No Mission Is Impossible (2 page)

On October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement), Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel, simultaneously invading the Golan Heights in the north and the Sinai Peninsula in the south. After several painful losses, Israel defeated her enemies, but at a heavy cost. Three years after the Yom Kippur War, Israel is still licking her wounds, having lost 2,700 soldiers and much of her deterrent protective power. Golda Meir has resigned as prime minister and been replaced by Yitzhak Rabin; Moshe Dayan has been replaced by Shimon Peres as defense minister. Rabin and Peres distrust and dislike each other, but they have to work together to deal with the unending attacks of terrorist groups on Israel.

A
German couple boarded an Air France plane in Athens on June 27, 1976, quietly took their seats in first class and placed their bulky carry-on bags beneath the seats in front of them. The man was of slight build, his brown hair and beard framing an oval face, a mustache drooping over a pointed chin and blue beady eyes. Apparently tired, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His companion, wearing a summer pantsuit, was a tall, blond woman with a pretty face, slightly marred by a prominent jaw.

The Airbus A300 Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris, with a short stopover in Athens, carried 246 passengers—105 of them Jewish and Israeli—and twelve crew members. During the Athens stopover, more people boarded. The passengers from Tel Aviv cast indifferent eyes on two Middle Eastern–looking men in dark suits who were shown to their economy-class seats by a smiling blond hostess.

At 12:35 P.M., fifteen minutes after the aircraft took off from Athens, the two Germans opened their handbags. The man took out a large gaily painted candy box and removed its tin cover. The woman
produced a champagne bottle and started spinning it in her hands. Suddenly the man drew a miniature submachine gun out of the candy box and leapt to his feet. He darted to the cockpit and pointed his weapon at the pilots. At the same time, the woman unscrewed the bottom of the champagne bottle and pulled out a handgun and two grenades.

“Hands up!” she yelled at the first-class passengers. “Don't move from your seats!”

Similar shouts could be heard in Economy, where the two Middle Eastern men had jumped from their seats, brandished small submachine guns, and easily subdued the other passengers. The excited voice of the male German hijacker boomed from the loudspeakers. He announced in accented English that he was the new captain of the aircraft and identified himself as Basil Kubaissi, commander of “the Che Guevara Commando of the Gaza Strip,”, belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Panic swept the passenger compartments—shouts of fear and anger, and weeping, erupted from almost every seat. The horrified passengers realized that they had been hijacked and were the prisoners of terrorists. The “new captain” and his companions ordered the passengers to throw all weapons in their possession down in the aisles. Some set down pocket knives. Immediately afterward the hijackers submitted the male passengers to thorough body searches. And meanwhile the plane turned and headed south.

In the midst of a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, a note was quietly handed to Shimon Peres. The fifty-three-year-old defense minister had been David Ben-Gurion's devoted assistant; Peres was credited with establishing Israel's alliance with France in 1956 and with carrying out a “mission impossible”—the building of a secret nuclear reactor close to the southern town of Dimona.

Peres passed the note to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who put on his glasses and read it. A year older than Peres, with graying blond hair and a pinkish complexion, Rabin had been a fighter in the Palmach, Israel's elite troops during the War of Independence. He had assumed office in 1974, after serving as the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) chief of
staff and as Israel's ambassador to the U.S. He had run in the Labor Party primary for prime minister against Peres, but in spite of the support of the party apparatus he had won by only a few votes. The two men loathed each other and Rabin had been forced to accept Peres as defense minister against his own judgment.

These two, in spite of their sour relations, had to cooperate in dealing with Israel's security. Both Rabin and Peres knew the Popular Front well—a terrorist organization led by Dr. Wadie Haddad, a Safed-born physician who had abandoned his profession and devoted himself to the struggle against the Jewish State. He had carried out several bloody hijackings and also used the services of foreign recruits, including the notorious Carlos, an Venezuelan-born terrorist with a chilling record of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations, that had made him the most wanted man in Europe. Haddad had been the first to organize the hijacking of an Israeli plane, in 1968, and was known to be a devious, cruel fanatic.

The 1967 Six Day War had radically changed the character of the relations between Israel and its enemies. In June 1967, threatened with annihilation by Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser and his allies, Israel had launched a preventive war that had crushed the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan; Israel had emerged from the war controlling huge chunks of territory—the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and the West Bank of Palestine, After Israel's astounding victory, the Arab armies had been largely replaced by newly born terrorist organizations, which claimed that they were continuing the struggle of the Arab world against Israel. They replaced confrontation in the battlefield with hijackings, bombings and assassinations, directed mostly against Israeli civilians. Wadie Haddad's Popular Front was among the most ruthless groups Israel had to face.

After receiving the news about the hijacking, Rabin and Peres called an urgent council of ministers and senior officials. As the group convened, more information about the hijacking arrived. Among the fifty-six passengers who boarded in Athens, four were transit passengers who had arrived in Greece with a Singapore Airlines flight from Kuwait. They were believed to be carrying forged passports. The Mossad,
Israel's national intelligence agency, quickly identified the Germans as Wilfried Böse, a founder of the German Revolutionary Cells terrorist group, formerly associated with Carlos and now of the Popular Front; and Bose's female companion, Brigitte Kuhlmann, as a known member of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang. The two others were recognized as Palestinians, Abu Haled el Halaili and Ali el Miari.

The intelligence reports also pointed out that the security personnel at Athens airport had carried out only a perfunctory search of the passengers' bags, and they had missed the four Scorpion miniature submachine guns and the hand grenades that had been concealed in tin candy boxes and a champagne bottle. Additionally, several packages of explosives had been hidden in the hijackers' hand luggage.

At midnight, while the plane still appeared to be heading toward the Middle East, Peres met with Yekutiel “Kuti” Adam, the forty-nine-year-old IDF chief of operations, a brilliant general whose huge, bushy mustache betrayed his family's origins in the Caucasus. They set about to make sure that the IDF would be prepared to storm the aircraft if it landed at Ben Gurion Airport. They took an army jeep and set off for the base of Sayeret Matkal, the IDF's elite commando unit, which had already begun rehearsing an attack on a large Airbus, in case the hijacked plane landed in Israel.

The newly appointed commander of the Sayeret was thirty-year-old Yoni Netanyahu, one of the three Netanyahu brothers, who, according to Peres, “had already become a legend—three brothers, fighting like lions, excelling both in their deeds and in their learning.” The brothers, Yonatan “Yoni,” Binyamin “Bibi” and Ido, sons of renowned scholar Ben-Zion Netanyahu, were all current or former members of Sayeret Matkal. New York–born Yoni, a handsome, tousle-haired lieutenant colonel, combined his military skills with a deep love for literature, mostly poetry. After the Six Day War, Yoni had spent a year at Harvard and six months at Hebrew University before returning to military service. Tonight Peres and Adam hoped to find him at the Sayeret base; he was away, though, off leading an operation in the Sinai, so the rehearsal was supervised by his deputy Muki Betzer, one of the Sayeret's best fighters.

They did not stay long as Peres, shortly after arriving, was informed that the hijacked plane had made a refueling stop in Benghazi, in Libya, and then was continuing to its destination in the heart of Africa: Entebbe airport, outside Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The first news to come from Entebbe revealed that Uganda's dictator, General Idi Amin, had warmly received the terrorists and had declared them “welcomed guests.” It now appeared that the landing in Entebbe had previously been coordinated with Amin.

Amin was a cruel and fearsome ruler who governed his country with an iron fist. A huge man, his uniform covered with scores of medals, he had been called the “wild man of Africa” by
Time
magazine. Once a lowly private, he had climbed the army hierarchy until he became chief of staff, then seized power in a bloody coup and pronounced himself “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshall Alhaji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, Master of all the animals on land and all the fish of the seas, Conqueror of the British Empire in all of Africa, and especially in Uganda.” Until recently, Amin had been Israel's ally and had gone through paratrooper training in the IDF parachuting academy, as the guest of former defense minister Moshe Dayan. Peres had met him at a dinner in Dayan's house and remembered that he was both attractive and scary, “like a jungle landscape, like an indecipherable secret of Nature.”

Amin later broke off diplomatic relations with Israel when Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to sell him Phantom jets. He also expelled all Israelis from his country and befriended Israel's worst enemies—hostile Arab nations and terrorist organizations. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he even claimed to have sent a Ugandan Army unit to fight against the IDF. And this unscrupulous despot now held in his hands the lives of 250 hostages in Entebbe airport, 2,500 miles from Israel.

When news of this broke in Israel, a storm erupted. Israelis were swept up by feelings of fury and helplessness. Heated debates over the appropriate reaction raged in the media. Many of the hostages' families teamed up to exert pressure on the government. They all made the same demand: free our loved ones.

In the days that followed the situation became clearer. At Entebbe,
more terrorists had been waiting for the plane. Amin had sent his private plane to Somalia, to bring over Wadie Haddad and a few of his henchmen. The hostages were being held in the old terminal at the airport, guarded by terrorists and Ugandan soldiers. The terrorists then separated the Jewish passengers from the others, reviving atrocious memories of the Holocaust “selection” by the Nazis in World War II. One of the German terrorists, Brigitte Kuhlmann, was especially cruel. She verbally abused the Jewish passengers with foul anti-Semitic remarks.

Upon arrival, Wadie Haddad gave Amin a list of jailed terrorists in Israel and in other countries whom he demanded be exchanged for the hostages. And the list came with an ultimatum: if Israel did not agree to Haddad's demands before the deadline he set, his men would start executing the hostages. Amin sent the list to Israel.

Prime Minister Rabin appointed a ministerial committee to deal with the crisis. At the committee's meeting on June 29, Rabin asked his chief of staff, General Mordechai (“Motta”) Gur, if he thought there could be “a military option.”

Gur was something of a legend. After fighting in the War of Independence, he had joined the paratrooper corps and participated in many combat situations beside Ariel Sharon. He had been wounded in a battle against Egyptian troops in 1955. In 1967 he had led the 55th Paratroopers Brigade in conquering East Jerusalem and had been the first Israeli soldier to reach the Temple Mount. “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” he had shouted in his radio as his armored half-track had emerged at the Jewish people's holiest place. After the Yom Kippur War, Gur had been appointed Israel's tenth chief of staff; Rabin held him in high esteem but thought Gur had no solution for the Entebbe affair.

“Yes, there is a military option,” Gur responded to everyone's surprise. He proposed parachuting a unit of the IDF somewhere close to Entebbe airport, perhaps over nearby Victoria Lake. His soldiers would attack the terrorists and protect the hostages until it became possible to bring them all home. But the committee rejected the plan. First, it became clear that, after landing, the paratroopers would have great difficulty reaching the airport. Second, the plan did not include any solution
as to how the hostages would be brought back to Israel. Rabin would later call this plan a “Bay of Pigs,” like the botched U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1961.

Rabin and Peres fought bitterly with each other from the outset. Rabin believed that he had no choice but to negotiate with the hijackers and to agree to release the Palestinian terrorists. But Peres was determined not to free the terrorists because of the negative impact such a deal would have both on Israel's international image and on its ongoing anti-terrorist struggle. The rift between the two men was amplified by their strained personal relations, which had been creating a foul atmosphere at the cabinet meetings.

After the meeting Peres left his office on the second floor of the Ministry of Defense, and through a nearby door entered the western part of the building, which housed the offices of the IDF general staff. Peres urgently summoned the chief of staff and some of his generals.

“I want to hear what plans you have,” he said to the group of generals in their olive-colored summer uniforms.

“We have no plans,” Kuti Adam answered.

“Then I want to hear what you don't have,” Peres said.

It was quickly revealed that while no formal plans had been drafted, some of the men had ideas. Kuti Adam suggested a joint operation with the French army—after all, he argued, Air France was a French company, and the French government should be involved. Benny Peled, the forty-eight-year-old IAF (Israeli Air Force) commander, had an “insane” but original idea. A founder of the IAF, this heavy-set, courageous and cool-headed fighter pilot was gifted with a fertile imagination. He proposed they fly a large number of elite troops to Uganda, conquer Uganda, free the hostages and bring them back home. He suggested employing the squadron of fourteen large Hercules (“Rhino”) aircraft for this. They could fly from Israel to Entebbe and then back.