Governments around the world are quietly turning to YAMAM, Israel’s special police force, for help with their most intractable security problems. And now, elite commandos publicly reveal the tactics that have made it one of the most fearsome counterterrorism units in the world.
n a spring evening in late April, I traveled to a fortified compound in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The location is not identified on Waze, the Israeli-built navigation tool, and so, as far as my app-addled cabdriver was concerned, it does not exist. Then again, the same could be said for its inhabitants: YAMAM, a band of counterterror operatives whose work over the last four decades has been shrouded in secrecy.
Upon
arrival at the group’s headquarters, which has all the architectural
warmth of a supermax, I made my way past a phalanx of Israeli border
police in dark-green battle-dress uniforms and into a blastproof holding
pen where my credentials were scanned, my electronic devices were
locked away, and I received a lecture from a counter-intelligence
officer who was nonplussed that I was being granted entrée to the
premises. “Do not reveal our location,” he said. “Do not show our faces.
And do not use our names.” Then he added, grimly, and without a hint of
irony, “Try to forget what you see.”
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