Though only ten-years-old at the time, I remember Saturday 3 July 1976 as if it was yesterday. A keen tennis fan, I sat transfixed as a young and un-fancied Bjorn Borg took on Ilie Nastase, the enfant terrible of the game, and beat him in straight sets to win the first of his five consecutive Gentleman Singles’ titles on the sun-baked grass courts of the All England Club at Wimbledon. Consumed by this sporting drama, I was unaware–as was the rest of the world–that the week-long hijack drama at Entebbe Airport in Uganda was about to come to a sudden and violent conclusion as Israeli planes were even then flying south from Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai, carrying commandos who would storm the Old Terminal at night, kill all the terrorists and rescue the vast majority of the 100 or so hostages in the most audacious special forces operation in history.
I may have overheard mention of the raid on TV and radio news programmes the following day, along with accounts of a million US citizens on the streets of Washington to celebrate two hundred years of independence from British rule. By Monday 5 July, however, there was only one story that mattered in the British press: ‘Israel rejoices at success of raid to free Entebbe hostages’, read the front page headline in The Times.
It was huge international news and within a few months had inspired three hastily written books–all by journalists–and three feature films, including Victory at Entebbe starring Anthony Hopkins, Burt Lancaster and Elizabeth Taylor. More books followed as the years went by, but not a proper history from the perspective of all those involved: hostages, rescuers, terrorists, politicians, diplomats, journalists and terrorists (of whom remarkably little was known). The spark for my own interest in researching and writing such a dramatic anti-terrorist mission–after many years penning more conventional military histories–was a two line email from my agent: ‘2016 marks 40th anniversary of the Raid on Entebbe. Might this be worth thinking about? Just a thought…’
My initial reaction was cautiously positive. ‘Yes,’ I wrote back, ‘not a bad idea. I can go to Israel to i/v the survivors.’ The more I read about it, the more my enthusiasm grew. I was looking to try something new and, as far as I could see, the story had not yet been properly told. I decided to write it unfolding in real time, with the narrative shifting from the sweltering Old Terminal at Entebbe, where the hostages were kept, to the cabinet rooms of the governments involved (particularly Israel), the houses of the hostages’ families, the headquarters of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), the airport in Paris where the released hostages were debriefed, the bases of the soldiers chosen to spearhead the rescue force and, finally, the C-130 Hercules planes that were used to ferry the rescue force to Entebbe. The intention was to convey the unbearable tension felt by all involved as the clock ticked towards the final, bloody denouement. Where possible I have used dialogue that is sourced from diaries, memoirs, biographies and tape recordings. For the occasional bits of the story where no record of the dialogue exists–or has not yet been discovered–I have constructed it myself using more general accounts of that meeting or conversation, and my own assessment of the personalities involved, their motivations and the type of language they typically used. The result is, I hope, an exciting true story that is exhaustively researched yet reads more like a novel than a traditional history.
I’m particularly grateful to the participants–Israeli soldiers and politicians, hostages, a key member of the Kenyan government and a former terrorist–who shared with me their memories of that traumatic week and its aftermath: Muki Betser, Amnon Biran, Olivier Cojot-Goldberg, Stéphane Cojot-Goldberg, Amos Eiran, Ilan Hartuv, Aliva Laxer, Uri Lubrani, Christina McKenzie, Martine Mimouni-Arnold, Charles Njonjo, Nancy Rabinowitz, Peter Rabinowitz, Emma Rosenkovitch, Claude Rosenkovitch, Dany Saadon, Gerd Schnepel, Ephraim Sneh, Noam Tamir and Louis Williams.
Of the many other people who contributed in vital ways to the book–giving contact details, setting up interviews, finding and translating documents, recommending areas of research, answering questions about the story and the personalities involved, and reading the manuscript–I would like to thank Rachel Kenyon (my wonderful French translator), Hester Abrams, Rebecca Abrams, Massoud Alikhani, Eyal Boers, Tim Butcher, Juliet David, Uri Dromi, Dr Colonel (Retd.) Zeev Drory, Aliza Eshed, Matthew Fox, Karen Gilbert, Holly Harwood, Yaakov Havakook, Jonathan Khayat, Damien Lewis, Kevin Maxwell, S.H. Neumark, Reuven Merhav, Yossi Melman, Jakob Schäfer, Andrew Sharpe, Fiona Sharpe, Dominic Sutherland and Michal Wulkan.
I am grateful to Penguin Random House for permission to quote from Shimon Peres’s Battling for Peace; Sir Max Hastings for Yoni: Hero of Entebbe and Going to the Wars; to Louis Williams for The Israeli Defense Forces; to Katharina Karcher, for ‘Sisters in Arms? Female Participation in Leftist Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1970’ (her unpublished PhD thesis); and to Olivier, Stéphane, Yael Cojot-Goldberg and David Franck for their father Michel Goldberg’s Namesake. I am also grateful to Dr Zeev Drory of the Kinneret Center on Peace, Security and Society in Memory of Dan Shomron for permission to use documents and photos in the center’s possession and to Eyal Boers for letting me use extracts from his excellent and moving documentary Live or Die in Entebbe. I have endeavoured without success to contact other copyright owners for permission to include material from their books. I would urge them to get in touch.
This book was bought as a joint venture by Rupert Lancaster of Hodder UK and Geoff Shandler of Little, Brown in the US. I thank them both for their backing, and Rupert for his perceptive editing. Sadly Geoff was not able to see the book through to publication, but Vanessa Mobley, my Executive Editor at Little, Brown, has stepped into the breach with enthusiasm and expertise. Both Rupert and Vanessa have been assisted by first-class teams: Maddy Price, Leni Lawrence, Juliet Brightmore and Peter James in the UK; and Morgan Moroney, Daniel Jackson and Meghan Deans in the US.
I always have good reason to thank my agent Peter Robinson (and his wonderful assistant Federica Leonardis), but this time more than ever: he came up with the idea; played a key role in shaping both proposal and manuscript; and then had enough faith to pitch it to film agent Matthew Bates who promptly sold an option to the film company StudioCanal (currently developing a script about the Entebbe Raid with Working Title). The only thing Peter didn’t do is write the book.
My wife Louise and daughters Nell, Tamar and Natasha have shown more enthusiasm for this book than any previous, even those dedicated to them. I’d like to think it’s because the story encapsulates so much that is good about the human spirit–fortitude, grace under pressure and courage (moral and physical)–and because for most of those involved there was a happy ending. But the real reason, I suspect, is because I foolishly mentioned the faint possibility of a red carpet and a film première. More fool me.