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

by Moshe Betser

  “Shaul,” I called to Mofaz in the BTR. “Take out the control tower, please.”

  A moment later, a powerful burst of heavy machine-gun fire and several rocket-propelled grenades slammed into the control tower, silencing its occupants.

  Again I stepped out onto the tarmac, into view of the control tower. And for a second time a blast of machine-gun fire raced across the asphalt at me from the control tower.

  “Shaul,” I called over the radio again. “How about giving them something that will really convince them.”

  RPGs and machine-gun fire from the BTR again riddled the tower. Shaul’s shooting went on for a full minute.

  That should silence it for good, I thought. But I waited for a long minute to be sure. “That’s it,” I told the boys, and we began moving the passengers out to the tarmac and the plane, about 150 meters away.

  I watched from the distance as they trooped to the Hercules, remembering the last Israeli departure from Entebbe airport barely four years before. Nobody helped us then as we climbed, heavy-hearted, onto the plane to Nairobi. Then we felt like refugees, helpless and defeated. Now, at first glance, the freed hostages boarding the Hercules also looked like refugees, struggling to carry a few precious possessions across the tarmac. But they were not helpless. Or alone. They were free citizens of Israel, and we had fulfilled our roles as their protectors.

  The back door to the Hercules slowly rose and the plane began its lumbering run down the runway to take-off. I turned back to the business at hand. The forces scouted the building one last time looking for stragglers, and then we boarded the Land Rovers and the Mercedes to carry us to the planes waiting near the new terminal.

  We threw out demolition slabs behind us as we started the trip across the tarmac, to create a smoke screen behind us for any Ugandans who might decide to be heroes as we left the old terminal. But suddenly someone announced that Udi Bloch, one of the fighters accompanying a BTR, was missing.

  Everything froze as fighters went to find him, taking care to avoid the demolition slabs. Within a minute he showed up, and we finally began rolling, packed into the Mercedes, the Land Rovers, and the BTRs.

  But as we drove away, shooting resumed from the machine gun in the control tower.

  “God, he’s stubborn,” I said out loud. But, finished with our job, we had no good reason to stop to shoot back. Someone in the car laughed at my joke as we raced away from the tracers flashing past us. Our fight in Entebbe was over.

  The final force to leave Entebbe, on the fourth plane, we took off exactly fifty-nine minutes after we had landed in the first plane, flying off into a night lit up by the flaring destruction of the Ugandan Air Force.

  A row of eleven MiGs parked about a hundred meters away from the old terminal, were sitting ducks for Omer Bar-Lev’s BTR. He and his fighters blasted them with machine guns and RPGs before driving onto their Hercules. Only afterward did we find out that he had acted without a direct order. Something disrupted his Motorola communication with me or Dan, so Omer decided to act on his own.

  No joy broke out in the fourth plane as we lifted off from Entebbe. We all knew that Yonni was seriously wounded.

  Ehud met us in Nairobi. He had flown to Kenya on Friday to help organize permission to land for the flying hospital in the Boeing and refueling for the planes on the way back from Uganda. The fighters stayed on board, but we opened the rear ramp for fresh air. I went down the ramp to greet Ehud.

  He was probably aching to hear from me what had happened back in Entebbe. But only one thing interested me just then. “How’s Yonni?” I asked as we shook hands and then hugged.

  “Wounded,” Ehud said, “but he’s going to be okay.”

  “Ehud,” I pressed. “I know it was serious. I saw him. Tell me the truth.”

  “The doctors are working on him right now.”

  “Please do me a favor, go see what’s going on,” I asked Ehud. “Find out about Yonni.”

  He grimaced a nod and left me waiting for him on the tarmac beside the plane.

  While I waited for him, I called Giora, who had led the break-in of the VIP room, to tell me how his team took down the two terrorists they found.

  “We broke in,” Giora told me, “and found two people in civilian clothes. We couldn’t tell if they were terrorists or hostages. ‘Who are you?’ I asked them. But they said nothing. I thought maybe they couldn’t understand me. But before I could try asking again, one of them pulled out a grenade. I gave a shout and we took cover, but added our bullets to the explosion. The terrorists died from the blast and our bullets.”

  I smiled at him. But my joy was short-lived. Ehud had come back — and his face said it all. Yonni was dead.

  I was left with the task of telling the fighters inside the plane.

  I climbed the rear ramp of the Hercules back into the plane, where the Mercedes and Land Rovers were lashed to the floor, the fighters gathered close to hear the news.

  “Yonni’s dead,” I began, pausing to let the news sink in. “We did our duty. We succeeded. Successfully. This is the painful price we sometimes have to pay in this kind of war. But we continue.” I paused for a second, then added, “Now we go home.”

  Throughout the airplane, most of the fighters slept for the ride home. I couldn’t sleep. I sat up front in the cockpit. The natural loneliness of the commander had never sat so heavily on my shoulders. Usually after such an operation, Yonni and I sat together, talking about what had just happened and what we planned next.

  Now, alone, I tried to understand what Yonni had been thinking when he decided to take out the Ugandan. He had obviously believed that the Ugandan soldier was threatening us. He didn’t know what I knew — that presenting arms and calling out “Advance” was routine drill for a Ugandan soldier.

  We could have driven right past any sentry. And even if the sentry became suspicious after we passed him, in those few seconds of his confusion, we would have reached the terminal building and begun our real work. Indeed, the entire plan was based on the idea that we were ready to endanger ourselves by driving past “enemy” soldiers on our way to the canopied entrances to the terminal in order to go ahead with our mission.

  Obviously, I realized, Yonni had believed that with his and Giora’s silenced guns, they could quietly eliminate the threat from the lone Ugandan soldier. But he could not have foreseen that the Ugandan would be only wounded and, getting back on his feet, would then be cut down by one of our own soldiers using an unsilenced weapon.

  I found comfort in the fact that despite everything — the wounded Ugandan, the bunched-up run to the building from fifty meters away, the blocked entrance to where I had expected to break in — the Unit knew how to react fast enough to nonetheless surprise the terrorists before they could harm the hostages.

  Deep in my thoughts, I was startled when the pilot turned to the Voice of Israel’s radio frequency and we heard a pre-dawn news report in which Israeli government “sources” confirmed international media reports saying Israeli troops had destroyed the Ugandan Air Force. Still facing another three hours of flight within reach of enemy aircraft from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our mission was not yet over. Someone in Jerusalem couldn’t wait to make the announcement and was endangering our lives by doing so.

  We flew directly to the Tel Nof base, far from the public eye. Rabin and Peres waited for us at the plane’s door, shaking our hands as we came off. Then they gave short speeches thanking us for our accomplishment. Rabin spoke to us like an army commander. Peres spoke of our contribution to the fight against international terror.

  Amiram Levine came up to me right after the speeches, and while we waited for the choppers to take us back to base, he told me they had appointed him that morning to replace Yonni.

  A few hours later, back at the base, Amiram ran the debriefing, which we field in the mess hall. Usually, only those who took part in an operation attend. But this time Amiram broke precedent. He invited all the members of Sayeret Matkal on the base
.

  First the officers, then the crew commanders, and finally each individual fighter reported on what he did and what he saw, especially in those few seconds between the time the Ugandan soldiers spotted us and the plan went wrong because of the silenced .22s and the long blast of Kalashnikov fire that followed. The soldier from the Land Rover who fired his Klatch explained that when he saw the Ugandan get back up on his feet and aim at us, he feared for our safety. The driver of the Land Rover said he also was worried and decided to try to run over the Ugandan.

  We did not celebrate a victory that night. For the Unit, even one casualty is proof that our performance did not match our plan. To maintain its abilities, a unit like Sayeret Matkal must always learn from its mistakes, facing honestly and truthfully what went wrong.

  Into the night we talked about what had happened, each of us, from our own point of view, trying to understand what went wrong on the night of our most famous initiative. This was mine.

  EPILOGUE

  One successful counterblow against terror does not put an end to the war. In March 1978, after terrorists hijacked an Israeli bus north of Tel Aviv and twenty-seven vacationers died, the IDF swept into Lebanon in what became known as the Litani Operation, pushing the terrorists north out of their bases in southern Lebanon.

  But by 1981 they were back, and then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared Yasser Arafat to be Adolf Hitler’s successor. With Arik Sharon his defense minister and Raful the chief of staff, no holds were barred to try defeating the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose aspirations for a state conflicted with the right-wing government’s belief in the Greater Land of Israel.

  For the third time in nearly twenty years in the army, I was assigned to get PLO chairman Arafat. This time, I scattered dozens of special-forces snipers into besieged Beirut, looking for him and other key PLO personnel. But by the time we found him in our scopes, the United States had brokered a deal giving Arafat safe passage out of the city. Nonetheless, my riflemen came back with the Polaroids proving they had indeed had him in their gun sights.

  Operation Peace for Galilee was supposed to last a few weeks. By its third year, it was my son Shaul’s turn to go to the army. Now, for the first time, I could understand my parents’ silence about their fears for my safety. I was faced with an even worse dilemma. In my last job in the IDF, I would be involved in the planning of operations my son might be asked to execute. I did not want to spend long hours waiting behind a desk for him to come back from a mission instead of being there by his side to protect his flanks. And at forty, I had to admit to myself that no matter how hard I tried, the twenty-year-olds would always be in better physical shape for the job.

  Proud, I watched Shaul enter the Unit just as I was leaving, and wished his mother had lived to see him full-grown. Nurit passed away shortly after Entebbe, finally freed from the tragic illness that debilitated her in the last years of her life. We laid her to rest in Nahalal’s cemetery overlooking the Jezreel Valley, under a broad fir tree that shades her spot from the hot sun. She was twenty-nine years old. Shaul grew up in Nahalal, where my younger brother Eyal, who had married Nurit’s sister, took over the family farm after Nurit’s passing.

  So, a decade after my most famous mission — though not at the pinnacle of my work in the army, a subject and period that await declassification for another book — I retired from the army at the age of forty. Since then, I’ve seen many of my friends and colleagues — Ehud Barak, Matan Vilnai, Amiram Levine, and others — rise to the highest levels in the army.

  But I never wanted an army career. And as a civilian I chose a profession as rooted in the traditions of my family as service in the defense of Israel — settlement. But instead of government-subsidized settlements in the occupied territories, my friends from the army and the Jezreel Valley organized our new village in the hills overlooking Nahalal.

  For the first time in Israel, private citizens undertook to build a new settlement without help from the government or from a political movement. Neither kibbutz nor moshav, nor merely a bedroom suburb to nearby Haifa, we planned it from the start as an independent community.

  Asked to serve as chief executive officer for the group, I became involved while studying at Haifa University. I finally went back to school during a sabbatical the army gave me in 1980, studying the geography, botany, and zoology of the Land of Israel, just as I had for years. We began construction in 1981. A year later I remarried, to Nomi, and in 1983, we moved into our new home, and had two daughters, Tamar and Shani.

  I began this book in the same September 1993 week as the historic handshake on the White House lawn between my former commanding general, Yitzhak Rabin, and my former enemy leader, Yasser Arafat. I wanted to leave the next generation an account of the wars and battles I saw from the tip of the IDF’s spear, to help those future generations understand the value of peace.

  As I have always said, I am a son of the Jezreel Valley, born in Nahalal, a village deliberately shaped as a circle. Indeed, an important circle of my life was closed that same week in September 1993 as the first steps on the long road to real peace in the Land of Israel took place — my father, Nahman, died.

  A working farmer until the last weeks of his life, he was gladdened to live to see the beginning of a peace process with the Palestinians, an enemy he never hated. He was buried beside my mother, Sarah, who died in 1986, in the Nahalal cemetery at the other end of the same row as Nurit. Hundreds of old-timers and members of our extended family came to the shady grove overlooking the valley to pay their respects to him as the embodiment of the pioneering ideal of a man who devoted himself to Israel’s safety and settlement.

  In late 1973, a few weeks after the cease-fire at the end of the Yom Kippur War, while Henry Kissinger still negotiated the disengagement of forces and the IDF field positions on the west bank of the Suez Canal, my brother Udi and I both managed to get home for a few hours.

  We told our father, Nahman, about the battles we had fought. He was interested, of course. But when we told him about the agriculture that we saw in Egypt, he became most excited. The Egyptian farming techniques fascinated him, for while we knew the best of Israeli agritechnology, the Egyptians used methods as old as the Bible. We decided to take him down to Egypt, to see firsthand.

  We drove over the bridges Arik’s engineering crews had put up to make the bridgehead into Egypt. We took him to Fa’id and to Deversoir, all the way to where Amitai Nahmani was killed, and then through the mango plantations to the dunes where Amit Ben-Horin died trying to invoke the cease-fire.

  Only when we reached the irrigation canals of that huge plantation did his excitement finally break through his normally stoic expression. Finding some Egyptian peasants working in the groves, he questioned them for hours in his farmer’s Arabic about when they plant and harvest, how they control the water, and which crops served them best. The farms, not the fighting, interested him.

  Like him, I understood there was no realistic choice but mutual recognition between the two people — the Israelis and the Palestinians-who regard the Land of Israel as home. Not that I wanted to run to embrace Arafat. But no people can rule another people without their consent, and no realistic alternative exists to compromise in the Land of Israel between us and the Palestinians. For me, the historic mutual recognition was proof of the success of the Zionist revolution my grandparents helped begin at the beginning of the century, a revolution that believed in eventual Arab acceptance of our presence in the region.

  The historic handshake in September 1993 also became the start of a process that enabled me to close two circles in my own life story.

  In January 1994 I received a phone call from an Israeli journalist asking if I would be ready to go with him to Uganda to do a documentary, including a trip to the old terminal at Entebbe airport. No Israeli had visited Uganda since the Entebbe rescue.

  “Sure,” I said. But that was about all he had as far as his story idea was concerned. He had been sending fa
xes to the Ugandan government ever since the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO when, suddenly, many of the Third World and developing countries that had long boycotted Israel announced their renewal of diplomatic relations. But Uganda was so far silent on the issue. Even the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem couldn’t help.

  Over the years I had kept up my contacts for anything connected to the African country that had played such an important part in my life. I knew that the Ugandan president’s brother was in Israel, having an operation at one of the country’s best hospitals. The medical treatment had been arranged by an Israeli, with a company based in Nairobi, that did business in Uganda. I gave the journalist the name of the Israeli businessman in Nairobi. “Here’s the intelligence,” I told the reporter. “Now, let’s see how good a reporter you are.”

  And sure enough, a week later, I was back in a jeep on the tarmac at Entebbe, but it was daytime, and instead of a web-belt and a weapon, I carried a tourist’s flight bag and a camera. And instead of an officer leading the break-in teams to the old terminal, I was officially a “producer” for an Israeli television news crew.

  Nothing had changed in seventeen years. Uganda had seen civil wars and coups, invasions, and finally peace, but nobody had used the old terminal since the night we flew out. The control tower at Entebbe was still riddled with the scars of Shaul Mofaz’s fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on the BTR. I climbed a musty stairwell to the room at the top of the tower, astonished by the commanding view it had of the scene and amazed at how lucky we were that more of us didn’t die that night.

  The Ugandan president invited us to meet him at his home in the far north of the country. Not certain how he felt about the rescue, we did not mention my role in the raid. But he told us he regarded Idi Amin as an enemy of Uganda, and praised Israel for its action in 1976. Indeed, on camera, he announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel. Promising Israeli tourists a warm welcome in his country, he took seriously a suggestion that the old terminal be turned into a museum for tourists interested in the rescue and its blow against international terror.