The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (26 page)

When he returned to the United States, Vaughn was greeted by a cheering crowd at the Phoenix airport. “I felt it was an offense to the human race and had to get the guy out of my presence,” he explained to the mob of well-wishers. “A lot of time and effort has been spent on trying to prevent hijackings, but the only thing that will be effective is a mandatory death penalty for any hijacker,
without loopholes.”

The crowd applauded wildly. The widespread acclaim for Vaughn did not go unnoticed by the airlines or the FBI.

Three days after the killing of Binh, a hijacked Pacific Southwest Airlines jet landed at San Francisco International Airport. Operating from the same fourth-floor command center where they had watched Holder and Kerkow slip through their fingers a month before, the FBI agents assigned to the case resolved to keep the plane from leaving the ground. They had little trouble convincing Pacific Southwest that resistance to FBI intervention would be unwise, given the public’s growing distaste for the coddling of skyjackers.

The jet had been hijacked by two Bulgarian immigrants, Michael Azmanoff and Dimitr Alexiev, who had boarded the Boeing 737 in Sacramento. They had seized the plane twelve minutes after takeoff, making three demands as they each held a stewardess at gunpoint: $800,000 in small bills, two parachutes, and the navigational charts necessary to get them to Siberia.

Upon landing in San Francisco to wait for the ransom, the hijackers were informed that their current captain was unqualified to fly to the Soviet Union. The airline offered to give them another pilot, one who had the experience necessary to curl around the Gulf of Alaska and cross the Bering Sea. Azmanoff and Alexiev had studied the Flight 701 hijacking, so they knew that a second crew had been used to reach Algeria. They accepted Pacific Southwest’s proposal.

The pilot showed up on the tarmac nearly four hours later, wearing a Pan Am uniform and carrying the two requested parachutes. Per the hijackers’ orders, he stopped a short distance from the boarding stairs to await further instructions.

A stewardess came down to meet him. “You are to take your clothes off right here, so they can see if you’re armed,” she said.

The pilot began to strip, starting with his slacks. The pants hit the tarmac with a metallic thud. The stewardess was suspicious. “You don’t look like a flight captain,” she said.

“I’m disappointed I don’t look like a pilot,” he replied as he continued to remove his clothes. “I’m an agent. Keep calm.”

The stewardess noticed a flicker of motion near the plane’s tail. She looked over and saw three men in white coveralls creeping beneath the plane’s fuselage. Each held a shotgun. These FBI agents had sneaked up on the plane by taking a Coast Guard raft through San Francisco Bay.

Once the disguised agent had stripped down to his skivvies, he was given the go-ahead to board the plane—the hijackers hadn’t spotted the .38-caliber pistol concealed in his pants pocket. A moment after the ersatz pilot passed through the door, the three shotgun-wielding agents stormed up the stairs and opened fire.

Alexiev, who was standing near the door, was the first to die; a shotgun blast tore open his chest before he realized what was going on. Stationed by the rear galley, Azmanoff wildly returned the FBI’s fire. When he ran out of ammunition, he pulled out a hunting knife and threatened to kill anyone who approached. His stubbornness was
rewarded with two bullets to the head, fired by the agent who had masqueraded as a pilot.
^‡

But the FBI’s celebration was muted, for its assault had incurred significant collateral damage. Two passengers were wounded, including the Chinese-American actor who played the cook on the TV show
Bonanza
. And one passenger, a sixty-six-year-old former railroad conductor, was killed by an errant bullet while
sitting next to his wife.

This was precisely the sort of tragedy that Western Airlines’ Bill Newell had tried to avert by refusing to indulge the FBI during the hijacking to Algeria. But there was no public condemnation of the Bureau’s aggressiveness. The prevailing mood was that blood had to be shed to curtail the epidemic; the railroad conductor was thus viewed as an unfortunate martyr to a worthy cause.

In praising the killings of Alexiev and Azmanoff, one prominent figure suggested that an even more ghoulish form of violence was called for. “I’d recommend that we have a portable courtroom in a big bus and a portable gallows,” said Ed Davis, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, when asked to comment on the FBI’s new audacity. “We [could] conduct a rapid trial for a hijacker out there and hang him, with due process of law,
out there at the airport.”

The day after the shoot-out in San Francisco, an AWOL soldier named Francis Goodell hijacked yet another Pacific Southwest plane as it neared Sacramento. He asked to be flown to San Diego, where he issued his demands: a $450,000 ransom that he would donate to two Palestinian organizations, a parachute, and an instruction manual on how to skydive.

Goodell was eventually frightened into surrendering by one of his
hostages, a California Highway Patrol officer who described to him the grisly effects of a sniper’s
bullet on the brain. But this second hijacking in as many days convinced President Nixon that his personal intervention was once again required. Goodell’s flight had passed directly over the president’s head as he vacationed at his mansion in San Clemente, the so-called
Western White House. Spooked by the thought of what could have happened if Goodell had been bent on assassination, Nixon asked his FAA administrator, John Shaffer, why the hijacker hadn’t been selected by the agency’s behavioral profile. Shaffer replied that the profile hadn’t been applied—short-haul shuttle flights like the one that Goodell had hijacked were exempt from screening passengers.

Nixon ordered the FAA to close that
loophole at once. But nothing changed: six days after behavioral screening became mandatory for all shuttle flights, two such planes were hijacked on the same day—one en route from Philadelphia to New York, the other as it flew from Oklahoma City to Dallas. The hijackers received a combined $1.15 million in ransom before their escapades
ended in surrender.

On Capitol Hill, one prominent politician realized that the unthinkable had become unavoidable. On July 20 Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania introduced the Airline Passenger Screening Act, which would compel the airlines to make each and every passenger pass through a metal detector. “Nobody will board an airplane with a shotgun or knife jammed up their sleeve
if my bill is adopted,” he vowed.

An amended version of Schweiker’s bill, beefed up to include such measures as the creation of a new Air Transportation Security Force, eventually passed the Senate by
a vote of 75–1. But by the time it reached the House, the airlines’ lobbyists had convinced numerous key representatives that universal electronic screening was unfeasible. And so as the bill made its way through committee, that particular mandate was stripped away. The two chambers of Congress were unable to reconcile their differences, and the bill died
a quiet death.

H
AVING FAILED TO
profit from hosting Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow at his Bab el-Oued bungalow, Donald Cox decided to give the couple the boot. In mid-July he informed Eldridge Cleaver that he was expecting visitors from America and therefore needed to clear space at his beachside home. The hijackers would have to
find other accommodations.

Fortunately for Holder and Kerkow, their eviction coincided with one of Elaine Klein’s frequent trips abroad. The daughter of a wealthy Connecticut
dress shop owner, Klein had become a fervent supporter of Algeria’s National Liberation Front while attending a Paris art school in the early 1950s. She later parlayed her activism into a job as press secretary for Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, whom Houari Boumédiène overthrew in 1965. Unlike her boss, who would go on to spend the next quarter-century under house arrest, Klein had landed on her feet after Boumédiène’s bloodless coup, finding work as a translator with the Ministry of Information. She had also become one of Cleaver’s closest confidants, often acting as a liaison between the International Section leader and
the Algerian government.

Klein had gone to Paris in June for an extended stay with friends, and she had left Cleaver the keys to her apartment in El Biar—a
spacious flat on the Rue de Traité, right around the corner from the Black Panthers’ headquarters
on the Rue Viviani. Cleaver invited Holder and Kerkow to crash there until Klein’s return. He also gave them an envelope stuffed with dinars so they could attend to their basic needs.

Holder and Kerkow blew the money on lavish meals in restaurants, where they always created a stir upon entering. Kerkow made few concessions to Algeria’s culture of female modesty; she delighted in traipsing about in the same hip-hugging slacks she had worn during the hijacking, a scandalous look in a country where many women draped white veils across their mouths and noses. Ever the troublemaker, she got a rise out of watching male diners’ faces contort with revulsion and lust as she and Holder picked their lobster tails clean.

Kerkow considered her provocations nothing more than a cheeky game, but Holder sensed that she was courting real danger. To guard against Algerian men who might take violent exception to his girlfriend’s antics, he borrowed a .357 Magnum revolver from Cleaver’s
personal stash of weapons.

When they weren’t feasting on seafood or haunting the café at the Hotel St. George, Holder and Kerkow were roped into political education classes
with the Black Panthers. Influenced by his travels in Pyongyang and Hanoi, Cleaver had developed a geeky fascination with the minutiae of Marxist-Leninist theory, filling up audiocassettes with his rambling thoughts about the First International and
Trotskyite revisionism. The discussions he led were thus rife with terms like
dialectical materialism
and
bourgeois nationalism
, to the befuddlement of Holder and Kerkow. The couple had never imagined that the revolution could be so deathly dull.

In addition to riffing on his vision for turning Babylon into a classless paradise, Cleaver made the diplomatic rounds in Algiers, trying to drum up support for one of his pet projects: convincing the United Nations to dispatch peacekeepers to
America’s inner cities. He also began to write a major speech that he planned to deliver on August 18, to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the
Watts Riots. And
whenever he could spare a few moments, Cleaver would shoot targets with his favorite pistol, a gift from an
admiring Zairian politician.

But these pursuits could only temporarily divert Cleaver’s attention from the grim reality at hand: with the hijackers’ $500,000 gone, the cash-strapped International Section stood little chance of long-term survival. There were just too many mouths to feed and not enough revenue coming in.

Shortly after midnight on August 1, though, Cleaver’s sagging spirits were lifted by a phone call from Donald Cox. A few hours earlier, while listening to his shortwave radio, Cox had heard a news report about a hijacked plane in Florida. “I didn’t want to wake you up until I was sure which way they were headed,” he told Cleaver. “They’re coming to Algeria
with $1 million.”

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
they hijacked Delta Airlines Flight 841, the five adult residents of a rat-infested Detroit house held a religious ceremony to bless their impending crime. They poured a mound of dirt onto their living-room floor, on top of which they placed a white-skinned doll with a red-handled penknife
stuck in its chest. This mock burial, which symbolized the hijackers’ rejection of
a racist America, was conducted beneath an advertising poster emblazoned with the slogan “
Fly Delta’s Big Jet.”

The hijackers, all young African-Americans who had been roommates for less than a year, had varied reasons for wanting to leave the United States. Melvin and Jean McNair, a married couple from North Carolina, were on the run from the Army; Melvin, a former star athlete at Winston-Salem State University, had become opposed to the Vietnam War while stationed in West Berlin, and he had deserted when ordered to fight in Southeast Asia. George Wright and George Brown had both broken out of a New Jersey penitentiary in 1970: Wright had been serving a lengthy sentence for the murder of a gas station proprietor, while Brown had been doing five years for armed robbery. And Joyce Tillerson, a childhood friend of the McNairs, had
become radicalized while working odd jobs at Oberlin College, where she first encountered the works of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.