JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Zvi Zamir, the Mossad head during the Yom Kippur War and the one who sounded the alarm of impending war, passed away Monday at the age of 98.
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After a long and distinguished career in the Palmach and IDF, Zamir was appointed head of the Mossad in 1968, presiding over the covert organization during the rise of Palestinian terror in the early 70’s but also during the Yom Kippur war.
The defining drama of his life came on October 5, 1973, when an Egyptian source, possibly the best the Mossad has ever had, asked for an urgent meeting with the commander himself. The source was not without controversy. The most influential man in Israel’s intelligence community at the time, Eli Zeira, who headed the Military Intelligence Directorate, maintained that the source, Ashraf Marwan, son-in-law to Gamal Abdel Nasser and adviser to his successor, Anwar Sadat, was too good to be true — a double agent. [Ironically, 50 years later, the head of the Military Intelligence Aharon Haliwa also downplayed Hamas’s war plans and is currently being held responsible for the October 7th debacle].
Despite these reservations, Zamir flew to London. He met Marwan at midnight in a swanky aparthotel. Convinced of the veracity of his report — that one million men under arms in Egypt would on the following day launch a surprise attack in tandem with the Syrian military — Zamir wrote out an encoded message on a piece of paper and then called his bureau chief. The hour was 3 a.m. “Put your feet in cold water,” he reportedly told the officer, beseeching him to shake himself awake and fast.
“The company, after all, will be signing the contract today toward evening,” Zamir dictated to his bureau chief. “It is the same contract with the same stipulations that we are familiar with. It is known that tomorrow is a holiday.”
Those four words — “tomorrow is a holiday” — was the commander of the Mossad reporting that tomorrow would be war. Never had a more valuable piece of intelligence been conveyed from the field. Despite this, for a variety of reasons, it was not heeded in full — a failure that haunted Zamir for the rest of his days.
Tzvi Zamir was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1925. He moved to Tel Aviv with his family at the age of nine months. The son of an observant Jewish father who drove a horse-drawn wagon for the electric company, he grew up playing soccer alongside Yitzhak Rabin and had his name changed by Israel Prize-winning author Yehuda Burla, who was his teacher in grade school and struggled to pronounce the name Zarezivsky.
In 1942, at the age of 16, he joined the Palmach. During the War of Independence, he served as a Palmach battalion commander, fighting along the slim corridor of road linking the coastal plains to the besieged city of Jerusalem. During the early months of the war, from the November 29, 1947, vote in the United Nations to the May 14, 1948, Declaration of Independence, he and the other members of the Harel Brigade improvised their own battle plans and exposed themselves daily to enemy fire. Nearly one hundred of them were wounded and 73, both men and women, were killed.
After the war, he remained in uniform and rose to the rank of two-star general before assuming the leadership of the Mossad in September 1968. During the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972, which was caused by a botched German attempt to rescue them, Zamir was forced to watch from the side as the German plan fell apart and the terrorists blew up the helicopters where the athletes were being held. “It was,” Zamir said in a 2017 documentary about the Mossad, “a vision I shall not forget for all of my days.”
Zamir left Munich fuming at the “new Germany” and fiercely determined to settle the score with the terror organizations active in Europe. It has been widely reported that upon his return to Tel Aviv, it was Meir who gave him the order to hunt down those responsible for the attack and to thwart any future attacks. In “Mossad: A Cover Story,” a recent documentary series on Israeli TV, he pointedly dismissed that notion. “Golda gave me no [such] orders. Why?” he asked, shutting his eyes and shrugging. “Because I required no [such] orders.”
Zamir’s next year was feverishly intense. In April, Mossad officers, after months of intelligence work on the ground, led three separate squads of Israeli commandos from the Beirut seashore to three separate terror strongholds in Beirut, playing a pivotal role in Operation Spring of Youth —a mission so bold it seems almost unfathomable in today’s military.
Four months later, in August, Zamir’s officers learned of a plan to shoot down two El Al passenger planes. The attack was imminent. It would be carried out with six SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, which had been sent, as per an agreement with Tripoli, from Cairo to Italy in diplomatic pouches. A senior Egyptian official oversaw the delivery of the missiles to a squad of Palestinian terrorists in Rome.
That official was none other than Ashraf Marwan. The disgruntled son-in-law of Nasser, who agreed to work for Israel for hefty sums of money and for the feeling, apparently, that he was valued, contacted Zamir and informed him of the plan. The terrorists were located, the Italian authorities tipped off, the arrests inconspicuously made. The missiles had been rolled up in carpets and were ready for use.
In October, Marwan again contacted Zamir. This time it was to warn of war. The trouble was it was not his first time. On May 15, 1973, he had sounded a similar warning. Zamir had taken it straight to prime minister Meir. The head of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, had berated him, claiming that the Egyptians were not yet ready for full-fledged war. Thus when Zamir sounded the warning on Yom Kippur night, he knew he was putting his career on the line.
Maybe due to Zeira’s influence, the alarm did not lead to full mobilization or even to preparation for a war. The prime minister was not immediately awoken. According to Uri Bar-Joseph’s book “The Angel,” the defense minister, Moshe Dayan, remarked, “You can’t call up the whole system just because of a few messages from Zvika.”
Zamir never forgave Zeira — for his overconfidence and his crusade to prove that Marwan, who had gotten the time of the attack wrong, was a double agent. Zamir went to his grave believing that Zeira (who is still alive at 95 years old) and Dayan bore the brunt of the guilt for the way the war unfolded. Meir, on the other hand, he believed, was a stellar leader, both before and during the war. Among Israelis, who have long held her responsible for the war, this position remains in a radical minority. “She was dreadfully wronged,” he told Channel 10 news at his ninetieth birthday party. “That woman was a hero.”