The out-of-control feeling among security personnel was exacerbated by the case of Mordechai Rachamim, an Israeli undercover security agent who was on the El Al flight in Zurich when it was attacked. Rachamim was able to deflect the attention of the attackers by luring them into a gunfight as he exited the plane via the emergency slide at the back door. He killed the head of the terror cell, and the battle finally came to an end when Swiss security forces arrived on the scene. Although he had saved an entire plane and fought against terrorists, the Swiss arrested Rachamim together with the three surviving terrorists, detained him for several months, and put him on trial for manslaughter. He was finally acquitted and released after extensive diplomatic efforts, returning to Israel in a halo of glory.

The international security bodies were looking for answers to this frightening new terror tactic, and flights that were marked as potential hijack targets were reinforced with security personnel. El Al began to post security officers in many terminals throughout Europe and the US, and the Shin Bet planted incognito security marshals on every flight.

But the threat of terrorist hijacking was still very real, and that’s why Uri Bar Lev, captain of the Boeing 707 El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York, was suspicious. Most of the 150 passengers on board were flying from Israel to New York, with a stopover in Amsterdam, yet already at the airport he sensed something was wrong. And to this day, 48 years later, as we sit in his living room on Moshav Avichail outside Netanya, 87-year-old Uri Bar Lev still remembers every detail of the most significant three minutes of his life.

“I came to the plane an hour and a half before takeoff,” Bar Lev recalls. “The captain has all kinds of preflight jobs to do, including checking the plane’s functions, and of course, overseeing the security procedures. At one point, one of the security guards came to tell me that that the new passenger roster from Amsterdam to New York included four people who had been marked as suspicious.

“I asked him who they were and he said that the four passengers had not purchased tickets themselves; someone had sent the tickets straight to the check-in desk at the airport in Amsterdam. Two of them had Senegalese passports and two others were Central American. He added that the Senegalese passports had consecutive numbers, which increased the suspicion that they were forgeries.

“In theory, I had to transfer this matter to Tel Aviv, but being in Amsterdam, making immediate contact was complicated, so I made my own decision, trusting my instincts: I told him to take the two Senegalese off the flight and to check the other two very well. The security guard began to argue with me. He said that the Senegalese passengers has purchased first-class tickets and this would mean a financial loss for El Al. I told him, ‘I’m the captain of this flight and this is what I decided, so that’s what you’re going to do.’ ”

Half an hour later, the security guard returned to Bar Lev and reported that he’d put the two Senegalese onto a Pan Am flight that was also leaving to New York. With regard to the other two, a man and a woman who carried Nicaraguan passports, he reported that they had been checked and there was no reason not to let them board the flight. Later, he would learn that the two Senegalese “passengers” were the ones who hijacked the Pan Am flight that was diverted to Cairo.

They Won’t Take Us

“I was still suspicious,” Bar Lev tells Mishpacha, “so I wanted to make sure to secure the plane in the best possible way. The first-class cabin was virtually empty except for one of the plane’s two armed security marshals, an agent named Avihu Kol (the other marshal was positioned in the back of the plane). And I thought to myself, If there really are hijackers on this plane, they have certainly done their homework and they know that the security guard is sitting in first class, all by himself. They could attack him from behind and neutralize him.”

Before the plane took off, Bar Lev made a snap decision — he insisted Kol come with him into the cockpit. (El Al was the only airline with on-plane armed guards and reinforced steel cockpit doors — precautions that had been instituted after the El Al hijacking to Algeria in 1968.)

Kol, though, initially refused, saying it contradicted his orders — and so Bar Lev felt he had no choice but to pull rank. He told Kol he’d deal with the orders when they returned to Israel. Now, he ordered Kol into the cockpit.

The plane took off. When it was at an altitude of 29,000 feet, the light signaling that an alarm had been pulled began to flash in the cockpit. “This alarm was meant to inform the pilot about some type of distress among the passengers. In most cases, they weren’t real emergencies, and so when the light flashed, my copilot said, ‘It must be a false alarm.’ But my internal alarm told me otherwise. I told him, ‘I think it’s a hijacking.’ It was my gut feeling.”

A few seconds after that, there was pounding on the door of the cockpit. “I heard one of the flight attendants screaming ‘Uri, there’s a man here with a gun and a woman holding two grenades. They are demanding that you open the door!’ At the same time, another flight attendant, Shlomo Weider, tried to jump the terrorist holding the gun and was shot in the process. Weider fell to the floor, badly injured.”

Bar Lev sent the flight engineer to look through the peep hole. The Nicaraguan passenger, Nicaraguan-American Sandinista supporter Patrick Arguello, was holding a gun to the stewardess’s head.

“But I knew exactly what would happen if I’d open the door,” Bar Lev relates. “The terrorists obviously planned to fly us to an Arab state, and there was a chance that none of the passengers or crew would remain alive. On the other hand, if I didn’t open the door, it was clear that the terrorist would shoot the stewardess, and then after killing her, he’d start murdering the passengers one by one.”

Meanwhile, he says, the navigator went into total shock and Bar Lev was left to manage communications with Israel and with the various control towers. “My copilot said to me, ‘Uri, open the door. According to IATA laws, the pilot is responsible for the lives of the passengers and he must not endanger them.’ But I refused. ‘We won’t be hijacked! We won’t be taken to Syria!’ I told him.”

It took less than two minutes for Bar Lev to find his way out of this lose-lose scenario. “I remembered a maneuver I had done during training at Boeing headquarters in Seattle, after El Al took in the Boeing 707s. They sent us for an eight-hour course, and since I completed the training in six hours, the instructor asked me what else I wanted to learn. I told him I wanted to know the outer limits of the plane’s capacity, and he taught me a few tricks.”

Bar Lev told Kol to hold on, that he was going to throw the plane into a dive. “It was clear to me that in order to stop the hijack and save the stewardess I had to change the balance of power,” Bar Lev says, and then titled the nose of the plane downward and threw the jet into a negative-G dive, an extreme descent of 10,000 feet in a minute, which creates virtual zero gravity on the aircraft and makes it impossible for anyone to stay on his feet.

At the same time, Bar Lev whispered to Kol that as soon as the plane began to drop, he should quickly open the cockpit door and overtake the hijackers. “I told him he had nothing to worry about, and it was clear to me that he would find them lying on the floor, because there would be no way they could survive the drop standing up. The entire maneuver took about ten seconds,” Bar Lev recalls with obvious satisfaction.

In order to change the position of the plane so drastically, Bar Lev had to update the control tower of the nearest airport. “We weren’t far from London so I contacted the control tower there. They didn’t quite understand what I wanted, but I informed them that they had to clear the airspace because I would be conducting an extreme maneuver.”

Bar Lev relates that the other pilots in the airspace panicked when they heard the announcement. “They thought I’d gone crazy. They were afraid I’d land on their heads after dropping so fast.”

In the confusion of the dive, the two undercover El Al marshals jumped on the hijackers, killing Arguello and subduing the woman, binding her up with some passengers’ neckties. She turned out to be notorious terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled (who was later delivered into British police custody, but was released at the end of September together with other terrorists in a swap of the remaining hostages in Jordan).

Race to the Plane

Bar Lev continued to manage the situation with the split-second calculated levelheadedness worthy of a lightning-paced action film. He straightened out the plane and then began to receive instructions over the radio to return immediately to Israel, upon orders of the Shin Bet. “I told them I had a casualty on the plane — the flight attendant who had been shot by the terrorist — and after I’d verify his condition I would be able to know where I was going,” Bar Lev says.

There was no doctor on the flight, but there was a dentist, who looked Weider over and assessed that he could withstand the four-hour-plus flight back to Israel. Bar Lev was skeptical though — he saw that Weider was white as plaster, yet didn’t seem to be bleeding outside. “I realized he must be having severe internal bleeding and my heart told me there was no way he’d survive another four hours. He looked at me and whispered, ‘Uri, what’s going to be?’And I replied, ‘Relax. I’m taking you to a hospital in London.’ I was a five minute’s flying time away from London, so I ignored the radio and asked for permission to land. My top priority was saving the life of the flight attendant. I’d deal with my superiors later.”

As he approached the landing runway, Bar Lev heard over the radio an exchange between the control tower and an El Al pilot who was about to take off from London to Israel. “I remembered what happened to Mordechai Rachamim and realized that the minute we’d land, the two security guards on the plane would be arrested for the illegal use of weapons on a plane, and maybe even for the murder of the terrorist. So I made another split-second decision. I asked the Israeli pilot on the ground to move to a private frequency channel, where I begged him to cooperate with me. In rapid-fire Hebrew I told him what had happened and asked him to wait with takeoff. I knew that after I’d land, there would be chaos, and that we needed to get the security guards off the plane before the British would take them away. I told him I’d pass next to his plane, open the mechanic’s door located between the wheels, and that he should do the same.

“And that’s what we did. I landed the plane and began slowly driving toward the Israeli plane, while fire trucks and police vehicles raced onto the tarmac. The entire area was in chaos. So no one noticed that when I got close to the Israeli plane, the two security guards jumped out of my hatch and into the hatch of the other plane.”

The second plane took off for Israel, while British M16 agents rushed onto Bar Lev’s aircraft together with rescue forces and stretchers. As soon as Shlomo Weider was safely ensconced in an ambulance (he recovered, and doctors later said that had he arrived five minutes later, he wouldn’t have made it), Bar Lev went to close the plane’s doors.

“The British security forces looked at me and asked what I thought I was doing. I told them that I’d dropped off a casualty and that I planned to take off right now toward Israel, as per my instructions. That’s when they took out their guns and very politely informed me that I was on British territory and that I should please accompany them,” Bar Lev says.

Bar Lev and his crew were taken for interrogation. “The Brits searched for the security guards,” he relates. “They realized that they were the ones who had shot the terrorist, but couldn’t figure out where they had disappeared to.” They never did receive a proper explanation about the two El Al marshals who jumped out of a trap door underneath the 707, ran across the tarmac, and slipped aboard the Tel Aviv-bound jet.

Who’s the Hero?

Bar Lev was released the next day and returned to Israel, to a hero’s welcome. He even received a telegram from then-prime minister Golda Meir stating, “To the heroic pilot and crew, blessings from the Israeli government.” But the excitement and honor was short-lived. “The next morning I got a phone call from the CEO of El Al, the late Mordechai Ben Ari,” Bar Lev relates. “He said to me, ‘Uri, to me you’re a big hero, but the Shin Bet is demanding that we fire you because you violated their security orders.’

“When I came to Ben Ari’s office, there was a resignation form ready for me to sign. I was to resign as a pilot and in two years, I could return to El Al, take the tests again, and then get my job back. ‘This is not going to happen,’ I said to Ben Ari.”

Bar Lev launched a battle for his reputation, while the Shin Bet put on the pressure to make him resign. “I was told that if I didn’t resign, they wouldn’t allow security guards on the El Al flights. Plus, at the same time, I was being sued by Pan Am, whose plane was hijacked by the two Senegalese whom I didn’t allow to board my flight. They claimed I bore responsibility for the plane being blown up in Cairo. That lawsuit dragged on for eight years and ended after it was proven in court that the relevant information regarding these passengers was given to the other airline.”

Bar Lev wasn’t going down without a fight. “Back in the day when you could still call the prime minister, I called Golda. I left a message that if, within a week, my version of events wouldn’t be heard, I’d go straight to the global media exposing what Israel was doing to a pilot who saved his plane from being hijacked.”

Two days later, the El AL CEO called Bar Lev to report that a commission of inquiry had been established. It would be comprised of government ministers, including Ministers Moshe Dayan, Yigal Alon, Yosef Burg, and Shin Bet head Yosef Harmelin. In the end, Bar Lev was exonerated and continued to fly until his retirement in 1996. And three months after the almost-hijacking, then-transportation minister Shimon Peres changed the Israeli aviation laws to be based on standards established with this incident, giving discretional power to the captain in case of a hijacking and averring that the state would provide legal assistance to anyone who tried to prevent a hijacking. Three years ago — 45 years after this incident, the clauses were added to the international aviation laws as well.

Yet despite having his name cleared, Bar Lev says he’s still paid a heavy price. He says his promotions in El Al were halted from that day, despite his exemplary flying record. “But I know I did the right thing,” he says. “I saved the lives of my passengers.”

It’s All in the Mind

Exactly 31 years later, Bar Lev sat and watched in horror as the images from New York emerged. The two planes that had been hijacked the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed into the Twin Towers, left him dumbstruck. He wondered — had aviation rules been different, and had crew members been trained to think out of the box, could those planes have been saved?

“For years, I’ve been lecturing about aircraft security, and after September 11, a group of pilots came from all over the world to hear me speak. One of them asked me if I could teach them how to thwart a hijacking. I told him that I couldn’t, but what I could tell them was that if a pilot makes a decision that he won’t be hijacked, there’s a much greater chance that he’ll find the way to prevent it from happening. I believe that once you know you’re not going to allow it to happen, it’s just a question of how.”

Golden Eagles

Uri Bar Lev was born in Haifa in 1931 to parents who had arrived ten years earlier from Europe. He was a year old when his family set out to drain the swamps in order to establish Moshav Avichail, near Netanya, where he still lives today.

A month before the establishment of the state in 1948, Bar Lev was drafted to the Palmach where, just 17, he learned to fly a plane. Later, representatives from the new state’s nascent Air Force approached him with an offer to study airplane mechanics. “The offer was very attractive, because the studies included a trip to America,” Bar Lev recalls. “In those days, this was like an offer of a trip to the moon.”

In the end, the program was suspended because of the high cost involved, so he decided to train as a fighter pilot instead. Bar Lev was one of the founders of the Air Force’s renowned Squadron 140, better known as the still-active Golden Eagles. He also trained as a prisoner interrogator and an instructor for Israeli pilots on how to deal with falling into captivity, during a time when, he says, “the fear of pilots falling into enemy hands was front and center in everyone’s minds.”

After the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Bar Lev entered the civilian sector and began working as a pilot with El Al, where he eventually made captain, the most senior pilot on the crew.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 724)