Flight 149

June 28, 2021
Journalist Davis debuts with a doggedly researched chronicle of an obscure yet consequential episode in the Gulf War. On August 1, 1990, a British Airways flight from London to Kuala Lumpur made a scheduled refueling stop in Kuwait, even though Iraqi forces had just invaded the country. Drawing on interviews with passengers and crew members, Davis documents reassurances from the British Foreign Office that the flight “could safely proceed,” and the arrival, just before takeoff from Heathrow airport, of a group of “nine or ten muscular, clean-cut young men” who had a “military bearing.” By the time the plane landed in Kuwait City, the airport was under attack from Iraqi forces, who detained most of the passengers and crew. They, along with other Westerners held hostage elsewhere in Kuwait and Iraq, were verbally and physically abused and used as human shields. Drawing on testimony from British and American intelligence sources, Davis contends that U.K. officials, at the request of the Bush administration, used Flight 149 to insert a team of covert operatives into the country (they managed to leave the airport before the other passengers were captured). Davis provides plenty of support for his allegations, and movingly documents the psychological impact of the hostages’ ordeal. This investigation rings true. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

July 15, 2021
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 expos�, 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.

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