90 Minutes at Entebbe

by William Stevenson

  “At 11:03 there was the noise of gunfire.”

  In the old terminal building at Entebbe, the hostages had endured their sixth day in Uganda. Their captors lounged in chairs on the brightly lit tarmac outside. The prisoners were being guarded, during this shift, by the German man and woman. An Egyptian doctor, called to attend to the passengers, chatted casually with Jaber, the terrorist operations chief.

  Many hostages were suffering severe attacks of diarrhea. Water in the toilets had run out. The toilet bowls filled up. Ugandan soldiers brought water in cans and filled up the roof tanks, but the pipes were clogged.

  Moshe Peretz had kept the entries on this day very short.

  Shabbat, July 3. 0530—Everybody gets up vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. Seems to come from contaminated meat, because the Orthodox people, who did not eat the meat, have not caught the ailment. Sanitary conditions are atrocious. The toilets are full of filth. There is no water in the taps.

  0730—People are lying in their beds and vomiting. Some are taken for treatment at a nearby dispensary, and others lie down to sleep. Many people do not eat lunch.

  1430—The Air France plane has been moved up close to the passenger building, with its nose pointed toward us.

  1645—Amin arrives in air force uniform, wearing a blue beret and sporting his Israeli parachuter’s wings. He announces that he has just returned from Mauritius, and everything is being done to try and save our lives. It is the Israeli government which is to blame, by not fulfilling the terrorists’ demands.

  This was the last time the hostages saw Big Daddy. “Your government is gambling with your fate,” he warned them. According to Peretz, one of the Israelis respectfully asked to reply. “Field Marshal President Idi Amin,” she began. Amin interrupted, shouting: “Don’t address me like that! My full title is ‘Field Marshal Doctor President Idi Amin Dada!”

  Amin had bestowed the title of doctor upon himself. After all, his friends Wadi Hadad and George Habash were doctors as well as terrorist chiefs.

  The group of terrorists dispersed. One, tall and wearing a white suit, picked up a short-barreled submachine gun and went off for his night’s rest.

  Those left to guard the hostages were some of the best of Wadi Hadad’s professionals. Besides the Germans at the entrance, two Palestinians patrolled the hall. One was Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber, a PFLP special operations officer, with a cocked Kalachnikov rifle in his hand.

  His thin, nervous companion, Abed el Latif, guarded another corner of the old terminal building. He too was one of Wadi Hadad’s close advisers.

  Jayel Naji al-Arjam, age 38, a short, sturdy Palestinian wearing a Carlos-style beret, was on guard in another part of the terminal. His function in the PFLP was to supervise terrorism in South America. There he helped recruit for the Terrorist International, whose leaders include Carlos, The Jackal. He assisted The Jackal in the attempt to assassinate the Jewish president of Marks and Spencer in London, Edward Sief.

  Navigating with the aid of the Entebbe Airport radio beacon, the Hippos approached their objective. Just one more correction, shortly before arrival, because of weather difficulties—and, down below, the pilots saw the Uganda shoreline, illuminated by a crescent moon low on the horizon.

  Inside the leading Hercules, Yonni and nine commandos were crammed into the repainted Mercedes, first in line before the rear ramp. Their faces were black. Their hands and Uganda-type pistols fitted with silencers were also coated in black. The Mercedes was black. They had not brought with them the dummy president. That particular deception was dangerous in the light of last-minute intelligence that Uganda’s president had returned to Entebbe earlier in the day. It could be embarrassing if two Big Daddies confronted one another.

  The transport planes split into two pairs. Entebbe Airport was approached by one pair aiming to land on the new main runway. The second pair were to land on the old runway, which is separated from the airport’s modem extension by a slight rise in the ground.

  The fleet covered the last ten-minute leg of the seven-hour flight at a sharply reduced speed of 180 miles an hour. They were within reach of the target at the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) calculated in Tel Aviv. Operational planners were delighted—and slightly astonished. The four Hercules had followed a difficult route comparable to a nonstop journey from New York to Moscow, without visual bearings or radio contacts, maintaining radio silence, and holding positions relative to the leader where in-flight decisions were made by the pathfinder.

  The pathfinder said later: “We hit Entebbe on the nose, at the hour when it was felt the Ugandans would be sleepy, but the hostages not yet dangerously drugged with sleep. We hoped to catch some of the terrorists relaxed after drinking in Kampala twenty-one miles away.

  “The soldiers knew the hazards of the flight. They saw the lightning and I felt sorry for them because nothing’s worse than sitting idle in bad storms, hour after hour. Whenever I climbed down into the cargo hold, half the men were sprawled on the metal floor and the other half were rechecking notes or systematically disposing of documents. For them it should have been an agonizing seven hours—that’s a hell of a long time groping through a void.”

  The pathfinder crept over the unseen waters of Lake Victoria, hanging the great bird on the four props, trusting the lives of his crew and 50 commandos to the accuracy of the radarscopes glowing in the dark. Shreds of mist condensed against the huge flight-deck windows and teardrops of moisture were flung back along the quivering perspex. The big wipers rocked rhythmically.

  Suddenly runway lights appeared ahead. David blinked back fatigue and checked his instruments. Flying blind, a pilot is quickly disoriented. Airliners have tried to land upside down on the Milky Way when pilots transferred their eyes from instruments to visual contact with the world outside and mistook stars for ground beacons. David concentrated on the dimly lit panels that told him that he was flying straight and level.

  Entebbe for some incredible reason was fully lit.

  This was the moment over which so much argument had taken place in Tel Aviv. If the first Hercules got down and taxied with muted motors to the old passenger lounge without arousing suspicion, the safety of the hostages might be fairly well assured. If the airport was lit up because the terrorists already knew what was coming, the raiders were flying into a trap and the hostages were in grave trouble.

  The first Hercules floated over the edge of the lake. Crew and soldiers had tightened straps for the tremendous jolt that comes with an assault landing. David watched the speed bleed away swiftly from 100 to 75 miles an hour. Inside the hull the plane seemed to fall out of the air with a shriek of twisted metal and protesting turbines. Outside, an observer would have seen the craft slide almost soundlessly onto the runway, the underinflated tires uttering a soft squeal.

  The IAF Hippo had crawled over the muddy shore with the soft-footed grace of those nocturnal hippos that rise out of Lake Victoria to crop the grass at night.

  David and his copilot kept the machine moving swiftly down the runway. No loud reversal of engines for braking, no standing on brakes, just the harmonious movements of two pairs of hands and feet juggling the controls and adapting swiftly to the new set of conditions. After a long and arduous flight the pilots had to maneuver with a different set of reflexes, eyes and ears alert for gunfire or the challenging glare of a searchlight.

  Behind and below, the men took their positions in the cavernous hold, belly muscles tight, bodies swaying with the new and slightly sickening sway of the aircraft groping toward the enemy at 20 miles an hour. Behind the first Hercules, number two was coming down the alley, trusting the pathfinder had encountered no problem, flying hard on his tail and ready to pull up if for some reason the runway was blocked or the pathfinder stalled.

  David kept moving at the same allotted speed, calculated in rehearsal to bring him within yards of the old terminal building without unnecessary noise. The turboprops scarcely disturbed the sluggish African night. The buildings
came into view, dimly lit. David had an unreal sense of having seen all this before. In a way he had, during briefings and the previous night’s dry run. He brought the Hippo to a gentle stop within sight of the long French windows of the lounge, so close that he felt he could reach out and touch them. The 70-ton Hippo, standing nearly ten stories high, wings spread more than 120 feet from tip to tip, growled softly at the guarded gates of what Yonni had called “the concentration camp.”

  The waiting commandos winced as the big ramp creaked open, letting in damp air and the faint unexpected light. The ramp struck the tarmac with a thud that seemed unbelievably loud.

  “I know now what is meant by a deathly silence,” David said later. “It didn’t seem possible. No shooting. No movement. The stillness was more frightening than a burst of gunfire. It was a real silence of death and I sat there, feeling horribly exposed, one hand on the throttles, waiting and wondering when the trap would be sprung.”

  But there was no trap. Simultaneously, on the parallel runway and out of David’s line of sight, the leader of the second pair of Hercules had dropped light as a feather in the same state of bewilderment.

  18

  “YONNI’S BEEN HIT!”

  Brigadier General Dan Shomron hurled himself down the pathfinder ramp with such speed that the IAF liaison officer with him said afterward: “He moved so fast, I lost him. I couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d been sitting at a desk all week.”

  Shomron’s men scattered to take care of the terrorists. The Mercedes rolled down the ramp and swung off in the direction of the airport security guard, posted near the control tower. The car doors flew open as the Ugandans saluted. The black pistols fitted with silencers spat briefly and the guards collapsed. The ruse had worked. Yonni and his group wiped faces and hands with the grease provided by the makeup girl and removed black Uganda-style blouses so that their comrades would not make the same fatal mistake in identification committed by the Ugandan guards. Yonni had gone over each minute and movement of the ground operation, but he feared the hair-trigger reaction of other Israelis if they collided in the dark.

  The Hercules behind the pathfinder bumped down and was almost abreast of the new terminal building when someone in the control tower must have taken fright. Suddenly the whole airport was plunged in darkness.

  “It happened to suit us very well,” reported the captain of the last Hercules. “I flew into a crossfire of tracers that opened unexpectedly from different points on the field. It was safer to land in complete darkness. This was what we were trained to do. Frankly, I’d been worried to see what looked like the lights of an amusement park on the approach. I was glad they went out. My job was to sit on the ground until everyone else was off, and then recover the last detachments assigned to destroy the Russian-built Mig fighters. I was a sitting duck for 90 minutes—the longest minutes of my life, because as my Hercules rolled to a stop, all hell broke loose.”

  This was the gunfire heard by the task force in Tel Aviv, some 2500 miles away, transmitted over handheld radiophones and relayed from the IAF command plane circling overhead.

  Benny Peled, the IAF commander over the scene of battle, required no reports from the Hercules pilots. It had been agreed that unless a major crisis arose, the air tacticians would draw their own conclusions from the sounds heard over the commandos’ radiophones. The technique had been perfected during years of raids into hostile territory beyond Israel’s borders. Twenty years before, Benny Peled himself had bailed out of his damaged fighter (the first IAF pilot to use an ejector). He had parachuted behind Egyptian lines, fractured an ankle, and hobbled into hiding. For several hours he dodged Egyptian search parties until a light IAF scouting aircraft found him and directed piston-engined Mustangs to fly a protective patrol until another Piper Cub retrieved him. Benny Peled learned then a lesson in the artful use of radio communications.

  “There was no miracle,” said another IAF chief, Ezer Weizman. “This was a straightforward operation based on accumulated experience.” Weizman, who planned the preemptive air strike of the Six Day War, was stressing what Israel’s fighting men take for granted—that years of antiguerrilla warfare have developed discipline and a system that only looks fantastic to those unfamiliar with this daily grind.

  RESCUE OPERATION AT ENTEBBE AIRPORT

  Brigadier General Shomron took his command position close to the passenger building. The direction of the Entebbe operation was now in his hands. His skinny air-communications officer had found him again.

  “Ilan,” one of Yonni’s men, ran toward the target assigned him—the German girl thought to be Gabriele Kroche-Tiedemann, the terrorist he called “that Nazi bitch.” Her male compatriot, Wilfried Bose, stood outside a window with his back to the giant shadow of the Hippo literally breathing down his neck, unaware of the men sprinting toward him on rubber-soled boots.

  Inside the dimly lit terminal, Baruch Gross, 41, and his wife Ruth holding their 6-year-old son Shai, were standing among the litter of bodies and mattresses. Gross himself had not slept since Idi Amin had announced that he was awaiting the final answer from Israel—before midnight. Watching the German through the window, Gross fancied the terrorist was about to squeeze the trigger of the Kalachnikov, its barrel pointing at the hostages.

  Suddenly, with an expression of slow bewilderment, the German swung away and lifted his gun. A long burst of fire broke the silence. The German twisted and fell with the same look of astonishment on his face, the Kalachnikov still silent. Yonni’s second-in-command jumped over the body toward his next target, and the youngster following stopped to roll the limp body face upward.

  Gross hugged little Shai and told his wife to run for cover in the empty office of the East African Airways manager.

  Ilan stopped breathing. Pacing him, near the entrance, with a gun in one hand and a grenade in the other, was the German woman. For a fraction of a second she seemed astounded and at a loss. Ilan pointed his submachine gun at her from a few yards’ range and pressed the trigger, emptying the entire clip into her body. He had never fired at a woman before. With a feeling of shock he stepped over her body lying in the entrance and burst into the passenger lounge.

  The raiders from the third Hercules reached the building just as Yonni’s men broke into the lounge. Commands were shouted in Hebrew: “Lie down! On the floor! Down!” Whatever the warnings failed to do was made up by shock. The hostages froze in their places, stretched out motionless. Two Palestinian terrorists—Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Abed el Latif—were in the lounge. Both had time to open fire, one with an automatic rifle, the other with a revolver. Yonni’s men pinpointed the source of the firing and poured a storm of bullets in their direction.

  During those moments, the young hostage Moshe Peretz, completed his journal: “Several fellows jumped up suddenly and said they heard firing outside. I heard the sound of guns being cocked. Everybody got down on the floor. Some people fled to the toilets. People piled up, one on top of the other. Mothers covered their children with their bodies. The sound of shooting. I am in the toilet. I thought they were going to execute us one by one. Screams of alarm . . .”

  One of the hostages, 56-year-old Ida Borochovitch, was bleeding profusely from a stray bullet. She was one of the pioneers of the Russian jews’ struggle for the right to emigrate to Israel. Her son, Boris Shlein, saw one of the terrorists—apparently Jaber—shoot her, only a few seconds before he himself was killed.

  Lizette Hadad, another hostage, said later: “Suddenly pieces of mortar began to fall from the ceiling. They struck me. A moment later Ida Borochovitch fell on me—and that was how I was saved.”

  Yosef Hadad, her husband, added: “We were lying down as usual, on mattresses laid out on the floor, trying to sleep. When the soldiers burst in I took a chair and held it over my head. I fancied that the German woman was beginning to shoot in my direction, and I began to say “Sh’ma Yisrael” I thought my life was finished. Suddenly we saw the Germans lying bleeding—and
suddenly, we were outside . . .”

  Young Benny Davidson related: “I did not know they were Israeli soldiers. Suddenly we heard shooting. We ran toward the toilets. Everybody was running in that direction. We buried our heads on the floor. My father lay on top of my brother to protect him, and my mother was protecting me.

  “I prayed. I don’t remember precisely what it was that I prayed. It must have been a kind of private prayer. God, protect us,” I said. And then I added: “Sh’ma Yisrael.”

  The crowded lounge filled with smoke. Some hostages crawled under mattresses as more commandos burst through the windows shouting “Israel! Israel!” and then the Hebrew instruction to lie down—“Tiskavu!” Despite this carefully planned attempt to clarify a terrifying situation, some of the children milled about in bewilderment, and parents like Claude Rosenkowitz and his wife Emma threw themselves upon the children. One or two blankets appeared to have caught fire, frightening the two young daughters of Arye Brolsky, who pinned them to the floor and then tried in vain to make another girl keep her head down. She pulled free, rose to her knees, and was wounded.

  The shooting inside the lounge lasted a total of 1 minute and 45 seconds. One victim was 19-year-old Jean-Jacques Maimoni, who had emigrated to Israel from North Africa only five years earlier. The other 103 hostages had nicknamed him The Barman. When others were sick or disheartened, Jean-Jacques raised spirits by brewing coffee or concocting drinks from fruit and coconut milk. He and Pasko Cohen, the 52-year-old manager of an Israeli medical insurance fund, had been the source of inspiration as more and more hostages became ill with colic or mild food poisoning. Cohen bore the tattoo marks of a concentration camp on his arm. Jean-Jacques, The Barman, worked beside him “as if we were father and son,” said Cohen later. In the first seconds of gunfire, when most hostages fell flat to the floor or remained where they were on their mattresses, Jean-Jacques instinctively rose and caught the full blast from an Uzi that killed him instantly. His “father” Cohen, who had survived the death camps, tried to reach him and was in turn fatally injured.