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49 “WE’VE GOT A HIJACK,” flight engineer Christian Zimmermann told the captain, John Testrake, as he reached for the cockpit fire ax by the bulkhead door. Who knew what weapons the hijackers had, or what weapons the crew might be able to use? Either way, Zimmermann thought, better to hide the ax. TWA flight 847 had just taken off from Athens on a short flight to Rome, with continuing service to the United States. But the routine trip became a terrifying, 8,500-mile journey around the Mediterranean aimed at securing the release of Lebanese Shi’a militants from Israeli and other jails. The hijacking also introduced the world to its mastermind, Imad Mughniyeh, who was famously photographed leaning out the cockpit window over Captain Testrake with his gun pointed at the tarmac.1 As soon as the flight engineer turned off the seat belt sign, the hijackers rushed the cockpit door. The flight crew first heard banging from the main cabin, then heavy pounding on the cockpit door. The door’s bottom panel was kicked out, flying into the cockpit. The hijackers kicked lead flight attendant Uli Derickson in the chest and held a gun to her head while screaming, “Come to die! Americans die!” Derickson called the captain on the intercom: “We’re being roughed up back here! Please open the door!” As Zimmermann unlocked the door, two hijackers stormed in, one gripping an automatic pistol and the other a couple of hand grenades, and demanded the plane head for Algeria. As he planned a new course for Algeria, the captain mused to himself how “they were well-groomed, average-looking guys who didn’t look like they could be hijackers or killers.”2 Aware they were vastly outnumbered, the two hijackers, later identified as Hezbollah operatives Mohammad Ali Hamadi and Hasan Izz al-Din, quickly established authority and control over the 153 passengers and crew. They burst in and out of the cockpit and ran up and down the aisles hitting passengers on the head, Hamadi holding the gun and Izz al-Din the grenades. Some crew members were pistol-whipped by Hamadi, while Izz al-Din took to pulling the pins out of his grenades and playing with them nervously. In an effort to reduce threats to the hijackers , men were seated by the windows and women and children moved to aisle seats. The area near the cockpit was cleared of passengers, who were crammed into the 3 Hezbollah’s European Debut 50 Chapter 3 back of the aircraft, where passengers now sat four across in each three-seat row. They were instructed to sit silently with heads down and hands clasped over their heads. Those who made a noise or complained were beaten. Such precautions were wise; members of the crew and several US military officers on board each considered confronting the hijackers but thought better of it. At one point the pilot even considered flying the plane to Tel Aviv and landing before the hijackers realized what he had done.3 Neither hijacker spoke English, and the crew spoke no Arabic, but Hamadi and Uli Derickson both spoke German. Hamadi would wave his gun and bark orders in German for Derickson to translate, while Izz al-Din “kept jumping up and down making threatening gestures.”4 Through Derickson the crew explained to Hamadi that the plane lacked the fuel to fly to Algeria, nearly twice the distance of the flight’s planned route to Rome. The hijackers first settled on Cairo as an alternative but quickly changed their minds, yelling, “Beirut! Beirut! Fuel only!” At this point the hijackers demanded the fire ax on seeing its empty storage space. The crew insisted the plane just didn’t have one, so the hijackers found another way to smash the doorknob off the cockpit door, which now swung open. With the flight under their control and now headed to Beirut, the hijackers sent Derickson to collect passengers ’ passports and identify all the Jews. Instead, Derickson shielded passengers with Jewish-sounding names.5 US Navy divers Robert Stethem and Clinton Suggs were seated in the last row of the plane, tired after a week’s work repairing an underwater sewer line at a US naval communications station in Greece and eager to get home. Soon after taking their seats they fell asleep, waking to passengers’ screams as the hijackers ran up and down the aisles hitting people on the head. When Derickson and Hamadi came by...

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