HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028017.jpg

entire airport. Though I didn’t say so, I had my doubts it would work. It was a bit like the initial option for the Rue Verdun raid Dado had rejected: a classic ground assault which, in addition to eliminating any chance of surprise, obviously ran the risk of igniting a small ground war. But I did think that some combination of Peled’s idea and the surprise commando strike we’d been looking at might provide an answer. A few hours later, the hostages’ ordeal took a chilling turn, which soon also provided us with our first real detailed picture of the scale of the challenge we faced. In a haunting echo of the Nazis’ “selection” process in the Holocaust, the terrorists separated all the passengers with Israeli passports or Jewish names. They let the rest of them go, and allowed them to board a special Air France flight back to Paris. We immediately dispatched Amiram Levin to debrief the freed passengers. On a scrambled teleprinter line Wednesday night, Amiram came up with far more than we could have hoped for. One of released passengers was a French woman who had managed to hide the fact she was Jewish. She confirmed reports we had been getting that the hostages were being held in the airport’s former terminal building, about a mile from its newer terminal and the main runways. Other passengers revealed that the hijackers had placed explosives around the old terminal building. And that, despite my hope that Idi Amin would stand aside if we did decide to go in and rescue the hostages, his troops were helping to guard the area. So in addition to taking on the hijackers, we’d have to find a way to deal with Ugandan soldiers. In another round of discussions in my office through the late hours of Wednesday night, we finally settled on our plan: Peled’s major airborne operation, but with a Sayeret Matkal strike force, with its “Ugandan” motorcade, spearheading it. Minutes later, three other C-130s would fly in additional troops to secure the rest of the airport, deal with any Ugandan army resistance, and fly out the Israeli soldiers and the hostages. An operation on that scale naturally meant bringing in Dan Shomron. After I'd taken the plan to Kuti Adam, he briefed Dan on the full detail and called me down to see him again. Dan had left to start preparations for the operation. He’d made just one request, Kuti said: that I be in command of the sayeret force. 169 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028017