Yitzhak "Ya鈥檛za" Ya鈥檃kov
Biography
Yitzhak Ya鈥檃cov (1926-2013), known his entire life by the nickname 鈥淵a鈥檛za,鈥 was a Brigadier General in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in charge of weapons research and development (R&D). He was at the center of Israel鈥檚 first nuclear alert on the eve of the 1967 war.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1926, Ya鈥檛za joined the Palmach, the elite special fighting force of the Haganah (pre-state militia) in 1944, and in 1948, during Israel鈥檚 鈥淲ar of Independence,鈥 fought on the Jerusalem front, starting as platoon commander and ending the war as an acting battalion commander.
After the 1948 war, Ya鈥檛za earned engineering degrees as an IDF officer, first from the Technion (Israel Technological Institute) and later from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served in various roles within the IDF鈥檚 R&D establishment. In 1963, upon his return from MIT, as a newly promoted colonel, Ya鈥檛za was appointed head of the Weapons Means department (Hebrew acronym, AMLACH) within the IDF General Staff (AGAM). In that capacity, he served as the senior liaison between the IDF and all the civilian defense R&D entities, including the nuclear project. He held that position during the crisis in May-June 1967 that led to the Six Day War.
In those days Ya鈥檛za initiated, drafted, and promoted a military plan, code-named 鈥淪himshon [Samson] Operation,鈥 to demonstrate nuclear capability, via detonation of a nuclear device, in a desolate site in the Eastern Sinai desert. This super-secret contingency plan did not even come close to execution, but in retrospect it was a most fateful moment in Israel鈥檚 nuclear history. Many regard it as the single moment when Israel crossed the nuclear threshold.
In September 1968, Ya鈥檛za was appointed Deputy Chief Scientist of the Israeli defense establishment (both military and civilian). In 1972, he founded and ran the Weapons Research and Development (Hebrew acronym, MOP) unit shared by both the IDF and the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Ya鈥檛za completed this assignment in late September 1973, just days prior to the Yom Kippur War. He formally retired from the IDF in April of 1974.
From 1974 to 1978, Ya鈥檛za served as the Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Trade and Commerce. In that capacity, he invented the concept of 鈥渢echnological greenhouses鈥 as a means to promote high-tech starts up in Israel. In 1979, he left government work and moved to the private sector as a venture capitalist promoting Israeli high tech. In the early 1980s, he moved to New York City where he continued his entrepreneurial work.
By the late 1990s, Ya鈥檛za found himself haunted by his memories of the 1967 Shimshon Operation. In 1997, he wrote a fictionalized novel titled, 鈥淎tomic Incident,鈥 based on those events and a year later he started writing his memoirs. Those manuscripts were never published.
In late 2000, Ya鈥檛za gave an interview to an Israeli journalist, Dr. Ronen Bergman, in which he discussed his 1967 experience. The interview was submitted to the military censor in Israel who banned its publication. The prohibited interview was also passed to the Security Office at the Ministry of Defense (MALMAB) who issued a security investigation of Ya鈥檛za.
On March 28, 2001, Ya鈥檛za was secretly arrested at Ben Gurion International Airport. Subsequently, Ya鈥檛za was indicted, charged, and tried on two national security offenses: the first, and more severe charge, being 鈥渉igh espionage,鈥 passing secret information with intent to harm national security, while the second, lighter one, was disclosing secret information to unauthorized people. Ya鈥檛za was eventually acquitted by the district court of the more serious offense, but found guilty of the lesser charge. He was given a two-year suspended sentence and was immediately released. His arrest and trial became known in Israel as the 鈥淵a鈥檛za Affair.鈥
In 2011, he published a new memoir in Israel.
Ya鈥檛za died in Tel Aviv on March 25, 2013, a day after his 87th birthday.
Interview Notes by Avner Cohen
The is extracted from the first 鈥 and the most comprehensive 鈥 interview in a series of several I conducted with Brig. General (Ret.) Yitzhak Ya鈥檃kov (Ya鈥檛za) during the summer and fall of 1999 and early 2000. Most of our meetings took place at Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 mid-town, New York apartment, though at one point we both travelled to Austin, Texas and met with Yuval Ne鈥檈man to share his own historical perspective. This interview, which lasts about two hours and ten minutes and was conducted in Hebrew, took place probably in August 1999.
The initial purpose of the interview was to create a taped testimony of Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 recollection of those extraordinary events of 1967. The interview was not initially intended for publication, but rather to serve as raw research material for future work.
Now, however, for the 50th anniversary of the 1967 War, we thought that this crude interview has a unique historical quality. It tells a remarkable story from the perspective of a senior IDF officer directly involved in one of the global nuclear history鈥檚 least known moments, indeed a story that was never before told in public.
The transcript 鈥 extracted from the original audio tape and later converted to digital 鈥 is now part of the 鈥淎vner Cohen Collection,鈥 for which the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP) serves as custodian. The audio was first transcribed in Hebrew, then translated to English, virtually verbatim, by NPIHP interns, Ronen Plechnin and David Najmi, in 2012-13. In February-March, 2017, I made a final edit of the English transcript by reviewing the original Hebrew tape and then comparing it again with both the Hebrew and English transcripts.
This transcript remains a very close reflection of the original tape. However, on a few occasions, when the conversation moves to areas deemed unfit for publication 鈥 for reasons of privacy, clarity, relevance or national security 鈥 some lines were deleted here and there. All the points where deletions were made are clearly marked in the transcript. Still, this nearly 12,000-word transcript represents more than 85 percent of the original interview.
The editors, both in 2013 and 2017, have also at times added brief text in brackets to the transcripts (full names, acronyms, clarity completion of sentences) to help clarify certain points. In addition, we inserted brief footnotes to provide additional historical/biographical information on individuals, events or acronyms mentioned.
Finding Ya鈥檛za
I knew Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 name long before I met him. Since my early research for Israel and the Bomb, in the early 1990s, I was aware of the role Ya鈥檛za played as chief liaison between the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the nation鈥檚 nuclear program. Ya鈥檛za was high on my list of 鈥減ersons of interest鈥 I wanted to interview, but it was not until early summer 1999 that I learned by chance Ya鈥檛za was living in New York City. When I finally got in touch with him, I was pleased to learn he knew who I was, and more pleased when he invited me for a visit at his mid-town apartment.
At the door I saw a white-bearded, seventy-five year old Palmachnik 鈥 a friendly, talkative Israeli, with a distinct, rugged Hebrew voice. As we started the conversation, I started to feel as if he had been waiting for my call. Not only was he familiar with my work, but I got a sense that it had helped trigger his memory. At one point, he was lecturing me on ignoring the IDF perspective. It felt like he was asking me, 鈥淗ow could you have written this book without first talking to me?鈥 Ya鈥檛za gave me a printout of his unpublished fictional manuscript, Atomic Incident, which I began reading immediately on the train back to Washington, D.C. After that initial meeting, I travelled to New York several more times just to hear his story in more detail.
May 1967: A Crash Nuclear Activity
In mid-May 1967, nobody in the Israeli army anticipated a war anytime soon. Ya鈥檛za was at that time on a professional tour in the United States, visiting the headquarters of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Ya鈥檛za was then a colonel, the head of Weapons Means Department (AMLACH) at the IDF general staff; effectively Ya鈥檛za served as the IDF chief weapons technology officer.
On May 14, 1967, however, the Egyptian army started moving into the Sinai, and two days later Egypt requested the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) commander to withdraw his forces from their observation posts along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Following an exchange of confusing messages between New York and Cairo, Egypt requested complete withdrawal of the UNEF. Soon after, Ya鈥檛za received a message from his boss, General Ezer Weizman, the IDF Chief of Operations, to drop everything and fly back home. And so he did.
Ya鈥檛za arrived in Israel around May 20, and found the IDF general staff in a state of crisis. Almost overnight, war with Egypt had become a serious possibility. Ya鈥檛za worried about the Egyptian surface-to-surface missiles, in particular the possibility of a strike on Tel Aviv, maybe even with chemical warheads. The Egyptian missile project was something Ya鈥檛za had followed for some time; Egypt had deployed and used chemical weapons against civilians in the war in Yemen only two years earlier. While the Israeli Military Intelligence (AMAN) discounted the Egyptian missile issue, though not the gas issue 鈥 some viewed the Egyptian missile project a fake project 鈥 Ya鈥檛za took it seriously.
Upon arrival, Ya鈥檛za met Weizman鈥檚 deputy, General Rechavam 鈥淕andi鈥 Ze鈥檈vy, who ordered him to 鈥淧repare everything you got.鈥 That meant, practically speaking, elevating the readiness of the entire R&D program under Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 supervision. Every piece of hardware being worked on should be rendered usable. This order initiated what would be called the 鈥淪himshon Operation.鈥
In following this order, Ya鈥檛za learned from one of his lieutenants at AMLACH that the people of the nuclear project were working around the clock to complete and make 鈥渦sable鈥 an explosive nuclear device. This device was an experimental nuclear explosive system, something akin to the nuclear 鈥済adget鈥 the United States had tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 19, 1945 (codenamed 鈥淭rinity test鈥); it was not an actual bomb that could be placed on a missile or dropped from an airplane.
The crash effort to produce the nation鈥檚 first nuclear device took place at different sites and through separate groups. In the north, RAFAEL engineers and scientists, headed by Yevgeny 鈥淛enka鈥 Ratner, were building the explosive system, commonly called 鈥渢he spider鈥; in central Israel at Dimona, and elsewhere, nuclear teams were working on assembling the first complete nuclear core. The man in charge of all this crash activity was the director general of Israeli Atomic Nuclear Energy, and the head of the new Scientific Administration, Professor Israel Dostrovsky.
As the chief military liaison with the nuclear project, Ya鈥檛za knew the nuclear project was making good headway on an experimental device, but now he was updated about the rush to prepare a usable device as quickly as possible. Ya鈥檛za did not know 鈥 or did not remember 鈥 the exact circumstances that led to the decision to sprint to complete the device, but he saw it as 鈥渢he most natural desire of weapons developers鈥 in such a situation. It is only 鈥渓ogical,鈥 Ya鈥檛za said, that the people at the top of the nuclear project would like to hand the prime minister another option, a very different option, just in case everything else failed. For the project leaders, the crisis was a unique opportunity to demonstrate their importance to the prime minister, to provide him with a unique option, a 鈥渄oomsday option.鈥 It also must have boosted the morale of all those involved, including the prime minister, himself.[ii]
Ya鈥檛za immediately recognized that the crash activity on the device lacked an operational dimension. Only the IDF could provide the resources 鈥 human and material 鈥 to make this technical capability truly operational, to create the operational structure for a demonstration. Ya鈥檛za emphasized during our conversations that nobody at the IDF or at the nuclear project asked him to draft an operational order, but rather he took it upon himself to transform the newly formed technical capability, and the idea of conducting a demonstration, into a viable military operation.
The unexpected existential crisis that Israel suddenly faced pushed the nuclear project to uncharted territories. The desire to provide the prime minister some sort of nuclear option revealed all sorts of problems that until then had never been considered. For example, in May 1967, there were no well-defined lines of communication or authorities, let alone procedures and protocols, to connect the military with the nuclear project. Nobody thought seriously about such issues before because it was so premature, too embryonic. But when a device was about to be produced and was required to be 鈥渦sable,鈥 those new issues needed to be addressed.
鈥沦丑颈尘蝉丑辞苍鈥
Ya鈥檛za believed it was he 鈥 as the IDF liaison 鈥 who initiated and promoted a role for the IDF in that crash effort, and transformed the idea from a demonstrative capability into something operational. Ya鈥檛za stressed that there was little order in this spontaneous initiative. It was highly improvised and there were no well-defined lines of communication between the IDF and the nuclear project. The fluid nature of the situation allowed him to propose a military-operational dimension to that crash activity. In consultation with the head of the nuclear project, Dostrovsky, and with approval from his superiors, Ze鈥檈vy and Weizman, Ya鈥檛za drafted an order creating a logistical and command framework for a demonstration test. The operation was codenamed 鈥沦丑颈尘蝉丑辞苍鈥 [Samson], a clear reference to the Samson story from the book of Judges in the Bible.
As Ya鈥檛za recalled, the original Shimshon order he drafted was a two or three-page document plus some appendices stating in a standard military style the operation鈥檚 objective, intention, means and methods of execution, as well as determining the size of the military force required to execute the operation. Ya鈥檛za stressed that the order was meant only for preparations, not execution.
The order established a small, ad-hoc IDF team with the necessary skills for such an operation: combat and security, communication, medics, etc. This was somewhat out of the ordinary because it required the IDF to support non-military personnel; the nuclear device was not considered an IDF asset 鈥 let alone a weapon 鈥 nor was it 鈥渙wned鈥 by the IDF. The role of the military team was to support the civilian nuclear team: to secure the area and to establish secured communication with the prime minister鈥檚 office. Ya鈥檛za believed the order named him as the military commander of the operation; Dovik Tamari, from the elite Sayeret Matkal, was named as his deputy in that operation.
As noted, the operation also included a civilian team that consisted of key members from the nuclear project 鈥 scientists, technicians and other support personnel 鈥 headed by Israel Dostrovsky, the nuclear project chief. Their mission was to transport the 鈥渟pider,鈥 the semi assembled device, along with the nuclear core, to the target site, to 鈥渕arry鈥 the 鈥渟pider鈥 with its nuclear core, to connect ignition wires to the command post, and to wait for an order from the prime minister.
According to the plan, the operation team would transported to the target site in two Air Force Super Frelon helicopters 鈥 the largest helicopter in Israel鈥檚 fleet 鈥 each capable of carrying a maximum of 38 people. One helicopter would carry the military group, the second the civilian, nuclear group. The military team was set to meet in the old police station in Gedera, in central Israel; the nuclear group would organize elsewhere in central Israel, where the core and the 鈥渟pider鈥 would have arrived separately from different locations.
The selected landing site was a mountain in eastern Sinai, roughly 20 kilometers from the large Egyptian military complex in Abu Ageila. The proposed ground zero was near the landing spot and a command hideout post would have been dug in a canyon or a creek about a kilometer and a half from the landing point. It was evident that a nuclear flash arising from that location would be visible for many tens kilometers throughout the Sinai and the Negev.
According to the plan, a small paratroop force would have diverted the attention of the Egyptian army in the area to allow the team to prepare the nuclear demonstration upon an order from both the prime minister and the chief of staff. That meant preparing the device at ground zero, itself, establishing an electrical system to activate the device from the command post, and setting up secure communication between the command post and the prime minister and chief of staff.
Rabin鈥檚 Signature and Preparations
After drafting the 鈥沦丑颈尘蝉丑辞苍鈥 plan, Ya鈥檛za brought it to his superior at AGAM, General Ze鈥檈vy for approval. According to Yatza, Ezer Weizman was aware of the activity but left it entirely to Ze鈥檈vy, as he was too busy on other things. Ze鈥檈vy made a few editorial changes in the text and approved it. Then they went to present the order to Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin for his approval and signature.
Ya鈥檛za recalled that they met Rabin soon after his two-day medical absence on May 23-24 鈥 what is now known as Rabin鈥檚 mental breakdown, a period of 36-48 hours in which Weizman served as the acting chief of staff. This suggests the meeting most likely took place sometime between May 26 and May 28. According to Ya鈥檛za, Rabin did not look good. Rabin鈥檚 office was unusually quiet and dark, all the curtains were drawn, and Rabin was sitting alone. They showed him the document, but Rabin seemed unable to focus. He read the document but hardly asked any questions. He signed and the two left. Ya鈥檛za remembered thinking to himself it was a very odd meeting, given the fact Rabin just authorized initiating steps towards a nuclear demonstration.[iii] Ya鈥檛za also noted that the entire process of producing and approving the order was rather fast; it may have taken no more than half a day.
Equipped with formal authority, Ya鈥檛za started to form the team. He met with Lt. Colonel Dovik Tamari, the former Sayeret Matkal commander who Ze鈥檈vy had named as Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 deputy. Together they visited the R&D installation in northern Israel where the device was built, and met key people involved in the effort. Ya鈥檛za recalls Tamari taking extensive notes.
The highlight of the preparations was a reconnaissance flight by helicopter over the selected landing site in eastern Sinai, not too far from the Israeli border. They flew a Super Ferlon, the same type of helicopter assigned for the operation. Ya鈥檛za vividly recalled among the people on board Dostrovsky, 鈥渁lways with his short pants,鈥 and Tamari; there may have been a few others on board: Ze鈥檈vy, Dan Tolkovsky, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force and a member of the Israeli nuclear priesthood, Moshe Shachar and some air force officers. The flight took off from Tel Nof Air Force Base and crossed the Egyptian border into the Sinai at low altitude. But just as the helicopter approached the landing site, the pilots received a message from ground control that Egyptian jets were taking off, and they turned around. 鈥淲e got very close to Abu-Ageila, we saw the mountain, and we saw that there is a place to hide there, in some canyon 鈥︹ Ya鈥檛za recounted.
While preparing for Shimshon, Ya鈥檛za told me more than thirty years later, all sort of qualms crossed his mind: Would it explode? Would he survive the blast, heat and the radiation of the explosion? What would it be like to be burned up in such an explosion? 鈥淓ven if we could have done it,鈥 Yatza told me at one point, 鈥淚 probably would have been killed.鈥 Ya鈥檛za also had qualms about Israel being the second state in history to conduct a nuclear explosion in a war. How would the world react if Israel would be the second nation to explode a nuclear device during war?
The Arrival of Dayan and Tzur
On June 1, 1967, Prime Minister Eshkol relinquished his Defense portfolio and former chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, was appointed Israel鈥檚 new Minister of Defense. In anticipation of war, Eshkol asked Minister Without Portfolio Israel Galili and former Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin to draft a short document defining and dividing the authorities and responsibilities between the prime minister and the minister of defense. The first paragraph specified the military actions that could not be taken without prior approval of the prime minister. Among those prohibitions was the use of unconventional weapons, the only implicit reference to the nuclear issue.[iv]
Within hours, the newly appointed Minister of Defense Dayan stripped Deputy Minister of Defense Zevi Dinstein of his authorities at the ministry, including his role as the nuclear project鈥檚 overseer. Dayan appointed former chief of staff Tzvi Tzur (Chera) as his chief civilian aide and as Dinstein鈥檚 replacement at the ministry. That made Tzur the new overseer of the nuclear project, and the de facto head of the newly created nuclear administration system.[v] By June 2, Israel Dostrovsky had essentially two supervisors: Tzur (on behalf of Minister of Defense Dayan) as his immediate supervisor and Prime Minister Eshkol as his ultimate boss.[vi]
These changes had an impact on Shimshon. Upon assuming his new post, Tzur took charge and reviewed every aspect of the operation. With a reputation as an exceptional administrator, Tzur infused order and clarity into what had until then looked pure improvisation. During our interview, Ya鈥檛za praised Tzur鈥檚 role as the new overall boss of the nuclear project. In the few remaining days before the war Tzur held daily coordination meetings with the civilian and military key figures involved, including Dostrovsky, Ya鈥檛za and a few others. According to Ya鈥檛za, it is not that Tzur changed much in what was going on, but rather he called attention to many loose ends and gaps between the various players and agencies involved.
The War and Afterwards
On June 5, 1967, the first day of the Six-Day War, Ya鈥檛za and his deputy, Dovik Tamari, were on full alert in Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 AMLACH office at IDF headquarters. They awaited the command to activate Shimshon. Ya鈥檛za said that even up through that morning he still believed Shimshon could be mobilized.
But by late morning, when it became known that the Israeli Air Force destroyed most of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground, it became clear that Shimshon would remain just an idea, a worst-case scenario. The commanding team was dismantled the next day.
A few days later, after the war was over and everyone in Israel was celebrating, there was a final meeting put together by Tzur to review Shimshon. They discussed lessons learned and what should be done next--how to bring the nuclear project back to its routine, given what was learned from this emergency exercise. Ya鈥檛za had another creative idea. The night before the meeting, he wrote a memo to Tzur proposing to conduct a test anyway. His reasoning in the memo was though the Arabs may be defeated; they were not ready to negotiate a peace. Israel should take advantage of this rare victory; it can now can do whatever it wants. This is the time to test and declare capability, for both political and technological reasons.
Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 proposal was totally dismissed; Tzur never even raised it for discussion. No one else referred to it. The consensus was to bring the nuclear project back to its secretive routine as if nothing happened. As Tzur noted in the interview he gave to the Rabin Center more than thirty years later 鈥 which is part of this special collection -- he viewed the whole effort as a mere technical status check. Politically, he thought a nuclear demonstration made no sense, 鈥淚t would have destroyed what we already had.鈥 Technologically, he viewed it as an amateurish improvisation.
Epilogue
For more than three decades, few people had any idea of the nuclear drama that took place in Israel on the eve of the 1967 War. Even the handful who did hardly ever talked about it, even in private. 鈥沦丑颈尘蝉丑辞苍鈥 fell into oblivion, even for those who knew. It was as if it never happened, another casualty of the Israeli nuclear taboo.
For Ya鈥檛za, however, never forgot those events. The memory lay dormant for decades, but gradually it came back to life. When I met Ya鈥檛za in the summer of 1999, he considered Shimshon one of the two most remarkable events of his life; the other was the fall of Gush Etzion in the 1948 war. He started referring to Shimshon as 鈥渕y legacy.鈥
Listening to Ya鈥檛za鈥檚 recollections made me reflect on the nature of memory, narrative and history, and the relationship among them. Long-term memory seems to be made of narrative anchored in distinct and vivid moments 鈥 events, situations, encounters. People vividly recall these individual moments, but the narrative is larger than the sum of those moments and it always has blanks, holes and sheer fog. Often, we fill these with guesses disguised as memory. True memory is inescapably fragile.
Ya鈥檃tza and I talked much about the fragility of human memory. It was clear that while some moments he recalled vividly, others he hardly remembered. He was aware that his narrative of events was at certain points more conjecture than memory. He conceded having doubts about some of his claims. Realizing the difficulty in uncovering the past, my job was often to challenge him by raising issues, puzzles, inconsistencies with his narrative and forcing him either to provide explanations or to admit memory lapses. The interview sometimes sounds more like an interrogation. At times Ya鈥檛za tried to address those difficulties by digging deeper into his memory and at times by proposing or reconstructing logical explanations. Often it was truly difficult to reconstruct what happened.
The fragility of memory is inescapable in any kind of oral history, and certainly it was a challenge here.
[i] Israel Dostrovsky (1918-2010), an Israeli physical chemist who was a prominent scientist in the Israeli nuclear program. He founded HEMED GIMMEL in 1948, was among the founding members of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), served as the first director-general (1966-71), the fifth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, laureate of the 1995 Israel Prize in the physical sciences. See Avner Cohen, 鈥淟ast of the Nuclear Mohicans,鈥 贬补鈥檃谤别迟锄, October 29, 2010. .
[ii] Indeed, in his briefing to the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense of the Knesset on May 26 Prime Minister Eshkol hinted about this extraordinary activity. See those minutes in this collection.
[iii] Ya鈥檛za told me that he considered the Shimshon operation order the most important military document he had ever drafted during his entire IDF service. For this reason, he kept a copy of the document in his safe at his home. After he left Israel in the early 1980s his ex-wife arranged that the document was removed by security. Months later, upon visit, Ya鈥檛za was summoned and reprimanded by keeping for keeping the document. Decades later, as Ya鈥檛za got haunted by his old 1967 memory, he reconstructed the order in his fictional Atomic Incident.
[iv] Avner Cohen, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel鈥檚 Bargain with the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 175.
[v] On the creation of the nuclear administration in 1966, formally referred to the Scientific Administration, the minhal, see Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, pp. 228-31; also, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel鈥檚 Bargain with the Bomb, pp. 172-4.
[vi] Although Eshkol as the prime minister remained formally in control of the nuclear project, in practical managerial terms, the newly appointed minister of defense, Dayan, controlled the nuclear bureaucracy, the minahl. During Eshkol鈥檚 tenure at the Ministry of Defense this authority was practically passed on to Dinstein who served as Eshkol鈥檚 ears and eyes on the secret project. By June 2 all Dinstein鈥檚 responsibilities were given by Dayan to Tzur. Avner Cohen, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel鈥檚 Bargain with the Bomb, pp. 174-75.