90 Minutes at Entebbe

by William Stevenson

  Yaakobi cherished a photograph of himself with David Ben-Gurion and kept it in his modest home in a Tel Aviv suburb. He consulted Ben-Gurion’s writings on such historical matters as the way Thucydides portrayed the factors in a nation’s survival. “The condition of the fields, the morale, the strength of the walls and the wisdom of tactics. . . . Here was our supreme test. How could Israel yield to demands from Uganda and continue to pretend to be the nation with Ben-Gurion’s moral strength?”

  Another and most disturbing counterpressure on the government was being exerted by families of the victims, and this was growing. They wanted to negotiate. Yaakobi faced fresh pleas to make a deal when the hijackers followed their demand for the release of jailed terrorists with a threat to kill the hostages and blow up the airbus if there was no Israeli response by 2:00 p.m., Israel time, on the morrow—Thursday.

  “Israel is the target,” Yaakobi said wearily when he joined another session of the task force. The tight-knit group moved wherever the prime minister happened to be when consultations were necessary. All were acutely conscious of the need to behave democratically, and a cabinet meeting was scheduled for Thursday, before the terrorists’ deadline.

  4

  THE OPTIONS

  Then came the sudden freeing of 47 passengers by the hijackers. This action helped unite Israel in an unexpected way, because it gave the first link that Jews were the target, their lives to be the subject of bazaar-style haggling with Israel. The nation had been badly divided since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. There was a sense of unease, manifest in public places and in parliament: irritability, recrimination, uncertainty about how to deal with enemies who switched from soft words to sudden gusts of hate. When 47 passengers were released and arrived in Paris late on the night of Wednesday June 30, they gave warning of the real danger. At first it had seemed that President Amin was truly mediating. But the freed hostages told a different story to French intelligence. This, passed to Jerusalem, strengthened the belief that Uganda was hand in glove with terrorist chief Dr. Hadad. The secret intelligence was fed into Jerusalem’s military-political computers, now locked onto what would become known as Track B . . . the military option.

  Track A was the diplomatic option of negotiation. It was necessary for several reasons to keep on this track, not the least being public concern in Israel. What was known publicly, however, about the release of the 47 hostages had a unifying effect on the nation. From one end of the country to the other, with the speed of the bush telegraph, ran the news that an old woman, marked visibly for life by a Nazi concentration camp number on her arm, had been negligently released among the lucky 47, perhaps because her passport gave no sign of her Jewishness. She was quoted: “I felt myself back 32 years when I heard the German orders, saw the waving guns, and imagined again the shuffling lines of prisoners and the harsh cry: ‘Jews to the right,’ and I wondered, so what good is Israel if this can happen today?”

  At a base in the desert near Beersheba, where Abraham once watered his flock, crossroads for centuries of camel trading, some 20 miles from the Mideast’s largest nuclear research center, the story of the old woman distracted the pilots and paratroopers in vast underground hangars. Deep under camouflaged runways was a war room that duplicated the primary operations center close to Defense Minister Peres’s office in Tel Aviv. On duplicate plots, the tracks of Israel’s enemies were pursued as a matter of routine from Baghdad to Libya. Here, condensed and laid out with electronic precision, the picture of a land under siege was continuously updated. Radar dots were the spoor of Russian warships and Russian or East European aircraft shuttling across the Mediterranean. Ground intelligence recorded the movements of terrorists.

  Here the commander of the Special Air and Commando Service, Brigadier General Dan Shomron, continually adapted his tactics in coordinating raids against terrorist bases beyond Israel’s borders.

  Dan Shomron’s mind was on Track B. He was accustomed to producing action plans that were aborted for political or diplomatic reasons. He knew that Track A, the option to negotiate an exchange, was in the cards. He did not like it. This was not the prejudice of a senior paratroop officer, though Dan Shomron in his 39 years never had much time for compromise. Shomron simply believed there was a military solution to the problem of extracting one or two hundred hostages out of the heart of equatorial Africa.

  He had learned a lesson from the Yom Kippur War, prolonged beyond Israeli expectations because of political errors, lack of preparation, failure to exploit the talent for speed and surprise of his and other special forces. “The Russians were given time to judge the progress of balance,” he concluded. “When the balance shifted in Israel’s favor, the Soviet Union threatened large-scale military intervention and practically ordered Henry Kissinger to report to the Kremlin, where the United States approved the cessation of hostilities just as the tide was turned in our favor.” Others spoke of a stopwatch war in which the hands moved slowly when the Arabs felt they had time to strike and bleed Israel. When the Kremlin saw Israel move into the ascendency, the hour hand spun swiftly. Thus Israel must always lose, for the world would never let her win. And that being so, thought Brigadier General Shomron, there was little point in paying attention to world opinion.

  So he continued to work on Track B. With him, producing one ingenious plan after another, were Israelis of every rank. The plans were screened. Only the practical schemes went up to the task force under Prime Minister Rabin. The man most likely to have to execute a military plan, Shomron, must pretend in public to be standing idle. That was how he found himself, on the evening of Tuesday, June 29, translated from the heat of the desert arguments to the garden of a private home in Ramat Gan, a pleasant suburb of Tel Aviv, twirling whiskey in his glass.

  “What about your paratroops? Can’t you take over Entebbe Airport?”

  The question came from a guest at the wedding of the daughter of an ex-paratroop colonel. This was anything but a war room; but the garden was full of paratroopers, past and present. Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur was in one corner. Beside him stood the Head of the Mossad—Israel’s Central Security and Intelligence Institute, an anonymous figure and a mystery to the foreign visitor. Assistant Defense Minister Yisrael Tal circulated among the groups on the lawn. Major General (Reserve) Ariel Sharon was pumping the hand of bearded Brigadier Danny Mat.

  Despite the festivities, talk always came back to the fate of the hostages in Uganda. What will the government do? Use force? Bomb Lebanon or some other target where such retaliation had taken effect before? Or were they going to capitulate and release those on the list received that same day from Wadi Hadad?

  The best known among the prisoners in Israeli hands were these:

  • Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, head of the Greek Catholic community in east Jerusalem. In 1974 he was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment on the charge of gunrunning (in his car, which enjoyed diplomatic immunity). He operated in the service of Al Fatah.

  • Kozo Okamoto, member of the Japanese Red Army terrorist organization. In July 1972 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for committing mass murder at Ben-Gurion Airport, Lod, in a bloody incident in which 24 persons were massacred and dozens were wounded. He operated in the service of the PFLP.

  • Patma Barnawi, a black African Muslim from east Jerusalem, who was convicted of laying a demolition charge in Jerusalem’s Zion cinema in 1968. She operated in the service of Al Fatah.

  • William George Nasser. Arrested in east Jerusalem in 1968, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for numerous acts of sabotage, as well as the murder of a Druze watchman in the Jerusalem corridor. He operated in the service of Al Fatah.

  • Muzna Kamel Nikola, a nurse by profession, who spent a number of years in London, and returned to Israel on a mission for Al Fatah, for the purpose of espionage and recruitment of additional members.

  • Kamel Namri, of Jerusalem. His mother is Jewish; by profession he is an engineer. In 1968, he was sentenced to life imprison
ment for acts of sabotage. He operated in the service of Al Fatah.

  • Samir Darwish, of Acre, was arrested before the Six Day War. He planned the escape of two security detainees from Ramleh prison and was a member of the organization headed by Jabril, the leading terrorist in Uganda.

  Initiatives taken by Defense Minister Peres were reported to Prime Minister Rabin as the need arose. Just prior to Thunderbolt, however, the misconception took root among units of the armed forces that the political rifts that had been widely publicized between the two men continued within the crisis task force dealing with Flight 139.

  This impression arose largely from the way Rabin entrusted Peres with handling the day-to-day demands and proposals for military action.

  The paratroopers held one opinion, voiced heatedly: “Whatever the cost, we must go to Entebbe. If we give in, it will be a curse for generations. Next time they take a plane, they’ll demand our leaders, or withdrawal from the West Bank . . .” Brigadier General Shomron, in civilian clothes, shrugged: “Come on boys, what do you want of my life? Depends on me? If the government wants—we can reach anywhere . . .

  Shomron was the antithesis of a guerrilla. Tall and well-built, with curly hair and blue eyes, he was born in Kibbutz Degania in 1937. (“We belong to the founding fathers. Both my father and mother were at one time or another ‘kibbutz secretary,’ and now my brother has the honor.”) He enlisted in the army as a paratrooper and participated in retaliation actions against terrorists before the Sinai War of 1956. In the Six Day War he commanded a force of jeeps armored and carrying recoilless guns—the first forward element to reach Al-Qantara on the Suez Canal. He was mentioned in dispatches. He was a paratroop battalion commander, and then transferred to armor. In the Yom Kippur War he commanded a standing army brigade in Sinai, first in the containment battles against the Egyptian breakthrough, then across the Suez Canal. He and his force reached Adabiyeh on the Gulf of Suez to close the ring of encirclement around the Egyptian 3d Army. After the war Dan “returned home” to the paratroops—as senior paratroop and infantry officer, a title revealing very little about the special Air and Commando Service.

  To understand Shomron’s operational mind, consider his past operations and missions. Before the Six Day War, he was sent to IDF Staff and Command College. “From the moment the war started, it was clear to me that reaching the Suez Canal would mean the end of the war,” he said later.

  He fought his way through an Egyptian commando battalion. When he reached the waterline he considered the war over—but that night he was sent to attack an Egyptian force at Firdan Bridge while under constant enemy air attack himself. The next morning he watched trucks bring Egyptain soldiers from the direction of Cairo to the west bank of the canal, the first preparation for the War of Attrition that would follow a year later.

  At noon on Yom Kippur, 1973, Shomron was preparing to take his armored brigade toward the Suez Canal. All the indications were that war would begin at 6:00 p.m., and his brigade, alternating with another, was responsible for the Suez line. While his preparations were under way, Egyptian aircraft dropped bombs on the brigade laager, killing ten of his men. His first thought had been: “Madmen. They might hit us.”

  Shomron said later: “My big trauma after the Yom Kippur War was when I went home on my first short furlough. I had the feeling of a serious alienation. It was afternoon when I arrived in Tel Aviv. I found a city going about its daily life as always. I went home and showered. Then the phone rang. There was disturbing news. I was to report to the airport and fly back south. When we took off, and I saw the lights of Tel Aviv—as though nothing had happened—I suddenly felt that my men and I were going to our private war. Then I remembered the sentence often heard among officers and soldiers of the line: ‘We fight on the front, that life can go on as always back home.’ But I put it differently: ‘I don’t want everything to be as usual on the home front. I don’t think it should be that way. This is total war, and should involve all the nation in Israel. Everyone must contribute whatever he can.’ I know that this troubled others and not only me. I saw the expression on the faces of soldiers coming back from furlough. They didn’t have to tell me anything. I knew what they were thinking and feeling.

  “Home in days like these should be like the front line. People who can’t work for one reason or another should go to help the moshavim and kibbutzim whose men have gone to the line. This is not some utopian vision. It can be done, and should be—not by volunteering, but in organized and planned fashion.”

  Prime Minister Rabin took a different view. He wanted to preserve the air of calm routine. He briefed a full cabinet that afternoon and got what he requested: continuation of authority for the crisis task force to act as it saw fit. “Assignment of responsibilities had been made,” Rabin said later. “Each operational team was making its separate assessment—what moves we could expect from the French Foreign Ministry, what line other governments were taking with regard to the hijack demands.”

  5

  “WHERE THE HELL IS UGANDA?”

  From the moment they presented their demands, the terrorists’ conditions included the release of five of their comrades-in-arms imprisoned in Kenya.

  Five months before the hijacking, according to British sources, Ugandan President Idi Amin provided three Palestinian terrorists with Soviet antiaircraft missiles with which they almost succeeded in shooting down an El Al plane about to land at Nairobi Airport on January 18, 1976. Before they had time to fire the missiles they were apprehended by Kenyan security agents. Their car was found to contain machine guns, hand grenades, and pistols. All these weapons had been smuggled from Uganda with the knowledge of President Amin. Two of the three men had taken part in the bazooka attack on an El Al airliner which took off from Orly Airport in Paris in January 1975. In December of that year, the three reached Nairobi on visitors’ visas issued by the British embassy in Beirut.

  On January 21 two sympathizers—a man and a woman, both German-speaking—arrived in Nairobi to learn what had happened to their three terrorist colleagues. They were arrested and interrogated. When they were searched, the woman’s stomach was found to bear instructions, written in invisible ink. The instructions ordered the terrorists to try and carry out the attack on an El Al plane. Kenya’s President Jomo Kenyatta secretly agreed to make the five detained terrorists available for Israeli interrogation, and this was done on February 3. Now the hijackers threatened that Kenya would be subject to reprisal actions “all over the world” if it did not release the five terrorists.

  While the terrorists were presenting their conditions for the release of hostages, Moshe Peretz continued to write his journal of events.

  Monday, June 28. 0035—We expect to land at any moment—after all, three hours have passed. Where are we flying to?

  0040—I request permission to go to the toilet. I raise my hand, and the terrorist in the red shirt waves his gun to indicate that I can go. Near the toilet I meet one of the stewards busy in the rear kitchen. He tells me that we are flying south.

  0315—After a short nap I wake up. The commander announces that we are landing at Entebbe, and orders us to close the window blinds.

  0600—I open the blind slightly and see daylight. I can make out that we are parked on a runway beside a gigantic lake. Many soldiers are lying on high grass surrounding the runway. I address the yellow-shirted terrorist in Arabic and he tells me that we are going to stay here for a long time. He tells me that he was born in Haifa.

  0620—The “captain” (The German leader of the terrorists) politely offers his thanks to the passengers for the great patience they have displayed, and announces that negotiations are going on with the Uganda authorities. Idi Amin is due to arrive personally to announce his decision . . .

  0800—The “captain” announces there is nothing to worry about, everything is being handled properly. He will explain later the circumstances of taking over the plane. He wishes us a good breakfast and jokes, saying this will b
e the first breakfast of our lives eaten in Uganda. It is a single roll, nothing else.

  0900—The rear door of the plane is wide open . . . A rope made by the terrorists from the stewards’ neckties is all that is between us and outside where I see the large figure of Idi Amin negotiating with the guerrillas.

  0915—The “captain” announces the main danger is past. He asks us to remember that he and his companions are not a group of cruel murderers.

  0935—The “captain” explains the hijack was undertaken by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine . . . He is not planning the mass murder of the passengers but aims only to attract public opinion.

  1205—The “captain” announces we are all to leave the plane in buses.

  1210—The decision has been altered; it is now decided that we shall travel by other means.

  1215—One by one we get off the plane. Three terrorists stand at the exit, and we clamber down the gangplank. Several passengers, convinced that the whole affair is over, wave goodbye to the terrorists. We enter the airport’s old terminal—a huge room, dirty and dusty. We sit down on armchairs while the Ugandans bring in additional chairs. Our hand luggage is with us, and several passengers ask when their suitcases will be brought.

  1415—We eat lunch at the Entebbe Airport building. Ugandan servants bring in pots overflowing with rice and hot curry. I am afraid to touch the meat (it might be from giraffes) or water—so I eat it dry. Ugandan paratroopers surround the airport building, their guns cocked. It is still not clear how long we shall remain under house arrest like this. Flying time from Uganda to Paris is about nine hours—so that if we fly off now we shall arrive at night. We have been photographed a number of times for Ugandan television. We are waiting for the “king” of Uganda, who may arrive at any moment.