the Suez Canal. There the ship was ambushed by an Egyptian missile
boat and sunk. Of the destroyer’s complement of 200, 47 were killed
and about 100 wounded. The commander of the Eilat, Lieutenant
Colonel Yitzhak Shoshan, was wounded in the attack.
The British-built destroyer had been launched in 1944. It saw ac-
tion in World War II, escorting supply convoys in the Arctic. In 1955
the British government agreed to secretly sell to Israel the ship,
which was renamed Eilat, and another destroyer of the same class,
the Ya ff o(Jaffa). The price of each was £35,000. The destroyers were
overhauled and adapted for Israeli use in British shipyards and then
mobilized for operational service in the Israeli Navy. Shortly after
reaching Haifa, the Eilat was sent into action in the 1956 Sinai cam-
paignin the battle to capture the Egyptian destroyer Ibrahim al-
Awal, afterward renamed the Haifa.
The day before the Eilatwas sunk, Captain David Leviatan of the
signals intelligence (SIGINT) Unit 515 (today Unit 8200)in Israel’s
Military Intelligence(MI) had intercepted a message revealing that
the Egyptians had discovered the patrol and knew of the presence of
the Israeli destroyer at the limit of their territorial waters. There was
also information indicating Egypt’s intention to carry out a maritime
attack. Two versions exist concerning this advance alert. One main-
tains that the reports reached the commander of the Eilat, Lieutenant
Colonel Yitzhak Shoshan, in time to save his ship and his crew. The
other states that Unit 515 did not convey the advance alert. Investi-
gations that followed the sinking of the Eilat were unable to decide
between the two versions.
Unit 515 was then commanded by Yoel Ben-Porat. It was a small
outfit compared with its large and prestigious present-day successor,
Unit 8200. It had two main sections: SIGINT, which tried to pick up
messages of enemy armies, and Deciphering Intelligence, whose per-
sonnel had the task of making sense of what was contained in the
messages. Leviatan said that his section, Shofar (Trumpet), consisted
at that time of five officers in national service whose task was to
transmit the information that was picked up and deciphered by the
unit to many consumers. Leviatan, as a regular officer, reinforced
Shofar on the day the Eilatwas attacked and sunk.
It is almost certain that on the day the destroyer was sunk, MI
succeeded in acquiring two pieces of information that in retrospectEILAT’S SINKING•8506-102 (02) A-G.qxd 3/24/06 7:23 AM Page 85