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Chapter Ten Sunday is an ordinary working day in Israel, and the first sign that June 27, 1976 would be any different came shortly after noon. It was an urgent message from Lod Airport, now renamed in honor of David Ben-Gurion, who passed away after the 1973 war. Radio contact had been lost with Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris, shortly after a stopover in Athens. We couldn’t know for sure what had gone wrong. Maybe a mechanical malfunction, a glitch in the electronics, a crash. Or a hijack. But we did know there were roughly 300 passengers and a dozen crew on board. Many of the passengers were Israelis, and others were Jews from abroad. Ever since the Sabena hijacking four years earlier, whenever a civilian airliner was thought to be under attack within three hours of Israel, step-one in our response had been automatic. Sayeret Matkal was ordered to the airport. Because I’d commanded the Sabena operation — the first, and still the only, time we had attacked and freed a hijacked plane — it was probably inevitable I would take some part in figuring out how, or whether, to intervene if the Air France plane turned out to have been hijacked. But my pivotal role, as the crisis intensified, was down to a combination of factors: my broader experience as sayeret commander, the fact that I now worked in the kirya, just one floor up from the chief of staff, and, as so often, pure chance. As the sayeret assembled at the airport, its current commander —Y oni Netanyahu, my former deputy — was hundreds of miles away in the Sinai, preparing for an operation across the canal. So it was Mookie Betzer, now Yoni’s deputy, who began briefing the men for a possible hostage rescue in case the jet returned to Israel. At the kirya, we were also without our commander: Motta was in the Negev observing a major military exercise. So it was his deputy — the head of the operations branch, Kuti Adam — who buzzed me on the intercom at two in the afternoon and summoned me to his office. By now, we knew the plane had been hijacked, but that it wasn’t heading back to Israel. The terrorists had renamed it “Arafat” and it was on its way to Libya. I took the stairs down to Kuti’s office, two floors below mine, and he immediately handed me a large, black-and-white aerial photo. It showed the international airport in Benina, just outside Benghazi on the eastern edge of Libya. “Can we do anything, Ehud?” he asked me. I didn’t say no outright. But I told him that even if we had a treasure trove of intelligence about Benina — 165 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028013