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The P.F.L.P. is one of the most militant of some dozen Palestinian commando outfits known collectively as the fedayeen (men of sacrifice). It is Marxistoriented, with touches of Mao. Last week the P.F.L.P.'s leader, Dr. George Habash, was traveling through North Korea on his way home from Peking, where he had sought more Asian Communist weapons and funds. Habash & Co. have been violently opposed to the Middle East cease-fire plan accepted in August by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein. Vowed Habash: "If a settlement is made with Israel, we will turn the Middle East into a hell."
Skyjacking has been a Front specialty since July 1968, when the P.F.L.P. hijacked an Israeli El Al airliner just outside Rome and forced it to fly to Algeria. There, instead of providing the usual Havana-style side trip that had marked most previous air hijackings, the guerrillas refused to release the plane and all its passengers. Eventually they set free everyone except twelve Jewish men, who were held captive for five weeks until Israel agreed to hand over 16 convicted Arab terrorists "in gratitude" for the Israelis' release. The blackmail precedent had been set.
Over the next months, the Popular Front staged airport or aircraft attacks against El Al in Athens, Zurich and Munich, though with scant success. One of its men was killed by an Israeli security guard in Zurich, and twelve have been captured. The P.F.L.P. is widely believed to have caused the explosion aboard a Swissair jetliner en route to Israel last February that sent 47 people to their death. Early this spring, it even issued a fund-raising stamp celebrating its hijacking successes. Then in July, apparently having decided that too many of its air pirates were languishing in foreign prisons, the guerrillas began hijacking in order to free hijackers. A group allied with the P.F.L.P. held 47 passengers captive aboard an Olympic Airways jetliner in the Athens airport until the Greek government agreed to release seven Arabs serving jail terms for attacks on El Al property in which two persons were killed.
Planning on last week's operation started in late July, with Habash and lis top lieutenant, Dr. Wadi Haddad, is the principal architects. They picked New York-bound flights and a weekend target date to ensure that many of their hostages would be vacationing American civilians. Fewer than half a dozen of the Popular Front's ranking leaders knew all the details, and individual skyjacking teams, who had been instructed in the rudiments of navigation and flight procedures, were not aware of one another's existence.
Target of Opportunity
Just after noon on Sunday, two P.F.L.P. agents boarded El Al Flight 219 at Amsterdam. They were Leila Khaled. 24. a stunning Palestinian ex-schoolteacher, and a male companion, still unidentified. In her brassière Leila carried two hand grenades. She had become a guerrilla heroine in August 1969, when she helped hijack a TWA Boeing 707 to Damascus Airport, where a bomb demolished the cockpit after the passengers and crew had debarked. Later she wrote to several passengers on the flight, explaining that the Popular Front was trying to strike at America's Middle East policy and that the hijack "was not meant against them personally."