Ofer was within twenty yards of the second entrance when he heard Pardo’s yell. He continued running, keenly aware of his task ‘to reach the door’ as quickly as possible because the terrorists ‘could blow up the building in a matter of seconds’. He had reached the canopied path and was approaching the door when its lower glass panel exploded outwards in a hail of bullets that seemed to pass on either side of Ofer, missing him by inches. Spotting a terrorist shooting from a prone position beyond the door, Ofer fired back through the shattered panel from a distance of five yards. The terrorist’s head dropped. He pushed the door open and shot the body again to make sure.
Akiva Laxer was sitting with Ilan Hartuv and two others at a card table to the left rear of the large hall, just finishing off a round of bridge, when he heard a burst of gunfire from outside. Two possibilities flashed through Laxer’s mind: either the terrorists had decided to kill them, or the Ugandans had decided to attack the terrorists. Hoping it was the latter, he advised his shocked companions to join the rest of the hostages on the ground.
Among those woken by the noise of gunfire were Willy and Cécile, lying with the French group near to the door. Willy stayed stretched out on his mattress, trying to work out what was happening. Hearing more shots, he concluded that either the Ugandans were firing on an escapee or the negotiations had reached an impasse and the terrorists were killing hostages. Others feared they were about to be executed, including Emma and Claude Rosenkovitch who were lying with their children Noam and Ella behind the glass-fronted aircraft-maintenance office. They at once rolled on top of their offspring, hoping to act as human shields.
Also now awake, Maggy and Agnès saw tracer bullets flashing across the front of the building from right to left. They could hear terrorists and Ugandans shouting orders outside–but to whom and what about they did not know. Then suddenly the four terrorists on guard tumbled back through the door, led by Wilfried Böse who was holding a sub-machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other.
Looking from the back of the room, Ilan Hartuv could see Böse pointing his weapon at the hostages on the floor, many of whom were sobbing, and was convinced he was about to open fire. So too was Michel Bacos who, a day or two earlier, had been told by Böse: ‘If any army from any country comes to save you, you can rest assured that we will hear them first, and before they get to you we will kill every last one of you.’
Now Bacos felt certain Böse would carry out his threat. The German certainly had the opportunity, as did the other terrorists. But, instead of pulling the trigger, Böse jerked his head towards the back of the room and told the hostages near him to ‘retreat’ and take cover. He and Kuhlmann were prepared to die for their beliefs, but not to murder women and children in cold blood.
Having shooed away the hostages, Böse turned to face the door, tugging the pin from his grenade as he did so.
Assuming Böse was about to throw the grenade in among the hostages, the chief steward got to his knees and begged him not to. But the German had already made up his mind and, after glancing again at the hostages, he hurled the grenade through one of the open windows, the flash from the explosion lighting up the darkness outside. This prompted Maggy to flee towards the back of the room, her back tensed in anticipation of a bullet that never came. Agnès followed her, the two of them throwing themselves stomach down on the floor behind the office. Next to head for the same corner were Willy and Cécile, both fearing that the terrorists were about to kill them. They piled on top of the large number of people who were already there, including the Rosenkovitches and their children.
Looking around her, Maggy could see a ‘young kibbutz guy’ she had got to know, ‘face down on the floor, under the chairs’. She noticed the Belgians Gilbert and Helen Weill praying for deliverance; others were ‘white with fear’. Of Jean-Jacques Mimouni, Isa and Brigitte there was no sign.
Böse, meanwhile, had fallen to the floor and had his AK-47 trained on the door ahead of him. Crouching slightly to the right of the door were two more terrorists, Faiz Jaber and Brigitte Kuhlmann, while a fourth, the Peruvian, had retreated into the room and was hiding behind a pillar towards the right rear of the hall.
Suddenly Böse opened fire through the door at an approaching figure who shot back at him. The noise of automatic gunfire was deafening and more than one hostage screamed in terror. Then Böse’s head twitched as a bullet hit it.
Amir Ofer burst into the hall, fired more shots into Böse to make certain he was dead, then moved slightly to his right to scan for more terrorists. His heart was pounding as he looked on the scene of chaos before him. Distracted by hostages screaming and fleeing in all directions, Ofer failed to see two terrorists–Jaber and Kuhlmann–kneeling below the window to his left rear. As they turned their weapons on Ofer, Amnon Peled, who should have led the assault, burst through the doorway, spotted the danger and shot them both. Running over to them, he kicked away their AK-47s in case they were still alive, prompting Ofer to shout out in Hebrew, ‘Amnon, don’t advance!’ He knew that more terrorists were unaccounted for and was worried Peled would obstruct his field of fire.
By now Muki Betser and Amos Goren had also come through the doorway. Betser immediately shot Jaber and Kuhlmann ‘to make sure they were out of action’. For a second there was silence. Then more shooting could be heard outside and one of the hostages began screaming. At this point Betser was standing just ahead of the doorway, Peled to his left and Ofer and Goren on his extreme right, ‘totally focused on the fully lit hall, searching for more terrorists’.
Scores of hostages were strewn ‘all over the floor on mattresses’, some frozen with fear, others screaming and shouting. Many ‘covered their heads with blankets as if to protect themselves from the bullets’.
Then a small object arced across the hall, from the soldiers’ left to right, before bouncing to the ground and igniting with a flash. It gave off large quantities of smoke and set fire to a number of blankets under which hostages were huddling. It was an incendiary grenade and had been thrown by the Peruvian, who was still hiding behind a pillar.
Perhaps hoping that the grenade would distract the soldiers, the Peruvian emerged from the pillar and brought his AK-47 up to the firing position. Betser and Goren saw him and opened fire simultaneously, their bullets striking the Peruvian’s weapon, head and chest. He fell to the floor.
Only a minute had elapsed since the soldiers had fired live rounds at the Ugandan sentries, and barely three minutes from the time the vehicles had rolled off Hercules One. In that short time Yoni Netanyahu had been wounded and Muki Betser and his men had killed all four armed terrorists who posed an immediate threat to the hostages in the large hall; which just left the trio who had been sleeping in the VVIP room unaccounted for. As more of the Unit’s fighters poured in through the door, Betser continued to scan the room for danger.
Suddenly to his right front a figure leapt up from a pile of smoking blankets and mattresses that had been set on fire by the Peruvian’s incendiary grenade. It was the only part of the hall in shadow, thanks to the broken lights, and the smoke made it harder still to identify the figure. In a split second Betser took in the man’s youth, olive skin, moustache and curly hair and assumed he was an Arab terrorist. He opened fire, as did at least one of the others, their bullets striking the figure in the body as he tried to turn and run.
It was Jean-Jacques Mimouni, the handsome young French-Israeli who all week had kept the hostages’ spirits up with his stories, jokes and a constant drinks service. When the shooting started and some of those around him fled to the back of the room, he and Isa stayed on their mattresses under some blankets. But after the Peruvian’s grenade had caused those blankets to catch fire, they were forced to get up–a desperate manoeuvre that, for Jean-Jacques, was fatal.
Though he did not fire himself, Ofer felt that this mistaken killing was entirely justifiable, if very sad. ‘It’s important to understand,’ he later admitted to Jean-Jacques’ nephew, ‘that according to our drill anyone who stood up, or was even suspected of being a terrorist, even if there was a one per cent chance of that, would have been shot.’
Moments after Jean-Jacques’ shooting, a half-dressed Isa also jumped up and fled towards the back corner, jumping over Jean-Jacques’ corpse on the way. But as she was clearly an unarmed and nearly naked European woman the soldiers did not fire.
Maggy could still hear the odd burst of fire in the room, and see bullets hitting the wall behind her, but most of the shooting now seemed to be coming from the direction of the Israeli hall and the floor above.
It was only now that Amir Ofer remembered the megaphone he was carrying. Raising it to his lips, he meant to shout out in Hebrew and English: ‘Lie down, we’re the IDF. Don’t get up.’ But so stressed was he that the words came out only half formed. His second attempt was clearer.
Ofer’s words did not, however, prevent a small figure from climbing to its feet in the far corner of the room, near the stairs. Peled and Goren pointed their weapons and were squeezing their triggers when they realized it was a young girl. They jerked their weapons up just in time, and the bullets hit the wall above her.
A young Greek man who worked for the French holiday company Club Med had a similar escape after getting to his feet in the centre of the hall. As a number of Kalashnikovs swivelled towards him, a voice cried out in Hebrew, ‘He’s one of ours!’ The soldiers lowered their weapons.
Only now that the firing had stopped did the majority of Israeli hostages realize that the soldiers in the room were IDF. ‘They are here!’ cried Emma Rosenkovitch to her husband Claude. Most of the French were uncertain as to their identity until an Israeli explained in their language: ‘They’re ours. These are our Israeli soldiers.’
Instructed in Hebrew and English to stay lying down, to remain calm, and assured that the situation was under control, the shocked hostages remained where they were. Seeing a hostage with his arm in the air, Muki Betser went over to talk to him. ‘Are there any terrorists among you?’ he asked.
‘You got them all in here. Apart from that one,’ said Akiva Laxer in Hebrew, pointing at Jean-Jacques’ bloodied corpse. ‘He was one of us. A hostage. But there are more terrorists in a small room to the side.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Betser, ‘we’ll take care of them. Are all the hostages here?’
Laxer nodded. ‘Yes, apart from one. An old woman called Dora Bloch who was taken to the hospital in Kampala.’
Betser frowned. ‘We won’t be able to take her back with us.’
While Muki Betser and his men were securing the large hall, the other two assault teams also entered the Old Terminal building. Using flashlights, Reicher and two men led the charge into the unlit customs hall where they found and killed three Ugandan soldiers before locating, in the adjacent reception hall, the stairs to the first floor. As he climbed the staircase, Reicher shot two more Ugandan soldiers at close range, their bodies tumbling past him. In the hallway at the top he discovered that the door to the platform that overlooked the large hall was barred by a locked metal grille. Leaving one man to guard it and the top of the stairs, he continued with the other to the large room at the end of the corridor that had been a restaurant and was now a dormitory for Ugandan soldiers guarding the Old Terminal. It was full of blankets and sleeping bags–Reicher estimated more than sixty–but no people. Hearing shots, the bulk of the soldiers had jumped from a window to the open area behind the terminal.
Having briefly checked that no one was on the terminal roof, Reicher used his radio to call Lieutenant Arnon Epstein, leading his second team, and ask him where he was. Epstein should have followed Reicher through the customs hall and posted his men at the stairs. But, failing to find the staircase in the darkness, he and his men had instead entered a side room where they found and killed several Ugandan soldiers. They were back at the front of the terminal–helping to suppress the Ugandan fire from the control tower that continued intermittently throughout the operation–when Reicher came down to meet them. Together they re-searched the customs and reception halls as far as the door at the end, shooting two more Ugandan soldiers in the process. Reicher’s teams killed at least twelve of Idi Amin’s men. Not one was taken prisoner.
With his team strung out behind him, Giora Zussman made a solo entry into the small hall that had held the Israeli hostages. He could see several empty mattresses with sheets, a number of suitcases and a table piled with passports; but no hostages or terrorists. Just in case, he sprayed the hall and the gap in the wall of boxes with bullets from his Kalashnikov until his clip was empty. As he ducked back out of the hall to reload, the two missing members of his team moved past him and into the hall, firing as they went. Reaching a room at the far end that had been used as a kitchen, they found and killed two Ugandan soldiers.
By now Zussman’s team had been joined by Shlomo Reisman, one of Amnon Peled’s men who had missed the entrance to the large hall, and Tamir Pardo, the communications officer who had been left with nothing to do after Yoni was hit and the command post ceased to function. With Pardo following close behind, Zussman and Reisman moved cautiously through the gap in the wall of boxes and down a corridor that led to the former VVIP lounge, throwing mini-grenades and firing as they went. In the first room they came to–the one that had earlier been used for Nahum Dahan’s interrogation–they saw emerging from the smoke two men with their hands out from their sides. Reisman called out in a mixture of English, Hebrew and Arabic: ‘Stop! Who are you?’
They ignored him and continued walking past Zussman.
‘They’re terrorists!’ Zussman shouted to Reisman as he jumped out of his line of fire. ‘Shoot them!’
Reisman hesitated and, unable to fire himself for fear of hitting his men, Zussman repeated the order.
‘No,’ replied Reisman, still under the impression he was near the large hall, ‘they’re hostages!’
But as the duo went past him, Reisman spotted a grenade on one of their belts. ‘Stop!’ he yelled, and when they ignored him he shot them both.
One of them must have been holding a grenade in his hand because as he fell the detonator gave off a blue flash. ‘Grenade!’ shouted Reisman as he pulled Pardo into a small alcove. Zussman also dived for cover.
The explosion shook the small room and left a pall of smoke. When it had cleared, Reisman confirmed that both terrorists were dead. His lip was bleeding from a minor shrapnel wound; other than that the Israelis were unharmed. As they worked their way back down the corridor to the large hall they found the body of a third terrorist. It was unclear how he had been killed.
By now Zussman’s second team had got through a window into the final part of the Old Terminal–the former VIP lounge–and found it empty. Their initial attempt to gain entry had been foiled by a barricaded door. When they tried to throw grenades through a window, one rebounded from the frame and wounded an Israeli in the leg.
It was not until the entire Old Terminal building had been secured that the stricken Yoni Netanyahu was dragged behind the relative cover of a low wall and treated by Dr David Hassin, the medical officer. This was in accordance with Yoni’s own order that the wounded were to be left where they fell while the battle was in progress. Hassin could tell by the paleness of his face and other indicators that Netanyahu had already suffered significant blood loss. There was little blood on Yoni’s clothing and he feared the haemorrhaging was internal. At first, having cut off Netanyahu’s ammunition belt and shirt with a knife, the doctor could only find an exit wound close to the spine on his lower back. But on closer examination he located a small slit below the collarbone on the right side of Netanyahu’s chest. That confirmed that the bullet, fired from above, had passed obliquely down through Netanyahu’s torso, tearing organs and most likely arteries as it went. He put dressings on the wounds, but knew that Netanyahu was unlikely to survive.
Muki Betser had just finished his conversation with Akiva Laxer when his hand-held radio squawked into life: ‘Muki! Muki!’
‘Giora here. Mission accomplished. Three terrorists down. No casualties on our side.’
Betser breathed a sigh of relief. The threat from the rooms beyond the large hall–where the terrorists were known to have set up their dormitory–had been neutralized. Unaware that Netanyahu had been shot, Betser tried to reach him on the radio. ‘Yoni!’ he called.
No response. He tried again. ‘Yoni? Muki here. Mission accomplished.’
A long silence, finally ended by a squawk. ‘Muki, it’s Tamir here,’ said Yoni’s communications officer, just returned from helping to clear the VVIP room. ‘Yoni’s down.’
Ordering the soldiers in the room to collect the terrorists’ weapons and treat any wounded hostages–the most serious of whom was Holocaust survivor Pasco Cohen who had been shot in the pelvis as he tried to shield his children from the hail of bullets that killed the Peruvian–Betser went outside to check on Netanyahu. He found him lying on his back on the tarmac, his shirt torn open, with David Hassin ‘kneeling by his side… trying to treat him’. The scene reminded him of another doctor’s desperate attempt to save the life of an officer shot during the failed operation to destroy the PLO camp at Karameh in 1968. He had failed, and Betser suspected that Hassin would too.
Looking around, Betser could see Shaul Mofaz’s BTR parked near to the Airbus in front of the terminal, his machine gun pointing at the control tower which, for the moment, had fallen silent. All the Israeli soldiers were surprised to see the Airbus so close to the terminal. According to the Mossad photos taken a day earlier, it should have been parked at the end of the diagonal runway. But, unbeknown to them, the terrorists had earlier that day instructed Michel Bacos to move the plane in anticipation of a press conference to celebrate Israel’s capitulation.
Betser used his radio to call Dan Shomron. ‘Dan. Muki here. Yoni’s wounded. I’m taking command.’
‘Okay.’
By now all four planes had landed: the last two with the assistance of the paratroopers’ lanterns after the Ugandans in the new control tower had realized a raid was in progress and turned off the runway lights. The first three Hercules were parked on the apron close to the New Terminal building that Matan Vilnai’s paratroopers had secured as Netanyahu’s men were storming the Old Terminal. They had found it well lit but mostly deserted apart from a few Ugandan civilians who were quickly rounded up. But as Sergeant Surin Hershko climbed the external stairs at the corner of the building, his Galil assault rifle slung from his neck, he came across a Ugandan policeman and a woman coming the other way. The policeman raised a pistol and, before Hershko could release his safety, fired two shots. The second hit Hershko in the neck, severing his spinal cord. He collapsed to the ground, conscious but unable to move his hands or legs. His assailant escaped.
No sooner had Hercules Two landed–at around seven minutes past midnight local time–than Shaul Mofaz drove his two BTRs towards the Old Terminal and patrolled as far as the eastern end of the building, where he found no opposition. Leaving Omer Bar-Lev’s BTR to guard that flank, he returned to the main entrance and parked near the Airbus in case he was needed. It was here that Betser spotted him. Meanwhile the remaining two BTRs had deplaned from Hercules Three and were stationed to the north of the Old Terminal to intercept any Ugandan reinforcements coming from the direction of Entebbe town. During their patrol they shot and killed seven Ugandan soldiers and made contact with some of Yiftach Reicher’s men at the back of the reception hall.
Hercules Four touched down at 12.08 a.m. local time. Its pilot was Amnon Halivni, a hugely experienced reserve officer and former head of the Yellow Bird Squadron who had been part of Israel’s military delegation to Uganda in the early 1970s. Because of his familiarity with Africa’s air routes, weather patterns and airports–particularly Entebbe–Halivni felt he should have been chosen to fly Hercules One. But Benny Peled had faith in Joshua Shani and Halivni was instead assigned to the plane that would carry the hostages to safety.
Once on the ground, Halivni taxied Hercules Four past the other three C-130s that were parked near the New Terminal building. The agreed pick-up point for the hostages and any casualties was the junction of the diagonal runway and the approach road to the Old Terminal (a point marked on the maps as ‘Yuval 48’). But at first Halivni stopped the plane well short of the turn because he saw one of the Golani soldiers waving a torch. The medics were in the process of setting up their equipment beside the runway when Alik Ron arrived on foot from the Old Terminal with a request from Muki Betser for the plane to move to the agreed embarkation point. The medics duly repacked their equipment and the plane was taxied to ‘Yuval 48’, and turned round so that its tail was ‘pointing in the direction of the terminal and the nose towards the runway’.
By then both Peugeot pick-up trucks on Hercules Four had left on their respective missions: one to ferry Ephraim Sneh and the Golani soldiers–including Noam Tamir–to the Old Terminal; the other to take the air force technicians with their pump to the fuel tanks. As they approached the Old Terminal building, Sneh and Tamir could see tracer bullets being fired from the control tower to the ground, and machine-gun bullets and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) going in the opposite direction. This caused the driver to halt, and only continue when the firing had stopped.
As Sneh reached the Old Terminal, Betser and Hassin were loading Netanyahu’s stretcher onto the back of a Land Rover for evacuation to Hercules Four. A few hostages, spilling out from the large hall, tried to get on as well; but they were told to wait. ‘They should take very good care of Yoni,’ said Hassin to Sneh, ‘because he’s in a bad way.’
En route to the plane, the driver of the Land Rover heard Netanyahu mumble something, but could not make out his words. By the time he was unloaded at the back of the Hercules, his heart had stopped. A resuscitation team–two doctors and a senior medic–administered CPR and gave him blood through a central venous line. But it was too late. He died beside the plane.
Back at the Old Terminal building, a soldier had told the hostages – some of whom were walking around blank-faced and in a state of shock–to leave their possessions, put on their shoes and get ready to depart for the plane. Most ignored him and wasted valuable time scrabbling for their bags. As Willy collected his from behind the bar–twisting his knee in the process–he saw the pilot Michel Bacos, ‘very pale’, changing from his sports shirt into his captain’s uniform, presumably because he wanted to look the part when he returned home; and all the time Bacos was shouting to the other hostages, ‘Don’t forget your shoes!’
Outside Betser had corralled the first batch of hostages into a tight group, protected by a wall of soldiers. As he began to lead them down the access strip to where the Hercules was waiting on the edge of the diagonal runway, another heavy burst of fire came from the control tower, the bullets ricocheting off the tarmac and causing the soldiers and panicked hostages to scurry back to the cover of the building. ‘Shaul,’ shouted Betser into his radio. ‘Take out the control tower please.’
Mofaz opened up with everything he had, as did one of the Land Rovers, their machine-gun bullets and RPGs tearing chunks out of the balcony from where the Ugandan soldier was firing. After another false start, Betser ordered a second burst of sustained fire that lasted for nearly a minute. Only then did he allow the hostages to leave the building.
The departure was more stampede than orderly procession as the terrified hostages, many weighed down by children and possessions, fled the building. Some were told to get on the two Land Rovers waiting outside, but many preferred to run, fearing that the shooting would start again. The latter included the Rosenkovitches: Emma holding young Noam’s hand; Claude carrying his daughter Ella and using Sanford Freedman’s bulky copy of the Complete Shakespeare to try to protect her from stray shots. From far behind them they could hear gunshots and explosions. But Emma did not care. She was just relieved to be out in the open again, free of her captors, and heading for safety.
Having grabbed her things, Agnès was about to leave the large hall when she saw an elderly Israeli man–probably Yitzhak David, who had been shot in the arm–sitting on a chair, covered in blood. He seemed to be waiting for something. She was about to go up to him and say, ‘Come on, you must get up and run!’ But at the last minute her courage failed her. Worried that he might be dead already, she ran past him. So too did Maggy, passing Jean-Jacques’ bullet-riddled body as she did so. It was obvious that he was dead, but she could not bring herself to believe that.
Willy was loath to leave the terminal without his sandals. By the time he had located them under some blankets, the fire was out, but the room was still full of smoke and reeking of cordite. He went outside, jumped over a wall and was directed by soldiers to a Land Rover parked thirty yards away. It was already packed with people, but he got in and soon found himself lying half on his back, his cheek pressed against the side panel. Near him was a wounded man who sobbed in pain every time someone pressed against him. Agnès was also in the truck, complaining that she could not breathe. She was holding a plastic bag with a big wooden spoon that she had bought as a present for her sister. Realizing that it was digging in to people, she threw the bag out of the vehicle, forgetting that it also contained another hostage’s belongings. Despite the crush, and the driver’s warnings that the truck was overloaded and some people might fall off, hostages continued to clamber in.
At last the Land Rover moved off on the short drive to the Hercules. It was pitch black but the hostages could hear the plane’s engines and feel the wind from its propeller wash before they saw it. When the vehicle stopped, there was an unedifying scramble to get off it and into the plane. To haul herself up, Maggy grabbed a machine-gun barrel that was still hot from the firefight and burned her hand. Willy lost a sandal and had to scrabble around to find it. Eventually they all got off–including the wounded man who was put on a stretcher–and were herded up the plane’s rear ramp by the Golani soldiers who were fanned out on either side to prevent hostages from disappearing into the long grass.
One of the last hostages to leave the terminal was a beautiful young stewardess wearing only a pair of red panties and matching camisole top. Lightly wounded in the thigh by a tiny piece of shrapnel, she refused to walk and became hysterical when the soldiers threatened to leave her. So Amir Ofer hauled her on to his shoulder and carried her outside. When a bullet narrowly missed his head, he shifted the stewardess’s body on to his exposed right side ‘so that, if they shot again, she’d take the bullet’. He was determined not to die ‘because of her stupid stubbornness’ and, as luck would have it, they both made it unscathed to one of the Land Rovers that was ferrying the hostages.
Inside Hercules Four the hostages were welcomed by Israeli medics wearing a red Star of David on a white armband, and told to move as far forward as possible because more were arriving all the time. They sat where they could: on the floor, on boxes and on bags of medicine. Only now did they start to look at each other to see who was there, who was hurt–or worse. In tears, Maggy embraced Willy. So too did Agnès. Not far from them were sitting Marianne, Cécile and Isa, the latter still struggling to come to terms with Jean-Jacques’ brutal killing.
The crew was sitting nearby in various states of undress: Bacos had his uniform on, but Lemoine was wearing a dressing gown and pyjama bottoms that only came to his knees. One of the stewardesses had lost her glasses and had covered a little yellow petticoat with her uniform jacket; another, the fiancée of a famous Israeli footballer, was wearing just a towel until the medics made her some knickers out of crêpe paper, almost like a nappy.
One grim-faced hostage, however, was in two minds about leaving Uganda. ‘My mother was taken to Kampala Hospital yesterday after a piece of meat got stuck in her throat,’ explained Ilan Hartuv to Dr Dolev, the head of the surgical team. ‘Maybe I should stay to make sure she’s safe.’
Dolev shook his head. ‘If you stay they’ll kill you for sure. But an elderly woman like your mother has a good chance of being left alive.’
By now the Land Rovers had returned from the Old Terminal with the remaining wounded–civilian and military–who were carried up to the front of the cargo hold and laid out on the floor so that they could be treated. Nearby was the body of Yoni Netanyahu, his face covered with an aluminium blanket.
Willy counted six injured people and two dead. Two were from the Unit: Netanyahu and the young soldier wounded by an Israeli grenade. The rest were hostages, including fifty-five-year-old Ida Borochovich–who had been shot in the heart and killed as she fled with her son to the back of the room–Pasco Cohen and Yitzhak David. Of Jean-Jacques Mimouni there was no sign. But shortly after Maggy had explained to Willy that she had seen Jean-Jacques badly hurt, another stretcher arrived. Though the face was obscured, they at once recognized the sweater on the blood-soaked corpse as belonging to their friend. All the girls started weeping.
On the flight deck the pilot, Amnon Halivni, was anxious to leave. He knew how vulnerable the unprotected Hercules was to gunfire, and how a single well-aimed RPG round would cause carnage in its hold. The longer they remained on the ground, the more likely a Ugandan counter-attack became. ‘How many hostages are on board?’ he asked the loadmaster.
‘We’ve got everyone.’
‘That’s not good enough. I need the exact number in writing.’
Moments later the pilot was handed a slip of paper which stated that ninety-three live hostages and the dead bodies of two more were on board. Halivni shook his head. He knew that there should have been 105 hostages in the terminal. Where were the others? He asked the loadmaster to count again and list, in writing, the names of the dead. Back came a second note with a total of 102 alive and dead: still fewer than it should have been. On the back were written the names of the dead: ‘Ida Borokovich’, ‘Jean-Jacques Mimouni’ and ‘Lt. Col. Yoni’. When Halivni again queried the number with the loadmaster, he was told that no two counters could agree, but that the hostages themselves were convinced that everyone, apart from Dora Bloch, was on the plane. Halivni reported the problem to Amnon Biran–call sign ‘Butterfly’–who was manning the radio in Shomron’s Tactical Headquarters Land Rover.
Biran, in turn, told Kuti Adam who was circling in the command and control Boeing 707–call sign ‘Two Hundred’–above the airfield. ‘Look,’ Adam responded, ‘the numbers are not making sense to me. I want you to check. Have you searched all the places and verified that you have removed all the people? Over.’
‘Uh, the search of the building has been done,’ said Biran. ‘That is all I can tell you at this stage. Over.’
‘Roger. Okay.’
A minute or two later, Adam asked for an update. ‘Butterfly, Two Hundred here. Over.’
‘Butterfly here,’ said Biran. ‘Roger. Over.’
‘Well, what’s going on? You’re not saying anything.’
‘We are continuing to organize for the evacuation. When I have more specific information other than general words I will inform you. Over.’
‘Okay. When the first takes off, tell me as well.’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘Roger. Over and out.’
But Adam was not silent for long. ‘Don’t forget,’ he reminded Biran, ‘that I also asked you about the French crew.’
Biran replied: ‘At this stage I don’t have specific details yes or no.’
‘Okay. I just don’t want you to forget it.’
‘There is no one left in the hall. If they were taken out of there beforehand…’ he said, a pause completing the sentence. ‘The hijacked plane is standing right in front of the terminal, with stairs beside it, so maybe it was preparing to take off or something like that. Over.’
‘Fine. Okay.’
Adam’s next request a minute or two later was for ‘more reports on the people’.
A clearly harassed Biran responded: ‘At this moment, I don’t have any, it’s being checked. When I have, I will report back. Over.’
‘Roger. Okay. Other than that, is there more gunfire?’
‘If there is, it is only from our side. Isolated gunfire towards additional places. Over.’
‘Fine. And regarding injuries, do you know anything yet? Over.’
‘There are a number of injured. At this moment we don’t know precise numbers. Over.’
‘Roger. Okay.’
Biran reported to Adam moments later: ‘What is happening now in this area, in the area of the army hangars of their air force, is that black smoke is rising, and there are fires. In the area of the Old Terminal it is quiet. There are more of our security forces there. We’re near the plane that is evacuating the wounded, and there are lights on at the New Terminal. Over.’
‘Is Dan near you?’ asked Adam, referring to Shomron.
‘He’s currently supervising the loading of the vehicle on to the plane; he’s at a little distance from me.’
‘Okay. Tell me, has the plane with the wounded left yet?’ asked Adam as if he had not heard Biran’s two previous comments.
‘Not yet,’ said Biran, biting his tongue. ‘They’re currently transferring the last vehicle to it; then it will take off.’
‘Okay.’
It was shortly after this conversation that Biran asked the pilot of Hercules Four to check in person on the Airbus’s crew. Leaving the flight deck for the first time since landing, Halivni found the hold packed with people but eerily silent. Directly ahead, doctors and medics were working on the wounded who had been arranged in two triple tiers on either side of the fuselage, their stretchers fastened to the fuselage by straps. As Halivni passed the man on the top left tier–the young soldier from the Unit who had been injured in the arm and leg–he put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him.
Beyond the stretchers were the unwounded hostages, most sitting and staring straight ahead with glassy eyes. Interspersed among them were some of the Golani, the medical team and the aircrew. At the very back, closest to the ramp, was the grey Peugeot 404 pick-up that had transported Sneh and the Golani. It was full of sleeping soldiers.
Identifying Michel Bacos by his white shirt and pilot’s epaulettes, Halivni beckoned him forward. ‘You’re the Air France pilot?’ he asked in halting French.
‘Yes.’
‘Is your whole crew here?’
‘Yes. But what about my passengers?’
‘They’re all here, except for Dora Bloch. We have to take off right away.’
Pausing briefly to talk to Uzi Davidson whom he knew from the IAF reserves, Halivni returned to the flight deck and assured Biran that the Airbus’s crew was on board. He added that he could see tracer fire from the direction of the Old Terminal and was worried that the vulnerable Hercules might be attacked. He wanted to take off as soon as possible. Having spoken to Shomron, Biran told a relieved Halivni that he could leave. His destination, said Biran, was Nairobi International Airport. The air force technicians had finally managed to connect their portable fuel pump to one of the ducts; but as it would take far too long to fill all four planes, the decision had been taken to head for Kenya.
While Halivni did his final checks, Biran was asked by Adam for another update. ‘At this stage,’ he said, ‘we’ve finished loading the plane that is evacuating the wounded. The first plane is still standing in place, but it will soon start taxiing for takeoff.’
‘Good.’
‘Look, it’s closing its doors.’
‘Good.’
Once its rear ramp was up, Hercules Four began to move on to and up the diagonal runway, back the way it had come. It had been parked at the start of the access road for just twenty-six minutes.
Watching the plane depart, Muki Betser was reminded of the last time he and the other Israelis had departed from Entebbe four years earlier. Then nobody had offered a helping hand as they ‘climbed heavy-hearted on to the plane to Nairobi’, feeling ‘like refugees, helpless and defeated’. This time the hostages were neither helpless nor alone. They were ‘freed citizens of Israel’ and Betser felt a surge of pride that he and his men had ‘fulfilled’ their roles ‘as their protectors’.
Reaching the end of the main runway, Halivni opened the throttles and the Hercules–with its cargo of 101 hostages, including two dead and a number of wounded–accelerated past the New Terminal and rose slowly into the air above Lake Victoria. Still stunned by their sudden and violent rescue, and fearful that the plane might be pursued and shot down by Ugandan fighters, the surviving hostages were in no mood to cheer. Instead they clung to each other as Halivni banked the Hercules steeply to the left and set a course for Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport.
It was 12.52 p.m. local time. The rescue had taken just fifty-one minutes.
Kuti Adam knew that Operation Thunderbolt’s first priority was to rescue the hostages. But once word had reached him in the command and control plane that the evacuation was under way, he gave the soldiers on the ground permission to destroy the eleven MiG fighters of the Ugandan Air Force that had been identified in the Mossad aerial pictures. It was, of course, the reciprocal part of the deal that had been struck with the Kenyans to allow the Israeli planes to refuel at Nairobi; but Adam had been reluctant to order such an action until he knew the hostages were safe.
When the message reached Shomron it was waved aside. The ground commander had his hands full with the hostages and intended to deal with the MiGs when the evacuation was complete.
Meanwhile Omer Bar-Lev, who had been assigned the task of destroying the MiGs, was sitting in his BTR at the far end of the Old Terminal. He could see eleven planes–four MiG-17s and seven MiG-21s–in his searchlight and was waiting for permission to open fire. When none came, he tried to get in touch with Shaul Mofaz, but the radio link was poor. So he eventually made a unilateral decision. The noise was deafening as his men opened up with both machine guns and RPGs. All eleven planes were destroyed: some perforated by bullets; others bursting into flame as their fuel tanks ignited. It was the black smoke from these explosions that Biran was referring to when he spoke to Adam about ‘fires’ in the ‘area of the army hangars’.
Not long after this, Hercules Four took off and Shomron asked Muki Betser to carry out one last search of the Old Terminal building for stragglers before withdrawing his force to the New Terminal, where the three remaining C-130 planes were parked on the concourse. Finding no one, Betser ordered his men aboard the Mercedes and two Land Rovers, and they set off down the diagonal runway. Shaul Mofaz’s four BTRs followed soon afterwards, leapfrogging each other in pairs and dropping demolition charges ‘to create a smoke screen’ for any Ugandan soldiers ‘who might decide to be heroes’.
The two rearguard BTRs–commanded by Mofaz and Bar-Lev–were halfway down the diagonal runway when Mofaz received a call from Shomron to return and check the Air France plane. Adam was worried that some of the hostages might have been left behind, and wanted to be certain they were not on the plane. Shomron told Mofaz to take a look, but not to enter the plane in case it was booby-trapped.
The two BTRs drove back through the smoke screen and, as they neared the Old Terminal, saw the headlights of two vehicles approaching down a side road from the direction of Entebbe. Mofaz ordered the BTRs to stop and turn off their lights. This prompted one of the vehicles to do the same, but they kept advancing. When they reached a bend in the road, Mofaz ordered his men to open fire at a distance of 200 yards. The lights on the first vehicle went out–either hit by bullets or turned off to provide a cloak of cover–and the occupants dispersed.
The BTRs moved on towards the plane and, as they neared it, were shot at by the brave Ugandan soldier (or soldiers) in the control tower whom the previous firefights had failed to subdue. They fired back, prompting the Ugandan to take cover. Reaching the plane, Omer Bar-Lev dismounted from his BTR and climbed the mobile stairs that led up to the rear door. It was open but he did not enter. Instead he called out and used his flashlight to look inside. There was no sign of life and no response. ‘The plane looks dark and we didn’t hear anything from it,’ Shomron told Adam after getting a report from Mofaz. ‘Everything is currently quiet. A few Ugandan soldiers remain, here and there a bullet. But overall, quiet.’
His task completed, Mofaz ordered the BTRs to head for the New Terminal. By the time they arrived, only Hercules Two–earmarked to carry them and Shomron’s Jeep–was still at the parking concourse. Hercules One had taken off with the Unit’s assault team and vehicles at 1.12 a.m. local time, a good twenty minutes earlier; Hercules Three, with the other two BTRs on board, was waiting on the main runway. While the last two BTRs were driven aboard, Shomron made his final report to Adam. ‘We’ve begun to load the fourth plane. See you later.’
Biran then dismantled the radio’s huge antenna and the Jeep was driven up the ramp. With everyone on board, Hercules Two began to taxi towards the main runway and, in the pitch-blackness, almost ran straight into the ditch that ran along the access strip. A yard or two further and at least part of the rescue force would have been stranded. But the pilot realized his error just in time and corrected his line. Joining Hercules Two at the top of the main runway, the two planes took off one after the other.
It was 1.40 a.m. local time. The rescue force had been on the ground for just one hour and thirty-nine minutes.
Henry Kyemba was woken at 12.45 a.m. by the ringtone from his bedside phone. Answering it, he was surprised and not a little irritated to discover that the caller was one of Idi Amin’s mistresses. What she had to tell him, however, soon dissipated his anger.
Amin had just called her from State House with the astonishing news that ‘there was fighting at the airport and that the situation was out of control’. According to the president, the airport had been ‘captured’ but he did not know by whom. He was, as a result, ‘taking care of himself, and advised her to do the same’. To that end he was sending a car for her and suggested she go ‘into hiding’. Which is why she was calling Kyemba. She could not think of anywhere to go and wanted the health minister’s ‘advice and help’.
Kyemba told her there was little that he–or anyone else–could do to help and quickly ended the conversation. But he was not in any doubt about the identity of the attackers. ‘It’s the Israelis,’ he told his wife Teresa. ‘It must be. They’ve come to take the hostages.’
Then, after making a couple of calls to let family members know what was happening, he and his wife went back to sleep.
It was only later that Kyemba learned of the panic the Israeli assault had caused among the country’s political and military leaders: that Amin himself had assumed it was ‘some sort of mutiny backed by a foreign power’–either Kenya or Tanzania–and could not discover the truth because ‘as soon as the fighting started’ his senior officers, many of whom had been carousing at the Lake Victoria Hotel near State House, simply ‘vanished’. When the first bursts of gunfire ripped through the night, the officers had fled from the hotel’s bar and swimming pool to their own homes where they went into hiding, ‘telling their families that if anyone phoned… they were not available’. They too had assumed that the troops had mutinied and ‘until it was clear who was fighting whom, no officers wanted to risk becoming involved with the wrong side’.
Amin took refuge in a ‘driver’s quarters near State House’, trying without success to contact his military chiefs to find out what was happening. Only after the Israelis had departed did he discover the truth: it was not a mutiny but a foreign incursion.
The military response, therefore, was too little, too late. Kyemba and his wife were woken again at around 3 a.m. by the ‘rumbling of tanks and trucks’ on their way to the airport. But even then two of the armoured personnel carriers ‘broke down’ en route, according to acting British High Commissioner James Horrocks, and had to be ‘towed back to Kampala’.
It was around three in the morning that Horrocks himself set off for the airport with two colleagues from the West German Embassy. He had received a call about a fire at the Old Terminal building and, after failing to contact the airport by telephone, had decided to go there in person in a consular capacity ‘out of concern for the hostages’. But Horrocks and the two West Germans were stopped by Ugandan troops near the Lake Victoria Hotel, two miles from the airport, and told they could not go any further. Instead they were taken to the nearby officers’ mess of the Ugandan Air Force and detained for a number of hours. Only at 10.30 a.m. were they finally given permission to return to Kampala by General Mustafa Adrisi, the Ugandan minister of defense, and Colonel Isaac Malyamungu, a former Jinja gatekeeper who had risen swiftly through the army ranks to become one of Amin’s leading henchmen. Idi Amin would later suspect that Horrocks’s nighttime drive to the airport meant he had ‘prior knowledge of the Israeli invasion’, a charge the British diplomat vehemently–and truthfully–denied.
Henry Kyemba, meanwhile, had been woken again at six by a call from a senior officer who had finally returned to the airport. He had found twenty-seven dead bodies, including seven terrorists, and another ten seriously wounded, and wanted the health minister to send ambulances to ferry the casualties to Mulago Hospital. ‘It was the Israelis,’ said the officer, confirming Kyemba’s suspicions. ‘All the hostages are gone.’
Kyemba made the necessary calls before heading to the hospital to supervise the admissions. There he discovered ‘army trucks and ambulances passing in and out, delivering the injured, while relatives crowded around, wailing’. The dead–including the terrorists–had been taken to the mortuary for identification. The seriously injured were in emergency wards, while those with minor wounds were treated and discharged. Later a number of civilians were admitted after they had been beaten up for laughing at Amin’s humiliated troops.
Gerd Schnepel was listening to the radio in the Frankfurt apartment of Magdalena Kopp, another Revolutionary Cells terrorist and the girlfriend of Johannes Weinrich, when the programme was interrupted by a newsflash from Entebbe in Uganda. A gun battle had broken out at the airport, said the reporter, and in the distance could be heard the muffled if distinctive sound of automatic fire. Schnepel and Kopp were stunned.
They debated what it might mean. Had the Ugandans turned on their comrades or was it a rescue attempt by the IDF? The latter was the last thing any of them were expecting. But either way the shooting was bad news and they feared the worst.
The ministers, security chiefs and aides gathered in Shimon Peres’s office in the Kirya had mostly listened in silence to the intermittent reports coming through the radio receiver as the drama unfolded in real time.
At first, having heard gunfire, they endured an agonizing wait until the static was interrupted by Dan Shomron’s cool, calm voice: ‘Everything is all right. Will report later.’
More shooting could be heard–or was it the plane’s engines? Time seemed to stand still. Then a single codeword was uttered–‘Shefel’–meaning that all four planes had landed safely at Entebbe.
Another wait for news, but this time shorter, until Shomron spoke again: ‘Everything is going well. You will soon receive a full report.’
The room seemed to relax. People dared to look at each other and nod. The troops were on the ground and, despite the firing, Shomron did not seem unduly concerned.
The next codeword was ‘Falastin’–denoting the start of the attack on the terminal. This was it: the moment of truth. Most of those present stared hard at the receiver, willing it to give them good news. At last, after an agonizing wait of twelve minutes, it came in the form of the codeword: ‘Jefferson’.
It meant the evacuation of the hostages was under way: the terrorists were dead and the attack had been successful. Were there casualties? Almost certainly, but how many they could not tell. They felt like throwing their arms around each other and dancing for joy. But it was too early for that: the terrorists had been killed but there was still the small matter of the Ugandan Army.
‘Move everything to Galila,’ said a voice over the radio. They deduced from this that the hostages were being moved to one of the planes. Everything so far had gone perfectly.
Then the first setback: a call for medical assistance for ‘Mateh Skedim’, the Unit. There were ‘two Ekaterina’–two casualties. ‘Who were they?’ Peres and the others wondered. They would have to wait to find out.
Finally, at around 12.40 a.m. local time, they heard the single word they had been waiting for: ‘Carmel’. It meant that all four planes had taken off, and the hostages and soldiers were safe. The operation had succeeded.
For a moment the occupants of Peres’s office looked at each other in stunned silence, scarcely able to believe what had just happened. Then a week of bottled-up tension exploded in hugs and shouts of triumph: ‘We did it!’
Peres’s heart ‘leapt with joy’ as champagne was opened and a toast drunk to the success of the mission. Then the group dispersed: Rabin to his office and the others to Motta Gur’s suite of rooms in the Kirya where ‘all the members of the General Staff’ had been told to assemble. Not all of them knew about the operation in advance, and ‘their shouts of enthusiasm mingled with the jubilation and relief of those who had known and had shared the anxiety and anticipation’.
Before heading over to Gur’s office to join in the celebrations, Peres called for Burka Bar-Lev and asked him to telephone Idi Amin at the presidential palace in Entebbe to discover whether the Ugandan dictator ‘had learned yet of the nocturnal visit to his country’ and to gauge his reaction.
When Amin’s voice came on the line it was 1 a.m. Israeli time, and just twenty minutes after the last Hercules had departed from Entebbe. ‘Sir,’ said Bar-Lev in his most matter-of-fact tone, ‘I want to thank you for your cooperation. Thank you very much, sir.’
Amin seemed nonplussed. ‘You know I did not succeed.’
‘Thank you very much for your cooperation,’ repeated the Israeli, before feigning surprise. ‘What? The cooperation didn’t succeed? Why?’
Amin asked what the Israelis had done, and Bar-Lev replied that they had done exactly what he, Amin, had wanted.
‘Wh—Wh—What happened?’ stuttered Amin, perhaps realizing for the first time that the fighting was not a mutiny by his own troops but an Israeli raid.
‘I don’t know.’
‘No,’ said Bar-Lev, lying. ‘I don’t know. I have been requested by a friend with good connections in the government to thank you for the cooperation. I don’t know what was meant by it, but I think you do know.’
Amin continued to insist he knew nothing and Bar-Lev, his task accomplished, said he would call back.
At Gur’s office, meanwhile, the chief of staff’s driver had procured more bottles of champagne and the drink continued to flow. Gur ‘made a little speech in which he said that apart from Netanyahu’–who, as far as they knew, was injured but still alive–and ‘another paratrooper’ (Hershko), the force had apparently suffered ‘no casualties’ (no mention was made of the soldier wounded by the grenade). All the hostages, he added, had been ‘rescued unharmed’–this of course was not true–‘save for one woman, Mrs Dora Bloch’ who had been taken to hospital in Entebbe. The hijackers, ‘who were Arabs and Germans’, had been ‘shot dead’. It was, said Gur, ‘certainly one of the most successful’ operations the IDF had ever undertaken. He added that he could not conclude even this preliminary assessment of the mission ‘without singling out the one man whose determination made it happen–the minister of defense’.
All eyes turned to Peres, as Gur elaborated: ‘I don’t know if it’s possible to apportion credit among those responsible for the decision to undertake this operation, but if it is, the biggest share of the credit goes to the defense minister.’
To those listening, this accolade was fully justified. Peres was the one minister who, from the very start, had warned of the consequences of caving in to the terrorists’ demands. It was largely thanks to his determination that the quite understandable objections of both Rabin and Gur to a military operation had eventually been overcome. Yet Peres–unlike the other two–had no operational military experience and his support for some of the earlier options put forward by the planners is an indication that he was prepared to support almost any military strike against the terrorists–regardless of the risk. It was for him both a matter of principle and an opportunity to label his political rival Rabin as a leader who was ‘weak on terrorism’.
For Rabin and Gur, on the other hand–particularly the former–there was an absolute conviction that a failed military operation would do more harm to Israel’s standing in the world than even a negotiated settlement and the release of imprisoned terrorists. It was for this reason that both withheld their support for a strike until they were convinced that the proposed plan had a reasonable chance of success. To both of them, and to the people chiefly responsible for planning and carrying out the operation–Ehud Barak, Iddo Embar, Muki Betser, Dan Shomron, Yoni Netanyahu, Benny Peled, Kuti Adam and the others–must also go a sizeable share of the laurels of victory.
At 1.15 a.m. Peres telephoned Rabin to inform him of Bar-Lev’s conversation with Idi Amin. The prime minister burst out laughing on hearing of Amin’s hapless response, and invited Peres over to his office. When the defense minister arrived he found in situ the various opposition leaders who had supported the mission, including Begin, Rimalt and Navon. Even the abstemious Begin, who preferred tea, was drinking whisky.
While Peres was there, Rabin phoned a number of senior politicians–including President Ephraim Katzir, Speaker of the Knesset Yisrael Yeshayahu, and former Prime Minister Golda Meir–to give them the good news. Peres took the opportunity to call his wife Sonia, who was ‘thunderstruck’ but delighted.
Meanwhile Amos Eiran had been asked by Rabin to make two important telephone calls: the first to Professor Yosef Gross, the chairman of the Relatives’ Committee, who cried when he heard the hostages had been rescued; and the second to the White House to let the United States president Gerald Ford know about the successful operation. With Washington six hours behind Tel Aviv, it was around eight in the evening when one of Ford’s aides came to the phone. Having listened to what Eiran had to say, the aide responded: ‘Tell Mr Rabin I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the Bicentennial.’
Finally they drafted a ‘laconic statement’ to be issued by the army spokesman. It read: ‘IDF forces have tonight rescued the hostages and aircrew from Entebbe Airport.’ The plan was to withhold the statement until the planes had reached the safety of Israeli airspace. But this was brought forward to 3 a.m.–when it was broadcast on the IDF’s radio station Galei Zahal–after the Agence France-Presse had reported, on the strength of Ugandan sources, ‘an Israeli attack on Entebbe’.
At around the same time Peres lay down on the couch in his office and closed his eyes. But he could not sleep. He kept ‘thinking of the hostages’, and ‘what they must be feeling now, in the belly of the Hercules’. Sensing a presence in the room, he turned round to see a distraught-looking Motta Gur. ‘Shimon,’ whispered the chief of staff, ‘Yoni’s gone. The bullet went through his heart. He was shot from the control tower.’
Peres turned away and, ‘for the first time that week’, gave vent to his ‘feelings’ by weeping. His joy at the operation’s success would forever be ‘tinged with sadness because of Yoni’s death’.
For much of Hercules Four’s short flight to Nairobi, the medics worked hard to stabilize the more seriously injured by fixing up blood and serum drips. When a woman who had been shot in the buttock was undressed, however, the sight and smell of blood was too much for young Maggy, who preferred to move to the back of the plane and settle in next to the Peugeot pick-up.
Sitting next to her was an Israeli youth called Frank,* fat with frizzy hair, who two days earlier had been one of the most vociferous opponents of Israeli negotiation. ‘I was one of the last to leave the terminal,’ he told her with a self-satisfied smirk, ‘because I was helping to evacuate the wounded and the dead. When that was over I borrowed a gun from an Israeli soldier I know and used it to finish off the German woman by firing a round into her ear.’
He seemed genuinely pleased with what he had done and proudly showed Maggy his bloodstained hands, exclaiming: ‘Look!’
Ignoring Maggy’s grimace, Frank added that he had taken a bullet from the chest of a dead woman–Ida Borochovich–and wanted to enlist with the Unit that had carried out the raid. But the commandos had said no because he was too young. He then showed her the souvenir he had brought with him: Böse’s megaphone.
By now the hostages could see that two of the dead, wrapped in aluminium blankets, were stacked on a single stretcher at the front of the plane: a woman–Borochovich–on the bottom; and an Israeli soldier dressed in green–Netanyahu–above her. The body of Jean-Jacques Mimouni, meanwhile, was still at the back of the plane.
Sitting close to Netanyahu’s corpse, a female hostage felt a lump under her bottom. Reaching down, she picked up something round and metallic. ‘What’s this?’ she asked Ephraim Sneh, who was tending to the wounded nearby.
Sneh recognized it immediately as one of the small and very unstable mini fragmentation grenades that the Unit carried for special operations. It must have fallen off Yoni’s webbing and rolled to the floor. He took it carefully from her and stored it in a locker. Had its pin come loose, the explosion would have caused carnage in the tightly packed cargo hold and might even have brought the plane down.
Informed by the pilot of the Boeing 707 medical plane that the rescue aircraft were on their way, Dany Saadon climbed the stairs of the control tower and opened the door. As the local El Al manager, Saadon was well known to the senior air traffic controller who, looking up from his radar screen, asked the Israeli how he could help.
‘I just wanted to let you know’, said Saadon, ‘that there are a few El Al flights coming in that you won’t be expecting. But I have authorization from both the minister of transport and the airport director for them to land. They are to taxi to Bay 4 where I’ll arrange for them to be refuelled. They won’t stay long.’
Knowing that Saadon had good relations with both the minister and the head of the airport, the air controller took him at his word. But when he identified no fewer than five blips approaching Nairobi from the direction of Entebbe–two within a few minutes’ flying time–he frowned and asked: ‘Are you certain that you have permission for this?’
‘Yes, I’m certain,’ replied Saadon. ‘But if you’re unsure you can call the airport director for confirmation.’
Hesitating for just a moment, the air controller replied: ‘No, I won’t call him. It’s too late. I’ll do that in the morning.’
Minutes later–having announced itself as El Al Flight 167 from Tel Aviv–the command and control Boeing 707 landed at Nairobi, followed immediately by Hercules Four. It was 2.12 a.m. local time.
Once Hercules Four had come to a halt in Bay 4–the quarantined area guarded by armed Kenyan GSU men–its ramp was lowered and the Peugeot 404 driven off to make it easier to unload the wounded. Told to remain on board, the hostages moved to one side as the six stretchers were carried off. The two most seriously wounded–Pasco Cohen and Yitzhak David–were taken by ambulance to Kenyatta National Hospital on the western edge of Nairobi, a distance of eleven miles. Pasco’s wife Hannah had wanted to accompany him but was told by a doctor: ‘That’s not possible. In any case, your husband will fly home on a Boeing and be there before you.’
Both men were rushed into theatre for emergency operations: David came through his, but not Cohen–the self-confessed survival ‘specialist’–who finally ran out of luck and died of a coagulation disorder, the fourth Israeli fatality of the raid.
The other casualties were treated in the field hospital before being put on the Boeing 707 medical plane. Most of the remaining hostages, however, were told they would leave Nairobi on Hercules Four, an announcement that hugely disappointed Willy, who imagined an Air France plane, or a French army plane at the very least, would be waiting in Kenya to take them home. The exceptions were two mothers–Emma Rosenkovitch and Yael Brotsky–who accepted Kuti Adam’s offer to travel with their children on the command and control 707 because it would be ‘more comfortable’. Their husbands stayed on the C-130.
Soon after Ephraim Sneh had got off Hercules Four to stretch his legs, he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Ehud Barak, wearing a blue suit and tie; Sneh had last seen him in uniform in Israel. ‘I understand,’ said Barak, ‘that Yoni was killed.’
‘Unfortunately yes,’ replied Sneh.
Wanting to see for himself, Barak got on the plane and pulled back the blanket covering Netanyahu’s corpse. Staring up at him was a ‘white face, pale, strikingly handsome–Yoni’s face’.
Shortly after Hercules One had landed at Nairobi at 2.32 a.m. local time–allowing Joshua Shani to turn off the engines for the first time since leaving the Sinai–Barak went onboard to tell Muki Betser and his men that their commander was dead. Their chatter died in an instant. Betser tried to raise spirits. ‘We did our duty,’ he told them. ‘We succeeded. Successfully. This is the painful price we sometimes have to pay in this kind of war. But we continue.’
Like Barak, Matan Vilnai wanted to see Yoni’s body. As he passed the hostages he was struck by how depressed they seemed, ‘completely stunned, shadows of men’. The downbeat mood prompted in him a ‘totally illogical’ feeling that ‘if Yoni was dead, then the whole thing wasn’t worth it’.
When the final two planes–Hercules Two and Three–landed at Nairobi at around 3 a.m. local time, they were given just over two hours to refuel, pack up and leave. The rushed timetable was the result of an ill-tempered conversation about forty minutes earlier between Ben Gethi, the head of the GSU, and President Kenyatta, who was out of Nairobi for the weekend. With Uri Lubrani standing beside him, Gethi had called Kenyatta to let him know that Israeli military planes were on Kenyan soil. After wincing at Kenyatta’s expletive-laden response, Gethi turned to Lubrani and said: ‘The president wants you out of Kenya in three hours. Can you do it?’
‘Yes, we can do it,’ replied Lubrani. ‘Tell him yes.’