Operation Thunderbolt : Flight 139 and the raid on Entebbe Airport, the most audacious hostage rescue mission in history

416 Pages·2015·5.26 MB·English

by  David Saul

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For Stewart and Noreen.
And in memory of Bruce McKenzie and the five Israelis
who lost their lives as a result of Operation Thunderbolt:
Dora Bloch, Ida Borochovich, Pasco Cohen, Jean-
Jacques Mimouni and Yoni Netanyahu.
Country names and borders as they were at the time of the raid.
DAY 1: SUNDAY 27 JUNE 1976
0500hrs GMT, Lod, Israel
A
chaotic scene greeted Frenchman Michel Cojot and his twelve-year-old son
Olivier as they entered the ground-floor checkin area of Ben-Gurion
International Airport’s Terminal 1, an unsightly four-storey concrete and glass
construction that had replaced the original whitewashed terminal built by the
British in the 1930s. The flow of people reminded Cojot of an Oriental bazaar as
it ‘tried to make a path among the baggage carts, the pillars, and the barriers
under the watchful eyes of young women in khaki and young soldiers… the only
persons there who were not bustling about’.
A spate of recent terrorist attacks against Israel–including the infamous
massacre of twenty-six people, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto
Rico, by three pro-Palestinian members of the militant communist Japanese Red
Army at Ben-Gurion four years earlier–had left the country with the tightest
airport security in the world. Anyone who could not convince the officials that
he was harmless would have his alarm clock ‘dismantled, the heels of his shoes
probed, his camera opened, his can of shaving cream tested’. Despite the delay,
most were happy to cooperate because they ‘approved of the reasons for the
controls’.
In truth the stringent checks were the final straw for young Olivier Cojot.
His parents had recently separated and he had jumped at the chance to join his
management-consultant father on a week-long business trip to Israel, leaving his
mother and two younger siblings in France. He had hoped to bond with his
father and learn more about his Jewish heritage. But apart from a ‘pretty
interesting’ visit to a factory run by Negev Phosphates, the mining firm his
father was advising, he had spent much of his time alone and sweltering in a
Beersheba hotel and could not wait to get home.
Not that the temperature in France was any cooler. It, like the rest of
Western Europe, was wilting in a heatwave that would prove to be the hottest on
record. Olivier was just relieved that the queuing for the early-morning flight
was at a comparatively cool time of day. He found the lengthy security checks at
Ben-Gurion ‘a pain in the arse’ and the terminal’s lack of air-conditioning did
not help.
Finally reaching the Air France checkin desk, the Cojots were told their
flight to Paris would be making an unscheduled stopover at Athens. The Greek
capital’s international airport was well known for the laxity of its transit security,
and Olivier voiced his father’s fears when he piped up: ‘Hey Dad, if I were a
terrorist I would get on at the stopover.’
Such fears of a terrorist attack–more specifically a plane hijacking–were far
from unfounded. Since Israel’s victory over the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and
Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, various Palestinian and pro-Palestinian terror
groups had used plane hijackings as a means of forcing concessions out of Israel
and publicizing their cause to the world. Before the Six-Day War there had
typically been five hijackings annually. By 1969 this had risen to eighty-two
hijackings worldwide–the most in a single year–and, though the average had
since fallen, it was still more than three a month.
Only too aware of the recent spate of hijackings, Cojot inquired about a
direct flight to Paris on the Israeli airline El Al that, with its armed sky marshals,
‘seemed to offer better security’. But hearing the flight was full, and unwilling to
wait for another, he reluctantly returned to Air France, his concern only partly
assuaged by the knowledge that his frequent-flyer status meant he qualified for
‘service plus’.
Other travellers on Air France Flight 139 were just as alarmed by news of
the stopover. Ilan Hartuv, forty-nine, a short-sighted and rotund former Israeli
diplomat and now deputy director-general of a Jerusalem urban-regeneration
company, was accompanying his seventy-three-year-old mother Dora Bloch on
the first leg of her journey to New York for the wedding of his younger brother
Daniel. Hartuv planned to part from her in Paris where he would meet his
brother-in-law and their respective wives for a short holiday and, aware of the
threat from terrorists, he had specifically instructed his travel agent to book non-
stop tickets. So too had Sara Davidson, en route to the United States for a coast-
to-coast tour with her husband Uzi and their two sons, seventeen-year-old Roni
and Benny, thirteen. ‘Let’s not go on the plane,’ she told Uzi when she heard it
would stop in Greece. ‘We don’t know who’s likely to get on in Athens.’ They
also tried to change to El Al without success.
Other passengers made late switches to Flight 139. Nineteen-year-old Jean-
Jacques Mimouni, French-born but of Tunisian descent, had been booked on a
Saturday flight to Paris. Tall and boyishly handsome, with a moustache and
fashionably long, dark-brown curly hair, a talented guitar player and artist, Jean-
Jacques had just finished his matriculation exams and was planning to spend the
summer in France with two elder sisters before either staying on–his father’s
preference–or returning to Israel for military service. But he was persuaded to
delay his flight until Sunday by his best friend Thierry Sicard, the son of the
French consul in Tel Aviv, so that they could fly together.
Belgians Gilbert and Helen Weill had just completed a short holiday in
Israel and were due to take a later Air France flight to Paris. Their plan was to
pick up their children in Metz and then return home to Antwerp. But when told
that their original plane had been delayed in Iran and their best option was Flight
139, leaving in just an hour, they took it. Walking away from the Air France
desk they met an acquaintance travelling on their original flight. ‘Quick,’
advised Mr Weill, ‘get on the earlier flight before all the seats are taken. Who
knows how long that other plane is going to be delayed.’
At 8.59 a.m. local time, Air France Flight 139 took off in perfect weather–a
blazing sun and clear blue skies–and headed north-west across the
Mediterranean for Athens. The plane was one of the recently introduced wide-
bodied Airbus A300B4s, a comfortable twin-engined jetliner capable of carrying
272 passengers in a two-class layout: 24 first-class seats at the front of the plane
in a 2:2:2 configuration; and a further 248 seats in two economy cabins to the
rear, the seats divided 2:4:2 by two aisles. For the last six rows, as the fuselage
tapered towards the tail, the middle row was just three seats. Possibly because of
late cancellations, only 228 seats were occupied.
Captaining the plane was a dashing fifty-one-year-old father of three called
Michel Bacos, a former naval pilot who had fought with de Gaulle’s Free French
forces in the Second World War. His eleven-man crew consisted of a co-pilot,
flight engineer, chief steward, four stewards and four stewardesses. Apart from a
Swedish stewardess called Ann-Carina Franking, all were French.
Sitting in the rear economy cabin, three rows from the front, Michel Cojot
quickly forgot his fears as the Air France crew made a fuss of him and his son.
‘After this heavy dose of the East it was a pleasure’ for him ‘to go back to the
language, the elegant restraint of the stewardesses’ uniforms, and even the food
tray’. There was nothing in the way of in-flight entertainment on a 1970s
airliner, and Cojot passed the two-and-a-half-hour flight time to Athens by
writing ‘a probably useless professional memorandum’ and giving Olivier ‘an
exercise in spelling by dictating a vaguely humorous piece on the joys of air
travel’. It was typical of the high-achieving Cojot to try and educate his son even
when he was on holiday. For Olivier, a ‘terrible speller’, these regular dictations
by his father were ‘a huge pain in the behind’.
The only bleak spot for the thirty-seven-year-old Cojot was the proximity
of unruly neighbours who included ‘brawling brats, a woman who spilled over
her seat on both sides, and a couple of retired Americans’.
0902hrs GMT, Athens, Greece
J
ust after noon local time, the Airbus touched down at Athens’s Ellinikon
International Airport, a few miles south of the Greek capital. As the stop was a
brief one–just forty-five minutes–only the thirty-eight disembarking passengers
were allowed to leave the plane. They included the retired Americans but not, to
Michel Cojot’s chagrin, the squabbling children.
In their place came fifty-six new passengers, bringing the total to 246, not
far from capacity. The majority were still nationals of Israel and France, though
more than twenty other nationalities were now present, including American,
Australian, Belgian, Brazilian, Canadian, Colombian, Greek, Japanese,
Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish. Of the new
arrivals, many had been holidaying in or around the Greek islands. Among them
were British yachtsmen and old friends Tony Russell, a married fifty-five-year-
old senior official for the Greater London Council, and George Good, sixty-five,
a retired accountant and widower, who had been sailing round Ithaca and Paxos
in the Ionian Sea; Frenchman Gérard Poignon and his English-born wife
Isabella, twenty-eight, who had left their eighteen-month-old daughter in the
care of Gérard’s parents while they enjoyed a ten-day cruise; Colin and Nola
Hardie from Christchurch in New Zealand, where Colin was general manager of
the Star newspaper; Peter and Nancy Rabinowitz, two young Jewish American
academics who were teaching literature at Kirkland College in New York State;
and Claude Moufflet from Versailles in France.
The Rabinowitzes were in Europe to celebrate thirty-one-year-old Nancy’s
recent completion of her PhD in comparative literature (a degree that Peter, two
years her senior, already possessed). Arriving in London from the US, they had
asked if they could buy a return plane ticket to Athens with a stopover in Paris
on the second leg. Informed that that was impossible, they bought a standard
return with the intention of taking the boat-train over the Channel. But when
they returned to Athens Airport after a two-week stay in Greece, they were told
by their airline that they could trade in their Athens–London tickets for Athens–
Paris–London at no extra cost. As a switch to another carrier was also possible,
Peter chose Air France because he did not like Greek food and thought that
airline cuisine on a French plane would be the best. Both Rabinowitzes were
acutely aware of the danger of hijacking and would not have got on Flight 139 if
they had known it was on a stopover from Tel Aviv. It never occurred to them to
ask.
Claude Moufflet was returning from a work trip to Teheran in Iran, where
his company owned a business, and had arrived at Ellinikon’s East Terminal–an
ugly single-storey concrete building designed by the celebrated Finnish architect
Eero Saarinen in the 1960s–by taxi from Athens’s original airport at 11.30 a.m.
local time. Shortly after checking in his suitcases at the Air France desk, he was
approached by a young Greek man who asked him if he was willing to post a
very urgent letter in Paris. Satisfied that the envelope contained only paper, he
put it in his briefcase.
Moufflet next passed through passport control and security, the latter a
‘systematic and rigorous’ series of checks. As his hand luggage went through a
radar detection tunnel he could clearly see his electronic calculator, Dictaphone,
camera, film and flash appear on the screen. Alarmed by this last unusual image,
the policeman on duty stopped the conveyor belt and instructed Moufflet to open
his briefcase so that he could check the authenticity of these objects. Once he
was satisfied, he passed Moufflet on to his colleague for a body search. Finally
convinced that the Frenchman was a harmless businessman, and that the
cylindrical 1.5-volt batteries that appeared on the radar screen were for his
Dictaphone and calculator, and not part of ‘an elaborate explosive system’, they
let him continue.
Four of Flight 139’s new passengers, however, were not subjected to the
same level of security because they were in transit, having landed at 6.45 a.m. on
Singapore Airlines Flight 763 from Bahrain. Two were travelling on South
American passports: a tall blond-haired Peruvian called A. Garcia, wearing a
natty brown corduroy suit and a green shirt; and a young Ecuadorian woman,
Ortega, in a blue denim skirt and top, with shoulder-length dark hair and wire-
rimmed glasses. The other pair were Middle Eastern in appearance and carrying
Bahraini and Kuwaiti travel documents: one was tall with long fair hair and
‘wild staring’ blue eyes that put one of his fellow passengers in mind of Mick
Jagger on drugs; the other short and stocky, with dark hair and a bushy
moustache.
Despite the fact that all four were carrying large bags, none was particularly
scrutinized because it was assumed they had been scanned at their airport of
origin. It did not help that ‘nobody was on duty at the metal detector in the
passenger corridor, and the policeman at the fluoroscope was paying little
attention to the screen at his side’.