It was the summer of terror — an altogether different terror than the pandemic kind we’re living through now. But it was just as global and, at the time, just as harrowing.
This is what happened in the span of just two weeks in June 1985: a bomb went off in the international terminal of Frankfurt’s airport, killing three and injuring 74; a guerrilla group attacked a restaurant in San Salvador’s Zona Rosa, killing 12, among them three Americans; the next day, bombs went off across Nepal, killing at least eight people; three days later, an Air India 747 was bombed out of the sky over the Atlantic, killing all 329 people aboard; that same day, a bomb hidden in a suitcase went off at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, killing two baggage handlers; in Spain on July 1, a bomb went off in the British Airways offices targeting TWA’s business operations on the floor above, killing a woman and injuring 27. Moments later, gunmen with submachine guns opened fire on the Alia Royal Jordanian Airlines offices 100 yards away, tossing inside three grenades that miraculously failed to explode.
And while all this was happening, during these very same two weeks, America barely noticed any of it as the country found itself in the grips of a hostage crisis that, thanks to new technology and an upstart cable network called CNN, was for the first time playing out 24 hours live on TV. Lebanese Shiite terrorists had hijacked a plane and were holding 40 Americans somewhere in war-torn Beirut’s Southern Suburbs. The TWA Hostage Crisis, as it came to be known, was an epic 17-day shitshow that whiplashed between abject terror and black comedy. It was America’s first reality show and it forever changed the media landscape and how we’re fed our news. As a young foreign correspondent for Newsweek, I got to see it all firsthand.
