The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (25 page)

After announcing the strike, ALPA discovered that American pilots were not the only ones to be unusually disturbed by the Western Airlines hijacking: in a show of solidarity, the International Federation of Airline Pilots Associations, a coalition of unions in sixty-four foreign countries, declared that it would participate in the work stoppage. For a day, at least, global air travel would screech to a halt, all
because of Holder and Kerkow.

The major American airlines filed suit against ALPA in multiple federal districts, arguing that the planned strike violated the public’s inalienable right to a basic service. Several judges agreed with that logic and issued temporary injunctions barring the pilots from walking out. But the union vowed to press forward, claiming that its membership was undaunted by the threat of arrest. “When no governments seem willing to act, we, the pilots, who have responsibility for the passengers,
have to do something,” ALPA’s president proclaimed.

The international strike seemed splendidly effective in its early hours, as air service was terminated throughout much of Europe; Paris-Orly Airport was completely shut down, while traffic at London’s Heathrow plummeted by 60 percent. When day broke in the United States, however, American pilots awoke to the news that the injunction against the strike had been personally upheld by Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger, who had issued his ruling shortly before midnight. Dispirited by the defeat in the country’s highest court, the pilots’ confidence wavered, and many made the eleventh-hour
decision to show up for work. Thousands of flights were still grounded, including fourteen hundred by Eastern Air Lines alone. But pilots for Northwest Orient, Pacific Southwest, and United buckled at the last moment, and the disruption in the United States was not as severe
as initially feared.

ALPA put on a brave face, terming the strike “very, very effective” in drawing worldwide attention to its members’ plight. The union crowed about the fact that the day after the strike’s conclusion, the United Nations unanimously passed a resolution calling for “all states to expand and intensify
cooperative international efforts” to stop hijackings.

But the pundits scoffed at the UN’s gesture. “That’s about like coming out
100 percent for motherhood,” observed one op-ed writer.

Two days after the resolution’s passage, an introverted Navy veteran named Martin McNally hijacked an American Airlines Boeing 727 at the St. Louis airport. He did so using a submachine gun that he had carried on board in a trombone case. Seeking to break Holder and Kerkow’s record for the highest ransom ever paid by an American airline, McNally asked for and received $502,000. He later jumped from the plane over a wooded area near Peru, Indiana, and hitchhiked back to his home in Detroit. He was arrested there five days later with just thirteen dollars in his pocket; he confessed that he had lost hold of the ransom while pulling
his parachute’s rip cord.
^†

In response to the McNally hijacking, ALPA sent up a trial balloon regarding a new protest idea: a boycott of all domestic airports where security practices were too feeble
for the union’s taste. But that plan was quickly dropped as untenable, given the courts’ sympathy for the argument that air travel was a
fundamental American right. Many
frustrated pilots began to wonder if the FBI was correct, and that violence was the only answer—even if it meant that passengers would get caught in the crossfire.

H
OLDER AND
K
ERKOW
spent two weeks confined to the Hotel Aletti, completely shut off from the outside world. They were questioned for hours on end by Algerian intelligence agents, who incessantly asked about the couple’s radical connections and political goals. The agents had a tough time following Holder’s circuitous riffs about astrology, Angela Davis, and Hanoi. And they couldn’t understand why the affable Kerkow had gotten mixed up in such a momentous crime.

Every night after their interrogations ended, Holder and Kerkow would retire to the hotel’s casino to play roulette and dine on fresh lobster. They were always accompanied by Mustafa and No Nuts, who were under strict orders never to let the Americans
leave their sight.

Finally convinced that Holder and Kerkow had acted alone and had no discernible politics aside from run-of-the-mill opposition to the Vietnam War, the Algerians informed the couple that they had been cleared for release. Holder and Kerkow had their doubts; they feared they might be taken to Maison Blanche and placed on a flight back to the United States. But true to their word, Mustafa and No Nuts drove the hijackers up the winding medieval streets of the Casbah and deposited them at the headquarters of the National Liberation Front, President Boumédiène’s ruling party. Eldridge Cleaver and his lieutenants were waiting there to assume responsibility for
the two young Americans. Holder and Kerkow had officially been granted asylum, and the International Section had bestowed upon them the title “
Students of Revolution.”

After the handover, the Panthers bickered over who should house the hijackers. Room was scarce at Cleaver’s residence in El Biar, where the International Section’s leader lived with his wife and two young children. Donald Cox, the Panthers’ erstwhile field marshal and munitions expert, volunteered to put them up at his bungalow in the Bab
el-Oued neighborhood, north of the city center. His motives for doing so were far from pure: he believed that whoever physically controlled the hijackers would ultimately control their money, which was still being held by
the Algerian government.

Holder and Kerkow were overjoyed to discover that their new quarters were close to Pointe Pescade, a crescent-shaped beach once favored by the French colonial elite. They spent their first days of freedom on the sand, watching Algerian families frolic in
the gentle waves. At night they played chess and smoked hashish with their friendly neighbors, a French economics teacher
and his American wife. Despite its many glitches, Operation Sisyphus had finally delivered Holder and Kerkow to a Mediterranean paradise.

But the respite proved short-lived. On June 30, Cox heard upsetting news on a Voice of America radio broadcast:
the money was gone.

In sizing up the hijackers at his palace, President Boumédiène had instantly pegged them as more akin to common thieves than revolutionaries. He wished to discourage such adventurers from seeking shelter in Algeria, strictly for business reasons. As much as Boumédiène loved to poke the West, he also depended on its vast appetite for oil and gas to keep his treasury flush—and, by extension, to fund his favorite third-world insurgents. In fact, the state-owned petroleum company, Sonatrach, was in the midst of secret negotiations to export
natural gas to the United States. Rather than risk imperiling that deal, Boumédiène ordered that the money be returned.

The transfer took place on neutral ground, at a Bank of America in Paris. An Air Algérie official gave the money to a Western Airlines vice president, who had it counted on the spot. There was just $487,300 in the sack: Holder had left $5,000 as a tip for Newell’s crew, and sticky-fingered Algerian police had evidently made off with another $7,700. The Western executive knew
better than to complain.

Holder and Kerkow were sad to learn the money had been returned. While confined to the Hotel Aletti, they had fantasized about how best to spend their loot: sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar, funding a hospital in North Vietnam, building some sort of freaky
statue in Coos Bay. Their dejection, however, was nothing compared to that of the Panthers; Cleaver and the others believed the Algerian government had given away what
was rightfully theirs.

Donald Cox still dreamed of making money off the hijackers somehow. He had a reputation for being skilled at that sort of task: in 1970, for example, he had helped organize a celebrity-studded fund-raiser for the Panthers at the New York apartment of composer Leonard Bernstein. (Tom Wolfe famously lampooned the party in a
New York
magazine piece titled “Radical Chic.”) Cox estimated that he could earn at least three thousand dollars by selling the hijackers’ story to the American press; he thought no newspaper could resist the lure of an exclusive interview with Cathy Kerkow, the pretty girl-next-door turned
badass revolutionary.

As Cox tried to peddle the hijackers’ story, Holder grew to despise him. When he had selected Algiers as an alternate destination for Operation Sisyphus, the manic Holder had assumed that Cleaver and his acolytes were visionaries like himself, men whom fate had selected to alter the course of history. But Cox was now revealing himself to be little more than a hustler. Before long Holder could barely stand to be in the same room as the man who had once been in charge of teaching the
Black Panthers to shoot. The animosity was mutual: Cox told several International Section colleagues that Holder was
probably an FBI informant.

Kerkow, meanwhile, was grappling with nascent pangs of guilt. She was beginning to regret her failure to bid her family farewell. Her mother had been trying to reach her by telephone for weeks, aided by the office of Coos Bay’s Republican congressman,
John Dellenback. But the Panthers kept denying Patricia Kerkow’s requests, and Cathy was barred from placing calls herself unless supervised by Cox. Instead, she wrote her mother a brief letter, stating only that she was doing well in Algiers. She offered no clue as to why she had
helped hijack Flight 701.

Shortly afterward, in an attempt to convince the
Oregon Journal
to buy the hijackers’ story, Cox put Kerkow on the line with a reporter
named Rolla J. Crick. “I’m all right,” she told Crick. “I don’t have an explanation at this time. But I am concerned about my family. I think of them a lot.”

Crick pressed Kerkow for details about her experiences in Algiers. But Kerkow was cagey, stating that she couldn’t share much until a sufficient sum of cash had been wired to the International Section. The
Oregon Journal
turned down the deal, as did every other publication that Cox contacted. Even the most ethically tenuous newspapers couldn’t stomach the thought of paying for
access to skyjackers.

Having failed in his attempt to ply money from the media, Cox concocted a desperate Plan B. Kerkow had told him that she and Beth Newhouse had dealt marijuana in San Diego. Cox asked her to write a letter to her old friend, proposing an elaborate drug deal: the International Section would send Newhouse a large load of Algerian hashish in exchange for a shipment of guns.

When Newhouse received the letter in Coos Bay, where she was spending the summer, she could tell that it had already been opened and read by someone else—presumably the FBI. But even if her mail hadn’t been monitored, there was no way she would ever involve herself in such an outrageous scheme. Newhouse got the sense that her friend was being manipulated by people who wouldn’t hesitate to harm her.

One sentence in Kerkow’s letter struck Newhouse as particularly sinister: “It’s so easy to slip
into darkness here.”

C
APTAIN
G
ENE
V
AUGHN
wanted to make a statement. Something that would show the world that he and his fellow pilots were sick of ceding control of their planes to extremists and thieves. Merely killing the young man who had commandeered his Pan Am Boeing 747 would not suffice; Vaughn wanted to turn the hijacker’s corpse into a warning, much as the English had once dangled the bodies of hanged pirates along the River Thames.

The focus of Vaughn’s rage was Nguyen Thai Binh, a twenty-four-year-old
college student from South Vietnam. Binh had graduated from the University of Washington on June 10, 1972, earning a bachelor’s degree in fisheries management. He had intended to stay in the United States, but his visa had been revoked on June 7 due to his antiwar activism; he had been arrested for occupying the South Vietnamese consulate in New York. Seething over his expulsion as well as the carpet-bombing of North Vietnam, Binh had decided to hijack his flight home as an “act of revenge.”

On July 1, the day before boarding Pan Am Flight 841 in Honolulu, Binh had mailed a letter to several antiwar groups, explaining the action he was about to take: “I know my voice for peace cannot be heard, cannot defeat the roared sound of B-52s, of the U.S. bombings.… My only bomb is my human heart.”

Binh didn’t reveal his intentions to the Pan Am crew until they were over the South China Sea. He passed a stewardess a note: “You are going to fly me to Hanoi and this airplane will be destroyed when we get there.” When Vaughn refused to comply, Binh wrote a second note, which he spattered with a liberal amount of his own blood. “This indicates how serious I am about being taken to Hanoi,” it read.

Vaughn went to the main cabin to meet Binh, a meek-looking young man who stood less than five feet tall. Binh showed off a foil-wrapped package that he said contained a bomb. Vaughn wasn’t buying it; he had read all about Roger Holder’s fake briefcase bomb and guessed that the diminutive Binh was trying to pull a similar stunt.

Vaughn knew that one of his passengers, a retired San Francisco police officer, had come on board with a .357 Magnum. He told the ex-cop to be prepared, for he would soon have an opportunity to end Binh’s life.

Under the pretext of making a refueling stop, Vaughn landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport. Once the plane was at rest on the tarmac, Vaughn walked back to speak with the hijacker again. Binh was highly agitated, going on and on about how he would detonate his bomb unless the plane took off at once.

“I can’t understand you too well,” said Vaughn. “Let me come closer.”

Binh leaned his head forward as Vaughn knelt down. Before Binh could repeat his demand, the captain grabbed him by the throat and thrust him to the floor. “Kill this son of a bitch!” Vaughn yelled as he pinned down the struggling Binh.

The cop came racing back with his weapon drawn. He shot Binh five times at close range, in full view of his fellow passengers.

Vaughn picked up Binh’s lifeless body by the neck and legs and walked it to the Boeing 747’s rear exit. He then heaved the 116-pound corpse onto the tarmac for
all the world to see.