Zeira had received a number of reports like this in the preceding week, but they didn’t cause him much concern. Remember the concept, he counseled his lieutenants: Egypt still didn’t have enough planes or missiles to defeat Israel. And besides, Zeira had other things to focus on, most notably the cultural transformation he was pushing through the Directorate of Military Intelligence. In the midst of remaking the military’s approach to threat analysis, Zeira was also ridding his agency of its propensity for endless debate. Henceforth, he had declared, intelligence officers would be evaluated on the clarity of their recommendations. Both Zeira and his chief lieutenant “lacked the patience for long and open discussions and regarded them as ‘bullshit,’?” the historians Uri Bar-Joseph and Abraham Rabinovich wrote. Zeira would “humiliate officers who, in his opinion, came unprepared for meetings. At least once he was heard to say that those officers who estimated in spring 1973 that a war was likely should not expect promotion.” Though internal debates were tolerated to a point, “once an estimate was formulated everyone was committed to it and no one was allowed to express a different estimate outside the organization.”
The Directorate had to lead by example, Zeira declared. He had been appointed to provide answers, not prolong debates. When one of Zeira’s subordinates, concerned about the latest reports of Egyptian troop movements, asked to mobilize a handful of reservists to help analyze what was going on, he received a phone call. “Yoel, listen well,” Zeira told the memo writer. “It is intelligence’s job to safeguard the nation’s nerves, not to drive the public crazy.” The request was denied.
On October 2 and 3, 1973, sightings of Egyptian troops increased. Then came word of activity on the border with Syria. Alarmed, the prime minister called another meeting. Zeira’s division, once again, counseled that there was no reason to be concerned: Egypt and Syria had weak air forces; they had no missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. This time, the military experts who had disagreed with Zeira six months earlier followed his lead. “I don’t see a concrete danger in the near future,” one general told the prime minister. Meir was troubled before the meeting, she later recounted in her memoirs, but the intelligence estimate eased her mind. She had chosen the right officials to bring the nation much-needed relief.
Seventy-two hours after Binyamin Siman-Tov submitted his report, Israel’s intelligence analysts learned that the Soviet Union had started an emergency airlift of Soviet advisers and their families out of Syria and Egypt. Intercepted telephone calls among Russian families revealed they had been ordered to hurry to the airport. Aerial photographs showed more tanks, artillery, and air-defense guns massing along the Suez Canal and in the Syrian-controlled portions of the Golan Heights.
On the morning of Friday, October 5, four days after Siman-Tov’s report, a group of Israel’s top military commanders, including Zeira, gathered in the office of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The hero of the Six-Day War was upset. The Egyptians had positioned 1,100 pieces of artillery along the Suez, and air reconnaissance showed massive numbers of troops. “You people don’t take the Arabs seriously enough,” Dayan said. The chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces agreed. Earlier that morning he had ordered the army to its highest alert since 1967.
But Zeira had another explanation for the troop movements: The Egyptians were preparing their defenses in case Israel launched an invasion of its own. There were no new fighter jets in Egypt, he said. No Scud missiles. Arab leaders knew striking at Israel would be suicide. “I don’t see either the Egyptians or the Syrians attacking,” Zeira said.
Afterward, the meeting moved into the prime minister’s office. She asked for an update. The military’s chief of staff, aware that mobilizing Israel’s reservists on the holiest Jewish holiday would draw fierce criticism, said, “I still think that they’re not going to attack, but we have no hard information.”
Then Zeira spoke. Concerns about the Egyptians and Syrians attacking, he said, were “absolutely unreasonable.” He even had a logical reason for the evacuation of Soviet advisers. “Maybe the Russians think the Arabs are going to attack because they don’t understand them well,” he said, but the Israelis knew their neighbors better than that. Later that day, when Israeli generals briefed the prime minister’s cabinet, Zeira reiterated that he believed there was a “low probability” of war. What they were seeing were defensive preparations or a military exercise, Zeira argued. Arab leaders weren’t irrational.
Having seized on an answer—that Egypt and Syria knew they couldn’t win, and therefore wouldn’t attack—Zeira was frozen, unwilling to reconsider the question. His goal of disciplined decision making had been satisfied.
The next morning was the first full day of Yom Kippur.
Before daybreak, the head of the Mossad telephoned his colleagues to say that a well-connected source had told him Egypt would invade by nightfall. The message was delivered to the prime minister as well as Dayan and the military’s chief of staff. They all rushed to their offices as the sun rose. The odds of war, they believed, had just shifted.
As Yom Kippur prayers began, Israel’s streets were quiet. Families were gathered in homes and synagogues. Shortly after ten o’clock, a full six days after enemy forces had started massing along Israeli borders, the military finally issued a partial call-up of reserves. Inside houses of worship, rabbis read hastily delivered lists with the names of people who needed to report for duty. By then, Egypt and Syria had been moving tanks and artillery into offensive range for weeks, but this was the first public hint that trouble might be near. At that moment, there were more than 150,000 enemy soldiers along Israel’s borders, ready to attack from two directions, and another half million soldiers waiting to follow the initial waves. Egypt and Syria had been coordinating their invasion plans for months. When confidential documents from that period were released decades later, they revealed that Egypt s president had assumed Israel knew what he was doing. How else could they interpret all the men and matériel being moved to the border?
Meir called an emergency meeting of her cabinet for noon. “She was pale and her eyes were downcast,” The Times of Israel wrote in a reconstruction of that day. “Her hair, normally neatly combed and pulled back, was disheveled and she looked like she had not shut her eyes all night….She began with a detailed report of events over the past few days the Arab deployment on the borders that had suddenly taken on ominous color, the hasty evacuation of the families of Soviet advisers from Egypt and Syria, the air photos, the insistence by military intelligence that there would be no war despite mounting evidence to the contrary.” Meir announced her conclusion: An invasion of Israel was likely to occur, maybe as soon as within the next six hours.
“The ministers were stunned,” The Times of Israel reported. “They had not been made privy to the Arab buildup. Furthermore, they had been told for years that even in a worst-case situation, military intelligence would provide at least a 48-hour warning to call up the reserves before war broke out.” Now they were being informed that a two-front war would occur in less than six hours. The reserves were only partially mobilized—and because of the holiday, it was unclear how quickly troops would be able to get to the front.
The attack came even sooner than Meir expected. Two hours after the cabinet meeting started, the first of ten thousand Egyptian shells began falling on the Sinai; at four P.M., twenty-three thousand Egyptian soldiers crossed the Suez in the first wave of attack. By the end of the day, enemy forces were two miles into Israeli territory. They had killed five hundred Israeli soldiers and were rapidly advancing toward the Israeli towns of Yamit and Avshalom, as well as an Israeli air force base. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Syria struck simultaneously, attacking the Golan Heights with soldiers, planes, and tanks.