- Israeli engineers helped upgrade Indian Mirage 2000 jets before and during Kargil War
- A key phone call from India triggered an urgent Israeli team deployment in 1999
- Integration of Israeli, French, and American systems was a major technical challenge
Twenty-seven years after Indian soldiers scaled the icy heights above the Drass Valley to reclaim territory from Pakistani intruders, a new chapter of the Kargil War has come to light, one that unfolded not on the battlefield but in hangars, workshops, and late-night phone calls between Tel Aviv and New Delhi.
In an exclusive interview with NDTV, timed to the Kargil Vijay Diwas, two former Israeli Air Force officers have spoken for the first time on Indian television about a covert defence partnership that helped equip the Indian Air Force during Operation Vijay and Operation Safed Sagar, the joint Army-Air Force campaign that repelled Pakistani forces in 1999.
Ami, a former civilian program manager at Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, and Shlomo, a veteran Israeli Air Force fighter pilot and former Mirage squadron commander, described how a project that began years before the war as a routine defence contract turned, almost overnight, into an emergency mission that changed the course of the fighting.
A Contract Years in the Making
The story began in November 1996, when Rafael signed an agreement with India to fit the Mirage 2000 fighter jets with the Litening targeting pod, a system that would allow Indian pilots to identify and strike targets with far greater precision than before. Ami, who calls himself one of Rafael's "pioneers" in India, credited the late David Zeit, his supervisor at the time, with championing the programme years before it was formally signed.
Between December 1996 and March 1999, Israeli engineers and Indian officials worked through what Ami described as demanding, highly professional trials with India's Defence Research and Development Organisation and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. By March 1999, the first rounds of aircraft testing were complete, but something, Ami said, was still missing.
The Friday Night Phone Call
That missing piece arrived in the form of an urgent phone call, not from New Delhi, but from Tel Aviv, placed by India's then defence attache, Group Captain N.A.K. Browne, who would go on to become Chief of the Indian Air Force. The call came on a Friday night, at the start of the Jewish Shabbat, when normal life in Israel comes to a standstill.
By Sunday morning, a team of engineers and specialists, among them Ami, Shlomo, and colleagues remembered only by first name, had assembled boxes of tools and test equipment prepared overnight and boarded a flight to India, uncertain themselves of exactly what awaited them. On arrival, Ami recalled, the commanding officer of the Indian airbase told the team simply that the situation demanded "much, much more than expected," and the team stayed on, working around the clock for days without knowing when they would return home.
Marrying Three Languages of War
The technical challenge, Shlomo explained, was formidable: an Israeli-made targeting pod, mounted on a French-built aircraft, needed to work seamlessly with American-made laser-guided bombs—three systems, in effect, that needed to "speak" one language a Hebrew-speaking pilot and Indian ground crews could operate under combat pressure. Getting there took what he called dozens of trips to India, endless troubleshooting on the ground, and long stretches where aircraft power or engine faults stalled testing before pilots could even see how the system performed in the air.
Both men singled out the contributions of Indian Air Force officers who worked alongside them—Squadron Leader Gershon Arora and a young lieutenant at the time, Rajeev Kumar Dash, who later rose to Group Captain. They reserved particular praise for Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar and Air Marshal Narmdeshwar Tiwari, whose high-altitude strike sorties over Tiger Hill, Shlomo said, went beyond anything Israeli planners had anticipated, describing the precision achieved as a genuine turning point in the conflict.
A Friendship That Outlasted the War
For Ami, who made more than a hundred trips to India between 1996 and 2004, the collaboration became personal. He said the experience left him, in his words, having "fallen in love" with India and that the bonds formed with Indian officers were less a commercial arrangement than what he called a "brotherhood."
Shlomo revealed that his son now works with an Israeli defence firm, Elbit Systems, and travels to India roughly once a month, continuing a relationship now well into its third decade.
In a closing, personal moment, Shlomo revealed he will travel to Kargil for the very first time next month to see the war memorial and the terrain where a mission conceived thousands of kilometers away helped alter the outcome of India's war.
