“The Skies Belong to Us,†by Brendan I. Koerner, documents a time in the late 1960s and early '70s when hijacking was an alarmingly regular part of traveling the American skies. Mr. Koerner devotes most of his attention to Roger Holder, a disgruntled Vietnam vet, and Cathy Kerkow, a troubled young woman from Oregon. The pair, who hijacked a flight and took it to Algiers, eventually settled in France, where they became minor celebrities among the French left. Reviewing the book for The Times, Dwight Garner called it “such pure pop storytelling that reading it is like hearing the best song of summer squirt out of the radio.†In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Koerner discussed interviewing Holder, why it took so long for the authorities to increase airport security at the time and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
How did you come across this story?
I actually have to give credit to The New York Times. Back in October 2009, I read a Metro story about a guy named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had hijacked a plane to Havana in 1968. He spent the next 41 years living in Cuba, then suddenly decided to return to the U.S., where he had left behind a wife and daughter; the Times story was about his arrest at JFK Airport. I've always been drawn to stories about fugitives and exiles, so the article got me curious about other Vietnam-era hijackers who had managed to dodge justice for years. In the course o f my search for those kinds of characters, I stumbled across the names Catherine Marie Kerkow and Willie Roger Holder - the two figures who became my great obsession.
Why do you think that Mr. Holder and Ms. Kerkow and the hijacking phenomenon of that time weren't better remembered before your book was published?
Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility. Over time, it became too easy to dismiss the whole phenomenon as some comic trifle - the work of a bunch of delusional failures who dropped ransoms while jumping out of airplanes, or who mistakenly thought they'd be greeted as heroes in Havana. The era's truly compelling stories, like that of Holder and Kerkow, got lost in the shuffle.
How did you recreate so much of the story? You spoke to Mr. Holder - how much did you rely on your talks with him and how much did you use other documents and research?
The Holder interviews were critical, but they were only a small piece of the entire research puzzle. I also spoke with a galaxy of people who had known him over the years: Holder's sister, his longtime girlfriend, his comrades from Vietnam, his acquaintances from Algiers and Paris, and many of the hostages he had held aboard Western Airlines Flight 701. There were also thousands of documents to sift through, including F.B.I. interviews, State Department cables, military records, transcripts from the hijacked flight and even Holder's unpublished memoirs.
How much time did you spend talking to him? Was he mostly cooperative and understanding of what you were trying to do?
I started talking to him on the phone in the early summer of 2011, but I didn't fly out to San Diego to visit him until that August. We spent a solid week discussing his story, in marathon sessions fueled by coffee and (for him) Pall Mall cigarettes. He was a little wary at first, but his reserve quickly melted away. He had been trying to write his memoirs since the early 1980s, so I think he rather enjoyed the opportunity to rhapsodize about all the history he had lived through. The one thing he was touchy about, though, was photography - he wouldn't let me snap his picture, no matter how many times I asked.
How far into writing his memoirs did he get? And how did you find them - candid, stylish?
Holder had some rough breaks with his memoirs over the years. He burned a first draft while living in France in the early 1980s; then the F.B.I. seized a manuscript in 1991, when Holder was being investigated for allegedly plotting another hijacking. The hundred or so pages that I read were somewhat fragmentary in nature - he wasn't great at crafting segues between his memories - but his prose was surprisingly vivid. He had very sharp recollections of his service in Vietnam and his time aboard Western Airlines Flight 701, in particular. I could tell that he had spent a lot of time pondering those pieces of his personal history, in an attempt to make sense of the unusual choices he had made.
Will Star Brendan KoernerMany hijackers at the time saw their actions as political protests, however vague. What was the most bizarre motivation you came across?
Arth ur Gates Barkley, an unemployed truck driver from Arizona, spent seven years disputing a $471.78 tax bill from the I.R.S. He eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case, but the justices turned him down. So in June 1970, he hijacked a plane to Washington, D.C., where he demanded a $100 million ransom to be paid out of the Supreme Court's treasury - an act of revenge against the judicial system that had betrayed him. As you can probably imagine, things didn't work out quite as Barkley had hoped.
The book chronicles more than a decade of hijackings. Yet security in airports over this time remained essentially nonexistent. That's hard to understand from our post-9/11 perspective. Why was no action taken for so long?
The airlines used their political clout to frustrate a lot of efforts to tighten security. They were scared that travelers would revolt if forced to pass through metal detectors o r have their bags checked. And they also figured that it was cheaper to endure periodic skyjackings than pay millions for security equipment and personnel. That sounds incredibly irresponsible in hindsight, but you have to realize that hijackers in that era were primarily interested in negotiating, not causing mass destruction. It wasn't until the very end of the epidemic that people started to awaken to the fact that, sooner or later, someone was going to crash a plane into a populated area - or a nuclear reactor.
Eventually, security around air travel tightened. You write: “The years that followed Watergate and the fall of Saigon would be filled with plenty of high-profile mayhem committed by men and women at their wits' ends,†but hijackings were no longer part of that. Where did the mayhem get channeled instead?
Into more run-of-the-mill violence, particularly shootings of public figures. Someone lik e John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, is a perfect example - had he been born a bit earlier, he probably would have been a skyjacker.
In your acknowledgments, you thank Spike Lee for giving you “a master class in storytelling.†Can you elaborate on that?
Spike optioned my first book, “Now the Hell Will Start,†and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative. And it changed the way I plan my projects - instead of writing a traditional outline for “The Skies Belong to Us,†for example, I storyboarded the whole book with more than 200 sequenced images.
Has the new book been optioned for the movies yet? If not, do you hope it will be?
No one has optioned it yet, but I would certainly love for that to happen. The book's atmosphere is deeply influenced by a bunch of tremendous movies, especially the full six-hour version of Olivier Assayas's “Carlos.†I must have watched that thing a half-dozen times while writing the book.
Are you on the trail of another story for a new book yet?
I have a few ideas percolating, but to be honest, I need a little time to breathe. This book took a lot out of me, as my long-suffering wife and kids can attest. I'm aiming to steal some days this summer to clear my head and get back in the creative flow. Oh, and clean my desk - it's a disaster right now.
