As the hostages slept, Ehud Barak’s seven-man ad hoc operations group was working through the night at the Kirya to come up with a military solution to the hijacking. Telephones rang constantly as information flowed into Barak’s office. Visitors included an engineer from the Israeli construction company Solel Boneh who arrived clutching the original plans for Entebbe Airport, and senior air force officers who had spent time in Uganda as flight trainers and pilots of the short-lived Israel–Uganda shuttle. The latter told Barak everything they could about the airport, other air bases in the country and Idi Amin’s air force.
Other vital information was gleaned from an international directory of airports, notably the location of Entebbe’s New Terminal in relation to its old one, and the presence of a new runway for the MiG fighters given to Amin by the Libyans.
All this enabled the planners to come up with ideas that were either rejected by the others or gradually refined. Subtly directed by Barak, and fuelled by endless cups of tea and coffee, the brainstorming went on all night. But again and again they were faced with ‘holes in the intelligence’, the largest of which was Amin’s role in the hijacking. Was he colluding with the terrorists or genuinely trying to help? They suspected the former. They knew that Amin was due to attend an upcoming meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Mauritius, his last as chairman, and felt that the hijacking gave him just what he wanted–an international stage. His statements to the press, meanwhile, were non-committal: promising the hostages’ safety on the one hand; and urging Israel to agree to the terrorists’ demands on the other.
Muki Betser was not alone that ‘long first night’ in feeling a ‘tremendous responsibility’ for the safety of the hostages. Yet all were convinced that an exchange of prisoners would not only be a humiliation for Israel but ‘a victory for terrorists everywhere’.
By dawn, Barak’s team had moved down into the underground Pit to put flesh on the bones of four possible plans, none without disadvantages, and all dependent upon surprise. Their favourite was a combined operation for members of the Unit and the navy’s Shayetet 13 to parachute into Lake Victoria with Zodiac inflatable boats, and then march the short distance from the shore to the Old Terminal at Entebbe where they would kill the terrorists and release the hostages. Only then would they hand themselves over to the Ugandans in the hope that they would arrange their repatriation. The weakness of this plan was that it assumed ‘Amin wanted a rescue to relieve him of responsibility’.
The second plan–also suggested by Gur at the meeting with Peres the night before–was for an assault force to fly to Kenya and then use boats to cross Lake Victoria to the shore near Entebbe. It was dependent not only upon Amin’s cooperation, but also upon that of the Kenyans who, like the rest of the OAU, had had no official diplomatic relations with Israel since the Yom Kippur War. Unofficially, however, the two countries still had close security links as proven by the recent cooperation between the Mossad and Kenyan security forces to prevent three members of Wadie Haddad’s PFLP from using Russian hand-held surface-to-air missiles (SAM-7s) to shoot down an El Al jet as it landed at Nairobi International Airport, en route from Johannesburg to Tel Aviv, in January 1976. The terrorists were caught in the act, thanks to information given by Mossad agents based in Nairobi to the Kenyan internal security police, the General Service Unit (GSU), and a second pair of West German suspects–sent to Kenya to find out why the attack had failed–were captured later that week. All five were on the list of ‘freedom fighters’ the terrorists at Entebbe wanted released from Kenyan jails in return for the hostages. What the PFLP did not realize, however–and the Israeli government was not about to tell them–was that shortly after the arrests the Kenyan authorities had allowed the Mossad to fly the five in secret back to Israel where they later stood trial. This all augured well, of course, for an operation launched from Kenya.
The third plan–suggested by Muki Betser–was a variation on General Adam’s: but instead of luring the terrorists to Israel, which all agreed was an unlikely scenario, the surprise assault would take place at Entebbe by soldiers masquerading as Palestinian prisoners. They would, moreover, be flown in an IAF Boeing painted in Air France livery, and by military pilots disguised as civilians. Once again, however, the success of the mission would require Amin’s cooperation.
The final plan–and arguably the least favoured at this stage–was the so-called ‘IDF Option’ put forward by Colonel Ran Bag of the Infantry and Paratroop Command. Keen for his own soldiers of the Golani and Tzanchanim (Paratroop) Brigades to be involved, Bag wanted to use a force large enough to overawe the Ugandans so that the Unit’s assault force could rescue the hostages. He envisaged a strike force of at least a thousand men. But unlike Air Force commander Peled’s original suggestion for these troops to be dropped by parachute, Bag wanted the Hercules C-130 transport planes to land so that they could later fly the hostages to safety. The plan had the advantage of relying on neither the Ugandans nor the Kenyans. On the other hand its very size would increase the likelihood of detection as its planes flew within radar–and fighter–range of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, three countries sworn to destroy Israel; and it would need both time and access to Entebbe’s fuel tanks so that its planes could return to Israel.
That the IAF was capable of landing planes unnoticed at Entebbe, Major Ido Embar was not in any doubt. ‘Believe me,’ he told the others, ‘I live on an air force base. I know what I’m talking about. If a plane manages to avoid radar detection up to its landing, it could land and come to a quiet halt at the end of a runway without anybody noticing.’
At 8 a.m., Ilan Hartuv was walking past the windows at the front of the Israeli room in the Old Terminal building, stretching his cramped muscles after an uncomfortable night in an armchair, when he noticed Ugandan soldiers laying rows of wires outside the building. ‘They’re booby-trapping us ready for demolition,’ said one fearful hostage.
‘No,’ interjected another, ‘those are electronic eavesdropping devices.’
The truth was soon revealed when a single Ugandan soldier entered the room and announced: ‘The wires outside are for you.’
Nonplussed, the Israelis said nothing, waiting for an explanation.
The soldier continued: ‘They are for your laundry. Anyone who wants to wash clothes may do so in the washrooms. You can hang them outside to dry.’
A collective sigh of relief went up and, minutes later, people flowed through the doorway to hang wet garments on the wires and play in the sun. The non-Israeli hostages, having received a similar message, were doing likewise. Emboldened by the relaxed atmosphere, Sara Davidson approached Wilfried Böse, on guard at the entrance to the Israeli room, and asked him: ‘Perhaps we can take our bags out of the plane?’
‘We wanted to bring them out,’ said the German, ‘but they are in special containers, and this airport doesn’t have suitable equipment to unload them.’
She shook her head indignantly. ‘I don’t understand you! How can you hold up so many people without decent mattresses and blankets, in such terrible conditions?’
Embarrassed, Böse asked her what was needed and scribbled down a list of her requests: blankets, mattresses, soap, clean the toilets, etc. When he had finished, he said he would do his best but it was not his decision. ‘I was only in command on the plane. They are the officers,’ he said, pointing in the direction of Jaber and the Peruvian. ‘Now they’re in charge.’
‘I’ve asked you here,’ said Shimon Peres, addressing the three officers seated around the conference table in his Ministry of Defense office, ‘because you all served with the IDF military mission in Uganda and know Idi Amin personally. I want you to tell me everything you know about the Ugandan army, Amin’s motives and methods, and to suggest any proposals for solving the hijacking crisis.’
The first to speak was Colonel Burka Bar-Lev, the tall and balding former head of the IDF’s last military mission to Uganda, who had once been so close to Amin that he had known about his January 1971 coup in advance. Bar-Lev, moreover, had welcomed the new regime enthusiastically, ignoring Israeli Foreign Office advice to play an impartial role. He had used his influence to save certain ‘friends’ of Israel from execution and to condemn others. Yet even Bar-Lev had been unable to avert the breach with Uganda that had resulted from the Israeli government’s refusal to give Amin a £10 million loan on generous terms and to supply his air force with a squadron of Phantom fighter-bombers. ‘We don’t manufacture Phantoms,’ Prime Minister Golda Meir had told Amin during his visit to Israel in July 1971, ‘we buy them from the United States, when we can. Why do you need Phantoms?’ His reply: ‘To use against Tanzania.’
Speaking with his trademark rapid-fire delivery, Bar-Lev told Peres that Amin obtained most of his information from talking to people. He was, as a result, ‘greatly influenced by those close to him and tended to rely heavily on their judgement and their personal loyalty to him’. Bar-Lev added: ‘I don’t believe he will massacre the hostages, but nor do I think he will get into a firefight with the hijackers. These presumptions will remain valid as long as Amin doesn’t dream something during the night. If he does, that could change everything.’ Bar-Lev explained that he was referring to Amin’s oft-repeated story of his mother appearing to him in a dream to warn him against ever harming the Jews.
The second of the three officers to speak was Lieutenant-Colonel Yosef Salan, the former commander of an IAF team in Uganda who had helped the country set up its own air force. He broadly agreed with Bar-Lev’s assessment, but warned that if Israel tried to use force ‘that could short-circuit all of Amin’s fuses’ and might cause him to ‘go wild’. In that event there would be ‘no knowing how it might end’.
While that was true, said the third officer, a major in the IAF, he also thought that the Ugandan Army would ‘probably not intervene’ in a battle between IDF troops and the hijackers. ‘They generally prefer,’ he added with a grin, ‘to steer clear of other people’s wars.’
‘Is Amin brave?’ Peres asked all three.
Their response was instant and identical: ‘No, he’s a coward.’
‘And,’ added the IAF major, ‘he’s also cruel. I remember once, after he had been given a rifle as a present, he immediately began spraying bullets across the courtyard of his villa, hitting innocent and unarmed people.’
Peres nodded. It had been, for him, a fascinating and revealing discussion and his silent conclusion was that Amin would be interested in ‘dragging out’ the drama for as long as he could, since it provided him with ‘an unparalleled opportunity for getting world attention’. He ‘would not, on his own initiative, kill the hostages’. He might have ‘played fast and loose with the lives of his own people, but was wary of harming “white” people’. Therefore if Israel used force he ‘would not intervene, even if some Ugandans were hurt or killed during the operation’. If, on the other hand, some hostages were still in his hands after such an operation, ‘they might well be killed out of revenge’. He thus concluded that the Ugandan Army would not be a serious obstacle to any military action, and that the best way to appeal to Amin was ‘not through diplomatic protocol or sweet reason’, but rather ‘through his ego–appealing to his pride and honour, hinting that there might be a Nobel Peace Prize in this for him, referring to his international standing, and appealing to the mystique surrounding his role as national leader’.
He determined, therefore, to set up a telephone link with Amin as soon as possible in the hope that it would provide the military planners with the detailed information they ‘lacked about the hijackers and the hostages’, and enable them ‘to form a more accurate assessment of the situation on the ground at Entebbe’.
The officer entrusted with this task was Burka Bar-Lev, a man once described as ‘Amin’s personal adviser’. He was asked by Peres to call Amin and say he was speaking for people ‘close to the top policymaking echelon in Israel’. Peres added: ‘Burka, this entire office, all the telephones, all the secretaries, are at your disposal.’
Peres had no sooner cleared his office of Bar-Lev and the two air force officers than in trooped the senior commanders of the IDF–Gur, Adam, Peled, Gazit and one or two others–for their scheduled 10 a.m. conference. ‘What have you come up with?’ asked Peres.
Gur explained that his planners were still recommending a seaborne assault–either from a paradrop into Lake Victoria or by troops crossing from the Kenyan shore–and that once the terrorists were dead the commandos would withdraw. The risk, quickly identified by Peres, was that the Ugandans would then take out their frustrations on the defenceless hostages. But an even more serious obstacle was that both operations would take a minimum of thirty-six hours to prepare. With the ultimatum due to expire at 2 p.m. Israeli time the following day, there simply was not enough time.
They discussed the alternative plans–including Peled’s preference for flying enough soldiers to Entebbe to take over the airport and the town–but none satisfied Peres or met with Gur’s approval. An added complication was a report from Uganda that Amin had deployed an entire battalion of troops to guard the hostages. Would they put up a fight? And what about the building that was housing the hostages? Had it been booby-trapped? They simply ‘did not know enough to mount a military operation–especially an operation whose success would depend, above all, on surprise’.
The distinctive whump-whump alerted the hostages to the arrival of a helicopter at 11.30 a.m. A French-made blue and white Lynx duly landed fifty yards in front of the Old Terminal building, and President Idi Amin Dada clambered out, wearing a dark-blue suit and a huge ten-gallon cream-coloured cowboy hat that was promptly blown from his head by the downdraught from the still-beating rotor blades. As his bodyguards scampered to recover his hat, Amin shook hands with Faiz Jaber, the chief terrorist, and together they got back into the helicopter for a brief conference.
Ten minutes later they re-emerged and began discussions with some of the other terrorists and a thin black man in dark glasses and a dark suit that the hostages assumed was the Somali ambassador to Uganda, the man the terrorists had nominated as their diplomatic point of contact. Their conversation over, Amin finally entered the large hall with one of his generals, his bodyguards and Jaber, Böse and the Peruvian. He was met with another burst of applause from the non-Israeli hostages–much to Michel Cojot’s embarrassment and frustration.
‘Good morning,’ said a jovial Amin. ‘I have good news for you. During the course of my negotiations with PFLP I have obtained an agreement that old people and ill people, as well as children and their mothers, will be liberated. The members of the PFLP will communicate with you a list of people in a moment. I just need to keep telling you that I don’t want any of you to be killed here and I will do all I can to obtain your freedom. Your governments have still not addressed any formal response to the demands given by the FLP of Palestine, therefore it is uniquely down to me that these people will be freed. When you are freed, I ask you to say to your governments that they must stop encouraging the Zionist politics of the state of Israel.’
Amin looked round the room, pleased with the reaction so far. ‘I am,’ he continued, ‘not only the Ugandan head of state, but also the President of all Africa and have already said to the United Nations that they must return the exiled Palestinians to their land. This is what you must repeat to your governments when you get back to your homes. The world is lucky that Yasser Arafat, the chief of the Palestinians, is a man of good sense, and also a moderate. He has publicly declared in front of all the world’s nations and to the United Nations that the Palestinians are happy to live in Israel with Jews and Christians side by side. Insist that your governments make this possible.’
Again Amin paused, seemingly unaware of the contradiction between what he had just said and the ideological stance of Wadie Haddad, the mastermind behind the hijacking of Flight 139. Haddad was an extremist who sought not compromise with the Israeli state, but rather its destruction. He was, as a result, violently opposed to Arafat’s tactic of seeking a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem and had, moreover, been ejected from the original PFLP and forced to set up his own splinter group because he disagreed with, as he saw it, the PLO’s defeatist order not to strike at targets outside Israel.
Ignoring the perplexed look on some faces, Amin ploughed on.
‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘that the Ugandan people are chased from their territory by an enemy people. Do you think we would accept this? No. The Ugandans would fight, even to the death, to reconquer their land. It’s what the Palestinians are doing, and it’s what your governments would do if it happened to you. I know that you men, women and children, young and old, are innocent and I am going to do everything I can to improve your comfort and obtain your freedom. I know that many of you have slept badly or not at all, but you should know that since you’ve been here I haven’t slept either. I just took the time to change clothes before coming to see you today. But I am going to have some mattresses brought, and some pillows, so that you can sleep better.’
He concluded his speech by telling the hostages that those due to be freed would return home that same day on a separate Air France plane that was waiting outside the New Terminal building. He reminded them that he ‘did not want anything bad to happen’ to them, and that it was the responsibility of their governments to respond to the terrorists’ demands. ‘I will,’ he said, ‘come back to see you soon. Goodbye.’
As Amin was speaking, Cojot again provided a simultaneous translation into French, making corrections where he thought it was useful to do so–replacing, for example, Amin’s description of himself as ‘president of Africa’ with ‘outgoing president of the Organization of African Unity’, and toning down menacing phrases like ‘I don’t want any of you to be killed…’
Their voices were occasionally made inaudible by the roar of a low-flying MiG that was surely intended, thought Cojot, ‘to discourage any attempt at revolt, or perhaps to help us take down the clothes we had washed and hung up to dry’. As if that was not bad enough, the encounter was captured for posterity by press photographers and a film crew from the local television station.
The end of Amin’s speech was met with a ‘massive round of applause’ that visibly delighted the dictator as he left with his entourage to speak to the Israelis in the adjacent room. There his reception was cooler, though a few people applauded after he greeted them with ‘Shalom’. He had little to say, beyond a promise to bring more blankets and pillows, and to inform the Israelis that the terrorists had no grudge against them per se, but instead against the ‘fascist Israeli government’ which, if it did not agree to the terrorists’ demands, was clearly unconcerned ‘about the fate of its citizens’. He made no mention of the possibility that any Israelis would be released.
The man translating Amin’s words into Hebrew–as he had during the president’s earlier visit–was Ilan Hartuv, a former economic adviser at the Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa who had met Amin a few years earlier during a ceremony to celebrate the construction of a big housing estate in Kampala by the Israeli firm Solel Boneh. Amin did not recognize Hartuv, and the Israeli chose not to remind him of their earlier meeting; he did, however, suggest during Amin’s second visit that there was nothing he and the other Israelis could do to influence their government while they were in Entebbe, but if they were released they could ‘repeat the terrorists’ statements’ once they were safely back in Israel.
Akiva Laxer was blunter. ‘You are Field Marshal Dr Idi Amin Dada, a great leader. How can you let these terrorists harm us? Why don’t you overpower them and release us?’
‘Look,’ replied Amin, gesturing at the wall of cardboard boxes, ‘the reason I can do nothing is because you are surrounded by all these boxes of explosives.’
‘But Field Marshal,’ said Laxer, ‘come and see. There is nothing in these boxes.’
Amin shook his head. ‘I cannot do this because they have told me the boxes are full of explosives. It’s too risky. They might blow up the whole building.’
Once Amin had left the room, several Israelis went to the gap between the two rooms to ask the other hostages what he had said to them. A few of the latter insisted that there was little difference between the two speeches, but one young Israeli woman was not convinced. ‘You will see,’ she said bitterly. ‘They are going to free people from your side and they will keep all of us.’
‘Surely not,’ responded a non-Israeli. ‘He said they would free people who were old, ill, children and their mothers. That will surely be for everybody.’
‘Maybe, but on our side there is no list. You made one last night.’
The conversation might have continued but for Brigitte Kuhlmann who shooed the hostages away from both sides of the gap in the wall as Khaled returned to his post.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Yitzhak Rabin, addressing the first full meeting of the Israeli Cabinet since the crisis had begun on Sunday, ‘I want to say that any information that leaks out today can end up costing lives. So I ask you not to behave normally regarding this issue.’ In other words, speak to no one.
An hour and a half earlier he had met with Yitzhak Navon, the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, and with Menachem Begin and Elimelech Rimalt, the two main leaders of the opposition, to apprise them of the latest developments regarding the hijacking and to enlist their support for what he knew would be a momentous political decision if there was no alternative: to begin negotiations for the release of the hostages. Begin’s response was all he could have hoped for: ‘Mr Prime Minister, you can expect the full support of the opposition. The nation is united at a time like this.’
Now Rabin was looking for the support of his ministers. He told them of the latest developments–particularly the likelihood that the IDF would not come up with a workable rescue plan in time–and reminded them that the deadline for a response to the hijackers’ demands was 2 p.m. the following day. Any later and the hostages would be killed.
‘We know,’ responded Yigal Allon, his lack of sleep obvious from the bags under his eyes and his tousled hair. ‘But if we publish a statement saying we’ll meet the terrorists’ demands, everyone will condemn us. The French will announce they aren’t planning on surrendering to pressure. West Germany is completely rejecting the possibility. In a meeting between our Washington ambassador and the assistant to the secretary of state, he mentioned that their secret approach is known to us–not to give in to demands or blackmail.’
Allon, by these comments, had made clear his belief that Israel would be diplomatically isolated if it tried to do a deal to save the hostages’ lives.
Rabin was unimpressed, chiefly because he could not see an alternative to negotiation. ‘At this stage,’ he responded, ‘I don’t think a military operation is possible, because we don’t have the ability to act without the consent of the countries involved. So what do we do? Attack Uganda? How would we even reach Uganda? The object is not to act militarily but to save people’s lives. As of right now I can’t see a way to do that. So, without befogging the issue, we are in trouble and it won’t be a surprise if the hostages’ families start to put pressure on us.’
After a few of the other ministers had offered their opinions, Rabin concluded: ‘Gentlemen, there is still no need to decide yet, but I can see that we’ll have to meet again today or tomorrow morning. My office will let you know when.’
Once the meeting with Peres and the other IDF generals had finished, air force chief Benny Peled returned to his own headquarters building in the Kirya to continue planning a possible rescue mission. Of all the senior commanders, he was the most convinced that a military strike was feasible. ‘The only danger,’ he told senior members of his staff, ‘is if they open fire on the planes. I think that the risks are reasonable. I don’t believe that we are exaggerating. It’s within normal range for a Hercules.’
‘There could be a problem of discovery by radar en route,’ suggested a member of his staff.
‘No,’ said Peled, shaking his head. ‘The problem isn’t radar, but rather what the enemy will do with the information he receives–if he receives it! Let’s assume for a moment that we are picked up by radar in Uganda–or anywhere else on the way to Entebbe. What will they do? What will they think? The last thing that will come to mind is that these are Israeli planes on their way to rescue hostages from Entebbe. But we must make sure that the chances of being discovered en route, and particularly in the target area, are reduced to the barest possible minimum.’
It was just after noon when the acting British high commissioner James Horrocks sent his response to Tony Crosland’s query of the night before from the three-storey British High Commission in central Kampala. Unable to get personal access to the Old Terminal, he was forced to admit that he and his French colleagues had only ‘second-hand’ information about the hostages’ living conditions.
He said that President Amin had assured the French ambassador that ‘catering services have been organized and a Ugandan medical team was in attendance’, while other sources–presumably airport workers–claimed ‘that arm chairs were moved from the new airport terminal for the hostages and mattresses provided for their babies’. Although this lack of adequate sleeping arrangements ‘must inevitably cause discomfort and hardship’, said Horrocks, it was undoubtedly ‘an improvement over their continued detention on the aircraft’.
Though not yet aware of Amin’s earlier visit to the hostages, Horrocks did include in his cable the hope that, thanks to the president’s intervention, some of the more vulnerable hostages–sick, elderly, mothers and children–would be released that morning. Less encouraging was Amin’s refusal to allow an Air France doctor and nurse to see the hostages on the grounds that ‘the Ugandans were providing all necessary medical attention’.
Horrocks’s reliance on the French for his limited knowledge of events at the airport was indicative of how low Britain’s stock had fallen in a country that until recently had been part of its Empire. The first British presence in what would become the city of Kampala was in 1890 when Captain Lugard established a fort on a feature known as the ‘Hill of the Impala’, or Akasosi k’Empala in the dialect of the local Buganda tribe. Four years later the British established a protectorate over Uganda–a loose form of imperial rule that allowed the Buganda a measure of self-government–and made Kampala its capital. Over the years the settlement mushroomed across a chain of hills, with the British building their spacious homes and government buildings on the neighbouring heights of Nakasero, Kololo and Mulago. In addition a handsome red-roofed and colonnaded State House was built in Entebbe, near the airport, for the British governor of Uganda. After independence in 1962, State House became the official residence of the Ugandan president.
With the end of imperial rule, Britain’s presence in Uganda was confined to the whitewashed three-storey High Commission building on Parliamentary Avenue (formerly Obote Avenue) in the Nakasero district of central Kampala. It was from here–among the flat-roofed post-1945 modernist buildings of the administrative and diplomatic quarters–that successive British high commissioners had attempted to influence Uganda’s rulers. But with increasingly little success: first President Milton Obote, in a move to the left, had angered the British by nationalizing private businesses, many of them foreign; then in 1972 his successor Idi Amin had responded to Britain’s refusal to give him arms to fight the Tanzanians by expelling from Uganda the large Indian Asian community that had arrived during colonial rule. In protest, the FCO had declined to send any more substantive high commissioners to Kampala, leaving less experienced diplomats to handle trade links and the consular interests of the dwindling British community.
Horrocks was not even the official acting high commissioner: that post had been held since 1973 by James Hennessy, who was on extended leave in the summer of 1976. Small wonder that Horrocks, normally the chargé d’affaires and Hennessy’s deputy, was finding it hard to get any concrete information from the airport.
‘Silence!’ demanded Wilfried Böse through the megaphone, and for once he got it instantly. He was standing in the centre of the Old Terminal building’s main hall, flanked by his superiors Faiz Jaber and the Peruvian. All around them the hostages had stopped what they were doing, eager to hear the long-awaited announcement of who would stay and who would go.
‘As we told you yesterday,’ continued the German, ‘we’ve decided to agree to the demands made by President Idi Amin, and I have here a list of people that will be freed.’ The room held its breath. ‘The list that we received yesterday had sixty names. We have agreed to free forty of these people.’ Groans filled the air.
‘However,’ said Böse, raising his hand to stifle the discontent, ‘for humanitarian reasons we will also free five more whose health is not good. Would you please all go to the left side of this room when I call your name, and take your hand baggage and make your way outside.’
As Böse was speaking, a yellow bus drove up to the front of the Old Terminal and out of it trooped a host of photographers and a film crew to record the moment of the hostages’ release. This caused an outbreak of chatter that irked Böse. ‘Silence, please!’ he shouted, a plea that was echoed by many hostages.
‘Yes, silence!’ ‘Be quiet!’ ‘We haven’t heard anything yet!’
As the room settled down, the German continued: ‘Would you please detach the tags from your hand luggage so that we can identify them. Also you must give us your cameras, tape and video recorders. We warn all of you that you are about to be searched and all disobedience will be very severely punished.’
Then he began to call out names, mentioning the very old, the sick and the mothers with children. Fathers were not included, and for some the separation was heartbreaking. One French mother of three wept as she realized her husband would not be going with them, and it took him some time to persuade her that she must go. She eventually left, holding a folded pushchair in one hand and a bag in the other, her children herded before her.
It was even harder for the children without mothers, like Olivier Cojot. When his father Michel’s name was not called after his, he strode up to the Peruvian and demanded: ‘Hey, hold on! What about my dad? If my dad isn’t released, I’m not going.’
His father could see what was happening and quickly intervened, pushing Olivier firmly towards the line that was forming on the left side of the room. Conscious of the vital intelligence that Olivier was carrying in his turn-ups, Michel Cojot was furious that he had drawn attention to himself. But he softened for their final embrace. ‘Papa,’ said Olivier, ‘you remember how much you missed your own father? So please don’t play the cowboy.’
Though distraught, the young boy tried not to show it, keeping his head high and his expression fixed as he walked outside. The watching Claude Moufflet was astonished by Olivier’s self-control and thought it must be a ‘deliberate sign of affection that he wants to display for his father’. With a son about the same age, waiting for him in France, Moufflet found himself wishing that if the roles were reversed his son would display such an ‘admirable attitude’.
The father of a thirteen-year-old girl–a senior officer in the Moroccan Royal Air Force–was on the list, but only because he had managed to convince the terrorists that he needed to accompany his wife who was suffering from breathing difficulties.
As the growing crowd of soon-to-be-liberated hostages sheltered from the sun under the awnings in front of the Old Terminal, some of those inside tried to pass them messages and possessions through the windows. This irritated the terrorists and caused Faiz Jaber to go outside, pistol in hand, and move the crowd further forward. When the conversations continued, Jaber ordered the windows closed.
For some of the remaining hostages, the realization that they were not to be freed was crushing. Many collapsed to their knees, hands clasped in supplication, pleading with the terrorists that they deserved to go too. Most were ignored, though at the last moment Böse signalled to two sisters that they could join the others, bringing the number of those liberated to forty-seven. Of that number, two French women–a nun and a lady in her fifties–offered to stay behind so that others could go. But their offers were rejected. ‘It was soon clear,’ noted Julie Aouzerate, one of the lucky ones, ‘that the list was fixed and unchangeable.’ It included thirty-three French nationals–among them twenty-five-year-old Annie Bracker and her two-year-old daughter Shirley–three Moroccans, two Greeks, two Americans, two Canadians, two Dutch, a Venezuelan, a Paraguayan, a Cypriot and one person defined as ‘stateless’. The majority were Jews.
Once all forty-seven had been searched, counted and recounted, they were directed on to the bus and driven away, causing at least two of the women left in the departure lounge to collapse in hysterics and to require sedation. Michel Cojot, on the other hand, felt only relief that his son Olivier–whose selfless behaviour throughout the crisis had filled him with pride–was safe and that henceforth he was ‘alone and free’.
Shimon Peres had missed the earlier get-together of the full Cabinet because he was consulting with the senior IDF commanders in Tel Aviv. But he was present at a brief meeting of the ministerial committee in Rabin’s office at noon, having driven across to Jerusalem with General Gur.
‘I called this meeting,’ said Rabin, ‘because a telegram has arrived from Uri Lubrani.’ Everyone in the room knew that Lubrani, a former political adviser to David Ben-Gurion, had been ambassador to Uganda in the mid-1960s and was currently heading Israel’s diplomatic mission in Teheran. Rabin continued: ‘He and Idi Amin Dada both shared an experience where they were saved from a plane crash. Regarding this, we have a statement that will be read by Yigal.’
Allon picked up the telegram. ‘Lubrani writes, “I want to offer myself as a messenger to Amin in Uganda, to try and get him to free all the hostages or trade myself in for them. I think we can try to play this card, especially with such a primitive person like Amin.”’
Rabin seemed keen. ‘I suggest you tell him,’ he said to Allon, ‘to try and get there.’
Peres was appalled. ‘He is the Israeli ambassador to Iran. If, God forbid, they get their hands on him, he knows a lot of secrets.’
The defense secretary’s blunt speaking seemed to bring Rabin to his senses and he decided to drop the matter. Instead he told the assembled ministers that they would meet again at nine that evening, by which time Gur would have reported on any possible rescue plan.
Only Peres stayed behind in Rabin’s office for a follow-up meeting with Gur. ‘What progress have you made?’ Rabin asked Gur.
‘We’ve put together a team to look into all the military options,’ said the IDF chief of staff, ‘and Ehud Barak is working with the air force and navy.’
‘Anything workable?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I should say,’ intervened Peres, ‘that I spent this morning consulting with people who have been in Uganda. There are various suggestions, but nothing firm yet.’
Now more certain than ever that the IDF would fail to come up with a viable military option in the short time remaining, Rabin turned to a separate matter: press censorship. He explained that an article about Operation Heartburn–the foiling, inspired by the Mossad and Shin Bet (the Israeli internal security service), of a PFLP plot to shoot down an El Al plane leaving Kenya earlier that year–had just appeared in one of the daily newspapers, even though such information was thought vital to national security and was subject to a D-notice. Rabin was incensed, not least because the article laid bare the close unofficial contacts between the Israeli and Kenyan intelligence services. ‘The fact,’ he said, ‘that we can’t take a military correspondent, put him in jail and question him on how he got this information–this is a catastrophe.’
Burka Bar-Lev was waiting nervously by the phone in one of Peres’s outer offices in the Ministry of Defense when an aide informed him that Idi Amin was on the line.
Bar-Lev picked up the receiver, aware that the call was being both recorded and listened to on an extension. ‘Mr President?’
‘Who’s speaking?’ responded the familiar gruff voice.
‘Colonel Bar-Lev.’
Amin’s tone brightened. ‘How are you, my friend?’
‘How do you feel, Mr President?’
‘I’m very happy to hear your voice today.’
Bar-Lev got down to business. ‘I’m speaking from my home. I heard what has happened. My friend, can I ask something of you?’
‘I agree, because you are my good friend.’
‘I know, sir,’ replied Bar-Lev. ‘My friend, you have a great opportunity to go down in history as a great peacemaker. Since a lot of people abroad, in England, in the United States, and in Europe, are writing bad things about you, you have an opportunity to show them that you are a great peacemaker, and if you free those people, you will go down in history as a very great man, and that will counter those who speak against you. I thought about that this morning when I heard all these things on the radio.’
‘I successfully spoke with the Popular Front of Palestine,’ said Amin, keen to relay good news. ‘I’ve just released forty-seven hostages and handed them over to the French ambassador. It’s very important for you to listen to Radio Uganda at five o’clock this afternoon.’
‘What about the Israeli hostages?’
‘The Popular Front of Palestine are now surrounding [with explosives] the remaining hostages completely,’ said Amin, his voice sombre. ‘They say that if the Israeli government doesn’t answer their demand, they will blow up the French plane and all the hostages tomorrow at twelve noon Greenwich Mean Time. Therefore, I propose to you, my friend, to report to Rabin–General Rabin, the prime minister, I know him, he is my friend–and to General Dayan. I know he is my friend, though he isn’t in the government. Your government must do everything possible to release the hostages immediately–that is the demand of the Palestinians. I am doing the best I can, I’m giving them mattresses, blankets, food, medical attention. I want you to do everything possible. I’ve just spoken with the Israelis now and they’re very happy. What they said has been recorded on television. They asked me to pass this message to the government, immediately.’
‘Mr President,’ said Bar-Lev, continuing the tactic of appealing to Amin’s ego, ‘you are the ruler of your country. I think you have the power to liberate these people. You’ll go down in history as a great man.’
Sidestepping the issue, Amin reminded Bar-Lev of their everlasting friendship and said that he was prepared ‘to make peace between Israel and the Arabs’, and wanted the Israeli government to know that. Rabin’s best hope of saving lives, however, was for him to reply to the Palestinian demands.
‘Can you do something to stop them from killing?’ asked a frustrated Bar-Lev.
‘I can stop them if your government accepts their demand immediately.’ There was a pause before Amin continued: ‘Now they’re calling me. At five they will publish their final decision, so you must act quickly, otherwise they will kill all the hostages. Your government must do everything possible.’
In desperation, Bar-Lev reminded Amin of his mother’s dying plea for him to help the Israelis. If he did so now he would ‘go into history, and perhaps even receive the Nobel Prize’. Surely he wouldn’t waste this God-given opportunity to show he was ‘a great and good man’?
Amin changed the subject, asking after Bar-Lev and his wife.
‘Everyone’s fine. Do you want me to come to you?’
‘I’ll be happy to see you.’
‘Can you stop them killing,’ asked Bar-Lev, ‘until I arrive?’
‘Can you approach your government quickly, so that I will receive an answer?’
Bar-Lev conceded defeat. ‘Very well, my friend. I’ll call you back later.’
‘Call me whenever you like,’ said Amin. ‘I’m waiting. I’m speaking from the airfield. I have not slept for three days. I want to save these people.’
The line went dead.
Once the ‘most vulnerable’ non-Israeli hostages had departed the Old Terminal building, those left behind–a total of 202 men, women and children–began to organize themselves ‘for a stay’ that Michel Cojot ‘imagined would be long’. They were starved of news from the outside–Böse had rejected Cojot’s request to have newspapers delivered–and tongues ‘were wagging’. Many thought the governments concerned were unlikely to give in to terrorist blackmail and were arguing about the ‘various options’ open to the hijackers.
On a more practical level Tony Russell, one of the two British hostages in the non-Israeli room–and known to Cojot and the others as ‘the Yachtsman’ because he was ‘an Englishman returning from a cruise and dressed appropriately’–devised an ingenious system of placing all the chairs in a square with both a daytime and a nighttime position. This made it possible for the hostages to move around during the day ‘without bumping into’ what served as their beds.
Cojot and Lemoine kept busy by drawing up an additional list of sick or elderly people who, ‘through weakness, ignorance, or timidity, had not made themselves known the first time’. They included Russell’s travelling companion George Good who suffered from a heart condition and had failed to notice the first list being drawn up, and an old woman ‘who had simply been in the toilet at the time’.
By mid-afternoon, having already met that day with his Cabinet, the ministerial committee and the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin joined Shlomo Avineri, the director-general of the Foreign Ministry, at the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee to report on the diplomatic efforts to free the hostages.
‘We have not made an official approach to the United Nations,’ explained Rabin, ‘because we don’t want to relieve France of responsibility for the passengers of the Air France plane. But we have made a personal approach to Kurt Waldheim, the secretary-general, in the hope that he will put pressure on Amin to intervene.’
Asked about the position of the other governments involved, he admitted that the official German position not to release its Baader–Meinhof prisoners was ‘troubling’ and made it even harder for Israel to achieve a peaceful solution.
Returning to the nearby Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Avineri was called in to a meeting with his boss, Yigal Allon, who was wondering which member of the diplomatic community to approach. ‘What about Kissinger?’ asked Allon, referring to the US secretary of state. ‘Do you think he might help?’
Avineri nodded, and after a brief discussion Allon dictated an urgent cable to Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, instructing him to enlist Kissinger’s support. Kissinger could help to put pressure on Amin, said Allon, by contacting President Anwar Sadat of Egypt who was known to have friendly relations with Amin and reservations about the use of terror. Allon added: ‘Suggest you also ask Kissinger to activate his friends among African leaders. They will meet Amin at the end of this week at a conference of the Organization of African Unity in Mauritius.’
Faiz Jaber strode into the large hall that held the non-Israelis, picked up the loud hailer and demanded: ‘Which one of you is Nahum Dahan?’
‘I am,’ responded the young French-born Jew who, like Jean-Jacques Mimouni, was now living in Israel.
Jaber marched over to Dahan, whose strained face betrayed his nervousness. ‘You’re Israeli, aren’t you?’ demanded Jaber in English.
Dahan shook his head. ‘Je suis français.’
‘Don’t lie to me,’ snarled Jaber. ‘Your mother has an Israeli passport and we’ve found your Israeli identity papers. We know you live in Israel. So you must be a member of the IDF. Are you?’
‘Je ne comprend pas,’ persisted Dahan.
Michel Cojot was called over to translate the questions from English into French, but still Dahan answered every inquiry about his connection to the IDF in the negative. Eventually Jaber lost his patience. ‘Do you speak English or not?’
‘Non.’
This was too much for Jaber. ‘Come with us.’
Dahan was led at gunpoint to a small adjacent room that the terrorists used as a dormitory. There he was asked again if he spoke English. His answer was the same.
‘You’re a damned liar!’ roared Jaber, pulling Dahan from his chair and throwing him to the ground. Dahan screamed as he was kicked and punched.
After what seemed an eternity, the blows ceased and Jaber told Dahan that he would not be left in peace until he had told them everything they wanted to know. Dahan was then taken into the Israeli room and put behind a desk that the terrorists had set up near the exterior door. Given a pencil and some paper, he was instructed to write down everything he could remember about his life in Israel and the IDF. ‘You won’t leave this desk,’ warned Jaber, ‘until we’re satisfied.’
With time running out, Kuti Adam sent out urgent orders for two officers just back from the Sinai to report to his office in the Kirya. The first to arrive was Colonel Shai Tamari, the deputy chief of the Special Operations Division. Briefed on the progress made so far by Ehud Barak’s team, Tamari was told to set up a separate team to ‘collect together the action ideas’ for a mission at Entebbe ‘and organize them into a plan’. Similar instructions were given to Brigadier-General Dan Shomron, the chief of the Infantry and Paratroop Command, who, like Tamari, had just returned to Tel Aviv. Adam’s intention was, in effect, to set up three separate teams in competition with each other in the hope that at least one would come up with a viable operation. Tamari, however, was given overall responsibility for coordinating the plans.
The objective of the teams, as outlined by Adam, was to ‘rescue the hostages and exterminate the terrorists and anyone who disrupts the execution of the operation’, such as Ugandan soldiers. The problems that needed to be overcome included: missing details about the airport, including the exact location of where the hostages were being held, their guarding arrangements and so on; the problem of refuelling the C-130 transport planes, given that only two ‘were capable of flying there and back without refuelling, and this with only a small number of soldiers’; and the extent to which the Ugandans were involved in the hijacking.
But the assumption, at this stage, was ‘that once the terrorists are killed the Ugandans would release the hostages’. With that in mind, the favoured option was still ‘to free the hostages by killing the terrorists, and leaving them and the operation troops in Entebbe’.
Barak’s team hoped to achieve this by paradropping Zodiac inflatables and soldiers from the Unit and Shayetet 13 into Lake Victoria. To prepare for this they scheduled a practice jump into the Mediterranean for Wednesday afternoon. ‘We’re leaving tonight,’ Betser told one of his squad commanders. ‘Get ready for a sortie that includes a flight, a drop and swimming freestyle among alligators.’ But the Unit’s drop was cancelled after some of the naval commandos’ Zodiacs exploded on impact, and thereafter they concentrated on the three remaining plans: ‘stealing across Lake Victoria from Kenya; pretending to be a civilian plane carrying the free international terrorists in a negotiated exchange; or as Benny Peled suggested from the start–airlifting a thousand troops to Entebbe’.
The latter option did not convince Muki Betser. ‘But it’s too many,’ he kept saying to his fellow planners. ‘If we want to keep the element of surprise on our side, we need to arrive in a more compact formation. The more elements involved in the mission, the more likely something will go wrong.’ Meanwhile Betser kept his absent commanding officer, Yoni Netanyahu, constantly updated on the discussions in the Pit. ‘Listen,’ he told him by phone that evening, ‘the chances of this going through are pretty slim.’
‘Is it worth my coming?’ asked Netanyahu.
‘I don’t think so. Believe me, what you’re doing now is much more important. The Unit’s represented here, and outside of us sitting here and planning, there’s absolutely nothing going on. In any case, I’m keeping you posted.’
As the debate over the most effective plan continued, word reached Israel via radio reports from Uganda and Paris that the terrorists had agreed to release some of the hostages ‘as a gesture of goodwill’. None of them, however, was Israeli. They had been separated from the others and were being kept in Uganda. The news was for Betser and his colleagues both a worry and an opportunity. It reminded them of Nazi methods and was proof that Israel was now ‘alone’.
On the other hand, it was obvious that the freed hostages might be able to provide important intelligence and it was decided to send a trusted officer to Paris to interview them. The natural choice was Major Amiram Levine, Military Intelligence’s director of operations and a man who had risen through the ranks of the Unit. He ‘understood intuitively’ the team’s ‘planning needs for a break-in at the airport’ and could be trusted to know ‘what to ask to get the answer’ it needed.
Before catching the early-evening El Al flight to Paris, Levine changed into civilian clothes and was provided with an intelligence kit by Amnon Biran. It included a list of the ‘essential information’ that the team required and a set of drawings based on the Solel Boneh blueprints of Entebbe Airport. He was also given strict instructions to avoid being seen in Paris by General ‘Gandhi’ Ze’evi, who had been sent there from London to coordinate the diplomatic efforts to free the hostages. If Ze’evi spotted Levine at Orly Airport he ‘would immediately understand that a military option was being planned’ and that might affect his judgement during the negotiations and possibly alert the French. ‘No matter what,’ Levine was told, ‘don’t let Gandhi see you.’
Unaware that Dora Bloch and Ilan Hartuv held British passports as dual Anglo-Israeli nationals (and that the former was travelling on hers), or that British-born Isabella Poignon was a dual national, officials at the Foreign Office in London were still assuming that only two of the Air France hostages–Tony Russell and George Good–were their direct responsibility. Yet they were keeping a close eye on events in East Africa nonetheless, not least because of Britain’s long colonial association with Uganda and shared security concerns with the other NATO countries involved.
The mandarin with particular responsibility for the crisis was Frank Wheeler, head of the FCO’s Near East and North African Department. During Wednesday afternoon he received a memo from David Colvin, the first secretary at the UK Embassy in Paris, which contained a highly controversial theory of who was behind the hijacking.
‘A contact in the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association rang me on 29 June,’ wrote Colvin, ‘to say that according to his information, the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Beit [sic]. The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO’s standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans. Their nightmare is that after the November [US presidential] elections, one will witness the imposition in the Middle East of a Pax Americana, which will be to the advantage of the PLO (who will gain international respectability and perhaps the right to establish a state on evacuated territories) and to the disadvantage of the Refusal Front [including the PFLP] (who will be squeezed right out in any overall peace settlement and will lose their raison d’être) and Israel (who will be forced to evacuate the occupied territory). Hence the unholy alliance of the hijacking. My contact said that the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis.’
It was an intriguing conspiracy theory–Israel collaborating with its arch-enemy, the PFLP, to scupper a potential PLO-sponsored peace settlement that would be to the disadvantage of both–but not one that the experienced Wheeler was prepared to take seriously.
‘We have to formulate a common line of action,’ said the speaker to the tense and weeping audience in the law association’s main auditorium, ‘and, as necessary, pressure the responsible people to obtain the release of our dear ones.’
This first meeting of the relatives of the Israeli hostages had been organized by law professor Yosef Gross, the brother of Baruch who was being held with his wife Ruthie and six-year-old son Shay in Entebbe. It quickly became apparent that the relatives wanted only one thing: the return of their loved ones at any cost.
‘We demand the release of our families,’ screamed one woman, ‘no matter what price asked of the government.’
‘Principles don’t interest me,’ shouted another. ‘I want my family back, safe and well.’
‘If we don’t use force, nothing will be done,’ said a third. ‘Let’s go to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem and demonstrate.’
‘Yes, we’ll present an ultimatum to Rabin. If he doesn’t see us straight away, we’ll start a hunger strike.’
Finally Gross intervened. ‘All right, there is pain in our hearts, but we must use our heads. All these suggestions, they’re exactly what the terrorists want us to do. Demonstrations will only work against us in the end.’
Ignoring the speaker the distraught relatives left the auditorium, determined to take matters into their own hands.
Faiz Jaber grabbed the six or seven pages that Nahum Dahan had pencil-written in French and got one of the hostages to translate it for him. It was, he discovered, a long and repetitive account of how Dahan had lived for many years in a kibbutz picking grapefruit. ‘This is not what we want!’ screamed Jaber, his chin thrust into Dahan’s face. ‘We want to know all about Israel. We want to know where the bases are. We want the name of your general!’
When Dahan failed to answer, Jaber had him taken to the adjacent room where he was slapped in the face, punched and had his fingers twisted back. A gun was placed against his chest, but still Dahan refused to tell the terrorists what they wanted to hear.
Eventually they gave up and took him back to the desk in the Israeli room where he was told to write another ‘report’–only this time it had to be genuine. ‘When you finish it is your choice,’ he was told. ‘But you won’t sleep until you do.’
Yitzhak Rabin had called a meeting of the Newspaper Editors’ Committee–a body that had been established to keep the editors of Israel’s most influential newspapers up to date with the latest security issues–at the Knesset building to prepare the ground for Israel’s possible capitulation to the terrorists. In particular, he wanted an assurance from the editors that they would not print stories that implied he had caved in to pressure from the hostages’ families.
‘There is no way out of this crisis,’ he told the editors seated round the Cabinet table, ‘without some kind of trauma. If there is no concession, then we must expect a massacre of Israelis. We cannot prevent it, and must not blind ourselves to the possibility.’
‘Is it clear,’ asked one of the editors, ‘that they will put the passengers to death?’
Rabin nodded. ‘We are talking about Wadie Haddad’s men. I wouldn’t like anyone to delude himself about the brutality of that group. They are not above any abomination.’
Having assured the editors that, despite their public pronouncements to the contrary, both Germany and France would probably back any decision Israel made, he turned to the emotive issue of the hostages’ relatives.
‘There is going to be,’ he said, ‘an assembly of all the hostage family members, demanding that the government begins negotiations. I’ve asked the radio and television stations not to interview them and not to publish this story. I think the extremists among them wished to protest near my house and outside the Prime Minister’s Office. I know some of them have already made a direct approach to the French Embassy. They sent me a telegram, asking: “Do the dead bodies of army soldiers justify the release of terrorists, while the saving of the lives of our relatives doesn’t?”* One thing is certain: it will be a disaster if the world thinks that we’ve been pressurized by the families to surrender to terrorists. This information cannot be published.’
The first man to respond was Shalom Rosenfeld, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Israel’s most popular Hebrew daily newspaper, Maariv. ‘We can’t,’ he said, ‘prevent a feature article in the newspaper calling on the government to surrender. It’s a legitimate opinion, even though I reject it.’
More sympathetic to the plight of the hostages’ families was Hannah Zemer, editor-in-chief of Davar and the first female to assume control of a major Israeli newspaper. Born in Slovakia, a survivor from Ravensbrück concentration camp (though many of her family had perished in the Holocaust), she thought that every effort should be made to save Israeli lives. ‘Even in this case,’ she asked Rosenfeld, ‘when the government’s surrender will prevent seventy-seven Jews from being blown up in an aeroplane?’
This comment prompted Gershom Schocken, the legendary German-born editor-in-chief of Haaretz (a post he had held for thirty-seven years), to inquire about the ethnicity of the hostages. He clearly had in mind the example of Ma’alot a couple of years earlier when Golda Meir’s government had been accused of authorizing the disastrous rescue attempt because most of the hostages were young Sephardic Jews from North Africa and not the more influential Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe.
Rabin bristled. ‘As far as Israel is concerned,’ he responded, ‘I haven’t checked the ethnicity. Anyway, it doesn’t interest me. Usually people of scanty means can’t afford to travel round the world. So it’s the group of people who don’t have much money–and it doesn’t matter what their ethnicity is–who aren’t there.’
Irked by the implication that most Sephardim were poor, Shocken responded: ‘There are wealthy people of North African origin.’ But he knew that Rabin was right: the Ashkenazi Jews were generally better off than the Sephardim, and were probably the dominant group among the hostages. Was this why, he wondered, the government was so sensitive to the political pressure that their relatives could apply?
Following his meeting with Adam, Brigadier-General Dan Shomron was keen to begin planning a possible rescue. But first he had to fulfil a longstanding engagement to interview newly graduated officers of the IDF Command and Staff College at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv, for posts in his command. To save time after the interviews, therefore, he summoned his planning group to meet at the college at 9 p.m. There were three men present: Shomron and Lieutenant-Colonels Ivan Oren and Amnon Biran, both of whom had attended the earlier planning meetings chaired by Ehud Barak. Neither they nor Shomron were convinced by Barak’s preferred plan to ‘parachute 12 fighters into Lake Victoria’ from where they would ‘get on to dinghies, reach the terminal, enter and kill the terrorists, and then we’d see what would happen’.
Shomron’s chief objection was that there were ‘two points with no answers: the one is the idea to sneak in through the swamps–indeed if someone gets spotted there’s a lot of time to kill all the hostages, and then there are these twelve stuck there. The second issue is the question of evacuation. How will an evacuation be done while Idi Amin is not cooperating with us and there are Ugandan soldiers all around the terminal?’ It was, he felt, ‘a dud of a plan’.
It took two hours for Shomron, Oren and Biran to sketch out their own ‘operational concept’: they envisaged landing the IAF’s two refuelling Hercules–with the ability to fly to Uganda and back–on the new runway from where an assault force would use ‘innocent-looking vehicles that would fit in with the setting of the airport’ to reach the Old Terminal, surprise and kill the terrorists and free the hostages. The intention was for the hostages to return to Israel on board the IAF’s two tankers, though they needed to check with the IAF if it was possible to fly a Peugeot pick-up in a refuelling Hercules and return with the assault team and more than 200 hostages.
While Shomron and his staff were working hard to come up with a viable rescue plan at Glilot, Rabin was meeting with General Gur and the ministerial committee in his Tel Aviv office, a small red-tiled building in the Kirya complex that, ironically, during the Second World War had housed Germans suspected of espionage. It was normal for Israeli premiers to split their week between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, holding meetings in the latter on Thursdays and Fridays. Thanks to the Entebbe crisis, and the need to be close to the Ministry of Defense, an extra Tel Aviv meeting had been scheduled for Wednesday evening.
They were gathered in the long Cabinet room, its walls empty of ornaments but for full-length portraits of the founders of Israel: Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann. If Rabin felt intimidated by their gaze–as if they were judging his actions from beyond the grave–he did not show it. Instead he turned calmly to Gur, lit cigarette in hand, and asked: ‘Motta, do we have a military option?’
Gur looked apologetic. ‘We’ll know by tomorrow at two in the afternoon. I’m sorry I don’t yet have a military answer.’
‘In that case, we must accept that the lack of a decision is in itself a decision. If we cannot rescue the hostages, we must assume they will be put to death when the ultimatum expires.’
The implication of this statement was obvious to all around the table. Without an alternative, they would have to consider releasing the prisoners the terrorists had named.
‘I think,’ said Rabin, assuming that the matter was settled, ‘Gad and Amos should meet the families tonight, and try and calm them down.’ The transport minister and the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office nodded in agreement.
‘If there is no military option,’ said one of the ministers, ‘we should hear what has been done so far in the diplomatic field.’
All eyes turned to Yigal Allon, who explained that ‘the French behaviour so far has been satisfactory’. He added that cables had gone out to Ambassador Dinitz in the United States to enlist the support of Henry Kissinger, and to Paris requesting pressure on African countries within France’s sphere of influence. In addition Chaim Herzog, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, was making a personal appeal to Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
‘What about the pope?’ asked Rabin, tongue firmly in cheek.
Allon’s deadly serious reply was that they were trying to get the pontiff to talk to Amin. ‘After all, the Ugandan was recently received in audience in grand style–something which must have appealed to his ego. We should make good use of it.’
While on the subject of emissaries, Peres suggested sending his adviser Asher Ben-Natan, a former ambassador to France, to Paris to discuss a possible joint Israeli–French military operation. ‘I do have a plan,’ he insisted. ‘It might work.’ The advantage of cooperating with the French was that it would solve the problem of a return flight as the planes could refuel at Djibouti. Rabin, however, did not believe for a minute that President Giscard d’Estaing of France would be prepared to jeopardize French relations with black Africa to recover the hostages. There was, in any event, no guarantee that such a military operation would succeed; and for this reason, among others, France generally preferred to negotiate.
‘Let us convene here tomorrow at seven forty-five,’ said Rabin, ending the discussion. ‘The full Cabinet will meet at eight-thirty.’
At Rabin’s suggestion, Gad Yaacobi and Amos Eiran spoke to the families of the hostages in a meeting at 11 p.m. that was ‘difficult’ and ‘emotional’. Yaacobi explained that the government was ‘sensitive’ to the timetable set by the terrorists, and that its chief priority was to save the lives of the hostages. For obvious reasons he did not tell them that Rabin’s mind was as good as made up and that it would soon agree to negotiations.
With the clock ticking inexorably towards the deadline of 2 p.m. on Thursday, the families were not interested in bland assurances. What they wanted to hear was that the government had abandoned every other consideration to get their relatives home safe and sound. This was not a promise that Yaacobi could give and the meeting broke up with little resolved and the families hurling insults.
Earlier, representatives of the families had met with the French ambassador to Israel, Jean Herly, and proposed that the French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, should fly to Entebbe and remain there until the hostages were released. When Herly said that that would not be possible, the families decided to take their anger and frustration out on their own government.
The arrival and distribution of more mattresses, blankets and towels meant it was past midnight before the first strip of lights in the large hall was turned off and the non-Israeli hostages went to bed. Next door in the Israeli room, on the other hand, all the lights were kept on and many had trouble dozing off. They could not stop thinking about the looming deadline and what it might bring–release or execution–and were further disturbed through the night by constant rustling sounds as people tossed and turned on the paper-covered mattresses. As they were brand new and destined for some of Uganda’s tourist hotels, the hostages had been told not to remove their wrapping, and this constant crackling chorus was the result.
Still sleeping behind the bar on an old mattress, Claude Moufflet managed to get to sleep quite quickly. At 2.30 in the morning, however, he was woken by a tall, dark-haired young Frenchman he had dubbed ‘the Flirt’ for his persistent interest in the opposite sex. Before turning in, Moufflet had noted how the Flirt had taken his latest conquest to the semi-privacy of an L-shaped space behind three boxes at the back of the room. Now, it transpired, the new rustling mattress had made it impossible for them to make love. ‘Hey,’ said the thwarted lothario to a groggy Moufflet, ‘do you want to swap mattresses? You understand my problem? The paper makes too much noise.’
Moufflet nodded his acquiescence and got up. ‘Thanks, you’re really kind,’ said the Flirt, a comment echoed by his companion. Leaving them to it, Moufflet went to stretch out in their ‘bedroom’ where, not disturbed too much by the noise of the paper, he went rapidly back to sleep.
At 5 a.m., Moufflet was again woken–this time by someone lying down next to him. It was the companion of the Flirt who, for reasons Moufflet did not care to speculate, had deserted her lover in the middle of the night. After a cursory ‘Excuse me’, she went to sleep.
Returning to his Ministry of Defense office tired and dispirited, Shimon Peres wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and sleep. But his fear of the consequences if Rabin went ahead and negotiated with the terrorists made him determined to try every last option. One was to appeal to Amin directly, and for this he needed Burka Bar-Lev.
Urgently summoned to the Kirya, Bar-Lev was again given an office with a phone and told to call Amin. When he finally got through it was just after midnight in Uganda. Peres listened in to the call on an extension.
‘I’ve passed on your advice to the government through a friend,’ said Bar-Lev, referring to their earlier conversation. ‘They said they accept your advice and will act on it, through the French government, as you proposed. Now I’m trying to find a way to visit you.’
‘If you come,’ replied Amin, ‘you’ll be at home because you’re my good friend. No one will harm you.’
Bar-Lev thanked the president and asked him to ‘take every possible step to make sure that nothing happens to the hostages’ until he reached Uganda.
Amin’s response made Bar-Lev’s blood run cold. ‘I am now with the leader of the Palestinian “Popular Front”. He’s only just arrived. He is the man who decides. The man I negotiated with previously was their number two. Now the right man has arrived. Forty minutes ago he told me that he won’t change his decision, if he doesn’t receive a reply by tomorrow.’
The ‘leader’ that Amin had mentioned could only be Wadie Haddad himself. If he was indeed in Kampala–and Bar-Lev and the listening Peres had no reason to doubt it–then it did not augur well. Haddad was known to be a ruthless enemy of Israel who would have no qualms about killing Jews if his demands were not met.
‘Your Excellency,’ said Bar-Lev, a little panicked, ‘I’m doing everything I can to come and see you. Perhaps I can help. When I heard the news on the radio, I said: “Now my friend Idi Amin Dada has a great opportunity, a chance to do something really great. Everyone will talk about him.” Please stop the bloodshed. I’ll try to come and find another solution.’
Amin made it clear, once again, that events were beyond his control. ‘But they’ve moved 145 Jews together, and they said they will surround them with high explosives, so there must be an immediate answer.’
Bar-Lev reminded Amin that he was only a ‘private individual’, but one who had always given him ‘good advice’. He added: ‘This is your country and you are the president and you have the power. If something happens, you’ll be blamed; and if you save them, you’ll be a holy man. What is the situation, your Excellency?’
‘They refused,’ said Amin, referring to the terrorists. ‘They surrounded everyone and they say they can blow up all the hostages and all the Ugandan Army around them.’
How, asked Bar-Lev, could they have brought in enough explosives to do that by plane? The problem for the Israeli government was that the terrorists wanted the release of ‘murderers’ who had ‘killed women and children’. He added: ‘I don’t believe that if someone tried to kill you, you would let him go. It’s not easy to persuade people here to release murderers.’
Amin said he understood, but the situation was complicated by the fact that ‘these people brought complete charges of TNT even on their bodies’.
Playing for time, Bar-Lev asked Amin if he could keep the terrorists ‘quiet for a couple of days’ to give him time to get there.
The answer was no. ‘They won’t wait for me. They said they will commit suicide with the hostages. They’ve already prepared everything to press the button, to blow up everything with themselves.’
Sensing an opportunity to obtain vital intelligence, Bar-Lev asked: ‘Where are the people, in the hotel or in the plane? Where are they sleeping?’
Amin obliged. ‘In the Old Terminal of Entebbe. We built a modern terminal. The old one is just a building, and that’s where they’re holding all the hostages. There’s no plane there. They asked us to remove all the planes. All air force personnel are now out of Entebbe. They’ve put high explosives around everything.’
‘Where is the French plane?’
‘Close to me. They have some people in it with high explosives, and they’re prepared to blow it up. If you can persuade your government to release those people, the ones you call criminals, it’s better to save the lives of 200 people. They said they are going to kill them all. They’ll start by blowing up the plane, then they’ll kill everybody with high explosives. They said that if any plane comes to Uganda, they’ll automatically blow up everything. They want to negotiate through France. I told them that I have some friends in Israel, like you, General Dayan, even the prime minister, that I can negotiate with them, but they said they want only the French government.’
‘Remember, sir,’ said Bar-Lev, a trace of desperation in his voice, ‘you have a great opportunity, given to you by God.’
Amin seemed more interested in speaking for the terrorists. ‘Tell your government they must put pressure on the Kenyan government to release the prisoners they caught. Otherwise something terrible will happen to Kenya. The leader of the Palestinians told me that if I can get in touch with you, I must tell you about Kenya. If not Kenya will be terribly punished.’
‘Good, sir. I’ll do the best I can, but I’m a private person. I saw a great opportunity for you to go down in history as a great man, a holy man. I’ll try to do what you asked.’
‘Tell your government,’ said Amin, satisfied that Bar-Lev would do his bidding, ‘I’d like to see you in a very important position.’
‘Thank you very much and good night, sir.’
Peres nodded with satisfaction as he put down the extension phone. The substance of Amin’s message to Bar-Lev–that there was nothing he could do to prevent the terrorists from killing the hostages if their demands were not met by noon the following day–was pretty much what he had expected to hear. The tone and content of Amin’s words, on the other hand, had revealed vital intelligence that might prove crucial to any rescue mission. Peres felt certain, for example, that Wadie Haddad was not only in Kampala but actually present in the room while Amin took the call. And if that was true then it was extremely likely that the Ugandans were actively assisting the terrorists to achieve their aims. This meant, in turn, that any potential rescue mission would need enough firepower to take on the Ugandan Army and, ideally, the means to return the hostages to Israel. A simple commando mission to kill the terrorists would no longer suffice.
Amin had also confirmed where the hostages were being held–in the Old Terminal building–adding that the terrorists had surrounded them with high explosives that they would ignite if an attempt was made to rescue them. This latter threat did not convince Peres any more than it had convinced Bar-Lev. Why was Amin putting his own soldiers in jeopardy if he truly believed the explosives existed? It did not add up.
It was almost midnight when the replacement Air France plane landed at Orly Airport near Paris and the forty-seven released hostages were escorted by airport officials and police to the VIP lounge where their relatives and the French foreign minister, Jean Sauvagnargues, were waiting to greet them.
Tears flowed as families were reunited with loved ones they had feared they would never see again; for some of the hostages, however, their joy was tempered by the memory of those they had left behind. Olivier Cojot raced into the arms of his mother and was so overcome with emotion that he forgot all about the note he was carrying in the turn-ups of his jeans. Julie Aouzerate–still wearing her halter-neck summer dress, headscarf and thick-rimmed glasses–hugged a pretty granddaughter. Meanwhile a smiling Sauvagnargues–a man who a couple of years earlier had caused outrage in Israel when he was photographed shaking Yasser Arafat’s hand–worked the room, shaking hands, stroking the heads of children and kissing Annie Bracker’s toddler.
The celebrations were interrupted by a message over the public address system. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said an anonymous government official, ‘President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has asked me to convey his congratulations. He shares in the rejoicing at your return from captivity. The president is happy that your suffering is at an end. He hopes, with all his heart, that the other hostages will soon also be free like you.’
Sauvagnargues repeated the sentiment to a few press reporters who had broken through the police cordon. ‘All our hearts are full of anxiety,’ he told them. ‘This is not the end of the affair.’
Meanwhile a group of unidentified men were working their way through the throng, taking notes and writing down names and addresses. They were all members of the French and Israeli security services, and their task was to single out the hostages who were likely to provide the most useful intelligence. They chose five, including Olivier Cojot and ‘a veteran officer of the French army, who spent his three days at Entebbe making mental notes of all the military options, wanting revenge on the terrorists who so humiliated him and his fellow passengers’.
Olivier was interviewed by ‘some Israeli people’–almost certainly Amiram Levine and agents from the Mossad–in a room at the airport. Amid all the emotion of his homecoming, he continued to forget to mention the vital document that he was carrying in his turn-ups.* But he made up for this omission by answering all the questions he was asked as accurately as he could, helped by his prodigious memory and the fact that the terrorists had given him more freedom to wander about the Old Terminal than they had the adults.
Many of the questions were very precise. Which way do the doors open? How high is the grass? Do the terrorists possess explosives? To this last vital query, Olivier said he could not be sure. They certainly had grenades, and had claimed they had explosives; but he had not actually seen any with his own eyes. He was not in any doubt, however, that the Ugandans were assisting the terrorists. ‘Of that,’ he told them, ‘there’s no question.’
Interviewed later in his home, the ‘veteran officer’ poured out another ‘gold mine of details’ for Amiram Levine to relay back to Barak and the other planners over a scrambled phone line. It included information about the ‘separation’ of the hostages into Israelis and non-Israelis–though this was generally understood as Jews and non-Jews–the layout of the terminal, the habits of the terrorists and their close relationship with Amin. ‘The Ugandans definitely are working with the hijackers,’ Amiram quoted the Frenchman as saying. ‘They are there to prevent the hostages from escaping.’ The good news, according to Amiram, was that ‘the last thing the terrorists expect is for us to show up’.
One revealing interview not conducted by the Israelis was that of a British-born US citizen, Carole Anne Taylor, an ‘articulate and well-educated’ thirty-three-year-old graduate student in comparative literature at Harvard University, who had been released with her six-year-old son Eric. Prior to the hijacking the pair had been on holiday in Israel and Greece with Taylor’s Jewish partner Sanford Freedman, another Harvard graduate student. Freedman was still in Uganda. Quizzed by US Embassy officials–most likely the CIA station chief for Paris–Taylor said the hijackers had assembled bombs on the aircraft, using ‘gunpowder’ packed in metal candy boxes. All the passengers had agreed that security was ‘very lax’ at Athens Airport. She thought the most significant event after the hijacking was the separation into two groups–Israeli and non-Israeli–on 30 June. After it there was a ‘distinct change in tone and substance of the announcements made by the hijackers who spoke more harshly and abruptly to the Israeli group’.
The hijackers were made up of ‘three different and distinct groups’: the two Germans, ‘Basil’ and ‘Girl Number 54’, who were ‘very articulate, personable, sympathetic and speak good English’; two Palestinians, ‘Number 39’ and ‘Haifa’, who were ‘very young, determined, speak very broken English, and get along fairly well with the passengers, even some Israelis, by trying to be helpful’; and the three Arabs who were ‘very rough in appearance, carry machine guns and grenades’ (whereas the others were armed mostly with ‘crude looking handguns’), and ‘make no attempt to propagandize and make friends’. Yet she did not see any prospect of them falling out as all seemed determined to achieve their aims.
The living conditions of the hostages were not good, according to Taylor: the women’s toilets had stopped working on the 29th; only dirty tap water was available to drink; food was inadequate; and most of the hostages were beginning to suffer from ‘mild dysentery’ (Taylor and her son had a touch of diarrhoea). The only hostage with medical training, as far as she was aware, was Dr David Bass, the American-born surgeon who was working in an Israeli hospital. But he seemed ‘withdrawn, bitter’ and was ‘making no real effort to help’, and other hostages resented his ‘lack of assistance’. Many were ‘showing signs of mental strain’.
Of the thirteen American hostages still in Uganda, most were ‘young, college-educated and bearing up well except for occasional crying fits’. They had, said Taylor, established a fairly good rapport with the Germans, ‘engaging in dialectic discussions on revolution and general topics’. This had, however, begun to ‘break down’ when the Israelis were separated from the others and Taylor’s partner Freedman and another man ‘nearly had serious trouble with the hijackers’ when they protested.
As Taylor and her son had originally intended to spend two months in Paris with Freedman before returning to the United States, her plan was to wait there in the hope that he would soon be released. She would call her parents in England and let them know she was safe.
As Ivan Oren finished speaking, his superior Colonel Shai Tamari leaned back in his chair. Tamari had spent the last thirty minutes of the meeting in his office in the Kirya listening to Oren sketch out the rescue mission that he had cooked up a couple of hours earlier with Shomron and Biran: a plan that hinged on the use of the IAF’s two refuelling Hercules to fly a rescue force and vehicles to Entebbe and return with the hostages.
‘It has possibilities,’ said Tamari after a pause, ‘but it needs more work. At the moment it sounds vague and half baked. You still don’t know, for example, about the carrying capacity of a Karnaf tanker [refuelling Hercules] and whether it can bear the extra load that you envisage. Then there’s the question of whether the Uganda troops are likely to be hostile or not. If they are, can the tankers carry enough of our troops to deal with them, and still have room to bring back the hostages? This is the sort of fine detail we have to be certain about before we can push this plan upstairs. Understand?’
Oren nodded. Though a little crestfallen, he could see the sense of Tamari’s words.
‘Flesh it out and bring it back to me tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, sir.’
At 6.40 p.m., Ambassador Simcha Dinitz picked up the phone in his office in the Israeli Embassy in Washington and asked to be put through to Henry Kissinger at the State Department.
A tall, dapper man with large black-rimmed glasses, a pencil moustache and slicked-down black hair, the forty-seven-year-old Dinitz had trained as a diplomat at Georgetown University and served as chef de cabinet to Prime Minister Golda Meir before his appointment to succeed Yitzhak Rabin as head of the Israeli Embassy in Washington–the ‘most important post in Israeli diplomacy’–in 1973. Dinitz played a key role in organizing shipments of US arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and had since used his ‘charming effrontery, ever mitigated by his warmhearted sense of humor’, to bind his country ever closer to the United States. He got on particularly well with Kissinger, the bespectacled German-born Jew and former Harvard academic who had been running US foreign policy since 1969. Kissinger was a figure of world renown–having a few years earlier brokered both an anti-Soviet Sino-American pact and a ceasefire and the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam, the latter earning him a Nobel Peace Prize–and Dinitz was eager to enlist his support for Israel’s increasingly frantic diplomatic efforts to encourage Idi Amin to intercede on behalf of the hostages. It helped that Kissinger liked Dinitz ‘enormously’, finding him ‘honest and honorable’ and a man he could trust to ‘give unvarnished accounts of Israeli domestic maneuvering’ on the one hand, and to report the US government’s ‘views equally accurately to the Israeli cabinet’. They would have spoken sooner about Entebbe if the American had not been away from Washington on official business.
‘Hello,’ said Kissinger.
‘Welcome back,’ said Dinitz, wasting no time on an explanation of why he was calling. ‘I just got a call from Israel. We have finished a meeting regarding the plane. They asked me to ask you to help on the following matters. Maybe there is a possibility for you to send an urgent message to Sadat asking him to appeal to Amin to ask that nothing happen to the passengers. Also that he won’t let the hijacked Air France plane take off because we feel they will release some of the passengers and take the Israelis somewhere else.’
Kissinger did not hesitate. ‘We will do it.’
Pleased, Dinitz mentioned that the Israeli government had also contacted Kurt Waldheim, secretary-general of the United Nations, and asked him to intercede. Could the United States, asked Dinitz, put similar pressure on Waldheim?
‘We have done that.’
‘The third thing,’ said Dinitz, aware that he might be pushing his luck, ‘is Rabin asked me to ask you if you know of any African country who would have contacts with Amin?’
‘We have approached Mobutu on it,’ responded Kissinger, referring to the flamboyant and authoritarian president of Zaire–a former Belgian colony in Central Africa previously known as the Congo–who was a close ally of the United States thanks to his anti-communist stance.
Dinitz seemed disappointed. ‘You think this is the only one?’
‘That is the only one we know of.’
After a moment’s thought, the Israeli agreed. ‘I think that is correct because the Kenyans don’t…’
Kissinger finished his sentence. ‘No, they are in danger from Uganda.’
‘Yes. Those people they [the hijackers] want from the Kenyans,’ said Dinitz, ‘were those that were arrested when they were trying to shoot down the El Al plane when it was in Kenya. This is all we can think of. If you have any suggestions we would be grateful.’
Kissinger reassured him. ‘We will approach the Egyptians and if Waldheim hasn’t gone out we will do that too.’
‘I am very grateful and sorry to bother you.’
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘Thank you, Mr Secretary.’
‘Okay. Bye.’
Unbeknown to both Dinitz and Kissinger, the French approach to the Egyptians had already borne fruit in that Anwar Sadat’s government had arranged for a special military plane to fly Hanni al-Hassan, a senior official of the PLO, down to Entebbe in the hope that he could end the hijacking peacefully. But though al-Hassan’s plane was given permission to land, no sooner had it done so than it was ordered to take off again by the Ugandan authorities before al-Hassan had had a chance to speak to either the terrorists or Amin. The mission had come to nothing.