the start. A number of others managed to escape when the bus was stopped. But

the start. A number of others managed to escape when the bus was stopped. But several dozen remained inside. I was in Europe at the time, on one of my periodic trips to discuss Middle East issues with a fellow intelligence chief. Yet an aide called me with the news. I was several thousand miles away from what happening. But I knew there was every possibility Sayeret Matkal might be called in, and my instincts told me we should proceed with caution. The situation we were facing felt nothing like Sabena, much less Entebbe. Here, we had a single bus. Our troops, and in fact everyone from ministers and officials to reporters and photographers, were in a loose cordon a couple of dozen yards away. That said to me there was no sense that the hijackers posed an immediate danger. Nor did they seem to have come equipped for a major confrontation. In place of the AK-47s and grenades we’d seen in previous terror attacks, these guys had knives, and, if they were to be believed, a couple of shells with no obvious way to detonate them. I phoned a friend in the command post set up near the stranded bus. He told me that Misha and Moshe Vechetzi were there. There was a standoff with the terrorists and, for now, it was quiet. The defense minister and the chief-of-staff, of course, did not need my presence, much less my agreement, to order the sayeret into action. But I said: why not wait? Though the last flights back to Israel had already left, I could be at the command post by mid-morning. Beyond wanting to be present if the sayeret was ordered in, I believed the crisis might even be brought to an end without another shot being fired. “III tell them what you said,” my friend replied. “But I doubt it’Il be allowed to drag on much past daybreak.” He was right. With my Chinese Farm comrade Yitzhik Mordechai in overall command, Sayeret Matkal stormed the bus at about seven in the morning. They shot and killed two of the hijackers immediately, through the vehicle’s windows. Sadly one of the passengers, a young woman soldier, died in the assault, but the rest of the hostages were freed, none with serious injuries. A controversy soon erupted over what came next. The sayeret commandos had captured the other two terrorists alive and uninjured. Yet barely a week later, first in an American newspaper and then the Israeli media, reports emerged that the two surviving Palestinians had been killed after the hijacking was over. A year later, Yitzhik Mordechai was — wrongly — put on trial for his alleged part in what had amounted to a summary execution. And, rightly, exonerated. Though the full details never became public, the people responsible turned out to be from the Shin Bet, our equivalent of the FBI. 214 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011685