His reasoning seems to have been that the possibility of ‘negotiating compensation for the lost assets against the background of a mismanaged Ugandan economy seemed remote’, that the number of British expatriates was diminishing by the day, and that the High Commission was ‘not being allowed to function as it should’.
By now the location of Bloch’s body was public knowledge in Uganda as people came in their hundreds to view the grisly remains: an attempt had been made to burn the corpse, but the white hair ‘remained conspicuously identifiable’. Among the eyewitnesses was the famous Ugandan photographer Jimmy Parma who worked for the Voice of Uganda newspaper. When word got round that he had taken pictures of the corpse, Parma was picked up in broad daylight by Amin’s henchmen and later murdered.
Dora Bloch and Jimmy Parma were far from the only victims of Amin’s fury in the wake of Operation Thunderbolt. Blamed for allowing the Israelis to land, the three air traffic controllers on duty at Entebbe on the night of the raid were also murdered on the president’s orders, as were many hundreds of ethnic Kenyans, including the director of civil aviation, and a number Karamajong tribesmen who were seen by Amin as the enemy within because their lands straddled the disputed Ugandan–Kenyan border. On 16 July the Kenyan border police estimated that more than 3,000 Kenyans had fled from Uganda.
The Kenyans responded by expelling several hundred Ugandan railway and airport staff, and by asking Britain to supply arms and ammunition to combat a possible Ugandan attack. Britain ‘agreed instantly to the Kenyan request’ and ‘immediately put in train arrangements for flying the equipment to Kenya by the fastest possible route’, though the difficulty of ‘gaining overflying rights’ meant the delivery time was longer than either party had hoped.
Finally, on 28 July, Crosland announced in the House of Commons that ‘with deep regret’ Britain was severing diplomatic ties with Uganda. It was doing so, he explained, because it was no longer possible for High Commission staff ‘effectively to discharge their duties’. Henceforth France would represent British interests in Uganda. It was the first time Britain had taken such action since breaking with Albania in 1946.
In the two weeks since the raid, Gerd Schnepel and his comrades in the RC had been considering ‘brutal’ ways to take revenge for the deaths of Böse and Kuhlmann at Entebbe, including the destruction of planes in flight. When nothing came of these plots, Schnepel and Johannes Weinrich flew to Baghdad to meet Wadie Haddad and ‘clean up the situation’. ‘We went,’ said Schnepel, ‘to analyse the defeat, make some agreements and work out how to contact each other. Because things were still in danger of being discovered.’
It was after this trip to Baghdad that Schnepel began to reconsider his membership of the RC. About a year later, during a delegate meeting of the various cells, he announced he was leaving the group. He no longer believed that its tactic of conducting joint operations with other international terror groups was likely to succeed. ‘I thought it wouldn’t bring us success,’ he said. ‘We would either all be killed, like Boni and Brigitte, or be put into prison. The enemy was too strong to fight in this way. We had to look for different ways of bringing down capitalism or finding an alternative. I eventually went into organic agriculture in Franconia in Germany, then in Washington state in the United States, and finally in Nicaragua.’
For the RC in general, however, Entebbe marked a watershed. ‘For most group members,’ wrote Katharina Karcher, a historian of German left-wing terrorism, ‘the failed kidnapping would lead to a turn away from “anti-Zionist” attacks, which had previously constituted a central field of action for the group.’ A few–Weinrich included–felt that, despite Entebbe, they should not limit their activities to West Germany and should ‘participate in armed conflicts around the globe’. But this ‘international cell’ became increasingly isolated from the rest of the RC who avoided further attacks against Israeli targets and focused instead ‘on local struggles and new social movements such as the anti-nuclear movement and the women’s movement in West Germany’.
The events at Entebbe–particularly the reports of a ‘selection’ of passengers, ‘Jews on one side, non-Jews on the other, with the Jews slated for execution’–had a profound effect on other German left-wing radicals like Joschka Fischer, the future foreign minister, who knew Wilfried Böse and Hans-Joachim Klein, and had himself supported the PLO’s anti-Zionist cause in 1969. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Paul Berman in his book Power and the Idealists, ‘the implications of anti-Zionism struck home to him… Now he knew what it meant. Fischer seems never to have gotten over the shock of Entebbe… He [later] cited the hijacking and especially the “selection” of Jews as part of his Desillusionierung with the violent left.’
Berman added:
Entebbe had such an effect on quite a few of West Germany’s New Leftists. A new suspicion was dawning on these people… It was a worried suspicion that New Left guerilla activity, especially in its German version, was not the struggle against Nazism that everyone on the New Left had always intended. It was a suspicion that, out of some horrible dialectic of history, a substantial number of German leftists had ended up imitating instead of opposing the Nazis–had ended up intoxicating themselves with dreams of a better world to come, while doing nothing more than setting out to murder Jews on a random basis: an old story.
Palestinian officials stunned the world by announcing the death of Wadie Haddad, the fifty-year-old ‘godfather’ of international terrorism, architect of the Entebbe hijackings and Israel’s Enemy No. 1. According to three Beirut newspapers, Waddad had expired of an ‘incurable disease’–thought to be leukaemia–in an East Berlin clinic on Tuesday 28 March. But George Habash’s PFLP disputed this claim, saying that Haddad had died in an unnamed Arab country and had ‘acquired martyrdom’, a phrase rarely used for a death from illness. ‘I can only say he did not die in Beirut,’ said a PFLP spokesman. ‘I can’t say now where or why he died.’ After first stating that Haddad would be buried in Beirut, the PFLP command corrected itself: the body had been flown to Baghdad for interment on Monday 2 April.
Habash travelled to Baghdad to attend the funeral of his former right-hand man, declaring at the airport: ‘We came to Baghdad to attend a sad occasion, which is the martyrdom of Dr Wadie Haddad, one of those who fought against imperialism and Zionism.’ He said he would ‘continue the march of the struggle for the Arab cause for which Haddad died’.
Shigenobu Fusako, the head of the Japanese Red Army and a protégé of Haddad’s, added: ‘He gave extreme care to each detail. He was a maniac for the most absolute secrecy. With him, the risk of error was eliminated. He duped many secret services, especially the Mossad. He still remains today, even after his death, our master and our model.’
Many at the time suspected Israeli involvement in Haddad’s death. This involvement was given added credence in 2006 with the publication of Aaron J. Klein’s Striking Back. Having discovered Haddad’s love of fine chocolate, says Klein, the Mossad arranged for the delivery of a box of Belgian chocolates laced with poison. Haddad died several months later after doctors were unable to diagnose his illness. More detail was provided in a second book by American academic Ami Pedahzur. According to Pedazhur, the Belgian pralines were injected ‘with a fatal biological substance’ that had been developed at the Research Institute of Biology at Ness Ziona in central Israel. Having eaten them, ‘the burly Haddad began to shed pounds’ and tests showed that his ‘immune system had collapsed’. In great agony he continued to deteriorate and eventually died.
The Mossad had tried and failed many times to kill Haddad, redoubling its efforts after the hijacking of Flight 139. Now, finally, it had got its man.
On a spring morning in 1978, Bruce McKenzie boarded a small twin-engined Piper Aztec light plane at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport for the short flight to Entebbe. Accompanied by two businessmen, Keith Savage and Gavin Whitelaw, he was due to meet President Idi Amin at State House to discuss an arms deal and the ongoing poor relations between Kenya and Uganda. Given that McKenzie was partly responsible for those frosty relations–having played a key role in persuading Kenyan security chiefs to let the Israeli planes refuel at Nairobi in 1976–it seems odd that he was willing to beard the lion in his den.
Yet McKenzie had never confessed to his role in the raid and was convinced that his semi-official status as a trusted adviser of President Jomo Kenyatta, as well as his role in supplying Uganda with military hardware, would protect him from assassination. McKenzie was a director of Wilken Communications Ltd of Nairobi, a company owned by Keith Savage which, among other things, distributed radio equipment for the British telecommunications firm Pye. One of Wilken’s biggest customers in Uganda was Amin’s feared secret police, the State Research Centre, which in August 1977 had ordered sophisticated Pye radio-telephone systems worth £44,500. More orders for radios, boats and vehicles followed, but by then Uganda’s economy was in freefall and Amin was struggling to pay his creditors. It was partly to demand payment of unpaid bills, partly to drum up more business, that McKenzie and Savage flew to Entebbe on 24 May 1978. McKenzie’s other motive for going, according to Charles Njonjo, was political: ‘He wanted to see what he could get out of Amin in the interests of Kenya. He knew that at that time we were trying to cultivate Amin.’
Shortly before his departure from England to Kenya in May 1978, McKenzie invited journalist and friend Chapman Pincher to his Surrey home and told him about his forthcoming trip to Uganda. Pincher was astonished, and warned McKenzie that ‘Amin might take revenge for his part in the Entebbe raid.’ But McKenzie would not be put off. He explained that he had already made one trip to Uganda and nothing had happened. ‘You don’t understand the African mind like I do,’ said McKenzie. ‘I’m convinced that Amin wants to repair his reputation with the West, which is why you should come with me to interview Amin and report the evidence of his good intentions.’
Pincher shook his head. ‘I don’t need to remind you,’ he told his friend, ‘that I’m also on his hit-list because I exposed, with Mossad’s help, his monstrous role in the hijacking.’
McKenzie insisted that neither of them was in any danger and, much against his better judgement, Pincher eventually agreed to go along. But at the last minute a British businessman called Gavin Whitelaw persuaded McKenzie that he should go instead because he had a commercial proposition to put to Amin. Pincher’s trip was postponed.
After landing at Entebbe on 24 May, McKenzie, Savage and Whitelaw were driven to nearby State House where they had ‘friendly’ talks with Amin. Back at the airport, however, they were told the plane could not take off until one of Amin’s cars had arrived with a gift for McKenzie. So they waited, and McKenzie used the time to call his wife Christina and complain about the delay. She had thought he was ‘potty’ to return to Uganda, but was not unduly worried.
Eventually a car drove up and McKenzie was handed Amin’s present: a mounted lion’s head. He carried it on board the Piper Aztec which took off at 4.19 p.m. with a pilot and three passengers. During the next forty minutes the control tower at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport was contacted three times by the pilot, the last at 5.58 p.m. It was due to land at 6.15 p.m. but that time came and went. The plane had crashed into the Ngong hills with no survivors. The most likely explanation is that Amin’s gift, the lion’s head, contained a time bomb. That was the conclusion reached by Kenyan intelligence, by McKenzie’s good friends Charles Njonjo and Chapman Pincher, and also by his wife Christina who was left a widow with two young boys.
Letters of condolence came from world leaders across the globe, including Jim Callaghan, the Shah of Iran, the Aga Khan and Yitzhak Rabin. The Israelis had already recognized the service that McKenzie did for them during the raid by awarding him the special medal given to participants of ‘Operation Yonatan’. After McKenzie’s death, the then head of the Mossad, Meir Amit, arranged for a memorial forest to be planted in Israel in his name.
Idi Amin’s sins finally caught up with him in the spring of 1979 when his capital fell to Ugandan rebels and troops from the Tanzanian Army, and he was forced to flee by helicopter. He went first to the north of the country, then to Libya, and finally to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where King Khaled had offered him sanctuary and a generous pension. He lived in Jeddah with some of his family until his death in 2003 of kidney failure.
The humiliation of the Entebbe Raid had been for Amin the beginning of the end because it shattered the myth of his military prowess. In an attempt to shore up his crumbling authority, he struck out ‘at those against whom he has a slight grievance, however slight’, like the Anglican archbishop Janan Luwuum and two members of his Cabinet. Their murders in early 1977–and the persecution of the Langi and Ocholi tribes, both of whom he accused of assisting the Israelis at Entebbe–were the triggers for the defection of Henry Kyemba and several other government ministers. Soon after arriving in England in May 1977, Kyemba published a book about Amin’s brutal regime, A State of Blood, which accused the dictator of orchestrating the murder of over 100,000 Ugandans. Amin’s support was dwindling.
In November 1978, troops loyal to the vice-president, General Mustafa Adrisi, mutinied in the south of the country. The insurrection failed and the survivors fled across the Tanzanian border, prompting Amin to accuse the Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere of inciting his soldiers. This was the pretext for Amin’s army to invade Tanzania and annex the disputed region of Kagera. But in January 1979 Nyerere’s army counter-attacked and, with the support of several Ugandan rebel groups, drove Amin’s troops back to Kampala and beyond.
Six weeks after Amin’s flight from the capital, Dora Bloch’s remains were exhumed from their shallow grave near the Jinja Road and positively identified by an Israeli forensic pathologist using spinal x-rays. They were flown back to Israel and reinterred in a state funeral attended by President Yitzhak Navon in Jerusalem on 5 June 1979.
As the New Year’s Eve celebrations were in full swing in the dining room of the famous Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, a bomb exploded in a bedroom above, bringing the ceiling down on to the revellers. More than twenty people were killed and eighty injured.
The man responsible for planting the bomb was Qaddura Mohammed Abdel al-Hamid, a thirty-four-year-old Moroccan member of the PFLP, who had checked out of the hotel seven hours earlier and flown to Saudi Arabia. The Norfolk had been targeted not only because it was the most famous hotel in Kenya and a regular stop for foreign tourists; but also because it was part of the Israeli-owned Bloch Group of Hotels (no connection to Dora Bloch). The Norfolk’s partial destruction, therefore, was an attack on both Kenya and Israel, and was the final act of revenge for the Entebbe Raid.