When the Israeli commandos  nearly bungled up raid on Entebbe

Once the first plane touched down and a Mercedes Benz vehicle similar to then president Idi Amin’s official vehicle drove straight towards the terminal building, but one of the Ugandan soldiers at the airport did the unexpected, sparking off an unexpected response.

“…a Ugandan soldier appeared, raising his rifle. Muki Betzer thought the guard would wave them through. Yoni Netanyahu made an instant decision. He and another commando fired at the soldier with their silenced pistols and the man fell. But then he sat back up, prompting another Israeli to shoot – this time with an unsilenced weapon. Another Ugandan returned fire with a Kalashnikov,” reports The Guardian in 2016.

Muki Betzer was the deputy to Netanyahu, the head of the Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, who died as a result of injuries sustained during the fighting at Entebbe. Netanyahu had only been installed as head of the elite commando unit.

While the soldiers at the airport were putting up a fight, some of the Generals and their Commander-in-Chief went into hiding.
“As soon as the fighting started, his senior officers vanished. 

At the time of the attack, at 11.45pm, many of the senior officers in charge of the airport were drinking and dancing at the Lake Victoria Hotel near State House… the sudden burst of firing sent everyone fleeing from the bar and swimming pool to their own homes,” Mr Henry Kyemba wrote in the book State of Blood.

Mr Kyemba had been presidents Milton Obote and Idi Amin’s private secretary. He went on to hold several ministerial dockets under Amin.

“Amin, too, went into hiding, in a drivers’ quarters near State House itself,” he added.

The hijack
The Israeli raid on Entebbe was precipitate by the hijacking of the Air France Flight 139, a Boeing 707 Jetliner with 250 passengers, including 83 Israeli nationals. The jet which had earlier set off from Tel Aviv for Paris, France, was hijacked on June 28, 1976, at Athens Airport by Palestinian and German hijackers.

The Palestinians belonged to the external wing of  the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-EO), while the Germans, Wilfried Bose and his girlfriend Brigitte Kuhlmann, who belonged to the Revolutionary Cells, or RZ, were part of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

They demanded the release from jails in Israel, France, West Germany, and Switzerland, 53 of their comrades.
Writing in The Guardian for the story ‘We thought this would be the end of us: The raid on Entebbe, 40 years on’, which was published on June 25, 2016, Mr Jonathan Freedland detailed how the hijackers took advantage of security lapses in Athens.

“Böse shoved his way into the cockpit, threw out the co-pilot and, grabbing the microphone, announced that the plane would now be called Haifa 1, taking its name from the city in the north of the country the passengers called Israel and the hijackers called Palestine,” he wrote.
Bose was armed with a revolver and a hand grenade.

Defending permission
Amin, who was on July 2 in Mauritius to hand over the OAU summit chair, having been elected OAU chairman during the summit that had been held in Kampala the year before, said Uganda had taken in the hijackers on “humanitarian grounds”.
However, Mr Kyemba says Amin sought to use the incident to settle a score with the Israelis.

“He thought he saw a fine opportunity to humiliate the Israelis and increase his stock with the Arabs. He wanted all the glory,” Mr Kyemba writes.

He further quoted Amin having told him that, “Now I have got these people where I want them” and “I’ve got the Israelis’ fixed up this time”.

The five countries had by June 30, 1976, not acquiesced to the hijackers demands. On July 1, 1976, the hijackers released 47 of the hostages, but on the same day issued a threat to blow up the jetliner along with the hostages.

On July 2, 1976, they issued a statement threatening to kill the 83 Israeli’s still in their hands if their demands were not met by midday on July 4, 1976.

Planning from the unknown
The Israeli government’s response was to announce that it had commenced negotiations with the hijackers. Little did the hijackers know that Israel was buying time to be able to concretise a rescue plan.

Military planners assembled in a conference room in Tel Aviv. Among them was Ehud Barak, a former elite commando who was in charge of planning operations of that nature, but the planning got off to the worst possible start. The planners did not have much information about Uganda. Others did not know where it was.

Mr Barak, who later became prime minister of Israel, confessed years later that, “we were in total blindness”. They had to work throughout the night, assembling whatever little information they could about Uganda.

Amin himself had received military training from the Israelis. The Israeli Defence Force parachute badge was one of the many paraphernalia that he used to adorn his uniform with . The officers who had trained him were brought in.

Breakthrough
The breakthrough came when an engineer at an Israeli firm which had won a tender to build the new terminal at Entebbe airport availed the men in uniform with plans of the old building in which the passengers were being held hostage.

They began studying the blueprints.
The planners soon realised that they were dealing with the hijackers and the Uganda Army. They prepared to deal with a bigger force.

The idea of parachuting Israeli Navy SEALs into Lake Victoria and them making the rest of the journey on rubber dinghies, or speedboats, was dropped at the behest of the Israel intelligence agency, Mossad, because Kenya, though willing to cooperate, could only do so covertly.
The planners moved to cash in on information that Amin had planned to spend the weekend outside Uganda.

“If Israel could somehow fly four huge Hercules transporters the 2,500 miles to Uganda, one of those could land and disgorge a motorcade of vehicles dressed up to look as if they were the dictator and his party returning from Mauritius,” Freedland wrote.
A Mercedes of the make was found, but had to be sprayed if only to get the colour right.

On Saturday afternoon, the vehicle and a fighting force of more than 200 soldiers aboard four Hercules C130H planes accompanied by two Boeing 707 jets, one that was to serve as a command post and the other a field hospital, left for Entebbe.
“To avoid radar, they flew extraordinarily low – at one point no more than 35ft off the ground,” Mr Freedland wrote.

Wrong turns
The element of surprise was lost. That marked the beginning of a gunfight that was not according to the initial plan.

The commando units ended up fighting in places other than they had been assigned to fight, but it in the end did not matter much that the initial plans had been scuttled.
The troops arrived at the terminal building in time to save most of the hostages from the hijackers.

All the seven hijackers were killed along with 20 soldiers. Eleven Mig 21 and Mig 17 fighter jets belonging to the Uganda Air Force were destroyed in the fighting that also left the old control tower destroyed.