Skyjack Sunday
The PFLP assault on civilian aviation began in the waning months of the Johnson administration in July 1968, but by the time Jabril's PFLP-General Command destroyed Swiss Air 330, Richard Nixon was president. Nixon had won the November 1968 election after a tumultuous year in the United States. In January the war in Vietnam took a dramatic turn after the Vietnamese mounted the famed Tet Offensive and opened a terrible political rift in American society. In March Johnson announced his decision to return to his ranch in Texas rather than stand for election to another term; in April an assassin cut down Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the influential civil rights leader; in June an angry young Syrian, Sirhan Sirhan, murdered Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, only moments after voting returns in the California primary made him the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. Although the Middle East conflict was not the most urgent issue on the Republican administration's ambitious foreign policy agenda, Nixon could not ignore the escalating tensions on the ceasefire line between Egypt and Israel. The wave of terrorism further complicated an already complex region.
Nixon adopted a more active Middle East policy than Johnson's, and viewed movement on the complex array of issues as part of a global Cold War strategy.19 As the Nixon administration approached the end of its first year, secretary of state William Rogers announced a peace plan based on Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967 as the United Nations reaction to the Six Day War. The Rogers plan was doomed from the outset. The Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in August 1967, when the sting of the defeat was still acute, swore itself to three “No's”: No negotiations with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No peace with Israel. Even Nixon admitted he believed the Rogers plan, because it envisioned Israel's return of the occupied territories, “had absolutely no chance of being accepted by Israel.” Henry Kissinger, Nixon's ambitious national security advisor, was skeptical of what he derided as the “sacramental language” and “mystical ambiguities of Resolution 242.”20 But by the early fall of 1970, the administration was confronted with crises along the confrontation line between Egypt and Israel and in Jordan that compelled the administration to attempt to broker a ceasefire.
Clashes between Israel and Egypt along the Suez in the so-called War of Attrition were intensifying and, worse, the Soviet Union had begun arming Egypt with advanced surface-to-air-missiles to counteract Israel's air superiority. The White House soon suspected the Soviets were deploying advisors to operate them. The crisis threatened a repetition of Israel's preemptive strike in 1967. The administration succeeded in convincing Egypt, Jordan, and Israel to agree to a tenuous ceasefire on 7 August, but the chances the ceasefire would hold were nil. By early September both the Egyptians and the Israelis were accusing each other of breaches of the truce. But even though Egypt and Israel continued to exchange fire in violation of the August agreement, the Palestinians viewed even the dimmest prospect of meaningful negotiations between the Arab confrontation states and Israel as a betrayal of the Khartoum's “Three No's.” Habash was explicit about it: “We do not want peace! Peace would be the end of all our hopes.”21 Those hopes now turned on the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy in the belief captured in an incendiary slogan—the road to Tel Aviv leads through Amman.
By the fall of 1970, Palestinian militancy was beginning to shake the foundations of the Jordanian monarchy. The presence of the armed PLO factions on Jordanian soil posed a danger for the very existence of Hussein's kingdom. Fedayeen incursions into Israel from Jordan put Jordan in Israel's line of fire. Moreover, the PLO was a force unto itself, a state within the Jordanian state. There were hundreds of violent confrontations between the Palestinians and the Jordanian population and army by 1970. Worse still, the PFLP and the DFLP openly militated for the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy. Arafat, acting as both chairman of the PLO and chief of Fatah, was nearly as provocative. The hostility was more than verbal: in June 1970 the PFLP ambushed the Jordanian monarch's motorcade in Amman. By early September, with the Jordanian army and Palestinian guerrillas virtually at war, the king, whose grandfather was assassinated by a Palestinian in 1951 for his supposed collusion with Israel and the West, began to contemplate action to rid himself of the PLO. Meanwhile, the Mossad made an attempt on Haddad's life to rid Israel of the escalating threat of terror. In July 1970, Mossad agents fired rocket-propelled grenades into Haddad's Beirut apartment. Although the Mossad could not have known it at the time, the attack came as the Master was meeting with one his most experienced air pirates, Leila Khaled, to plan the PFLP's most audacious hijacking. Haddad and Khaled were not seriously wounded; Haddad's wife and eight-year-old son suffered minor cuts and burns. Undaunted, Haddad moved ahead with the planning of the most infamous simultaneous skyjacking in history until 9/11.
On 6 September 1970, Skyjack Sunday, squads of PFLP terrorists managed to board four New York bound flights and hijack three of them.22 Two Palestinians took control of Pan Am flight 93 only minutes after the Boeing 747 left the ground in Amsterdam. Instead of crossing the Atlantic, the jet crossed Europe and landed in Beirut, where seven more terrorists boarded it and Lebanese airport personnel refueled it. Then the hijackers ordered it on to Cairo. The terrorists threatened no harm to the 152 passengers and 17 crew members. It was more like theater than terror. Passengers described the terrorists as “perfect gentlemen,” who politely explained their intention to destroy the plane once it was on the ground. One crew member wondered whether the men were serious. But when the plane touched down the Palestinians ordered an evacuation of the plane and passengers scrabbled for escape chutes. The men who had rigged the explosives were barely off the jet when it exploded in flames. For the passengers aboard Pan Am 93 this was the end of the ordeal. The next morning all flew on to New York.
For the passengers aboard TWA flight 741 and Swissair 100 the hijacking was just the beginning of what proved to be a violent month in Jordan. The Boeing 707 left Frankfurt with 141 passengers and 10 crew members en route to New York. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, as the jet crossed West Germany's frontier with Luxembourg, two Palestinians seized it and ordered it to Dawson Field, a remote airstrip on a desert plateau 30 miles from Amman, the Jordanian capital. Swiss Air flight 100 out of Zurich was over France when two more Palestinians commandeered the DC-8at almost the same moment.. Like those aboard the American jet, the 143 passengers and 12 crew members were suddenly en route to Dawson Field. As the pilot put his jet down he had to avoid the TWA jet already on the ground.
The two terrorists on El Al flight 219 failed in their mission to divert the jet to the Jordanian desert. Thirty minutes after the Boeing 707 left Amsterdam en route to New York with 148 passengers and 10 crew members, Leila Khaled and Patrick Arguello jumped into the aisle of the first class compartment and rushed the cockpit. Israeli intelligence knew Khaled's identity from the August 1969 TWA hijacking. That this young Palestinian woman managed to board an El Al flight demonstrated her resolve. She had undergone plastic surgery to alter her appearance and was traveling on a false Honduran passport posing as Arguello's Latin wife. Arguello was a U.S. citizen educated in Chile and living in Nicaragua. Not only had these two managed to board the jet, accomplices managed to place weapons aboard it. But the security failures prior to the departure of El Al 219 ended the moment Khaled and Arguello tried to commandeer the flight.
Arguello, armed with a pistol, rushed the cockpit door and shot an air steward who threw himself against