The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (8 page)

As the FAA’s task force sifted through the mountain of proposals, the hijackings continued apace, each more outlandish than the last. A seventy-four-year-old World War I veteran pulled a knife on an Eastern stewardess in the
skies above South Carolina; a Black Panther, wanted for his role in a San Francisco shoot-out, hijacked a TWA
Boeing 707 over Nevada; an alcoholic used-car dealer from Baltimore took over an Eastern flight while wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals, so that he could hit the beach
upon landing in Havana.

The United States was not suffering through this chaos alone. Skyjackings were occurring at an alarming rate in every corner of the world, as insurgents discovered the ease with which airplanes could be seized and flown to friendly countries; in the terminology of public health, the epidemic had morphed into a pandemic, no longer confined to a discrete geographic area. Leftist guerrillas in Colombia seemingly hijacked Avianca Airlines flights every few weeks, often
murdering crew members who dared resist; Eritrean separatists diverted Ethiopian airliners to Sudan, where the ruling junta was sympathetic to their goals; a Greek dissident escaped to Albania by hijacking an Olympic Airlines DC-3, bringing his wife and two sons
along for the ride.

Leila Khaled smiles for the camera in Jordan, October 1969.
BETTMANN/CORBIS/AP IMAGES

But it was supporters of the Palestinian cause who became the world’s best-known practitioners of skyjacking, thanks to the hauntingly beautiful face of Leila Khaled. On August 29, 1969, the twenty-five-year-old Khaled, a veteran commando for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), helped hijack a TWA flight to the Syrian
capital of Damascus. (The date was picked to coincide with the opening of the seventy-second annual meeting of the
Zionist Organization of America.) After freeing all 120 passengers, she and her accomplice destroyed the plane’s cockpit with dynamite. By the time the Syrians released her that October, Khaled had become an international celebrity, idolized as much for her fashion sense as for her terrorist exploits: she let her jet-black hair pour jauntily from her loose-fitting kaffiyeh, and she wore a shell-casing ring that symbolized that she was “
engaged to the revolution.” Khaled’s fame garnered the PFLP countless new supporters; it also forced her to undergo extensive plastic surgery, since her natural face became too recognizable
for covert operations.

The international response to these skyjackings was tepid at best. The United Nations agency responsible for global aviation policy
drafted a multilateral treaty that would make “the unlawful seizure of aircraft” an international crime, thereby obligating all parties to either extradite
or prosecute hijackers. But that treaty, eventually known as the Hague Hijacking Convention, was initially signed by fewer than four dozen nations, many of which then dragged their feet on formal ratification. The world would remain full of
potential “hijacker havens.”

Cuba was among the many countries that refused to sign the convention. Fidel Castro’s government instead tried to negotiate a bilateral “extradite or prosecute” agreement with the United States, working through Swiss intermediaries in Havana. But these secret talks stalled over Castro’s stubborn insistence that the United States also send him Cubans who had fled the island on stolen boats—an unthinkable concession for President Richard Nixon, who had close political ties to South Florida’s 300,000-strong
Cuban community.

As American and Cuban diplomats bickered through the Swiss, the FAA trumpeted a slight slowdown in skyjackings in the early fall of 1969. The agency credited the improvement to an advertising campaign that reminded travelers that air piracy was punishable by death. The head of the FAA’s Miami office waxed optimistic when asked about the decelerating pace of skyjackings, which had dropped to just two or three per month. “It’s possible,” he said, “that the fad
has just died out.”

A
FTER SIXTEEN MONTHS
of charging up booby-trapped hills in South Vietnam, where he earned a Purple Heart, Lance Corporal Raffaele Minichiello returned home a bitter man. A native of Melito Irpino, Italy, who had immigrated to Seattle as a teenager and enlisted in the Marines at the age of seventeen, Minichiello had come to despise his commanders for their casual racism. “The leaders of my platoon just think of me as cannon fodder,” he would later recall in his thick Neapolitan accent. “I really get mad. Always, they send me first up the
road with the minesweeper so they can walk safe and not get blown up.
‘Send the wop,’ they say.”

Upon arriving at California’s Camp Pendleton in April 1969, Minichiello decided that he no longer trusted the Marines with his money. He demanded the $800 that he had asked to be set aside from his military salary while he was in Vietnam. But his unit’s paymaster said that Minichiello had miscalculated—he had managed to save only $600, not $800. Minichiello’s anguished pleas to the contrary fell on deaf ears. Despite the relative pettiness of the disputed sum, the nineteen-year-old Marine considered himself the victim of a great betrayal.

One night in May 1969, Minichiello decided to exact his own form of justice. He guzzled eight cans of beer and broke into the Camp Pendleton post exchange, where he took precisely $200 worth of radios and wristwatches. When he was court-martialed for the burglary three months later, Minichiello became enraged: had he not simply taken back the $200 that the Marines stole from him?

Rather than face a possible six-month prison term, Minichiello opted for a radical solution to his problem. He took a bus to Los Angeles International Airport and bought a $15.50 ticket for a TWA flight to San Francisco. His carry-on bag contained a disassembled M1 rifle and
250 rounds of ammunition.

Minichiello made his move after downing two quick
shots of Canadian Club. He put together the gun in the lavatory, then pointed it at a stewardess and asked to be taken to New York. The stewardess had never heard of such a thing—every skyjacker wanted to go to Havana. But Minichiello kept insisting—New York, New York, he wanted to go to New York.

They stopped in Denver first, where Minichiello released all the passengers. As the Boeing 707 refueled for the next leg of its trip, he informed the captive crew that New York was not his ultimate destination: he was actually trying to get back to his native Italy, a country that would understand why he considered the Marines’ $200 slight such a grave affront to his honor.

Confusion reigned at John F. Kennedy International Airport when
the flight arrived. The FBI was desperate to stop Minichiello; letting a skyjacker go anywhere other than Havana would set a terrible precedent. The agents were aghast to learn that TWA had every intention of cooperating with Minichiello, in accordance with the airline’s official hijacking policy; as long as no blood was spilled and the jet was returned undamaged, TWA was happy to fly the Marine wherever he wished to go.

The FBI had other plans. Agents in bulletproof vests surrounded the jet and crept forward, hoping either to frighten Minichiello into surrendering or to mount a decisive assault. They were yards away from the plane when they heard a single gunshot—Minichiello had fired a round from his M1 into the roof of the fuselage. The startled agents backed off and allowed the plane to depart on its long journey to Rome, via Bangor, Maine,
and Shannon, Ireland.

Minichiello avoided capture at Rome’s airport by taking a carabiniere officer hostage and stealing the policeman’s car. He found brief sanctuary in a rural church, where police tracked him down on the morning of November 2—his twentieth birthday. “
Paisà,
perchè m arresti
?” he asked as he was hustled off to Rome’s Queen of Heaven prison—“Countryman,
why are you arresting me?”

The Italian public shared Minichiello’s belief that he didn’t deserve punishment. He was lauded as a folk hero, a man courageous enough to stand up to America, a country increasingly despised in Western Europe for its muscular foreign policy. Girls swooned over the wiry, brooding Marine, whom they considered akin to a matinee idol. “He’s even better than Giuliano Gemma,” one seventeen-year-old admirer squealed to an Italian reporter, referring to a handsome star of spaghetti Westerns. Minichiello “played a real-life role while Gemma does only films. I would
like to marry him!” Movie producer Carlo Ponti, the man behind such hits as
Doctor Zhivago
and
Blow-Up
, vowed to make a hagiographic film about Minichiello’s life titled
Paisà, perchè m arresti
?

Bowing to public pressure, the Italian government refused to extradite Minichiello to the United States, deciding instead to try him in
Rome—though only for relatively minor offenses such as weapons possession, since air piracy was not technically a crime in Italy. Minichiello’s defense lawyer gave a virtuoso performance at the eventual trial, comparing his client to one of literature’s most beloved figures: “I am sure that Italian judges will understand and forgive an act born from a civilization of aircraft and war violence. A civilization which overwhelmed this uncultured peasant, this Don Quixote without Dulcinea, without Sancho Panza, who instead of mounting his Rocinante
flew across the skies.”

Given Minichiello’s stratospheric popularity, the trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion: he was convicted of a single charge and ended up serving just eighteen months in jail. After his release, he signed a contract to star in
a spaghetti Western.
^e

The Nixon administration was dismayed by Minichiello’s escape from American justice. Italy was supposed to be a close ally, a founding member of NATO that had sent millions of its sons and daughters to the United States over the decades. Yet now it was not only providing sanctuary to a fugitive hijacker; it was lionizing him for his courage and hailing him as a sex symbol. Once American viewers saw footage of Minichiello and his moon-eyed teenage fans, how long would it take for others to try and follow his lead?

The answer was roughly a week. In Norwood, Ohio, a troubled fourteen-year-old boy named David Booth watched Minichiello’s saga unfold on the evening news. On November 10, he ditched school and caught a bus to Greater Cincinnati Airport, where he pulled a knife on an eighteen-year-old ballerina as she bade farewell to her grandmother. “You’re going with me, you’re going to Sweden,” Booth told his hostage as he prodded her through the terminal and onto a Delta DC-9. Once on board, he told the pilots to head for Stockholm, evidently unaware that a DC-9 cannot
cross the Atlantic.

Booth was persuaded to surrender as the jet idled on the Cincinnati tarmac. But though that incident ended peacefully, it signified that the skyjacking epidemic had entered an erratic new phase: even the most tranquil and law-abiding countries were being sucked into the madness. The United Nations, declaring itself “deeply concerned over acts of unlawful interference with international civil aviation,” soon passed a resolution calling for all of its members to criminalize air piracy and punish hijackers as harshly as possible. The final vote was 77–2, with only Cuba and Sudan
voicing opposition.

In the eighteen days between the UN resolution’s passage and the dawn of the next decade, another six planes were hijacked
around the world.

Rafaelle Minichiello speaks to the adoring press in Rome.
AP PHOTO