Aviation: Gift for Castro

Until the slim-winged Eastern Air Lines Electra was 20 minutes northwest of Miami one sunbright morning last week, the dark, bushy-browed little man in the front seat seemed to be brooding silently on the dangers of flight. Then he came to life. He beckoned to Stewardess Joan (“Casey”) Jones and sent her for more cream for his coffee. When Casey returned, the passenger was gone. Across the aisle, another passenger pointed to the cockpit door. Casey rattled the handle, kicked the door lightly, could not budge it. She put the waxed cup on the floor and said: “When he comes out, tell him here is his cream.”

Up forward in the cockpit, Wilfredo Roman Oquendo, 36, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had made an abrupt transformation from the shy Miami hotel waiter who had meekly bought a ticket to Tampa. Suddenly he was the same snarling Cuban secret policeman he had been in pre-Batista days; suddenly he was fulfilling his role as a hotheaded member of Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement. He pointed a big, Luger-type pistol at Pilot William E. Buchanan. 40, and snapped: “Turn this airplane around.” Unruffled, Buchanan banked the $3,500,000 ship into a wide turn calculated to alert the radar watch on the ground. “All right, now,” Buchanan drawled, “what heading do you want me to fly?” “Two hundred ten degrees,” said the slim air pirate. As Buchanan set his course, he knew he was flying toward Cuba.

On the other side of the door, the 32 passengers knew only that something was wrong. “I know they don’t move the sun, and it was on the wrong side of the plane,” recalled a nervous lady. At Miami International airport, FAA radar observers were aware of trouble, too. Efforts to raise the plane by radio failed. An eavesdropping Pan American pilot on a training flight slid his jet close by to identify the Electra. From SAC’s Homestead Air Force Base came a fully armed F-102 to hover watchfully 5,000 ft. above the hijacked plane.

Hotheaded Kids. In the cockpit, Oquendo braced himself against the closed door, tapped Flight Engineer Philip Knudsen menacingly with his gun whenever anyone reached for a switch without explanation. Pilot Buchanan nursed a double worry: the Cuban air force might attack because he was out of the normal Havana approach corridor (“They have some hot airplanes there with hotheaded kids flying them,” he reported later), and the gunman might start shooting if any passengers tried to storm the door. He got Oquendo’s permission to make one laconic announcement on the plane’s public-address system: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a passenger that wants to go to Cuba, so we’re taking him. Please stay in your seats and offer no resistance.” As they approached Havana, the escorting F-102 turned back. Electra Copilot John Yandell got the pirate’s approval to ask Key West for the Havana airport frequencies, and managed to slip in a quick warning: “This is an emergency. We are being forced at gunpoint to fly to Cuba.”

As the bulky turboprop, which looks much like a Soviet Ilyushin 18, touched down at José Marti airport, a waiting crowd of Cubans cheered and youthful armed militiamen saluted. But the cheers died abruptly when the big “Eastern Air Lines” markings became clear and the pistol-packing waiter climbed out. The exuberant crowd had been waiting for an entirely different visitor—Soviet Spaceman Yuri Gagarin.

Rough Time. Soldiers signaled the Electra crew to hurry out of the plane; but Buchanan and Yandell stalled, throwing switches and circuit breakers wildly, making sure the Cubans would have a rough time refiring the engines. “That system is a mess now,” says Buchanan. “I pity the poor guy who has to try to start her up. He’ll go crazy.” Pirate Oquendo had only one terse explanation for the puzzled airport guards: “They have three of our airplanes. Here’s one for you.”

Eventually the Electra’s passengers and crew were taken to a steak lunch at the airport dining room, where they (and Castro) watched Honored Guest Gagarin arrive in a sudden rain squall for the July 26 celebration. They were then escorted to the terminal hotel, where their room keyholes were stuffed with paper so they could not lock the doors. Armed guards stood in the halls, telephone calls were banned, a Swiss embassy representative was turned away. But no one was harmed, and next day the Americans were permitted to return to Miami in a regularly scheduled Pan American DC-6. Now their luggage included cartons of Cuban rum emblazoned: “Let’s go to Cuba—the friendly island next door.”

Riding Shotgun. The U.S. State Department asked the Swiss embassy in Havana to protest Castro’s refusal to release the big plane, but got no answer. The FBI charged the out-of-reach Oquendo with four offenses, including kidnaping—punishable by life imprisonment. New York police revealed a Cuban plot to hijack five more planes. Detectives studied passenger lists at air terminals, kept a sharp eye on boarding Latin Americans. Kentucky’s Representative Frank Chelf introduced a bill to permit civilian crews to “ride shotgun” in airliner cockpits equipped with one-way glass to observe passengers. FAA Administrator Najeeb Halaby asked Congress to make aircraft hijacking as serious a crime as piracy on the high seas.

But in Havana, Castro serenely told a celebrating audience that he would not return the plane unless the U.S. returns “all planes that were stolen from Cuba” or are “hijacked from here” in the future —a blanket description covering the ten Cuban planes seized in the U.S. by court order after the Cuban government failed to pay a Miami advertising firm its $429,000 bill for plugging Cuban tourism. He ignored one fact: 14 planes hijacked by Cuban defectors had been promptly returned to Cuba after arrival in the U.S.

U.S. legislators frothed with frustration. Florida’s Senator George Smathers led the chorus calling for U.S. military forces to march right into Havana and grab the Electra. And one Eastern Air Lines director exploded: “I’d bomb every damned airport Castro’s got. This was stealing, kidnaping, mail robbery and felonious assault aboard a United States aircraft—and the sad part is that this country is doing nothing about it. What in hell’s come over this country?”

At week’s end, Fidel Castro was still cockily unconcerned. He passed the Electra’s disposition to the United Nations, claiming that otherwise the U.S. would use the incident as a pretext for invasion. “But let them come if they want to,” he said. “If our destiny is to be a bloody one, let them come.”