by Shimon Peres
“We have to use our imagination, and examine any idea, as crazy as it may seem,” I insisted to those assembled. “I want to hear the plans you have.”
“We have no plans,” responded one.
“Then I want to hear the plans you don’t have!” I replied.
This tug-of-war continued for several hours, but by the end of the session, we had made progress. Doubt had given way to determination among the group. Even the most skeptical among them refused to let the unlikeliness of a solution prevent them from seeking one out. This was the essential cognitive breakthrough—something I relentlessly attempted to inspire during the most challenging moments of my career. Far too often, especially under stress (and few things could have been more stressful than the Entebbe crisis), we turn inward and close down. Believing that distraction is the greatest danger, our analysis simplifies in hope of increasing not the odds of success, necessarily, but the chance we will be certain about what the outcome will be. This can be a great strategy for defense, but until one accepts that “unlikely” does not mean “impossible,” the chances of developing creative solutions are severely limited.
In those tense days, I remember thinking how few armies, if any at all, had such a group of courageous, serious people. As the discussion continued, I knew I was asking the world of them in a seemingly impossible circumstance. And yet I also knew they stood ready and willing to answer my every request, including my plea that they use their imaginations.
By the end of the session, three possible plans had emerged from the group.
The first came from Kuti Adam, who argued that if we couldn’t rescue the hostages in Entebbe, we should try to get the hostages to come to us. If we could convince the hijackers to fly to Israel—perhaps in the belief that we would participate in an exchange of hostages for prisoners upon their arrival—we could conduct a raid similar to the one we’d executed so successfully with the Sabena flight.
It was a creative approach, to be sure, but it assumed we had leverage where we likely did not. Surely the terrorists had chosen Entebbe for a reason—not only because of its distance from Israel, but because they had the support of Uganda’s president, Idi Amin, who we knew had greeted the terrorists as “welcomed guests.” It seemed implausible that they would give up such an advantage—and surely not before having proof that we’d upheld our end of the bargain. Besides, the Sabena rescue operation had been widely publicized; it was no longer a secret playbook.
The second approach, proposed by Gur, assumed the rescue would have to take place in Entebbe. He described a scenario whereby Israeli paratroopers would sneak into Entebbe by way of Lake Victoria, launch an unexpected attack on the hijackers, and remain to protect the hostages.
This plan had the virtue of practicality, in that it described a scenario the IDF was more than capable of executing. But what it lacked, fundamentally, was an exit plan. Once the hostages were rescued, there would be no way to evacuate them. If the Ugandan army chose to respond, it could surely send a force large enough to overpower even our finest commandos.
The third approach was by far the most fantastic in terms of imagination. Major General Benny Peled, who was the commander of the Israeli Air Force, suggested that Israel conquer Uganda—or at least Entebbe itself. Israeli paratroopers would temporarily occupy the city, the airport, and the harbor, after which the hijackers would be attacked and killed. Having secured the area, the air force would land its Hercules military transport plane at Entebbe airport and use it to bring the hostages home.
On its face, the plan seemed preposterous. Gur described it as “unrealistic, nothing but a fantasy.” The others agreed. And yet, of the three proposals, it was the one that had me most intrigued. Aside from its scale and ambition, it struck me that there was nothing about Peled’s plan that was disqualifying. Unlike Gur’s plan, this one included a strategy for evacuating the hostages. And unlike Kuti’s plan, it didn’t require us to manipulate the terrorists into acting against their interests. Indeed, when the meeting was over, Peled’s plan was the only one I hadn’t dismissed.
Late that evening, Rabin reassembled the key ministers to discuss the hijackers’ demands and our options for response. We had received a list of prisoners whose release the terrorists were demanding by July 1 at 11:00 A.M. We had fewer than thirty-six hours to comply. The list included forty terrorists imprisoned in Israel, along with six in Kenya, five in Germany, one in France, and one in Switzerland. Even if I had wanted to submit to the demands, doing so would be impossible—there was not enough time to organize such a complex release across so many countries, and we had no reason to believe that the other countries would participate. The Kenyan government said that the terrorists in question were no longer in the country. The French claimed that they had already released the terrorist said to be held in their territory. The West Germans were surely not going to release the Baader-Meinhof terrorists on the list, as they had been responsible for so much horrific murder and violence.
In my view, the impossibility of the demands bolstered the argument for rescue. That is, as improbable as a military option may have appeared, it now seemed clear we were more likely to mount a successful rescue than we were a successful negotiation. In that case, I decided it was better to focus all of our efforts on mounting our best attempt. For his part, Rabin wasn’t as convinced as I was about the precedent that negotiation would set. He noted that when he met with the relatives of the hostages, they reminded him that after the 1973 war, we had exchanged prisoners for the bodies of fallen soldiers. How could we now refuse to free these prisoners, when the hostages remained alive?
I understood the place of desperation the hostages’ families were coming from. But, I told Rabin, we had never freed prisoners who had killed innocent civilians, and that’s exactly what the terrorists were demanding. To accede to their demands would indeed set an alarming new precedent.
As the debate continued, Rabin grew impatient with me, perhaps understandably so. Though I knew that my case for a military option was both moral and practical, I was the only one in the room agitating for it. And yet I still lacked a viable, detailed plan to present to the prime minister. With less than two days before the hijackers’ deadline, this made the whole exercise feel like an abstraction—and a distraction—to Rabin. By the end of the meeting, Rabin had decided that it was time for Israel to announce its willingness to release its forty prisoners. And I decided I needed a better plan.
•••
When we first learned that the Air France flight had landed in Uganda, one of my bodyguards pulled me aside to tell me he knew Idi Amin quite well, having once served as one of his aides.
“He’s going to drag this out as long as he can,” he said of Amin. “He will love the attention.”
As I lay awake in the early hours of Wednesday morning, I kept returning to those words. If my bodyguard was right, it meant that for very different reasons, Amin and I shared the same goal: to delay the end of the crisis. I returned to the ministry that morning increasingly convinced that Amin would ask the terrorists to postpone their deadline. In the meantime, I gathered a few IDF officers who had served in Uganda, and who knew Amin. It was a powerful moment of clarity.
The officers told me that Amin relied heavily on the judgment of those closest to him, that he loved to be in the spotlight and had great hopes of being treated as an equal on the world stage; he even imagined a day where he would win a Nobel Prize. But he was a cruel and cowardly tyrant, not worthy of his larger ambitions. One of the men recalled a time when Amin, having been handed a rifle as a gift, aimed it at the crowded courtyard of his villa and began shooting indiscriminately. They told me that Amin didn’t like getting involved in other people’s wars, so it was unlikely that the Ugandan army would be a major presence at Entebbe. They also told me that they didn’t think the dictator would kill the hostages on his own accord: Amin had once recounted a story in which his mother warned him to never kill the Jews, that he would pay dearly
for it. Still the officers made clear that he could be unpredictable. If he felt his pride was at stake, or if, as had happened in the past, he had a vivid dream during the night, there would be no accounting for his actions.
The conversation proved enormously valuable. I concluded from it that the Ugandan army didn’t present a threat to a military operation, and that Amin was unlikely to support the execution of hostages while he was at the center of an international drama. I also suspected that Amin could be manipulated to our benefit—that we could appeal to his narcissism and use it to our advantage.
I asked one of the officers, Colonel Baruch “Burka” Bar-Lev, to reach out to Amin, who considered him a friend. If he was able to, I instructed him to call Amin and tell the Ugandan leader that he was speaking on behalf of the senior leadership of the government. I told Burka to play to Amin’s ego—to give him the impression that Israel viewed him as a leader of great international importance—and to try to convince Amin to intervene. “Tell him he’ll be blamed if something goes wrong, and it will make him look weak,” I added. “Tell him he might even win the Nobel Peace Prize if he helps us.”
That afternoon, Rabin convened the senior ministers to discuss the situation and review our options. He was—as were we all—deeply concerned about the hostages, particularly the children. As a decorated former IDF commander, Rabin was well aware of our capabilities—and our limitations. He told us that whatever our official position, in the absence of a military option we would have no other choice but to negotiate.
“At this stage, I don’t think a military operation is possible,” he reasoned. “What do we do? Attack Uganda? How would we even reach Uganda?
“The object,” he continued, “is not to act militarily, but to save people’s lives. As of right now, I can’t see a way to do that.”
Shortly after, I convened a meeting of my own, one that Gur would coin the “Fantasy Council.” My intent was to bring the most creative thinkers in the IDF together so that we could consider every known option and be bold in thinking about options that did not exist. I had asked Gur to invite those most interested in planning for the impossible. Once they arrived, I asked Gur to provide the group an update on his scheme to parachute into Lake Victoria. He had little good to report: the army confirmed that the lake was infested with crocodiles, and the previous night’s rehearsal had failed. The alternative—which required speedboats—was unworkable, the Mossad chief reported, because it would require Kenya’s participation, and he was certain the Kenyan government wouldn’t want to risk retaliation. And there was still no clear answer for how we would evacuate the hostages once rescued.
With Gur’s plan shelved, I turned to Peled. In the time between our last discussion and now, he had modified his plan to require a smaller footprint. Rather than conquer the city, Peled resolved to simply conquer the airport. He suggested dropping a thousand paratroopers from ten Hercules aircraft.
General Dan Shomron, the chief paratrooper and infantry officer, quickly raised an objection. “By the time your first paratrooper hits the ground, you won’t have anybody left to rescue.” The terrorists, he explained, would surely see the paratroopers falling from the sky and begin firing on the hostages.
As the conversation continued, others around the table suggested a more surgical operation—using two hundred soldiers and landing a plane at the airport instead. There was risk that the plane might be spotted by radar, but it offered an important added advantage: a way to bring the hostages home.
It was, in my estimation, the most viable plan we had, and so I asked the group to keep working through its details. The trouble was, there were still far too many things we didn’t know. We were hampered by a lack of intelligence, and what we did have we couldn’t necessarily trust. One report suggested that a squadron of Soviet-made fighter jets might intervene; another claimed that a full battalion of Ugandan troops had been mobilized to the airport. We didn’t know how many terrorists there were, or if the hostages were even still on the plane. We were planning a rescue mission that involved our soldiers landing at the airport—with no sense of what they would find upon arrival.
After adjourning the meeting, I learned that Burka had indeed been able to speak to Amin and was anxious to debrief me. Burka had done everything that was asked of him, but Amin was adamant, claiming to be powerless to stop the terrorists on his own soil. His unwillingness to help only confirmed my view that a military rescue was our only option.
From the conversation, we were told that the hijackers had released the forty-eight non-Israeli hostages, which we later confirmed to be true. But it remained quite difficult to separate fact from fiction. Amin swore that there were thirty hijackers, though based on the manifests we thought it was closer to seven. He said that the hijackers were wearing suicide vests and had enough TNT to blow up the entire airport, which, while possible, seemed hard to believe given that they had traveled there on a commercial airline.
And yet these were the circumstances. After another sleepless night, I faced the morning feeling dreadfully dark. It was Thursday, July 1, and the ultimatum was set to expire that afternoon. And though I suspected it would be extended, I feared the carnage awaiting us if I were wrong.
Rabin scheduled an early-morning ministerial meeting. Before it began, I pulled Gur aside to discuss new intelligence we had received. Some of the forty-eight non-Israeli hostages had already reached Paris and had provided critical details. We confirmed, for example, that the hostages were being held in one of two terminals—the old terminal, we called it. They were being guarded both by terrorists and Ugandan soldiers, and they were no longer being kept in the plane. We also received detailed information on the setup of the terminal itself. To me this was sufficient to begin preparations for a rescue mission. Though I was defense minister, I knew that in order to convince Rabin, I would also need the support of others, particularly Gur. As chief of staff, he was the linchpin, without which there was no realistic path to a military option. Until I persuaded him, it made little sense to try to convince the cabinet. But he was not easily convinced.
“I, as chief of staff, cannot present this plan for the rescue of the hostages,” he said after hearing the new intelligence I had shared with him. Once again, I was more or less on my own.
The ministerial committee meeting began in a sullen mood, and under a tremendous weight. With the deadline imminent, the tension was impossible to avoid. I opened the meeting by reading the transcript of Burka’s phone conversations with Idi Amin. We had gotten some useful intelligence from calls, I explained, but it was also quite clear that Amin would not be the leader we needed.
The discussion turned to the passengers’ families. Minister Haim Zadok informed us that the families were insisting we begin negotiations, that they expected us to do whatever was necessary to save their loved ones.
“The problem isn’t simply the families’ claims,” I repeated for a second day in a row. “It should be made clear that negotiation and an Israeli surrender open a wide terror front in the future.”
“Who is saying that this will open a terror front?” Rabin shot back.
“I am saying so.”
“I request you clarify your words and elaborate further,” he replied.
“Until now, the Americans have not surrendered to terror because the Israelis set the world’s standard not to surrender,” I explained. “If we surrender, not one country, the world over, will be able to hold. We will invite more and more of these kinds of attempts.”
“This is the situation at the moment,” said Rabin. “In this moment, not making a decision is itself a decision.”
The debate continued for several hours, until Rabin again intervened. “I wish to clarify: We don’t have time for evasions. The fundamental question is, are we willing to enter negotiations or not? I ask that government members do not avoid answering this question.”
Minister Yisrael Galili responded, saying that he believed the government should begin negotia
tions immediately, including “showing readiness to free detainees.” Rabin seconded Galili’s suggestion, noting that we had made trades in the past and that he didn’t want to get into a debate about why such trades, in this circumstance, were unacceptable.
“Precedents aren’t the problem,” I said. “The problem is the future, the people’s future and the future of Israeli airplanes and aviation. We should be concerned with the fate of the people here, of what will happen to the country and its status regarding hijacking and terror, in addition to the fate of those taken hostage.”
Rabin was unmoved, as I still lacked a satisfactory alternative. “I wish to know whether anyone is opposed,” he said, “and I don’t want any misunderstanding of the issue. I don’t propose we discuss negotiations, but that the government authorizes the team to continue our attempts to release the hostages, including exchange of prisoners in Israel.”
When he asked who was in favor, every person around the table raised his hand—including me. Without a clear military option to present, the thing I needed most was more time. If beginning a slow negotiation process could create delay, then perhaps we could find a sufficient window for a miracle. In the meantime, it had the advantage of keeping the lines of communication open, of my not appearing to be a pariah whose views deserved to be dismissed out of hand. If we were somehow able to present a military option, I needed credibility to gain Rabin’s approval.
An hour after the meeting, Burka and Amin spoke by phone again. Amin was insistent that Burka tune in to Radio Africa for an announcement. He wouldn’t say anything else, except that he had tried and failed to intervene, and that the hostages would be killed at 2:00 P.M. as planned.
We waited anxiously for the announcement. And then, momentary relief: the hijackers had granted a three-day delay in the ultimatum. Amin was to travel to Mauritius for a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity, and the hijackers would not take any action until he returned. Suddenly, instead of hours, we had days.