 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
'There Were No Acts of Heroism at Entebbe'
Erik Schechter
MOSHE SHAI |
Twenty-five years ago, on the night of Saturday July 3, 1976, Israel carried out what is generally regarded as the most remarkable act of counter-terrorism in history.
It flew its commandos for seven-and-a-half hours and over 4,000 kilometers, passing within radar range of enemy Arab states, and landed them at Entebbe airport in Uganda. There, they overcame dozens of Ugandan soldiers, burst into a terminal building where 103 mostly Jewish hostages from a hijacked Air France flight were being held captive by eight gunmen, killed all the terrorists and freed all but two of the hostages who were shot in the crossfire.
A quarter of a century later, however, Dan Shomron, the man who commanded the operation, and who went on to become the army's chief of staff from 1987 to 1991 and is now in private business, speaks of Entebbe in the most prosaic terms. He points out that his force enjoyed numerous advantages that proved crucial to the operation's success, and worries that it created unreasonable expectations about the capabilities of the Israeli military and especially its intelligence operatives. He reveals that then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had his staff prepare a letter of resignation, which he intended to submit to the president had the operation failed. And he discloses that he chose not to recommend a single one of his fighters for a citation. Carrying out the operation, he says laconically, during a lengthy interview with The Report at a beachfront Herzliyah hotel, was so straightforward that no heroics were necessary.
As late as the afternoon of D-Day itself, Shomron recalls, the Rabin government was publicly committed to a capitulation to the terrorists' demands - the release of terrorists held prisoner by Israel, Germany, Switzerland, France and Kenya.
Israel had prepared a rescue operation - but it had relied on the assumption that Ugandan president Idi Amin was reluctantly caught up in the affair, rather than complicit in it. So the plans kicked around at first, says Shomron, "envisaged sending a small force - 12 or 13 commandos - to kill the terrorists, with the assumption that Amin, happy to be rid of his awkward problem, would then release everyone."
Shomron, who was chief paratroop and infantry officer at the time, with the rank of brigadier general, says that when he read the intelligence, he reached the conclusion that Amin was involved and argued that sending in a small force would be a disaster. "Entebbe had two connected terminals, and a whole battalion of [about 300-400] Ugandan soldiers on guard, and it was obvious that we would have no choice but to clean out the whole area."
The released non-Jewish passengers, when they reached Paris on Wednesday, June 30, and were interviewed by Israeli intelligence, confirmed Shomron's suspicions, and next morning it was Amin who issued an ultimatum on behalf of the hijackers: If their demands were not met that day, they would begin killing hostages. "The deadline was only hours away," notes Shomron, "and now we didn't have a military solution. So the government decided, unanimously, to capitulate to the terrorists' demands."
"The State of Israel had tried to convince the Free World to cooperate in fighting terror because terror is international," says Shomron. "One day, Israel is the target, the next it is another democratic government. Capitulation, we had argued, would naturally prompt further acts. But the world hesitated. And now the world was watching us, to see whether even in this situation, where the terrorists were so far away from Israel, we would be able to act against the terror - whether our principle would hold."
Countering that, of course, notes Shomron, was the pressure from the families - "lots of families. They were pressing the prime minister, saying, 'You don't have a solution, so don't play with the lives of our loved ones.'"
When Israel that Wednesday evening announced that it intended to accede to the terrorists' demands, the deadline for the prisoner releases was extended to Sunday morning, July 4, at 10 a.m. And that window gave Shomron the opportunity to present new ideas for a larger-scale rescue, in which the whole airport would be brought under Israeli control. These were refined to a final plan involving four Hercules military transport planes, flying with Phantom fighter-jet cover over the Red Sea to Entebbe, with two civilian Boeing 707s heading to Nairobi, one to serve as a field hospital there and the other as an airborne command post. Naturally, the operation would take place at night - Saturday night, July 3.
As Shomron readily acknowledges, planning for the mission was hugely boosted by an uncommon series of advantages: First and foremost, an Israeli construction firm, Solel Boneh, had built Entebbe airport, and was able to provide blueprints. Though there had been changes to the layout in the years since, information on those was obtained from the freed non-Jewish hostages. Those passengers were also able to describe the terrorists - their numbers, weaponry, positions and dispositions. And Israel also had an ally in neighboring Kenya, where it could refuel its planes for the journey home.
Critical to the mission's success was the element of surprise, as Shomron explains: "You had more than 100 people sitting in a small room, surrounded by terrorists with their fingers on the trigger. They could fire in a fraction of a second. We had to fly seven hours, land safely, drive to the terminal area where the hostages were being held, get inside, and eliminate all the terrorists before any of them could fire."
If that sounds almost impossible, Shomron stresses that the very implausibility of the rescue was a central factor in its success. "Nobody dreamed that we'd be going there," he says, revealing that he was inspired by accounts of General Douglas MacArthur's actions during the Korean War in 1950 when, as leader of the U.N. forces, he docked 261 ships at Inchon, in an area where nobody in their right mind would have considered landing, because of the shallowness of the waters. Thanks to the element of surprise, MacArthur was able to rout the North Korean forces all the way back to the 38th parallel.
"The Americans saw us carrying out training on the Friday, in broad daylight in the center of the country," Shomron notes - but they didn't put two and two together.
Surprise apart, the mission's success was also presumed to depend on Shomron's battle strategy. His intention was to send an advance party to the terminal to eliminate the terrorists and safeguard the hostages, and only then to have larger forces secure the entire airfield.
"When I presented the plan, Peres asked me to assess its chances of success. I said that if the first plane made it as planned" - coming in seven minutes ahead of the others, with no lights, hard on the heels of a British cargo plane, and carrying the key assault force, complete with a black Mercedes of the type used by Amin - "then we'd pull it off, 100 percent. There will be shooting in the field, so we'll have casualties, maybe three or four dead - soldiers and hostages - but that's all. I advised him to go through with it ... I also said that it would take 60 minutes from the first plane landing to the plane with the freed hostages taking off. In reality, it took 58."
According to Shomron, the mission was carried out "precisely according to plan." The first plane came in undetected, the Amin Mercedes rolled off toward the terminal, with Landrovers in tow carrying the rest of the assault team. "And in the very spot where we had predicted, Ugandan troops raised their weapons at us, but they didn't open fire."
Except that the Israelis did.
"My firm order to all the soldiers had been not to shoot at the Ugandans, even if they pointed weapons at us from point-blank range. 'They won't actually fire,' I stressed, 'so don't you fire.' But someone got agitated, opened fire and killed two Ugandans." (Maj. Muki Betser, in his memoir, "Secret Soldier," identifies this someone as Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, head of the hostage rescue team, with whom he was in the same vehicle; Shomron declines to comment. In his book "Yoni's Last Battle," Iddo Netanyahu, his youngest brother, writes that Yoni had no choice but to open fire.)
Other Ugandan forces, outside the terminal building, now opened fire as well. Netanyahu was killed in the exchange. Potentially, all this gunfire could have torpedoed the mission - had the terrorists realized what was going on. "But no one in the terminal opened fire," says Shomron, who prefers to describe the incident as "a certain mishap." Presumably, he adds, "the terrorists thought some of the Ugandans had gone crazy and started firing in the air."
The rescue team was helped by the fact that, of the 13 terrorists, says Shomron, only eight were "on duty" - the other five were apparently away from the airport, "on vacation," at the time. In all, says Shomron, several dozen Ugandan troops were killed as the airport was secured for the hostages to be flown out. "We didn't want to kill any Ugandans," he stresses. "Our key objective was the safety of the hostages."
SHOMRON ARGUES THAT THE impact of the Entebbe rescue was profound. "It resonated far and wide. It showed that you could counter terrorism, and that it was worth cooperating to do so. All sorts of countries set up their own counter-terrorist units. We began exchanging intelligence and technical information. And there were terrorist acts right after that - hijackings to Mogadishu, and Cyprus - where the countries involved resisted, albeit not always successfully."
Fighting terrorism, he says simply, is a function of political will. And, asked - as many critics suggest nowadays - whether Israel has lost that will, Shomron draws a careful distinction between the conflict with the Palestinians and the fate of captured Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.
"Arafat is the biggest murderer-terrorist," he says flatly. "But we are in a complex situation today, facing up to him. There are left-wing parties, even Labor, which consider Arafat as a peace partner. So they don't want him harmed."
That duality, he says, undermines both Israel's ability to confront Arafat, and international cooperation against him. "We have the military capacity, don't doubt it," he says. "But it is placed under limitations."
Overseas, he notes, Arafat is widely regarded as leading "a national liberation movement, not inspiring terrorism. Yes, an act like the Dolphinarium bombing [in Tel Aviv on June 1, in which 21 Israelis were killed] is seen as terrorism, plain and simple, and not tolerated. But other incidents ..."
Personally Shomron, who was briefly aligned with the now-defunct Third Way centrist party, is withering in his attitude to Arafat: "Since Olso, Arafat has not really entered into negotiations with us. He's been willing to take what we give him. If we were to give him the right of return - which amounts to the destruction of the State of Israel - then he'd have no problem. If not, he'll use terror to internationalize the conflict."
As regards the missing Israeli soldiers being held by Hizballah in Lebanon, Shomron sympathizes with the anxious parents, and others, who demand action, but counsels that even the most innovative commando rescue operations can only succeed if they are based on firm intelligence information. "You can't set out on an operation if you don't know where the captives are being held. It's very sad, but that's the reality."
Indeed, Shomron worries a little that the very success of Entebbe created unrealistic expectations about Israel's abilities to achieve the seemingly impossible. "It may be that it created expectations that our intelligence knows everything, at every moment. That's not true. There are places where it knows everything, and places where it does not.
"Entebbe was not a suicidal mission," he stresses. Israel's intelligence information was uniquely thorough. And it sent an extraordinarily powerful fighting team. "Two hundred plus soldiers, with APCs. Top commanders. The best people from all the units" - deliberately selected by Shomron, he says, so that each of these units would have its share in the Entebbe mythology.
So smooth was the operation, indeed, Shomron insists, that, "no one got a citation. Why? Because no one did anything out of the ordinary. They asked me, 'Don't you want to recommend anyone? I said, 'No.' The execution was so similar to the plan that no act of heroism was required to overcome any problems."
(July 16, 2001)
Israel
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2004 |  |