The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (24 page)

A
NAKED
B
ETH
N
EWHOUSE
groggily stumbled to the front of her family’s cabin, tucked away in the woods above the Coos River. It was too early on a Sunday morning for any of her friends to be paying a visit, so she had been particularly alarmed to hear the sound of crunching gravel outside. She peered through a window and saw a late-model sedan pulling up the driveway. It was the kind of car favored by undercover cops.

Newhouse ran back into the bedroom, where her boyfriend, Lee Davis, was fast asleep. “Oh my God, oh my God!” she shrieked as she scrambled to pull on a pair of jeans. “We’re busted!”

Newhouse and Davis had been crashing at the cabin for a week, having driven up to Coos Bay to sell a load of Fast Eddie’s marijuana. A few pounds of the drug were still in the trunk of their car. Newhouse feared that the local police had caught wind of their illicit trade.

Once dressed, Newhouse went to the front door to greet the cops, hoping to allay their suspicions with flirtatious pleas of ignorance. But the two men who emerged from the sedan were not members of the Coos Bay Police Department. One was Newhouse’s father, Andrew, the town’s most prominent attorney; the other was a friend of his, an FBI agent named Thomas Elliott, whose son had graduated from Marshfield High School the same year as Beth.

Now Newhouse was truly freaked out. She had transported large quantities of drugs across state lines—a federal crime. That had to be why the FBI was here.

But Elliott put her fears to rest at once. “You’re not in any trouble,” he assured her. “We need to talk. There’s been a hijacking.”

Over coffee in the cabin’s kitchen, the FBI agent laid out as much of the story as he could: how Cathy Kerkow and Roger Holder had ended up on Western Airlines Flight 701; how Kerkow had refused to disembark in New York; and how the Algerians were apparently reluctant to hand over the couple. Elliott said that Holder had flown under an assumed name but had been positively identified by a seatmate who had seen his Army discharge papers. Kerkow, by contrast, had made no effort to conceal her identity while obtaining the Western tickets in Los Angeles.

Newhouse could not have been more stunned. She and Kerkow may have had loose morals, but they were far from hardened criminals. They were just ordinary hippie chicks, trying to enjoy their fleeting youth. The thought of Kerkow hijacking a plane and making off with a half-million dollars was too absurd to comprehend. And though Holder had always given her the creeps, Newhouse couldn’t imagine him doing something so monumentally insane, either.

Elliott pressed Newhouse for details that might aid the investigation, but she couldn’t provide much help. She did recall that Kerkow had asked her for money to buy airline tickets to Hawaii, but that was the extent of her useful information. She could only speculate that Holder had decided to hijack the plane on a whim, without Kerkow’s knowledge. No other explanation made sense.

Newhouse’s father asked Beth whether she might be willing to travel to Algeria to coax Kerkow into coming home. But she refused to go on such a mission, and not just because she had heard that Algeria was a dangerous place. She also knew that the courts were coming down hard on convicted skyjackers, handing out thirty-year sentences like candy. She couldn’t bring herself to play a role in sending her best friend to
prison for decades.

The rest of Coos Bay was just as dumbfounded as Newhouse to learn of Kerkow’s crime. Kerkow’s mother, Patricia, at first insisted that there must be some mistake, citing early news reports that erroneously described the female
hijacker’s hair as blond. But as it became clear that Cathy had, in fact, gone to Algiers with $500,000 in extortion proceeds, Patricia claimed that her daughter must have been duped: “From what I have been told, I cannot believe my daughter was actively involved in this in any way. It must have been an impulsive act on the other person’s part. I can’t imagine her taking part in planning
something like this.”

Many of Kerkow’s Coos Bay acquaintances could only express astonishment when confronted by the many reporters who descended on the town. “The whole staff here was stunned, shocked,” sputtered Elmer Johnson, the principal at Marshfield High School. “We just couldn’t believe this was our Cathy. She was a good girl when we knew her here
three years ago.”

A few locals offered a less flattering portrait of Kerkow. One high school friend described her as “something of a swinger” who was no stranger to the
pleasures of marijuana. “But she was very intelligent,” the friend hastened to add, “and I cannot figure her smoking it on a plane in a hijack when she would
want to be alert.”

A former co-worker at a housewares store marveled that anyone so spacey could be involved in such an ambitious crime: “I didn’t think she could follow orders well
enough to be a hijacker.”

Down in San Diego, meanwhile, Seavenes and Marie Holder were not surprised when the FBI showed up at their door on the morning of June 3: the previous evening, when news of the hijacking had aired on TV, Seavenes had casually remarked, “That sounds like something our
crazy son would do.”

The Holders cooperated fully with the investigation, telling the agents that Marie had driven their son and his girlfriend to the airport on Friday morning; Roger had told them of the couple’s plans to homestead in Australia, though not the means by which they would get there. The Holders then guided the FBI to the Lauretta Street
apartment that Kerkow had rented three weeks earlier. Agents tore the place apart, looking for clues to the
hijackers’ political agenda. They were also curious to learn whether Holder had any connection to the other skyjacker of June 2, who had been captured near Nevada’s Washoe Lake around 5:30 that morning. That man, Robb Heady, had been a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division, and the FBI wondered if he
knew Holder from Vietnam.
^*

But the FBI found nothing to shed light on Holder and Kerkow’s motives, nor to indicate that their paths had ever crossed with Heady’s. Aside from Kerkow’s waterbed, all the agents discovered were clothes, astrology books, and several airline timetables.

The following day, at 12:35 p.m. Pacific time, the jury in the Angela Davis trial returned its verdict: not guilty on all charges. The usually stoic Davis burst into uncontrollable sobs upon hearing that her legal ordeal was over. “This is the happiest day because it means this is now out of the way so I can resume the struggle against oppression,” she told the assembled press, shortly before greeting and embracing the jurors as they filed out of the courtroom.

Neither Davis nor any of her supporters mentioned a single word about
the hijacking of Flight 701.

W
HEN
H
OLDER AND
Kerkow finally awoke on Sunday, June 4, they decided to go for a celebratory stroll along the bustling Algiers waterfront, where scores of brightly colored fishing boats bobbed in the pale blue water. But when they stepped outside their room, they were stopped by the police in the hallway, who were being overseen by Mustafa and No Nuts. Mustafa politely informed the Americans that they were not to leave the Hotel Aletti for the time being, for security
reasons. They were free to make use of the casino or dine in the restaurant, but only if accompanied by at least two guards.

Holder asked about the money. Mustafa said it would be returned as soon as the couple had met with President Boumédiène; His Excellency was due back from Senegal on Tuesday, at which point the couple would be
granted a private audience.

Holder and Kerkow returned to their room and tried to ring the Black Panthers, using the number that Eldridge Cleaver had slipped them at the airport. But the room’s
phone line was dead.

At the International Section’s villa in Algiers’s El Biar neighborhood, Cleaver was also getting stonewalled in his efforts to get his hands on the ransom: Algerian officials had rebuffed his numerous inquiries, explaining that the money
had to be “processed.” But that didn’t stop the Panthers from making grandiose plans for the $500,000. When a reporter from the
Oregon Journal
called Pete O’Neal, Cleaver’s top lieutenant, he got an earful about how the money would be spent: “When the brother and sister arrived, we spoke with them at the airport. They said the money they had liberated was earmarked for a number of causes. A substantial sum was to go to the Palestinian Liberation Forces and the bulk of it is for the Afro-American struggle, to be used to fight
Zionism or American imperialism.”

Even though the money was in limbo, Cleaver was ecstatic about the hijacking. The International Section had been losing visibility for months, as the novelty of the Algiers operation began to fade; journalists seldom came knocking anymore, looking to pay four hundred dollars or more per interview with the eminently quotable Cleaver
and his gorgeous wife. Cleaver, whose literary talents included a nose for drama, knew he could regain relevance by tapping in to the American public’s fascination with skyjacking.

The International Section therefore released an official statement hailing Holder and Kerkow as revolutionary heroes who had struck a major blow against the pig power structure. “Like our comrades in Vietnam, all the blacks and other oppressed peoples of the United States are undertaking a just war of liberation against the same
capitalistic killers,” the statement read. “[Hijacking] is a correct and just tactic to expropriate all that we can from the big capitalistic companies and corporations who extort
billions from the people.”

On the afternoon of June 6, just as they had been promised, Holder and Kerkow were driven from the Hotel Aletti to the presidential palace, a pristine Moorish villa guarded by saber-wielding soldiers in long white capes. They were met by Salah Hidjeb, the secret police chief who had welcomed them to Maison Blanche Airport three days earlier. He escorted the couple down a narrow marble hallway to a wood-paneled office with exquisite antique rugs. Beneath a gold-framed painting of praying Algerian peasants sat a stern-looking man with an aquiline nose and a bushy mustache. A dark cloak was draped around his slim-fitting suit. Though so skinny that his cheekbones nearly jutted through his flesh, he exuded the air of supreme authority.

President Houari Boumédiène rose to shake Holder’s hand, though he ignored Kerkow. Without offering any further greeting, he began to converse with Hidjeb in Arabic so that the hijackers couldn’t follow a word. After a few minutes of this discussion, Boumédiène signaled for Holder and Kerkow to be taken back to their hotel. He had decided their fates
based on a single glance.

B
ILL
N
EWELL AND
his Western Airlines crew first realized the magnitude of the hijacking story while trying to leave Madrid. They had stopped in the Spanish capital on the night of June 3, to unwind with a few whiskeys and grab some much-needed sleep. At the airport the next day, as they made their way through the terminal, the pilots were stopped by a United Press International reporter and his photographer. “Take off your sunglasses,” the reporter urged Newell as the photographer clicked away. “The people will
want to see your eyes.”

The businesslike Newell was annoyed by the intrusion, but he agreed to field a few questions. The reporter asked him to describe the male hijacker as best he could. “The hijacker was a highly intelligent man dissatisfied with his experiences in the Army,” Newell replied.
“He said he wanted to go to Algiers because that was the only place he
would be genuinely free.”

By the time the crew got the Boeing 720H back to Los Angeles, the hijacking had become a media and political sensation, held up as evidence that the skyjacking epidemic now posed an existential threat to national security. By finding sanctuary in Algeria, Holder and Kerkow had inaugurated a whole new hijacker haven, one that actively supported the likes of the Vietcong. And the couple had also set a new American record for the amount of ransom paid by an airline, smashing the previous mark by nearly $200,000; the Flight 701 affair had made it seem as if there was no limit to how much skyjackers could extort. Everyone dreaded what was sure to come next: a wave of increasingly unhinged copycats who believed that they, too, could defy the odds and skyjack their way to happier circumstances.

Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., whom President Richard Nixon had picked to head the nation’s antihijacking efforts two years earlier, publicly condemned Western Airlines for allowing Holder and Kerkow to escape. He argued that the Flight 701 fiasco proved that the airlines’ policy of total compliance should be scrapped. “We must instill in all parties an increasing determination to resist hijack and extortionist demands to the fullest extent possible consistent with the safety of human life,” he said. “Too often, hijackers have been afforded service and responsiveness that is not provided even the first-class traveler. Too often, funds have been raised and provided to extortionists in amounts and with a speed that approach the fantastic.” Davis also urged the airlines to place greater trust in the FBI, stressing that the Bureau’s agents were not “trigger-happy gunslingers” but rather seasoned professionals who would make every conceivable effort to
avoid wounding passengers.

The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), by contrast, directed its ire at the federal government, arguing that the Nixon administration hadn’t done enough to pressure Algeria into extraditing Holder and Kerkow. The labor union implored the president to order an air-service boycott of any nation that permitted its jets to land in Algeria—a
measure that would put enormous pressure on allies such as Spain and France to suspend their daily flights to the
North African country. ALPA also sent an open letter to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, asking him to push for a total economic embargo of Algeria that would be lifted only if Holder and Kerkow were returned to
the United States for prosecution.

When its entreaties to Washington did not elicit an immediate response, ALPA decided to take drastic and unprecedented action: the union called for a twenty-four-hour pilots’ strike, to begin at two a.m. on June 19.