By 11 that Sunday morning, Vienna was still only just waking up. There wasn’t much traffic on the street. Although the Christkindlmarkt was open.
So were the cafes along the Ring where you could sit inside, out of the cold and drink hot coffee while you read a newspaper that you took off the large rack of newspapers that you always find in good Viennese cafes along the Ring.
It was December 21, 1975.
Christmas was only four days away.
There were holiday lights strung along the streets and nativity scenes in department store windows. There were baubled Christmas trees in hotel lobbies and cardboard signs in shops that spelled out “Gut Yule” in large cutout letters.
On the first floor of the building at 10 Karl Leuger Ring which OPEC shared with the Canadian Embassy and the Austrian headquarters for Texaco, in the large windowless conference room where a glass wall looked out to the hallway, 11 oil ministers, their deputies, their secretaries and the OPEC general staff began their meeting.
The agenda contained a discussion of price differentials and quotas and the establishment of the OPEC Special Fund which would provide interest-free loans to developing nations.
Before the morning was out the agenda was revised to include murder.
*****
Yamani was due to make a speech in Britain on Monday. He’d planned to stay at the OPEC meeting only long enough to see it get under way. He intended to be back at his hotel by mid-morning, to pack, to make some calls and to catch an early afternoon plane.
But the debate that morning was especially good. Two of the ministers were really going at each other. Yamani looked at his watch and saw that it was just about 11:40. He thought to himself that he really ought to leave. Except, he decided, this was too good to miss. So stayed a little while longer.
Had he left five minutes earlier he would have been in the UK for his speech the next day.
Had he left when he was supposed to, taking the stairs instead of the lift the way he always did, he might have been murdered then and there.
Because at precisely 11:40, five men and one woman casually walked into the building through the main door, wearing long coats and hats and carrying sports bags.
They passed some journalists in the small lobby who were waiting there with a pair of plain clothes Viennese policemen and headed briskly up the stairs.
More curious than suspicious, one of the policemen politely asked where they were going.
None of the six took the time to answer.
Now they ran up the stairs, and when they got to the first floor all hell broke loose.
Led by a man with a moustache and goatee, wearing a brown leather jacket, a light grey roll-necked sweater, khaki trousers, short brown boots and a brown beret, the gang yanked guns out from under their coats and started firing in all directions.
One of the men, a German, went straight for the switchboard, took his gun and blew out the telephone lines.
A policeman grabbed for the automatic pistol held by the man with the beret.
The girl, dressed in a grey wool cap pulled down to her eyes, raced over to the cop, shouted at him, then put her gun up to his throat and pulled the trigger.
Four of the gang rushed down the hallway towards the conference room.
The shooting continued.
An Iraqi bodyguard stepped out of an office and lunged at the girl.
She opened fire.
A young Libyan got in the way.
He too was killed.
To cover their rear, one of the terrorists rolled a hand grenade down the stairwell, just in case anyone had any ideas of following them.
By then, the man with the beret and most of the others had burst into the conference room.
There was screaming and there was panic as the gang started shooting at the ceiling, running off rounds from their guns and pistols.
Lights, were shot out and the stench of gunpowder quickly filled the darkened room.
Yamani threw himself under the conference table. “My first thought was that the attackers must be Europeans protesting against the rise in the price of oil. I thought they came to avenge themselves on us.”
The man with the beret yelled that he wanted everyone to lie down on the floor.
The others kept shooting at the ceiling.
The man with the beret continued yelling.
And the gang never stopped until the man with the beret was firmly in control.
Trapped, with no possible escape, men and women sprawled out along the floor, hovered in comers and cowered under tables. Chairs were overturned. Tables were shoved aside. Papers flew about. Some of the people in the room prayed out loud. Some of the people in the room wept openly. One secretary was crying so uncontrollably that the man in the beret just let her leave. But everything happened so quickly that most of the people in the room were simply stunned into a trembling and shocked silence.
“When the shooting stopped,” Yamani says, speaking this frankly and openly, on the record, for the very first time about that awful day, “there was dead silence for a short time. Then I heard someone ask in English, ‘Have you found Yamani?’ My heart sank.”
One of the terrorists crawled along the floor with a flashlight, shining it into everyone’s face. He looked at everyone hiding under the table, and when his eyes met Yamani’s he gave an ironic salute.
“He told the others he had found me. I suddenly realized that I was going to be murdered. That I was going to die.”
Almost as soon as they were in control, the terrorists placed dynamite charges in each corner of the room. They’d brought everything they needed in those sports bags. Within two minutes they had the room wired.
By the time the terrorists had neutralized the conference room, the Vienna police had been alerted. They arrived with sirens blaring. First they cordoned off the neighborhood. Then, all along the street and on nearby rooftops, anti-terrorist officers with bullet-proof vests and automatic weapons took up their positions.
The moment police commandos approached the front door, the terrorists guarding the entrance to the corridor rolled more grenades down the stairs and down the elevator shaft too.
In an exchange of gunfire, one of the terrorists was wounded.
When both sides were finally dug into positions they thought they could hold, the man with the beret demanded that their wounded colleague be taken to a hospital.
The police insisted that they be given any wounded hostages as well.
A deal was struck and the wounded terrorist was handed over, together with a Kuwaiti who had been shot in the shoulder.
Then the police retreated.
And a long wait began.
As soon as they could locate him, the Austrian Chancellor, Dr. Bruno Kreisky, was notified of the siege. He’d gone skiing for the weekend. Told that 11 OPEC ministers had been taken hostage and three men were already dead, Kreisky returned to Vienna for an emergency session with his cabinet.
Inside OPEC, the man with the beret allowed the Iraqi Embassy attaché to act as his go-between with the police.
And it was the man with the beret himself who told the Iraqi, “You will have heard of me already. I am the famous Carlos.”
OPEC headquarters had been seized by the most wanted man in Europe.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela on October 12, 1949, the pudgy faced, brown-eyed, brown-haired, 5’11” Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez was the son of a wealthy lawyer with long-standing and very active communist party affiliations. So dedicated a communist was Sanchez pere that he actually named his other two sons Vladimir and Lenin.
An introverted, fat and socially self-conscious child, Ilyich is believed to have done his basic training in terrorism in 1966 at Camp Montanzas, in the hills overlooking Havana, where Cuban and Soviet agents taught the art of subversion. A few years later he was shipped off to Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow for a six-month course designed to train militant students from the third world in the ways of Soviet-style communism. But before he graduated, the Russians expelled him for anti-Soviet activities of the extreme-left variety. Whether they decided he was uncontrollable or just used his deportation as a whitewash to send him into the cold, no one knows.
Returning to South America, he soon got into trouble with the Caracas police. Charged with inciting a student riot he was jailed for a couple of months.
From Venezuela he went to France, where he played a role in riots in Marseilles.
He next showed up in London, where his parents had taken up temporary residence. He worked for a time, teaching Spanish at a secretarial school in Mayfair. Assuming the guise of a rich young economist, he joined the Latin American social set, made the rounds of parties and settled on a nom de guerre - he called himself Carlos Martinez.
Somewhere along the line he hooked up with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This is the same group that claimed credit for the murder of the Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and the massacre at Tel Aviv airport that same year. Little is known about Carlos’ training with the PFLP, except that he was sent for his indoctrination either to a camp in Jordan or to one just outside Beirut. But where he trained is immaterial. It is what he learned there that matters.
He obviously completed his degree with honors because, over the next few years, the PFLP credited Carlos with at least six major operations in Europe. Among them were, the bombing of Le Drugstore in Paris where two people were killed and 34 were injured; the siege of the French Embassy in Holland; a bazooka attack on a DC-9 at Orly Airport in Paris’ and the near fatal shooting of Edward Sieff, head of Marks and Spencers, in London.
That one was a particularly daring act. Carlos forced his way into Sieff’s home in north London, found him on the toilet and shot him with a 9mm pistol before easily managing his own escape.
The name Carlos didn’t mean much to anyone at the time of the Sieff shooting. It was two years later, when police stumbled across the gun he used in a Bayswater flat and officers from the anti-terrorist squad at Scotland Yard also found what has now come to be called “the death list” - a handwritten selection of men Carlos planned to murder. Included were prominent British businessmen such as Lords Sainsbury and Goodman, playwright John Osborne, singer Vera Lynn, MP Tony Benn, disc jockey David Jacobs, concert violinist Yehudi Menuhin and, yet again, Edward Sieff.
Also on that list was Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani.
The Saudis were alerted and they dispatched a pair of Secret Service officers to Libya, demanding that Colonel Qaddafi arrest Carlos. But Qaddafi denied knowing anything about Carlos and the two Saudi agents returned home unsuccessful.
Then, in the spring of 1975, acting on a tip-off from inside the PFLP, French counter-intelligence officers raided an apartment at 9 rue Toullier in Paris’ 5th arrondissement, the student quarter. Carlos himself answered the door. In the ensuing gunfight, the PFLP informer and two detectives were killed by Carlos, who managed to escape.
In spite of further Carlos sightings in France and Spain, there is reason to believe he came back to London, where he hid for several months while planning his attack on OPEC.
From London he went to Baghdad, where it is known he had discussions with the PFLP.
Eventually he made his way to Switzerland, where he left a communiqué with collaborators and finalized his plans.
More than two and a half years after the OPEC siege, one of the terrorists revealed to the German magazine Der Spiegel that the six of them had arrived in Vienna on December 19. He said that, as they rode the near-empty tram car to the Karl Leuger Ring on that Sunday morning, they were so laden with pistols, machine guns and hand grenades, “we could hardly sit down.”
Describing Carlos as being terribly vain and chiding him for always taking showers, then powdering himself from head to foot, the terrorist claimed overall command for the operation was left to Wadi Haddad, a Palestinian terrorist now believed to be dead.
Until that point, there was speculation that Carlos might have once again been acting for Dr. George Habash, leader of the PFLP, who’d often gone on record as saying that, by breaking up OPEC, he could sabotage any moves by certain pro-western members - meaning Saudi Arabia and Iran - who might be inclined to try to force through a peace settlement with the Israelis at the expense of the Palestinians.
Rumors of another possible connection suggested the less well-known Northern Front of Rejection. That was a group supported largely by Syria, Iraq and Libya, who were dead set against allowing the “capitulation” of Saudi Arabia, Iran and even Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in a peace settlement.
In this case, however, at least according to Der Spiegel’s source, “the idea for the attack came from an Arab president.”
Although the terrorist did not say who that was, the betting man’s favorite has always been Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi.
In this case, Haddad was merely in charge.
Actually, Haddad’s original idea was to kidnap the Pope. That was ruled out when he concluded that no Arab nation would ever allow the Pope’s abductors to run around free. His second choice was Mahdi al-Tajir. Some time in early 1975, Haddad drew up a list of wealthy international businessmen and put Tajir’s name at the top, believing the Bahraini could be held for as much as $25 million. It was Carlos who vetoed that, when he found out that Tajir - then said to be worth $13 billion - was constantly surrounded by armed bodyguards.
Apparently, when the unnamed “Arab president” suggested kidnapping all of OPEC and brought up the possibility of murdering Yamani, Haddad and Carlos finally had a mission they could agree on.
Now in Vienna, playing for huge stakes regardless of who was financing the operation, Carlos and the others fortified their positions inside the conference room.
They divided the hostages into four groups.
The ones Carlos labeled “friendly” - Algerians, Iraqis and Libyans - were grouped almost directly in front of the door, along the glass wall that bordered the library.
He put the “neutrals” - Nigerians, Kuwaitis, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans and Gabonese - in the middle of the room, opposite them.
OPEC employees were placed just inside the door, to the right, in the front of the room.
Then came his “enemies” - Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE and Qatar – placed farthest from the door, crammed into the rear corner where the glass wall met the back wall.
Everyone was tied and gagged.
The “enemies” were also corralled in by dynamite charges, with one of the terrorists facing them sadistically, holding two wires barely apart.”
Never one to miss an opportunity for publicity, Carlos sent a message to the police announcing that he and his gang were part of the “Arm of the Arab Revolution.”
Until that moment no one had ever heard of the group.
The police announced the name of the organization to the press.
The press quickly released it to the world.
Just as quickly, the PLO disowned the terrorists.
According to them, “Undoubtedly, American imperialism and Zionism are behind this which is aimed at undermining OPEC.”
The PFLP did not comment.
In stating his demands to the Austrians, speaking through an Iraqi middleman, Carlos said he wanted a plane made ready to take him and his hostages anywhere in the world. He explained that he had undergone this operation to confront a high-level plot aimed at legalizing the Zionist presence in Palestine. He said he intended “to confront the conspiracy, to strike at its support and to apply revolutionary sanctions to all personalities and parties involved.”
The text in his raison d’etre was contained in a seven page letter, which he turned over to the authorities at just about the same time that an anonymous telephone call came into the press headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva saying that a letter, in English, could be found in the men’s lavatory there.
It was the communiqué he’d left in Geneva before coming to Vienna.
As soon as it was found, his message went out over the press wires as part of this unfolding drama.
The hidden letter was in fact a clever little insurance policy on Carlos’ part, showing just how sophisticated his thought process was in matters like these. No one knows who made that phone call alerting the press to its existence. It could have come from any of several sources, as the Carlos gang had loose connections with other international terrorist organizations such as the Japanese Red Army, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group, the Turkish Popular Liberation Front, the Basque separatists and various Palestinian liberation factions. The point is, that some Swiss-based associate of Carlos would have signaled the location of the letter whether or not Carlos had succeeded in taking hostages and staying alive.
In other words, Carlos had assured himself of being heard even if he failed.
The text of his message was a typically laborious emotional accounting of a terrorist group’s motives. It labeled Iran as “an active imperialist tool”, and called Egypt’s Sadat, “one of the leading traitors.” There was, however, praise for Iraq, Syria and the Palestinians as “progressives” who demanded sovereignty when it came to handling oil reserves, “for the benefit of the Arab people and other peoples of the third world.”
Carlos insisted that his letter be read out over Austrian radio. Then he said, “A bus with curtained windows must be made available to bring us to Vienna airport at 7 o’clock tomorrow morning. There, a fully tanked DC-9 with a crew of three must be made ready to take us and our hostages to the place we decide.”
In addition, he asked for two dozen meters of rope, five pairs of scissors, several rolls of adhesive tape, 100 sandwiches and as much fruit as the police could get.
Speaking mainly in English, with smatterings of Arabic and lots of Spanish thrown in for good measure - the Venezuelan oil minister did the translating - Carlos threatened that unless his demands were met he would shoot Yamani’s deputy and, after that, Amouzegar’s. deputy. If the demands were still not met, he would continue by killing Amouzegar, then Yamani. If he still didn’t get his way, he’d blow up the OPEC building and kill everyone else.
The Austrian government retreated to consider their next move.
From the time the gang came into the building until about 2 o’clock, Yamani wondered who they were and what they wanted. He personally found it difficult to believe that they were Palestinian commandos because their leader was not an Arab.
The girl was German and they called her Nada. She was later identified as 25-year-old Gabriele Krocher-Tiederman, a former sociology student who earned her terrorist reputation with the German 2nd of June Movement. The second-in-command said his name was Khalid and that he was Lebanese. There was one Palestinian who called himself Yusef. The one who was wounded was a German. While Yamani says the last one had a slight accent, as if he came from North Yemen.
According to investigative reporters Christopher Dodson and Ronald Payne, who went to enormous lengths to study Carlos and wrote the definitive book about him, some of the Arabs in the conference thought, at first, that they were being attacked by an Israeli hit squad.
When someone told him that, Carlos supposedly replied, “Can I help it if I have a Jewish-looking face?”
Yamani, understandably frightened, spent most of that day trying to calm himself by repeating passages from the Koran.
“At one point,” he says, “two of the terrorists left the room and were replaced by two others. The girl, who was in her twenties, came into the room and said to her boss with a slight smile, ‘I killed two.’ He replied, ‘I killed one myself.’ Then she asked, ‘Where’s Yamani?’ And he pointed to me.”
When he was told this was Carlos, Yamani goes on, “I was quite shocked. I knew about the death list. I had also been informed that when the French police raided the flat in Paris a few months before, they came across papers and documents that included a well-organized plan to assassinate me. Carlos and his gang knew all the details of my movements and my way of life. They even had lists of places I like to visit in various towns.”
Somewhere around 4 o’clock, Carlos took Yamani into a nearby room to speak with him alone. Carlos sat behind a desk. Yamani took a chair facing him. It was dark in the room.
Carlos said in English, “You will be killed.” But he wanted Yamani to know that what they were doing was not directed personally against him. “We respect you. But you will be killed because what we are doing is directed against your country.”
Yamani immediately felt that Carlos might be bargaining for something. “After all, it’s not normal to say to someone, we respect you and we like you but we’re going to kill you. So I said to him, ‘Now tell me what you want.’ I said, ‘Tell me what you’re driving at.’”
Carlos answered, “Why do I have to drive at anything? I have my gun and I could kill you right now. What could I want from you? You are under my mercy.”
Yamani agreed that Carlos’ power over his life was obvious. But he told Carlos that what he was saying was not logical.
“It was odd, but by that time I had calmed down considerably. I wasn’t worried at that point as I had been because I could see that he wasn’t crazy. That may sound like a strange thing to say because yes, he was very coldblooded. And yes, he was in complete control of everything. But he wasn’t crazy. I didn’t get the impression he would do something totally irrational. I could tell that he wasn’t going to kill me then and there.”
Perhaps not then and there, however Carlos did outline his plan to Yamani which ultimately included murdering him.
He said, “Unless the Austrians agree to broadcast my demands and get me a plane, I will have to start the killings.”
He even fixed 6 p.m. for the time of Yamani’s assassination.
He said, “I hope you will not feel bitterness towards me. I would expect a man of your intelligence to understand our noble aims and intentions.”
Yamani wanted to know, “How could you possibly expect me not to be bitter? You are trying to pressure me into something.”
Carlos laughed. “Why should I put pressure on you? I am pressuring the Austrian government to try to get out of this place.”
If the Austrians came across with the plane, Carlos said, they would fly to Libya where the non-Arab ministers would be released, with the exception of Amouzegar. The Algerian and Libyan ministers would also be set free in Tripoli. Then, they would go to Baghdad to release the Iraqi and the Kuwaiti. Their final stop would be Aden.
“Once we arrive in Aden,” Carlos promised, “we will kill you and Amouzegar.”
That said, Carlos escorted Yamani back into the conference room to await the Austrians’ decision.
If they said no, Yamani would be dead in an hour.
He took a pen and some paper and began writing a last note to Tammam, to his mother and to his children. “I cannot deny that waiting for death is a frightful and painful thing. But the human soul is strange. When the hour was 5 p.m. and the Austrian government had not yet broadcast the communiqué, Carlos with a smile on his face came to remind me what would happen. My feelings had changed and there was less terror in my heart. I began to think, not of myself but of my family, my children, my relatives and those for whom I had responsibility. I wrote a farewell letter to them, explaining what I wanted done.”
Late that afternoon, Carlos untied everybody and got them off the floor. He let everybody sit on chairs. He said people could talk if they wanted to, and they could even move around a bit - everybody except the “enemies.” He warned them that if any of them moved off their chairs, they would be shot.
At precisely 5:20, Vienna radio began to broadcast Carlos’ statement, while the government sent word to Carlos that they’d placed an aircraft at his disposal.
For Yamani it was a temporary stay of execution.
Under the circumstances, the Austrians decided that capitulation was their only course of action. They explained their behavior in a terse press release. “The terrorists have explosives, hand grenades and many guns in there. They have shown they are prepared to use them. We think that by letting them leave with their hostages the danger will be reduced. It is a gamble.”
Even then, Kreisky only gave in to Carlos on two conditions. First, he said, all Austrians must be released. Second, any foreign hostages who were to accompany the terrorists on the getaway plane must declare in writing that they were doing so voluntarily.
The terrorists agreed, adding their own stipulation that the gang member who’d been wounded and taken to the hospital must be released to accompany them on the plane.
At this point, the Shah announced that if Carlos’ plane were to fly over Iranian air space, he’d order his air force to destroy it.
That didn’t help much to comfort any of the hostages, although knowing they’d live at least until they landed in North Africa some time the following morning was better than nothing.
Tension in the conference room subsided a bit.
Then food arrived.
The police did the best they could to collect enough to feed everyone. But they sent in a stack of ham sandwiches. And, of course, Moslems don’t eat ham.
More food was demanded.
There was supposed to have been an OPEC reception at the Hilton that evening and 500 guests were expected. Someone inside the room remembered the Hilton banquet and suggested the police go over there for food. They did and transported most of the banquet for 500 back to the 70 hostages and their five captors.
That night, in spite of the terrorists’ radios which kept crackling and blaring, a few people managed to get some sleep.
Not Yamani. His chair had been pulled away from the wall, which meant there was nothing he could rest his head on. There was no way he could fall asleep.
It was probably just as well. The terrorist holding the two wires apart which would set off the dynamite started to doze. Yamani watched as the boy’s eyes closed and the two wires came closer.
Now Yamani called for Carlos. “This one is about to kill us all.”
Carlos shouted at the boy and told him to get away from the charges. He then taped the ends of the wires to keep them apart and assured Yamani that the problem was solved.
Still, Yamani couldn’t sleep.
By morning the atmosphere was different again. Exhaustion had dulled everyone’s nerves. Many people seemed resigned to their fate.
An Austrian post office bus arrived at dawn and parked at the rear of the building.
Curtains across all the windows were drawn shut.
At 7 a.m. Carlos started to usher his hostages, group by group, downstairs and through the back door. It took him nearly half an hour to load the bus. And then there wasn’t enough room for everyone. So Carlos released all the OPEC staff members and some of the various delegation members as well.
Now, with just over 40 hostages, Carlos was escorted to the airport by the ambulance bearing the wounded terrorist and two police cars.
Arriving at the airport, Carlos shook hands with Austrian officials. He smiled and waved to the television cameras which carried the story live.
Once the Austrian Airlines DC-9 was airborne, around 9:15 a.m., Carlos announced that they’d been invited to stop first in Algiers and so, instead of heading directly to Tripoli, that’s where they were going.
After a while Carlos came down the aisle and sat next to Yamani.
He explained, “You see, Algeria is a revolutionary country and I could not refuse. Despite the fact that I do not cooperate with the Algerians, they cannot obstruct my plans.”
Yamani asked how long they would stay in Algiers.
Carlos told him, “Two hours. I will release some of the hostages there, the ones I originally planned to release in Tripoli and then we will go on to Libya.”
“It was odd,” Yamani recalls, “but as we sat together and talked, it was almost as if we had become friends. He was telling me so much, knowing that I would die. For instance, he said he thought the Syrians were deviationists and dangerous. He said that he fought in the 1970 civil war between Jordan’s King Hussein and the Palestinian commandos but that he’d grown disenchanted with the Arabs. He said he could not understand how the Jordanians could love their king. He seemed very bitter about that. He told me that he’d known King Faisal’s grandson. You know, I still believe what he told me because it’s easy to give your secrets away to someone when you know he won’t reveal them.”
Carlos then told Yamani what to expect when they got to Libya.
He said, “When we arrive in Tripoli the Prime Minister will be at the airport to greet us. There will also be a Boeing 707 waiting for us which can take us to Baghdad non-stop. In Baghdad we will set free some of the ministers. Our next stop will be Kuwait and there we will set free the rest of the hostages. Everyone except Amouzegar and you. Then we will go to Aden.”
He repeated that once they got to Aden he would kill Yamani and Amouzegar.
From there, he said, he planned to go to an African country.
Possibly heady with his success so far - after all, he was still alive, he had the OPEC ministers as his hostages and he was obviously getting the press attention he sought - Carlos began to act like a star. He even gave one of the hostages an autograph - “On flight Vienna to Algiers Carlos 22/XII/75.”
He also handed a letter to the Venezuelan oil minister which he asked the man to post. It was addressed to Senora Ramirez Sanchez, his mother.
But three hours later, when the DC-9 landed at Dar al Beida airport in Algiers, Carlos’ jovial mood had changed.
Yamani says, “He got nervous. He made everyone pull down their window shades and warned that if anyone opened theirs while we were on the ground they would be shot.”
Everyone sat quietly and waited while Carlos positioned the other terrorists throughout the cabin with their guns aimed at the hostages should the police, or the army, try to storm the plane.
The rear door was opened and Carlos, armed with a machine gun, took up his post there.
Suddenly, Carlos screamed, “Get out.”
Everyone on the plane froze with fear.
“Get out,” he yelled again as the Algerian Foreign Minister approached the plane and started to climb the rear gangway.
The man backed away.
For the next 15-20 minutes Carlos negotiated with Belaid Abdesselam. The Algerian oil minister was finally allowed to leave the plane to carry Carlos’ message to the authorities.
He returned several minutes later to escort Carlos personally into the airport.
When Carlos left the plane the rear door was shut and another round of waiting began.
Without Carlos, the guards on the plane were more nervous, more jittery than before.
Yamani says he couldn’t stop thinking that one of them might do something stupid, might get over-excited and react to someone or something, igniting the whole situation. “We sat there for a very long time in silent horror.”
Carlos spent most of the afternoon talking to the Algerians who, it was later learned, tried to convince him to release everyone. They agreed to give in to all his demands if he let everyone go. But Carlos refused. Abdesselam then tried to get Carlos to stipulate that he would not harm either Yamani or Amouzegar. Again Carlos refused, although he did promise “to do my best not to harm them.”
Next, the Algerians suggested that Carlos drop all his hostages in Baghdad, then return to Algiers where, they promised, to grant him asylum. This was an idea that appealed to him. So he said yes, all right, but added, “unless I receive orders while in Baghdad to continue on to Aden.”
Returning to the plane with the Algerian Foreign Minister, Carlos released all his non-Arab hostages, except Amouzegar.
He also set Abdesselam free.
Then, he left his nervous colleagues in charge again, while he went back to talk to the Algerians.
The hostages sat all day on the tarmac.
Inside the DC-9, there was very little air and no food. Yamani and the others, all of them uncomfortable in the narrow cramped seats, silently prayed that their captors would keep their cool until Carlos came back.
He returned at around 5 p.m., accompanied by Abdesselam.
Despite Carlos’ protest, the Algerian oil minister insisted on staying with his Arab colleagues.
The rear door was shut and the pilot was given orders to take off for Tripoli.
There were now 20 hostages on board, including six ministers.
Once they took off, Carlos allowed them to raise the window shades.
They’d taken food on board, so everyone was fed.
While Yamani ate, Carlos sat down next to him and hinted that the Algerians had tried to save him and Amouzegar.
It was a two-hour flight to Libya.
During the trip Carlos wrote another letter and gave it to one of Yamani’s aides. It was addressed to an old classmate of Carlos’ from his days as a student in London. The classmate was working in Yamani’s ministry. It was that letter which was later used to help positively identify Carlos through handwriting and fingerprinting.
The terrorists were considerably more relaxed now than they had been since the whole thing started on Sunday morning.
Carlos seemed so sure of himself that when the plane landed in Tripoli no weapons were aimed at the hostages. He even allowed them to keep the shades up.
But when Carlos was informed that Major Jalloud was not yet at the airport, he ordered the plane door kept shut.
Outside it was raining and cool.
Inside it was cramped and stuffy and the air smelled stale.
They waited in the closed plane for another hour and a half.
When Jalloud finally arrived, the Libyan oil minister left the plane with Khalid, who was clearly second-in-command of the gang.
For the next hour, while Carlos waited for them to return, the plane door remained open and everyone was free to move about inside, or go to the lavatory without asking permission.
Yamani asked Carlos, “Why didn’t you go to negotiate?”
Carlos responded, “Because of the Libyans’ mentality. They insisted that the negotiations be conducted by an Arab. In any case, it is all easy to arrange and without complication.”
Khalid returned with the Libyan oil minister and Major Jalloud who walked up and down the aisle, talking to the hostages. But when Jalloud got to Yamani and Amouzegar he gave them a chilly welcome. He offered them his hand to shake but turned his head away.
Finally, Jalloud huddled in the front compartment with Carlos. He explained that Carlos and his hostages might have to stay at Tripoli airport for some time because the Boeing 737 they had planned to supply was at Tobruk airport.
But Carlos knew a 737 couldn’t take them nonstop to Baghdad, that it would have to refuel somewhere, maybe Damascus.
The discussion grew heated.
Carlos did not hide his feelings.
Jalloud did not even try to calm him down.
Carlos demanded the Libyans live up to their part of the deal.
Jalloud said he would try to charter a 707 from an international company or another Arab airline.
There was little else Carlos could do but wait.
“We sat there, with the rain storm outside, watching as Carlos grew more and more anxious. The others too. They all started to get very nervous. None of them had slept. They were exhausted. The girl burst into tears. Khalid got ill and started to vomit. Carlos sat next to me and tried to hide his worries by talking about himself. He told me about his childhood, his studies, his family, his love affairs.”
By midnight, when there was still no sign of a 707, Carlos unleashed his fury with the Libyans. “No one can cooperate with these people. They are not up to helping me.”
Now he announced that his plan was to take the DC-9 to Tobruk, to pick up the Boeing 737 there and then go on to Baghdad. Even though the 737 could only make it that far with a strong tailwind, Carlos said he was willing to chance it.
However, the Austrian pilot scotched that plan when he explained that he didn’t have charts for Tobruk and didn’t know the airport.
The Libyans offered to provide charts.
The pilot he said he couldn’t adapt them to his DC-9 system.
Carlos, feeling the squeeze, said in that case, they had no choice but to return to Algiers and find a 707 there.
Before leaving Tripoli, Carlos released ten more hostages, including Abdesselam and two members of the Saudi delegation.
As they were being led off the plane, one of the Saudis turned to Carlos and said, “For God’s sake, do not harm Zaki Yamani.”
Carlos replied, almost laughing, “I have, received instructions here in Libya from my bosses not to do any harm to him or the Iranian minister. And I can now promise you that they will be safe.”
But as Carlos said that, Yamani remembers, all he could see in the man’s eyes was mockery and sarcasm.
Still holding four ministers - Yamani, Amouzegar, Kuwait’s Kazimi and Iraq’s Karim - plus six others, Carlos told the pilot they’d return to Algeria.
The pilot plotted his course and the DC-9 left Tripoli.
About half way to Algiers, Carlos changed his mind. Ill-tempered and extremely uptight at what he considered to be a betrayal by the Libyans, he ordered the pilot to divert to Tunis. He said that’s where they would go because the Tunisians would help them, and anyway he didn’t necessarily trust the Algerians.
The pilot radioed down, requesting a new heading and asking permission to land.
The Tunisian authorities called back that permission was refused.
Enraged, Carlos ordered the pilot to land the plane at Tunis no matter what. He yelled, “They can’t stop us. Just land there.”
But the airport was suddenly blacked out. The runway lights were turned off. Touching down there was out of the question.
So the Austrian DC-9 went to Algiers.
Again Carlos demanded that the window shades be pulled down before they landed and, again, after they landed, Carlos left the others in charge while he negotiated with the Algerians.
This time he was gone for quite a long time.
The others could no longer hide their frayed nerves.
The plane was a tinderbox waiting to explode.
When Carlos finally climbed back on board, he was sporting a most disconcerting grin.
Yamani immediately felt he was hiding something unpleasant.
Carlos went straight to Yamani and Amouzegar and told them both, “I do not know what I should do. I am a democrat and you two do not know the meaning of democracy. I shall have a meeting now with my colleagues and consult them on what to do about your case. I shall inform you about the decision later.”
That meeting took place in the front section of the plane.
Yamani and Amouzegar could only watch.
When the discussion ended, Carlos came to Yamani and Amouzegar and lied to them, “We have finally decided to release you by midday. And with that decision your lives are completely out of danger.”
Yamani’s deputy wanted to know, “Why wait till midday?”
Carlos answered, “Because I want the excitement prolonged until noon.” He offered to shut off the cabin lights. “You will sleep peacefully knowing that your lives are no longer in danger.”
At this point Gabriele screamed nastily at Carlos, “Fuck you.”
Now, Yamani realized this would be his last night alive. “I was certain that they planned to execute us right there in the plane.”
One of the gang offered Yamani and Amouzegar some coffee.
Another brought them sweets.
A third gave them pillows to help them sleep.
The cabin lights were dimmed and the aircrew left the plane.
“The atmosphere was one of choking silence,” Yamani says. “It was the calm before the storm. I was going to die here. There was no doubt in my mind.”
A few minutes later, the Algerians called for Carlos, saying that they wanted to meet with him. He left and was gone for two hours.
Yamani sat in his seat waiting to be murdered.
To this day Yamani is still astonished that the Algerians discovered Carlos was lying about setting them free at noon. That, instead, he had marked 7 a.m. as the hour of their execution. He says they had somehow bugged the front cabin and had been able to listen in on the meeting Carlos had with the others. It was the chief of security who called Carlos off the plane and told him, “We know your plans. We have spoken to the President about them and he says, if you kill Yamani you will all die.”
Carlos didn’t believe it, so the chief of security rang President Boumedienne and put Carlos on the phone.
At one point Carlos is supposed to have told the Algerians, “If I release them, I won’t get the rest of my money.”
That he might then have struck a deal with Boumedienne is possible. Yamani doesn’t know. All he’s sure of is that Carlos returned to the plane nervous and angry. He told his gang what he planned to do, gave them instructions, then walked through the plane to wake up the few hostages who were sleeping.
He positioned himself directly in front of Yamani and Amouzegar. In a most vitriolic tone he said that he and his comrades had decided to kill Yamani and Amouzegar and that their decision was final. “But if you escape death this time, our hands in the future will stretch to wherever you might be. And faster than you might imagine, we will implement our decision.”
He spent a few minutes personally insulting Yamani and Amouzegar and the policies of their two governments. When he was finished, he announced to everyone on the plane that he and the other terrorists were going to leave the aircraft and that once they were gone, everyone was free.
And, just like that, Carlos and his gang walked off the plane.
Yamani and the others waited a few minutes, expecting someone to come for them. When no one did, they stood up and came down the gangway. The Algerian Foreign Minister met them and hurried them into an airport lounge.
At exactly 5:45 a.m. local time, the ordeal was over.
Almost.
The Algerian authorities brought all the hostages into a lounge. Carlos and his gang were in the next lounge. They could see each other through the glass that separated the two waiting areas.
Khalid, the Palestinian, said he wanted to speak to Yamani, so the guards brought him over.
He said, “I want you to know that you will be killed much sooner than you expect. Carlos will not let you live.”
As he spoke, Yamani watched his eyes. “They were dilated and shifted constantly. And his right hand kept moving across his chest. He was nervous, as if he was planning to do something.”
There was an awkward moment before the Algerian Foreign Minister also sensed that something was about to happen. Thinking very fast, he handed Khalid a glass of juice.
That distracted him just long enough for the Algerian security guards to surround him, reach under his coat and discover a pistol in a shoulder holster.
Later, when they questioned him, Khalid replied, “I wanted to carry out the death sentence against the criminals.”
Yamani believed what Khalid said that morning, and still believes it now.
He spent that day in Algiers. His wife Tammam, his son Hani and his daughter Maha were flown in from Switzerland to meet him there. Together they flew to Jordan, where King Khaled was, and then home to Jeddah, where an enormous crowd greeted him at the airport with a televised hero’s welcome.
From the time the kidnapping began until he arrived home four days later, Yamani says, he never slept a wink.
Later the king welcomed him home again, this time with the gift of a brand-new Rolls-Royce.
For obvious reasons it was a long time before Yamani returned to Vienna. “Austria is an open country. They don’t restrict people coming and going. There is some sort of understanding or gentleman’s agreement, if you will, that terrorists will not operate inside Austria. But twice there were terrorist attacks - that time with Carlos, and once, if I remember correctly, terrorists attacked a train bringing Jews from Russia. So that gentleman’s agreement wasn’t very valid. Vienna wasn’t that secure.”
He stops short of actually saying that the Austrian police let OPEC down. But, he insists, OPEC had previously asked for security. “There had been a minor incident in the same building. The Canadian Embassy was there and I think there had been a bomb scare or something. So the OPEC secretariat asked for security. But nothing was ever done.”
Too little, too late, the Austrians filed a formal request to the Algerians for Carlos’ extradition. The Algerians disregarded it and no other country ever followed suit.
Like many people, the Austrians assumed that Carlos had been arrested in Algiers. He wasn’t. All five terrorists were permitted to leave the airport and go wherever they liked.
Carlos decided to stay in Algiers for a while, and with his French girlfriend in tow, moved into room 505 at the Albert I Hotel.
In 1977, Gabriele Krocher-Tiederman, together with a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, was arrested by Swiss police after a shootout along the German border where two guards were wounded. Under questioning, she supposedly claimed that a senior member of Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath party had been the one to provide Carlos with the intelligence details he needed about OPEC headquarters.
Could it possibly be a coincidence that, of the 13-member Iraqi delegation to OPEC, only three showed up for the meeting that morning?
A Qaddafi-Iraq connection was certainly what Carlos led Yamani to believe. He told Yamani ahead of time what was going to happen in Tripoli and that was exactly what did happen. It is also now known that the guns Carlos used were brought into Austria by the German terrorist who was later wounded. He’d fetched them in Rome where they’d been sent from Libya in a diplomatic pouch.
Terrorist expert and author Ronny Payne is equally certain that Qaddafi’s hand shows in this. “I think there’s no doubt about that. I’m sure that Qaddafi paid for it and that there was a large bonus afterwards. I got that from an Israeli source.”
The supposed fee was $1 million upfront and a £1 million bonus once the job was done.
As for what happened to Carlos, he soon left Algeria for Libya, and from there went on to Aden where Wadi Haddad had a home.
There, Haddad demanded to know why he hadn’t followed orders and murdered Yamani and Amouzegar. His mission was deemed a failure and he was reportedly expelled from the PFLP.
Carlos was arrested in Yugoslavia in September 1976, detained for a short period of time, then permitted to leave for Aden, where he established the Organization of Armed Struggle. Some reports say he was then able to link his new group with the East German secret police, Stasi, and established a new base for himself in East Berlin. Over the next several years, he used his East German resources to plan attacks on various targets, including the offices of Radio Free Europe in Munich.
In February 1982, his wife Magdalena Kopp was arrested, along with a Swiss terrorist, Bruno Brequet, in Paris, in a car laden with explosives. When Carlos’ demands that they be set free were not met, he bombed the Paris-Toulouse TGV train, killing five and injuring 77; bombed the Paris offices of the Libyan newspaper Al-Watan al-Arabi, killing two and injuring 33; and bombed the Marseilles-Paris TGV train, killing three and injuring 12. He also claimed responsibility for the August 1983 bombing of the Maison de France cultural center in West Berlin, killing one and injuring 22.
Some years later, with the fall of East Germany and research into the Stasi’s files, it was revealed that through them, Carlos had a connection to the Soviet’s secret police, the KGB.
By then, Haddad was dead – it turns out that he too had KGB connections – opening the door for Carlos to offer his services again to the PFLP. But when his rocket attack on the French Superphenix nuclear power plant in Creys-Malville failed, international pressure on the East Germans forced Carlos to leave. He showed up first in Hungary, and when he was expelled from there, he wound up in Damascus. The Syrians expelled him in 1991, sending him first to Jordan and then, under Sudanese protection, to Khartoum.
Under pressure from the Americans and the French, the Sudanese government cooperated with French agents who, literally, kidnapped him and brought him to Paris to stand trial.
Found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for three murders on French soil, he appealed, lost, was tried again – this time for murder 11 people and injuring more than 100 on French soil - and lost that one too.
Nearly one year after the OPEC kidnapping, a set of classified reports was compiled by the Austrian police in cooperation with the Saudi intelligence service. Included was a transcript of a conversation between the German terrorist who’d been shot in Vienna and the Austrian authorities.
In it, the German talked about a discussion the terrorists held among themselves when they debated who would kill Yamani. He said nobody was reluctant to kill Amouzegar. They all agreed that any one of them could kill him. But the question was raised, who will kill Yamani? No one wanted to do it. It was left to Carlos. They all agreed that was the job of the leader.
In the years following the OPEC raid, various facts have come out to suggest that Carlos had been paid a handsome sum for the safe release of the Arab hostages and had kept it for his personal use. Reports vary, putting the amount between $20 million and $50 million, allegedly paid by the Saudis at the behest of the Iranians. But Carlos denied to his lawyers that he’d kept the money, maintaining that it was “diverted en route and lost.”
Before long, the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar El Youm claimed to have proof that the plot against OPEC had been masterminded and totally financed by Qaddafi, with the help of George Habash and the PFLP.
Habash, as it turns out, just happened to have been in Tripoli at the time of the hijacking.
Certain governments then received information confirming that Qaddafi was definitely the one who financed the operation.
When asked, does that sound true, Yamani waltzes around an answer with, “I don’t know how much anyone was paid.”
When told, but you must know by whom, he pauses for a moment, then half-nods, “Take your best guess.”
*****