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[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. For Stewart and Noreen. And in memory of Bruce McKenzie and the five Israelis who lost their lives as a result of Operation Thunderbolt: Dora Bloch, Ida Borochovich, Pasco Cohen, Jean- Jacques Mimouni and Yoni Netanyahu. Country names and borders as they were at the time of the raid. DAY 1: SUNDAY 27 JUNE 1976 0500hrs GMT, Lod, Israel A chaotic scene greeted Frenchman Michel Cojot and his twelve-year-old son Olivier as they entered the ground-floor check-in area of Ben-Gurion International Airport’s Terminal 1, an unsightly four-storey concrete and glass construction that had replaced the original whitewashed terminal built by the British in the 1930s. The flow of people reminded Cojot of an Oriental bazaar as it ‘tried to make a path among the baggage carts, the pillars, and the barriers under the watchful eyes of young women in khaki and young soldiers… the only persons there who were not bustling about’. A spate of recent terrorist attacks against Israel–including the infamous massacre of twenty-six people, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, by three pro-Palestinian members of the militant communist Japanese Red Army at Ben-Gurion four years earlier–had left the country with the tightest airport security in the world.