Author(s): Saul David

Military History

'Totally thrilling, totally poignant. Bringing the greatest special forces operation of modern times blazingly to life' Simon Sebag Montefiore At 15.40 hours on 3 July 1976, four Hercules C-130 transport planes carrying a secret Israeli special forces unit take off from an air force base in the Sinai Desert and fly south down the Red Sea. Codenamed Thunderbolt, the operation carries huge risks. The flight is a challenge: 2,000 miles with total radio silence over hostile territory to land in darkness at Entebbe Airport in Idi Amin's Uganda. On the ground, the Israeli commandos have just three minutes to carry out their mission. They must evade a cordon of elite Ugandan paratroopers, storm the terminal and free more than a hundred Israeli, French and US hostages held by German and Palestinian terrorists. So much can go wrong: the death of the hostages if the terrorists get wind of the assault; or the capture of Israel's finest soldiers if their Hercules planes cannot take off. Both would be a human and a PR catastrophe. Now, with the mission largely forgotten or even unknown to many, Saul David gives the first comprehensive account of Operation Thunderbolt using classified documents from archives in four countries and interviews with key participants, including Israeli soldiers and politicians, hostages, a member of the Kenyan government and a former terrorist. General Bill McRaven, architect of the successful US mission to kill Osama Bin Laden, calls Operation Thunderbolt 'the best illustration of the theory of special operations yet presented.' Its legacy is still felt today: rather than give in to terrorist blackmail, western governments prefer to use specialist counter-terrorists units like Britain's SAS and the US Army's Delta Force to rescue hostages; while in Israel the very success of the operation may, ironically, have made it harder for politicians to force through the compromises required for peace. Both a thrilling page-turner and a major piece of historical detective work, OPERATION THUNDERBOLT shows how the outcome of Israel's most famous military operation depended on secret diplomacy, courage and luck-and was in the balance right up to the very last moment.