Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ Passengers described the terrorists as “perfect gentlemen,” who politely explained their intention to destroy the plane once it was on the ground. One crew member wondered whether the men were serious. But when the plane touched down the Palestinians ordered an evacuation of the plane and passengers scrabbled for escape chutes. The men who had rigged the explosives were barely off the jet when it exploded in flames. For the passengers aboard Pan Am 93 this was the end of the ordeal. The next morning all flew on to New York.

      For the passengers aboard TWA flight 741 and Swissair 100 the hijacking was just the beginning of what proved to be a violent month in Jordan. The Boeing 707 left Frankfurt with 141 passengers and 10 crew members en route to New York. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, as the jet crossed West Germany's frontier with Luxembourg, two Palestinians seized it and ordered it to Dawson Field, a remote airstrip on a desert plateau 30 miles from Amman, the Jordanian capital. Swiss Air flight 100 out of Zurich was over France when two more Palestinians commandeered the DC-8at almost the same moment.. Like those aboard the American jet, the 143 passengers and 12 crew members were suddenly en route to Dawson Field. As the pilot put his jet down he had to avoid the TWA jet already on the ground.

      The two terrorists on El Al flight 219 failed in their mission to divert the jet to the Jordanian desert. Thirty minutes after the Boeing 707 left Amsterdam en route to New York with 148 passengers and 10 crew members, Leila Khaled and Patrick Arguello jumped into the aisle of the first class compartment and rushed the cockpit. Israeli intelligence knew Khaled's identity from the August 1969 TWA hijacking. That this young Palestinian woman managed to board an El Al flight demonstrated her resolve. She had undergone plastic surgery to alter her appearance and was traveling on a false Honduran passport posing as Arguello's Latin wife. Arguello was a U.S. citizen educated in Chile and living in Nicaragua. Not only had these two managed to board the jet, accomplices managed to place weapons aboard it. But the security failures prior to the departure of El Al 219 ended the moment Khaled and Arguello tried to commandeer the flight.

      Arguello, armed with a pistol, rushed the cockpit door and shot an air steward who threw himself against it. An Israeli sky marshal shot him where he stood. Arguello, convulsing outside the cockpit, died before the plane made an emergency landing. (In a communiqué released the same day, the PFLP cynically charged Israel with a serious violation of international law by allowing El Al personnel to carry firearms aboard a civilian aircraft.) Khaled, who had leaped into the aisle holding two hand grenades, was supposed to hold the passengers and crew at bay while Arguello broke into the cockpit, but another marshal rapidly disarmed her and wrestled her to the cabin floor. The crew diverted the plane to London's Heathrow Airport, where British authorities took Khaled into custody, angering the Israelis, who claimed jurisdiction over air pirates for crimes aboard Israeli aircraft. In another seventy-two hours the British would come to regret their entanglement in the affair.

      Haddad's operation on Skyjack Sunday was a triumph. Although the Israelis thwarted the seizure of El Al flight 219, the PFLP commandeered three jets, destroyed one, and held two others in Jordan with nearly three hundred hostages. Flush with bravado, the PFLP explained that it had hijacked the jets to manifest its abhorrence of the August cease-fire agreement Egypt and Jordan conceded to Israel and the United States. The PFLP seized the Pan Am and TWA flights—symbols of American global presence—to punish the United States for its support of Israel; it went after the El Al flight simply because the Palestinians were at war with Israel. Haddad's commandos had more pragmatic reasons for hijacking Swiss Air 100: the release of the three fedayeen serving twelve-year prison sentences for the February 1969 attack on an El Al jet in Zurich. Because Germans were aboard the flight, the PFLP demanded the release of three more Palestinians imprisoned for the September 1969 attack on an El Al office in Munich. And it reiterated its demand for the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy. Once Leila Khaled fell into British hands, the PFLP also demanded her release and the body of her fallen comrade. This was just the opening round of demands. The PFLP would reveal its specific demands for the release of fedayeen imprisoned in Israel only after the terrorists in England, Switzerland, and West Germany went free.

      The PFLP's position was formidable. It held two multimillion-dollar aircraft and more than three hundred hostages of many nationalities. PFLP spokesmen threatened to destroy the jets—although not to kill the hostages—in seventy-two hours, at 10 p.m. New York time, on Wednesday, 9 September. The hostages sat confined to their seats in the sweltering desert heat. PFLP guerrillas encircled Dawson Field; the Jordanian army encircled the PFLP. It was a dangerous confrontation, but the Jordanian army was powerless to rescue the hostages without endangering their lives. On Monday, the PFLP released more than half the hostages, mostly women and children who could not tolerate the conditions. They were free but not safe. They made the overland journey to the capital in a country descending into civil war; in Amman, fierce fighting in the streets forced them to take shelter in the basement of the hotel where the Jordanians had put them up. But the terrorists still held more than 150 Israeli, American, British, West German, and Swiss nationals. The crisis was just beginning.

      President Nixon was relaxing at his house in San Clemente for Labor Day weekend when the PFLP seized the airliners. Terrorists were holding an unknown number of Americans hostage and threatening the destruction of the aircraft within seventy-two hours, yet the president's thinking ran to geostrategic considerations. Nixon recorded in his memoir that after the hijackings “it seemed likely that a serious showdown was going to be unavoidable.” Kissinger, the national security advisor, was of a like mind. As Kissinger saw things, the United States “faced two problems, the safety of the hostages and the future of Jordan.” But the future of Jordan mattered most to him: the survival of the man Kissinger patronizingly called the “tough little king” was a strategic imperative. Here the United States had options.²³ Nixon ordered U.S. naval forces in the Mediterranean to move into striking distance of Jordan to deter Syrian and Iraqi intervention in defense of the Palestinian fedayeen, and he discreetly indicated that the United States would favor an Israeli attack to save Jordan and crush the Palestinians. The threat of a U.S. and Israeli attack could at least buttress King Hussein. But the United States could not guarantee the safety of the hostages—the Pentagon advised that it could not organize a rescue operation—and the president and his national security advisor refused to bargain for their lives. “Israel had a policy of never yielding to blackmail,” Kissinger wrote later; “our own view was roughly the same.” The reality was that Israel's policy was not that rigid; Israel made “humanitarian gestures” after the release of Israeli hostages in 1968 and again in 1969. The Nixon administration's fidelity to a doctrine would be challenged again—with dire consequences—before Nixon left office. The Swiss and the West Germans, however, saw no wisdom in risking innocent lives in defense of an abstract principle. The Swiss immediately announced their intention to comply with the demand for the release of the three fedayeen held in Swiss custody, and the West Germans gave assurances they would trade Palestinian terrorists for West German tourists a few days after the Swiss announcement. But both governments refused to release the Palestinians until all the hostages were released, regardless of nationality. No one was certain about the position of British prime minister Edward Heath. Haddad knew how to influence his thinking.

      British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) flight 755 departed Bombay en route to London on 9 September with 117 passengers and crew. The flight was scheduled to make stopovers in Bahrain and Beirut before proceeding to London. The BOAC jet never arrived in London. PFLP terrorists boarded it in Bahrain and commandeered it during its final approach to Beirut. It was the second time in three days that a hijacked jetliner approached the airport in the Lebanese capital. To heighten the drama, the terrorists ordered the pilot to circle the city for a full hour before putting down to refuel. By the time the plane landed, both the British ambassador and the Lebanese transportation minister were on the radio urging the terrorists to release the women and children aboard the jet. This the terrorists were not willing to consider: “We are leaving with everybody” they warned “or we are blowing up the airplane with everybody.” It was the first—and last—explicit threat to the passengers. After refueling in Beirut, the plane made the short journey to Dawson Field outside Amman. The pilot, a twenty-two-year veteran, remembers one of the terrorists pondering aloud СКАЧАТЬ