which, I soon verified, we didn’t — the obstacles would be enormous. Unlike the

which, I soon verified, we didn’t — the obstacles would be enormous. Unlike the Sabena jet, this one was a wide-bodied Airbus, and El Al had none of those in its fleet. Even we could find a way to make sure a sayeret team got briefed on the airliner, we’d be mounting an attack-and-rescue operation a thousand miles away. And even if we could take out the terrorists, we were almost certain to face opposition from the former army colonel who ruled Libya, Mummer Ghaddafy. The chance of success seemed slim, the risks enormous. Soon, however, Kuti’s question ceased to matter. Later Sunday night, Flight 139 took off again. Before leaving Libya, the hijackers freed a passenger: an Israeli dual national, with a British passport as well, who managed to convince them she was going into labor. We learned through her that there were four hijackers: two Arabs and two Europeans. It was a PFLP operation, but included members of the far-left West German Baader-Meinhof terror group. They forced the pilot to head for the east African state of Uganda. On Monday evening, it landed at Entebbe Airport, 20 miles outside the Ugandan capital of Kampala and just a couple of hundred yards from the shore of Lake Victoria. It was five times further away than Benghazi. Yet with each passing hour, increasingly alarming radio and television reports focused on the obvious agony of the hundreds of captive passengers. To this day, I’ve never been able to establish why it was a further 24 hours before we Started seriously to work out if there might be some way for us to free them. Prime Minister Rabin was clearly asking himself the same question, however, because on Tuesday afternoon, he called Motta in the Negev. It was now a full 53 hours after the hijacking, he said. What the hell we were doing to try to come up with a plan? Motta was immediately summoned back to Jerusalem for an emergency meeting of the government. As he was on his way back from there to the Airya, Kuti called me back down to his office. “Motta just told them that there is a military option,” he said, with a wry smile. Kuti had been a Haganah officer in 1948, in charge of the Golani brigade, head of both the northern and the southern command, and had known Motta for years. “That means we now have to find one.” I had just begun briefing a few of the analysts in my office when Motta returned. When I got to his office, Kuti waved both of us across the hallway to the big, rectangular conference room where general staff meetings were held. On the side of the room was a globe. Giving it a spin, he said: “Nw, Motta. Tell me, when you told the government we had a military option, did you even know where Entebbe is?” Motta didn’t so much as crack a smile. “We have to find a 166 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028014