The audacious story of 100 Israeli commandos flying thousands of miles into Idi Amin’s Uganda to free the hijacked occupants of Air France Flight 139
Operation Thunderbolt Saul David ★★★★★
Two hundred and twenty-eight passengers boarded Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris on Sunday June 27, 1976.
At that time there were roughly three hijackings a month, somewhere in the world, but Tel Aviv airport was known to have by far the tightest airport security.
The plane stopped for 45 minutes in Athens – 38 passengers disembarked, and 56 got on, bringing the plane to near-capacity.
‘Hey, Dad,’ said Olivier Cojot, a 12-year-old French boy. ‘If I were a terrorist, I would get on at the stopover.’
No one imagined the Israelis would risk flying thousands of miles into enemy territory to attempt to rescue the hostages (pictured: the squadron leader of the rescue planes is welcomed home)
He was right. Screening of passengers between flights at Athens airport was minimal.
Four new passengers – three men and a woman – were nodded through security. The big black bags they were carrying were not even scanned.
Noticing these passengers barging down the aisle with their cumbersome bags, one elderly lady, Dora Bloch, whispered to her son that they looked like Arabs, and she was worried they might be hijackers.
Her son thought of alerting the crew, but everyone had fastened their seatbelts, and the plane was about to leave, so he decided against.
Eight minutes after take-off, the four terrorists sprang to their feet, brandishing pistols and grenades.
The plane, they said, had been taken over by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Some passengers screamed; most were mute in shock. Young Olivier Cojot took a different line. His first thought was: ‘This is going to be a good story to tell at school.’
A short, bearded passenger tried to resist. The hijackers knocked him to the floor and beat him up, the female hijacker, a German, doing most of the punching. The chief steward tried to calm everyone down.
The narrative is studded with pen-portraits of key figures – hostages, terrorists, soldiers and politicians (pictured: Michel Bacos, the head pilot of the hijacked Air France plane, is reunited with his wife and son)
‘There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t be frightened,’ he said, but he was shaking like a leaf.
Operation Thunderbolt is the story of what happened to the passengers, crew and terrorists on Flight 139, day by day, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, over the next seven days.
It’s a brilliantly orchestrated book, wonderfully rich in detail, but at the same time roaring along at a heart-thumping pace.
At a stop-off in Libya, the passengers were informed that the exits were all wired with explosives.
Only a Manchester nurse, who pretended to be undergoing a miscarriage, was allowed to leave. Finally, the plane came to land at Entebbe airport in Idi Amin’s Uganda.
‘Thank you for having flown Air France,’ joked the lead hijacker, prior to disembarkation.
‘We hope that you were satisfied with the service and that we see you again soon on this airline.’
The French pilot announced that ‘the nightmare is now over’. The passengers all applauded.
At this point – 26 hours after setting off from Israel – the mood became light-hearted. A handful of passengers even waved a cheery goodbye to the terrorists at the exit door.
Dora Bloch, who suffered a cruel fate in the drama, with her granddaughter
They were then shepherded into a disused terminal building, where three new terrorists joined the original four.
The airport itself was surrounded by Ugandan troops: it soon became clear that they were not there to protect the hostages but to aid the hijackers, and that, for all his grinning protestations of impartiality, General Idi Amin was in fact a willing accomplice.
Any suggestion that the hostages’ ordeal was over disappeared when the leader of the hijackers made a fresh announcement.
They were demanding the release of 53 terrorists from prison, he said, plus $5million. If not, they would blow up the plane with all the hostages on board. At this news, two of the stewardesses burst into tears, and a woman fainted in shock.
Saul David reflects the urgency of the situation by letting the story unfold in real time, swinging to and fro between the terminal at Entebbe and the cabinet room in Tel Aviv, with lots of other locations – the houses of the hostages’ families, the headquarters of the special unit of the Israel military, the hospital in Kampala – cropping up along the way.
‘The result is, I hope, an exciting true story that is exhaustively researched yet reads more like a novel than a traditional history,’ writes David in an afterword.
He is right on every count: I embarked on this book as someone not particularly interested in the Middle East, or in adventure tales of soldiers in action; I finished it in a state of high tension, buzzing through the pages in the need to know what happened next.
No one – least of all the terrorists – imagined the Israelis would risk flying thousands of miles into enemy territory to attempt to rescue the hostages.
After all, they were closely guarded not only by armed terrorists but also by the Ugandan military.
Within the Israeli government, there was a strong faction, led by the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, that favoured negotiation, and dismissed any attempt at rescue as out of the question.
But the intransigence of the Defence Minister, Shimon Peres, and the cool professionalism of the special unit commander Yoni Netanyahu (elder brother of the current Israeli Prime Minister) finally won them round.
As the unit set off, Rabin said that over 25 soldiers and hostages killed would signal a failure, and any fewer a success.
It strikes me as likely that most readers of Operation Thunderbolt will already have some knowledge of the outcome.
By the end of his rule in Uganda, Idi Amin's victims numbered at least 300,000
On the very first page, David dedicates the book to those Israelis who died, naming each of them. In terms of excitement, you might have thought that this would be letting the cat out of the bag, but as books like The Day Of The Jackal have shown, if a tale is told well enough then its tension remains intact, regardless of pre-knowledge.
David is not one of those military historians who is more interested in people in general than in particular. He has a wonderfully sharp eye for the idiosyncracies of human behaviour.
A hostage points out to the female hijacker that her blouse has come undone and she is showing a bit of breast; the hijacker borrows a hairpin from another passenger to lock the handle of her grenade while she does up her buttons.
A soldier’s fingers are trembling so much before he disembarks that he has trouble buckling his belt. When the bullets start flying, the first impulse of many hostages is to cover their heads with blankets for protection.
The narrative is studded with pen-portraits of key figures – hostages, terrorists, soldiers, politicians – and with increasing anxiety you follow their destinies through the twists and turns of providence.
As the tale unfolds, the tug-of-war between luck and organisation grows ever more intense. As one of the rescuers’ planes taxis along the runway in the pitch-dark, it misses a ditch by only a yard or two.
The most heart-rending tale of the twists and turns of fortune must surely belong to Dora Bloch, the old lady who had originally suspected those four new passengers of being terrorists.
At Entebbe, she happened to get a bit of meat stuck in her throat, and was allowed to go to hospital.
To the other hostages, this must have seemed a stroke of luck, and luck seemed to strike again when a benevolent Ugandan health minister let her remain there, away from the jeopardy of the airport.
But after the raid on Entebbe, Dora Bloch was left high and dry. In a fit of rage at his humiliation by the Israelis, Idi Amin then ordered her to be dragged from her hospital bed, kicking and screaming, and executed.
Amin’s thirst for revenge was not assuaged by her murder. He executed three air traffic controllers for failing to spot the Israeli planes, hundreds of immigrant Kenyans, for their country’s complicity in the raid, and also his director of civil aviation.
By the end of his rule in Uganda, his victims numbered at least 300,000.
Coincidentally, his fifth wife, who accompanied him on his grandstanding visits to the hostages, died in London a fortnight ago.
‘He was just a normal person, not a monster,’ she said in an interview after Amin’s death in 2003.
‘He was a jolly person, very entertaining and kind.’
