Hezbollah (13 page)

128.
US CIA, “Wild, Wild West Beirut.”

129.
Ibid.

130.
Ranstorp,
Hizb’Allah in Lebanon
, 86–108.

131.
US CIA, “Western Hostages in Lebanon.”

132.
Jaber,
Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance
, 118.

133.
“William Francis Buckley,” Arlington National Cemetery website, last modified April 23, 2006.

134.
Cannistraro, interview,
PBS Frontline
.

135.
US CIA, “Lebanon: Hizb Allah.”

136.
Cannistraro, interview,
PBS Frontline
.

137.
US CIA, “New Rash of Kidnappings.”

138.
US CIA, “Lebanon: ‘Islamic Jihad’ Goes Public.”

139.
Jaber,
Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance
, 118.

140.
Gordon Thomas, “William Buckley: The Spy Who Never Came in from the Cold,”
Canada Free Press
, October 25, 2006.

141.
Jacobsen,
Hostage
, 51–52.

142.
Thomas, “William Buckley.”

143.
James Sturcke, “Car Bomb Kills Hizbullah Chief in Syria,”
Guardian
(London), February 13, 2008.

144.
Ranstorp,
Hizb’Allah in Lebanon
, 2.

145.
Jacobsen,
Hostage
, 54.

146.
Israel, Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, “Hezbollah (part 1): Profile of the Lebanese Shiite Terrorist Organization of Global Reach Sponsored by Iran and Supported by Syria,” June 2003; Ariel Merari et al., “INTER 85: A Review of International Terrorism in 1985,” 98; Ariel Merari et al., “INTER: International Terrorism in 1987,” 54.

147.
Ibid.

148.
Davies and Tomlinson,
Spycraft Manual
, 108.

149.
Ibid.; Fisk,
Pity the Nation
, 613.

150.
Ariel Merari et al., “INTER 85: A Review of International Terrorism in 1985,” 99.

151.
Fisk,
Pity the Nation
, 613.

152.
Woodward,
Secret Wars of the CIA
, 416.

153.
James S. Robbins, “Holding Us Hostage Speaking Their Language,”
National Review Online
, April 12, 2004.

154.
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland, “Islamic Liberation Organization,” 2012.

155.
US Department of Justice, FBI, “International Radical Fundamentalism.”

156.
John Kohan, Johanna McGeary, and Barry Hillenbrand, “Horror aboard Flight 221,”
Time
, December 17, 1984.

157.
Wright,
Sacred Rage
, 134.

158.
Kohan, McGeary, and Hillenbrand, “Horror aboard Flight 221.”

159.
Evan Duncan, “Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Official Personnel Abroad, 1982–84: Iran,” US Department of State Bulletin, April 1985.

160.
Wright,
Sacred Rage
, 136.

161.
Ibid.

162.
Paul Wilkinson, “Hezbollah: A Critical Appraisal,”
Jane’s Intelligence Review
(August 1993): 369.

163.
Wright,
Sacred Rage
, 140.

164.
“Facts for Your Files: A Chronology of U.S. Middle East Relations,”
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
, December 17, 1984.

165.
Duncan, “Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Official Personnel Abroad.”

166.
Shaked and Rabinovich,
Middle East Contemporary Survey
, 404.

167.
US CIA, “Lebanon: ‘Islamic Jihad’ Goes Public.”

168.
“1988: Hijackers Free 25 Hostages,”
BBC News
(On This Day), April 5 1988.

169.
Associated Press, “Hijacked Plane in Cyprus After 7 Hours of Air Terror,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 8, 1988.

170.
Associated Press, “Chronology of Events in Hijacking of Kuwait Airways Flight 422 with AM-Hijack Bjt,” AP News Archive, April 12, 1988.

171.
Sam Allis Larnaca and David S. Jackson, “Terrorism Nightmare on Flight 422,”
Time
, April 25, 1988.

172.
Times Wire Services, “Hijackers Free Hostages, End 16-Day Ordeal,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 20, 1988.

173.
Jaber,
Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance
, 129.

174.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
9/11 Commission Report
, released July 22, 2004, 48.

175.
Ranstorp,
Hizb’Allah in Lebanon
, 125.

176.
US CIA, “Keenan’s Release a Victory,” 5.

177.
Ranstorp,
Hizb’Allah in Lebanon
, 105.

178.
US CIA, “Hizballah Terrorist Plans against U.S. Interests.”

“WE’VE GOT A HIJACK,”
flight engineer Christian Zimmermann told the captain, John Testrake, as he reached for the cockpit fire ax by the bulkhead door. Who knew what weapons the hijackers had, or what weapons the crew might be able to use? Either way, Zimmermann thought, better to hide the ax. TWA flight 847 had just taken off from Athens on a short flight to Rome, with continuing service to the United States. But the routine trip became a terrifying, 8,500-mile journey around the Mediterranean aimed at securing the release of Lebanese Shi’a militants from Israeli and other jails. The hijacking also introduced the world to its mastermind, Imad Mughniyeh, who was famously photographed leaning out the cockpit window over Captain Testrake with his gun pointed at the tarmac.
¹

As soon as the flight engineer turned off the seat belt sign, the hijackers rushed the cockpit door. The flight crew first heard banging from the main cabin, then heavy pounding on the cockpit door. The door’s bottom panel was kicked out, flying into the cockpit. The hijackers kicked lead flight attendant Uli Derickson in the chest and held a gun to her head while screaming, “Come to die! Americans die!” Derickson called the captain on the intercom: “We’re being roughed up back here! Please open the door!” As Zimmermann unlocked the door, two hijackers stormed in, one gripping an automatic pistol and the other a couple of hand grenades, and demanded the plane head for Algeria. As he planned a new course for Algeria, the captain mused to himself how “they were well-groomed, average-looking guys who didn’t look like they could be hijackers or killers.”
²

Aware they were vastly outnumbered, the two hijackers, later identified as Hezbollah operatives Mohammad Ali Hamadi and Hasan Izz al-Din, quickly established authority and control over the 153 passengers and crew. They burst in and out of the cockpit and ran up and down the aisles hitting passengers on the head, Hamadi holding the gun and Izz al-Din the grenades. Some crew members were pistol-whipped by Hamadi, while Izz al-Din took to pulling the pins out of his grenades and playing with them nervously. In an effort to reduce threats to the hijackers, men were seated by the windows and women and children moved to aisle seats. The area near the cockpit was cleared of passengers, who were crammed into the
back of the aircraft, where passengers now sat four across in each three-seat row. They were instructed to sit silently with heads down and hands clasped over their heads. Those who made a noise or complained were beaten. Such precautions were wise; members of the crew and several US military officers on board each considered confronting the hijackers but thought better of it. At one point the pilot even considered flying the plane to Tel Aviv and landing before the hijackers realized what he had done.
³

Neither hijacker spoke English, and the crew spoke no Arabic, but Hamadi and Uli Derickson both spoke German. Hamadi would wave his gun and bark orders in German for Derickson to translate, while Izz al-Din “kept jumping up and down making threatening gestures.”
⁴
Through Derickson the crew explained to Hamadi that the plane lacked the fuel to fly to Algeria, nearly twice the distance of the flight’s planned route to Rome. The hijackers first settled on Cairo as an alternative but quickly changed their minds, yelling, “Beirut! Beirut! Fuel only!” At this point the hijackers demanded the fire ax on seeing its empty storage space. The crew insisted the plane just didn’t have one, so the hijackers found another way to smash the doorknob off the cockpit door, which now swung open. With the flight under their control and now headed to Beirut, the hijackers sent Derickson to collect passengers’ passports and identify all the Jews. Instead, Derickson shielded passengers with Jewish-sounding names.
⁵

US Navy divers Robert Stethem and Clinton Suggs were seated in the last row of the plane, tired after a week’s work repairing an underwater sewer line at a US naval communications station in Greece and eager to get home. Soon after taking their seats they fell asleep, waking to passengers’ screams as the hijackers ran up and down the aisles hitting people on the head. When Derickson and Hamadi came by collecting passports, Suggs whispered that he and Stethem only had their military identity cards and hesitated before handing them to her. Seeing this interaction, Hamadi demanded they hand over their identification, which they did.
⁶

Ten or fifteen minutes later, Hamadi barreled down the aisle holding the two divers’ military ID cards. “You, marine?” Hamadi asked after hitting Suggs on the head with his pistol. “No, US Navy,” Suggs replied. Hamadi turned to Stethem, told him to stand up, and led him to the front of the plane. After another five or ten minutes, Hamadi returned to pistol-whip Suggs once more and take him to the first-class section as well. There, Suggs saw Stethem with his hands tied behind his back and his head between his knees. Hamadi tied up Suggs too, adding, “If you move, I kill you.” He pulled an armrest off a chair, dragged Stethem into the open cockpit doorway, and used the armrest—with screws still sticking out—as a club to beat Stethem. Soon it was Suggs’s turn to be beaten, and from time to time the hijackers also hit members of the crew, especially Zimmermann, the flight engineer, whose face was quickly bloodied. But Stethem took most of the punishment.
⁷

As the plane passed over Cyprus, the crew radioed Beirut air traffic control for permission to land. “I am sorry,” the controller replied, “but we are closed, and you will not be allowed to land.” Frustrated and under tremendous stress, the first officer made it clear the flight was landing in Beirut, like it or not. “These people are
armed and dangerous,” he stressed. “And they are ordering us to land at Beirut.” The captain chimed in, noting that the aircraft was low on fuel, and in distress he declared an emergency and demanded clearance to land. As the flight entered its final approach to the Beirut airport, the unnerved controller finally relented: “Very well, sir, you are cleared to land. Land quietly please.”
⁸

As the hijackers’ primary means of communication, Derickson found herself at the center of the drama. She occasionally calmed Hamadi by singing him a German song he requested, successfully negotiated for the release of some of the passengers, and repeatedly came to the defense of passengers and crew. “Don’t you hit that person!” she would shout. At one point, one of the hijackers asked her to marry him. She would later be honored for her bravery and would be the subject of a made-for-TV movie. But at the time she thought not of fame or honor, just survival.
⁹

Derickson was immersed in the third Middle East hijacking in four days, and she could only have hoped this affair would end as well and as quickly as the other two. All three hijackings involved Beirut International Airport, which had become a preferred transit point for terrorists on the move. It was now, the CIA reported days after the TWA hijacking, “the site of a considerable number and variety of terrorist activities, especially skyjackings.”
¹⁰

The first of that week’s hijackings took place three days before the TWA 847 saga began, when six Shi’a gunmen stormed a Jordanian airliner at the Beirut airport and forced the Swedish pilot to fly to Cyprus, then Italy, and then back to Beirut, where the passengers were released and the plane was blown up. Over the twenty-eight hours during which the plane hopped around the eastern Mediterranean, the hijackers, who called themselves the “Suicide Brigade of Imam al-Sadr,” lashed out at a recent Arab League statement supportive of the plight of Palestinians in Beirut’s refugee camps. The camps had been under attack from Shi’a militants over the past few weeks, part of an effort to drive the Palestinians out of Lebanon and undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). After airing their grievances and destroying the plane, the hijackers sped off into the Shi’a neighborhoods of South Beirut near the airport.
¹¹
One of the hijackers would issue a statement in the name of the “Martyrs of the Lebanese Resistance,” a Hezbollah cover name.
¹²
It would not take long for more concrete ties to emerge between this hijacking and that of TWA flight 847.

Some of the passengers of this hijacked Jordanian flight were able to book themselves on the first available flight out of Beirut, a Middle Eastern Airlines flight to Cyprus the next day. But as the plane landed at Larnaca, a Palestinian militant pulled out a hand grenade and threatened to blow up the airplane to protest the previous day’s hijacking. He was talked out of that idea, however, and allowed to fly to Amman, where he was arrested on arrival.
¹³

The hijacking of TWA flight 847 by Hamadi and Izz al-Din took place two days later, kicking off a seventeen-day crisis far more severe than the week’s earlier two hijackings. Airport hijackings involving Beirut International Airport, the CIA
concluded, were “a particular problem.” The agency recorded thirty-six hijackings involving the airport, part of a “sorry 15-year record” underscoring the “chronic security problem there.”
¹⁴