Where was Military Intelligence?
The first operational failure was revealed when the battalion traveled to Jerusalem in a convoy of buses. As in the Second Lebanon War, when Military Intelligence files about Hezbollah were not passed down to the fighting units, before the Six-Day War a great deal of information had been gathered about the Jordanians, but on the day of reckoning, it was nowhere to be found. Micha Eshet, the operations officer of the 66th Brigade, was a 24-year-old student, and one of the first officers to reach the city. “At 1 P.M., there was shelling and total chaos at the Schneller camp,” he says, “absolutely no intelligence material. Motta took the brigade commanders on a patrol, but they had only what they could observe with their eyes.” Even today there is no consensus as to who was responsible for supplying intelligence to the brigade. The operations officer of the Jerusalem Brigade, Amos Ne’eman, insists that he gave the paratroop officers all the maps and aerial photographs that were on the wal