The Sick Skyjacker

"That poor Houston ticket clerk never had a chance," Dallas Psychiatrist David Hubbard said last week. "He defied the first rule in dealing with a paranoiac--never crowd him or move at him suddenly--and got an instant, deadly education."

Hubbard was talking about Airline Agent Stanley Hubbard,* who was killed last week attempting to stop four armed skyjackers from boarding an Eastern Airlines jet (see THE NATION). If airline employees and passengers --and Government agencies, too--are properly educated about skyjackers. Psychiatrist Hubbard believes, tragedies like the one in Houston can be avoided. Skyjackers, says Hubbard, are not normal men who can be dealt with as if they were ordinary criminals; in most cases they are paranoid, suicidal schizophrenics to whom the threat of death is not a deterrent but a stimulus to crime. Thus Hubbard believes that the Federal Government is endangering air travelers by pursuing its belligerent policy toward skyjackers. In fact, he says, each time the Government escalates its response to aerial piracy, it excites the interest of "mutations," new types of psychopaths with ever more dangerous tendencies toward violence.

Women's Underclothes. Hubbard speaks with some authority. He is the only U.S. psychiatrist who has studied the skyjacking phenomenon. Supported by a $200,000 grant from a private Dallas foundation, Hubbard in the past 3 1/2 years has taped hundreds of hours of interviews with 50 imprisoned skyjackers, worked with airline crews to develop techniques for handling piracy, and outlined his ideas in a 1971 book called The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fantasy (Macmillan; $5.95). Hubbard's go-easy approach is anathema to get-tough FBI officials and many pilots. But there is some evidence that it works: Hubbard has personally stage-managed the peaceful surrender of three hijackers.

The principal characters in the Houston skyjacking and in an unsuccessful attempt two days later at New York City's Kennedy Airport seem to give Hubbard's theories even more credence. Charles Tuller, who led the band that took over the Eastern jet, could not sustain his marriage, hated his exwife, and was said to be awkward and uncomfortable around women. The man who was subdued before he could hijack a National Airlines jet in New York was discovered to be wearing women's underclothes. What is known about both men seems to confirm Hubbard's belief that skyjackers are emotionally disturbed. In his experience, they are not strong, masculine supermen but weak, longtime losers, men who have failed at life and love. They tend to be passive, effeminate, latently homosexual, and afraid of their eldest sisters and mothers.

"I never dated. I didn't know how to ask," many skyjackers have confessed to Hubbard. When a skyjacker gets married, it is usually to a woman who "seduced him first and proposed later." Adds Hubbard about the skyjackers he knows: "Almost without exception, the men were reviled by their wives, strove to placate them and were often cuckolded." One betrayed skyjacker's wife told her husband that he had "never pleased her sexually, had a tiny penis, and not the least idea in the world about what to do with it."

Shattered by that kind of accusation, a husband may try to repair his ego by a daring act of air piracy--at the same time symbolically getting back at other members of his family. Observes Hubbard: "It is not difficult to discern the delight they experienced when they approached little sister-mother stewardess, gun in hand, and said, 'Honey, we're going all the way --to Cuba,' and the sense of power they derived from making daddy (flying the plane) stay put, making him permit the abuse of sister-mother, and forcing him to perform the bidding of sonny."

Numerous skyjackers have confessed suicidal fantasies to Hubbard. Sometimes this intent is displayed when a skyjacker purposely delays opening his chute after jumping from a plane. Sometimes it comes out in an expressed indifference to death. Said one young man: "I bought me a plane ticket and a pistol. I thought, I'll either die or I'll do it. Either way was O.K. with me." Thus for many skyjackers, Hubbard says, death may be "not the ultimate punishment but the ultimate reward."

With such men, Hubbard believes, the threat of force is actually "counterproductive." In fact, the skyjacker seems to respond to greater force with increasingly violent tactics of his own. A good example, says Hubbard, is the sky-marshal program. "Before marshals arrived on the scene, skyjackers were arming themselves with pistols. When the Government escalated, so did the hijackers; now they use a pistol and a bomb." To make things worse, the Government has virtually abandoned the marshal program, yet has made only a low-key--and little noticed--announcement to that effect. As a result, skyjackers have not reduced their armaments. Similarly, an offer by pilots and airlines to pay $25,000 for information leading to a skyjacker's arrest triggered responses from armed bounty hunters who were "usually more dangerous and deranged than the skyjackers." The offer was withdrawn--but so quietly that "some of those nuts" are presumably still riding planes looking for trouble and likely to provoke it.

The greatest deterrent to skyjacking, Hubbard says, would be an international agreement to send the air pirates back to the country where they committed their crime. Without exception, skyjackers have told Hubbard that they would never have gone through with their plans if they had been certain of immediate return to the U.S. In particular, Hubbard told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos, the four men who killed the agent in Houston must be sent back by the Cubans, "or else the life of every airline ticket agent in this country is up for grabs." Hubbard acknowledges that negotiations with Cuba may be difficult, because "it was the U.S. that first condoned skyjacking; after the Castro takeover, we welcomed as heroes those Cuban refugees who hijacked planes and boats to get to freedom."

Another debatable deterrent that Hubbard advocates is elimination of the death penalty so that skyjacking cannot be undertaken as a form of unconscious suicide. He also favors stressing the skyjacker's sexual problems to make piracy seem humiliating rather than heroic. It would help if the press played down the details of particular crimes. Skyjackers, says Hubbard, "are like small boys acting out a play for which they have read the script."

Latent Violence. For those who suddenly find themselves the victims of air piracy Hubbard recommends treating the skyjacker like a frightened animal. Passengers and crew should move slowly and deliberately in his presence, and show courtesy, warmth and understanding in order not to trigger his latent violence by making him feel cornered or attacked. Passengers should stay noncommittally aloof, stewardesses should avoid seductiveness because this frightens air pirates, and everyone concerned should avoid any trickery, which is especially alarming to paranoids. "The crew needs the same understanding of mentally ill people as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital," says Hubbard. Even without training, air personnel often know intuitively what they should do. "Many times a crew will have worked wonders, have the skyjacker at the point of giving up, only to land in an airport where 200 police are waiting. In a flash, the hijacker has a gun at the captain's head."

Outside forces can be useful, however, as Hubbard himself has proved. Last year, for instance, he managed, by long-distance telephone to Argentina, to maneuver AWOL Sailor Robert Jackson into surrendering 70 hours after he had hijacked a Braniff 707 at San Antonio and ordered it to Buenos Aires. "We were dealing with a very tired skyjacker who had not slept for most of 48 hours. I figured if we could crowd him with problems at the low point of his fatigue and will to continue, we would have him--and we did."

While waiting for Jackson to get to that physiological low--which Hubbard says every human being reaches around 5 a.m.--Hubbard counseled against actions that might make Jackson's adrenalin flow. The skyjacker, for instance, had demanded a DC-8 for a flight to Algeria. At Hubbard's insistence, however, Braniff officials reluctantly agreed to keep the DC-8 out of sight: "If he had seen it, it would have pepped him up enormously." Hubbard also got the airline to replace a radio operator whose voice, after 17 hours, had come to sound familiar and comforting to the skyjacker. After letting Jackson stew in isolation for 21 hours, Hubbard next injected a note of anxiety by having airline officials notify the crews that they were no longer physically fit to fly. Hearing this, Jackson let two crew members leave the plane; five hours later he gave himself up.

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