First the barren expanses of the Sinai Desert, then the green orchards and fields of the Gaza Strip and of Lachish’s farming villages further inland, and at last the white stripe of waves breaking on the shore, the city blocks sprawling across the coastal lowlands, and the bare hills rising above them to the east: This was the landscape Yoni watched pass below him on Thursday, July 1,1976, as he flew into Tel Aviv, in the center of the country. Next to him sat Avi, the Unit’s intelligence officer, who had spent the last several days with him. Over the past year, the two had put in long hours together, working through a day and a night and on through the next. Often their overloaded weekdays would stretch into Saturdays spent in Yoni’s apartment over cups of coffee, maps and aerial photographs spread out before them as they drafted plans to the last detail. It was a work relationship, but with time a level of warmth and mutual respect had been added.
Now, on the plane, Yoni exchanged a few words with Avi and, as he looked at the land below, let his mind wander. He may have tried to doze a little too, knowing he wouldn’t find time for that when he got back to the Unit. He had just put a sleepless, event-packed week of work behind him, and ahead of him already lay the possibility of a new mission. Though the chances of it actually taking place were close to zero, the idea alone was enough to set his imagination on fire. And what imagination suggested — even if reason did not dwell on it — was that if only constraints were cast aside, if only courage were given a chance, a deed might be done that would be remembered for generations.
The hijacking of an Air France airliner had been a concern for Yoni all week. Until Thursday, though, it was not his main one; he was caught up in other important operational activities, which are still classified and can’t be recounted here.
On Sunday, June 27, several hours after the Airbus was hijacked by a Palestinian terror group, a detachment of the Unit was put on routine alert, standard for such circumstances. Not much was known — only that the airliner had been hijacked over Europe, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, and that about a third of the passengers were Israelis. The plane had been hijacked in the afternoon, following a stopover in Athens. Yoni, who was away from the Unit’s base with some of his men at the time, was kept informed about what was happening by the Operations Branch of the General Staff. Based on that information, he gave directives by phone to Maj. Muki Betser, the Unit’s duty commander that day, and thus the officer responsible for the detachment on alert. Yoni went over various points with him, making sure that certain key officers, men and materiel were on the base.
“Listen,” he told Muki at the end of one conversation, “get everything you can ready now, before it’s too late.”
At around midnight, Muki arrived with the Unit’s contingency force at Lod Airport, outside Tel Aviv, where they prepared for the possible return of the airliner to Israel. The plane, that had landed in Libya, had taken off from there. But the airliner was now heading south, and the detachment was sent back to the base. Yoni called Muki again for a quick report on what had happened.
“How does it look now?” Yoni asked.
“We’re still on alert and waiting to see if the terrorists decide to come here. We’ve been called back to Lod again.”
Yoni gave an order that Yiftah Reicher, the Unit’s second-incommand, go to Lod with the detachment, and said that he himself would meet them there, flying in from the Sinai early Monday morning.
As it turned out, the hijacked airliner landed that morning at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. After meeting with his men at Lod, Yoni went back to the base and met with Muki, Yiftah, and other officers. He made a few changes in the plans for storming the airliner, if it did return to Israel, and in the make-up of the force assigned to the task. After the meeting, he resumed his other operational duties. Activity on the base went on as usual, except that the alert remained in force, since no one could know whether the plane would stay in Uganda or for how long.
At this point, on Monday, June 28, the demands of the hijackers, from Wadi’a Haddad’s Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had not yet been announced. It was clear, though, that they would soon be issued. The 241 hostages were held inside the Air France jet for about twelve hours after the plane put down at Entebbe. On Monday afternoon they were moved from the plane to the main passenger lounge in the airport’s old terminal. That building had once served those entering or leaving Uganda by air, including the Israelis who served in that country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since 1972, when the Israeli military and economic advisers had been expelled from Uganda after strongman Idi Amin suddenly tilted toward the Arabs, the airport had been expanded, a new and longer runway added, and a new terminal and control tower built at the west end of the field on a long, low hill over a mile from the old terminal. The old terminal, unused and deserted, provided the terrorists a convenient place to hold their hostages.
The four hijackers — the German man who had led the operation, a German woman, and two young Arabs — were joined in Uganda by three or more Arab terrorists. Among them was the Arab who from then on would be commander of the entire group. In contrast to the tension among the four hijackers while they were on board the plane, the terrorists now appeared relaxed. The difficult and dangerous part of their mission, the hijacking itself, had been a success, and here in Uganda, they felt far from any threat. “The terrorists felt sure of themselves,” recounts Sarah Davidson, one of the hostages. “We were trapped in their hands, like a mouse in a cat’s paws.” Whatever the final outcome of the hijacking — Israeli capitulation or liquidating the hostages — the work before them could be carried out without any real interference.
That day almost nothing was done within the Israeli military to examine options for freeing the hostages, though Lt.-Col. Joshua (Shiki) Shani, commander of the Israel Air Force’s squadron of Hercules C-130 transport planes, did call a meeting of his staff on his own initiative to discuss the hijacking. He assumed that if any action were taken, his squadron would be involved, since the Hercules were the only military aircraft Israel had that could reach Entebbe. The meeting in the squadron HQ was brief. Shani and his officers mainly discussed flight ranges and possible routes. Given the distance from Israel to Uganda, about 2,200 miles, it was clear that only the squadron’s two tanker planes, intended for in-flight refueling, could make the round trip to Uganda on their own fuel supply. A regular Hercules could make it to Uganda, but after taking off again would have only enough fuel for an hour-and-a-half flight.
The next day, Tuesday, June 29, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called a late afternoon meeting of the senior cabinet ministers with whom he consulted on important matters of state. The terrorists had already announced their demands. They included the release of forty terrorists who were held in Israeli prisons, including Kozo Okamoto, a Japanese enlisted by the PLO, who killed twenty-four people at Lod Airport in 1972, and the release of a number of other Arab and German terrorists imprisoned in other countries.* The terrorists set Thursday, July 1, at 2:00 p.m., as the deadline for meeting their demands. If the prisoners on their list were not freed by then, they threatened, as was their wont, to execute the hostages. This time, it seemed, Israel had no choice but to submit to the demands of terrorists — the hostages were in a hostile country thousands of miles from Israel, in the hands of Arab and German killers, and subject to the whims of a ruthless African despot.
Nevertheless, Rabin did summon the army’s chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Mordechai (Motta) Gur, to the meeting. He intended to ask him whether there was any chance, however slim, of a military solution. Gur received Rabin’s message minutes before he was due to fly to the Sinai to observe a divisional exercise. He realized immediately why Rabin had summoned him. With Gur was his adjutant, Lt.-Col. Hagai Regev, and Gur told him to contact the Kiryah, the sprawling Tel Aviv headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces** (IDF). Stopping the car at a public phone booth on the road to Jerusalem, Regev called the Operations Branch commander, Maj.-Gen. Yekutiel Adam, and passed on Gur’s orders to begin examining options for military action. At the cabinet meeting, in response to Rabin’s question, the chief of staff said that the army had not yet looked into ways to free the hostages — but that in principle such an operation was feasible. Gur even made a few suggestions about how it might be done.
The meeting of the ministers ended without reaching a decision. At the time the Israeli government considered France duty-bound to help find a solution, as the plane was French and most of the passengers were non-Israelis. Apart from this, since the terrorists had made demands involving various other countries, any negotiated resolution to the crisis would necessarily relate to those countries as well.
At 9:00 p.m., Chief of Staff Gur called a preliminary meeting concerning the hijacking, prior to a conference with Defense Minister Peres. About a day and a half had passed since the hijacked plane had landed at Entebbe. Among those at the meetings were Operations Branch chief Adam and Air Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Benny Peled. Before the meetings, Peled asked his men to provide him with basic data on the air force’s capability to reach Entebbe. “We’ve got four fully operational Hercules air crews suitable for this kind of operation,” he was told by Maj. Iddo Embar, an Air Force section commander. In principle, Iddo added, it was possible to send a larger number of Hercules planes, as well as Boeing 707s. Peled also decided to speak directly with Shani, the commander of the Hercules squadron, and discussed with him on the phone a number of technical questions, mostly dealing with navigation to Entebbe and the range of the plane with different payloads on board.
Armed with this information, Peled went into the meetings with the chief of staff and the defense minister and spoke strongly against giving in to the terrorists under any circumstances.
“What do you suggest?” he was asked.
“We’re capable of putting down a force of over 1,000 men at the airport and taking control of it,” said Peled, speaking of a major operation lasting several days. “From our perspective, I don’t think there will be a problem with Ugandan air defenses. A problem would only come up if the runway at Entebbe is blocked for some reason — if, for instance, some drunken driver has parked his truck right in the middle.” Peled added that a more limited operation was also an option, making use of only four Hercules planes, for which operational flight crews were available.1
The idea still lacked form. What, for instance, would be done with the hostages once they were freed? How would the force be brought home? Yet, in light of later events, it is clearly significant that the air force had stated it could reach Uganda, and that it took seriously the possibility of a “soft” landing at Entebbe — i.e., without cover from combat aircraft.
Chief of Staff Gur was extremely doubtful about an operation of that type; Adam, the Operations Branch chief, said the proposal was worth examining further. Besides landing planes at the airport, other ideas for possible action were raised at the meeting with the defense minister.2
That same evening, before the meeting with Peres, Adam had assigned responsibility for checking possible military options to Col. Ehud Barak, then on loan to the Operations Branch. Ehud had been commander of the Unit in the early 70s, when Yoni was second in command, and had extensive experience in planning and carrying out special operations. As commander of the Unit, he’d done much to develop its special operations role, and had personally commanded several such actions, including the storming of a hijacked Sabena 707 at Lod Airport in May 1972, and a nighttime raid inside Beirut in April 1973 in which several top PLO commanders were killed.
Ehud had been given a room at the Operations Branch, where a number of men gathered late Tuesday night, including Muki and Yiftah, who had been delegated by Yoni to attend. It was natural for the Unit to be represented, since it was fairly clear that it would play the central role in any mission of this kind. Also present were representatives from the marine commandos, the air force, and military intelligence. Before dawn, Lt.-Col. Haim Oren arrived to represent the head of the Infantry and Paratroops Command, Brig.-Gen. Dan Shomron. With him was Lt.-Col. Amnon Biran, the Infantry and Paratroops intelligence officer. Biran had been the Unit’s intelligence officer some years earlier, and was personally familiar with its intelligence needs for a special operation.
The group had virtually no information on Entebbe. Maj. Embar of the air force, who would play a key part throughout the week in preparing the aerial component of the operation and in coordinating between the air force and the ground forces, came to the meeting with a Jeppesen, the civil aviation guide to the world’s airports. The book gave the group extremely limited but vital information. It had a sketch showing the locations of the runways at Entebbe and their lengths, and the location of the old terminal. Muki, who had served for a short time in Uganda in an Israeli military mission, also remembered the building. The field was on the shore of Lake Victoria, the inland sea that is the main source of the Nile and lies between southern Uganda and the western tip of Kenya.
Ehud was convinced that a military action had to be attempted, if at all feasible. Various options were raised; naturally, each man suggested a mode of operation best suited to his own unit. The marine commando representative suggested reaching Entebbe via Lake Victoria by dinghy; Lt. Col. Oren, of the Infantry and Paratroops, proposed parachuting forces into the area; and Muki suggested the ruse of landing a civilian aircraft carrying the rescue force. The proposals, of course, were extremely general; no one could go into details, since almost nothing was known about the target. There was no real certainty that the hostages were in the old terminal, nor was there any information on the terminal itself beyond the small rectangle representing it on the diagram in the guide.
A full-scale assault using the C130 Hercules transport planes was also mentioned. But the idea was given little attention, since the underlying assumption in the discussion was that Ugandan strongman Idi Amin and his army were not cooperating with the terrorists, but had simply fallen into the role of “hosts,” which they would be happy to get rid of. The officers at the meeting therefore thought that only a minimal force, capable of eliminating the terrorists, would be needed. With that accomplished, they assumed, Amin would allow the hostages and their rescuers to leave his country peacefully.
At the end of the meeting, which extended into Wednesday morning, it was decided that the preferred plan was parachuting onto the lake. At this stage, Chief of Staff Gur preferred that option as well, though Peled, the air force commander, was skeptical. The idea was for the air force to drop soldiers of the Unit and the marine commandos, along with rubber dinghies, onto Lake Victoria. After a trip of several hours, the men would secretly land at the airport and attack the terrorists.
Throughout the day, Muki returned periodically to the Unit, at one point instructing the commander of one of the squads that was on the base that week to get five men ready who knew how to swim. “We’re leaving tonight,” he said, half seriously. “Get ready for a sortie that includes a flight, a drop, and swimming freestyle among alligators.” The officer ran around preparing equipment and notifying his men, but after a few hours word came that the mission had been postponed.
Meanwhile, Rabin dismissed the proposals that were presented to him out of hand. “It will be Israel’s Bay of Pigs,” he said.3
Yoni was kept constantly apprised of various ideas being raised. He spoke over the phone with Ehud a number of times Tuesday night and Wednesday, if only to ensure that the operation, if it took place, would be assigned to the Unit. Perhaps he was worried that his absence from the Kiryah would allow another unit to get the prize. On Wednesday, Yoni flew to the Sinai. From there, he spoke with Muki and others to receive reports and to try to get a sense of how seriously a military option was being taken at the Kiryah.
“Listen, the chances of this going through are pretty slim,” Muki told him on the phone.
“Is it worth my coming?” Yoni asked anyway, even though it was nearly impossible for him to do so at the time.
“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.”
That answer must have put Yoni a bit more at ease, though he undoubtedly felt somewhat trapped, unable to get to the Kiryah and help personally to push the military option.
Meanwhile, the second in command of the Operation Branch’s special operations division, Col. Shai Tamari, asked Yekutiel Adam to transfer authority for handling the Entebbe crisis from Ehud to him. Tamari had just been freed up by the end of a major exercise, and since standard procedure was for him or his immediate superior to coordinate planning in such matters, Adam granted the request. It was less than a day since Ehud had begun exploring ideas for an operation. That afternoon, Wednesday, June 30, Tamari called a meeting in his office and was briefed on the proposals raised the night before. He ordered each unit to continue its planning and told the team from the Infantry and Paratroops Command to work on developing a larger operation, involving landing transport planes at the airport itself and taking full control of it.4 While leaving that option open, though, Shai focused mainly on the proposal for a smaller operation in which forces would parachute with rubber dinghies onto the lake and strike from there.
Yet from the air force’s perspective, landing at Entebbe remained the most realistic option. Familiar with how airports functioned day to day, the air force’s men figured no one would notice a plane landing at night without lights. Even if someone did pay attention, they conjectured, he wouldn't immediately realize what kind of plane it was or what it was doing there. By the time anyone started asking questions, the hostages could be freed. That afternoon, Defense Minister Peres called in Adam and Air Force Commander Peled and asked them how much stock they put in the idea of landing Hercules transports at Entebbe. Both answered that they believed in the idea.5 With additional officers from the General Staff taking part, a brief discussion was held at Peres’s office on the size of the force that would be needed to seize control of the airport.6
That day, Shomron, the Infantry and Paratroops commander, was at the IDF’s Staff College, interviewing newly graduated officers for his command. Whatever type of operation was finally decided on, it was clear that Shomron would command the ground forces since, by virtue of his position, he was to supervise all special operations of this kind. Toward evening, he met at the college with Oren and Biran, his representatives at the meetings at the Kiryah, to go over the different options. Shomron preferred a full-scale takeover of the airport to a limited operation. Throughout the day, the feeling had grown that Idi Amin was collaborating with the terrorists, and Shomron believed the rescue force would have to prevent intervention by Amin’s troops during the operation and be able to return unassisted to Israel with the freed hostages. His thinking, in line with Peled’s original proposal, was to use a large enough force to take the entire airport and to hold it if the Ugandan army counterattacked. That meant bringing a substantial quantity of troops and equipment to Entebbe, and one feasible way to do that was landing the Hercules planes.
“We sat for two hours…and put together an operational concept, an idea. I wouldn’t even call it a plan,” recalls Lt.-Col. Biran. The essentials of the concept seem to have been as follows: The planes would land on the main runway, a considerable distance from the old terminal. The rescue force — made up of men from the Unit — would land first and move toward the old terminal to free the hostages. To avoid alerting the enemy too soon and spoiling the rescue, additional planes carrying reinforcements would land only after the assault on the terminal began. A second force would take the new terminal and control tower; no hostile forces were expected in that part of the airport, but the buildings there overlooked the main runway and the parking area where the planes would wait until the end of the operation. A third, backup force would take up positions on the diagonal runway between the new terminal and the old.
The three men also discussed using vehicles of some sort to move the troops and possibly considered bringing in light armored personnel carriers for defensive purposes. In addition, Shomron wanted to find out how many people could be put on the air force tankers. If the released hostages could all be squeezed on board the planes, they could be taken to Israel; at least for them, the problem of getting out of Uganda would be solved. The option of refueling the other Hercules planes from Entebbe airport’s underground tanks, suggested earlier by the air force, may also have been raised at this meeting.
In passing, it is worth noting the lack of agreement among various sources on who came up with this concept and how it developed. “It’s a Rashomon. I’m not sure anyone will ever get to the absolute truth,” said Gur, who several years later interviewed the men involved. “There’s no way for me to reach a conclusion.” Listing at least five different figures who claim credit, he added: “Each has his own version of the story… But in the last analysis, that doesn’t really interest me. What matters is that in the end an idea was developed.”*
What’s clear, though, is that various ideas were raised over the three days between Monday and Thursday, and that the first of these was perhaps the landing of a force at Entebbe by means of Hercules transports. It is also clear that this proposal was given some additional content in the meeting Shomron conducted at the Staff College, where he laid down several principles for implementing the idea.
Late that night, Lt.-Col. Oren returned to the Kiryah and presented the conclusions of the meeting to Col. Tamari of Operations Branch. Tamari, dissatisfied, told him to go back to work. The Infantry and Paratroops Command’s plan sounded vague and half-baked to him, and he wanted it to be elaborated on and presented to him again. Yet, until the more practical planning for the operation began a day later, on Thursday evening, the idea lacked operational substance. “Nothing was done during that time to treat the subject in depth, to broaden the background planning,” says Biran, Shomron’s intelligence officer.
Meanwhile, as Wednesday passed, Defense Minister Peres became more convinced that Israel would have to find a military solution to the hostage crisis, even though the IDF had not yet recommended a course of action or developed a real plan of operation. The former head of Israel’s military delegation to Uganda, Baruch (Burkah) Bar-Lev, whom Idi Amin still considered a personal friend, had been phoning the Ugandan despot from the Defense Ministry, in the hope of gaining information and having a moderating influence. The contents of these conversations strengthened the defense minister’s sense that Amin was cooperating with the terrorists and had no interest in helping secure the release of the hostages. What was more, the terrorists’ demands for the release of prisoners in countries besides Israel were making it extremely hard to reach a deal with them. At his meeting Tuesday night with Adam and Peled, who had wholeheartedly supported a military solution, it had been agreed that the IDF would push ahead on the matter. By Wednesday night, the air force had already begun working on the aerial side of the operation in a more detailed way. If it couldn’t get the rescue force to Entebbe and bring it home again with the freed hostages, an operation would obviously be out of the question.
Meanwhile, the Infantry and Paratroops Command conducted a trial run of the amphibious option on Wednesday night, with the marine commandos and a Hercules flight crew under Shani’s command taking part. The trial revealed a number of difficulties, particularly in parachuting the rubber dinghies onto the water. A second attempt, at midday Thursday, would be more successful. Squadron leader Shani, like many others in the air force including Peled, had however serious doubts about the amphibious plan, and was patiently waiting for the air force’s preferred plan to be implemented: landing the Hercules planes at Entebbe and taking the airport.
At midnight Wednesday, Peres called another meeting at his office, and the various options were gone over again. The available intelligence was still so limited that it was virtually impossible to make real plans. That night, though, Yoni received calls from Muki, the Unit’s representative at the Kiryah, and others, telling him that the army’s top echelon was begin to tilt, at least ever so slightly, toward considering a military operation.
“Wednesday night the phone calls began to come in,” says Avi, who was with Yoni, “saying a directive had been issued for the Unit to start planning. It’s true that it still looked like the kind of situation where people say things without really being serious. But during the night there were quite a few calls…mostly from Muki, who was talking at that point about a paradrop onto Lake Victoria. Muki was pressing us to come, because they kept asking him, ‘When can Yoni get here?’ and because they were asking him to start planning… With every phone call you said to yourself, ‘Maybe there’s a chance something will happen after all.’ The pressure was pretty serious, and we understood that by the next day, first thing, we’d have to fly back.”
So, before dawn, Yoni ordered one of the men responsible for logistics to get things organized as quickly as possible once that night’s activities were completed. “Pack it up,” he told him. “Something may move with the hijacked plane.”
It’s hard to know what went through Yoni’s mind during the flight to the center of the country on Thursday morning. He’d just had a strenuous week; he was about to throw himself into a new mission of the utmost significance; and the flight offered him a brief rest, almost against his will. He couldn’t begin to tackle planning of the operation, since he lacked the most basic information; even the role of the Unit had not yet been defined, although it was obvious that he and his men would be assigned the central task — freeing the hostages.
That week, perhaps during that flight or just before it, Yoni wrote his girlfriend Bruria a letter full of sad musings:
“I’m at a critical point in my life, facing a deep inner crisis that has been shaking up the way I see things for a while… Most of what I’ve written ends with question marks. If I knew the answers, I wouldn’t keep agonizing, going back and forth. It’s tough; there have been only a few times in my life when it’s been so tough…
“I have to stop and get off now, right away, or soon, and I’ll do it, too — but not quite yet.
“I remember the sad, crazy cry in a play I saw a long time ago — ‘Stop the world, I want to get off!’
“But you can’t keep this crazy world we’re on from turning, and the law of gravity won’t let us pull free of it.
So, like it or not, alive or dead (alive, of course, and as long as possible), you’re in.”
Yoni hadn’t let the men under him see his sadness, but it was there. And now he had reached the point of crisis. His mental state was tied up with his growing, unrelenting, physical fatigue. “I’m tired most of the time,” he said in the same letter, “but that’s only part of the problem.”
For the short time he was in the air, he was free to contemplate where he was in life and where he was going. From the moment the plane touched ground, he would be forced to draw on immense physical and mental strength to overcome his exhaustion and inner tension.
In the next two days — nearly 48 hours of almost continuous work — he would have to plan the ground operation for his unit, coordinate it with his commanders and the other forces involved, and prepare the Unit’s men for battle. Above all, he would have to infuse his men with faith in their own ability to meet the test, and to instill absolute confidence among the country’s military and civilian leaders in his ability and that of the Unit to succeed in a mission where failure would mean a national catastrophe.
When those two days had passed, he and his small group of fighters would board the Hercules transport that would carry him to his last mission.
The same morning, Prime Minister Rabin called another meeting of the senior members of his cabinet. Chief of Staff Gur repeated what he had told them the day before: As things stood at the moment, he was unable to recommend any military operation to release the hostages. The IDF, he said, did not have a plan to solve the problem.7 The terrorists’ ultimatum would run out at 2:00 that afternoon. And so, at that Thursday morning meeting, the decision was made to free terrorists held by Israel in exchange for the release of the hostages at Entebbe. To implement the decision, Israel would begin indirect negotiations with the hijackers. “My intention was not a ruse or a tactical ploy to gain time,” Rabin later wrote, “but serious negotiations, with Israel fulfilling whatever commitments it made.”8 The decision was approved by the full cabinet in the course of the morning; the opposition, led by Menachem Begin, also officially supported it. After the Israeli decision was made public, the terrorists announced at midday in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, that they had extended their ultimatum until Sunday, July 4.9
By Thursday afternoon, it should be noted, the military still had taken almost no practical steps to prepare for a rescue mission. A second attempt to parachute rubber dinghies had gone better than the previous night’s trial, and a count had been made of the number of people who could be placed aboard a tanker. But only two days before the rescue force actually left for Entebbe, the IDF had still made no real preparations for action: troops hadn’t been put on a true combat alert, arms and equipment hadn’t been readied, and a real operational plan hadn’t been formulated. The military machine had simply not been put in gear.
At the same time, though, crucial information had begun to trickle in, for the first time creating a realistic chance of carrying out an operation. The reports came from several members of a group of hostages who had been released from Entebbe and had reached Paris. All those who had been freed were non-Israelis. In fact, as early as Tuesday the terrorists had shown that they distinguish between the Israeli and non-Israeli passengers. First, they divided the hostages into two groups. The Israelis, along with several Orthodox Jews from other countries who could be identified by their skullcaps or kerchiefs, had been put in the smaller of the terminal’s two passenger halls, while the other passengers had remained in the large hall. The terrorists had put a beam across the opening between the two halls, and they had forced the Israelis to stoop under the beam to get to their new quarters. Although some Jews remained in the large hall, it wasn’t clear whether the terrorists were fully aware they were Jewish.
The implications had become clear to the hostages on Wednesday, when the gunmen began releasing some of the hostages from the large hall. Wednesday night the first group of forty-seven hostages, mainly children and the elderly, were freed and flown to France on a French-chartered plane. The rest, about 100, were freed and flown out on Thursday morning. At Entebbe remained 94 Jews, almost all Israelis, along with the twelve members of the Air France flight crew, including the captain, Michel Baccos. When Baccos had heard on Wednesday that some of the hostages were about to be released, he called the crew together and said he believed they should refuse to leave Entebbe until the last of the passengers was released. None of the crew members voiced objections, and Baccos informed the terrorists of their decision. There’s no way of knowing whether the crew members would otherwise have been released.
For the 106 hostages who remained in that distant corner of the world, the prison walls seemed higher than ever. Four days had passed since the moment on the plane when they had become captives. The fates of a mother and her two small sons, of a high school girl traveling alone, of an elderly couple who had survived the concentration camp — all were now in the hands of the “freedom fighters” of the Palestinian revolution; the gunmen’s leader, Wadi’a Haddad, would decide what use to make of this human merchandise. In the cramped, mildewed hall, the hostages sat on the floor or spread out on mattresses, and spoke to each other in whispers. The slow passing of the minutes seemed like torture — but at least they kept passing, instead of being cut short by some horror. All felt a confused mixture of hope, despair, and above all, fear. Would a dozen of them be taken out the next morning and shot as the opening gambit in negotiations, their bodies exhibited before the world? Maybe an hour from now? Wondering how they had ended up here, they must have shouted inside: But I didn’t do anything to deserve this! And yet, it seems they had committed one ancient sin, from which there was no escape: They were Jews. Perhaps the Israelis among them who had grown up in their own country did not understand what their “crime” was. But to the Arabs and Germans standing guard over them, hands on their weapons, it was obvious, entirely self-evident.
When the released hostages reached Paris, some were debriefed, providing the first hard information on the situation in Entebbe. The hostages reported that the Ugandan army was in control of the building and helping guard the prisoners, and it was clear beyond any doubt that Idi Amin was cooperating fully with the terrorists. It was possible to find out now exactly where the hostages were being held inside the old terminal, or at least where they had been until Thursday morning, and to get some information about the terrorists themselves. Though most of the intelligence would be passed on to Israel and processed only later, even the first bits made it possible to think of forming a more concrete plan to free the hostages.
Now that the degree of the Ugandan army’s collaboration was clear, the IDF’s top commanders believed any rescue operation would have to be on a big enough scale to include neutralizing the Ugandan forces and extricating the hostages and their rescuers from the country. “Thursday afternoon Yekutiel met with me and Ehud,” says Col. Shai Tamari. “There was a reliable report then that Idi Amin was collaborating. We said that the only choice was an all-out military operation…it couldn’t be a small group of men arriving, overpowering the terrorists, and then handing themselves over to the Ugandans. We’d have to take control of the airport.”
Afterward, Yekutiel Adam called more officers into his office at Operations Branch, including Shomron, the Infantry and Paratroops commander. Adam reported to them on how serious the situation was in Uganda, and he told Shomron that a major operation, in which forces would land at Entebbe, had to be prepared. Shomron announced that he had a plan; Adam responded that it would be discussed at a meeting already scheduled to take place in the defense minister’s office. Before the meeting with Peres, Shomron met with several officers at the Operations Branch and went over the various possible approaches. “This wasn’t a serious discussion, just a sort of strategy jam session… It still wasn’t planning, just talking in generalities,” Maj. Iddo Embar of the air force recalls. Shomron suggested bringing as many troops to Entebbe as could be carried in all the Hercules transports Israel had. The air force men continued to stress that it had only four fully operational Hercules flight crews. Muki, too, spoke in favor of a more limited operation.
The meeting with Peres took place later that afternoon. Among those present were Gur, Adam, Peled, and Shomron, as well as several mid-echelon officers, including Barak, Embar and Brig.-Gen. Avigdor (Yanosh) Ben-Gal, who was Adam’s assistant. Peled again advocated landing aircraft and troops at Entebbe. Adam explained the basic idea of a night landing of a rescue force that would knock out the terrorists and evacuate the hostages to airplanes. Shomron, for his part, outlined to the defense minister the general plan for taking control of the entire airport that he had sketched out the night before at the Staff College and discussed at the “strategy jam session.” The air force men said it would be possible to refuel the planes at Entebbe itself, using a fuel pump that the force would bring with it, but added that they preferred to have an alternative refueling stop available, just in case. It was mentioned that the last possible time for the operation, before the terrorists’ final ultimatum ran out, would be Saturday night — only two days away.10
Gur felt that the suggestions remained too vague and too risky to implement. He also said that without certain pieces of intelligence that were still lacking, he was not ready to approve an operation of any sort. Still, he continued, he would put off making a final judgment on what he had just heard. “The only one who had his feet firmly on the ground — for good reason, since he was chief of staff and bore all the responsibility — was Motta Gur. At that point the operation was resting on such foggy intelligence that no responsible person would have dared approve it,” says Maj. Embar. However, with both Adam and Peres voicing intense support for a military solution, it was agreed to begin preparing for a rescue, and Shomron was appointed commander of the ground forces for the operation.
Almost all the officers left the defense minister’s room, except for Gur, Adam, and Benny Peled, who remained with Peres. Gur now expressed his opinion more openly: The plan was wild and, most important, impractical, since it lacked the most basic intelligence information.11 He also doubted the raid could be carried out before the ultimatum expired. “Here Yekutiel interrupted,” Peres writes, “and suggested we begin work on a detailed plan, organize a force and train it, and stage a full dry run, on the assumption that the operation could be canceled at any time without any harm having been done. No one objected.”12
Outside the defense minister’s office, Yekutiel Adam ordered the officers involved to work non-stop on planning and preparing for the operation, without taking time out to get the usual clearances and approvals. They should push forward, he told them, unless there were an explicit order to stop.13 Once again, Adam showed the sense of urgency that had characterized his efforts over the last two days to create a military option. From the moment on Tuesday when Gur asked him to begin checking the possibilities, Adam’s interest in the matter hadn’t let up. “The one who had pushed hard for the operation was Yekutiel,” says Col. Tamari. “He was the one who tried, in spite of everything, to find solutions. Without a doubt, he was the driving force.”
At 5:00 p.m., Prime Minister Rabin consulted in his office with Peres, Gur, army intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Shlomo Gazit, and the chief of the Mossad. Gur expressed his opinion that the plan, as formulated, was not realistic, and said he therefore could not endorse it. The mission, as one account would later put it, “looked like a distant dream.”14
And yet Rabin said efforts to find a military solution should continue. “Bring me something we can implement,” the prime minister said.15 Only a few hours had passed since he and his cabinet had decided to capitulate to the terrorists. To conduct negotiations, with France acting as mediator, he had already sent his adviser on terrorism, Rehavam Ze’evi, to Paris. For the duration of the crisis, Rabin acted simultaneously on two fronts: negotiating in earnest and preparing to free the hostages by force. If he had a realistic option for a rescue, and if the expected casualties were tolerable, Rabin maintained, so much the better. If not, there would be no choice but to release imprisoned terrorists in exchange for the hostages. The Jewish heart, even a statesman’s, isn’t ruled by the dictates of statecraft. Rabin listened to the families of hostages who came to see him, and he knew he would be unable to sacrifice their loved ones. But he also knew his decision would mean the collapse of Israel’s policy of not surrendering to terror — a policy it had taken years to build, at a formidable cost in innocent blood.
Yoni arrived at the Kiryah in the afternoon and was briefed at Operations Branch on how matters stood. “His uniform was still covered with dust,” recalls Maj. Embar. “It was obvious he had just come back from several nights in the field. I remember he was very tired.”* Yoni also met with Muki, who outlined the information gathered so far and the various proposals that had been made, and briefly met with Shomron. He then returned to the Unit’s base and issued orders for some of his officers and men to return from exercises and furloughs. He didn’t yet know how many men he would need for the mission, but he wanted to be ready for any eventuality.
Afterwards, he drove to Paratroops House — a clubhouse for offduty paratroopers in Ramat Gan, outside Tel Aviv — where Shomron had called an 8 p.m. briefing for the commanders of the participating units. Yoni took his intelligence officer, Avi, as well as his two top administrative officers — Yohai Brenner, his head of staff, and Rami Sherman, his operations officer. There they met with Muki and others from the Unit, who came directly from the Kirya. Men from the Golani Brigade, an elite infantry unit, and the paratroops — both under Shomron’s command — had been summoned to the meeting as well. But not all of them had come yet, so when Yoni and his companions arrived, they comprised most of those present.
Lt.-Col. Biran, the Infantry and Paratroops Command’s intelligence officer, was the first speaker. Pointing at a diagram of the airport, he told the assembled officers: “The hostages and terrorists are here, approximately, but we don’t know exactly where — or what is going on.”
“I didn’t have much to convey to them,” Biran remembers. “I only knew there were Ugandans outside, maybe two battalions, about 1,000 troops, but I couldn’t say anything about the extent of their collaboration with the terrorists. We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages, or how to get to them.”
Next, Shomron laid out the concept of the mission: the IDF would land ground forces at Entebbe Airport, using Hercules transports, rescue the hostages, and fly them back to Israel. Though Shomron may not have explicitly said so, it was clear that the real fighting would be at the old terminal, where both the Ugandans and the terrorists were located.
Then he made a basic division of the forces and their roles. “We were told: The Unit’s mission is the old terminal. Of course, there will be other forces guarding the planes…and securing the new terminal… Your role will be to mount the assault on the old terminal, free the hostages, and bring them to the plane,”’ Avi recalls. The area of the Unit’s operations, the eastern sector of the airport, was a separate complex; it bordered on a military base used by the Ugandan air force. The paratroops and Golani would take the new terminal and control tower in the airport’s western sector, guard the plane for evacuating the hostages, and serve as the reserve force.
Shomron again spoke of landing as many Hercules planes as the air force could provide. His goal was to bring to Uganda a force so large that it would enjoy unquestioned superiority on the ground. But objections were raised once more. Yoni, Muki, and others expressed their opinion that such an operation would be too cumbersome and could end in disaster. In their view, only enough forces to carry out the assault and to secure the area against attack were needed. “They said Shomron’s operation would be too big and unwieldy,” says Avi, “and a more limited, compact way had to be found, one that would have a better chance of succeeding.”
Shomron, Avi recalls, also presented the other ideas raised in previous planning sessions, such as parachuting forces and arriving by dinghy. “Everything is still wide open,” Shomron said.16
“The instructions were extremely general,” says Biran. “Yoni had logistical questions — how many troops to plan on, how many vehicles — for which we had no answers. Everything was still up in the air. We didn’t go into specifics at all about who and how many, how and what. It was obvious that this thing would have to be studied and developed. As for the Unit’s plan of action, Shomron didn’t get involved. He said: ‘These are men who know their job. There’s no point for me to interfere.’”
At 7:00 the next morning, Shomron said, he would issue the formal battle orders at a base close to the Unit’s camp. There the paratroops and Golani forces slated to participate in the mission would also assemble for the dry run later that day. With this, Shomron adjourned the meeting.
Yoni returned to his base by 10 p.m. Until now, the tension of the crisis had hardly touched the Unit; now, Yoni knew, he had very little time to get everything moving to prepare for the mission. Nearly all the tasks would have to be carried out simultaneously. He asked his secretary at the Unit’s headquarters to make urgent calls to staff officers who were away from the base. “At some point I got a call from Yoni’s office,” says Tamir, the Unit’s signal officer, who was at the General Staff at the time in connection with another of the Unit’s operations. “I was simply told that he wanted me to get back to the Unit after my meeting, because there was something that had to be discussed.”
Yoni then called Muki and Avi into his office, and the planning began. Avi had already managed to make it to an intelligence base and get an update on what was known. Lt. Col. Amiram Levine, a former officer of the Unit, flew to Paris Thursday morning and arrived there in the early afternoon. His task was to gather, through French intermediaries, information from the freed hostages on the status of the terminal, the hostages, the hijackers and the Ugandan army — in short, the kind of information essential for planning a raid. By Thursday night, his reports started filtering back to Israel. Sometime after Avi had returned to the Unit’s base with information, Ehud Barak arrived and stayed for part of the planning. Yiftah Reicher, Yoni’s deputy, likewise participated in it. Both Barak and Muki already “knew” the airport from earlier planning sessions. And, as a member of the Israeli military delegation to Uganda in earlier years, Muki had arrived in and left the country via the old terminal.
In the previous discussions Ehud and Muki had attended, the concept had been that a small team of soldiers would slip into the building where the hostages were held and would eliminate the terrorists. Now that it was clear that the Ugandan army was working hand in hand with the terrorists, an entirely different approach was needed. The Unit would have to overcome the problems posed by the presence of the Ugandan forces, take control of the entire area around the old terminal, secure the airport against additional forces that might arrive during the operation, and get the hostages out.
With the limited intelligence obtained so far, key questions remained unsettled, such as which of the two halls the hostages were being held in, how many terrorists were guarding the hostages, did they have explosives, how large the Ugandan force was and how it was deployed. Even a detailed sketch of the airport was lacking; the group in Yoni’s office was still relying on the Jeppesen guide. The book showed the location of the main runways but not all the connecting strips between them, and the buildings were not drawn to scale or in any detail. The group also had a schematic (and inaccurate) sketch of the ground floor of the old terminal, drawn on the basis of what Israelis who had once served in Uganda could remember. Though additional material arrived during the meeting and was used in formulating the plan of action, the lack of requisite information kept them from filling in all the details at that meeting, and was the main reason for the changes and additions that Yoni made later, mostly by Friday afternoon. Certainly, the kind of precise and detailed intelligence the Unit was accustomed to use in preparing its operations was missing. Despite important information that was gathered, much remained unknown even when the forces set out for Entebbe.
The discussion was based on the common agreement that the forces would land directly at Entebbe in Hercules transports. The officers examined the diagram of the airport, and discussed ways to reach the objective after landing. At least at the start, the plane carrying the Unit’s men could not be brought too close to the old terminal; the aircraft being large and noisy, it would attract unnecessary attention and be vulnerable to attack by Ugandan units deployed in the area. That meant that the rescue force would have to deplane on the main runway and advance along the diagonal runway to the old terminal. But the more time that passed between the first plane touching down and the actual rescue, the more chance there was that the Ugandans would realize the airport was under attack. The time spent crossing the large airport had to be cut to a minimum, to reduce the risk of the terrorists and Ugandan sentries at the terminal being alerted by the control tower — and to make sure that even if they were warned, they would not have time to understand exactly what was happening and respond. The rescue force, it appeared, would have to come equipped with some type of vehicles in which to drive across the field.
The intelligence Avi had received indicated that about 100 Ugandan soldiers were guarding the building, deployed as a security belt around it and on its roof and balconies. Yoni understood, says Avi, that the key problem would be how to prevent this security belt from effectively opening fire on the small Israeli force approaching the terminal. If the Ugandans delayed the rescue force for even a minute or two, it would give the terrorists enough time to realize that an operation was underway and to massacre their prisoners. It was obvious to Yoni that a standard, frontal assault, in which the force would hit the belt of Ugandans first and break through it, would alert the terrorists and might spark resistance that could keep the Unit from reaching the hostages in time. What’s more, if the security belt were indeed so substantial, a frontal assault by the small Israeli force would be quite dangerous. Muki, who had worked with the Ugandan soldiers, voiced absolute scorn for their fighting ability. But Yoni couldn’t disregard the difficulties they might create and the casualties they could inflict. Not that he expected the Ugandans to act like an organized fighting unit and return fire in a disciplined way when attacked. But a few panicked Ugandan soldiers shooting wildly would be enough to wreak havoc on the Unit’s force and turn the operation into a fiasco.
“Yoni was adamant that we had to find some sort of solution to the problem of the Ugandan security belt,” says Avi. So the idea was born of using a ruse to throw off the Ugandans for the crucial moments needed to get into the building. The rescue force, which would be arriving in vehicles under cover of darkness, would pose as a Ugandan army unit, it was decided. “There were enough Israelis who had been to Uganda, including Muki, who could give us specifics on what kinds of vehicles they had, what color they were, and so forth… The question was even raised of the order the Ugandan vehicles would move in — what the procession would look like if, say, an important visitor arrived, like a colonel.”17 Variations on this were also considered, such as posing as Ugandan police. Avi was given the job of finding out how the Israeli force would have to look in either case.
The officers first thought of using three Land Rovers, but later they hit on a plan to improve the ruse: a military motorcade seemingly following Idi Amin in a civilian car. On Saturday night, it turned out, Amin was scheduled to fly back to Uganda from Mauritius, where he was chairing a summit meeting of the Organization of African Unity. There were reports that Amin had already visited the hostages several times, so why shouldn’t he come to see them the night of his return?* At the least, the Ugandans might waver rather than open fire, and with a bit of luck, maybe they would let the “motorcade” pass without stopping. The cars would have their headlights on, to appear innocent, and the lights would also make it hard for someone standing in the darkness to tell who was in them. Photos that Military Intelligence gave to the Unit showed Amin occasionally riding in a Mercedes, and Muki said that all senior officers in Uganda drove such vehicles. That car produced a kind of automatic deference among the Ugandans, Muki said. So it seemed like a good idea to have the rescuers’ motorcade headed by a Mercedes. The Unit’s men would wear camouflage fatigues resembling Ugandan army uniforms to further confuse the Ugandan soldiers and the terrorists.
But the ruse could only be taken so far. The suggestion was made that the Israelis wear black-face, but since this would increase the chance that they would make mistakes in identifying one another, the idea was dropped the next day. Someone also pointed out that in Uganda, a former British colony, cars drive on the left side of the road, so their steering wheels are on the right. In Israel, though, there was virtually no chance of getting a car with the wheel on the right. “We knew it would be nighttime, and in the dark only someone close enough to talk to you would be able to see whether the wheel was on the right or the left.. .and if it got to that you’d be at the point of no return anyway, you’d have to open fire.”18
In any case, the hope was that as the rescue force drove down the diagonal runway and then along the access road leading from it to the old terminal, it would appear innocent. Yoni and Muki would ride in a stretch Mercedes along with seven more men carrying light arms. Behind the Mercedes would come two Land Rover jeeps packed with troops, who would be equipped with machine guns and RPG shoulder-fired missiles. The heavy weapons could be used if the Ugandans did open fire while the force was en route, and would provide covering fire once the action began at the terminal. No more jeeps could be taken, since a Hercules could be taken, since a Hercules could carry a maximum of three vehicles.
The first goal was to get as close as possible to the terminal and “delay opening of fire by the Ugandans as long as possible,” explains Avi. If the Ugandans were completely taken in and let the rescue force through without trouble, so much the better. If they did suspect something and tried to hold up the Israelis, or if they appeared to realize that a hostile force was arriving, “the men would have to open fire” and to eliminate the Ugandan soldiers. The Ugandans couldn’t be left at the rear, since they could start shooting from behind or sound the alert. If possible, the men in the Mercedes would take care of them, using handguns with silencers. In the worst case, if a noisy gun battle began with the Ugandans, the nine men in the Mercedes would leave the fighting to the men in the Land Rovers, speed to the terminal, jump out and storm the two main halls inside — even if there were not a single other Israeli behind them — to wipe out the terrorists before they could begin slaughtering the hostages.
Even as the discussion went on, Yoni used the intercom on his desk to issue instructions, and called in staff officers to give them orders. To each he briefly explained the outlines of the mission, and instructed him as to the preparations he was to make. Among them was Amitzur Kafri, the Unit’s weaponry and special equipment officer, a farm boy from the Galilee. Yoni told him to check into the types of weapons with silencers that could be issued to the men in the Mercedes, ways to neutralize booby traps at the entrances to the terminal or inside, and options for vehicles to use. He also told him to prepare small charges for blowing open any barricaded doors and larger blasts for destroying the vehicles if they had to be left behind.
Meanwhile, the men in Yoni’s office began discussing how to take control of the terminal and assigning teams of men to different parts of the building. As the night went on, more detailed intelligence arrived regarding the terrorists’ routine of guarding the hostages, their weapons, the location of the Ugandan soldiers in the building, the lighting in the halls, and the layout of the terminal itself. The old terminal was a two-story building about thirty feet east of the old control tower. The main halls on the ground floor faced out toward a parking area for planes, and each had at least one entryway from the outside. At the west end of the building was what had been the passport control and customs hall for travelers entering Uganda. Next to that, in the center of the building, was the largest hall on the ground floor, with two entries from the outside. This had once been the departures hall, and as far as it was known the hostages, or at least some, were being kept here. Past the large hall was the smaller one — once the V.I.P. lounge — where the Israeli hostages had been put after the division of the passengers into two groups and where some might still be held. The old photos showed the building ending here, with an empty lot next to it; only the next day would it emerge that an extension had been built next to the small hall, with rest rooms and additional rooms that were now serving as the terrorists’ living quarters.
Taking the large and small halls would be the focus of the attack on the building. A team was assigned to each of the three entrances leading into these halls, with an extra team for the second entrance of the large hall. Other teams were assigned to the main entrances of the other rooms and to the second floor, where the Ugandan soldiers had set up their living quarters. One more team, consisting of a commander and the drivers of the three vehicles, would remain on the jeeps outside the building. Its main objective would be to provide covering fire against the high points commanding the area — the control tower and roof of the terminal.
The chances of neutralizing the enemy forces on the roof and particularly in the control tower would be limited, especially at the beginning of the battle. If the rescue force began by laying down heavy covering fire against them and only then advanced into the building, it would give the terrorists time to kill the hostages.
“We knew the control tower presented a threat, and Yoni addressed himself to this. It was mentioned several times as a problem spot,” says Avi. “But it was clear that we couldn’t begin the action by storming or attacking the tower. Instead, we talked in terms of a force that would be ready to pin down anyone in the tower immediately, even as the building was being stormed, if there was fire from above. If we had started the other way and given the Ugandans and the terrorists warning by opening fire early, I think it would have caused serious damage. We made the decision without feeling good about it. We knew what it meant.”
No attempt would be made to take the tower itself, since penetrating such a building would be likely to result in substantial casualties, and in any case the Unit would not have the men needed for it. Covering fire would have to be enough.
The number of men in the rescue force, including Yoni’s command team, would be just over thirty. That was the most that could be squeezed into a Mercedes and two jeeps, even once the interior of the jeeps was altered. No more vehicles could be put on one plane, and Yoni knew — as did those above him who drew up the initial plans — that the rescue could not wait until more planes arrived with additional troops. If the Ugandans saw a number of planes landing, rather than just one, they might realize they were under attack, and the element of surprise on which the mission’s success depended would be lost. Reinforcements from the Unit would arrive only after the initial force had carried out the main part of the mission. The Unit’s thirty-odd men would have to break through the Ugandan security belt, eliminate the terrorists, take control of the old terminal, and pin down any additional Ugandan troops who were likely to remain around it and in the control tower.
Now the planning group moved on to discussing the need for a peripheral security force at a greater distance from the old terminal, to be provided by the reinforcements. “It was obvious to us that taking the old terminal would not be enough. We’d also need broader defenses, and we knew we’d be responsible for providing them.”19 To the east of the old terminal, no more than two hundred yards off, was the military base, where a squadron of Mig fighters was stationed. As far as it was known, a battalion or two of Ugandan troops was also on the base. To the north and west of the terminal were numerous smaller structures, some adjoining it and some further off. And to the northeast, just beyond a fence surrounding the terminal area, the outskirts of the town of Entebbe began. To cover the area and the surrounding buildings and to counter any possible threat from Ugandan reinforcements, it was decided that the Unit’s reinforcements would need four more vehicles, preferably armored. One would be deployed in the parking area in front of the terminal itself to provide close defense and block any hostile forces coming from the direction of the new terminal; a second would guard the east flank, on the side of the military field; and two more would swing around the terminal and the dozens of small buildings adjacent to it on the north and secure the rear of the terminal.
To bring in the armored vehicles would require two more Hercules transports, each carrying two armored personnel carriers (APCs). Altogether then, the Unit’s operational requirements alone called for three transport planes. If indeed only four Hercules were taken, with one designated for returning the freed hostages, almost no room would remain for combat vehicles for Golani and the paratroops. In fact, though, they would only have serious need for vehicles if a large-scale battle broke out and they had to intervene. Their main assignment, capturing the new terminal, was not expected to involve real fighting. What’s more, the planes would bring them fairly close to their objective. For the Unit’s purposes, then, only four Hercules transports were needed, which matched the air force’s preferences.
Yoni now turned to choosing his troops for the operation, starting by putting Muki in command of the teams that would storm the halls. Effectively, he would also be the second-in-command for the Unit’s contingent. Yoni had high regard for him as a fighter and an officer from the years they had spent together in the Unit, and especially from the Yom Kippur War, when Muki had served directly under him. Selection of the rest of the men was based as a rule on seniority in the Unit. For the teams that would storm the main hall Yoni picked a group of men who had gone on a pre-discharge furlough only a few days earlier. He told the secretaries to call the men and their officer, Amnon Peled, back to the Unit. Capt. Yiftah Reicher, the Unit’s new deputy commander, was put in charge of the force that would secure the second floor. Maj. Shaul Mofaz,* Yoni’s previous No. 2, who had left the Unit for a different assignment in the army only a few weeks earlier, after working with Yoni for most of the past year, was put in command of the force that would land in the second and third planes and would be responsible for the peripheral defenses. Shaul had already been summoned back to the Unit at the beginning of the week by Yohai, the Unit’s head of staff, and he had spent a day or two at Lod Airport with the Unit’s detachment. He had considerably more combat experience than most of the Unit’s officers, arid though it had seemed to Yohai that Yoni had been angry for a moment that Shaul had been summoned without his knowledge, in the end Yoni was clearly pleased that Shaul was there.
After midnight the four took a short break in their discussion. Yoni told the secretaries to phone everyone whom he had listed as taking part and who had not yet returned to the Unit. Meanwhile, he summoned the officers who were on the base for the first presentation of the mission. Before beginning the briefing he crossed the base to where the tactical vehicles were kept, and spoke to Yisrael, who was responsible for them. He explained that a plan to free the hostages was taking shape, and that it required fixing the Landrovers so that each could carry about a dozen men. Yoni ordered him to prepare six or eight vehicles — most apparently intended for the peripheral defense force if getting armored personnel carriers small enough to load on the planes proved impossible, or if using them turned out to be impractical. During the night, Yoni returned every once in a while to check how the work was progressing. “When I thought they were ready,” says Yisrael, “I called him and he came back again, this time with two or three other people. They sat on the panels I’d put in, and we went for a drive. We made a sharp stop to see whether they were stable. Yoni asked me to reinforce them here and there, but he basically approved the alterations.”
At 1:00 a.m. the officers gathered in the Unit‘s memorial room for the introductory briefing. A few still did not know an operation was being planned, and they had been wondering why Yoni was keeping them on base when they were eager to go on home leave after the grueling week in the Sinai.
On the lawn outside this room, the Unit’s men assemble every year to mark Israel’s Memorial Day and listen as their commander reads the names of those who have fallen while serving in the Unit. The room itself was built by the Unit’s men; on its western wall hang pictures of the fallen. The opposite wall is lined with bookshelves. Besides being a place where the soldiers can come to remember their comrades, it is also used by those staying on the base on weekend alert for reading and relaxation. And now and then, as on this night, it is used for meetings. When Yoni arrived, the officers were already gathered inside. Some sat on the carpet, others in armchairs.
Avi hung up a map of Africa. A smile appeared on some of the officers’ faces when they noticed the huge scale of the map — a million to one. Avi pointed to a spot on the map, and said: “Here.” It was over 2,000 miles away, in the heart of sub-Saharan Africa, in a strange land that not one of them, other than Muki, had set foot in. To the west, the intelligence officer showed them, Uganda bordered on Zaire, to the south Rwanda and Tanzania, to the north Sudan, and to the east Kenya — the only one of the countries that maintained any ties whatsoever with Israel.
Yoni outlined the purpose of the operation — freeing the hostages, most of them Israelis, the rest non-Israeli Jews and the members of the French airliner’s flight crew. He explained the basics of the plan, pointing out the particular objectives, and then gave them a timetable for the following day. The officers asked a few questions, and the short meeting ended.
Most of the officers laughed under their breaths when they heard the idea of the mission. It looked too fantastic ever to be approved. They knew the routine: They would get ready, prepare equipment, practice, and, because of the crowded timetable, work non-stop — and in the end nothing would happen. Yoni could also see that enormous obstacles stood in the way of approval, but he spoke to them about it and the chance of getting a go-ahead with total seriousness. Beyond being their commander and not allowing himself to act differently, perhaps there was another, more compelling, explanation for his tone. It was as if his attitude, the force of his will alone, would be enough to bring about the objective he so desired.
After the meeting, Yoni returned to his office and, together with Muki, Avi, Yiftah, and others, continued developing the plan. As he worked he was inundated with demands from various officers to include their men in the operation. There was not room for all of them, and he had no choice but to stick to his original list. Danny Arditi, one of the Unit’s officers, recalls that only minutes before, when Yoni had been briefing them on the operation, he had thought it was “pie in the sky, the whole thing: illogical, impractical to implement, with zero chance of being approved.” Now he came in to demand that all of his men be included, without exception, because he had heard that one would be left out for lack of space. “You’ll have to tell one of your men that he can’t take part,” Yoni said, cutting the argument short. Danny left the office indignant, and as he came down the steps, he ran into Muki and angrily told him about Yoni’s decision. Muki tried to calm him down, saying, “There’s no choice, Danny, that’s the way it is.”
Muki entered Yoni’s office and suggested that the staff officers get some sleep, since many of them were exhausted from the week’s activities. Yoni agreed, and so most of them finally went to bed. Muki also went to his room to sleep. Yoni remained alone. He knew the plan was nearly completed. The next day’s schedule had been set, the orders for the initial preparations had been given, and people had begun their work. Now he could go to sleep. His eyes, heavy, nearly shut of their own accord. His body demanded sleep with all its being. But rather than picking himself up from his chair and going to bed, virtually for the first time in several nights, he remained at his desk. With the maps and the diagrams spread out before him, he meticulously went over the plan. As always, in the end he had to decide on everything alone. He needed time to sit quietly and think through the problems that might crop up during the operation, polish the plan, and prepare the detailed briefing he would give to the entire force. He knew that the next day, amid the frenzy of briefings, preparations, drills, and presentations to the higher-ups, he would have no chance to do this. The plan Yoni had ready by the next morning, Muki says, “included lots of specifics we hadn’t considered. He’d really worked it out to the end. He presented it complete, down to the last detail.”20
It may be that then, as he sat alone in his office, he saw for the first time the full significance of the operation and the risks it entailed. The people of Israel had yet to recover from the devastating blow of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In many ways, the morale of the country had only deteriorated in the three years since. If the operation failed — if the hostages, or most of them, were killed, and if the elite forces of Israel’s army were captured or wiped out, far from the country’s borders — the effect on the country’s spirit would be crushing. His first responsibility was to ensure that the hostages and his men returned safely to Israel. Yet beyond that, he felt his responsibility to the country weighing fully upon him.
“He was very, very thorough, down to the smallest details,” says Yiftah, his second-in-command. “He spent the entire night thinking about what had to be done during the mission. It was a case of his obsession with detail, which clashed, really, with his more abstract way of thinking, with his wide view of things — and which also made him more worried than the others.”
Yoni considered the issues soberly that night, but he also had absolute confidence in the Unit’s ability to carry out the mission, and in his own ability to prepare his forces and lead them — not just successfully, but with the very minimum of casualties. He was well aware of his own talents as a combat officer; everyone who had seen him in battle was aware of them. “Yoni was top of the line,” says former chief of staff Rafael Eitan, who first got to know him during the battle for the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War, which Eitan has called “the ultimate test.” “If you compare him to other officers his age, men who were battalion commanders in the paratroops then and are generals today, he was head and shoulders above them. They’re great officers, but I’d have to say Yoni was on an entirely different level.”
From time to time Yoni left his office to check on matters, such as how the work on the jeeps was being done. In the middle of the night he made a brief visit to the near-by base where the paratroops and Golani men had begun to assemble and where the dry run would be held the next day. Lt.-Col. Rami Dotan,* the Infantry and Paratroops Command’s quartermaster, met him there. Dotan was preparing the base for the arriving soldiers; urgently needing a work detail to put up tents and move equipment, he had no choice but to ask the commander of the Parachute Training School to lend him air force cadets who were at the facility learning to jump. Using cadet aviators was against the army’s standing orders, but after arguing with Dotan, the commander gave in and sent them over. It was also Dotan’s job to provide combat equipment for the paratroops and Golani forces and to begin preparing the props for simulating the raid, such as the pair of buses that would stand for the new terminal.
Yoni and Dotan knew each other well from the time when Yoni had served as a battalion commander in the Armored Corps and Dotan had been quartermaster for his division. Dotan says Yoni’s reason for coming in the middle of the night was apparently to check how the other units’ preparations were progressing, even though they were outside his responsibility. “It was typical of him…that he was concerned about what was happening outside his immediate area of responsibility,” says Dotan. “It was the first time I saw Yoni before the operation. I saw him for three or four minutes. We slapped each other on the back, chatted, said ‘How are things?’ And you felt that this was a solid guy. But you felt something else, too: that he had the whole world on his shoulders.”
Avi, meanwhile went to an intelligence base to receive new information. Among other things, he met with several people who had served in Uganda and who were being debriefed. By now the Intelligence Branch had thrown itself full force into gathering every possible crumb of information on the airport at Entebbe.
During the night, after countless phone calls, it was arranged that the Infantry and Paratroops Command would provide the Unit with Israeli-made Buffalo armored personnel carriers, the only armored vehicles that could fit aboard a C130. These phone conversations were necessarily curtailed, as Yoni had given a general order that, in any calls made from the Unit, the other party was not to understand that preparations were underway for a rescue operation at Entebbe. To prevent accidental leaks, he had also ordered the operators not to give the soldiers lines to call home. Around dawn, Amitzur Kafri, the weaponry officer, and Yisrael, the tactical vehicles man, left with several drivers to bring the APCs from the base where they were stored. Yoni kept the option open of using the Land Rovers for the peripheral defenses, though. The Buffalos had just been put into service, and the Unit had never tried them. Before making the final decision to take them to Entebbe, Yoni wanted to check them out and make sure they were usable. Meanwhile, Tamir was working on the communications, and at dawn he drove to the General Staff to help prepare the communications net for the operation.
Before daybreak, Ehud also returned to Yoni’s office. When he had left Yoni a few hours before, he had gone to the Kiryah with the justformulated preliminary plan in hand. There he had met with men from the air force and other branches of service and begun developing the blueprint for coordination between the ground forces and the air force. At 1 a.m., he and Dan Shomron, along with Maj. Iddo Embar of the air force, had gone to the prime minister’s office in the Kiryah. The three were supposed to present the plan for the operation to Rabin. Chief of Staff Motta Gur met them outside the office and asked to be shown what they had. “We spread the map out on the table in front of him and start showing him the different stages. Little by little, for the first time, Motta begins to grasp that he’s looking at an operation that’s doable under the circumstances we face… And Motta says: ‘Okay, leave this to me. I’ll present the plan to the prime minister. You guys get back to work.’”21
When they came out of the prime minister’s office, Iddo recalls, the scene that met them in the Kiryah was “total darkness. The only car parked outside is the one we’ve come in. Compare that to what you see for every operation in Lebanon, even the smallest one…when the lights are all burning and everyone’s at work. Here there’s only a tiny group of people working, which is already buckling under the load…. It just drives home that the General Staff isn’t taking this seriously yet.”
Ehud returned to the Unit after his visit to the Kiryah. The afternoon before, when Yoni had barely begun to get involved in the effort, Dan Shomron had appointed Ehud commander of the assault on the old terminal, perhaps following a request by Ehud that he do so. In essence, that meant he would be in command of the Unit’s forces, with Yoni under him. Shomron explains that he hardly knew Yoni, while he knew Ehud well and felt he could depend on him. Yoni, of course, was miffed by the move. True, he had authority for anything related to the Unit’s operational decisions: He had led the planning meeting and had made the decisions there; he gave the Unit’s briefings, he would oversee the practice runs, and he would give the men their orders during the mission. Yet the possibility remained that during the rescue itself, Ehud would be giving the orders, or at least that it would look that way from the outside. Ehud, for his part, did not want to miss the chance to lead a mission of such enormous significance. As one of the Unit’s staff officers commented later: “Who wouldn’t want to be in command of an operation like that?”
Yoni had no intention of letting the matter stand. The actual fighting force at Entebbe would be made up entirely of the Unit’s men, and as the Unit’s CO, he felt it imperative to have sole command over them. Already the afternoon before, when Muki had told him of Ehud’s appointment, Yoni had said: “I don’t see any alternative to my being in command.”22 True, he was happy to have advice from a man he respected highly, but he was dead set on working to keep Ehud from being in charge, even if only in a supervisory role.
Tamir says that when he had come to Yoni’s office earlier, during the evening planning session, he had sensed for an instant from Yoni’s glance and manner that he was uncomfortable with Ehud’s presence. The other officers did not share that impression, though.
Now Ehud and Yoni sat alone, and undoubtedly there was tension between them, even if it remained beneath the surface. Ehud went over the entire plan with Yoni, and made a number of suggestions. Though he was taken up nearly completely with the coordinating and preparatory work at the Kiryah, he was unwilling to stop there. For now, at least, he had responsibility for the key part of the operation, and by his nature Ehud wanted to keep as close tabs as possible on what the Unit was doing — not just supervise from above and give general instructions — even though he knew Yoni well and knew he could depend on him.
After the two men finished going over the plan, they climbed into Ehud’s car and drove home. They lived in the same apartment building — Yoni one floor below Ehud.
When he got to his apartment, Yoni had an hour or two to sleep before he had to go back to the Unit. On the kitchen table he left Bruria the four small notebook pages he had written to her earlier in the week about his sense of turmoil.
It was a letter full of sadness, but at the end some hope for the future came through.
“I trust you, and me, and both of us, to succeed in living out our youth — you, your youth and your life, and me, my life and the last flicker of my youth.
“It’ll be all right.”
These were to be the last thoughts he would commit to writing.
Notes
*The terrorists’ official list of demands reached Israel only on Wednesday morning. They included the release of 53 imprisoned terrorists by Israel, West Germany, Kenya, France and Switzerland. Among those on the list were several members of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang.
**The official name of the Israeli military, including ground forces, air force and navy.
* The difficulty in determining the true story of this phase of preparations is due in large part to the death, subsequently, of Maj.-Gen. Yekutiel Adam, who oversaw all IDF activities in the operation and who was the overall commander in the airborne command post during the mission itself. Adam was killed in June 1982, in the first week of the Lebanon War, without ever having given his version of events. In fact, the author‘s brother, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, had set a meeting with Adam in May 1982 in order to interview him, but was forced to postpone it. Days later the war broke out and Adam was killed.
* Embar says that if his memory is not mistaken, Yoni arrived in time to participate in the “strategy jam session” before the meeting with Peres. Avi remembers that Yoni met with Yekutiel Adam that afternoon.
* In fact, Amin did visit the hostages on his return, but this took place a few hours before the raid.
* Later, chief of staff of the IDF.
* Not to be confused with the air force officer of the same name who was later jailed for corruption in connection with deals with U.S. defense firms.