More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 1 - April 29, 2020
But this violent episode was so little noticed that Congress didn’t even bother to make hijacking a crime when it passed the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which empowered the federal government to regulate the airline industry. Seizing control of an American aircraft was thus perfectly legal, at least according to the letter of the law.
As the plane began its descent to El Paso in the wee hours of August 3, 1961, Gilman gently asked Leon Bearden why he wished to go to Cuba with his son—was he a card-carrying Communist, or a great admirer of Castro’s fortitude? “I’m just fed up,” replied the convicted bank robber and unemployed father of four. “I don’t want to be an American anymore.”
In the midst of all this aggressive posturing, a senator asked the FAA’s Halaby if he and President Kennedy had discussed the possibility of requiring airlines to screen passengers—perhaps by searching carry-on bags, a tactic that likely would have prevented the Beardens from boarding Flight 54. But Halaby scoffed at the idea as wholly impractical: “Can you imagine the line that would form from the ticket counter in Miami if everyone had to submit to police inspections?”
It was no coincidence that both hijackings took place in Hawaii: as would soon become evident, each skyjacking tended to influence the next, in terms of both location and modus operandi.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cini initially had no designs on attempting this himself, for he was deathly afraid of heights. But the more he contemplated the risky caper, the more he became convinced that it represented his one shot at improving his lackluster life. “I wanted recognition,” he would later explain. “I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m Paul Cini and I’m here and I exist and I want to be noticed.’ ”
The fame that Cini had so desperately craved would instead go to a man who called himself Dan Cooper. Just eleven days after Cini’s misadventure, Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon. Shortly after takeoff, he informed a stewardess that he had a bomb in his briefcase. He requested $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, all of which he received after the plane landed in Seattle. After releasing the hostages, Cooper asked to be flown to Mexico City, with an agreed-upon refueling stop in Reno, Nevada.
Hubbard’s oddest notion, though, was that skyjackings could be prevented in the womb. He believed that all skyjackers suffered from physiological deformities of the inner ear, which explained their poor equilibrium. Hubbard suspected that these deformities were caused by prenatal diets that lacked sufficient manganese and zinc.
Holder was getting excited about the new life that lay ahead. He thought the Algerians sounded thrilled about his impending arrival. He was sure that such hospitable folks would have no problem granting his final, most important request. “And listen, I want you to get Eldridge Cleaver to come meet me at the airport.” “Again, please?” “Eldridge Cleaver. I want Eldridge Cleaver.”
The camera crew next moved into an adjoining room, where the Algerian police showed off the bag of money and the black Samsonite briefcase, which was popped open to reveal its contents: an alarm clock, a dog-eared copy of Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, and an empty disposable-razors box. Holder and Kerkow had pulled off the longest-distance skyjacking in American history without a single real weapon.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
Influenced by his travels in Pyongyang and Hanoi, Cleaver had developed a geeky fascination with the minutiae of Marxist-Leninist theory, filling up audiocassettes with his rambling thoughts about the First International and Trotskyite revisionism. The discussions he led were thus rife with terms like dialectical materialism and bourgeois nationalism, to the befuddlement of Holder and Kerkow. The couple had never imagined that the revolution could be so deathly dull.
It soon emerged that Sibley was a former American Airlines pilot who had flown secret CIA-backed supply missions over Laos during the mid-1960s. Wracked by guilt over his role in the war, he had steadily unraveled upon returning from Southeast Asia, losing a series of jobs as well as his statuesque German wife. He had hoped to unburden his conscience by donating United’s cash and gold to a North Vietnamese orphanage.
On September 16 O’Neal and his wife, Charlotte, left for Cairo without Cleaver’s knowledge; they intended to resettle in Tanzania, another nation known for its hospitality to left-wing militants. O’Neal left behind a letter in which he named his successor as head of the International Section: Willie Roger Holder.
Southern scraped together every last nickel it could—$2 million in all. The airline had no choice but to gamble that the hijackers would be so overwhelmed by the sheer heft of the ransom—approximately 150 pounds—that they wouldn’t bother to count it.
One of Florida’s senators termed the assault a “stupid blunder” that had nearly caused the deaths of more than two dozen innocents. The FBI had erred not only by failing to cripple the plane, the critics charged, but also by firing on the DC-9 as it was connected to a fuel truck; a lethal conflagration would have ensued if one of the hijackers’ grenades had exploded near a pool of spilled gasoline.
The far more troubling issue was the skyjacking epidemic’s new twist: the potential use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction. In the face of such lunacy, the airlines could no longer claim that the crisis deserved anything less than the most extreme response possible.
On December 5 the Nixon administration declared an emergency FAA rule: starting five days after the new year, airlines would be required to screen every single passenger with metal detectors, as well as inspect the contents of all carry-on bags. Furthermore, all of the nation’s 531 major commercial airports would have to post a local police officer or sheriff’s deputy at each boarding gate, to deal with any passengers who were found to be in possession of weapons.
Castro had finally tired of receiving skyjackers from all over the Western Hemisphere; he had decided that the few thousand dollars he earned by returning each plane were outweighed by the risks of dealing with violent and deranged foreigners.
The once-celebrated International Section now consisted of seven American skyjackers who hadn’t even been Black Panthers before arriving in Algiers.
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
...more
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.
Without prompting, Holder also revealed that he was wanted by American authorities for hijacking a plane to Algeria.
“I would like to go back alone, solo, and turn myself in,” Holder told a reporter at the start of what would become a two-and-a-half-hour interview. “I want no armed guards. I just want the Carter administration to know what my objective is.… If they review my whole military record they will see what I did was patriotic.”
Cleaver had quickly wearied of life in exile. Suffering from writer’s block, he had switched creative gears and tried to establish himself in the world of fashion, designing a pair of men’s pants that featured an external pouch for the genitalia—a codpiece, more or less.
That November, confident that God would solve his legal problems, Cleaver flew back to New York, where he was arrested by the FBI. He was eventually bailed out not by his former Black Panther allies, who had denounced him as a traitor, but by an evangelical insurance tycoon. As he awaited trial, Cleaver made numerous appearances at revival meetings to testify that he and his wife, Kathleen, were now full-fledged “companions to the Lord.”*
“My only regret,” he said, “is that I did not smash that plane into the ground.”
Holder quote
Holder was found guilty of hijacking and kidnapping, but with extenuating circumstances. He was given a five-year suspended sentence, which meant that he wouldn’t spend a single day in prison.
On March 18, 1988, Holder pleaded guilty to two counts of interfering with a flight crew—a much less serious crime than either air piracy or kidnapping, the two top counts of his original indictment. He was sentenced to four years in prison, to be served at a medium-security facility in North Carolina.
In conversations with strangers and acquaintances, Holder spun colorful yarns about his adventures while on the lam. But few people believed that a disabled, unemployed ex-convict had ever walked the halls of Algeria’s presidential palace or quaffed champagne with Jean-Paul Sartre.
During one of these two-man parties in June 1991, a stoned Holder mentioned something startling: he wanted to hijack another plane and donate the ransom to the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s political party. Holder could not have picked a worse confidant: Bullock had been a police informant for fifteen years.
