In July 1976, the Israeli military pulled off its daring rescue of over 100 Jewish hostages held captive in the Ugandan city of Entebbe after a group of fterrorists hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris.
Similar to the Mossad’s capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann a decade prior, the audacious operation (code-named “Thunderbolt”) captured the global imagination and took center stage in three different films: Raid on Entebbe, Operation Thunderbolt, and Seven Days in Entebbe.
Parties lauded in the aftermath include the elite Sayeret Matkal commandoes who carried out the mission and Air France pilot Michel Bacos. The latter is said to have refused to leave his passengers when the hijackers offered to release him. He ended up receiving France’s highest, the Légion d’honneur, and even had a street named after him in the coastal Israeli city of Netanya.
By Bacos’s own admission, however, the official story perpetuated for the last 50 years isn’t exactly true, as journalist-turned-documentarian Boaz Dvir learned while interviewing the retired pilot before his death in 2019.
“He’s volunteering information,” recalled Dvir, who also teaches journalism at Penn State University. “And I come to the conclusion in the middle of this two-hour interview that he didn’t deserve to be [considered] a hero. The whole thing was made up. I grew up believing he was a hero because he refused to leave when he and his crew had a chance to leave, but they stayed with the Jewish hostages. Not the case. I’m not accusing him and I’m in shock, but I’m asking more questions that further revealed that this whole thing was just fabricated.”
After conducting subsequent interviews with other surviving hostages—including Roger Bunel (Bacos’s flight engineer) and Ilan Hartuv (whose mother, Dora Bloch, was murdered on the orders of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin)—as well as Thunderbolt operatives like Rami Sherman, Dvir learned of an unsung hero, who, ironic as it may sound, happened to share the pilot’s first name.
“They said to me, ‘Look, while Michel Bacos wasn’t a hero, there was a French hero there. He was named Michel, just not Michel Bacos. [His name was] Michel Cojot,’’ shared the filmmaker. “And that’s when I started pursuing the story.”
He essentially pivoted from one Michel to another with his new documentary, To Kill a Nazi (premiering June 22 at the TLC Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles).
Narrated by Seinfeld alum Jason Alexander, the film spotlights how Cojot prevented the hostage crisis from spiraling out of control, while collecting key information that helped make the rescue a success.
As Dvir put it: “There is no Operation Thunderbolt, without him.”
But to understand Cojot’s indispensable role at Entebbe, one must first understand his already stranger-than-fiction existence prior to July 1976.
Michel didn’t have much of a normal childhood, considering he and his mother were constantly evading capture as Jewish enemies of the state in Nazi-occupied during World War II. The patriarch of the family, Joseph Goldberg, was rounded up by ruthless Gestapo official Klaus Barbie (known amongst the French Resistance as the “Butcher of Lyon”) and ultimately murdered as part of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkeanu death camp in Poland.
As an adult, Cojot—who had adopted the surname of his mother’s second husband—hatched a plan to track down and kill Barbie as revenge. Knowing the war criminal had escaped to South America, he consulted with legendary Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, both of whom were interviewed for the documentary, and even duped his boss into letting him open a satellite office in Caracas, Venezuela. Posing as a French journalist, Cojot caught up with Barbie in 1975 and came very close to gunning down the former SS man in a rain-soaked alleyway in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, but couldn’t pull the trigger. It sounds almost too crazy to be true, like something ripped from the pages of bestselling spy thriller, which meant Dvir needed all of his ducks in a row.
“I took extra time in triangulating every piece of information, because so much of it is so unbelievable,” he noted. “You really gotta back it up … I do not use any piece of information, unless I know it from three credible, independent primary sources that are not sitting there at the same time.”
When it came to certain events for which there were no direct visual aids (such as Cojot’s aborted extrajudicial execution of Barbie), the filmmaker relied on animated recreations meant to feel a little clunky and off-kilter.
“This is such a surreal and eerie story [that] I purposely used the kind of animation that’s simplistic, unrealistic, and a bit surrealistic in some ways to enable viewers to have that entry point and run with their own imagination,” he explained, citing Waltz with Bashir as an influence on the decision. “It’s a real story, but they’re still going to imagine and build a picture of what they’re seeing for themselves.”
In refusing to kill Barbie, Cojot proved himself the better man. Stooping to the cold-blooded level of an amoral Nazi murderer would not bring him the closure he sought, but even so, Michel couldn’t help but feel like a failure.
Incredibly, his shot at redemption presented itself a year later when he and his son, Olivier, became Entebbe hostages used as leverage to force the release of fellow extremists imprisoned in Israel and several other countries.
“It’s a story of a guy in search of meaning in his life,” affirmed Dvir. “He thinks he finds it through revenge and discovers [it won’t help]. He’s given a very real second and finds redemption, finds his purpose in life, through saving lives—not taking them.”
Showing extraordinary fortitude, Michel became an unofficial representative for the group, lobbying for better conditions, memorizing the layout of the Ugandan airport, taking stock of the terrorists’ weaponry, and subtly chipping away at the psyche of Wilfried Böse, the hijacker with arguably the weakest constitution. Indeed, one could postulate that Cujot’s numerous conversations with Böse helped prevent the hijacker from dispatching captives when the firefighting began.
It easily could have become a repeat of Fürstenfeldbruck, “but the [hijacking] success becomes a big failure and changes history,” Dvir emphasized. “[Böse] has a machine gun, he has a grenade. He can easily kill 30-40 hostages.” Böse knew he was a dead man and had nothing to lose, “but he doesn’t do it and you wonder why. I leave it to the audiences to decide.”
Released in a wave of non-Israeli passengers, Cujot relayed all he had ascertained to Mossad agents upon his return to France, effectively helping them increase the odds of Operation Thunderbolt’s success. “The Israelis nicknamed him ‘Colonel Cojot,’” Dvir revealed. “I actually had to break it to Rami [Sherman] that he had no military background. He was shocked. Rami had come to believe that he was a high-ranking officer in the French military. Otherwise, how could he have done what he had done and delivered such information?”
As fate would have it, Cojot and Klaus Barbie’s paths converged a decade later when Cojot provided testimony during the extradited Nazi’s long-awaited trial in France. Not surprisingly, Barbie was found guilty and sentence to life in prison.
Cojot, who passed away in 1999, does get to speak on his behalf through archival footage, with further color provided by the likes of his children (Michel, Olivier, Yaël, and Stefan), Joshua Shani (pilot of the Lockheed C-130 Hercules used in the rescue), Saul David (Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History), and Raphaël Delpard (a scholar on hidden children during the Holocaust).
“I take a very journalistic approach to telling it,” Dvir said. “I tell the facts, I don’t take sides. Was Michel Cujot a hero? I don’t know. He was very complex. Was Böse 100% bad? Maybe. It’s your decision. That’s my main thing, is to really hand the story to the world, and let the world debate and stimulate discussions around it.”
