Drama of the Desert: The Week of the Hostages
DEEP in the timeless Jordanian desert, the three silvery jetcraft glinted like metallic mirages in the afternoon sun, their finned tails emblazoned with the insignia of three famed airlines: TWA. BOAC and Swissair. Then suddenly a huge explosion, then another and another. The planes crumpled, then burst into flame. From the burning wreckage rose columns of black smoke that were visible 25 miles away in Amman, where Arab guerrillas fired their guns in celebration.
Mercifully, just hours before that apocalyptic scene occurred last week, the aircraft had been emptied of some 300 men, women and children who had been held hostage in them for as long as six days. But at least 40 of those passengers remained in the hands of their captors, waiting under threat of death for a political bargain that would free them in return for the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Israel and elsewhere. The rest were free to fly away.
The sky pirates responsible for one of the most audacious acts of political blackmail in modern times belong to a small band of Arab extremists called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Equipped only with guns and grenades, they managed to terrorize air travelers from the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, jeopardize a shaky truce in the Middle East, bargain for human life with some of the world's most powerful nations, and hold the entire international community at bay. In all, they detonated some $50 million worth of jet aircraft. Faced with the outrage of most of the world, including nearly all Arab governments, the commandos bragged about their act, saying that "the headlines have shown that our cause is now clearly publicized."
Skyjackers are the greatest threat to travel since bandits roamed the Old West. With astonishing impunity, the pirates of the skies are able to take over the swift vehicles that represent the most advanced developments of modern technological civilization. Less and less often are the culprits misfits and former mental patients seeking psychic as well as physical escape. Increasingly, they are dedicated, vicious political fanatics, who have discovered that one of the most vulnerable points of the developed world is a jetliner at an altitude of 30,000 ft.
If the world has become a global village, as Marshall McLuhan would have it, the Palestinians have become its most troubled ghetto minority. Evicted from their ancient homeland by the influx of Jews after World War II. the Palestinians were driven into the squalid misery of refugee camps on the Jordanian desert. The Arab governments, which could have helped them, preferred to allow the refugees to remain in the camps as living symbols of the Israeli usurpation. The Israelis were unwilling to accept large numbers of Palestinians inside their own borders and thus risk becoming a minority within their own state. Gradually, the Palestinians honed their hostility. From the sons and daughters of the original refugees have sprung thousands of guerrilla fighters whose fury intimidates even the Arab governments.
Hellish Vow
The P.F.L.P. is one of the most militant of some dozen Palestinian commando outfits known collectively as the fedayeen (men of sacrifice). It is Marxistoriented, with touches of Mao. Last week the P.F.L.P.'s leader, Dr. George Habash, was traveling through North Korea on his way home from Peking, where he had sought more Asian Communist weapons and funds. Habash & Co. have been violently opposed to the Middle East cease-fire plan accepted in August by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein. Vowed Habash: "If a settlement is made with Israel, we will turn the Middle East into a hell."
Skyjacking has been a Front specialty since July 1968, when the P.F.L.P. hijacked an Israeli El Al airliner just outside Rome and forced it to fly to Algeria. There, instead of providing the usual Havana-style side trip that had marked most previous air hijackings, the guerrillas refused to release the plane and all its passengers. Eventually they set free everyone except twelve Jewish men, who were held captive for five weeks until Israel agreed to hand over 16 convicted Arab terrorists "in gratitude" for the Israelis' release. The blackmail precedent had been set.
Over the next months, the Popular Front staged airport or aircraft attacks against El Al in Athens, Zurich and Munich, though with scant success. One of its men was killed by an Israeli security guard in Zurich, and twelve have been captured. The P.F.L.P. is widely believed to have caused the explosion aboard a Swissair jetliner en route to Israel last February that sent 47 people to their death. Early this spring, it even issued a fund-raising stamp celebrating its hijacking successes. Then in July, apparently having decided that too many of its air pirates were languishing in foreign prisons, the guerrillas began hijacking in order to free hijackers. A group allied with the P.F.L.P. held 47 passengers captive aboard an Olympic Airways jetliner in the Athens airport until the Greek government agreed to release seven Arabs serving jail terms for attacks on El Al property in which two persons were killed.
Planning on last week's operation started in late July, with Habash and lis top lieutenant, Dr. Wadi Haddad, is the principal architects. They picked New York-bound flights and a weekend target date to ensure that many of their hostages would be vacationing American civilians. Fewer than half a dozen of the Popular Front's ranking leaders knew all the details, and individual skyjacking teams, who had been instructed in the rudiments of navigation and flight procedures, were not aware of one another's existence.
Target of Opportunity
Just after noon on Sunday, two P.F.L.P. agents boarded El Al Flight 219 at Amsterdam. They were Leila Khaled. 24. a stunning Palestinian ex-schoolteacher, and a male companion, still unidentified. In her brassiere Leila carried two hand grenades. She had become a guerrilla heroine in August 1969, when she helped hijack a TWA Boeing 707 to Damascus Airport, where a bomb demolished the cockpit after the passengers and crew had debarked. Later she wrote to several passengers on the flight, explaining that the Popular Front was trying to strike at America's Middle East policy and that the hijack "was not meant against them personally."
Leila and her friend expected to meet the other half of their team on the plane. But a hitch developed. El Al security officers had become suspicious of two young men who were traveling on Senegalese passports and who paid for their first-class seats with cash. At the last moment, El Al bumped the two men from Flight 219.
Determined to carry off the job on their own, Leila and her friend waited until the plane had completed its climbout from Amsterdam. With a war whoop, they leaped from their seats, pulled out the grenades and a pistol, and raced forward to the first-class cabin. There they ran into an El Al steward and an Israeli security agent. As the pilot put the Boeing 707 jetliner into a sharp bank in order to throw the hijackers off balance, passengers overpowered the girl and bound her with neckties. Meanwhile the Israelis fought the male skyjacker in a desperate hand-to-hand battle for possession of his gun. Then passengers heard a muffled pop-pop. Using his special low-power pistol, the Israeli agent had shot the Arab gunman, but the steward was critically wounded in the stomach. The 142 passengers and crew members may well have been saved from death or serious injury by a malfunctioning fuse on a grenade, which was found as the plane was making an emergency landing in London. For unknown reasons, it had failed to explode. Leila, unsuccessful in her attempt to blow up the plane and herself, was placed under British detention.
About 45 minutes later, the Front struck again. TWA's Flight 741, which had taken off from Frankfurt, was over the North Sea when the skyjackers seized the plane. "We are being kidnaped," radioed TWA Captain C.D. Wood. Then he set a course for the Middle East. On the flight across West Germany, the captured 707 carrying 149 passengers and a crew of ten was escorted by two helpless U.S. Air Force fighter planes.
At almost that same moment, Arab hijackers were seizing control of yet another plane. A Swissair DC-8 was over France on its way from Zurich to New York when French ground controllers were surprised to hear a woman speaking on the Swissair frequency. "Swissair Flight 100 is in our complete control," she said. "Our call sign is Haifa One. We will not answer to any other code." Meanwhile TWA Flight 741 had also issued a new call signal. It was Gaza One.
News of the skyjackings had flashed throughout the world, and millions waited anxiously for word about the planes.
They could not have imagined what was actually taking place. Gaza One and Haifa One were not headed toward a major airport. Instead, they were on a course toward a broad expanse of flat desert some 25 miles northwest of Amman. After World War II, the British had used the area as a training airfield, and its name--Dawson's Field --was taken from the British commander who sent units there.
By now it was night. Without the help of ground navigational aids, the two planes groped their way toward the field. Gaza One found it first. Captain Wood guided in his craft by Jeep headlights and flaming oil drums strung out in a line. The British had never used Dawson's strip to land a plane that weighed more than a fraction of the 707's 180,000 Ibs. Ever so lightly, Wood brought the 707 down, down, until its huge wheels skimmed along the packed sand and began to turn. Then he eased the wheel forward and set the plane down on the baked desert crust. It held. Gaza One had safely landed at "Revolution Airstrip."
Nice Fellas
Forty minutes later, Haifa One started its descent into the darkness. As soon as his DC-8 touched down, Swissair Captain Fritz Schreiber hit the brakes and applied full reverse thrust on the four engines, raising a cloud of desert dust and sand, which was sucked into the ventilation system. "The cabin was filling up with cloudy stuff that smelted like smoke," recalled Cecily Simmon of Utica, N.Y. "You could hardly breathe." Many passengers leaped through emergency doors before it became evident that there was no fire. When the dust settled, the Swissair passengers saw the reason for the fast stop. The DC-8 had come to rest not more than 50 yards from Gaza One.
Meanwhile, another aerial drama was under way. Back in Amsterdam, the two "Senegalese" who had been denied passage by El Al had bought first-class tickets on Pan American's Flight 93, a 747. As Clipper 93 taxied toward its takeoff position, ground controllers--whom El Al had alerted about the attempted hijacking of its craft and about the suspicious passengers it had bumped off its flight and onto Pan American--radioed a warning to Captain Jack Priddy. He halted the 747 and walked through the passenger compartment looking for the pair. When he finally found them, they readily agreed to be frisked on the spot. "They seemed like nice fellas," says Priddy. "I'm no professional, but I went over their bodies and hand luggage fairly closely."
He found nothing; they had hidden their weapons under the seats. Flight 93 had just leveled off at 28,000 ft. when one of the men forced his way into the cockpit and held a revolver on Priddy. The hijackers then ordered him to fly to Beirut, where airport officials sent radio warnings to the plane that it would be dangerous for the giant aircraft to attempt a landing on a runway that had not been reinforced to bear the 500,000 lbs. of the immense 747. "My brother, this plane is not like a 707 --it requires better facilities to land," pleaded one Beirut air controller. The hijackers remained adamant, and Priddy put the plane down without incident.
The Popular Front was in a quandary about what to do with the big plane, which had not figured in their plans. Apparently the two skyjackers had seized it on their own initiative. It was too large to land on the desert at Revolution Airstrip. At Beirut, guerrilla demolition experts brought a satchel full of explosives on board. One of them remained in the plane with the two hijackers and began wiring up explosive charges in the cabin and toilets during the flight to Cairo. The P.F.L.P. had decided to blow up the plane in the Egyptian capital as a sign of its disgust with Nasser for agreeing to the Middle East negotiations.
No Smoking, Please
On the final approach to Cairo, the demolition expert asked Stewardess Augusta Schneider for some matches. Handing him a pack, she cautioned as a good stewardess should: "You can't smoke now. We are about to land." The guerrilla had no intention of smoking. Instead, while the giant Clipper was still 100 feet off the ground, he lit the fuse to his explosives. As the fuse began to burn, the hijackers told the passengers: "You have eight minutes." But Captain Priddy, captive in his cockpit, knew none of this. Landing in early-morning blackness at an unfamiliar airport, he might have elected to abort the approach and go around for another landing. Fortunately, he did not.
As the plane slowed down, the crew blasted open the emergency exits, and passengers began to slide to safety on the plastic evacuation chutes. But Captain Priddy, still unaware of the emergency, inched the 747 forward a few yards, throwing some passengers from the slides. Then the crew was allowed to leave. "You have two minutes," one gunman informed Priddy as he sat in the cockpit. The crew had run only as far as the wingtip when the $25 million craft exploded into a ball of fire. Egyptian authorities seized the three commandos. At week's end, there were still no charges placed against them --partly, no doubt, because Nasser had welcomed the Athens hijackers to Cairo last July as "patriots." However, Egypt's semi-official newspaper Al Ahram pointedly noted that "the attack on international civil aviation does not encourage world feeling of solidarity with the Palestine cause."
In capitals of the nations whose citizens were being held prisoners in the desert, stunned governments started the long job of getting them home. Early Monday, Switzerland made the first diplomatic move by offering to free the three Arab hijack convicts it was holding in return for the release of the passengers and crew of the Swissair jet. But the offer was hastily withdrawn later the same day after it was privately criticized by Secretary of State William Rogers. At a Labor Day meeting with representatives of Switzerland, West Germany, Israel and Britain, Rogers stressed that one-plane deals with the terrorists would only encourage them to play off one government against another.
The passengers spent their first night in the desert in total darkness and eerie silence. As dawn broke over the sunbaked clay, prisoners and guerrillas alike found that they had some ominous visitors. A line of tracked armored personnel carriers and Centurion tanks surrounded the entire enclave. "They just sat there," recalled TWA Passenger Nancy Porter. "We didn't know whose side they were on." Neither, probably, did most of the other people on the scene, including the troops themselves. They were units of the Royal Jordanian Army, posted by King Hussein as a symbol of his power. But Hussein's hold on Jordan was increasingly shaky, and despite the menace of the tanks, it was extremely problematical whether he would risk moving against the airliners' guerrilla captors.
That morning the commandos ordered the hostages to hand over their passports, and gave out pink landing passes emblazoned with the P.F.L.P. emblem. Each passenger had to kneel while his passport was examined. When a woman on Swissair protested, a Palestinian answered: "We have been on our knees for 20 years, so five minutes won't hurt you."
The Popular Front guerrillas planned to transport women, children and old people--except for those who were Jewish--to hotels in Amman, and they were searching documents for evidence of Israeli citizenship or Jewish-sounding names. Recounts Nancy Porter, a Gentile who was evacuated: "They asked each of us, 'Are you Jewish?' I thought it was going to be the firing squad."
Crisis Cartel
The separation of Jew from non-Jew lent a concentration-camp atmosphere to the scene, and it caused panic among some of the passengers. News of it caused severe anxiety among relatives back home. Said Alexander Herman of Brooklyn, whose 17-year-old daughter Miriam was a prisoner: "I was four years in a concentration camp in Hungary. I lost four children by Hitler, and now I am going through the same thing again." However Passenger Jonathan David, a bearded Jew from New York, felt that he had "not been given different treatment that I'm aware of" by his captors. The Popular Front, which said it detained the Jews for "further interrogation," maintained that "Zionism is our enemy, not Jews."
On Monday afternoon, the 127 designated passengers were bused to three Amman hotels--the Intercontinental, the Philadelphia and Shepheard's. Almost immediately, some of the fiercest street fighting in Jordan's recent history broke out. While Palestinian commandos and regular Jordanian forces battled each other, the various hotels were completely cut off from one another, isolating the three groups. Those in the Intercontinental spent harrowing nights in the basement or in hallways, while bullets smashed through the plate glass in the lobby, water from a ruptured roof cistern cascaded down stairwells, and mortar explosions shook the building. Electricity, phones and cable facilities went dead. "I'm glad I'm not at the airstrip," said Sheila Warnock of New York, a hostage. "But if you ask me, it was safer out on the plane."
On Tuesday, the Swiss government recommended that the five nations choose the International Committee of the Red Cross as their common bargaining agent and all quickly agreed. The concerned nations quickly set up a coordinating board, composed of diplomats and high government officials in Bern, which was soon dubbed the "crisis cartel." To handle the negotiations, the Red Cross chose one of its ace troubleshooters: Andre Rochat, 44, a veteran of sensitive Middle East assignments. His only guideline was that he should work for the release of all passengers, crews and planes--a strategy designed to ensure that Israelis and other Jews would be included in any deal. As for concessions to the commandos, Switzerland and West Germany made no secret of their willingness to release their Arab prisoners. But Britain was reluctant to trade Leila Khaled; she was being formally detained under the Alien Order Act in a heavily guarded London police station, where she spent her waking hours lecturing the police matron in her cell on the justice of the Palestinian cause. Most reluctant of all was Israel, which has some 3,100 Arab terrorists in its prisons. Israel did not rule out a trade of prisoners, but insisted that it must study the Arab terms very closely before committing itself.
Meanwhile conditions for those remaining on board the planes were becoming distinctly uncomfortable. Desert temperatures reached over 100DEG in the daytime and fell to the mid-50s at night. Some passengers requested boiled water and special diets that the "field kitchens," which the guerrillas had set up alongside the planes, could not provide. The most serious worry was inadequate sanitation, as toilet storage tanks filled to overflowing. Many of these problems were revealed to reporters at a chaotic planeside press conference sponsored by the P.F.L.P., during which airliner prisoners conversed by bullhorns with newsmen, who were warned not to approach the hostages too closely.
On Wednesday, the Popular Fronts terms for releasing the hostages became somewhat clearer after it staged an even more audacious hijacking. Concerned that they might not have enough British nationals to trade for Leila's release, the commandos pirated a London-bound BOAC flight shortly after its takeoff from Bahrain in order to gain more human bargaining chips. The VC-10, carrying 105 passengers and a crew of ten, was ordered by two gunmen to land at Revolution Airstrip beside the other two hijacked craft. News of the latest hijacking reached Prime Minister Edward Heath as he was on his way to a Cabinet meeting about the earlier incidents. "Oh, Lord," Heath muttered.
Living conditions improved somewhat on Wednesday for the imprisoned passengers. Airline meals, 1,000 a day, were flown from Beirut to Amman, where they were transported to the airstrip. From Geneva, the Red Cross shipped portable toilets, blankets, first-aid supplies and sanitary napkins. The Palestinian commandos draped their banners on the airliners' open doors and even painted the Popular Front's name in large Arabic letters across the fuselage of two craft. They provided ambulance rides for the kids, helped older passengers climb down stepladders for daily exercise, and brought in a doctor to attend medical problems.
Troubles in Amman
The continued chaos in Jordan made negotiations all but impossible. After arriving in Amman from Geneva, Red Cross Negotiator Rochat was trapped all day Wednesday in his hotel by the wild street fighting outside. He finally managed to reach one Front official by telephone. Pleading that circumstances made it impossible to start bargaining, he persuaded the commandos to agree to a 72-hour extension of their original 10 p.m. Wednesday deadline for blowing up the planes and their occupants.
The new deadline was 10 p.m. E.D.T. on Saturday. The U.S. State Department, which set up a round-the-clock command post in Washington under Middle East Specialist Talcott W. Seelye, stayed in constant touch with its embassy in Amman. But a U.S. official who tried to drive out to the airstrip was turned back, and frequently diplomatic personnel could not even venture into Amman's streets.
Another problem was that no one, in Habash's absence, emerged as a clear spokesman for the P.F.L.P. That made almost any remark by an individual commando appear to be a Front demand. One hijacker aboard the Pan American 747, for instance, told passengers that the Front would demand freedom for Sirhan B. Sirhan, convicted assassin of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The assertion was quickly denied by other Popular Front members.
Wired for Explosion
On Thursday, the crisis cartel turned down the commandos' first detailed list of demands, which would have resulted in the trade of some hostages for convicted hijackers held in Europe and left others, including all the Jews and Israelis, to be bartered in a separate deal with Israel. The harrowing existence of hostages in Amman eased somewhat when the warring Jordanians and commandos reached yet another truce.
By Friday, the unstable situation in Jordan as well as the prolonged plight of the hostages forced the U.S. and Israel to consider a more drastic plan: military intervention. The Pentagon moved 25 Phantoms into a U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik, Turkey, where six 130 transports were already standing by to aid in a possible evacuation. The U.S. also ordered an aircraft carrier and supporting ships of the Sixth Fleet to a destination within reach of Jordan. Meanwhile Israel worked out a contingency plan that called for the use of helicopters and heliborne troops.
Rumors of a possible attack by the U.S. or Israel threw Popular Front commandos into a panic. On Friday afternoon, they suddenly ordered a four-man Red Cross medical team off the airstrip and turned back a Red Cross supply convoy that was on its way to the hostages. Then, while passengers and crew were hustled inside the stifling aircraft, demolition squads wired up explosive charges under the wings of each plane. Popular Front leaders demanded new guarantees from Red Cross negotiators that none of the five nations were contemplating a rescue attack on the airfield. Said Swiss Foreign Minister Pierre Graber: "If these assurances were not forthcoming, they said that they would push the button." The commandos got their assurances from the Western powers Friday night, but Israel stated its position carefully. Speaking on the state radio, Deputy Premier Yigal Allon said, "I would not suggest speaking about military measures at this moment. We must wait and see what will happen." Many Israelis interpreted this to mean their government was keeping its military options open.
At about the same time. P.F.L.P. leaders came under strong pressure to turn over bargaining responsibility to the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella association of fedayeen groups that is dominated by Guerrilla Chief Yasser Arafat, the comparatively responsible leader of Al-Fatah. The other Palestinian organizations were eager to gain control over Popular Front actions because of stinging criticism that had been heaped on the hijackers by most Arab governments, including the commandos' usual allies Iraq and Syria. Popular Front officials reluctantly agreed to the evacuation of all hostages from the airstrip and to the release of some women and children from Amman's hotels. They also acquiesced in a firm bargaining position, which had already been worked out by the P.L.O.: to hold only Israelis "with military capability" for a separate deal involving Arab prisoners in Israel. All others could be freed in return for hijackers held in Europe.
Late Friday evening, shortly after two rabbis on the TWA jet had conducted an impromptu two-minute service, the commandos started to evacuate the aircraft. By midday Saturday, they had transported the remaining women and children by cars and trucks into Amman. Another 141 passengers, including all men aboard the three jets and ten Jewish and Israeli women (some with dual citizenship), were taken to another--and unannounced--location. After the two caravans departed, the Front's demolition experts did their work, and the three shiny jets were reduced to smoking rubble.
A few women and children wept when they arrived at the Intercontinental in Amman, and a number expressed anxious concern for their missing menfolk. But most seemed in surprisingly good shape after their ordeal. "Everyone went around in stocking feet," joked Stewardess June Haesler. "It was a six-day pajama party." Like captives and captors elsewhere, some passengers and commandos developed a genuine liking for each other. One of the Popular Front men playfully tried on a Jewish boy's yarmulke in the hotel lobby, and at least one stewardess showed up wearing a P.F.L.P. button pinned to her uniform. Said Stewardess Linda Jenson: "They put so much effort into consoling us that I had no doubt we would get out."
Matter of Principle
But when? At a press conference Saturday evening, the Popular Front announced that it intended to keep 35 men and five young "Israeli" girls as hostages indefinitely until the seven guerrillas held in Europe and an unspecified number of Palestinians detained in Israel were released. The Front said that its prisoners, who presumably include the Israelis "with military capability," are being kept in a "special hotel" outside Amman. The guerrillas assured relatives that the accommodations were more comfortable than those in the Palestinian refugee camps. Meanwhile, none of the men passengers had yet arrived in Amman from the airstrip site, and the Front was still holding passports.
If all but the 40 are set free early this week, the hostage crisis will be reduced enormously in scope, but not in principle. The five nations bargaining with the commandos remain committed to the release of all hostages, whatever their nationality or religion. Only when that condition is met will the five governments agree to turn over any Palestinians in exchange. In order to facilitate a possible swap, the British government declared that it was prepared to hand over Leila Khaled as part of a deal. Meanwhile, Israel was still opposed to freeing Arab terrorists in return for the release of civilian hostages. It was, however, willing to discuss a bargain if it would include several captured Israeli pilots and civilians held in Egypt and Syria. Since many of the 40 "prisoners of war" held by the Front are probably American Jews with both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, the diplomatic focus of the crisis may narrow to those two nations.
If the basic issue of hostages remained unsolved, so, too, did the problems of growing tensions within the guerrilla groups in Jordan. At week's end the Palestinian Liberation Organization ousted the P.F.L.P. from membership on the grounds that the skyjacking had damaged the Palestinian cause. Yet since the P.L.O. had arranged the release of most of the hostages and then forced the P.F.L.P. to accede to the agreement, the ouster was likely to make further negotiations only more difficult.
But even before the hostage issue was resolved, Revolutionary Airstrip reverted to nothing more than a patch of desert, the guerrillas gone and the army tanks departed. The great planes that had been the focal point of one of the strangest dramas in modern times had virtually disappeared, reduced to twisted charred wreckage. Already Bedouins were poking among the ruins for scrap metal and souvenirs.
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