“It’s funny how different I am when I can do something from when it looks like there’s nothing more I can do. For example, as long as it’s possible to drill, to reconnoiter, to conduct inspections, or just to keep things shaking, I can’t relax for even a minute. But the moment the ‘before’ ends and it’s time to carry it out, I become totally calm.
—Yoni, in a note to Bruria.
After a few hours sleep, Yoni awoke Saturday morning and ate breakfast with Bruria. Stretched out next to them on the floor of their apartment was Mor, their German shepherd. Yoni took the lemon meringue pie Bruria had bought out of the refrigerator and, as he sometimes did, ate straight from the pie pan. “I’ll eat just half of it,” he joked, “and then next time I’ll eat half of the half that’s left, so I’ll always have some more pie to eat.”
Bruria knew that the Unit was planning a rescue mission. While they ate, Yoni told her he was sure the government wouldn’t have the courage to approve the operation, and that nothing would come of it. “It’s possible that’s what he thought,” says Bruria, “but he might just have been saying it so I wouldn’t worry.”
“I’ll probably be back in the afternoon for a few hours,” he told her. “I’ll see you then.”
In response to her questions, Yoni started saying something about the troubled mood he’d been in, and that he’d expressed in the letter he’d written her a few days before. But the conversation didn’t go far, perhaps partly due to lack of time. “I’ve got to run,” he said when he realized he’d stayed longer than he’d planned.
After he had gone down to the car, in which his driver was already waiting, Bruria rushed downstairs and called to him: “Yoni, you forgot to say goodbye to Mor!” But the car was already on its way out of the lot, and he did not hear her.
The activity at the Unit still hadn’t let up. The men were still busy with the last preparations and with laying out all their equipment on the ground for the final inspection. The staff officers continued coordinating the final details.
Besides the inspection, Yoni gave a short briefing for everyone who was going. Then he phoned Hagai Regev, Chief of Staff Gur’s adjutant. They were careful to speak only in veiled comments. Yoni wanted to hear from Hagai, who was at Gur’s side constantly, whether the previous night’s decision to go ahead remained firm. He also wanted to make sure that no one from outside the Unit would interfere at the last minute with its independence, or his as commander, during the raid. Hagai let him understand that nothing had changed on either point, then wished him luck.
Yoni put down the receiver. What he’d just heard undoubtedly made him very excited. Even now, he realized, after a long night of agonizing deliberations had passed in Tel Aviv since Gur had declared his backing for the operation, even with only a few hours left to H-hour, the operation continued to gather momentum. His brief respite at home had interrupted his own preparations, which had continued for over twenty-four hours. But events hadn’t stopped because of his short time-out. The chance that he and his men would fly to Africa to free the captives looked more likely than ever.
Next Yoni sat with the commanders of the Unit’s sub-forces to talk through tactics for each stage of the mission. Before the meeting, some of the junior officers approached their immediate superior, Giora. “On Saturday morning we found out that the mission was still on…,” he recalls. “I remember the feeling we had when we suddenly realized that things were happening for real.” The officers said that, with the operation about to get underway, they did not feel good enough about it. “You’ve got to go to Yoni and tell him that the details just aren’t all worked out,” they said. The move, Giora says, stemmed from the “hasty way in which the operation was prepared, and from the tendency in the Unit of bringing up endless scenarios, from a tradition which says that before every action, you ask what you do if such and such happens. A lot of questions had come up this time — what happens if this or that team gets stuck, or if the terrorists are here and not there — and there was no time to settle everything.” Giora went to Yoni, explained the situation and told him what was worrying the junior officers. “Yoni understood immediately that there was a problem here, and accepted what I told him.” He assembled his officers in the room of his deputy, Yiftah, and the discussion began.
At the meeting, the officers went over the full range of questions that had arisen. One problem that came up was how to hold down enemy forces on the roof or in the control tower. As Giora remembers it, Yoni had ruled during previous briefings that, in the first seconds of the attack, the covering team would not fire on the high points unless shooting began from those spots. When the tactics session began, the officers didn’t understand why the team shouldn’t open fire immediately. But this point in Yoni’s plan stemmed from the fact the the operation was a rescue mission, not a conventional assault on an enemy building. As always in such operations, preventing harm to the hostages entailed additional risks for the rescue force.
“We told Yoni: ‘They’ll shoot at us from there,’” says Giora. “But Yoni explained that the entire action would last between thirty and sixty seconds. During that time, Yoni was supposed to be at the front, and would have to decide if a team was stuck, and maybe to call another team to come in, or even to go in himself if there was a problem. When troops from five different teams enter a building at the same time and start shooting, there’s noise and confusion, and it’s hard to keep control. At first glance it looks simple, but in practice it’s not, and especially if you want it to be over in a minute. So if he had a team above or behind him pouring heavy fire in the direction of the tower or the top floors, it would wreak so much havoc and make so much noise that he, as the commander, might lose control at the critical moment. He wouldn’t be able to communicate with the different teams and shout his orders to them. Yoni’s emphasis was on achieving the mission’s goal of securing the rooms where the hostages were, and that depended on his being able to read what was happening in the battle during that very short bit of time. He insisted on withholding the cover fire, even though he was aware of the danger. He insisted that he have control over the heart of the operation.”
The session was scheduled to last fifteen minutes. It went on for an hour. “It was a productive hour,” says Giora. “There was a lot of discussion about how things would be done under this kind of pressure. Different issues came up, and Yoni had to give them answers on the spot… It was a real tactics session, like it should be what happens if this team is knocked out, who replaces it, and so on. We raised these questions, and Yoni just decided on them and said: We’ll do it this way or that. After an hour, we came out feeling completely different, feeling that a lot of things…that hadn’t been clear were settled now. It was an excellent meeting.”
When the hour was over, Yoni had to leave. He and several of the staff officers had to go to Lod for the last officers’ briefing before the operation, and he asked Muki to finish up with the issues that were left to discuss.
On his way out of the office he called Ya’el Tatarkah, one of his secretaries, to say goodbye. Yoni seemed to her to be in a good mood. In answer to her question, he told her he was sure everyone would come back — but added, “as long as it didn’t end in disaster.” As he left, Ya’el noticed that he took with him a paperback in English that he’d been reading, a thriller by Alister MacLean called The Way to Dusty Death.
On his way across the base he ran into Yisrael. They stood together talking for a moment. Yisrael noticed that Yoni seemed introspective, thoughtful. “He felt he’d finished his battle over the operation, and now he was alone with his thoughts.”
Suddenly, Yoni told him: “Listen, Yisrael, I’m going to salute the flag. Once in his life, a guy’s got to salute the flag.” He said it with all his heart, recalls Yisrael, “and I felt that he really did salute. Not with his hand, but with his soul.”
Even though Avi didn’t want to go to Lod, saying it would be a waste of time, Yoni urged him to come along. “Come on, come with me,” he said. Avi sensed that the ride to Lod deepened Yoni’s recognition that the mission was about to take place. Yoni told him that he wanted to speak once again to the soldiers of the Unit, to tell them some additional things, before they set out.
“Also,” relates Avi, “there was another side to our conversation, beyond the tactical aspect of the operation: the Zionist and human side. The importance of the mission really moved him, and he started talking about it with a lot of feeling. You start picturing where you’re going, and thinking that if you pull it off and bring back more than a hundred Israelis, what an incredible accomplishment it would be… Yoni also apologized that he had stuck me with other work, but said there was no choice, that someone had to take care of our ongoing responsibilities… He was in a good mood, but immersed in his own thoughts. There was a lot running through his mind… He was also concerned with the other matter, the one that was keeping me here while he was about to go. He said: ‘Avi, I’m leaving you here. Take care of this, because we shouldn’t mess it up.”
They reached the squadron headquarters at Lod with a little time to spare before the briefing. Yoni saw Dr. Eran Dolev, who had once been the Unit’s combat doctor. Eran had been asked by Dr. Ephraim Sneh, the Infantry and Paratroops Command’s medical officer, to be responsible for the medical facilities that would be set up on the fourth plane, the one that would evacuate the hostages. Eran assembled a team of experienced physicians and medics, and they had prepared abundant supplies and equipment to care for the dozens of wounded that were expected. Yoni and Eran talked a bit about treatment of the wounded, and Eran reminded Yoni of another action of the Unit a few years earlier, in which a soldier had been hit. The man had lain wounded in enemy territory, with only one other Israeli by his side. Yoni, who had been relatively far from the scene, was the first to arrive. “After he finished his own task, he ran toward them,” recalls Menahem Digli, who was commander of the Unit at the time. “He simply took the initiative and went to solve the problem. It was an episode that epitomized Yoni’s way of doing things — the way he saw a problem, responded fast, and solved it first. He kept us in the picture by radio the whole time, and he was very quiet, no panic at all. He told us he was on his way, and he calmed down the soldier who was with the wounded man, ‘We’re on our way to you, stay calm.’” Yoni evacuated the wounded soldier; the doctor who treated him was Eran.
Now, at Lod, Eran returned to the question of casualties in the present operation and said their number would depend on whether the terrorists were taken by surprise.
“Yoni was very level-headed,” Eran remembers. “I think he was in the kind of state of mind you sometimes see before exams. He had finished preparing and felt completely ready… For him the matter was taken care of, all that remained was to carry it out. My impression was that he was under no stress at all…but he was like a wound-up spring, ready… It also struck me that he really needed a haircut; his hair was down the back of his neck. And then I saw that he was tired — his responses were a bit slow.”
While Yoni was standing in the squadron’s briefing room, he heard that Amnon Halivni, the pilot of the fourth plane, had been stationed at Entebbe for a few years as a member of the Israeli military mission and knew the place well. “When he heard that, he pounced on me like a dog on a bone,” Halivni recounts. “‘Just a minute,’ he said, ‘Can you tell me about the building?’”
They bent over either side of the long briefing-room table. Yoni spread out a chart of the airport, and began to interrogate Halivni. As the pilot answered Yoni’s questions, he sketched a diagram of the building on a piece of paper.
“Yoni wanted to know details about the building, from the shed for fire-fighting equipment on the right end to the control tower on the left. He wanted to know where the stairs were, what kind of windows there were, what the approach to the entrances was like, and more. He was especially interested in how to get from room to room inside. He asked how you got from the customs hall for arriving passengers to the large departures hall. I told him there was a corridor hallway sandwiched between the two, but I couldn’t answer his question about whether there were doorways from the two rooms into the corridor so that you could get from the arrivals hall to the departures hall that way.” This could have been the first Yoni had heard of the corridor or of the entrance to it from the outside.
Yoni was also very interested in where the stairs to the second floor were. Halivni told him that, as far as he could remember, the entrance to the stairwell was on the other side of the building, and that to get to it from the entrance plaza on the south side, one had to cross through the building and come out on the north. (In fact, the entrance to the stairwell was indeed in the northern part of the building, past the customs hall, but not outside the building.) Likewise, Yoni wanted to know the exact location of the door on the second floor that opened onto the other staircase leading back down to the floor of the large hall. He went over details of other parts of the building with Halivni, and questioned him about the entrance plaza in the front, across which the assault force would run — whether there were any fences across it or other obstacles, and what the surface was like. Halivni also told him a few things about the control tower — most importantly, where to find the stairs leading up to the top.
“He asked about one more thing,” says Halivni. “‘How do you think the Ugandan sentries will react to the Mercedes and the jeeps?’ I told him: A Ugandan sentry plays by the rules all the way. It’s not like an Israeli on guard duty at a gate. The Ugandan sentries do what they’re supposed to, and follow the orders they’re given. They’re on their feet the whole night, without napping, and if a car comes, there’s no messing around. They’ll yell ‘Stop!’ or something like that, and they’ll point their bayoneted rifles at you. And if you don’t stop, they’ll shoot, not because they think you’re an enemy, but for fear of the punishment they’ll get if they don’t… A Ugandan soldier might not be bright, but he’s aggressive, and you’ve got to be careful with him.”*
They talked for about twenty minutes, with Yoni asking questions and Halivni answering to the best of his ability. “He was anxious for info, trying to get more facts,” recalls Halivni. “He left one clear impression: He was completely focused on the mission ahead of him… As long as he thought he could learn something from me, he listened to every word. The moment he saw he’d extracted the relevant information, he moved on…”
At 11:30 Saturday morning, Yekutiel Adam opened the briefing, the forum in which the top commanders would formally receive their final orders. Inside and outside the briefing room, high-ranking officers huddled together. A large diagram of the airport at Entebbe had been set up on the dais. Among those who spoke were Adam, Benny Peled, Dan Shomron, Matan Vilna’i, Shiki Shani, and Yoni. But most of those who would take part in the mission — officers and men — were not present, and the briefing was aimed mainly at going through the standard procedure.
Matters were presented in brief, though the air force’s part was reviewed in detail. Ram Levi, the reserve pilot slated to fly with the first plane, gained the impression that, contrary to air force norms, quite a few issues relating to its role remained unresolved. Levi raised several questions before the forum, but no one answered them. “I didn’t see any solutions for a lot of the problems that were bothering me… There wasn’t time to plan everything, and maybe they also didn’t want to answer every question, because doing so can also complicate things. If you leave things a little open, you’re more flexible and can get on with the operation.” Einstein took notes on torn scraps of paper during the briefing on matters such as the radio frequencies and codes that would be used. Those scraps would take the place of a proper mission packet, which he used to get before any exercise, however simple.
Adam summed up by reviewing the orders. When he was nearly done, someone asked who Shomron’s second-in-command would be; there on the spot, Adam appointed Matan Vilna’i, the head of the paratroops. The plan now was for the force to proceed to Sharm al-Sheikh, Israel’s southernmost airfield; there it would await the cabinet’s final decision. A Boeing 707 would serve as airborne command headquarters, but would leave Sharm several hours after the four Hercules turboprops, since it was much faster and would catch up with them over East Africa. Among those aboard the 707 would be Peled, in command of the airborne side of the operation, and Adam, overall commander of the entire mission.
When the briefing ended, Yoni went over to Shani. “Come show me again exactly where it is you’re putting us down,” he said. The request was typical of Yoni. While asking for his own sake, he undoubtedly also wanted to make sure there would be no misunderstanding on Shani’s part about where and how the vehicles would be unloaded. They sat at the briefing room table and went over the diagram of the airport. Shani took the opportunity to tell Yoni that he intended to put the plane down at Entebbe even if the runway lights were dark and the radar failed to identify the runway. “It’s the squadron’s own private alternative plan,” Shani said. “If we can’t find the runway, we’ll pretend to be a civilian aircraft in distress, and ask the control tower to turn on the runway lights for us.”
“Yoni liked the idea. He told me: ‘That’s a great plan,’” says Shani. “Then he ran off to tell someone in his group about it, as though it were a problem they’d been wrestling with, and here someone had come and given them a reasonable solution. After that, all sorts of senior officers got hold of him over there and wouldn’t let go of him. I pulled out of there and sat outside on the grass with my pilots and talked.”
Yoni made a deep impression on Shani. “We were the same rank, but I felt a respect for him the way you do for someone who is much higher up. It was a feeling based partly on what I’d seen of him myself and partly on stories going around. You had a combination of an extraordinary fighter and an intellectual… I definitely had the image of someone out of the ordinary. He seemed like a hero out of our ancient past.”
After the briefing, says Tzvika Har-Nevo, Shani’s reserve navigator, the two of them saw Yoni pass a short distance away. Shani turned to Tzvika and made a comment that remained indelibly in his memory. “That’s the greatest fighter Israel has ever had,” he said.
The veteran navigator hardly expected to hear such a remark from his squadron commander, whom he’d known for years. “From Shani you’d get a compliment maybe once in half a century. He’s a serious sort,” explains Tzvika. “After all, we’d all been raised from childhood on stories about our heroes from the country’s early years, and suddenly to hear this from a guy like Shani was really astounding.”
And then Shani said: “And he’s got a fifty-fifty chance of coming out of this alive.”
During the morning, Gur, Adam, and Peled had met with Prime Minister Rabin, Defense Minister Peres, and Foreign Minister Yigal Allon. Earlier, Gur had received a report from the head of the Intelligence Branch, saying that in his judgment the available intelligence material was sufficient to permit going ahead. The army’s plan for freeing the hostages was presented to the three ministers, and the chief of staff announced unequivocally his recommendation that it be implemented. On the basis of this recommendation, Rabin assembled the senior ministers, and after a short discussion in which Peres spoke strongly in favor of a military solution to the crisis, the ministers approved the plan. A meeting of the full cabinet was set for 2 p.m. There the final decision would be made.
The Unit’s men had a respite of an hour or two before boarding the army bus for Lod. During and after the officers’ tactics session there was not much left for them to do, since most of the preparations had been completed. Bukhris, the youngest member of the force, remembers this break as the toughest part of the whole operation — waiting, with little to do but think about what was coming and to take stock of himself and his life. Yael, Yoni’s secretary, had gone to high school with Bukhris, and came up to him during the morning to encourage him. He was mulling over whether to leave something in writing for his family before setting out.
Danny Dagan and Amitzur Kafri were still so busy working on the Mercedes that they didn’t notice the bus had left the base with the rest of the men. They finished putting the Ugandan flag on the antenna on the car’s left side and another small pennant on the metal rod that had been welded to the front of the Mercedes. The license plates had already been switched to “Ugandan” ones made of cardboard. But they still weren’t satisfied with the car’s appearance. The night-time paint job had left splotches of uneven color, and so the two continued to go over the car with can after can of black spray paint. Suddenly, Danny realized they were alone. They went to the center of the base to look for the rest of the force and saw that everyone had left. Quickly they folded the flags, covered the plates, climbed in and drove to the airport.
When they arrived there was still some time until takeoff. Amitzur backed the Mercedes into the hold of the first Hercules, which was standing out on the runway. The two Landrovers were already inside, and all three vehicles were tied to the floor of the plane. In the meantime, the Unit’s men had already met up with the members of the other, larger forces taking part in the operation. Bukhris remembers several paratroopers kissing goodbye to their company secretaries, who’d come with them to the airport.
Meanwhile, Avi had gone to a nearby base and came back with a packet of aerial photographs of the Entebbe airport. These had been taken by a Mossad agent the day before, flying a small civilian plane. The photos ruled out the presence of a massive Ugandan force around the building or on the roof — at least at the time the information had been gathered. That reduced concerns about a high casualty toll and supported the assessment that the operation would succeed. Without that information, which the chief of staff had received verbally earlier, he would not have given his go-ahead.
During the wait at Lod, David, the Unit’s doctor, was told that his medic was being dropped from the operation roster. Apparently it had turned out at the last minute that there was one man too many in the assault force. David was unhappy with the decision, since it meant that he would have to treat the wounded alone, forcing him to function more as a medic than as a doctor. “I knew I’d need the medic to treat the wounded. There was no doubt about it,” says David. “Yoni was busy. I went over to him and told him: ‘It’s a mistake.’ But he said: ‘The issue’s closed,’ and that was the end of the matter… I understood that he’d done it to make room for Alik. Alik was a veteran fighter and a good one. Yoni trusted him in battle, and decided it was worth it.”
Yoni told his men that they’d soon fly to Sharm al-Sheikh, and after a stopover there would go on to Entebbe. The cabinet was now meeting, he said, to decide on the operation. He added a few words of instructions for the operation, but left most of his final briefing for Sharm al-Sheikh, the last spot where he would have all the men together.
Only when Shaul Mofaz, the commander of the peripheral defense force, boarded plane No. 2, did he finally have a chance to arrange with Nati, the pilot, how they’d work together. They agreed, for instance, on the signals Nati would give the troops by blinking the interior lights when it was time to unchain the vehicles or open the cargo doors. Coordinating such matters at the last minute was out of character for both the air force and the Unit, but this was practically the first time they’d been able to talk to each other.
Peres and Gur arrived at Lod to see the forces off. Peres writes that when he got to Lod, the commanders of the different units came to ask him whether the cabinet would approve the mission. Shomron told Peres: “Shimon, don’t worry. Everything will go fine.” Yoni, says Peres, “came to shake my hand and tell me that the plan was ‘tip-top.’”37 Peres and Gur stayed only a few minutes before hurrying back to Tel Aviv, where the meeting of the full cabinet was about to begin.
Yoni and Avi still had time to discuss the new intelligence material and its implications. “Intelligence was still pouring in from all sorts of directions,” says Avi, “and we talked it over. Towards the end, when they were about to start getting on the planes, Yoni said to me: ‘Come with me as far as Sharm al-Sheikh.’ I said to him: ‘Yoni, I’m here without a gun or anything, and you’re telling me to come to Sharm? Then what? You all take off and I stay behind. It doesn’t feel right.’ In the end I convinced him there was no point in my going on to the Sinai with him. I went with him to the car to get his ammo vest and equipment bag.” At Yoni’s request, his driver had filled his canteens for him; he hadn’t had time to do it himself.
“We agreed that I’d take his car, and come back with it to Lod the next morning to pick him up after the operation and take him back to the Unit,” Avi says. “We shook hands, and I wished him luck. I could feel from his handshake that this wasn’t just another operation, but something special. I felt, and I think he felt, even though I can’t tell you for sure what was going on in his mind, that this handshake meant more, somehow, than a simple good-bye. He was smiling, but it was a smile that had a lot of meaning to it. He still thought to tell me: ‘Do everything we agreed on, so we won’t lose time on the other thing.’”
Ben-Gal, too, parted from Yoni here. “Yoni was the last one to board his plane. I was standing at the door. We shook hands. I told him: ‘Don’t worry. If something happens, we’ll look after the widows.’ Of course, I said it more as a joke than anything else. It never crossed my mind that he would be killed and would never come back. I didn’t doubt for a second that he’d come back. He told me: ‘It’ll be all right, and give her my regards,’ or ‘take care of her” — he said something like that, referring to Bruria. And that was the last time I saw him.”
At 1:20 p.m. the four Hercules transports began taking off from Lod, along with a fifth plane that was brought to Sharm al-Sheikh in reserve. The planes took off at intervals of five minutes and flew in different directions so that it would not appear that they were taking part in an action against a specific target. At a certain distance from Lod each of the planes turned south. On the flight to Sharm al-Sheikh, Rami Levi flew the first plane instead of Shani to get experience with an aircraft he hadn’t flown in a long time. Before takeoff, a few mechanical problems had been detected in the plane, even though Shani had made sure earlier that the four planes picked for the mission underwent a thorough overhaul and that the mechanics repaired or replaced anything that might malfunction. The problems were minor and were quickly repaired, but they left Levi feeling uneasy.
Complete radio silence was maintained during the flight, mainly because there were Soviet surveillance ships not far from Israel’s coast. The pilots flew at a very low altitude to elude Jordanian radar. Flying so low, along with the summer heat, caused tremendous turbulence, and the troops suffered severe nausea and vomiting. “It was horrible. I’ve flown a lot on these Hercules planes, but this was the worst flight of them all by far,” remembers one soldier. “We sat in the jeep, and there were times when our heads pounded against the ceiling because the plane was rocking so badly. I thought that when we got to Entebbe and opened the hold, we’d all fall flat on the runway and wouldn’t be able to move.”38 Shani felt guilty about the miserable flight even though there was nothing he could do about it. “You know you’ve got to carry them 7½ hours and afterwards they have to get out and fight, and here it’s just the beginning of the flight and you’re already knocking them dead.” After more than an hour of turbulence that left the floors covered with vomit, the planes finally put down at Sharm al-Sheikh. Just then, radio silence was broken by the pilot of a plane belonging to Arkia, Israel’s domestic airline, who noticed the landing and told the control tower — so that anyone else on a civilian wavelength could have heard: “Looks like there’s a party going on down there.”
The troops deplaned as ground crews rushed to fill the fuel tanks to the top. Even now, only a few men believed the operation would really take place. Shaul remembers wondering at the time of the landing where they could spend the night in the airport.
The paratroopers and the Golani soldiers gathered in one underground hangar, and the Unit’s men in another. Many of them were worn out from the flight. Alik did not even have the strength to get off the plane. He asked Amitzur to bring him a change of clothing, and Amitzur brought over a jerrycan of water as well to wash his face. Alik changed his soiled clothes, descended from the plane, and lay for a long while in the sand until he recovered. David gave out anti-nausea pills to the Unit’s men, as Dr. Dolev did among the other infantrymen. One soldier from Muki’s assault team, who had thrown up repeatedly during the flight and was left dazed and weak, felt that he wouldn’t be able to go on. To replace him, Yoni ordered Omer, the commander of one of the APCs, to transfer one of his men to the assault force. Omer chose Amos Goren, whom he trusted to open fire without hesitation when the time came. Yoni told Amos that he’d explain his precise role to him during the flight. In the meantime, Amos went to the soldier who’d pulled out and took his camouflage fatigues, bullhorn, and backpack, which contained explosives for opening doors.
A light meal was distributed to the troops. The soldiers ate and drank, and after a little while began to recover from the flight. Yoni once more reviewed the intelligence data, then spoke to the various teams. “Yoni personally briefed every one of the men, asking each if it was clear where he should be, where the rest of the men would be, and so on,” recalls a soldier.39 Apparently based on his conversation with Halivni, Yoni explained to Yiftah’s team, which was to go up to the second floor, that the stairs were located beyond the first room they would enter.
He also gave final instructions to the peripheral defense force, emphasizing that it had to provide an “active blockade” around the old terminal. That didn’t mean massive fire, or shooting at fleeing Ugandans who posed no threat; it did mean taking the initiative and thoroughly combing the area to prevent any penetration of forces from outside — and not hesitating to fire on defined targets. The intent was to turn the four APCs into a real security belt. Yoni again stressed the need to block the road leading from the town of Entebbe to the north side of the terminal.
Shaul’s APC, which would be deployed relatively close to the terminal in the entrance plaza area, would carry the Unit’s former doctor, Arik Shalev, who was supposed to help David Hasin if the need arose. Yoni was asked when Arik should come over to the building, where David would be. Because of the danger of crossing the line of fire, Yoni told him: “If nothing special happens and we don’t need you, stay where you are.” Even if Arik did join the forces in the building at some stage, he would have to return to Shaul’s team on the APC during the withdrawal, and to evacuate with it on the last plane. Yoni didn’t want men to be left in the field without a doctor.
“As things went on, there was a change in Yoni,” says one soldier. “I think he was more relaxed. He seemed more at ease, as if he were in his element now.”40
In addition to Yoni’s short briefings, the commanders of the main sub-forces gave their own: Muki to the ground-floor teams, Yiftah to the men who would take the second floor, and Shaul to the periphery forces.
Yoni now gathered his men around him. Just then, they were called two or three times to come to the other hangar for a briefing with Shomron, but Yoni told them that it was more important at the moment for them to hear what he had to tell them. These would be his last words to the entire force. He knew that the things he would try to express and the feelings he would try to instill were critically important to the mission. He spoke briefly, but in these few minutes he succeeded in having the effect he needed.
“It wasn’t your usual briefing,” says Ilan Blumer. “It was a different sort, and left an impression on everyone.”
Yoni started by reporting on the new intelligence material, including the assessment that the Ugandan security belt was thinner than had been thought, and repeated the broad outlines of the plan for the mission.
He then put aside the countless details and instructions that had been heaped on the men in twenty-four hours of hasty preparations, and spoke to the them about the heart of the matter. The objective was to save the hostages’ lives, he said. Even when they were under fire, even if the hostages weren’t exactly where they were supposed to be, no matter how unexpectedly things developed, everyone had to remember that goal and work toward achieving it. It had to be their first thought and guide their decisions at every stage of the operation.
The Unit’s men were better than the terrorists, so that if everyone acted as logic and necessity demanded, they would quickly overcome the enemy, he said, expressing total confidence in their ability to carry out the mission according to plan. To the assault teams he emphasized again that the overriding concern was to reach the hostages as quickly as possible and eliminate the gunmen threatening them. Men would be wounded during the assault, he said, and no one was to stop to take care of them. The priority was to get to the hostages. Only after the terrorists had been wiped out would the wounded be treated.
“What Yoni said was short and completely to the point,” says Shlomo. “His instructions that everyone had to respond to developments in line with the purpose of the mission were exactly what a soldier needed to hear… It put things in the right perspective. When you cram a million details into a man’s head in a single day, things gets confused. Then someone comes along and straightens it all out in two sentences.”
Finally, he made some brief remarks about the significance of the mission — “words that touched your heart,” as Yohai terms them, that can be reconstructed only in the broadest strokes: It was crucial not to compromise with the terrorists, he said. Israel, and the IDF, had an obligation not to give in to blackmail in such situations, even if that now meant that they had to go far from the country’s borders to fight back. This was a mission of the first importance, he summed up. Everything was up to them; the entire nation was depending on them.
“During the briefing, I remember being struck by his eloquence,” says Amir. “What he said gave me a tremendous amount of confidence… You couldn’t give a better briefing before a mission.”
“It was a speech I’ll never forget,” says Alex Davidi, a soldier in Muki’s team. “He gave us the confidence that we could do it. His leadership and his ability to affect us were simply above and beyond.”
At the end of the briefing, Danny Dagan came up to Yoni, as did others, to glance at the new photographs of the terminal he was holding. “I put my hand on his shoulder. He nodded his head that everything would be all right, without saying a word. It gave me a good feeling.”
Omer, too, went over to Yoni after the briefing. His APC was to deploy in the area next to the Migs and the army base, and he wanted to know whether he should fire first on Ugandan forces or wait to respond. Omer felt uncertain about this because he remembered the firing orders for the armored force being changed several times over the preceding twenty-four hours. “He told me explicitly that I was to initiate fire. Not to go wild, but as needed.” As for firing on the Migs, Yoni said that, in principle, Omer had the go-ahead, but he should still get final approval from him first. In any case, the Migs would wait until after Omer had finished taking care of any Ugandan threat in his sector, and until he was told that he wasn’t needed elsewhere.
Yoni gave Tamir a photo of the airport and a map of Uganda for a possible overland escape. “Hang on to these in case we need them,” he said.
Among the aerial photographs was a close-up of the old terminal, showing that there was no substantial Ugandan security force outside the building or on its roof. It also showed two awnings, one leading to the second entrance to the main hall and another to the entrance of the small hall. The first entrance to the main hall, which was assigned to Muki and his team, had no awning.
Some of the men then went to the other hangar to hear Shomron. Thirty-one years after the Holocaust, he was saying, there were people who were once again conducting a “selection” of Jews to kill them. The men on this mission had the privilege, he said, to serve as the long arm of the IDF and to prevent history from repeating itself.
Muki recounts that after Yoni’s briefing, he and Yoni went off for a few minutes to discuss some points concerning the mission. Suddenly Muki noticed that Shomron was standing and speaking to the rest of the force. He didn’t realize that the Unit had been called earlier to hear Shomron’s briefing, and somewhat angrily, he said to Yoni: “Look what’s happening. They’ve forgotten who’s the main force. They’re talking to everyone but us. No one spoke to us.”
“No, it’s all right,” said Yoni. “He called us over, but since we were giving the kind of briefing we were, he let us be.”
“Listen, Muki said. “We’re the ones doing the dirty work, we’re the ones going off to get killed, and the guys on the front page tomorrow are going to be Shomron, Gur and Rabin.”
Yoni laughed.
Notes
* In fact, Israelis who served in Uganda were warned upon their arrival in the country about how Ugandan sentries tended to shoot with hardly a second thought. Halivni himself says that he used to raise his hands, despite his senior status in Uganda, when he approached a sentry at night.