PDF The Skies Belong to Us Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking Brendan I Koerner 8601418314585 Books

Product details Paperback 336 pages Publisher Broadway Books (June 17, 2014) Language English ISBN-10 0307886115

The Skies Belong to Us Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking Brendan I Koerner 8601418314585 Books Reviews

• I knew there had been domestic airplane hijackings back in the day (like everyone else, I'd heard of D.B. Cooper), but I'd had no idea how numerous they were until I read Brendan Koerner's The Skies Belong To Us. In the late 60s/early 70s, they were happening all the time! Sometimes even twice in one day! Koerner tells the general story of the brief skyjacking "craze", but also focuses on a particular instance to tell the story writ both large and small. The crime he chooses to highlight was a hijacking to Algeria, committed by Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow.
  
  Holder and Kerkow were a deeply odd couple, united mostly by their love of drugs. Holder used them to salve the psychic wounds of a life scarred by systemic racism and the Vietnam War, Cathy used them because they were fun. A one-time small-town Oregon good girl (she was track teammates with Jeff Prefontaine), she grew up to become a party girl in hippie San Francisco. Through much more luck than planning or skill (they were almost thwarted by their own idiocy), they managed to pull off stealing an airplane and get $500,000 hard currency to take with them. Although their original plan was to head to southeast Asia, when that got derailed, Holder chose to head to Algeria. From there, the couple headed to France, where Holder fell deeper into long-brewing mental illness and Kerkow propelled herself into the most exclusive social circles she could find. While the pair eventually split and Holder returned to the US, Kerkow is still living the life of an international fugitive from justice to this day.
  
  Although I certainly recall life before the TSA, I don't recall life before any sort of airport security at all. Which is apparently how it used to be for a long time, even after all this constant hijacking nonsense! The airlines pitched a fit about even the most minor screening measures because they didn't want to inconvenience their customers! Which, coming from a time in which little girls are bounced from flights because they're wearing leggings and ticketed customers are dragged off flights and beaten, seems literally crazy. I mean, there are definitely things about that time that I 100% don't want to go back to, but given what we hear about the actual efficiency of TSA at actually finding any sort of dangerous material, it seems like maybe considering the idea of lighter security (like PreCheck, but for everyone!) should be on the list of things to do.
  
  Koerner does a very solid job of balancing all of the elements in his book the state of the country as a whole at the time, the prime hijacking era and highlighting some illustrative vignettes (including one set right here in Reno where the banks were already closed after the money demand was made so the casinos ponied up the cash), and the story of Roger and Cathy. No one story thread feels irritatingly dominant, and Koerner's treatment of hijacking never feels like cheap drama being played up for shock value. The frequency of hijacking in that era was shocking enough and he's assured enough to let it speak for itself. That he was able to interview Roger before his death definitely helps in creating portraits of the central hijacker and his long-ago girlfriend as actual people and not caricatures. It's a very readable, enjoyable look at a phenomenon that happened not actually that long ago that I'd had NO idea about.
• It was the 70's, a time when airline security was so lax as to be nonexistent. Airliner hijackings were occurring almost weekly for a while, and the motivations for them were as varied as the destinations the hijackers demanded to go. Some did it for money, some for political reasons, while others just wanted a free flight to Cuba or some non-extradition country. Koerner's book covers the attitude of the times, as well as some of the actual cases. He focuses particularly on Catherine Kerkow, a party girl from Coos Bay, Oregon, and Roger Holder, a Vietnam veteran. They were an unlikely couple, but ended up pulling off one of the biggest hijackings ever perpetrated...with Kerkow actually getting away with it.
  
  It was also the time of 'radical chic,' a concept that glorified anyone who staged a big stunt (like a hijacking) for political reasons. Holder and Kerkow even gave their 'project' a name ('Sisyphus') and a goal To free Angela Davis, an accused 'radical' who was on trial at the time. Kerkow and Holder became the darlings of the rich and powerful in France who supported the concept of radical chic. And France was where they ended up after the pair hijacked a Western Airlines flight, and managed to extort $500,000 from the airline to boot. After switching to a longer-range aircraft with a portion of the passengers, they forced the flight to go to Algiers. Koerner goes into great detail about their time in Algiers, and later in France, where Kerkow finally disappeared for good after she separated from Holder. She remains on an active warrant issued by the F.B.I. The irony here is that both 'DB Cooper' and Cathy Kerkow got away with their hijackings, but the F.B.I. could never catch either of them, and they had an advantage because they knew Kerkow's entire history. Picking France to disappear was a brilliant move on Kerkow's part, because she not only spoke the language fluently, but took advantage of a country (at that time) that looked the other way on politically-motivated hijackings. It was also a time when obtaining a passport or new I.D. under a new name was reletively easy to do. Koerner asserts in the book that this is probably what happened to Cathy Kerkow, and that she is living a genteel life today, most likely married, in either France or another country in Europe. It is unlikely she will ever be called to justice.
  
  For fans of the 'D.B. Cooper' hijacking mystery, 'The Skies Belong to Us,' is great entertainment. It could be better than the Cooper story, because readers come to know and understand Kerkow and Holder, who were real people with actual lives and histories. D.B. Cooper was only a mystery. Kerkow and Holder have an actual STORY.
  
  'The Skies Belong to Us' includes many pictures and illustrations, which was certainly a bonus. Kudos to Brendan Koerner.
  
  It's an amazing book that tells a story few know about.
• This is a fascinating journey into the origins of aircraft hijacking, focused on a largely more innocent, pre-9/11 age, when hijackings generally meant a two-day delay and an unscheduled trip to Cuba, with food and a visit to a nightclub often provided gratis by Dr Castro as part of the ongoing propaganda war of that time.
  
  As time progresses, we see the hijackings representing more calculated acts of political violence, with losses of aircraft hulls and, in some instances, injuries and fatalities among passengers and crew.
  
  What is quite telling is that the air carriers lobbied for more than a decade with vigour and malice against sensible precautions that could be used to prevent hijackings, with such measures including the use of metal detectors and checks on hand luggage. The lobbying was often carried out by Washington lobbyists, in a sadly prescient warning of the lobby group politics one sees today.
  
  This meticulously researched work is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of hijacking and modern terrorism, and is likely to make one nostalgic for the days before Palestinian, Arab and Irish terrorism became an unfortunate facet of modern life.