“Y. didn’t kill him. He did not kill him. He died,” said Yigal Simon, the commander of 504 at the time. “It was a long interrogation. Very long. He was beaten, but it was established that his death was not connected to this. The autopsy proved it.”
When the three Arab operatives were brought from Kenya, Y. “worked them very hard,” according to a Shin Bet operative. One of them was badly injured and also hospitalized, but he recovered.
The German prisoners enjoyed completely different treatment and were questioned politely by Shin Bet personnel. AMAN chief General Shlomo Gazit visited the interrogation facility. “The lady [Schulz] made a remarkable impression,” he said. “A very strong woman, in control of herself and her surroundings with an iron hand. The guy was a drip.” In the end, Hadar, who conducted the interrogation in his quiet, cunning way, won Schulz over with his soft speech and innocuous appearance.
The two Germans confessed, pleaded guilty, and provided information about Haddad. “They told us a lot, including plans for future terror attacks,” said Hadar. “All of this time the woman from the Mossad [the German-Hebrew interpreter] is sitting there and telling me in Hebrew, ‘I’d like to slaughter her.’
“Before we parted, I took Schulz’s hand and asked, ‘Brigitte, let’s say that one day you go back to Germany and friends tell you that you have to kill Harry’—that’s how she knew me. ‘What will you do?’ And she answers, without blinking, ‘I couldn’t kill you, Harry, after everything you’ve done for me.’
“I was pleased. I thought that perhaps at least something in her had changed for the better. But then she added, ‘I’d ask someone else to shoot you.’ ”
—
ON JUNE 27, 1976, six months after the Kenyan attack was thwarted, Rabin and his cabinet convened for a meeting in the prime minister’s office, in the Kirya-Sarona in Tel Aviv.
The ministers were discussing a proposal by Defense Minister Shimon Peres to increase the pay of IDF soldiers when, at 1:45 P.M., the military secretary entered the room and handed Rabin a note. Suddenly his face became grave. He cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. “Before we go on, I have an announcement to make,” he said. “An Air France plane that took off from Lod at 9:50 has lost contact. Apparently hijacked. Apparently flying the other way. On the plane there are about eighty-three Israelis.”
The military aide, Efraim Poran, told Rabin that intelligence agencies did not know yet who had perpetrated the hijacking and that he’d update him when more information came in.
There was a moment, Rabin confided to an associate later, when he regretted not giving the okay to throw the Nairobi five into the sea.
“Forget it,” Rabin told Poran. “I know. It’s Wadie Haddad.”
There were four hijackers—two from the PFLP and two German leftist extremists. They had boarded the Paris-bound plane during a stopover in Athens, and after takeoff, they got up, drew guns, and burst into the cockpit, ordering the pilot to fly first to Benghazi, for refueling and to pick up three more terrorists, and then to Entebbe, Uganda.
Wadie Haddad had proved once again that he was the best strategist in the terrorist world. He had learned from his own and others’ mistakes and had produced a large-scale operation based on accurate intelligence, meticulous preparations, and coordination with at least two despots, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Uganda’s Idi Amin, both of whom extended logistical assistance and asylum to the hijackers, far from Israel’s reach.
Amin, an ex-boxer and a sergeant in the British Army, had seized control of Uganda with the assistance of the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Ministry, which maintained secret ties with the country. In exchange for bribes Amin received in suitcases with double bottoms, he awarded Israel large military and civilian contracts and gave the Mossad a free hand in Uganda.
But Amin’s bloodlust and cruelty were matched only by his lust for money, and in 1972, when Qaddafi began offering him bigger bribes than Israel had, he expelled its representatives and became its avowed enemy. He agreed to host the hijackers and their hostages at Entebbe, 2,200 miles from Israel.
Haddad believed that Israel would have no alternative but to negotiate with him. In Entebbe, his operatives released the 209 non-Israeli and non-Jewish passengers and the twelve Air France crew, though the crew, in a courageous act of solidarity, insisted on staying with the remaining eighty-three Israeli and eight non-Israeli Jewish passengers. The hijackers then demanded the release of fifty-three “freedom fighters” in exchange for the Israeli and Jewish hostages. This demand came via Idi Amin, who made telephone contact with Israel himself. The list of “freedom fighters” included Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, a man of the cloth who had used his diplomatic status to smuggle a large shipment of weaponry in his Mercedes sedan to Fatah cells in Jerusalem; Kozo Okamoto, one of the perpetrators of the 1972 Lod airport massacre; and the five terrorists who had been on the Nairobi mission, who Haddad was sure were in Kenyan or Israeli hands.
The Mossad was in turmoil. There were now many who regretted that the Nairobi five had not been dumped into the sea. At a command meeting, Tsafrir said, “They want the five? With pleasure. Let’s fly them to Uganda and drop them from the plane onto the roof of the terminal so Haddad will realize that that’s all he is going to get from us.”
Meanwhile, the IDF planned a rescue operation involving a huge force that would land in the area of Lake Victoria, then secure the whole airport and a wide swath of land around it. Rabin listened to the plan, growing angrier by the minute.
“In the time that it takes to secure the whole area, the hijackers will slaughter all the hostages, and Idi Amin will have time to bring in reinforcements,” he fumed.
“Rabin told the IDF that he wanted to see a plan in which no more than three minutes would elapse from the moment forces land until the rescue operation begins,” said the director general of the prime minister’s office, Amos Eiran. But from such a distance, without any intelligence, this seemed an impossible request.
Lacking any viable alternatives, Rabin was inclined to comply with the hijackers’ demands. Though he loathed the idea, he saw no other way to save the hundred-plus innocent lives. But this action would entail a breach of the ironclad law laid down by Golda Meir and accepted thereafter as Israeli policy: no negotiations with terrorists. Shin Bet director Avraham Ahituv demanded that, if there truly was no other way, then, at the very least, no prisoners “with blood on their hands”—a phrase that has since been invoked repeatedly in similar situations—should be exchanged for hostages. In other words, only junior PLO functionaries, who had not been directly involved in spilling Israeli blood, could be considered for release. “Anyone who has killed a Jew,” said Ahituv, “must either be eliminated or die in an Israeli prison after being sentenced to life.”
For four days, the debate continued. Demonstrations by relatives of the hostages raged outside the gates to the Kirya, within earshot of Rabin’s office. The daughter of the director of Israel’s main nuclear reactor was one of the hostages. He had access to Rabin and exerted heavy pressure on him to reach a compromise with the terrorists.
If all that wasn’t enough, Rabin then received a secret report from the Military Censorship Bureau that it had barred the publication, in an Israeli daily newspaper, of a story that included all the details of Operation Heartburn. Ahituv informed Rabin that he had ordered the reporter’s phone to be tapped but had still not managed to determine the source of the leak. Rabin was furious: “I am really shocked…[that] it is impossible in this country to take a military correspondent and lock him up and grill him about where he got it from….This [leakage of information] is going to be a disaster for us.”
Rabin understood that breaking Israel’s promise to Kenyatta of total secrecy about the Nairobi five would lead to a crisis in their relationship with Kenya. More important, disclosure of the affair could paint Israel, which was now asking for
the world’s support against the hijackers, as a pirate state employing terrorist-like methods. On the other hand, how could Israel negotiate with the terrorists when both they and Kenya denied having any knowledge of their whereabouts?
In the end, Caesarea came up with a solution that didn’t require a hostage-for-prisoner swap. Five years earlier, Harari had decided that he needed an operative who could pose as a pilot. Why, exactly? “Because perhaps we’ll need it one day” was his customary answer to any questions about preparations he’d made without any immediate cause. He persuaded Zamir to make the financial investment, and an operative code-named David underwent the lengthy training in Israel and Europe.
Now the investment paid off, big-time.
David rented a plane in Kenya and circled the Entebbe terminals and tarmac, taking photographs from the air. When he landed, he posed as a wealthy, pampered English hunter living in a Central African country who needed the assistance of the control tower on a number of matters. The Ugandan air controllers cooperated willingly and even had a drink with him, sharing their impressions of “the big mess of the last few days,” their term for the hostage situation in the nearby terminal.
Twelve hours later, when Harari brought David’s detailed report and the hundreds of photos he had taken to Rabin, the prime minister’s face lit up. “This is just what I needed,” he said. “This is the intelligence for an operation.” Especially important to Rabin were the shots of Ugandan soldiers all around the terminal, which he took as proof that Wadie Haddad’s men hadn’t booby-trapped the building. “Idi Amin wouldn’t have allowed his men to be there,” he said. It was also clear from the pictures that the Ugandan force guarding the terminal was very small.
Sayeret Matkal came up with an original and daring plan: A small Sayeret contingent would land, under cover of darkness, in an unmarked C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft, using the runway lights that were lit for a civilian cargo plane scheduled to land before it. The force would disembark and travel toward the terminal in a number of vehicles behind a black Mercedes similar to the one used by Idi Amin, in order to confuse the Ugandan guards. Close to the terminal, the force would dismount and storm the building from several different entryways, taking advantage of the surprise and confusion to eliminate the terrorists. All of this was supposed to be accomplished in less than two minutes. More IDF forces would land immediately afterward and would deal with the control tower, the Ugandan soldiers, and the Ugandan air force jets, so that they would not be able to pursue the Israeli planes once they took off with the hostages and troops aboard. Kenyatta agreed to allow the Israeli aircraft to land in Nairobi to refuel on the way back.
Defense Minister Shimon Peres believed that the plan could succeed, and he pressed Rabin. On July 3, the prime minister gave the green light for the raid.
The commanders of the operation asked Rabin what to do if they ran into Amin himself. “If he interferes, the orders are to kill him,” Rabin said. To which the foreign minister, Yigal Allon, added, “Even if he doesn’t interfere.”
The Israeli task force set out for the mission on four planes. Each soldier was given a map of Uganda and a sum of money in American dollars, in case they were stranded and had to escape on their own. “But it was clear to us that this was mere talk, and that in fact this was an operation without a getaway plan. If something were to go wrong, we’d be stuck there and would have to fight to the death,” said Yiftach Reicher, the deputy to Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Benjamin and now commander of Sayeret Matkal.
The first Hercules landed as planned. Reicher, who was in one of the Land Rovers following the black Mercedes, recalled the scene: “There was total silence and total darkness, blacker than black, in the huge, deserted airfield. Wide runways with nobody moving on them. All I thought to myself was ‘Mommy, this is scary.’ ”
The element of surprise was almost lost when the force encountered two Ugandan guards and Netanyahu decided that they constituted a danger and opened fire at them with a pistol fitted with a silencer. The soldiers were not killed by the shots, and the man sitting behind Netanyahu, believing they were still dangerous, shot them with his unsilenced rifle.
The sound of the rifle brought other Ugandan troops to the area, and a firefight began. The Israelis’ vehicles reached the terminal and the charge began, but Netanyahu was hit, and he later died of his wounds. However, the terrorists were taken by surprise when the raiding party, headed by Muki Betser, broke into the terminal, and he killed all of them before they could get organized. Reicher’s force broke into an adjoining building manned by Ugandan troops and killed them, too. Another detail seized the control tower. Another destroyed eight Ugandan air force MiG fighters parked on the runway.
All eight hijackers had been killed. Three of the hostages, caught in the cross fire, also died. Another hostage, an elderly Israeli woman who had been taken to the hospital the previous night, was murdered, on Amin’s instructions, in retaliation for the raid.
But a hundred people had been rescued, and Israel had made no concessions. The operation became a model for how to handle hostage situations: no negotiation and no compromise with terrorists, but a steadfast willingness to go to extraordinary lengths and even to risk lives in order to free hostages.
But though the raid on Entebbe was a significant tactical victory, the man who’d ordered the hijacking—the man Golda Meir had signed a kill order on more than six years earlier, the terrorist who’d been only slightly wounded by a barrage of RPGs fired through his Beirut office window, the zealot who’d survived a bomb dropped on a Beirut stadium in 1974, who topped Israel’s hit list, and who was the target of a number of assassination plans still on the drawing boards—was still alive and still at large.
Rabin told the Mossad to spare no expense. Wadie Haddad must die.
IN MAY 1977, ISRAEL’S Labor Party, which had ruled the country since its establishment in 1948, lost a national election for the first time. It was defeated by the Likud, a nationalist right-wing party led by Menachem Begin, the former commander of the Irgun, the anti-British underground. A combination of various factors—the discrimination and humiliation suffered by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, revelations of corruption in the Labor Party, the shortcomings of the Yom Kippur War, and the ability of the charismatic Begin to take advantage of these factors and ride a wave of populism—led to an upset that shocked both Israelis and observers abroad.
Begin was viewed by many foreign leaders and local top officials as an extremist and a warmonger. Some of the chiefs of Israel’s military and intelligence agencies were convinced that they would soon be replaced by partisans of the new government.
But Begin’s initial moves as prime minister surprised everyone, foreign and domestic. At a dramatic summit meeting with Presidents Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978, he agreed to a breakthrough peace treaty with Egypt that provided for Israel’s eventual total pullout from the Sinai Peninsula, conquered from Egypt in 1967. The withdrawal of the army, the dismantling of settlements, and the relinquishment of oil fields and tourism facilities were bitterly opposed by Israel’s right wing. But Begin, risking his own political standing, forced his party to comply. He also greatly strengthened the security alliance with the United States and bolstered the overarching authority of the Israeli Supreme Court.
Internally, there was no purge. Indeed, Begin even asked two men with strong ties to Labor—Shin Bet chief Avraham Ahituv and Mossad head Yitzhak Hofi—to remain in their jobs. “It was very strange for us,” Hofi said. The Labor Party was hard-boiled and pragmatic when it came to matters of the military and intelligence. “But for Begin,” Hofi said, “the army was something sacred.”
As a practical matter, that meant Begin gave the military and intelligence agencies carte blanche. He had been given very limited access to the intelligence community when he was leading the parliament opposition, and he had to be taught a
great deal. But even after he’d been exposed to the nuts and bolts, his oversight was superficial at best. “It was as if he was hovering above us at eighty thousand feet,” said Mossad deputy chief Nahum Admoni.
Begin signed off without question on all of the Red Page targeted killing orders that the Mossad submitted to him. The prime minister did not even insist on the standard operating procedure of having an aide transcribe meetings with the Mossad chief to approve sabotage and targeted killing operations. This surprised Hofi. “Rabin,” he said, “would bring the issue to be approved before a kind of inner cabinet.” But Begin signed off on operations “face-to-face, without a stenographer and without his military aide….I advised him that it was important to put things in writing.”
The only point of disagreement between Begin and his intelligence chiefs was one of shading and priorities. At his first meeting with Hofi, he said he wanted the Mossad to launch a large-scale targeted killing campaign against at-large Nazi war criminals. “I told him,” Hofi said, “ ‘Prime Minister, today the Mossad has other missions that concern the security of Israel now and in the future, and I give priority to today and tomorrow over yesterday.’ He understood that, but he didn’t like it….In the end, we decided that we’d concentrate on one target, [Josef] Mengele, but Begin was a very emotional person and he was disappointed.”
At the same time, though, Begin understood Hofi’s point. “Unlike other Israelis who saw the Holocaust as a one-time historical catastrophe,” said Shlomo Nakdimon, a prominent Israeli journalist who was close to Begin and served as his media adviser when he was prime minister, “Begin believed with all his heart that the lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people must protect themselves in their own country in order to prevent a renewed threat to their existence.”
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