The resolution of the Lufthansa incident came at a price. The West German transport minister acknowledged Lufthansa's payment of $5 million for the lives of the crew and the return of the plane intact.8 In previous hijackings to Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, airline executives and stockholders watched in horror as the Palestinians destroyed the multimillion-dollar jets. The West Germans avoided the monetary losses and averted the loss of life. The West German government managed the September 1970 hostage crisis in Jordan this same way. With the lives of hostages at risk, Bonn offered assurances of the release of imprisoned fedayeen, but only after British and Israeli hostages went free. When the chance of a peaceful resolution presented itself, and the decision was the West Germans' to make, the government acted to save lives. But in a few months time, the West Germans would find themselves entangled in another incident, this time on their own soil, without the option to make concessions.
The terrorists went free soon after the passengers were released. The Yemenis, like the Algerians and the Syrians before them, saw no reason to incarcerate the Palestinian terrorists. The Egyptians, too, would eventually see the prudence of quietly freeing Wasfi Tel's assassins. West German authorities later complained about the terrorists' brief detention, despite the fact that West German intelligence already knew the identities “of at least several of them.”9 Several of the terrorists were, in fact, already known to Western intelligence. When the hijacked Lufthansa flight arrived in Aden, Ali Taha was there waiting for it. Taha, who went by the name of Kamal Rafat, personally took charge of the negotiations that produced the release of the hostages and the extortion of Lufthansa. Taha was known to intelligence services because he commanded all the previous PFLP air piracy operations going back to the Algiers incident in 1968.10 By now, Taha was so well known that he could not board a flight without the risk of compromising an operation. The temptation to commandeer another planeload of hostages must have been tremendous. Eight weeks later Taha succumbed to the temptation, and this desire to see action one more time cost him his life.
In May, Black September, impressed by the spectacular PFLP operations, decided to mount its own hijacking operation. Mohammad Najjar conceived the operation, Salameh, Black September's operational commander in Europe, organized it, and Ali Taha conducted it.11 In May 1972, Najjar was acting as chief of Fatah intelligence, replacing Salah Khalaf, who was quarreling with Arafat. Under the circumstances, Najjar was concerned with his standing among the more militant fedayeen. To compensate for Fatah's lack of experience with air piracy, Najjar enlisted Taha to command a combined Fatah-PFLP operation under the banner of Black September. On 8 May, Taha led three Fatah terrorists in an operation to seize a Belgian Sabena flight en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. Taha was living dangerously. Even before the flight left Vienna, officials in Brussels warned security in Vienna of a plot to commandeer the flight. Security searched three Arabs for weapons, but inexplicably the search turned up nothing.12 En route to Tel Aviv, Taha and three confederates, a man and two women, took control of the plane and its 101 passengers and crew in the name of Black September.13 Taha had defied the risks of direct participation in the operation and had narrowly escaped capture. Now, instead of directing the flight to a secure location in a friendly country like Algeria, Syria, or South Yemen, he ordered the pilot to continue Ben Gurion International Airport, the original destination. It was an act of utter contempt for the Israeli security forces. But because the risk was great the propaganda value of putting the plane down in Israel was even greater. It was a fatal miscalculation.
Taha's audacity may have astonished the IDF, but it also gave them a tactical advantage. When the plane put down, ground controllers directed the Boeing 707 to a remote area of the airport, and Taha began direct radio communications with senior IDF officers in the control tower. Moshe Dyan, the defense minister and hero of the Six Day War, was present, but Shimon Peres, the transportation minister and future prime minister, handled the negotiations. Taha demanded a straight exchange: 101 passengers and crew for 300 fedayeen held in Israel. The Israelis should deliver the Palestinians directly to the jet; Taha would deliver them to freedom. But Peres refused to make the concession. The most the government could contemplate was the release of perhaps twenty Palestinians as a “gesture of good will,” the innocuous phrase used during the 1968 Algiers incident. In fact, the Israelis were preparing for a demonstration of force rather than a gesture of good will. As night fell on the first day of the hijacking, Israeli commandos disabled the aircraft's landing gear to prevent the hijackers' departure to a more secure location. For the pilot, Captain Reginald Levy, the Israeli action heightened the danger. After Taha threatened murder-suicide unless the Israelis repaired and refueled the jet, Levy appealed over the cockpit radio, “I think they will blow it up, they are serious.”14 In fact, the Palestinians let 10 P.M. and 5 A.M. deadlines pass without acting on their threat. The delays, and the apparent loss of will, gave the Israelis the time to organize a rescue.
Twenty-three hours after the hostage crisis began, the Israelis communicated their intention to repair the jet in the interest of saving lives. In fact, Israel was mounting its first takedown of a hijacked airliner. The El Al mechanics who assembled beneath the fuselage were really Lieutetnant Colonel Ehud Barak's elite Sayaret Matkal commandos.15 Before the Palestinians could react, the commandos rushed up ladders onto the wings and forced open the emergency doors. The assault was over in moments. The Israelis killed Taha and another hijacker and captured the two women. The bullets that ripped through the cabin wounded five passengers, killing one. That same evening the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. General David Elazar, issued a challenge: “If all the countries would do as we did, there wouldn't be the disgrace of hijacking in the world.”16
The Sabena incident marked a turning point in assault on civilian aviation. It did not end “the disgrace of hijacking in the world,” but it raised the risks to the hijackers. The hazards to the hijackers had been negligible thus far. Israeli sky marshals had captured Leila Khaled and killed her accomplice in the El Al incident in September 1970. But the terrorists involved in other operations were not even imprisoned—or not for very long—much less killed. The British, after all, set Khaled free. After the commandos burst into the Sabena jet and killed Taha, terrorists understood that governments had options other than capitulation. Khaled's statement, made after her release in September 1970, that the hijackings proved “we could impose our demands” was no longer valid. Israeli commandos would mount a more spectacular rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976; West German commandos would do so in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1977. In both operations the commandos killed hijackers and rescued hostages. The glory days of the air pirates came to an end in Lod. But the risks increased on all sides. Palestinian hijackers did not execute a single passenger or crew member until December 1973. In future hijackings, terrorists would realize that the credibility of their threats depended on their willingness to kill.
Wadi Haddad grasped the new dynamic. Black September claimed the Sabena operation, but when it failed Haddad lost his most experienced air pirate. Three weeks after Israeli commandos cut down Ali Taha, Haddad turned the Ben Gurion International Airport at Lod into the scene of an atrocity. The Israelis were learning to combat air piracy, and El Al had begun to throw up extraordinary security around airliners after the ground attacks against airliners in Athens, Zurich, and Munich between December 1968 and February 1970. The Israelis were on high alert for Palestinian terrorists, and they had reason to be alert to threats posed by Europeans. The spectacular terror operations of previous years succeeded in attracting mercenaries to the Palestinian cause. Because of its Marxist rhetoric, the PFLP held special appeal. The German Revolutionary Cells provided recruits in search of battlefronts in the world revolution. In April 1971, Israeli security personnel seized four French terrorists with explosives inside the terminal at Lod.17 But the Japanese were the first to join forces with the Palestinians. The Japanese Red Army, or JRA, was the radicalized Japanese students' answer to the call for revolutionary violence. The JRA, although small, already had carried out its first hijacking in March 1970, months before Skyjack Sunday in September. In February 1971, the JRA's leader, Fusako Shigenobu, traveled to Lebanon to establish relations with Habash and the PFLP. By 1972, JRA militants were training