by Moshe Betser
Nobody was surprised. Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi’s oil-financed support for international terrorism, especially Palestinian terror against Israeli targets, was well known. We began preparing for the plane’s arrival, suspecting it could yet return to Israel.
Sure enough, within an hour of the first report of Libya as their destination, the terrorists radioed ahead to Benghazi airport demanding fuel be readied to top off the passenger plane’s tanks — and that representatives of Wadi Haddad’s Popular Front meet them. Wadi Haddad, head of one of the most radical of the Palestinian groups, regarded Yasser Arafat’s Fatah as too moderate. Haddad worked hand-in-hand with Western European terror groups like the German Bader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades. The news that the terrorists wanted more fuel could mean they still wanted to try landing in Israel.
A few minutes later, Ran Bag showed up. A lieutenant colonel, he headed the counterterrorism branch in the chief infantry and paratroops command, under Dan Shomron. A full participant in the Unit’s development of new methods and doctrines for handling terror incidents, he spent the rest of the day and much of the evening with us, while we refined details on plans we already knew by heart, waiting for the plane to take off from Benghazi.
Yitzhak Rabin, then in his first term as prime minister, was running the weekly cabinet meeting when his military liaison officer informed him of the hijacking. Rabin immediately formed a working committee of relevant ministers and issued a statement reiterating government policy that Israel never negotiates with terrorists. Jerusalem regarded the French government as responsible for the safety of the passengers aboard the Air France plane, said the statement.
Meanwhile, three IDF officers back at general staff headquarters began considering options if the plane remained in Benghazi under Libyan protection. Major Amiram Levine, the “dancing blond dervish” from Spring of Youth, who graduated from Sayeret Matkal to become an intelligence-branch officer specializing in operations planning; Major Gadi Shefi, commander of the Shayetet, the naval commandos; and Major Ido Embar, air force branch chief for combined operations raised ideas ranging from a helicopter rescue to hijacking a Libyan plane or Libyan strategic facility and holding it in exchange for the hostages. If any harm came to any of the Israeli passengers, they planned a punitive action to make the Libyans think twice about cooperating with any terrorist group again.
A few minutes after ten o’clock that night, word arrived that the plane took off from Benghazi, about three hours away. I called the troops into the briefing room at the airport and conducted a final review of the plan.
Chief of operations and deputy chief of staff Yekutiel “Kuti” Adam was there with his assistant, Col. Avigdor “Yanosh” Ben-Gal, the former armored corps commander who had asked us to rescue Yossi Ben-Hanan at Tel Shams during the Yom Kippur War.
But by one-thirty in the morning, the plane had still not arrived and Defense Minister Shimon Peres appeared with his own entourage. Kuti asked me to go over the plan’s essentials for the defense minister. So once again, I recited the plan, tapping at the airport map hanging on the wall behind me and counting off “positions one, two, three, and four” for each of the squads.
“Here’s the runway; the control tower will direct the plane to here,” I pointed out, tapping at a runway marked on the map. Then I ran through the reasoning behind the chosen method.
“As always,” I concluded, “if we take the initiative, we can control the events.” With that, I ended the briefing.
“Does anyone here want to comment?” Peres asked from his position at the rear of the small hall. Nobody spoke up. Peres looked around. “Anyone here take part in the Sabena operation?” he tried.
Danny, sitting on the floor to my right, raised his hand.
“Do you want to make any comment on the plan?” the defense minister asked the soldier.
“No,” Danny said, shaking his head.
“Well then,” Peres said. “I wish you all luck.” But instead of leaving, he asked Kuti, me, Ran Bag, and Yanosh Ben-Gal into a side room.
“Why this way and not the Sabena method?” the defense minister asked as soon as the door closed behind us. Kuti nodded at me to provide the answer. For the third time in an hour I ran through the explanation about not wanting to repeat the same tactic twice.
When I finished, Kuti spoke up. “They demonstrated it last week to the general staff,” he said. “It works.”
“Okay,” Peres finally decided. “Approved.”
We settled in to wait for the plane’s appearance. But as the night wore on, so did reports that the plane did not head east toward Israel. It went south, over the Sahara, into Africa, and far from our purview. They might still be coming our way, we figured, on a surprise route over southern Egypt and then up the Red Sea. But by dawn the plane had disappeared into central Africa, and we finally called off the alert at the airport, and headed back to base.
THE IDF OPTION
A round noon on Monday, a foreign radio report provided surprising news. The Air France plane had landed in Uganda, at Entebbe airport, where President, Field Marshall, and erstwhile Israeli paratrooper Idi Amin Dada (who never did jump and didn’t deserve the wings) offered his services as a mediator for the release of the plane, its passengers, and the terrorists in our jails.
In the years since he threw us out of Uganda so ignominiously, his appearances on the international stage had grown increasingly bizarre. He took dozens of women from the villages of his country to serve in a harem and fed his political opponents to crocodiles living on the banks of Lake Victoria. Ambassadors out of favor were made to kneel before him if their government wanted good relations with Uganda, a country rich in natural resources. Yet despite his bizarre behavior the Organization of African Unity chose Amin as its chairman for 1976.
Extremely sketchy reports came in from Uganda, mostly from the BBC, relying on stringers in Kampala, the capital. Amin’s first declarations said he wanted to mediate the dispute. It was impossible to determine if he let the plane land because the pilot said he desperately needed fuel or because Amin was aligned with the terrorists. In any case, he had already proved his treachery to us in the past.
In the afternoon, the BBC reported the terrorists had allowed the hostages off the plane. Later the BBC said the terrorists had hustled the passengers into the old terminal building at Entebbe airport. And that Amin had surrounded the building with what he called his best troops — the paratroops I had begun training four years earlier.
By mid-Monday, the terrorists released their demands: $5 million in cash and a hostages-for-prisoners exchange on the tarmac at Entebbe. They wanted terrorists freed from jails in Kenya, France, Switzerland, Germany, and of course Israel. They set a deadline of Thursday at one in the afternoon, and their demand for the release of their jailed comrades from the Bader-Meinhof gang confirmed that the operation was a clear-cut case of international cooperation by terrorist groups. Amin immediately proposed that the government in Jerusalem surrender to the terrorists by releasing their comrades in exchange for the hostages. Rabin’s government kept referring the matter publicly to the French government as being responsible for the safety of passengers aboard an airplane from the French national carrier’s fleet.
I knew the troops and the airport. Not only had I flown in and out of Uganda through that airfield, I visited it on routine supply missions during my three months in Jinja, meeting incoming military air transports from Israel bringing supplies to our delegation. I wasn’t surprised when Ehud Barak’s office called, asking me to attend a meeting about the hijacking. Now assistant to the chief of Intelligence, responsible for research and special operations, he worked out of a Defense Ministry office a few floors above the Pit.
Coming into his office, I saw the IDF’s leading counterterrorism experts — Sayeret Matkal veteran Amnon Biran, now an intelligence-branch major; Amiram Levine, Ido Embar, and Gadi Shefi, who began planning an attack on Libya when the plane landed in Benghazi; Li
etenant Colonel Ran Bag and Haim “Ivan” Oron, both from the staff of Dan Shomron’s chief infantry and paratroops Command in the IDF. We were all friends and colleagues from past operations.
They filled the chairs around the T-shaped table, with Ehud leaning back in the seat at the top of the T. He smiled at me standing in the doorway. “Muki, you know Entebbe. What do you think of Ugandan soldiers?” he asked.
“They must be good,” I said. “After all, I trained them.” It raised a laugh around the table.
But then Ehud’s expression changed. “How good?”
“They’re afraid of the night. In the best of circumstances they don’t have much in the way of motivation. In this case? I really don’t see what motivation they’d have to fight us.” I rattled it off as I saw it.
Ehud grinned as if I had just proved the point he was making before my arrival.
I went on. “So, I don’t think Ugandan soldiers will be our problem.” Then I thought of something. “You know, Solel Boneh built the terminal,” referring to the Israeli construction firm.
“We already sent for the plans,” said Ehud. And with that, the planning for the Entebbe rescue mission began.
No order came down from the government, or even the general staff, for the planning to begin. Although from the start air force commander Benny Peled told a meeting of the general staff that the air force could be ready in twenty-four hours to fly to Entebbe for a rescue, without any solid intelligence from Entebbe, issuing an order for a rescue operation was impossible.
Indeed, with the hijacked plane so far away, the top ranks of the entire IDF — except for those of us in Ehud’s office — continued functioning as previously scheduled. Chief of staff Motta Gur kept to his schedule. So did Kuti, as chief of Operations the deputy chief of staff, as did Dan Shomron, the chief infantry and paratroops commander.
But meanwhile we worked. The telephones rang constantly, and information flowed into the office. An engineer from Solel Boneh provided the original plans, sworn to secrecy and astonished to find himself part of a planning team for what appeared to be an impossible mission.
We called in pilots who had flown the Israel-Uganda shuttle in the years we maintained a mission, and brought in former IDF flight trainers who had trained Uganda’s little air force. We made extensive use of international directories of the world’s civilian airports, used by all commercial pilots. The directory gave us an up-to-date picture of Entebbe airport, where the Ugandans had added a new terminal about two kilometers away from the old one, as well as a new runway to handle eleven MiGs — not Mirages — the Libyans had given them.
The enthusiasm for the operation infected everyone. From the start, we felt we had almost everything we needed to make it work: pilots who knew the route, knowledge of the airport, and of course, our special skills in hostage situations.
The seven of us became the ad hoc operations group, making plans for a military solution to the hijacking. We had all worked together in the past on missions-those we executed and those scotched at the last minute, those that never went beyond theory to those we practiced and honed but never set into real motion.
More than colleagues or associates, we felt like members of a team in which we all knew our positions, with a natural dynamic of give-and-take. Sometimes it felt like a Ping-Pong game, with someone throwing out an idea and someone else hitting it back with a spin. Sometimes it felt like a basketball team, passing ideas like a ball down-court. With each pass the idea developed a new twist that enhanced the plan.
I called in Amnon M., one of my reservist officers, to act as my intelligence officer for the planning, and Bicho, another reservist officer, to be operations officer. They would stick with me throughout the coming week as my assistants, putting together the dossier for action.
It went on all night, over endless coffees and teas, with Ehud subtly directing the brainstorming. But over and over we came across major problems, holes in the intelligence. The biggest was that we still did not know what Idi Amin wanted. Even states like Libya and Iran, which sponsor terrorism, pay public lip service to peaceful air traffic. But Amin remained totally unpredictable.
The intelligence officers noted that Amin was due to chair an upcoming meeting of the Organization of African Unity, scheduled to open in Sudan at the weekend. The hijacking guaranteed just what he wanted — an international stage. Meanwhile, his statements to the press promised his guarantee of the hostages’ safety — but pleaded with Israel to agree to accept the terrorists’ demands.
All of us in that room during that long first night of thinking about Entebbe felt a tremendous responsibility. If Jerusalem gave in to an exchange, our humiliation would be a victory for terrorists everywhere.
By dawn we had moved to the Pit with four plans sketched out. Advantages and disadvantages accompanied each one. All depended on surprise.
At the top of our list we put a parachute drop into Lake Victoria, a combined operation with fighters from the Shayetet. Landing in the water and riding into shore on Zodiacs para-dropped into the lake, we could reach the shore, where the airport sat at the edge of a swamp on the lake’s banks. We would move into the airport on foot, overcome the terrorists, and then give ourselves up to the Ugandans. The plan assumed Amin wanted a rescue to relieve him of responsibility.
The second plan depended heavily on Israel’s diplomatic ties with Kenya, one of the few Third World countries that maintained relations with us in those years. A lake-faring ship could carry us across Lake Victoria to Entebbe. Like the first plan, our going in by ship assumed Amin wanted a rescue as much as we did.
So did the third plan. The terrorists wanted a prisoner exchange at Entebbe. We could give them one. If we painted an air force Boeing with civilian colors, put together some uniforms for the pilots, and disguised soldiers from Sayeret Matkal as prisoners, we could come out of the plane fighting. But again, the success of this plan depended on Amin guaranteeing us safe passage out of Uganda.
Indeed, all three blueprints for action also required the major involvement of the Mossad, whether arranging affairs in Kenya, dealing with the other countries holding terrorists the hijackers wanted freed, or getting us Air France uniforms.
So, while we put the Mossad on to those ideas, we dubbed our fourth design “the IDF option.”
A straightforward show of force, it called for flying into the African country with enough soldiers to hold off hostile Ugandan troops while we eliminated the terrorists, collected the passengers, and flew out.
But the larger the fleet flying to Uganda, the more likely its discovery. The flight down the Red Sea and then west into central Africa took us within radar — and fighter — range of three Arab countries sworn to our destruction.
Ido Embar’s confidence that the air force could do the job inspired us all. The planes needed to fly more than eight hours — with a large portion of the flight within radar range of enemy countries: Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and, of course, Egypt — the largest and most powerful of our Arab enemies at the time.
Furthermore, he convinced me a plane could land unnoticed in an airport. “Believe me,” he said. “I live on an air force base. I know what I’m talking about. If a plane manages to avoid radar detection up to its landing, it could land and come to a quiet halt at the end of a runway without anyone noticing.”
His idea became a cornerstone of an air operation. Just in case the Entebbe air traffic controllers did pick us up on radar and ask for identification, we could name a regularly scheduled flight in the area. But ideally, we wanted to land in radio silence, without any contact with the control tower. And we needed to work on the assumption that the Ugandans might turn off their runway landing lights, whether to save electricity or foil just such an unexpected landing. We needed camouflage.
Ehud assigned each member of the team a job appropriate to his skills and function in the army. As Sayeret Matkal’s representative, I became responsible for all aspects of the plan involving the break-in force th
at would eliminate the terrorists and free the hostages.
“Battalion commanders in the Ugandan Army ride around in Mercedeses with chauffeurs and a couple of Land Rovers of soldiers behind them,” I suggested. “With that disguise, we could drive through into any military installation in the country without stopping. By the time they figure out who we really are, we’ll be on the job.”
Indeed, my suggestion for the Mercedes became the second cornerstone of all the plans. The Mossad, at work on what we needed if we decided to sneak into Entebbe, whether disguised as terrorists aboard a faked civilian plane or on board a ship carrying us across Lake Victoria from Kenya, added it to their plans.
But we took things a step further with them, pressing them for up-to-date photographs of the airport. We had the plans for the old terminal, where the hijackers field the hostages. But even the Jeffison airport directory only gave us a schematic map of the airport, with little about the buildings, very little about the Ugandan military presence at the airport, and nothing about the squadron of MiGs the Libyans had given Amin. And since Amin threw us out of Uganda in 1972, no Israeli had visited the country.
Defense Minister Peres called in Burka Bar-Lev, the former mission chief in Uganda. Amin had always liked Burka and now, Peres hoped, Burka’s conversations with Amin could reveal the Ugandan dictator’s intentions. Peres listened in on the conversations, taking notes, looking for a clue to Amin’s position. Burka reminded the crazy dictator that Amin’s mother, on her deathbed, told her son “never to betray the Jews.” Burka even promised Amin a Nobel Peace Prize if he released the hostages. Amin sounded tempted, and continued claiming innocence in the affair. But he told Burka that Israel should accept all the terrorists’ demands.
We still did not know if Amin was in cahoots with the terrorists or whether the terrorists had hijacked his airport along with the passengers on board the Air France flight. But some new intelligence arrived that told us a little more about the terrorists.
