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

by Moshe Betser

  I told him how the first thing Ehud asked when he called me to the ad hoc task force was what I thought of Ugandan soldiers; how Shai Tamari handled all the coordination with the other forces, while Ido Embar handled the planning for the air force’s role. I told him how we sent Amiram to Paris, and how the Mossad decided that it would not be safe for him to fly back on any airline other than El Al, so he got stuck in Paris, eating his heart out that he was missing the action.

  But after a while, exhaustion from a sleepless week of non-stop preparation took over. I settled into a deep sleep. Over Kenya, a massive African thunder — and — lightning storm outside the plane woke me completely. Appropriate, I thought, smiling to myself, considering the IDF computers named the mission Operation Thunderball.

  The storm reminded me of all that I missed in Africa. The sky flashed with streaks of lightning outside the small portals of the Hercules. The thunder clapped louder than the Hercules engines’ rumble. The plane rocked unevenly through the sky. But for a little while I enjoyed the view, remembering the red skies of Jinja, until the storm receded as quickly as it had begun and it was time to get ready.

  I checked my gear and moved around the plane, patting boys on the back, giving them a wink or a smile. I noticed one of the paratroops officers having difficulty buckling his web-belt. Coming closer, I saw his hands trembling as he tried to rush through the buckles.

  I smiled at him. “Relax,” I said, checking my watch. “We’re still twenty minutes away,” I added with a grin. His pale face seemed to regain its color in front of my eyes, and he smiled back.

  We all carried lightweight gear: mostly Kalashnikov AK-47s and some Galils, Israel Military Industries assault rifles still in experimental form at the time. Those carrying special equipment, whether silenced pistols or megaphones, double-checked their equipment one last time.

  Yonni moved among the soldiers, shaking hands and patting backs, until we found ourselves facing each other beside the Mercedes. We shook hands, grinning at each other, and then climbed into the car as the plane began its landing approach.

  Nine of us, three per bench, were crammed into the Mercedes. I sat directly behind Amitzur, whom I knew from Nahalal. Yonni sat in the same row, beside the right-hand passenger door. The rest of the break-in crews were aboard the first Land Rover behind us, while the third vehicle carried the force to protect us from the Ugandans once the shooting began. Their first job would be to take out the control tower, with its commanding view of the tarmac in front of the old terminal. Motta emphasized the point to Yonni several times during the preparations, reminding us that he was once wounded by a rooftop sniper in Gaza.

  I let out a deep breath as the plane’s wheels touched the runway. “So far, so good,” I heard a soldier behind me mumble, perhaps a last prayer. Almost as soon as the plane touched ground, the rear ramp began to lower, and soon it was moving slowly enough to let the paratroopers on board run out to post lanterns for runway lights for the planes behind us.

  Finally, the Hercules came to a stop. Flight crew yanked away the blocks and lashes holding the Mercedes and Land Rovers in place. Yonni tapped Amitzur on the shoulder. The car engine roared and then began to purr. The rear ramp clanked to the ground.

  “Go,” Yonni ordered.

  The car lunged forward and memories poured into me as we came out of the Hercules into the fresh night air of Africa right after a rain. I felt calm, almost serene, looking out into the darkness as Amitzur drove slowly but steadily, like any convoy of VIPs in the Ugandan Army — not too fast to attract attention, not too slow as to cause suspicion. The silence of the night was absolute. Far ahead, the old terminal was but a glow in the dark.

  I turned to look over my shoulder. Right behind us, the Land Rovers did indeed look like Ugandan troop carriers — though the soldiers’ faces were white, not black. Nonetheless, everything felt right.

  I broke the radio silence between the three vehicles with the code word to my break-in crews to prepare their weapons. The ratcheting sounds of seven assault rifles clicking their first round into the chambers filled the car. I used the code word to order the break-in crews to set their weapons to single-shot mode for selective shooting.

  The distant halo of the old terminal’s lights sharpened into detail as we rolled closer. I could see the canopied entrances to the building, just as we expected, and began the countdown in my mind to the moment when the car would stop in front of the building — and we’d rush out into action.

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed two Ugandan soldiers. One of them was walking away from his comrade, disappearing into the dark. But I concentrated on the building ahead. We could ignore the Ugandan guards — that’s why we were in the Mercedes.

  The lone Ugandan sentry noticed our arrival and, in the standard operating procedure of a Ugandan soldier, raised his rifle and called out, “Advance.”

  It was nothing to get excited about. Just routine. I used to see it all the time in Uganda. We could drive right by him. That’s why we were in the Mercedes. “Eighty, seventy, sixty,” I was saying to myself under my breath, concentrating on the first canopied entrance, where I would push through the doors and enter the hall where the terrorists field the hostages. When I reached zero, the action would begin.

  “Amitzur,” Yonni suddenly said, breaking the silence in the car, and my concentration. “Cut to the right and we’ll finish him off.” The car swerved to the right.

  “Leave it, Yonni,” I said quietly but emphatically. “It’s just his drill.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Yonni repeated his order. Like me, he and Giora were carrying silenced 22-caliber Berettas, useful for very close quarters shooting. Giora Zussman cocked his Beretta and aimed it out his window at the Ugandan. The car continued veering toward the Ugandan, away from the terminal.

  “Giora, let’s take care of him,” Yonni said, cocking his own gun.

  “No,” I tried again. The entire effort of the last week was to deliver us to the front doors of the terminal in peace and quiet. The memory of Ma’alot raced through my mind. We were making a mistake, even before we reached the terminal. “Forget it, Yonni,” I tried again. But I was too late.

  Yonni and Giora both fired from the moving car from ten meters away, using the silenced .22s. They were the only guns at the time that could carry silencers. I knew them well from my El Al air marshal work. It was a shot I wouldn’t have tried to make. But it was too late. The silencers turned the crack of the small handguns into bare whispers. The Ugandan fell.

  I sighed with relief. We could still get there and get our job done before he caused us any trouble. I tried to resume my focus on the terminal building. Amitzur continued driving toward the old terminal, now barely fifty meters away. The Land Rovers kept to the path behind us.

  Suddenly, from behind us came a terrifying sound — the long burst of a Kalashnikov cutting down the Ugandan.

  I jerked my head around, just in time to see the Ugandan, back on his feet and aiming his rifle at us, cut down by a burst of Kalashnikov fire from the Land Rover.

  The order was clear and simple: no shooting until the operation starts, but then heavy fire to keep the Ugandans away. Someone in the Land Rover behind us had seen the Ugandan soldier get up and take aim at us. Instintinctively, he had wanted to protect us. But now all of us were in danger as shooting erupted all around us.

  Fifty meters from the target, I was seeing the entire element of surprise evaporate in front of my eyes. The rattling gunfire certainly alerted the terrorists. At any moment the terminal building might turn into a fireball of explosions as the terrorists followed through with their threats to blow up the hostages.

  From the very start of the planning, I had recited the lessons of Ma’alot. “We failed there because of our own mistakes,” I warned. And now it was happening again.

  “Drive!” Yonni shouted at Amitzur, who braked instinctively with the first burst of Kalashnikov fire from the Land Rover behind us. “Fas
t!” Amitzur sped ahead another ten meters. Fire came at us from the darkness around the tarmac.

  Crammed together in the car, we became sitting ducks for the Ugandans. Yonni realized it, too. We shouted at the same time: “Stop!” Amitzur braked hard. The car slid to a stop, the Land Rovers behind us screeching to a halt.

  I flung open the door and began running toward the building, still at least fifty meters away, instead of the five meters we planned for. I flanked left to avoid the pool of light on the tarmac directly in front of the terminal, hearing the thumping of the fighters’ boots behind me. Long bursts of fire shattered the night air. But I continued running, still focused on the canopied entrance to the terminal building, my target, aware that I was pulling the fighters behind me in the same direction.

  Some Ugandan fire blasted toward us from my right, screaming lead past my head. Still running, I flicked the Kalashnikov to automatic and aimed a long burst at the source. I needed to create cover for all of us — myself and everyone in the column behind me. It was just like this in el-Hiam, I thought for a second as I raced ahead at the front of the column, creating as much fire as possible. The African flew backward, and I ran on, followed by all the fighters.

  Finally I reached the building, directly below the control tower, barely a dozen meters away from the entrances to the building. The rattle and crack of rifle and submachine-gun fire shook the air, kicking up bits of asphalt at our feet. And behind me, thirty-three Sayeret Matkal soldiers bunched up, instead of heading to the assigned entrances. It was a complete contradiction of the battle plan, indeed of any combat formation.

  But then I realized that no explosions had yet rocked the building. We still could prevent another Ma’alot. I was first in line, and the only way to proceed was forward. I took a deep breath and resumed the race to my assigned entrance, knowing that my example would spur the fighters behind me to follow suit.

  Half a dozen strides into my run, a terrorist came out of the building from the second canopied entrance. I knew I had used up most of the magazine creating the cover fire in order to reach the control tower. But I also knew that once inside, I only needed a few bullets to do the job. Now, surprised by the terrorist, I aimed and fired. Only a couple of bullets spat out of the barrel. And I missed. He ducked back into the terminal building.

  Racing forward, I pulled out the empty ammo magazine and flipped it over, reloading on the run, all the while keeping my eyes on my target — the canopied entrance to the building a few meters away. Still, no explosion racked the building. The plan could still succeed.

  Instead, a second disaster struck: no glass doorway opened at the end of the canopied path into the hall.

  I found myself facing a blank wall. We had planned according to Solel Boneh’s original architectural plans, and they clearly showed an entrance. Somehow, we had lost one of the most crucial pieces of information the Frenchman gave Amiram.

  Withering machine-gun fire poured down at us from the control tower. Yonni’s backup fighters were supposed to take out the machine-gun nest up there. But obviously, the fighters were still confused by the bad start. The fifty-meter run from the cars, instead of the few meters we had practiced, threw everything off. At any second, I feared, the terrorists would ignite the explosives they had planted in the hallway. I had no choice but to get inside, to prevent that from happening.

  With my preassigned entrance blocked, I began running to the second entrance, where I had seen the terrorist duck inside. Amir, a fighter from my second break-in team, suddenly ran past me, followed by his team leader, Amnon. Later, Amir said that in the confusion he lost his crew and thought they had already made it inside. Meanwhile, he became the first of us to get into the building.

  He immediately spotted a terrorist and cut him down with a burst. Just then, Amnon ran in and saw the German man and woman terrorists kneeling side by side aiming guns at Amir’s back. Amnon fired at the two Germans, sending them flying, just as I came in through the door, with Amos Goren on my heels.

  I immediately added my own shots to the two German terrorists, to make sure they were out of the action.

  For a second, silence fell over the room. Then suddenly shooting erupted again from outside, and screaming began inside the hall. I stood in the doorway, Amnon to my left and Amos and Amir on my extreme right, totally focused on the fully lit hall, searching for more terrorists.

  People were lying all over the floor on mattresses. Some were frozen with fear, others screamed and shouted. People covered their heads with blankets as if to protect themselves from the bullets.

  To my left, about fifteen meters away, a man came out from behind a column, bringing a rifle up to firing position. Amos and I fired simultaneously, knocking the terrorist off his feet. Again we scanned the hall. A dark-haired young man jumped up from amidst the hostages. Bullets from all four Kalashnikovs cut him down.

  The shooting continued outside. Suddenly, Amir remembered the megaphone he carried. “Lie down, we’re the IDF. Don’t get up!” He shouted the instructions in Hebrew and English. We stood that way in the room for a long moment, ready to fire again.

  Hesitantly, one of the hostages raised his hand. “You got them all,” he said. “All of them. But that one,” he added sadly, pointing at the body of the young man we had just shot, “he was one of us. A hostage.”

  The radio clasped to my web-belt gave me no time to respond. “Muki, Muki,” it squawked.

  “Muki here.”

  “Giora here. Mission accomplished.” He had taken the VIP room, which the terrorists had made into their dormitory. “Two terrorists down. No casualties on our side.”

  “Yonni,” I called over the radio. No answer came back. I tried again. “Yonni?” I tried again, “Muki here. Mission accomplished.” A long, foreboding silence followed, finally broken by a squawk.

  But instead of Yonni’s voice, I heard Tamir Prado, the signals man from Yonni’s command-and-control team. “Muki,” he cried out. “Yonni’s down.”

  I gave orders to the medics to treat any wounded among the hostages and went outside. Yonni was lying flat on his back on the tarmac. The bullet had come from the control tower, which had now fallen silent. The slug ripped into his chest and exited from his hip. David Hessin, the doctor, kneeling by his side, had torn open Yonni’s shirt and was trying to treat him.

  Karameh flashed through my mind — Arazi’s body on the stretcher in the chopper, the doctors working on him to no avail. I looked around. Shaul Mofaz and his BTRs, from the second and third planes, were already patrolling the perimeter. Omer Bar-Lev’s BTR from the third Hercules was headed toward the MiG airfield.

  I clenched the radio clipped to my belt. “Dan,” I called Shomron, who was on the other side of the airport at the new terminal, overseeing the Hercules landing. “Muki here,” I continued. “Yonni’s wounded. I am taking command.” Dan Shomron confirmed my report with a terse “Okay.”

  Shaul Mofaz reported in. “Muki, everything’s fine with me,” he said. Then Yiftach Reicher, who led the break-in to the second floor, reported that he and his crew had also finished their job.

  I kept Dan Shomron informed as my medics and the doctors took care of the few wounded hostages and collected the terrorists’ weapons. Dan showed up, his face grave and worrying as he watched Hessin work on Yonni.

  The shooting was over. But the noise continued. The spinning propellers of the Hercules approaching us to collect the hostages and the clanging of the BTRs’ metal treads on the asphalt protecting us from any potential Ugandan assault filled the air.

  Dan left us to handle shepherding the passengers to the Hercules while he headed back to the fuel depots, where the air force technicians readied to refuel the planes. But by the time he reached the fuel depot, word came through the command-and-control communications center circling overhead that the Kenyan government, informed of the operation, had given permission for us to land in Nairobi for refueling.

  We knew that we had killed six terro
rists — four in the main hall, and two taken out by Giora’s force in the corridor outside the VIP room. Yiftach Reicher’s team took out some Ugandan soldiers on the second floor. But we found no other terrorists at the old terminal. The other four terrorists, we later heard, spent that night in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, a few miles away from Entebbe airport.

  Three hostages died in the rescue: Pesko Cohen, hit by one of our bullets when we hit the terrorist near the column; Ida Bobovitz, killed by terrorist fire; and the young dark-haired man who we mistook for a terrorist when he jumped up — Jean-Jacques Maimon, a young French Jew on his way home to visit family before coming back to Israel to join the army. (One other civilian from the hostages died — Dora Bloch, a Tel Aviv matron who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital the day before, when she choked on some food. Amin’s thugs murdered her after the rescue.)

  We loaded a Land Rover with the wounded to take to the flying hospital plane. “Yonni first,” I ordered. While the Land Rover disappeared into the darkness across the tarmac to the field hospital, I went back inside to find Amos Goren pleading with the hostages to leave their possessions behind, to free them for the race to the airplane.

  But the same passengers who only a few moments before had listened to everything we told them now ignored Amos’s request to leave behind their belongings. Realizing that Amos’s efforts were in vain, I let the passengers collect their valuables before the crews organized them for the hike to the airplane across the wide tarmac at the front of the terminal.

  The fighters formed a protective wall around the civilians to ferry them out across the tarmac to where the Hercules stood waiting about 150 meters away. The Golani troops waited by its open rear door to help the freed civilians aboard.

  I took the lead position of the box, Amir beside me as we stepped out of the terminal building. A heavy burst of fire came at us from the control tower.

  Nervous, Amir accidentally let loose a bullet. It whizzed past my ear. “Hey, Amir, don’t overdo it,” I joshed him as we ducked back inside the building.