Reporter David Adams' father had a unique view of the 'Black September' hijackings in 1970 that pushed terrorism to a new level.
By DAVID ADAMS, Times Latin America Correspondent
Published February 27, 2006
I have this vague image in my head from when I was 9: My mother is fretting about my father being in danger in some far off place.
There are a bunch of Palestinians with guns and three planes exploding in flames in the desert.
I also recall a newspaper photograph of my parents happily reunited.
It wasn't until several years later that I had any real idea what the fuss was about. But few adults -- let alone children -- could have anticipated the impact of "Black September," as it became known.
Today, when terrorism is almost an everyday occurrence, the picture is much clearer.
Hijacked, a one-hour documentary on PBS tonight argues that Sept. 6, 1970, marked the birth of "a new era in global terrorism."
That morning Palestinian hijackers boarded planes in several European cities bound for the United States. Over the next three days two more planes were seized in midair.
Three planes were diverted to a remote landing strip in the Jordanian desert, dubbed "Revolution Airfield." They were greeted by guerrillas belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Their goal was to seek public attention for the Palestinian cause, and to gain the release of Palestinian prisoners held in jails in Europe and Israel.
They achieved both. They also set off a chain of events still felt today.
The hijackers that day "crossed a barrier," said the film's Israeli-American director, Ilan Ziv. Although all the hostages, more than 500 in all, would be released unhurt, the hijackings set a dangerous precedent.
"It's a naive notion to think you can take 500 people hostage," said Ziv, who lives in New York. "You can only do it once. Next time you have to start killing people or they don't take you seriously."
* * *
I owe my own understanding of Black September to a detailed account my father, Michael Adams, wrote at the time. I first read it after his death last year. He apparently dug it up after Ziv contacted him while making the film.
In his diary, neatly typed on 52 pages, my father describes how he responded to news of the hijacking by jumping on a plane from our home in London to the Middle East. He flew to Amman, the Jordanian capital,
with the idea of seeing the PFLP's leader, George Habash, "and trying to talk him out of it."
A former newspaper correspondent in the Middle East, my father had quit mainstream journalism a few years earlier in frustration over what he saw as anti-Arab bias. By 1970, he was working as an independent advocate for the Palestinian cause, with a newly formed group called the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.
When he arrived in Jordan the next day he found chaos. "The first thing we had heard at the airport was shooting in the streets and there was a column of black smoke rising from the center of the town," he wrote.
He quickly made contact with the PFLP, serving as an intermediary between the guerrilla leadership and the British embassy in Amman.
Jordan was crawling with Palestinian refugees, including militant groups under the wing of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
That afternoon shooting erupted outside the InterContinental hotel where my father had checked in, along with most of the foreign press corps and the released hostages.
At 4:15 p.m. he wrote: "I am sitting on the floor in a passage of the hotel and there is heavy firing all around, with rifles, machine guns and what I take to be mortars, plus (I am reliably informed) the occasional rocket."
My father was not prone to exaggeration. Besides being a bomber pilot during World War II, he had worked as a Middle East correspondent for more than decade, based in Cairo and Beirut.
That night heavy explosions continued to rock the hotel. In an entry at 10:10 p.m. he wrote: "I have put my mattress on the floor at the furthest point from the window and built a barricade beside it with the bedstead (on its side) and odd tables. Quite a snug hide-out, but not much use against mortars, I suspect."
He added: "Jordan, it seems safe to say, is far gone on the road to total anarchy."
* * *
The next day he got out to see the hostages.
My father describes the odd scene of the "three gleaming airliners" sitting "marvelously incongruous" in the empty desert with the letters PFLP painted on their tails.
Archive footage in Ziv's film shows hostages sitting on the sand talking with journalists. One TV camera was even allowed on board the hijacked planes.
The planes had already spent three days in the desert. The guerrillas were treating their hostages reasonably well, but it was hot and food and water were running low. Lanterns provided the only light in the cabins. The aircraft toilets soon were filthy.
Many of the women and children had been released, but the hijackers singled out a group of Jewish and American passengers who were being held separately. (They were later transferred to a safe house in Amman.)
On this occasion everyone would be released unharmed. Two years later, at the Munich Olympics, things turned out far bloodier after Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a Palestinian group calling itself Black September.
In his diary my father quotes a colleague, David Hirst, as noting that the PFLP guerrillas seemed "unaware of the dimensions of the row they have caused."
Most of the passengers were American. The Nixon administration was unsure how to react, according to Ziv's film. Nixon wanted to bomb PFLP sites in Jordan, but his orders were never carried out. His advisers made up excuses about bad weather.
Another British TV reporter who was there, Gerald Seymour, describes in Ziv's film that the guerrillas "didn't have the sophistication or the ruthlessness" that we associate with terrorists today. "They were to learn it but they didn't have it then," he notes.
* * *
Maybe that was why my father expressed no reservations over negotiating with terrorists. His main object was to get as many people to freedom as possible.
The guerrillas acceded to several of his requests, though it is not clear how important his role was in the eventual release of the hostages.
Six days after the ordeal began the PFLP suddenly freed the remaining hostages on the planes. They then blew up the aircraft -- captured spectacularly by TV cameras.
It would be another two weeks before the Jewish and American passengers were let go in return for the release of seven Palestinians. Meanwhile, Amman had erupted in civil war. King Hussein decided he had had enough of the PLO militants and ordered them driven out of the country.
My father and many of the journalists ended up trapped in their hotel for another week.
"This is a battle for the city," he wrote, "not a futile exchange of undirected fire such as we saw last week."
The InterContinental hotel had ceased functioning. Most of the staff had fled, there was no food, water and electricity were shut off and many windows were blown in. Several guests were also injured.
Some of the 150 journalists in the hotel got together and elected my father chairman of an "action committee" to bring some organization to the chaos. Several of my father's former colleagues figured his experience as a POW in Germany made him ideally qualified.
Within an hour all six floors had been swept and teams went up and down stairs with buckets of water to flush the toilets.
A few days later the journalists were evacuated, the story over for them. My father returned to England, anxious to get back to his family, but saddened to leave behind a country with an uncertain fate.
"What began as a piece of theater in the desert ended in tremendous bloodshed," said Ziv. By the time the brief civil war ended, several hundred people had been killed.
It was also a disaster for the Palestinian cause. The fedayeen fighters were routed from their bastions in the Palestinian refugee camps. Many fled to Lebanon where the PLO set up its new headquarters. But the Palestinian military presence there fueled another -- even bloodier -- civil war.
Two years earlier, my father had published a book, Chaos or Rebirth, warning of the danger the world faced if the Palestinian problem was not resolved.
The Palestinian cause he went to his grave supporting would never fully recover. Instead, it slid from one catastrophe to another, growing steadily more intractable.
-- David Adams is the Times' Latin America correspondent. He can be contacted at dadams@sptimes.com.
[Last modified February 27, 2006, 15:16:35]
