The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (18 page)

A
CLOUD OF
marijuana smoke wafted about the pilots’ heads as Holder sucked down the first of his joints. Aware that the straitlaced crew disapproved of his indulgence, Holder tried to assure them that he was acting in everyone’s best interest. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t make me irrational,” he told the pilots. “It actually
gets me right.”

But as Flight 701 passed over the forested wilderness of northern California, Holder became irritable rather than relaxed. It was now almost five o’clock, and there had been no word from Western regarding his numerous demands. He decided to ratchet up the pressure.

“Weathermen, we are one half hour out of phase,” he announced over the
public address system. He told the pilots that this message had signaled one of his handlers to reset the timing device on the Weathermen’s bomb, to thirty minutes hence. If their demands weren’t met by then, the plane would be destroyed as it circled the Bay Area.

Crawford got on the horn with dispatch in Los Angeles:

Crawford was about to tell Holder to stay patient when a devious idea occurred to him: how might the hijacker react to a bluff?

“Sorry, they say they can’t get ahold of any parachutes,” said Crawford. It was only a minor gambit on his part; Crawford had the sense
that Holder was too reasonable to detonate his bomb over such a trivial issue, certainly not before making his displeasure known.

Holder just nodded at Crawford’s lie, seemingly unperturbed by the
lack of parachutes.

Looking for an excuse to try a riskier ruse, Crawford got back to dispatch:

Crawford made his move: “Hey, Angela Davis—you know, they say
she got acquitted today.”

His mind burbling with manic energy, Holder did not greet this claim with skepticism. He instead marveled at the role that Operation Sisyphus must have played in securing Davis’s acquittal. He wondered at what point the jury had been informed of the hijacking, and whether the liberated Davis was thinking of him fondly at that very moment. How would she express her gratitude for all he had
done on her behalf?

Once again Holder just nodded at Crawford—Davis would no longer be a topic of negotiation. But he still wanted that second plane capable of reaching North Vietnam—that, he told Crawford sternly, was something his Weathermen handlers could not forgo.

Shortly after five p.m., the radio crackled with an update from Los Angeles:

Satisfied that his orders were being followed, Holder flipped through his notebook, looking for ideas on how to adjust Operation Sisyphus now that Davis was supposedly free. He still wanted to have his say about Vietnam, to shock the nation into understanding the madness of that distant war. But Davis’s acquittal seemed like an unmistakable sign that Holder’s ultimate goal was slightly off. And Holder was not one to quibble with cosmic advice.

So as Western Airlines Flight 701 swooped toward San Francisco, Holder pondered the list of alternate destinations in his notebook. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to reach Hanoi.

V
ISITORS TO
W
ILLIAM
Newell’s office couldn’t help but notice the black-and-white mug shot that
hung above his desk. The photograph’s subject, a big-eared kid with a patchy mustache, sported an expression halfway between sour and fatigued. The small chalkboard he held to his chest contained a puzzling jumble of letters, the first three of which were “Kfg”—the German acronym for
Kriegsgefangener
, or “prisoner of war.”

Newell had been just nineteen years old when he posed for that photo at Stalag Luft I, the German prison camp where he spent the last fourteen months of World War II after ejecting from a damaged P-51 Mustang. He rarely talked about his time in captivity, except to note that he had been sustained by a memento that the guards had failed to confiscate: a single lock of
his young bride’s hair. But the mug shot alone was enough to impress his peers and underlings at San Francisco International Airport, where Newell served as Western Airlines’ chief pilot. Even in a company full of hardy combat veterans, Newell was regarded with a certain sense of awe.

On the afternoon of June 2, 1972, the balding, pugnacious Newell sat hunched beneath his German mug shot, grumpily plowing through a thick stack of paperwork. He knew he would never finish the job by five p.m. and was thus condemned to get a late start on the
summer weekend. At the rate he was going, it would surely be close to dark by the time he reached his home
in suburban San Mateo.

At roughly a quarter past four, Newell received a phone call from Norman Rose, the head of Western’s dispatch center in Los Angeles. Rose had startling news to share: Seattle-bound Flight 701 had apparently been hijacked by a gang of LSD-addled Weathermen armed with multiple bombs. The Boeing 727 was now headed to San Francisco, where the hijackers expected to be given $500,000, five parachutes, and—most bizarrely—a white-clad Angela Davis. A team of FBI agents was on its way to the airport, to set up a command post on the main terminal’s fourth floor. The FBI knew the airport and its buildings well; this would be the fourth hijacking the Bureau had handled in San Francisco since 1969.

By the time Newell found the makeshift command post, located in an isolated room protected by a retractable steel gate, the FBI agents had already arrived. One agent was connecting telephones that provided access both to the outside world and to Western’s communications system. Another was taping up diagrams of the airport’s layout and a Boeing 727’s interior. And a third agent was unpacking a duffel bag containing shotguns and flak jackets, neatly arranging the
items on a folding table.

The FBI agents were feeling bold, buoyed by a rare victory in the War on Skyjacking: that morning the fugitive Frederick Hahneman, who had parachuted into the Honduran jungle on May 5, had surrendered at the American embassy in Tegucigalpa—albeit without the $303,000 he had extorted from Eastern Air Lines, the fate of which
he declined to reveal. The agents wanted to build on that mild success by putting a rapid end to the hijacking of Flight 701.

A Western vice president was at the command post, too, and he updated Newell on the airline’s efforts to
comply with the hijackers. Angela Davis had steadfastly refused to get involved in the affair, so that particular demand was a nonstarter. But two Western employees were gathering the ransom at the Bank of America on South Van Ness
Avenue; since the FBI was insisting that the bank record every bill’s serial number, the process would take
at least two more hours. Most important, the hijackers were now requesting a new plane capable of transoceanic travel. The vice president was aware that Western had no such aircraft in San Francisco at that time. He asked Newell
to make some calls.

Newell returned to his office and worked his Rolodex, starting with his local counterparts at United and Pan Am. But both airlines were understandably reluctant to lend a long-range jet to Western, especially after Newell admitted that the hijacking involved explosives. Newell then reached out to Western’s other bases of operation, in the hope that one of them could spare an aircraft. After much frustration, Newell finally lucked out: a Minneapolis-based Boeing 720H was scheduled to land in Las Vegas a little after six p.m.
^*
He arranged for the plane to be flown to San Francisco as soon as its passengers had disembarked. With any luck, it would arrive around eight p.m.

But Newell worried that the 720H could only be a stopgap. Based on the Weathermen’s antiwar ideology, as well as the limited information he had gleaned from Norm Rose, Newell inferred that the hijackers wanted to go to North Vietnam, the rare nation that might grant them asylum. But the 720H had a maximum range of just 4,370 miles, nowhere near enough to reach mainland Asia from San Francisco. The plane could certainly get to Hawaii, where Western could then arrange for a transfer to a Boeing 707-320C with a range of approximately 6,600 miles—almost exactly the distance
between Honolulu and Hanoi. It would be prudent to refuel in either Tokyo or Manila, but coordinating such an overseas stop would be difficult for an airline whose most exotic destinations were Edmonton and Mexico City.

The more pressing matter, though, was who would fly the 720H, since Jerry Juergens and his crew were not qualified to do so. Newell nominated himself to be the new plane’s captain—as chief pilot, he
felt obligated to take the job. He perused the duty roster to find two more men he could trust. Newell quickly settled on Donald Thompson, a World War II veteran who had been with Western since 1949,
to be his co-pilot. Richard Luker, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve who had flown A7 Corsair attack jets in Vietnam,
would be his flight engineer.

Newell had Thompson paged first. When they spoke over the airport’s courtesy telephone, his instructions were vague and terse: “I’m going to need you to stand by, Don. Looks like we may be
going on a trip.”

R
OGER
H
OLDER COULD
now make out the specks of cars moving across the Bay Bridge. He knew this meant the plane was making its final approach to San Francisco International Airport, after holding near Oakland for forty minutes while a runway was cleared. He asked Tom Crawford to inquire about the status of his money and the long-range jet. The reply from Western upset him greatly:

Western’s dithering had become too much for Holder to stand. “In less than twenty minutes, they are going to kill us!” he screamed, causing the Samsonite briefcase to rock precariously on his lap. “They are holding my family!”

It wasn’t just the flight crew that heard Holder’s rant—it was everyone at Western dispatch and at the FBI’s command post, too. In making preparations for landing, Ed Richardson had accidentally brushed against the switch that turned on his radio. The co-pilot didn’t realize his goof until a concerned dispatcher asked: “Uh, say again?”

Richardson tried to clarify the situation. “These people, they came to this party’s house and are holding his family. He is the middle party, a concerned party whose family is, uh, let’s say
controlled
. He is on our side. He is a go-between between us and the others. The others are from the Weathermen group, and you know their desires as
regards to this country.”

The dispatcher confirmed that he understood Richardson’s explanation—the crew was dealing with a hijacker who claimed to be under duress. But the eavesdropping FBI agents were still confused. They couldn’t distinguish Holder’s voice from Richardson’s, and they feared that a hijacker might have a gun to the co-pilot’s head, forcing him to recant his plea for help. The agents alerted the FBI’s field office in Los Angeles, requesting that Richardson’s house in nearby Palos Verdes be checked for
evidence of a kidnapping.

Flight 701 landed in San Francisco at 6:15 p.m. and taxied to the north end of runway 19R. Just as in Seattle, Holder did not wish to play into the FBI’s hands by idling on the ground. He demanded that the plane be refueled quickly, then take off again once its tanks were full. They would circle the airport until his $500,000 and his long-range
jet had been delivered.

Back in the main cabin, Cathy Kerkow sprang into action as soon as the plane came to rest. She walked to the rear exit, where Gina Cutcher was sitting in a jump seat. “Hey, what’s going on?” Kerkow asked cheerfully. “Anything I can do to help out?” She kept one eye
on the jet’s folding stairs, checking for signs that they were about to be deployed to
enable an FBI ambush.