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A few women and children wept when they arrived at the Intercontinental in Amman, and a number expressed anxious concern for their missing menfolk. But most seemed in surprisingly good shape after their ordeal. "Everyone went around in stocking feet," joked Stewardess June Haesler. "It was a six-day pajama party." Like captives and captors elsewhere, some passengers and commandos developed a genuine liking for each other. One of the Popular Front men playfully tried on a Jewish boy's yarmulke in the hotel lobby, and at least one stewardess showed up wearing a P.F.L.P. button pinned to her uniform. Said Stewardess Linda Jenson: "They put so much effort into consoling us that I had no doubt we would get out."
Matter of Principle
But when? At a press conference Saturday evening, the Popular Front announced that it intended to keep 35 men and five young "Israeli" girls as hostages indefinitely until the seven guerrillas held in Europe and an unspecified number of Palestinians detained in Israel were released. The Front said that its prisoners, who presumably include the Israelis "with military capability," are being kept in a "special hotel" outside Amman. The guerrillas assured relatives that the accommodations were more comfortable than those in the Palestinian refugee camps. Meanwhile, none of the men passengers had yet arrived in Amman from the airstrip site, and the Front was still holding passports.
If all but the 40 are set free early this week, the hostage crisis will be reduced enormously in scope, but not in principle. The five nations bargaining with the commandos remain committed to the release of all hostages, whatever their nationality or religion. Only when that condition is met will the five governments agree to turn over any Palestinians in exchange. In order to facilitate a possible swap, the British government declared that it was prepared to hand over Leila Khaled as part of a deal. Meanwhile, Israel was still opposed to freeing Arab terrorists in return for the release of civilian hostages. It was, however, willing to discuss a bargain if it would include several captured Israeli pilots and civilians held in Egypt and Syria. Since many of the 40 "prisoners of war" held by the Front are probably American Jews with both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, the diplomatic focus of the crisis may narrow to those two nations.
If the basic issue of hostages remained unsolved, so, too, did the problems of growing tensions within the guerrilla groups in Jordan. At week's end the Palestinian Liberation Organization ousted the P.F.L.P. from membership on the grounds that the skyjacking had damaged the Palestinian cause. Yet since the P.L.O. had arranged the release of most of the hostages and then forced the P.F.L.P. to accede to the agreement, the ouster was likely to make further negotiations only more difficult.
But even before the hostage issue was resolved, Revolutionary Airstrip reverted to nothing more than a patch of desert, the guerrillas gone and the army tanks departed. The great planes that had been the focal point of one of the strangest dramas in modern times had virtually disappeared, reduced to twisted charred wreckage. Already Bedouins were poking among the ruins for scrap metal and souvenirs.