Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...subsequent call demanded the abdication of Queen Juliana as ransom for Caransa. The caller also insisted on the release of West German Terrorist Knut Folkerts from a Maastricht prison cell in southern Holland. Police speculated that Caransa's captors might belong to the same gang of anarchists that kidnaped West German Industrialist Hanns-Mar-tin Schleyer in early September. Schley-er's body was found in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France, not far from the German border two weeks ago, shortly after West German commandos staged their daring rescue raid on a skyjacked Lufthansa...
...dramatic rescue came less than a month after the Tokyo government had surrendered to the ransom demands of five Japanese Red Army terrorists who had skyjacked a JAL jet with 156 passengers aboard. The determination and courage of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who ordered the commando attack, brought jubilant congratulatory messages from many of the world's leaders. President Jimmy Carter praised the West Germans for the "courage of their decision." Israeli Premier Menachem Begin, whose country mounted the successful rescue of hostages from Uganda's Entebbe Airport on July 3, 1976, cabled, "It was indeed a salvation...
Schmidt and his top aides were determined not to give in to the skyjackers, just as they had refused to yield to the ransom demands of Schleyer's kidnapers. The only decision left was when and to where the commandos would be dispatched. Largely because of a press blackout that had been in effect since Schleyer was seized, the government's deliberations were shrouded in hermetic secrecy. West German morale plummeted?particularly after news arrived of Pilot Schumann's death. But then came Mogadishu. Radio stations interrupted regular programming and punctuated coverage of the rescue and the return...
...Rome-Tel Aviv El Al flight and the 1970 skyjacking of four passenger jets, three of which were later blown up in the Jordanian desert. Haddad also planned the 1975 terrorist raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which forced the oil-producing states to pay $25 million to ransom their ministers. The commander of that attack was Haddad's sometime deputy, the notorious Venezuelan known as Carlos (real name: Ilyich Ramírez-Sánchez). Carlos has served as the liaison man between terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East...
With The Talisman, though, the fun of the plot becomes confused with the characters' politics. The coffin-nappers here are not simply crooks looking for a big haul, but political protesters, holding one national symbol for the ransom of another--but very different--symbol. The trouble is that just as the book is too serious to be taken as light fiction, it is too outrageous to be taken seriously by anyone...