Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Hostage negotiations 101, I

In November 1952, Dayan summoned Scheinerman to his office in Nazareth. He wondered aloud whether it would be possible to kidnap two Jordanian soldiers. Perhaps, he thought, a pair of Legionnaires could be used as bargaining chips to secure the release of two Israeli soldiers who had been captured while training near the Jordanian city of Qalqilya.

Scheinerman answered with a knee-jerk affirmative, but said he'd have to look into the matter. As soon as he left the general's office, he rifled through maps in search of Jordanian positions within striking distance. The Sheikh Hussein Bridge, which crossed the meandering Jordan River, seemed a suitably vulnerable point. With nightfall, Major Scheinerman and Lieutenant Shlomo Grover of the northern reconnaissance team set off in a flatbed truck. They parked on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and made their way to the river on foot. On the opposite bank they saw two soldiers smoking cigarettes. The Israeli officers grabbed metal rods protruding from the bottom of the ruined bridge and made their way across the shallow river in silence. On the eastern bank, they crawled to the guards' hut and pulled out their pistols.

Source: Hefez, Nir, and Bloom, Gadi. Ariel Sharon: a Life. Random House, New York, 2006.

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