Sunday, September 6, 1970, was the Palestinians’ Pearl Harbor. It all began in Amsterdam, where a voluptuous young woman with a Honduran passport boarded an El Al 707 en route to New York. She and her handsome male companion took their seats and waited for friends. The friends did not arrive. As the woman paced up and down the aisles, looking vainly for her expected companions, many of the men on the flight couldn’t take their eyes off this bombshell. Was she ever! No sooner had the 707 taken off than the woman pulled a grenade out of each of the cups of her brassiere, and with a war whoop, she and her seatmate, brandishing a gun, made a dash for the cockpit, which, unique on El Al, was bulletproof and locked. The quick-thinking El Al pilot, noting the commotion, put the 707 into a dramatic dive that threw the would-be hijackers off their feet, allowing passengers to secure the woman with their neckties, while an onboard Israeli security agent shot the male attacker in the stomach. Their grenades had failed to detonate.
The plane made an emergency landing at London Heathrow, where police swarmed the plane. The bombshell turned out to be, like the thwarted Athens hijacker, a Lebanese former schoolteacher turned Marxist PFLP radical. Her name was Leila Khaled. She was twenty-four. A year before, in August 1969, carrying a book called My Friend Che, she had hijacked a TWA 707 between Rome and Tel Aviv and diverted the plane to Damascus, where she blew up the cockpit though spared the passengers’ lives, again as a warning to TWA to stay out of Israel. Having captured the imagination of the world press as the “deadly beauty,” Khaled had undergone extensive plastic surgery so she could strike again, not that there was much effective security in place to stop her. This was before the age of screeners and pat-downs. All you had to do was show your passport, and on the plane you went.
In London, Khaled’s companion was pronounced dead of his gunshot wound. He was identified as Patrick Argüello, a Nicaraguan Sandinista living in San Francisco and, like Khaled, traveling on a Honduran passport. His was a very jet-setty bio, a sign of the international times. His politics were international as well. He was part of a Central American terrorist group that, like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the Basque ETA in Spain, were brothers-in-arms with their Palestinian comrades, all dedicated to bringing down capitalism and bringing down the planes.
Just as Khaled was being transported to captivity in London, that same morning, three more PFLP terrorist groups struck again and simultaneously. A TWA 707, just having taken off from Frankfurt to New York, was ascending over the North Sea when two skyjackers took the captain hostage and had him reverse course for the Middle East and rename the flight Gaza One. And a Swissair DC-8 leaving Zurich for New York became Haifa One when still another female terrorist announced to the passengers, “This is your new captain speaking.” An American feminist capable of dark humor joked to her seatmate how remarkable it was to be skyjacked by a woman. They’d come a long way, baby.
But the biggest PFLP “get” that morning was one of Juan Trippe’s new 747s. Pan Am’s flight from Brussels to New York was known among travelers as the “Wall Street Express” because it carried so many bankers doing business at Common Market headquarters in Belgium. On its one stop in Amsterdam, it was boarded by two European-looking men with passports from Senegal who had seats in first class. Presumably, they were international bankers, like most of the other capitalists up front. Such a presumption was terribly wrong. In fact, the men were the “friends” of Leila Khaled, who had not shown up for the El Al flight she had just tried to hijack. Sharp-eyed El Al security knew bankers when they saw them, and these men seemed too young. Furthermore, they had bought their first-class tickets with cash, another red flag. So El Al bumped them from the flight, into the welcoming arms of Pan Am, whose current marketing motto was “The World’s Most Experienced Airline.” Alas, that experience did not extend to terrorism. After takeoff, the two “Senegalese,” who were actually Lebanese and had casually hidden their weapons under their seats, calmly took the circular staircase up to the unlocked cockpit, put their guns to the captain’s head, and had him change course to the Holy Land.
The terrorists took the TWA and Swissair flights, now Gaza One and Haifa One, to a flat part of the Jordanian desert twenty-five miles outside Amman, to an old World War II British training airstrip called Dawson’s Field. The place had been defunct for years, with no electricity, and had been used only for small craft that weighed a fraction of the 180,000 pounds of the 707. It was a tribute to the skill of the two pilots that they were able to land their craft by the light of oil drums set ablaze on the tarmac of what the PFLP had rechristened “Revolution Airport.”
No pilot, however, would have been able to land the 500,000-pound 747 at Revolution. In fact, no one expected to. The Palestinians didn’t want the 747 precisely because of its size. They wanted to have three imperialist aircraft lined up side by side in the Arab desert, so they could blow them all up, all together, for all the world to see. But El Al had foiled these plans, leading the faux-Senegalese to act on their own, without considering landing logistics. Besides, better a jumbo somewhere else than no jet at all. So they ordered the plane to Beirut, which, despite being considered the Paris of the Middle East, did not have a big modern airport like Orly that could accommodate the 747. They weren’t Dawson’s Field, but Beirut’s runways weren’t all that much longer; nor were they reinforced to bear the 747’s tonnage. Beirut air controllers tried to scare the skyjackers off, to no avail. This pilot, too, did a great job and feathered the giant plane down.
Not for long. The PFLP quickly decided that Beirut lacked shock value. They now wanted Cairo, just to show Egypt’s President Nasser the Palestinians’ displeasure for his agreeing with President Nixon, Secretary of State William Rogers, and his top aide Henry Kissinger to a cease-fire with Israel and Middle East peace talks. Cairo had the biggest airport in the Arab world, so landing was no problem. But as soon as the plane touched down, the terrorists evacuated all 180 crew and passengers and blasted the $25 million technological marvel into oblivion, in perhaps the largest, most dramatic fireball the Mideast had ever seen. Take that, Nasser, was the idea. The explosion would be a painful thorn in the mind of travelers who might be contemplating a once-in-a lifetime trip to see the Pyramids. Not in this lifetime. Not now. The desperately needed foreign exchange from tourist dollars, Egypt’s chief source of revenue, was certain to dry up.
Because of the ongoing travel recession, which was sure to grow to crisis proportions with this cataclysm, the three hijacked planes had been flying at less than half capacity. But there were still more than three hundred hostages to deal with, most of whom were Americans. Back in Jordan at Revolution Airport, the morning desert sun was rising, and by noon, the temperature outside was 120 degrees. Inside the aircraft, with no power for air-conditioning, the effect was like broiling in the metal shed used by the Japanese to torture Alec Guinness’s Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai. The planes’ toilets were quickly fouled beyond usability, and the water provided by the self-declared “humanitarian” terrorists had so much chlorine that some hostages complained that it was like drinking from a swimming pool. Soon the targeted airlines were flying in thousands of packaged meals to vast makeshift desert kitchens; portable toilets were set up for the hostages in what came to look like a film set, a space-age Lawrence of Arabia, which actually was shot in this very desert.
Discomforts aside, the fear factor was overwhelming, particularly for the Jewish passengers, quickly identified by last names and Israeli passport stamps, if not by self-declaration. The Jews, in particular, were designated as the bargaining chips for the release of PFLP prisoners incarcerated in Europe and Israel. On September 7, 127 of the hostages—the non-Jewish females and children—were released, taken off the planes and transferred to Pan Am’s Hotel InterContinental in Amman. Meanwhile, the rest of the men and all the Jews sat and baked in their jet ovens and worried that their end was near.
The world’s press descend
ed on Jordan. This was something no one had ever seen, and it was blockbuster news, televised across the planet, live from Revolution Field. If the Palestinians had felt they’d been ignored, they were now getting their compensatory close-up and then some. But the picture was anything but flattering, particularly three days later on September 9, when a fourth plane—a BOAC jet en route from Bombay to London—was hijacked and brought to Revolution. The PFLP leaders had wanted three planes in the desert to blow up. Two, they thought, wouldn’t be a big enough spectacle. They also needed more British subjects to bargain with to secure the London release of Leila Khaled and to retrieve the body of Patrick Argüello. The plane they took was a Vickers VC-10, a beautiful rear-engined craft that was nonetheless too little and too late to compete with the jets of Boeing and Douglas and represented the long frustrations of the British aviation industry. Here they all were, the 707, the DC-8, and the VC-10, the wings of man in the land of God, the Holy Land, which at the time seemed like the lowest and hottest circle of hell. The soaring brilliance of modern technology had been brought to this precipice by the savagery of man’s oldest and most primitive emotions.
Back in America, President Nixon was getting trigger-happy for a direct military response. He wanted to storm Revolution Airport and bomb all of Jordan, if need be, to wipe out the PFLP. The Sixth Fleet was poised in the Mediterranean, off Jordan; military aircraft and transports were readied in Turkey. Luckily for the hostages, Nixon’s defense secretary, Melvin Laird, opposed to the use of force, told the commander in chief that the weather was too overcast for an attack, and the plan was dropped. Negotiations, conducted through the neutral Red Cross, were a farce. There was no single or reliable spokesperson for the PFLP, and some of the demands—like the release of Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan—were proferred, then dropped. The talks dragged on for several more days, until Friday, September 11. Then the planes were wired with explosives. This 9/11 was the hostages’ darkest hour.
But Nixon’s warmongering stance had its effect. The Palestinians began to fear their own obliteration. The scattered PFLP turned over all negotiating to the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat, who, compared to everyone else on his side, was a voice of relative reason. A deal was made. In return for Nixon’s not pulling the trigger, all hostages except for Israelis “with military capability” would be freed, as would all the Palestinian prisoners currently being held in jails of European countries whose citizens were hostages. The remaining Israelis, forty of them, would be traded for Palestinians being held in Israel, if Israel could come to terms.
BLACK SEPTEMBER. Arab terrorists deal the jet age a crippling blow when they hijack and destroy three Western commercial airliners in the Jordanian desert, 1970. (photo credit 13.2)
The commandos evacuated the planes, and the hostages were driven away to Amman in convoys. When the next dawn broke, the three planes were blown up, $50 million worth of “capitalist-imperialist” aircraft, in probably the greatest sound-and-light spectacle the modern press had ever witnessed. The towering columns of smoke were visible as far away as Amman, but it was an explosion seen on television around the world.
Jordan’s very Westernized and pro-American King Hussein was appalled at the horrid public relations the Palestinians had wreaked on his country. He finally snapped and commenced a war against the PLO, the PFLP, and any related terrorist group within Jordan’s borders. The campaign, which lasted barely a month, was known as Black September, and it succeeded in purging Jordan of the PLO and nearly half of its entire Palestinian population. An estimated 20,000 Palestinians were killed in the war, compared to fewer than 100 Jordanians. Hussein’s offensive also forced the freeing of the remaining Jewish/Israeli hostages, in return for Leila Khaled, after which the PFLP—as well as its disapproving parent PLO—relocated to Lebanon.
Richard Nixon was just as outraged as King Hussein. On September 11, at the height of the terrorists’ intransigence, Nixon issued an order to combat “air piracy” that included following Israel’s successful lead of assigning armed sky marshals to random American flights. An initial team of one hundred federal agents was organized for this task. When the last hostages were finally released on September 28 and flown via Cyprus to Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Nixon, who was in Italy visiting the pope, came out to welcome them. He made it clear to the world that America’s stance on skyjacking terrorism would be the toughest on earth. X-ray machines and metal detectors were also part of Nixon’s decree. The age of airport anxiety had begun.
The excess capacity of the new 747s had never seemed like such a terrible idea. First the economy had taken its toll; now it was the human factor, the fear factor. For Pan Am, skyjacking was the coup de grâce from which it would never recover. Planes that previously had been half filled were emptier than ever. The glamour days of flying truly went up in smoke that hot September at Revolution Airport. Nearly overnight, the jet set had become the fret set.
THE DECLINE OF THE JET SET HAD AS MUCH TO DO WITH THE RISE OF THE TERRORIST as it did with the fall of the playboy. The scandals involving Eddie Gilbert and Igor Cassini accelerated the extinction of this unique midcentury species of male hedonist, those high-profile lady-killing high livers who inspired the classic nomad-chic lifestyle of the 707 era. American youth was no longer aspiring to ape the Jet Set and follow their gilded footsteps. Being a playboy of the old school, the Ian Fleming James Bond school, was suddenly unhip. Being a gangster like the ones Alain Delon played, or a hippie like the protagonists of 1969’s global smash Easy Rider, was vastly cooler, and changing the world was cooler still. The Peace Corps was, in many ways, the new Jet Set.
Ah, Delon, and ah, Paris. As Bogart said to Bergman in Casablanca, “We’ll always have Paris.” Or would we? Paris was the spiritual home of the playboy. Now both Paris and playboys were on the ropes. While the Sorbonne riots of May 1968 may have scared away their parents and the Temple Fielding set and decimated the first-class cabins of the new 747s, American students, clutching their Frommer’s and Harvard Let’s Go budget guidebooks, heard the siren call of the barricades and began packing $200 round-trip student charters or $129 Icelandic Air prop jets to make the trip to a promised continent, symbolized by open-air-tolerated pot smoking in Amsterdam, fabulous cheap peasant food in Florence, and easy, if not free, love everywhere from Sweden to the Balearic Isles.
Before the skyjackings began in deadly earnest, and before the markets began their seemingly permanent decline, when travelers planned for Europe in the late sixties, London had already eclipsed Paris as the El Dorado of travel fantasies. The youthquake that had spawned all kinds of alluring creative and artistic ferment throughout the world had in Paris spawned only revolution and unrest, Danny the Red instead of Mick Jagger. Daniel Cohn-Bendit was the Jewish Marxist free-love-espousing radical who forged an alliance of students and workers at the barricades of the Sorbonne in May 1968 to protest what was to them the archaic reactionary rule of Charles de Gaulle.
The resulting violent Paris riots, like their sister riots at Columbia University the same month, had global publicity but little effect. By June, the Gaullists had retaken a three-quarter majority in the French National Assembly. The riots were simply bad publicity, antitourism that even the wizards of Doyle Dane Bernbach couldn’t turn on its head into a clever come-on, something like “Come to Paris and Get Bombed” or “Radical Chic,” before Tom Wolfe coined the phrase. Instead, Doyle Dane gave up the French account in 1969, a year before De Gaulle died, but the Gaullists continued to rule.
PRETTY BOY. Euro screen heartthrob Alain Delon, who was involved in a French version of the Profumo scandal, 1965. (photo credit 14.1)
One of the precipitants of the youthful unrest in France and its hatred of the ancient regime was a 1968–69 scandal that was France’s version of England’s Profumo Affair. The Markovic Affair, as the French contretemps was known, was as damaging to the mystique of the Jet Set as Danny the Red’s Sorbonne riots were to the occupancy of Juan Trippe’s
747s. While the Profumo Affair led to the emasculation of the British aristocracy and the rise of a new Cockney street elite of talent and cheek, the Markovic Affair led to nothing but a creeping malaise and a sad realization that la gloire de la France was less glorious than Doyle Dane had painted it.
Profumo was about sex, Markovic about death. Sex at least may have sold tickets; death was terrible for tourism. Because the scandal took place on two continents, with movie stars, rock stars, presidents, models, gangsters, French, Americans, Corsicans, and Serbians, the Markovic Affair, like Profumo’s, was a dramatic testament to the incredible mobility that the 707 had wrought. Here the heady stuff of gossip columns mixed with the murky stuff of true crime. Yet the overwhelming impression was an underlying rot that raised serious doubts in the minds of a newly financially pressed American travel population whether the Old World they were thinking of escaping to was any better than the troubled one they were leaving behind. In the European collision between fantasy and reality, the big victim would be the big new 747.
In October 1968, a body was found wrapped in a plastic mattress cover in a garbage dump in Elancourt, a poor suburb of Paris—a city, if you believed Doyle Dane, that didn’t possess such unromantic venues. The body seemed Parisian enough; it was even rakishly dressed in a Pierre Cardin suit. There was a bullet in the corpse’s brain, and his severed penis was in his mouth. When the initial investigators determined that the dead man was the valet, body double, and dead ringer for the biggest movie star in France, Alain Delon, the case was taken upstairs to the highest levels at the Élysée Palace. This was no time for some Inspecteur Clouseau to muck up a very sensitive situation.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 33