On the night of March 31, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, met in Tel Aviv with senior officers of the Haganah and the elite Palmach strike force and ordered them to go on the offensive. The days of trying to protect vulnerable convoys against overwhelming odds were over, Ben-Gurion said. The entire Zionist enterprise faced imminent collapse unless the battle of the roads was won and the interior of the country secured. In order to achieve that goal, the conflict had to be taken to a new level of violence. The Arab villages that Sheikh Asad and the other warlords used as bases for their operations had to be conquered and destroyed—and if there was no other option, the inhabitants had to be expelled. The Haganah had already drawn up a master plan for just such an operation. It was called Tochnit Dalet: Plan D. Ben-Gurion ordered it to begin in two days with Operation Nachshon, an assault on the villages lining the besieged Jerusalem Corridor. “And one more thing,” he said to his commanders as the meeting adjourned. “Find Sheikh Asad as quickly as possible—and kill him.”

The man chosen to hunt down Sheikh Asad, a young Palmach intelligence officer named Ari Shamron, knew that Sheikh Asad would not be easy to find. The warlord maintained no fixed military headquarters and was rumored to sleep in a different house each night. Shamron, though he had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1935, knew the Arab mind well. He knew that, to the Arabs, some things were more important than an independent Palestine. Somewhere during his rise to power, Sheikh Asad had surely made an enemy—and somewhere in Palestine was an Arab thirsting for revenge.

It took Shamron ten days to find him, a man from Beit Sayeed who, many years earlier, had lost two of his brothers to Sheikh Asad over an insult in the village coffeehouse. Shamron offered the Arab a hundred Palestinian pounds if he would betray the whereabouts of the warlord. A week later, on a hillside near Beit Sayeed, they met for a second time. The Arab told Shamron where their common enemy could be found.

“I hear he’s planning to spend the night in a cottage outside Lydda. It’s in the middle of an orange grove. Asad, the murderous dog, is surrounded by bodyguards. They’re hiding in the orchards. If you try to attack the cottage with a large force, the guards will sound the alert and Asad will flee like the coward that he is.”

“And what do you recommend?” Shamron asked, playing to the Arab’s vanity.

“A single assassin, a man who can slip through the defenses and kill Asad before he can escape. For another one hundred pounds, I’ll be that man.”