by Ami Pedahzur
At 12:33 p.m., eight minutes after the plane lifted off from Athens and a short while after the captain had turned off the seatbelt sign, Böse, who sat in first class, asked the stewardess to bring him a glass of champagne. The other passengers, preoccupied with their own affairs, did not notice the young German as he pretended to stretch his limbs. He bent forward and down to where he pulled out a handbag that lay near his feet, then lifted it up in the air. This was the agreed-upon sign for launching the operation. Böse pulled out a gun from his bag and quickly covered the short distance between first class and the cockpit. Kuhlmann, who sat next to him, removed a hand grenade and a gun that were strapped to her thighs. She shouted to the passengers that the plane was being hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and ordered them not to move. In those very same seconds, Ali el-Meyari and Haled Haleilah jumped up from their seats in coach. They extracted hand grenades from tin candy boxes and brandished them in the air for all passengers to see.8
It was only a matter of seconds until the plane was under their control. Böse broke into the cockpit and forced Captain Michel Bacos to alter the flight plan and turn south. The other hijackers pushed and shoved the rest of the passengers back into the tourist class. Kuhlmann then commanded them all to hand over their passports. On the plane’s internal intercom system, Böse announced that the plane was now under the control of members of the Che Guevara Force and Gaza Commando of the Palestine Liberation Forces. At 3:00 p.m., Flight 139—or “Haifa,” as Böse called it—touched down at the airport in the city of Benghazi, Libya. Landing in this country was marked by many difficulties. The control tower in Benghazi procrastinated for a long while before giving its permission to land, and when the okay was finally given, the hijackers were coldly received. The six-and-a-half-hour wait at the airport frayed the hijackers’ nerves even more. The Libyan junior naval officer who was assigned to be their intermediary at first rejected all their requests. After taxing negotiations his superiors relented, and he gave the order to pump thirty-five tons of fuel into the plane’s tanks.9
A little after 9:30 p.m., the Air France plane lifted off for the third time on that same day. This time, Bacos was instructed to fly in a southeasterly direction. Six more hours passed until the plane landed at the darkened Entebbe Airport in the heart of Africa. In Uganda, six fellow collaborators from the Popular Front organization waited for the hijackers. Their leader was a former Cuban intelligence officer, Antonio Degas Bouvier, who would become a central figure in the international terrorism network with which Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, was associated. After another nine hours aboard the plane, the hostages were finally allowed to disembark and then herded into a large hall in the old terminal. The Arab hijackers were placed in charge of guarding the hostages. These guards kept their distance and avoided any contact with them. The commanders of the operation, who enjoyed the support of the Ugandan leader, Field Marshal Idi Amin, began to negotiate with the French government. The date they set for the release of their comrades was Thursday, July 1. After locking horns for a while, they finally agreed to postpone the date of the ultimatum by three days, which, in the end, turned out to be critical.
Meanwhile, Ugandan soldiers began to saw off the lower part of the door inside the terminal hall that separated the hostages’room from a neighboring room. Toward evening, the hostages realized the purpose of this effort. Wilfried Böse took the passports out of the bag in his hand and announced that those persons whose names were read aloud were to go to the neighboring, smaller room. All the names he called out were Jewish. Crying and shouting accompanied the entire “selection” process, as the hostages called it. The hostages felt that the young German was in effect condemning them to death.10
On the next day, Wednesday, there was a dramatic turn of events. The forty-six passengers who remained behind in the big hall were instructed to board a bus that waited outside the terminal. They were then transported to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, in order to meet with the French ambassador to Uganda. Afterward they were bused back to Entebbe, where an Air France airplane awaited them, and several hours later they were already back in Paris. The Israeli and Jewish passengers, together with members of the plane crew who had refused to board the plane to freedom, all anxiously watched the departure of the liberated hostages.
Thousands of miles northeast of Entebbe, in the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv offices of the prime minister and minister of defense, and in the bureau of the chief of staff, the lights remained on around the clock. From the moment that news of the hijacked plane had reached them on Sunday, 1:30 in the afternoon, the Israeli intelligence community had fervently applied itself to collecting every scrap of information that might shed light on the situation. In this way, they hoped to provide some basis for a possible military rescue operation of the hostages. On Tuesday, while the hostages were undergoing the “selection” process, the intelligence dossier began to take shape.11
The release of the non-Jewish hostages was a significant windfall for the intelligence-gathering process of building up a full picture of the situation. Ehud Barak, former chief commander of Sayeret Matkal and, at the time of the hijacking, aide to the Aman head of operations, was assigned the job of consolidating intelligence assessments. When he heard about the release of the hostages, he did not even pause for a moment. He dispatched his former colleague from Sayeret Matkal, Amiram Levine, to Paris in order to question the passengers. Levine was especially interested in details of the building structure where the hostages were being held and in descriptions of the terrorists. To his great fortune, among the freed hostages was also a retired French paratrooper officer who took note of exactly these kinds of particulars. Levine’s seven-page report would prove to be a key intelligence document.12
While Levine was collecting information in Paris, Israeli military officers who had served in Uganda during the period of cooperation between Israel and Amin’s government were being questioned at the IDF intelligence headquarters at the Kirya complex in Tel Aviv. At the same time, interviews were conducted with employees of the Israeli Solel Boneh Company, which had taken part in the construction of the Entebbe terminal in the late 1960s. They provided the officers with photographs and films of the facility from the years when they worked there. Additional intelligence material was collected from public-domain sources, including the Jeppesen Manual, which surveys airport structures all over the world, and a French television production that included up-to-date pictures of the terminal. The amassed information made it possible to draw up an exact diagram of the terminal building and provide answers to vital questions, such as the layout of the rooms where the hostages were being held and the location of entrances to the terminal.13
In order to corroborate the accuracy of the intelligence profiles taking shape in Tel Aviv, the chief of Mossad, Yitzhak Hofi, sent off two of his people to Africa. These agents carried international pilot licenses and were able to hire a light airplane in Nairobi. They explained to the owners of the airline company that they intended to take photographs for a tourist travel guide. After taking off, they deviated from the flight plan and made straight for the Entebbe Airport. While flying over the airfields they were able to take pictures of the runways and several of the adjacent buildings. The photos reached Tel Aviv several hours later. In those very same hours, officers of the Israel Air Force intelligence squadron were deeply immersed in gathering updated information on the weather forecast and the air forces and anti-aircraft capabilities of the six countries that separated Israel from Uganda. The resultant information was pieced together and used to devise relatively safe flight plans for the Israel Air Force aircrafts.
On the next day, Wednesday, preparations entered high gear. The chief infantry and paratroopers officer, Dan Shomron, was asked to devise a blueprint for the release of the hostages and present it before government ministers. Ehud Barak, who was summoned to Shomron, was asked to expound on the ideas that so far had taken shape. These ide
as had been discussed in earlier meetings with Aman officers and representatives of Sayeret Matkal and the naval commando units whose soldiers had training in overcoming terrorists and rescuing hostages. Some of the schemes put forward by Barak seemed to come straight out of a Hollywood action movie. The geographical proximity of the Entebbe Airport to Lake Victoria opened a window of opportunity for a naval commando operation. Among other possible scenarios, he proposed that commandos be parachuted together with their rubber dinghies into the lake or that a yacht set sail from Kenya with special forces on board. However, logistic problems—among them the risk of the lake’s dense alligator population or the chance that the boats would not be able to withstand the strong impact of landing on water—led to the shelving of the options of launching an operation from the lake.
The most significant proposal that remained relevant at this stage was the one put forward by Muki Betser, deputy commander of the Sayeret Matkal. When he first heard of the hijacking, he had suggested transporting unit teams by means of Israel Air Force Hercules planes to Kenya. After landing, they would take the terminal by surprise with a convoy of military vehicles and overpower the abductors. Dan Shomron was convinced that despite the great risk involved in carrying out the plan, the chances of success were good enough. Defense Minister Shimon Peres was informed, and the unit received permission to start training.14
The preparations made a strong impression on Chief of Staff Mordechai “Motta” Gur, who visited the training facilities of Sayeret Matkal in order to weigh up the plan. In his meeting with Minister of Defense Peres, he said, “There is no reason why we shouldn’t carry out the operation. I think that the chances of success are very good. I was present at the training yesterday, and the level of professionalism was just fine.” However, the description of Omer Bar-Lev, commander of one of Sayeret Matkal’s teams and son of the minister of commerce and industry at the time, was entirely different: “In the evening, there was a dry run. Today, they are making such a big deal out of the dry run, but at that time one of the younger teams approached the runway, and took out a white marking tape.... They unwound it and stuck some jute bags on the runway. We still haven’t got all the details of the plan down pat and there was a mess of jute bags and we couldn’t understand where the openings were, the entrance and the exit. We did the drill: The Hercules landed on the runway and the mock-up was at the far end of the runway. We fired a few shots in the air, and that essentially was the whole dry run.”15
Two days after the expiration of the deadline of the original ultimatum, on Saturday, July 3, at 2:00 p.m., four Hercules transport aircraft of the Israeli Air Force took off from the airport at Sharm el-Sheikh and set off for Entebbe. The planes carried Sayeret Matkal commandos, whose mission was to rescue the hostages, as well as infantry forces from the Paratroopers and Golani brigades, whose task was to gain control of the airport and provide backup for the assault forces. While at the commanding level there was consensus that the task of freeing the hostages should go to the Sayeret Matkal, the decision to reinforce the latter with two different infantry brigades did not come from entirely straightforward considerations. Dan Shomron, who was well aware of the traditional rivalry between the Paratroopers and Golani, feared that assigning the mission to only one of them would lead to a great dissatisfaction among members of the other. Therefore, he decided to create a joint task force, even though they were not really acquainted with each other and most likely had never even trained together.
At 11:00 p.m., Uganda time, the planes settled down in Entebbe Airport. Within seconds, their huge doors opened. Vehicles and special troops in the tigerstripe camouflaged fatigues of the Uganda Army quickly descended the ramp into the hot and humid night. Thirty-two soldiers made their way to the terminal mounted on two Land Rovers, escorting an official car, a Mercedes painted in black. This arrangement of the convoy was supposed to mislead the Ugandan soldiers into assuming that the car belonged to Idi Amin.16
The occupants of the vehicles sat anxiously as all eyes were fixed on the entrances to the terminal. But suddenly there was an unexpected hitch on the way. Two Ugandan army guards signaled to the drivers to stop. This was standard procedure for checking documents, as Muki Betser knew from his days as an advisor to Amin’s army. He urged Yoni Netanyahu, his commander, who sat next to the driver, to pay no heed to the two soldiers, but Yoni fired off several shots in their direction with a silenced gun. The bullets did not hit their target. Seconds later, the machine gunner on one of the Land Rovers sprayed the Ugandans with automatic fire. As a result, the operation lost its element of surprise, and heavy gunfire poured down from the control towers onto the attacking force. The Israeli soldiers abandoned their original plan of action and stormed the terminal entrances in a crowded cluster that bottlenecked the entrance.17
Fortunately for the Sayeret soldiers, the terrorists simply could not imagine that Israeli forces were responsible for all the pandemonium outside the terminal. A soldier by the name of Amir, who stuck to the original plan, spotted the door where they were supposed to storm the hall. Directly across from him, on the other side of a large window, one of the hijackers stood with a Kalashnikov assault rifle.This hijacker detected the commando and pulled the trigger but missed Amir, who immediately returned fire and killed him. Apparently he did not notice another abductor, who crouched off to the left side of the entrance. He and the German woman aimed their weapons at Amir, but his commander, Amnon, who burst into the hall right behind him, was able to gun them down both before they could even pull the trigger. Muki Betser was the third soldier to enter the hall. A soldier named Amos followed him. They identified another kidnapper and were able to shoot him down. Then Amir and Amos announced to the hostages that they were Israeli soldiers who had come to rescue them.18
Jean-Jacques Maimoni, a nineteen-year-old from Netanya, jumped up from his place and gave a shout of delight. Two Israeli soldiers who thought he was one of the hijackers shot him. Another hostage, fifty-year-old Pasco Cohen, who ran to the other side of the hall in order to locate his children, was also mistaken for a hijacker. The soldiers of the elite force aimed their guns at him and at one of the abductors who stood next to him. In the end, however, only one hostage, Ida Borowitz, died by hijacker gunfire. Fifteen seconds after the operation had begun, the passenger terminal was under the Sayeret’s control.
While the special forces were completing the mission of liberating the hostages, Yoni Netanyahu had been shot outside the terminal. A 7.62 mm rifle bullet, apparently fired by one of the hijackers, penetrated his throat and killed him. In an investigation conducted by Iddo Netanyahu, other theories were raised. One possibility was that the abductor who had shot him in fact stood outside the terminal. Another was that a stray bullet fired by Sayeret fighters, who were also armed with Kalashnikov rifles, might have hit Yoni.
Paratroopers and Golani forces spilled out from the last two Hercules planes and began taking over the airport field. According to the soldiers, utter chaos reigned everywhere. A unit in the command of Omer Bar-Lev blew up eight MiG fighter jets of the Ugandan army without waiting for approval from the operation commander, Dan Shomron. In retrospect, it turned out that if these planes had been armed, the explosion might have reached the hostages and their rescuers. The hostages were led quickly to the Hercules planes. These huge cargo aircraft waited, engines running, for the command to fly back to Lod Airport. The last plane took to the air leaving Entebbe behind approximately one hour and forty minutes since the beginning of the operation.19
At the airport in Lod, family members, the highest army echelons, and heads of state were there to receive the occupants of the planes. The feelings of euphoria at the airport had a significant effect on the media in Israel and the Western world in general. The same could not be said for members of Sayeret Matkal. According to Omer Bar-Lev, “On the way back, I really had a lousy feeling. Although we did go, we fought, and it was like in the movies; but war is not fun. Yoni was killed and hostages were
killed. There was a feeling of an historical moment, but also of discomfort. We landed in Israel at about nine, and at about six in the morning we began to hear news on the plane. In Israel, there was total hysteria over the happiness of victory, and that made us even more depressed.”20
One year and seven months later, on Thursday, March 30, 1978, Dr. Wadie Haddad died at an East Berlin hospital at the age of forty-eight. According to his doctors, the cause of death was a severe and unidentified illness. Only some thirty years later were suspicions confirmed that Haddad’s death was not a natural one. Israel had made him pay the price for the hijacking of Flight 139. Haddad, who with colleague Dr. George Habash had founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had been one of the most active terrorists in the international arena at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. His people had hijacked the El Al plane that was forced to land in Algeria in June 1968. They were also responsible for “Skyjack Sunday,” the hijacking operation of American and European airliners to Zarqa, Jordan, on September 6, 1970.21
Two months before the dramatic hijacking of September 1970, Israel made an initial attempt to assassinate Haddad. In the dead of night on Saturday, July 11, a volley of six Soviet-made Katyusha rockets was fired at his apartment on the third floor of the Katerji Building on Muhi a-Din al-Hayat Street in Beirut.22 To his great fortune, the rockets slammed into the guestroom and bedroom while he himself was in the study at the time. Searches for the gunman led to an apartment in the neighboring building where three rocket launchers were found. A man with an Iranian passport had rented the apartment. In a newspaper interview, the head of Mossad at the time, Zvi Zamir, did not deny that his people had carried out the operation.