N7

N7

Mossad took delivery of Horst Wagner with all his supplementary documentation, but  there  were  many  pointed  questions  that Judith found impossible  to answer. Fortunately for her, such was her new  fame,  both nationally  and internationally,  that the intelligence service was  severely constrained. When Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned of the details, he told Mossad to back off. In his  ancillary role  as  Defense Minister  he brevetted Judith  to the  rank of Segen  in the  Israeli Defense Force, equivalent to a junior lieutenant.

For the time being, as a brevet officer, she retained the pay of Samal, or Sergeant, from her service in the reserves. But having fallen officially into the clutches of the IDF officer corps she was compelled to undergo her first physical.

In the main Judith was in excellent condition. The doctors noted the ugly mass of keloid whip  scars on her back,  which limited her movement to a degree. When they noted the six digit tattoo on her forearm they knew how she got the scars.

In 1952 there was a coup in Egypt deposing King Farouk, who had ruled his country  since  1936. One of the  coup plotters,  a leftist revolutionary named Colonel  Gamal Nasser, steadily rose in influence to  become the  usual President-for-life. In 1956 Nasser nationalized the  Suez Canal,  seizing control  from the British. He closed the Straits of  Tirin in the Red  Sea, which effectively put the southernmost Israeli port of  Eilat under a blockade. At the same time he refused to allow  any ships bound for Tel Aviv or Haifa to transit the canal.

The United Kingdom and France laid plans to take the canal back by force. They were interested in  getting Israel  involved in this operation. Israel was already leaning toward a tussle with Egypt, the  question  was  simply when,  not  if. Cross-border fedayeen raids from the Gaza strip had never ceased in the eight years Egypt had occupied it, as Judith could well testify.

Judith skipped from 1951 and arrived in 1956 at the still tender age of twenty-three. For Michael the  only difficult  part was convincing Judith that what hy had done to her was real.

When Judith reported to her unit she explained her absence from all the scheduled drills with a claim that she had been overseas hunting Nazis. That was  entirely  sufficient. Her superior officers knew she was the apple of the Prime Minister's eye.

Seren Judith Margolies's part in the war began at Eilat and ran down the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba.