The “Fergusson Force” then suited up to look like kibbutzniks, though few spoke any Hebrew, and the government issued them battered civilian cars and trucks loaded with weapons and ammunition. It also assigned them urban safe houses stocked with supplies. Fergusson’s entire operation rested on making targeted strikes with little or no intelligence to go on. Commando hubris riddled the whole operation. “The circumstances were not right,” Richard Catling recalled. “The scene of operations was not right, the enemy was not right, the population was hostile, everything was against its success.”[32]
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