July 1, now less than 36 hours away. Having moved the passengers off the plane

July 1, now less than 36 hours away. Having moved the passengers off the plane to one of the terminal buildings, they were threatening to start killing them unless we freed a list of 53 Palestinians and PLO supporters, forty of them held in Israel and the rest in a number of European countries, and paid a ransom of five million dollars. Well past midnight, we started looking at our options. One which seemed — briefly — to hold promise drew on suggestions from Ido Ambar and Mookie. Ido’s almost rhapsodic description of the capabilities of our C-130 Hercules transport planes convinced us we could parachute in a Sayeret Matkal team, as well as vehicles for them to use on the ground. Mookie and I agreed that to ensure surprise, we would disguise the commandos as Ugandan troops, in “Ugandan” Jeeps. The final twist came with the arrival of the reserve air force officer who had been on training duty in Entebbe. He brought a reel of 8mm film from an official ceremony at the airport. At the start, a Ugandan army general could be seen arriving in a black Mercedes. “That’s it!” Mookie said. “The Mercedes. Every top Ugandan military officer has one.” We decided to swap one of our Jeeps for a jet-black limousine. Yet by daybreak on Wednesday, when I went up to brief Motto, we'd set aside the option of a parachute drop. Any initial surprise would be outweighed by the risk of exposure from the very start of the assault. We’d also gone cold on a second option, to infiltrate sayeret teams along the shore of Lake Victoria from across the nearby border in Kenya. I doubted we had enough time to navigate all the operational and diplomatic obstacles before the deadline expired. That left option three: having the SEALs, along with a core team from the sayeret, parachute onto Lake Victoria with rubber dinghies and attack the airport from on foot. We arranged to do a test parachute assault off the Israeli coast in Haifa later in the day, but if that went well, it seemed the only practical alternative. Motta and I went met Peres around 8:30am. Shimon had no first-hand military experience, having played a political role alongside Ben-Gurion from Israel’s early years. So he was not really interested in the details. But he was keen to hear our assurances that a military option did exist. He was even more intrigued when we were joined by the head of the air force, Benny Peled. Unaware of the airborne parachute drop we had been discussing overnight, Peled suggested something far more ambitious. Rather than using a single Hercules, he proposed using four of the giant transport planes to ferry in a larger force, some 200 men in all, land them on one of the runways and take over the 168 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028016