Another voice
Learning from Larnaca
Auberon Waugh
Nicosia It is strangely fitting that the only disciplinary repercussions of the great shootout at Larnaca Airport should involve press and television coverage of the incident which left fifteen Egyptian commandos dead on the tarmac and the whole area writhing with wounded like an epidemic of food poisoning I once witnessed at Butlin's Holiday Camp in Minehead. A British correspondent, Mr John Bierman, has been charged with incorrect reporting, and a deputy chief of police, Mr Pavlos Stokkos, has been suspended for bad briefing of journalists — ie, in the words of the indictment, 'communicating false information regarding the events at Larnaca Airport'.
Obviously, it was most important that the journalists should be correctly briefed, and should repeat their briefing accurately, if only because they all hid under the tables in the airport building as soon as the shooting started. They had been assembling from the four corners of the world as soon as it was known that the hijacked plane was heading back to Cyprus from Djibouti, and during two hours while the two aeroplanes — Egypt's Hercules troop transport carrying seventy-four fearless commandos and the Cyprus Airways DC8, carrying gunmen and hostages — confronted each other across the tarmac. Tension mounted as time passed, but it was not until the shooting started that the reporters disappeared like rabbits down their burrows.
At least one of them was rather lucky in the bolthole he chose, if a story going round Nicosia is true. This was Mr Eric Silver, the Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent. As he sat telephoning a blow-by-blow account to his London office, his room was chosen by the Cypriots to interrogate the two Pales
tinian terrorists. They did not see him under the table, as the story goes, and he was able to relay the whole interview to London until betrayed by his squeaky voice and ejected, quivering with fright, into the corridor. I have not been able to check this story with Eric; it may be totally untrue but I think one should tell it nevertheless. Eric, like all good journalists, usually denies the best stories about himself. The mystery is why the Egyptians waited two hours before launching their attack on the airliner. Various explanations are offered. The Cairo version is that the commandos were listening to exchanges between President Kyprianou, in the control tower, and the Palestinian hijackers which finally convinced them that Kyprianou intended to let the terrorists go scot-free. Another theory is that they were planning their strike, holding '0' Groups and giving each other situation reports etc, but this seems unlikely since, in the event, they seemed to have very little idea of what to do beyond shooting off haphazardly at the plane full of hostages. A more plausible explanation is that they were arguing among themselves about which should jump out of the plane first — never a very agreeable thing to do, under these sort of circumstances.
But my own theory is that they were simply waiting for the press and television cameras to arrive. This was to be Egypt's answer to the Israeli raid on Entebbe Airport, and they were understandably anxious that the moment should be captured for all time.
In the event, of course, it did not quite turn out like that. A lengthy comparison between the raids on Entebbe and Larnaca Airports might lead us into discussion of racial characteristics and aptitudes of the sort which respectable newspapers try to avoid. By the time the commandos jumped out of the plane it was dark, the journalists and cameramen were hiding under the tables. Some interesting shots of table and chair legs emerged and from the Egyptians' point of view this was probably all for the best. The final toll was fifteen Egyptian commandos dead, sixteen wounded, fortyone prisoners and two, mysteriously, missing. On the Cypriot side, six policemen and National Guardsmen were wounded and one employee of Cyprus Airways was seriously injured —he may have died by the time this appears. Hostages and terrorists were alike unscathed. Several days later, nobody can explain what has happened to the two missing Egyptians. Perhaps they are victims of some peculiar Egyptian method of counting, or perhaps there are still two terrified commandos cowering in the lavatories or under an office table somewhere in the airport. If they come out now, they have a medal waiting for them in Cairo. But it is the Cyprus Airways official whom I feel worst about. Perhaps I had better explain.
I arrived at Larnaca Airport on the afternoon of the battle from Athens, having checked my luggage through from Bangkok. At Bangkok there was an argument with a pretty Thai girl at the KLM desk who denied that Larnaca was in Cyprus, but I thought I had won the argument and was exasperated to find no suitcase in Larnaca. At the airport, people were excited by rumours that the hijacked plane was returning, but I was more concerned at this stage for my missing suitcase.
Cyprus has always been associated with dramatic events in my experience. On the I previous day, Mr Yussef el Sebai, editor of A /-Ahram, had been murdered in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. Or at any rate, everybody supposed he was murdered. In fact the body was covered with a sheet and forgotten while reporters squabbled over how to spell its name. It was more than half an hour before a British businessman, Mr Richard Cowell, who was attending a wedding reception at the Hilton, decided to have a look under the sheet and discovered that the unfortunate gentleman was still alive. By the time he eventually died, murderers and hostages were half way to Djibouti. But press and television chose to ignore this aspect of what had, in every other way, been an entirely successful media occasion. So far as the media were concerned, Yussef Sebai had done all that was expected of him when his body was covered with a sheet for the first time. After that, he could be forgotten.
But I was certainly not going to forget about my suitcase. By now I was in the frame of mind which once visited Mr Heath when he was stuck in a traffic jam outside the House of Commons and insisted on telephoning the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police in Tokyo. Telex messages would have to be sent to Bangkok, Karachi, Athens and Amsterdam, I said, with an inventory of everything my suitcase contained: three pairs of pyjamas, six shirts, a dressing gown, various lengths of women's dress material, a silk kaftan, a motherof-pearl Aeolian harp, about four pairs of socks, a small stuffed cobra. .
Regrettably enough, I found myself consumed by a hatred for Cyprus Airways. Their food on the flight from Athens had been vile; seats on the miserable BACI -11 were crammed together to make reading impossible; mine would not recline but the person's in front did, so I travelled with his brylcreemed head under my nose; now they had lost my suitcase and threatened to close the only civilian airport in Cyprus. I settled down to a campaign of harassment by telephone.
By some miracle, I managed to get through to the baggage department just when the battle was at its height. 'Please get off the line and let us telephone you later,' pleaded the Cyprus Airways official as machine guns, hand grenades and mobile anti-aircraft guns exploded around him. 'That's all very well,' I said, with the icy patience of a desperate man, 'but I haven't got any clothes to wear until Ifind my suitcase, and I've just remembered that it also contained two silk scarves, a pair of sandals and a child's toy in che shape of a duck or goose on wooden wheels.
I would not like to think that any official of Cyprus Airways had laid down his life for the sake of a child's toy in the shape of a duck or goose on wooden wheels. But it makes a good story for the newspaper.
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