Hello and welcome to the Battleground Special Forces podcast with me, Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Last week in part one of Cyret, Matt Kahl and the Entebbe raid,

we looked at the origins of the unit, some of its early operations and the crisis that began

on the 27th of June 1976 as an Air France jet was hijacked by German and Palestinian terrorists

as it flew from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens and and a day later landed in Nintebatea Airport in

Idi Amin's Uganda. We ended the last episode with the four Hercules planes containing the

Israeli rescue force en route to Uganda, their highly dangerous mission having just been

authorized by the Israeli cabinet. This week will discover

what happened next and the attempt to answer the burning questions. What were the raids

long-term consequences? Did it, for example, make peace with the Palestinian Arabs more or less likely?

So, back to the action, after just over seven hours in the air, the last 20 minutes

of which were spent flying through a storm, Hercules 1 landed at Entebbe Airport with

barely a jilt at just after midnight local time.

That was 11 p.m. in Israel. The runway lights were still on and the pilot Shani had not needed

to use his radar. He quickly reduced power to enable the parachuters to jump off and place

electric lanterns on either side of the runway for the follow-up planes and taxied past the internal building to the access strip that led to the old terminal, where, of course, the hostages were held.

There the plane stopped and its ramp was lowered enabling the black Mercedes.

Famous black Mercedes we mentioned in the previous episode, which the thinking was would

fool the Ugandan soldiers who were guarding the hostages into thinking there was one of

their senior officers or some top politician of their own on board and they would therefore

hold their fire.

Behind that came two Land Rovers and they were loaded up with team leader, Yoni

...