Losing My Virginity

by Richard Branson

  Two days later, all the seats were removed from one of our 747s and replaced by over 40,000 blankets, several tons of rice and medical supplies. The 747 then flew to Amman. The blankets were loaded up into a line of trucks waiting at the airport, and we came back with a number of British nationals who had been stranded in Jordan and wanted to come home.

  When I returned to Britain, William Waldegrave told me that he had had a call from Lord King, chairman of British Airways, who had been surprised to see the Virgin Atlantic flight to Jordan featuring on News at Ten.

  ‘We should be doing that,’ Lord King had told Waldegrave.

  William Waldegrave had pointed out to Lord King that I had just offered to help and Virgin Atlantic happened to have an aircraft available to make it possible. The next week British Airways flew some supplies out to Jordan and brought back some more nationals. Christian Aid told us that they were amazed: over many years they had unsuccessfully appealed to British Airways to help them, but, ever since the Virgin Atlantic flight to Amman, BA had been practically suffocating them with offers of help. Healthy competition even benefits charities sometimes.

  Since I heard that some of our original shipment had not reached the refugee camps, I decided to go and stay in Amman for a few days to watch the procession of the next delivery of supplies until it finally reached the camps. Once again I stayed with King Hussein and Queen Noor at the palace. I had fierce arguments with the minister for the interior about the need for strict accountability over these supplies so that the people who had provided them could be confident that they reached the camps. I also had several long talks with King Hussein about the Gulf crisis. King Hussein was sure that war could be averted, but was worried that the West wanted diplomacy to fail so that they could defend Kuwait and protect their oil supply. By the time I returned home it was clear that there would not be a full-blown refugee crisis in Jordan. Queen Noor told me that there were no more deaths from dysentery or dehydration. Over time the 150,000 refugees slowly dispersed.

  A few days later I was watching the news when I saw the extraordinary footage of Saddam Hussein surrounded by the British nationals who had been detained in Baghdad. In one of the most chilling scenes I have seen on television, he sat down and motioned a young boy to come and stand by him. He put his hand on this young boy’s head, and then continued to address the camera while gently patting his shoulder. The boy was about the same age as Sam. I knew that I had to do something to help these people. If that boy had been my son, I would have moved heaven and earth to bring him back home. The reporters were expecting that the hostages would be used as ‘human shields’ and would be incarcerated inside the prime Allied targets.

  I had no idea how I would set about helping bring these hostages home, but I knew that Virgin Atlantic had an aircraft and that, if we could somehow obtain permission to fly into Baghdad, we would be able to pick up any hostages whom Saddam Hussein agreed to release. It struck me that, in the same way in which I had been able to help the crisis in Jordan, I might be able to provide the vehicle for releasing these hostages.

  The next day I was called by Frank Hessey. His sister Maureen and his brother-in-law Tony were hostages in Baghdad. Tony had severe lung cancer and needed urgent medical attention. He had telephoned every department in the Foreign Office, the Iraqi ambassadors in Europe and even the Iraqi Government in Baghdad, but nobody seemed able to do anything. Frank asked me to help.

  As well as being in touch with the Foreign Office over the blankets-to-Jordan flight, I also had my friendship with King Hussein and Queen Noor. King Hussein was one of the few points of contact any government in the West had with Iraq. I had heard that Iraq was short of medical supplies and I wondered whether there were grounds for a deal whereby, if we flew in medical supplies, Iraq could release some foreign detainees. I called Queen Noor and asked her whether she could help me. When I described my proposal, she suggested that I come out to Amman once again and discuss it with King Hussein.

  The next three days, which I spent in Amman with King Hussein and Queen Noor, gave me an insight into how a businessman can help in moments of crisis. On the face of it, all I had to recommend me to Saddam Hussein was that I had once taken King Hussein and Queen Noor up in a hot-air balloon and I owned a tiny airline that operated four Boeing 747s. Although nobody else had taken King Hussein hot-air ballooning, many businessmen own large aircraft. But these two qualifications had propelled me into a unique situation: I was one of the only Westerners whom King Hussein was prepared to confide in, and therefore I had virtually direct access to Saddam Hussein.

  I started to draft a letter to Saddam Hussein. I told him that I was staying in Amman, helping out with the repatriation of immigrants and organising some medical and food supplies. I asked him whether he would consider releasing any foreigners who were caught in Baghdad, particularly women and children and those who were sick. As a gesture of goodwill I offered to fly in some medical supplies that Iraq was short of. I mentioned Frank Hessey’s brother and his lung cancer. I signed it ‘Yours respectfully, Richard Branson’.

  Then I went down to the drawing room and King Hussein spoke for an hour about the problems in the Middle East. As I sat there and listened, I looked around and saw a signed photograph of Margaret Thatcher standing beside one of Saddam Hussein. King Hussein pointed out to me why he did not automatically support the Kuwaiti position against Iraq:

  ‘The people of Kuwait are divided into three categories,’ he said.’ There are 400,000 Kuwaitis who are either very rich, or very, very rich; and there are 2 million impoverished immigrant workers looking after them.’

  He pointed out that there was no free press and no free elections in Kuwait: it was hardly the democracy’ the West claimed to be defending.

  ‘The Kuwaitis do nothing for the Arab world,’ he went on. ‘All their money is in Swiss bank accounts, not in Arabia. I’ve asked a number of world leaders whether the West would have come to Jordan’s rescue if Iraq had invaded Jordan, a country with no oil. Each time there was a silence. I doubt it.’ Then he laughed. ‘I know that you would, though! Yes, you’d come sailing over the horizon in your balloon with your Virgin planes beside you!

  ‘No, seriously,’ he said, ‘this is the chance to resolve the entire Middle Eastern question. Kuwait promised Saddam Hussein that it would pay its share of the costs of the war against Iran, which Iraq fought on its behalf. It has reneged on that promise. Originally, Saddam only planned to take the disputed oilfields he thought were rightfully his. He only occupied the whole country because he heard that the Kuwaitis were preparing the landing strips to let the Americans come in and defend them. He is certainly not interested in invading Saudi Arabia.’

  King Hussein’s peace plan involved Iraq pulling back to the border but keeping the disputed strip of land which he felt that Kuwait owed Iraq. Then in three years’ time there should be elections in Kuwait to see whether these border people wanted to be part of Kuwait or Iraq. He told me that the West had little idea of the months of negotiation which had gone on between Iraq and Kuwait, and how the Kuwaitis had continually failed to honour their promises. On top of that, the Kuwaitis had not waived the debts which Iraq had incurred over the Iran war, and the Kuwaitis continued to cheat all the Arab states by overproducing oil and selling it too cheaply.

  At the end of dinner, King Hussein took my letter off to his study and translated it into Arabic. He wrote a covering letter to Saddam Hussein, and despatched it by special courier to Baghdad. Before we went to bed, he quoted something his brother had said: ‘Why did the sheep bells of the Falkland Islands ring louder than the church bells of Jerusalem?’

  Back in London, I began talking to the Foreign Office. I tried to get the medical details of all those people stuck in Baghdad so that we could ‘prove’ they were ill. I then called around other foreign embassies to alert them that there might be a rescue flight going into Baghdad and that they should try to get some of their people on it by showing ‘proof’
that they were ill.

  Two nights after I returned to England, we got a response from Saddam Hussein. He promised us that he would release the women and children and the sick hostages, but he wanted someone of stature to be flown in to ask him publicly to do so. I telephoned Edward Heath, the previous Conservative British prime minister, and asked him whether he would do so. He agreed. King Hussein contacted Saddam Hussein and put forward Ted Heath’s name. Saddam Hussein agreed to him. The next day we flew Edward Heath out to Amman, where King Hussein arranged for him to go to Baghdad.

  A day later, King Hussein phoned me:

  ‘I have good news for you, sir,’ he said. He was impeccably polite and always addressed people as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, as did his children. ‘You can set off for Baghdad. I have Saddam’s word that you will be safe.’

  We had spent the last few days planning for this call and had already found a brave volunteer crew, whom I’d like to name: Les Millgate, Geoff New, Paul Green, Ray Maidment, Peter Johnson, Jane-Ann Riley, Sam Rasheed, Anita Sinclair, Caroline Spencer, Ralph Mutton, Peter Marnick, Paul Keithly, Helen Burn, Nicola Collins, Janine Swift and Stephen Leitch. We had forewarned passengers that there might be delays on Virgin Atlantic and that we might have to move them on to another airline.

  When I told my fellow airline directors that we had permission to fly, they were understandably concerned. They knew that if the plane was delayed in Baghdad for more than a handful of days we could go bust.

  ‘The government has confirmed that they will stand behind our insurance company if the plane is destroyed,’ Nigel Primrose, the Virgin Atlantic finance director, confirmed. ‘But nobody will give us loss-of-business insurance if the plane is hijacked and kept in Baghdad. Remember, BA have already had one 747 wrecked in Kuwait.’

  There was silence round the table as they digested this.

  ‘There is one upside,’ David Tait said with a serious face. ‘They’ll hold Richard there too and spare us any more of his harebrained schemes!’

  Everyone laughed.

  Although I knew I was risking everything on this flight, I also knew by now that there was no backing out.

  We took off from Gatwick at 11a.m. on 23 October 1990 and headed east over Europe. We sat huddled together at the front of the plane, a strange collection of hostage relatives, doctors, nurses, Virgin cabin crew, and one journalist to represent the press. The remaining 400 seats behind us were empty. It was rather eerie. After a couple of hours we all walked up and down the aisles to get some exercise.

  The daylight outside rapidly faded and by the time we entered Iraqi airspace it was dark. I looked out into the night and wondered where the Iraqi army was. I imagined the radar monitoring us as we headed towards Baghdad. We would be a single luminous green blob moving slowly across their dark screens. I half expected to see a couple of fighter planes come up and give us an escort, but it remained unnervingly quiet. The plane hummed and shuddered its way towards Baghdad, the first plane in twelve months to do so. Everyone stopped talking. We were entering the most dangerous airspace in the world, the concentrated target of the Allied Forces’ planned attack. I wondered when the assault would begin.

  I let myself into the flight deck and sat behind the captain, Les Millgate, and the two first officers, Geoff New and Paul Green. They were talking to air-traffic control over the radio but that was the only sign that Baghdad was out there. Ahead of us through the windscreen there was nothing. Iraq had a complete blackout. I wondered who lived down there, whether they could hear us flying overhead and whether they thought that we were the first Allied bomber. We seemed to be the only plane in the sky.

  ‘We’re getting close to the city,’ Les Millgate said.

  I scanned the screens in front of us and watched the altimeters drop as we descended. Flying long haul is deceptive. For most of the time up in the air you are above the cloud level in that magical world of the jet stream, hardly aware that you are moving. Then, as the plane starts coming down, you suddenly realise that you are flying a massive piece of metal at over 400 miles an hour and it has to be brought to a standstill. We came down lower and the plane hurtled through the darkness. Normally an airport is a blaze of orange and silver lights and it is difficult to distinguish the runway lights among them. The runways, ramps, planes and control tower are all brilliant with fluorescent and halogen lighting. But, for the first time, we were flying over a land that was so blacked out we could have been flying over the sea.

  Geoff New was being guided in by air-traffic control at Baghdad. He opened the wing flaps and let down the undercarriage. I watched as we came lower and lower. Now we were only 600 feet up, now 500 feet. The disembodied voice of the air-traffic controller started counting out our height. Suddenly, two lines of landing lights lit up in the darkness below us. We aimed straight down the middle; the plane touched down and raced along the tarmac. A few more lights appeared to guide us, and we taxied to the loading gates. I could dimly make out men with machine guns standing alongside a flight of steps. Jane-Ann Riley, our in-flight supervisor, signalled the door was safe to be opened, and I looked out. It was freezing cold.

  The steps were being manoeuvred towards us. I led the way down to Iraqi tarmac. Two lines of soldiers fanned out around us. A couple of senior government officials wearing brown camel-hair overcoats greeted us and indicated that the relatives should stay aboard. Baghdad airport is bigger than Heathrow but it was completely deserted: ours was the only aircraft there. I looked back at the incongruous sight of the Virgin cabin crew, with their red miniskirts and red stilettos, walking past the group of Iraqi soldiers in the vast empty airport. Their heels clacked loudly in the silence. We all smiled. The soldiers were a little timid at first, but then grinned back. Without any other planes on the runway, ours looked unnaturally large.

  We were taken into a bare departure lounge where all the technology – computer terminals, telephones and even light fittings – had been stripped out. This would have taken some time, and it indicated that the Iraqis were fully expecting to be bombed and had already salvaged everything they wanted from the airport. We handed out some presents we’d brought: boxes of chocolates for the officers and lots of Virgin kids’ flightpacks for the soldiers to send home to their families. Then I heard movement outside and Ted Heath came through the glass doors at the head of a large crowd of men, women and children. They looked pale under the fluorescent lights. As soon as they saw us they broke into a cheer and ran forward to embrace us. Ted was smiling and laughing and clasping everybody by the hand.

  I soon realised that we weren’t going to take all these people back with us. Everyone was laughing and hugging each other, tears streaming down their faces. Outside, the soldiers were unloading the medical supplies we had brought. We opened bottles of champagne and toasted each other and those that were to be left behind. I found Frank Hessey’s brother and we hugged. A pregnant Filipino woman who was having to leave her husband behind came up to me. She was in tears. Another man had to hand his three-year-old daughter to his nanny and say goodbye to her. I just hugged him. There was nothing else I could do. We both had tears in our eyes. I was a father too.

  After an hour the Iraqis told us to get back on the plane. As we walked across the freezing tarmac I shook hands with the soldiers and gave them more children’s packs for their kids. We wished each other well. It was disturbing to think that when we flew away these frail-looking, scared soldiers in their uncomfortable boots and olive-green trousers would still be clutching their guns and keeping guard at what would probably be the first target to be bombed to smithereens.

  Most of the hostages walked arm in arm across the runway to keep warm and support each other. They looked like ghosts. The lone 747 dwarfed them. All the lights had once again been turned off, apart from a single spotlight illuminating the steps. I went up the stairs and turned to wave goodbye.

  ‘You’re always late!’ said a gruff voice. It was Frank Hessey. He had stayed on board to surprise his
sister and brother-in-law. When they saw each other they burst into tears and hugged.

  My last sight of the Iraqi soldiers was of them gathering together and starting to pull open the red Virgin packs we had given them. We may well have been the first Westerners they had ever met. They knew that the second lot would soon arrive, roaring overhead and firing missiles. Will Whitehorn had been checking through all the bags the hostages had brought with them. At the last minute he found a bag with a transistor radio which nobody claimed. Just as the plane door was about to be closed he ran towards it and threw the bag down on to the concrete. The soldiers were too startled to do anything. The bag lay there as the doors shut and the plane rolled back off the blocks.

  Inside the plane there was a great cheer as the relatives swarmed down the aisles to hug each other. We put on seat belts for takeoff, but as soon as the plane levelled out the party started. We had got away. We were standing around with glasses of champagne and swapping stories when the pilot announced that we had left Iraqi airspace. There was applause.

  I grabbed the microphone and pulled Ted Heath’s leg by announcing, ‘And I’ve just had word that Mrs Thatcher is absolutely delighted that Ted has managed to return safely!’ Her bête noire was on the way home.

  Frank Hessey, his sister Maureen and brother-in-law Tony held hands in a state of disbelief: they couldn’t believe that they were together and had left Baghdad. Others on the plane were crying – they were delighted to be free but in turmoil over those they had left behind. Two months later Tony was to die of lung cancer, and Baghdad airport was reduced to rubble by the heaviest concentration of firepower ever used by a military force. I hope that the Iraqi soldiers with their badly cut uniforms had somehow managed to escape.

  ‘Who the hell does Richard Branson think he is?’ Lord King demanded of William Waldegrave in his second call to him. ‘Part of the bloody Foreign Office?’