Four Syrian helicopters lifted off at 2 p.m. and headed toward the Israeli position. One of the craft crashed when its rotor struck a slope but the others landed their troops safely. Artillery fire was placed on the Israeli outpost to keep the defenders’ heads down. At 2:45 p.m., the attack force from the Syrian Hermon reached the outpost. In the absence of trenches or firing positions, the Golani soldiers could only fire from the narrow entranceways to the structure.

After an exchange of fire lasting forty-five minutes, the surviving defenders pulled back into the building and slammed shut the metal door. By 5 p.m. the attackers, dropping grenades and smoke canisters through air ducts, had forced their way in. Eleven men managed to escape but thirteen were killed and thirty-one taken prisoner, four of them after hiding in a basement for seven days. Soviet and East German experts who arrived to dismantle the electronic equipment were exultant to discover most of it intact.

For the Syrians, an even greater windfall was the information elicited from Israeli intelligence personnel during interrogation, particularly from a lieutenant named Amos.

When his commander at SIGINT headquarters learned that the Hermon had fallen, he prayed that Amos had not been taken alive. In Arab hands, the young officer was a threat to some of Israel’s most guarded intelligence secrets. He had a curiosity about things, important or trivial, that was obsessive. He read everything at headquarters he could get his hands on. He also had a photographic memory and a compulsion to display it. He would challenge his colleagues to ask him the car license number of any officer on base and his answers were inevitably right. His analyses of Syrian systems were brilliant but his commander found his obsessiveness and nerdiness annoying in the extreme.

In the days before the war, as tensions in SIGINT headquarters mounted, the commander decided that Lieutenant Amos was too much of a distraction and ordered him transferred to the Hermon listening post. An aide pointed out that IDF policy barred the assignment of soldiers like Amos, the only son of a widowed mother, to dangerous posts. The commander said that the Hermon was unlikely to be attacked and insisted that he did not want him at headquarters. It did not take long after Amos’s capture for the Syrians, and their Soviet mentors, to realize that a treasure had fallen into their hands. Held separately from the other prisoners, he was told that Israel had fallen and that any information he gave would not harm his country because it no longer existed. It was not an implausible claim to prisoners who had witnessed the stunning collapse of Israel’s defenses in the opening hours of the war.

His interrogator displayed a gun and told Amos he would be killed if he did not cooperate but, unlike the other prisoners, he was not tortured. He answered all questions at exhaustive length—in Arabic, which he spoke fluently. He gave the names and duties of SIGINT’s officers, revealed which Syrian communication lines were being tapped, where Israeli commando units placed listening devices on Syrian territory, how Israeli intelligence was organized. As Amos’s bounty poured forth without pause, his interrogators found it difficult to keep up. In the end, they gave him paper and a pen and told him to just write down whatever he knew. Which he did over the coming days.

He had far more answers than they had questions. When he was done, drained of secrets, he was taken to a large cell where he was astonished to find some thirty other Israeli prisoners—pilots and tank crewmen—sitting in a circle on the floor. They made room for him. When he learned that some had been captured days after Israel had supposedly fallen, he covered his face with his hands and said, “It will take twenty years to repair the damage I’ve done.” The effect of his revelations was felt almost immediately by SIGINT whose listening devices lost track of Syrian command and intelligence personnel.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5898867&forum_id=2/#50102652)

https://www.amazon.com/Yom-Kippur-War-Encounter-Transformed-ebook/dp/B000XUBECU?crid=22MJD7YFUILVB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DSMMX57wV41qxECDMO0dnc2TkC7zmxyIi9J4JOF2iqFPJ-xmrH0chOcw2i0GvXPxqEQwPgxii4gSTB02nzg1lb2diXWQIHisS7XqQLZQ2tL0mzzp3OO-alWob0M10CCejv69ynHiWVz-EAvN2utSoHFIxhLhKQ-5feHQrvpLkV8Y2xZLflMDJ5zrlV_9jjmC1x5VrRDnmdWHXWBn-9YmUiA7S-4Q71XCS7Ge4z8STwQ.eJwiKKFz39qxKcvsRtk_By_izy0tK276RAJDDHvgoWw&dib_tag=se&keywords=yom+kippur+war+kindle&qid=1787970264&sbm=true&setroute=search&sprefix=%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5898867&forum_id=2/#50102718)

The military attaché at the Israeli embassy in London perked up at the Arabic accent of the man on the telephone. The caller, identifying himself as an Egyptian, said he would like to meet with an Israeli intelligence officer at a neutral venue. The attaché said that a meeting could only be arranged in the embassy building.

It was 1970, three years after the Six Day War, and there had been periodic calls since then from persons with Arabic accents professing to offer their services. Security considerations ruled out such meetings on non-Israeli turf. The caller said he could not come to the embassy but left his name and telephone number. The name meant nothing to the attaché.

He mentioned the conversation later to two visiting Mossad officers with whom he was being driven to the airport. Upon hearing the caller’s name, they looked at each other and asked the driver to pull over. One of them took a taxi back to the embassy to call the number the man had left. The Mossad officials knew Ashraf Marwan—the man who had called—to be no less than the son-in-law of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who had died two months before.

Under Nasser, Marwan worked in the Presidential Office, the nerve center of Egypt and of the Arab world. He had been kept on as a roving ambassador by Nasser’s successor, Sadat, who saw the co-option of a member of Nasser’s family helping to legitimize his own rule, which was being challenged by powerful political rivals. The Mossad kept a close eye on Egypt’s ruling hierarchy and knew Marwan to be a political insider and a profligate spender, often short of cash. There had even been thoughts of trying to recruit him but they had not yet stretched that far into the heart of the Egyptian establishment.

Receiving the callback, Marwan was invited to a meeting in the lobby of a luxury hotel in central London. The Mossad officer who had called him, ostensibly reading a newspaper, sat close to the lobby entrance while along the street security men discreetly positioned themselves against surprises. At the appointed hour, a handsome, dark-complexioned young man carrying an attaché case entered and looked about him. The Mossad officer glanced at a photograph in a four-year-old Cairo daily concealed between the pages of his newspaper. It showed President Nasser beaming at his daughter in wedding finery and her young groom. The Mossad officer looked again at the new arrival, then nodded at a man with European features sitting across the lobby. The man, the deputy Mossad station chief in London, approached the Egyptian. “Mr. Marwan, good to meet you,” he said in fluent Arabic. “My name is Alex.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5898867&forum_id=2/#50102818)

An unspoken premise on which Israel had built its defense strategy—and he its prime architect—was that the Arabs they would face in the next war were the same Arabs they had so handily defeated in the Six Day War and the Sinai Campaign of 1956. It was a premise that invited strategic corner cutting, like maintaining disproportionately small forces on the front lines. A single day’s battle had now demonstrated that these were not the same Arabs.

Both the Egyptians and Syrians were attacking according to a well-thought-out plan—better thought out, clearly, than Israel’s own. They had been massively supplied with modern weapons by the Soviets, including weapons Israel had no answer for, like the SAM-6 and the Sagger. More troubling still, they were infused with a fighting spirit they had never before shown. They were not running, even when hit hard. Israel had not calculated the psychological boost the Arabs would derive from seizing the initiative. Nor did it calculate the negative psychological impact the surprise would have on Israel.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5898867&forum_id=2/#50102880)

Before the helicopter landed at Sde Dov Airfield on the Tel Aviv seafront, he determined to share his dark vision with Elazar and Mrs. Meir. Most Israelis had little doubt that while the situation was difficult, the IDF had the resilience to recover and to win the field. The day before, with the war only two hours old, Dayan himself had spoken optimistically at a meeting with Israeli newspaper editors. “The Egyptians have embarked on a very big adventure they haven’t thought through. After tomorrow afternoon [when the reserves begin to reach the front] I wouldn’t want to be in their place.”

Now it was tomorrow afternoon and it was Israel that was in trouble, not the Arabs. “Do you know what I fear most in my heart?” he said to Elazar in the Pit. “That Israel will be left without sufficient arms to defend itself, regardless of where the new line is drawn. That there won’t be enough tanks and planes, that there won’t be enough trained personnel.” The war was not against Egypt and Syria, he said. “This is the war of Israel against the Arabs”—that is, the entire Arab world. This was the message he intended transmitting in the coming hour to Mrs. Meir. “If you take exception to anything,” he said to Elazar, “tell me now.” He was not advocating an immediate retreat but a fallback line had to be prepared, he said, perhaps along the Lateral Road.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5898867&forum_id=2/#50102886)

If Dayan had used that word, it is inconceivable that he used it in the conventional sense. But he had spoken of beleaguered garrisons surrendering and of surrendering territory—pulling back from the Bar-Lev Line. (Years after Mrs. Meir’s death, her old friend, Ephraim Katzir, a distinguished scientist and a former president of Israel, said that Mrs. Meir told him that “a senior officer,” evidently Dayan, had suggested at an early stage seeking international intervention to end the war.) Dayan offered Mrs. Meir his resignation, which she refused. When she asked what his reaction would be if the U.N. ordered a cease-fire, he said he would grab it, even if this meant the Egyptian army remaining on the Sinai bank of the canal.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5898867&forum_id=2/#50102894)