The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (28 page)

“I’m not a criminal in the real sense of the word,” a subdued Sibley would later claim at trial. He was sentenced to
thirty years in prison.

E
LDRIDGE
C
LEAVER SPENT
several days working on his open letter to President Houari Boumédiène, striving for the right combination of firmness and flattery. On August 10 he called a press conference to present the finished product to the world. Minutes before facing the reporters, Cleaver showed the letter to Pete O’Neal, who was supposed to approve all of the International Section’s official statements. O’Neal was alarmed by the bluntness of his boss’s words and begged Cleaver not to release the letter. But the increasingly paranoid Cleaver was wary of O’Neal’s motives; he suspected that his top aide was in cahoots with the Algerians. He decided to go ahead with the press conference.

Flanked by members of the Hijacking Family, Cleaver read the letter verbatim in his sonorous voice, addressing it to “Comrade Boumédiène”:

Cleaver considered himself quite shrewd for framing President Boumédiène’s choice in such a manner. He had no inkling that his open letter would, in fact, be the International Section’s ruin.

Boumédiène was deeply insulted by Cleaver’s public gambit. He thought the letter insinuated that Algeria was a lackey of the West, eager to capitulate to American demands rather than defend its revolutionary principles. Nor did Boumédiène appreciate receiving political advice from a man he essentially considered a low-level employee, whom he paid five hundred dollars a month to serve as a symbolic irritant to the United States. Cleaver, the self-described “fat mouth,” had talked his way into the bad graces of the only man whose opinion truly mattered in Algeria.

The following afternoon Holder and Kerkow were lounging in Elaine Klein’s apartment when they heard a commotion outside on the Rue de Traité. They went to the window to see people rushing toward the Panthers’ villa on the Rue Viviani. Holder and Kerkow went downstairs to
join the excited crowd.

They reached the villa to find it surrounded by dozens of soldiers, who were holding the onlookers at bay. Police were streaming in and out of the compound, hauling away telephones, typewriters, and AK-47s. The entire leadership of the International Section had been inside
the villa when the raid occurred; all were now under house arrest, as payback for Cleaver’s
public relations blunder.

Five days later Cleaver and O’Neal were summoned to Salah Hidjeb’s office to explain their impudence. The two Panthers insisted that they had done no wrong, for they genuinely believed that the Hijacking Family’s money belonged to them and that Algeria was betraying its ideals by handing it back to Delta.

The Panthers’ lack of contrition enraged Hidjeb. He disparaged Cleaver and O’Neal as “palace revolutionaries” who were all talk, no action. He said if they wanted money for their struggle, they should have the guts to rob and kidnap on American soil, rather than lazily wait for hijackers to come to Algeria. And he blasted the Panthers as ingrates for embarrassing their generous hosts: “You should be thankful that the Algerian government has allowed you to live here in exile, to function openly, and to receive enough money to operate.”

The stubborn Cleaver was not cowed by Hidjeb’s tongue-lashing. He complained that the International Section could not accomplish its important work unless the Algerian government furnished it with “large sums of money to take care of business.” And he demanded that the police return his favorite pistol, which had been seized
during the villa raid.

Shortly after this contentious meeting, one of Hidjeb’s operatives visited O’Neal and gave him an ultimatum: Cleaver had to relinquish day-to-day control of the International Section, or the Panthers were finished in Algeria. The Boumédiène regime insisted that O’Neal himself take over the reins; the Algerians considered him a more pliable partner than
the headstrong Cleaver.

When Holder heard that Cleaver had acceded to the Algerians’ demand and stepped aside in favor of O’Neal, he was aghast.
How do you resign from a revolution?
he thought. Donald Cox’s zeal for money and Cleaver’s logorrheic Marxist sermons had already soured Holder on the International Section. Now, having learned that the organization was at the mercy of Algeria’s secret police,
he lost all faith.

Holder’s pessimism was justified by O’Neal’s brief tenure atop the International Section. One of O’Neal’s first acts as chief was to ask Hidjeb to supply him with passports for himself, Sekou Odinga, Larry Mack, and several other Panthers who had grown weary of life in Algiers. Hidjeb, who was keen to dismantle the International Section after his confrontation with Cleaver, was happy to oblige.

On September 16 O’Neal and his wife, Charlotte, left for Cairo without Cleaver’s knowledge; they intended to resettle in Tanzania, another nation known for its hospitality to left-wing militants. O’Neal left behind a letter in which he named his successor as head of the International Section:
Willie Roger Holder.

T
HE SKYJACKING THAT
heralded the end of the epidemic began in humdrum fashion. On the night of November 10, 1972, three days after President Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection and twenty-three weeks after the hijacking of Western Airlines Flight 701, three African-American men took over Southern Airways Flight 49 as it made its way across central Alabama. The hijackers were armed with guns as well as three hand grenades, which they had purchased from a military surplus store in Birmingham; they had smuggled the weapons aboard in a folded-up raincoat. The ringleader, Louis Moore, put a stewardess in a chokehold and marched her to the cockpit, where he ordered the pilot to land in Jackson, Mississippi, for refueling. Moore then wanted to go to Detroit, where he had been working in restaurants and factories for the past few years.

Like the members of the Hijacking Family, Moore was at odds with Detroit’s controversial STRESS police unit. After filing a complaint against STRESS for beating him outside a bar in late 1971, Moore claimed that the cops had threatened to kill his wife and children. He fired back by suing the city for $4 million; the city countered with a settlement offer of twenty-five dollars, a figure that Moore considered an affront. On October 13, 1972, Moore and one of his best friends, Henry Jackson, were arrested for sexual assault—a charge the
two men alleged had been trumped up to punish them for opposing STRESS. They fled the city after posting bail, joined by Moore’s half brother, Melvin Cale, a convicted burglar who had recently escaped from a Tennessee halfway house. The fugitive trio made a pact to teach Detroit authorities an unforgettable lesson.

As Flight 49 flew toward Michigan, Moore told the captain what the hijackers wanted in exchange for the twenty-six passengers: ten parachutes, ten bulletproof vests, and $10 million in cash, along with an official White House letter certifying the money as an irrevocable “government grant.” Save for Arthur Barkley’s absurd request for $100 million in 1970, this was the largest skyjacking ransom demand in history—double the amount that the West German government had paid the Palestinian hijackers of a Lufthansa flight that past February. Southern Airways, a commuter airline with a fleet of fewer than forty planes, couldn’t possibly come up with such an extravagant sum.

Southern officials tried to negotiate with the hijackers, offering them a lesser amount and unhindered passage to the destination of their choice. But Moore and his cohorts refused to settle for a penny less than the full $10 million. The talks were getting heated when the hijackers learned that Detroit was too fogged in to permit a safe landing. Forced to improvise, they ordered the pilot to fly to Cleveland instead.

As the DC-9 veered southeast toward Lake Erie, the hijackers steadied their nerves by helping themselves to the plane’s liquor cabinet. The three men knocked back forty miniature bottles of whiskey and vodka in short order. The infusion of alcohol turned their behavior erratic.

After picking up fuel in Cleveland, the intoxicated hijackers asked to be flown to Toronto. As the plane landed there, an elderly passenger suffered a nonfatal heart attack. Southern officials, who had managed to rush $500,000 to the Toronto airport, begged the hijackers to accept the money and release the stricken hostage. But their pleas were ignored: the hijackers ordered the plane to take off again, this time bound for Knoxville, Tennessee.

Moore, who had grown up in Knoxville, had one last gambit in mind. “This is going to be the last chance,” he radioed Southern officials as Flight 49 soared over Lake Ontario. “If we don’t get what we want, we’re going to bomb Oak Ridge.”

Moore was referring to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, twenty miles west of downtown Knoxville. The facility’s centerpiece was a nuclear reactor powered by highly enriched uranium-235, a primary component of fission bombs like the one that had obliterated Hiroshima.

The Pentagon and White House were apprised of the potentially catastrophic situation as Flight 49 circled low over Oak Ridge, waiting for word from Southern that the full ransom was ready. At one point the drunken Moore decided to terrorize his hostages. “I was born to die,” he slurred over the public address system. “And if I have to take all of you with me, that’s all right with me.”

Around noon on November 11, one of President Nixon’s top advisers, John Ehrlichman, was patched through to Flight 49’s cockpit. He tried to reason with Moore, explaining that it could take days, even weeks, for Southern to come up with $10 million. But Moore was not in a patient mood. “I’m gonna show you the Olympics wasn’t anything—that Munich wasn’t shit,” he swore to Ehrlichman, referring to the September massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists.

Southern scraped together every last nickel it could—$2 million in all. The airline had no choice but to gamble that the hijackers would be so overwhelmed by the sheer heft of the ransom—approximately 150 pounds—that they wouldn’t bother to count it.

Flight 49 landed in Chattanooga around 1:30 p.m. to pick up the money. Just as Southern had hoped, Moore, Jackson, and Cale were too awestruck by the abundance of cash to realize they had been shorted by $8 million. The hijackers celebrated their new wealth by handing out wads of cash to passengers and crew members; the captain and co-pilot alone received $300,000.

But the ecstatic hijackers reneged on their promise to release the passengers in Chattanooga, fearing that the FBI would storm the
plane as soon as the hostages were free. They instead demanded to be flown to Havana—they wanted a personal audience with Fidel Castro to beg for asylum.

But the hijackers were unaware that Castro had no love for criminals. As Flight 49 headed south over the Gulf of Mexico, the Cuban leader was briefed on the hijackers’ threat to cause a minor Armageddon in Tennessee. He personally traveled to José Martí International Airport to ensure that such maniacs never set foot on Cuban soil.

Upon arriving in Havana, the hijackers were bluntly told that neither they nor their hostages would be allowed to exit the plane. Flight 49 was forced to take off once more and head back to the United States, eventually landing at an Air Force base in Orlando, Florida. That was where the FBI decided to make its stand.

As the DC-9 refueled for the sixth time since the hijacking began, six FBI agents opened fire on the plane, aiming to take out its landing gear. The hijackers panicked and yelled at the captain to take off immediately; in the confusion, Jackson shot the co-pilot in his left arm. Though its tires were shredded and its pressurization system was destroyed, the plane somehow managed to get airborne, clearing the base’s perimeter fence by just a few feet. The hijackers could think of no better plan than to head back to Cuba, where they had been so rudely rebuffed just hours earlier.

Around a quarter past midnight on November 12, nearly twenty-nine hours after Louis Moore had first wrapped his arm around a frightened stewardess’s neck, Flight 49 began its second descent toward José Martí. Cuban airport workers had tried to cover the runway with foam to create a cushion for the jet’s denuded landing gear, but they had run out of material before finishing the job. The Southern crew prepared for a crash landing by opening the plane’s emergency exits, creating a mighty gust of wind that sucked fifty- and hundred-dollar bills out of the cabin. When the DC-9’s rubber-free wheels hit the runway asphalt, a mass of orange sparks lit up the Cuban night.

The plane screeched to a jarring stop. Disoriented passengers
choked on thick black smoke as they scrambled down the inflatable slides that extended from the exits; once safely on the José Martí tarmac, they collapsed onto their backs and gasped for air. Everyone had survived the ordeal, even the elderly man who had suffered a heart attack in Toronto.

Moore, Jackson, and Cale were nabbed by Cuban soldiers as they ran through the grass that lined the runway. Their nightmare was just beginning: enraged that the hijackers had returned to Havana knowing full well that they were personae non gratae, Castro vowed to treat them with maximum cruelty: he promised Flight 49’s captain that the hijackers would spend the rest of their lives “
in four-by-four-foot boxes.”
^*