of Transportation Moshe Carmel struck a calmer, more ominous note. Noting that “members of the [PFLP] openly train in Lebanon,” Carmel warned, as The New York Times summarized, that “Israel would not tolerate a situation in which El Al airliners were attacked and those of Arab countries could fly in peace and safety.”3 A few days later, Israeli commandos landed at the Beirut airport under cover of darkness and dynamited thirteen parked Arab airliners.
Israel’s claim that the terrorists were aided and abetted by the various Arab governments was inarguable, but its choice of Lebanon as the target for retaliation was dubious given the weakness and relative moderation of the Beirut government. The UN Security Council passed a resolution denouncing Israel’s action without mentioning the attacks that had provoked it. And French President de Gaulle, who, in 1967, had frozen a contract for the delivery of additional Mirage jet fighters to Israel, now seized the moment to claim a high-minded rationale for canceling it outright. Whatever the justice or wisdom of Israel’s attack on Lebanese soil, the United Nation’s unbalanced resolution was a harbinger of much that was to follow.
Two months later, February 1969, the Athens attack was repeated in Zurich, where four terrorists sprayed machine gun fire and tossed grenades at an El Al plane taxiing for takeoff. A pilot trainee was shot through the chest and died at the hospital. More would probably have been killed were it not for the heroics of Mordechai Rachamim, a twenty-two-year-old who had immigrated with his parents from Iraqi Kurdistan seventeen years before and was now a member of a squad of sky marshals that Israel had hastened to form in the wake of the Algiers hijacking.
Armed only with a twenty-two-caliber Beretta, deemed small enough that its bullets, if fired within an airplane, would pose little risk to the craft’s integrity, Rachamim at first shot back at the attackers through a blown-out window in the cockpit. But the “horrifying realization” that a bullet or grenade to a fuel tank could immolate the entire plane impelled him to improvise more dramatic action.4 He sprinted to the back of the now-stationary plane, and used an emergency exit to slide down to the tarmac, then scaled the perimeter fence and closed on the terrorists while finding cover behind mounds of snow plowed high along the road that paralleled the runway. When he got close he yelled at the gang to drop their weapons. Apparently not recognizing that he was alone and that his small pistol was no match for their two Kalashnikovs and grenades, one of the two gun-toters did as commanded. The other, apparently the leader, turned to confront Rachamim who shot him dead on the spot. Now out of ammunition, Rachamim rushed the other three terrorists in a rage. He seized one by the throat and began choking him, screaming “Why are you attacking civilians? Why won’t you face me on the battlefield?” He stopped only when he felt the barrel of a gun pressing his back. It was a Swiss policeman, ordering him to desist.
Rachamim was taken into custody along with the three surviving terrorists, loaded into a police car where he was seated between two of them, none of the three in handcuffs. He was held for a month before being released on bail and allowed to fly to Israel after promising to return for trial on manslaughter charges,5 which he did nine months later, winning acquittal.
With El Al increasingly well protected, the terrorists turned to non-Israeli carriers. In August 1969, a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv was commandeered over Italy by two hijackers, styling themselves the Che Guevara Brigade. One of them, a twenty-five-year-old woman who had once worked as a school teacher, was Leila Khaled. Petite, attractive, and given to posing with a Kalashnikov, she became something of an icon in the Marxist-Leninist world. At the time, the hijackers said they had targeted a US airline to protest America’s sale of military aircraft to Israel. Later, in her autobiography, Khaled said, “Our minimum objective was the inscription of the name of Palestine on the memory of mankind.”6
They forced the plane to land in Damascus where the crew and passengers executed an emergency evacuation before the “brigade” blew up the cockpit. Collaborating with the terrorists as the Algerian government had done, Syria held passengers and crew prisoner overnight, then released all but the six Israelis on board. Days later, four female Israelis were released. But the two men were held more than three months until Israel agreed to exchange thirteen Syrians in its custody.7 The US State Department denied a leak that, in brokering the deal, Washington had promised Hafez al-Assad’s government a seat on the UN Security Council,8 but Syria was indeed soon elected to one of the rotating seats for the next two years, only the second time in the United Nations’s history that the country had secured this position.
Only ten days after the TWA hijacking, grenades were tossed at the El Al offices in Brussels and the Israeli embassies in Bonn and The Hague. These caused injuries but no deaths. The PFLP released to the Lebanese press photos of four perpetrators who it said ranged in age between thirteen and sixteen, and whom it christened “Tiger Cubs,” members of the front’s Ho Chi Minh Division. It also warned in a press conference that it would no longer seek to avoid deaths among the nationals of other countries in its attacks on Israeli assets.9
As if to illustrate the point, two months later, November 1969, two men belonging to the Popular Struggle Front, an offshoot of the PFLP, threw a hand grenade into the El Al office in downtown Athens. Among the fourteen people injured none was Israeli. Hardest hit was the Natsos family, residents of a working class suburb of Athens who were migrating to Canada and happened to book El Al for one leg of their journey.
The father, Christos, was the only one to escape injury. “Why? Why?” he sobbed to journalists after his wife and two young sons were rushed to the hospital.10 A few days later two-year-old George succumbed to his wounds while his five-year-old brother, Athanasios, was blinded, although surgeons held out hope they might restore vision to one of his eyes. The mother, Katina, was also seriously wounded. The two attackers arrested carried Jordanian passports. “If I ever meet a Jordanian, I am going to kill him,” swore Christos after little George’s death.11
February 1970 was a particularly bloody month. In Munich, three terrorists bombed and strafed an airport bus and a transit lounge holding passengers awaiting an El Al flight, causing one death and many injuries. Days later, a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv was brought down by a bomb, killing all aboard, sixteen Israelis and thirty-one others. Yet another PFLP offshoot, the PFLP-General Command, claimed responsibility.
In July 1970, as the two men who had tossed the grenade that killed George Natsos and blinded his brother awaited sentencing, a team of six commandos, each carrying weapons, took over an Olympic Airways flight from Beirut to Athens. They commenced negotiations for the exchange of those on board for the seven Arab terrorists held in Greek prisons: the two killers of Natsos, as well as the two who had machine gunned the El Al flight in 1968, and three others whose plans to hijack a TWA flight had been aborted.
The Greek government agreed to the trade but insisted on the formality of first completing the process of sentencing the grenade-throwers. The government’s official statement explained: “When the Greek laws will have been observed and the sense of justice will have been fulfilled by putting two of the Arabs on trial, the Government will hand them over to the International Red Cross.”12 Within a month, all seven terrorists were free.
Having succeeded in wreaking havoc at very little cost to themselves, the air terrorists were on a roll. Foreshadowing the terror spectacular mounted by al Qaeda decades later, the PFLP hit upon the idea of hijacking several jetliners simultaneously.
The plot was executed on September 6, 1970. A TWA flight from Frankfurt, a Swissair flight from Zurich, and El Al and Pan Am flights from Amsterdam were hijacked simultaneously. The first two were flown to a remote military airstrip in Jordan called Dawson’s Field. The last was a jumbo jet unable to negotiate Dawson’s short runway, so it was taken to Cairo.
The events aboard the El Al flight were the most dramatic, since El Al uniquely had begun carrying sky marshals. When the two hijackers made their move, the pilot put the plane
