90 Minutes at Entebbe

by William Stevenson

  “It is no secret that the archterrorist Carlos, The Jackal, is back in Libya,” Sadat dictated later to the editor of Akhbar el-Yom. “I want al-Qaddafi [the Libyan leader] to hear this. The Jackal moves now to South Yemen, now to the Sudan, in support of a superpower, seeking to make the naive leaders of inexperienced nations mere tools in the game of this superpower.” Sadat stopped short of identifying the Soviet Union, but referred later to Russian support for Libya.

  President Amin was aroused at 2:20 a.m. on Sunday, Uganda time, by a phone call from the Tel Aviv store where “Borka” Bar-Lev sat by the radio.

  “Tell your government it must accept the demands of the hijackers,” said Big Daddy.

  “I see,” Bar-Lev replied solemnly.

  “It is not a matter for more negotiation,” said the president of Uganda.

  “Well, thank you for what you have done,” said Bar-Lev.

  “Thanks? What for?” said Big Daddy.

  Bar-Lev put down the phone. A radio report from Paris had already broken the news of the raid on Entebbe. Evidently Amin still knew nothing about it. The hostages were out of his reach. The terrorists who brought him fresh fame were dead.

  A few hours later, at about 5:00 a.m., the situation was reversed. This time it was Amin who phoned his Israeli friend.

  In a choked voice he asked Bar-Lev: “What have you done to me? Why did you shoot my soldiers? After all, I looked after the Israelis, I treated them well, I gave them services, blankets, mattresses, I hoped that we would soon make the exchange—and look—you killed my soldiers.”

  Bar-Lev said that Amin’s voice indicated confusion and shock. Amin still did not understand what had happened at Entebbe.

  Amin: “They shot my men . . .”

  Bar-Lev: “Who shot? Did the hostages have guns?”

  Amin: “The hostages didn’t shoot. Planes came and shot.”

  Bar-Lev: “Planes? I didn’t hear that there were planes. You woke me from my sleep. I’m at home, and I don’t know a thing.”

  In the course of the conversation Amin pulled himself together. Bar-Lev asked him if he wanted to talk to his wife Nehama, whom Amin knew well. The president declined, but sent his regards to her and to the children.

  Before he hung up, Amin recovered his flamboyance. “Not as a politician, but as a professional soldier, I must tell you that the action was very good indeed and your commandos were excellent.”

  Daylight brought second thoughts. Big Daddy called again with a request that Israel provide his armies with “a few spare parts.” Some of his guns and armor were not in good order and it sounded as if the Russians were not pleased by the loss of their Mig-17s and Mig-21s. Replacements from the Soviet Union were likely to come with strict orders for their protection. As an Israeli military spokesman commented: “The Russians have invested $20 billion in that area these past few years, and they have to choose between unstable leaders like Amin or terrorist groups to guarantee the investment.

  “The raid on Entebbe hurt the credibility of the PFLP and the PLO groups. God knows what it did to Amin.”

  Perhaps Big Daddy had an inkling. Thunderbolt’s aircraft were delivering the hostages to Israel when the Ugandan president spoke to Uri Dan in Tel Aviv: “I am carrying in my arms the corpses of my soldiers who were killed by the bullets of your men; I think you have repaid me with evil for good,” President Idi Amin told the author. News agencies had already sent out fragmentary reports about three mysterious planes landing at Entebbe and producing a tremendous upheaval in which they had spread death and destruction before leaving again. An Israeli military spokesman had issued a dry, one-line statement: “The hostages have been liberated from Entebbe by an Israeli army force.”

  The first frantic international phone calls multiplied into a veritable deluge of questions for Israel from all over the world. Everyone wanted details of an operation which shocked and astonished friend and foe.

  “Yet Idi Amin himself knew very little about what happened under his very nose,” reported Uri Dan. “It was with great difficulty that I persuaded a frightened assistant to call his president to the phone. When I heard his shattered voice, I grasped that he had taken the beating of his life. He was like a man who had had the carpet pulled from under his feet.”

  Amin said: “I am speaking to you from the airfield. I am counting the bodies of the soldiers who were killed during the night.”

  His tone at first was cringing. He presented himself as the protector of hostages, the innocent victim of Israeli deceit. He denied collaborating with the Palestinian terrorists.

  “Today I had intended to work for the release of the Israelis. For this purpose, I advanced my return from the OAU conference in Mauritius. All that’s left for me now is to count the victims.”

  Amin refused to say how many of his soldiers had been killed at the airfield. Uri Dan had the impression that Amin did not really know what had happened.

  “Your Hercules planes came, and my soldiers did not want to fire at them, for otherwise we would have shot them down.”

  The conversation lasted 30 minutes.

  Question: “Why were your soldiers there? Were the hostages the captives of your soldiers, and not just of the Palestinians?”

  Amin: “The hostages were not in the hands of the Ugandan army. They were in the hands of the Palestinians. If my soldiers had wanted to fight, they would have fought. But they were killed. My soldiers were 200 yards from the building, and the Palestinians were inside. Ask your people when they return to Israel.”

  Question: “Is it your intention to come to Israel to clarify the issue, the situation which has been created?”

  Amin: “Why should I? I have no reason to come. It’s all quite clear . . . I was very good to the Israeli hostages. I will help anyone in the world to bring about peace. I’m sorry you killed innocent people.”

  Question: “Why did you permit piratical deeds on your territory for a whole week?”

  Amin: “Only yesterday, I spoke to the UN secretary-general and told him that I received a message from the [Air Force] plane that it only had enough fuel for another 15 minutes. Then I said I had to give it permission to land at Entebbe. Since then I have been engaged in negotiating to save them.”

  Amin’s voice broke, and he went on, almost crying: “We looked after them very well. We did everything for them. We gave them food, we gave them toilet requisites, and we guarded them so as to be able to exchange them. And now, what am I left with now? Instead of thanking me, you kill my people.”

  He added: “God will help everyone to bring peace. God wanted my people to die today. It’s very bad . . . very bad. I am collecting the bodies of the dead. I know it comes from God, and I will help him, and everyone, to bring peace. I don’t want there to be war, for we are all children of God. In the Middle East too. I want to make peace between you and the Palestinians.”

  Uri Dan asked him: “Why do you collaborate with the Palestinians—even letting Palestinian fliers learn to pilot your Migs?”

  Amin: “I don’t collaborate with the Palestinians. Those who hijacked the plane were not just Palestinians. There were also Germans and French and others. It’s not true that the Palestinians fly my planes. My pilots fly them.”

  Uri Dan asked how it was his soldiers who were killed, if there was no cooperation between them and the Palestinians.

  Amin: “The soldiers were there to protect the lives of the Israelis. I saved their lives, and tell them, when they come to Israel, that I wish them a happy life. I even said that to Colonel Bar-Lev, who I just talked to on the phone. If my soldiers had fired at the airplanes, they would have killed your soldiers. But we didn’t want to fight. We can fight—when we want to. All we wanted was to solve your problem. I’m sorry, very sorry, about what happened. What you did was a bad thing.”

  Question: “Mr. President, nevertheless, was it essential that you give a safe haven to pirates for a week? Instead of throwing them out, why did you allow the Palestinians
to intervene in your country’s internal affairs?”

  Amin: “They did not interfere in Uganda’s affairs. I wanted to protect your people. But the Palestinians—and not just the Palestinians, the Europeans, the French and the Germans—they laid explosives in the building, and threatened to blow it up. I put them into the building, because I wanted to give the people good conditions. But it’s not true that I collaborated with them. I tried to save the lives of the passengers.”

  Question: “Do you intend to proclaim a state of emergency? Aren’t you afraid that, after an operation like this, and after such a blow, you are likely to lose the presidency of Uganda?”

  Amin (hesitating, sounding worried): “No, no! Definitely not! My soldiers are with me, and they are helping me, and there are no difficulties at all.”

  Question: “Will you proclaim a state of emergency?”

  Amin: “Yes.”

  A moment later he changed his mind, and in response to a further question concerning a possible state of emergency, replied: “Why?”

  Uri Dan said: “So that your regime can survive . . .”

  Amin: “No. My country is well protected. What happened is a small thing, and we’ll see to it.”

  “A last question, Mr. President: Will you approach the United Nations on this matter, or the Organization of African Unity?”

  Amin: “I can’t talk about that over the phone. Thank you.”

  Uri Dan wrote later: “From the moment I heard of the plane being hijacked to Uganda, I could not stop thinking of the scene in a documentary film about Idi Amin Dada, where he rows in a boat on Lake Victoria and talks to the crocodiles. While I followed the exhausting negotiations, through the so-called mediation of Amin, I fancied a crocodilelike conversation, though I could not make up my mind. When I completed my conversation with Amin, it was clear to me that the crocodile was on the other end of the line.”

  22

  “I AM DISTRESSED FOR THEE, MY BROTHER JONATHAN”

  The Sunday Nation in Kenya published a front-page account of the raid that morning. It may have been incautious on the part of editor George Githii, who had left Israel only hours earlier. Still, it was a scoop. Only those who knew the technicalities of newspaper production, and the sleepy routine of putting the Sunday edition to bed on Saturday afternoon, may have wondered.

  President Jomo Kenyatta had put his fellow Kikuyu into The Nation for political reasons and he kept a discreet distance. Nobody else in the one-party state would disturb the discipline imposed by Jomo, the old Mau Mau chief who knew a few things about terrorism himself. So when the Sunday Nation published its scoop, editor Githii was unlikely to have acted without his president’s approval. Kenya is too small. And Amin in Uganda had been getting too big. It would have been easy to keep secret the scene at Embakasi Airport, several miles from Nairobi with a game park between, although the airport had been busy all through the night.

  The unusual activity began when an unscheduled Boeing 707, El Al charter flight LY 167, landed at 11:26 p.m. local time and taxied to Bay 4, reserved for aircraft requiring security precautions. The 707 was quarantined at once by Kenyan GSU men and El Al staffers. The civil registration number on the tail was 4XBY8, which conflicted with the air control log that recorded this as Flight 169. Almost two hours later another 707 contacted Nairobi control and announced itself as Flight 167 from Tel Aviv.

  Slightly bewildered, the Nairobi air controllers accepted the captain’s report that he was delayed by engine trouble. Then they called El Al’s station manager to ask for clarification. This was enough to tell the El Al manager that the rescue planes were on their way to Nairobi from Entebbe. At 2:06 a.m. Nairobi time, both the second 707 and the first of the Thunderbolt Hercules landed together. Within the next 30 minutes, three more Hercules landed and joined the rest of the fleet in Bay 4. A fully equipped hospital inside the first Boeing 707 received the casualties brought by the Hercules. Ambulances sped ten of the more seriously wounded to the Kenyatta State Hospital where a Canadian nurse on night duty heard the call for blood. She was “astonished to see burly Israeli soldiers arrive to give transfusions. They already knew the type of blood required.” In the case of Pasko Cohen, the survivor from the Nazi death-camps, they were too late. He died shortly before dawn.

  The big transports gulped fuel for the long flight back and some of the released hostages left the security area for coffee and sandwiches. It was obvious that regular services were being extended beyond the normal daytime period. They were asked not to “make any fuss” about this hospitality, by officials of the East African Directorate of Civil Aviation who feared retaliation against their colleagues at Entebbe. In the event, four were reported by the directorate to have been murdered by Ugandan soldiers, apparently in revenge for failure to challenge the incoming Israeli planes.

  The last Hercules left Nairobi less than two hours before dawn. The Boeing 707 hospital followed, leaving two seriously wounded Israeli soldiers and an injured hostage in Kenyatta State Hospital. By daylight, the sole evidence of the night’s activities, reported The Nation, was bloodstains where the rescue planes had parked. Elsewhere on Embakasi Airport, however, squatted a P3 Orion long-range reconnaissance aircraft, the first U.S. Air Force plane to be based—however temporarily—in Kenya.

  About midnight, in Tel Aviv, the general staff, the task force ministers, and senior officers moved to the prime minister’s office—the red-tiled former barracks in Tel Aviv’s muddle of military and ministerial compounds. There they were met by Menachem Begin, the opposition leader, who, punctilious as always, arrived in suit, shirt, and tie despite the heat. He came at Rabin’s request.

  “Kol hakavod—well done!” Begin hugged the prime minister.

  “A drink?” Gur waved a whiskey bottle in Begin’s direction.

  “Tea.” Begin loosened his tie. It was the first sign of concession. He had maintained his old-world courtesy, his abstemious habits, his careful sense of dress almost as if to live down his reputation as the terrorist that the British once sought to “string up,” as he put it. He continued to relive the period of his Irgun resistance movement over and over, hour by hour. He was still Commander of the IZL—Irgun Zvai Leumi—though it was 30 years since Black Sunday when British and Jewish moderates moved against him.

  “Tea it is then,” said Gur, producing a glass of tea-colored liquid.

  Begin sipped it, made a face, then grinned. “To health—Lechaim” He swallowed the raw whiskey. “Today I make an exception.”

  The eyes of Herzl and Weizmann seemed to twinkle from the portraits on the wall.

  “You know how many fighters we lost during the Ir-gun campaigns?” asked Begin.

  “Several hundred,” guessed a young aide.

  “Thirty-five!” The opposition leader had taken off jacket and tie now. “The lives were always our priority. When operational planners came up with schemes, my first question was always: Is there a safe way back?”

  The question had been asked and answered on this anniversary of Black Sunday, just as it was at the birth of Israel. Many more had come back from Thunderbolt than the pessimists expected, because of the same obsessive concern for life, “an obsession,” Begin had once said, “that only comes from seeing one’s people nearly exterminated.”

  And so he broke his own rules and toasted the rescuers—nearly five hundred men and women in frontline roles, from agents to commandos. They had suffered the loss of Yonni, but nobody else.

  The sense of relief washed over Begin a few hours later when crowds mobbed him at Ben-Gurion Airport where he arrived with the task force to greet the released hostages. For eight hours, since 3:00 a.m. when the army radio first broadcast the news, families had received word through friends or from their committee. They gathered first at Yad Eliyahu baseball stadium at dawn. By then, the four Hercules had split and were moving toward secret bases to disgorge military equipment and the commando teams. Each of the big transports buzzed Elath Airport at the head of th
e Gulf of Aqaba and made low passes over other communities where civilians could be seen out in the streets, waving. The planes unloaded the human cargoes and equipment that still required top security protection, refueled, and reassembled at Ben-Gurion. It was 11:00 a.m. and the families of the hostages had moved to the airport from the stadium. When the crowds saw Begin, they seized him and began pushing him over their heads, passing him along in a spontaneous recognition that he represented tradition.

  A cable was sent to the parents in Boston, Massachusetts, reporting the death in action of Colonel Yehonatan Netanyahu, Yonni, son of Ben-Zion. Those who knew his father were sure that when he heard how Yonni died there would be no tears. And this was so. The parents flew back to receive Yonni’s body in Jerusalem. The father, steeped in Jewish history, a teacher of Jewish history at Cornell University, understood what prompts every Israeli soldier to take risks to recover the corpse of a fallen comrade and knew that grave risks had been taken to bring back this boy.

  “Yonni took me from the streets, literally,” said one of the commandos who visited the parents during the seven days of mourning. “I would be a criminal today, or going from job to job. I was lucky to get into his unit. He did more than teach night marches through the desert, jumping from planes, moving fast from a helicopter in battle. He knew all the weapons but he made me see them as the means of preserving the nation. He taught me history and opened my eyes. Because of him, I went to college.”

  Ben-Zion the father listened to these comrades of a fallen son and nodded and said little. He had completed his massive study of religious persecutions and his work in the United States had removed him only physically from his home in Jerusalem. He received Defense Minister Shimon Peres, who would deliver the eulogy at Yonni’s funeral. Peres reminded him of Ben-Gurion’s fine dedication of the first Scrolls of Fire to Reuben Avinoam: “To Reuben who lost his son and discovered his generation.” The defense minister added: “Ben-Gurion learned anew the astonishing human riches of our people, and the abysmal tragedy of the premature death of the best of our sons.”