The rising probability of executions put new pressure on Prime Minister Rabin. He had hoped until then that the earlier assessment was correct: President Amin would prolong the palaver to keep himself in the spotlight.
“If we are talking about a nation that does not submit to demogogues,” Rabin was to say later, “then as prime minister I had to make a final decision based on consensus.”
Rabin did most of his lonely agonizing in the provisional office of the prime minister in Tel Aviv. This is a small red-tiled building which, ironically, has housed first the German Order of Templars and then, during World War II, German civilians suspected of Nazi espionage by the British. Then it became British military headquarters in the tragic postwar period before Israel was born, when a Jewish underground army (which included most of the older men involved in the Flight 139 crisis) fought the British. Later it was David Ben-Gurion’s provisional government quarters before the birth of Israel.
Inside a long room bare of ornament except full-length portraits of the founders of Israel—Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann—Rabin wrestled with his conscience between sessions with his full cabinet. He would have preferred to be in the first plane landing at Entebbe, he said when he came to review the find fateful hours before the decision on Thunderbolt . . . GO!
He talked with opposition leader Menachem Begin, which seemed strange to those unfamiliar with Israel’s checkered history. During the Palestine mandate, Begin was the most wanted man by British security forces after the assassination of Abraham Stem of the Stem Gang. Begin had been the elusive leader of the underground guerrilla organization of Irgun Zvai Leumi and to this day is identified with the “hawks” and thought to be critical of Rabin’s hesitations. But the bitter political battles of previous weeks were forgotten in this unifying reaction to danger.
Rabin himself had been a commando at the age of 18 in the guerrilla forces fighting underground during the British blockage of Palestine against Jewish immigration. Yet oddly enough, he began as a saboteur under British direction against the Nazis in World War II. His life since that boyhood experience has been involved in warfare of an unconventional kind; yet he is by inclination a farmer and embodies contradictory characteristics in the Israeli civilian-soldier: a tough recognition of the need always to fight to preserve his Jewishness, and in the thick of fighting a kind of gentleness which is a consequence of an underlying philosophical approach to life and death.
Rabin took British Staff College training after the birth of Israel. He understood the role of the air force in subduing enemy airfields on the first day of the 1967 Six Day War. “Once these were made unserviceable,” said Rabin (then chief of general staff), “the burden fell upon our desert units to crush the Arab invaders.”
Rabin the humanist was visibly upset when relatives of Flight 139’s Jewish passengers stormed his office. Rabin the soldier calculated the risk of the unprecedented raid in view. It could jeopardize a large number of hostages’ lives because there was to be no needless killing of Ugandans defending the target. Rabin the logician recalled that there were precedents for a prisoner exchange. He recalled them bitterly in one of the heated cabinet discussions: “In 1968 we released Palestinians in secret negotiations leading to a silent exchange for Israelis on an El Al plane hijacked to Algeria. In 1969 there was another silent exchange of Syrian airmen and other prisoners of war to get back two Israeli hijack hostages after they were held ninety-eight days in Damascus.
“Finally, we returned more than a hundred saboteurs and spies after the Yom Kippur War to get back the bodies of a few Israeli soldiers killed in that conflict.”
But the relatives of Flight 139’s passengers only demanded: “Do you want to wait until people are dead before you make an exchange?”
And Rabin the humanist said later: “I have to live with my conscience for the rest of my life. I adopt with Flight 139 the principle by which I stick until something changes the situation. And that principle is that as the situation existed until Friday, and even until I could be convinced on Saturday that dress rehearsals were faultless enough to meet prescribed requirements, some sort of exchange must be made.”
The prime minister, standing rocklike against accusations of nervous delay, distinguished three forms of reaction to the terrorist methods of blackmail:
One, reaction to terrorists operating on our territory. Then it is better to fight than to give in, though sometimes our commandos attack and in doing so (as in the case of an Israeli school held by terrorists in which more than a score of children died in the operation) * innocent lives are lost. In such a case, within our frontiers, we must fight.
Two, reaction to the taking of hostages onto friendly foreign territory where the government policy is hostile to terrorists. This was the case in South Africa and we dealt with it because we had support from the authorities there. So there was no moral dilemma.
Three, reaction to the capture and removal of hostages to territory friendly to terrorists. This is the Flight 139 case where I know our forces have the capability to conduct a long-range battle but I cannot justify the loss of a hundred innocent lives or even of one.
I want no rescue operation with soldiers holding one-way tickets.
I want proof that the first plane into Entebbe can land safely and get back. A catastrophe will be the most tremendous victory for our enemies.
Until this last minute, there is nothing to tip the scales away from Thursday’s decision to negotiate.
Begin, the grizzled ex-Irgun guerrilla, agreed. He had been taken into the counsels of the cabinet and accepted its Thursday decision to negotiate. Then, on Friday evening, Rabin completed his review of the latest intelligence from Entebbe and told his political adversary and former comrade-in-arms: “I think we can do it. What remains is to have General Gur attend a rehearsal of Thunderbolt and then if he is satisfied, we’ll ask for full cabinet approval.”
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* The tragedy at Maalot in May 1974 was that when commandos stormed a school, hoping to free 100 children held hostage by PFLP Arab infiltrators, 22 children perished in the crossfire before the guerrillas could be overpowered.
14
THE NIGHT OF THE DRY RUN
Only a handful of the men and women destined for Thunderbolt knew they were rehearsing the real thing on Friday. The rehearsal was divided into sections. Each team performed mock combat assaults during the day, as far as possible independent of the others. Combat-trained doctors were already familiar with airborne surgery and were not required to participate. Most of them were quarantined that afternoon. One returned to his hospital to deal with an emergency and was seen by a colleague stowing away special webbing designed like an ammunition belt to carry basic drugs and surgical instruments. This, and the sudden absence of other doctors, soon became known, and the hospital was one of the very few places where outsiders guessed a rescue mission was in prospect.
Otherwise security was nearly watertight. Airmen told to go into quarantine, however, protested. “I want to spend my last night in my own bed” was the typical lament. Since three times as many fliers had been earmarked as would go on the operation, and they were unlikely to spill information because they are the first victims of leaked secrets, the quarantine was lifted. Pilots had suffered brutal torture and mutilation when shot down over hostile territory in the past. All were concerned for the protection of their wives and children from vengeful terrorist attacks on their homes. This made the pilots the most tight-lipped group in the country.
General Gur had to be convinced that the C-130 Hercules, known to the Israeli air force (IAF) as the Hippo, could fly with a full load into the unknown and return without mishap after delivering a commando strike with half-track infantry carriers, recoilless-rifle jeeps, and rocket-armed troops in the course of a 5000-mile round trip without external navigational aids. He doubted that a group of aircraft could pack an adequate punch without being detected on the way in. He questioned if any large combat aircraf
t could sneak onto guarded runways some 3800 feet above sea level without alerting the defenders.
Suppose, he wanted to know, one of the aircraft smashes its landing gear, damages an engine, or gets hit by a stray grenade. Suppose nothing worse than that a vulture is sucked into an engine. The Hercules armada, in the proposed operation, was being kept down to the minimum of four. If one was damaged or delayed at Entebbe, how would the crew and commandos get away?
“No problem,” IAF chief Benny Peled assured him. “I’ll be flying overhead. We’ll have reserves within call. And you haven’t seen what our Hippos can do when pushed. Come on.”
Gur went through one of the most hair-raising experiences of his long life as a fighting man. For nearly three hours he sat on the huge flight deck while the four-engine Hercules was put through tests that would try a thoroughbred jet fighter. Designed for an enormous range of workhorse jobs, the Lockheed C-130 had made trial deliveries of 92 fully armed troops 2000 miles from home. In one test the transport had dropped onto beaten-earth strips to unload howitzers, trucks, and troops, then boarded 74 stretcher cases in a total elapsed time on the ground of 33 minutes.
Benny Peled, who had been flying since boyhood, knew these things were possible from experience. General Gur knew it from reports. But he had yet to feel the immense power and flexibility of this huge machine.
That night the chief of staff’s Hercules flew in and out of the desert and between mountains in what seemed to him total darkness. In jump-takeoffs, with the four turboprops at full power and the pilot standing on the brakes, the 70-ton transport climbed more like a helicopter. Landing on the invisible desert, it seemed to drop out of the sky.
These were deadly serious tests. Several times Gur found himself gripping crossbraces, fighting sudden acceleration or deceleration. Once he burst out: “Where the hell are we going?” Peled gave him a comradely punch in the shoulder. “To Entebbe, we hope.”
The Hercules was put through these paces because Entebbe would demand a swift, near-silent arrival, the minimum use of runways, and the shortest and steepest possible getaways. The pilots were prepared to land on packed earth if the runways should be knocked out by forewarned Ugandans, and they were ready to lift the hostages almost vertically out of what might become a battlefield. The Hercules was ideal for these tasks; but while it could do astonishing things, it carried red warnings on the panels too. The plane was built for slow-speed flight, and rolling it too quickly into a fast getaway could buckle the highly flexible wings.
In the kind of short takeoff needed at Entebbe, the acceleration would be breathtaking. The captain in such an operation keeps his left hand on the nose steering wheel and his right hand on the throttles. He keeps the two outboard engines at half power and the inners at full power while his copilot juggles frantically to keep the wings level by using the ailerons. The reason is that the tremendous power generated by the four turboprops becomes dangerous if one engine fails during the critical run-up to 90 miles an hour. Below that speed there is not enough rudder control to counteract the terrific drag on the side with the failed engine. “Flying the ailerons” is an unusual technique, required because the fat low-pressure tires and narrow landing gear are not enough to prevent, at worst, one wing digging down too far until the Hercules “roller-skates” sideways.
General Gur was shown the quirks and the qualities. But the demonstration was done in the blackness of night. A stranger on the flight deck, surrounded by picture windows that give a greenhouse effect in sunlight, has the nightmare sensation of being flung through a void. The fact is, of course, that the four-man crew have electronic aids that give a picture of conditions outside the aircraft. Even knowing this, General Gur must have shared the sense of disaster that is normal when the Hercules is dumped into a small landing space in a kind of controlled crash. The speed goes down until the big machine seems to rock with every puff of air. Controls are sluggish because of the low airspeed. When the throttles are chopped the plane slams into the ground and the great wings curve down as if about to snap off. Several times Gur was treated to a short-field landing that felt more like a falling elevator. The distance eaten up during landing was never more than 700 feet, which would perch the Hercules on the outer edge of Entebbe Airport and hopefully beyond earshot of the terrorists.
During the night he talked with soldiers who had flown in the Hercules. They were all confident that if the planes put them into Entebbe they could complete their tasks within an hour.
“Make it 55 minutes,” said Gur. The teams rehearsed their individual missions again, this time using a cannibalized Hercules and pouring down the ramp and spreading out in simulated attacks on the Ugandan guards, the radar station, the control tower, and most important of all, the old terminal building. In rehearsal it was decided that the hostages could be released within 75 seconds of the rescue commando knocking out the terrorist guards.
Still Gur was not satisfied. He studied scale models of Entebbe, with the latest intelligence applied to show where armor and guards might be found. A full-scale model of the hostages’ “prison” was gone through yet again by the small team of marksmen and commandos whose sole task would be to free the passengers and speed them into the Hercules equipped to yank them out of Entebbe with rocket takeoff gear if necessary.
“What impressed me,” Gur said later, “was that nobody felt there was anything impossible in the plan. They had conducted combat operations in which at one time or another a feature of the Entebbe raid had occurred. They had fought and trained to the degree that the business was almost routine. They did not underestimate the difficulties and dangers. They approached them with the precision and confidence of surgical teams in an operating theater. The surgeon knows everything he possibly can beforehand, but he is prepared for something unexpected once the operation begins. He always has a set of alternatives in mind. And so it was with these men.”
The chief of staff spoke to them of the thinking behind the operation, the need to avoid bloodshed as much as possible; but above all he spoke of the moral justice of Thunderbolt and its importance in demonstrating once more that the Jewish people need never fear persecution or feel naked and unarmed in facing their enemies.
There was one bright spot in the surrounding sense of isolation. The British, with terrorists leaving a trail of blood and bombs from London to northern Ireland, were offering the fullest cooperation within limits set by the fact that British citizens were still living in Uganda. They had a secret defense alliance with Kenya, negotiated by an earlier Conservative government, that allowed the Royal Air Force and airborne commandos to make use of Nairobi and other Kenyan airfields.
They had one further contribution—not a welcome one, but certainly necessary as the task force weighed the odds. With Thunderbolt in rehearsal, an estimate was made of the probable casualties. The largest number of raiders and hostages in danger of being killed was thought to be 30 to 35. Was this acceptable?
A late report from British sources in East Africa warned that, for reasons ranging from President Amin’s return from the African summit to the growing unease among some of the PLO strategists in Kampala, the risk had increased considerably that execution of hostages would begin early on Sunday morning. If Thunderbolt was to be launched, the time frame was reduced drastically. The equation was now simple. Risk losing 35 Israelis by taking action, or face the possibility of 105 dead by the sin of omission.
15
THE HIPPOS ASSEMBLE
The women and men involved in Thunderbolt were warned to move to their bases in civilian clothes, to travel by bus or private vans and cars, to hitch rides rather than utilize military or government vehicles; for this was the Jewish Sabbath, and in Israel any military operation is likely to signal itself by the interruption of family life or religious devotions.
“Secrecy, speed, and surprise” were the key words employed the previous night by Thunderbolt’s commander, Brigadier General Dan Shomron. It was ironic that a threat to secrec
y came from Israel’s tendency to become one large family on Saturdays, when everyone gossips and the elders interrogate the young: “Where did you go? What did you see?” If the answers are “Out” and “Nothing,” the elders know something is up. And on this particular holiday there was only one possibility in every mind.
So Saturday seemed a normal, hot summer day: the beaches crowded, roads cluttered with traffic. The chosen few, the commandos selected from the Golani Brigade, the paratroops of the 35th Airborne, the handpicked members of the counterguerrilla force, and the young air force girls who would tend the wounded in the air, the motley stream trickled unobtrusively from the kibbutzim, from Tel Aviv, and from Jerusalem toward the secret assembly points.
At one air base in the desert engineers of the Solel Boneh construction company were kept in isolation. They had produced for the dress rehearsal a replica of Entebbe, using blueprints from which they had built new sections of the airport during Israel’s honeymoon with Uganda. The replica was modified by intelligence from Paris and the debriefing of released hostages, and from photographs taken by Israeli reconnaissance jets or retrieved from U.S. satellites. The engineers had been detained by unexpectedly lavish hospitality from the base commander and later by polite suggestions that they should remain on base to rest from their exertions. If they guessed why, they did not say. There is an invisible line between the family life of Israel and the business of defending it. An air base conveys the feeling best.
This base, scarcely visible, lay in a great depression ringed by tall trees and haunted by the ghosts of Superhornets, large helicopters past their prime and now broken down to provide training for airborne commandos. Behind the husks were jump towers and tight ropes. Between thick ranks of eucalyptus trees were old aircraft from previous wars, preserved as monuments.
90 Minutes at Entebbe Page 10
