TWA Flight 847 Hijacking

Photograph

By: The photograph was taken by one of the hijackers.

Date: June 1985

Source: Available online from WorldHistory.com at <http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/T/TWA-Flight-847.htm>.

About the Photographer: The photograph was taken by one of the hijackers.

INTRODUCTION

On June 14, 1985, Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 847, a Boeing 727 under the command of Captain John Testrake, was hijacked after departing from Athens, Greece, bound for Rome, Italy. The plane held 153 passengers and crew.

Two Shiite gunmen connected with the terrorist group Hezbollah (also known as Hizbollah) based in Beirut, Lebanon, seized command of the jetliner shortly after takeoff at 10:10 a.m., using guns and grenades they had smuggled aboard. A third hijacker, Ali Atwa, unable to board the plane because it was full, was arrested in Greece.

Thus began a seventeen-day ordeal for the crew and many of the passengers. The plane first stopped for refueling in Beirut, where nineteen of the passengers were released. The plane flew on to Algiers, where twenty more passengers were released. After the plane returned to Lebanon, the hijackers singled out one passenger, U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem, whom they beat and shot in the head before dumping his body onto the tarmac. At this point nearly a dozen armed terrorists joined the hijackers.

The odyssey continued when the plane next returned to Algiers. There, the hijackers released sixty-five passengers before returning again to Beirut, where the plane remained for the rest of the ordeal. The hijackers demanded that Israel release all of the Shiite Muslims it held in Lebanon. They also demanded that the international community condemn both Israel and the United States for their military activities in Lebanon. They insisted that the United States be specifically condemned for a car bombing in a Beirut suburb on March 8, 1985, which killed eighty people and which the hijackers considered to be the work of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When the Greek government released Ali Atwa, the hijackers released eight Greek citizens.

On Monday, June 17, most of the remaining hostages were released to Nabih Berri, a moderate Shiite leader and a Lebanese government official. Berri protected the hostages at a secure location. By now forty hostages remained on the plane, although one was released when he developed heart trouble. The standoff lasted for two weeks, with the plane just sitting on the tarmac of Beirut International Airport. The crisis came to an end on June 30, when the remaining hostages, all Americans, were released and flown to West Germany.

During the hostage crisis, people around the world became familiar with the following dramatic photos. The first shows two of the hijackers in the cockpit of the plane with Captain Testrake. The second shows one of the hijackers threatening Testrake while holding his head out the plane's window.

PRIMARY SOURCE

TWA FLIGHT 847 HIJACKING

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

Beginning in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Americans in the Middle East were the repeated targets of terrorist attacks and other forms of violence, usually at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists based in such countries as Lebanon and Iran.

• On November 4, 1979, fifty-two Americans were taken hostage by radical militants at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran. The ordeal dragged on for 444 days and likely contributed to President Jimmy Carter losing his bid for re-election.
• On April 18, 1983, the American embassy in Beirut was bombed, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans.
• On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber armed with a truck full of explosives killed 241 U.S. Marines at their barracks at the Beirut International Airport.
• On December 12, 1983, six people were killed when the U.S. embassy in Kuwait was bombed, part of a concerted series of attacks that included the French embassy, the country's major oil refinery, and a housing area for Americans.
• On March 16, 1984, CIA station chief William Buckley was kidnapped and tortured, one of thirty Westerners who were kidnapped in Lebanon from 1982 to 1992.
• On September 20, 1984, a U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was bombed.
• On December 3, 1984, Kuwait Airlines Flight 221 was hijacked, and when the hijackers' demands were not met, they killed two Americans from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The United States had absorbed these blows, but the administration of President Ronald Reagan, along with the American public, was rapidly losing its patience. After the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro was hijacked by Palestinian gunmen in October 1985, and elderly American Leon Klinghoffer was shot and his body dumped overboard, the United States took military action to force down the plane carrying the gunmen in Italy.

The hijackers of Flight 847 all escaped, although one, Mohammed Homadi, was captured two years later in West Germany. He was convicted of Stethem's murder and sentenced to life in prison. Three of the terrorists—Imad Fayez Mugniyah, Ali Atwa, and Hassan Izz-al-Din—were placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of most wanted terrorists in October 2001; a $25 million reward was offered for their capture.

Within a month of the end of the hijacking, Israel released its Lebanese prisoners. The Israelis have stead-fastly denied that they struck a deal with the hijackers.

Flight 847 produced its share of heroes. One was Captain Testrake, who gave a dramatic interview to ABC News while the crisis was ongoing. Another was purser Uli Derickson, who spoke German and discovered that she could communicate with one of the hijackers in that language. During the ordeal, she was able to calm him and the others by singing a German ballad he requested. She frequently put herself in harm's way by confronting the hijackers when, for example, they were beating a passenger. In Algiers, when the ground crew refused to refuel the plane and the hijackers threatened to kill passengers, Derickson put a $5,500 charge for 6,000 gallons of fuel on her personal credit card.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Snyder, Rodney A. Negotiating with Terrorists: TWA Flight 847. Pew Case Studies in International Affairs. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1994.

Testrake, John, and David J. Wimbish. Triumph over Terror on Flight 847. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1987.

Audio and Visual Media

History Channel. "On the Hijacking of TWA Flight 847." Speech by President Ronald Reagan, June 18, 1985. Available from <http://www.historychannel.com/speeches/archive/speech_235.html> (with audio link; accessed June 27, 2005).