Israeli commandos narrate Entebbe raid
Jul 05, 2020
Fresh details have emerged showing how Mossad, the Israel intelligence agency, played a key role in the raid on Entebbe 44 years ago.

Today marks 44 years since Israeli commandos raided Entebbe airport and rescued 102 hostages. Code-named Operation Thunderbolt, the night raid involved 240 Israeli commandos and lasted 90 minutes. Rami Sherman, 67, who was the operations officer of the commandos, narrated their experience in an online interaction.
Fresh details have emerged showing how Mossad, the Israel intelligence agency, played a key role in the raid on Entebbe 44 years ago.
Speaking at an international briefing on Wednesday ahead of the July 4 anniversary marking the day Israeli commandos attacked Entebbe, Avener Avraham and Rami Sherman, who participated in the raid, revealed how Mossad provided the final information that motivated the government to endorse the audacious operation.
In the briefing held online with participants from across the world, the two said a Mossad agent flew a light plane from Nairobi on July 2, 1976, which hovered over Entebbe airport taking photos in broad daylight. The plane returned to Nairobi without raising any suspicion.
When the photos were provided to the Israeli cabinet, they were convinced the defence forces had gathered sufficient information. Mossad had earlier during the planning of the raid got maps of Entebbe airport from a construction firm that had worked on the airport before President Idi Amin severed ties with Israeli.
The two also revealed how Mossad worked with its operative, Bruce McKenzi, who was Kenya's agriculture minister. McKenzi ensured that planes would refuel in Nairobi after the raid on Entebbe.
THE GENESIS
The hijack of the plane on June 27, 1976 sent shock waves across the world. Over 240 passengers aboard and the entire crew found themselves at Entebbe airport after refuelling in Benghazi, Libya. For their release, hijackers demanded the freeing of 40 Palestinian militants held in Israel and 13 others detained in Kenya, France, Switzerland and West Germany.
RESCUE PLAN
Sherman revealed that the rescue operation was delayed by a cabinet endorsement. The then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin and his cabinet feared that if it failed, they would be compelled to resign. The terrorists would have won on two fronts; failure of the rescue and Israeli government dissolution.
The commandos decided not to wait for cabinet endorsement. On July 3, the commander of the Israeli elite commandos, Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of the current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered his over 200 soldiers into the C-130 Hercules transport planes for the operation.

THE SLEEP PROBLEM
According to Sherman, 240 commandos were involved.
"We were flying at 30 metres below sea level and it is not easy to fly at that level," he narrated.
An earlier article published in New Vision on June 27, 2015, indicates that the planes took different paths and later converged over the Red Sea. They then flew at a low altitude to avoid detection by Egyptian, Sudanese and Saudi Arabian air defences. They then turned south to fly over Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia.
According to Netanyahu's posthumous publication, The Letter of Jonathan Netanyahu, published in The New Vision's June 27, 2015 article, the lead pilot of the operation, Lt Col. Joshua Shani, narrated that the lead plane was crowded. It carried the assault force and three vehicles.
"I looked back and saw Netanyahu sleeping (in the lead pilot's) bed," Shani said in the article. "Under normal conditions, if some battalion commander is resting there, I tell him politely but firmly to go rest in the rear of the plane. This time I could not bring myself to do it, because my theory was that the chances of the first group that would storm that building (Entebbe) to stay alive were 50-50."
RISKY MISSION
However, for Sherman, the flight was noisy.
"There were no toilets, no windows. The flight was bumpy. We flew through a tropical storm for three hours before landing at Entebbe. Some soldiers vomited. We refuelled all planes and we would refuel in Nairobi after the operation," he said.
Sherman said the chief of staff had warned them that the operation was too risky.
"He said it could turn into what you see in the James Bond movies; when several Americans tried it they died as they tried to invade Cuba in 1962. But the defence minister could not hear any of it. He insisted we had to defend every Jew in the world," Sherman said.
They landed at Entebbe at around 1:00am on June 4, 1976. They were dressed in Ugandan military uniform to deceive the staff and guards on duty.
"This was a standard drill in the Ugandan army. I knew this because I had instructed the force," Betser, who worked as a military instructor in Uganda before the raid, said.
He added: "I told Netanyahu not to shoot the soldiers outright, but he went on and shot them with his silenced gun. One of them did not die immediately. He reached for his gun, prompting one of our commandos to shoot him with his AK-47. That broke our cover.
After this, Netanyahu ordered us to storm the terminal where the hostages were being held."

The hostages were afraid of us. We ordered them to jump into the Jeep. In 52 minutes of the attack, the first plane was taking off," Sherman explained.
THE OPERATION LASTED 90 MINUTES
Sherman explained that 11 Ugandan MIG fighter jets at the airport were destroyed for fear that they would be used to follow and shoot down the rescuers.
"When we arrived in Israel, the airport was crowded. Many people wanted to be part of the historic moment. The hostages walked to a new life, new hope," he said.
Netanyahu was not the only Israeli who perished in the rescue. Others are Dora Bloch, Jean-Jacques Mimouni, Ida Borochovitch and Pascal Cohen.
CAN SUCH OPERATION SUCCEED TODAY?
The ‘Raid on Entebbe' is dubbed as one of the most successful military hostage rescue operations of all time. But whether it was because of Israeli astuteness or Uganda's weakness at the time, it calls for a question of whether it can happen again today.
"This operation was based mainly on intelligence and covertness rather than the amount of weaponry that each army had," says a serving Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) officer, who asked for anonymity.
Had Isaac Maliyamungu taken the intelligence reports about the attack seriously, the Israelis would have found a totally different battle game. Col. Gad Wilson Toko, who was in Nairobi, had been told by a friend in the Kenyan government about the plan and he informed Maliyamungu. Maj. Gen. Isaac Lumago, who was Amin's ambassador to Lesotho, had also passed on the information.
Maliyamungu was the defacto president of Uganda at the time because Amin and his deputy, Mustafa Adrisi, were away, and had just returned from the OAU summit in Mauritius.
"If these intelligence reports had been taken seriously, the Israelis would have found the Uganda army on ‘red alert'," says UPDF officer.
Amin's army had the weapons to resist the attackers. For starters, there were at least 30 fighter jets on tarmac at the airport. They included MIG17s and MIG21s. At that time, these were fairly new planes — the equivalent of the SU-30s that the UPDF has today.
With ‘high value' hostages at the airport, any security conscious army should have had at least a pair constantly patrolling the skies of the country. These planes were operated by experts, mainly Russians. Since the Israelis did not bring any fighter jets, the MIGs should have done the job against the defenceless C-130 Hercules planes that carried the troops and the Boeing 707s that carried the hostages.
The army also had 267 T-55 tanks and APCs. Even on the day of the attack, six tanks were stationed around the airport perimeters. They should have given the invading Israelis a real fight.
Amin had also just acquired several Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs), through Libya. These should have attacked the planes as they flew back. The Uganda Army was 21,000-strong. Most of these soldiers were deployed in striking distance of the airport, including at Malire in Lubiri.
The UPDF officer concludes: "These days we are a professional force that takes any threat, based on intelligence, seriously so I know we would have deployed heavily at the airport in anticipation of a raid. Certainly, they would not have come."
Additional reporting by Joshua Kato