response,” he said. “I’ve committed us. Ehud, I want you to check what can be

response,” he said. “I’ve committed us. Ehud, I want you to check what can be done. Take whatever you need, from wherever you want. Bring me suggestions by seven tomorrow morning.” Then, he said, we would go brief the Defense Minister, Shimon Peres. I assembled a team the same way we’d prepared for special-operations missions in the sayeret: looking for information, intelligence and above all experience and insight from whoever I thought was likely to make that always- narrow difference between failure and success. My first calls went to Mookie Betzer and another of my most trusted and experienced sayeret comrades, Amiram Levin. Then I brought in Ido Ambar, the personal aide to air force commander Benny Peled, and Gadi Shefi, the commander of the Shayetet 13 SEALs. Finally, two officers from Dan Shomron’s office. Since Dan was katzhar, in overall command of paratroop and infantry forces, it was critical to keep him in the picture. I told them all that we’d be working through the night, and that I had to be able to tell Motta and Shimon by the morning whether we really could mount a rescue mission. I still thought Pd end up having to tell them no. However difficult the obstacles we’d faced with Sabena, they were almost child’s play compared to getting a sayeret assault team 5,000 miles across the continent of Africa, surprising the terrorists, freeing the hostages unharmed and getting them out. That was even assuming, as I did at that point, that we wouldn’t face armed opposition from the troops of Uganda’s increasingly tyrannical president, Idi Amin. Amin had begun to align himself politically with the Palestinians in the past few years — one reason, no doubt, the terrorists had landed there. But he had actually been on a paratroop course in Israel before taking power in 1971. We had sent officers to help train his army in the early 1970s. Now, I discovered, Mookie himself had been on one of the training missions. “Their men aren’t great fighters, at least at night,” he said, an insight of obvious relevance to planning a commando attack, if we could get that far. When Ambar, the air force aide, spoke up, I finally began to feel we might at least be able to put together the outline of a plan. He’d brought with him a copy of the standard reference book on world airports, which gave us at least a general idea of the layout of Entebbe. He also said that the air force had run a training program for the Ugandans. In Entebbe. He’d contacted one of the reserve pilots who had been on the training mission, and he was on his way to join us. Still, time was short we were nowhere near being able to recommend a specific plan of action. The hijackers had set a deadline — noon on Thursday, 167 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028015