At exactly 11pm on the night of July 3, 1976, the 100 Israeli’s flying over Lake Victoria landed at Entebbe. Members of the assault team headed straight for the terminal building where the hostages were kept. ILLUSTRATION BY COSMAS ARINITWE
Tomorrow will be exactly 40 years since a team of Israeli commandos stormed Entebbe airport in a 90-minute rescue operation to release Jewish passengers taken hostage aboard Air France.
Uganda, which had fallen out with Israel and turned their former embassy building in Uganda into a Palestine Liberation Organisation office, was quick to give the hijackers affiliated to the Palestinian group permission to land the plane at Entebbe. Uganda went ahead to take part in negotiations for the hijacker’s demands.
The eight-day ordeal started on June 27, 1976, when Air France flight 139 Air bus A300B4-2013 registration F-BVGG, left the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv for Paris.
On board were 246 passengers with 12 crew members. It first landed in Athens, picking more passengers, among them were the four hijackers. They were two Palestinians and two Germans. Wilfred Bose and Brigitte Kuhlmann, the Germans, were members of the Germany Revolutionary Cells.
In his book By Way of Deception, Victor Otrovsky, a former Mossad agent, says Bose was involved in the Munich Olympics attack. The hijackers wanted to use the hostages as a bait to have the Israel government release 40 Palestinians in its jails and 13 others in other countries.
From Athens, instead of heading to Paris, the plane was commandeered to Entebbe with a stopover at Benghazi in Libya for refuelling.
At Entebbe airport, fearing that the plane may be blown, they moved all the hostages to unused building where they separated the Jewish people from the non-Jews. On 29 June, 1976, the hostages were separated according to nationality. All Israelis and those holding dual citizenship were kept away from other nationalities.
The following day, 48 hostages among the non-Israelis were released, majority of them were old women, children and the sick. On July 1, 1976, after agreeing on the extension of the deadline given to the Israeli government, the hijackers released another 100 hostages.
However, as the negotiations for the release of the hostages were going on in the background, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, was working around the clock to provide information to the military to plan and launch a rescue operation, which included a possible military showdown with the Ugandan army.
Plan of attack
Planning for the rescue took a week on two fronts. There was a political and a military solution. In the end, the military rescue operation took the day. The military solution was boosted by a number of factors, among them the presence of a ‘Vacuamer’ (Mossad’s term for a person who provides detailed information on a target).
This was a lady based in Masaka District for some time working incognito. The other, Gen Baruch Bar-Lev, a retired Israel Defence Force (IDF) officer who patronised with the top brass in the political and military ranks in Uganda and is also alleged to have had a hand in the 1971 coup that brought Amin to power.
Also important to the Mossad was one of Israel’s big construction companies which had constructed the airport tower and the terminal building where the hostages were being held.
The hijackers gave the Israel government up to July 1, 1976, to either meet their demands or the hostages were to be killed. However, as the day approached an extension was agreed up to July 4 for the demands of the release of all prisoners and a $5 million ransom by both parties.
On July 3, Maj Gen Yekutiel Adam presented to the Israeli cabinet a military rescue operation codenamed “Operation Thunderbolt”, later renamed “Operation Jonathan” in memory of one of the commanders who died during the operation. The plan was approved immediately and Brig Gen Dan Shomron was appointed as the operation commander.
According to IDF declassified documents, the mission had a problem of refuelling the Lockheed C-130 Hercules planes to be used in the mission. IDF did not have the capacity to carry out air refuelling.
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