TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capts.11

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                                                                                June 24, 1985

COVER STORY

Terror Aboard Flight 847


Muslim hijackers hold Americans hostage on a murderous journey


Millions around the world watched their television sets or
listened to their radios as the horrific drama unfolded. "He
has pulled a hand-grenade pin and is ready to blow up the
aircraft if he has to. We must, I repeat, we must land at
Beirut. We must land at Beirut. No alternative."  After much
delay, the curious, grudging reply of the Beirut control tower:
"Very well. Land. Land quietly. Land quietly."  Then another
desperate plea:  "The are beating the passengers. They are
threatening to kill the passengers. We want fuel now.
Immediately. Five minutes at most, or he is going to kill the
passengers."  After that, another, more excited, more hostile
voice, in broken English:  "The plane is booby-trapped. If
anyone approaches, we will blow it up. Either refueling the
plane or blowing it up. No alternative."

After airport authorities complied, the stricken plane took off
from Beirut, where it had landed after having been hijacked out
of Athens. Hours later, it landed in Algiers, then took off
again and returned late that night to Beirut, the tension
rising, the crew bone-weary. And minutes after landing, the
senseless slaying of a hostage, and a harsh voice over the
plane's radio:  "You see?  You now believe it. There will be
another in five minutes," and the nightmare rolled on.

In the beginning, the hijackers were outnumbered by their
captives 153 to 2, and U.S. authorities tended to believe that
the terrorists would soon be overwhelmed by exhaustion if
nothing else. By Sunday morning, however, with the plane on the
ground in Algiers, the ranks of the hijackers had swelled to
between twelve and 15, and all but 32 male American passengers
and crewmen had been released (another passenger was later freed
in order to receive medical treatment). The gunmen set a 10 a.m.
deadline (5 a.m. E.D.T.) for their demands to be met, but then
inexplicably left Algiers more than an hour ahead of time. Once
again, their destination was Beirut. On landing there, they
demanded the release of 50 fellow Shi'ite Muslims currently
detained in Israel; such a gesture was justified, the hijackers
said, by their freeing of three American men the night before
in Algiers. The terrorists had been seeking the release of 700
Shi'ites from Israel custody, and this appeared to be the first
step in realizing that goal. If Israel and presumably the U.S.
balked, declared the hijackers, "our blood will be a witness."

Tension and deep fatigue had marked the TWA jetliner's third
arrival at Beirut. Not only was the crew frazzled, but the
plane was thought to be in need of maintenance. Beirut
authorities had again tried to refuse permission to land, but
had been overruled by the hijackers and by a desperate-sounding
pilot who said he had only five minutes' worth of fuel. Even
as he prepared to land, Shi'ite militiamen around the airport
fired their weapons out to sea, at what they said was an Israeli
gunboat. The lives of remaining passengers and crew were
obviously still in danger. But particularly disturbing was the
news that on the plane's second stop in Beirut the previous
night, some six or eight passengers with Jewish-sounding
surnames had been hastily removed from the aircraft in the
darkness. In effect, this meant that the well-organized
hijackers had created a hostage crisis within a hostage crisis,
and there was no end in sight.

For the U.S., it was no ordinary sky-jacking, no incident
involving some troubled soul who needed to be jollied or
sweet-talked or strong-armed out of a free ride to Havana or
Timbuktu. It was an American plane, Trans World Airlines'
Flight 847 on its leg from Athens to Rome, with 153 passengers
and crew members aboard, at least 100 of whom were Americans.
Most important, the hijackers were identified by an accomplice
as members of Islamic Jihad (or Holy War), the shadowy Shi'ite
Muslim organization that is regarded as a sort of umbrella for
various fundamentalist terror groups operating in Lebanon and
other Middle East countries Sympathetic to Iran's revolutionary
ruler, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and quite possibly
subsidized by the Iranian leadership, Islamic Jihad and its
confederates are blamed for many of the suicide bombing missions
that have afflicted American and other Western military bases
and diplomatic missions in the Middle East in the past two
years.

On a political level, the hijackers of Flight 847 called for
the release not only of the Lebanese SHi'ites still held by
Israel, but of a few others imprisoned in Cyprus and Kuwait.
They also demanded the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces
from southern Lebanon (a pullout has been under way since
January and, except for patrols and forays back into the border
area, is now virtually complete) and international condemnation
of the U.S. and Israel. In a broader sense, the Shi'ites of
Lebanon, newly radicalized by the violence that has plagued
their country, particularly since the Israeli invasion of June
1982, are seeking a fairer shake after generations of neglect
and discrimination by Lebanon's wealthier and more powerful
Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. Beyond all that, the
Shi'ite fanatical fringe, inspired by the example of the
Iranian revolution, wants to destroy the last vestiges of
Western "decadence" in the Islamic world, particularly the
presence of the U.S., that "Great Satan."  Whether the hijackers
of Flight 847 fitted into that category, or were exemplars of
a more classical political terrorism, bent on achieving specific
ends in the region, was not yet known.

This was the first hijacking of an American airliner in the
Middle East since Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, and
the Administration was deeply disturbed. It was convinced that
the hijackers of Flight 847 were in the same league as the ones
who seized a Kuwaiti airliner last December, took it to Tehran
and eventually killed two American passengers. That incident
ended when the Iranians sent a platoon of security men aboard
the plane dressed as a maintenance crew. The hijackers were
arrested, but there is no evidence that they were ever brought
to justice.

As Flight 847 zigzagged around the Mediterranean, the
Administration faced the vexing question of what it should, or
could, do to respond to the crisis. By 9 a.m. Friday, a working
group chaired by Robert Oakley, chief of the State Department's
office for combatting terrorism, had gathered next to Secretary
of State George Shultz's office in the State Department's
antiterrorism suite. The group set to work on a 24-hour watch,
monitoring events, establishing communication lines, serving as
liaison to the various foreign governments involved, soothing
the families of hostages and working out options for U.S.
action. That evening, the Administration dispatched
antiterrorist Delta Force units from West Germany and Fort
Bragg, N.C., to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean; the 40-
to 50- man units are trained in such skills as
counterintelligence and commando operations, but they have never
been used to storm a pirated airliner.

When asked later in the day what the U.S. was doing to help,
the President replied, "Everything that can be done."  But when
asked if it were true that Washington had threatened to
retaliate against Iran if any U.S. hostages were harmed by
Islamic fundamentalists, Reagan said flatly, "I can't answer
that."

In fact, Shultz had warned Iran months ago that if any of the
Americans kidnaped in Beirut were executed by its Lebanese
surrogates, Iran would suffer the consequences. Precisely what
that means would have to be carefully determined, but the U.S.
has long since learned that it is difficult to retaliate against
so amorphous an enemy as the Lebanese fanatics. Their
headquarters and even their whereabouts are hard to pin down,
and their precise links with Iran are not easy to define. As
Friday turned to Saturday and the ordeal continued, the
President remained in touch with the situation from his weekend
retreat at Camp David, telling National Security Adviser Robert
McFarlane:  "Let's do all we can to support the Algerians. Our
main objective is to get those people out safely."  Shultz
canceled a trip to Evanston, Ill., where he had planned to
accept an honorary degree from Northwestern University, and Vice
President George Bush returned early from a trip to Texas. The
President cut short his stay at Camp David and late Sunday
morning flew back to Washington, where he told reporters, "I
think we're going to continue doing the things we're doing and
just hope that they themselves [the hijackers] will see that,
for their own safety, they'd better turn those people loose."
He then attended an early afternoon meeting of the National
Security Council. Presumably on the agenda were such subjects
as a possible approach to Israel concerning the status of its
Shi'ite Muslim prisoners, and a consideration of what if any
military contingency plans should be made. Afterward, the
White House issued a terse statement:  "We do not make
concessions to demands, and we do not encourage other
governments to do so."

The hijacking of Flight 847 had begun Friday morning when the
plane, a Boeing 727 that had taken off from Cairo two hours
earlier, landed at Athens and took on additional passengers.
Among them were 24 members of three Roman Catholic churches from
towns in northeastern Illinois, who had spent a fortnight
visiting the Holy Land. Also among them were two well-dressed
young Arabs carrying shoulder bags who had arrived from Cairo
the day before. Along with a third man, they spent the night
in the airport lounge, waiting to board the TWA plane. As it
turned out, only two of the men managed to get seats on the
crowded flight; the third, after arguing with TWA officials,was
forced to stay behind. He was later arrested at the airport by
Greek police and identified as Ali Atwa, 21, an air-conditioning
technician from southern Lebanon. He identified his
confederates as Ahmed Gharbiyeh and Ali Youness, both 20 and
also Lebanese.

According to police, Atwa said he and the others were members
of Islamic Jihad, a claim later affirmed by an anonymous caller
in Beirut and then disputed in a statement delivered to news
agencies there. The confusion may stem from Iran's recent
efforts to play down its connections with terrorists in hopes
of winning international support for its 4 1/2-year struggle
against Iraq. Atwa told police that his friends had managed to
smuggle two grenades and a 9-mm pistol through the airport's
X-ray machines by wrapping the weapons in fiber glass
insulation.

Scarcely 20 minutes after the plane had taken off for Rome's
Leonardo da Vinci Airport, on a flight that was supposed to
continue via a Boeing 747 to Boston, Los Angeles and San Diego,
it was taken over by the two terrorists, who wildly brandished
their grenades and pistol. They gave the pilot, Captain John
Testrake of Richmond, Mo., the first order:  fly to Beirut. At
Beirut International Airport, the last thing officials wanted
was a skyjacking crisis on their hands, and so they blocked the
airport runway with buses and other obstacles. But the
terrorists and their captive pilot were having none of it.
Demanded the pilot:  "They are beating up passengers. We must
land in Beirut. He has pulled the pin of the grenade. We must
land. He is ready to blow up the plane."

On the ground in Beirut, the plane was refueled as the hijackers
had ordered. The terrorists also asked to speak to an official
of Amal, the mainstream Shi'ite Muslim political and military
force, but Amal leaders refused the request. After announcing
their demands, the hijackers released 19 women and children via
a yellow escape chute lowered from the forward door. One freed
hostage, Irma Garza of Laredo, Texas, said that the terrorists
had shot one man in the neck. Passengers were unnerved by the
behavior of the hijackers. "They were hysterical, they were
screaming," said Patricia Weber of Albuquerque.

Next stop was Algiers, where local officials responded to the
plane's landing request by closing their airport. But they
changed their minds after the arrival of an urgent plea from
President Reagan to Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid. U.S.
officials, who well remember the important role played by
Algerian diplomats in settling the Iranian hostage crisis almost
five years ago, had hoped that the hijacking could be resolved
one way or another in Algiers. But after remaining on the
runway there for five hours, during which time they released
another 21 passengers, the hijackers ordered the pilot to take
off again and head back to Beirut.

It was well past midnight in the Middle in the Middle East when
Flight 847 again landed in Beirut. The airport-tower operator
did his best to refuse permission, but Captain Testrake was
adamant:  he was running out of fuel, and the terrorists were
threatening to kill him. A hijacker may have clinched the
argument by shouting, "We are suicide terrorists!  If you don't
let us land, we will crash the plane into your control tower,
or fly it to Baabda and crash into the Presidential Palace!"
The tower relented.

Once again, the hijackers asked to speak to an Amal official,
and when none appeared, they responded by murdering an American
passenger and throwing his body onto the tarmac. They claimed
the victim, a young man with a crew cut, was a U.S. Marine who
had taken part in "security blowups in Lebanon."  It was then,
after the pilot shouted over the radio, "He just killed a
passenger!  He just killed a passenger!" than a hijacker
declared, "You see?  You now believe it. There will be another
in five minutes."  When the control-tower operator remonstrated
with him, saying, "Isn't it a shame, killing an innocent
passenger?" the hijacker replied angrily, "Did you forget the
Bir al Abed massacre?"  He was referring to the March 8 car
bombing in the Bir al Abed suburb of Beirut that killed more
than 75 Shi'ite Muslims but failed to hurt Sheik Mohammed
Hussein Fadallah, one of Lebanon's pro-Iranian Shi'ite religious
leaders. Shi'ites later claimed that the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency had engineered the bombing, in an attempt
to fight Shi'ite terrorism with counterterrorism; the CIA denied
the charge.

Moments after the killing of the passenger, an Amal official and
his bodyguard went aboard the plane, where they remained for
some time. As negotiations continued, a hijacker asked that all
airport lights be turned off, and the demand was met. At the
time, it seemed that the hijackers were fearful of an attack by
the Israelis or by one or another of their enemies within
Lebanon. In fact, however, it later became clear that they
wanted the darkness for other reasons:  to bring aboard about
a dozen additional terrorists as reinforcements, as well as a
supply of arms and ammunition; and to remove the six or eight
passengers with Israeli- or Jewish-sounding names. A day later,
a released passenger, Ken Lanham of San Francisco, reported that
the hijackers went up and down the aisle calling out the names
of these people, and then led them away.

The body of the murdered American had been lying on the tarmac
for about two hours when a hijacker told the tower, "The Red
Cross can come and get the body."  The hijacker then called for
fuel, food and water, saying, "I want 200 sandwiches, 150 apples
and 88 lbs. of bananas. But the fuel first, and make it fast."
As the food and fuel were taken on, the pilot said he wanted
the runway cleared for takeoff at dawn. He was asked for his
destination. His reply:  "I don't know."

The next destination turned out once more to be Algiers, where
the plane landed, for the second time, at 7:45 a.m. local time
(2:45 a.m. E.D.T.) Saturday. Algerian officials authorized the
landing on the condition that the hijackers not use violence.
Before leaving Beirut, it turned out, the hijackers had
demanded that Ali Atwa be released by Greek authorities and
brought to Algiers. Otherwise, they said, they would kill all
eight Greeks on the plane, including Singer Demis Roussos.
Greek authorities complied and sent Atwa to Algiers in an
Olympic Airways plane.

Soon after the TWA jetliner landed in Algiers, two ranking
Algerian officials came aboard and began discussions with the
hijackers. The negotiations evidently paid off. Having
released three hostages on arrival, the hijackers then released
58 others. Among them Dorothy Sullivan of Chicago, who
described the tension during the seemingly endless ordeal. One
of the original hijackers had been soft-spoken, the other
brutal, she said, and the latter liked to go up and down the
aisle thumping passengers on the head. Several passengers
recalled that Stewardess Uli Derickson, of Newton, N.J., had
stood up to the hijackers. Said she, speaking of her
passengers:  "They're doing what you tell them to do. Why do
you keep beating them up?" The released passengers also noted
that, before leaving the plane, they were relieved of their cash
and valuables by the hijackers.

That evening, the terrorists announced that if their demands
were not met by the following morning, they would fly to an
unspecified destination, and destroy the plane and perhaps its
remaining passengers. By early Sunday afternoon, they had made
good on only the first half of their ultimatum, arriving in
Beirut for the third time. On the ground, the hijackers called
for food, fuel, newspapers and videocassettes. They urged the
International Committee of the Red Cross to work for the release
of the 50 Shi'ites in Israel and "move fast before it is too
late so that all will achieve satisfactory results."  The
hijackers added ominously that the next communique would be
their last, presumably meaning that they planned to destroy the
plane afterward. They also announced that they were sending a
letter to President Reagan, reputedly signed by the hostages,
asking him to negotiate their release and refrain from "any
direct military action on our behalf."

At the same time, the hijackers demanded to see Amal Leader
Nabih Berri, representatives of the United Nations and the Red
Cross, and the ambassadors of France, Spain and Britain; they
later agreed that such a meeting could be held at Berri's
residence, where he would act as their representative. The
terrorists' repeated emphasis on seeing officials of Amal, the
mainstream Shi'ite organization, suggested not only that they
were seeking a negotiated settlement but that their motivation
may have been essentially political rather than ideological.

Back in the U.S., some worried relatives had learned of the
hijacking only hours before they had intended to go to the
airport to welcome travelers home. Against a backdrop of yellow
ribbons and flickering candles, parishioners of three Catholic
churches in the Chicago area spent the day praying, huddling
around radios and exchanging bits of information. They were
cheered by the news that many of their 24 friends had been
released in Beirut or Algiers. "We're waiting, we're praying,
we're hoping," said the Rev. Robert Garrity of St. Margaret Mary
Church in Algonquin, where parishioners maintained an all-night
vigil.

Elsewhere, reactions were much the same. "I just hope they're
not beating people, like they say they are," said Pete Lazansky
of Tulsa, whose parents were on board. Other passengers
included Kathryn Davis and her fiance James Hoskins Jr., both
22 and from Indianapolis, whose parents had given them European
vacations as college graduation presents. "I was going to pick
her up this evening," said Stockbroker Stephen Davis of his
daughter. "We just sit here and wait."  In Florissant, Mo.,
Katharine Ellerbrock tuned in a morning TV show and realized
that she was listening to the recorded voice of her brother,
Flight Engineer Benjamin Zimmerman, talking to the Beirut
control tower. She said her brother, who manages to be both a
full-time TWA pilot and a Lutheran pastor with a ministry in
the mountains of Idaho, was "strong, steady and stable" and "has
got to be a comfort to the passengers."  In Richmond, Mo., a
small town northeast of Kansas City, friends and neighbors
stayed up to follow the ordeal of Captain Testrake, who in his
spare time raises horses, restores small antique planes and
nurtures a recently planted vineyard on his nearby farm. "He's
been an airman for a long time," said Howard Hill, editor of the
Richmond Daily News. "He won't panic."

One of the most troubling aspects of the plight of Flight 847
was that it was the third hijacking that occurred in the region
within three days last week, and the second apparently
engineered by Lebanese Shi'ites. In earlier times, Arab
skyjackers tended to be Palestinians, from one or another
faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, attempting to
advance or at least dramatize the Palestinian cause. The
politicization of Lebanon's Shi'ite Muslim community is one of
the most significant and most troubling consequences of the
Israeli invasion.

The week's first hijacking had begun on Tuesday, when half a
dozen Shi'ites stormed aboard a Jordanian-owned Boeing 727 at
Beirut airport. They overpowered eight Jordanian security
guards, then ordered the Swedish pilot to fly to Larnaca,
Cyprus.

Over the next 28 hours, as the plane bounced around the eastern
half of the Mediterranean, the skyjackers had ample time to air
their complaints. They were angry about an Arab League
statement supporting the cause of the Palestinians in the Beirut
refugee camps, which have been under attack by Lebanese Shi'ites
for the past three weeks. The Shi'ites want to drive out the
Palestinians to make sure that the P.L.O. will never again be
able to set up a "state within a state" in Lebanon. After
several dire threats, the hijackers freed the passengers, blew
up the plane and sped off in a Range Rover, disappearing into
the Shi'ite neighborhoods near the airport.

Several of the released passengers then boarded the first plane
they could catch out of Beirut, a Middle East Airlines flight
to nearby Cyprus. But as the Lebanese Boeing 707 landed there,
a young Palestinian, producing a hand grenade, threatened to
blow up the plane as a protest against the earlier Shi'ite
hijacking. He soon surrendered to the plane's captain, however,
after being granted his request to fly to Amman aboard a
Jordanian airliner.

On board both the hijacked Jordanian plane and the hijacked
Lebanese plane were Professor Landry Slade an American who is
serving as an acting dean of the American University of Beirut,
and his teenage son William. "It wasn't bad," the younger Slade
remarked, after he and the other passengers had been released
in Cyprus, "but is isn't something we want to talk about."  Two
days later, when he learned of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847,
Landry Slade told reporters, "God help them all. I know what
it's like."  Professor Slade was, in fact, a good deal luckier
than his colleague Thomas Sutherland, 54, dean of the American
University's agriculture and food sciences faculty. Sutherland
had been kidnaped earlier in the week as he was riding in a
six-car convoy from Beirut airport to his campus home. He thus
became the seventh American and the twelfth Western currently
being held by various extremists groups in Lebanon.

In that troubled country, as usual, superlatives were
insufficient to describe the scene. The fighting in the refugee
camps between Palestinians and Shi'ites spread to other parts
of West Beirut. On Friday morning, a shell struck a vegetable
market there, killing or wounding 50 people. Two suicide
bombers crashed an explosives-laden car into a Lebanese Army
position, killing 23 and wounding 36. Since the victims were
mostly from the predominantly Shi'ite Sixth Brigade, reports had
it that the bombers were Sunni Muslims, who have sided with the
Palestinians in the current struggle, and view with apprehension
the Shi'ites' lust for a greater share of political power. The
Shi'ites and the Druze were allies until about a month ago, but
last week they were shooting at each other after a group of Amal
militiamen tried to stop a car loaded with Druze. Druze Leader
Walid Jumblatt agreed to a cease-fire but later, when asked how
long it would last, replied, "Only God and Syria know."  Given
all these circumstances, Syrian President Hafez Assad was
content to let the rival factions in Lebanon fight on for a
while before he risks his own troops to try to restore order.

In Lebanon, the Israeli forces were largely gone, but the
impasse continued between the United Nations peacekeeping forces
and the Israeli-backed, predominantly Christian militia known
as the South Lebanon Army. Two weeks ago, the S.L.A. had seized
25 Finnish soldiers of the U.N. force, released three of them
and taken the others to the Christian town of Marjayoun. It
refused to let them go until eleven of its own members had been
handed over by the Shi'ite Amal militia. The S.L.A. accused the
U.N. force, which does not recognize the S.L.A. as an
independent militia and customarily disarms its members whenever
they try to pass through U.N. lines, of having captured the
eleven S.L.A. members and turned them over to Amal. The Shi'ite
militia, in turn, claimed that the eleven S.L.A. members had
defected to their side.

At midweek, Israel arranged for Western newsmen to visit
Marjayoun. The trip demonstrated not only that the Finns were
in good condition, but that the Israelis, if they choose to do
so, could have ended the incident quickly by putting pressure
on the S.L.A. The situation took a comic turn late in the week
when the eleven S.L.A. men, all of whom happened to be Shi'ites
in an overwhelming Christian militia, told U.N. and Red Cross
officials that they had no desire to return to the S.L.A.
Confronted with this information, the S.L.A. commander, General
Antoine Lahd, released the Finnish soldiers the next day.

This was the world that had produced the nightmare of Flight
847, an ordeal that continued without resolution as the new week
began. There were hints that Israel might be willing to release
its Shi'ite detainees if the U.S. asked it to do so; after all,
only a month ago, the Israelis had exchanged 1,150 prisoners,
including some world- class terrorists, for three of their own
servicemen. At the same time, there were reports that the U.S.
Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean had invoked a "radio silence"
on its movements--a possible sign of action to come. As of
Sunday night, there were further reports of military activity
around Cyprus and of the departure of a U.S. naval vessel from
the Israeli port of Haifa.

Perhaps nothing so aptly epitomized the chaos of Lebanon for
Americans last week as the fate of the body of the young man,
said by the hijackers to be a U.S. Marine, who had been murdered
on Flight 847. After lying on the tarmac for two hours, the
body, with a bullet wound in the head, had been taken by an
International Red Cross ambulance to a morgue at the American
University Hospital in Muslim West Beirut. U.S. officials,
based on the other side of the "green line" in
Christian-dominated East Beirut, were unable to retrieve it for
24 hours. Not until Sunday morning did a State Department
spokesman announce that the body was at last on its way to a
U.S. air base in Spain for identification. Used first as proof
of the hijackers' resolve, the stranded corpse had thus become
a symbol of the obstacles and divisions that afflict the
terrorists' homeland.

--By William E. Smith.  Reported by John Borrell/Algiers, Dean
Fisher/Cairo and Johanna   McGeary/Washington