Battle of Flight 517

Sabena Flight 517 from Brussels to Tel Aviv was 20 minutes out of Vienna last week when two Arabs waving pistols rushed the cockpit. "As you can see," Captain Reginald Levy calmly informed his 90 passengers, "we have friends aboard." The friends--the men and two women, who produced explosives from under their skirts--were members of a Palestinian guerrilla organization called Black September.* Their audacious plan: to land the Boeing 707 at Tel Aviv and embarrass Israel by threatening to blow up the plane on a Lod Airport runway unless 317 imprisoned fedayeen were released.

Levy's radioed alert that his plane had been commandeered rang top-level alarms in Israel. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff General David Elazar hurried to the airport to supervise the troops mustered to meet the jet. As soon as Levy touched down in the Tel Aviv dusk and rolled to an isolated runway, mechanics at Dayan's orders immobilized the plane by deflating its tires and draining the hydraulic system.

After presenting their demands for the prisoners' release to Lod's control tower, the skyjackers were alarmed to discover that they could not take off again. Emotionally, they kissed one another goodbye and prepared to detonate the explosives. Levy started a conversation to calm them down, and kept on chatting through the night. "I talked about everything under the sun," he said later, "from navigation to sex."

Next morning, in response to Levy's plea, Dayan promised to prepare the plane for takeoff and produce the fedayeen. A group of bogus prisoners were shown to the skyjackers from a distance and Dayan had an airplane taken out to a runway, supposedly to fly the released fedayeen to Cairo. From the control tower, one of the "prisoners"--actually an Arabic-speaking Israeli soldier--lulled the skyjackers: "They tell me I'm being sent to Cairo. Is that true? Praised be Allah." Meanwhile, out of sight, commandos were practicing assault tactics on a 707. When they were able to force the doors, swing aboard and start shooting in 90 seconds, Elazar deemed them ready. His "ground crew" approached the jet, allowed themselves to be frisked by Red Cross negotiators who had been called in at Arab request. No pistols turned up in the search; they had been hidden in boots or tool boxes. Suddenly the "mechanics" burst into the plane with guns blazing. The two male skyjackers died from bullets in the head and one of the two women was wounded. In all, the action took precisely 90 seconds.

Israelis hailed the jet's recapture as a military victory--and as an example of how other nations ought to handle skyjacking. Dayan himself was host at a dinner for Levy, a British citizen with a Jewish father and a Christian mother who was celebrating his 50th birthday. Prime Minister Golda Meir later threw a second dinner for all the participants. She kissed Levy and cried, "We love you." Publicly, Mrs. Meir justified the recapture, citing "the terrible significance of submission" to terrorism.

Elsewhere the response was less enthusiastic. The International Air Line Pilots Association protested the danger to passengers in such go-for-broke shootouts. As it happened, three aboard Flight 517 had been wounded. One 22-year-old Israeli was in critical condition; she had leaped up in panic when the firing started and was shot in the head by a commando who mistook her for one of the Arabs. The International Red Cross angrily cried that it had been duped by the Israelis. Arabs nevertheless accused the agency of complicity. In Beirut, where Red Cross week was in progress, volunteers soliciting donations were attacked on the street by Black September supporters.

* The leader of the group, who called himself Captain Rafat, was later identified as Ali Taha, 34, a onetime Jerusalem tour guide and seasoned skyjacker. In 1968 he helped divert an El Al jet to Algeria, and two years later participated in one of the fedayeen's most spectacular feats: the simultaneous skyjacking of three jets to the Jordanian desert.

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