The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner Read Free Book Online Page A

plane-for-boat swapdid eventually take place.)
    Eight days after the Eastern flight’s diversion to Cuba, an inebriated oil worker named Bruce Britt tried to hijack a Pacific Air Lines DC-3 from Chico, California, to Smackover, Arkansas, where he hoped to reconcile with his estranged wife. He was subdued by several passengers before the flight could leave the Chico airport, but not before he shot both a Pacific ticket agent and the plane’s captain, the latter of whom wasblinded for life. Britt’s attack confirmed that hijackers were not afraid to follow through on their threats of violence.
    Less than forty-eight hours later a forty-one-year-old parolee named Leon Bearden and his sixteen-year-old son, Cody, boarded Continental Airlines Flight 54 in Phoenix. The Boeing 707 was supposed toreach Houston near dawn, after making stops in El Paso and San Antonio. But the Beardens, who had two loaded handguns tucked into their carry-on bags, had no intention of finishing their trip in Texas.
    A WOMAN ’ S PANICKED scream roused Leonard Gilman from his slumber. In all his years of air travel, the lanky forty-three-year-old Border Patrol agent had never heard such a piercing cry of distress. He was about to leave his seat to investigate when the plane’s intercom switched on.
    “We have some men up here, they’re asking me to ask for … volunteers,” announced a clearly shaken stewardess. “They’re telling me they need four men to come up here to the front of the plane—no soldiers. They say they’ll let everyone else go. But … they need four volunteers.”
    Gilman and three other male passengers responded to this cryptic plea for hostages, walking through the darkened cabin of Continental Airlines Flight 54 to the first-class bar beside the cockpit. When they got there, they were surprised to discover who their captors would be: a jittery, gaunt-faced man with a receding hairline and a dour teenage boy. Leon and Cody Bearden both held guns to the heads of stewardesses; the hammer on the boy’s .45-caliber pistol was cocked, his finger disconcertingly tight on the trigger.
    The elder Bearden told the volunteers that he had ordered the pilot to keep flying to El Paso, Flight 54’s next scheduled stop. After the plane refueled, he and Cody would release all the passengers, save for the four hostages. The plane would then veer southeast to Havana, where the Beardens hoped to earn Cuban citizenship by giving Prime Minister Fidel Castro the $5.4 million jet as a gift.
    As the plane began its descent to El Paso in the wee hours of August 3, 1961, Gilman gently asked Leon Bearden why he wished to go to Cuba with his son—was he a card-carrying Communist, or a great admirer of Castro’s fortitude? “I’m just fed up,” replied the convicted bank robber and unemployed father of four. “I don’t want to be anAmerican anymore.” Cody said nothing, just snarled and posed with his gun like some B-movie cowboy. Gilman sensed that the youth was itching to kill someone.
    By the time Flight 54 touched down in El Paso at two a.m., President John F. Kennedy had been briefed on the developing crisis. The year’s two previous hijackings to Cuba had been embarrassing enough, but the Flight 54 situation was an order of magnitude worse. This was no mere commuter flight in Florida—it involved transcontinental travel and the jewel of Boeing’s fleet. And the perpetrators appeared to be white Everymen, whose arrival in Havana would give Castro a golden opportunity to declare that the American people were losing faith in their government. Loath to hand his Cuban nemesis yet another public relations victory, President Kennedy authorized the FBI to do everything in its power to prevent the hijacked plane from leaving Texas.
    At the FBI’s behest, Continental’s ground crew stalled for time after the passengers were released, pretending that the jet required hours of maintenance to prepare for the fifteen-hundred-mile journey