Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  "May I come up?" I yelled, taking a chance.

  "Come on," they answered.

  I had happened upon what turned out to be the American command house, which was the only building in the immediate area still occupied. From the balcony upstairs we could look across a span of several hundred feet, onto the balconies of the Saudi embassy, and virtually into the masked eyes of the madmen.

  From different places and voices we got bits and pieces of information. The terrorists wanted some of their fellows released from prison. If they did not get that, they would kill the diplomats. My mind was filled with the picture of Curt Moore again, the last time I saw him, sitting in his office at the back of the embassy and telling me with such intelligent, informed sympathy about the very things that were driving these terrorists to such insanity.

  I left the area once in order to file quickly at the government information office and then to return. And, of course, filing in a situation like this is a special horror. The government had set up several telex machines in a jerry-built office. Most of the time things either did not get through or were endlessly delayed. I was lucky -- I just handed in my copy and left and it got through.

  The morning had seen a mood of busyness and purposeful activity. The police had smartly cordoned off the area. Even the gawking onlookers were quiet and orderly. Journalists came and went. Negotiations of every possible sort were started behind the scenes. But as the desert sun smote us with its merciless heat, tempers began to fray. Nothing was progressing -- nothing. As evening approached, a new mood -- one of desperation -- began to set in.

  Then suddenly the terrorists grew more violent and more impatient. They set a deadline of 8:00 p.m. for killing the men.

  People rushed about now, faces grim -- time was not money but lives.

  Meanwhile, in the American command house, I waited with the U . S . AID couple, two charming and generous Americans. The U . S . Marine guards were there, and the political officer, and the CIA station chief. The telephone line was kept open to the embassy so information could be relayed back and forth. I was the only journalist. President Nixon was sending an envoy on a special plane. But Nixon had also said at three o'clock that under no circumstances would he negotiate.

  Somehow nothing worked. The special plane was delayed somewhere in Egypt. The demands were not being met.

  A new mood seized us. It was as though the horror were palpable, as though it were sitting there, in black robes, with its eye sockets empty and staring at us. By 7:30 p.m., as a strange hooded sun was dropping over the spectral villas of Khartoum, we stood on the upstairs balcony staring at the stark silence of the Saudi embassy. The worst sign of all was the fact that now no one could be seen. I kept looking at my watch. The hand was creeping inexorably toward eight o'clock.

  Five to eight: I could feel myself freezing inside. Four ... three. I almost felt my throat close totally.

  "They'll put it off, they'll give more time," the young marine lying on the roof above us with his machine gun murmured. The rest of us stood on the upstairs balcony, in utter, stark, deathly silence.

  At eight o'clock I looked at my watch, as though pleading with it not to continue its march. And then, at eight o'clock, something so incredible happened that when I looked up from the watch, I thought perhaps I was going quite mad.

  Before my eyes at precisely 8:00 P . M . there passed a perfect vertical wave of sand. Then that wave passed and we were in the middle of a blinding sandstorm, one of the worst Khartoum had ever had.

  Inside the house, where we now barricaded ourselves trying to close up every crevice lest we be drowned in the pounding golden waves, the sand seeped in with persistence. The minute the storm started, the now-desperate Sudanese began to send tanks and soldiers in. Now, no one could see, even in outline, the Saudi embassy. The drama had entered still another form.

  The tanks rumbled past us in the sand. From time to time we would take turns running outside to stand by the gate in the storm and then running back into the house to report. Sudanese soldiers were following the tanks, running from side to side for protection. Now there was the new fear -- that the terrorists would try to escape in the storm, perhaps with their captives.

  By 9:15, with the storm at its wild height and with increasing feelings of lostness and hopelessness, I stood on the upstairs balcony, only slightly protected from the driving waves of sand. I looked at my watch. We had again begun to hope. But the next moment the waiting was over.

  Through the sand, we could see nothing. But we could hear. Volley after volley after volley of shots rang out in the night.

  "I think," the young marine murmured, tears in his eyes, "that they just zapped my boss."

  I knew in my heart they were dead, but tried not to know. All night long we huddled in the house. Over the open phone came some hope: It had been shots in the night. At 2:00 A . M . some Americans came. They tried to pretend .... But by morning we knew. The two Americans were dead. The Jordanian and the two Arabs had been spared.

  The weirdness of the night outside, as the storm continued to bombard the hapless city, paralleled the weirdness of the night within. Nothing in the world will ever convince me that the two events were not linked, or that we were not linked in some metaphysical whirlpool in which nature took upon itself to symbolize the horrors of men.

  At 5:00 A . M ., as a pallid sun began to throw a strange light over the city, I got up and slipped out -- to file and hopefully to sleep. I walked out of the cordoned-off zone, and I can still remember and taste the sand hanging soundlessly in the air.

  Saturday morning very early was the latest time I could file for our Saturday-night paper. So after filing I was free until Monday morning. Bob Allison and I went to the restaurant at the new modern hotel on the Blue Nile and sat for hours, drinking Scotch after Scotch. Certainly now at least I would sleep!

  Instead it was the only time in my life that I went five days and five nights without any sleep at all. It was simply impossible. On the surface I was calm and I had performed as expected. But underneath that performance I was in a state of inner shock. The Khartoum story tormented me. I carried it in my heart and gut. I was torn between wanting to kill the terrorists and wanting to change the world so young men would not commit such atrocities.

  When I was in Saudi Arabia that summer, I decided to stop off at Khartoum on the way back and see what had happened in the aftermath.

  The Sudanese were holding the nine terrorists, and it was becoming a cause célèbre in the Arab world. Moreover, the Palestinians, while denying officially that they had done it, had sent a young observer to work there. I immediately went out to see him at his villa and found a pleasant, red-haired young man who invited me to lunch the next day. Since that happened to be the day I was leaving for the airport to fly to Cairo, I thought out loud in his office. "Maybe I will bring my bags here and leave them while I go to the airport," I said. "Of course," he said.

  When I got back to the hotel, I realized the madness of what I had done. Go to lunch and leave my bags at the office of people whose whole life is devoted to putting bombs, grenades, electrical devices, letter bombs, and detonators in other people's bags? I was enraged at my own stupidity. And when I did indeed come for lunch the next day, Abu Khaled (for that was his name) eyed me with a gimlet eye (or so I presumed) and asked, "Where are your bags?"

  I lied, and hardly convincingly. "I didn't have time to pack," I said. "I'll have to return to the hotel before going." A half-smile lingered on his lips.

  At lunch I berated him bitterly for what they had done. "It's crazy -- crazy," I said impassionedly.

  Then he voiced words I shall never forget. "After all we've been through," he said, staring expressionlessly at me, "don't you think we would be a little crazy?"

  The men were convicted and spent a few months in jail. Then they were sent to Cairo, where they lived in a villa under house arrest until they quietly disappeared into the murderous shadows of the Middle East.


  ***

  How did one work in this terrorist world?

  I controlled these shadowy, clandestine, ultimately lethal situations by never, ever giving terrorist leaders any reason to suspect me -- and by giving them every possible reason in the world to trust me. And so, as in so many other areas, I devised my own little set of rules to operate by and live by:

  (1) I neither flattered them nor insulted them. Unless they proved otherwise, I treated them as I treated all people: with respect.

  2. I never, ever had anything romantically to do with anyone in or around any movement. Indeed, my effectiveness rested upon my being a kind of "third sex," here as elsewhere in the Third World. If there were any problem at all with any of the men, I would have reported it immediately to their higher-ups. As a matter of fact, I like to think that because of my behavior and attitudes, there was none.

  3. I was quite open about what I was doing -- I never pretended I did not go to Israel or did not sympathize greatly with Israel. At the same time, there was a line beyond which I did not want to go. I never, for instance, wanted to meet the real "crazies," like the murderous Abu Nidal in Baghdad or even some of the more extremist elements in Beirut. There is simply such a thing as knowing too much about people like them.

  ***

  Those, in short, were my rules for dealing with guerrillas. They are not perhaps the kinds of rules that most young women of similar education and background find themselves drawing up as rules for living as they move through life, but then life seldom turns out exactly as we would have planned.

  In this work in the Middle East, as in Guatemala, there were advantages to being a woman. Guerrilla or "liberation" or terrorist movements -- those dark children of the twentieth century -- were generally Marxists of one form or another. So almost all of them hated American men, seeing in them the representatives of the imperial power, of the metropole, of everything that they themselves were not... and probably never would be. At the same time, they envied them, resented them, wanted to be like them. They could feel more at ease with a woman. Despite their ideologies I always felt that few could actually in their guts accept women as equal. Thus we could never really be a threat. Yet they were quite modern enough and quite aware enough of modern communications to know that I could, as a woman, get them what they needed. There may also have been the added thrill of dealing with the woman of the conquerors, with showing me (if they could never convince them ) how powerful, how potent, how chivalrous, how courageous -- and how dangerous -- they were.

  These "advantages," however, did not always help.

  I had been in Baghdad in April 1973 when I received the news of the death of Kemal Nasser, the poet who was the spokesman for the PLO , during the Israeli raid on Beirut, and whose story will come later. I was deeply saddened, for I had been genuinely fond of Kemal. And as it happened, I was returning to Beirut from Baghdad the morning of the funeral for Kemal and the other two Palestinian leaders who were killed.

  At the airport which I had then crossed and crisscrossed so many familiar times, I picked up the papers, skimmed them lifelessly, and only noticed in passing the blazing stories: ISRAELI BLOND WOMAN LEADS COMMANDOS , BEAUTIFUL ISRAELI BLONDE SOUGHT . Below were stories from neighbors of Kemal describing the "beautiful blonde."

  After checking into the St. George's Hotel, I walked hurriedly over to the Fatah Information Office to get my press pass -- something that I had done dozens of times and something that was indispensable to do in a situation like this -- only to be confronted by three very young, very nervous, very inexperienced Palestinians. They had been searching the city, if only in their contorted minds, for the "Israeli blonde"--and I was soon it. Within minutes I realized that I was being surrounded. A uniformed man with a gun came in and wordlessly trained his machine gun on me. I was a prisoner.

  I suppose most people think that scenes like this are tremendously dramatic -- and frightening -- and even grand. Well, they can be tremendously frightening but otherwise there is a kind of absurdity about them. What scared me most, I suppose, was how ignorant and now nervous they were. (I have always preferred pros; it is the amateurs who threaten the world.)

  There we sat, for hours, in this small back room. One chap trained his machine gun on me, when he wasn't twirling and playing with it. A young skinny one with glasses (the interrogator) went through my purse and looked over everything, half-assedly.

  He picked out an old picture of me with a friend in Macao and got very excited. It was a rather worn picture with the two of us standing in front of a mountain. It could have been anywhere. "That's in my village in Galilee," he kept saying.

  Finally he said to me, "You call the American embassy and tell Mr. Oakley to come down here to identify you." (Bob Oakley, a fine diplomat married to my college friend, Phyllis Eliot.)

  No doubt because I am blond and from the Midwest, I appear kind of Blondie-dumb to many people. My young captors obviously shared this opinion.

  "There is no way in the world that I am going to call the American embassy," I told him, staring calmly and speaking very deliberately and slowly.

  Odd, it always works. People, even of other cultures, recognize when you have reached your outer limit. But you cannot pretend, you have to mean it. This does not apply, of course, to the brutes of the world; if they want to torture you, they can probably get anything from you they want. But in most situations like this one you are dealing with people whose business is bluff.

  They brought me tea. When I tried to lift it to my mouth, the boy said coldly and suspiciously, "You're trembling."

  "Of course I'm trembling," I said with not at all disguised anger. "You're frightening me to death." Then I sat back and glared at him.

  After a while they picked up somebody else, The New York Times 's Juan de Onis, who had been the top Latin America correspondent for years and a good colleague. So now there were two of us. But eventually it ended, and it ended almost at the exact moment the funeral ended.

  Soon people like Clovis Maksuud, a journalist who later became Arab League ambassador to the U . S ., and other friends discovered my "captivity" and phoned. Now those same hostile boys became the soul of Arab hospitality and attentiveness. Did I want tea? I did. Did I want to go home? I did not, goddamn it. "Look," I said, "you brought me here. You've half scared the life out of me and you've made me miss the funeral of a friend. Now sit down and let me interview you."

  They did. They were like puppy dogs. And during the next few days I was to stay in Beirut they came over daily with bits of information. One's information networks are not always planned ahead.

  But the story of my "captivity," brief but nevertheless real and frightening, did not end there. From Beirut I moved through Cyprus and on to Israel and soon found myself being interviewed by Israeli television. As it happened it was on Friday, on the eve of Sabbat, so most everybody saw it. Soon I was getting flowers from unnamed people and people would recognize me on the street. The Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv, always jammed, was telling me, "Any time you want to come back, we have a room for you," and they gave me a duplex suite the next time I did come.

  Finally I asked Daily News correspondent Jay Bushinsky what was going on. "You don't seem to understand," he said. "They are not sure you aren't the Israeli blonde who led the raid on Beirut."

  Later my friend Yehoshophat Harkabi, the foremost Arabist in Israel and the man who was intelligence chief during the Six-Day War, explained what I had been caught up in. "There was an 'Israeli blonde,'" he said, "but it was a man in a blond wig. We never send women on these raids. And there was a reason." He paused. "In ancient times there are many stories about blond Jewish women commanders against Arab armies -- Judith, for instance. It is a bit of psychological warfare."

  Yes, I thought wryly as I left, a bit of psychological warfare that might have killed me!

  But the whole saga was not yet to end. As I was leaving Tel Aviv for Jerusalem one day, I picked up my mail at the embassy and was rewarded wit
h a copy of the story I had written after my "capture." Across the front page of the Daily News was emblazoned, OUR GIRL HELD BY GUERRILLAS. There was my smiling picture and the story, which had been completely rewritten into a caricature of sensationalism. As Nick von Hoffman always told me, "You are their white virgin in the jungle." Here, I surely was. And it was I and not those nameless editors who would have to live with this.

  I called Jay, shaking with rage.

  "What shall I do?" I asked. I could actually feel the blood rising and swelling in my veins.

  Jay, always practical and usually right, said, "Don't do anything. No, don't call. No, by all means, don't write. Wait twenty-four hours before you do anything. " And so I did. I waited twenty-four hours. During those twenty-four hours my originally watershed level of fury grew to flood proportions. At 4:00 p.m. the next day I called the paper from Jerusalem and exploded. I kept my friend and editor Nick Shuman on the phone for one and a half hours, knowing that the spending of money was always a far more sensitive issue than any editorial.

  Every time he would say, "We'll talk about this when you come home," I told him -- quite honestly, "If you don't talk now, I'm not coming home. In fact, I'm quitting." It worked quite neatly, but only because I thoroughly meant it.

  In the end I demanded and got two rounds of apologies from every editor involved, but it was small consolation. I was the one, not they, who would always be "Ms. Terror Filled the Room," as one of their better lines put it. Sometimes it seemed easier to deal with male guerrillas than my clear and "rational" colleagues in Chicago.