The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (7 page)

When he arrived for his son’s arraignment at New Orleans’s federal courthouse, Robinson’s father was besieged by reporters. The man, a junior college mathematics professor, pronounced himself baffled by the whole affair; his son, he emphasized, was an honor roll student who had never been in trouble with the law. But when pressed by the throng of journalists who surrounded him on the courthouse steps, the elder Robinson decided to speculate on his son’s rationale: “I presume he just thought and thought and thought, and then decided within his own mind he must express himself in some way or he wouldn’t
hold his self-respect.”

That observation, made by a bewildered man under duress, would prove to be one of the era’s wisest assessments of the skyjacker psyche. Though the men and women who hijacked planes would claim dozens of different motives over the years, they all shared a keen sense of desperation—a belief, however deluded, that they were so cornered by circumstance that only the most extreme of measures could redeem them. And in a nation smitten with the ingenious machines that plied its furthest frontier, no measure was more extreme than skyjacking.

“Oh, yeah, something had to be done—and I did something, for better or worse,” one captured skyjacker would later state when questioned about the prudence of his crime. “It [was] better than eighteen years of therapy, or whatever. It just
seemed like the answer.”

M
OST SKYJACKERS EARNESTLY
believed that upon reaching Havana, their sole destination during the mid to late 1960s, they would be hailed as heroes. Cuba had, after all, proven itself quite hospitable to notable American exiles such as Robert F. Williams, a North Carolina
civil rights activist who had fled the United States after being falsely accused of kidnapping.
^b
Though they were all far less distinguished than Williams, skyjackers expected that they, too, would be free to enjoy the supposed fruits of Castro’s revolution. “In a few hours it would be dawn in a new world—I was about to enter Paradise,” one skyjacker recalled thinking as the runway lights at José Martí International Airport came into view. “Cuba was creating a true democracy, a place where everyone was equal, where violence against blacks, injustice, and racism were things of the past.… I had come to Cuba to feel
freedom at least once.”

But though Castro welcomed the wayward flights in order to humiliate the United States and earn hard currency—the airlines had to pay the Cuban government an average of $7,500
to retrieve each plane—he had little but disdain for the hijackers themselves, whom he considered undesirable malcontents. After landing at José Martí, hijackers were whisked away to an imposing Spanish citadel that served as the headquarters of G2, Cuba’s secret police. There they were interrogated for weeks on end, accused of working for the CIA despite all
evidence to the contrary. The lucky ones were then sent to live at the Casa de Transitos (Hijackers House), a decrepit dormitory in southern Havana, where each American was allocated sixteen square feet of living space; the two-story building eventually held as many as sixty hijackers, who were forced to subsist on monthly stipends of
forty pesos each. Skyjackers who rubbed their G2 interrogators the wrong way, meanwhile, were dispatched to squalid sugar-harvesting camps, where conditions were rarely better than nightmarish. At these tropical gulags, inmates were punished with machete blows, political agitators were publicly executed, and captured escapees were dragged across razor-sharp stalks of sugarcane until their
flesh was stripped away. One
American hijacker was beaten so badly by prison guards that
he lost an eye; another
hanged himself in his cell.

Yet as word of this brutal treatment filtered back to the United States via newspaper reports, the epidemic only grew worse; every skyjacker was an optimist at heart, supremely confident that his story would be the one to touch Castro’s heart. The twenty-eight-year-old heir to a New Mexico real estate fortune hijacked a Delta Airlines jet while inexplicably
dressed as a cowboy; a sociology student from Kalamazoo, Michigan, forced a Piper PA-24 pilot to take him to Havana because he wanted to
study Communism firsthand; a thirty-four-year-old Cuban exile diverted a Northwest Airlines flight back home because he could no longer bear to live without his mother’s
delicately seasoned
frijoles
. By July 1968 the situation had become dire enough to warrant another Senate hearing.

The FAA was represented at the hearing by a functionary named Irving Ripp, whose testimony was devoid of even the slightest hint of hope. “It’s an impossible problem short of searching every passenger,” Ripp testified. “If you’ve got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana, and he has got a gun, that’s all he needs.”

Senator George Smathers of Florida countered Ripp’s gloom by raising the possibility of using metal detectors or X-ray machines to screen passengers. He noted that these relatively new technologies were already in place at several maximum-security prisons and sensitive military facilities, where they were performing admirably. “
I see no reason why similar devices couldn’t be installed at airport check-in gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns or other weapons just prior to emplaning,” Smathers said.

This modest proposal was something the airlines feared far more than hijackers. For the industry was convinced that enduring periodic skyjackings to Cuba was financially preferable to implementing invasive security at all of America’s airports.

In the grand calculus of business, an airline’s bottom line barely suffered when one of its vessels was diverted to Havana. The price to bring a hijacked aircraft and its passengers back to the United States
was around $20,000, a sum that included the costs of having to cancel flights and reward abducted crew members with
extra vacation days. That figure struck the airlines as chump change compared to the fortunes they imagined losing should electronic screening be made compulsory. Would passengers swear off flying if asked to empty their pockets by uniformed guards, or if forced to reveal the contents of their suitcases? With business booming as never before—the number of miles traveled by American commercial aircraft had risen over 600 percent since 1961—the airlines were not
willing to find out.

Having turned a profit of more than
$360 million in 1967, the airline industry had ample resources to hire Washington, D.C.’s, top lobbyists, who made the FAA well aware of their employers’ strident opposition to electronic screening. Among these highly paid persuaders was Najeeb Halaby, the former head of the FAA, who had become Pan Am’s chief lobbyist right after leaving
his government post.
^c

With such influential voices railing against metal detectors and X-ray machines, the FAA’s views on the matter had come to mirror those of the airlines. And so Irving Ripp parried Senator Smathers’s suggestion as certain to have “a bad psychological effect on passengers.… It would scare the pants off people. Plus people would complain about
invasion of privacy.”

Exactly as had occurred seven years earlier, the Senate committee was swayed by the forcefulness of the FAA’s stance. It quietly dropped the matter of electronic screening.

Two weeks after the Senate hearing, a deranged forklift operator named Oran Richards hijacked a Delta Airlines flight. Somewhere over West Virginia, Richards jumped from his seat and pulled a pistol on the first passenger he encountered in the aisle—a man who just happened to be Senator
James Eastland of Mississippi. Though the Delta crew eventually talked Richards into surrendering in Miami, the skyjacking of a national political figure represented a dangerous
new twist to the epidemic. Almost immediately the State Department proposed a novel antiskyjacking solution: free one-way flights to Cuba for anyone who wished to go, provided they vowed never to return to the United States. But Castro refused to accept these “good riddance flights”; he had no incentive to help America curtail its skyjackings, which gave him excellent fodder for his marathon sermons
against capitalist decadence.

Unwilling to spend the money necessary to weed out passengers with dark intentions, the airlines instead focused on mitigating the financial impact of skyjacking. They decided that their top priority was to avoid violence, since passenger or crew fatalities would surely generate an avalanche of bad publicity. As a result, every airline adopted policies that called for absolute compliance with all hijacker demands, no matter how peculiar or extravagant. A November 1968 memo that Eastern Air Lines circulated among its employees made clear that even minor attempts at heroism were now strictly forbidden:

To facilitate impromptu journeys to Cuba, all cockpits were equipped with charts of the Caribbean Sea, regardless of a flight’s intended destination. Pilots were briefed on landing procedures for José Martí International Airport and issued phrase cards to help them communicate with Spanish-speaking hijackers. (The phrases to which
a pilot could point included translations for “I must open my flight bag for maps” and “Aircraft has mechanical problems—
can’t make Cuba.”) Air traffic controllers in Miami were given a dedicated phone line for reaching their Cuban counterparts, so they could pass along word of incoming flights. Switzerland’s embassy in Havana, which handled America’s diplomatic interests in Cuba, created a form letter that airlines could use to request the expedited
return of stolen planes.

As the airlines labored to make each hijacking as quick and painless as possible, the American public grew to accept unscheduled diversions to Havana as a routine risk of air travel. Comedians mined the phenomenon for corny jokes, none more mimicked than Jerry Collins’s quip that stewardesses were being trained to ask hijacked passengers, “Coffee, tea,
or rum daiquiris, sir?” Pundits shrugged their shoulders at the epidemic, convinced that nothing could be done to halt its spread. “It seems the best we can do is add airplane hijacking to the list of things we don’t like, along with sin and high taxes,” wrote the editorial board of
The Pittsburgh Press
in December 1968, “and pray
there are no tragedies.”

That same month, in response to the twenty-second American skyjacking of the year,
Time
ran a tongue-in-cheek travel guide titled “What to Do When the Hijacker Comes.” “Don’t panic,” began one of the feature’s recommendations. “Hijackers, although unwelcome, can be congenial. One of the three men who took over Pan American’s San Juan–bound Flight 281 in November, identified only as Jose, passed out .32-cal. bullets as souvenirs and chatted amicably with passengers.” The writer also advised against pushing the stewardess call button, since “the sudden ping in the cockpit might startle the felon and provoke him to fire his pistol.”

Once the plane was safely on the ground in Havana, however, there was no point in being glum.
Time
noted that hijacked passengers were typically put up at the Hotel Habana Libre while awaiting transport back to the United States. “You will probably be treated to a nightclub, complete with daiquiris, a chorus line and an audience of gaping Eastern Europeans,” the guide cheerfully predicted. “The
shopping downtown is better: in addition to cigars and rum, bargains include East German cameras and beautifully embroidered
Czech peasant blouses.”

B
UT IT WAS
a mistake to treat skyjacking as a managed risk. The airlines’ harm-reduction strategy was contingent on the assumption that the epidemic’s basic features would never change—that the perpetrators would always be either sad sacks or Cuban exiles whose sole intent was to reach Havana with a minimum of fuss. But as the hijackings piled up with little apparent resistance from the airlines or the authorities, the crime’s appeal broadened to new demographics of the disenchanted.

The epidemic first revealed its metamorphosis on the second day of 1969, when a young African-American couple, Tyrone and Linda Austin, took over an Eastern Air Lines flight en route from New York to Miami. Tyrone was the aggressor, announcing the hijacking by holding a gun to the head of a two-year-old boy and shouting, “Black power, Havana! Black power, Havana!” Though the Austins’ revolutionary credentials were sketchy—Tyrone’s real objective was to flee a felony arrest warrant in New Jersey
^d
—their success in drawing media attention would soon inspire more sincere black militants to embrace skyjacking as a key
tactic in their struggle.

Later that month a nineteen-year-old Navy deserter hijacked a National flight from Key West to Havana, telling a stewardess at knifepoint that he refused to shed blood in Vietnam. It was the first American hijacking in which a member of the military cited his opposition to the
war as a motive. It would by no means be the last.

By the second week of February 1969, eleven flights had been
commandeered in the United States—a record pace. In addition to the Austins and the Navy deserter, the hijackers included a former mental patient accompanied by his
three-year-old son; a community college student armed with a
can of bug spray; a Purdue University dropout with a taste
for Marxist economics; and a retired Green Beret who claimed that he intended to assassinate Castro
with his bare hands.

At the behest of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, the FAA formed a special antihijacking task force to develop possible solutions to the crisis. The group was immediately inundated with thousands of letters from concerned citizens, who recommended inventive ways to frustrate skyjackers: installing trapdoors outside cockpits, arming stewardesses with tranquilizer darts, making passengers wear boxing gloves so they couldn’t grip guns, playing the Cuban national anthem before takeoff and then arresting anyone
who knew the lyrics. The most popular suggestion was for the FAA to build a mock version of José Martí International Airport in a South Florida field, so that skyjackers could be duped into thinking they had reached Havana. That idea sparked serious interest at the agency but was ultimately
discarded as too expensive.