Counter Terror Gazette

The Hijacking of 58 November: a personal 9/11

02 Oct 2011

The airwaves today are filled with special reports, documentaries and memorials related to the 10^th anniversary of the 11^th September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States.  The 9/11 Commission recently presented its report card of what has and has not been done to keep the public safe since 2004, when the Commission issued its first report; 9 of its 41 recommendations have not been addressed. 10 years on, the general public and, more importantly the bereaved, are still seeking answers and solutions…ones that may take time to come to fruition if history is anything to go by. Andy Downs, whose father was killed in a 1971 hijacking incident, is still seeking transparency and common sense forty years later, not as a vendetta but as way of ensuring that tragedies, whether they kill 3 or 3,000, are prevented in the future. He analyses his own family experience and draws parallels with the comparatively recent attacks that supposedly changed the world we live in.

My story came to a public close on 11^th September 1975 in the Federal Courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee, where the presiding judge – a former FBI agent himself – had to admit defeat from the higher court. It had been a long legal siege that had started just four years earlier. The effects from the case are largely unknown to the public, but they changed how law enforcement, mainly the FBI, dealt with hostage situations and hijackings. This case and the Appellate Court’s ruling forced the FBI to start the first hostage negotiation team.

The Hijacking

The 3^rd October 1971, was a cool, sunny Sunday in Nashville. My parents had taken me to church and we had lunch and spent the day at home together. Late that afternoon, the phone rang and my father answered it. It was the air charter company he worked for telling him he had a short flight to Atlanta a little after midnight. Later that night, he put me to bed and kissed my mother goodnight. He told her he would be back before the sun came up and went out to the car and drove off.

Waiting next to the hangar was his co-pilot, Randall G. Crump. The plane had been pulled out and topped off with Jet A. The plane was a 681 Hawk Commander and it had been ready for an hour when a car pulled up to the hangar. It was a gold Cadillac with, according to the linesman’s subsequent report, two large men in the front seat flanking a dark-haired young woman, who was screaming and fighting to escape. She yelled that she was being kidnapped and begged for someone to please help her.

The young woman was Susan Giffe who, a week prior to that fateful night, had left her husband George with the couple’s two-year-old daughter. With financial issues at the heart of the break up, George had bought a new Cadillac and chartered a plane to impress her and win her back. George, sensing that she did not want to see him again, showed up at her work that Sunday evening with a friend named Bobby Wayne Wallace; George had given Wallace a pistol prior to arriving at Susan’s workplace.

Susan thought she was simply getting a ride home from George, but when he turned toward the airport in lieu of her parents’ house, the couple starting fighting and Susan demanded to be let out of the car. Wallace held her still in the car as the three drove to the airport. The domestic dispute was about to impact more than just the Giffe family.

As the stunned co-pilot, the lineman and my father looked on, the driver got out of the car and walked over to my father and said that they were ready to go. The co-pilot said, “Hang on there, that girl is hysterical and is screaming she is being kidnapped. We can’t put her in a small plane like that.” George Giffe Jr. said not to worry; he was a doctor and was taking the girl to Atlanta for treatment. In reality he was a former professor of biology, turned real estate agent. My father asked for his credentials and he pulled out his wallet. He flashed his wallet, like you would see on an old TV show, where the cop opened his wallet with a badge just long enough for you to wonder what you had just seen.

Giffe walked back over to the car where his estranged wife had just been able to tear herself away from the Wallace. She fell out of the car on the driver side onto the ramp. Giffe picked her up by the hair, pulled out a gun and aimed it at her head. Wallace came out at this point, with his gun pointed at the crew. With guns drawn, they ordered the crew to get on the plane.

The lineman unhooked the GPU and as the plane taxied off the ramp, he ran into the hangar to call the airport police, who scrambled two cars which sped down the taxi way to try and cut off the plane. They were too late. The Commander N-9058N had taken the active runway by now and my father was ordered by the hijackers not to stop. The plane started its takeoff roll with the two airport police cars in chase. Their blue lights could be seen inside the cockpit, fading as the plane picked up speed to rotate into the night sky.

Once airborne Giffe said he wanted to go to the Bahamas in lieu of Atlanta. My father notified Air Traffic Control (ATC) of the change as the FBI and FAA started to figure out what to do next. In order to fly to the Bahamas, the plane needed to land in Jacksonville, Florida, to refuel and obtain the necessary charts, flotation gear, weather information and a flight plan.

By this time, the Nashville FBI office had determined the identity of the main hijacker and had begun interviewing his family. The family told the local FBI agents that he was volatile and likely to react violently if he were cornered.

The system in those days was that smaller FBI offices had to send all information to the largest field office in that state and they would decide where that information would be sent. In this case, the Nashville FBI office sent information to Memphis. The Washington, D.C., FBI was in the mix as well at this point communicating with Nashville, Memphis and Atlanta ATC. In the meantime, no one had called the Jacksonville FBI office to let it know a hijacked aircraft was coming. Two more hours elapsed until the Jacksonville Field Office was notified that it had a hijacked aircraft landing in one hour.

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