by Shane Harris
Finally, take the ship. That tricky task fell to an elite military unit, hand-picked from the best of the Army’s Delta Force commandos and the Navy’s counterterrorism squad, SEAL Team Six. Known as the Joint Special Operations Command, the group had been formed in response to the blundered rescue of U.S. hostages in Iran years earlier. The JSOC was called in for unique jobs that posed unanticipated challenges. They improvised. Hostage rescue was their specialty. The commandos had practiced raids using empty airliners, and they had been trained to distinguish hostage from hijacker in a cramped, confusing space.
Poindexter wanted the JSOC to get aboard Achille Lauro, kill or capture the terrorists, and return the ship safely to port. The commanding officer, a twenty-year veteran of the Special Forces from Tennessee coal country named Carl Stiner, happily accepted the mission.
While the Navy and the White House searched for a fix on Achille Lauro the JSOC prepared to deploy. Poindexter’s team had asked them to come up with a rescue plan literally on the fly—Stiner and his men left their home base in North Carolina and worked on the details on a plane ride to the Mediterranean.
The JSOC needed a jump-off point that offered easy access to wherever the ship might try to go. Ideally, somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Poindexter called up his counterpart in British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s office. “We want to send our unit to Akrotiri,” he said.
It was a British sovereign base nestled on the tiny southern peninsula of the island of Crete, a holdover from colonial rule. Akrotiri seemed an ideal staging area, and the British readily agreed, since some of their own citizens were aboard the ill-fated cruise liner.
The JSOC wasn’t the only team speeding toward the region. The Italian defense minister deployed a special military unit to meet up with Stiner at Akrotiri. It included experts on Achille Lauro’s design and layout. The Italians were eager to be publicly helpful—the ship was under their flag—but Bettino Craxi, the prime minister, found himself in a bind. The Americans were allies, but Craxi was anxious to maintain good relations with Arab governments. Italy too had been a target of terrorism, and the prime minister knew that a bloody battle aboard an Italian cruise ship could inspire retribution. Craxi publicly asked Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, if he was responsible for the hijacking. Arafat insisted that he had played no role, condemned the terrorists, and offered to send two top advisers to Egypt to negotiate a surrender.
The Americans were no longer the only ones with skin in the game. The rescue operation was getting ever more complex, and the NSC team hadn’t even found the ship.
Early Tuesday morning the Situation Room picked up a radio transmission from one of the hijackers to port officials in Tartus, Syria, requesting permission to dock. More than thirty-six hours after the gunmen had stormed Achille Lauro, Poindexter’s team finally could put a finger on them. The choice of staging area had been flawless—Tartus was due east of Akrotiri. Now, nothing stood between Achille Lauro and Stiner’s men but open water.
The hijacker on the radio identified himself as a member of the Palestinian Liberation Front, which, though it bore a nominal resemblance to the PLO, was not controlled by Arafat. The PLF wanted fifty Palestinian prisoners released from Israel, and the hijackers said that if their demands weren’t met by three o’clock Damascus time, they’d start killing passengers. It was 11:00 A.M. in Syria, seven hours ahead of Washington. Port officials didn’t immediately respond to the ship’s request to dock. Achille Lauro waited as the hours ticked off.
Poindexter’s team wasn’t aiming for a negotiation. Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv responded to the terrorists’ demands. Shortly after 3:00 P.M., the hijacker again took to the airwaves. He told a Syrian port official that one hostage was dead, and he would soon kill another. The Syrian was unshaken. “Go back where you came from.”
Achille Lauro went back out to sea, heading for Port Said, Egypt, about three hundred miles away. Stiner and his men followed aboard USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship that a few years earlier had supported the Marines in Beirut. Their window of opportunity to board the ship would close as soon as Achille Lauro entered Egypt’s territorial waters. Poindexter conferred with the staff of the Joint Chiefs; they agreed that Stiner’s JSOC team should hold for the moment. Achille Lauro dropped anchor fifteen miles off Egypt early Wednesday morning as the ordeal entered its third day.
An Egyptian gunboat carrying a handful of men sidled up next to the massive blue-hulled cruise liner. One of the hijackers peered over the side and recognized a familiar face among them: Abu Abbas, the founder of the PLF. Arafat had sent Abbas, along with a PLO official, as his emissaries, which raised the obvious question of just how limited Arafat’s involvement actually was. The White House had never trusted him, and Poindexter regarded Arafat as a demagogue who was more inclined to keep the Palestinian people poor and outraged than to help them make peace with Israel.
Abbas was joined by a team of Egyptian and Italian officials and for a few hours engaged in what passed, at least onshore, for negotiations with the Achille Lauro hijackers. Arafat had suggested that if the Egyptians and Italians agreed to hand the hijackers over to the PLO, he would see that they stood trial.
After the shipside meeting, the delegation sent back word: The hijackers would let the hostages go in exchange for free passage off the ship and direct negotiations with the U.S. ambassador in Egypt, as well as his Italian, West German, and British counterparts. The hijackers were eager for guarantees that none of these countries would try to take them into custody on dry land.
The Egyptian foreign minister hurriedly called the emissaries to his office in Cairo and urged them to take the deal. Nicholas Veliotes, the American, and his British counterpart were nonplussed. The hijackers had threatened to kill their captives, and, as far as anyone knew, they had kept their word. Neither government was prepared to negotiate with these people, now or under any circumstances.
The Italian and West German weren’t so sure. Getting the passengers off the ship safely trumped matters of prosecutorial strategy. They wanted to end the ordeal.
As the ambassadors haggled over whether to take the hijackers’ offer, a confusing radio transmission arrived from Achille Lauro.
It was a man’s voice, calm sounding, assured. “I am the captain,” he said. “I am speaking from my office, and my officers and everybody is in good health.”
No one had heard from Achille Lauro’s skipper, Gerardo de Rosa, since the terrorists’ first deadline had passed. Had the hijackers been bluffing when they claimed to have killed a passenger? The PLF issued an apologetic statement, claiming that their soldiers were merely aboard Achille Lauro trying to get to Israel, where they planned to strike a military target. The men had been surprised by a ship steward while cleaning their guns and, in a panic, they took control of the vessel.
The story had changed. What began as a hijacking now sounded like an unfortunate mishap. The captain attested that everyone, passengers and crew, were fine.
It sounded good to Cairo. The Egyptian foreign minister publicly conveyed de Rosa’s statement, and shortly after five o’clock Wednesday evening an Egyptian military boat ferried the hijackers safely to shore. A small crowd of wellwishers greeted them, shouting jubilantly, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
With the hijackers off the ship, Italian prime minister Craxi called de Rosa on the bridge. Italian authorities hadn’t had a chance to come aboard and interview the passengers, and Craxi wanted to confirm the captain’s prior assurances before he declared an end to the crisis.
De Rosa, who had seemed so at ease in his radio transmission, broke down. One of the hijackers had held a gun to his head, he said. He’d forced him to say no one had been hurt. But actually, the terrorists shuffled the Americans’ passports and picked one out at random—it belonged to Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old wheelchair-bound passenger from New York. One of the hijackers took Klinghoffer to the aft deck, shot him
twice, and then forced Achille Lauro’s crew to toss his body overboard off Tartus.
Craxi relayed the grim news to the press. An American had died, and the hijackers were now at large.
Ambassador Veliotes headed to the ship. He found de Rosa on the bridge, his body shaking, tears welling in his eyes. The captain silently handed him Klinghoffer’s passport. The hijackers had chosen Klinghoffer, he said, from among the passengers they suspected were Jewish. Enraged, Veliotes grabbed the ship’s radio and called the embassy. The deal with the Egyptians was off. The U.S. embassy staff was to call the foreign minister immediately and tell him that the Americans had had no idea a man was dead.
“In my name,” Veliotes boomed, “tell them that we insist they prosecute those sons of bitches.”
And one more thing. “I want you to pick up the phone and call Washington and tell them what we’ve done. And if they want to follow it up, that’s fine.”
News of Klinghoffer’s death reached Poindexter and the crisis team. The sheer villainy of the act made them shudder with rage. To shoot an old, unarmed man in his wheelchair and toss his body into the sea. So far terrorists mostly had targeted soldiers and Marines, or other representatives of American influence, such as university professors and journalists. Klinghoffer was a vacationer. A civilian. He was as purely innocent as anyone could be.
A few hours after the hijackers set foot in Port Said the State Department conveyed an urgent message to the White House. Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, said the hijackers’ whereabouts were unknown. “They have left Egypt. I do not know exactly where they have gone.”
“He’s lying,” Poindexter told his colleagues flatly. “They’re still there.”
The hijackers hadn’t enough time to mount a getaway. Surely they were planning to leave, but the crisis team still had time to stop them. They couldn’t be hiding far from where they’d come ashore.
Mubarak wanted to wash his hands of the affair. If he let the hijackers go, he’d enrage the Americans. If he handed them over for trial, he’d face outrage at home. He would try to get rid of them quietly and quickly. Poindexter knew there was only one easy way to do that.
Poindexter walked over to his office and called Art Moreau, the assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Moreau was an Annapolis man, five years Poindexter’s senior, and slated to become the new commander of naval forces in Europe. Poindexter clicked with Moreau, a fellow admiral. And now, he needed another Navy man’s mind to test the idea he had in his.
Poindexter predicted that the hijackers would try to fly out of Egypt. It was their best chance to move undetected and swiftly. He wasn’t sure when it would happen. But he asked Moreau to start thinking about how the Navy might intercept their plane in midair.
Moreau told Poindexter to stand by as he ran it up the flagpole. In the meantime, Poindexter went looking for information.
The National Security Agency had been slurping up Egyptian communications already, and new intercepts indicated that Mubarak knew the hijackers’ whereabouts. Poindexter needed more specifics, something to act on.
North shot into his office. He and Jim Stark, a Navy captain on the NSC staff, had been picking up the intelligence traffic on Mubarak, and they agreed that signs pointed to an airborne escape. North told Poindexter that if he could obtain the plane’s flight number, or some other identifier, then the Navy could grab them. Not shoot them down, but force them to land at a friendly airfield.
Poindexter was pleased, since he’d had the same thought. Now it was time to turn North loose.
At Poindexter’s instruction, North had cultivated a relationship with the military attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, General Uri Simhoni. Poindexter wanted the crisis team to have its own access to intelligence, and especially to timely sources, as they delved deeper into covert operations planning.
Poindexter and North guarded this private channel assiduously, which was both useful and highly unusual. If the State Department or the CIA had discovered NSC staffers exchanging intelligence directly with a foreign military officer—in the United States—there’d be hell to pay. Not only were Poindexter and North treading on their turf, but the connection to the embassy was dangerous. North had let the Israelis get close to sensitive U.S. operations. No one could be sure what kinds of information he was trading, or what promises he had made. How could he be sure that the Israelis weren’t playing him? When intelligence flowed between governments it had to be filtered through layers and back channels, held up to the light and stripped of biases, and then perhaps reinjected with a few. The dance was done at arm’s length, with elbow-high gloves. Healthy relations between national intelligence agencies were built on the dependable pillars of shared interests and mutual distrust. North was throwing it all off.
But he was getting results, and the delicate steps suited Poindexter’s new tempo. North called Simhoni at the Israeli embassy and explained that the NSC was thinking about an aerial intercept. The Israelis had dependable human sources in Egypt. Could they obtain the flight information?
Simhoni didn’t say no, but he also knew that North’s fleet feet could get him in trouble. “Just confirm to me that you are not acting on your own,” he said. North assured him that this wasn’t a solo project. The boss was in.
Simhoni agreed. He phoned the Israeli chief of military intelligence and within an hour delivered to North the name of the air carrier, the plane’s tail number, the departure time, and the runway the hijackers planned to use for their escape from an airfield near Cairo.
Poindexter had spent two years painstakingly building a system that could obtain this kind of golden intelligence. At last he could feel the gears clicking into place.
The crisis team had only a few hours to coordinate a clandestine and dangerous mission that under the most forgiving circumstances would take days to plan. All the players—Defense, State, the Joint Chiefs’ staff—would have to play all the right notes, and with precise timing. Poindexter conducted, and the marvel to the men surrounding him wasn’t that he embraced the challenge, but that he did so unflappably. He moved with an effortlessness that to the uninitiated might have suggested Poindexter didn’t fully grasp the severity of the moment. But he was utterly and completely in control, for the first time in a long time.
Moreau, the number two man to the Joint Chiefs’ chair, called back from the Pentagon. His boss was on board. Now it was time to get the president’s blessing.
Reagan was in Deerfield, Illinois, speaking to workers at a Sara Lee bakery about his new tax plan. Poindexter rang up McFarlane, who was standing in the warm kitchen, and gave him the details.
“Mubarak has reported that the hijackers have left Egypt. He’s lying to us,” Poindexter said. He explained the intelligence, that the hijackers planned to fly out, and that the team could identify the aircraft precisely. The Navy could send up reconnaissance planes and fighters to identify the airliner and then persuade the pilot to land. It was risky, but would the president authorize the plan?
“Let me ask him,” McFarlane replied.
After the president finished his speech, McFarlane quickly delivered the brief, emphasizing the technical difficulty of the mission. The Navy would have to find the plane in the dark. Beyond that, there were no guarantees of success. The U.S. Navy would force down an Egyptian civilian airliner. The diplomatic stakes were perilous.
Reagan replied that the hijackers had murdered an American. He told McFarlane to go ahead, an order that staff would soon start calling “the Sara Lee decision.”
Poindexter phoned Moreau. “I’m calling on behalf of the president.”
The NSC crisis team would manage the takedown from Washington. They would provide detailed intelligence for the commander of the Sixth Fleet, who would plot the intercept using the aircraft under his command. Poindexter didn’t advertise his Israeli source, but he let Moreau know that the intelligence was solid. The Navy wasn’t going to fly in blind.
Stiner and h
is JSOC team, who had been preparing to head home after the hijackers abandoned ship, received new orders. They would follow the aircraft in their own plane and then apprehend the hijackers at whatever airport they ultimately landed.
North received nuggets from Simhoni, then passed them to Moreau, who in turn handed off the details to the Sixth Fleet. Ordinarily, the defense secretary, Cap Weinberger, would have weighed in at every step and likely put the brakes on the entire operation. Poindexter had never truly forgiven Weinberger for calling off the raid in Beirut two years earlier. But fortunately for Poindexter, Weinberger was out of town this day. And when he got word of the pending mission and tried to reach the president, he couldn’t seem to work his secure phone. The device required the caller to press levers and speak only when he had a coded channel. Weinberger had never gotten the hang of it, and Poindexter made no special effort now to help the defense secretary overcome his technical difficulties. The operation moved forward.
Eventually, Weinberger reached Reagan aboard Air Force One using a public radio frequency. He implored him to call off the plan, insisting that the United States would be castigated the world over for a rogue attack. Reagan blew Weinberger off with uncommon tenacity. An American was dead. End of discussion.
While the defense secretary objected, the Navy devised a clever plan. The commander of the Sixth Fleet ordered a squadron of F-14 Tomcats and E-2C Hawkeyes to take up positions off Egypt. The Hawkeye was a flying command-and-control station equipped with an early-warning radar system that could sweep the skies in any weather conditions. Its crew would monitor commercial aircraft coming out of the target area, and once the plane was positively identified, the Tomcats would approach.