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)

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(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)