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The passengers spent their first night in the desert in total darkness and eerie silence. As dawn broke over the sunbaked clay, prisoners and guerrillas alike found that they had some ominous visitors. A line of tracked armored personnel carriers and Centurion tanks surrounded the entire enclave. "They just sat there," recalled TWA Passenger Nancy Porter. "We didn't know whose side they were on." Neither, probably, did most of the other people on the scene, including the troops themselves. They were units of the Royal Jordanian Army, posted by King Hussein as a symbol of his power. But Hussein's hold on Jordan was increasingly shaky, and despite the menace of the tanks, it was extremely problematical whether he would risk moving against the airliners' guerrilla captors.
That morning the commandos ordered the hostages to hand over their passports, and gave out pink landing passes emblazoned with the P.F.L.P. emblem. Each passenger had to kneel while his passport was examined. When a woman on Swissair protested, a Palestinian answered: "We have been on our knees for 20 years, so five minutes won't hurt you."
The Popular Front guerrillas planned to transport women, children and old people—except for those who were Jewish—to hotels in Amman, and they were searching documents for evidence of Israeli citizenship or Jewish-sounding names. Recounts Nancy Porter, a Gentile who was evacuated: "They asked each of us, 'Are you Jewish?' I thought it was going to be the firing squad."
Crisis Cartel
The separation of Jew from non-Jew lent a concentration-camp atmosphere to the scene, and it caused panic among some of the passengers. News of it caused severe anxiety among relatives back home. Said Alexander Herman of Brooklyn, whose 17-year-old daughter Miriam was a prisoner: "I was four years in a concentration camp in Hungary. I lost four children by Hitler, and now I am going through the same thing again." However Passenger Jonathan David, a bearded Jew from New York, felt that he had "not been given different treatment that I'm aware of" by his captors. The Popular Front, which said it detained the Jews for "further interrogation," maintained that "Zionism is our enemy, not Jews."
On Monday afternoon, the 127 designated passengers were bused to three Amman hotels—the Intercontinental, the Philadelphia and Shepheard's. Almost immediately, some of the fiercest street fighting in Jordan's recent history broke out. While Palestinian commandos and regular Jordanian forces battled each other, the various hotels were completely cut off from one another, isolating the three groups. Those in the Intercontinental spent harrowing nights in the basement or in hallways, while bullets smashed through the plate glass in the lobby, water from a ruptured roof cistern cascaded down stairwells, and mortar explosions shook the building. Electricity, phones and cable facilities went dead. "I'm glad I'm not at the airstrip," said Sheila Warnock of New York, a hostage. "But if you ask me, it was safer out on the plane."