Theirs for the Taking

On June 2, 1972, a few minutes before his flight from Los Angeles was scheduled to land in Seattle, a tall, skinny black man in an Army dress uniform walked up the aisle and handed the flight attendant an index card that said he was wired to bomb the plane. Like everything else about the man, his note seemed to veer between the meticulous and the insane. He had drawn a diagram of the bomb he said he was carrying in his briefcase; it was so credible the pilots concluded he had had training in explosives. But his note seemed the product of a manic mind: “Success through Death,” it read, and it said that he had accomplices in the cabin from the violent radical Weatherman group, and the not-violent radical group Students for a Democratic Society. The pilots decided to comply. They asked the man where he wanted to go. North Vietnam, he said.

The man, whose name was Roger Holder, was not actually a member of the Weatherman, or of S.D.S. He was a traumatized, unemployed drifter, whose only accomplice was his 20-year-old girlfriend, Cathy Kerkow, who until a few days earlier had been working in a San Diego massage parlor. They were radicals only casually, with no obvious aptitude for terrorism: Holder consulted astrological charts to ease his mind during the hijacking, and when it turned out the plane lacked the capacity to fly across the Pacific, he chose a new destination — Algiers, where the charismatic Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver had taken up residence.

And yet, despite their obvious limitations, this unlikely pair succeeded. In an era when skyjacking was shockingly common, they pulled off the longest-­distance hijacking in American aviation history, and then, equally amazingly, stayed mostly ahead of the law ever since. Their adventure peaked when Holder became the director of the international branch of the Black Panther Party and Kerkow a French socialite.

This material, naturally a great yarn, is handled exceedingly well by the journalist Brendan I. Koerner, whose main interest, beyond the simple delight of the story, is in excavating the skyjacking epidemic from history — an extended moment, from 1968 to 1972, when dozens of planes in the United States were taken over by hijackers, most of them professing political aims. These acts of violence had become so normal that air traffic controllers in Miami were given direct lines to Havana, where the planes were often being diverted. Koer­ner is particularly sharp in detailing the strange collision of forces that contributed to the epidemic — psychologists, a powerful airline lobby that resisted government efforts to install more effective preflight security, a Vietnam-weary nation a little less sure than usual whether it sided with authority or the radicals.

But “The Skies Belong to Us” has a more urgent theme, though Koerner is less explicit about it: the often circumstantial nature of political violence. We tend to assume that terrorists are those who have made the most profound philosophical commitment to their cause and undergone the most extreme radicalization, like the glamorous Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled or, currently, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In Holder and Kerkow’s story, the familiar late-’60s issues of the left are all there: racial alienation and separatism, the Vietnam debacle, feminism, even an allegiance to Angela Davis, the indicted black militant and Communist whose freedom Holder intended to bargain for with his hijacked plane. And yet Koerner’s deft touch, his deference to the randomness of his characters’ story, helps show that the commitments of Holder and Kerkow, and of many of the other radicals they met, were deeply felt but transitory, even momentary — depots that they ghosted through.

Holder and Kerkow, young and broke and often happily stoned, were not obvious terrorists. She was a couple of years out of a small-town Oregon high school, and had moved to San Diego, which to her was “a wonderland of sunny days and easy sex.” He was a withdrawn, spacey Vietnam vet who had received an undesirable discharge and took solace in building elaborate model airplanes. The grievances Holder nursed against his superior officers escalated in the spring of 1972, when he became obsessed with Davis’s conspiracy trial, which he perceived as a persecution. (It is thanks to Koerner’s capacities as an investigator that we know this great detail: what really outraged Holder was not the politics of the trial but the prosecution’s use of Davis’s personal letters, which he viewed as a violation of her privacy.)

Having noticed the success of other skyjackings, Holder started drawing up plans to hijack a flight and demand that Davis be liberated and flown with him and Kerkow to Hanoi. (Holder and Kerkow’s shared fantasy was that they would then migrate to Australia and live a hippie, outback existence.) The couple seemed almost surprised when the airline complied with their request for half a million dollars in cash, when the pilots politely ferried them across the Atlantic, when the skyjacking actually worked.

Viewed from the perspective of the present, what is most striking is how easy hijacking was at that time. Koerner believes this was largely because the airline industry had been lobbying for years to ward off more stringent security measures. A successful skyjacking tended to cost an airline only about $25,000, Koerner writes, and since violence was rare, both the industry and the Federal Aviation Administration believed it was easier and cheaper to endure periodic acts of inconvenience than to impose long security lines on passengers, which might reduce the number of paying customers. “It would scare the pants off people,” an F.A.A. official told a senator who, in 1968, proposed X-ray machines and metal detectors. The industry made some grudging concessions — training their ticket sales personnel to single out potential hijackers by their behavior in line — but they also stocked every pilot’s cabin with maps of Cuba’s José Martí International Airport and Spanish-language phrase cards. The instinct to cooperate with hijackers and resist law enforcement was so deeply ingrained that the pilot on Holder and Kerkow’s flight turned away F.B.I. agents on the Kennedy Airport runway in New York because he feared they might instigate a firefight, and continued on his way to Algiers.

In Algeria, as Koerner describes them, Holder and Kerkow were 1960s romantics in a 1970s world. They smoked hashish and sunned on the beach, while Cleaver and his cronies — hardly ideologues — tried to pry away their ransom money. But the leftist president of Algeria, Houari Boumediene, recognized that they were party people, not the genuine article. After meeting them face to face, he promptly dismissed them, Koerner writes, having “decided their fates based on a single glance.”

Rifts developed, not merely between the couple and the Panthers but between the couple themselves, though they managed to find asylum in France. Kerkow headed for a sexy radical-chic Parisian life and Holder for the depths of mental illness and institutionalization. Characters like these, in a less sympathetic writer’s hands, could become avatars for the wildest impulses of the ’60s. But Koerner has a rare empathy, and by acknowledging the fullness of their strange story, he suggests a deeper truth about the nature of extremism. For some, politics may be a logical process from outrage to radicalization. For others, like Holder and Kerkow, it is simply a disguise.