The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (27 page)

The five had come together in Detroit to form a commune of sorts, a vegetarian household that eschewed alcohol, embraced marijuana, and avidly studied African mysticism. The commune was rounded out by three children, none of them older than three: the McNairs had a son and daughter, Johari and Ayana, while Tillerson had a daughter, Kenya.

Their decision to become skyjackers was precipitated by a conflict with Detroit’s police department. In January 1972 George Brown had a violent run-in with a Detroit police unit known as STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets). STRESS, which planted cops disguised as bums in high-crime neighborhoods, was notorious for its brutality; during its two-year existence, its members killed seventeen people,
all of them black. Brown survived his encounter with STRESS, but just barely: after being mistaken for a robbery suspect, he was shot six times.

Miraculously, Brown, who was living under the pseudonym Harold Singleton, was not identified as an escaped convict while recuperating from his wounds. Four months after the shooting, he was acquitted of robbery and assault charges at trial, a verdict that greatly embarrassed the police. As Brown left the courtroom a free man, several STRESS cops accosted him, promising that he and his housemates wouldn’t live through the summer.

The commune’s members agreed that they needed to flee Detroit before the police made good on their threat. They desperately wanted to emigrate to Africa, which they idealized as an enchanted land devoid of Western decadence. But without money or passports, such a move seemed an unattainable dream.

But then Holder and Kerkow demonstrated that there was a way to reach the Motherland free of charge and even make a tidy sum to boot. Duly inspired, the commune’s members set about planning their version of the perfect hijacking.

The plane they seized on July 31 was a DC-8 bound for Miami. George Wright, dressed in the robes of a Catholic priest and armed
with a .38-caliber pistol, confronted the pilot an hour before the flight’s scheduled arrival. George Brown and Melvin McNair, with two .22-caliber revolvers between them, were responsible for keeping an eye on the passengers in the main cabin. Joyce Tillerson and Jean McNair watched after the kids, none of whom were old enough to realize what their
parents were up to.

The hijackers said they wished to join their revolutionary brothers and sisters in Algiers, whom they planned to honor with $1 million in ransom. They asked that this money be delivered to the plane in Miami by a man wearing only a tight-fitting swimsuit, so that he couldn’t conceal a weapon. The hijackers also demanded that this seminude deliveryman tie the cash to a rope that they would lower from the DC-8’s front door.

The plan went off without a hitch, as Delta predictably hewed to its policy of total compliance. An FBI agent in bathing trunks carried a suitcase containing $1 million to the plane. The hijackers hoisted up the seventy-pound piece of luggage, then allowed the eighty-six passengers to go free. Flight 841 next proceeded to Boston’s Logan International Airport, to pick up a qualified navigator for the long trip to Algiers. Aware that three children were on board, the FBI decided not to risk an assault in Boston; the so-called Hijacking Family was permitted to leave the United States
without any interference.

Around eight a.m. on August 1, Cleaver learned that Flight 841 would be landing at Maison Blanche Airport at noon. He rushed there with several Panthers in tow, hoping to beat Salah Hidjeb to the money. But the Algerian military had the airport locked down tight, with tanks posted at every entrance; word had arrived that one of the hijackers was an escaped murderer, and the Algerians feared that his cohorts might be similarly
prone to violence.

Like Holder and Kerkow before them, the Hijacking Family were initially given the warmest of welcomes. “We are your brothers,” declared a smiling government official who ascended the boarding stairs to meet Melvin McNair. “You are home here.” The hijackers were taken to the airport’s VIP lounge, where the children were given
glasses of cold milk. A member of President Houari Boumédiène’s secret police kindly asked
to inspect the money.

Upon discovering that the suitcase contained only $700,000, however, the Algerians dropped their kindly facade. They roughly searched the hijackers and their children, finding bundles of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills stuffed in underwear, brassieres, and even Ayana McNair’s diaper. The hijackers were left with nothing as they were herded onto an Air Algérie bus bound for the Hotel Aletti.

As the bus sped toward central Algiers, Cleaver pulled up alongside it in his Renault 16. Sekou Odinga, one of Cleaver’s lieutenants, leaned out the car’s passenger-side window and yelled to the hijackers, “Don’t give up the bread! Don’t give up the bread!”

The bus screeched to a halt, as did its police escort. Eight men with submachine guns surrounded Cleaver’s vehicle and screamed for the Panthers to make a U-turn. Cleaver and Odinga showered the Algerians with obscenities before finally departing. The Hijacking Family watched the hostilities with dismay; they had imagined that the Black Panthers and the Algerian police would be on friendly terms, united in their opposition to the depraved and imperialist West.

While the Hijacking Family’s adults were interrogated at the Hotel Aletti, the Panthers convened in El Biar to discuss their next move. Cleaver was furious that he had once again been deprived of a fortune that, to his mind, belonged to the International Section. Worse yet, he was getting flak from back home—Panther officials in New York were constantly calling to demand a cut of the hijackers’ loot.

Pete O’Neal, Cleaver’s second in command, offered several bold proposals for bringing attention to the International Section’s grievance: he suggested that the Panthers organize a sit-in at the National Liberation Front’s headquarters in the Casbah, or march on the presidential mansion. But Cleaver ridiculed these ideas as sure to lead to disaster. “Where do you think you are—Harlem?” he scoffed. He knew that the Algerians, just ten years removed from a war that had killed a million of their countrymen, would not hesitate to massacre the Panthers in the streets. Cleaver instead decided to write an open
letter to President Boumédiène, to lay out his case for why the International Section deserved the hijackers’ $1 million. Cleaver had supreme confidence that his literary skills
would win the day.

On August 5 all eight members of the Hijacking Family were released into the Panthers’ custody. American journalists inundated the International Section’s phone lines with pleas for access to Melvin McNair or George Brown, but they were all emphatically rejected by O’Neal, who acted as the organization’s media coordinator. One enterprising young reporter, however, managed to get past O’Neal by making a different request: Bill Keller of
The Oregonian
, who asked to speak with Cathy Kerkow.
^*

It had been nearly three weeks since Rolla J. Crick of the
Oregon Journal
had chatted with Kerkow while she was cooped up in Bab el-Oued. The twenty-three-year-old Keller hoped that she would now talk more freely, having realized that her coyness with Crick had failed to pique commercial interest in her story.

Perhaps caught off guard by Keller’s interest in the white girl rather than the more au courant Hijacking Family, O’Neal passed the phone to Holder, whom he chauvinistically considered Kerkow’s boss. Kerkow listened over her boyfriend’s shoulder as he began to respond to the reporter’s questions.

Holder was cautious at first, warning Keller that any story
The Oregonian
ran would be “detrimental to our organization.” But he loosened up as Keller gently probed his past: within minutes, Holder was recounting his family’s tragic experience in Oregon (“We were the only niggers in Coos Bay”), his time as an Army deserter (“They didn’t even know I was gone”), and his initial encounter with Kerkow that past January (“I was looking for another girl and when I knocked at the door she answered with soap in her eyes”). He also vehemently denied Keller’s suggestion that Kerkow might not have been a willing participant in the hijacking of Western Airlines Flight 701.

“[Cathy] decided she wanted to do something about the mess the world’s in rather than wait,” Holder said. “She seemed to have her eyes wide open. She wasn’t just coming along for the ride because she loves me. That’s life imprisonment, man!”

When Kerkow finally took the phone, she sounded like a seasoned Panther rather than the sweet-yet-mischievous party girl who had left Coos Bay in her beat-up Volkswagen the year before. “Look around the country, man,” she told Keller in an attempt to explain why she had turned to international air piracy. “Nothing’s getting done by the so-called radicals there. They’re getting stomped on and stepped on.”

Kerkow went on the defensive when Keller asked whether she had put much thought into her decision to accompany Holder. “Would you jump into something like that without doing a lot of thinking?” she snapped. “I had a lot of people to think about, a lot of consequences to worry about. Well, here I am.”

Unaware that Kerkow had not spoken to her mother since arriving in Algiers, Keller asked how her parents had reacted to the news that their daughter was now a wanted skyjacker. “What would your parents say if you did what I did?” she retorted.

“Yeah, and with a nigger, too!” Holder gleefully shouted in the background.

Unfazed by the hijackers’ insolence, Keller tried a different tack, asking Kerkow whether she was happy with her decision to become a fugitive. Her mood turned pensive in a flash.

“There are a lot of different sides to that,” she replied softly after a moment’s thought.

And would she do it again?

“
I couldn’t say.”

T
HE SWIMSUIT-CLAD
FBI agent who had delivered the ransom to Delta Airlines Flight 841 became the latest icon of the failed War on Skyjacking. Every major newspaper in the country ran the same grainy, surreal photo of him lugging the oversize suitcase containing
$1 million. The accompanying stories described the Hijacking Family’s success as a major setback both for the airlines and for the FBI, which had previously seemed on the verge of making real progress in the war. The twenty-four-hour pilots’ strike of mid-June, the killings of Michael Azmanoff and Dimitr Alexiev in early July, the tighter security regulations for shuttle flights—all these supposed turning points now seemed worthless. By carefully planning their tactics and using their children to stave off the FBI, the Hijacking Family had proved that commercial airplanes were as vulnerable as ever.

In response to the second Algiers-bound hijacking of the summer, the FAA once again revised its security rules: airlines were now ordered to search all passengers who fit the FAA’s behavioral profile, regardless of whether those selectees could present valid identification. Cynics noted, however, that this new policy would not have prevented the hijacking of Delta Airlines Flight 841, since none of the perpetrators had been picked for
additional screening.

The day after the Hijacking Family landed in Algiers, Eastern Air Lines announced the launch of a groundbreaking experiment at New York’s LaGuardia Airport: passengers on its shuttle flights to Boston and Washington, D.C., would have to pass their carry-on bags through an X-ray machine, the Philips Norelco Saferay. The Saferay had been in development since early 1968, but it had only recently received the FAA’s blessing after the federal Bureau of Radiological Health had concluded the device posed little risk to humans. The machine scanned each piece of luggage with a paltry 0.2 milliroentgens of radiation for fifty nanoseconds, and its interior was lined with lead that absorbed the scattered X-rays. Lead curtains at each end of the Saferay’s conveyor belt discouraged passengers and security personnel from foolishly sticking their hands inside.

Though convinced the Saferay would not damage its customers’ health, Eastern worried that the electronic screening would significantly slow its boarding process. But a mere ten days into the experiment, the airline pronounced itself pleased with the results: Eastern stated that “the use of the device had no effect on departure times,”
despite the fact that the Saferay produced such fuzzy images that 10 percent of bags had to be
checked by hand.

But Eastern made no immediate plans to purchase additional Saferays beyond the single one it had at LaGuardia. And despite the positive publicity surrounding the screening experiment, Philips Norelco could not persuade another airline to buy one of its
$30,000 machines. Potential customers such as United and Pan Am said they first wanted Congress to give them $2 million for new security equipment. But a financing package that would allocate that amount was stuck in committee, as congressmen quibbled over how much pork
they could tack on.

As Congress and the airlines dawdled, skyjackers continued to come up with clever ways of routing around airport security. On August 18 a forty-three-year-old man named Frank Markoe Sibley hijacked a United Airlines Boeing 727 as it boarded passengers in Reno. He did so by riding a bicycle through a gaping hole in the airport’s perimeter fence. No one noticed that a man in a ski mask was pedaling across the tarmac until it was too late.

Sibley diverted the San Francisco–bound flight to Vancouver, where he asked for an exorbitant ransom: $2 million in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills; fifteen pounds of gold bars; two .45-caliber pistols; three submachine guns; twenty bottles of amphetamines; a set of walkie-talkies; a flashlight; a radio; a set of handcuffs; and, for some inexplicable reason, a jug of ammonia. Sibley also demanded that a newscaster from a local radio station, CJOR, read a lengthy statement he had prepared. “We are a well-disciplined paramilitary organization fed up with Nixon’s broken promises and deceit which is clearly expressed by his secret buildup in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia,” the statement began, before going on to promise that United jets would continue to be hijacked until the last American soldier had left Vietnam.

Sibley was eventually undone at the Seattle airport, where he made the common skyjacker mistake of letting two FBI agents disguised as relief pilots come aboard the aircraft; the agents shot Sibley
multiple times. It soon emerged that Sibley was a former American Airlines pilot who had flown secret CIA-backed supply missions over Laos during the mid-1960s. Wracked by guilt over his role in the war, he had steadily unraveled upon returning from Southeast Asia, losing a series of jobs as well as his statuesque German wife. He had hoped to unburden his conscience by donating United’s cash and gold to a North Vietnamese orphanage.