and killed one hijacker, a Nicaraguan “Sandinista,” while others overpowered his accomplice, a short woman who turned out to be none other than Leila Khaled, back again just a year after her first hijacking, having undergone plastic surgery to avoid recognition.
With one would-be hijacker dead and the other subdued, the pilot made an emergency landing in London. Almost at once, reportedly, he received orders to take off for home. Apparently, Israel was eager to interrogate Khaled rather than release her to Britain. But London would not allow the takeoff and took custody of Khaled. Three days later another PFLP commando hijacked a British Overseas Air Company flight and took it, too, to Dawson’s Field, demanding the release of Khaled.
After a few days, the PFLP released most of its hostages, except crew members and Jews, and dynamited the three planes. This had unforeseen consequences in Jordan where Palestinians constituted the majority, their numbers augmented by King Hussein’s policy, unique among Israel’s neighbors, of granting citizenship to some of the refugees of 1948. The PLO had thus based itself in Jordan, where thousands of young fighters trained in camps around the country. As the movement gained momentum the PLO increasingly acted as if sovereign in Jordan, setting up road blocks throughout the capital, ignoring local laws, and disdaining Jordanian police and officials. King Hussein had tolerated these infringements on his sovereignty, but he could not allow them free rein to operate against Israel. A host country is always considered responsible for attacks emanating from its soil, and Hussein knew that Israel practiced severe retaliation.
More than once the king had come to the brink of expelling the PLO, but he dared not defy the other Arab states, especially Nasser’s Egypt, which considered the Palestinian cause sacrosanct (except of course on their own territory). The use of a Jordanian airfield for hijacking operations and destruction of Western aircraft despite the king’s firm alliance with the West was, however, a step too far—all the more so as one of the proclaimed goals of these highjackings was to destroy a new US peace initiative that Jordan had accepted, as had Israel and Egypt. This was the last straw. Only a week earlier King Hussein had escaped an attempt on his life, the second within three months’ span, both attributable in all likelihood to the Palestinian bands.
Now, he unleashed his army against the Palestinian guerrillas and crushed them, surprising many who had overestimated the military prowess of the PLO. The fighting took a toll in civilians as well as combatants, with the number of Palestinians deaths estimated variously at two or three thousand. Nasser mediated an end to the onslaught at the price of the PLO’s withdrawal from Jordan. A codicil to the deal secured the freedom of the remaining airline hostages in exchange for the release of seven terrorists from prisons in England, Germany, and Switzerland. These were Leila Khaled; the three who had attacked the Munich airport bus and lounge; and the three who had strafed and grenaded the El Al jet in Zurich and managed to escape Mordechai Rachamim’s wrath.
Flight from Jordan proved to be the prelude to a new chapter in the history of the PLO. Until this point, all or virtually all of the attacks on civilian air travel had been the work of the PFLP and its offshoots. Fatah had held back from this particular tactic because, as the dominant group in the PLO, it felt answerable to the Arab states. Arafat’s deputy Abu Iyad chafed at this self-restraint, complaining that Fatah had “compromised its revolutionary character” trading “militancy” for “respectability.”13
His fretting proved premature. Although the PFLP’s recklessness had pushed King Hussein too far and brought the whole PLO to disaster, it apparently convinced Fatah that it, too, needed to turn to international terror to compete with the PFLP for headlines and a reputation for revolutionary fervor. This impetus was reinforced by logistics. Expelled from Jordan, the PLO moved its headquarters and operational bases to Lebanon. There, it still had access to a border with Israel, but a shorter and more remote one that made infiltration more difficult, another factor arguing for action abroad.
Yet Arafat was reluctant to abandon all claim to the respectability his adroit phrasing of the Palestinian cause had won in the West. So he resurrected a tactic from the past. In 1965, when Fatah staged its first raids inside Israel, it took no credit. Instead, responsibility was claimed by al-Asifa, a fictional creation that was nothing but an alias for Fatah. Years later, Arafat explained his reasoning: “If al-Asifa succeeded, Fatah would then endorse” its actions. “If it did not succeed, then al-Asifa would take responsibility . . . and not Fatah.”14
Fatah’s new false front announced itself to the world in November 1971, just over a year after the expulsion from Jordan. Four men gunned down Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal, the executor of King Hussein’s crackdown on the Palestinians, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. Reenacting the bloodthirstiness of the first El Al hijacker, one of the killers knelt beside the body and lapped up Tal’s blood. The PFLP at once issued a press release claiming credit, but the boast was false. It soon was established that the party behind the deed was a previously unheard of group calling itself Black September.
The next month the same group shot and wounded the Jordanian ambassador in London, and a few months later it mowed down five Jordanians in their sleep in Germany, claiming they were intelligence agents of some sort. Less spectacularly, Black September was apparently also responsible for several attacks on European oil and industrial facilities in 1971 and 1972.
So, by 1972, in addition to the PFLP and its offshoots, there was nominally a new major player in the international terror game. In February 1972, a team of three Arabs hijacked a Lufthansa plane and forced it to fly to Yemen, demanding release of those detained in Germany for the murder of the five Jordanians. One of the hostages was Joseph Kennedy III, the nineteen-year-old son of Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated four years earlier by the Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, whose release from jail in the United States had been a demand of earlier hijackers. In this case, however, the gunmen settled for a five-million-dollar cash ransom from Germany.
The year 1972 also marked the initiation of a new tactic, although it is not clear which of the terror groups was behind it. Arab men in Europe seduced local women then arranged trips in which the women could meet the young men’s families in Palestine. In each case on some pretext, the Arabs convinced the women that they had to fly on separate flights and they loaded some small electronic device, a purported gift for the family back home, in the women’s luggage. The “gift” contained a bomb. In February 1972, one such bomb detonated in an El Al cargo hold, but the damage was less than intended, and the pilot managed to return to Rome’s airport and land the craft without casualties.
Early in May that year, Black September seized a Sabena flight to Tel Aviv where the four terrorists—two men, two women—demanded release of 315 Palestinians in exchange for the passengers and crew. The Israeli government commenced negotiations with them, but also organized a rescue operation. The hijackers were told that their demands would be met, and a team of mechanics in white overalls proceeded onto the tarmac to make the plane ready to fly to an Arab country. The “mechanics” were in truth an elite squad that stormed through the emergency doors, shooting the two males hijackers to death and taking prisoner the two females. The rescue team included two future prime ministers—Ehud Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu—as well as Mordechai Rachamim, the hero of the Zurich attack.
After this thwarted effort, the Christian Science Monitor reported that “Arab world opinion” expected “further and better-planned hijackings” and generally welcomed the prospect. “Photos of the Arab skyjackers were splashed through the press in Beirut and other Arab capitals, presented mainly as the pictures of ‘heroes,’” the newspaper said.15
Two weeks later, these hopes were rewarded not by a hijacking but a new kind of attack on civil aviation. Three Japanese passengers disembarked from an Air France flight at Israel’s Lod Airport carrying violin cases. From these, they extracted assault rifles and hand grenades and began killing anyone they could, taking twenty-six lives, seventeen of them Puerto Rican pilgrims. The trio had escaped closer scrutiny because they were not Arabs: they were members
