FLIGHT 149

An investigative reporter digs into the fate of British Airways Flight 149 and its passengers and crew, whom Saddam Hussein used as “human shields” during the Gulf War.

Davis has written the closest we are likely to have to a definitive account of Britain’s calamitous decision to allow a flight from London to land in Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, hours after Iraq had invaded. After the plane touched down, Iraq took as hostages its 367 passengers and 18 crew, including British and American citizens and 11 children. Until the last were released four months later, the hostages were split up and moved repeatedly to thwart allied air attacks. In a thorough and well-paced exposé, the author convincingly rebuts Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s claims that her government failed to order the flight to divert because the invasion didn’t start until after the plane arrived in Kuwait. Drawing on more than 300 interviews with sources ranging from Flight 149’s crew and passengers to a penitent former MI6 officer, Davis offers strong evidence that the flight was instead allowed to proceed because it carried a British black-ops team mostly drawn from an ultrasecret group called the Increment or “Inc,” which Thatcher’s government wanted to have on the ground before the invasion and whose involvement was covered up in London and Washington. Davis shows vividly the cost of the official missteps in close-ups of the horrific plight of the “human shields,” some of whom were kept in squalid conditions. One group was forced to dig a trench they were told was for them; they were to be shot and buried if the invasion reached them. Britain’s blunders may have been less significant in the Gulf War than Hussein’s threat to disputed Kuwaiti oil fields, but they provide a fascinating window onto black ops’ work and hostages’ lives.

A skillfully reconstructed account of a hostage crisis and the bungling that caused it.