It was two years after the Yom Kippur War that I first heard about the Israeli missile boats. The media had until then reported nothing about the navy’s activities in the war. With the fate of the country hanging on the fierce tank battles raging in Sinai and on the Golan, and on the air force’s desperate attempts to stem the Arab tide, the navy had clearly played a marginal role at best.
I was part of a Jerusalem Post team that covered a symposium on the war in 1975 which was addressed by Israel’s top military commanders and political leaders. Although it was not part of my assignment, I stopped by to hear a lecture by the navy commander, Admiral Binyamin Telem, out of curiosity about what the navy had in fact done.
His talk was a revelation. There had been battles at sea, which the public was unaware of, and they had been fought — for the first time in history — not with guns but with missiles which pursued enemy vessels with their own radar. Israel had employed a new kind of warship, missile boats, and so had the Arab navies. The Egyptian and Syrian missile boats, acquired from the Soviet Union, outnumbered the Israeli vessels by more than two to one and their missiles had more than twice the range of the Israeli missiles. Yet the Israeli missile boat flotilla came through the war without losing a boat or a man while sinking almost every Arab vessel it encountered and driving the Arab fleets into harbor. Israel had itself conceived and developed its missile boat and its sea-to-sea missile. No other country in the West had anything similar.
This, then, was not some irrelevant skirmishing of gunboats on the margins of a bloody land war but a turning point in the history of naval warfare. A nation of three million had developed an advanced weapon system that not even the United States possessed and it had proved superior to the only other missile boat system in the world, developed by the Soviet superpower.
Several years later, in an idle moment of reflection triggered by a random remark as I walked down Ben-Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem, I thought of Telem’s talk. Before I reached the corner, I had an epiphany – a sudden recollection of the arrival in Haifa on New Year’s eve 1970 of newly built patrol boats that Israeli sailors had run off with from Cherbourg after the boats were embargoed by the French government. The world had chuckled at the time at Israel’s audacious “theft” of vessels which it had ordered and paid for. They had escaped on Christmas eve into the teeth of a Force 9 gale and made it to Haifa after a week-long run. Might those innocent-looking patrol boats, I now wondered, have been the platforms for the missile boats which performed so spectacularly three years later, the ones Telem had talked about? Might that have been the reason that Israel went to such lengths, endangering its relations with France, to get them out of Cherbourg?
Taken together, the two episodes made for a tale greater than its parts, a tale of national will that surpassed conventional bounds.
I wrote to the Israeli Defense Ministry to express my interest in writing a book on the subject and to request access to relevant military sources. The request was kicked up to Defense Minister Ezer Weizman himself who sent me a letter saying that the matter was still too sensitive to be written about, particularly the Cherbourg aspect. When Weizman was replaced by Ariel Sharon I tried again and received a similar reply from his office. In 1983, Sharon stepped down as defense minister and the defense portfolio was temporarily taken over by Prime Minister Menahem Begin. I wrote once more. This time I received a reply from naval headquarters in Tel Aviv inviting me to a meeting. Apparently no one in Begin’s office knew what to do with my request and it had been passed on to the navy. A friendly captain behind a desk questioned me about my background and about the kind of book I intended to write while a female officer took notes and asked me to send them a copy of a book I had previously written.
A month later I was invited back. Looking solemn this time, the captain informed me that after consideration the navy had decided it could not cooperate. Crestfallen, I was about to take my leave when he added, “But we won’t stand in your way if you want to interview people on your own. We could even provide telephone numbers of any specific persons you ask for.”
“But where would I begin?” I said. “I don’t know who to ask for.”
The officer wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. On it were the names of two persons and their telephone numbers. He did not tell me who they were.
I left the office uncertain whether to be depressed or elated. It took me a while to understand what was happening. The navy did not want to get involved in the project officially but it was interested in seeing the book written. The captain had mentioned that after seeing a recent movie about Israel’s naval commandos the naval command had regretted cooperating with the film company that made it. On the other hand, evidently, it wanted to have the story of its missile boat exploits told – exploits unknown even to the Israeli public. The navy would help me with my project, but from a discreet distance.
The names on the slip of paper given me by the captain were Hadar Kimche and Moshe Tabak. I called Kimche first and traveled to his home on Mount Carmel in Haifa on a stormy winter evening without knowing what edge of the story I was about to touch. It was only after we began talking that I realized that I was not at the edge of the story but at its very center. Kimche had commanded the Cherbourg breakout and was the first commander of the missile boat flotilla. When I left his home after four hours the piece of string the captain in naval headquarters had handed me had become a web leading in a dozen different directions. From Tabak, who had been Kimche’s deputy, I received an expanded picture and the names of still more people.
There would be more than a hundred interviews in the coming years. I would have lengthy talks with the former commanders of the navy who had been instrumental in the development of the missile boat concept, including Yohai Bin-Nun, whom I met at his kibbutz on the Mediterranean coast; Shlomo Erell, then serving as inspector general of Israel’s defense establishment; and “Binny” Telem on his small farm near Netanya. “Yomi” Barkai, the feisty officer who commanded the flotilla during the war, recounted the battles as we sat in the cabin of the small yacht he lived on for half the year between sailings as captain of a merchant vessel.
I had two long sessions with Yitzhak Shoshan, who had commanded the destroyer Eilat, the first ship ever to be sunk by a missile. As we sat in the small paving stone plant he now managed, the emotional scars inflicted by the loss of his vessel and a quarter of his crew were apparent. Many of the interviews with ex-naval officers were conducted in electronics plants in the Haifa and Tel Aviv areas where they had gone to work after completion of their military service. The navy, by now fully cooperating in the project, made active duty personnel available for interviews at the Haifa naval base. I was permitted to join a missile boat on a training mission and even to simulate firing a missile at night. Moshe Arens, a former aeronautics professor at the Technion who had been involved in the development of the missile and gone on to become Israel’s defense minister, met with me in his Jerusalem office.
A key figure in the story, Admiral (ret.) Mordecai (Mocca) Limon, who had master-minded the Cherbourg breakout, initially refused to be interviewed, noting that he had declined numerous requests because of the political sensitivity of the subject. He relented, however, when informed of the navy’s cooperation. We met twice in his executive offices in Tel Aviv, where he managed Rothschild interests in Israel. To meet another key figure in the story, Ori Even-Tov, the developer of the Gabriel missile, I traveled to the United States, where he had founded an electronics plant in a Philadelphia suburb.
In Washington, D.C., declassified documents on the Sixth Fleet’s activities during the Yom Kippur War were made available at the Naval Historical Division in the navy yard. Retired Vice Admiral Daniel Murphy, who commanded the Sixth Fleet during the Yom Kippur War, shed light during an interview on the little known confrontation between the American and Soviet fleets in the Mediterranean during the war -- the largest naval confrontation of the Cold War. American naval authority Norman Polmar offered helpful insights on missile development as well as encouragement, noting that there was virtually no literature on the subject of Israel’s missile boats. Retired Rear Admiral Julian Lake (USN), a member of the team that debriefed Israeli naval officers after the war, told me that he had carried out a study on the development of modern weapon systems around the world. The way the Israeli navy had analyzed the threats facing it and the steps it took to deal with them, he said, “stands out as the one clear example where everything was done right.”
In Cherbourg, which I visited twice, I met with Monsieur Corbinais, who had headed the boat construction project at the Amiot shipyards. On the basis of the Israeli navy’s success in the war, his shipyard would win numerous orders for similar vessels, including from Arab countries. Local journalists who had covered the story, particularly Rene Moirand of La Presse de la Manche, were generous with their time. A shipping agent in Cherbourg provided me with the Paris telephone number of a shadowy figure, Victor Zipstein, said to be a former Mossad agent, who had traveled to Cherbourg with Limon the night of the escape. From a public telephone in a Paris railway station I contacted Zipstein who, after initially refusing to speak, went on to offer important confirmation about central points in the Cherbourg affair and make new revelations while a long line of impatient Parisians formed behind me before dispersing in search of other working phones.
I met in Paris with General Cazelles, who had been sacked by the Pompidou government for his inadvertent role in the affair and found the distinguished old officer still dazed by what had happened to him. From retired French officials, I obtained copies of relevant documents, including intelligence reports on the flight of the Cherbourg boats. Ex-Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas described in an interview the government’s deliberations when the escape was discovered, including the proposal that the French air force “interdict” the fleeing boats.
In the end, all these strands emanating from the piece of investigative string offered by the captain in Israeli naval headquarters would weave together into a single tale. There were three distinct parts to the story – the development of the missile boat system, the escape from Cherbourg, and the performance of the boats in battle. The story of the Cherbourg breakout is told here comprehensively for the first time on the basis of interviews with the principals involved. Likewise, the account of the boats’ performance in the war. For me, however, it was the story of the boats’ development that was the most exciting aspect, even though it was the most sedentary. The development process was an act of intellectual daring and creative teamwork that would foreshadow the successes of Israel’s military industries in future decades, including the Iron Dome anti-rocket system.
In maritime encounters around the world after the Yom Kippur War, the missile would prove to be king. In the Falklands campaign, the British, despite electronic defenses, lost two vessels to French-made Exocet missiles fired by Argentine planes. In the Persian Gulf, tankers would become targets in a shooting gallery for Iranian and Iraqi missiles and even the American destroyer, USS Stark, would fall victim.
The virtual absence of written references to the Israeli missile boat performance in the Yom Kippur War, even in professional literature, was probably due to the secrecy with which the Israeli navy initially shrouded events for security reasons as well as tight-lipped habit and lack of publicity consciousness. Even in Israel, the story of the electronic defenses that permitted the Israeli missile boats to overcome the technology of a superpower was virtually unknown outside the navy itself.
Among the numerous persons not mentioned in the text who were generous in providing information I would like to thank Zvi Tirosh, Moshe Oren, Hirsh Goodman, Michael Lazarus, Arye Barak, Munya Mardor, Ephraim Talmon, Louis Lipsky, Yitzhak Zoran, Jacques Derogy, and Jacques Bruneau. My special thanks to the number-two man on the Gabriel team —anonymous at his own request — who was able to shepherd my non-technical mind through the arcane world of electronics.