A chaotic scene greeted Frenchman Michel Cojot and his twelve-year-old son Olivier as they entered the ground-floor check-in area of Ben-Gurion International Airport’s Terminal 1, an unsightly four-storey concrete and glass construction that had replaced the original whitewashed terminal built by the British in the 1930s. The flow of people reminded Cojot of an Oriental bazaar as it ‘tried to make a path among the baggage carts, the pillars, and the barriers under the watchful eyes of young women in khaki and young soldiers… the only persons there who were not bustling about’.
A spate of recent terrorist attacks against Israel–including the infamous massacre of twenty-six people, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, by three pro-Palestinian members of the militant communist Japanese Red Army at Ben-Gurion four years earlier–had left the country with the tightest airport security in the world. Anyone who could not convince the officials that he was harmless would have his alarm clock ‘dismantled, the heels of his shoes probed, his camera opened, his can of shaving cream tested’. Despite the delay, most were happy to cooperate because they ‘approved of the reasons for the controls’.
In truth the stringent checks were the final straw for young Olivier Cojot. His parents had recently separated and he had jumped at the chance to join his management-consultant father on a week-long business trip to Israel, leaving his mother and two younger siblings in France. He had hoped to bond with his father and learn more about his Jewish heritage. But apart from a ‘pretty interesting’ visit to a factory run by Negev Phosphates, the mining firm his father was advising, he had spent much of his time alone and sweltering in a Beersheba hotel and could not wait to get home.
Not that the temperature in France was any cooler. It, like the rest of Western Europe, was wilting in a heatwave that would prove to be the hottest on record. Olivier was just relieved that the queuing for the early-morning flight was at a comparatively cool time of day. He found the lengthy security checks at Ben-Gurion ‘a pain in the arse’ and the terminal’s lack of air-conditioning did not help.
Finally reaching the Air France check-in desk, the Cojots were told their flight to Paris would be making an unscheduled stopover at Athens. The Greek capital’s international airport was well known for the laxity of its transit security, and Olivier voiced his father’s fears when he piped up: ‘Hey Dad, if I were a terrorist I would get on at the stopover.’
Such fears of a terrorist attack–more specifically a plane hijacking–were far from unfounded. Since Israel’s victory over the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, various Palestinian and pro-Palestinian terror groups had used plane hijackings as a means of forcing concessions out of Israel and publicizing their cause to the world. Before the Six-Day War there had typically been five hijackings annually. By 1969 this had risen to eighty-two hijackings worldwide–the most in a single year–and, though the average had since fallen, it was still more than three a month.
Only too aware of the recent spate of hijackings, Cojot inquired about a direct flight to Paris on the Israeli airline El Al that, with its armed sky marshals, ‘seemed to offer better security’. But hearing the flight was full, and unwilling to wait for another, he reluctantly returned to Air France, his concern only partly assuaged by the knowledge that his frequent-flyer status meant he qualified for ‘service plus’.
Other travellers on Air France Flight 139 were just as alarmed by news of the stopover. Ilan Hartuv, forty-nine, a short-sighted and rotund former Israeli diplomat and now deputy director-general of a Jerusalem urban-regeneration company, was accompanying his seventy-three-year-old mother Dora Bloch on the first leg of her journey to New York for the wedding of his younger brother Daniel. Hartuv planned to part from her in Paris where he would meet his brother-in-law and their respective wives for a short holiday and, aware of the threat from terrorists, he had specifically instructed his travel agent to book non-stop tickets. So too had Sara Davidson, en route to the United States for a coast-to-coast tour with her husband Uzi and their two sons, seventeen-year-old Roni and Benny, thirteen. ‘Let’s not go on the plane,’ she told Uzi when she heard it would stop in Greece. ‘We don’t know who’s likely to get on in Athens.’ They also tried to change to El Al without success.
Other passengers made late switches to Flight 139. Nineteen-year-old Jean-Jacques Mimouni, French-born but of Tunisian descent, had been booked on a Saturday flight to Paris. Tall and boyishly handsome, with a moustache and fashionably long, dark-brown curly hair, a talented guitar player and artist, Jean-Jacques had just finished his matriculation exams and was planning to spend the summer in France with two elder sisters before either staying on–his father’s preference–or returning to Israel for military service. But he was persuaded to delay his flight until Sunday by his best friend Thierry Sicard, the son of the French consul in Tel Aviv, so that they could fly together.
Belgians Gilbert and Helen Weill had just completed a short holiday in Israel and were due to take a later Air France flight to Paris. Their plan was to pick up their children in Metz and then return home to Antwerp. But when told that their original plane had been delayed in Iran and their best option was Flight 139, leaving in just an hour, they took it. Walking away from the Air France desk they met an acquaintance travelling on their original flight. ‘Quick,’ advised Mr Weill, ‘get on the earlier flight before all the seats are taken. Who knows how long that other plane is going to be delayed.’
At 8.59 a.m. local time, Air France Flight 139 took off in perfect weather–a blazing sun and clear blue skies–and headed north-west across the Mediterranean for Athens. The plane was one of the recently introduced wide-bodied Airbus A300B4s, a comfortable twin-engined jetliner capable of carrying 272 passengers in a two-class layout: 24 first-class seats at the front of the plane in a 2:2:2 configuration; and a further 248 seats in two economy cabins to the rear, the seats divided 2:4:2 by two aisles. For the last six rows, as the fuselage tapered towards the tail, the middle row was just three seats. Possibly because of late cancellations, only 228 seats were occupied.
Captaining the plane was a dashing fifty-one-year-old father of three called Michel Bacos, a former naval pilot who had fought with de Gaulle’s Free French forces in the Second World War. His eleven-man crew consisted of a co-pilot, flight engineer, chief steward, four stewards and four stewardesses. Apart from a Swedish stewardess called Ann-Carina Franking, all were French.
Sitting in the rear economy cabin, three rows from the front, Michel Cojot quickly forgot his fears as the Air France crew made a fuss of him and his son. ‘After this heavy dose of the East it was a pleasure’ for him ‘to go back to the language, the elegant restraint of the stewardesses’ uniforms, and even the food tray’. There was nothing in the way of in-flight entertainment on a 1970s airliner, and Cojot passed the two-and-a-half-hour flight time to Athens by writing ‘a probably useless professional memorandum’ and giving Olivier ‘an exercise in spelling by dictating a vaguely humorous piece on the joys of air travel’. It was typical of the high-achieving Cojot to try and educate his son even when he was on holiday. For Olivier, a ‘terrible speller’, these regular dictations by his father were ‘a huge pain in the behind’.
The only bleak spot for the thirty-seven-year-old Cojot was the proximity of unruly neighbours who included ‘brawling brats, a woman who spilled over her seat on both sides, and a couple of retired Americans’.
Just after noon local time, the Airbus touched down at Athens’s Ellinikon International Airport, a few miles south of the Greek capital. As the stop was a brief one–just forty-five minutes–only the thirty-eight disembarking passengers were allowed to leave the plane. They included the retired Americans but not, to Michel Cojot’s chagrin, the squabbling children.
In their place came fifty-six new passengers, bringing the total to 246, not far from capacity. The majority were still nationals of Israel and France, though more than twenty other nationalities were now present, including American, Australian, Belgian, Brazilian, Canadian, Colombian, Greek, Japanese, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish. Of the new arrivals, many had been holidaying in or around the Greek islands. Among them were British yachtsmen and old friends Tony Russell, a married fifty-five-year-old senior official for the Greater London Council, and George Good, sixty-five, a retired accountant and widower, who had been sailing round Ithaca and Paxos in the Ionian Sea; Frenchman Gérard Poignon and his English-born wife Isabella, twenty-eight, who had left their eighteen-month-old daughter in the care of Gérard’s parents while they enjoyed a ten-day cruise; Colin and Nola Hardie from Christchurch in New Zealand, where Colin was general manager of the Star newspaper; Peter and Nancy Rabinowitz, two young Jewish American academics who were teaching literature at Kirkland College in New York State; and Claude Moufflet from Versailles in France.
The Rabinowitzes were in Europe to celebrate thirty-one-year-old Nancy’s recent completion of her PhD in comparative literature (a degree that Peter, two years her senior, already possessed). Arriving in London from the US, they had asked if they could buy a return plane ticket to Athens with a stopover in Paris on the second leg. Informed that that was impossible, they bought a standard return with the intention of taking the boat-train over the Channel. But when they returned to Athens Airport after a two-week stay in Greece, they were told by their airline that they could trade in their Athens–London tickets for Athens–Paris–London at no extra cost. As a switch to another carrier was also possible, Peter chose Air France because he did not like Greek food and thought that airline cuisine on a French plane would be the best. Both Rabinowitzes were acutely aware of the danger of hijacking and would not have got on Flight 139 if they had known it was on a stopover from Tel Aviv. It never occurred to them to ask.
Claude Moufflet was returning from a work trip to Teheran in Iran, where his company owned a business, and had arrived at Ellinikon’s East Terminal–an ugly single-storey concrete building designed by the celebrated Finnish architect Eero Saarinen in the 1960s–by taxi from Athens’s original airport at 11.30 a.m. local time. Shortly after checking in his suitcases at the Air France desk, he was approached by a young Greek man who asked him if he was willing to post a very urgent letter in Paris. Satisfied that the envelope contained only paper, he put it in his briefcase.
Moufflet next passed through passport control and security, the latter a ‘systematic and rigorous’ series of checks. As his hand luggage went through a radar detection tunnel he could clearly see his electronic calculator, Dictaphone, camera, film and flash appear on the screen. Alarmed by this last unusual image, the policeman on duty stopped the conveyor belt and instructed Moufflet to open his briefcase so that he could check the authenticity of these objects. Once he was satisfied, he passed Moufflet on to his colleague for a body search. Finally convinced that the Frenchman was a harmless businessman, and that the cylindrical 1.5-volt batteries that appeared on the radar screen were for his Dictaphone and calculator, and not part of ‘an elaborate explosive system’, they let him continue.
Four of Flight 139’s new passengers, however, were not subjected to the same level of security because they were in transit, having landed at 6.45 a.m. on Singapore Airlines Flight 763 from Bahrain. Two were travelling on South American passports: a tall blond-haired Peruvian called A. Garcia, wearing a natty brown corduroy suit and a green shirt; and a young Ecuadorian woman, Ortega, in a blue denim skirt and top, with shoulder-length dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses. The other pair were Middle Eastern in appearance and carrying Bahraini and Kuwaiti travel documents: one was tall with long fair hair and ‘wild staring’ blue eyes that put one of his fellow passengers in mind of Mick Jagger on drugs; the other short and stocky, with dark hair and a bushy moustache.
Despite the fact that all four were carrying large bags, none was particularly scrutinized because it was assumed they had been scanned at their airport of origin. It did not help that ‘nobody was on duty at the metal detector in the passenger corridor, and the policeman at the fluoroscope was paying little attention to the screen at his side’.
At 12.15 p.m., Air France Flight 139 was announced. Clutching his briefcase and a Duty Free bag containing two bottles of ouzo, a bottle of Scotch and a carton of cigarettes, Claude Moufflet slowly made his way to Gate 2, ‘through which passengers were flowing in dribs and drabs to board the shuttle bus’.
With an outside temperature of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and no air-conditioning on the shuttle, the passengers were perspiring freely by the time they reached the waiting plane at 12.35 p.m. Moufflet had scanned his fellow travellers on the bus, but none particularly drew his attention. He was more interested in the type of plane and noted with satisfaction that it was a modern Airbus ‘which, given the temperature, promised a comfortable, quick and cool flight’.
The two South Americans had first-class tickets and took their seats at the front of the plane. The other pair in transit had cheaper tickets and sat in the forward economy cabin where their Arab appearance, large bags and cans of stuffed dates caused some suspicion. Ilan Hartuv was looking out of the window when his mother whispered to him that she had seen two young people get on who looked like Arabs and had very big bags, and that she was afraid. Hartuv wanted to alert the crew, but as everyone had fastened seatbelts and the plane was about to depart, he decided not to.
Another alarmed by the new arrivals was Helen Weill, an Orthodox Jew from Antwerp in Belgium who was sitting with her husband Gilbert at the front of economy class. ‘Arabs!’ she hissed at him. ‘Maybe we should find another flight.’ But Gilbert was more concerned with picking up his children on time and told her to stop worrying. French-born Emma Rosenkovitch–en route with her husband Claude and their two children Noam and Ella to visit her parents in Paris–hardly noticed that two of the Athens passengers were Arabs: she and Claude were peace activists and had many Palestinian friends. Instead she was struck by their rudeness as they struggled up their aisle with their giant black bags, bumping into people. ‘Why would an airline let people get on with such big bags anyway?’ she wondered.
Meanwhile Claude Moufflet, having stowed his briefcase and Duty Free in the overhead locker, had settled down in the row behind the Weills. With his seatbelt fastened, he began reading a newspaper. So too did Gilbert Weill, noticing as he flicked through his paper an article about Idi Amin Dada, Uganda’s eccentric, erratic, flamboyant and ruthless dictator who, just two days earlier, had been declared ‘President for Life’ by the Ugandan parliament. A few minutes later, as the plane was about to take off, Weill heard a young boy a few rows behind him asking one of the Arabs what was in the large bag he was carrying. ‘Dates for you,’ the Arab replied, ‘and grenades for your parents.’
As if to show his comment was harmless, the Arab offered a stuffed date to his neighbour, a forty-eight-year-old Tunis-born Israeli called Joseph Abougedir who took and ate it. But not before noting the place of origin on the box’s Arabic label: Iraq.
Barely eight minutes after takeoff, with the plane still climbing towards its cruising height of 31,000 feet, and the stewards and stewardesses ‘already busy in the galleys preparing lunch’, the two South American transit passengers in first class sprang to their feet, both holding a pistol and a grenade. While the female Ortega stood guard, Garcia made straight for the door leading to the flight deck. Nearby passengers screamed in alarm.
Inside the cockpit was Bacos, his co-pilot Daniel Lom and flight engineer Jacques Lemoine. Hearing shouting in the first-class cabin, and thinking that a fire had broken out, Bacos told his flight engineer to check. But no sooner had Lemoine opened the door than he came face to face with a man holding a pistol and a grenade. The engineer was forced to the ground, the gun pressed to his temple, as Bacos begged: ‘Please don’t kill him!’
Convinced as he was that Lemoine was about to be executed, those first few minutes seemed endless to Bacos. But the crisis passed and, having confiscated Bacos’ oxygen mask and microphone, Garcia told the occupants of the flight deck that the plane had been taken over by a commando of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and that the captain should set a course for Benghazi in Libya. If he and his crew cooperated, no harm would come to them. By now the terrorist’s gun was pointed at Bacos’ head; if he tried to turn round, the muzzle was prodded in his neck to discourage him.
Back in economy class, the two Arabs had leapt out of their seats to join in the hijacking. Moshe Peretz, a twenty-six-year-old Israeli medical student, noted in an improvised diary that one was ‘a long-haired youth wearing a red shirt, gray trousers, and a beige pullover’ and the other had ‘a thick mustache, wears long trousers and a yellow shirt’. They were ‘running towards the first-class compartment’. Soon after ‘frightened and hysterical stewardesses’ emerged from there and, with ‘trembling arms’, tried to calm the agitated passengers.
In the aisle to the left of Claude Moufflet appeared a ‘livid, flustered’ stewardess who kept saying: ‘Stay calm. Sit down. Stay calm.’ Moufflet repeated the instructions ‘without knowing the reason, in English and French’, to the passengers on his right until he noticed the barrel of a pistol ‘resting on the backrest of the first seat in [economy] class, approximately 20 centimetres’ from his face. The man holding it was ‘about 25 years old, average height, stocky, Mediterranean looking, his tanned faced sporting a very black moustache’. In his left hand he was holding a ‘fragmentation grenade’ that was clearly unpinned because Moufflet could see the pin ‘passed like a ring’ around the hijacker’s middle finger.
Then to his left Moufflet saw the second Arab–‘small, very thin, with a pale, angular face, blue eyes and long straight hair’–herding two stewards at the point of a gun. He and his comrade kept shouting in bad English: ‘Don’t move! Put your hands on your head! Don’t move! Keep quiet! Don’t move!’
Back in the rear economy cabin, the passengers thought the plane was on fire. Michel Cojot heard a shout ‘and saw a man, bent over, running towards the front of the plane’. The rumour quickly spread that the plane was on fire, though there was no sign of smoke or flame. Cojot’s son Olivier felt more excited than afraid, and was ‘already thinking this is going to be a good story to tell at school’. As he kept glancing back, half expecting to see smoke, he heard his father curse, ‘something he never did, and it was a bad curse, so I know something bad has happened’.
He turned to see a steady stream of passengers, stewards and stewardesses coming from the front of the plane with their arms raised. Some were screaming but most were mute with shock. They were the occupants of first class and the first fifteen rows of the forward economy tourist cabin–among them Claude Moufflet, Moshe Peretz and the Weills–and had been moved to create a cordon sanitaire between the cockpit and the passengers in case anyone tried to intervene. Herding the crowd were three hijackers: two Arabs and one young Western woman who kept shouting in heavily accented English: ‘Sitonzeflor! Sitonzeflor!’
She was, thought Moufflet, ‘about 25 years old with straight dark black hair that came down to her collar, a fringe at the front, dark eyes and a very pale face that reminded me of a prison guard. She wore little round glasses with steel rims and was dressed in an outfit of navy and petrol blue, black shoes with wedged soles and holding in her right hand an automatic pistol and in her left a grenade. I couldn’t see from where I was whether or not it had the pin taken out.’
Shortly after the appearance of the female hijacker, who sounded German, ‘a short bearded man, about five feet three, who spoke French with a heavy Yiddish accent, tried to resist’. Julie Aouzerate, a sixty-two-year-old Algerian-born French Jewish grandmother, watched on in horror as the hijackers ‘knocked him to the floor and beat him severely–the German woman doing most of the punching’. As everyone froze, chief steward Daniel Courtial tried to calm the situation by saying: ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t be frightened.’
Yet even he was shaking like a leaf.
The intercom crackled into life. ‘This plane has been hijacked,’ said a male voice with a German accent, ‘and is now under the control of the Basil al-Kubaisi* Commando of the Che Guevara of Gaza Group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The plane has been renamed “Haifa” and only that name will get a response. I’m your new captain. As long as you obey our orders and do exactly as we ask you, you will not be harmed.’
Moments later the message was repeated in French by a stewardess’s trembling voice. It was now clear to many of the 246 passengers–most of whom were Jews–that their greatest fears had come to pass: the plane had been hijacked by the PFLP, a Palestinian guerilla organization that was committed to the destruction of the Israeli state. The threat to the Israelis on board was obvious, and on hearing mention of the dreaded PFLP many of them began ‘ripping off their Jewish star necklaces and throwing them on the floor’.
Every Israeli knew and feared the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Formed by Dr George Habash, a Palestinian Christian, in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967, it was the second largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Yet it quickly became the best known after it pioneered the use of plane hijackings to strike back at Israel. The architect of this strategy was Habash’s forty-nine-year-old deputy Dr Wadie Haddad, another Palestinian Christian from Safed in northern Israel, who realized that the initial tactic of cross-border raids from the PLO’s bases in Jordan would ‘never achieve the liberation of Palestine’. In 1967 he told the PFLP leadership that it was impossible to fight the Israelis ‘plane for plane, tank for tank, soldier for soldier’. Instead they had to concentrate on the Israelis’ ‘weak points’ by using ‘spectacular, one-off operations’ that would help to focus the world’s attention on Palestine. This would cause people to ask: ‘What the hell is the problem in Palestine? Who are these Palestinians? Why are they doing these things?’ In the end the world would ‘get fed up’ and decide it had to do something about Palestine. It would be forced to give the Palestinians ‘justice’.
Bassam Abu-Sharif, the public face of the PFLP and a member of its Central Committee, thought Haddad’s speech electrifying. Once it was over, he ‘felt like standing up and applauding’, and could tell others felt the same way. It was as if the world had tilted on its axis in favour of the Palestinians. Here, at last, thought Bassam, ‘was a new way forward–a chance to get the Israeli boot off the back of the Arab neck’. Henceforward they ‘would carry the attack to Israel’; they ‘would take–and keep–the initiative’. From this moment on, Haddad became known as ‘the Master’.
With his strategy duly endorsed by Habash and the Central Committee, Haddad went to work training selected guerillas to hijack planes in mid-air. Most of the early volunteers came from within the PFLP. Talent spotters in the camps would refer the best recruits for further training, and ‘from this second, much smaller pool, Haddad would select the best again, looking for intelligence, persistence, strength of character, resourcefulness and physical toughness’. Their final training, according to Bassam Abu-Sharif, ‘went far beyond such things as proficiency with weapons and explosives’. They were trained to fly ‘even the biggest and [most] modern airliners’ so they knew exactly what the pilots were doing, and ‘couldn’t be bluffed’. If a pilot needed to be killed, they would take control. They also practised exchanging gunfire in confined spaces, and learned not only how to defeat airport security checks but what local laws applied to them if they were captured.
The first hijacking planned by Haddad–the takeover of an Israeli El Al plane en route from Paris to Tel Aviv in July 1968–was a spectacular success. Forced to land in Algiers, the plane and its twenty-two Israeli passengers and crew were kept for forty days until Israel finally agreed to the terrorists’ terms: the release of sixteen convicted Arab terrorists in return for the Israeli hostages (the non-Israelis had been returned to France at the start of the ordeal).
Other Palestinian terror groups such as Black September began to copy the PFLP’s hijacking strategy. They mostly targeted Israeli and Western airlines like El Al, BOAC, Lufthansa, TWA, Pan Am and Swissair, and it seemed to many at the time as if the West’s security forces were powerless to stop the hijackings. The one consolation for Israeli citizens was that, thanks to the tight security at Ben-Gurion, no plane flying direct from Israel had ever been skyjacked. That did not, of course, prevent terrorists joining the plane during a stopover en route to or away from a non-Israeli airport: just such a tactic had been used in the Sabena hijacking of 1972 when four Black September guerillas got on the Paris-to-Tel Aviv flight after a stop in Rome.
The most ambitious early PFLP operation was the coordinated hijacking of three planes bound for New York in September 1970. The plan was to force all three to land at Dawson’s Field, a disused former British air base in Jordan, where the hostages would remain until the PFLP’s demands had been met. But only two of the three hijackings were successful: that of a TWA Boeing 707 and a Swissair Douglas DC-8 from Frankfurt and Zurich respectively. The third was foiled when two of the four hijackers were removed from an El Al Boeing 707 out of Amsterdam, and the remaining pair–Palestinian Leila Khaled and her Nicaraguan accomplice Patrick Argüello–were overpowered during the flight.* This did not prevent the other two thwarted terrorists from opportunistically hijacking a Pan Am Boeing 747, but it was blown up on the ground at Cairo because Haddad feared it was too heavy for the packed-sand runway at Dawson’s Field. A third plane–a BOAC Vickers VC-10 out of Bahrain–eventually joined the others in Jordan after it had been hijacked by a PFLP sympathizer keen to secure Khaled’s release.
The PFLP might have achieved all its demands had its actions not alienated its Jordanian hosts. On 16 September, four days after the three planes at Dawson’s Field had also been blown up by the PFLP, King Hussein of Jordan turned on his former Palestinian allies. He was forced to do so by the United States who ‘made it very clear to him that unless he got rid of the Palestinian “terrorists” operating from his country, they would come in and do it themselves’. Faced with this ultimatum, Hussein ordered his tanks and loyal Bedu infantry into the Palestinians’ camps and training bases. Hundreds were killed in the fighting: all of them Arabs. Bassam Abu-Sharif wrote later: ‘Our own Arab brothers had taken up arms against us: a catastrophe for the Palestinian cause. We called it “Black September”.’
The one tiny consolation for the PFLP was that Leila Khaled and three Palestinian terrorists in a Swiss prison were exchanged for the remaining Israeli hostages. But the loss of Jordan as a base for terrorist operations against Israel was a disaster for the PLO leadership and, blaming the PFLP, they ordered Haddad to stop attacking targets outside Israel. He refused and was eventually expelled from the PFLP by Habash in 1973. Yet he continued to operate under the banner of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–External Operations (PFLP–EO), and it was this rogue group, with its headquarters in Baghdad, that was behind the hijacking of Air France Flight 139.
With the first stage of the hijacking accomplished, the terrorists–who referred to themselves as Number 1 (Garcia), 10 (Ortega), 39 (red shirt) and 54 (yellow shirt)–decided to separate those who were potentially dangerous from the others by moving mothers with infants and all children to the first-class buffer zone in the front of the plane. This meant a few kids, like Olivier Cojot and a young Dutch boy of about the same age, were taken from their fathers.
The look of distress on young Olivier’s face as he was led away was a heart-rending moment for Michel Cojot. His son had ‘become a little boy again, my little boy’, and he was sorry for dragging him into ‘an adventure which could cost him his life’. On the other hand he was happy he was not alone, as his own father Joseph Goldberg, a Polish-born Jew, had been when facing a similarly lethal situation.
Four years after fighting for France in the ill-fated 1940 campaign against the Germans, Goldberg had wanted to take the then five-year-old Michel with him as he travelled in to Lyons on a cold winter day to donate his French-Jewish passport–he had acquired a forged non-Jewish replacement–to a foreign Jew. But Michel’s mother had refused to let him go because his boots were being repaired and it had saved his life. On arrival in Lyons Goldberg had been arrested with his two passports in a roundup organized by Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief, and was eventually sent to his death in Auschwitz. Michel and his mother survived the German occupation by hiding their Jewishness and using the name Collenot (courtesy of a Gentile neighbour of that name who risked his life to give them a new identity, and was later honoured as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance). This, in turn, became Cojot when Michel’s mother remarried after the war. But, ever since, Michel had been burdened with the guilt of not accompanying his father that day. Which is why he was now glad that, come what may, he and his son would face the danger of the hijacking together.
Not all the passengers were so sanguine. One Israeli mother hid her son under her skirts, ignoring the hijackers’ threats of ‘severe’ punishment for anyone who did not send or accompany their children to first class. There he remained–‘crouched noiselessly’–for more than an hour, only emerging when it was ‘clear that children would not be harmed’.
Other passengers were finding it hard to cope with the ever-present threat of injury or death. Tony Russell and his friend George Good were just two rows back from the German girl, who was chain-smoking with her right hand while in her left she held a pistol that was ‘pointed for a large part of the time straight at them’.
Sitting in the aisle on Claude Moufflet’s right was a well-dressed, heavily made-up ‘official-looking’ Israeli woman in her fifties who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She lit cigarette after cigarette ‘in a feverish way with trembling hands’, her face ‘consumed with tics as she sobbed pleas to everyone in general and no one in particular’.
When Moufflet tried to reassure her, she put her hand protectively on the head of a brown-haired girl of about seventeen who was accompanying her. The girl, who was the woman’s niece, was much calmer and spoke better English. It was the first sign of a marked difference in attitude between the various age groups–the young coping better than their elders–that surprised Moufflet. ‘Where do you think we are going?’ the girl asked Moufflet.
‘I don’t know, maybe Libya,’ he replied. ‘Gaddafi is very pro-Palestinian.’
A young dark-haired woman, sitting to Moufflet’s left, interrupted them. ‘Please tell my husband to stay calm,’ she begged Moufflet in almost faultless French, indicating a dark-skinned man around thirty-five, wearing a garish shirt with vertical brown and yellow stripes. ‘He wants to jump on top of them and is going to get himself killed.’
Moufflet asked the man what he wanted to do.
‘I don’t know,’ the man replied, his gaze darting back and forth. ‘But there are many of us and only a few of them. If we jump them we should be able to disarm them.’
The man’s neighbour, a well-built teenager with curly hair, agreed: ‘It’s true. We’ve only got to jump on them. There’s no reason not to.’
Moufflet brought them back to reality. ‘Listen,’ he said quietly, ‘just think about it. Even if we could do it, the first to get up will be shot and even killed. And then what? What about the grenades?’
‘They still have their pins in,’ said the husband, pointing to his neighbour: ‘He told me that.’
Moufflet shook his head in exasperation. ‘Look at the metallic ring round his finger. It’s the ring from the grenade’s pin. If that grenade falls there will be no way to stop it exploding.’
The husband was not convinced, insisting that there was time to put the pin back in the grenade, and that the other passengers would help with the remaining terrorists. Genuinely worried that the husband’s recklessness would get them all killed, Moufflet played his last card. ‘Do you have children?’ he asked the wife.
‘Yes, three.’
‘Are they on the plane?’
‘No, they’re with my parents.’
He turned to the husband. ‘Would you like to see your children again? If yes, stay calm and see what happens.’
Before the husband could respond, the voice of the terrorist leader sounded on the intercom. ‘This is your new captain speaking. We are going to body-search you because we want to assure ourselves that you aren’t armed. If you have a weapon, throw it immediately into the aisle. If you have anything that could be used as a weapon, throw that also. Don’t try to fool us, or you’ll be sorry. We are going to frisk you and if you have anything hidden that you haven’t given up it will be very serious for you.’
After a steward had repeated the message in French, the two young Arab hijackers began searching the passengers and collecting ‘weapons’. Moufflet handed over his pipe cleaner, but young Olivier Cojot was less keen to surrender the ‘beloved’ Swiss army knife that he always wore chained to his trousers. He eventually added it to ‘the little pile of pocket knives, nail files, knitting needles and other engines of death that had escaped Israeli vigilance’.
One by one the passengers were called and searched ‘in all the intimate parts of their bodies’. But the longer the searches went on, the more superficial they became. Sara Davidson was dreading the experience, not least because she had had what she coyly termed ‘special surgery’ and did not want the hijackers to know about it. To her great relief she was overlooked.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was chairing the government’s weekly midday Cabinet meeting in his office complex at 3 Kaplan Street in the official district of Givat Ram in west Jerusalem when his military aide, Brigadier-General Ephraim ‘Freuka’ Poran, entered the room and handed him a note. It read: ‘An Air France plane, Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris, has been hijacked after taking off from a stopover in Athens.’
Small and dapper, with a receding hairline that had gone grey at the temples, Rabin was a former head of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and ambassador to the United States who possessed a keen analytical mind and ample reserves of physical and moral courage. But he did not always react well to a crisis–as his temporary nervous breakdown at the start of the Six-Day War in 1967 had demonstrated–and this news startled him. He stared at the papers in front of him, trying to decide what to do. Eventually he turned Poran’s note over and wrote: ‘Freuka–find out: 1) How many Israelis are on board. 2) How many hijackers are on board. 3) Where the plane is heading.’
As Poran left the room, Rabin ‘banged his gavel to silence a minister who was working himself up over the price of bread, and informed his Cabinet of the shocking news’. He then announced that after the Cabinet had adjourned a special task force of relevant ministers–himself, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, Defense Minister Shimon Peres, Transport Minister Gad Yaacobi, Justice Minister Chaim Zadok and Minister without Portfolio Yisrael Galili–would meet in the downstairs conference room to consider the government’s response.
On the way to the meeting he told Yaacobi to warn Ben-Gurion Airport that ‘the hijackers might want to do another Sabena’. He was referring to the 1972 hijacking by Black September* terrorists of a Boeing 707 operated by the Belgian national airline Sabena en route from Rome to Tel Aviv. Having landed at Ben-Gurion Airport (then known as Lod), the hijackers threatened to blow up the plane unless more than 300 Palestinian terrorists were released from Israeli jails. But while negotiations were ongoing, commandos from the IDF’s elite anti-terrorist force Sayeret Matkal (known simply as ‘the Unit’) stormed the plane dressed as mechanics, killing both male hijackers and capturing the two women. Though one of the hostages was mortally wounded in the crossfire, the operation was considered a success and Rabin wanted the airport to be ready for a repeat performance if the latest hijacked plane returned to Ben-Gurion.
Deep in the bowels of the Kirya, the complex of government buildings in central Tel Aviv that since 1948 had housed the Ministry of Defense, was a concrete warren of bomb-proof tunnels and cinderblock offices known as the ‘Pit’. Operating day and night, this ‘windowless, fluorescent-lit complex’ was the nerve centre of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Meeting in one of the Pit’s small offices with colleagues from operations, intelligence and the air force was Major Moshe ‘Muki’ Betser, the thirty-year-old reserve commander of the Unit and one of Israel’s most experienced combat soldiers. Just before 1 p.m. local time, their discussion about a potential special-forces mission unconnected to the hijacking was interrupted by a knock at the door. ‘We have a hijacking,’ said an IDF major. ‘An Air France plane out of Greece. It took off from Tel Aviv earlier this morning.’
With the Unit’s commander Yoni Netanyahu and deputy Yiftach Reicher away in the Sinai on an exercise, Betser was the duty officer in the event of an emergency. He reached for the phone and put in a call to the Unit’s base. It was answered by the operations officer. ‘They just called from Operations,’ said the officer, pre-empting the news.
‘Good. Get the team to the airport on the double. I’ll meet you there.’
The Israeli Army has many reconnaissance units–or sayerets–for special operations: Sayeret Golani, scouts for the crack Golani Infantry Brigade of northern command; Sayeret Shaked, scouts for the southern command; and a Sayeret Tzanchanim for the paratroops. But the best of the best is Sayeret Matkal–or General Staff Reconnaissance Unit–the brainchild of the legendary Jewish fighter Avraham Arnan who in the late 1950s petitioned the chief of staff to create a force that could carry out top-secret missions behind enemy lines. Backed by David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin, Arnan got his way and the new unit began independent operations under the direct authority of the IDF’s General Staff in 1958.
Modelled on the British Army’s SAS–and with the same ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto–the Unit was, and still is, recruited from the cream of Israeli youth and at first specialized in strategic intelligence gathering. But by the late 1960s, with the emergence of the PFLP and other Palestinian terror groups, the Unit began to develop the world’s first hostage-rescue and counter-terrorism techniques. It was soon called upon for the tasks inside and outside Israel that demanded brains as well as brawn, including assassination, kidnapping and demolition. So secret was its work, however, that few outside the General Staff even knew its name until the late 1980s.
It was shortly after the Unit’s most conspicuous anti-terrorist operation–the storming of Sabena Flight 571 at Lod Airport in 1972, known as Operation Isotope–that Muki Betser joined its ranks. The grandson of Russian immigrants, Betser had grown up on Israel’s first moshav* in the Jezreel Valley near Galilee where the constant threat of Arab incursion from neighbouring Syria meant he was taught to shoot at a young age. By sixteen he was six foot three, a fine athlete and an expert field navigator using only a map and the stars. Yet he had no interest in becoming a career soldier and assumed that the thirty-month compulsory military service expected of all Israeli nineteen-year-olds irrespective of gender would be a ‘rankling’ experience.
He was wrong. Supremely fit, he sailed through basic training and the brutal paratroop course–with its dropout rate of more than 50 per cent–to gain entry to the Sayeret Tzanchanim, known at the time as ‘the tip of the IDF’s spear’. It was during his time as a paratroop scout that he first used a Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle that had been captured from Arab troops in the Six-Day War. It was, he soon discovered, the best and most reliable ‘all-round assault weapon available’, and was his constant companion for the next eighteen years of active and reserve service.
No admirer of authority for authority’s sake, Betser appreciated the democratic nature of service in a sayeret where even new recruits were ‘encouraged to speak their minds about ways to improve the unit’s performance, even if it means challenging the commanding officer’. All officers had to earn the respect of their men by leading by example and ‘combining distance and friendship, an aloofness with intimacy’. Most ranks, like Betser, hailed from the kibbutz and moshav farms of Israel where ‘the values of settling the land’ were ‘inseparable from the values of defending it’. City boys made good fighters, but were less patient and more averse to hard work.
A natural leader, Betser was persuaded to train as an officer and stay on an extra six months when his compulsory period of military service came to an end in late 1966. His first posting was to Sayeret Shaked, commanded by the Bedouin Amos Yarkoni (born Abed al-Majid), and chiefly involved tracking Egyptian spies and Palestinian fedayeen in the Negev Desert. It was now that he married his childhood sweetheart Nurit, a niece of Moshe Dayan, the former IDF chief of staff who lost an eye fighting for the Allies against the Vichy French in 1941 and would shortly be appointed minister of defense. Betser’s intention was to finish his final six months and return to the Jezreel Valley to farm. But the Six-Day War intervened–a decisive pre-emptive strike by Israel against its Arab enemies that was prompted by Egypt’s provocative blockade of the Red Sea and massing of troops in the Sinai Desert–and Betser played his part by leading the first Israeli troops on to Egyptian territory.
With the war over, and a new attritional struggle against Egyptians and Palestinian terrorists just beginning, Betser again extended his military service by returning to the paratroop scouts as deputy commander. But he was seriously wounded in the jaw during the IDF’s flawed and costly attempt to destroy a PLO camp at Karameh in Jordan in 1968, and spent the next six months recuperating.
A succession of civilian and military jobs followed–including eighteen uneventful months as an El Al sky marshal, and a year as a staff officer with Sayeret Egoz (the northern command’s new scout force)–until in January 1971 word came from Uganda, an East African country with close commercial and military ties to Israel, that President Milton Obote had been ousted in a coup led by his former chief of staff, General Idi Amin. A graduate of the IDF paratroop course and on good terms with Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan–respectively Israeli prime minister and defense minister–Amin was seen as a friend of Israel. Would Betser consider going to the Ugandan town of Jinja to form a battalion of paratroopers on Israeli principles? asked Baruch ‘Burka’ Bar-Lev, the IDF colonel who headed Israel’s military mission to Uganda. The answer was yes, and Betser and his wife and young son left for Uganda soon afterwards.
Betser enjoyed his time at Jinja, situated fifty miles north of the capital Kampala on the banks of the White Nile: the perks of the job included a house with servants and a brand-new Peugeot 404; and he found the Ugandans eager to learn, though the distance the officers kept from their soldiers and their aversion to hard work was difficult for him to accept. But the training progressed smoothly enough until he received word from Bar-Lev, in March 1972, that all non-military Israeli organizations and companies had twenty-four hours to leave the country. A second ultimatum, two days later, ordered Betser and other military personnel to follow them. Frustrated by Israel’s refusal to give him the latest Phantom jets, the fickle Amin had turned instead to Gaddafi’s Libya and the Soviet Union for military support: their price for MiG jet fighters and other hardware was Israel’s expulsion. As Betser took off from the country’s international airport at Entebbe, near Kampala, he ‘mourned for the beautiful country’ he would miss, for its people ‘who deserved better than Amin’, and lastly for his own country Israel, ‘humiliated by a tin-pot dictator’. He did not expect to return.
Arriving back in Israel, he was offered and accepted a post in a paratroop battalion. But when Lieutenant-Colonel Ehud Barak, commander of the Unit, heard of his availability, he made him a counter-offer. If he only came for a year or two, said Barak, a short and stocky kibbutznik who exuded energy and confidence, he would have a ‘great time’ and then he could join the reserves. But if he wanted an army career, time with the Unit would give him ‘ideas’ and ‘something for the road to bring to other jobs’.
The chance to serve under the man who had commanded the Sabena operation was too good to refuse. Nor would Betser regret his decision as, during the next four years, he was at the heart of all the Unit’s major operations: the 1972 kidnap of high-ranking Syrian intelligence officers in Lebanon (later exchanged for Israeli POWs); the 1973 assassination in Beirut of senior PLO leaders implicated in the Munich massacre (Operation Spring of Youth, a mission Barak took part in dressed as a woman); and the recapture of Mount Hermon from Syrian commandos during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
But there was one mission he did not remember with any pride: Ma’alot. It began in late May 1974 when three Palestinian terrorists crossed from Lebanon into northern Israel and killed two Israeli Arab women in a van before heading for the town of Ma’alot, where they shot another four people: a city worker, a couple and their three-year-old son. Then they made for the local elementary school and took hostage more than a hundred high-school students and their teachers.
For most of the following day Betser and his comrades waited for the Israeli government to make a decision: either agree to the terrorists’ demands–the students’ lives for the release of twenty-three Palestinian militants from Israeli jails–or let the Unit off the leash. When the green light was finally given at 5 p.m., dusk was falling. But the assault took place anyway and it was a disaster. ‘Without any formal doctrine’, commented Betser, ‘regarding an adequate number of break-in points, optimum firepower, the use of grenades, small caliber or large caliber weapons, we improvised.’ This meant setting up a net of snipers round the school in the hope that all three terrorists would appear in their sights at the same time. Their coordinated shots were the signal for the assault. Yet they only managed to wound two terrorists rather than kill them, and before Betser and the other assaulters could break in the Palestinians had turned their Kalashnikovs and grenades on the students. In the first classroom Betser found a scene from his ‘worst nightmare’: dozens ‘lay on the floor, piled on top of each other where they fell, wounded or dead’. Only a handful of students were unscathed.
Betser knew that he and his comrades had made mistakes, and vowed to learn from them. ‘Into our new doctrine for hostage situations,’ he wrote, ‘went a string of lessons for future incidents.’ But the greatest failing in his opinion was the government’s hesitation: ‘Their policy said no negotiations with terrorists, but their hesitation in fulfilling that policy proved costly.’
In the wake of Ma’alot, the Unit rethought its tactics and training. New recruits ‘learned how to break into a room crowded with hostages, identify the terrorists, and [practise] selective shooting to kill terrorists and avoid hostages’. They rehearsed assaulting ‘houses, apartment buildings, ships, trains, planes, buses–any target the terrorists might capture’. They designed a different doctrine for every type of structure ‘regarding entry, firepower, adequate number of teams’. They were determined never to witness another Ma’alot.
Swerving through traffic and running the occasional red light on his way to the airport, Muki Betser thought about the best tactic to use on the hijacked Air France plane if it returned to Israel. Since the Sabena rescue in 1972, the Unit had devised a number of different doctrines and methods for a plane on the ground. It never used the same ploy twice.
By the time he reached the airport perimeter, he had made up his mind. They would use the latest method they had demonstrated to the General Staff just a few weeks earlier. Flashing his ID to the guard on the main gates, he drove towards the small hangar on the landing field where he could see the Unit’s crews readying their gear. But as he got out of the car he was told the plane was heading not for Israel but for Libya. It was no surprise. ‘Gaddafi’s oil-financed support for international terrorism, especially Palestinian terror against Israeli targets, was well known.’ There was still a possibility, however, that the plane would fly on to Israel. And until that was ruled out, Betser and his team would remain at Ben-Gurion.
As the minutes ticked by, several passengers on hijacked Flight 139 asked for and got permission to go to the toilet. At first it was just one or two people going to the facilities at the front of the plane, and the same number to those at the back. But as people realized these brave souls were coming back unharmed, more got up. The terrorists let them get on with it ‘until some fairly long queues started forming’. This caused even more people to join them until it was almost impossible to walk down either aisle. Observing the chaos, the female terrorist screamed: ‘Sit down! Sit down! You can’t all go in there. Sit down and be quiet.’
When certain passengers did not react quickly enough, the woman abused them in such shrill tones that Moufflet could tell she was compensating for her nervousness. But it had the desired effect as passengers pushed and shoved each other in their panic to sit down.
Again the voice of the chief terrorist came over the intercom: ‘Here is your new captain. Stay calm and seated. We will let you go to the toilets but you must realize that we have revolvers and explosives and that you cannot do anything about that. Respect our orders and do what we ask. As the explosives are here in the front of the plane, you can only go to the toilets at the back. We will not do you any harm and we will not kill you. Do what we say. Obey our orders. I will give you more instructions later.’
The tension was relieved by a brief moment of farce when Michel Cojot noticed that two buttons on the female terrorist’s blouse had come undone, ‘allowing a glimpse of breasts primly encased in a rather feminine brassiere’. This glimpse of vulnerability contrasted starkly with the woman’s aggressive actions and stern appearance–she had, thought Cojot, the ‘unappealing face of a bookworm’ with her metal-rimmed glasses, plain suit and blue stockings–and he was about to say something. But another passenger tapped her on the hip as she was passing, and ‘indicated with his finger that her blouse was gaping’.
She smiled thinly and tried to adjust her blouse without putting down her weapons, causing Cojot to speculate on the irony of her dropping the fragmentation grenade and ‘no one ever knowing that we had died for modesty’. Unable to accomplish the task with her hands full, she used a hairpin borrowed from a passenger to lock the grenade’s handle. She then placed it on the floor and did up her buttons.
Soon afterwards, at the terrorists’ bidding, two stewardesses and a steward distributed water, fizzy drinks and pieces of bread to the thirsty and hungry passengers. But this only prompted more visits to the toilet and, within minutes, the same disorderly queues had formed outside the two cubicles at the back of the plane. ‘Sit down and stay there!’ shouted the exasperated female terrorist. ‘You are not children, and yet you behave worse than them. You’re all mad. Sit down and stay there.’
The Rabinowitzes thought the woman hijacker was ‘less like a commando than a frustrated substitute teacher beset by an unexpected problem’. Another passenger agreed. ‘Some hijackers!’ he grunted. ‘More like glorified toilet monitors.’
By now tempers among the passengers were also fraying with some joining the terrorists in exhorting their fellows to stay seated. Others took advantage of the absentees by stealing their seats. Among the squatters was a large bald man in his sixties wearing glasses and a grey suit. When the occupant returned, he refused to move. ‘I didn’t ask to come here,’ he said in French. ‘I’m a passenger from first class. I have a right to a seat and I’m taking this one.’
Claude Moufflet gave up his place to accommodate the interloper, and instead shared a pair of seats with two ‘nice’ young French girls called Agnès and Maggy. Short and chubby, Agnès had her long black hair in a ponytail and was wearing glasses too big for her face. Her unusual accent, she later explained, was because she came from Bône in Algeria. A little taller, Maggy had very curly hair and was dressed in jeans and a blue cotton jumper. They told Moufflet they both worked in information services and were returning from a holiday to their homes in Paris. It seemed to him they were ‘controlling their emotions really well’, and he was happy to keep them distracted by taking part in their ‘best legs on the plane’ competition that they eventually awarded to one of the stewardesses. Their lighthearted banter was interrupted by yet another intercom announcement.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the terrorist chief, ‘the members of the commando are going to come amongst you to collect up your identity cards. It’s important that you give them all up, particularly if you are of dual nationality and have an Israeli identity card or passport. Any attempt to hide anything will be severely punished.’
Moufflet put everything into the plastic bag held open by the Arab with the moustache: his passport, identity papers and driving licence. His two young neighbours followed suit, handing over all their pieces of photo identity. But some on board, particularly those of dual nationality, tried to hide or destroy their Israeli identity cards because they knew that in previous pro-Palestinian hijackings the Israeli hostages had often been kept after others were released. The most at risk were the many Israeli men with connections to the military like Sara Davidson’s husband Uzi who was a reserve colonel with the Israeli Air Force (IAF). Aware that Uzi’s ID card would give him away, they both chewed part of it and squeezed the pieces into a used cola can with just ‘seconds to spare’.
But most chose not to defy the terrorists. Mindful of their young children, Claude and Emma Rosenkovitch handed over their French and Israeli passports, as did young Jean-Jacques Mimouni, while reserve soldier Moshe Peretz gave up his army card.
‘What will they do with our passports?’ one of the French girls asked Moufflet, a question on countless minds as the bags containing them were taken to the front of the plane.
‘Well, first they’ll use them to establish a list of who is on the plane,’ he replied. ‘Then I don’t know.’
To further ‘reduce tension and free the aisles’, the terrorists allowed some more ‘passengers they considered harmless’ up to the front of the plane. They included Michel Cojot who, as a single parent travelling with a child, was able to rejoin his son Olivier. ‘I thus reaped,’ noted Cojot, ‘an unexpected dividend from the solidarity of two liberation movements’: the women’s and the Palestinians’.
It was around this time that one of the hijackers told some of the passengers their aims: the release of ‘dozens of Palestinian prisoners and Kozo Okamoto’–the sole survivor of the Japanese Red Army’s deadly terrorist attack at Lod Airport in 1972. ‘If Israel acceded to these demands,’ noted Emma Rosenkovitch, ‘no one would be harmed, they said.’
Twenty-two-year-old Martine Mimouni-Arnold had just returned from work to her Tel Aviv apartment when the phone rang. It was a friend with the alarming news that Martine’s parents had failed to pick up her two-year-old daughter Aurelia from kindergarten, as they did each weekday, and so the friend had collected her instead.
Martine was perplexed. Her father Robert, a Tunisian Jew who had worked for fifteen years as a policeman in France before moving his family to Israel in 1971, was not the type to forget his granddaughter. His only appointment that day had been to drop off his son Jean-Jacques–Martine’s younger brother–at Ben-Gurion for his flight to Paris. Something serious must have happened. She hurried round to her parents’ house but no one answered the door, so she returned home and, in an attempt to keep busy, took out the rubbish. As she did so she overheard two people in the street talking about the hijacking of an Air France plane. Shocked by the news, and fearful for her brother’s safety, she ran back up the steps to phone for confirmation. But as she did so she tripped and felt a stabbing pain in her ankle. It was fractured.
Only later, in hospital, did she learn that her parents’ had returned to Ben-Gurion as soon as they heard of the hijacking, all thoughts of their granddaughter far from their minds; and there they remained, waiting in vain for news that their precious only son–conceived after five daughters–was safe.
The confiscation of the passengers’ identity papers was followed by an even more alarming development as the two Arab hijackers reappeared from the front of the plane with huge boxes that looked to Claude Moufflet as if they might once have held sweets and cakes. Protruding from them, however, were long pink fuses–a quarter of an inch in diameter to eight inches in length–that left most passengers in no doubt they now contained explosives.
To free up space for the boxes, the passengers in the two seats next to the central emergency exits were moved to the central block where armrests were lifted so that five people could sit on four seats. Then a terrorist came back and placed what appeared to be small white packages between the doors of the plane and the boxes of explosives. Moufflet assumed this ‘was a system of detonation that would go off if the exit doors were opened’.
Not all the passengers nearby drew the same conclusion. Once the terrorists had left, a small well-dressed lady of around sixty-five years of age, wearing her hair in a chignon, declared her determination to return to her confiscated seat. ‘Madam, you can’t,’ advised Moufflet. ‘They have just blocked the exits.’
When she continued to complain, saying that to expect five people to share four seats was unfair because not everyone was thin, he lost his temper. ‘Listen, madam,’ he said harshly, ‘it is dynamite that they have put under your seat. Would you really like to go and sit on top of it?’
This brought her to her senses, and confirmation, if it was needed, came with the chief terrorist’s next announcement: ‘Sit down please. Put your seatbelts on and stop smoking. We will soon land at Benghazi. You should know that the emergency exits have been wired with explosives. It is strictly forbidden to go near them or to sit on the seats next to them. Any attempt to open them will set off the charge. Therefore you have been warned. Be careful. Remain in your seats and, above all, do not smoke any more.’
Up in the cockpit, after circling the airport a number of times, Michel Bacos was finally given permission to land by Benghazi airport’s control tower. ‘Land it gently,’ he was warned by the gun-wielding chief terrorist. ‘We don’t want the explosives to ignite.’
The screech of wheels on tarmac caused many of the passengers to flinch as Bacos landed the plane as softly as he could on the single rudimentary airstrip at Benina International Airport near Benghazi, the second-largest city in Libya and capital of the eastern province of Cyrenaica. It was just before 3 p.m. local time.
For the many Israelis and Jews on board this was a worrying time. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, dictator of Libya since his successful military coup in 1969, was an ardent Arab nationalist and an inveterate enemy of Israel. ‘We knew, my neighbours and I,’ recalled Julie Aouzerate, ‘that our “visit” to an Arab country dedicated to destroy Israel was not good news. This was certainly not a safe haven for us.’ But was Libya the terrorists’ final destination, they wondered, or simply a stop along the way?
After taxiing for fifteen minutes, the plane came to a halt in a secluded section of the airport and the engines were shut down. The blinds were closed but a few passengers risked the terrorists’ anger to sneak a look outside. Moshe Peretz could see ‘arid landscape, four bored soldiers sitting on the runway’ and fire brigade trucks nearby. The majority of passengers sat patiently, unable even to see beyond the drawn curtain between first and economy class. For Claude Moufflet, time seemed to crawl as passengers ‘read or spoke in a low voice’. They were waiting, the two Palestinian hijackers announced, ‘for the arrival of the representative of the Libyan government’. Some passengers lit cigarettes, in spite of many protests, but were ordered to put them out by the hijackers.
Eventually a steward opened the front-left exit door, and Olivier Cojot could see a cordon of soldiers on the tarmac and the chief terrorist being greeted by a ‘welcoming committee’ of civilian handshakes and hugs. He assumed they were comrades from the PFLP. Then a Libyan official climbed the stairs and came on board, greeting the passengers ‘not without humour’ in ‘guttural English’. He welcomed them to the Arab Republic of Libya, but regretted the circumstances of their arrival. He then asked for and was given the bags with the identity documents, and took them back down the stairs to where another official was waiting behind a table with a rubber stamp. Olivier could hardly believe his eyes. They were issuing visas to each passport as if the hijacking had never happened. ‘What the hell,’ he wondered, ‘is going on?’
Major Muki Betser was still at Ben-Gurion International Airport with the Unit’s specialist anti-hijacking team when word reached him from the Pit that the terrorists had radioed ahead to Benghazi with two demands: that they be given enough fuel for four hours’ onward flight; and that the local representative of Wadie Haddad’s branch of the PFLP be summoned to the airport to meet them.
The news that the terrorists wanted more fuel was a clear indication that Benghazi was not their final destination, and that, as Betser put it, they might still want ‘to try landing in Israel’. His men, as a result, would remain at Ben-Gurion until the picture was clearer. But any possible operation would not be for some time, and in the interval he put a radio call through to the Unit’s commanding officer, Yoni Netanyahu, on an exercise at Umm Hashiba in the Sinai Peninsula.
A few months younger than Betser, Netanyahu came from a very different political and social milieu: that of right-wing urban intellectuals. The grandson of a prominent Lithuanian Zionist who had emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s, Netanyahu was born on 13 March 1946 in New York City where his right-wing and pro-Revisionist* father Benzion was studying for a history doctorate. The family returned to the Middle East after Israel’s creation in 1948, and Netanyahu’s early years were spent in Talpiot, the idyllic south Jerusalem suburb much favoured by scholars and professionals. Though not religious, he nevertheless ‘preserved a deep affection for Jewish ritual and tradition’.
He was educated at Jerusalem’s Gymnasium Elementary School and later the Darom School and, like Betser, enjoyed athletics and games of any kind. He was a ‘natural leader, a boy whom other children deferred to and wanted to follow, and from his mid teens one to whom girls were immediately attracted’ by his impish, mischievous grin and remorseless energy.
From the age of eleven to thirteen, and again from sixteen to eighteen, Yoni lived with his parents and two younger brothers–Binyamin (‘Bibi’) and Iddo–on the east coast of the United States while his father taught Hebrew studies at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. During the latter sojourn he was a model student, but deeply unhappy. ‘I feel I belong to a different world,’ he wrote to an Israeli friend. ‘I am remote from them and the distance does not diminish as time passes but quite the reverse… There isn’t a moment here that I would not sacrifice at once for my immediate return to Israel. My friends in Israel, my social life and, above all, the land itself–I miss very much.’
Conscript service gave him the opportunity to return to Israel in 1964. Like Betser, he joined a paratroop unit (though not the elite Sayeret) and was quickly marked down as a natural soldier. His ‘physical toughness and fierce determination carried him through every exercise. He absorbed with ease the principles of navigation, tactics, weapon-training.’ Promotion followed rapidly, and by early 1966 he had passed out of officer school as the prize cadet.
In 1967, having left the army to resume his academic studies, he was mobilized for the Six-Day War and fought in both the Sinai and on the Golan Heights, receiving a bullet wound in the arm during the latter battle. Once he had recovered he married his girlfriend Tutti and took up a place at Harvard in the United States to study philosophy, physics and mathematics. But though he thrived academically, he soon tired of the anti-Vietnam War atmosphere of the Cambridge campus–the ‘shaggy young men and beaded girls’–and yearned to take part in Israel’s struggle against Fatah and the other Palestinian fedayeen. ‘I hope with all my heart,’ he wrote to his brother Bibi, ‘that my hand will improve enough for me to be able to go back to reserve duty. It’s important because it’s the duty of every good Jew… Each terror operation in Israel strengthens my conviction that the sooner I come back the better… I know I must. If Fatah come to fight, then my responsibility is many times greater. One thing is certain: I am a better soldier than any of them, and my national consciousness is stronger than theirs. If they want war–we have no choice but to fight for our existence.’
He and Tutti returned to Israel in 1968. The following spring he was fortunate to be passed fit by an army medical board. The army doctor, a recent immigrant, had only a flimsy grasp of Hebrew and mistakenly examined Netanyahu’s leg rather than his damaged arm, thus failing to notice that the muscles were still badly wasted and the hand could not be fully straightened. With his new bill of health, Netanyahu joined his younger brother Bibi as a junior officer in the IDF’s finest fighting force: the Unit. At first his men ‘were a little suspicious of his incessant reading, his solitariness, his almost inhumanly high standards’. Yet they gradually came to appreciate his exceptional qualities. ‘They had always sensed his inner strength, his iron resolution. But in the field they began to see this translated into the spirit of a superb fighting commander.’
The initial training of Yoni’s team was thorough and relentless. They ‘began months of navigation practice, route marches, fire exercises and team attacks’. They learned to shoot at figure targets while running, and were taught to close the range at all costs, and never to fight a long-range duel. They practised house clearing in abandoned Golan villages, crawling from stone to stone across open country, and to fire single aimed shots rather than bursts. They acquired specialist skills like first aid, communications, photography and demolition. And they were reminded that every member of the Unit had to act both as a member of a team and as a self-contained soldier who could think for himself.
After a seven-month break from the Unit, commanding a company of the Sayeret Haruv in the Jordan Valley, Yoni returned as a captain in July 1971 and was furious to be barred from the Sabena operation because his younger brother Bibi was taking part. The IDF have a rule that two members of the same family cannot go together on an operation in case both are killed. In the event, Bibi was wounded by friendly fire.
Yoni did, however, take part with Betser in many of the Unit’s subsequent operations: the kidnap of the Syrian intelligence officers from Lebanon in 1972; Operation Spring of Youth and the fighting on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (for which latter action he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal).
By now a single man–his marriage having failed a year earlier–Yoni chose to further his military education, and ease promotion to senior rank, by leaving the Unit in late 1973 to command a tank battalion. There he began a relationship with a pretty young female conscript called Bruria that continued after he was appointed to command the Unit in the summer of 1975. A friend, on hearing he was going back, asked: ‘Why do it? If you stay alive, you’re going to be a general. But if you go on like this, you’re going to be killed. Why push in the queue for hell?’
Yoni’s chief concern was not that he might die in action, but that he would struggle to lead one of the most sensitive, highly bred groups of men in the IDF. It did not help that his predecessor, Giora Zorea, was everything he was not: compulsively frank, open and easy-going, every soldier’s friend. Yoni, on the other hand, was viewed by some members of the Unit as off-hand and tyrannical in his ruthless drive to raise standards.
The tension had still not been properly resolved by the time Yoni received Betser’s call from Ben-Gurion on 28 June 1976. ‘You need us?’ asked Yoni, his voice hard to make out over the patchy radio connection.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Betser. ‘It’s pretty straightforward. I’m planning to use the new method.’
Thorough as ever, Yoni checked that certain key officers, men and matériel were at the airport. Betser said they were.
‘Keep me posted.’
‘Of course.’
Yitzhak Rabin opened the 4 p.m. meeting of the ministerial task force in the downstairs conference room of his Kaplan Street office: ‘The only thing we know for sure right now is that the hijacked plane is Air France.’
He then turned to Justice Minister Chaim Zadok, a portly round-shouldered man with an encyclopaedic legal brain, and asked: ‘What exactly is the legal status of passengers on board that plane?’
‘By law,’ responded Zadok without a pause, ‘the passengers are under French sovereign protection. The French government is responsible for the fate of them all.’
Rabin seemed relieved. ‘Yigal,’ he said to his foreign minister, ‘have your people inform the French government, and tell them we’re issuing a public statement to that effect. Ask Paris to keep us informed of their actions.’
As Allon left the room to telephone his officials, Zadok called after him: ‘And tell them they must make no distinction between the Israeli passengers and the rest.’
‘That goes without saying,’ muttered a huffy Allon.
Moments later Poran returned with a new note that Rabin read out loud: ‘There are 230 passengers* on board, 83 of them Israeli, and 12 crew members. The Libyans have allowed the plane to land at Benghazi.’
The prime minister lit a cigarette. ‘So now at least we know where the passengers are,’ he said frowning. ‘But there are three crucial things we don’t know. We don’t know whether Benghazi will be their final stop. We don’t know who the hijackers are. And we don’t know what their demands will be.’
For the next thirty minutes the ministers discussed these unknowns, including the possibility that the plane would return to Ben-Gurion. They also agreed that Yaacobi, the transport minister, would deal with the media and liaise with the hostages’ families, though he himself thought an Air France representative at Ben-Gurion should be the one to tell them the bad news. This prompted Allon to blurt out: ‘We are in deep trouble.’
‘Yes we are,’ agreed Rabin.
They were interrupted by a message for Allon from Jean Herly, the French ambassador to Israel, which was read to the room. It confirmed that the French government of Jacques Chirac was prepared to take ‘full responsibility for the safety of all the passengers without distinction on Air France Flight 139’, and that it would keep Israel ‘apprised of its actions in this regard’.
Satisfied by this response, Rabin adjourned the meeting but warned the ministers to stay close to their phones. His office then issued an official statement giving a bare outline of the hijacking that recognized France’s assumption of responsibility for the passengers’ wellbeing, and declared that, as Shimon Peres later put it, ‘Israel would not submit to blackmail on the part of the hijackers’.
After a message from the terrorist chief had invited ‘any other women and children’ to move to the comfort of first class, a steady trickle of hostages made their way to the front of the parked plane at Benina International Airport. Of the vacated seats they left behind, one was occupied by Claude Moufflet on the left side of the central block, a little in front of the wings, next to two young Canadian women: twenty-year-old Louise Kourtis and her friend Jo-Anne Rethmetakis, eighteen, both from Montreal. Kourtis, a small pretty girl with chestnut hair and very long varnished nails, was sitting cross-legged on her seat. The slightly taller Rethmetakis, next to the window, wore her brown hair in a ponytail and reminded Moufflet of a ‘Red Indian’, with her ‘great big dark sloping eyes’, ‘slightly hooked nose’ and white even teeth.
They told Moufflet that they were on the plane only because they had got tired and had decided to cut short their tour of Europe by a few days. ‘Our parents aren’t even expecting us until 1 July,’ said Kourtis. ‘So as of now they won’t be worried. They don’t even know we’re on this plane.’
‘Well,’ said Moufflet, trying to reassure them, ‘with a little bit of luck it’s you who will be able to let them know about your adventure, and then they can find out at the same moment about your hijacking as well as your liberation.’
The thought amused the girls, and Kourtis pretended to sulk. ‘Ah yes, but if it did happen like that nobody would believe us.’
Suddenly Rethmetakis became more serious. ‘If it finishes that way,’ she said quietly, ‘then I don’t care if they don’t believe us.’
To Moufflet’s right sat two Moroccan men whispering in heated tones. Eventually the older one turned to him and asked: ‘Shouldn’t we do something?’
This was the second time Moufflet had been forewarned of a potential mutiny and, conscious of the danger, his answer was cautious. ‘Well, perhaps, but what?’
‘I don’t know. Jump on them? Disarm them?’
‘What are you going to do with their pistols and their grenades?’
The younger one responded by saying the grenades had not had their pins taken out.
Moufflet gasped in exasperation. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the ring of the pin which each terrorist had around a finger, ‘you can see very well they’ve had the pins taken out.’
‘Well,’ persisted the older Moroccan, ‘I doubt the guns are loaded.’
‘Well, there is no way we can be certain there are bullets inside. But I, for one, am not going to give them the opportunity to prove it. Are you?’
Seeing the Moroccan hesitate, Moufflet continued: ‘In any case, you’ve already seen that they’re very organized and are part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. You know as well as I do that these people can obtain all kinds of weapons and that there is no chance they’re bluffing.’
‘It’s true,’ said the younger one.
‘So you really think there’s nothing to do?’
‘Certainly not for the moment.’
Up at the front of the plane, where the terrorists had left two big bags of weapons unattended on the seats of Row 1, Michel Cojot was having similar thoughts of rebellion. ‘It was tempting,’ he wrote later. ‘But the terrorists were always well distributed in the plane, and one couldn’t predict what the reaction of the Libyan soldiers would be.’
British Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland was attending a morning session of the second G7 economic conference at the Dorado Beach Resort near San Juan in Puerto Rico with Prime Minister Jim Callaghan when he received a cipher telegram from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London: Reuters had reported the ‘hijacking, and landing at Benghazi, of Air France Flight en route for Paris from Athens (having originated at Lydda [Lod])’.
A public-school- and Oxford-educated socialist who had served as a paratrooper during the Second World War, Crosland began as a university lecturer in economics. But after entering Parliament as a Labour MP in 1950, he wrote the influential The Future of Socialism and became the chief intellectual force behind left-wing ‘revisionism’. For the first two years of Harold Wilson’s second Labour government, Crosland served in the Cabinet as environment secretary. When Wilson resigned as prime minister on 5 April 1976, Crosland threw his hat into the ring in the leadership contest of the ruling Labour Party. But on falling at the first hurdle, he supported the eventual winner and new prime minister James Callaghan, and the vital portfolio of foreign affairs, for which he had no experience, was his reward.
His first couple of months in the job were dominated by two main issues: the ‘Cod War’ between British and Icelandic fishermen which Crosland defused with some canny diplomacy; and the long-term future of Rhodesia which, since Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in 1965, had been ravaged by a guerilla war between the white government and black rebels. Crosland’s attempts to broker a deal between the two sides that would usher in majority rule had already, he felt, been undermined by some clumsy interventions by Dr Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state.
The news that an Air France plane had been hijacked was, by contrast, a relatively minor matter. Concerned that British citizens might be involved, Crosland wired the British ambassador in Tripoli: ‘Grateful for any details you or Athens or Tel Aviv can obtain of (A) British subjects among passengers (B) Present situation of aircraft and passengers (C) Identity and motives of hijackers.’
At about the same time that the British government was trying to find out if any of its nationals were on the hijacked plane still parked at Benina International Airport, one of them was making an audacious bid for freedom. Her name was Patricia Martell, a thirty-year-old nurse from Manchester who had recently emigrated to Israel with her Leeds-born husband Howard. She was returning to Britain to attend the funeral of her mother when the hijacking intervened. Determined not to miss the service, she was prepared to do almost anything to escape. ‘I had to get off that plane,’ she remembered, ‘and that’s all there was to it. I wasn’t scared.’
Her first thought was to feign a heart or asthma attack. But eventually she decided on a fake miscarriage, though not pregnant. She ‘screwed up her face in simulated agony’, blanched, perspired and ‘began to twist and turn with pain’. Then she called to the female terrorist: ‘I’m pregnant… second month… I think something’s happening to me…’
‘I’ll call a doctor,’ the girl said, before moving Martell up the plane to a bigger seat in first class. A minute or two later a doctor appeared: David Bass, forty, a US-born surgeon who had emigrated to Israel in 1972 and was working as head of gastroenterology at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. The hijackers had checked, soon after taking control of the aircraft, if any of the hostages had medical training. ‘I’m bluffing,’ murmured Martell. ‘I must get out of here.’
Bass was aghast. ‘You’re better off on the plane than in Libya,’ he insisted.
But Martell would not be deterred and a second opinion was sought from a Libyan doctor who, when he first came on board, pronounced her a fraud. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her,’ he said. ‘Just frightened that’s all.’
He changed his mind when Martell showed him her menstrual blood as ‘proof’ she was about to miscarry. He needed to take her with him for emergency treatment, he told the terrorists, or she might lose her child. After some debate, they decided to let her go. It was the start of the hijacking, recalled Martell, and the terrorists were ‘very uptight and very nervous. The woman hijacker realized that if I miscarried there would be a hell of a mess. It wasn’t worth their while. I wasn’t that important.’
The terrorists were not the only ones who were duped. Sitting across from Martell in first class were Olivier Cojot and his father. ‘All of a sudden,’ remembered Olivier, ‘I see she’s bleeding. I was convinced she was having a miscarriage.’
As she was led off the plane, Martell turned to the Cojots and whispered: ‘Good luck.’
While the other members of the Cabinet committee remained in Jerusalem to await news of the plane, Defense Minister Shimon Peres hurried back to his office in the Kirya complex in Tel Aviv to consult with the IDF chief of staff, Mordechai ‘Motta’ Gur.
Born Szymon Perski in 1923, the son of a Polish lumber merchant, Peres had played a key role in the security of the Israeli state since its creation in 1948. Having emigrated to the then British Mandate of Palestine with his family at the age of eleven, he had lived for a time on a kibbutz and was later elected secretary of a Labour Zionist youth movement. His route into politics, however, was via the Haganah–the Jewish defence organization that later became the core of the IDF–which he joined in 1947 on the advice of David Ben-Gurion, the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine and soon to become Israel’s first prime minister. Peres’s job was to mobilize new manpower and procure arms for the Haganah/IDF. Though he did not fight on the front line, he played a significant part in Israel’s hard-fought victory in the eighteen-month First War of Independence (1948–9). This paved the way for his meteoric rise in Israel’s Ministry of Defense, culminating in his appointment in 1953 as director-general, or senior permanent official, at the age of just twenty-nine.
As the Defense Ministry’s top official, Peres was responsible for arms purchases and establishing strategic alliances. The most important was with France, enabling Israel to acquire the latest weapons–including the modern Dassault Mirage III jet fighter–and the Dimona nuclear reactor that had become active in 1963. He was elected to Israel’s unicameral parliament, the Knesset, in 1959 and eight years later joined the Labor Party–a social democrat and Zionist organization that had been formed out of various left-wing parties. From 1970 to 1974 he served in Golda Meir’s Labor government as minister of transport. When Meir was forced to resign as both prime minister and leader of the Labor Party in 1974, bowing to mounting criticism that her government had failed to anticipate the Yom Kippur War–when Israel’s intelligence services and the IDF was caught badly off guard by sudden and coordinated Arab attacks–Peres stood as her successor. But he was narrowly defeated by his politically inexperienced rival Yitzhak Rabin and had to make do with the post of minister of defense.
It was not an appointment Rabin wanted to make. ‘I did not consider Shimon Peres suitable,’ he explained, ‘since he had never fought in the IDF and his expertise in arms purchasing did not make up for that lack of experience.’ But as other members of the Labor Party wanted Peres to receive the defense portfolio, and Rabin was loath to split the party, he approved the appointment ‘with a heavy heart’. It was an error he would later ‘regret’.
Their political alliance, as a result, was one of expediency rather than shared convictions, and Rabin always suspected Peres of trying to undermine his premiership. Peres denied the charge, insisting that he ‘served the 1974–77 government, and the man who led it, loyally, fully shouldering the collective responsibility of a cabinet minister’. Short and stocky, with swept-back greying hair and a handsome, heavily lined face, Peres looked every inch the soldier he had never been. Instead he was a consummate politician who resented the fact that Rabin, militarily experienced but a political neophyte, had beaten him to the premiership.
Peres’s main priority on hearing of the Air France hijacking was to prevent the Israeli government from caving in to blackmail. It was to that end that he rushed back to Tel Aviv during the late afternoon of 27 June to talk to the IDF chief of staff Motta Gur, a man he had known since the 1950s and who had always impressed him ‘as a straight talker with a firm grasp of strategy’. Seven years Peres’s junior, Gur had fought with the elite Palmach branch of the Haganah before joining the IDF. He had since commanded the Golani Brigade and served for a time as the IDF’s chief of operations. But he came to national prominence as the commander of the paratroop brigade that ‘liberated’ the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, and was the choice of both Moshe Dayan and Peres to succeed David Elazar when the latter stepped down as IDF chief of staff in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.
Since their respective appointments, Peres and Gur had striven to rebuild and strengthen the Israeli army. They ‘worked well together’, Peres wrote later, often ‘as many as eighteen or twenty hours a day’. The ‘general mood of aftershock and depression that pervaded the nation’ after the Yom Kippur War had made them ‘doubly aware’ of their ‘responsibilities at the head of the nation’s defenses’. Peres had ‘full confidence’ in Gur and gave him his ‘total political support’. Together they groomed ‘a new generation of promising officers, among them Dan Shomron and Ehud Barak’, to lay ‘the groundwork for what came to be called the “long-arm option”–a capacity to strike hard and fast at targets far beyond our immediate frontiers’.
When Peres met with Gur and his aides on 27 June, however, their discussion centred on the possibility that the hijackers might bring the Air France plane back to Ben-Gurion. If they did, their preferred option was to use the Unit to storm the plane as it had during the Sabena hijacking in 1972 when Peres, as minister of transport, worked alongside Moshe Dayan, the defense minister, ‘during a long night of negotiation and preparation’. Once again, Peres intended to be at the centre of the action and was only awaiting news of the plane’s departure from Benghazi before he made his way to the airport.
Barely an hour after Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland’s request for information on the Air France hijacking, a cipher telegram from the British Embassy in Athens was decoded in the FCO’s imposing George Gilbert Scott-designed Italianate headquarters in King Charles Street. It read: ‘Air France Office here say that 2 British subjects embarked at Athens: A Mr G. Good and a Mr C. Russell… They say the aircraft is still at Benghazi. Nationality of hijackers unknown.’ It then confirmed Good’s and Russell’s passport numbers, year of birth (1911 and 1921 respectively) and the fact that both had entered Greece on 17 June.
The news that at least two of the Air France passengers were British prompted Crosland, still in Puerto Rico, to cable his embassies in Tripoli (the capital of Libya) and Paris with an exhortation for the former to ‘keep in close touch with your French colleague’ who, it was assumed, would be leading the negotiations to free the hostages. He added: ‘We should be grateful if Paris could likewise liaise closely with appropriate French authorities and… keep us and Tripoli informed of French plans to secure release of passengers and aircraft.’
The response from Sir Donald Murray, the British ambassador to Libya and a former Royal Marine commando, was that the Embassy at Tripoli was ‘keeping in close touch’ with its French colleagues and had passed them Good’s and Russell’s details. ‘We have also,’ he continued, ‘told them that we understand from BBC reports that there are a number of Commonwealth citizens aboard as well. They have undertaken to pass this information to French consul in Benghazi, who is at Benghazi Airport, when they next speak to him. Second Secretary (R. D. Lamb), who happened to be visiting Benghazi, has been instructed to liaise closely with French Consulate there.’
Murray had yet to be informed that the dual Israeli–British national Mrs Patricia Martell (née Hayman) had been released, and that Lamb had spoken to her. That news would reach London later that evening.
Four hours after their arrival at Benina International Airport, while many passengers were stretching their legs in the aisles, the terrorist chief gave the first hint of Flight 139’s future destination. ‘Sit down,’ he instructed over the intercom. ‘We are preparing for a flight of about three hours. We will serve you something to eat in a short while. It is still forbidden to smoke and we will let you know when you can.’
The news prompted Claude Moufflet to check on the map in his diary the possible airports that were within the requisite flying time from Libya. Eliminating anything to the south, he settled on Baghdad in Iraq as the most likely objective and said as much to his neighbours. This prompted a flurry of questions from the two young Canadians: ‘Where is it?’ ‘Is it an Arab country?’ ‘Is the government an ally of the terrorists?’ ‘Will they put us in prison?’
To stop the girls from worrying unnecessarily, Moufflet replied ‘as vaguely as possible’ before immersing himself in a crossword puzzle.
Moments later, perhaps regretting his earlier decision to allow Mrs Martell to leave the plane, the terrorist chief issued a warning over the intercom. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we don’t want all of you to start inventing illnesses so that you can get off the plane. You have been warned. We have a doctor here. Do not try to trick us. If you do you’ll be severely punished.’
To relieve the tension, the terrorists told the crew to serve the food that had been intended as lunch on the original flight, complete with plastic trays and cake as pudding. Akiva Laxer, a thirty-year-old Tel Aviv lawyer who had been en route to the Montreal Olympic Games, was astonished to be given the same gefilte fish he had pre-ordered for the flight in Israel. As he ate it he mused on the irony of an Orthodox Jew ‘sitting on a hijacked plane in Benghazi eating kosher fish from Israel’. He also cursed his bad luck at having been present at two of Israel’s most infamous terrorist atrocities–the Lod Massacre in 1972 followed a few months later by the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games–and now this hijacking. Was he the common denominator?
Claude Moufflet decided to keep his cake, orange juice and a little water for the long night ahead. A can of Schweppes fizzy drink he gave to the grateful young Canadians. Medical student Moshe Peretz thought the cold supper was ‘not bad’. He noted in his makeshift diary that ‘the stewards serve cans of juice, with Arab inscriptions’ and that the female German terrorist was ‘the sort who gets things together fast’. If anyone wanted to go to the toilet, they had to raise their hand and she would shout an order for them to go. But when two passengers got up at the same time she screamed ‘like a veritable animal’.
An hour later a new message came over the intercom, informing the passengers that despite a few technical difficulties the preparations for the onward flight were almost complete. Already 5,500 gallons of kerosene had been added to the fuel tanks; only another 2,000 gallons were needed. ‘The aeroplane has been checked,’ said the chief terrorist. ‘It’s in good condition and our departure is now estimated at 2100hrs local time.’
That time came and went. But shortly before 9.30 p.m. Libyan time (GMT + 2 hours) the passengers were told to sit down and buckle their seatbelts for takeoff. A few minutes later the two General Electric CF6-50 engines roared into life and the plane began its long taxi to the main runway. At 9.50 p.m., the Airbus rose into the night sky and headed south.
Peretz scribbled: ‘At long last, in the air. Unbelievable. After 6½ hours on the ground. Our treatment is fairly good. But where are we flying? To Damascus? Baghdad? Beirut? Tel Aviv? Or Paris? The passengers conduct a kind of lottery about the destination of our flight. We speak freely to one another, with the unknown factors being our destination and the hijackers’ demands.’
Major Muki Betser was still at Ben-Gurion International Airport with the Unit’s anti-terrorist team when word reached him that the hijacked Air France plane had taken off from Benghazi. Aware that the plane was just three hours’ flying time from Ben-Gurion, he called his men into the briefing room and conducted a final review of the assault plan for the benefit of Major-General Yekutiel ‘Kuti’ Adam, the IDF’s chief of operations and deputy chief of staff.
Born near Tel Aviv in 1919, and therefore a Sabra Israeli–literally a ‘prickly pair’ or native Jew–who spoke Hebrew as his native tongue, Adam had joined the Haganah at the age of fifteen and later transferred to the IDF. A soldier’s soldier with an extravagant Zapata mustache and extensive combat experience to match, he also possessed a keen analytical mind that had been honed by two years’ study at France’s War Academy in the 1960s. He, like his political master Peres, regarded military action as the only response to terrorism, and was convinced that the men of the Unit were up to the task if the plane returned.
With the briefing over, Adam gave his authorization for an assault. Now there was nothing more that Betser and his men could do but wait.
While Betser was still briefing Adam, word finally reached the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London that ‘a British subject, a Mrs Neman (They are not sure of the exact spelling), has been allowed to leave the plane’. The cipher telegram from the British Embassy in Paris added: ‘She is, as far as the Quai [d’Orsay, the French foreign office] know, the only person allowed to do so.’
More detailed and up-to-date information was provided twenty minutes later by a cable from Sir Donald Murray at Tripoli:
Aircraft left Benghazi at 2149hrs local time (GMT Plus 2).
Heading South. Beyond taking on food, water and fuel, hijackers made no requests at Benghazi. The aircraft is said to have four and one half hours endurance.
One sick passenger, a British nurse, Miss Patricia Suzanne Hayman (Passport No. L989499, issued April 1975), was allowed to disembark at Benghazi. She will travel to Tripoli and on to London tomorrow.
Hayman saw 2 Arab and 2 non Arab hijackers, whom she described as very nervous. They have placed explosives in the aircraft. She said the morale of the passengers was holding up excellently.
Please try and inform Hayman’s next of kin (her mother has just died). Second Secretary [R. D. Lamb] was unable to obtain her home address before she was whisked away by the Libyan authorities.
The confusion over Mrs Martell’s name was down to the fact that she had only married a few weeks earlier and still possessed a passport in the name of Miss Hayman. Met in Tripoli a day later by Sir Donald Murray, she was described as ‘well but still somewhat shaken’. She later admitted that her ruse to get off the plane was ‘pretty stupid’. She added: ‘It could have gone very wrong, but it didn’t and it paid off.’
Mrs Martell arrived back at Heathrow on a scheduled Libyan Airways flight in the early afternoon of Monday 28 June and was met by Scotland Yard and a member of the Mossad–Israel’s highly effective foreign intelligence service–who was attached to the Israeli Embassy. In her subsequent interview she confirmed there were four terrorists: two Arabs from the PFLP and two that sounded German. They were later identified as members of a little-known radical left-wing terrorist organization known as the Revolutionary Cells (RC, or Revolutionäre Zellen in German). Their names: Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann.
Born in 1949 in the beautiful historic Bavarian town of Bamberg, Wilfried Bonifatius (‘Boni’) Böse was a warm-hearted and jovial young man who liked to relax by drinking the local Franconian wine and eating bratwurst. But the former sociology student at Frankfurt University was also a committed political activist who, like many founding members of both the RC and the more notorious Red Army Faktion* (RAF, better known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang), had played a leading role ‘in the student and protest movement in the late 1960s and had been involved in a range of leftist groups and local initiatives’. They included the Black Panther Solidarity Committee (Black-Panther-Solidaritätskomitee)–modelled on the revolutionary Marxist Black Panther Party in the US–that ‘sought to organize educational work about and active support for the Black Panthers in Germany’. This ‘identification with the countercultural style, the readiness to use violence, and the radical anti-imperialist stance of the Black Panthers played a decisive role in the radicalization’ of Böse and other founding members of the RC and RAF.
Another common denominator among many early members of the RC–including Böse, Johannes Weinrich and Gerd Schnepel–is that they either sold or published leftist literature before joining the armed struggle. In Frankfurt in 1970, Böse and Weinrich founded the left-wing publishing house Red Star (Roter Stern), producing many books on revolutionary struggle and armed rebellion. Schnepel was running a leftist bookstore and publishing house when he decided that ‘political literature and legal forms of protest alone’ were not enough to force through fundamental political change. Aware of the ‘cruelties’ done in the name of capitalism, he felt duty bound to act. Yet it was Böse, a ‘bustling organizational talent and key actor in the radical leftist scene’, who seems to have been the ‘driving force’ behind the formation of the Revolutionary Cells in 1973.
Brigitte Kuhlmann, co-founder of the RC and the female terrorist on Flight 139, was two years older than Böse. A plain serious-looking woman of medium height–her mother once said to her, ‘You are not pretty, this is sure, but you are interesting’–she was born in the north German city of Hanover in Lower Saxony and studied pedagogy (the science of teaching) before moving to Frankfurt where she worked with handicapped children. Like Böse, she ‘moved within radical leftist circles and knew leading members of the RAF’. She was also ‘a feminist who enjoyed life but had a strong sense of social and pedagogical responsibility’. She had been in a relationship with Böse, but was sleeping with Schnepel prior to the Air France operation. Schnepel thought she was ‘women’s lib, anti-authoritarian, resolute and honest’, a ‘friendly, caring person with social commitment’.
Kuhlmann formed the original Revolutionary Cell with Böse and Weinrich in Frankfurt in 1973; Schnepel was recruited soon afterwards. Within five years there were eleven cells across West Germany: four in Frankfurt and its environs, and others in Berlin, the Ruhr and south Germany. Each cell was composed of three to five members and acted autonomously of the others; no RC member used their real name, and to reduce the risk of betrayal only one person in each cell communicated with the other groups. Often the members of local groups were–like Böse, Kuhlmann and Schnepel–‘friends or lovers and lived or worked together’. Moreover they divided tasks equally, sharing domestic chores like cooking and washing up, with only ‘occasional relapses in “typical” [gender-specific] behaviour’.
The core beliefs of the RC were a mixture of left-wing anti-imperialist liberation doctrine with strong anti-Zionist, anti-patriarchal and anti-racist elements. Rejecting ‘the dogmatism and elitism of the RAF’, they wanted to ‘create small nuclei of resistance, who work autonomously in different spheres of society, and who fight, intervene… [and] form a part of the political mass movement’. They believed that members should remain part of mainstream German society, in contrast to the more elitist RAF which thought that revolutionaries should be wholly ‘underground’ (outside the mainstream socio-political system). Many members of the RC ‘led a double life for years without arousing suspicion’ and, as a result, were sometimes referred to as Feierabendterroristen (‘after-work terrorists’).
The RC’s early terror attacks were mostly bombings of foreign (chiefly US) businesses, courts and railway ticket machines using homemade explosives that resulted in few casualties. There was even one with an openly feminist agenda when female RC members–including, most likely, Kuhlmann–bombed the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe in March 1975 to protest against the court’s recent decision to block the decriminalization of abortion. But soon Kuhlmann, Böse and Weinrich began to forge links with various international terror groups like the IRA, the Red Brigades in Italy and especially Wadie Haddad’s offshoot of the PFLP. They did this, according to Schnepel, because they were keen to ‘strengthen the group’ by cooperating with other terror organizations that shared their basic left-wing political philosophy. They saw the Palestinians’ anti-Zionist cause as part of a wider anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle that was loosely characterized as ‘world revolution’.
But there was also a practical reason: if they were part of the international hostage-taking process they could force the German government to release some of its political prisoners. ‘There were a lot of differences with the Red Army Faktion,’ said Schnepel, ‘but we felt it was an obligation on all of us to do anything that we could to free them. And so the connection with Wadie Haddad seemed to be a promising way to succeed in this idea.’
No one felt this obligation more than Kuhlmann. She blamed herself for Ulrike Meinhof’s arrest in 1972 because she had recommended a safe house in Langenhagen. Unfortunately the owner, a teacher, became suspicious that he was harbouring a member of the RAF and called the police. By 1974, many of the other RAF leaders–Baader, Ensslin and Raspe–were also behind bars and Kuhlmann and her comrades were determined to free them.
The first joint operation with Wadie Haddad’s PFLP was at Paris’s Orly Airport in January 1975 when Johannes Weinrich and Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’) tried to shoot down an El Al plane with a Russian-made RPG-7 (rocket-propelled grenade launcher). But Weinrich missed with both shots and was later arrested in Frankfurt for providing the cars used in the attack. He jumped bail while awaiting trial and in 1977 became Carlos’s right-hand man.
With Weinrich on the run, a second RC terrorist called Hans-Joachim Klein teamed up with Carlos for an even more spectacular Haddad operation: an attack on the OPEC (oil producers) Conference in Vienna in December 1975. Their intention was to kidnap the oil ministers, fly them out of Vienna to a ‘friendly’ destination and release them only on receipt of a ransom and a pro-Palestine statement by their governments. If the demands were not met, the ministers were to be executed.
As well as Klein, the Jackal’s commando included a second German terrorist, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann of the anarchist Movement 2 June (J2M), a Palestinian and two Libyans. On 21 December they stormed the building hosting the conference, killing three people and taking sixty-two hostages (including eleven oil ministers). In the ensuing gun battle with police, Klein was wounded in the stomach. But after treatment in a Vienna hospital he was allowed to rejoin the terrorists and the bulk of their hostages for a flight to Algeria. After a short detour to Libya, the plane returned to Algeria and the hostages were released in return for an unspecified ransom of up to $20 million (allegedly paid by Saudi Arabia) and safe passage out of the country.
Wadie Haddad, however, was unimpressed. According to Bassam Abu-Sharif of the PFLP, ‘none of the financial and political objectives of this immensely complex operation’ had been met and Haddad considered it to be ‘a complete failure’. Carlos had ‘missed a fabulous opportunity’. On the Jackal’s return to the PFLP’s training camp in the South Yemen, Haddad told him he had developed a ‘star complex’ and that there was ‘no room for stars in my operational teams’. He was ordered to go.
And so the Jackal left Haddad’s PFLP to strike out on his own, telling Bassam that he was thinking of setting up a direct-action group in South America where there were ‘plenty of fascists who needed sorting out’. Bassam was not convinced. He felt the Jackal did not have the organizational ability to run a terrorist group. He was an ‘executioner’ rather than a ‘mastermind’, and ‘for once he had failed to execute’.
Undeterred by the Jackal’s failure, Haddad began plotting a new operation with the RC: the hijacking of a plane carrying Israeli passengers to France. His PFLP would provide two of the four-man commando, Khaled al-Khalili and Ali al-Ma’ati, both young Palestinians on their first mission (and wearing, respectively, yellow and red shirts during the hijacking); the RC leaders Boni Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann would make up the balance, with Böse in overall command.
Böse had already trained at Haddad’s camp in the desert of South Yemen. Now it was Kuhlmann’s turn, along with her boyfriend Gerd Schnepel, who was preparing for future missions. As well as cleaning, repairing and firing weapons–including pistols, automatic rifles and even bazookas–they learned how to handle and prime grenades and explosives. But their most effective training was psychological: how to control and speak to hostages. Kuhlmann, in particular, was told by Haddad to keep her distance and not feel sorry for them. ‘We were told to treat it as a military action,’ remembered Schnepel, ‘and not go round offering tea to the hostages.’
Schnepel is convinced that a combination of this training and the fact that Kuhlmann might have felt that as a woman she had to be ‘tougher’ than the men of the commando is the reason why some of the Jewish hostages from Air France Flight 139 later claimed she had behaved like a ‘Nazi’. In reality, he says, ‘Brigitte was very kind, very caring… She was normally a soft person, but at the same time she was very disciplined.’
Kuhlmann did not give Schnepel any details about her and Böse’s mission. Instead she simply told him that he wouldn’t hear from her for some time, adding: ‘Then hopefully I’ll come back. But it’s a dangerous operation.’ When he asked if he could go with her, she refused to answer.
In possession of the latest intelligence from Benghazi, Yitzhak Rabin called a second meeting of the ministerial committee in his office in Jerusalem at 10.20 p.m. Present were Allon, Yaacobi, Zadok and Galili, but not Peres who was still in the Kirya in Tel Aviv conferring with Chief of Staff Gur.
‘Here is the new information,’ said Rabin, scanning a dossier in front of him. ‘The plane was seven hours on the ground at Benghazi, for refuelling. One passenger, a pregnant woman, was released. The plane took off… We have no idea where the plane is heading now. Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion Airport is on the highest alert. As for the identity of the attackers, it seems there are four–two Arabs from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and two Germans from a terrorist splinter group calling itself the “Revolutionary Cells”. That’s as much as we know.’
As the subsequent ‘anxious’ discussion added nothing to the ‘sum total of knowledge or ideas’, Rabin brought the meeting to a close and left for his private residence. He was to be contacted immediately if there was any news.
Still unaware of the plane’s final destination, though vaguely conscious that it was heading south, the passengers tried to sleep. But for some it was impossible. There were loud squabbles over seats and then, from the front of the plane, a woman’s anguished screams as she contemplated the full gravity of her predicament. She fell silent only when the female terrorist Brigitte Kuhlmann, her face ‘mean and full of hate’, threatened to shoot her.
As the plane flew on, Michel Cojot noticed that the new ‘captain’–Wilfried Böse, a man he described as ‘a blond, chubby German about thirty years-old’–‘began to spend more time with the passengers, trying to smile and even to joke’. He went to ‘great lengths to calm his companions, especially the two young Arabs, who were still very nervous’. Gradually they became ‘less tense and some passengers went to sleep’. Even young Olivier ‘stopped asking questions and dozed off’ on his father’s shoulder. ‘I thought about possible landing places,’ recorded Cojot. ‘I was very much afraid of the south of the Arabian Peninsula: South Yemen or, worse, the Dofar Province in rebellion. I preferred a well-established sovereign state with a seat in the United Nations and numerous diplomatic ties.’
More than three hours after the hijacked plane had left Benghazi–about the time it would take to fly from there to Israel–Muki Betser and the Unit’s anti-terrorist team were on high alert in a small hangar at Ben-Gurion International Airport when General Adam walked in with Defense Minister Shimon Peres. ‘Several of the soldiers were inside,’ recorded Peres, ‘looking serious and businesslike. They showed no signs of tension.’
Asked by Adam to go over the plan’s essentials once again for Peres, Betser did so, ‘tapping at the airport map’ on the wall behind him, and ‘counting off “Positions One, Two, Three, and Four” for each of the squads’.
He continued: ‘Here’s the runway, the control tower will direct the plane to here.’ He pointed at a runway marked on the map. ‘And as always,’ he concluded, ‘if we take the initiative, we can control the events. Any questions?’
A few soldiers asked some technical questions and then the room fell silent. ‘Does anyone here want to comment?’ asked Peres from the rear of the hangar.
Nobody spoke.
‘Anyone here take part in the Sabena operation?’ persisted Peres.
A soldier named Danny raised his hand.
‘Do you want to comment on the plan?’
‘No.’
‘Well then,’ said Peres. ‘I wish you all luck.’
But, instead of leaving, Peres called Betser, Adam, the latter’s assistant Colonel Avigdor ‘Yanosh’ Ben-Gal and Colonel Ran Bag, the head of counter-terrorism in the Infantry and Paratroop Command (who had spent the day refining details of the plan with Betser), into a side room. As the door closed behind them, Peres asked: ‘Why this way and not the Sabena method?’
Because, explained an exasperated Betser, it was a mistake to use the same method twice.
Adam backed him up. ‘They demonstrated it last week to the General Staff,’ he told Peres. ‘It works.’
‘Okay,’ said Peres. ‘Approved.’
Peres departed, leaving Betser and his men ‘to wait for the plane’s appearance’. As the night wore on, reports came in that the plane had headed south, not east, ‘over the Sahara, into Africa, and far from our purview’. Betser had still not ruled out the possibility of the plane appearing ‘on a surprise route over southern Egypt and then up the Red Sea’. But by dawn the plane had ‘disappeared into central Africa’, and Betser finally called off the alert at the airport and headed back to base.