Years Ago, Hijacked Plane Targeted Nuke Complex

By DUNCAN MANSFIELD
Associated Press Writer

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - Twenty-nine years ago, hijackers took over an airliner with 27 passengers and four crew aboard and threatened to crash into the government's nuclear weapons production complex in Oak Ridge.

"They let us know that if we didn't have the money by X hour then we were going to dive into Oak Ridge," co-pilot Harold Johnson recalled in an interview last week from his Memphis home. "And there was no doubt in my mind that we would have done just that."

Johnson would be threatened with his life and shot in the arm before the 32-hour ordeal finally ended Nov. 12, 1972, in Havana.

Airline hijackings to Cuba were common in those days. The commandeering of the Southern Airways DC9 with its '70ish smiley face on the nose was one of about 30 hijackings that year.

But this was one of the few times in American aviation history _ before last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon _ in which hijackers threatened to use an airplane as a weapon.

Johnson, who retired in 1983, said domestic security measures were increased after his flight. But he said the government didn't go far enough.

"For a long, long time, it was something that I thought could happen someday, but had just hoped and prayed that it never would," he said.

Unlike the recent hijackers, the three Americans who took control of Johnson's Memphis-to-Miami-flight had little training and virtually no plan. They did have guns, a hand grenade and a grudge against Detroit, where two of them had been charged with rape.

Hijacker Melvin Cale grew up in nearby Knoxville and worked in Oak Ridge before moving to Detroit with his half brother Louis Moore, another hijacker. Henry Jackson of Detroit completed the trio.

They commandeered the plane about 10 minutes after a stopover in Birmingham, Ala., crashing through the cockpit door with an arm around a flight attendant's throat and a gun to her head.

They wanted a $10 million ransom, 10 parachutes and 10 bulletproof vests. The plane eventually reached Knoxville and began circling Oak Ridge, site of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant and their specific target _ a nuclear research reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"It was surreal in a sense," said Jim Alexander, a former government spokesman at Oak Ridge. "We would look up in the sky and see this jet airliner circling. It was high, but it never left."

In his book, "Odyssey of Terror," the plane's captain, William Haas, wrote that the hijackers became enraged when their demands received a lukewarm response. They forced Haas to begin a steep descent on Oak Ridge, pulling out only when the airline said it would comply.

Johnson, however, said the plane never got below 8,000 to 10,000 feet and that was only so the hijackers could identify Oak Ridge.

The airline finally came up with $2 million for the hijackers, who then forced the pilots to fly to Havana. They shot Johnson in the arm during a shootout with FBI agents when the plane stopped to refuel in Orlando, Fla.

The hijackers were arrested in Cuba and imprisoned for eight years. The trio returned in 1980 to Birmingham, where they were sentenced to 20- to 25-year terms.

Haas retired in 1988 and died earlier this year. His widow said he never would have crashed the DC9 into Oak Ridge.

"There is not a pilot in the United States that flies commercially that would do anything like that," Ann Haas said. "He might make the hijackers think that was what he was going to do, but never, never would they use it as a target."