It was barely light when the yellow bus pulled up outside the Old Terminal building and waiters got out with trays of coffee, tea and rolls for the hostages’ breakfast. The stewards and stewardesses helped to serve the meal, and when it had been cleared away a hostage tuned his transistor to Radio Uganda to catch the news. It was about the hijacking. ‘Israel,’ said the report, ‘is refusing to negotiate with the terrorists, who are threatening to blow up the plane if their demands are not met.’
This was far from accurate: the Israeli government had not categorically refused to negotiate the release of the hostages, though it did issue a statement on Sunday emphasizing its unwillingness to cave in to terrorist blackmail; nor had the hijackers yet made known their demands. But the hostages could not know this and, taken at face value, the Radio Uganda broadcast was the last thing they wanted to hear. Moshe Peretz saw ‘anxiety’ on many faces. It may have been now that thirteen-year-old Benny Davidson murmured quietly to his mother Sarah: ‘Ima, we won’t get out of here. We won’t get out.’
Having returned briefly to Tel Aviv the day before, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoni Netanyahu was back on exercise in the Sinai when he poured out his fears for the future in a letter to his girlfriend Bruria, now an airline stewardess who lived with him in Tel Aviv. Writing by gaslight in his tent, he explained that he was at a ‘critical stage in my life, facing a profound inner crisis that has been disturbing my whole frame of reference for a long time now’. What was ‘so sad and ridiculous about it’ was that his only solution was to carry on. He was, he confessed, ‘tired most of the time, but that’s only part of the problem–I have lost the spark that is so vital for any achievement–the spark of creative joy, of self-renewal, of re-awakening’. He continued:
I keep asking myself: Why? Why now of all times? Is it that my work doesn’t absorb me, doesn’t hold me? Wrong! On the contrary… it possesses me and I don’t want it to… And the same haunting questions come up: Can I let myself live like this, work like this and wear myself out? And the answer always is that I must go on and finish what I’ve begun…
He admitted he was ‘having a hard time as seldom before’ in his life, and that ‘even the alternatives outside the army’ had ‘lost much of their appeal’. He doubted he had the ‘energy to start again from scratch’ and did not want to ‘burn any bridges’. Yet he knew he had to ‘stop and get off now, at once or very soon’.
He closed the letter on a personal note. ‘Good that I have you, my Brur, and good I have somewhere to lay my weary head. I know I’m not with you enough, and that it makes it hard for you to be alone so much, but I trust you, me, both of us to manage living our youth to the full–you, to live your youth and your life, and I my life and the last flicker of my youth. We’ll cope.’
The letter reveals that the commander of the Unit, Israel’s first line of defence in the war against Palestinian terrorism, was undergoing something of a personal crisis at the height of the Entebbe hijacking. He had lost faith in the government’s ability to guarantee Israel’s security, and feared that the hijacking would end with another capitulation. This, in turn, caused him to question his own future in the IDF. Yet it was all he had known and the alternatives–returning to Harvard to resume his studies* and possibly entering politics–were no more attractive.
He was in an impossible position. The constant vigilance required of his job had left him mentally and physically exhausted, and close to burn-out. Yet he felt an obligation–to himself and to his country–to finish his stint as the Unit’s commander. Whether he possessed the necessary reserves of strength to hold on for another year was a different matter.
Yitzhak Rabin began the day by bringing the secret weekly meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee–the cross-party body that oversees diplomatic relations, intelligence and homeland security–up to date on the hijacking and the decisions taken the previous day by the ministerial team. The only new information since then, he told the committee, was a brief description of the hijackers that had just arrived in a cable from Major-General Rehavam (‘Gandhi’) Ze’evi, the prime minister’s special adviser for terrorism, who was in London when the crisis began. Containing information from Patricia Martell, the hostage released on health grounds who had been debriefed at Heathrow Airport the night before, the cable read: ‘The hijackers, three men and one woman, are from the PFLP. They have pistols, hand grenades, and containers which they placed by the emergency exits of the plane.’ As for demands, none had yet been made.
Shimon Peres had little to add. He had stopped off at the Ministry of Defense before leaving for Jerusalem, but there was no new information beyond a few ‘colour’ stories about the ‘mood at the airport, visits by various dignitaries’ and ‘a string of bombastic but essentially meaningless declarations by the Ugandan president Idi Amin’.
With these summaries complete, the committee returned to its main business of assessing the ongoing process within the IDF of applying the lessons of the Yom Kippur War. This dragged on until the committee adjourned at midday, enabling Rabin to hold a private meeting with Menachem Begin, the leader of the Likud opposition. Almost ten years older than Rabin, a former leader of the Irgun underground movement that had violently opposed British rule, Begin was a hugely experienced political operator who, but for a spell as a minister without portfolio in the national unity government of 1967–70, had yet to taste power. But his right-wing Likud party–itself a coalition of smaller groups–had won 39 of the Knesset’s 120 seats in the most recent 1973 election and Rabin was right to identify him as a rising force in politics. Having told Begin the story so far, he added: ‘Mr Begin, I am of the opinion that this Entebbe business will be deadly serious and very difficult. If you have no objection, I would suggest that I keep you in the picture.’
Begin expressed his gratitude and the two parted with a handshake.
Tormented by mosquitoes, loud snoring and the discomfort of a hard floor, Hannah Cohen had slept little during her first night in the Old Terminal building. She worried constantly about the welfare of her young son and daughter sleeping beside her, and after breakfast used her Arabic to ask Khaled, the Palestinian terrorist guarding one of the doors, if they and the other children could go outside and play in the sun.
Though surprised by a request he saw as impertinent, Khaled relayed it to his superior–Jaber–and permission was given for Hannah to take Tzipi, Kobi and ten other children, including Olivier Cojot and a Dutch boy of a similar age, out on to the tarmac where they played football with an old can and other games. To give them a little more room, the cordon of unsmiling Ugandan paratroopers was moved back thirty yards.
For forty-five minutes Hannah organized games like catch and hide-and-seek. But when she encouraged the children to dance a hora–a traditional Israeli folk dance performed by a circle of people holding hands–Khaled lost his patience. ‘I don’t agree to you dancing,’ he roared. ‘All inside!’
The terrorists had, in any event, a more pressing problem to deal with as three elderly French women were becoming ‘very vociferous about their detention’ and insisting ‘on being allowed to leave’. When the terrorists refused, one of the ladies ‘urinated at the side of the hall, clearly determined to make herself as objectionable as possible until she was removed’. This prompted the Egyptian doctor to recommend their transfer to the hospital in Entebbe and, ‘worried about their ability to preserve calm in such circumstances’, the terrorists agreed.
They also allowed the removal to hospital of the frail French man with the suspected heart complaint. Though the doctors there could find nothing amiss, Idi Amin tried to gain credit for the man’s ‘miraculous’ recovery by announcing to the press that he had been treated all over the world but ‘only properly diagnosed and cured when he came to Uganda’.
Caring little for their real welfare, Amin ordered that all four should be returned to the Old Terminal as soon as they had been treated. Would it not be disastrous publicity for Uganda if the man died? asked his health minister Henry Kyemba. Reluctantly Amin agreed that it would and he was eventually discharged from hospital into the care of the French Embassy.
This meant that two of the original 254 hostages had been released, and more would eventually follow thanks to the efforts of Michel Cojot. ‘If this lasts a few more nights,’ he warned Wilfried Böse, ‘one of these old people will die, and even if it is only ten minutes before the time that he or she would have died somewhere else, the whole world will consider you a murderer.’ He added: ‘It is in your interests and ours to rid ourselves of them. That was the logic of the SS on the Auschwitz train platform. If you don’t want to resemble them you had better free the weak quickly.’
Cojot’s advice was given added weight by the number of complaints to the Egyptian doctor from hostages–many of them elderly–suffering from backache. The doctor’s solution was to recommend to Henry Kyemba, his boss, that additional blankets and mattresses be provided. Kyemba spoke, in turn, to Amin, and with the latter’s approval the new bedding was delivered, courtesy of the Canadian Aid Agency. Even so, there were not enough mattresses to go around and some of the younger hostages had to do without.
With time on their hands, some of the hostages began speculating on the means by which the terrorists were able to smuggle their weapons aboard the Airbus. Most agreed that they must have taken advantage of the slacker baggage controls for transit passengers, a fact confirmed by a member of the crew. This prompted Captain Bacos and his co-pilot, Daniel Lom, to lament the recent announcement by Air France that all stopovers in Athens on their Tel Aviv–Paris flights would end on 1 July–the following day. It had come too late for them.
And all the while two snub-nose fighter jets of the Ugandan Air Force–identified by Daniel Lom as a Russian built MiG-17 and a MiG-21, the latter capable of supersonic speed–were paraded in front of the Old Terminal building, though they did not take off. Claude Moufflet thought this was all a bit of propaganda on Amin’s part, to show the hostages ‘how modern and well kitted out’ his air force was. Others saw it as a form of intimidation. ‘What a megalomaniac,’ observed Emma Rosenkovitch. ‘What was he doing with those planes and those medals, showing off?’
Several volunteers helped the members of the crew and the Ugandan waiters to serve the same lunch as the day before: rice, potatoes, beef in sauce, bananas and mineral water. After it had been eaten, most of the hostages were at a loss what to do next. Some were milling around and chatting, others playing cards or travel games they had brought with them on the plane. Claude Moufflet recognized one owned by a stewardess–a code-breaking game called ‘Mastermind’–as a present his daughter had received for her birthday. He preferred chess, but made the mistake of challenging a Russian-Israeli and was easily beaten.
To pass the time, Moufflet used the single dilapidated old shower in the men’s toilets, and was forced to grit his teeth as cold water cascaded from the broken pipe. Through the broken circular windowpane in front of him he could see two Ugandan soldiers–one reading a letter in a doorway opposite, and another moving along the alleyway between the departure lounge and the arrivals hall next door–and concluded that there was a double system of sentries: one fixed and one roving. It occurred to him then that if he were to chance an escape he would need a lot more information.
Leaving the shower cubicle he was met by the young Ugandan whose job it was to patrol the men’s toilets and recover any written documents the hostages had left there–more proof, if any was needed, that the Ugandan authorities were colluding with the terrorists. ‘You wash?’ asked the young African with a smile. ‘Feel good?’
Moufflet nodded, prompting the Ugandan to point and ask: ‘You, cigarettes?’
Motioning with the flat of his hand for the man to wait, Moufflet went out and recovered from his hand luggage three packs of cigarettes from the carton he had bought in Athens. When he handed them over, the toilet attendant smiled broadly and put his hand on his heart.
The early-afternoon meeting of the ministerial committee was barely under way in the conference room of Rabin’s office on Kaplan Street when Freuka Poran’s assistant entered with a note. He handed it to Poran who passed it, in turn, to the prime minister. ‘This is what we’ve been waiting for,’ said Rabin, scanning the paper. ‘The hijackers have broadcast their demands over Ugandan radio.’
Having read the note in more detail, Rabin continued: ‘In return for the hostages, the hijackers want the release of terrorists–they call them freedom fighters–imprisoned in five countries: forty from us, six from West Germany, five from Kenya, one from Switzerland, and one from France. They’ve issued an ultimatum. Within forty-eight hours the released terrorists are to be flown to Entebbe. Those freed by us are to be transported by Air France; the other countries can decide on their own mode of transport.’
‘And if not?’ queried Yisrael Galili, minister without portfolio. ‘What happens if they are not freed?’
Born in the Ukraine in 1911, a former Haganah chief of staff, Galili was said by a contemporary to have ‘the white hair of an Einstein, the stocky build of a kibbutznik, the shrewdness of an entrepreneur, and the veiled eyes of a Svengali’. He was, moreover, Rabin’s closest adviser in government and a hugely experienced political operator–and alleged lover of the former prime minister Golda Meir–who would always stay calm in a crisis.
Turning to him, Rabin replied in a portentous tone: ‘If the terrorists are not freed, they threaten to begin killing the hostages as of two o’clock Thursday afternoon, 1 July. That is the day after tomorrow.’
The ministers gasped as one, but Peres was the first to speak, giving an ‘impassioned address on the implications of capitulation to terrorist blackmail’.
Rabin had little time for such grandstanding, as he saw it, and quickly cut Peres short. ‘Before the defense minister sermonizes any further,’ he said, the contempt clear in his voice, ‘I suggest we adjourn to think the matter through with all its implications. We’ll meet again at five-thirty this afternoon and, hopefully, come up with some ideas.’
Once the ministers had departed, Rabin called together his personal staff–including Freuka Poran, his British-born private secretary Yehuda Avner (who had performed the same role for former premiers Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir) and Amos Eiran, director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office (and in effect Rabin’s chief of staff)–and vented his frustration with ‘what he regarded as Peres’s self-serving homilies’. He then asked if any progress had been made with attempts to encourage Idi Amin to intercede on behalf of the passengers. When he was told that, on the contrary, Amin appeared to be revelling in the media spotlight and might well be colluding with the hijackers, he exploded: ‘Nothing will surprise me about what that man Amin is capable of. He runs his country like a personal fiefdom. He probably has his own fish to fry in this mess, in cahoots with the terrorists.’
Rabin’s suspicions were correct. Though not part of Amin’s inner circle and therefore unaware of the hijacking in advance, the Ugandan health minister Henry Kyemba soon realized that ‘the whole operation was being supervised by Amin himself, working together with the Palestinians based in Kampala’. The dictator ‘thought he saw’, as Kyemba put it, ‘a fine opportunity to humiliate the Israelis and increase his stock with the Arabs’ and ‘wanted all the glory’.
He crowed several times to his health minister: ‘Well, Kyemba, now I’ve got these people where I want them’ and ‘I’ve got the Israelis fixed up this time.’ He was even ‘closely involved in drafting the Palestinian demands’, including the forty-eight-hour deadline that was, in Kyemba’s opinion, ‘impossibly tight’ and left ‘hardly time to contact all the authorities involved, let alone get their agreement to the terms’.
Conscious of the time constraint–if not of Amin’s direct involvement–Rabin told Avner to arrange another brief for the foreign media that emphasized, again, ‘France’s responsibility’. He then instructed Freuka Poran to ensure that the IDF chief of staff, Motta Gur, attended the next meeting of the ministerial committee at 5.30 p.m.
Poran seemed surprised. ‘Why do you need the chief of staff?’ he asked. ‘You have something in mind for him?’
‘I want to know,’ replied Rabin, ‘what the IDF thinks about this whole matter. I don’t have the slightest doubt that Peres’s pontifications about not surrendering to terrorist blackmail are for the record only, so that he’ll be able to claim later that he was in favour of military action from the start. The problem is his rhetoric is so persuasive he believes it himself.’
The hostages were mostly lying around the main hall of the Old Terminal building–reading, chatting, playing games and dozing – when a commotion was heard from the front of the building where the women and children had again been allowed to play. Seconds later they were herded back inside, followed by all the terrorists. As ever it was Wilfried Böse who spoke through the megaphone. ‘I have just communicated to your governments,’ he announced, ‘the official demands of the PFLP. Your freedom will depend upon them being accepted.’
He then read out the demands: The release of fifty-three ‘freedom fighters’ in five countries, including Kōzō Okamoto and Hilarion Capucci, the Greek Catholic archbishop of Caesarea who in 1974 had been imprisoned for smuggling weapons to Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank. The list mentioned some other familiar names–notably Werner Hoppe and Jan-Carl Raspe, two leaders of the German RAF terror group (the Baader–Meinhof Gang)–but most were unknown Palestinians and meant nothing to the hostages.
All had to be flown to Uganda by noon GMT (3 p.m. local time) on Thursday 1 July, along with $5 million from the French government, or the terrorists would blow up the plane with the hostages on board. This last detail brought a collective gasp of horror from the hostages, with many now convinced that they would not leave Uganda alive. One woman was so shocked she fainted, and two of the stewardesses burst into tears. Yet while Moshe Peretz was ‘almost certain’ that Israel would refuse these terms, he could envisage various possible outcomes: the least probable being that the terrorists would carry out their threat to murder everyone; a more likely scenario was a compromise whereby ‘a small number of detainees are released, or all the passengers, with the exception of the Israelis, are released on Thursday’.
Lieutenant-General Motta Gur–a short, stocky forty-six-year-old in combat uniform and boots, his receding black hair hidden by a paratrooper’s red beret–was about to board a military helicopter at Dov Field Airport in northern Tel Aviv for a flight to the Sinai when an aide ran up. ‘Sir, the prime minister wants you to attend an emergency meeting in Jerusalem at 5.30 p.m. to discuss the Entebbe crisis. Your car is waiting.’
Gur shook his head. The hostage crisis had begun forty-eight hours earlier, and only now had Rabin seen fit to consult his chief of staff. They knew each other well from the early 1970s when Rabin had been Israeli ambassador to the United States and Gur military attaché. But as a former chief of staff Rabin had a habit of questioning Gur’s operational decisions; whereas Peres, with minimal military experience, trusted him to do the right thing.
As his car sped along the highway to Jerusalem, it suddenly occurred to Gur that Rabin might ask whether the IDF had contingency plans to rescue the hostages. As things stood, the answer was no; so Gur ordered his driver to pull over at the next public telephone and told his adjutant, Lieutenant-Colonel Hagai Regev, to call the operations branch so that they could begin planning. Regev got through to Brigadier-General Avigdor Ben-Gal, the deputy chief of operations, and instructed him ‘to examine military action options to rescue the hostages, and to prepare troops to carry out the operation’.
It was this telephoned order that initiated the formal start of the ‘battle procedure at General Staff level’, though informal planning by air force and combined operations officers like Shiki Shani had been under way since Monday afternoon. When Chief of Operations Kuti Adam was informed of Gur’s order, he at once put together a ‘thinking team’ that included his deputy Ben-Gal and Colonel Ehud Barak, the former commander of the Unit and now assistant to the chief of military intelligence with responsibility for research and special operations.
Barak was in his Ministry of Defense office, a few floors above the Pit, when his intercom beeped. It was Adam. ‘Listen, Ehud, a plane has been hijacked and the hostages are being kept somewhere in the old Entebbe terminal. All we need to do is create a surprise.’
It was obvious to Barak what Adam wanted. He knew from previous experience that the key to ending hostage situations by force was the element of surprise: with it, as few as fifteen men of the Unit could enter the terminal and kill the terrorists before they could harm the hostages. But first they would need to gather as much intelligence as they could about the situation at Entebbe: the number of terrorists, their weaponry and habits; the layout of the airport; and, just as importantly, the quality and temper of the Ugandan soldiers who were guarding the airport. Barak knew at once who to call: Muki Betser.
When Betser reached Barak’s office, he found the IDF’s leading counter-terrorism experts–all friends and colleagues from previous operations–sitting round a long T-shaped table: Lieutenant-Colonel Amiram Levine, a former member of the Unit who now worked for Military Intelligence; Ido Embar, an air force major with responsibility for combined operations; Major Gadi Shefi, commander of Shayetet 13, the naval equivalent of the Unit (and similar to the US Navy’s SEALs); two senior officers from the staff of the Infantry and Paratroop Command, Colonel Ran Bag and Lieutenant-Colonel Amnon Biran; and Lieutenant-Colonel Chaim ‘Ivan’ Oren, Adam’s head of special operations. Leaning back in his seat at the top of the T, Barak was chairing the meeting. ‘Muki,’ he said, as all eyes turned towards the late arrival, ‘you know Entebbe?’
‘Sure,’ replied Betser. ‘I know it.’
‘So what do you think of Ugandan soldiers?’
Betser grinned. ‘They must be good,’ he said, moving towards a free chair, ‘after all I trained them.’
When the laughter had died down, Barak’s tone hardened. ‘How good?’
‘Well, they’re afraid of the night. And in the best of circumstances they don’t have much in the way of motivation. In this case?’ Betser paused. ‘I really don’t see what motivation they’d have to fight us.’
This was exactly what Barak wanted to hear and he smiled.
‘So,’ continued Betser, ‘I don’t think Ugandan soldiers will be our problem. You know Solel Boneh built the terminal?’
He was referring to the huge Israeli construction firm that had completed a number of projects in Uganda before Amin turned against his former allies. Barak nodded. ‘We already sent for the plans.’
And with that the preparations for a potential Entebbe rescue mission began.
Motta Gur had barely taken his place at the rectangular table in the conference room of the Prime Minister’s Office, alongside the head of the Mossad and members of the ministerial committee and their aides, when Yitzhak Rabin asked him a direct question: ‘Motta, does the IDF have any possible way to rescue the hostages with a military operation?’
Before Gur could respond, Shimon Peres intervened. ‘There has been no consideration of the matter in the defence establishment,’ he said gruffly. ‘I haven’t yet discussed it with the chief of staff.’
‘What?’ spluttered an outraged Rabin, the veins standing out on his forehead. ‘Fifty-three hours after we learn of the hijacking you have not yet consulted the chief of staff?’
Rabin turned to Gur. ‘Motta,’ he said sternly, ‘do you have a military plan, yes or no? If you do have a military plan, that will be our top preference. But remember, any operation has to provide for a way of bringing the hostages back.’
Again Peres was about to respond when Rabin insisted that Gur answer. ‘When I received your message to attend this meeting,’ said the chief of staff, ‘I assumed it was to seek my advice on a military option. Consequently, before coming here, I ordered the chief of operations to start a preliminary examination to see whether an operation is feasible, and if so, at what cost. A major problem is our lack of reliable information on the attitude of Idi Amin. If the Ugandans cooperate with us our chances for a successful operation would be that much greater.’
‘Obviously,’ said Rabin, still seething that Gur had received no prompting from Peres to plan a military solution, ‘but the reports we are receiving about Amin are not encouraging. The point is that, as of this moment, there is no concrete military solution, so we shall have to…’–he paused, as if reluctant to continue–‘… consider negotiating with the terrorist hijackers for the release of the hostages.’
But outwardly, added Rabin, we will ‘maintain our position that France was responsible and Israel would not capitulate’.
Now it was Peres’s turn to seethe. His feeling was that ‘a lack of authoritative information regarding the hijackers’ conditions and the hostages’ situation ought not… dictate a preference for any particular option’. Why ‘rush into a decision favoring one option (free the hostages through negotiations), when its feasibility was unclear, at the expense of an alternative option (freeing the hostages by force), when there was no definite evidence to show the latter option was unfeasible?’ he asked himself. But, sensing Rabin’s determination to pursue this course of action, he kept his concerns to himself.
Instead Peres observed that ‘there was no operational proposal, as yet, that had been thoroughly checked out’, and that one would be submitted only ‘after meticulous examination’. He and Gur then rose and left the room, ‘presumably’, commented Yehuda Avner, Rabin’s aide, ‘to speed back to the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv to see what military plan they could come up with, if at all’. This left the rest of the ministerial committee–Rabin, Allon, Yaacobi, Zadok and Galili–to engage in a ‘fretful discussion about the frightening thought of attempting to rescue so many hostages, thousands of miles away in the heart of Africa, and the unthinkable alternative…’.
That alternative was to release forty mainly Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails, the full list of names having just reached the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem via a phone call from the Israeli Embassy in Paris. Hastily scribbled down on a piece of paper and delivered to the meeting of the ministerial committee by Shlomo Avineri, director-general of the Foreign Ministry, the list was ‘woefully confused and full of spelling mistakes’. But most of the prisoners could still be identified and, once Avineri had read out the list, the head of the Mossad and former army general Yitzhak Hofi reviewed all he knew about the hijacking, the organization behind it, the PFLP–EA, and its ruthless leader Dr Wadie Haddad. Hofi, for one, was as unhappy as Peres at the prospect of negotiations. But he, too, was prepared to wait on events.
The only concrete decision taken at the meeting was for Yaacobi, the minister of transport, to set up an office at Ben-Gurion Airport to liaise with the hostages’ families. ‘These people,’ commented Peres later, ‘were going through a terrible time, their desperate worry exacerbated by our frustrating ignorance.’
So desperate, in fact, that that evening the fathers of two young hostages put forward an extraordinary proposal: to offer themselves as substitutes for their sons. The man behind the offer was the former French policeman Robert Mimouni, father of young Jean-Jacques, who since his emigration to Israel in 1971 had been living in the seaside town of Natanya and working as a clerk in the French Consulate in Tel Aviv. It was because of Robert’s link to the Consulate that Jean-Jacques had attended the French school in Jaffa where he became friends with the consul’s son, Thierry. That friendship had, in turn, prompted Jean-Jacques’ last-minute switch to Flight 139 so that he could accompany Thierry. For that reason–and, moreover, because he had encouraged Jean-Jacques to go to France in the first place–Robert felt guilty that he had placed his son in danger.
So, having first spoken to Consul Sicard, he walked into a Natanya post office and wrote out the following telegram to Idi Amin in Uganda: ‘WE, THE PARENTS OF JEAN JACQUES MIMOUNI AND THIERY SICKER [sic], ARE PREPARED TO FLY TO UGANDA TO TAKE OUR CHILDREN’S PLACE AS HOSTAGES.’
They received no reply.
For much of the afternoon Michel Cojot, the pilot Bacos and some other passengers had been pestering the two most approachable terrorists–Böse and the Peruvian–to relieve the overcrowding in the large hall by giving the hostages access up the barricaded staircase to the second floor. They refused to allow that, but they did instruct Ugandan airport employees to knock a hole through the left-side wall of the large hall, behind the former tourist shop, into a smaller room–formerly a waiting hall–beyond.
Night was falling as the workmen put the finishing touches to the jagged breach in the wall: a wooden ‘T’ nailed across the opening to restrict rapid movement. Cojot and others were about to pass through this awkward gap when Böse, Jaber and the other terrorists entered the departure lounge. ‘We’re separating you,’ said Böse matter-of-factly though the megaphone, ‘but not because of nationality, there’s no connection between that and the separation. I’ll call out the names and whoever hears their names will go into the other room. Really, we’re doing this so that you won’t be crowded. It has nothing to do with nationality.’
The first name to be called was Emma Rosenkovitch, followed by Noam Rosenkovitch and Ella Rosenkovitch. Then more Israeli names, sparking a deep fear in many that–as in previous hijackings–Israelis were being singled out for ‘special treatment’. The psychological consequences were ‘disastrous’, and very quickly Böse’s voice was ‘muffled by fearful cries, sobbing and protestations’.
Emma’s more immediate concern, however, as she crawled through the low and narrow opening with her children, was for her husband Claude. His name had not been called and she feared that, as an army reservist–like most Israeli males under forty–he might be killed out of hand. She had to wait thirty long minutes before he was finally allowed through to join her.
By then more than eighty mostly Israeli names had been called. ‘The feeling,’ noted Moshe Peretz in his diary, ‘is like an execution.’ For Akiva Laxer, the shame of being forced to bend down as he passed into the other room was ‘the worst feeling’ of his life and he understood for the first time ‘what it meant to be a hostage’. Sara Davidson also resented this deliberate humiliation of the Israelis, particularly as one of the Palestinian terrorists was standing by the gap ‘armed and ready’. She noted in her diary: ‘The German reads the names over a [megaphone] and everyone who hears his name goes to the exit, and grinds his teeth and crawls under the “T”.’ Soon Kuhlmann took her turn guarding the gap, prompting Davidson to comment: ‘Tough. Wicked.’
Even those of dual nationality–like Jean-Jacques Mimouni and Dora Bloch–were sent next door: though born in Jaffa, the daughter of a famous Zionist pioneer called Yosef Feinberg, Dora had married naturalized Welshman Aarhon Bloch in Palestine in 1925 and was travelling with both her Israeli and British passports. Her son Ilan, though also of dual nationality, had brought only Israeli identity papers. They were both on Böse’s list.
Not everyone living in Israel was identified. Since moving to the Middle East, Dr David Bass had become a reserve medical officer in the IDF; but because he was travelling on his US passport his Israeli links had been overlooked. The same went for a twenty-six-year-old French-born welder called Nahum Dahan who was accompanying his mother: she had an Israeli passport and was on Böse’s list; as his was French he was not. Two elderly sisters were also separated because one was a naturalized Israeli and the other not, causing the former to collapse in hysterics. But there were no deliberate exceptions, and as the protests grew the terrorists made ‘more and more menacing gestures’.
To try to calm the situation, the pilot Michel Bacos took the megaphone from Böse. ‘It is we who have asked our guards for more space,’ he said. ‘All they did was grant our request, so there is no cause for alarm.’ His words had little effect and Cojot was not surprised. In his view, Bacos had failed to understand ‘that it was not more space but the criterion of separation that was the problem’.
Once the separation of the Israelis was complete, six Orthodox Jews were sent to join them, the men easily identifiable by their little black skull caps: two seventeen-year-old Brazilians wearing checked shirts, Raphael Shammah and Jacques Stern, who had just completed a year of studies in a Jerusalem yeshiva; the Belgian couple Gilbert and Helen Weill, the former having led many of the prayer groups; and a young American couple from New York, a twenty-eight-year-old stockbroker and his twenty-five-year-old wife. This latter couple were nearing the end of a three-week vacation in Europe and Israel when they boarded Flight 139 to Paris. Like the Weills and the two Brazilians, they did not have Israeli identity papers, and their addition to the list was probably because, as the US Embassy in Paris later put it, they ‘appeared very Orthodox, ate only Kosher food and were seated with the Israelis aboard the plane and remained with them on the ground because the commandos permitted them to prepare Kosher food’. In other words they were associated with the Israelis, even if they had no direct connection beyond their deeply held religious faith.
Suddenly aware of the potential danger of his and his wife’s inclusion, the stockbroker shouted: ‘I’m American. I’m not Israeli. I have no connections with the Israelis. I have an American passport! I’m not going through there!’
His pleas fell on deaf ears and Emma Rosenkovitch, for one, ‘felt a certain contempt’ for him, though she could understand the American’s predicament.
Only one person volunteered to join the Israelis: twenty-six-year-old Janet Almog, the American-born wife of Israeli Ezra Almog. A pretty dark-haired native of Madison, Wisconsin, Janet had fallen for Ezra–a dead ringer for tennis star Jimmy Connors–during a summer stint as a volunteer at the Ein Dor Kibbutz in Israel. They had married soon afterwards and were en route to the United States to visit her parents–Janet’s first trip back for two and a half years–when the hijacking occurred. Thanks to his military training, Ezra took the shock of captivity in his stride. Janet had not coped so well and when her husband’s name was called and not hers she dissolved into tears. Ezra, however, was firm. ‘I want you to swear not to follow me. Stay on this side!’
Dora Bloch had tried to soothe Janet by saying her husband was right and it was best for her to remain. But the young American would not have it. ‘I can’t live without him,’ she sobbed, ‘and he told me not to follow him.’
Minutes later Bloch herself had been called through and, because of her age, she was spared the humiliation of the low entrance and instead taken outside by a terrorist and through the Israeli room’s exterior entrance. There she told Ezra Almog she had changed her mind. ‘You meant well,’ she said, ‘but you must take your wife with you. She won’t be able to stand it without you.’
Ezra tried to protest. ‘At least this way one of us will get out of here. There’s no point in her being here with me. Perhaps they’ll let her out…’
‘No,’ said Bloch, firmly. ‘She must be with you.’
At last Ezra relented. He spoke to the Palestinian terrorist guarding the entrance and was delighted when Janet was allowed through. They embraced in tears.
The rectangular room the eighty or so Israelis had been moved to was much smaller than the main hall next door: still forty feet from front entrance to back wall, but barely twenty-five feet wide, its size made tinier still by a temporary side wall of cardboard boxes. It, too, was dusty and unclean, with rows of seats its only furniture. ‘The terrorists warn us that [the boxes] are full of explosives,’ noted Moshe Peretz in his diary, ‘and if touched will go off. At first we are frightened, but in time the fear wears off and people hang their shirts over the boxes. While we are getting organized one of the hostages goes up to a terrorist and asks for a cushion for his baby. The terrorist strikes him violently with the butt of his revolver.’
Back in the departure lounge, many of the 170 or so non-Israelis were feeling just as indignant, particularly Jews like Julie Aouzerate who were reminded of Nazi practice during the Second World War. ‘It was a terrible scene,’ she recorded, ‘that thick German accent and the selektzia.’ It was inevitable that some of the hostages, particularly concentration-camp survivors, would be reminded of the selection process used by the Nazis: to be sent one way to live; the other to die. But, as Ilan Hartuv and others were later quick to point out, this was never a simple division of Jews and non-Jews. Many non-Israeli Jews like Julie Aouzerate, Michel Cojot and Peter and Nancy Rabinowitz remained in the original room. Appalled by the separation, Nancy had thought about joining the Israelis as a sign of Jewish solidarity and to show moral support; but Peter persuaded her to remain where she was.
Claude Moufflet and others felt so bad for the Israelis that they spontaneously picked up mattresses to take through to them. But they were stopped by the pair now guarding the entrance–Kuhlmann and Khaled–and told to pass the mattresses over the ‘T’, which they did. It was while he was helping to distribute the mattresses that Akiva Laxer was struck in the back with a savage blow from the butt of Jaber’s pistol, knocking him off his feet and leaving him shocked and winded. Following this unprovoked and unexplained attack by the violent and clearly anti-semitic Jaber, Laxer decided that it was dangerous for an Orthodox Jew like himself to be noticed and henceforth kept a lower profile.
A number of Israelis, meanwhile, had tried to re-enter the departure lounge with the excuse of going to the toilet. They, too, were halted and escorted individually by Kuhlmann, pistol in hand.
Moufflet now knew for certain that the separation was ‘not just by hazard’, but rather was ‘corresponding to a very precise objective’. He felt duped, and promised himself that he would make another attempt to get access to the Israeli room the following day when the surveillance might be ‘less rigorous’.
Cojot also realized the importance of ‘free movement’ between the two rooms and extracted an assurance from Böse that it would not be hindered. In the event, this promise was never honoured. Suspecting that it might not be, Cojot suggested to Bacos and the flight engineer Lemoine that ‘two or three of the twelve members of the crew might ask to be assigned to room with the Israeli passengers’ to offer moral support. Both asked for time to think about it and consult the other members of the crew. It was not until the following morning that Lemoine came back with a reply that won Cojot’s respect for its candour if not its courage. ‘We have wives and children,’ said Lemoine, almost apologetically. ‘If there is any shooting it will be in there first. We are not heroes, we prefer to remain here.’
Reminded of Cojot’s suggestion, Bacos’ response was blunter. ‘It’s not worth the trouble. We’ll visit them often. It’s no use complicating things.’ He, other members of the crew and a few passengers did indeed pay frequent visits to, as Cojot put it, the ‘people of the ghetto’. But the opportunity for the crew to make an important statement to the terrorists–that we will voluntarily share the fate of the Israelis, come what may–was lost.
Two occupants of the Israeli room were allowed back across, however, thanks to the efforts of Ilan Hartuv and Yitzhak David. They had tried to get all six non-Israeli Orthodox Jews returned by reminding Böse and the Peruvian of their earlier argument that they had nothing against Jews, only Israelis. ‘We know,’ came the reply, ‘we didn’t want to put them in your room but the German woman insisted.’
Later, Hartuv tried again on behalf of the young Brazilians. ‘These fellows are just seventeen years old,’ he told the Peruvian. ‘They’re both from Brazil and only came to Israel for a year to study in a yeshiva, a theological seminary. So maybe you’ll take them back into the other room?’
‘I know Portuguese,’ replied the Peruvian. ‘I’ll go and speak to them and if the story you tell me is true I will put them back in the main room.’ He honoured this promise, and before the day was out the Brazilians had been moved.
Sitting in the back of his Ministry of Defense car as it sped down the hill to Tel Aviv, Shimon Peres was still angry that Rabin could even consider negotiating with terrorists. He knew, now, that the only way to prevent this was for him and Gur to come up with a credible military option.
His thoughts were disturbed by his bodyguard in the seat next to the driver. ‘Shimon,’ said the man, turning in his seat, ‘I was once security officer at the Israeli mission in Kampala. I think it would be possible to exploit Idi Amin. He’s a great admirer of Moshe Dayan, but absolutely crazy about Zonik [Shaham] and Burka [Bar-Lev].’ Peres knew he was referring to the two colonels who had headed Israel’s military missions to Uganda in the 1960s and early 1970s. ‘He’s very sensitive,’ continued his bodyguard, ‘about all the Israelis who did him favours. For all his madness, he doesn’t forget them. I think we should do something along those lines. Perhaps it’s worth a direct talk with Idi Amin, to try and influence him.’
Peres could see the sense of this. ‘Okay,’ he said after a moment’s reflection. ‘Tomorrow, bring me Burka Bar-Lev and two or three more officers who were in Kampala, and who know Idi Amin well. At this stage we have to try everything, including Amin.’
As Peres neared the Kirya complex in Tel Aviv, a long evening of work ahead of him, Rabin was trying to unwind with a glass of whisky and a succession of cigarettes in his Jerusalem office. Realizing that Eiran, Avner and the other members of his personal staff were a little concerned by his comments at the meeting of the ministerial committee, he decided to explain himself.
‘When it comes to negotiating with terrorists,’ he said, ‘I long ago made a decision of principle, well before I became prime minister, that if a situation were ever to arise when terrorists would be holding our people hostage on foreign soil and we were faced with an ultimatum either to free killers in our custody or let our own people be killed, I would, in the absence of a military option, give in to the terrorists. I would free killers to save our people. So I say now, if the defense minister and the chief of staff cannot come up with a credible military plan, I intend to negotiate with the terrorists. I would never be able to look a mother in the eye if her hostage soldier or child, or whoever it was, was murdered because of a refusal to negotiate, or because of a botched operation.’
‘Silence!’ shouted Wilfried Böse through the loud hailer, instantly stilling the raised voices that had filled the large hall of the Old Terminal building since the removal of the Israelis.
‘I have good news,’ he began. ‘The President Idi Amin Dada has personally insisted that certain hostages will be freed as quickly as possible for humanitarian reasons. We have accepted this demand and the list of people who will be part of this will be communicated to you tomorrow morning.’
Hope rose in the breasts of many and, as Böse left the room, a vigorous debate began as to ‘who will be freed, on what criteria the choice will be made, and the conditions of this freedom’. It was quickly decided, however, by the unofficial spokesmen of the hostages–Cojot, Bacos and Lemoine–that a list would be drawn up of the sick, old people, mothers and children and given to the terrorists. They knew, however, that no Israelis would be permitted to leave.
After dinner–again provided by the Lake Victoria Hotel and divided up between the two rooms–the list of sixty names was given to Böse. They included twelve-year-old Olivier Cojot but not his father Michel. When Olivier discovered this, he grabbed Böse’s sleeve and pleaded in broken English: ‘Put my father on the list, put my father on the list.’
Cojot intervened. ‘Olivier,’ he said sternly, ‘one doesn’t beg these people.’ It was the first time he had raised his voice to his son since the start of their ordeal; but deep down he was touched by his son’s unwillingness to leave him.
That night, aware that Olivier would soon be free and able to pass vital information to the French authorities, Cojot scribbled in tiny writing on a scrap of paper everything he thought might be useful: the layout of the terminal and its various entrances; the number of terrorists, their weapons and their guarding arrangements; the location of the Ugandan soldiers and their activities. When he had finished, he rolled up the piece of paper as small as it would go and put it into the turn-ups of Olivier’s jeans where he assumed the terrorists would not look. He was hoping that the possession of this information might encourage the French authorities to launch a rescue mission. They still had a military base at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa that, at 1,000 miles from Entebbe, was less than half the distance an Israeli force would have to travel. As a Frenchman, albeit one conflicted by his countrymen’s abandonment of Jews in the Second World War, Cojot hoped against hope that his government would do something to save the mainly Jewish hostages. Such an act might be some recompense for the behaviour of the Vichy government and the death of his father during the Second World War, not to mention the casual anti-semitism he had faced as a child, and finally give him closure. It would, he felt, be the perfect opportunity for France to act in a heroic way and pay off its long-due blood debt to its own Jewish citizens.
He knew, of course, that sending the note with Olivier was a fearful risk and that the consequences might be serious. But he reasoned that it was only information that many of the other released hostages would be able to give from memory–if not in such precise detail–and that, in any case, the terrorists were unlikely to search a child.
Others came to a similar conclusion. Convinced they were unlikely to see their families again, the Rabinowitzes wrote farewell letters and wills and asked the ten-year-old Dutch boy–also on the list of sixty names without his father–if he would smuggle them out in his shoe. He agreed.
With most of his day taken up by a meeting of EEC foreign ministers in Luxembourg, it was not until early evening that Tony Crosland turned his attention to Uganda and the news of the terrorists’ ultimatum. ‘As hijackers have claimed no animus and made no demands against us,’ he cabled Horrocks in Kampala, ‘we are considering, in response to a request by Mrs Russell, whether there would be any advantage in trying to get individual release for British and Old Commonwealth citizens. There is the added humanitarian consideration that Mr Good suffers from a cardiac condition.’
What Crosland was suggesting, under pressure from Tony Russell’s wife Edith, was that Horrocks should use the absence of any explicit criticism of the United Kingdom in the PFLP’s communiqué to secure the release of all the Britons and the ‘Old Commonwealth citizens’ like the Canadians and the New Zealanders. It was a course of action, however, that even Crosland had misgivings about.
‘We have grave reservations about this,’ he confessed, ‘because of the risk of attracting to us PFLP attention and demands, the hijackers’ own demands that all negotiations should be conducted through a French-appointed negotiator, and the risk of harmful confusion in the use of more than one negotiating channel.’ But it was an avenue they needed to explore, and be able to say they had explored, because of the level of press and public attention the hijacking had attracted in the UK. He concluded: ‘Grateful for your urgent comments on the feasibility and usefulness of approaches solely on behalf of those for whom we have consular responsibility. You should not at this time consult the Ugandans or the French.’
Horrocks’s response to this cable, sent later that evening, was to dismiss the idea out of hand. ‘Although the Ugandans have ready access to the hijackers,’ he said, ‘I do not believe that they would be willing to exercise any influence in our favour in attempts to secure the release solely of those for whom we have consular responsibility.’ Neither they nor the hijackers would, he added, ‘entertain approaches from us on this subject’. As for the risks, he thought it likely that such a course of action ‘would be looked upon by the other governments affected as a selfish unilateral step in a situation that requires a common stand’.
Faced with such vehement opposition to his tactic from the man on the spot, Crosland gave up all hope of playing an active role in freeing the British and Commonwealth hostages. Their lives would henceforth depend on the actions of other governments–particularly the Israelis–and, of course, on the whim of the terrorists themselves. The foreign secretary was, however, prepared to act on French requests to put pressure on the Ugandan government to improve the ‘allegedly appalling conditions’ of the hostages in the Old Terminal. ‘If you consider it useful,’ he told Horrocks, ‘encourage the Ugandans to persuade the hijackers to allow [them] to bring in the necessary amenities. You should make it clear to the Ugandans that this request applies on humanitarian grounds to hostages of all nationalities.’
Sitting with Shimon Peres round the conference table in his Ministry of Defense office were the IDF’s most senior officers: Chief of Staff Motta Gur; his deputy Kuti Adam, chief of operations; Shlomo Gazit, chief of intelligence; and Benny Peled, commander of the Israeli Air Force.
Peres opened the 9 p.m. meeting by recounting Rabin’s words in Jerusalem: if the IDF could not come up with a viable scheme for rescuing the hostages at Entebbe he would have no option but to negotiate their release with the terrorists. ‘So, gentlemen, what have you got to say?’
Peled spoke first. Born in Tel Aviv in 1928, the scion of a long-established pioneer family, he had joined the IAF as a mechanic and later became one of Israel’s first jet pilots. He resembled a film star with his handsome fine-boned face, swept-back dark hair and pencil moustache. But his looks belied his toughness: he had twice survived the shooting down of his plane over enemy territory; he had held his nerve during the early setbacks of the Yom Kippur War; and, now that Israel was threatened by a new enemy–terrorism–he was in no doubt what the response should be. Nor had he arrived at the meeting unprepared, having earlier received assurances from Joshua Shani that Hercules planes could transport an assault force to Entebbe.
‘I, for one,’ said Peled, ‘am strongly against giving in to terrorists under any circumstances. I would propose landing an airborne force at Entebbe Airport. Once we have eliminated the terrorists who are guarding the hostages, Idi Amin will have no alternative but to let them go. To succeed in a military operation, we must have complete control over Entebbe and the neighbourhood. It can be done by dropping a thousand paratroops.’
A thought then occurred to Peled and he turned to Peres. ‘What do you want? That we conquer Entebbe or the whole country?’
Peres was intrigued: ‘How many men do you need for that?’
‘To conquer the whole country I need 1,000 soldiers–to conquer Entebbe maybe 200 or 300 men.’ Peled went on to explain that a force of either size could be flown to Entebbe non-stop on Hercules C-130s. He had made inquiries: it could be done.
It all sounded a little far fetched to Peres, though he gave the IAF chief credit for his daring. Gur was even less convinced. Dismissing Peled’s plan as ‘fantastic’ and one they would all do well to forget, he raised instead the possibility of a seaborne attack on Entebbe: either by troops crossing from Kenya in boats; or by marine commandos parachuting into Lake Victoria with inflatables.
The last to make a suggestion was Kuti Adam. He too was against negotiating, he said. His plan was to lure the terrorists to Israel by insisting that the exchange of prisoners and hostages take place in the Middle East. Then, once the terrorists were in reach, the Unit would launch a surprise assault to rescue the hostages. Few of those round the table thought it likely the terrorists would agree to this: yet it was, nevertheless, a tactic worth exploring.
Clearly there was much work to do and Peres closed the meeting by telling his generals to ‘continue raising new ideas and checking them out–no matter how weird or crazy they sounded’.
Claude Moufflet had just fallen asleep, precariously perched on a narrow shelf behind the bar in the large hall, when he was woken by hysterical cries from the French lady separated from her sister. ‘Jaco! Jaco!’ she kept crying, a man Moufflet assumed was either her husband or her son.
Two stewards and a stewardess tried and failed to calm her down, and eventually resorted to wrapping her in a blanket and, with the permission of the red-shirted terrorist ‘Ali’, carrying her outside. So tired were most of those in the room that they didn’t even wake up; those that did were quickly back to sleep, despite the hot airless atmosphere and the buzzing of mosquitoes.
Next door in the Israeli room, Sara Davidson flinched as she heard the cries. ‘I’ve no strength left,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It’s hard even to write. I gaze at my children and pray that they’ll emerge sound in body and spirit from this nightmare.’ Like many others, Gilbert Weill felt ‘broken and depressed’.