The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (11 page)

Barkley peeked his head out of the cockpit to see that only a single passenger remained, a photojournalist who instinctively trained his
Nikon on the startled hijacker. The man snapped five quick pictures before leaping onto the wing, just as Barkley aimed
his gun to fire.

Moments later FBI agents swarmed up the aft stairs that dropped from the Boeing 727’s rear like a collapsible attic ladder; the pilot had stealthily lowered them while Barkley was preoccupied with the photographer. When he saw the agents running up the aisle, Barkley ducked back into the cockpit and shot the co-pilot in the stomach. The FBI responded with a hail of bullets, one of which perforated Barkley’s right hand. He was handcuffed as he flopped around in a pile of cash, blood gushing
from his busted nose.

Late that night reporters descended on Barkley’s shabby Phoenix home to get comment from his wife. Unlike most skyjacker spouses, who typically professed bewilderment regarding their husband’s exploits, Sue Barkley struck a defiant tone. “He believes in this country and the Constitution, he believes in what he was fighting for in World War II, but [the government] wouldn’t even listen to him,” she said while showing off her husband’s cartons of legal papers. “He did it to get someone to pay attention to him. He was trying to help us! But
he made it worse.”

T
HOUGH HIS COMICALLY
ambitious revenge had ended in failure, Arthur Gates Barkley was not without his fans. His novel demand for ransom had turned the skyjacking of TWA Flight 486 into one of the year’s most compelling media spectacles: dozens of cameras had captured the dramatic transfer of money from tarmac to plane, and
Life
soon ran a major spread on Barkley, featuring the blurry photographs snapped
by his final hostage. The story was so enthralling because Barkley had lived out a common, if ignoble, fantasy: by briefly ruling the skies above the nation’s capital, an unemployed truck driver had forced the government to finally treat him with respect. Anyone who felt like an abject nobody could grasp the appeal of commanding such a powerful platform.

All too predictably, then, Barkley’s escapade touched off a new wave of skyjackings, one that laid bare the limitations of the FAA’s unobtrusive screening process. A man armed with a bottle of nitroglycerin took a Pan Am Boeing 747 from New York to Havana, where Castro personally inspected the brand-new airplane and asked in-depth
questions about its design; an Army private hijacked a Philadelphia-bound TWA flight to the Cuban capital by duping the pilot into thinking that he had a bomb-toting
accomplice on board; a black AWOL Marine seized a Delta flight en route to Savannah, Georgia, claiming that he could no longer endure his commanders’ penchant for
calling him “nigger.”

President Nixon at first paid little attention to the epidemic’s resurgence. He was too busy pressing Congress for anticrime legislation that would stiffen penalties for domestic bombings—an effort to end a spate of attacks on university campuses, where antiwar radicals were targeting laboratories
with Pentagon ties. With the congressional midterm elections approaching that November, Nixon’s decision was smart politics: Republican voters were convinced that shaggy-haired students represented the Vietcong’s fifth column. Skyjackers did not yet elicit the same emotional response from the conservative “silent majority.”

But a coordinated series of hijackings in the Middle East forced the president to alter his priorities. On September 6, 1970, four teams of operatives from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine simultaneously hijacked four planes, three of which belonged to American carriers and were en route to New York. Among the hijackers was Leila Khaled, the female commando who had become a global fashion icon the year before. She managed to avoid preflight detection thanks to her new face, the product of multiple surgeries that had clipped her nose and
stretched back her cheekbones.
^§

Khaled and her partner were overpowered by passengers before completing their mission, but the three other PFLP teams succeeded.
One Pan Am plane was flown to Cairo and, after the hostages were released, destroyed with hand grenades. The other two planes were taken to a desert airstrip in Zarqa, Jordan, where masked gunmen paraded the weary passengers and crew past reporters; eighty-six of the hostages were American citizens. Five days after that humiliating display, the PFLP dynamited the planes in front of several Western film crews. Startling footage of the jets’ fiery obliteration led the evening newscasts on all three American networks; the nation’s major newspapers, meanwhile, ran front-page photos of jubilant guerrillas dancing on the
planes’ blackened wreckage.

On the night of September 8, as the doomed planes sat on the tarmac in Zarqa, President Nixon called his top advisers to the Oval Office to formulate an emergency antihijacking plan. The PFLP operation had struck a nerve with the president, who recognized the danger of letting foreign militants believe they could take American hostages with impunity. Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover were all at the meeting, as was Henry Kissinger, then serving as a special presidential assistant. They worked into the wee hours, brainstorming measures that could be implemented
by executive order.

On September 11 President Nixon made a somber national address in which he outlined his advisers’ seven-point plan. “Most countries, including the United States, found effective means of dealing with piracy on the high seas a century and a half ago,” he declared in his gruff baritone. “We can—and we will—deal effectively with piracy in the skies today.”

Most of the plan’s directives were fairly dull, such as a promise to study the best security practices of foreign carriers and a vague commitment to develop “new methods for detecting weapons and explosive devices.” But one of the president’s decrees was truly radical:

The details of this sky marshal program did not emerge until five days later, when FAA chief John Shaffer appeared on a one-hour ABC television special devoted to the hijacking epidemic. Shaffer revealed that the United States planned to have four thousand undercover agents in the air by early 1971, at an initial cost of
$80 million per year. The marshals, armed with .38-caliber pistols, would be instructed to shoot to kill; no man was supposed to qualify for the job unless he could fire twelve bullets in twenty-five seconds with enough accuracy to kill a hijacker
from forty-five feet away. The force would be overseen by Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., whom President Nixon had appointed to the newly created post of Director of Civil Aviation Security. Davis, a retired Air Force general who had recently resigned as supervisor of Cleveland’s troubled police department, was essentially the nation’s
first skyjacking czar.

The airlines dreaded the prospect of sky marshals. They worried that planes could lose pressure and crash if their bulkheads were punctured during midair shoot-outs. And they feared the legal fallout should a passenger be slain by a marshal’s errant bullet; a civil court might be sympathetic to a lawsuit alleging that an airline’s ticket agents should have flagged a
skyjacker before boarding.

The airlines’ discontent turned to rage when they learned how the Nixon administration planned to pay for the armed guards: by increasing the tax on each domestic ticket by half a percent, and on each international ticket by two dollars. “The airlines see no justification for the imposition of these new taxes,” the head of the Air Transport Association of America, the industry’s primary trade group, told the Senate Finance Committee at an October hearing. “The taxes are
discriminatory in their application because they would be levied on many persons who could not benefit from the purpose for why they are proposed to be imposed.” In other words, because only a minuscule percentage of flights would actually have sky marshals aboard, the industry thought it grossly unfair that all travelers should be expected to pay for protection they
probably wouldn’t enjoy.

Several senators were swayed by this selfish logic, though perhaps more by the airlines’ threats to slash service should the tax be imposed. The Senate Finance Committee’s deliberations became bogged down in acrimony, with senators touting pet amendments that would exempt Alaska-bound flights from the tax or prioritize the hiring of unemployed pilots as sky marshals. The powerful American Automobile Association, meanwhile, became a major proponent of the tax, hoping the surcharge would convince many travelers to
drive instead of fly.

By early December the so-called skyjacking tax was dead in the water, the victim of too much
lobbyist meddling. Deprived of critical funding, the sky marshal program had to drastically scale back its ambitions. The manpower goal was slashed to twelve hundred guards, though high turnover meant that as few as eight hundred eventually ended up on duty at any given moment. The training regimen was trimmed to a mere one-week course at Virginia’s Fort Belvoir, a move that raised questions about the marshals’ marksmanship. “The program is a menace to the people who ride airplanes,” one marshal warned the Associated Press. The airlines instructed their ticket agents to bump marshals off full flights in
favor of paying customers.

But even if the tax had passed, a full complement of well-trained marshals would have done little to curtail the epidemic. There were 5.1 million airline departures in the United States in 1970; even if four thousand guards were on the job around the clock, the odds of a sky marshal and a skyjacker winding up on the same flight were infinitesimal. The program was akin to placing a single sprinkler in a twenty-story office tower, in the vain hope that any fire would start right beneath it.

It was even more foolish to presume that skyjackers could be
deterred by the remote possibility that one of their hostages might be a sky marshal. As Thomas Robinson’s father had observed back in 1965, after his son’s failed attempt to reach Havana, the rational calculus of risk and reward meant nothing to a skyjacker. These were lost souls bent on salvaging their self-worth, on seeking the transformative high of reigning supreme in America’s most distant frontier. As long as they could board aircraft with guns or bombs or jars of acid tucked inside their bags, they would gladly risk death for a chance to right their wayward lives.

And so the hijackings kept right on going as the calendar flipped to 1971. A seventeen-year-old Alabama boy tried to hijack a National flight to Montreal, where he believed the large community of American draft dodgers would understand
his adolescent angst; a former New York City police officer threatened to blow up an Eastern Air Lines Boeing 727 unless he was given $500,000, a plan foiled by an airline official who tackled the hijacker during the ransom exchange
in the Bahamas; a fifty-eight-year-old West Virginia coal miner, suffering from a terminal case of black lung, demanded that a United Airlines crew fly him to Tel Aviv, where he hoped to curry favor with the Almighty by
working on a kibbutz.

Convinced that the epidemic was only destined to get worse, Lloyd’s of London began to offer hijacking insurance to travelers in the United States. For a $75 premium per flight, a traveler could earn $500 per day of captivity, plus $2,500 in medical coverage, and $5,000 in the event of
death or dismemberment.

N
O ONE WAS
surprised when the first passenger was killed. With skyjackers striking nearly every week during the summer of 1971, and their demands consistently growing more outrageous, such a tragedy was inevitable. But to those who knew him well, Gregory White seemed an unlikely murderer.

The only remarkable thing about the twenty-three-year-old White was his unusually gangly physique, which he accented with a bushy
goatee. He lived in a working-class Chicago suburb with his wife and two children, whom he supported as a six-hundred-dollar-a-month clerk for the Illinois Central Railroad. His sole vice was liquor, which he used to overcome an innate shyness that bordered on the pathological. He sometimes acted foolishly when drunk; his criminal record was marred by several charges for disorderly conduct. But nothing about White’s history suggested that he was capable of violence, or that he had any particular interests aside from keeping food on his family’s table and his bar bills paid.

Shortly after eleven p.m. on June 11, 1971, White showed up at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport carrying only a folded umbrella. He strolled through the terminal and onto the tarmac, where he queued to board a TWA flight to New York. He made it to the top of the Boeing 727’s stairs before a stewardess asked to see his boarding pass. Rather than comply with this polite request, White pulled a pistol out of his umbrella, grabbed the stewardess by the throat, and pressed the gun to her forehead.

“North Vietnam,” said White, his slurred speech revealing that his bravado was fueled by whiskey. “We’re going to North Vietnam.”

A man who had boarded the flight immediately ahead of White, a sixty-five-year-old management consultant named Howard Franks, turned around and moved back toward the stairs. Perhaps he meant to help the imperiled stewardess, or maybe he was oblivious to the drama and just wanted to retrieve an item from his hanging coat. His true intent will never be known, because the spooked White shot him twice—first in the head, then again in the back, as Franks’s limp body twisted to the jet’s carpet.

The murderous deed done, White whipped his gun back to the stewardess’s head; she could feel that the barrel was still hot. “You’re next,” said White.

Screaming passengers stampeded off the plane, pushing past the hijacker, his captive stewardess, and Franks’s corpse. When the chaos settled, White reiterated his demand to the pilots: North Vietnam. And he wanted $75,000, too, as well as a fully loaded machine gun.