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Sun., February 17, 2008 Adar1 11, 5768

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Last update - 19:31 17/02/2008

Flying in the face of perfection

By Uri Dromi

Tags: Israeli books, Yiftah Spector

Ram vebarur (Loud and Clear), by Yiftah Spector, Yedioth Ahronoth Books (Hebrew) 867 pages, NIS 98

Anyone who has read Yiftah Spector's book "A Dream in Black and Azure" and has been waiting for him to sit down again and write, will not be disappointed by "Ram vebarur" ("Loud and Clear"). His is a fascinating autobiography of the pilot, commander and non-conformist who led his men to achievements in battle while preserving their lives. The eloquently written memoir is laced with a broader view of the history of the air force, but it is not intended for pilots alone: The dramas that follow one another in rapid succession, the struggles with outside enemies and internal rivals, the dilemmas, the solutions and Spector's insights - all will be of interest to many others. The fact that Spector was the most senior signatory to the 2003 pilots' letter (the declared refusal of certain pilots to attack Palestinian civilian population centers) only raises expectations of this book.

This is the story of a boy whose father, Zvi Spector, disappeared into the sea when he led 23 Palmach seamen (Yordei Hasira) on a fateful mission with the British to blow up oil refineries in Lebanon in May 1941; his mother, Shosh Spector, was then a tough secretary at Palmach headquarters. As a young pilot, Spector was influenced by Yaakov "Yak" Nevo, the father of Israeli aerial tactics, and became a daring and original aerial fighter who always pushed the envelope of his operations and achievements. In this he is reminiscent of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker 50 years before him, the American's "ace of aces," who fought Baron von Richthofen's "Red Circus" in World War I, and was ahead of his times in understanding technology and the art of aerial warfare.

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When major events took place, Spector was there. He attacked the Arab airfields in the Six-Day War; he bombed an "Egyptian" ship that turned out to be the USS Liberty, and he led his squadron of Mirages in air battles during the War of Attrition, and the Phantom squadron in the Yom Kippur War. As chief operations officer of the air force, he pushed - not always successfully - for changes in the force's outlook; he participated in the 1981 attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq; and he was commander of two bases. Together with Spector, we recall both his fine and less-than-fine moments.

More than anything else, this book allows us ample opportunity to become acquainted with Spector's complex personality. "Everything starts from inside," is a phrase he returns to throughout the book. "Listen well, Mr. Yiftah Spector," he says to himself at times of trouble, "it all depends on you. The question is only what you have inside you, what you are worth."

But what about the other people who exist in his world? With astonishing frankness he admits that "the matter of 'human relations' is a total mystery. I didn't know how this was done. And therefore I decided to stop pondering this and move forward, and this matter would have to look after itself over time."

But it wasn't only people that Spector had a hard time getting along with: The rules and norms others were subject to felt like shackles to him. As commander of the first fighter squadron, he enforced iron discipline on his pilots. In one particular scene, in which he gives the boot to one of his best pilots, after the latter has disobeyed his orders, seems to have been taken straight out of Alexander Bek's book "The Men of Panpilov."

But it was not long before Spector himself committed a bad flight violation. The next day he gathered his pilots and informed them that the pilot (namely, Spector) who had committed the violation would immediately be expelled from the squadron; then, in the same breath, he declared that the squadron commander (also Spector) was essential for leading the unit in battle and would therefore have to remain. With typical cruel frankness, he admits that he acted "with intellectual dishonesty," but the reader, instead of bristling, finds himself charmed.

All of this suggests more than a whiff of the Nietzschean: "Look what has happened to me. How I have soared to heights where the rabble is not found. It is possible that it was loathing that created my wings and my power. The truth is that I had to soar to the highest altitude in order once again to find the river of pleasure. My brother, I have found it here in the highest place. It is full to the brink and there is no rabble to drink from it" ("Thus Spoke Zarathustra").

The well-kept secret

Spector tells of a meeting at his house 20 years after the attack on the Iraqi reactor. During the encounter, it emerged that two of the pilots and the commander of the air force had revealed the deep secret to their wives before the mission. At least they hadn't behaved like Herbert Asquith, the British prime minister about whom people said he "revealed state secrets to other men's wives." It is an open secret that of the eight pilots who took part in the operation, only Spector missed the target and hit the yard of the reactor rather than its core. However, at that meeting, Spector surprised everyone when he revealed to his friends what he had kept in his heart for 20 years: On that historic sortie, he flew when he was not in the best of health. He had been suffering from shortness of breath and was taking blood-thinning medication that caused him to black out as he closed in on the target. Moreover, the night before, he had suffered from insomnia, and had nodded off briefly during the flight. Didn't he endanger the success of the operation, one of the most important in the history of the air force and the country? And how could he violate the air force's code of honesty by not disclosing the reason for his flawed functioning?

Spector admits honestly: "I was a man of 41. I simply was incapable of sharing with anyone the fact that my body was betraying me." Now that the things have been said and a weight lifted from his heart, readers will do what they like with the information.

The excitement and tension wrought by the book culminates in a dramatic ending: Spector, one of the air force's heroes, in a courageous - but, in my opinion, mistaken - step challenges the system to which he had devoted his life. The system responds in an exaggerated way. The commander of the air force at the time, General Dan Halutz, should have behaved as Colonel Ezra Dotan counseled Spector himself to do when he was faced with misbehaving pilots: "Don't boot them out, educate them."

But the deed was done and its consequences tremendous. In the wake of the letter, Uri Avneri wrote that "this mission by the pilots has served the state more than the hundreds of missions they carried out during their military service." Dov Weissglas, former head of the Prime Minister's Bureau, said Spector's protest was one of the factors that caused Ariel Sharon to order the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. But the protest astonished and angered the air force.

In this context, the reader might have expected Spector to offer some philosophy to interpret his actions, to explain in detail the difference between refusal and disobedience, to deal with the argument that one kind of refusal will be countered by another, leading to the end of democracy, and so on and so forth.

But perhaps he was tired of doing so. Instead, we got something like "in the wake of the storm that battered me after that pilots' letter, I started to think, to read, to listen and to talk. It became clear to me that our existence here and the existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora is still very far from a solution," and other statements that do not fit in with the altogether high level of the book. The reader, therefore, is left with the bitter taste of having missed out on something.

At the end of the book, Spector tells us he has not revealed all, "because you wouldn't believe it." Perhaps 20 years from now, he will muster the courage to say he was sucked into the pilots' letter by mistake - that everything could have been different had things happened one way and not another. If he does write that, I will be the first to read it, as Spector is more fascinating when he is mistaken than many of us are when we are right.

Israel Air Force Colonel (res.) Uri Dromi is the director general of Mishkenot Sha'ananim.

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