Hadad rarely appears in public. He has almost never been photographed, and is most cautious in his movements and travels.
Lufthansa and the German authorities gave in to Hadad’s extortion, so this terrorist had ample means to finance more terrorism.
In July 1973, Hadad’s men, again commanded by a woman, hijacked a JAL airliner and demanded $15 million ransom; the plane was demolished on the runway of Benghazi Airport.
On April 12, 1976, Dr. Wadi Hadad began preparing a new wave of terror, and advocated terror against Israel throughout the world.
And so it can be said today that it is doubtful whether there is any other Palestinian so expert in terror and with such serious links with international terror organizations. For years he has served as nerve center for Palestinian links with German terrorists, South Americans, Irish, Japanese, Scandinavians, and many others who are prepared to share in sabotage and murder.
Only Wadi Hadad would be capable, in present circumstances, of organizing a group apparently including foreigners to carry out the Flight 139 hijack. Hadad has friends and helpers not only among terror operatives. Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya could be included in the list, as could Idi Amin in Uganda and leaders of the regimes of South Yemen and Iraq.
In Japan, Hadad recruited the members of the Japanese Red Army, from which Kozo Okamoto and his comrades appeared on the international terror scene for the first time to carry out the massacre at Lod Airport in May 1972.
The list—in the last five years—is long and staggering. But not all Dr. Hadad’s attempts and plans work out successfully. He also has failures. His strikes are sometimes foiled. A man like Hadad does not give up. If he fails, he immediately appears elsewhere with another plan. And the terror balance sheet is in his favor.
Hadad’s movements are kept a secret—and from time to time he appears in odd parts of the world: Southeast Asia, Europe, South America, the oil emirates, and, of course, his favorite countries where he receives support—Iraq, Libya, Uganda, Somalia, and South Yemen.
Hadad is the supplier for various operations. Palestinian and other, of documentation, funds, weapons, and explosives. His hand has shaken those of The Jackal, of Baader-Meinhof, and of the Japanese Red Army.
Before Hadad started planning and executing the Air France hijacking to Uganda, he failed in a terror attempt at Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel. He sent a German, Bernard Hausman, as a “walking bomb.” Hausman came to Israel from Vienna in May 1976, not suspecting that his Palestinian friends had installed in his bags a device that would explode upon opening. He succeeded in passing negligent security at Vienna, and in putting his two booby-trapped suitcases on an Austrian Airline plane.
He was suspected the moment he got off the plane in Israel, and was asked to open his luggage. A woman security officer watched over him. Hausman confidently opened one of the cases, and a loud explosion reverberated around the terminal. He and the security officer were killed. A miracle had prevented a tragedy at the terminal—one that might have equaled that inflicted by Hadad’s Japanese messengers four years earlier.
The Israeli and German authorities investigated Hausman’s past, and found a model example of how German anarchists are recruited into Hadad’s service. Had he not been killed at Lod Airport, Hausman would have celebrated his 26th birthday four weeks later.
Hausman was trained in a camp of George Habash’s PFLP. He was classified among the terrorists who might be identified with The Jackal.
In similar fashion Dr. Hadad has recruited Japanese, South Americans, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, and other Germans for his “Terror International.” That is also how he put together the team to hijack Flight 139. The German woman in the team that took the passengers from Athens to Uganda was a close friend of Hausman. She was not told that Hausman was tricked and sent to Israel as a walking bomb, but that “the Israelis murdered your friend Hausman.”
She set out to revenge him, and this perhaps is the way to explain her crazed behavior throughout this week.
These were some of the details included in an intelligence digest that helped to justify the extreme measure code-named Thunderbolt, a continuation of the war between the terrorists and Israel.
10
INTELLIGENCE FILTERS IN
Thunderbolt would prove an operation unprecedented in history. But military aspects aside, it was also a unique test of democracy under siege. Prime Minister Rabin had tried the peaceful option of Track A and now felt morally justified in switching to Track B. But he needed the cabinet’s unanimous vote. All through the crises, a meticulous record was kept of every conference, every task force session, every military consultation. No one was more sensitive to this need than Rabin, the soldier who paraphrased de Tocqueville: “A democracy can only pursue firm action in foreign policy with great difficulty and slow resolve. It lies at the mercy of a dictator. If it surrenders the democratic process in order to survive, it loses the moral reasons for fighting.”
Rabin was determined that Israel must move democratically. All through Friday he had argued this quietly with the commanders.
Later, it would be said that Thunderbolt was agreed upon as a practical military operation on Friday. The prime minister knew otherwise. Only on Saturday morning was it possible to say the raiders had the smallest chance of success.
That chance was taken then because intelligence from Uganda reported that the execution of the first hostages was being prepared for next morning.
“President Amin flew to Mauritius for Friday and Saturday,” reported Rabin. “We gambled that nothing would happen while he played to the grandstand of the Organization of African Unity. It gave time to bring all the processes—political, military, diplomatic, and intelligence—to their logical conclusion. By Sunday, however, we could expect a new demonstration of his mania for killing.”
There were no perfect answers to a problem set by madmen and fanatics. There were only choices. . . And each choice invited disaster. “Thunderbolt will either prove a spectacular success or a terrible catastrophe for Israel,” said Rabin.
This kind of dilemma was indicated Friday night to Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the chief foreign policy advisers to U.S. presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, who dined with the chief of Israeli intelligence. The host was Defense Minister Peres, who talked quietly in Polish to Brzezinski, who like Peres is Polish-born.
The defense minister, like every other task force minister, was keeping up a front of “business as usual.” On this night when Thunderbolt’s dress rehearsal took place in the desert—a rehearsal whose outcome would decide if the hostages in Entebbe were doomed—he was not unhappy to have the bonus of a guest who might one day replace Henry Kissinger.
Brzezinski, a 48-year-old professor in international affairs at Columbia University, where many U.S. policymakers have emerged, examined the problem with the analytical approach of a Jesuit. He was a Catholic sensitive to the Jewish dilemma. Nothing he said that night bore upon Thunderbolt or influenced the machinery behind Track A, now virtually abandoned, or Track B, still unsettled but approaching an inevitable rendezvous with the reality of the pending executions in Uganda. But he came away with a clear picture of how Israelis can keep secrets and yet convey information. What was said at dinner became meaningful only when Professor Brzezinski phoned his New York home early Sunday and heard of the Entebbe raid. Then his discussion on ways to handle international terrorism acquired new meaning. Brzezinski had been talking about U.S. fears that the biggest danger to humanity in the next decade would be the improved technology available to small suicidal teams of fanatics. The anarchist’s smoking bomb, that cartoonist’s delight of the last century, would soon appear as an equally small nuclear device. Defense Minister Peres had spoken optimistically of how countermeasures might improve if the nations collaborated in inventing new responses to each new threat.
“An amazing performance,” remarked Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most outspoken of U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations. For
Moynihan, too, by happy coincidence was in Israel and shared a meal with a member of the task force on Friday: Foreign Minister Allon. “He conversed long after coffeepots were empty, relaxed and seemingly without a care in the world. If his intention was to help prevent any leak of what was really being planned, he succeeded with me.”
Was there a deliberate plan to deceive the world and the hijackers while Thunderbolt got underway?
“No, because of the dangerous delay in releasing the aerial armada carrying the raiders. They were airborne but still not ordered to go in case negotiations might succeed. Every wasted minute consumed tons of precious fuel and raised the risk of unpredictable changes in the Entebbe situation. That should be sufficient reply,” in Daniel Moynihan’s view.
A closer examination of last-minute procedures confirms this. The task force pursuing both Tracks A and B was practicing a technique of crisis management. The general staff, being a military body, concentrated on Track B. In Israel there is nothing to keep enlisted men, corporals, or brigadiers from going over the heads of their superiors. A system of communications, perhaps only possible in a family-type environment, allows ideas to flow to the top; “but God help the ambitious border guard who wastes the chief of staff’s time with requests for ice cream and refrigerators” is the unofficial warning. For days fairly practical schemes had gone forward. Some that looked promising were broken into component parts and each part assigned to an intelligence team working within a sealed department.
Each intelligence research and planning cell, as they were called, had no means of knowing why it was required to determine, for example, the specific movements of President Amin. One IRP cell worked on Big Daddy’s normal working routine. Another examined only the methods of transport available to him. In retrospect, it was easy to report, after hearing gossip from such cells after Thunderbolt was completed, that a dummy of Big Daddy in his black 1973 Mercedes was taken by the raiders and landed ahead of the commandos as a means of deceiving Entebbe guards. (There was such a scheme, discarded in the end as risky.)
As Big Daddy was the subject of intensive scrutiny, so were the terrorists. Deputy air force commander Yerucham Amitai’s very full reports on Big Daddy’s interest in aviation led to the mobilization of pilots who had served as instructors to the Ugandan air force. Their studies included an account of President Amin’s demand for Japanese-style kamikaze pilots, for Phantoms to bomb President Nyerere of Tanzania, “the whore who spreads vile sexual diseases all over Africa,” and for a tiny airplane just big enough for his small nine-year-old son to fly—“but no higher than the trees, and very slow.”
The massive six-foot-four, 280-pound ex-British army sergeant had expressed a desire to memorialize Hitler and reprint the spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Russian ambassador protested against a monument to the Führer, but there is no record that he complained of the lies about Zion. An Israeli political study emphasized that buffoon though Amin might look to non-African eyes, he had capitalized cleverly on tribal divisions, destroying the backbone of the progressive Baganda by massacring 50,000 to 120,000 of the followers of King Freddie of Buganda, who was forced to jump over his palace wall to a brief freedom that ended violently. Mixing bully-boy tactics with bursts of generosity, he kept the more educated Baganda in useful bureaucratic and commercial jobs.
At the beginning of the week Big Daddy seemed a harmless joke. Nobody in the task force had given him much thought before Flight 139’s disappearance. Now he was a joke no longer, despite the Monty Python-style conversations that were launched by Borka Bar-Lev, working from his self-contained cell, unaware of why he was making ludicrous phone calls beyond the obvious need to make some unofficial contact. Personalities all over the world had been asked to seek help in Uganda to save the hostages. Bar-Lev felt he was part of an international effort that included British diplomats and Kenyan newsmen when, in the back of his shop, he lifted the receiver and asked the international exchange to get him Kampala 2241, the office of President Idi Amin.
“This is your friend Bar-Lev speaking.”*
“Who?” said Amin.
“Bar-Lev . . . B as in ‘bomb’ . . .” and Bar-Lev spelled out his name to his old friend. Radio Uganda shortly afterward announced proudly, “Colonel Bar-Lev, an old friend of his honor the president of Uganda, has made contact in the name of the government of Israel. His honor the president asked him to convey to the Israeli government his request and demand that Israel should carry out the will of the hijackers. Colonel Bar-Lev will call back his excellency the moment he receives the answer from his government.”
On Friday, July 2, Radio Uganda announced that Colonel Bar-Lev had spoken again with Amin. The radio station praised the Israeli officer and recommended that Prime Minister Rabin promote him to general. “Bar-Lev has done more for the hostages than the prime minister himself.”
Jerusalem announced officially that it knew nothing of these telephone conversations, but secretly the government was ready to make use of Bar-Lev. He had close contacts with Amin and knew him better than others. In 1973 Amin ordered all Israelis to leave Uganda in angry reaction to the recall of Colonel Bar-Lev, then chief of the Israeli military mission in Uganda. Amin’s relations with Bar-Lev while the former was Ugandan commander in chief (Amin visited Israel at this time) were so close that when President Milton Obote of Uganda, was forced into exile, he alleged that Israel was involved in Amin’s coup against him.
Bar-Lev said during the Flight 139 crisis that he knew of Amin’s plan to depose Obote. As far back as 1970 it had been decided to end the activities of foreign experts in Uganda. Bar-Lev persuaded Amin to sign a three-year agreement for military training and rewarded Amin for this assistance later.
According to Bar-Lev the voracious Idi Amin Dada—field marshal, honorary doctor of philosophy, president for life—was in fact no cannibal but almost a vegetarian. Bar-Lev, reporting all he knew to Israel’s intelligence analysts, had this to say:
Amin is allowed nothing but vegetable salads and chicken. He likes whiskey, brandy, and other drinks; but the doctors have forbidden him alcohol, so he drinks large amounts of tea. Maybe it reminds him of the British army’s NAAFI tea. When I returned to Israel, I felt there would be no difficulty in finding a job. I could direct any lunatic asylum. Amin’s behavior during this crisis betrays most of the traits in Amin’s complex character.
Amin is from a lesser northern tribe. He has never read a book in his life. The hijacking is the most historic opportunity for him. The whole world is writing about Uganda and about Amin, its president. Important governments negotiate with him, diplomatic messages go back and forth. He visits the hostages every day, in a different uniform each time. He comes with his small son Sharon (named after Israel’s Sharon Hotel where Amin once stayed). He is applauded by the hostages and he orders them food and drink, blankets and sheets. He has only shown anger once—when one of the Jewish hostages omitted one of the titles which must be used when addressing the field marshal-doctor-president.
Idi Amin Dada’s mother loved the Bible. In her will she ordered her son to honor the Jewish people. In his childhood he had no religion until convinced he was a Muslim. When he visited Israel I took him to the Omar Mosque in Jerusalem, whereupon Amin proclaimed, “Now I’m a hajji [Muslim pilgrim],” a word included in his name now. When told that to gain that title he had to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca, he asked, “What is Mecca?”
When he was a strong 14-year-old, the British inducted Amin into the East African Rifles. He did not know English and learned numbers and letters from signs in the British barracks. He attended school for two years. During World War II he fought with his battalion in Burma and attained the rank of sergeant major. There is no doubt he has the gift of leadership; his control of his soldiers—most of them from the northern tribes—comes largely from his tall stature, his great physical strength, his mastery of English, and his Führerlike rhetoric.
But behind the hero stands the inval
id. He often has sharp pains in his legs and arms. When pain attacks he goes wild. In Israel, when he underwent treatment in the Tel Hashomer hospital following his visit to Sinai after the Six Day War, he was full of praise for the Israeli army. But when the pains grew, he began to shout: “You are bad people. I saw what you did to the Egyptian army. I want to fly home immediately and tell Obote about it.” When he was told there was no plane that day he said angrily: “I’ll walk to Athens, and take a plane to Uganda from there.” Later Amin used to get tablets from his Israeli doctors through me.
Amin acts upon visions which no one dares disbelieve. One morning he woke up and announced that Uganda should manufacture cars adapted to Uganda’s harsh climate (his country has one of the best climates in the world). On another morning he was about to conquer Kenya and Tanzania to give his country an outlet to the sea, yet he knows his army cannot carry out any exercise lasting more than two hours. The units simply disintegrate.
After the British left, Sergeant Amin became a captain. When President Obote clashed with King Freddie of Buganda, Amin’s jeeps with their recoilless guns—supplied by the Israeli army—opened fire on the king’s palace and turned the tide in Obote’s favor. Amin was promoted to deputy commander in chief, and then commander in chief. When he reached this rank he took great care that all other officers should be at least two ranks inferior to him. He only appointed brigadiers after promoting himself to field marshal.
Amin is haunted by paranoia. He keeps a special jeep reconnaissance unit as his personal bodyguard. This unit enabled Amin to survive when Obote decided to arrest him. This led to the coup which brought Amin to power.
Amin has an uncanny, animal sense of impending danger. Like many megalomaniacs, he has a devilish way of escaping death.
During the last year before the coup his position was weakened as commander in chief and senior officers urged then President Obote to arrest him. Amin flew to visit the Egyptian minister of defense. He received a telegram ordering him back to Kampala immediately. Amin notified the president that he was not returning but, instead, going to Mecca to attain the status of hajji.
90 Minutes at Entebbe Page 7
