The first that Captain Michel Bacos knew of the plane’s final destination was more than five hours into the flight when he was told by a pistol-wielding Wilfried Böse to prepare for a landing at Entebbe, the international airport for the Ugandan capital of Kampala.
At around the same time Claude Moufflet woke from a fitful two-hour sleep to find the Canadian girls ‘chatting in low voices’ and other passengers praying and sleeping. The terrorists were in their usual positions: one at the back of economy class and one at the front, with the German girl sitting in first class. He began to leaf through a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine when Böse’s voice came over the intercom: ‘We are getting ready to land at Kampala. Close the blinds and fasten your seatbelts.’
The news caused general astonishment in Moufflet’s vicinity of the plane because practically no one knew that Kampala was the capital of Uganda, still less that Uganda was a black African country, a former British colony, and that the country’s head of state was Field Marshal Dr Idi Amin Dada, an ex-NCO of the British Army. Moufflet doubted he would have known had his cousin not been working in neighbouring Rwanda, and had he himself not recently seen a ‘fascinating’ film in Paris about Amin and the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
On telling his neighbours, he circulated the little map in his diary so that they could see the location of Kampala on the edge of Lake Victoria, just above the Equator in East Africa. To the north lay the Sudan, to the west Zaire, to the south Rwanda and Tanzania, and to the east Kenya. As they were scanning the map, the two Palestinian terrorists stationed themselves next to the emergency exits in the middle and rear of the plane. Kuhlmann did the same in first class.
Just after 3.20 a.m. local time (GMT + 3 hours), following a circuit of the airport, the plane touched down on the main runway of Entebbe and came to a halt at its far end. It was still dark, but through a half-open blind Moufflet could see the lights of two vehicles approaching the plane.
Up in first class a French woman sitting with her two-year-old infant in the row of seats in front of Michel and Olivier Cojot suddenly started screaming. It seemed to Olivier as if she had ‘totally lost her mind’. Worried that she might harm her child, he and his father held her arms ‘to restrain her’. She had clearly been under a lot of stress and the arrival at ‘Entebbe caused her to break down a little bit’. Eventually, with the help of the crew, they managed to calm her down. Fortunately her young daughter, ‘dumbfounded at the sight of Mama stamping both her feet’, had ‘remained quiet’. But she had left her mark on Michel Cojot in the form of deep scratches on both his hands.
An hour later Böse announced that soon they would open one of the plane’s exits so that he could speak to President Idi Amin Dada, either in person or by radio. But nothing happened, and the passengers continued their ‘interminable coming and going to the toilets’, amid shouts of ‘Sit down!’, ‘Don’t smoke!’, ‘Where is Uganda?’, ‘You think we’re going to see Idi Amin Dada?’ and ‘Oh, shut up!’
Any mention of Amin was enough to terrify Algerian-born Julie Aouzerate, who recalled the African dictator boasting how much he admired Adolf Hitler. ‘First the German woman was screaming out orders,’ she noted, ‘and casting terrifying glances–and now: the country of Idi Amin. During those moments I fancied that I had entered a terrible nightmare world–the world of the concentration camps of World War II.’
This fear of what awaited the hostages in Uganda was only to be expected. The country’s lifelong president and effective dictator Idi Amin had, since taking power in 1971, cut off ties with his former ally Israel, ordered the expulsion of non-citizen Asians, and executed tens of thousands of political opponents. He had further alienated the West by courting rogue Arab countries like Libya and the Soviet Union; moreover it was Amin who had helped to persuade almost all African countries to break off diplomatic relations with Israel in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
A former heavyweight boxer–six feet four inches tall and stout–Amin was a larger-than-life figure who divided opinion: in the eyes of many black Africans, his willingness to stand up to his former colonial overlords made him a hero; to those in Israel and the West, on the other hand, he was seen as a political loose cannon with a huge sexual appetite–he had had five wives, countless mistresses and numerous brief sexual encounters, not all of them consensual–and a penchant, so it was rumoured, for eating human flesh. The charge of cannibalism was never proven. What is not in doubt, however, is that Amin was a man of extremes. One of his former Cabinet ministers described him on the one hand as ‘nearly illiterate’, ‘politically naïve’, ‘violently unpredictable’ and ‘utterly ruthless’, and on the other as ‘jovial and generous’ and with ‘extraordinary talents–for practical short-term action, for turning apparent weaknesses to his own advantage, and for asserting his leadership among a gang of thugs’.
Small wonder that the hostages–particularly the Israelis–were nervous.
Yitzhak Rabin was sleeping soundly at Beit Aghion, his official residence at 9 Smolenskin Street in the upmarket west Jerusalem district of Rehavia, when his bedside phone rang. ‘Who is this?’ he said, half awake.
‘Freuka.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Four in the morning. Sorry for waking you. The plane has landed in Entebbe, Uganda.’
Rabin was relieved. ‘Better there than an Arab country,’ he told his military aide, Brigadier-General Freuka Poran. ‘We know the Ugandan president, Idi Amin.’
‘Didn’t he do his parachute training here?’ asked Poran.
‘He did. And during the heyday of Golda Meir’s African aid programme quite a few of our specialists worked in Uganda. Some should know him personally so, hopefully, we can straighten this thing out soon. Try and find out who knows him. Any word yet of the hijackers’ demands?’
‘None.’
‘Convene a meeting first thing.’
‘I will. Try and get back to sleep.’
At dawn–6.40 a.m. local time–the more daring passengers raised their blinds and looked out of the plane. Through the window to his right, Claude Moufflet could see Lake Victoria and ‘armed soldiers in leopard uniforms who, hidden slightly by long grass’, were ‘cautiously approaching the plane’.
On his left side he could see a Jeep carrying more Ugandan soldiers and a civilian, and beyond them a road on which were passing ‘cars, a lorry and a coach, and several people on foot’. Along the edge of a ditch, just fifteen yards from the plane, were posted a ring of armed Ugandan soldiers in camouflage uniforms and red berets (denoting, though Moufflet was not aware of this, elite paratroopers). The plane, Moufflet realized, was ‘completely surrounded’.
Michel Cojot, who had spent many happy years working in Africa, looked with nostalgic fondness on ‘the savannah, the groves of tall leafy trees’ and the ‘large El Greco clouds’. He knew that Kampala was several thousand feet above sea level, and that on its ‘high plateau’ they ‘would not suffer from the heat’. Yet it was ironic ‘to land in the country’ that Britain had ‘offered to the Jews for their state at the start of the century!’ If ‘they had not refused’, he mused, ‘perhaps today we would be in the hands of Ugandan terrorists’, rather than Palestinians and Germans.
Desperate for any information he could glean, Moshe Peretz asked ‘the yellow-shirted terrorist’ in Arabic how many days they planned to stay in Entebbe. A ‘long time’, came the reply.
‘I was born in Haifa,’ said the terrorist, confirming Peretz’s suspicion that he was a Palestinian.
Just after 8 a.m., the exit door at the front of the plane was opened. Wilfried Böse informed the passengers that a delegation from the Ugandan government had arrived and negotiations were about to begin. Moufflet could see through the window a Jeep arrive with two Ugandan officials. One was tall and thin, and dressed in a navy-blue uniform with three stars on the shoulders; the other was even taller and more thickset, wearing a khaki uniform with gold epaulettes and a chest full of medals. This second officer–assumed at first by Moufflet to be Amin–was deep in conversation with ‘a little guy wearing glasses, a blue suit and a green cap’ who resembled Yasser Arafat.
The Arafat lookalike was, in fact, a senior member of Wadie Haddad’s PFLP called Jayel Naji al-Arjam–who, with two comrades, had come to join the original four hijackers. The Ugandan officer was not President Idi Amin but one of his generals. They were discussing what to do with the hostages. The fact that the PFLP reinforcements, armed with assault rifles, were able to move ‘freely about the airport in diplomatic vehicles’, and were not prevented by the Ugandans from assisting their hijacker comrades, was confirmation for Michel Cojot and many other passengers that Amin was colluding with the terrorists and had known about their plans in advance. This link between the Ugandan dictator and the hijackers was later confirmed by Gerd Schnepel, the colleague of Böse and Kuhlmann, who stated: ‘Amin was cooperating with the PFLP. The [Ugandan] soldiers who defended the airport didn’t know. But the government of Idi Amin itself was helping Wadie Haddad, because of his history with Israel.’
While al-Arjam’s discussion with the Ugandan general continued, Böse tried to reassure the passengers that the soldiers around the plane were there for their security and not to harm them. He had, he continued, asked the airport director ‘for a little breakfast for everyone’ and was certain that he would soon be able to speak to President Amin.
As the waiting continued, the temperature rose and the stench from the overflowing toilets became almost unbearable. Sara Davidson was convinced that the Israelis would be ‘separated from the other passengers’, as had happened in previous hijackings, and was terrified that her family would be split up too. ‘Take my husband away from my children and myself?’ she scrawled in her diary. ‘We’ll never be able to stand it.’ Yet simply being on terra firma was a relief to her and ‘less dangerous than to fly through the air with a band of hijackers pointing revolvers at the heads of the pilots’.
The young Canadian Louise Kourtis, on the other hand, was certain the end was near. ‘They’re going to kill us,’ she told her friend Jo-Anne Rethmetakis. ‘They’re going to blow up the plane.’
‘Certainly not,’ interjected Claude Moufflet. ‘They’re hardly likely to blow up the plane at the start of negotiations. Be patient, stay calm and make yourself as comfortable as possible.’
Rethmetakis backed him up, and Kourtis, though far from convinced, fell silent.
At around 10 a.m. Böse made another announcement: ‘Please sit down. You are going to be served breakfast and it is necessary for you to remain in your seats. I am very satisfied with the negotiations at the moment. I still haven’t told you the reasons for this hijacking because I haven’t had lots of time. But I will communicate to you our objectives as soon as I can.’
Soon afterwards, breakfast was brought on board the plane. It consisted of a fried egg accompanied by either mushrooms from a tin, potatoes or a piece of bread, served on little plastic pink plates and eaten with either a fork, a knife or a spoon, one piece of cutlery per passenger. This prompted the usual complaints from the passengers, but a steward responded calmly: ‘It’s bread or potatoes. There’s not a lot and everyone must have something to eat.’
Eventually more food was brought on board–tiny cuts of meat in sauce and some slices of bread–and the crew decided to take it straight to the back of the plane so that the passengers could serve themselves. ‘They’ll see soon enough,’ said one steward to another, ‘if it’s easy to make each portion equal’.
Moufflet overheard this comment and thought it was ‘the only demonstration of bad humour on the part of the crew’ since they had left Athens.
At 10.30 a.m., in an attempt to get some air into the sweltering plane, the terrorists opened the rear exit door and roped off the opening with the stewards’ neckties. Through it Moshe Peretz was certain he could see ‘Idi Amin negotiating with the Guerillas’.
The first that Henry Kyemba, Uganda’s thirty-six-year-old minister of health, knew of the Airbus’s arrival at Entebbe was when he heard a BBC World Service broadcast at 6 a.m. Not a member of Idi Amin’s inner circle–and a man increasingly disillusioned with his president’s unpredictable and psychotic style of rule–Kyemba had been excluded from the plotting with Wadie Haddad. But after hearing the BBC report, he realized that his ministry ‘would be closely involved in any operations connected with the hostages and crew’, and went straight from his house in Kampala to the ministry headquarters in Entebbe, next door to Amin’s State House and just two miles from the airport.
At 9 a.m. he got a call from Amin. ‘Kyemba,’ said the president, ‘Palestinians have hijacked this plane from Israel and brought it to Entebbe.’ He had, he said, already been in touch with them. Now he wanted Kyemba to arrange for a doctor and nurse ‘to assist with any medical treatment required’. As secrecy was paramount, he wanted just a small, sympathetic team and specified ‘a particular Nubian nurse for the job’. The choice of a doctor ‘acceptable to the Palestinians’ he left to his health minister. Kyemba duly contacted an Egyptian, Dr Ayad, and asked him to stand by at Entebbe hospital with the nurse ‘for emergency duty’.
Waking early from just a few hours of sleep, Shimon Peres phoned Prime Minister Rabin ‘to report on the night’s events’. Then he showered and made coffee before heading back to his office in downtown Tel Aviv, ‘where a ceaseless flow of reports’ about the hijacking ‘was being monitored’. To Peres ‘some appeared fanciful, others just plain contradictory’, and it ‘was hard to sift fact from fiction’.
According to one, the hijacked passengers included a group of senior Israel Defense Forces officers. But Peres knew this was false because by this time the ministry had ‘obtained a complete and accurate’ list of passengers and crew from Air France–confirming their number as 246, and not 230 as first thought–and it did not include any IDF brass.
With breakfast cleared away, two young Ugandans came down the aisle of the Airbus with huge basins of water on their shoulders. Their job, explained Wilfried Böse through the intercom, was to clean the toilets and then provide fresh basins of water for the hostages to wash in. At the same time the stewards and stewardesses moved down the aisles with big plastic bags collecting any ‘old papers, empty bottles, plates, cutlery, and any remains of food’.
The relaxed atmosphere–which Claude Moufflet likened to people ‘in a charter plane going on holiday’–meant that many hostages were laughing and talking in loud voices ‘as if everything was over’.
Böse added his own words of reassurance. ‘You probably know,’ he told the hostages, ‘that the history of aircraft hijackings has shown that none of the captives have ever been killed. We’ll conduct negotiations. We have claims. If our claims are accepted, we shall release you and send you back soon to your homes and families.’ For those like Michel Cojot who knew the truth–that hostages had been killed by hijackers, most recently a German banker during the takeover of a British Airways VC-10 by Palestinians at Tunis in 1974–this assertion was far from comforting.
Böse continued: ‘I have not yet had the time to explain the reasons for this hijacking. People are often told that Air France planes cannot be the target of hijackings because France has a very pro-Arab policy. This is not true. France is one of the first countries in the rank of Palestinian enemies.’
The German then read from a typed PFLP–EA communiqué that was, in effect, a justification of the hijacking. They had chosen a French plane, he said, ‘to declare to the world that the French State is an historic enemy of the Arab Nation’. It was ‘no more than a junior partner prostrate in front of United States imperialism’, and yet it was ‘an important executor of neo-colonialism in the Mediterranean’. Proof of this was its collusion with the United Kingdom and Israel in the invasion of Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956, its supply of Mirage jets and other military hardware to Israel that enabled the latter to achieve a ‘decisive victory’ in the Six-Day War, and its role in Israel becoming an atomic power.
Israel itself, the communiqué continued, had ‘exploited the humanistic sentiments of its people to inhuman ends’ by expelling the Palestinians ‘from their homeland’ and importing ‘alien people to replace them under the slogan of rescuing the Jews from the Nazi-planned… European barbarity’. Israel had become, as a result, the ‘heir of Nazism’. The aim of the PFLP, said Böse, was to liberate the whole of Palestine, expel the Jews and establish ‘a socialist secularist democracy’.
After turning on President Anwar Sadat’s Egypt for signing a provisional agreement with Israel over the future of the Sinai, and President Hafaz Assad’s Syria for promoting civil war in the Lebanon (the new home of the PLO), the communiqué then declared the PFLP’s support for anti-government rebels in Eritrea, Morocco, South Africa, Angola and French-controlled Djibouti. It ended with a call for ‘revolutionaries everywhere’ to ‘represent the oppressed’ and ‘come together and create a world revolutionary front and defeat imperialism everywhere’.
Böse’s long manifesto, read ‘in rather good English’, reminded Michel Cojot of ‘a jumble of Ulrike Meinhof and the Palestinian revolution, of imperialism and French guilt at having provided Israel with arms and an atomic reactor–in short a leftist stew à la [Andreas] Baader, the kind that it regularly served up in certain Third and Fourth World newspapers, and even from the rostrum of the United Nations’.
When Böse asked for someone to translate the communiqué into French, the ‘five or six members of the crew seated near by… looked at each other like pupils who have been asked for a volunteer to go to the blackboard’. They were clearly exhausted, so Michel Cojot stepped in. Handed a ‘poorly typed page’ and a cone-shaped megaphone to amplify his voice, he gave ‘an almost faithful translation’.
As he did so, he ‘took the opportunity to glance into’ the terrorists’ ‘half-open bags’ in front of him, and saw some grenades, handguns ‘and a sub-machine gun loading clip–not bad for hand luggage!’ He also noticed that, since landing, the terrorists had become ‘less and less cautious’ and that ‘sometimes three of them would be in the front of the plane at once, guns in their belts with their hammers lowered, grenades in their pockets; clearly they had won the first round’.
Claude Moufflet had also noticed the terrorists’ lowered guard and the fact that there were often ‘only two, weapons in their pockets, installed near the front door looking after us’. He was tempted, as a result, to push both of them out of the plane and lock the door behind them. But he decided not to because he feared a violent response from the terrorists and suspected, in any case, that a sudden exclamation from one of his fellow hostages would give the game away.
Once Cojot had completed the French translation, Böse spoke again: ‘I’ll now tell you about our commando. It is composed of two Germans and two Palestinians. You will wonder why two Germans are part of our group. The German guerilla groups are engaged in the fight against worldwide imperialism and want to force worldwide public opinion to be interested, which they are not, in the cause of the PFLP and other revolutionary ideas. Our next objective is to obtain the release of as many of those imprisoned fighters in France, Germany, Israel and Africa at Djibouti. I excuse myself if this message seems confusing and not very clear, but English is not my maternal language, and even though I speak it often I am very tired because I haven’t slept for more than seventy-two hours. I will speak to you when I have rested and you will understand better.’
After a pause he added: ‘At least now you know how the mind of a crazy German revolutionary works!’
A little after the reading of the PFLP–EA’s communiqué, as Böse was resting at the back of the plane, the Israeli lawyer Akiva Laxer spoke to him in German and asked why the terrorists were targeting women and children. When Böse repeated his argument about ‘fighting for world solidarity’ and one group of freedom fighters helping another, Laxer changed tack and asked how he had ended up at Entebbe. Böse replied that he had been involved in various terrorist activities, including the blowing up of supermarkets in Berlin and other cities, and that he thought he would end this operation ‘either for many years in prison or being killed’.
Major Muki Betser was back in his office in the bowels of the Kirya when he heard a radio report on the Voice of Israel that the hijacked plane had landed at Entebbe in Uganda where, in his words, ‘President, Field Marshal and erstwhile Israeli paratrooper Idi Amin Dada (who never did jump and didn’t deserve his wings)’ had ‘offered his services as a mediator’.
Since his and the other Israelis’ ‘ignominious’ departure from Uganda in 1972, Betser had noticed how Amin’s ‘appearances on the international stage grew increasingly bizarre’. He had taken ‘dozens of women from the villages of his country to serve in a harem, and fed his political opponents to crocodiles living on the banks of Lake Victoria’. Ambassadors were ‘made to kneel before him if their government wanted good relations with Uganda’. And yet despite all this, noted Betser, the Organization of African Unity–set up by thirty-two signatory governments in 1963 to give African states a collective voice–had chosen Amin as its chairman for 1976.
Hearing the ‘extremely sketchy’ news reports from Uganda, ‘mostly from the BBC relying on stringers in Kampala’, Betser was highly suspicious of Amin’s role. ‘It was,’ he thought, ‘impossible to determine if he let the plane land because the pilot said he desperately needed fuel–or if Amin was aligned with the terrorists.’ His own experience of Amin’s ‘treachery’ caused him to suspect the latter.
Just after one in the afternoon, with the temperature in the Airbus a stifling 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the weary but still remarkably upbeat passengers were relieved to hear Wilfried Böse announce that they were about to leave the plane with hand luggage and be taken by buses to the Old Terminal building.
But this decision was soon rescinded and instead Bacos was told to start the engines and taxi there. Five minutes later, the plane halted on the apron directly opposite a dilapidated two-storey building that had served as Entebbe’s international terminal from the airport’s opening in 1929 to the construction of a newer, modern terminal in the early 1970s. A variety of aircraft had used the Old Terminal, from its first visitor, an RAF Fairey III biplane of the Cairo–Cape route, to the de Havilland Comet of the early 1950s and modern jetliners more recently. Its most famous passenger was Queen Elizabeth II, who took off from Entebbe on her way back to England after hearing that her father George VI had died and she was monarch of the United Kingdom.
Few if any of Flight 139’s passengers were aware of this royal connection as they shook the stiffness from their limbs and prepared to end their excruciating twenty-six-hour incarceration in the Airbus’s cramped interior. Before they did so, Böse made a final light-hearted announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen. We thank you for having flown Air France. We hope that you were satisfied with the service and that we see you again soon on this airline.’
This released the tension and, according to Cojot, ‘there was a general impression–with no basis in logic or fact–that our misadventure had come to an end’. This way of thinking was encouraged by the plane’s pilot, Michel Bacos, when he told the passengers, in both French and English, that ‘the nightmare is now over’. He added: ‘On behalf of the crew I thank you for staying calm and for coping in exceptionally difficult conditions. I have been informed that Field Marshal Idi Amin has agreed to take charge of your security and that of the terrorists. Before long you will be allowed into the terminal to wait to hear how you will return home. Thank you.’
The applause was long and loud.
Soon afterwards, clutching their hand luggage or holding the hands of their children, the hostages were squinting in the bright sunshine as they walked down the mobile staircase to the tarmac. A handful even waved goodbye to the three terrorists stationed at the forward exit, so convinced were they that their ordeal was over.
They were quickly disabused by the sight of Ugandan soldiers, guns at the ready, lining a path to the door of the nearby terminal. It seemed ‘very strange’ to Gabriella Rubenstein, a twenty-nine-year-old Jerusalem psychologist who had been looking forward to a holiday in Paris with her husband Uri. ‘We thought we were free,’ she recalled. ‘Then we watched the hijackers again greet their friends, and the real bad news followed.’ No sooner had the last of the 253 passengers and crew* passed through the metal and glass double-doors into the former departure lounge of the Old Terminal–a ‘huge room, dirty and dusty’ with reddish-brown and white walls and a wooden parquet floor–than Böse announced through the megaphone that ‘you are all still under our control’. He added: ‘We have arrived in Uganda, but you are in the hands of forces of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. We are already negotiating with your governments. We hope the affair will end in the best possible way. Now, listen carefully to our instructions–then no harm will befall you.’
At a stroke, Böse had dashed the passengers’ hopes and then raised them a little. The word ‘negotiation’ seemed to imply a peaceful solution and their eventual freedom. But would the governments of the many nationalities involved agree to the terrorists’ demands? And what were those demands? Certainly none had yet been made to Pierre-Henry Renard, the experienced fifty-two-year-old French ambassador to Uganda, who had left for the airport soon after news of the plane’s arrival had reached his private residence in Kampala. He would remain there all day and leave as night fell at 7 p.m., none the wiser. ‘We still don’t know what the hijackers want,’ his spokesman told journalists, ‘and until we do there’s little that can be done.’
Meanwhile the hostages had settled down in the big hall that had formerly served as the terminal’s departure lounge–a large rectangular room some forty feet deep by eighty wide, the ceiling supported by twelve concrete pillars–as best they could, some sitting on ‘uncomfortable, well-worn red imitation-leather armchairs’, others on the ground until more seats were brought in by Ugandan soldiers. Even then there were not enough to go round; but this did not prevent some from keeping two seats when others had none.
Families and friends tended to cluster together in small groups, as did the exhausted stewards and stewardesses, their blue uniforms now marked by a fine film of dust. The captain, the pilot and the flight engineer, meanwhile, had been kept on the plane so that it could be moved to a part of the airport where, the hostages were told, ‘it wouldn’t get in the way’.
About 500 yards in front of the large hall, clearly visible to the passengers through a row of large and rusty iron-framed sliding windows, was the huge expanse of Lake Victoria. A little further to the extreme right* was the control tower that served the New Terminal, itself not visible because it was located at right angles to the Old Terminal, while much closer to the left of the hall could be seen the nose cone of a Russian-made MiG fighter jet poking out of an aircraft hangar.
A cordon of armed Ugandan paratroopers stood guard twenty yards from the front of the main hall. They were also stationed on the first floor and roof of the Old Terminal, and in the old control tower, just to the right of the main hall. Their presence suggested more than a hint of collusion with the terrorists, as did the fact that the Ugandans had allowed three new terrorists armed with automatic weapons to join the original four.
The most distinctive of the new arrivals was Jayel Naji al-Arjam, a thirty-nine-year-old Palestinian who was responsible for the PFLP’s political activity in Latin America, and a man the hostages would soon nickname ‘Groucho Marx’ because of ‘his cap, his moustache, and his odd gait’. To Michel Cojot he was ‘“the Peruvian” because he had lived in Latin America for a long time’.
The Peruvian’s superior, however, was the forty-six-year-old Faiz Abdul Rahim Jaber, one of founders of the original PFLP who had stayed loyal to Haddad after his split with Habash and was now the PFLP–EA’s operations’ chief. A tall strongly built man from Hebron who had lived most of his adult life in Egypt, Jaber had fought in the ‘Black September’ war in Jordan, had participated in many missions inside Israel and held a particular hatred for Israelis since the IDF had killed at least one of his brothers in anti-terrorist actions. Wearing a moustache and a distinctive blue safari jacket, Jaber was now in overall command at Entebbe, though Böse (as the head of the hijack commando) and the Peruvian exerted some influence over him.
The last of the trio was the Iraqi-born Abdur Razaq al-Samrai (also known as ‘Abu Addarda’), another founder member of the PFLP and, according to a confidential IDF report, ‘a long-time participant in Wadi[e] Haddad’s mechanism of terror attacks abroad’, including the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Aden in 1972 and the attack at Lod Airport that same year.
While Jaber, the Peruvian and al-Samrai stood guard outside the entrance to the Old Terminal, the original four hijackers got some rest on camp beds in a room to the left of the main hall that had originally served as the VVIP lounge. Left largely to their own devices, the hostages were free to stretch their legs and use the two rooms housing toilets in the right-hand corners of the large hall: the ladies’ at the front, next to a second entrance from the tarmac that had been blocked off, and the men’s at the back, beneath a broken flight of stairs up to the first floor that had also been barricaded at the top. On the back wall of the five men’s cubicles–four toilets and a shower–were circular windows, five feet off the ground, which looked through to the space between the main hall and the original arrivals’ inspection hall.
The only other features of note in the large hall were an aircraft-maintenance office with glass walls (the former souvenir shop), situated in the centre of the left-side wall with its door accessed by three steps, and a small horseshoe bar at the foot of the stairs, adjacent to the opposite wall. A locked iron door in the centre of the hall’s rear wall led to what had been the terminal’s kitchens.
At 2.25 p.m., local press photographers arrived and were allowed to take pictures of the hostages through the windows. This prompted some of the hostages to compete for their attention, much to the disgust of one elderly American lady who exclaimed: ‘Look at that! It’s incredible. People are crazy. All that for a photo in a newspaper nobody will read. It’s sickening.’
After they had tried to waylay the two pilots and the flight engineer as they returned from parking the plane at 2.45 p.m., the press were finally told by the terrorists to leave. Entering the hall, Bacos and the others were greeted with ‘shrieks and claps’ by their fellow hostages. The captain responded with a salute.
While many hostages killed time reading books and magazines, others jotted down their hopes and fears in makeshift diaries. ‘A plane will arrive shortly to take us,’ wrote Sara Davidson, still convinced that salvation was imminent. ‘Everything is now being settled. We’ll soon be flying onwards, on our family excursion… Illusions maybe, because a situation like this makes you want to delude yourself. Maybe the soul needs delusions, to fortify it.’
Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland had scarcely arrived back in Britain from the G7 conference in Puerto Rico when he received the first details of the arrival of the hijacked plane at Entebbe from James Horrocks, the British chargé d’affaires and acting high commissioner in Kampala.
According to Horrocks’s cipher, the plane had been ‘refused permission to land at Entebbe’–an incorrect version of events that the Ugandans had fed him–but it had ignored this instruction because it was ‘short of fuel’. President Amin had arrived on the scene at 7.30 a.m. but, as the hijackers refused to negotiate through him, he had asked ‘the PLO resident representative to act as intermediary’. The PLO man had since spoken to the hijackers, said Horrocks, ‘from the control tower and was given their conditions for the release of the aircraft and passengers’, though he had yet to reveal what they were.
Meanwhile the French ambassador, who had been at the airport since the early morning, was trying to keep abreast of developments. Having spent most of the morning at the airport with him, Horrocks had learned that an Air France plane–including a reserve crew for the hijacked aircraft–was ‘en route from Paris to Nairobi where it will remain on stand by’. He was, he declared at the end of his message, ‘maintaining close touch with the French Embassy in Kampala’.
Two hours later, Horrocks sent a second cable informing London that, thanks to a suggestion by President Amin, the hijackers had agreed ‘to leave the aircraft and move to the old airport building with the hostages’. All the passengers were reported to be in good shape. He had heard, moreover, from the French ambassador that, contrary to initial reports, the hijackers had not yet made known their demands, and would not do so until they had received instructions from their superiors in the PFLP. The local PLO representative had said much the same thing to Horrocks, adding that the Ugandans were now dealing with the hijackers direct, and he would play ‘no further role in the drama’.
Other cables read by Crosland that day included one from the British Embassy in Athens with details of the nine Commonwealth citizens who had boarded Flight 139 in Greece (three Canadians, five New Zealanders and a Cypriot); and another from the Tel Aviv Embassy stating that one more Briton, a Miss Frances Hallan, did board the plane at Ben-Gurion but got off at Athens. The latter cable also confirmed that Patricia Martell was a dual national and had been travelling on her Israeli passport, which is why ‘she was not previously known to be British’.
Having spent the morning with his aides at the Ministry of Defense, Shimon Peres drove to Jerusalem for a meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the coalition members of the Knesset Finance Committee. It was another hot day–with the temperature in the 80s–and most of the ministers and MKs were wearing slacks and open-neck, short-sleeve shirts. Rabin, as he tended to do when tense, was chain-smoking.
The session opened in the tall Knesset building in the Givet Ram district at 2 p.m. with Yehoshua Rabinowitz, minister of finance, arguing hard for cuts in the defense budget. Peres, who had spent the previous two years demanding and receiving an increase in defense spending, responded with typical pugnacity. ‘It’s a strange thing,’ he observed with more than a hint of bitterness, ‘that in Washington US senators are demanding higher allocations for military aid to Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, while here in Jerusalem we’re ready to vote for lower defense spending.’
Tense though the debate was, it still served as a welcome distraction from, as Peres put it, the ‘relentless tension through which we had been living since the day before’. Returning to his office in Tel Aviv, Peres found ‘no shaft of clarity through the pall of uncertainty and speculation that surrounded the hijacking saga’. Never before had hijackers taken a plane full of Israelis so far from the reach of the IDF. What the terrorists’ intentions were was anyone’s guess. Would they stay in Uganda or was it merely a staging point? Was this the usual attempt to swap hostages for imprisoned terrorists, or something more sinister? And, most importantly, was Amin helping the hijackers? If he was, Peres told his staff, it would set a very dangerous precedent. Hitherto no aircraft hijacking had enjoyed the explicit support of any president, army or state. If this hijacking now had such support, and it succeeded, no aircraft could ever be safe in African skies. So it was imperative to know what was actually happening at Entebbe. But even if the hijackers were acting alone, experience had taught Peres that, ‘at the end of the day, we would have to rescue the hostages ourselves’. It was, however, far too early–if not impossible–‘to translate this principled position into an operational plan’.
Back in Jerusalem, Yitzhak Rabin was also wondering how to resolve the hostage crisis peacefully. The son of immigrants–his father was Ukrainian, his mother Russian–he had grown up a ‘withdrawn, bashful child’ in a Spartan home in which respect for property and public duty were the watchwords. Educated at an agricultural school, he was trained to use firearms by Yigal Allon, one of the school’s first graduates who was now serving as foreign minister in Rabin’s cabinet.
Destined to found a kibbutz and work the soil, Rabin saw his life and future career change in 1941 when he was invited to join the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah Jewish defence organization. He would remain a soldier–seeing action, for example, as a twenty-two-year-old brigade commander in the 1948 War of Independence–until his retirement as IDF chief of staff in 1968. Since becoming prime minister of the Labor coalition government six years later, his greatest achievement had been to work with Henry Kissinger, the Jewish US secretary of state, to bring peace to the Middle East. Military disengagement agreements with Syria and Egypt had already been agreed. Rabin took the next step, in 1975, by signing an interim agreement with President Sadat of Egypt to withdraw from part of the Sinai.
The agreement was, in Rabin’s opinion, ‘a first but invaluable step on the long and winding path that would lead Egypt away from war and toward peace’. His reward was much closer diplomatic relations with the United States, financial aid and a regular supply of arms (including F-16 fighter planes). Moreover the US vowed not to ‘negotiate with or recognize the PLO’ or ‘initiate any moves in the Middle East without prior consultation with Israel’. Rabin and Kissinger then began work on further peace agreements with Egypt, Syria and Jordan. But they were interrupted by the outbreak of civil war in neighbouring Lebanon as the Christians attacked an alliance of Palestinian Arabs and left-wing Lebanese. This in turn drew in the Syrian Army in support of the Christians. It was to distract world attention ‘away from events in Lebanon to the other front–the battle against Israel’, a Middle East expert speculated in an Israeli newspaper on Monday 28 June, that the Palestinian terror groups had undertaken the Air France hijacking. Rabin’s main concern was to liberate the hostages without making concessions. But how to achieve that in a country so far away, and one so unfriendly to Israel?
Just after 3 p.m., two hours after their arrival in the Old Terminal building, the hostages nearest the windows noticed a yellow bus pull up on the tarmac outside and smartly dressed waiters get off. They had come from the nearby four-star Lake Victoria Hotel and were carrying rectangular metal containers of rice, hot meat curry and bananas–the hostages’ first proper meal since boarding Flight 139 a day earlier. Though the waiters were impeccably polite, saying ‘Sir’ and ‘Please’, some of the hostages refused the meat curry because they did not know its provenance–‘it might be from giraffes’, Moshe Peretz scribbled in his diary–others out of religious scruple.
A quick census turned up twenty Orthodox Jews who rejected the non-kosher meat–including the lawyer Akiva Laxer–and the rice was served to them before it was mixed with the curry. They were also compensated with bananas. (When others realized that the ‘religious observants’ were being served first, they joined their ranks until, by the following morning, more than sixty were claiming Orthodox status.) Michel Cojot was shocked when ‘many [of the hostages] stuffed themselves with rice and bananas’. He put the overeating down to a means of ‘relieving anxiety, of alleviating fear which gnaws at the plexus. To eat is to live.’ Rather unkindly, Cojot suggested to an overweight Moroccan Jewish woman that it might be a good ‘opportunity to diet’. When she responded with a thin humiliated smile, he felt ‘ashamed’.
A well-meaning Frenchwoman thought the solution would be for Cojot–who had become by this time, thanks to his linguistic abilities, both ‘interpreter and intermediary’–to ask for apples. ‘That would be enough,’ she commented. ‘And it’s healthier.’
‘But madam,’ replied a flabbergasted Cojot, ‘we are around the equator.’
While they were eating, Wilfried Böse came into the room with a pile of forms that he asked two stewardesses to distribute. Headed ‘THE POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE’, the forms asked for a variety of personal details that included name, date of birth, profession, passport number, destination and the names of others accompanying. While Claude Moufflet was filling in his, he took a good look at Böse and observed that he was ‘fairly tall, with grey-green eyes and a little scar above the arc of his left eyebrow’. His hair was short and his profile bore a ‘vague resemblance’ to the film star Steve McQueen, though his mouth appeared to have a ‘permanent sulk’.
Shortly after lunch had been cleared away, Moufflet decided to move from the busier left front of the room to the right rear, below the broken stairs, where fewer people were gathered. There he got talking to Gilles, a tall young Frenchman with blond curly hair who soon introduced him to a smaller dark-haired work colleague called Willy. Offering Moufflet a Gitane cigarette, Gilles explained that he and Willy were coming back from a ten-day work trip to Greece where they had been filming a documentary on holiday destinations. ‘We weren’t supposed to be on the Airbus to Paris,’ explained Gilles. ‘But we had a big night out and missed our flight. In other words we tempted fate. What about you?’
‘I was coming back from a business trip to Athens, Istanbul and Teheran,’ said Moufflet, puffing on a second cigarette, ‘and I stopped in Athens to spend the weekend with my wife who was staying with friends on the island of Mykonos. I should have taken this flight three days earlier.’
‘Oh, wow!’ responded Gilles. There was something in the calm and laid-back attitude of the two young men that Moufflet appreciated, and they decided to set up camp together near the wooden bar.
Soon after this encounter, the airport director and some employees arrived in the large hall with a cart full of Duty Free items such as cigarettes, soap and razor blades. They were besieged by hostages keen to buy everything they had. ‘Everyone jumped on them,’ remembered Emma Rosenkovitch. ‘They said, “Don’t worry; we’ll come back every week.” We said, “Every week?” Prisoners at least know how much time they serve.’
Again Cojot was amazed by the lack of community spirit. When one woman grabbed two cartons of Duty Free cigarettes, he asked her at the behest of several passengers to give them up. She refused. ‘I don’t smoke, you know. They are for my son.’ As her son was not present, Cojot could only assume that this was ‘her way of telling herself she would see him again’.
He turned to the airport director and gently chided him for not having a particular item he wanted. ‘It is not easy,’ said Cojot, ‘to receive 257 persons unexpectedly.’
The airport director looked perplexed: ‘But I expected you.’
It occurred to Cojot then that there had also been enough lunch for everyone: was such a small airport ‘equipped to receive nearly 300 persons from one second to the next?’ He doubted it, and the words of the airport director were for Cojot the final confirmation that Amin and his cronies had known in advance of the plane’s arrival. He was in ‘no doubt’ that Amin ‘was in agreement [with] and an accomplice’ of the terrorists. Other factors were the speed and ease with which the hijackers had been joined by their three accomplices; and the loosening up of the ‘military discipline’ of the hijackers after the landing at Entebbe. Up to that point they had been ‘extremely strict’. But once on Ugandan soil the four hijackers ‘regrouped in the forward part’ of the plane ‘and began to arrange their material in their bags and kept only a pistol, with the safety catch on, which they slid under their belts, while previously they had kept it in their hands, even to eat’. Grenades were put in pockets and it was then, in Cojot’s opinion, that ‘they could have been overpowered’. They behaved this way, he thought, only because they were ‘in friendly territory’.
Shortly after 3.30 p.m., Health Minister Henry Kyemba received a second call in his office from Idi Amin. He was to take the Egyptian doctor and the nurse he had put on standby to check on the hostages at the Old Terminal. Driven the two miles from Entebbe Hospital to the airport in an ambulance, they were met outside the Old Terminal, according to Kyemba, by ‘officials from the Kampala office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’. Kyemba does not name these ‘officials’: they could have been Haled el-Sid and other members of the local PLO, based at the former Israeli ambassador’s residence on Mackinon Road; or, more likely, they were the senior PFLP–EA representatives Jaber and al-Arjam (the Peruvian).
Taken inside, Kyemba was shocked by the state of a building that was now being used as a warehouse for tea exported to England. It was an ‘empty shell–dusty, with broken windows and peeling paint’. In the former departure lounge where the hostages were ‘all huddled on the seats, some lying in piles of clothing, others talking in low voices’, the water system was ‘rusted’ and toilet facilities ‘virtually non-existent’. Despite having just eaten lunch, they were to Kyemba ‘a miserable sight’. The hijackers, meanwhile, ‘in civilian clothes and armed with pistols and grenades, were standing just inside the doorways’.
Kyemba was introduced to the ‘leader of the hijackers’ (Böse) and a ‘woman hijacker’ (Kuhlmann) whom he later misidentified–like many journalists–as Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann of the 2JM. He thought she was a ‘strikingly good-looking woman, wearing a blue skirt and jacket with a pistol slung on her hip’. Told he was the minister of health, she said she was ‘very pleased’ to meet him and was about to say her name when she thought better of it. Instead she said: ‘I am Miss Hijacker.’
‘Well,’ replied Kyemba courteously, ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Hijacker.’
With the introductions over, Kuhlmann announced to the hostages in English that Kyemba, the white-gowned doctor and the uniformed nurse had come to deal with their medical complaints. At the same time a female hostage translated the announcement into Hebrew through a megaphone, while a low voice in another part of the hall, probably Cojot’s, gave the same message in French.
Kyemba then told his medical staff to carry on with their work while he spoke to the hijackers. After a few minutes he left. ‘I was later told by the doctor and the nurse,’ he wrote, ‘that the hostages were generally in good shape. They only had to distribute anti-malaria tablets and treat a few headaches.’
That was because, according to Frenchwoman Julie Aouzerate, the few medical examinations that were done by the Arab-looking doctor–some suspected he was a Palestinian–‘were hurried and superficial’. For elderly Israeli Solomon Rubin who suffered from a ‘heart ailment’, for example, he prescribed ‘a few aspirin tablets’.
‘The troubles are only beginning,’ said Yitzhak Rabin with a sigh to his wife Leah.
He had returned to his official residence after the meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee, and was mulling over the likely outcome of the Air France hijacking. The historical precedents were not good. There were bound to be demands for Palestinian terrorists to be released from Israeli jails. There always were. And when they were made from countries sympathetic to the hijackers, Israel generally paid the price. It had done so after the El Al hijacking to Algeria in 1968; and again a year later when two Israelis were taken off a TWA plane and held in Damascus. More recently, after the Yom Kippur War, the Egyptians had demanded the release of 138 live and healthy terrorists and spies in return for thirty-nine Israeli corpses. Pressured by the dead soldiers’ families, Golda Meir’s government had done the deal. With that in mind, how could he refuse to negotiate for living Israelis?
Or as he put it to Leah: ‘Can the blood of Israelis in Entebbe be spilled just because I won’t allow the barter of terrorists for hostages?’
He knew the answer.
While Yitzhak Rabin agonized over their fate in Jerusalem, the hostages’ spirits were raised by an unexpected visit at 6 p.m. from Uganda’s president. A tall, thickly built man in a green beret and neatly pressed paratrooper’s uniform (complete with Israeli ‘wings’), Amin towered over the soldiers and civilians of his entourage as he entered the large hall to spontaneous applause from many of the hostages.
‘Shalom,’ he said, using the traditional Hebrew form of greeting. ‘I think some of you know me. For those who don’t, I am Field Marshal Dr Idi Amin Dada, the man responsible for you being allowed off the plane. I did it for humanitarian reasons. I support the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and I think that Israel and Zionism is wrong. I know that you are innocent, but the guilty one is your government. I haven’t slept since you arrived. I haven’t yet received the demands of the Popular Front, but I promise you that I am doing my best so that you can be freed as quickly as possible. Make yourselves comfortable here. I have given orders for you to have chairs and some extra mattresses. I will come back to see you soon.’
If some of the hostages–particularly the Israelis–suspected Amin of playing a double game, they tried not to show it and the end of his speech was met with more applause. One Israeli even felt the need to ‘shake his hand effusively’ as if he was their best hope of salvation. Cojot, for one, felt ‘deeply humiliated’ by the hostages’ behaviour and went round the room trying to convince people that they had nothing to gain by ‘lowering’ themselves ‘in that way’.
To revive spirits, the fifty-two-year-old Pasco Cohen told the hostages near him that they had nothing to fear. ‘You are lucky to be travelling with me,’ announced Cohen, partly to calm his wife Hannah and their two children Tzipi, eight, and Kobi, six. ‘I’m a specialist in getting out of the most dangerous places. I was one of the few survivors of the Holocaust. I’ve taken part in all of Israel’s wars and I’ve faced death many times.’
Tall, blond and blue-eyed, Cohen had indeed cheated fate. Born in the Romanian wine-producing region of Vrancea, he was just weeks from his bar mitzvah in 1940 when his father was killed by the invading Germans. He himself survived a blow from a German rifle butt and later emigrated to Israel where he worked as an administrator of the Sha’ar Menashe hospital in the north of the country. It was there he met Hannah, a Moroccan-born nurse nineteen years his junior, and together they moved to nearby Hadera with their two children. Hannah now owned a clothes shop; Pasco was manager of the local branch of health insurance and the author of two research projects on diabetes and heart disease. As a reservist he had fought many times for his country, a fact he was determined to keep from the terrorists.
It was late afternoon when air force pilot Lieutenant-Colonel Joshua ‘Shiki’ Shani, unprompted by his superiors, called a meeting of his staff at Tel Nof Air Force Base to discuss the hijacking. He, like most people in Israel, had heard the radio reports of Flight 139’s arrival in Uganda. But as commander of the Israeli Air Force’s 131 Yellow Bird Squadron of Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport planes, he felt duty bound to carry out some ‘private planning exercises’ in case his superiors wanted the option of a military operation.
Born in Siberia in 1945, the son of educated Ukrainian Jews who had settled in Israel after the war, Shani had never been interested in planes as a teenager and wanted to become an electrical engineer. On his draft day for national service, sitting on the grass with other new recruits at the IDF induction base known as the Bakum, an air force major had asked if anyone present did not want to volunteer for flight school. Shani started to raise his hand, but then noticed that no one around him was doing the same. He put it down and the rest, as he said later, ‘is history’.
Qualifying as a pilot in 1965, Shani started on Nord Noratlas transport planes and Fouga trainers. Six years later he was sent to Arkansas and North Carolina in the United States to learn to fly the IAF’s newest acquisition, the C-130. During the Six-Day War he had flown supplies of ammunition and fuel to IDF soldiers fighting in the Sinai Peninsula. In the Yom Kippur War he went one step further by taking similar supplies in the C-130 across the Suez Canal and deep into Egypt proper.
The chief advantages of the C-130 over previous models were its greater flying range (2,175 miles), its larger load capacity and its ability to land on and take off from a relatively short runway, in darkness if necessary. With this in mind, Shani and his staff spent six hours looking at range, fuel, payload, navigation, weather problems and anything else that might affect a flight to Uganda. They concluded that the C-130 was the only IAF plane that could transport a sizeable military force the 1,900 miles from Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai to Entebbe.
The problem was getting back. The only C-130s with the necessary range were those with extra fuel tanks; but they could not transport the requisite number of troops and vehicles. The regular C-130s, on the other hand, would only have a brief amount of flying time after the eight-hour flight from the Sinai to Entebbe. To return to Israel, they would need to refuel. This had not been a problem when C-130s made regular supply runs to Uganda before the ejection of the Israeli military mission in 1971. They topped up their tanks at Entebbe. But if Amin was colluding with the hijackers, as many suspected, they would either have to take extra fuel in Uganda by force or land in friendly territory nearby. The question was: where?
Aware that they might be in the Old Terminal building indefinitely, the hostages thought up ways to pass the time. They pooled books, mostly paperbacks, to set up a library (with the greatest demand for thrillers and blockbusters, and few takers for the highbrow novels by Henry James and George Eliot that the Rabinowitzes were carrying); Jacques Lemoine, the flight engineer, gave a lecture in French on the Airbus, then still a novelty in air travel; and a Frenchman nicknamed ‘Teach’ made ashtrays out of old fruit-juice cans for those ‘who were trying to puff away their fears’.
At 8 p.m. the yellow bus returned with a dinner that consisted of beef stew, potatoes and beans, and bananas. There was also some coffee and tea, but not enough food for everyone and the bus had to make a second trip. After dinner, to raise morale, Claude Moufflet cracked open one of his bottles of ouzo and shared it with Gilles and Willy.
Michel Cojot, now the main intermediary between terrorists and hostages, was in his element. He felt like he was ‘finally living out a play’ he had ‘rehearsed a thousand times but never performed’. Surrounded as he was by Frenchmen and Jews, under the eyes of his son, facing a death he was all but indifferent to, his chief concern was to conduct himself well. He thought a lot about his ‘gentle’ yet ‘intense’ ten-year-old second son Stéphane, back in France with his mother and younger sister, and was determined not to give him a reason to be ‘ashamed of his father’.
To that end he used every opportunity to speak to Böse and the Peruvian, the most approachable terrorists, quizzing the former on his motives and using the familiar ‘tu’ when addressing the latter. In one of their conversations, Böse trotted out the same woolly arguments he had used in his earlier address–blaming France for sundry pro-Israeli activities–but added: ‘Besides, it’s useless trying anything with El Al; they have orders to shoot it out and have special bullets that won’t pierce the fuselage.’
Böse wanted to be called Basil, his nom de guerre. Instead Cojot baited him with ‘Klaus’ and sometimes even ‘Obersturmführer’, and took ‘sadistic delight’ in engaging this post-war German child in ideological discussions. ‘Doesn’t it bother you,’ he asked Böse, ‘a leftist revolutionary from a country that made a name for itself by inventing the worst type of fascism, to torment the same victims of this fascism again?’
‘No,’ replied the German, ‘because my goals are different.’
‘And the means?’
Böse looked unsettled. ‘Up to now,’ he said defensively, ‘you haven’t suffered too much. We have been korrect with you.’
Cojot raised his eyebrows at this unwitting use of an adjective so beloved of the Nazis. But his response was playful: ‘True, but we could all have been burned alive. And besides, you’re not keeping us here to educate us.’
Another hostage who had a similar conversation with Böse at this time was Yitzhak David, deputy major of the Israeli town of Kiryat Bialik and an Auschwitz survivor. Showing the German the number tattoo on his arm, David declared: ‘I was mistaken when I told my children that there is a different Germany. When I see what you and your friends are doing to women, children and the elderly, I see that nothing has changed in Germany.’
Böse paled. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘I carried out terrorist acts in West Germany because the ruling establishment took Nazis and reactionaries into its service. I also know that in September 1970 the Jordanians killed more Palestinians than the Israelis did, as did the Syrians at Tel al-Zaatar [a battle fought in 1976 during the Lebanese Civil War that resulted in a massacre of Palestinians]. My friends and I are here to help the Palestinians, because they are the underdog. They are the ones suffering.’
David was unimpressed. ‘Well, then,’ he responded, ‘when the Palestinians fulfil their promise and throw us in the sea, we’ll come to you to help us hijack Arab planes.’
Slowly but surely some of the hostages–Cojot in particular–were establishing a pseudo-egalitarian relationship with Böse, exactly the type of reverse Stockholm Syndrome* that he and Kuhlmann had been warned about in the PFLP training camp in South Yemen. Kuhlmann took the advice literally and Cojot, noticing her tendency to seek the affection of children, sent his son Olivier to divert her when he wanted to be sure she ‘would not meddle in a conversation’.
The only time Cojot opposed her was on this first night at Entebbe when ten mattresses had to be shared by more than 250 people. She wanted them for the children. But as most by this time were already asleep, ‘curled up against their mothers’, while many old people ‘were having difficulty in finding a restful position on the seats or on the floor’, Cojot told her the latter should be given them and eventually he got his way.
He also managed to turn off some of the lights in the large hall so that people could sleep. But the Peruvian stopped him from extinguishing them all by placing a Kalashnikov barrel in his stomach.
This was at 10.45 p.m., by which time Cojot had changed into the pyjamas, kimono and slippers that he always carried in his hand luggage. None of the other hostages had night attire because it was in their suitcases in the hold; and some of them, unaware of Cojot’s idiosyncrasies, thought he must be a terrorist plant or why else would he have brought pyjamas? Others, like Moufflet, admired his stiff-upper-lip resourcefulness–like a ‘British officer’–and felt it would help those who were less psychologically prepared for the situation they found themselves in.
Gradually the room settled down as people tried to ignore the swarms of mosquitoes and the dust and filth on the floor. It was ‘hot as hell’, Moshe Peretz recorded in his diary, and there was ‘a veritable symphony of snores’ with people shouting at one another to keep quiet. It reminded him of ‘summer camp at the Gadna’, where Israeli teens were put through army basic training.
With most people asleep, ‘an old Jewish woman, probably of Germanic origin’, had what seemed to Cojot to be a ‘fit of madness’. It began with her sitting bolt upright on her mattress and asking in an increasingly loud voice: ‘Where am I? Where am I?’
Her voice then rose several octaves as she screamed: ‘Help me! Help me!’
This woke some of the children, who began to cry. When the woman’s neighbours failed to calm her, Böse intervened and led her out of the building as she ‘rambled incoherently’. Instead of berating or threatening her, he put his arm round her shoulders. It was, thought Cojot, ‘incredible’ to see ‘the heir of the Nazis speaking in a gentle voice for a good two hours to this old Jewish woman, shaking with spasms’. He was sitting with his son Olivier on a blanket taken from the plane, and together they gazed ‘at the scene illuminated by moonlight, made even brighter by the reflection of nearby Lake Victoria’. Finally the woman began to sob in Böse’s arms and it ‘was over’.