Prime Minister Eshkol’s government, battered by the reaction from Paris, distanced itself from Mossad’s chief. More criticism came from an unexpected source. The more Meir Amit protested that Mossad’s role had been “marginal,” no more than “supplying a few passports and hiring some cars,” the more his predecessor, Isser Harel, insisted the Ben-Barka affair would never have happened in his day. Meir Amit warned the prime minister they would both sink under such sniping. Eshkol responded by setting up a committee of inquiry, headed by the then foreign minister, Golda Meir. The committee concluded Meir Amit should resign, but he refused until Eshkol did the same. Stalemate followed. It was not until a year later that Meir Amit accepted that the death of Ben-Barka was no longer going to trouble him. But it had been a close-run call.
By then Kimche had other matters to concern him. The Palestinians had secretly trained a commando unit to exploit a security weakness not even Mossad had anticipated: midair aircraft hijacking. Once a plane was seized between destinations, it would be flown to a friendly Arab country. There the passengers would be held for ransom—either for substantial sums of money to buy their freedom, or to be exchanged for Arab prisoners held by Israel. An additional bonus would be the worldwide publicity for the PLO cause.
In July 1968, an El Al flight from Rome was hijacked to Algeria. Mossad was stunned at the simple audacity of the operation. A team of katsas flew to Algeria while Kimche and other planners worked almost around the clock to devise a strategy to free the terrified passengers. But any attempt to storm the aircraft was hampered by the presence of the world’s media crews covering the story. Kimche recommended playing for time in the hope the story would lose its momentum and the
And come they did, each one better prepared than the last. In a short time half a dozen more passenger aircraft were overpowered by hijackers who were not only expert in concealing weapons and placing explosives on board, but had been trained to fly the actual aircraft or know the actual workings of a flight deck crew. In the Libyan Desert, they practiced exchanging fire in the confined area of an airplane cabin, knowing that El Al had now introduced armed guards on its flights—one of the first moves Kimche had recommended. He had also correctly predicted that the hijackers would know the laws of the various countries they would be flying in and out of so that if they were captured, their colleagues could use those laws to obtain their freedom by bargaining or threatening.
Kimche knew that Mossad urgently needed an incident that would enable the service to overcome the hijackers through the two skills for which it was justifiably renowned: cunning and ruthlessness. And, just as the hijackers effectively used publicity, Kimche wanted an operation whose outcome would match the universal praise for Israel that had followed the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. The incident Kimche needed must have high drama, considerable risk, and an against-all-the-odds outcome. Those elements would combine to show Mossad leading the fight back.
On June 27, 1976, an Air France plane filled with Jewish passengers, en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, was hijacked after a stopover at Athens Airport, which was notorious for lax security. The hijackers were members of the extreme Wadi Haddad faction and they made two demands : the freeing of forty Palestinians in Israeli jails, together with a further dozen held in European prisons; and the release of two German terrorists arrested in Kenya when they tried to shoot down an El Al jet with a Sam-7 rocket as it took off from Nairobi Airport.
After a stopover in Casablanca, and being refused permission to land in Khartoum, the plane flew to Entebbe in Uganda. From there the hijackers announced the aircraft would be blown up along with all its passengers unless their demands were met. The deadline was June 30.
