by Moshe Betser
Ido, Amnon, Ivan, Dan, and I headed for Kuti’s office, a few floors above the underground war-room. Kuti was waiting for us in the corridor outside his office.
“Can you present the plan in a minute?” he asked Dan, who ten minutes before knew nothing of it.
“Sure,” Dan said confidently.
“Good. Motta’s waiting for us with the defense minister.”
Everything picked up speed at that point as we marched down the corridor to the minister’s office. For a moment, the last four nights and five days flashed before my eyes — all the work, all the effort, all the hopes. I could see it coming together. Our plan already slated one in the morning on Saturday night as the moment the first Hercules touched down at Entebbe. It was getting hot. Time to call Yonni.
As we reached Peres’s office I told Bicho to get the light plane the air force had promised us into the air to pick up Yonni. While the rest of the officers trooped into Peres’s office to make the presentation, I called down to Sinai. “Grab your kit and get over to the airfield,” I told him as soon as we finally patched through.
“It’s hot?” he asked.
“It’s hot.”
As I hung up, a beaming Dan Shomron came out of Peres’s office and announced that the full plenum of the government would, of course, vote on final approval, but meanwhile we proceed full-steam ahead. He called an 8 P.M. meeting that night at the Paratroopers’ House in Ramat Gan, a small civic center built in the memory of the IDF’s fallen paratroopers. I immediately called back down to Yonni, telling him to come straight to the Paratroopers’ House at eight.
Ido and Amnon came out of the office behind Dan. I asked them what I missed inside Peres’s office. “Dan was a hundred percent,” Ido said. “He presented the plan as if he had planned it himself. Peres asked everyone what we thought. So Dan added something. ‘If we can reach the terminal in secret, we can succeed.’ Exactly what you told him.”
* * *
Thursday night, officers from the signals corps and the medical corps as well as commanding officers from Golani and the paratroops brigades joined us as Dan went over the order of battle from top to bottom, filling in the details of the plan.
The first Hercules rolls down the runway. A dozen paratroopers, under Matan Vilnai, run out the rear doors, laying electric lanterns along the side of the runway in case the Ugandans turn off the landing lights.
Disguised as a convoy of Ugandan troops in a Mercedes and two Land Rovers, a break-in force from the Unit, under the command of a regimental commander, drive off the plane to the old terminal building. Headlights on, they travel at normal speed to the old terminal building. That takes five minutes. Another two minutes should suffice for taking out the terrorists and securing the building.
Exactly seven minutes after the first plane lands, the second Hercules lands, carrying reinforcements: a second group of Sayeret Matkal fighters aboard two BTRs, commanded by Shaul Mofaz. His force patrols a perimeter around the old terminal.
The third plane lands a minute later, carrying two more BTRs manned by Sayeret Matkal fighters, plus more of Matan’s paratroopers, plus a contingent of Golani troops under Uri Saguy. The paratroops take the new terminal building, the refueling station at the airport, and guard the new runway. One BTR, commanded by Omer Bar-Lev, takes the MiG airfield beside the old terminal, while the fourth joins Mofaz to patrol around the old terminal.
The Golani forces meanwhile cover the area between the old terminal and the new, and stand by to help the freed hostages on board the first Hercules. Medical crews on the fourth plane, carrying field hospitals, begin treating any casualties, who are then ferried by Land Rover to the plane, guarded by the Golani troops.
A second flying hospital in a converted Boeing 727 meanwhile lands in Nairobi, where the Kenyan government has been informed of the operation and asked for permission to land all four Hercules aircraft leaving Uganda.
During the entire operation, somewhere in the skies over Entebbe, a converted Boeing command-and-control plane carries Kuti, Benny Peled, and a host of radio technicians keeping communications open with the Pit in Tel Aviv.
Dan selected Sayeret Matkal’s headquarters as the base of operation for all the forces involved. With our own runway to practice on and the strictest field security of any base in the army, we were also not too far from the airport from which the Herculeses would take off.
From the moment Dan ended his briefing, anyone on the base was to stay there until after the mission. All but the most necessary phone lines in the base were cut to prevent leaks, while the remaining few were monitored.
As Dan wrapped up his summary, Yonni burst through the doors. His smile made me realize I had missed him the week he was away. Our experiences together had created a friendship that transcended the differences between a farmer from the Jezreel Valley and someone educated in America.
We had shared so much — from the capture of the Syrian officers through Spring of Youth and the Yom Kippur War. I got up from the long table to shake hands with him, and we remained standing, eager to get going. Dan wrapped up his briefing, and we were on our way.
I rode with Yonni in his car back to the base, not wanting to lose a minute of time. Yonni knew nothing about the entire week. He had been in another place, another country, another operation. He was always very reserved, but when he became enthusiastic about an idea, he had a little chortle of excitement. As I outlined the plan, his little bursts of laughter punctuated my speech as I described how each element fit into the next.
Back at the base, Amnon M. handed over the dossier he had prepared during the week. A folder full of all the paperwork, it contained everything from Amiram Levine’s reports on the French gold mine to the architectural plans of the old terminal building. Yonni quickly took up the baton and was conducting the Unit’s operations for the plan, naming me his deputy for the operation, as well as commander of the four break-in teams. As deputy, my job was to fill in for him whenever he was absent. As commander of the break-in teams, the responsibility for success fell on my shoulders. Remembering the mistakes we had made at Ma’alot, I told him I wanted to be in the first break-in crew.
“C’mon, Muki, you know it’s against doctrine.” That was true. I was too senior an officer to be risked as first into the fire. But I didn’t want a repeat of Ma’alot, where afterward I realized I should have gone up the ladder first. I wanted to make sure the job was done properly. “I insist upon it,” I said bluntly to Yonni.
He knew me well enough not to argue. “You’re impossible,” he sighed, accepting my condition.
In overall command of the break-in teams, I broke them down first into three teams. Giora Zussman’s team was assigned the VIP lounge, which the Frenchman had said the terrorists used as a rest area. We assigned the second floor, where Ugandan troops bivouacked, to Yiftah, Yonni’s new deputy. I would take care of the main hall, where the terrorists field the hostages. I broke down the break-in team for the main hall into two separate teams, one for each of the entrances to the hall from the tarmac.
With only fifteen soldiers in four break — in crews, and another nineteen outside holding off a Ugandan opposition, Yonni’s command-and-control post would remain outside, responsible for all the Unit’s forces on the ground. A doctor, David Hessin, plus Tamir Prado, our communications officer, and Alek Ron, a reservist company commander, would stay outside during the break-in, to help fend off any Ugandan opposition.
The entire operation hinged on delivering the four break-in crews quietly to the front door of the terminal. While Yonni spent the night writing the order of battle, I put soldiers to work building a model of the terminal building according to Solel Boneh’s architectural plans. Using two-by-fours for a frame, we hung burlap and canvas sheets to simulate the exterior and interior walls and doorways of the terminal building. As soon as it stood alongside our runway, just like in Entebbe, we began practicing.
All night, troops from the Golani and the paratroops brig
ade converged on our base, to begin practicing their function in the operation. Blue-uniformed air force techies responsible for handling the refueling from Idi Amin’s fuel dumps stood out among all the green combat fatigues. But doing their best to keep up, the techies threw themselves into the drills and rehearsals alongside the combat fighters. At dawn the air force landed a Hercules on our runway, and we added its element to our drills.
Mid-morning, a white seven-seater Mercedes that obviously had seen better days as a taxi pulled into base. Danny Dagan, the Unit’s munitions and automotive expert, inspected it with a grumble.
“It needs a lot of work,” he said about the car that came off a used-car lot in Tel Aviv.
“Whatever it needs,” I told him. “But just make sure it works for the ride from the plane to the terminal. Put in a second ignition, just in case. And,” I added, “paint it black.”
According to the Frenchman, the terrorists had put a permanent guard at one point in the hall, right beside the entrance where I would lead my break-in crews. But he had said to expect at least four to six terrorist guards with the hostages, and another two to four in the VIP room at the end of the building.
The memory of Ma’alot was uppermost in our minds. Again and again I drilled the essential concept into the troops. “When the Ugandan soldiers see the Mercedes, they are going to assume it is an officer’s,” I drummed into the troops. “They won’t try to stop a senior officer,” I emphasized. “As far as they are concerned, we will look just like a Ugandan brigadier and his escort. They are not going to shoot at us — at least not until we start shooting. And even if they aren’t sure about our identity, the dilemma will make them hesitate long enough for us to reach the terminal.
“But, if for any reason they do start shooting,” I told the break-in crews, “let the backup crews handle it. We concentrate on the break-in, eliminating the terrorists and then defending the hostages until the time comes to get them on the plane.”
Two elements that became important in our planning evolved during those hours of drilling. We decided that one member of the two break-in crews slated for the main hall would be carrying a megaphone to shout, in Hebrew and English, “Everyone lie down! This is the IDF. Lie down!” when we entered the hall. And to prevent accidents, since we’d be wearing leopard-spot fatigues like Ugandan paratroopers, we decided that once the firefight began, we’d all pull on white caps, to identify friendly forces.
Chief of staff Motta Gur moved into a tent headquarters beside the tarmac at our base on Friday to watch the drilling with Dan Shomron. They studied us shortening the landing-to-break-in timetable minute by minute until we did it in less than seven minutes from start to finish.
For those seven minutes we would be alone on the ground. As long as we kept the initiative, we could finish off the terrorists and hold off the Ugandans, until the second plane landed with reinforcements, including the light armor.
Motta grilled Yonni and me over and over with questions. At one point, he decided that we had packed too many soldiers onto the Land Rovers and told us to remove two from each vehicle.
“They’ll never forgive us if they miss this,” I told Yonni, taking him aside after Motta issued his order.
“What do we do?” Yonni asked.
“At least offer a compromise,” I told Yonni. “Tell him we’ll give up two riders, not four. Tell him we need every extra man in case another regiment of Ugandans shows up.”
Sure enough, Yonni convinced Motta that the Land Rovers could handle the load without attracting attention. But breaking the news to the two fighters Motta made us leave behind was not easy.
Much also depended on the skills of the pilot in the first plane. We wanted him to land a plane with neither its own lights nor landing lights on the runway. The lead pilot for the first plane, Yehoshua Shani, backed up by an old Uganda hand, Ram Levi, told Motta confidently he could do it.
‘Prove it,” Motta demanded. “Fly me down to Ofira and land me there in the dark.” At the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula, the Ofira airport, like Entebbe’s, had a landing approach over water.
While Motta flew south, we continued practicing through the night. The Mercedes and two Land Rovers ready, we began fitting all the pieces together, from rolling off the Hercules to the ride across the tarmac to the terminal, coming to a halt in front of the building a few yards from the front doors. Yonni and I worked with stopwatches, keeping track of the time, making the soldiers run it over and over until everything clicked into place. The eight-hour flight to Entebbe would give us plenty of time for sleep.
When Motta returned, Yonni and I went to see him in his command tent.
“I made them land twice, just to make sure,” Motta told us. “It went perfectly,” he said. “How are your boys doing?”
“It’s working like a clock,” Yonni said.
Other commanding officers for the mission — Dan, Matan Vilnai, Uri Saguy, Ephraim Sneh, the medical officer in charge of the field hospitals — trooped into Motta’s tent. They all reported that their forces were ready.
In another few hours dawn would rise in the east, marking the last twenty-four hours before the terrorist deadline ran out. It was now or never. We all waited for Motta’s decision. His usually dour expression broke into a grin. “The cabinet is meeting at nine this morning,” he said. “I’m going to tell them we can do it.”
But we went back to work, just to make sure we had it right. By eleven, the first troops began heading by bus to the airport, fifteen minutes away. The four Herculeses waited there for us, and would fly to Ofira, to top off the fuel tanks and wait for the final okay from the government.
We loaded the Land Rovers and the Mercedes onto two large trucks and drove them under canvas to the airport. The last thing we needed was someone noticing fake Ugandan license plates on a Mercedes limo driving through the quiet suburbs of Tel Aviv on a Saturday morning.
While the ground forces from the Unit, the paratroops, and Golani headed for the airport on their buses, I conducted a last meeting with the break-in crew commanders. Yonni stayed for a little while but, needed at the airport, he left early. I worked another half hour with the crew commanders, going over last-minute questions, until finally we were out of time. We went out to the bus to take us to the airport.
“Stop!” shouted one of my soldiers just as the bus reached the main gate.
“What happened?” I jumped up from my seat behind the driver.
He looked at me sheepishly and then down at his feet. “I forgot my boots.” I told the driver to turn around. But before the driver could finish his U-turn, the soldier shouted, “Here they are!” pulling the boots from his duffel bag.
Yonni waited for us in the rear Hercules doorway, the other three Herculeses lined up beside the first, propellers already beginning to spin. Yonni watched the men march aboard, finding places to stow their gear and get comfortable on the cargo floor between the Mercedes, the two Land Rovers, and Dan Shomron’s command-and-control jeep, which took up most of the space in the hold.
Just as the rear ramp of the plane began to rise, a jeep raced across the tarmac to our plane. A fighter from the Unit jumped out, running to the rear door waving an envelope.
The flight engineer took it and wound his way through the hold to Dan Shomron, up front in the cockpit with the pilots. A moment later, Dan called for Yonni and me to join him.
The envelope came from the Mossad, containing photographs shot from a light plane over Entebbe airport that week. The pictures were snapshots, raw data with no legends or explanations about the buildings in view. But they confirmed everything we knew.
Nonetheless, as our plane took off toward Sharm al-Sheikh, I wondered if the eleven MiGs we counted in the pictures would be in the air to meet us as we flew into Ugandan airspace.
BACK TO AFRICA
The flight to Sharm al-Sheikh was horrible, with air pockets all the way making the plane buck in the sky like an angry rhinoceros. Around me, tro
opers vomited into air sickness bags, turning the closed hold into a reeking den of unhappiness. If it went on like this all the way to Uganda, I worried to myself, we wouldn’t be fit for the job.
The temperature at the tip of Sinai that morning was close to forty Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). But we were grateful for the fresh air — at least we could breathe.
One soldier in particular, designated for my break-in team, was obviously too sick for the trip. I called over Amos Goren, a soldier from one of the BTR crews, reassigning him to my break-in squad, quickly bringing him up-to-par with a description of his job.
We sat in the hot dry shade of a hangar, waited for the planes to be topped off with fuel and for the government, meeting in an extraordinary Sabbath session, to decide whether to give us the green light. But to keep to our schedule, we couldn’t wait in Sinai for the okay. Just after one o’clock, Dan ordered us back on board the planes, which were retopped with fuel.
The turbulence flying down to Ofira still a rude memory, we boarded the planes apprehensively. But like during my boat ride to Beirut for Spring of Youth, the turbulence miraculously disappeared as soon as we took off from Sharm and began heading south over the blue waters of the Red Sea.
Twenty minutes into the air, as we were flying low to avoid Egyptian radar detection, word came to Dan via Kuti in the command-and-control plane. The government gave its okay.
The boys curled up in corners of the plane, leaning against the car and the jeep, sacked out on the floor of the rumbling airplane. It’s true of soldiers everywhere — given the chance, they can always find a way to fall asleep, no matter how noisy the surroundings.
Yonni and I bunked in the Mercedes. As usual, he carried a book in a pouch. But for the first hour we mainly talked about what each of us had missed during the week we were apart. He told me about the operation in Sinai, and I told him about the days and nights in the Pit, planning the rescue.