No Mission Is Impossible

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  “The prime minister was ready to exchange the jailed terrorists for the hostages. Most of the cabinet thought like him. Even Menachem Begin, the bold activist, agreed with him. Motta Gur, the IDF chief of staff, ridiculed my little group, compared our plans to James Bond stories and called us the ‘Fantasy Council.’ I knew that even if I had a good plan, I couldn’t get it approved by the cabinet over the objection of the chief of staff and the reluctance of the prime minister. I decided to try obtaining the support of some cabinet ministers. I went to Hayim Tzadok, the minister of justice, a strong supporter of Prime Minister Rabin, but also a very wise and objective man. In utmost secrecy I revealed the plan to him. ‘An excellent plan,’ he said, ‘I’ll support it at the cabinet.’

  “I got another encouragement from my friend Moshe Dayan, the former defense minister. I found Moshe in the Tel Aviv Capricio restaurant, in the company of Australian guests. I admired Dayan and valued his opinion. We ordered two glasses of wine and moved to a nearby table. I told Dayan about the plan. I remember how his eye sparkled. ‘That’s a great plan,’ he said, ‘and I support it a hundred percent.’

  “But Motta Gur kept refusing to endorse the project. Only at the very last moment, on Friday morning, I brought him a new and detailed intelligence report about Entebbe, the hostages and the terrorists guarding them. This report made Motta change his mind. He became a staunch supporter of the mission.

  “Now, at last, we could go to Rabin and ask for his support.”

  TAMIR PARDO, SAYERET MATKAL’S COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER, LATER HEAD OF THE MOSSAD

  “There were many heroes in this mission. Everybody who took part in this operation—in every category—deserves a place in the Entebbe pantheon. The mission was well prepared but the guy who planned the air force part deserves special appreciation. To fly four Hercules aircraft to the heart of Africa; to land those without being detected; to discharge the forces without being fired at, even one shot; and to get them back after the rescue of the hostages—this is an act deserving our praise. Ido Ambar, who was a colonel in the IAF and head of the planning team, deserves special honors. True, military orders are always signed by generals and senior commanders, while the men who worked day and night, and brought to the task so much talent and creativity, remain sometimes in the shadows.

  “We, the takeover force, had trained well, and each and every one of us knew exactly what his place was and what his role in the operation was. During the long flight all I did was try to sleep and to not throw up because of the violent shaking and jumping of the planes that flew at different altitudes and chose different paths.

  “I was a twenty-three-year-old captain. In the assault of the Old Terminal I was in the first Land Rover, the jeep that moved ahead of the Mercedes. When our attack started I was beside Yoni. He was about a yard away from me when he was killed. In front of us stood a Ugandan soldier and he kept firing at us. I killed him. I think he was the one who shot Yoni, but there is another version—that Yoni was killed by a soldier firing from the old control tower or by a terrorist.

  “I had a lot of esteem for Yoni as a commander. I saw him in action, and he had a very important part in the success of the Entebbe mission. When he fell, I bent over him and saw that he was seriously wounded. I alerted the doctor at once and radioed Muki Betzer, his deputy, to assume command. Later I joined Giora Zussman’s detail, and together we entered the Old Terminal. The operation itself took barely a few minutes.

  “The following day we came back to Israel with the hostages. I was sent to Jerusalem, to the home of the Netanyahu family, to tell them about Yoni’s last moments. That was a painful task.”

  PART ONE

  How It All Started

  On May 14, 1948, the British Army and administration leave Palestine after thirty years of British rule. That same afternoon Israel’s independence is proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The United Nations, by a vote taken six months before, on November 29, 1947, has decided to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, but the Arabs reject partition. The local Palestinian Arabs and the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, as well as units of Arab volunteers from all over the Middle East, set out to invade and destroy the Jewish State. David Ben-Gurion is elected prime minister and minister of defense. The acting chief of staff is Yigael Yadin, a future world-renowned archaeologist.

  CHAPTER 2

  TO SAVE JERUSALEM, 1948

  On May 24, 1948, while Israel’s Independence War was raging, David Ben-Gurion summoned Yigael Yadin. He approached the map of Palestine, hanging on the wall in his office, and pointed at a crossroads marked “Latrun.”

  “Attack! Attack at all costs!” he forcefully said.

  Yadin refused.

  Ben-Gurion, “the Old Man,” was sixty-two years old, a stocky Polish-born man with a defiant face, a jutting chin, piercing brown eyes—all this crowned with two tufts of snow-white hair hovering like wings over his temples. Yigael Yadin was half his age—a thin young man, balding and with a luxuriant mustache. Before the war he had studied at Hebrew University, following in the footsteps of his father, a noted archaeologist.

  Ben-Gurion was haunted by the situation in Jerusalem. The Jewish part of the city was under siege, surrounded by the Arab Legion—Jordan’s first-rate army. Starved, thirsty, its defenders and weapons insufficient, Jerusalem was in immediate danger of collapsing. Ben-Gurion believed that if Jerusalem fell, the newborn Jewish State wouldn’t survive. The fortress of Latrun, near a Trappist monastery, controlled the road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem; it had been occupied by elite units of the Arab Legion. To break the siege, Latrun had to be conquered.

  But Yadin had other priorities. The Arab armies had penetrated deep into Israeli territory. The Syrians had reached the Jordan Valley; the Iraqis were close to the Mediterranean coast, threatening to cut the country in two; and the Egyptian expeditionary force had set up camp on the shore of the Lakhish River, thirty-five kilometers from Tel Aviv. Yadin believed he had to stop the Egyptians first.

  Latrun, Ben-Gurion repeated, had to be taken. Nothing else mattered as much. A heated exchange erupted between the two, and Yadin angrily slammed his hands on the glass plate covering Ben-Gurion’s desk, breaking it. But the Old Man wouldn’t budge. While respecting Yadin and even admiring his fiery character, he stuck to his guns. Yadin finally gave in, and in a telegram to the commander of the Seventh Brigade repeated Ben-Gurion’s order: “Attack at all costs!”

  Wave after wave of Israeli soldiers stormed the Latrun fortress over the next weeks; time after time their attacks ended in failure. Hundreds of Israelis were killed and wounded, but the Arab Legion repelled all the attacks. In the meantime UN envoys were feverishly trying to broker a temporary cease-fire between Jews and Arabs. Ben-Gurion knew that the cease-fire agreement would “freeze” the situation on the different fronts. This meant that if the cease-fire was achieved while Jerusalem was still under siege, that fact would be finalized in the UN reports, and Israel wouldn’t be allowed to supply Jerusalem with reinforcements and weapons. The Holy City would fall, and Israel with it.

  While Latrun fortress still blocked the road, Aryeh Tepper, a platoon commander in the Harel Brigade, which was fighting near Jerusalem, reported to the brigade commander, a young officer named Yitzhak Rabin. He asked permission to try to reach—by foot—the coastal plain. His brother had fallen in battle, Tepper said, and he wanted to visit his bereaved mother. Rabin not only approved the request but ordered three more soldiers to join Tepper. At nightfall, the four men made their way down steep slopes and tortuous arroyos, quietly slipped by an enemy patrol and finally reached kibbutz Hulda in the plain.

  The kibbutz members were stunned. It turned out that following some recent battles the Israeli forces had gained control over a strip of land between Hulda and the approaches to Jerusalem, west of Latrun and concealed from the enemy’s eyes by a mountain ridge. This discovery was almost unbelievable: there might b
e a chance to develop an alternative road to Jerusalem that would bypass the deadly Latrun fortress.

  A few days later, 150 soldiers reached Jerusalem by the new route; they were the first reinforcements to Rabin’s Harel Brigade. Yet the IDF did not need a footpath but a real road for the transport of weapons to the besieged city. The front commander, General David Marcus, decided to try reaching Jerusalem from the plain by jeep. Marcus, tall, jovial and smart, was an American colonel, a Brooklyn boy who had graduated from West Point and law school. He had volunteered for the U.S. Army during World War Two and parachuted over occupied Normandy on D Day with the 101st Airborne Division. He became a Zionist after witnessing the horrors of the German death camps. The Jewish people, he thought, while preparing legal briefs for the Nuremberg trials, must have a homeland. As a volunteer again, he had come to fight in Israel’s Independence War under the pseudonym Mickey Stone and had been appointed by Ben-Gurion as the first Israeli general. Now a senior officer in the IDF, he shared Ben-Gurion’s thoughts about the importance of saving Jerusalem.

  One night he set out from the plain on a jeep with two Harel officers, Gavrush Rapoport from kibbutz Beit Alfa and Amos Horev, a future general. The jeep slowly advanced through the gullies and up the hills, and the three officers discovered a route connecting with the Deer Path, a steep, sinuous trail that led to the Jerusalem road, far beyond the reach of Latrun fortress. Horev and Gavrush repeated their trip the following night, and after an exhausting three-hour drive suddenly bumped into another jeep that came from Jerusalem, carrying two other Harel officers. They joyfully hugged their comrades; they had proved that it was possible to reach Jerusalem from the plain by jeep!

  After several failures and mishaps, jeeps started moving along the new trail and even brought heavy mortars to Jerusalem. To shorten the process, the jeeps would bring their load to a rendezvous point with trucks coming from Jerusalem and transfer the food and the equipment. On their way back the jeeps brought wounded soldiers and civilians from Jerusalem to the plain. But it soon became clear that the jeeps could not transport enough food to the Jerusalem civilian population, which suffered from acute hunger. The city military governor, Dov (Bernard) Joseph, dispatched desperate requests for food, water and fuel.

  The engineering department of the Seventh Brigade, using all the heavy equipment it could find, started to build a real road, where trucks could pass, but the Achilles’ heel of that enterprise was the sheer Beth Sussin slope, where a four-hundred-foot abrupt drop separated two road portions.

  At Ben-Gurion’s order hundreds of porters were mobilized—some of them from Tel Aviv and some—about two hundred—volunteers from Jerusalem, who each carried a load of twenty kilograms of flour, sugar and other vital products; night after night they climbed the steep slopes and brought the food to Jerusalem. The army also tried to use some mules and three camels, but those were not very helpful.

  Time was running out, and Ben-Gurion ordered an all-out engineering offensive against the treacherous Beth Sussin slope. Every piece of equipment that could be found in Israel—bulldozers, tractors, compressors—was brought to the site. Israel’s major construction company, Solel Boneh, sent over its best engineers and workers. Expert stonecutters from Jerusalem were also mobilized, and the roadwork continued day and night. The feverish road paving was not only a technical endeavor but also a heroic operation: hundreds of soldiers and volunteers carried heavy loads on their backs, climbed the slopes, pushed or towed trucks and equipment. Jerusalem’s chief rabbi, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, authorized work on the road on the Sabbath and even called it “a great mitzvah [a good deed].”

  Nevertheless, the only way to vanquish the steep hill rising over the heads of the workers was to quarry into the rock a succession of serpentines—snakelike paths that would enable the trucks to reach the top.

  Suddenly, one night, explosions rocked the Jerusalem Hills, and a murderous shelling swept the new road site. The Arab Legion had detected the feverish activity close to its positions; it ignored what the Israelis were doing there, but started an intense bombardment of the area. The legion batteries relentlessly shelled the site and fired on the IDF soldiers and volunteers, who suffered heavy losses. Egyptian Spitfire planes also strafed and bombed the area several times.

  Yet the work continued in a race against the clock. In a few days the UN would announce a temporary truce that would freeze all activities on the ground. Building or paving roads was forbidden as long as the truce was in effect. If the road to Jerusalem was not open, the city would remain besieged for the duration of the truce and probably would collapse even before the fighting resumed. If Israel wanted to continue supplying Jerusalem during the truce, it had first to prove to the United Nations that there was a road to Jerusalem entirely controlled by the IDF.

  Forty-eight hours before the cease-fire, the road workers were stunned to see a group of foreign correspondents visiting their construction site. They had been led to the new road by Israeli press officers. Unwittingly, the journalists became of tremendous help to Israel. Their reports in the world press that Israel had secretly built an alternative road to Jerusalem were proof that the city was not under siege anymore.

  The New York Herald Tribune star reporter Kenneth Bilby called the new road Burma Road, after the highway built in the years 1937 to 1938 between Burma and China that provided supplies to the Chinese Army in spite of the Japanese blockade.

  The Israeli Burma Road was completed on the night before the truce began, on June 11, 1948. The work, however, quietly continued till July 14, when the UN observers visited the site and saw the Israeli trucks climbing all the way to Jerusalem. Later, when the Burma Road was paved and officially inaugurated, it was renamed the Road of Valor.

  The Burma Road being built behind the back of the Jordanian Legion.

  Hans Pinn, GPO (Israel’s Government Press Office)

  David Marcus, who had contributed so much to the Road of Valor, did not live to see it completed. Unable to sleep on the night before the truce began, he wrapped himself in a sheet and took a walk beyond the perimeter of his advanced command post. A sentry mistook the white-robed figure for an enemy. He shouted at the man in white, asking for that night’s password. Marcus failed to identify himself with the password, and the sentry fired at him, one single shot. Marcus collapsed, fatally wounded. His coffin was flown to the U.S. and buried with full military honors. A little-known IDF officer, his left eye covered with a black patch, escorted Marcus’s coffin to New York. He was named Major Moshe Dayan.

  Years later, Marcus’s story would be made into a film, Cast a Giant Shadow.

  A few hours before the truce began, the trucks rolled on Burma Road, and Jerusalem was saved.

  YITZHAK NAVON, LATER ISRAEL’S FIFTH PRESIDENT

  “During the siege of Jerusalem, I was the head of Intelligence’s Arabic division. With the outbreak of war, we could no longer use Arab agents and had to rely mainly on monitoring our enemies’ phone conversations. Thus, for example, when our fighters—among them future generals Dado Elazar and Raful Eitan—were about to retreat from the San Simon Monastery, in the Katamon neighborhood, we overheard a transmission from the Arab commander announcing that his soldiers were exhausted and he had decided to withdraw. As a result, we took control of Katamon. A similar thing happened to us at Allenby Camp. By contrast, when we picked up a discussion about a plan to set a trap for the Bloc Etzion relief convoy (the Bloc is a cluster of Jewish settlements south of Jerusalem), we passed it on to the military staff; but they didn’t take us into account, and the convoy departed. On its way back, it was attacked by the Arabs at Nebi Daniel, with lethal consequences. I then resigned my position—what’s the use of intelligence if it isn’t exploited?—but they convinced me to stay.

  “There was great hardship during the siege. The governor of Jerusalem, Dov Joseph, informed the government that the city’s entire stock was five days’ margarine, four days’ noodles and ten days’ dried meat. He introduced
rationing—two hundred grams of bread per day for adults (plus an egg for children), fifty grams of margarine per week, one tin of sardines every other week, one hundred grams of legumes, fifty grams of sugar and fifty grams of rice. We also ate mallow (malva), which I would pick in a field, and we made soup from grass. Water was distributed in measuring cups.

  “And then they broke through on the Burma Road!

  “One day, I went down to Tel Aviv on the Burma Road for an interrogation of prisoners. And, to my surprise, I was able to buy candles and matches and sardines—as much as I wanted. Sardines: what a feast!”

  The Independence War is crowned with an Israeli victory. At the end of 1953, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, sixty-seven, has resigned and settled in kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev, but in February 1955 he is convinced to return as defense minister under Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion accuses moderate Sharett of weakness and irresolution. This is also the opinion of the chief of staff, forty-year-old Moshe Dayan, who is a close ally of the director general of the defense ministry, thirty-two-year-old Shimon Peres. The incursions of terrorists into Israel and the growing threats of a new war publicly made by Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser lead Ben-Gurion to adopt a tough policy toward Israel’s neighbors. After each terrorist act Israel will now hold responsible the state from whose soil the terrorists have come—and launch retaliatory raids against its military bases.

  CHAPTER 3

  BLACK ARROW, 1955

  On February 28, 1955, after nightfall, six IDF paratroopers under the command of Captain Saadia (“Suppapo”) Elkayam crossed the border into the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. The border was not fenced—just a deep ditch dug by tractors. Suppapo’s small advance team quietly moved between two Egyptian army positions, but a couple of Egyptian soldiers in a concealed ambush farther up the road opened fire on the Israelis. Suppapo and his men killed the Egyptians with hand grenades and submachine-gun fire and continued to advance. Very soon they were joined by a column of paratroopers of the 890th Paratroop Battalion. At their head was an already famous officer: Ariel (“Arik”) Sharon.