Loud and Clear: The Memoir of an Israeli Fighter Pilot Book

Iftach Spector—retired Israeli Air Force general and its second-highest-scoring fighter ace—is one of Israel's living legends. During the Six Day War in June 1967, he led the flight that attacked the U.S. surveillance ship USS Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, an apparent case of mistaken identity that remains controversial to this day. He was one of the eight Israeli pilots who attacked and destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981. In 2003 he was the senior signatory of the famous "Pilots' Letter," in which General Spector and twenty-seven other Israeli pilots stated their refusal to bomb targets in Palestine where collateral damage would likely be severe. It was the end of his military career. In this vivid memoir, at turns moving and exciting, Spector illuminates what it was like coming of age in the fledging Jewish state of Israel and how he defended both its territory and its conscience as he rose through the ranks as a fighter pilot.