90 Minutes at Entebbe

by William Stevenson

  The sudden disappearance of Flight 139 was registered by a special Israeli intelligence force that has no known parallel. Monitoring the world’s airwaves with powerful electronic ears, and by other methods, it watches over travelers for reasons that are unique. It aims to prevent Israel from being isolated and then destroyed. That means the protection of legitimate visitors to and from the Jewish state, and the tracking of killers who wish to turn Israel into a ghetto to be besieged and undermined as if the fortress can then be alienated from the world and destroyed at leisure.

  “Flight 139 with a very large number of Israelis aboard has either crashed or been hijacked,” ran the first message. “The missing aircraft, an Air France airbus which left Ben-Gurion Airport (near Tel Aviv) shortly before nine this morning . . .”

  The message went to the Israeli cabinet, which was halfway through its routine weekly Sunday session. Minister of Transport Gad Yaakobi, a 41-year-old economist, passed it to his prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. The time was 1:30 p.m., only minutes after Flight 139 failed to transmit after the refueling stop at Athens.

  Prime Minister Rabin, a retired general, formerly chief of Israel’s military staff, told Yaakobi, who had served as a soldier and finally as a second lieutenant: “If it’s hijacked, you take charge of information . . .”

  Gad Yaakobi understood in what sense he was now on the firing line. The junior lieutenant was about to learn the burdens of high rank.

  More information began streaming in. Thoughts of lunch vanished. “The missing airbus left here with 245 passengers and 12 crew,” reported the Ben-Gurion Airport security men already combing their files. “We believe 83 Israelis—but perhaps more because some passengers have citizenship in other countries . . . an unknown number of Arabs are believed to have transferred to Flight 139 from a Singapore flight that landed in Athens shortly before the airbus . . .”

  A crisis management team was formed at 3:30 p.m., two hours after the first intelligence report, and 15 minutes before the routine cabinet session broke up. The team consisted of the prime minister and five members of his cabinet. With them was the chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, a formidable general whose paratroop commandos had won him a reputation for swift and unexpected action.

  Each member of this crisis task force was supported by specialists: experts on the new international network of terrorists whose attacks on Israel had the same ideological significance as bombings in Ireland; experts on antipiracy tactics; military, political, and diplomatic experts. They drew together swiftly and smoothly. This sort of emergency had happened before, though never on this scale. Nobody yet knew if Flight 139 was a total loss or in the hands of terrorists seeking one melodramatic act of homicide. Or it could be in the grip of a new breed of sophisticated hijackers trained in airline operations and political blackmail.

  “I fear the last,” Prime Minister Rabin confided to the defense scientific adviser, Dr. Yehezkel Dror. “Face the fact! Our enemies have never had such a catch before—perhaps one hundred Jews who may have relatives of power and influence all over the world, any one of whom might crack under pressure.”

  The professor had once written a study: “How to Deal with Terrorism Linked with Mad Regimes.”

  He had no notion how prophetic this was. Nor could Defense Minister Shimon Peres guess that his own arguments in the cabinet earlier that day cast a shadow over coming events, when he replied to criticism of the Westwind, a civilian jet built with Israeli ingenuity but also with Israeli tax money. The Westwind was an investment in Israel’s future aircraft industry, said Peres, adding ironically: “Even President Idi Amin of Uganda chose it against the world’s best.”

  That Uganda’s dictator had his own Israeli-built Westwind jet was, on Sunday, June 27, an idle joke. So far as anyone knew, the stolen Flight 139 airbus was still in the air but flying southward, instead of northwest toward its scheduled destination, Paris.

  Paris was groaning in the worst heat wave in a hundred years. All who could, fled the city. French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing was flying to join U.S. President Ford at a summit conference in Puerto Rico. With him were key French government ministers. Anyone awaiting Flight 139 at the Charles de Gaulle Airport saw only that beside the landing time of 1335 GMT (1435 Paris time) appeared the single bleak word DELAYED.

  “Attention!” The voice of a ground-hostess cut through the noise. “Attention, s’il vous plaît . . .” Few of the perspiring relatives and friends heard or fully comprehended the brief announcement. “Air France apologizes for the delay in arrival of Flight 139. Those awaiting Flight 139 will please come to the central Air France office.”

  At precisely the time scheduled for arrival in Paris, the missing airbus was on the final approach to land at Benghazi, Libya. This aroused the worst fears.

  It was dusk in Israel when the crisis task force began a grim vigil. By then, certain facts were emerging. The hijackers had prepared for Libya as the opening move in some complicated game. They were experts in the new kind of “war” against Israel waged by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose chief of operations was Dr. Wadi Hadad.

  Dr. Hadad commanded an international army of fanatics armed with weapons of terror. Israeli intelligence believed he had moved out of strife-torn Lebanon to some more secure base in Africa to train young disciples of violent revolution who might not share his hatred of Zion but did want to share his arsenals and the knowledge of his trained guerrillas. The immediate fear was that this was a repetition of the takeover by Hadad’s men of a Belgian airliner that was forced back to Ben-Gurion Airport in May 1972. On that occasion, Israeli commandos disguised as mechanics and ground attendants had recaptured the airliner, killing 2 Arab gunmen, but saving 97 passengers.

  If the hijackers were following a careful plan, as indicated by Israel’s electronic ears tuned to African and Arab radio traffic, General Gur’s commandos would have an unpleasant task ahead. They began moving quietly into position on Ben-Gurion Airport, wearing the white coveralls of mechanics or the casual summer clothes of passengers.

  It seemed that Flight 139 would return here, directed by Dr. Hadad’s experts in terror and blackmail.

  Confrontation with Flight 139’s hijackers, if they landed in Israel, would require all the prime minister’s powers of self-control. Hitting the hijackers meant the risk of killing innocent passengers. The world would condemn Israel. So Rabin prepared for prolonged negotiations, setting up a command post in the office of El Al’s general manager, Mordechai Ben-Ari, who had created a great airline out of his early career moving refugees from Nazi death camps by an underground network of improvised transports.

  2

  AN AFRICAN DICTATOR TAKES OVER

  From London during Sunday night came the first detailed description of the hijackers. It suggested that two Germans were in charge; that the terrorists were indeed following a carefully calculated plan; and that Flight 139 would end up somewhere “friendly to the terrorists.” These important clues came from a young Englishwoman, Patricia Heyman, age 30, who persuaded her captors to release her at Benghazi because she was in advanced pregnancy and in danger of giving premature birth.

  Pat Heyman held a British passport but her home was in Petach Tikva, Israel. She said nothing until a regular Libyan Airlines plane brought her to London. There Scotland Yard took over. In five hours, she passed from the hands of political pirates to specialists in antiterrorist tactics. Whatever the placatory mood of governments, the police of the free world had created their own international underground for the exchange of intelligence.

  “Five minutes after departure from Athens, Flight 139 was taken over by a German female, a German male, and what appear to be three Arabs, according to the released hostage,” London reported to Israel. “All appear to be armed. Explosives, apparently disguised as cans of dates, were placed at exit doors of aircraft Benghazi is described as stopover only. Central Africa appears to be final destination.”

  Three hour
s after midnight on the second day, Monday, June 28, Israel’s defense minister drove wearily back from the airport to his Tel Aviv office on the second floor of military headquarters. Shimon Peres, born in Poland in 1923, had been sent to Palestine at the age of 11 as the child chosen to represent a Jewish family which entertained little hope of joining him in the creation of a nation that would protect Jews from further persecution.

  “If Israel means anything,” Peres told himself now, “it means Jews can go anywhere as free men without fear. We can’t give in to blackmail.”

  He had just learned that Flight 139 was on the ground at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. He knew something about Uganda and its president, Idi Amin, because for some years Israel had cultivated the dictator and trained his airmen. There was a more ironic reason. Uganda was once touted as the place where Jews could establish their first homeland in 2000 years. Uganda had been the alternative to the Palestine that became Israel.

  Peres passed through the security points, disguising his anxiety with brief smiles, already aware of the need to maintain confidence and discourage rumors of disaster. In his office waited General Gur and intelligence advisers, with maps and photographs spread over a long desk.

  “It’s more than 4000 kilometers,” said Gur, answering the defense minister’s unspoken question. “We’re working on military options, but the distance is enormous and the territory between is hostile.”

  An intelligence officer broke in. “Terrorists are getting President Amin’s support.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Positive. The Voice of Uganda, is broadcasting appeals to revolutionaries, and attacks against France and Israel. The terrorists already have an organization in Uganda. Their operational directors appear to be moving overland from Somalia.”

  Peres glanced at the maps. British Somalia, no longer British, had become host to the Communist Chinese and then yielded to the superior bribing powers of the Soviet Union. Equipped with Russian arms, “defended” by Russian missiles against unspecified enemies, Somalia was the safe haven for Dr. Hadad’s senior specialists in guerrilla warfare on behalf of the PFLP.

  The maps told more. Uganda had been British-controlled along with Kenya and Tanganyika. In the wake of decolonization, East Africa passed through storms of unrest. Ethiopia, to the north, had recently overturned the legendary Emperor Haile Selassie and destroyed Britain’s traditional influence. French Somaliland was out of French control except for the port of Djibouti. . .

  Djibouti? Peres looked up inquiringly.

  “It’s an option,” said Gur. The chief of staff tugged one of his jug-handle ears. “Test French reaction to any possibility of refueling there—”

  Nobody had to ask what he meant. If a military operation became necessary—and it could only be if—planes must fly around hostile Arab territories, evade Somalia’s Russian detection systems, and complete flights beyond the normal range of Israel’s existing military aircraft.

  THE POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE (PFLP)

  Someone picked up the scrambler phone and called for Foreign Minister Yigal Allon. His task would be to sound out the French on the use of Djibouti, with a thousand other unpredictable tasks to follow. General Gur spoke softly into another phone to his paratroop commanders. The special commando units at Ben-Gurion Airport should remain alert and at their positions, although the chances of Flight 139 landing there now were less than 10 percent. “All men of Force X* and Force Y* must stand ready for action elsewhere.”

  The text of a 2500-word statement from Uganda Radio began to pour into Peres’s office. It denounced French occupation of Djibouti, as if the minds of the crisis task force had been divined already. “For Djibouti is only held by France to preserve Israel’s sole route to the Far East and Africa,” declared Uganda Radio.

  This was the language of Dr. Hadad and better-publicized enemies of Israel. The theme was cutting Israel off from the rest of the world: a theory that had once seemed outrageous until the exits were blocked one by one, save those provided by commercial air lanes.

  By late Monday, the task force received an astonishingly informed guess of what to expect. Israeli intelligence delivered an analysis of possibilities:

  Operation Uganda was a plan devised by 46-year-old Dr. Wadi Hadad, mastermind of the PFLP, a faction operating in apparent independence from Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. Hadad had organized a series of spectacular hijacks designed to strengthen arguments for greater violence rather than the PLO’s recent pseudodiplomatic initiatives which emphasized moderation. For Operation Uganda, Hadad stationed himself in Somalia and despatched his hijack team to Athens: a German woman and a German anarchist tentatively identified as Wil-fried Böse, known associate of The Jackal, Carlos Ramirez. The leader of this team could be Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber, born in Hebron in 1930, longtime resident in Cairo, founder of the “Heroes of the Return,” operational commander of the PLFP’s radical wing linked with leftist-anarchist groups throughout the world.

  The Jackal’s running-mate, Jaber, was credited with direction of the PLFP’s political department. That indicated Flight 139 would become an element in political warfare designed as much to win support for Jaber’s theories of violence as to discredit Israel by forcing the Jewish state for the first time to kneel before threats. Jaber organized the attack on a Pan-Am airliner at Rome in December 1973 when 31 were killed. Jaber’s family, including five brothers, had been under constant Israeli intelligence surveillance. One brother, Rasmi Jaber, ran a souvenir shop near Jerusalem, openly identified with terrorism, and now testified that Fayez Jaber was “leader of many big operations against Israel.”

  Two hours before midnight on Monday, the ominous speculations began to harden. In a flamboyant display of jubilation, “Big Daddy” President Amin appeared before the hijack victims at Entebbe with a bodyguard of armed and uniformed Palestinian guerrillas. Big Daddy was being projected by Uganda Radio as a “negotiator” between the hijack team and Israel.

  But why only Israel?

  An awful truth was reflected in the faces around Prime Minister Rabin that night. The released hostage, Patricia Heyman, had spoken to Scotland Yard of “segregation”—of Jews separated from other prisoners aboard the airbus by the Germans waving pistols. None of the task force was especially “mystic-minded” (as one described it later), but none could forget that Israel was born out of the Holocaust in which Jews were told to step aside in Nazi camps and directed to the gas chambers. “Segregation” was an emotive word. It would be best if families of the hostages were told nothing of this.

  In Uganda, it was now reported by Israeli intelligence, President Amin was parading before the hostages as their protector. Addressed merely as Mr. President by a young Israeli mother, he rebuked her. “I am His Excellency al-Hajji Field Marshal Dr. Idi Amin Dada, holder of the British Victoria Cross, DSO, MC, and appointed by God Almighty to be your savior.”

  _____________

  * Deleted by censors.

  3

  TERRORISM AND MAD REGIMES

  Word was sent to a shopkeeper in a Tel Aviv suburb. Would he try to get on the telephone to Kampala? Talk to Big Daddy, flatter the African president, remind him of his awesome responsibility as chairman of the Organization of African Unity now on the brink of a summit meeting in Mauritius.

  The shopkeeper was Colonel Baruch Bar-Lev, “Borka,” former Israeli military mission chief in Uganda. Borka had been an intimate friend of the black dictator. “Keep him talking,” was the unofficial request. He began a series of bizarre long-distance phone calls between Israel and Uganda while the task force played desperately for time. There were now, it seemed, some 250 innocent passengers and 12 French airline employees at the tender mercy of Big Daddy, widely regarded as a dangerous buffoon, known to the doctors who had treated him in Jerusalem as a victim of syphilis and entering the final manic stages of that fearful disease, but still an inventive and cunning foe.

  D
r. Dror, the chief scientific adviser who wrote the prophetic study on terrorism linked with mad regimes, analyzed a proso-profile of President Amin. These proso-profiles were based on methods of historical research, modernized during the intelligence war against Hitler. A pioneer was Professor Gilbert Highet of Columbia University, a quiet Scot who could re-create the psychological atmosphere of Roman emperors. He had adapted the technique to forecast how leaders of hostile or secret regimes might react to differing sets of circumstances, using limited knowledge concerning their personalities, families, and friends, and current circumstances.

  While Dr. Dror worked on Big Daddy, seeking alternative plans for the safe release of the hostages, Uganda Radio made known during the course of Tuesday, June 29, the price of liberation. The hijackers demanded the delivery of 53 convicted terrorists, including 40 supposedly held in Israel, 6 in West Germany, 5 in Kenya, 1 in Switzerland, and another in France.

  “We are the only nation with both hostages and convicted terrorists,” commented Transport Minister Gad Yaakobi. He had the unenviable task of dealing with a self-styled Committee for Saving the Hostages and another Committee of Relatives, all clamoring for action. The list of hijack victims was not being made public for security reasons, and relatives were contacted but sworn to secrecy. Yaakobi, whose job in the task force required him to keep open channels to Air France and the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, and to speak for the government during the crisis, was unhappy with the early signs of Israel’s isolation. Words of condolence did not alter the fact that the French seemed unwilling to take firm action, while ICAO, being an agency of the United Nations, already reflected the UN’s submission to the dictates of Uganda’s fellow third-world nations, all hostile to Israel. Only 73 of the 134 members of ICAO were parties to the main Hague convention that covered the agreements making it easier to extradite and prosecute hijackers and penalize countries that accommodate them. Yaakobi, once an executive of the General Federation of Jewish Labour—Histadrut—had become increasingly disenchanted with third-world governments that embraced socialist theories but practiced dictatorship.