Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando

by Moshe Betser

  A woman with dual Israeli-British citizenship, on her way to London, managed to get off the plane in Libya. A doctor on board the plane convinced the plane’s captors that the woman needed hospitalization due to a complicated pregnancy. They agreed to let her off the plane. Reaching London, she contacted the Israeli embassy and gave her account of the hijacking, describing in detail everything she remembered.

  According to the woman, two Germans and two Palestinian teenagers had pulled out their guns about ten minutes out of Athens. She reported that the German man led the hijacking. The German woman was being particularly vicious to the Jewish passengers, whether Israeli, European, or American. The woman’s information helped us profile the four terrorists, but with the hostages now in Uganda, her report about what happened inside the plane and on the ground at Benghazi was old news.

  In the Pit, under the Defense Ministry, day and night merged as we worked around the clock. Early Wednesday morning, Defense Minister Peres called Ehud to his office. Peres was pressing hard for a military solution to the hijacking, but Prime Minister Rabin, a soldier since his youth, knew that wanting an operation was not the same as being capable of producing one.

  But Ehud could only report what the old Uganda hands remembered, what the Jeffison directory said about the airport, and what the radio reported about Ugandan Army troops surrounding the airport. And despite Burka Bar-Lev’s conversations with Amin, we still could not be sure if the Ugandan troops at the airport were protecting the hostages from the terrorists, preventing their escape, or on guard against a rescue attempt.

  I kept in touch with Yonni down in Sinai, to keep him up-to-date on our work. If things heated up, he’d come back, we decided. I told Bicho, the reservist operations officer, to make arrangements for the air force to keep a light plane or chopper available around the clock if necessary to bring Yonni back from Sinai.

  Meanwhile, the work went on. The Shayetet naval commandos planned a practice jump with para-dropped Zodiacs into the Mediterranean. For the first time since the planning began, I left the Pit to collect my gear for the jump. But as I pulled up in the parking lot outside my office at Sayeret Matkal’s base, a secretary ran out to the car with a message sending me back to the planning group.

  I called back to the Pit, wondering what news had come in since I left. “The para-drop can’t work,” I was told about the plan to drop Zodiacs into Lake Victoria. “At least not yet.” Ironically, only a few months later, I would see a drill in which para-dropped boats worked perfectly.

  With the parachute drop off our list, we worked on three plans: stealing across Lake Victoria by boat from Kenya; pretending to be a civilian plane carrying the freed international terrorists in a negotiated exchange; or, as Benny Peled suggested from the start, airlifting a thousand troops to Entebbe.

  “But it’s too many,” I kept saying about a major airlift. “If we want to keep the element of surprise on our side, we need to arrive in a much more compact formation. The more elements involved in the mission, the more likely something will go wrong.” In any case, with the terrorists’ deadline set for Thursday, July 1, it looked like we were running out of time.

  None of the governments involved wanted to appear to cave in first, but as the appointed hour approached, it seemed more likely than ever that the Europeans were cutting a deal. Wednesday afternoon, radio reports, first from Uganda and then Paris, said the terrorists had agreed to free some hostages “as a gesture of goodwill.” But as the details came in, we learned that there was no goodwill in the gesture for us. Indeed, our worst fears were coming true.

  The terrorists, led by the German whom we now knew to be Wilfried Boese, a member of the Bader-Meinhof gang, distinguished between the Jews and non-Jews among the hostages. He freed the non-Jews. The Jews remained in Uganda. To their credit, the Air France flight crew stayed with the remaining hostages.

  It reminded us all of the Nazi selektzia, the process whereby they selected who would die and who would live in the concentration camps. The discrimination between Jews and non-Jews proved to us that we were alone.

  But the freed hostages in Paris could provide important intelligence. We immediately decided to send someone to Paris to interview them. The natural candidate for the trip was Lt. Col. Amiram Levine, at the time director of operations planning in Military Intelligence.

  Amiram, the blond dervish of Spring of Youth in Beirut, rose through the Unit: from soldier through crew commander, company commander, deputy commander of the Unit, to next in line to replace Yonni as commander. Eventually, he would go on to become a general, commander of the Northern Command. Someone who can be dropped anywhere and immediately know how to get around, Amiram knew what to ask to get the answers we needed.

  Amnon Biran provided Amiram with an intelligence kit for the trip. Amnon organized the Solel Boneh blueprints, and in a neat, clear handwriting he listed the essential elements of information that interested us, attaching a set of drawings based on what we knew about Entebbe airport. While Biran coded and photocopied the material, Amiram rushed home for civilian clothes and then came back for a final briefing before flying to Paris.

  One unexpected problem faced him. Rabin sent his adviser on terrorism to Paris to handle Israel’s side of the political negotiations in case of a hostage-for-prisoner exchange. Former general Rehavam “Gandhi” Zeevi knew nothing of a military plan in the works. If he saw Amiram at Orly Airport, he would immediately understand that a military option was being planned. It could affect his judgment during the negotiations. So, we reminded Amiram, “No matter what, don’t let Gandhi see you.”

  That night, forty-two freed French hostages celebrated with their families and friends at home. With help from the French government and the Israeli embassy in Paris, Amiram managed to meet with five of the hostages. Without revealing that Israel was planning a rescue, Amiram questioned them, digging for the kinds of details we needed. One of the five freed hostages was a veteran officer of the French Army, who had spent his three days in Entebbe making mental notes of all the military options, wanting revenge on the terrorists who so humiliated him and his fellow passengers. Reading between the lines of Amiram’s questioning, the retired French officer understood Israel planned a rescue. Displaying a prodigious memory, the Frenchman poured out a gold mine of details for Amiram to relay back to us over a scrambled phone line.

  The selektzia began when Ugandan soldiers silently came into the terminal and broke a hole through the main hall into a smaller room. The terrorists then ordered the Israelis and Jews into the much smaller room.

  The terrorists maintained round-the-clock guards on the hostages, said the Frenchman, who described what appeared to be explosive charges laid out throughout the room.

  But the most critical piece of information concerned the relationship between the terrorists and the Ugandans. First of all, Amiram reported, while four terrorists had hijacked the plane, at least another six had showed up in Entebbe when the hostages landed. That meant we faced as many as ten terrorists. It also meant that Amin was involved.

  “The Ugandans definitely are working with the hijackers,” Amiram quoted the Frenchman as saying. “They are there to prevent the hostages from escaping.” But, Amiram added hopefully, “from what the Frenchman’s saying, the last thing that the terrorists expect is for us to show up.”

  Ships across Lake Victoria or fake identities as Palestinian terrorists aboard a plane painted to look like a civilian jet — all the other planning suddenly become irrelevant. With the product from Amiram’s gold mine, everything became clear: the only plan that counted involved landing at the airport, freeing the hostages, and flying out.

  I went to Col. Shai Tamari, then assistant to Kuti Adam. “I suggest dropping everything else and working only on the IDF option,” I said, briefing him quickly on what we had learned from the retired French officer.

  He reached across his desk for the button on the direct intercom to Kuti’s desk. “Here’s what we have,” S
hai told Kuti, outlining the scope of information the Frenchman had provided and how it narrowed our options down to the airborne rescue.

  Despite all the pressure on him from Motta Gur to come up with a plan to bring to the government, Kuti remained calm. “I want a written brief on all four options,” he said over the intercom. “All four plans,” he emphasized, “including the failed naval one. I want a concise report on the advantages and disadvantages of each one.”

  Shai and I looked at each other impatiently. But Shai shrugged, and pulled out a clean sheet of paper. With the rest of the team now crowded in around him in case he had a question, he neatly and concisely listed all four options, with their pluses and minuses in meticulously drawn columns. Finished, he nodded to himself, looked up, and announced he was off to see Kuti.

  It only took a few minutes before he was back with authorization. We finally could get down to details.

  * * *

  The radio played constantly in the office. Every hour we all paused to listen to the latest news. The government appeared impotent. Demonstrations by anguished relatives of the hostages turned violent outside the prime minister’s office. With 104 Israelis and Jews field hostage, the entire country shared the anxiety of the families. Nobody in the media even raised the possibility of a military solution. Indeed, they discounted it because of the huge distances involved. But while those of us deep in the Pit could feel the frustration of the people outside, we had an important advantage over everyone else. At least we could work on turning a theoretical possibility to free the hostages into a real plan of action.

  Nonetheless, the gap remained large between planning an operation and reaching a reasonable level of feasibility in its execution. Until Rabin saw a feasible plan, he would not recommend a military solution to the government. Feasibility meant a minimum of casualties and a successful escape from Uganda.

  When the clock struck one o’clock in the afternoon that Thursday, reaching the deadline set by the terrorists, Jerusalem surprised the world by announcing a reversal of the years’ long policy of never negotiating with terrorists.

  Made with a heavy heart, the government’s statement noted that such an exchange takes time to arrange, and called on the terrorists to extend their deadline.

  A few hours later, while we redoubled our efforts, the terrorists announced a new deadline — one in the afternoon on July 4, seventy-two hours away. It gave us the extra bit of time we needed.

  All Thursday we worked on the compromise between the need for an unobtrusive airlift and the need for the firepower necessary to take the airport from the Ugandan Army.

  Ido Embar calculated and recalculated fuel and cargo weights for the Hercules transport planes recently acquired from the Americans. I concentrated on the most important cargo the first of those planes would be delivering to Entebbe — the Unit — planning the landing, the ride to the terminal, the break-in, the elimination of the terrorists, freeing of the hostages, and holding the building against Ugandan opposition until the arrival of troops from the second plane in our air convoy. I had to find ways to minimize the size of that “package” while maximizing the amount of firepower we could bring.

  Amiram’s French gold mine continued to yield important intelligence. For example, we learned that at midnight, the terrorists ordered the hostages to lie down on the straw mattresses the Ugandans provided. By one in the morning, most indeed slept. The hour gave us a cornerstone for our timetable.

  With the hostages at the old terminal, Entebbe’s international airport remained open and operating at the new terminal, about a mile away from where the hostages languished. A regularly scheduled British cargo flight was due to fly into Entebbe a little after midnight on Saturday night. We decided to sneak in behind the British plane, before the Ugandans turned off the runway lights.

  By Thursday afternoon we narrowed the mission down to four Herculeses, with each plane loaded far past its recommended capacity. We needed the break-in crews on the first plane to take out the terrorists, neutralize any interfering Ugandan troops, and hold the old terminal until the second Hercules landed seven minutes later with reinforcements, including two armored vehicles.

  Booty from the Yom Kippur War, the Soviet-made APCs, known as BTRs, were lighter than our usual APCs but carried plenty of firepower to protect a perimeter around the old terminal building.

  Once the second plane landed, the third and fourth would immediately follow. The third plane would carry more reinforcements, including two more BTRs, while the fourth plane was devoted to medical facilities. We prepared for 25 percent casualties among the hostages and the soldiers. The break-in and rescue were to take no more than seven minutes, but the planes would need an hour on the ground to refuel from the airport’s fuel depots — unless the Kenyans agreed to let us refuel at Nairobi airport after the operation. But to preserve field security, no mention of the operation could be made to the Kenyans until we landed at Entebbe.

  Dan Shomron, chief infantry and paratroops officer, arrived in the Pit at four in the afternoon on Thursday, for the first time joining the ad hoc planning group Ehud put together. He knew nothing of the four plans we began with, let alone the details of our plan for only four planes. He began with an explanation that he figured ten planes would be necessary for the job, and I lost my patience.

  “Dan, I think there is a misunderstanding here,” I began. He raised an eyebrow, but I plunged on. “You’re making it sound as if we are going to start planning. We’re almost done with the planning. We don’t need hundreds of soldiers. Let us brief you on the essentials of the plan, give you an idea of what we have. Then you can make up your mind.”

  In the Pit’s war-room, the walls were covered with the documentation of our planning: old aerial photos taken in the days when Israeli planes flew into Entebbe, up-to-date civilian flight paths for East Africa, architectural schematics of the old terminal building provided by Solel Boneh, outlines of the intelligence provided by the French officer through Amiram.

  I gave the floor to Amnon Biran, the chief intelligence officer for the operation. He detailed the intelligence in our hands for Dan, running down everything we knew, from the Solel Boneh architectural plans to Amiram Levine product from Paris.

  Then it was Ido Embar’s turn, as air force branch chief for combined operations. He didn’t need to point out that the IDF had never undertaken an operation so far from home. He emphasized that the best planes for the job were the U.S.-made Herculeses we nicknamed Rhinos. They were also relatively new planes in the air force fleet at the time. So, only four Hercules crews fully trained for a night landing in an unfamiliar airport were available in all of Israel, he explained.

  Nonetheless, his expression of the air force’s confidence in its ability to deliver us to Entebbe — and get us and the hostages back-inspired us all. For the infantrymen in the planning group, the conceptual hurdle of the vast distance to Uganda was one of the biggest problems to overcome. Ido’s confidence made us certain. “We can land the first plane without the Ugandans noticing — or thinking something’s amiss,” Ido summed up, just as he had promised those of us planning the break-in. More than anything, our operation depended on the Ugandans — and the terrorists — not knowing we had arrived, at least until we eliminated the terrorists.

  “If we can reach the terminal in secret,” I said, picking up from where Ido left off, “we can succeed.” It had been my motto from the start.

  Dan’s expression said he was waiting for me to explain how we would get to the old terminal without being detected. “The break-in force from the Unit will land in the first plane. It’s a kilometer and a half from the new terminal building to the old one. We’re going to drive.”

  He raised his eyebrow. I went on. “I know the Ugandan soldiers,” I told him. “I trained them. We don’t need hundreds of soldiers. Instead we use a Mercedes. Every battalion commander in Uganda rides around in one. A soldier spots a Mercedes, he snaps to a salute. They’ll see us in the Merce
des with a couple of Land Rovers carrying soldiers, and they’ll assume a general’s about to drive by. They aren’t going to shoot to stop us.” I smiled at him. “You know, it’s possible I’ll run into one of the soldiers I trained,” I pointed out.

  “It’s lucky you trained them for only four months and not four years,” someone in the room cracked back.

  We all laughed, but I wanted to make a serious point. “While we’re driving to the target, we’ll probably see Ugandan troops, and they’ll probably see us. We can ignore them. Indeed, for the plan to work, we must ignore them, to avoid alerting the terrorists to our arrival. That’s what makes a hostage situation so unique,” I explained, speaking as one of the four Sayeret Matkal officers at the time who were capable of commanding a hostage-rescue force. “Our first concern must be eliminating the terrorists — or else they’ll start harming the hostages. We’re not going all that way to fight Ugandans. We’re going down there to eliminate the terrorist threat to the hostages.

  “So,” I went on, “even if a Ugandan soldier sees through our disguise and starts shooting, we should speed on to the terminal, to the break-in. Only then should the backup force deal with the Ugandans, while the break-in crews do their job.

  “So, to sum up,” I said. “Five minutes for us to drive across the airfield to the old terminal. Two minutes for the break-in. Seven minutes after we land, the second and third planes come in carrying reinforcements. In an hour, we’re all on our way home.”

  Dan has a lot of field experience. To his credit, he immediately understood the operational principles of the plan.

  Just then, a messenger came in with the message that Kuti wanted to hear the plan so he could take it to Motta and Peres.

  “Ivan,” Dan said to the colonel from his staff who had been on the job with us from the start. “Grab the maps. Let’s go.”