reasonable chance of success, he would approve it. But otherwise, we could not

reasonable chance of success, he would approve it. But otherwise, we could not let dozens of hostages be murdered if by talking, even deal-making, we could have saved them. He turned to Dan and asked whether there indeed was a military option with a reasonable prospect of getting the hostages out. Dan said yes. Rabin turned to me next. I agreed: we had a plan, and we felt we could make it work. Motta was a bit more hesitant. He suggested we couldn’t know for sure until we’d finished testing key parts of the operation. But for Rabin, it seemed to me Dan’s was the key voice. So he told us that he was approving it. In principle. He said he still needed answers to two questions. The first was whether it was physically possible to cross from the new terminal area, where we’d be landing, to the old terminal buidling. He was right to press us. If a retaining wall or a drainage trench had been added druing the modernization work on the airport, any element of surprise could be lost. Rabin’s second condition was that we find a way to make absolutely sure, by the time the first Hercules landed, that the hostages were still in the old terminal building. I knew why that troubled him, from a remark I’d heard him make a few years earlier when describing an American hostage-rescue raid behind enemy lines in North Vietnam. That operation went exactly as planned. Except that the POWs had been moved. I drove to see Yoni and Mookie at the sayeret base. We spent most of the meeting on the opening few minutes of the operation: the rolling out of the vehicles, the drive to the old terminal, and how to handle the possibility that we might meet Ugandan resistance. Mookie remained adamant about the Ugandans, from his time training them a few years earlier. Even if we did run into a group of Amin’s troops, even if they were armed, even if they were pointing their guns at us, even if they shout at us to stop, they “wouldn’t dare open fire on a Mercedes.” I trusted his experience. I kept emphasizing that we had to go in with the mindset of not engaging Ugandan troops unless there was no choice. If we did need to do so, we would use only small, silenced Berettas — since I’d made sure the unit trained on the Berettas after Sabena. I also raised another critical condition for success. “There will definitely be an armed presence in the control tower,” I said. We needed to designate a special unit whose sole job would be to train machine guns, rifles and grenade- launchers on the tower as soon as we got off the Hercules. “The moment that we lose the element of surprise, they open fire.” 172 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011643