A propulsive, globe-trotting account of the decade in which a network of international terrorists seized the skies and held the world for ransom

In the 1970s, a group of revolutionaries terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions. They sought to champion Palestinian liberation and topple Western imperialism, coordinating violent attacks that caught governments weak-kneed on a widely televised stage. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition, the Cuban-cigar smoking Carlos the Jackal with his penchant for brandy and unbuttoned shirts, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield 30,000 feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. As the '70s continued, this unprecedented wave of violence across the Mediterranean swelled even further, into Western Europe, parts of the Middle East, and as far away as East Asia. Their operations rallied activist networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a cataclysmic trail from Bangkok to Washington, D.C.

Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a masterfully thrilling account of this spectacular violence, drawing on decades of research and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones. From Dawson's Field and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, he invites us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents who sought to foil them. In the process, he shows how a campaign of secular, leftist revolutionaries metastasized into a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism.

Driven by an indelible cast of characters at a blood-soaked, breakneck pace, The Revolutionists is the definitive account of a dark and seismic decade.