ENTEBBE FOOTNOTES

DAN, URI

ENTEBBE FOOTNOTES URI DAN *Because Israel faces a continuing threat from terrorists, there arc parts of the Entebbe story that will not become known for many years. But one aspect—in mans ways,...

...ENTEBBE FOOTNOTES URI DAN *Because Israel faces a continuing threat from terrorists, there arc parts of the Entebbe story that will not become known for many years...
...He found Rabin in his suburban Tel Aviv apartment, pacing, in his bathrobe, relieving the tension by switching his television set from the Israeli channel to the Jordanian...
...He passed the news along to both the White House and to Kissinger...
...had any substantial information regarding Israel's plans, and that even when the mission was launched, it was managed with such sophistication that the huge American intelligence complex along the Red Sea, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean did not detect it...
...Accordingly, until the very end, Israeli officials continued to confer and negotiate with their French counterparts as if no other possibilities were being considered...
...It was only after the famous 90 minutes, when the last Israeli Hercules had left the airport, that Din-itZLgot the phone call from Rabin that told him what had happened...
...Rabin had stopped smoking some months earlier, and was still adjusting...
...One minister quietly passed a note to the Chief of Staff, Motta Gur, who was a participant in the meeting...
...We have to do everything we can to develop a military option, but if there is none, we have to try to save the lives of the hostages through negotiation...
...And he added, with a touch of irony and perhaps even bitterness, "Believe me, if we would have had to go to Uganda for such an operation, Washington would have insisted that we first send two divisions to Kenya, to secure the operation...
...Indeed, the Air France crew was still held hostage, having refused the freedom their captors offered...
...When such things happened in friendly countries, such as West Germany (during the Munich Olympics) our demand was that those countries go in and free the hostages by force...
...The Prime Minister had spent a considerable part of his day in conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski, maintaining the facade that nothing unusual was in the offing...
...Hours later, July Fourth and independence had a new and contemporary meaning...
...On that day, he said, an official of the Israeli Embassy staff in Washington was summoned to State and asked what was being planned...
...Rabin explained his deliberations in some detail: "When Palestinian terrorists took hostages in Israel, in Ma'alot, and in other places, we did not give in...
...My own strong impression, based on extensive conversations in both Israel and the United States, is that neither Kissinger nor the C.I.A...
...And, if so, would such an option exist for tomorrow, for Thursday...
...Days later, I asked Prime Minister Rabin why the Israeli government had decided to give in and to negotiate with the terrorists and why he had later changed his mind, and the Government's...
...camp was, of course, empty...
...He told Dinitz, "You know, all day Saturday we were getting bits and pieces of information at the State Department...
...If," he said, "the operation is successful, that in itself will be the best message to President Ford...
...But Rabin rejected it as premature...
...It is a blunt and desperate consequence of Israel's situation, a consequence brought sharply home by the surprise of Yom Kippur, 1973...
...But the Israeli official could not reply...
...But when such a thing happens in Uganda, when our hostages are transferred to a hostile country, then we have a new situation...
...Only a military capability honed to the sharpest possible edge could pull off so exacting and diverse a set of tasks in so short a space of time...
...In Washington last month, a high State Department official told me, "We felt that something was going to happen, that Israel was preparing something, on Friday, the second of July...
...He gasped, and asked for details...
...Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres knew that the slightest leakage of the plans might well endanger the lives of both the commandos and the hostages, turning Entebbe into a terrible trap...
...On Thursday, faced with the need to decide, there was no option except to negotiate...
...The parachutist officers and the airmen supplied the answers to Rabin's questions, and the answers were detailed and promising...
...Just as Israel squeezed the last drop of secrecy out of its plans, so does it squeeze the last drop of capability out of its commandos, pilots, even its equipment...
...That is why Brigadier General Dan Shomron, the 38-year-old commander of Israel's paratroopers, could tell me when I met him just four days before the raid, calmly, even shyly, "We are capable of operating everywhere, we can reach anywhere...
...This state of preparedness has nothing to do with heroism...
...Uri Dan, a contributor to the book, Ninety Minutes at Entebbe, is a military and foreign correspondent for Ma'ariv...
...He knew nothing at all...
...Pursuit of a military option was intensified when the terrorists' intentions became apparent...
...James Schlesinger, former American Secretary of Defense, told me quite bluntly: "The United States Armed Forces are not capable of carrying out such an operation...
...Dinitz was taken completely by surprise...
...That is why the terrorists insisted that the prisoner exchange take place at Entebbe, under their auspices and Amin's...
...In that elliptical manner, Kissinger evidently sought to communicate both the effectiveness of intelligence and his own endorsement of the operaT tion...
...The central fear was not of leakage to the Americans, but of leakage to the French...
...We operated, even though the price was high...
...Rabin's proposal that the exchange be conducted in a neutral country, such as France, or even in a Moslem country such as Tunisia, was categorically rejected...
...Gur checked immediately, and passed back a note indicating that the son was scheduled to participate...
...And I decided that we would reach a judgment on the operation the next day, Saturday, once these questions were answered...
...Major General (Res...
...Forget about it...
...Dinitz notified his close friend, Henry Kissinger, who responded with manifest satisfaction, "I expected that Israel would act...
...In the next 24 hours, Jerusalem was to learn that the terrorists had no intention of liberating the hostages, even after Israel had delivered its prisoners, that instead they had in mind a blackmail plan with several phases, beginning with a five million dollar payment, and including a per capita payment to Idi Amin for each freed hostage...
...It is Israel's situation of constant emergency that explains how the Israeli army could conceive and execute a plan of such complexity as Entebbe within two or three days...
...Sadness, and profound frustration...
...But one aspect—in mans ways, the most intriguing—does not suffer such restriction...
...But when I was consulted, I told my people to brush them aside...
...The minister had a son in the commando forces, and he wanted to know if his son had been chosen to participate...
...His answer: "I asked the Chief of Staff on Wednesday night whether there was a military option, some way for us to liberate the hostages from Uganda...
...State had heard that Israeli military cargo planes were being painted with El Al colors at Ben Gurion airport, and their curiosity was, of course, aroused...
...Do you mean to tell me that there is logic in handing saboteurs back to the Arabs in exchange for dead bodies and refusing to hand them back when it comes to liberating living people...
...The French, after all, had special interests in Africa, and were, of course, directly involved in the drama of the hijacked Air France plane...
...We had met at the wedding of a mutual friend, all of us happy to have an excuse for joy in a week of such sadness...
...Here, indeed, the slogan "no alternative" has meaning...
...When the United States sent a Special Forces team to raid a P.O.W...
...And when they finally arrived, the P.O.W...
...The minister was the last to speak in the debate...
...social and human need paves the way...
...he merely surmised that a military option was under consideration...
...But he was told that he would not know any more for another hour or so...
...But it is not our decision...
...The Government appeared to be on the verge of accepting most of the terrorists' demands, and there stood Dan Shomron, the premier parachutist officer in Israel, quietly asserting that his men "can reach anywhere...
...The Eran suggestion was straightforward, intended to avoid American pique at being taken by surprise...
...He asked every minister to express his view...
...The difference in doctrine and in operations between Israel and the United States is a difference born of necessity...
...But it is precisely Israeli military thinking that accounts for the success of Entebbe...
...Thai is the story of how Israel kept the rescue plan a secret...
...But negotiations with terrorists have their own dynamic...
...That night—Friday night— Amos Eran, Director General of the Prime Minister's office, who had served with Rabin in Washington, went to Rabin to suggest that President Ford be informed of the plan...
...And if we fail, no message will be strong enough to repair the damage...
...he vehemently endorsed the operation...
...Dan, who, four nights later, was to be the commander of ground operations at Entebbe, did not know when I spoke with him of the role he would have...
...It was not until 24 hours later, when the commandos had already landed at Entebbe, that Rabin instructed Eran to phone Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz, via a special line to Washington, and to instruct him to advise the White House that a special operation was under way...
...Indeed, the Israeli government itself had not yet taken the final decision and almost no one in Israel outside the most limited circles had any inkling that a major operation was being planned...
...Knowing that Rabin had just come through an exceedingly stressful week, he thought to take the initiative with his proposal...
...This time, Kissinger was somewhat more composed...
...And then, emphatically, "Did we not liberate spies and terrorists after the Yom Kippur War, following Egyptian demands, in order to get back the bodies of our dead soldiers...
...The answer was negative...
...Motti Hod, the former chief of the Israeli Air Force, expressed much the same view, when I talked with him immediately after the operation: "There are very few pilots in the world who are capable of operating the way the Israeli pilots did at Entebbe...
...I asked whether the first Hercules could land without being detected, and I asked how long it could take the commandos to get from the Hercules to the terminal, and I asked whether the terminal building was really mined, as Amin had claimed, and I asked how sure we could be that this would not prove a one-way trip...
...it's up to the Government...
...The Hercules pilots are trained day and night to get the maximum results from their planes, and the parachutists hover on the edge of collapse from the rigor of their training...
...camp in North Vietnam, it was only after three and a half months of training at a specially constructed model in Alabama...
...No military vanity here...
...It is too remote from their operational concept and their military thinking...
...Eran had no certain knowledge...
...But had Kissinger really had foreknowledge...
...So Rabin and the Government were ready for the exchange, had reconciled themselves to it...
...The word 'Hercules' was mentioned strongly for the first time only on Friday night," Rabin told me...
...Perhaps the American pilots are as capable, but there is really no chance that the Americans would ever carry out such an operation...
...So when Rabin convened the Government at noon on Saturday, a military option did exist...
...With the planes already in the air, the Government endorsed the plan unanimously...
...That is the doctrine of Israel's armed forces: to prepare for operations "on the margin" of the impossible, at the extreme outer limits of noncon-ventional warfare...
...His words were both a compliment to Israel and an expression of disappointment at the state of America's special forces...

Vol. 2 • December 1976 • No. 3


 
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