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TWA Flight 847

On June 14, 1985 TWA Flight 847 under the command of Captain John Testrake with First Officer Philip Maresca and Flight Engineer B. Christian Zimmermann departed Athens, Greece for what was scheduled to be a short flight to Rome, Italy. As soon as Captain Testrake turned off the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign, a commotion was heard in the cabin, followed by someone pounding at the cabin door. The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and what would prove to be a 17 day ordeal for the passengers and crew held as hostages had just begun.

The intent of the Hisbollah hijackers was to trade the plane and its passengers for Lebanese prisoners being held in Israel’s Atlit Prison Camp. They wanted to fly the plane to Algiers, but since Flight 847 was to have been a short hop there wasn’t enough fuel, so the plane was flown to Beirut instead. Condensing a lengthy story, no country wanted to “host” the hijacked plane and as a result the plane shuttled back and forth several times between Algiers and Beirut. In the process, all the woman and children, the flight attendants and all non-American passengers were released leaving only American men as hostages when the plane landed for the last time in Beirut. The Hisbollah terrorists who hijacked the plane were ruthless, cold-blooded murderers. When they discovered that one of the passengers on the plane was U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, they beat him without mercy before killing him and dumping his body onto the tarmac at Beirut Airport.

While it had been the murderers of Hisbollah who had actually performed the hijacking, it was a more moderate, less anti-western group, Amal, that controlled much of the city of Beirut including the airport. As a result, the holding of the hostages became more or less a joint operation between the two groups. Eventually, the passengers were removed from the airplane, split up and sent to various safe houses around the city of Beirut. Most of the passengers were under the control of Amal, but a few remained in the hands of Hisbollah as did control of the aircraft and its flight crew.

My involvement in coverage of the hostage crisis began several days after the hijacking had first taken place. There were no television satellite uplink facilities available to the news media in Lebanon and so all video coverage would have to be shuttled to another location for transmission back to the United States. Being only 130 air miles from Beirut, ABC decided to use Larnaca, Cyprus as its transmission point. Larnaca would also serve as a way point for personnel entering and leaving Beirut and as base of operations for ABC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent and Paris Bureau Chief, Pierre Salinger. A small on-camera facility was needed for Pierre and for any interviews that might occur during the course of the coverage and Lodi Field Operations was called upon to provide the facilities to serve as the control room for the live on-camera events and also to serve as the feed point for tapes being shuttled out of Beirut for transmission to London and New York. I was asked to accompany the equipment to Cyprus, set up the system and then serve as the transmission engineer to feed material to the satellite.

To transport tapes and personnel between Beirut and Cyprus ABC had chartered a private LearJet that would shuttle across the Mediterranean between Larnaca and Beirut in no time at all. No one seemed the least bit concerned that the LearJet would have to land and takeoff at the very airport where TWA Flight 847 sat parked on the ramp with the flight crew and Hisbollah gunmen on board.

Normally, ABC would have leased satellite time and uplinked through the local Intelsat facility on Cyprus; the same facility that normally provided long distance telephone circuits in and out of the island nation. However, the capacity of the Intelsat facility on Cyprus was limited and so to ensure unfettered access to a satellite video circuit 24/7 ABC chose to employ what at the time was very new technology - a “flyaway” satellite uplink. The flyaway pack consisted of some monitoring equipment, a small fold-up satellite dish and the satellite transmitter itself, all mounted in several shock proof shipping cases. This allowed the system to be sent anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.

ABC would be setting up headquarters in a hotel in Larnaca. Our technical equipment was set up in one meeting room and the news offices were in an adjoining meeting room. The on-camera interview area was actually set up on a platform on the hotel roof, adjacent to the swimming pool. The original plan was to place the flyaway satellite package on the rooftop as well, but here we encountered a regulatory snag. For reasons that were never fully explained, the Cypriot government would not allow ABC to transmit to a satellite from the hotel roof. We could still use the flyaway pack, but only if it were set up within the physical confines of the Intelsat uplink facility, about fifteen or twenty miles away. We would have to set up a microwave link to get our signals from the hotel in Larnaca to the site of the Intelsat facility. This would not be easy due to the intervening terrain. Since microwave signals are “line-of-site” in nature a single microwave shot would not make it all the way to the Intelsat facility as the signal would be blocked by the hilly terrain. We would need at least two “hops” to establish a microwave path between the hotel and Intelsat. To make this linkup ABC received permission to use Cyprus’ Kionia Repeater Station. The station serves as a microwave relay station for the Cyprus telephone company and also houses aviation radar equipment. The station is situated on a mountain top out in the middle of nowhere. It was about twenty-five miles from the hotel as the crow flies and was line of site from the roof of our hotel and line of site to the Intelsat facility. We would beam the signal from our hotel roof to Kionia, then from Kionia to the Intelsat facility.

I arrived in Larnaca on June 23rd and immediately got my first taste of life in the Middle East. Our plane parked out on an apron a short distance from the terminal building. No jet ways here. As we walked down the stairway we were immediately under the watchful eyes of men in military uniforms with machine guns at the ready (that is, the guns were in their hands, not slung over their shoulders) who herded the passengers into the terminal building. A few hundred yards away were unmarked, black military aircraft that we later learned belonged to the elite U.S. Delta Force anti-terrorism team. After claiming our luggage we headed to immigration. ABC had an expediter (a “fixer”) waiting to guide us through customs and into a waiting van for the short trip to the hotel. I checked into the hotel, freshened up, then immediately started unpacking the equipment for the transmission facility. Another engineer set up the microwave equipment on the roof and then headed out to the Intelsat site and to the relay station to set up the microwave equipment there. He “ball parked” the aiming of the microwave dishes - just pointing them in the general direction they needed to be pointed - but to really fine tune the system and make it usable for broadcast, we would need people at each of the three microwave locations: the hotel, the relay station and the satellite station to fine-tune everything. Meanwhile I worked to set up the transmission equipment inside the hotel as well as the cameras and audio gear for the interview area on the roof.

The next day it was time to fine tune the microwave equipment. With the other engineer at the Intelsat facility setting up the flyaway uplink package, I was sent to the relay station. Tech Manager Steve Alhart would aim the microwave dish on the roof of the hotel. We would all communicate by walkie-talkies.