On A Wing And A Prayer For Fatima Secrets

On a wing and a prayer

FOR FATIMA SECRETS

BY LLOYD GORMAN

WHAT HAVE A FORMER MONK FROM PERTH, WA, AN AER LINGUS BOEING 737 AND THE VATICAN GOT IN COMMON? EXACTLY 40 YEARS AGO ON MAY 2nd, THESE THINGS WERE INVOLVED OR IMPLICATED IN ONE OF THE MOST UNUSUAL HIJACKINGS IN AVIATION HISTORY.

On that date in 1981, Flight 164 – with 103 passengers and 10 crew – was on a regular lunchtime flight from Dublin to London. The trip was uneventful until the plane was just a few minutes away from landing at Heathrow. A man came out of the toilet – doused in petrol – and carrying what appeared to be two vials which he said was cyanide gas, according to a cabin crew member. The man – Laurence Downey, originally from Western Australia but who was living in Churchtown, South Dublin at the time – demanded the plane be redirected to Tehran because he had drafted a new constitution for Iran and he wanted to deliver it himself. There was nothing about the unassuming man or his manner that suggested what he was going to do next. Passenger Terry McCormack, who was travelling with her young daughter – probably no older than ten – was interviewed for RTE News at the time. She gave this description of him and the lead up to the hijacking. “When we got on the plane we sat in the first row of the smoking and he came on and sat beside us, he looked like a very prosperous well dressed businessman, grey hair, very tanned,” she said. “He sat down and as we started to take off he asked Sinead if she’d ever flown before, and she said yes and I said yes, that we go back and forth quite a lot. He said she’s quite an experienced traveller then! He was very polite to us he took out a brief case and started reading some notes, and when the drinks came he had a brandy and passed us our drinks and then he smoked a cigar, he just sat there. We didn’t suspect anything and as the captain said we were approaching London, he got up, I thought he’d gone to the toilet but he came back and went to the front of the plane.” The crew were able to reason with him that if he wanted to fly the extra 5,000km to reach Tehran they would need to refuel and so they changed course and landed at Le Touquet, Normandy. French authorities were waiting for the plane to arrive.

Left: Passengers and air hostessess inside the Aer Lingus Flight 164 in 1981. Right: The Kingman Daily Miner article about the hijacking from May 3, 1981. Below: Passenger Terry McCormack and her daughter Sinead who were on the plane

As odd as his claims about a new constitution for the Iranian people sounded, the real motivation behind the hijack was even stranger. It was during the approximately eight hours the plane spent on the runway that Downey demanded the release the third secret of Fatima by the Vatican. He had a religious but hardly conventional background. Downey had been a Trappist monk in Rome in the 1950’s but was expelled from the order after punching the superior in the face. He then worked as a tour guide in Fatima, Portugal, the site where in 1917 three children claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in a vision and been told three great secrets. Two of the secrets were revealed in 1941 and appear to be about the two World Wars. It was speculated the third secret related to World War III but it remained a mystery, even after a written account by one of the children had been opened by the Vatican in 1960, and then sealed again. It is said that Pope John XXIII had a look of horror on his face when he read the secret. Instead of a new Iranian constitution, Downey’s briefcase contained a nine page handwritten statement which the pilot threw to the ground from the cockpit. Downey wanted the Irish Independent to publish the account of his efforts to reveal the secret. Over the next few hours he was in contact with the then editor of the Independent, Vincent Doyle. The 3,500 word manifesto was transcribed and sent to the newspapers Dublin office by telex. Just as Doyle came on the radio and agreed to publish the document, French paratroops stormed the plane and quickly overpowered him. The plane’s pilot held his arm until he was subdued. One of the first people to get access to the plane in the moments after the daring rescue was then transport minister Albert Reynolds, who flew in to manage the situation for the Irish government. After talking with passengers the Longford politician emerged to brief the media. “They [French paratroops] came in from the rear and side doors,” Mr Reynolds explained. “The special forces soldiers rushed the hijacker after an ambulance took a woman off the plane who had fallen ill. After eight hours sitting on the tarmac, the drama was suddenly over in the blink of an eye. “He didn’t notice the lights go on in the cockpit so they came in with the element of surprise... he didn’t offer any resistance, there was no trouble and that was it, nobody was hurt,” added Reynolds, who ten years later would become Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minsister). “Its a rather unusual one, it wasn’t a hijack as we would normally associate one. This fella had a small bottle of liquid which he claimed was cyanide... He certainly had petrol sprayed over him and petrol as you know will not show up on a scanner like other liquids.” After being allowed to leave the plane for a meal and fresh air, the passengers and crew reboarded the aircraft and finished their journey. Downey was taken away for questioning but it took nearly two years before he was tried in a Calais court in 1983. The vials he threatened the plane with contained blue toilet salts and vodka, it emerged during the trial. Downey was sentenced to five years in jail but was released after 16 months and deported to Australia.

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About 25 years ago he was reported to be living near Perth where he was a wanted man. Local police here wanted to interview him about an alleged $70,000 land fraud. He is reported to have then fled Australia – and a wife and five children. Even at this stage Downey had led a colourful life and had already been a merchant seaman, mercenary and professional boxer. He ended up in Shannon, where he set up a language school. In the same year of the hijacking he wrote to then Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald disgruntled about his treatment and the reception he got. “I went to Ireland thinking she was an oppressed underdog,” he wrote. “I tried to help in the hope that I might be accepted in the land of my ancestors, but they hated me without cause and told me not to interfere.” If he is still alive today Mr Downey would be 96 years old. If he is and would like to speak with Irish Scene about this chapter in his life, we would love to hear from him and give him a chance to publish the full story in his own words. Just eleven days after the hijacking – the only time an Aer Lingus flight has been targeted in this way – the world and Catholic Church was rocked by another incident. The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican City by Turkish man Mehmet Ali Ağca happened on May 13 1981. The Pontiff was hit four times and badly wounded in the attempt on his life. There might not have been a direct link between the two incidents, but they appear to be connected. During his time in prison, Ağca became obsessed with Fatima and even claimed during the trial that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ and also demanded the Vatican release the Third Secret. On June 26, 2000 Pope John Paul II – who had visited Ireland in 1979 – finally revealed the missing meaning. May 13th - the date of the attempted murder of the leader of the Catholic Church – was also the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady to the three children. The Pope – who died five years later and is now a Saint - is said to have regarded this as significant and attributed his survival on the day to her protection. He believed the hand of Mary moved one of the bullets that should have killed him. He spent three months in hospital and exactly one year after the attempt he went to Fatima, Portugal where he had the deadliest of the bullets that hit him encased in Our Lady’s crown, where is remains to this day. There are many interesting aspects to all this but one of them involves Iran. In his 2013 memoirs, Ağca claimed that his orders to kill the pontiff came from the Iranian government and Ayatollah Khomeini. If this is some unlikely coincidence with Downey’s initial hijack claim about Iran we will probably never know. In yet another mysterious aspect to this story, when the state papers about the hijacking were opened in Dublin some 30 years later, they were filed under the heading ‘Ireland: Question of return to Commonwealth’. Stranger and stranger!

Left: Former Transport Minister Albert Reynolds on steps outside plane with passenger coming out of the plane

A HOLY SHOW

Irish playwright Janet Moran was watching an episode of Reeling in the Years on RTE when she saw news footage about the 1981 hijacking. The clip – which can be easily found by searching online or in the RTE archives – inspired her to write a stage comedy about the incident: ‘A Holy Show’ which was produced as part of the 2019 Dublin Fringe Festival and was due to tour Ireland and even Paris last year, until COVID hit.