The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (30 page)

The Algerian government continued to support the group with a five-hundred-dollar monthly stipend, but all other sources of revenue dried up. Stripped of its communications equipment, the villa in El Biar became useless and fell into disrepair; it was eventually repossessed by the National Liberation Front. Huddled together at Donald Cox’s former bungalow in Bab el-Oued, the struggling hijackers could only wait for help from Cleaver once he surfaced in France. But weeks flew by with no word
about his fate.

H
OLDER
’
S PANIC ATTACKS
grew more frequent as winter turned to spring. He started to believe that he and Kerkow were certain to be
killed in Algiers, by any number of foes both real and imagined: Salah Hidjeb, the Panthers, the CIA, the Vietcong. Convinced that such a fate was unavoidable, he decided to follow through on the promise he had made to Kerkow while planning Operation Sisyphus.

“Let’s get married,” he blurted out one day as he and Kerkow lay together on the beach at Pointe Pescade. “At least that way we can be buried together.”

Kerkow lovingly ran her fingers through Holder’s tight Afro. “Rub a nigger’s head for luck,” she said with a devilish grin. And with that playful jest, she rose and waded into the surf, reveling in the stares of male beachgoers as she splashed water over her immodestly covered frame.

She never did
respond to Holder’s proposal.

W
HEN THE FIRST
airport security queues began to form on the morning of January 5, 1973, no one was quite sure how the public would react. The conventional wisdom was that many travelers would never stand for being treated like criminal suspects and so would loudly protest when asked to place their keys in plastic trays. Eager to catch such moments of rage, reporters staked out the walk-through metal detectors that now prevented unfettered access to all of the nation’s boarding gates.

Those reporters were disappointed by the day’s lack of conflicts. The skyjackers had become so brazen that even the most privacy-conscious travelers had come to accept the need to sacrifice convenience for peace of mind. And so even though the airport security gauntlets took an average of fifteen minutes to navigate, scarcely anyone complained about the hassle. “Somebody’s got to put a stop to this hijacking,” one Alabaman told the Associated Press as a guard picked through his carry-on bag at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. “If this will do it,
glory be!”

Because it was still unclear whether drugs seized during these inspections were admissible in court, guards were instructed to search
only for weapons. They discovered an abundance: handguns, knives, swords, batons, screwdrivers, fish saws, even a black widow spider
stored in a mason jar. The weapons’ owners were not always arrested: many pleaded ignorance regarding the new security rules and were allowed to stow their potentially lethal items
in their checked luggage.

To cut down on the screening delays, many airports soon decided to forbid all but ticketed passengers from passing through security, thereby ending the tradition of families bidding farewell to loved ones at boarding gates. The airlines also began to purchase hundreds of X-ray machines, which were rolling off the assembly lines of engineering firms for which the antiskyjacking push represented a golden opportunity. These companies boasted that their machines could screen a carry-on bag in three seconds, seven to ten times faster than
any human inspector.

To the surprise of the Justice Department, which was prepared to defend universal physical screening all the way to the Supreme Court, no significant legal challenges to the FAA’s new security rules emerged. The most notable case triggered by the new regulations questioned not the constitutionality of the searches but rather the safety of the X-ray equipment: consumer crusader Ralph Nader filed suit against the FAA, claiming that the machines manufactured by two companies, Bendix Corporation and Astrophysics Corporation, leaked radiation. Nader was correct: both companies’ machines failed to protect their openings with lead-lined curtains, and their X-ray emitters were not properly shielded. But the FAA acted with atypical haste to establish technical guidelines for future machines, and there was little public outcry over the fact that untold thousands of travelers had been dosed with harmful
amounts of radiation.

The airlines and the Nixon administration, meanwhile, amicably resolved their dispute over how to pay for the tightened security. The idea for a new Department of Transportation police force was scrapped, as was the notion of making the airlines use salaried personnel to operate metal detectors and X-ray machines. The airlines were instead permitted to contract their security to private firms—a unique arrangement in the developed world. They funded these contracts through a combination of fare increases and a government-approved
surcharge that averaged
thirty-four cents per ticket. Customers did not seem to mind shouldering the fiscal burden; despite the higher ticket prices, the number of airline passengers would increase by a healthy
7 percent in 1973.

By February 15, the day Secretary of State William P. Rogers finally signed the long-anticipated extradition pact with Cuba, the United States had gone more than six weeks without a hijacking—the nation’s longest such stretch since 1967, the year the epidemic had begun to accelerate toward its peak. The streak continued through the spring, then the summer, then the fall, even as the epidemic persisted in parts of the world that had yet to adopt universal physical screening. Planes were commandeered in Libya, Venezuela, and even France, where the wife of a Parisian film producer was slain after hijacking a Boeing 747 and demanding that all French cars
sit idle for a day. But in all of 1973, not a single such incident occurred in American airspace. Nor were any commercial flights successfully
hijacked in 1974. (One charter plane was taken to Havana in December 1974, but the Cuban government promptly extradited the skyjacker
back to the United States.)

The longer the skyjacking lull lasted, the more the epidemic receded from the public imagination—and, by extension, from the escapist fantasies of the despondent and deranged. The essence of skyjacking’s allure had always been the theatricality of the crime; a seized plane was a mammoth stage, the nation below an audience rapt in suspense over how it would all end. But like so many theatrical fads, skyjacking did not age well: once images of ransom deliveries and tarmac shoot-outs disappeared from the airwaves, the crime quickly assumed a dated feel. What lingered in people’s minds was not the skyjackers’ audacity, but their futility.

And so the most desperate Americans sought new ways to cast themselves as the heroes of their own warped redemption tales. The years that followed Watergate and the fall of Saigon would be filled with plenty of high-profile mayhem committed by men and women at their wits’ ends—kidnappings, car bombings, and assassinations of
politicians and celebrities alike. But almost none of the era’s madness would occur in America’s skies.

O
N THE NIGHT
of January 6, 1975, two years and a day after American aviation security changed forever, two Paris policemen spotted something unusual along the River Seine: a tall, skinny black man wandering about the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville in a daze, as if thoroughly drunk. This was not a part of town with many Senegalese or Ivorian residents, and the man did not look like a typical wide-eyed tourist. The police approached him and asked to see his identification; when he could not produce any, they escorted him to their headquarters on the Île de la Cité
for further questioning.

Roger Holder held nothing back during his interrogation. He stated his real name and admitted that he had been living in France illegally “for quite some time,” though he couldn’t say
precisely how long. He gave the police the address of his current residence, a sixth-floor apartment on the Rue Blomet in the
Fifteenth Arrondissement. Without prompting, Holder also revealed that he was wanted by American authorities for hijacking a plane to Algeria.

The French police thought this all sounded preposterous, for the genial and spacey man before them did not seem dangerous in the least. Besides, what sort of international fugitive would blab so freely? The cops surmised that this man who claimed to be a hijacker was a harmless kook whose sole crime was overstaying his visa. They let Holder go the next day, after photographing him and extracting a promise that he would return with his passport
by week’s end.

Almost as an afterthought, a police supervisor notified the American embassy on January 8 that someone who called himself Roger Holder had been briefly detained. The Americans were outraged that the police had not held this man until his identity could be verified; they demanded that he be rearrested at once.

The embarrassed Paris police rushed over to Holder’s apartment, but the occupants had apparently packed suitcases and fled just hours
earlier. The bedroom closets still contained numerous articles of male and female clothing. In the living room, the cops discovered a movie projector, a stack of pornographic films, and several models of trains, airplanes, and helicopters in
various states of assembly.

R
OGER
H
OLDER AND
Cathy Kerkow had hung on in Algiers longer than anyone else. The Hijacking Family left in May 1973, finding their way to France with the aid of Eldridge Cleaver, who had resurfaced in the
Latin Quarter of Paris. But Holder and Kerkow remained at the Bab el-Oued bungalow, living off meager handouts from the Algerian government and bumming around the beach at Pointe Pescade. They grappled with boredom and got on
each other’s nerves.

Though the International Section had disintegrated, Holder still believed he was in peril from unseen foes. He became prone to babbling about a mishmash of disturbing topics: atrocities from Vietnam, the secret operatives who were tracking his every move, his regrets over leaving his twin daughters in San Diego. By the fall of 1973, caring for Holder had become a full-time occupation for Kerkow, who found the job too difficult to manage. She reached out to
Cleaver for help.

Though Cleaver had been in France for less than a year, he already had many friends in the country. The Black Panthers had always been popular among French intellectuals, who shared the Panthers’ dim view of the United States. There were thus many artists and scholars eager to support exiles like Cleaver. Julia Wright Hervé, the daughter of
Native Son
author Richard Wright, was always willing to assist Panthers with money or shelter, as was her mother, Ellen, who became Cleaver’s literary agent. And the celebrated French writer Jean Genet, who had traveled to the United States in 1970 to speak on behalf of imprisoned Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, offered to provide Cleaver with introductions to
highly placed politicians.

Through these connections, Kerkow arranged for herself and Holder to escape from Algiers. A Black Panther in San Francisco sent them American passports that identified the couple as Leavy and
Janice Ann Forte; someone very skilled at forgery had affixed the hijackers’ photographs
to the documents. In January 1974 Holder and Kerkow used those passports to follow in Cleaver’s footsteps, wending their way through Tunisia, Switzerland, and southern France before finally arriving in Paris, where they crashed in a sympathizer’s apartment
near the Rue Beaubourg.

A man the couple knew from Algiers—the French economics teacher who had once been their neighbor in Bab el-Oued—pulled some strings to get Holder into the Borde Clinic, an experimental psychiatric institute located in a stately château about two hours south of Paris. The clinic employed a Marxist-inspired approach to treatment, whereby patients were expected to help run the facility, handling jobs ranging from gardening to cooking to administration. It had a long and distinguished history of treating
traumatized war veterans.

While Holder settled into his therapeutic routine, Kerkow moved into the apartment on the Rue Blomet, the pied-à-terre of a prominent physicist who was active
in left-wing politics. Other French activists provided her with a modest allowance so that she needn’t look for work. Kerkow was delighted with her comfortable new circumstances, not least of all because she was finally free of Holder. The object of her youthful infatuation had become a burden over the preceding year; she pined for a future that consisted of more than just watching her boyfriend unravel.

Though just twenty-two years old when she arrived in Paris, Kerkow bore little resemblance to the naïve masseuse who had left San Diego in 1972. The hardships of Algiers had melted away her juvenile exuberance. She now radiated a weary sophistication, her beauty tinged with a glint of icy reserve. The aimless party girl from Coos Bay had become a survivor.

Unlike Algerian men, who’d had a difficult time relating to Kerkow’s overtly sexual vibe, the male denizens of Paris knew exactly how to respond to her signals. As she explored the city, Kerkow discovered that she rarely needed to pay for meals in cafés; admirers sitting a few tables away picked up the checks. She started dating men
who bought her shoes and dresses from swanky
grands magasins
; soon enough she developed a keen eye for fashion, abandoning her previous taste in hippie garb for clothes more befitting a young woman of means.