The Egyptian Air Force pilots staggered out of their barracks, still groggy from the night before, and found their planes exploding on the tarmac. Across the Sinai, the same scene unfolded—hundreds of aircraft, the pride of Nasser’s army, burning before a single engine could start. The morning patrol had landed just minutes earlier, convinced that nothing would happen at first light. They were wrong.
By 7:45 on June 5, 1967, Israel had launched a strike so secret that most of its own pilots only learned of it when they were handed their target sheets. Nearly the entire Air Force lifted off, flying low over the Mediterranean, maintaining radio silence. For forty-five minutes, nobody on the ground knew if they were okay. They were making history.
This was the culmination of years of desperate work. Since 1948, Israel had lived in a constant state of siege, surrounded by Arab nations that refused to accept its existence. Outnumbered and outgunned, Israeli leaders knew that their only advantage lay in espionage. They couldn’t match the enemy’s numbers.
They had to outthink them. The Mossad and Aman, Israel’s intelligence agencies, operated in the shadows. Their very existence was officially denied. And yet they managed to penetrate the highest levels of the Arab world, gathering information that would determine the nation’s fate.
The most prized intelligence came from a daring operation that captured an entire Soviet-made MiG-21 jet fighter. It was the most advanced warplane on the other side, and no one in the West had ever seen one up close. Even the United States, bogged down in Vietnam, was losing planes to these jets. A Mossad contact inside Iraq found a way in.
A pilot named Munir Redfa, a Christian who felt persecuted, was approached by a female agent and lured to Europe. He was offered a million dollars and safety for his family if he would deliver his plane to Israel. He agreed. Before the defection, he was secretly brought to Israel.
He flew with the chief of intelligence in a dual-control jet, looking down at the country he was about to help. Then he slipped back into Iraq. On the morning of August 16, 1966, he took off in his MiG-21 and flew a zigzag route over Jordan, avoiding radar. Sixty-five minutes later, he entered Israeli airspace.
Two people in the entire Israeli Air Force knew what was happening. The chief of intelligence and the head of the Air Force himself. When the plane appeared on radar, a squadron commander was sent up to greet him. He was ordered to intercept the aircraft but not shoot it down.
He lowered his wheels to signal the pilot to follow. When the MiG-21 landed safely, the Americans arrived in Washington less than twelve hours later. They had never had a flyable enemy jet to study before. Every Israeli pilot then trained in simulated combat against it.
But intelligence wasn’t just about hardware. It was about people. Mossad agent Eli Cohen had infiltrated the Syrian government undercover as an Arab businessman. Accepted at the highest levels, he toured army bases and was given complete access to the fortifications on the Golan Heights.
With a photographic memory, he radioed back every detail. He sent excellent information about troop deployments and gun emplacements. In 1965, he was caught transmitting a message and executed. It was a disaster for the agency.
But he had provided a complete picture of an enemy country that had seemed impenetrable. By 1967, the situation was spiraling out of control. Tension over water resources had boiled over, and Palestinian guerrillas, supported by Syrian military intelligence, were launching terror attacks on northern Israeli settlements. On April 7, Israel retaliated with tanks, artillery, and aircraft deep into Syrian territory.
In the brief battle, six Syrian MiG-21s were shot down and at least sixty soldiers were killed. Moscow was watching. They wanted another center of tension to distract from Vietnam, and they wanted to regain their image after backing down in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The KGB spread disinformation, reporting that Israel was concentrating seven brigades on the Syrian border for a possible attack.
Egypt’s President Nasser was told he must help Syria. Israel denied the claims, but no one listened. The Russian ambassador in Tel Aviv even accused the Israeli prime minister of mobilizing troops. The prime minister offered to let the ambassador inspect the border himself.
The ambassador refused to go. Well, there were no forces there. But the lie had taken on a life of its own. Nasser, who had been looking for an opportunity to prove himself and build an Arab empire, responded by moving his military into the Sinai Peninsula.
He demanded that UN forces leave the area. The UN Secretary General insisted his troops either hold their positions or leave altogether. Nasser held his ground, and the entire UN force was evacuated. Israel called up its reserves.
Six full Egyptian army divisions stood in the Sinai. Yet Israeli intelligence believed Nasser wasn’t really planning to attack. He was posturing, playing politics. Then came the morning of May 23.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was awakened with the news that Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping, blocking the country’s only route to its southern port of Eilat. The same act that had triggered war in 1956. The man around chief of staff General Yitzhak Rabin were convinced that Israel could strike first and win. Rabin urged the hesitant Eshkol to act.
But Eshkol sent his foreign minister abroad to try a diplomatic solution. President Johnson asked Israel to delay, promising an international task force would open the straits. The American Sixth Fleet and British destroyers moved into the Eastern Mediterranean, watched by Soviet warships. Then King Hussein of Jordan, reluctantly, signed a defense pact with Egypt.
Jordanian forces were placed under Egyptian command. Israel would soon be fighting on three borders. Eshkol sent Mossad chief Meir Amit to Washington to find out the truth about the promised task force. Amit met with his friend, the CIA director, who told him the truth: “There’s no task force, no naval forces.
We couldn’t assemble them. ”
Amit then met with the Secretary of Defense. He explained that Israel didn’t want intervention from either side. The Secretary said, “I read you loud and clear.
” When Amit asked if he should stay another day, the Secretary paused. “No,” he said. “You go back home. ”
It wasn’t a green light.
But it wasn’t an objection either. Amit returned to Jerusalem and reported to the Prime Minister. In a meeting on June 4, Eshkol’s cabinet voted to attack. The fate of Israel was now in the hands of its army.
264,000 Israeli men would face 540,000 Arab soldiers. Israel was outnumbered three to one in heavy weapons and aircraft. The next morning, a first strike would be launched under the code word “Red Sheet. ”
The attack went perfectly.
The Egyptians hadn’t known what hit them. Their pilots and officers, some of whom had been entertained by Israeli spies the night before, kept up late into the early hours, were driving to their bases when the planes came. In less than three hours, Israel destroyed 419 aircraft, ninety percent of the Egyptian Air Force, on the ground. It took six hours for the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians to understand what had happened.
Israel kept its success a secret. It wanted the public to stay panicked, and wanted the world not to know the result. Not even Nasser knew what had happened to his Air Force that day. On the ground, Israeli intelligence provided every detail of the Egyptian positions.
They knew where they were deployed, what obstacles they had built. One general had even told his troops that the side that won this first battle would win the war. They were right. Over the next two days, more than a thousand tanks fought in the largest battle in the Sinai desert.
The Egyptians retreated toward the Suez Canal. On the eastern front, Israel gave King Hussein a way out. An agent was dispatched to tell him that Israel would not enter into hostilities if Jordan stayed out of the fight. But Hussein had already issued the order to attack.
He called for Egyptian air support, not knowing that Egypt’s Air Force had been wiped out. The Jordanians fought alone and lost. Israeli columns broke through the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Over the radio, General Mordechai Gur proclaimed, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.
” For the first time in two thousand years, Jews controlled their holiest site, the Western Wall. The king lost the West Bank and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s most treasured shrines. By June 7, Israel and Jordan agreed to a UN ceasefire. Israel was basking in global support.
The world loved an underdog, and Israel was clever enough to show the world that even America and Britain stood beside them, while the Arabs stood alone. On June 8, Israeli troops reached the Suez Canal. The Straits were reopened. Israel and Egypt held their fire.
All of Sinai was in Israeli hands. But the same day was marked by tragedy. The USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship run by the NSA, was sailing in international waters off the Sinai coast. Israeli forces, warned that Egypt might attempt a naval landing behind their lines, saw the unidentified vessel and attacked it with jets and torpedo boats.
They later claimed they tried to identify it. They even called the American Embassy, which knew of no US Navy ships in the area, because the ship was controlled by intelligence and not the Navy. When the torpedo boats closed in, they saw the code letters on the ship, GTR-5, an English designation. They realized they had made a mistake.
But by then, thirty-four sailors were dead. Israel apologized and offered compensation to the families, but never fully explained the attack. An official US inquiry ruled it a mistake. Many survivors remain convinced it was deliberate, that Israel wanted to keep even its allies from learning of its plans.
The truth may never be known. The Syrian front exploded on June 9. The Air Force bombed the fortified gun positions on the Golan Heights, using the information supplied by the executed spy Eli Cohen. The ground assault was brutal.
Israeli soldiers faced steep climbs against heavily defended positions. By the end of the day, the heights were taken, and the guns that had terrorized the settlements below fell silent. The next day, Israeli troops pushed the Syrians further east until a ceasefire was agreed on the evening of June 10. Israeli soldiers stood on the doorstep of Damascus.
After six days, the war was over. On the seventh day, Israelis woke to a new Middle East. They had captured the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the entire Sinai Peninsula. The conquered area was three times the size of Israel itself.
But they were unprepared for the consequences. Nearly a million Palestinians were now under Israeli occupation. The problem remains unsolved to this day. The Arab nations were also unprepared for the price of their defeat.
They had lost Jerusalem, and their intelligence services were blindsided by the speed and efficiency of the attack. One General admitted, “If I want to blame somebody, we blame ourselves. We were never convinced of this war, and we lost the most precious city in the world to us as Muslims and Arabs, Jerusalem. ”
Arab intelligence had fallen into the dangerous trap of wishful thinking.
They refused to face reality. Israel had confirmed their underestimation. They would never take the Jewish state for granted again. In Israel, the victory was a triumph of intelligence.
But the same intelligence community knew the truth. The work was not glamorous. It was a puzzle, a dull, continuous operation in the shadows.
And like the memorial to the spies, shaped like a maze, it would always be a place where the names of the dead remain as mysterious as the stone they’re cut in.
