No Mission Is Impossible (5 page)

The military vehicles and units drove back into the Rhinos. The soldiers of Lieutenant Omer Bar-Lev, son of a former chief of staff, blew up the eight MiG jets stationed at the airport to prevent them from chasing and attacking the much slower Rhinos on their way home.

At 11:51 P.M. the radio message everyone in Tel Aviv was praying for
finally came—“Mount Carmel.” It meant the end of the evacuation. The operation was completed and all the planes had taken off.

“The heart jumps with joy,” Shimon Peres wrote jubilantly in his diary.

After the planes took off from Entebbe, Peres instructed Borka Bar-Lev, Idi Amin's former friend, to call Amin from Tel Aviv. Perhaps the Ugandan dictator had now returned from Mauritius, Peres thought. To Borka's surprise, Amin himself picked up the phone. He had returned a bit earlier to Kampala.

Borka spoke to him using a well-rehearsed scenario, one intended to create the impression that Amin had been secretly involved in the rescue; that might ignite a conflict between him and the terrorists he had so eagerly assisted. The phone conversation was recorded by the IDF.

“I called to thank you, Mr. President, for what you did!”

“Yes,” Amin said, “I advise you to accept my friends' demands.”

Borka was taken aback. “I want to thank you for what you did for the hostages.”

“Yes, yes,” was Amin's response. “You should negotiate with my friends and make the exchange with them. The hostages will be released, and so would the prisoners.”

This dialogue continued for a few minutes, until Borka understood: Amin did not know that the hostages had been liberated! He was sitting in his palace, discussing the ultimatum and upcoming negotiations, completely ignorant of the fact that the Israelis had been to Entebbe, freed the hostages and taken off. None of his officers had dared to inform him that a few miles from his palace a firefight had taken place, the terrorists were dead and the Israeli hostages were on their way back home!

“Thank you, sir,” Borka mumbled and hung up, dismayed.

All the aircraft landed safely in Nairobi. The IDF medical team treated the wounded as the Rhinos refueled. Shortly afterward, the planes took off and headed for Israel.

Very few of the liberated hostages slept during the long journey. They were too excited by this extraordinary experience. When the IDF
spokesman published a short communiqué about the mission, “IDF forces tonight rescued the hostages from Entebbe airport, including the Air France crew,” an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm and rejoicing swept the country.

An elated outburst shook the IDF general staff when Motta Gur informed his officers of the mission's success. He also made a speech, saying, “I cannot sum up the operation even in this early stage without stressing the drive and the influence on its execution that were centered in one man . . . who pressed on and pushed in every direction, both up and down, for the operation. And this is the defense minister, who deserves all the credit.”

In the prime minister's office, Rabin and Peres exchanged excited greetings with Knesset members Begin and Elimelech Rimalt and Yitzhak Navon, chairman of the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee. Rabin briefed the president and Golda Meir, while Peres woke up his wife, Sonia. The fantastic news spread throughout the world, and messages of amazement and admiration poured in from all over.

But then, in the wee hours all this joy was painfully interrupted. Gur came to the defense minister's office. Shimon Peres was lying on his narrow couch, trying to get some sleep.

“Shimon, Yoni is dead,” Gur said. “He was hit by a bullet in the back. Apparently he was shot from the old control tower. The bullet pierced his heart.”

Peres, devastated, burst into tears.

T
he following day, the Fourth of July, 1976 (the two-hundredth anniversary of the United States), the rescue planes landed in Israel and were received by a festive, flag-waving crowd. The operation became legendary in Israel and in the outside world. Flowery articles, books, TV shows and movies hailed the glory of the IDF soldiers. Foreign nations regarded the operation as a symbol of courage, dedication and impressive military capability.

All the terrorists who had participated in the hijacking and the imprisonment
in Entebbe had been killed, with the exception of Wadie Haddad, head of the Popular Front, who had left Entebbe before the IDF raid. Knowing he was now in the crosshairs of the Israelis, he found refuge in Baghdad, hoping he would be protected there. It took nearly two years for the Mossad to reach him. Israeli agents discovered Haddad's weakness: he adored fine Belgian chocolate. The Mossad laced a box of mouth-watering Godivas with an untraceable poison and recruited one of Haddad's trusted lieutenants, who brought him the deadly box. Haddad gobbled down the chocolates, all by himself. A few weeks later, the ailing arch-terrorist was urgently flown, in critical condition, to an East German clinic, where he died in March 1978.

That same year, Idi Amin's regime collapsed following a war he instigated against neighboring Tanzania. Amin escaped to Libya and later to Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death in 2003.

T
he IDF mission in Entebbe had been an astounding success. And yet, Yoni Netanyahu's death left a dark shadow over the popular rejoicing. The IDF changed the name of Operation Thunderball to Operation Yonatan. Peres eulogized Yoni at his funeral:

“What burdens didn't we load on Yoni and his comrades' shoulders? The most dangerous of the IDF's tasks and the most daring of its operations; the missions that were the farthest from home and the closest to the enemy; the darkness of night and the solitude of the fighter; the taking of risks, over and over again, in times of peace and in times of war. There are times when the nation's fate depends on a handful of volunteers. . . . Yonatan was a commander of valor. He overcame his enemies by his courage. He conquered his friends' hearts by the wisdom of his heart. He didn't fear danger and victories didn't make him vain. By falling he caused an entire nation to raise her head high.”

Shimon Peres quoted King David's biblical verses mourning his friend Jonathan: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me; thy love to me was wonderful” (2 Samuel 1:26).

   
SHIMON PERES, LATER ISRAEL'S NINTH PRESIDENT

          
“From the first moment I was determined not to yield to the terrorists. We had to find a way to liberate the hostages. I had the support of a fine group of generals—Shomron, Adam, Peled, Gazit and their close colleagues. At the beginning our plans were vague. We perfected and honed the project hour by hour. But I felt I was completely alone in that matter.

              
“The prime minister was ready to exchange the jailed terrorists for the hostages. Most of the cabinet thought like him. Even Menachem Begin, the bold activist, agreed with him. Motta Gur, the IDF chief of staff, ridiculed my little group, compared our plans to James Bond stories and called us the ‘Fantasy Council.' I knew that even if I had a good plan, I couldn't get it approved by the cabinet over the objection of the chief of staff and the reluctance of the prime minister. I decided to try obtaining the support of some cabinet ministers. I went to Hayim Tzadok, the minister of justice, a strong supporter of Prime Minister Rabin, but also a very wise and objective man. In utmost secrecy I revealed the plan to him. ‘An excellent plan,' he said, ‘I'll support it at the cabinet.'

              
“I got another encouragement from my friend Moshe Dayan, the former defense minister. I found Moshe in the Tel Aviv Capricio restaurant, in the company of Australian guests. I admired Dayan and valued his opinion. We ordered two glasses of wine and moved to a nearby table. I told Dayan about the plan. I remember how his eye sparkled. ‘That's a great plan,' he said, ‘and I support it a hundred percent.'

              
“But Motta Gur kept refusing to endorse the project. Only at the very last moment, on Friday morning, I brought him a new and detailed intelligence report about Entebbe, the hostages and the terrorists guarding them. This report made Motta change his mind. He became a staunch supporter of the mission.

              
“Now, at last, we could go to Rabin and ask for his support.”

   
TAMIR PARDO, SAYERET MATKAL'S COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER, LATER HEAD OF THE MOSSAD

              
“There were many heroes in this mission. Everybody who took part in this operation—in every category—deserves a place in the Entebbe pantheon. The mission was well prepared but the guy who planned the air force part deserves special appreciation. To fly four Hercules aircraft to the heart of Africa; to land those without being detected; to discharge the forces without being fired at, even one shot; and to get them back after the rescue of the hostages—this is an act deserving our praise. Ido Ambar, who was a colonel in the IAF and head of the planning team, deserves special honors. True, military orders are always signed by generals and senior commanders, while the men who worked day and night, and brought to the task so much talent and creativity, remain sometimes in the shadows.

              
“We, the takeover force, had trained well, and each and every one of us knew exactly what his place was and what his role in the operation was. During the long flight all I did was try to sleep and to not throw up because of the violent shaking and jumping of the planes that flew at different altitudes and chose different paths.

              
“I was a twenty-three-year-old captain. In the assault of the Old Terminal I was in the first Land Rover, the jeep that moved ahead of the Mercedes. When our attack started I was beside Yoni. He was about a yard away from me when he was killed. In front of us stood a Ugandan soldier and he kept firing at us. I killed him. I think he was the one who shot Yoni, but there is another version—that Yoni was killed by a soldier firing from the old control tower or by a terrorist.

              
“I had a lot of esteem for Yoni as a commander. I saw him in action, and he had a very important part in the success of the Entebbe mission. When he fell, I bent over him and saw that he was seriously wounded. I alerted the doctor at once and
radioed Muki Betzer, his deputy, to assume command. Later I joined Giora Zussman's detail, and together we entered the Old Terminal. The operation itself took barely a few minutes.

              
“The following day we came back to Israel with the hostages. I was sent to Jerusalem, to the home of the Netanyahu family, to tell them about Yoni's last moments. That was a painful task.”

On May 14, 1948, the British Army and administration leave Palestine after thirty years of British rule. That same afternoon Israel's independence is proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The United Nations, by a vote taken six months before, on November 29, 1947, has decided to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, but the Arabs reject partition. The local Palestinian Arabs and the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, as well as units of Arab volunteers from all over the Middle East, set out to invade and destroy the Jewish State. David Ben-Gurion is elected prime minister and minister of defense. The acting chief of staff is Yigael Yadin, a future world-renowned archaeologist.

O
n May 24, 1948, while Israel's Independence War was raging, David Ben-Gurion summoned Yigael Yadin. He approached the map of Palestine, hanging on the wall in his office, and pointed at a crossroads marked “Latrun.”

“Attack! Attack at all costs!” he forcefully said.

Yadin refused.

Ben-Gurion, “the Old Man,” was sixty-two years old, a stocky Polish-born man with a defiant face, a jutting chin, piercing brown eyes—all this crowned with two tufts of snow-white hair hovering like wings over his temples. Yigael Yadin was half his age—a thin young man, balding and with a luxuriant mustache. Before the war he had studied at Hebrew University, following in the footsteps of his father, a noted archaeologist.

Ben-Gurion was haunted by the situation in Jerusalem. The Jewish part of the city was under siege, surrounded by the Arab Legion—Jordan's first-rate army. Starved, thirsty, its defenders and weapons insufficient, Jerusalem was in immediate danger of collapsing.
Ben-Gurion believed that if Jerusalem fell, the newborn Jewish State wouldn't survive. The fortress of Latrun, near a Trappist monastery, controlled the road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem; it had been occupied by elite units of the Arab Legion. To break the siege, Latrun had to be conquered.

But Yadin had other priorities. The Arab armies had penetrated deep into Israeli territory. The Syrians had reached the Jordan Valley; the Iraqis were close to the Mediterranean coast, threatening to cut the country in two; and the Egyptian expeditionary force had set up camp on the shore of the Lakhish River, thirty-five kilometers from Tel Aviv. Yadin believed he had to stop the Egyptians first.

Latrun, Ben-Gurion repeated, had to be taken. Nothing else mattered as much. A heated exchange erupted between the two, and Yadin angrily slammed his hands on the glass plate covering Ben-Gurion's desk, breaking it. But the Old Man wouldn't budge. While respecting Yadin and even admiring his fiery character, he stuck to his guns. Yadin finally gave in, and in a telegram to the commander of the Seventh Brigade repeated Ben-Gurion's order: “Attack at all costs!”

Wave after wave of Israeli soldiers stormed the Latrun fortress over the next weeks; time after time their attacks ended in failure. Hundreds of Israelis were killed and wounded, but the Arab Legion repelled all the attacks. In the meantime UN envoys were feverishly trying to broker a temporary cease-fire between Jews and Arabs. Ben-Gurion knew that the cease-fire agreement would “freeze” the situation on the different fronts. This meant that if the cease-fire was achieved while Jerusalem was still under siege, that fact would be finalized in the UN reports, and Israel wouldn't be allowed to supply Jerusalem with reinforcements and weapons. The Holy City would fall, and Israel with it.

While Latrun fortress still blocked the road, Aryeh Tepper, a platoon commander in the Harel Brigade, which was fighting near Jerusalem, reported to the brigade commander, a young officer named Yitzhak Rabin. He asked permission to try to reach—by foot—the coastal plain. His brother had fallen in battle, Tepper said, and he wanted to visit his bereaved mother. Rabin not only approved the request but ordered three
more soldiers to join Tepper. At nightfall, the four men made their way down steep slopes and tortuous arroyos, quietly slipped by an enemy patrol and finally reached kibbutz Hulda in the plain.

The kibbutz members were stunned. It turned out that following some recent battles the Israeli forces had gained control over a strip of land between Hulda and the approaches to Jerusalem, west of Latrun and concealed from the enemy's eyes by a mountain ridge. This discovery was almost unbelievable: there might be a chance to develop an alternative road to Jerusalem that would bypass the deadly Latrun fortress.

A few days later, 150 soldiers reached Jerusalem by the new route; they were the first reinforcements to Rabin's Harel Brigade. Yet the IDF did not need a footpath but a real road for the transport of weapons to the besieged city. The front commander, General David Marcus, decided to try reaching Jerusalem from the plain by jeep. Marcus, tall, jovial and smart, was an American colonel, a Brooklyn boy who had graduated from West Point and law school. He had volunteered for the U.S. Army during World War Two and parachuted over occupied Normandy on D Day with the 101st Airborne Division. He became a Zionist after witnessing the horrors of the German death camps. The Jewish people, he thought, while preparing legal briefs for the Nuremberg trials, must have a homeland. As a volunteer again, he had come to fight in Israel's Independence War under the pseudonym Mickey Stone and had been appointed by Ben-Gurion as the first Israeli general. Now a senior officer in the IDF, he shared Ben-Gurion's thoughts about the importance of saving Jerusalem.

One night he set out from the plain on a jeep with two Harel officers, Gavrush Rapoport from kibbutz Beit Alfa and Amos Horev, a future general. The jeep slowly advanced through the gullies and up the hills, and the three officers discovered a route connecting with the Deer Path, a steep, sinuous trail that led to the Jerusalem road, far beyond the reach of Latrun fortress. Horev and Gavrush repeated their trip the following night, and after an exhausting three-hour drive suddenly bumped into another jeep that came from Jerusalem, carrying two other Harel officers.
They joyfully hugged their comrades; they had proved that it was possible to reach Jerusalem from the plain by jeep!

After several failures and mishaps, jeeps started moving along the new trail and even brought heavy mortars to Jerusalem. To shorten the process, the jeeps would bring their load to a rendezvous point with trucks coming from Jerusalem and transfer the food and the equipment. On their way back the jeeps brought wounded soldiers and civilians from Jerusalem to the plain. But it soon became clear that the jeeps could not transport enough food to the Jerusalem civilian population, which suffered from acute hunger. The city military governor, Dov (Bernard) Joseph, dispatched desperate requests for food, water and fuel.

The engineering department of the Seventh Brigade, using all the heavy equipment it could find, started to build a real road, where trucks could pass, but the Achilles' heel of that enterprise was the sheer Beth Sussin slope, where a four-hundred-foot abrupt drop separated two road portions.

At Ben-Gurion's order hundreds of porters were mobilized—some of them from Tel Aviv and some—about two hundred—volunteers from Jerusalem, who each carried a load of twenty kilograms of flour, sugar and other vital products; night after night they climbed the steep slopes and brought the food to Jerusalem. The army also tried to use some mules and three camels, but those were not very helpful.

Time was running out, and Ben-Gurion ordered an all-out engineering offensive against the treacherous Beth Sussin slope. Every piece of equipment that could be found in Israel—bulldozers, tractors, compressors—was brought to the site. Israel's major construction company, Solel Boneh, sent over its best engineers and workers. Expert stonecutters from Jerusalem were also mobilized, and the roadwork continued day and night. The feverish road paving was not only a technical endeavor but also a heroic operation: hundreds of soldiers and volunteers carried heavy loads on their backs, climbed the slopes, pushed or towed trucks and equipment. Jerusalem's chief rabbi, Yitzhak HaLevi
Herzog, authorized work on the road on the Sabbath and even called it “a great mitzvah [a good deed].”

Nevertheless, the only way to vanquish the steep hill rising over the heads of the workers was to quarry into the rock a succession of serpentines—snakelike paths that would enable the trucks to reach the top.

Suddenly, one night, explosions rocked the Jerusalem Hills, and a murderous shelling swept the new road site. The Arab Legion had detected the feverish activity close to its positions; it ignored what the Israelis were doing there, but started an intense bombardment of the area. The legion batteries relentlessly shelled the site and fired on the IDF soldiers and volunteers, who suffered heavy losses. Egyptian Spitfire planes also strafed and bombed the area several times.

Yet the work continued in a race against the clock. In a few days the UN would announce a temporary truce that would freeze all activities on the ground. Building or paving roads was forbidden as long as the truce was in effect. If the road to Jerusalem was not open, the city would remain besieged for the duration of the truce and probably would collapse even before the fighting resumed. If Israel wanted to continue supplying Jerusalem during the truce, it had first to prove to the United Nations that there was a road to Jerusalem entirely controlled by the IDF.

Forty-eight hours before the cease-fire, the road workers were stunned to see a group of foreign correspondents visiting their construction site. They had been led to the new road by Israeli press officers. Unwittingly, the journalists became of tremendous help to Israel. Their reports in the world press that Israel had secretly built an alternative road to Jerusalem were proof that the city was not under siege anymore.

The
New York Herald Tribune
star reporter Kenneth Bilby called the new road Burma Road, after the highway built in the years 1937 to 1938 between Burma and China that provided supplies to the Chinese Army in spite of the Japanese blockade.

The Israeli Burma Road was completed on the night before the truce began, on June 11, 1948. The work, however, quietly continued till July
14, when the UN observers visited the site and saw the Israeli trucks climbing all the way to Jerusalem. Later, when the Burma Road was paved and officially inaugurated, it was renamed the Road of Valor.

The Burma Road being built behind the back of the Jordanian Legion.

Hans Pinn, GPO (Israel's Government Press Office)

David Marcus, who had contributed so much to the Road of Valor, did not live to see it completed. Unable to sleep on the night before the truce began, he wrapped himself in a sheet and took a walk beyond the perimeter of his advanced command post. A sentry mistook the white-robed figure for an enemy. He shouted at the man in white, asking for that night's password. Marcus failed to identify himself with the password, and the sentry fired at him, one single shot. Marcus collapsed, fatally wounded. His coffin was flown to the U.S. and buried with full military honors. A little-known IDF officer, his left eye covered with a black patch, escorted Marcus's coffin to New York. He was named Major Moshe Dayan.

Years later, Marcus's story would be made into a film,
Cast a Giant Shadow.

A few hours before the truce began, the trucks rolled on Burma Road, and Jerusalem was saved.

   
YITZHAK NAVON, LATER ISRAEL'S FIFTH PRESIDENT

          
“During the siege of Jerusalem, I was the head of Intelligence's Arabic division. With the outbreak of war, we could no longer use Arab agents and had to rely mainly on monitoring our enemies' phone conversations. Thus, for example, when our fighters—among them future generals Dado Elazar and Raful Eitan—were about to retreat from the San Simon Monastery, in the Katamon neighborhood, we overheard a transmission from the Arab commander announcing that his soldiers were exhausted and he had decided to withdraw. As a result, we took control of Katamon. A similar thing happened to us at Allenby Camp. By contrast, when we picked up a discussion about a plan to set a trap for the Bloc Etzion relief convoy (the Bloc is a cluster of Jewish settlements south of Jerusalem), we passed it on to the military staff; but they didn't take us into account, and the convoy departed. On its way back, it was attacked by the Arabs at Nebi Daniel, with lethal consequences. I then resigned my position—what's the use of intelligence if it isn't exploited?—but they convinced me to stay.

              
“There was great hardship during the siege. The governor of Jerusalem, Dov Joseph, informed the government that the city's entire stock was five days' margarine, four days' noodles and ten days' dried meat. He introduced rationing—two hundred grams of bread per day for adults (plus an egg for children), fifty grams of margarine per week, one tin of sardines every other week, one hundred grams of legumes, fifty grams of sugar and fifty grams of rice. We also ate mallow (malva), which I would pick
in a field, and we made soup from grass. Water was distributed in measuring cups.