LABOR Party leader Ehud Barak goes into today’s elections favored to beat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, thanks to a campaign that drew heavily on the kinds of commando tactics he practiced when he was the head of Israel’s elite Unit 269.
Foremost among those tactics was complete secrecy.
Once Barak chose his core campaign team – including his American spinmeisters, former Clinton adviser James Carville, Democratic speech writer Bob Shrum and onetime Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg – he isolated them from Labor Party headquarters and put a tight seal on all planning and information.
His handlers found Barak to be an obedient and disciplined combatant in the political arena – just as he was when as an obedient soldier he risked his life behind enemy lines on secret commando raids.
Barak also recruited into his campaign several loyal soldiers who served under him in Unit 269.
He used this key cadre to help organize the thousands of campaign workers who spread out across the country, putting up posters, canvassing and taking the Barak message to the grass roots.
I first met Barak in 1970 at a Tel Aviv cafe when he was a young army captain with a shy smile and a slight build.
Avraham Arnan, the commander of the secret Unit 269 was with us and he told me, “Meet the young man who one day will be the commander in chief of the Israeli armed forces.”
I had already heard stories about the young officer who had gone again and again on daring intelligence missions into the Arab countries that bordered Israel.
Therefore I was not surprised in 1973 when I learned that Ehud Barak, now the commander of the vaunted unit, had gone disguised as a woman to Beirut where he and other commandos killed the top aides to PLO chief Yasser Arafat involved in the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the previous year.
Other Barak victories included the planning of the 1976 raid to free Israeli hostages at Entebbe in Uganda and a 1989 mission to Tunisia to eliminate Abu Jihad, who was controlling the Palestinian Intifadah in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.