90 Minutes at Entebbe

by William Stevenson

  In March 1972, during the last days of Israel’s official presence in Uganda, the Israeli ambassador sat waiting for the verdict of the unpredictable president. He tried to learn Amin’s intentions from a senior member of Uganda’s Foreign Ministry, who was of the opinion that Amin had no real intention to break off relations. Twenty-four hours later notification was received of the severance of relations.

  Dozens of Israeli families were forced to leave Uganda in the middle of the night from Entebbe Airport. They were the early victims of the monster they, like Frankenstein, had created. It was not only the Israelis who miscalculated. The British in their zeal to decolonize had earmarked Amin as one of many African leaders who could be supported, flying in the face of experienced white settlers and Western observers not struck dumb by the fashionable refusal in the 1960s to say that “the emperor has no clothes.”

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  THE GENERAL STAFF EXAMINES TRACK B

  Shimon Peres, in addition to being defense minister, possessed an intimate, firsthand knowledge of Uganda and President Amin. He could see the strongest arguments against any high-flown action against Amin or involving harm to Ugandan armed forces.

  His special knowledge and close identification with Israel’s military evolution since early days made him the natural confidant of military commanders impatient with the slow processes of Parliament. He had worked closely with antiterrorist experts too, and by Friday had arrived at certain conclusions with regard to the jailed terrorists whose deliverance to Uganda was demanded as part of the price for releasing the hostages.

  Peres’s initiatives were reported to Prime Minister Rabin as the need arose. Here is the defense ministry’s summary of how the general staff operated in those days.

  The general staff followed the developments from the first moment of the Air France hijacking. But at the beginning of the week no one thought it would be necessary to go to Entebbe. The defense minister consulted the chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, who consulted his generals, while the government gave priority to diplomatic activity.

  During the first night, while the aircraft was on its way to Uganda, the task force watched the flight path constantly. The hijackers told Cairo control tower their destination was Amman. When the plane landed in Uganda and was obviously going to stay there, the general staff began operational planning.

  As the diplomatic process moved toward stalemate and the government’s dilemma grew, the desire to use the military option strengthened—to the extent that, when the terrorists’ conditions were published, a senior defense ministry official said: “The end will be that the military echelon will save the political echelon, just as they did in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.” Prime Minister Rabin gave a sharp reply: “I am awaiting a firm, clearly feasible military proposal. I am not interested in your philosophy of war. I want facts not theory.”

  On Tuesday at noon, 48 hours after the hijacking, the chief of staff was called to an urgent meeting in Jerusalem. He sensed that the army was about to be asked for action, and radioed for commando units to be put on alert that evening. Gur was asked if he thought a military operation could be mounted, and answered: “Such a possibility exists.” When he returned to his Tel Aviv office, Gur ordered planning teams be set up in the general staff that evening to prepare the operational proposals coming in from the field. He was encouraged by what could be called “the pressure from below,” from Brigadier General Dan Shomron and the Golani Brigade’s infantrymen, tough men who deal with terrorists across the border every day. These were men who would have to go on the mission. They were typical Israeli soldiers, steeped in a philosophy as old as the struggle for Israel.

  “Know what you fight for and love what you know” is a quotation handed down to them from the early Jewish resistance movement, which got it from Orde Wingate, who got it from Oliver Cromwell. Wingate was a British guerrilla warfare expert in World War II, with a biblical sense of the Jewish cause matched by a lack of orthodoxy. Wingate gave his name to the first quasi-military training camp. The renegade Englishman organized special night squads among Jewish settlers in prewar Palestine to strike at Arab killers. His influence was described in the Flight 139 crisis by a former Israeli air force chief, Ezer Weizman: “I chanced to meet one of the most colorful characters to figure in the long annals of our wars, [who] came on the recommendation of my Uncle Chaim [a founder of modern Israel] . . . He looked much more like a missionary than an officer of the British Empire, and he would spend hours talking about the Bible. I suppose it was his link to the land of Israel and the Jewish people—a mystical, very personal link.”*

  What they would be fighting for in Entebbe was clear to the general staff—it was the right of every Israeli to travel without fear, and ultimately the right of citizens everywhere to make free decisions about where they lived and how they lived. The issue at Entebbe was how to defeat enemies of this freedom of choice, and whether the hostages should be regarded as soldiers in such a fight.

  On Wednesday the chief of staff summoned several officers to present their plans to him. On the face of it these seemed feasible. On analysis—or as the jargon has it, “when they were attacked” in argument—each was revealed to have at least one weak point. Here and there were ideas that were more imaginative than pragmatic, and the chief of staff treated them as unrealistic. “These plans don’t promise minimum chances for the lives of the hostages, and so I cannot recommend them.” The officers departed disappointed, some with long faces, but they quickly recovered as the intelligence data streamed in, and made new plans. They worked day and night in the general staff and in the headquarters of senior paratroop officer Dan Shomron.

  Air-strike forces were always ready with contingency plans. There were plans to seize oil wells and plans to take over well-defended airfields in hostile countries in the event of all-out war. The essence was to capture a strategic point from which the surrounding enemy could be dominated. Some plans called for paratroops to be dropped from the air; others for night landings (by helicopter) of commandos trained to infiltrate guarded bases. All demanded speed and surprise. The realities of Middle Eastern instability and the threats against Israel demanded these preparations and this kind of training. The men and women instructed in these contingency plans were pursuing peaceful civilian occupations; they had learned to separate in their private thoughts the daily routine and the prospect of sudden danger. A large medical corps, for example, consisted of doctors trained to fight alongside airborne commandos. In the use of this versatile force the general staff had the grave responsibility of making precise plans based on precise intelligence. The defenses surrounding a target had to be known in detail.

  There was not enough intelligence at this stage. What antiaircraft defenses existed at Entebbe? Where were the guards positioned? There were two Ugandan battalions known to be guarding the airport. The chief of staff explained: “The problem is to preserve the safety of the hostages. We are taking a risk for our own soldiers in advance. We have to have a specific answer on the Ugandan positions at Entebbe Airport.”

  On Thursday Shomron felt the situation at the airport had become clear. The marathon discussions accelerated. The chief of staff was encouraged by the fact that Defense Minister Peres was pushing the army to act at Entebbe. Brigadier General Shomron appeared that day before Gur, head of operations branch Yekutiel Adam, and air force chief Benny Peled to propose a new plan.

  “Believe me,” said Shomron, “from the moment that we will be on the ground in Entebbe, we can carry it out easily. We have done things a thousand times more complicated.” Dan was the youngster in this group of planners. All were Independence War veterans. He was the only one born in the state of Israel. He knew that these generals looked on him as the child of their old age.

  But Shomron got what he wanted: qualified approval of the plan to land combined forces at Entebbe under his command with special units to be directed by Yonni Netanyahu. There were three provisions: a dry run must be carried o
ut during Friday night to convince General Gur that aircraft could be landed in pitch darkness on a strange airfield under heavy guard; there must be some foolproof way to get the hostages safely out of Entebbe and home; and the whole operation must be based on complete, tested intelligence.

  “Everything depends on reliable intelligence,” Gur warned.

  _____________

  * On Eagles’ Wings (Jerusalem, 1976).

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  THE INVISIBLES

  On-the-spot intelligence began to reach Dan Shomron’s final planning team before and during the Friday night rehearsal. Uganda’s defenses were based on a relatively large number of armored troop carriers (267), unknown quantities of missiles, howitzers, and mortars, and at least 50 combat aircraft including 30 Mig-17s and Mig-21s based at Entebbe. Out of 21,000 fully trained, well-armed Ugandan soldiers, about half were thought to be stationed between Entebbe and the capital at Kampala, 21 miles away. The airport was guarded by an outer ring of good Ugandan troops equipped with Russian-built weapons, including tanks.

  More details of Entebbe’s defenses were offered in the final hours by a highly specialized group which had flown to Nairobi on El Al Flight LY 535 on Wednesday. Out of this team of 50 “businessmen,” a few set up headquarters in the private home of an Israeli trader whose house promised peace and seclusion. From here, discreet contacts were made with Lionel Bym Davies, chief of Nairobi police, and a colorful ex-British Special Air Services commander, Bruce McKenzie.

  A powerful figure on the Kenyan political scene for three decades, Bruce McKenzie had survived the Mau Mau insurrection as a white farmer and befriended the leader of it, Jomo Kenyatta. Big, burly, bewhiskered, and bluffly contemptuous of whites who refused to recognize Kenyatta’s leadership in the 1960s, McKenzie had become minister of agriculture until replaced by a Kikuyu of Kenyatta’s tribe. He continued to serve in the capacity of friendly adviser to President Kenyatta, who respected McKenzie’s soldierly frankness. At 85, Kenyatta himself was a benign but unpredictable ruler whose one-party government blended the traditional tribal system of following strong leaders and the trappings of Westminster-style democracy. His political wishes were enforced by the euphemistically named General Service Unit (GSU), which took care that parliamentary debate never went beyond a mild discussion of Kenyatta’s policies.

  The crucial question was: Would Kenya permit the rescue planes to refuel at Nairobi? This was the only airfield in relatively friendly hands. The giant Hercules with full loads could help themselves to Uganda’s fuel, at a pinch. But they would never make it back to Israel without taking aboard fuel somewhere during the operation. A proposal to refuel in the air had been rejected as too dangerous because of the combination of circumstances: the flight must be conducted at night for the sake of surprise; the route lay within range of hostile aircraft; and it would be too easy for an enemy to stage-manage an accident during the delicate refueling procedure.

  The commander of Kenyatta’s GSU strong-arm units, Geoffrey Karithii, was able to give assurances that his president would turn a blind eye if the GSU and Nairobi airport police isolated the rescue force during a stopover—provided this phase of the operation was conducted as a routine matter under cover of El Al charters. Charles Njojo, Kenya’s attorney general, offered a legal opinion that so long as the laws governing international civil aviation were observed (at least in the eyes of Kenya’s airport authority), facilities could not be refused.

  Black African agents hired by Israel’s Mossad reinforced the last-minute reports on Entebbe’s defenses and conditions. The rescue pilots needed to know the serviceability of runways, the location of fuel tanks (should there be time to draw from them), and the degree of alertness in the control towers—one of which took care of Uganda’s fighter squadrons based on the old part of the airfield. Some of this information came from casual questioning of commercial airline pilots. Some came from observers on Lake Victoria. Technicians of the East African Directorate of Civil Aviation were familiar with the customary modifications that take place daily in routine, providing details to El Al officials without understanding the significance of their questions.

  The changing habits of the hijackers were crucial. A new figure was reported to be on the scene. He seemed to be the terrorists’ commander and traveled from and to Entebbe airport in a car driven by Ugandan soldiers. Word filtered back that the hostages called him Groucho Marx because of his drooping black mustache and slouching gait. The German woman was identified as Gabriele Kroche-Tiedemann, 24, a member of the team that kidnapped OPEC members at Vienna, and a known associate of Carlos, The Jackal.

  On the whole, Entebbe’s defenses seemed vulnerable to a swift attack. A cautionary report that two Uganda Migs might dive-bomb the hostages was discounted. The numbers on the Migs were given as 903 and 905—known to be earmarked for training, they seemed more likely part of the daylight routine of student pilots. Nervous hostages would be unfamiliar with the “circuits-and-bumps” cycle of landings and takeoffs that are the lot of trainee pilots. Rather more worrisome was the mood of the terrorists and the control they seemed to have over Ugandan troops.

  A host of “invisibles” had been consulted, often without their knowing. The invisibles were knowledgeable observers, given the nickname because they were unconsciously serving Israel intelligence. Among them was the chief editor of the Daily Nation of Kenya, George Githii, another close friend and adviser to President Kenyatta. He left Israel early on Saturday, July 3, for Nairobi after informal talks that would bear fruit. Ahead of him sped messages to the El Al airline manager in Nairobi requiring him to have large sums of money ready. Without being asked, and out of personal curiosity, El Al’s man measured off the distance from Nairobi to Entebbe—380 miles.

  An extraordinary Israeli was learning the distance to Entebbe the hard way. He landed there in his private aircraft at such a critical moment that his Tel Aviv office began to receive cryptic requests to bring him home. He was Abie Nathan, the so-called Peace Pilot whose crusades in a one-man search for alternatives to each of Israel’s wars had earned him some grudging admiration, though his earlier “mercy” flights had caused embarrassment. There was always a risk that Israel’s enemies might see him as evidence of weakening military resolve. The risk this time was that he would be caught in the crossfire of Thunderbolt. He flew into Entebbe shortly after President Amin took off for Mauritius.

  “I had a bad feeling when Ugandan soldiers surrounded me,” he reported later. “They took me for interrogation in the new terminal building, away from where the hostages were held. Then Amin’s chief aide came and agreed that I might speak through him with one of the hijackers.

  “The hijacker was concealed behind a screen. I spoke through Amin’s man. I saw that the president, while in Mauritius, was relaying decisions to his Ugandan aide. The hijackers took instruction from him, and from the senior officers sent to join the terrorist group that originally took Flight 139. They told me there was no room to bargain.”

  Abie Nathan flew back to Nairobi. His attorney, Arieh Marinsky, was phoning frantically from Tel Aviv. “Do not fly back to Uganda,” he told Nathan sharply. “You understand? Your doctors here are worried about your liver.”

  “My liver?” Nathan demanded. “There’s nothing wrong with my liver.”

  “You remember the doctors said tropical fruit is bad for it,” Marinsky said with fierce emphasis. “And the altitude—”

  “But here in Nairobi it is more than six thousand feet,” argued Nathan. “In Entebbe, it’s almost half as high.”

  “Then it’s on your own head,” sighed his attorney. “If you get sick, don’t blame me.”

  Abie Nathan finally understood and spent Saturday disclosing the details he had observed on Entebbe’s airfield. His most significant observation was that he felt certain the Ugandans, if not the terrorists, would begin executing Jews the following day in keeping with the Sunday deadline. He thought this because President Amin seemed the ultimate au
thority and Amin would feel his prestige was at stake if Israel wheedled more concessions.

  Other details were being extracted in Paris from an American doctor under hypnosis. A team of Israeli intelligence specialists had reached France and were concentrating on the released hostages. Many could not consciously remember vital details like the location of doors in the old terminal building or where exactly the hostages were held, or whether the long French windows in the building opened, in or out. Hypnotists skilled in debriefing soldiers and captured terrorists worked, with their consent, on those suffering the normal amnesia following shock.

  Under hypnosis the American doctor revealed a great deal that he had been unable to recall while consciously trying to help the interrogators. They were working against time and it was Friday before they were sure the released hostage had seen and heard enough to reconstruct not only the physical scene but the psychological atmosphere among Ugandans and terrorists at Entebbe. They reported to the task force by heavily encoded messages radioed from the Israeli embassy in Paris: “Earlier analysis of President Amin needs to be modified. His tendency has been to prolong negotiations for publicity reasons. But he is also anxious to please his ‘comrades’ of the PLO and the PFLP. They are becoming trigger-happy. On the basis of evidence set forth below, it seems likely that Amin will agree to begin ‘propaganda executions’ on Sunday, July 4, at dawn.”

  This assumption was supported by the Paris team’s findings. It was not intended to be alarmist. The team knew it would be weighed against a mass of other, perhaps contradictory, evidence. It was read in the prime minister’s office as pointing to the same conclusions indicated by Abie Nathan and by George Githii from Kenya, speaking unofficially for President Kenyatta.