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Begin Reading Table of Contents Photos Newsletters Copyright Page In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. For Stewart and Noreen. And in memory of Bruce McKenzie and the five Israelis who lost their lives as a result of Operation Thunderbolt: Dora Bloch, Ida Borochovich, Pasco Cohen, Jean- Jacques Mimouni and Yoni Netanyahu. Country names and borders as they were at the time of the raid. DAY 1: SUNDAY 27 JUNE 1976 0500hrs GMT, Lod, Israel A chaotic scene greeted Frenchman Michel Cojot and his twelve-year-old son Olivier as they entered the ground-floor check-in area of Ben-Gurion International Airport’s Terminal 1, an unsightly four-storey concrete and glass construction that had replaced the original whitewashed terminal built by the British in the 1930s. The flow of people reminded Cojot of an Oriental bazaar as it ‘tried to make a path among the baggage carts, the pillars, and the barriers under the watchful eyes of young women in khaki and young soldiers… the only persons there who were not bustling about’. A spate of recent terrorist attacks against Israel–including the infamous massacre of twenty-six people, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, by three pro-Palestinian members of the militant communist Japanese Red Army at Ben-Gurion four years earlier–had left the country with the tightest airport security in the world. Anyone who could not convince the officials that he was harmless would have his alarm clock ‘dismantled, the heels of his shoes probed, his camera opened, his can of shaving cream tested’. Despite the delay, most were happy to cooperate because they ‘approved of the reasons for the controls’. In truth the stringent checks were the final straw for young Olivier Cojot. His parents had recently separated and he had jumped at the chance to join his management-consultant father on a week-long business trip to Israel, leaving his mother and two younger siblings in France. He had hoped to bond with his father and learn more about his Jewish heritage. But apart from a ‘pretty interesting’ visit to a factory run by Negev Phosphates, the mining firm his father was advising, he had spent much of his time alone and sweltering in a Beersheba hotel and could not wait to get home. Not that the temperature in France was any cooler. It, like the rest of Western Europe, was wilting in a heatwave that would prove to be the hottest on record. Olivier was just relieved that the queuing for the early- morning flight was at a comparatively cool time of day. He found the lengthy security checks at Ben-Gurion ‘a pain in the arse’ and the terminal’s lack of air-conditioning did not help. Finally reaching the Air France check-in desk, the Cojots were told their flight to Paris would be making an unscheduled stopover at Athens. The Greek capital’s international airport was well known for the laxity of its transit security, and Olivier voiced his father’s fears when he piped up: ‘Hey Dad, if I were a terrorist I would get on at the stopover.’ Such fears of a terrorist attack–more specifically a plane hijacking–were far from unfounded. Since Israel’s victory over the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, various Palestinian and pro- Palestinian terror groups had used plane hijackings as a means of forcing concessions out of Israel and publicizing their cause to the world. Before the Six-Day War there had typically been five hijackings annually. By 1969 this had risen to eighty-two hijackings worldwide–the most in a single year–and, though the average had since fallen, it was still more than three a month. Only too aware of the recent spate of hijackings, Cojot inquired about a direct flight to Paris on the Israeli airline El Al that, with its armed sky marshals, ‘seemed to offer better security’. But hearing the flight was full, and unwilling to wait for another, he reluctantly returned to Air France, his concern only partly assuaged by the knowledge that his frequent-flyer status meant he qualified for ‘service plus’. Other travellers on Air France Flight 139 were just as alarmed by news of the stopover. Ilan Hartuv, forty-nine, a short-sighted and rotund former Israeli diplomat and now deputy director-general of a Jerusalem urban- regeneration company, was accompanying his seventy-three-year-old mother Dora Bloch on the first leg of her journey to New York for the wedding of his younger brother Daniel. Hartuv planned to part from her in Paris where he would meet his brother-in-law and their respective wives for a short holiday and, aware of the threat from terrorists, he had specifically instructed his travel agent to book non-stop tickets. So too had Sara Davidson, en route to the United States for a coast-to-coast tour with her husband Uzi and their two sons, seventeen-year-old Roni and Benny, thirteen. ‘Let’s not go on the plane,’ she told Uzi when she heard it would stop in Greece. ‘We don’t know who’s likely to get on in Athens.’ They also tried to change to El Al without success. Other passengers made late switches to Flight 139. Nineteen-year-old Jean-Jacques Mimouni, French-born but of Tunisian descent, had been booked on a Saturday flight to Paris. Tall and boyishly handsome, with a moustache and fashionably long, dark-brown curly hair, a talented guitar player and artist, Jean-Jacques had just finished his matriculation exams and was planning to spend the summer in France with two elder sisters before either staying on–his father’s preference–or returning to Israel for military service. But he was persuaded to delay his flight until Sunday by his best friend Thierry Sicard, the son of the French consul in Tel Aviv, so that they could fly together. Belgians Gilbert and Helen Weill had just completed a short holiday in Israel and were due to take a later Air France flight to Paris. Their plan was to pick up their children in Metz and then return home to Antwerp. But when told that their original plane had been delayed in Iran and their best option was Flight 139, leaving in just an hour, they took it. Walking away from the Air France desk they met an acquaintance travelling on their original flight. ‘Quick,’ advised Mr Weill, ‘get on the earlier flight before all the seats are taken. Who knows how long that other plane is going to be delayed.’ At 8.59 a.m. local time, Air France Flight 139 took off in perfect weather–a blazing sun and clear blue skies–and headed north-west across the Mediterranean for Athens. The plane was one of the recently introduced wide-bodied Airbus A300B4s, a comfortable twin-engined jetliner capable of carrying 272 passengers in a two-class layout: 24 first-class seats at the front of the plane in a 2:2:2 configuration; and a further 248 seats in two economy cabins to the rear, the seats divided 2:4:2 by two aisles. For the last six rows, as the fuselage tapered towards the tail, the middle row was just three seats. Possibly because of late cancellations, only 228 seats were occupied. Captaining the plane was a dashing fifty-one-year-old father of three called Michel Bacos, a former naval pilot who had fought with de Gaulle’s Free French forces in the Second World War. His eleven-man crew consisted of a co-pilot, flight engineer, chief steward, four stewards and four stewardesses. Apart from a Swedish stewardess called Ann-Carina Franking, all were French. Sitting in the rear economy cabin, three rows from the front, Michel Cojot quickly forgot his fears as the Air France crew made a fuss of him and his son. ‘After this heavy dose of the East it was a pleasure’ for him ‘to go back to the language, the elegant restraint of the stewardesses’ uniforms, and even the food tray’. There was nothing in the way of in-flight entertainment on a 1970s airliner, and Cojot passed the two-and-a-half-hour flight time to Athens by writing ‘a probably useless professional memorandum’ and giving Olivier ‘an exercise in spelling by dictating a vaguely humorous piece on the joys of air travel’. It was typical of the high- achieving Cojot to try and educate his son even when he was on holiday. For Olivier, a ‘terrible speller’, these regular dictations by his father were ‘a huge pain in the behind’. The only bleak spot for the thirty-seven-year-old Cojot was the proximity of unruly neighbours who included ‘brawling brats, a woman who spilled over her seat on both sides, and a couple of retired Americans’. 0902hrs GMT, Athens, Greece Just after noon local time, the Airbus touched down at Athens’s Ellinikon International Airport, a few miles south of the Greek capital. As the stop was a brief one–just forty-five minutes–only the thirty-eight disembarking passengers were allowed to leave the plane.

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