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My command of Battalion 532 lasted only a few more months. On April 1,
1974, an official commission of inquiry published its initial report on the war. It
was scathing in its assessment of our intelligence failings, for which it placed
the main blame the officer who had been promoted the year before as head of
military intelligence: Eli Zeira, the man who had addressed us on the sayeret
base before the the 1967 and so confidently predicted the outcome. It also took
aim at two other commanders. Gorodish, as head of the southern command, was
one. The other was Dado. As chief-of-staff, he was held ultimately responsible
for the intelligence failings and for not having ordered at least a partial call-up
of our reserves.
In Eli’s case, I recognized the very fact of our being caught by surprise made
his position untenable. In fact, as I learned more details about what had
happened, I realized the commission had, if anything, understated the
seriousness of his errors. In the run-up to the war, Eli had resisted multiple
requests from other intelligence officers to activate what the commission called
our “special sources” of intelligence: the communications intercepts we’d
planted deep inside Egypt. Worse, he had indicated to the few generals who
were aware of their existence that he had activated them, implying that his lack
of concern about the possibility of an Egyptian was based on our intercepts.
Because Dado was one of the people misled, his fall struck me as profoundly
unfair. He had devoted his whole adult life to the defense of our country. After
the inquiry report, he was never again the same person. He developed an
obsession with fitness and exercise. Psychologists might have called it
displacement activity. I wondered whether it was a kind of self-punishment.
Either way, it may well have killed him. At age 50, less than three years after
the war, he died of a heart attack after a day of running and swimming.
Almost every level of command was thrown into flux after the inquiry
report. So was the political landscape. Both Golda and Dayan bowed to growing
public pressure and resigned. The premium was on finding replacements who
were sufficiently experienced, but did not bear responsibility for the errors of
the war. For Prime Minister, the choice fell on Yitzhak Rabin. He had strong
military credentials, of course. But he had left the army and entered politics, and
had been out of Israel for several years as Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
He had joined Golda’s government only weeks before the war, in the relatively
minor role of Minister of Labor. Much the same thing happened in the army.
Only one of the generals who had been in the running to succeed Dado before
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