90 Minutes at Entebbe

by William Stevenson

  Yonni and his men hunted for the remaining terrorists, combing the upper floor. In one of the toilets they discovered two terrorists with guns, hiding under a bed. The two were reported killed later. Another commando squad, operating in the northern wing of the passenger building, claimed a seventh terrorist—Jay el Naji al-Arjam, close personal friend of Wadi Hadad.

  Doctors and medical orderlies, trained as combat troops,* moved swiftly to bring out the wounded—five civilians and four soldiers—and brought them to operating tables in the second Hercules. The battle on the airfield entered its second phase. The Israelis were fired upon from the nearby control tower, and Yonni’s force advanced to take care of them. Bazooka shells and machine-gun fire were directed at the tower.

  Someone shouted: “Yonni’s been hit! Yonni’s wounded! Orderly!” The call jolted the men. Yonni had been hit in the back and fell face down in the open space near the building’s main entrance, bleeding heavily.

  Yonni tried to stand up. He fell back again and lost consciousness. His second-in-command took over, reported to Dan Shomron, and continued with the movements planned by the men to whom the hostages owed their lives.

  There were several small operations taking place. Each Hercules was under the guard of a dozen commandos, and the first plane had swung around to receive the hostages, who were directed toward its gaping hold by soldiers using bullhorns. From the other side of a 200-foot rise a glow of red fire illuminated the sky as the first of the Russian-built Mig jet fighters went up in flame.

  Israeli half-tracks and jeeps armed with recoilless weapons raced for the outer defense perimeter, expecting to meet a column of armor coming down the Kampala road. President Amin’s quarters, less than a mile from Entebbe Airport, were known to be heavily guarded by crack Ugandan troops. Instead of Russian-built tanks and infantry carriers, the Israelis encountered a squadron of Ugandan troops riding in light trucks. By a margin of seconds, the Israelis reached the main airport gate in time to ambush the relieving forces, which were wiped out and on inspection seemed to have been rushing to the scene without much idea of what was happening.

  The raid had begun one minute after midnight, Uganda time (which was one hour ahead of Israeli time), shortly after a pale moon had disappeared below the horizon. A thin rain had started to fall. The scene was wrapped in much the same fog that shrouded President Amin asleep close by. He was still unaware of the raid hours later.

  _____________

  * “Israel has the world’s first army to produce medical teams capable of assuming all combat duties,” the chief of staff claimed later.

  19

  DORA BLOCH VANISHES

  James Horrocks, a British diplomat in Uganda, heard explosions and saw the black pall of jet-fuel smoke spreading over Entebbe. As charge-d’affaires at the High Commission in Kampala, he had watched the progress of the drama since Flight 139’s capture. One of his concerns was Dora Bloch, age 75, whose possession of a British passport entitled her to British protection. Dora Bloch was a hostage, as was her son Ilan Hartuv, an economist who had been interpreting for President Amin during the past week. Big Daddy had dubbed Dora Bloch’s son “my translator.”

  On Friday Mrs. Bloch had been rushed to hospital after choking on some food. Ilan expected her return after receiving a message that she was now well again. Mother and son were on their way to the New York wedding of another son, Daniel, chairman of the Israeli Journalists’ Union.

  At midnight on Saturday, James Horrocks observed the raid with misgivings. In the previous four years Big Daddy had driven out 45,000 Asians holding British citizenship and whittled down the white European community from 3500 to some 500 Britons who were now hostages to fortune. The High Commission took a humanitarian interest in some 130,000 African refugees from neighboring states suffering from civil strife, and in several hundred Kenyans still employed in Uganda.

  From many such witnesses, it was possible to piece together details of Thunderbolt kept secret by Israel’s harsh system of security.

  The destruction of the Russian Migs was undertaken by a team of experts. Another team rushed the main radar center and removed certain items of Russian equipment before blowing up the station to hide the evidence that devices had been stolen. Out of ten terrorists, seven were killed and their fingerprints and photographs recorded. Three other terrorists, it would seem, despite Israeli denials, were taken alive for interrogation.

  A $1 million Israeli mobile fuel pump, adapted to serve the four Hercules from Entebbe’s tanks, was left behind to make room for Soviet-built equipment and machinery taken from the quarters of Palestinian pilots learning to fly the Russian-built Migs.

  The plan to refuel from Big Daddy’s own tanks was abandoned. Thunderbolt proceeded faster than the planners expected. The first Hercules with hostages was lumbering out of Entebbe 53 minutes after the initial landing, 2 minutes sooner than predicted. Heavy gunfire, numerous small fires, the danger from exploding Migs, and the gauntlet that the Hippos must run to reach the fuel dumps caused Brigadier General Shomron to choose from several alternative plans. The Hercules, one with no more than 90 minutes of fuel left, should fly straight to Nairobi, 50 minutes flying time away.

  All Israeli equipment, all trace of the raiders (except spent cartridges, the big fuel pump, and the general destruction) were cleaned up by the last group to leave. The senior pilot of their aircraft had sat for 90 minutes in the middle of continuous crossfire, knowing a stray shell could destroy the Hercules and remove the last chance for escape of the specialized intelligence and sabotage teams.

  “I felt lonely and exposed, and each minute seemed like a lifetime,” he reported. “It seemed a miracle that the preceding transports had escaped without incident. We planned for a meticulous schedule. My head told me that everything was going according to plan, ticking like a well-oiled clock. But my belly told me: Everything can’t be that perfect—and you’re the last one left.”

  Days later, home on a kibbutz where life is rural and the fields drowsy with summer heat, he found himself startled from bed by the rumble of thunder, convinced that he was back at Entebbe sitting on a planeload of explosives hit by shellfire.

  In fact, none of the Hercules suffered damage. But the owner of the Mercedes complained, when it came back to him from its 16-hour escapade in the sky and at Entebbe, “I liked it white, the way it was. Look at it, covered in black paint. How—?”

  Rather than answer his question, the IAF paid to have it resprayed.

  The listeners in Defense Minister Peres’s Tel Aviv office waited past midnight and then drifted next door into the chief of staff’s quarters. From the IAF command 707 there was nothing to report after the brief news that the planeload of released hostages was en route to Nairobi.

  From their flying command post above Entebbe, “Kutti” Adam, the chief of general operations, and IAF commander Benny Peled made no attempt to bother Dan Shomron. Thunderbolt’s ground commander would keep informative transmissions to a minimum. The muffled sounds of firing, from 11:03 until nearly 12:30 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, July 4, Israeli time, were disturbing but not important so long as the ground teams remained silent.

  “It’s America’s 200th birthday,” said Adam as the 707 turned toward Nairobi. “And Israel is still in her twenties. . .”

  At 1:20 a.m., Transport Minister Yaakobi telephoned the chairman of the semiofficial Committee for the Families of Hostages, Professor Gross.

  “He couldn’t believe it when I told him his brother and his sister-in-law were probably free, the hostages liberated,” Yaakobi recalled. “Only a few hours before he had asked for another meeting with me this Sunday morning to discuss the deteriorating situation. He feared the start of executions. Ten minutes later, he recovered enough to begin phoning all the relatives of hostages. We knew perhaps two were killed, two or three injured. But we had no names. All families were invited to collect at the baseball stadium where we’d tell them where to meet the rescue planes. That was t
he worst part. There would be two families who rejoiced with the rest, and who would then go through the agony and the greater grief when they saw freed hostages stream into the sunlight—their own relatives not among them.”

  In the hospital where Dora Bloch had been taken, another British diplomat, Peter Chandley, checked to make sure she was safe. The elderly woman was sleeping quietly. The nurses said she was well and could rejoin her fellow Flight 139 passengers later. Chandley said nothing to the staff about the raid, and they seemed to know nothing about it. He tiptoed from the ward. No non-Ugandan would see her again alive.

  20

  “REFUEL AT NAIROBI!”

  Golda Meir was awakened from a sound sleep, the phone beside her bed purring insistently.

  “Ken—”

  “Mrs. Meir, I thought you would like to know the hostages are on their way home,” said Prime Minister Rabin. “Please excuse me for interrupting your sleep but—”

  “You wanted me to know. Thank you. And congratulations.”

  Golda Meir put down the phone and looked at the time: 2:30 a.m. Outside her home in Ramat-Aviv, a gentle breeze stirred the heavy red flowers of a blossoming flame tree. The flame trees of Africa.

  Later she wrote a dignified but indignant letter to the Jerusalem Rost denying publicly an allegation “under the title ISRAEL SUPERSPY MADE ENTEBBE RAID POSSIBLE. It mentioned that I had urged the prime minister to go ahead with the mission and not surrender to the terrorists’ demand and that I said that if he does not do it, he is not a man any more.

  “I am dismayed by your quoting such a distasteful story.

  “Of course Mr. Rabin did not ‘consult’ me nor did he have to. Mr. Rabin was gracious enough to phone me in the middle of the night, as soon as our people were on the way back, to inform me about the successful rescue operation—a call for which I am deeply grateful. For the action itself I am full of admiration, for him, for his cabinet, and of course for Zahal” (the Israel Defence Force).

  There had been no superspy. There had been the swift drawing together of threads. How this was done in the last hours could be judged from computer-coordinated tapes of the laconic and brief messages acquired by IAF commander Benny Peled and General Adam in the flying command post. The messages between airmen, commandos, and special task teams during the 90 minutes at Entebbe were models of brevity. Yet they conveyed drama and the fast collection of field intelligence.

  They went something like this:

  “Twenty aboard,” referring to hostages. “Twenty-one . . . Now another group of ten . . .”

  “Do we go for Jumbo?” referring to Nairobi and the difficulty of refueling at Entebbe.

  From each pilot in turn: “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.”

  “Don’t harm the gogglies in Apple,” referring to Ugandan troops in the old terminal where hostages had warned the commandos not to shoot the African soldiers. “They were only helping us.”

  But one group of gogglies—another mobile force of Ugandan troops—did not come with helpful intent. Two commando units caught them near the main control tower and estimated they killed 20. Later counts indicated that at least 45 Ugandans died in actions that the commandos sought to avoid. No sure figures were possible because of the later wave of vengeance murders by Uganda’s secret police.

  Yonni’s body was carried to the Hercules slated to leave with the hostages. His men, sweeping beyond him in the skirmish, thought he was only injured. They caught a brief glimpse of hostages streaming into Yonni’s machine, some pushing past stretchers, a few clearly frightened and desperate to reach the safety of the big Hercules.

  A young woman stripped to her bra and panties was wrapped in a blanket as she fell breathless inside the ramp. A young boy kept shouting, it seemed, for his mother. A Hercules guard reprimanded him: “You’re a grown man—stop calling for mama!” In the confusion none of the rescuers understood the distress of Dora Bloch’s son. Near the lounge a young Israeli found himself with two Ugandan prisoners and a couple of minutes to spare. He tied their wrists and ankles and then gave them a quick lesson in Hebrew: “Tell President Amin that Danny from Kibbutz———was here. That’s all. I have come to Africa and I want to leave a souvenir for your chief. Understand?” He spoke in English and then repeated the treasured Hebrew phrase: “Danny from Kubbutz———was here.”

  The first Hercules down was to be the last out. The chief pilot turned down the cockpit lights after stopping engines, and reviewed the situation. The two runways were not within sight of each other and the old runway was used for the two known squadrons of Russian-built Migs and other military aircraft. Explosions and fires were visible, but not their cause. Airmen detailed to make a swift survey immediately on landing were reporting that fuel tankers had been moved to the far side of the field.

  Fifteen minutes into the ground-attack phase of Thunderbolt, terse consultations were held between the pilots. Was it worth taxiing through areas of fire and possible ammunition explosions? Since airworthiness was paramount, a decision was made to refuel in less hazardous conditions. An IAF commander said: “We knew that if one or more Hippos could not get out, some men would have to be left behind. The soldiers knew this. We knew it. If you consider the normal delays when airliners cover lengthy routes, and how a small malfunction grounds a plane, you have an inkling of how we felt. A stray bullet, some moment’s neglect, and there would be no forgiveness. Even a slight delay in leaving at the end of the operation would be fatal. We were all acutely aware of this and it tightened my guts.”

  One of the Hercules, loaded to full capacity and ready for takeoff, struggled with one set of wheels inexplicably pushing against mud. The light drizzle had made the tarmac slick and slippery, the soil marshy. The pilot felt the hesitation and peered ahead at the white line by which he was steering. “Stick your head out,” he ordered his copilot. “That line—”

  “It marks the edge of the runway, not the middle!” yelled the copilot. “Turn starboard—”

  The pilot pushed the throttles wide and wrenched the Hercules away from the mud, having lost precious yards in the hazardous last stage of takeoff. Lake Victoria was coming up fast. The pilot switched automatically to the emergency procedure for maximum effort takeoff. Stand on the brakes, pour on power . . . down went the nose. He selected full flap and released the brakes. Up came the nose and the machine lumbered forward. At about 60 miles an hour the plane came unstuck, behaving partly like a conventional aircraft and partly like a helicopter with the props as rotor blades. The big Allison turbos were hauling the load skyward. The total run was later estimated at 600 feet and the Hercules’ angle of attack an incredible 45 degrees.

  Close shaves like this were not heard at defense headquarters in Tel Aviv. What was retrieved in code words and hasty exchanges built up a powerful sense of tension. A task force minister said later: “The clipped transmissions created a mosaic of action. Any hostile eavesdropper would have been baffled. Doubtless the Russians, who snatch every broadcast down to the lowest frequencies, were now conscious of the operation. The Arabs? They’d guess. But an informed listener could only conclude that a fantastically efficient long-range raid was ending. The voices were very calm, almost matter-of-fact.”

  The air talk in Hebrew sounded totally mystifying, a shorthand of acronyms and numerals between sender and receiver. To the chief of staff, General Mordechai Gur, it meant more now than the previous night when he sweated through landings and takeoffs by pilots determined to convince him that such operations were feasible and safe. Gur, listening to the jargon, was glad to have been convinced by sharing the flight deck of a Hercules performing circuits and bumps in the darkness of an Israeli desert. “It was enough to shatter any man’s nerves who isn’t a flier,” acknowledged a pilot. “It can blow the mind of a man who is a flier—unless he knows the procedures.”

  Brigadier General Dan Shomron, first on the ground at Entebbe, was also (like his Hercules) last off. His IAF aide became a walking flight c
ontroller. The last groups ran back from the shattered Entebbe control tower and the sabotaged radar station. Field security made a rapid check of the scene for lost documents or dropped Israeli equipment. The dead terrorists had been photographed and fingerprinted.

  Shomron walked backward onto the Hercules ramp. Fires were spreading beyond the hillock where the Migs burned in their revetments. Shots continued from the direction of the burning tower. Slowly the ramp creaked up, hydraulic pistons hissed, and the Hippo began to shudder as the turboprops picked up speed with the final clunk of closing ramp doors.

  Somewhere The Jackal and Dr. Hadad would lick their wounds. Flight 139, the Air France airbus, stood unharmed, a symbol of the compromises and weak policies that in Shomron’s opinion forced Israel to risk lives and limited resources in what should have been an international police action.

  “If we can do this in Africa, we can do it anywhere,” he reported later. He had argued that hostile bases should be dealt with in this summary fashion. “Surgical operations,” he called them. When a nation covered the tracks of assassins, it should know that Israel would strike. Airports and oil wells could be tidily knocked out in reprisal raids. A score of targets were filed at headquarters, indicating the method of attack—paratroops, helicopter-borne commandos . . . But none of this would be needed if an international antiterrorist agency emerged from Thunderbolt.

  Brigadier General Shomron watched the men strip to the waist again and stretch out under the battle-scarred half-tracks, sinking back into sleep as if nothing had happened.

  21

  IDI GETS THE NEWS FROM TEL AVIV

  In Cairo the first stir of common sense was felt by Arabs with more to lose than gain from continued terrorism. President Anwar Sadat was called from bed to hear a preliminary report. Egyptian leaders had followed the changing fortunes of terrorism, noted the development of guerrilla bases in other more radical Arab territories and in Somalia, and some felt they had more in common with Israel than with the forces that armed these artists in modem revolution.