We had just a few hours to adapt the original plan. Although we’d trained in

We had just a few hours to adapt the original plan. Although we’d trained in close-quarters fighting for my plan to attack the officers’ club near Damascus, we'd never had to use that skill in a live mission. Nor had we ever used the Berettas. While we’d disguised ourselves as enemy soldiers or military police on our intelligence operations, this would be the first time we were taking on the persona of civilian engineers, with the need to fool armed terrorists on the lookout for any sign of danger or betrayal. And for the first time in any of our major operations, we would be operating in daytime. Now that nearly all our soldiers and officers had arrived, I began arranging the final line-up of attack teams. We would need six rather than four, since the new plan would give us access to the front and rear doors. Danny now also told me that a couple of the El Al technicians had shown him a way of climbing up from inside the nose wheel into the cockpit. One of the toughest and strongest of our soldiers, Uri Koren, had tried it successfully on the El Al 707. I told Danny, Uri and another officer that they would be assigned to attack through the front door and the nose wheel. I put Uzi Dayan in charge of the tail door. The emergency doors above the wings, however, still gave us the quickest way in. I planned to command the operation from the left of the aircraft, because both the front and tail doors also faced that way. I entrusted Bibi Netanyahu and his team with breaking in through the main wing door on the far side of the plane. By noon, we got a further boost. With the resumption of incoming flights, we began collecting air marshals. One in particular raised my confidence. I knew Mordechai Rachamim well from the sayeret. He was a Yemeni Jew from Elyakhin, the moshav near Mishmar Hasharon where Baddura and the other Yemeni workers lived. He was tall, strong and athletic, naturally agile and quick to respond in situations of danger. He was also no ordinary air marshal. In 1969, he’d been posted on an El Al flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv. On a stopover in Zurich, four gunmen from Fatah’s main radical rival in the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, leapt out of a car, opened fire with AK-47s and began throwing grenades. The PFLP assault injured four of the crew and killed the co-pilot. Armed with his Beretta, Mordechai rushed to the cockpit window and returned fire. Seeing the attackers were too far away, he slid down the emergency chute. Once on the tarmac, he shot one of the terrorists in the head and kept the rest of them at bay. As additional air marshals arrived, I slotted each of them into an assault team in place of one of our sayeret soldiers. The next to arrive was Marco Ashkenazi, a Cairo-born veteran with whom I’d worked on a mission inside Egypt. I put 121 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027969