Knowing the Building

On June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by two Palestinians and two German militants and diverted to Entebbe, Uganda. In the old terminal there, the hijackers did the thing that froze the world: they read the names off the passports, in a German accent, and separated the Jews. Non-Jewish passengers were eventually released and flown to Paris. Some 94 Jews and Israelis — plus the Air France crew, who volunteered to stay — remained under the guard of the hijackers and soldiers of Idi Amin's Uganda.

In Jerusalem, the decision was forming: a rescue 4,000 kilometers from home, into a hostile airport, at night. The one thing Israel could not do was fail blind. The intelligence operation that preceded the raid — the raid itself was the work of the IDF's Sayeret Matkal — is the real Mossad story of Entebbe.

The released hostages' arrival in Paris was the first opening. Within hours, Mossad operatives were extensively interviewing them: where exactly in the terminal were the hostages being held? How many hijackers? How many armed Ugandans? A French-Jewish passenger with a military background, later described as having "a phenomenal memory," gave detailed counts of the terrorists' weapons and positions. The debriefings built an accurate floor-by-floor picture of the old terminal — and, crucially, established how many Ugandan troops surrounded the building. (That number was uncertain almost to the end; cabinet approval depended on it.)

Then came an even stranger asset. The old Entebbe terminal had been built in the 1960s by Solel Boneh, the Israeli construction firm. The IDF consulted the company, and with the help of civilians who had worked on the original, erected a partial replica of the terminal for the commandos to rehearse on — a building the raiders would walk through dozens of times before flying to Uganda. Separately, a Mossad operative flew into the region in a small plane, faked engine trouble, landed at Entebbe, and photographed the airport from above and on takeoff; the pictures confirmed there was no massive Ugandan cordon around the terminal. Baruch Bar-Lev, Israel's last military attaché to Uganda — who knew Amin personally — was brought in to profile the dictator's likely behavior.

On the night of July 3–4, 1976, four C-130s landed unannounced in the dark at Entebbe and the raid succeeded in ninety minutes. It succeeded, in large part, because the men storming the terminal had already been inside it — on a mock-up, in a debrief, in a photograph. Entebbe became the textbook case of a principle the Mossad had been built on: intelligence doesn't just guide operations; when it is complete enough, it is the operation.