by Max Boot
From the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador to the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Montoneros in Argentina, Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s gave birth to a bewildering array of guerrilla and terrorist groups with similar names, similar proclivities for violence, and similar ideologies to justify their acts, notwithstanding bitter and self-defeating divisions between Trotskyites, Maoists, and pro-Moscow Communists. Most of these movements were inspired by “the glorious Cuban Revolution.”150 Some were based in rural areas in accord with Guevara’s advice: “In the underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.”151 Others—particularly in more urbanized countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay—were more influenced by the Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1970), which substituted an urban foco for a rural one.
Marighella was head of National Liberation Action, a Brazilian terrorist group formed in 1967. It kidnapped several foreign diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador, hijacked a Brazilian airliner, and robbed numerous banks. But while Marighella focused on targets different from Guevara’s, his views on the redemptive power of violence and the heroic qualities of the revolutionary were similar. “Today,” he wrote, “to be ‘violent’ or a ‘terrorist’ is a quality that ennobles any honorable person, because it is an act worthy of a revolutionary engaged in armed struggle against the shameful military dictatorship and its atrocities.”152
There was another resemblance: Marighella was just as unsuccessful as Guevara. In 1969 he was shot dead in an ambush by Brazilian police. His urban foco disappeared as rapidly as Che’s rural foco in Bolivia.
The same fate was suffered by almost every rebel group in Latin America, rural or urban. The one exception was the Sandinista movement, which took over Nicaragua in 1979 from Anastasio Somoza, who was as weak, corrupt, and incompetent as Batista. But the Sandinistas were hardly an isolated foco. They had been organizing since 1961 and were part of a broad-based antiregime movement that came to include the Catholic Church, the chambers of commerce, and much of the upper class—something that happened nowhere else in Latin America outside of Cuba. And, just as in Cuba, the revolutionaries’ triumph in Nicaragua was facilitated by a last-minute cutoff of U.S. aid to the old regime.153
EVEN WHEN ULTIMATELY unsuccessful, most of the Latin American revolutionary groups managed to inflict considerable carnage for substantial periods of time. Rural guerrilla movements, in particular, had the ability to stay alive for decades. But the social change they achieved was mostly negative by inadvertently spurring military takeovers. Latin military juntas unleashed the security forces, often complemented by paramilitary “death squads,” to wreak carnage against the rebels and their suspected sympathizers—a category wide enough to encompass almost any leftist. As many as 30,000 people were said to have died in Argentina’s “Dirty War” alone—the name given to the campaign by the junta in Buenos Aires against suspected leftists from 1976 to 1983.154 The toll in Guatemala was even higher: a civil war that raged between 1960 and 1996 cost the lives of an estimated 200,000 people.155
Heavy-handed repression was counterproductive in Algeria and Indochina, where the counterinsurgents were foreigners who lacked popular support. Batista and Somoza showed how repression could backfire even when perpetrated by homegrown regimes. But by the early 1970s many Latin Americans, perhaps most, were genuinely alarmed about growing violence and chaos and the possibility of a communist takeover. This led to widespread if tacit support for the harsh steps taken by military regimes to restore law and order. Once the crisis passed, the public turned on the generals and demanded the restoration of civilian rule. By the turn of the millennium most Latin American insurgencies had been crushed and, not coincidentally, most Latin countries had become democratic.
The defeat of all these communist movements did not require direct American military intervention, except in the Dominican Republic and Grenada, but there was a considerable role for American military backing especially in El Salvador in the 1980s and Colombia in the 2000s. In both cases democratic governments, benefiting from much greater American support than Batista or Somoza had ever received, curbed the excesses of their own militaries and embraced the sort of population-centric counterinsurgency methods that had been used by Templer in Malaya and Magsaysay in the Philippines. El Salvador’s FMLN gave up the armed struggle and became a political party in 1992. Colombia’s FARC survived President Alvaro Uribe’s 2002–10 offensive but as a much diminished force and one that appeared more interested in criminality than in revolution. For his success in beating back an insurgency that once seemed on the verge of power, Uribe deserves to be remembered along with Gerald Templer and Ramón Magsaysay as among the most effective counterinsurgents since World War II.156 Though no American adviser of the stature of Edward Lansdale emerged from these conflicts, there were many “Quiet Professionals,” as the Green Berets like to call themselves, who played an important behind-the-scenes role in bolstering indigenous counterinsurgency capacity.
Latin America was not, of course, the only region that experienced an epidemic of revolutionary violence in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a worldwide phenomenon that afflicted even the advanced liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America. Everywhere radicals inspired by the example of Mao, Ho, and Che—the one-name gurus of guerrilla-ism—mounted a violent assault on the “establishment.” Many of them received direct support from Cuba, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other communist or radical states. In the process they ushered in a second age of international terrorism that in sheer savagery easily eclipsed its forerunner, the anarchist epoch.
55.
THE CHILDREN OF ’68—AND ’48
The Raid on Entebbe and the Terrorism of the 1970s
AT 12:20 P.M. on Sunday, June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139 made a smooth departure from Athens airport, where it had stopped en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. The cabin crew was busy preparing lunch for the 246 passengers when a scream was heard from the first-class section. The flight engineer opened the cockpit door to investigate and found himself face to face with a young blond man waving a pistol and hand grenade. He had a Peruvian passport identifying him as Senor Garcia, but his real name was Wilfried Böse, and he belonged to an offshoot of the Red Army Faction—a German leftist group popularly known, after two of its founders, as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Also on board was his girlfriend and fellow Revolutionary Cells member Brigitte Kuhlmann, who was sporting a ponytail and glasses. Waving a gun and hand grenade of her own, she took over the first-class cabin. At the same time, in the economy section, two Arabs stood and grabbed hand grenades they had smuggled aboard in tin candy boxes past the notoriously lax Greek airport security. Kuhlmann referred to them as “Comrade 39” and “Comrade 55.” Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Jayel Naji al-Arjam were both senior members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-Special Operations Command, one of numerous Palestinian splinter groups targeting Israeli interests.
The incongruous nature of this alliance—dispossessed Palestinians and “guilty white kids” from the West157—was made clear when Böse took to the intercom of the Airbus A300 to announce to the frightened passengers that they were under the control of the “Che Guevara Force and the Gaza Commando of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” The links between far-flung terrorist organizations became clear, too, when the hijackers issued a demand for the release of fifty-three terrorists detained by countries as disparate as Israel, France, West Germany, Switzerland, and Kenya. Among them was one of the Japanese Red Army operatives who in 1972 had gunned down twenty-six travelers in Israel’s Lod Airport, today Ben Gurion Airport, at the behest of the PFLP. Those demands emanated from Entebbe airport in Uganda, where Flight 139 landed at 3:15 a.m. on Monday, June 28, after a refueling stop in Libya, and they received instantaneous coverage on television screens around the world.
The terrified hostages did not know what to expect when the Ugandan army surrounded the airplane. Were they about to be rescued? It soon became clear, however, that Uganda’s maniacal dictator, Idi Amin Dada, was working with the terrorists. Although Uganda had previously enjoyed good relations with Israel, Idi Amin, a Muslim, had embraced the Palestinian cause after seizing power in a military coup in 1971. He established close ties with Libya and Saudi Arabia, which provided him with financial aid that he could use to subsidize an economy badly battered by his decision to expel and expropriate the South Asians who had owned many of the country’s most successful businesses. In 1972 Idi Amin had publicly proclaimed his belief that Hitler had been right when “he burned over six million Jews.” The passengers therefore had much to fear as they were transferred to the airport’s old terminal under the guns of the Ugandan soldiery. Here the four terrorists who had taken control of the airplane were joined by six compatriots. They were under the command of Dr. Wadia Haddad, who was operating from a temporary headquarters in Mogadishu, Somalia. A dentist by training, the well-educated Haddad had founded the Marxist-oriented PFLP in 1967 with George Habash, a fellow Palestinian medical student he had met in Beirut. Their specialty was spectacular terrorism; their favorite target, airliners.
Aerial piracy was as old as commercial air travel; the first recorded instance occurred in 1931 when a Pan Am airliner was hijacked in Peru by local revolutionaries who wanted to drop propaganda leaflets. The first airline bombing occurred just two years later when a United flight was blown up en route from Cleveland to Chicago, killing all seven on board.158 But Habash and Haddad took airline attacks to new heights, making this the signature terrorist tactic of the 1970s, just as handheld bombs had been the signature weapon of the anarchist era and car bombs were to become the signature weapon of the 2000s. In 1968 PFLP operatives were the first to hijack an El Al aircraft; in February 1970 they blew up a Swissair jet in the air; and in September 1970, in a frenzy of attacks, they simultaneously seized four Western airliners. In response Israel dispatched commandos to blow up fourteen empty aircraft on the ground at Beirut airport in 1968 and, more importantly, introduced armed air marshals and other stringent and costly security measures on El Al. This forced the PFLP to set its sights on other nations’ aircraft that were not as well protected. By 1976 even Habash had decided that attacks on non-Israeli and nonmilitary targets had gone too far. Haddad broke away to form his own ultra-radical faction, PFLP-Special Operations Group, which received considerable covert support from the KGB,159 showing not for the first or last time the importance of outside backing for insurgents.
The PFLP-SOG members who had taken control of Flight 139 claimed that France and other countries were complicit in “Zionist crimes,” but their animus was directed primarily against Israelis and Jews. On the evening of Tuesday, June 29, Böse announced that certain of the passengers were going to be moved to a separate room in the old terminal. As he began reading off the names from their passports, it became apparent that all those he named were Jewish. For the Jewish passengers, who included Holocaust survivors, the reading of the names in a German accent was chillingly reminiscent of Auschwitz, where Dr. Josef Mengele had chosen who would die immediately and who would get to live a little longer. Over the next two days, 148 Gentiles were released and flown to France. Ninety-four Jews remained along with the 12 members of the Air France crew who courageously volunteered to stay behind.
The release of the Gentiles was, from the hijackers’ perspective, a fatal mistake. As soon as they arrived in Paris, they were debriefed by Israeli operatives who learned vital details about the layout at Entebbe. Further information was provided by Israeli officers who had served in a military assistance mission to Uganda and by two Mossad agents who rented a small airplane and flew over the airport taking pictures. Their findings made possible the planning of a rescue operation.
Ever since the hijacking had started, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Defense Minister Shimon Peres, and fellow cabinet ministers had been debating whether to mount such an operation or whether to accede to the terrorists’ demands as Israel had done many times before. The record of past rescue missions did not inspire much confidence. The most famous failure occurred at Munich airport in 1972 when a clumsy German attempt to free Israeli Olympic athletes had resulted in the death of all nine hostages and one policeman along with five of eight terrorists. Israeli security forces were better prepared for such difficult operations but often no more successful. In 1974 three Palestinian infiltrators from Lebanon had seized a school at Ma’alot in northern Israel. Army commandos rushed in but did not get to the terrorists fast enough, allowing them to kill twenty-one children and wound dozens more. The following year eight PLO operatives, who had landed by Zodiac boat on a beach, took over the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv. Again army commandos attacked. This time five hostages were freed but eight were killed along with three soldiers.
Both of these operations had been carried out by the army’s elite Sayeret Matkal, known simply as “the Unit,” which was modeled on the SAS. It had had more luck in 1972 when four Palestinians landed a hijacked Sabena Airlines flight at Lod Airport. Sixteen commandos disguised as airport technicians in white overalls, including Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak and Lieutenant Benjamin Netanyahu, both future prime ministers, managed to free the airplane with the loss of only one passenger. But hostage rescue was not the unit’s specialty, and it had never conducted an operation so far from home. So few in the Unit believed that they would be given the order to fly to Entebbe. They did their best, however, to plan a successful operation.
Even as the attention of the world continued to be riveted on the plight of the hostages, who were growing worried they would never go home again, Israel’s senior military and civilian leaders became increasingly confident that Operation Thunderball, as the operation was code-named, could be pulled off with acceptable losses. Rabin decided it was worth doing if even fifteen or twenty hostages and rescuers died. Better that than give in to blackmail.
At 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 3, 1976, four heavily laden C-130 cargo aircraft took off from the Sinai Peninsula bound for Entebbe, almost 2,500 miles away. Aboard was a 34-man assault team from the Unit that would free the hostages. There were also more than 130 other soldiers and four light armored vehicles to keep the Ugandan army at bay while the operation was going on.
A minute past midnight on July 3–4, 1976, the lead C-130 touched down at Entebbe. Within seconds the Unit’s men, dressed in Ugandan army uniforms, were rolling down the dark tarmac in a black Mercedes and two Land Rovers outfitted with mock Ugandan license plates. They had to cover a mile from their aircraft to the old terminal and hoped that this ruse would make the sentries think that Idi Amin or some other big shot was in the limousine. But almost three hundred yards short of their destination they were stopped by two guards. One of them raised his rifle. Sayeret Matkal’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu, and another soldier in the Mercedes opened fire with silenced .22-caliber Beretta pistols. Their small-caliber ammunition did not stop the sentry, forcing another commando in a Land Rover to open fire with his unsilenced AK-47. The gunfire could have been disastrous by giving the terrorists time to kill their hostages. “I was seeing the entire element of surprise evaporate,” wrote one of the Unit’s officers. But luckily the hijackers were fooled by the Ugandan uniforms; they thought they were witnessing a coup attempt against Idi Amin—not a rescue attempt.
; The Mercedes and Land Rovers screeched to a halt farther than planned from the terminal as “long bursts of fire shattered the night air.” Running toward their objective, the Israelis were astonished to discover that one of the entrances they had planned to use was blocked. Their intelligence had been faulty. The whole assault was in danger of stalling until Netanyahu rushed to the front, urging his men forward. At the very moment a terrorist inside the terminal fired a shot that hit him. He fell, mortally wounded, but his men kept moving, obedient to his orders not to pause for casualties. They burst into the hall where the hostages were being kept and quickly cut down all seven terrorists on the premises, including the Germans, Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann. In the confusion three hostages were also killed, but the others were safe. Just four minutes had passed since the first C-130 had landed.
Meanwhile the backup Israeli force was securing the rest of the airport, despite constant if inaccurate fire from a determined defender in the control tower. The Israelis killed as many as fifty Ugandan soldiers and blew up seven MiG fighter aircraft on the ground to make pursuit impossible. By 1:40 a.m. the last C-130 had taken off, heading for refueling in Kenya before a return journey to Israel. Only one hostage was left behind—seventy-five-year-old Dora Bloch, who had been removed to a Kampala hospital and was murdered a few days later by Idi Amin’s henchmen.
The hostages and their saviors were met by a rapturous Israeli public eager to erase the foul memories of military unpreparedness that had nearly led to catastrophe in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Only the members of the Unit were not rejoicing; they were mourning their commander, Yoni Netanyahu, the only soldier who lost his life in Operation Thunderball. (Another soldier was crippled for life.) Yoni’s memory would be carried on, burnished to superheroic proportions, by his family, including his younger brother, Benjamin, the future prime minister. The operation as a whole was celebrated not only in the news of the day but in books and films such as Raid on Entebbe (1977), in which Charles Bronson, Peter Finch, and other American actors played the Israeli principals.