LUIS ALEMANY
Sunday, August 16, 2020 - 02:03
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- Black panthers. Angela's case
Fifty years ago, at the height of the "golden age of hijackings," some people suggested that passengers on planes wear boxing gloves so that no one could draw a gun. There was also a proposal to build an airport in Florida that would be an exact replica of the one in Havana , so that the hijacked planes would land there and the captors mistakenly thought they were already safe. And traps were even designed on the floor of aircraft that, when triggered, would open and lock the terrorists in the hold.
They are almost comical ideas that show how often airliners were robbed half a century ago. In 1969, 86 flights were hijacked. In 1970, 70 more fell . To have a measure: only eight kidnappings were recorded in the last decade, none of which ended successfully. According to the chronicles, the passengers of 1970 used to react with resignation in these cases, like the one who receives the news that their flight is going to be delayed one hour. Also the protocol of the crews was based on acceptance: the assailants had to be said yes to everything and avoid the dramas.
What happened in the air 50 years ago? The first explanation is geopolitical but it is simple and can be summed up in three words: Vietnam, Cuba, Nixon. Since the Republican politician had arrived at the White House, the lives of many anti-American anti-establishment activists had become complicated: hiding, harassment, jail ... Dozens of black panthers, yippies and members of Weather Underground desperately needed to leave their country. Regarding Cuba, the island was a kind of gray zone, more or less alien to international legality and a refuge for all dissidents in the world. The hijacked planes were received without asking for an explanation. In addition, his airport issued invoices for 7,500 dollars for the costs of landing, take-off and mediation in each case of hijacking.
And Vietnam? The influence of war during the golden age of air hijacking is more emotional: As former combatants returned to the United States, their cities filled with hyper-politicized men, accustomed to drugs, groggy from their post-traumatic stress disorder, and trained in arms.
Brendan I. Koerner's book The Skies Belong to Us (published in English by Crown Publishing) connects the three factors in a near-perfect account that ranges from love melodrama to historical investigation. Actually, the melodrama part is the most fun. Its protagonists are Willie Roger Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkow, some emuli of Bonnie and Clyde from the 70s who hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701, Seattle-Los Angeles and took it not to Cuba but to Algiers, the equivalent of Havana to this side of the Atlantic.
Holder was a 23-year-old black man, a former tanker in Vietnam, smart, handsome, war-drenched, bipolar, and headed for schizophrenia . Kerkow was white, 20 years old and had a tedious job in a call center, she was also pretty and her main interest was marijuana. The couple shared a vague political sense of their relationship, but, in reality, they were more than two hangers-on, yearning for strong feelings. Koerner packed a black briefcase in which he carried two books on the zodiac, shaving tools, and a coil of wire, the end of which protruded and tied at his left hand. She said it was a bomb; Kerkow backed him up, and no one thought to put them to the test.
They also said that they were black panthers (not true) and that they were demanding the release of Angela Davis and a loot of $ 500,000 to let the crew leave the plane. The Angela Davis thing was impossible, but the half million turned up and Holder and Kerkow decided then to take the plane to Algiers, the city where Eldridge Cleaver and his Black Panther split had taken refuge. It was the longest kidnapping in the world.
There is another book, Algiers, third world capital , by Elaine Mokhtefi, which narrates the landing of the flight from the opposite point of view. Panthers, Mokhtefi explains, had come to North Africa as rock stars and had even achieved diplomatic status. But they had a problem: money. When they learned that some colleagues were flying towards them with half a million in a purse they put on their best clothes and went to the airport. When the plane landed, they discovered that the kidnappers were not two comrades but a rather unconscious boy and her white and smoked girlfriend. It is not clear what happened to the money.
Holder and Kerkow's case is significant. As the 70s passed, the game of air hijacking was ceasing to be a political activity and was becoming a matter for psychiatrists. Little by little, the kidnappings stopped being the matter of movements like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Black Panthers, to be the work of lone wolves like DB Cooper (her real name is uncertain). Cooper, in 1971, hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight, got $ 200,000, and parachuted from the back of the Boeing 727 that he had captured. It was never known what became of her.
Even more serious was the case of the three hijackers who in 1973 announced that they planned to crash their plane into a nuclear plant. The kidnappers were three common criminals fleeing justice. They had their victims flying 30 hours through the United States and Canada and ended up in Havana. Castro's police detained them and put them in jail for eight years.
That case marked the end of the golden age of air hijackings. According to The skies belong to us, part of the chaos of the early 1970s had to do with the attitude of the airlines, which refused to implement security measures against kidnapping. They would rather bear the costs of the kidnappings than invest in metal detectors and computer files of suspects. In addition, they did not want the sumptuous image of air traffic to be clouded: those passages where liquor was ruthlessly served and the hostesses looked like models.
There were more changes. Cuba began to correct its open door policy with dissidents. Especially when she realized that many of the kidnappers were simple criminals. In Algeria, the journey towards authoritarianism of the National Liberation Front made Algiers cease to be another haven of desired freedom. Police in Europe and America began to develop methods with which to neutralize kidnappers. And even the Nixon government and the Vietnam War ended in the following years. Between 1968 and 1971, only 21 people died in 246 kidnappings. In 1977, 38 kidnappings left 114 dead. The game was no longer a harmless adventure.
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