WHEN THE airplane`s no-smoking light went off, Dorothy Sullivan was reading an English-language newspaper that she had bought at the Athens airport.
At a window seat two rows back, Sullivan`s close friend, Isabel Carpio, was saying the rosary on her fingers because she didn`t have her beads handy. A young mother`s small children, fussy before takeoff, were asleep. Toward the back of the Trans World Airlines Boeing 727, Stanley Balt lighted a cigarette while his wife, Evelyn, sank into her seat and closed her eyes for some rest after a long and tiring vacation to the Holy Land.
Suddenly, there was the sound of breaking glass in a lavatory in the rear of the plane.
And then two men ran up the aisle toward the cabin. Both had grenades. One had a pistol.
”I had my eyes closed because I was praying,” recalled Carpio, of far west suburban Montgomery.
”And then I heard this gruff voice say, `Hands up!` I looked and saw these two men. Then the purser came up and said: `Please cooperate with our friends here. Put your hands on your head and put your head down.` ”
Evelyn Balt, of Oswego, heard the commotion and opened her eyes to see people from the first-class section being herded into the tourist section with their hands up.
”I said to my husband, `What is this? A hijacking?` He said, `Yes.` I said, `I don`t believe it.` ”
At this moment–10:10 a.m. on Friday June 14 (Athens time)–the 145 passengers and 8 crew members of flight 847 were at the start of a tense deadly drama that, more than a week later, still was being played out in Beirut, Jerusalem and Washington.
It was a drama that would cost one American his life, draw a worldwide audience and, more than a week later, continue to feature as unwilling actors 40 American hostages, 10 of them from the Chicago area.
The passengers and crew of flight 847, of course, had no way of knowing this, just as they had no way of knowing that the two hijackers who, at this moment, were taking control of the airplane were Ahmed Karbeia and Ali Yunes, both 21-year-old Shiite Moslems from Lebanon.
Nor did they know that there was supposed to have been a third hijacker, Ali Atwa, 21, a Lebanese. But Atwa had been left in Athens on the Rome-bound airliner because he couldn`t get a seat on the flight.
The passengers did not know that the fate of many of them would be inextricably bound with that of 766 Shiite Moslems from Lebanon who were being held in Israel and whose freedom would be demanded by Karbeia and Yunes.
All that the passengers and crew knew at this moment was that two men, armed with hand grenades and a pistol, were threatening them for some unknown reason and ordering them to bend over in their seats, put their hands on their heads and keep silent.
”They were very loud,” recalled Sophie Kowalczyk, 79, who lives in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago.
On Kowalczyk`s right sat her daughter-in-law, Dolores, of Arlington Heights, and on her left was Rev. P. William McDonnell, 47, pastor of St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church in Algonquin.
”I put my head down, but I kept peeking and whispering to my daughter-in-law. She said to be quiet,” Kowalczyk said.
”Then I started to pray, and Father said to me, `Be quiet.` I said, `I can`t. I`m too scared.` ”
The Balts, both 70 and married for 45 years, did not even try to whisper. But every once in a while Stanley would nudge Evelyn with his knee in a secret but gentle form of communication.
Edward Liebst, 65, of Lake in the Hills, could hear the hijackers opening and closing the overhead racks and became convinced that they were preparing to blow up the plane. His wife, Marie, could see a young woman crying soundlessly, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Sullivan, 60, of Aurora, saw only one of the hijackers. He was a man who held a hand grenade and looked like he would use it if he had to.
”The woman next to me whispered, `He slapped me,` ” Sullivan recalled.
”This one man seemed to be going up and down the aisle and just doing it. You could hear–slap, slap, slap.
”I thought maybe this is it, this is how it`s going to end. Then I prayed. I prayed for them that they would change their ways.”
Sullivan`s friend Carpio also was praying, and trying to cope with waves of disbelief and fear.
”The prayers I learned from childhood just kept coming to me,” she said. ”I thought, `Lord, thy will be done if this is the way it will end.`
”A numbness set in. You just did what you were told. You prayed.”
Next to Carpio sat Frances Reynolds, 65, of the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Chicago. To the right of Reynolds, an elderly woman started to cry and was beaten by the hijackers.
”They beat her hard. Then they knocked her glasses off,” Reynolds recalled.
”She reached down to get them and they hit her again.
”Her husband was next to her, and he got up to protect her. Then they grabbed him by the neck and threw him to the back.
”He was an older man, but he was trying to protect his wife. What else could he do? When they threw him back there, we thought he was going to die.
”His wife was crying and praying. We all were crying and praying hard all the time.”
— — —
For the 33 Chicago-area people on the plane, the terror of the hijacking came on the homebound leg of a two-week vacation that had been fun, educational and inspiring.
The tour, which cost $2,100 per person, had been sponsored by Ever So Young Seniors, the senior citizen group at St. Margaret Mary. Eighteen of the original 34 members of the tour (one dropped out) were St. Margaret Mary parishioners, including Father McDonnell.
Everyone on the tour was Catholic, except for Sullivan, who is a member of Big Woods Congregational Church in Naperville, and Peter W. Hill, the tour guide from Good News Travel Agency in Schaumburg. Both are Protestants.
”We`d never done it before,” Evelyn Balt said in explaining why she and her husband took the tour. ”We went to Rome and Switzerland last year, and have been to every one of the 50 states.”
”That`s why we wanted to go, to make a pilgrimage,” Stanley Balt said.
The tour group met Hill at O`Hare International Airport on May 31. They flew to New York, then to Paris, then to Tel Aviv, and then took a bus to Jerusalem, arriving late the next afternoon, a Saturday, to begin a week in the Holy Land.
”The masses were all prearranged to be said in significant places,”
Carpio explained. ”There was one at the Church of the Nativity and another at Dominus Flavit, the place where Jesus wept looking over Jerusalem.
”I had wonderful pictures of the masses. They were so funny because you would see the priests in their solemn robes and then you`d see the sneakers peeking out the bottom. I liked the photographs because they showed you can serve God in any garb.”
In addition to Father McDonnell, two other priests were on the tour–Rev. Thomas Dempsey, 49, pastor of St. Patrick Catholic Church in St. Charles; and Rev. James McLoughlin, 45, pastor of St. Peter Catholic Church in Geneva. Father McLoughlin also brought along a number of his parishioners and his mother, Loretta, 73, of Deerfield.
On June 5 in Cana, the site of a wedding feast at which Jesus performed his first miracle by turning water into wine, the Liebsts celebrated their 38th wedding anniversary by renewing their wedding vows.
At the same time, a new wedding ring that George Lazansky had bought in Jerusalem for his wife, Joanne, was blessed.
After their week in Israel, 33 of the 34 tour members flew to Athens for sightseeing and a four-day cruise of the eastern Mediterranean aboard the City of Rhodos. Robert Schwendau of Chicago was the only tour member not to take the cruise.
Each night the group would hold sing-a-longs that were led by Father McDonnell.
”The last night was so very special,” Carpio recalled. ”It was Ken and Lorraine Anderson`s wedding anniversary, and we all sang `Happy Anniversary.` ”The moon was out. It was just beautiful as we sang all those songs.
”And Grant Elliott–I called him `our baby`–he just sort of blossomed out and began talking that night.”
Elliott, a recent convert to Catholicism and, at 27, the youngest person on the tour, had been quiet during much of the trip. But that changed during a show put on by the cruise ship crew on the last night at sea.
”The emcee said they wanted five men and five women up on stage, and Grant was the first one up there!” Carpio recalled. ”We were all so surprised. He`d been so quiet on the trip.
”Anyway, a woman wrapped him up as a mummy–that was the contest. He looked so handsome wrapped up that everyone clapped, and he won a prize.”
As tour members sipped wine directly from bottles passed from hand to hand around the table, Carpio asked Peter Hill to read aloud a poem she had written to commemorate the tour and fix in her mind each member of the group. (More than a week later, four members of that happy group–Hill, Elliott, Ken Anderson and Simon Grossmayer–would still be held hostage.)
The next day, Friday, the day of departure, wake-up calls came early. The group had to leave the ship at 7:30 a.m. and get to their plane for Rome by 9 a.m. From Rome, they were to fly to Boston and then to Chicago.
Security at the Athens airport seemed rather perfunctory to many group members.
Usually, the keys and pocketknife that Stanley Balt carries set off airport alarms, but they didn`t in Athens.
Reynolds noticed only one guard watching the luggage X-ray machine. ”It wasn`t like Israel. There weren`t any other guards there.”
Sophie Kowalczyk didn`t see any guards when she went through.
”It was very funny,” she recalled. ”We put all our hand luggage on the conveyor belt, and it went through the X-ray thing, but nobody was looking at it, nobody was inspecting it.
”It all began to pile up at the end, and nobody was there, so we just picked it up. I thought that was really strange.”
The group got to the airport but had to wait some time before boarding.
”We were so happy when they announced it was time to board,” said Josephine Scibetta, 78, of Geneva. ”We were so happy that it would be just an hour-and-a-half flight to Rome, then a change of planes there before we went home.
”I was sitting in the middle seat, my brother on one side and this young girl on the other side. The seatbelt sign had just been turned off when these two men rushed up the aisle.
”I never realized that our wonderful trip was about to become a nightmare.”
— — —
Often in the initial hours of the hijacking, the plane, now headed toward Beirut, was filled with a tense quiet.
At one point, the hijackers ordered flight attendant Uli Derickson, 40, of Newton, N.J., to identify passengers with Jewish-sounding names. Instead, she collected all the passports.
”They went through the plane and took all our passports,” Sophie Kowalczyk recalled. ”I heard somebody say, `Are there any Jewish people on the plane?` They asked if there were any celebrities, then asked about servicemen.”
Toward the front of the tourist cabin, Reynolds saw the hijackers drag Robert Dean Stethem, 23, a U.S. Navy petty officer, into the first-class section.
”You could hear the beatings,” Reynolds said. ”I was praying, but I knew what was going to come. Then we all heard a shot.”
Fifteen hours later, Stethem`s body would be thrown onto the runway in Beirut during the second of flight 847`s three stops there during the hijacking.
It apparently was early in the hijacking that a male passenger slipped a note to Derickson saying that some of the men were willing to try to overpower the two hijackers. She sent back word discouraging an attempt while the plane was in flight.
The hijacked plane`s first landing in Beirut came three hours after the hijacking, and soon, 17 women, most of them elderly, and 2 children were ordered into the first-class cabin.
”At first, I thought, `Okay, now it`s my turn to get beaten,” Dorothy Sullivan recalled. ”I grabbed my purse and went up to the (first class section).
”I saw this man bound and leaning up against the seat in front of him. I knew he was alive because he moaned a little bit and his head moved. He had on a white blindfold like they did to the Iranian hostages, and at the back of it you could see a little blood.”
After a warning from the stewardess, a side door in the compartment blew open with a slight explosive sound, and an escape chute spread out from the plane to the ground.
”Jump! Jump! Jump!” one hijacker yelled.
”As you jumped,” Sullivan recalled, ”you could see a ring of soldiers with Tommy guns out there. I thought we were going from these people to their friends.”
But the soldiers on the runway told them they were free.
Sophie Kowalczyk and Evelyn Balt were in that first group.
”We got to the door and the slide was there, and I said: `I can`t do that. I`ll break my leg.` So they pushed me,” Kowalczyk said. ”I got to the bottom and looked up, and all these men on the ground had guns. They said,
`Mama, no be scared. We no hurt you.` ”
Balt was one of the last to go out. ”I got to the top of the chute and my heel kind of caught, and this hijacker just held me and helped me get the heel out.”
Then she sat down and slid away to freedom.
Over the next two days, Flight 847 would be flown to Algiers, back to Beirut, back to Algiers and back again to Beirut.
On the second trip to Beirut, the two hijackers would be joined by men wearing army fatigues and then by about a dozen men in civilian clothes, led by a man in a white jacket from whom the hijackers took orders. Six of the passengers, apparently those with names thought to be Jewish, would be removed from the plane at this time, and Stethem`s body would be thrown onto the runway.
In following days, another 102 passengers and crew would be released. For them, the ordeal would end.
But for the 40 who would remain held, most apparently at scattered sites around Beirut, another ordeal was just beginning.
