____________________________________________ 5 IICC Perspectives "The IDF and Intelligence fell in love with cyber, fell in love with the situation between wars, and the unit was completely shut down from 2018 until October 2023." " I immediately passed all the information I collected to the division. I constructed a table and began entering details: whom I spoke to, from which community, where contact with the enemy was reported, here in this neighborhood, there on that street, here next to the chicken coops, there next to the children's houses. "All throughout that Saturday I was engaged in gathering intelligence. At the same time, there was a small group of CED personnel, just ten, who were trying to do something, mostly working with materials recovered from the bodies of terrorists in areas we had already secured. We understood almost immediately that there were tactical radios on the bodies, maps with invasion directions, other documents. The CED personnel managed military-issued cellphones to photograph of some of the items and relayed assessments to the units using a computerized operations log. Over the next two to three days, they realized it was an unprecedented find of intelligence material. D.: "To help the group, which had set itself up at my base in Julis, I connected them to the Intelligence Directorate leadership so they could get resources, like communications and equipment. I still didn't know that would become my role in the war, but I was involved with their activities from day one because I wanted to help." *** "I had many conversations with the group, and in one of them, on October 12 or 13, during a conference call with the Chief Intelligence Officer (CIO), in front of everyone he told me, 'Pack your things. Tomorrow morning you're starting a unit.' So I packed my things without asking my commanders in Julis, without informing my general, without anything, and the next morning I sat down in Glilot [an IDF base near Tel Aviv] to establish a unit. The CED Unit – the phoenix rises from its ashes... "In Glilot no one, nothing was waiting for us. There were no facilities, no assigned space, no combat assignment. No manpower, no trained professionals, no preparations. Nothing. We were given a key to a classroom in the cyber officer training compound and told that's where we'd be working from. After I politely asked, we were given a small adjoining room as well…" From the moment word spread that a unit had been established, anyone without a combat assignment in the IDF, or who wasn't a fighter, or any former intelligence personnel, or anyone who had been connected to CED in one way or another, showed up.
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