The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (31 page)

But Kerkow’s happy interlude was brief: in the autumn of 1974 Holder joined her in Paris. His time at the Borde Clinic had gone well enough, but he had grown weary of the asylum’s languid pace of life. The clinic let patients come and go as they pleased, so Holder had decided to take a break and soak up some Parisian atmosphere. He trusted that Kerkow would help him stay on an even keel
during his sabbatical.

His nerves dulled by a daily regimen of
four tranquilizers, Holder spent long hours wandering the streets with a vacant look in his eye and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He perked up when passing by corner stores with large glass windows; he suspected that his enemies spied on him from such vantage points.

When he did spend time at the apartment on the Rue Blomet, Holder would build models he obtained through a mail-order catalog. The hobby allowed him to retreat to his adolescence in California, a halcyon age when his life had not been such
a disorienting mess.

K
ERKOW HADN
’
T BEEN
terribly concerned when she woke up alone on the morning of January 7, 1975, for she knew that Holder occasionally walked all night. She expected that he would return shortly, thirsty for coffee and mumbling about the rubber groves near Loc Ninh. But when Holder finally appeared after a full day’s absence, he spoke of something more disturbing than his memories of Vietnam: a police interrogation at which he may have exhibited a lack of discretion.

Kerkow knew they had to run. And at this point in their relationship, she alone was responsible for making such decisions.

She once again contacted Eldridge Cleaver, who by that time was living openly in Paris with his wife and children. Cleaver had earned this privilege by forging a personal relationship with France’s
president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom he had met through the politician’s mistress; as a personal favor to that woman, Giscard had given
Cleaver political asylum. Now comfortably ensconced in a two-story house
on the Left Bank, Cleaver had lost much of his militant edge; he had turned against Marxism, for example, and had come to believe that the 1974 impeachment of President Richard Nixon signaled that all was not entirely rotten in “
Babylon.” Though Cleaver was reluctant to risk his privileged status in France, he still felt obliged to help the hijackers; he provided Kerkow with a list of useful contacts.

As Holder and Kerkow bounced from one Paris
safe house to the next, the FBI sent agents to the San Diego home of Seavenes and Marie Holder, to show them a photograph of the man they believed to be their now-twenty-five-year-old son. The agents wanted the Holders to sign an affidavit confirming Roger’s identity so the United States could prepare an extradition request for France’s Ministry of Justice. But the Holders refused; as much as they had been devastated by Roger’s actions, they could not bring themselves to bear witness against him. Instead they claimed that Roger was still in Algiers, and that the man in the photo was their older son, Seavenes Jr., then an Army soldier posted in West Germany. Their charade was in vain, however, for the FBI had also obtained Holder’s
fingerprints from the French.

On January 23, having eluded capture for over two weeks, Kerkow wondered whether the danger might have passed. She surveyed the area around the Rue Blomet apartment and saw no sign of the police. So she and Holder settled back into their home that night, confident that the authorities had lost interest in the case.

But Kerkow had underestimated the police, who had asked one of the couple’s neighbors to monitor the apartment. Early the next morning, as Holder exited the building to begin one of his interminable walks, he was instantly surrounded by cops. Kerkow was hauled out of bed and handcuffed, pleading all the while that her name was
Janice Ann Forte. But once she and Holder were whisked into the Ministry of Justice at the Place Vendôme, Kerkow realized there was no longer
any point in lying. It was instead time for her to call upon the most important contact on Eldridge Cleaver’s list—the only man in France who could save her from spending the next two decades in an American prison.

A
S A NOVICE
lawyer in the mid-1950s, Jean-Jacques de Felice had desired nothing grander than a modest career helping juvenile delinquents. He set up an office in the dingy Parisian suburb of Nanterre, where the majority of youthful offenders were Algerian immigrants. He couldn’t help but notice that many of his clients’ fathers were incarcerated for aiding Algeria’s National Liberation Front, which was then orchestrating both peaceful protests and systematic bombings throughout France. De Felice was intrigued by these men, whom he began to visit in French prisons. Soon enough he was traveling to Algiers to meet with anticolonial fighters whom the French had sentenced to death by guillotine. Those death-row encounters altered the course of his life.

“What always strikes me about these imprisoned and chained men is their almost mythical acceptance of their fate,” he wrote of his meetings in Algiers. “I come out of prison not overwhelmed and demoralized, but rather comforted by
their quiet strength.”

De Felice thereafter became France’s leading legal provocateur, dedicated to defending anyone whose interests ran contrary to those of the establishment. He defended Algerians accused of bombing French trains and cafés; Italian migrant workers threatened with deportation; the indigenous peoples of French Polynesia; peasants stripped of their property rights by developers; and anyone else whose cause brought
discomfort to the powerful.

When Eldridge Cleaver had first arrived in Paris in early 1973 and needed advice on how to seek asylum, de Felice was naturally the first lawyer to offer his assistance. Though de Felice hadn’t been able to help him much, Cleaver had been impressed by the attorney, whom he described as “the embodiment of French
concern for human
rights.” He had advised Kerkow to seek de Felice’s counsel should she ever wind up in French custody.

De Felice met the hijackers at Fleury-Mérogis Prison in late January, a few days after their arrest. A preliminary hearing on the American extradition request had already been scheduled for February 7, which gave the lawyer scant time to prepare. But after listening to Holder’s convoluted account of Operation Sisyphus, de Felice knew precisely the legal tactic he would employ.

On the day of their first hearing, Holder and Kerkow were escorted to the imposing Palais de Justice in central Paris, where reporters had gathered for their first glimpse of the skyjacking lovers. The press was drawn to the poised and pretty Kerkow, who had opted for a crowd-pleasing outfit: a sleek violet dress complemented by knee-high purple boots.

Holder, Kerkow, and de Felice waited in an anteroom as the judge prepared for the proceedings. They were about to be ushered into the courtroom when Holder’s arms and legs began to twitch violently. He fell to the floor in a semiconscious heap as guards rushed in from all directions.

After several anxious minutes, Holder improved enough to explain that he was prone to such episodes, especially when deprived of his daily allotment of tranquilizers. Since he did not appear well enough to handle the pressures of open court, he was taken to a vacant office to rest. Kerkow walked into the courtroom as the sole defendant, radiating an aloof cool that caused a stir among the spectators.

Due to Holder’s poor health, the judge decided to limit the day’s business to formalities. He asked Kerkow to sign a form verifying her identity and then advised her of the serious charges listed in her American arrest warrant: air piracy, kidnapping, and extortion.

Kerkow caught the court off guard by replying to the judge in impeccable French: “This warrant for arrest concerns me, but I have nothing to say for the moment.”

As the hearing drew to a close, a guard beckoned Kerkow to follow him. “Come here,” he said. “Your friend is having a new crisis.”

Kerkow was brought to the office where Holder was being kept. He was curled up on the floor, trembling and moaning his refusal to sign his identity papers.

Kerkow knelt by her boyfriend of over three years and gently stroked his shaking hands. “Everything’s
going to be all right,” she whispered in his ear. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Cathy Kerkow in Paris, 1975.
INTERPOL

S
ECRETARY OF
S
TATE
Henry Kissinger advised his relatively new boss, President Gerald Ford, that extraditing Holder and Kerkow was essential to maintaining America’s hard-won gains in the War on Skyjacking. “U.S. government views [this] case as very important for many reasons, including the precedential value of a successful extradition of a hijacker from France, a country with so much influence on ‘Third World countries,’ ” the State Department’s legal team stressed to Kenneth Rush, America’s ambassador to France, in a
February 18 memo.

That memo also highlighted the State Department’s principal concern about the case: that de Felice would argue that the hijacking had been a political act. The 1909 extradition treaty between the United States and France contained a clause of great interest to defense lawyers:

Proud of its revolutionary tradition, France had long proved willing to exercise its rights under this clause, which appeared in numerous bilateral extradition treaties to which the nation was a party. As a result, France had become a favorite home base for extremists from around the world. In 1974, for example, the French had declined to arrest the four Basque assassins of Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco, stating that extradition would be an impossibility because the crime was “
so obviously political.” Prominent members of West Germany’s Red Army Faction and Italy’s Red Brigades called Paris home at that time, as did the Venezuelan terrorist-for-hire Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. And of course, President Giscard had personally secured asylum for Eldridge Cleaver, who was still wanted for attempted murder in California. The State Department feared that a nation so protective of radicals would have a soft spot
for Holder and Kerkow.

Ambassador Rush, a former Union Carbide executive known for his tact and loyalty, expressed these concerns to a top official at France’s Ministry of Justice. Rush offered to supply the ministry with a dossier of evidence supporting the Americans’ contention that the hijacking was “purely criminal.” Kissinger’s legal team had already sent the ambassador an FBI document stating that neither Holder nor Kerkow had been members of the Black Panther Party prior to the hijacking. Rush assured the French official that his colleagues in Washington, D.C., could round up plenty more damning evidence if need be.

The official said that wouldn’t be necessary—any more material would, in fact, be “gratuitous” and likely to harm the Americans’ case. He gave Rush every indication that the extradition process
would be trouble-free.

De Felice, meanwhile, was taking advantage of the French public’s growing fascination with his female client. On March 3, before another preliminary hearing at the Palais de Justice, de Felice arranged for Kerkow to chat with a small group of sympathetic journalists. Calm and cheerful, wearing a well-tailored jacket and glasses with huge ovoid frames, Kerkow spoke of her deep appreciation for France’s history of sheltering political refugees and of her hope that she and Holder might become part of that rich tradition. “One is always an optimist,” she said in her surprisingly good French. “If we are not extradited, I think they will
let us stay in France.”

Four days later de Felice held a press conference at which he laid out the narrative he planned to present to the judge—an embellished and streamlined tale that elided the more incoherent elements of Operation Sisyphus. De Felice stated that Holder was a war hero who had deserted the Army after becoming disillusioned with America’s mission in Vietnam. Traumatized by the horrors he had witnessed, he had joined the “black liberation movement” upon returning to the United States. He had orchestrated the hijacking solely as a protest against the Vietnam War, and he had fully intended to give the $500,000 ransom to the Vietcong. He had changed his destination to Algiers only upon learning that the hijacked jet would have to refuel at American military bases en route to Hanoi, something that he found morally odious. Kerkow, de Felice added, had been active in the antiwar movement, which was why she had elected to take part in the hijacking.

De Felice concluded his press conference by announcing that several of France’s leading artists and intellectuals had formed an ad hoc committee to oppose his clients’ extradition. He waved a copy of an open letter that the committee had addressed to President Giscard, which characterized the hijacking as “without a doubt a political act directly linked to the Vietnam War.” The letter was signed by three of the nation’s most famous men: Alfred Kastler, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist; Claude Bourdet, founder of the left-wing
Le Nouvel Observateur
newspaper and a hero of the French Resistance; and Jean-Paul
Sartre, the father of existentialism, who believed that America’s actions in Vietnam had
constituted a genocide.