Apple TV’s fun, thrilling, and breezy summer show, Hijack just ended. Over 7 episodes that covered the 7 hour flight from Dubai to London, Idris Elba—the man who should have been Bond, James Bond—cajoled, soothed, argued, and negotiated with the hijackers telling them over and over again: I just want to get home to my family. I truly believe no one has ever made sitting and thinking look as good as he does. No one, that is, other than my dad. For my dad, you see, was also on a hijacked plane. But for real.
In the summer of 1984, my dad boarded a plane from Tehran to Shiraz, his place of birth. He ended up…well keep reading.
For a while in the mid-80s, it felt that every other day, someone hijacked a plane from Tehran and flew it out of the country. It was a time when the Iran-Iraq war had morphed into an unending war of attrition: No land was lost or gained. Just boys killed again and again. The revolution was still new enough to be seen from the rear view window but not so new to carry hope for a better future. To feed the war, the government had banned boys under the age of 14 from leaving the country for fear that no one would be left to die on its battlefields when the time came and as far as they were concerned, the time would definitely come. And even if these boys could leave, where would they go? For those of us living in Iran in the ‘80s, the whole world felt like a mean girls clique: We weren’t misfits. We were brutally outcasts. Things were, to put it simply, just bad.
A year before my dad was hijacked, in July 1983, a plane heading to Shiraz from Tehran was taken over by members of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization. They first flew to Kuwait where they refueled and let some of the passengers off. Then they headed for Paris, the MKO’s headquarters at the time, where they threatened to blow up the plane if their demands were not met. The UPI deliciously reports that Masud Rajavi, the head of MKO, “barked” his orders to them: “Open the door of the plane, free the passengers, stay in the plane and I will come to talk to you,” even though he also denied they were members of his organization.
Less than a month later, an Air France flight from Vienna to Paris was hijacked. This time, it was brought to Iran. The hijackers were understood to be Lebanese and were demanding the French government change its policies in the Middle East. In Iran, we found it hilarious that someone would choose to come to Iran as opposed to just flee from it.
By the summer of 1984, the joke was if you want to leave Iran, just hop on a short haul flight, preferably from Tehran to Shiraz. I repeated this to my cousin in Shiraz who was already worried about being drafted in a couple of years. Make sure it’s not to Tehran, I teased him, but from Tehran. The joke of course was on me. Actually, it was on my dad.
On August 7, 1984 we celebrated my little sister’s first birthday. Then my dad took his bag, hugged us all, and headed to the airport to meet my uncle, my mom’s oldest brother, who was accompanying him on the trip. An hour into the 50 minute night flight, my dad looked out the window and saw no lights on the ground. He figured they must be having trouble with the landing gear. Shortly after, the plane nosedived and then a steep pull out. Screams everywhere. Then a slow descent onto a runway covered in firetrucks and ambulances and all kinds of other cars. The flight attendant announced: Pull down your shades! Pull down your shades! Eventually the plane took off and once airborne, my dad opened the shades to take a peak: There was a fighter jet right next to him, flying alongside the plane. There was no doubt as to what had happened.
Shortly after the comms came on and the voice of a young man said: “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. I am a follower of Musa Khiyabani and I have hijacked this plane.” Then the passengers, as my dad later repeated a 1000 times with a sly smile to a rapt audience of friends and family, erupted into applause. Two mullas sitting in front of my dad turned to him and asked: Do you have a spare suit we can borrow? Everyone knew this meant the trip to Shiraz was now a trip to Paris! Even the Iranian press agency in, what reads as a rather droll tone, wrote: “It is anticipated that the hijackers will take the plane to France.'' Huzzah!
But the French had had enough. All these planes being hijacked to France or from France were just too much. In the 10 days before my dad got on the plane there had been 3 other international hijackings, two of them involving French planes. One of the two was yet another Air France flight hijacked exactly a week before my dad’s plane, taken to Tehran where the hijackers released the passengers, blew up the cockpit, and surrendered.
The plane made another (and less nerve wrecking) stop to refuel in Cairo. The Egyptian press agency reported there was 18 hijackers on board and the pilot had told air traffic control that they had tied explosives to themselves.
Eventually the plane landed in Rome and eventually the passengers were let out. My dad, ever curious about other humans, hung back to learn more about the hijackers. Turns out there was but one. The kid, 18, had said he was a follower of Khiyabani, the MKO commander who had been killed in 1982, but in truth he just did not want to be drafted into the bloody war. So he had bought a ticket for the Shiraz flight, taken some army green socks, rolled them up, and at the right time gone to the cockpit and told the pilot: I have a grenade and I’ll blow up the plane if you don’t do as I say. “And the nosedive?” my dad had asked? The Bahrainis had first not given permission for the plane to land to refuel and covered the runway with trucks. So the kid had threatened to crash the plane into it. The nosedive was a game of chicken and the kid had won.
I remember the respect in my dad’s voice when talking about him. Respect and care and something akin to melancholy that a teenager would resort to all this so as to escape a war that kept getting bloodier by the day.
My dad’s story of his hijacking gets funnier from here. It involves hundreds of Iranians getting off the plane in Rome 5 years after the revolution and the banning of alcohol and ordering massive amounts of beer on the Islamic Republic’s dime. It also gets sweeter from here. It involves a father spending the vouchers they’d given him for the overnight stay in Rome to buy his 3 kids tiny souvenirs from the land they call kharej. Those are stories that should be told and maybe they will be one day if I ever get around to finishing the book.
But for now, it’s important to note that my dad and uncle went to Shiraz from Rome as planned because when you’re living through a major revolution and a bloody war, a little hijacking won’t throw you off course. Life continued if you were lucky enough to survive it.
A week later, the Italians prosecuted two men, Hosein [sic] Eftekhari and Mohsen Rahgozar for hijacking the plane, but acquitted the latter on account of him being asleep when the cockpit had actually been taken over. Eftekhari was given 7 years. His defense attorney was Rocco Ventre, the acclaimed attorney and member of international Red Aid (Soccorso Rosso; Dario Fo was another member.) Reality was clearly stranger and better than any fiction the creators of Hijack could come up with.