What if the hijackers brought you forward to die?

This Is Actually Happening

Mike Thexton recounts his harrowing experience during a 1986 Pan Am flight hijacking by the Abu Nidal Organization. After traveling to Pakis

Key takeaways

• Mike Thexton was specifically targeted by hijackers because he was British, as the group was searching for Americans.
• Flight attendant Sunshine performed an act of immense bravery by hiding American passports to protect passengers from being singled out.
• The hijacking occurred during a period of intense political instability in Pakistan under General Zia-ul-Haq.
• Mike escaped the plane by jumping from the wing during a moment of chaos and gunfire on the aircraft.
• The Abu Nidal Organization operated as a mercenary group, carrying out various international terrorist attacks in the 1980s.

Main topics

• K2 mountaineering and loss
• 1986 Pan Am hijacking
• Abu Nidal Organization terrorism

Notable quotes

I had gone from thinking, you know, somebody will die today, but it doesn't have to be me, to, well, it's going to be me.

Conclusion

A powerful meditation on surviving extreme trauma and finding a sense

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Speaker 3 (0:20) Hi listeners. I'm so thrilled to be back with a fresh new slate of episodes for season 16 of the show. Today's episode will require a bit of context, so I first have a couple announcements as we start the new season, and then I'll give a bit of context about today's story. So first, I wanted to thank you all for our Substack live conversation last Tuesday. It was such an amazing gathering, and I'm so grateful for all of you who showed up, and it will be the first of many to come. If you haven't already, please join the Substack newsletter, now called The End of the Known, at witmissildine.substack.com. There you can see a recording of the conversation, get weekly reflections on episodes and updates about the Speaker 2 (1:00) show, Speaker 3 (1:00) and consider becoming a paid subscriber. That helps support the show and gives you access to future live events, AMAs, past storyteller updates, and other exclusive additional show content. Our second announcement is that we have a new experimental feature that we're launching with this new season. We've created a space where you can record your own short audio recording or writing directly on our website about anything you feel moved to share with us and with the community of listeners. We're calling it The Unsaid, and it's a place to directly share a short story of something strange, shocking, or unexplainable. It could be a secret confession, a question you can't find an answer to, or a hard truth you simply can't reconcile. It's a space to express the things that we never say out loud. This is not a way to submit your story for consideration for a full episode of the show. It's a way to directly record a short story from your life, five minutes or less. This is an experiment, and we hope to compile the recordings and writings into bonus content to share on both Substack and the show itself. to create more ways to engage and connect with each other around the kinds of experiences that bring us together. So if you'd like to share a short story from your life, you can find it on our website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, under the tab, The Unsaid. So now, moving on to today's episode, I'd like to provide a bit of context. The incident in today's story, from Mike Thexton, takes place mostly in Pakistan in 1986. In the early Speaker 2 (2:31) 1980s, Pakistan was defined by the military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq, Speaker 3 (2:37) who seized power in a coup in 1977. Two years later, Zia had the prime minister at the time, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, executed in 1979. After rising to power, Zia suspended the constitution and banned political parties. But opposition rose in the early 1980s as the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy launched a major civil disobedience campaign. Protests turned into a rural uprising that the army suppressed with deadly force. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the slain former prime minister, had gone into exile. But she eventually returned in April 1986 to an outpouring of support among protesters, reinvigorating the opposition. Meanwhile, Zia sought to legitimize his rule and preserve sweeping powers as president. Mike's story in today's episode takes place just as Zia was clinging to power, and just after Benazir Bhutto had returned to Pakistan and the opposition was gaining momentum. Meanwhile, Pakistan was also under pressure by the Soviets, Afghanistan, and the West, at the center of struggles for nationalist, Islamist, and communist bids for power in the region. As a result, it became the site of multiple, intersecting, violent international terrorist incidents. Most importantly, the organization central to this story was called the Abu Nadal Organization, a military mercenary Palestinian group founded in 1974 by Abu Nadal. The group operated largely as freelance contractors, carrying out assassinations and violent attacks, funded by various Middle Eastern states, breaking with efforts at diplomacy in the Middle East, and turning its violence mostly against Israel, Western, and moderate Arab targets. Abu Nadal was responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the era, including the simultaneous assaults on the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985. This is, of course, a very, very broad overview of an extraordinarily complex situation, and I encourage you to look up more details about this history. But for now, that brings us up to speed with where Mike found himself in 1986. Mike will provide some more details as the story unfolds, most of which were opaque to him throughout the incident and only revealed in the aftermath. And now, on to today's episode, What If The Hijackers Brought You Forward To Die? Speaker 5 (5:04) I was kneeling on the floor with my hands on my head. And I had gone from thinking, you know, somebody will die today, but it doesn't have to be me, to, well, it's going to be me. At some point, they will make a demand and it will not be met. And I will then be shot. I could not see any other way that this would end. Speaker 3 (5:32) From Audible Originals, I'm Whit Misseldyne. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 433. Speaker 3 (5:45) What if the hijackers brought you forward to die? Speaker 4 (6:05) James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey. For the best bingeable series, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (6:25) He lurks in shadow. He slips into dreams. He casts no reflection. Audible presents Bram Stoker's Dracula, a new full cast audio thriller starring Jonathan Bailey as Dracula and Ella Purnell as Mina Harker. Don't miss the year's best new audio thriller. Listen to Bram Stoker's Dracula only on Audible. Speaker 5 (6:46) My parents were a Methodist minister and a doctor. My mother, quite unusual in the early 1950s to be a female doctor, and they met at a party. The story in our family always was that he went home afterwards and said to his best friend, I've met the woman I want to marry. Years later, I asked him, what was it about her that made you think that? He said she was so full of life. I think he saw that she was what he needed to keep him from being a rather boring, middle-aged Methodist minister. They got married in 1952, and they had my elder brother Peter, who was born in 1953, my older sister Penny a couple of years later, and I was born in 1959, the third of four children. My younger sister was born in 1965. Speaker 5 (7:41) So my father was quite a serious man. He didn't really sort of express his love in words, but he loved us. He was a great father. My father was always working. My mother would do counselling. She specialised in family planning, so she would be out in the evening. But she was much more nurturing and she loved to cook and she loved to look after us. We would go on family holidays together. We would go for walks in the mountains. We would play Scrabble. We would play bridge. And that's my abiding memory of childhood. So my oldest brother, Peter, he went away to boarding school when he was about eight or nine. So I would have been about three or four. And I can't really remember the time when he lived at home. But when he finished boarding school, he went to medical school and trained as a doctor. He was quite driven. He discovered rock climbing at boarding school and he went fairly quickly from rock climbing with the Boy Scouts to going away to North Wales and other areas and then with friends to the Alps. And by the late 1970s, when he would have been 25, 26, he was off to the Himalayas climbing with people that were famous. This was always exciting. He would come home from one of these expeditions and he would give us a slideshow and he would tell us all these things. It was amazing. Not terribly surprising, but he would be my hero. In some ways, he was a bit difficult. I think he went to boarding school because my parents couldn't really cope with him. Although he really enjoyed boarding school, I think he did feel some resentment that they had sent him away. So he was not easy to get on with at that time. Speaker 5 (9:38) In my school, you were all right if you were either clever or you were sporty. Fortunately, I was very clever. I was not sporty. So I was top of the class in academic subjects. When I went to university, I discovered that there are other people who are really, really clever. I was no longer the clever one. And it took me some time to get over that. So when I was at university, I joined the climbing club. because obviously I wanted to be my big brother. Discovered fairly quickly that I was not my big brother. I am scared of heights. I cannot do rock climbing. I have tried. But before I'd really worked that out, the climbing club arranged for him to come and do a tour about one of his expeditions. My brother was, you know, on another level. I just looked up to him. I suppose one of the things that I did find difficult was realizing that I was not my brother. Speaker 4 (10:37) I quite wanted to do adventurous things and finding Speaker 5 (10:42) that I really couldn't cope with heights on rock climbing was upsetting. I just couldn't do it. I would freeze on the rock. rock climbing with my brother I mean I was a disappointment to him I think but on the other hand you know we'd be on a fairly easy route and he'd be up top with a rope and I'd be trying to climb up it and then I'd say Pete I'm falling off here and suddenly I'd find myself two feet higher up because he'd just pull me up Speaker 5 (11:13) I did other things to try to be a bit adventurous. So in the year that I finished university, I took my father's car and went to Rome. That was quite an adventure, which I quite enjoyed. But I was beginning to realize that I was less into hardship than my brother. He was quite happy to hang off a mountain ledge all night in a sleeping bag. And I was a bit more for my home comforts. At the end of university, my best friend from school said, I'm going to train to be a chartered accountant. And I said, well, that sounds like a good idea. I'll come and do that with you. And so training as a chartered accountant was much more my thing. And in that time, I had a piece of enormous good fortune. As a six-month newbie auditor, I found a fraud. And so that was quite exciting. Also rather got me noticed. in my large firm of accountants. I would go to the office and do my nine-to-five job. And in a way, I didn't mind doing this job because my brother was doing the exciting stuff. It's sort of living vicariously. Peter would do a six-month junior doctor job, and then he would go climbing. And then when he came back from the expedition, he'd have to find another six-month job so that he would be able to go on the next expedition. Speaker 5 (12:43) In 1980, he went on an eight-man expedition to Everest that was led by Doug Scott and Joe Tasker, who were both very famous climbers. So we were following his doings as much as we could and looking at the slideshow when he came home. And I was doing this boring job, but that was OK. Speaker 5 (13:07) In the summer of 1983, my brother went on a mountaineering expedition to K2, the second highest mountain in the world, considered by many to be rather harder than climbing Everest. It's in the north of Pakistan. And we took him to the airport and said goodbye to him, I think, at the beginning of May. Again, he was with a number of famous climbers. Again, Doug Scott, Don Willans, Al Rouse. All of these people were the Olympians of British climbing. And they'd gone on this expedition to climb K2 without bottled oxygen. He'd done this before, you know, and so I thought nothing much of it. I know that my parents worried about him, but he was Peter. He was fine. Meanwhile, I was doing my final exams as a chartered accountant. I did the exams and we celebrated afterwards. Then the following week, the phone rang at just before seven in the morning. That's never good to be woken by the phone. And it was my mother. And she said, Peter died in the mountains. It was absolutely shattering. Speaker 5 (14:26) I sat there, I tried to sort of say something coherent to my mother. I put the phone down and I just sat there sobbing. And my flatmate and his girlfriend came and she just held me and I cried. And I have to say that I almost still cry thinking of that moment. It doesn't really go away somehow, the feeling that he'd gone and the shock of it because he was... Speaker 5 (14:55) indestructible to me. He was the guy who pulled me two feet up on the rope when I was falling off. I got through the next few days. I went for a couple of days just in the south of England, took a tent and camped on my own. Tried to deal with it in my head, the fact that he was gone. Speaker 5 (15:20) I came home and my parents, they were relieved that I was fine, even though I'd been in no danger at all. And they said, you know, how are you? I said, I've got a terrible blister on my foot. And my dad, he said, oh, let me see. And so he sat me down and looked at my foot. And I sat there watching him cut sticking blasters to fit the blisters on my feet. It was what he could do for the child who was not dead. And it was quite moving. My elder sister, Penny, said that she absolutely couldn't bear to think about him. She would be too upset. She used to tell herself that he was still alive, that he was out there and this was all a misunderstanding and sometime he'd come home. And she really couldn't face it. Speaker 5 (16:14) That summer, I had started a new position in my accountancy firm. There were various administrative things Speaker 4 (16:22) that Speaker 5 (16:22) I was given to do, and it was very exhausting. And it was really about just trying to keep myself incredibly busy so that I wouldn't have to think. If I stopped to think, then that was not good. Remembering grieving for my brother, one of the things that I really remember is the first Christmas that he wasn't there. And my parents decided we can't be in the house. That's the house that he used to come home to. And so we decided we would go to North Wales. It was a very strange Christmas. But I remember sitting in the kitchen of my parents' house with my younger sister. And again, I burst into tears because we couldn't talk about him. It's not just that he wasn't there. We couldn't bear to mention him because we all knew that we would be so upset if we did. This was my first experience, really, of being bereaved. I hadn't gotten any sort of point of reference. This was just the most brutal person who could have died. Peter did the exciting stuff, and now he wasn't there. And we were all just too upset even to talk about him. I wrote some poems about this grief and about the fact that you don't really want it to stop. that grieving feels the right thing to do. And when people say, you know, oh, well, time will heal. You say, no, I don't want it to heal. That would be wrong. And I suppose time does make it slightly less raw. But I'm happy that it feels this raw. And I suppose that's what I had to get used to. Speaker 5 (18:05) The thing that really changed everything was in September, I got my exam result. And I had not only passed, but I had come first in the country in these chartered accountancy final exams. Because of that, everybody wanted to give me a job. And I decided that this was the moment where I had to become my brother. Speaker 5 (18:33) You know, I thought, I don't want to do this boring job. It was okay while Peter was off climbing Everest and coming home with his slideshow, but I'm not going to do that now. And I can't do this nine to five job. What I decided I wanted to do was to write books. So I wrote a book and realized that actually it's quite difficult to write a good book. But I did write a book. And so there was a college that I knew where they wanted somebody who could teach a particular subject that I could do. And they said, we only teach for a very small part of the year. The rest of the year would be your own. The money was better than what I would have for a full-time job at my old firm. So I gave up my day job with the intention of, you know, becoming a famous author, but also traveling. I wouldn't have done that if my brother hadn't died. In 1985, I did some traveling. I went to China. Going to China at a time when not many Chinese people had ever seen a Westerner, I think it's a very good experience for anybody to realise how hard it is to look weird and to not be able to understand any of the writing and just be at the mercy of everything that's going on. That was very hard, but good. I came back from that, and in that summer, some of the students from the mountaineering club at St Mary's Hospital in London, where Peter had trained as a doctor, they had told our family, we want to hold an expedition in Peter's honour. We're going to go to Mount Kenya in Africa. We're going to climb the mountain. We're going to do some research into altitude sickness because he died of altitude sickness. It wasn't a fall or any sort of accident. It was simply the fact that 26,000 feet, there isn't enough air. And so they went and did this expedition. And when they came back, they said it was great. We'd like to do it again. Next year, 1986, we're going to go to the Karakoram Himalaya in northern Pakistan. We'd like to climb the last mountain that Peter climbed, which was a mountain called Lobsang Spire. Speaker 5 (20:51) They approached my family and said, look, we want to use Peter's name again, but would Mike like to come? We understand he's not going to climb, but he could be the base camp manager. And I had thought at some point I could go to the bottom of the mountain and say goodbye to Peter. And here it was. They sort of laid it out in front of me. They said, we will take you to the bottom of the mountain. I had to say yes. Speaker 2 (21:29) Imagine you're reading Pride and Prejudice, except you're not reading it. Harris Dickinson and Marissa Abella are reading it to you on Audible. Her barbs sting you. His coldness sends a shiver up your spine. Your heart aches. Your ears burn. You yearn for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible.