scenes with Amal and Hezbollah's Iranian masters to resolve the situation, but on terms that would be to his political advantage.
'You arc trying to gain time,' the terrorist continued. 'You don't believe me. We'll kill this Marine.' He meant Robert Stethem, the Navy diver who had been beaten during the first landing in Beirut.
Castro then dragged Stethem, screaming in agony, to the open door of the aircraft, placed a pistol to the back of his head, and fired. Then he dumped his body onto the tarmac.
'He has just killed a passenger,' the pilot reported.
As he spoke, Castro snatched the microphone and said, 'You see. You now believe. There will be another in five minutes.'
At this point, Castro ordered Testrake to taxi to the refueling points.
The terrorists never forgot that time was precious. The longer they stayed in one place, the greater the window for a takedown attempt. Thus they bounced back and forth from one place to the other.
'As I began moving down the runway,' Testrake later remembered, 'I turned the wheel sharply to avoid running over the young serviceman's body.'
As all this was going on, everyone on the plane had fallen silent — horrified at the violence — until one of the terrorists started singing a song. 'It was a song of celebration,' Uli Derickson recalled.
Meanwhile, the terrorists chose their next victim: Clinton Suggs, another Navy diver.
'The hijacker came back where 1 was,' Suggs recalled, 'and he was kicking me and hitting me and calling me American pig. I thought I was dead. I prayed and asked the Lord to receive me in his arms.'
All of a sudden, the back door of the plane opened and ten or twelve heavily armed militiamen carrying automatic weapons rushed onto the plane, screaming and shouting. The terrorists had succeeded in getting their reinforcements… and multiplying the difficulty of a takedown.
One of the twelve, who identified himself as Gihad and spoke fluent English, was in fact one of Lebanon's leading terrorists, Imad Mugniyah. Mugniyah had once been a member of Amal, but at this time he was with Hezbollah — their 'enforcer.' Muginayah now took charge of the operation.
After the aircraft was refueled, six Americans, including Kurt Karlson, Clinton Suggs, and three other Navy divers, were ordered into seats in the last two rows of the plane. Shortly after that, the six were rushed down the back steps of the plane into a waiting enclosed truck. A few moments later, a second group of five passengers — another Navy diver and four of the seven with Jewish-sounding names — were also taken off the plane, loaded into another truck, and whisked away.
Flight 847 then took off again, headed for Algeria. This second Algerian episode would last until Sunday.
It was now daybreak Saturday.
Robert Stethem's body had already been dumped on the tarmac in Beirut before Carl Stiner was given authority to launch with his JSOTF. Six to eight more hours of flying time were required before they could be in position to resolve the situation.
While Stiner was en route, the State Department had directed Ambassador Newlin to ask the Algerians for permission to bring in Long's EST, who by then had reached Sigonella.
According to Newlin, however, the Algerians refused. They could not permit a rescue mission, and that's what the EST, with its Air Force C-141, seemed to be.
Unable to bring in his aircraft or his entire team, Long did the best he could. He pared his numbers down by a third and flew this smaller group by commercial air to Algiers by way of Marseilles.
Meanwhile, JSOTF and the rest of the support team had arrived at Sigonella, having planned the rescue operation en route. Soon after landing they linked up with the TWA 727 and the two Combat Talon aircraft from England. All the pieces were now in place for a rescue operation, and sufficient darkness remained to reach Algeria and conduct the operation before daylight. However, a rescue operation would be a different ball game now. Instead of the pair of lightly armed terrorists that had been on board the first time the plane landed in Algeria, there were now fourteen heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen on the plane, some armed with machine guns.
The only thing the Task Force team could do now was wait in the hangar for further developments.
TWA 847 landed once again in Algeria early Saturday morning, and they would remain there this time for just over twenty-four hours. During the just-completed Beirut to Algiers leg of the 847 odyssey, the hijackers had systematically robbed everyone else on the plane.
Soon after the aircraft landed, the hijackers made another demand. They wanted the Greek government to release Ali Atwa, their accomplice who had been arrested at the Athens airport the day before. If he was not released, the hijackers promised, they would kill the plane's Greek passengers. If he was, the Greek passengers would be freed. The Greeks caved in, and that afternoon, an Olympic Airways jet took off from Athens bound for Algeria with Ali Atwa on board.
The Algerians, however, managed to use the release of Atwa to extract a few more concessions from the terrorists, who agreed to free everyone on the plane except the American male passengers and crew. According to Michael Newlin, the Algerians negotiated a brilliant deal. 'They were absolutely superb,' he said. 'They made the terrorists pay for everything.'
What the terrorists 'paid for' was not obvious to Stiner. The terrorists had been in total control all along — and still were.
Newlin later recalled that when he left the airport early Sunday morning, he was certain that the Algerians and the International Committee of the Red Cross would resolve the crisis without further bloodshed. Armed with that conviction, he went to sleep.
A few hours later, an Embassy officer called him: The hijackers were again demanding fuel.
Newlin then called the Secretary General of the Algerian Presidency, the Algerian executive's chief administrative officer, and reiterated the American position: 'Everything possible should be done to keep the plane on the ground,' he told him, 'even if it means shooting out the tires.'
Moments later, the Embassy officer reported to Newlin that TWA 847 was taking off. Newlin again got on the phone with the Secretary General.
'We had to let them go,' the Algerian told him. 'The hijackers threatened to blow up the plane.' Later, the Algerians offered a second excuse: 'The hijackers undoubtedly heard radio reports that U.S. Special Forces were on the way,' they explained.
That statement was disingenuous. Whether or not the hijackers had heard such reports (most of which were, as it happened, inaccurate), their actions had proved they were worried about a rescue attempt from the very start. They didn't need a news report to tell them that they'd been on the ground too long in Algeria.
In the meantime, the U.S. government had failed to gain Algerian approval of a rescue operation, but even if they had gotten it, the situation had become agonizingly complex. Unlike the first time TWA 847 had landed in Algeria, the terrorists were clearly in control. Not only had their numbers grown, but they'd unloaded a total of thirty-one hostages in Beirut, at least nineteen of whom had been disbursed among the heavily armed militias holed up in the labyrinthine southern suburbs of Beirut. It was now impossible to rescue all the hostages in a single attempt.
TWA 847 took off for Beirut shortly after 8:00 A.M., after spending more than twenty-five hours on the ground in Algeria. A half hour later, an Air Alger plane arrived from Marseilles, carrying David Long and five members of his emergency support team, too late to affect the outcome of the TWA 847 hijack drama. TWA 847 was gone from Algiers forever.
Meanwhile, as TWA 847 was winging once again toward Beirut, Captain Testrake managed to listen in as the terrorists were making further plans. Their new idea was to take on more fuel in Beirut, then move on (he thought) to Tehran. That was definitely not what Testrake wanted. Once they landed in Beirut this time, he decided, he would see to it that they did not take off again. Testrake and Zimmerman, the flight engineer, then worked out a plan of their own, and when the plane touched down in Beirut, Zimmerman shut off the fuel valve and switched off the electrical power to one of the engines. Lights began flashing like mad on the instrument panel.
'TWA 847 can't go anywhere,' Testrake explained to Mugniyah, 'until a new engine can be brought in from the States.'
It was now Sunday afternoon in Beirut, Sunday morning in Washington.
