The skyjacking had the classic ingredients: gun-toting men, innocent hostages, tense conversations between cockpit and control tower. But little else was predictable about the drama that began last week in a southern Soviet city and ended at Ben-Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv. Not only was it unusual for Moscow to bow to the demands of hijackers, but the incident ended peacefully only after extraordinary cooperation between the Soviet Union and Israel, two countries that do not have diplomatic relations.
The episode began when four armed men, led by Pavel Yakshiyants, 38, a driver from Krasnodar with a criminal record, commandeered a...
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