Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror

by Nicholas Davies

  In one such raid in 1995 two Spetsnaz companies each of about thirty men were tasked with attacking a former government office block on the outskirts of Grozny which was being used as a headquarters by Chechen rebels. The objective was to storm the building, kill all those inside, set fire to the place and then retreat. One company was tasked with controlling and holding the immediate area surrounding the block while the second company stormed it to clear it of rebel fighters before setting fire to the building.

  It was a cold autumn dawn when the Spetsnaz operation began. Three Russian Army T-72 tanks led the way through the deserted streets to the target building, and behind them some twelve APCs, armed with single heavy machine guns, carried the Spetsnaz assault force. As the convoy arrived at the square where the Chechen headquarters stood the tanks opened fire on the building while the Special Forces soldiers disembarked from the APCs and took over the square and the streets leading off it. They met virtually no resistance except for the occasional sniper round.

  After five minutes of intense fire from the tanks the assault force stormed the building. The sound of automatic fire could be heard from those keeping watch outside, as well as frequent explosions as the Spetsnaz troops tossed grenades into the rooms before moving inside. Those outside could also hear the odd scream and, sometimes, orders being barked out by those commanding the assault team. The basement rooms were cleared first with a dozen or so hand grenades, CS gas and smoke grenades. As Chechen fighters emerged, coughing and spluttering their way up the stairs, the Spetsnaz showed no mercy. Everyone emerging through the smoke and CS gas was shot as they came into view. The Spetsnaz were under orders to take no prisoners.

  The Special Forces troops moved from floor to floor, but the Chechen fighters were determined to hold out as long as possible. As the Spetsnaz reached each floor the Chechens would throw grenades down on to their heads and spray them with automatic fire. But these attackers were not the usual underfed, under-trained and underpaid Russian conscripts who only wanted to get back home safely but the Federation’s crack troops, privileged, well paid, well trained and keen.

  When the Chechens reached the top of the eight-storey building they barricaded themselves into a large room and threw cabinets and shelving on to the floor to offer some protection against the attackers. Then they waited.

  The assault on the top-floor redoubt began with an explosive charge which disintegrated the wooden doors, followed by half a dozen grenades and a non-stop torrent of bullets from machine guns which sprayed the room for several minutes. The Chechens fired back and killed at least three Spetsnaz troops during this final attack but, in reality, they stood no chance. It is not known whether any of the Chechens surrendered or tried to surrender, for all were killed, ruthlessly and professionally. And some of the bodies were thrown out of the top windows, to the cheers of the Spetsnaz men keeping guard in the square below.

  Yet, for all its overwhelming strength, the Russian Army was forced to pull out of Chechnya because of the determination and courage of the Muslim fighters in their guerrilla attacks on the dejected, down-hearted ordinary Russian soldiers, who had no stomach for the war. Despite horrendous losses, a devastated capital city and many war-ravaged towns and villages, the small army of Chechen fighters, supported by a half-starved local Muslim population, had been able to absorb the worst their enemy could throw at them and still inflict so much damage on the Russian forces that they decided first to retreat and eventually to abandon their campaign in Chechnya.

  CHAPTER 5

  RESCUED

  HOSTAGE RESCUE OPERATIONS are a key element of Special Forces work, and one of the most impressive to date took place in 1976, when an Israeli elite squad stormed a hijacked Air France airbus at Entebbe, in Uganda. That raid spawned books, films, television programmes and lectures and has become part of the folklore of the world’s Special Forces.

  The hijacking of Air France Flight 139 was meticulously planned by leading members of a number of terrorist groups who, for this single dramatic event, decided to work together in an attempt to force the French and German governments to free terrorists they had jailed. The prisoners included members of the West German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Black September (which grew out of the PFLP) and the Japanese Red Army.

  Behind the hijacking was a West German lawyer, Wilfried Boese, a fair-haired, blue-eyed, intelligent, sophisticated man of twenty-eight who had previously worked for the PFLP with his friend the terrorist Carlos Ramirez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. For this mission he recruited twenty-four-year-old Gabrielle Kröcher-Tiedemann, a stocky, dark-haired, aggressive West German woman who had joined the Baader-Meinhof Gang as a teenager. She had taken part in the attack on the OPEC ministers in Vienna in December of the previous year. The other two members of the team were Arabs, tried-and-tested PFLP gunmen. Boese turned to a South American friend of Carlos, Antonio Degas Bouvier, who had planned the raid at the Munich Olympics, to mastermind the hijacking.

  On the morning of June 27 Boese and Kröcher-Tiedemann drove from an apartment in Kuwait and bought first-class tickets to Paris via Athens for a flight due to arrive at Athens at 7 am. The two Arab gunmen arrived at the airport separately and bought tourist-class tickets for the same flight. They were each carrying a tin of dates containing a 7.65mm Czech automatic pistol and a grenade.

  On arrival at Athens they waited for the Air France flight to Paris which had begun its journey in Tel Aviv. On board were two hundred and fifty-eight passengers, including about a hundred Israelis, and a crew of twelve. In the toilets at Athens one of the Arabs passed Boese the pistols and the grenades and, undetected, the four boarded the plane.

  The aircraft had been in the air only some ten minutes when Kröcher-Tiedemann rose to her feet, stepped into the centre aisle, shouted for attention and raised her arms high above her head. In each hand was a grenade. ‘Sit down,’ she yelled. ‘Everyone must sit down.’

  At that moment the well-dressed Boese walked up the aisle waving a pistol at the stewardess and entered the flight deck. The two Arabs, one wearing a red shirt, the other a yellow one, rose from the seats and ran down the aisle, each brandishing a pistol. There were screams of terror from the passengers, who then heard a voice announce over the intercom, ‘We are Palestinians. If you remain seated and do as you are told no one will be harmed.’

  The two Arabs moved to the exits, carrying what looked like boxes of chocolates, and fastened them to the doors. The voice on the intercom – it was Boese’s – announced, ‘The boxes contain explosives. If there is any trouble these will be detonated.’ The German then lectured the passengers, telling them the reasons behind the hijacking and explaining that they would be held hostage until a number of freedom fighters had been released from jails in Israel and Europe. He emphasised that the hijackers bore no animosity towards the hostages, who would be in no danger as long as they obeyed orders. The hostages listened to the speech in silence.

  An hour later the Air France plane landed at Benghazi, in Libya, refuelled and took off for Uganda. Some two hours later the big jet flew low over beautiful Lake Victoria and landed at Entebbe. Believing their ordeal was now over, the passengers cheered and clapped and soft drinks were brought to the plane. The stewardesses handed them out to everyone as though nothing untoward had occurred. The passengers began to relax and chat among themselves.

  Some two hours later they were taken off the plane and made their way under a guard of Ugandan Army soldiers to the rather dilapidated, two-storey terminal building. They were welcomed by an airport official who offered them drinks and sandwiches, promising them a meal later. Within an hour or so President Idi Amin, dressed in combat fatigues, arrived by helicopter, accompanied by his four-year-old son, who was dressed likewise. Amin introduced himself, explaining, ‘For those who don’t know me I am Field Marshal Dr Idi Amin Dada, President of the Republic of Uganda.’ He had come a long way from his days as a sergeant in the British Arm
y in Uganda. Laughing and smiling, he mingled with the hostages. He shook hands with some of them, saying, ‘You must not worry. I will take care of you like a father. I will see that you are all released safely.’

  But the hours of waiting became days and still there seemed to be no progress in the negotiations which the hostages understood were going on between Uganda, France, Britain, Greece and Israel – citizens of all of which countries had been on the flight – and Antonio Degas Bouvier, the mastermind who had flown to Kampala to conduct the negotiations on behalf of the hijackers. Progress was slow because all negotiations were being conducted through Somalia and then Idi Amin, who insisted on the role of mediator, before Bouvier was consulted about his next reply.

  On the third day the Israeli Cabinet agreed to release a few Palestinian prisoners in return for the safe return of some of the hostages. In fact they were playing for time. Bouvier agreed and the hijackers set free most of the women and children hostages and a few elderly men, some one hundred and fifty people. These were immediately flown to Paris but there was not a single Jew among them. Every single hostage now held at Entebbe was Jewish. As a result, the Israeli Cabinet came to the conclusion that the only way they could save the lives of the remaining hostages was by direct military action.

  The man chosen to command the force was Israel’s senior operational officer, Brigadier Dan Shomron, who had been a paratrooper during the Six Day War and a tank commander during the 1973 war. Every Israeli officer involved in the detailed planning of the rescue, as well as those who would take part, knew that unless they could be in action around the Entebbe terminal within one minute of landing, the lives of the hostages would be in grave danger.

  The assault force was led by Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, an American-born Israeli paratrooper with a glittering military record. In the 1967 war Netanyahu had commanded a mortar platoon on the Syrian front and in fierce fighting was hit twice in either arm. But he had refused to pull back and somehow continued to fire.

  Netanyahu had learnt all about the man who, in the 1930s, founded the famous Israeli clandestine Special Force originally known as the Jewish Night Squads and so called because they attacked at night, returning to base before dawn. That man was a famous British soldier and guerrilla leader, Orde Wingate. A religious mystic, Wingate trained at Sandhurst and in the 1920s served with the Sudan Defence Force, becoming intoxicated with desert life. In the 1930s he moved to Palestine and Transjordan, in both of which he trained Jewish and Arab special soldiers. Wingate won fame in Burma in World War Two when he founded the famous Chindits, a jungle-trained Special Force who caused great problems for the Japanese by fighting guerrilla style behind their lines.

  In addition to learning about the methods of the Jewish Night Squads, Netanyahu had also been one of thousands of young Israeli soldiers who had rushed to the Golan Heights to face the Syrian tanks when the 1973 war broke out. Having helped to throw back the Syrian Army, he and his fifty hand-picked paratroopers were then detailed to back the Israeli tank thrust deep into Syrian territory. At night on the Golan Heights he would take out a small squad of paratroopers to pinpoint enemy tank concentrations.

  Netanyahu and his men believed that the greatest risk of the entire Entebbe raid – code-named Operation Thunderball – would be the two thousand-mile flight from Tel Aviv to Entebbe. They feared their slow-moving Hercules C-130 transport planes might be intercepted by Saudi Arabian or Egyptian fighter jets and ordered to land. Six Phantom jets escorted the Hercules as far as their fuel tanks would permit, the pilots all the while searching the night skies for attack fighters. But there were none.

  Three Hercules C-130s were taken on the mission in case one was shot up on the tarmac. Both the hostages and the Israeli Special Forces troops would then be at the mercy of the militant hijackers, the Ugandan Army and their leader, the mercurial Idi Amin. In one of the Hercules was a black Model 60 Mercedes 220 – precisely the same model and colour as Idi Amin’s personal car – which the Israelis hoped might fool the Ugandan soldiers guarding the airport at Entebbe. This Mercedes had been found rusting in a Tel Aviv junkyard and in forty-eight hours had been sprayed black, polished, totally serviced and given new tyres and a new leather interior. A fourth Hercules – an Israeli mobile hospital equipped with surgeons, doctors and nurses – landed at Nairobi.

  And ahead of the three Hercules was a Boeing 707 aerial command post – crammed with sophisticated electronics – which would take up its position above Entebbe. In command of the entire rescue mission at some thirty thousand feet was General Yekuti Adam.

  At one minute past midnight on Sunday July 3 1976 the pilot of the first Israeli Hercules called the control tower at Entebbe, saying, ‘This is El Al Flight 166 with the prisoners from Tel Aviv. Can I have permission to land?’

  However, the two Ugandan flight controllers had not seen on their radar screens two more aircraft skimming the surface of Lake Victoria and making for Entebbe. The first Hercules touched down on the runway and headed towards the terminal. It came to a halt and the heavy ramp of the cargo hold slowly sank to the ground.

  ‘Go,’ yelled the commander.

  A Land Rover was first down the ramp, roaring at speed on to the well-lit area near the control tower, followed by the black Mercedes. This was followed by a second Land Rover. As the three vehicles swept steadily the four hundred or so yards to the terminal, where the hostages were being held, the Ugandan guards on duty snapped to attention.

  As soon as the small convoy came to a halt and Israeli paratroopers with Uzi sub-machine guns clambered out of the vehicles, one Ugandan soldier shouted an alarm and raised his rifle. Before he could take aim he had been shot through the head.

  As the first shot was fired Netanyahu and his fifty paratroopers ran down the ramp of the Hercules and fanned out across the area. As they took up positions and began to move more slowly towards the terminal they could see an intense firefight surrounding the Mercedes and the two Land Rovers. Yoni and seven other armed commandos in the Mercedes were raking the Ugandan troops with their automatic assault rifles, while the driver of one of the Land Rovers – a sniper – was methodically shooting out the lights along the roof of the terminal.

  Within less than a minute the Ugandans turned and ran in fear of their lives, leaving a dozen of their number lying wounded or dead on the ground. But they ran into Israeli paratroopers who were approaching the terminal from the other side. Another firefight began, with the Ugandans not knowing where to flee to escape the terrifying onslaught.

  Within seconds Kröcher-Tiedemann and Boese were dead – Kröcher-Tiedemann gunned down as she raised her pistol; Boese cut down as he raced out of the building to see what was going on.

  Now there were eight more hijackers to be accounted for. Netanyahu and two paratroopers raced along the corridor and up the stairs to the first floor. Before them they saw a door and heard gunfire behind it. Netanyahu took up a position next to the door while opposite him the two paratroopers waited, grenades in their hands. He kicked open the door and jumped back as his two comrades hurled the grenades into the room and a burst of machine-gun fire came from inside. As the grenades exploded, Netanyahu and his men ran into the room and raked it with their Uzis. The two hijackers never stood a chance.

  Down on the ground two Palestinians were seen running from the terminal. They covered only a few yards before both were killed in murderous fire.

  Inside the building the Israeli paratroopers were shouting in Hebrew, ‘Lie down, lie down, stay still.’ In panic, two hostages jumped to their feet and the Israelis, believing them to be hijackers, shot them dead.

  Meanwhile Netanyahu and the two paratroopers were racing towards the terminal’s roof terrace, having been briefed that a detachment of Ugandan soldiers usually kept guard there. There they found a few Ugandan soldiers, who within seconds were dead. Other Israeli paratroopers followed Netanyahu and his men up the stairs and during the next five minutes firefights broke out in corridors
and on stairs.

  Suddenly the horrendous noise that had reverberated around the building ceased and there was silence. Netanyahu checked his men, all of whom were safe and well except for three with minor gunshot wounds. He talked to General Adam in the aerial-command Boeing above the airfield, telling him, ‘The terminal is secure. We are now going to evacuate the hostages.’ But he had barely finished speaking when a single shot rang out and he was hit in the back. He was dead before he touched the ground.

  Already shocked that their Commanding Officer had been killed, the Israelis were surprised again seconds later when a new barrage of fire could be heard coming from the other side of the airfield. The Israelis had already placed paratroopers around their aircraft, fearing a counter-attack. They knew only too well that if the Hercules did not get off the ground with the hostages aboard they would be shown no mercy. Not one of them would survive.

  There was one further worry that the Israelis would have to attend to. Mossad, Israel’s famous secret service, had reported to Tel Aviv that sixteen Russian MiG fighters were on the ground at Entebbe. It was understood that these were in good condition and flew frequent practice missions. They would need to be destroyed before the Israelis flew out of Entebbe, otherwise the lumbering Hercules C-130s would be at their mercy once in the air.

  From the cargo bay of one of the other Hercules an APC and four jeeps came roaring on to the tarmac. On the bonnet of each jeep was a heavy machine gun which raked the area. Whenever they saw Ugandan troops or any vehicle moving around, the machine gunners opened fire with blistering attacks. Following these vehicles were one hundred Israeli commandos armed with Uzis, who raced towards the terminal and took up positions supporting those who had gone in on the first attack.