving in the port city, in pairs, by train. Barred from speaking Hebrew or attracting attention, they lodged in Cherbourg in private apartments and in the boats themselves. Each crew numbered twenty-four, so the total would be 120 sailors for the five missile boats. Forty additional sailors, beside the eighty who came from Israel, were selected among the IDF Navy personnel already in Cherbourg. As their D Day approached, the sailors discreetly purchased great quantities of food at various locations—1,200 days' worth, based on an expectation of 120 sailors at sea for 10 days. Because the boats' communications systems hadn't been completed, the Israelis spread in the city, trying to acquire walkie-talkies
with a three-quarter-mile range. They finally found them in toy stores. The sailors also began turning on the boats' engines each night, claiming that there was a power shortage in the shipyard, and the city grew accustomed to hearing the constantly booming engines. Meanwhile, the Zim ships set sail, placing themselves at predetermined positions at sea.

By Christmas Eve, everything was ready. The teams had settled onto the boats. Admiral Limon, Hadar Kimchi, his deputy, Ezra (“Shark”) Kedem, and the commanders of the five boats sat in the
Sword
's commander's quarters. The French were fulfilling the role that had been “assigned” to them, sitting down for the holiday meal at exactly the appointed hour.

Only one variable wasn't playing its part: the weather.

A terrible storm was raging in the open sea, with huge waves rising from the west; naval personnel rated the water as “sea 7 to 9,” fraught with lethal danger to anyone who struggled against it.

The hours passed and the officers collected any bits of information they could about the storm's location and movement. Limon was determined to set sail that night; otherwise, the entire plan might collapse. But the final decision belonged, of course, to Kimchi. Ten
P.M
., 11:00
P.M
., midnight. . . . The storm raged on, and the tension grew. Kimchi decided to delay his final decision until 2:00
A.M
. After one o'clock, an updated forecast arrived that inspired hope among the sailors. The direction of the wind was going to change; the storm was turning toward Scotland and Scandinavia. Ten minutes later, another forecast: the wind had indeed shifted course.

The crews feverishly prepared the boats for departure. The boats' engines broke out in a tremendous roar and, at two-thirty, the order was given to sail. First the
Sword,
then the four remaining ships set out toward the open sea. As they disappeared into the darkness, the Israeli defense delegation's vehicles blocked the entrance to the port, in order to frustrate any sudden check by the police. At the Hotel Atlantique, overlooking the sea, lights in the windows turned on and off intermittently, as the families of some of the crew members that had been living there bade farewell to their loved ones.

The docks remained empty. Limon was the last to leave the port. At three-thirty, he awakened Amiot and informed him that the boats had sailed for Israel. Amiot embraced him and burst out crying. Limon handed him a check for $5 million, the final payment for the boats' construction.

The five boats sailed into a stormy sea, fighting hard against the waves. Their connection to naval headquarters in Israel was lost again and again, and the engines didn't function properly. Nevertheless, the original plan was executed; the rendezvous with the
Leah
took place on the night of December 26, and the boats were refueled, if terribly slowly because of unexpected complications. The second refueling took place south of Malta. The most severe difficulty cropped up when water seeped into the
Arrow
's engine; in the absence of appropriate gauges, the sailors were forced to taste the fuel to see whether it had been contaminated with seawater, which could have damaged the engines. After several rounds of tasting, the problem was fixed and the boat continued on its way.

The storm in the Mediterranean subsided, but it erupted in a new location: the international press. Nearly two days had passed between Christmas Eve and the world's discovery that the boats had vanished from Cherbourg. “Where are they?” reporters asked the staff at the Israeli embassy in Paris; the diplomats nonchalantly answered, “The boats are no longer ours, presumably they're sailing to Norway.” But a Spanish helicopter and later a light BBC aircraft discovered the boats at sea, and the global media reported that the “Boats of Cherbourg” had escaped out from under the noses of the French. Front-page headlines and huge articles with aerial photos filled papers around the world. France was ridiculed, while Israel gained fame for the sophisticated operation. When the press revealed that the boats were sailing through the Mediterranean toward Israel, a massive uproar broke out in Oslo, where Siem was forced to respond to difficult, embarrassing questions, and in Paris, where the French government saw itself tricked and humiliated. The French defense minister, Michel Debré, a former staunch supporter of Israel, now demanded that the army chief of staff use any means
necessary to stop the boats, even by bombing them from the air. Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas rejected the idea.