The Watchers (6 page)

North had felt overwhelmed when he arrived at the White House, shortly after Poindexter. Other military officers on the NSC staff held advanced degrees in international relations and political science. They were wonks. North was a Marine; his expertise lay in combat training and field operations.

But he worked like a dog; he was loath to decline an assignment and often the first to volunteer. He became invaluable. A go-to man whom Poindexter gave responsibilities without questioning his capacity to handle them. While his colleagues struggled to keep up, North sailed ahead, and he never missed the chance to remind them of it. Poindexter knew that North exaggerated his own influence on the NSC staff. That he took credit for creating many of the new rules of which Poindexter was the principal author. He was, as Poindexter often conceded to Ollie's detractors, flamboyant. But he was also indispensable. A man of seemingly infinite capacity who, Poindexter thought, would protect both their interests. If he pissed people off as he passed them by or stepped over them, then that was their problem, Poindexter figured, not Ollie's.

As the months rolled on, Poindexter could sense the system coming into alignment. Order and discipline were taking hold. The once ill-tuned layers of committees understood their roles better now. They had focused. Poindexter and his NSC terror fighters were making sense of information, corralling disparate data sources, and coming up with richer and more informative reports for the president than at any time in recent memory. They were, at last, starting to look like a respectable orchestra. All they needed now was a chance to play.

 

 

 

 

Poindexter arrived to a buzzing West Wing on the morning of Monday, October 7, 1985. The CIA's operations center had received word less than an hour before that an Italian cruise ship had been taken over by Palestinian gunmen. A radio station in Sweden had picked up the distress call. Apart from those bare facts, the White House knew only that the vessel was somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Hijack a ship?
This was a new tactic. Poindexter was actually grateful that whoever these latest characters were they had chosen a slow-moving, contained vessel to mount their operation. Four months earlier Poindexter and his crisis team had scrambled to keep up with the hijackers of TWA Flight 847, which was en route from Athens to Rome. The terrorists had demanded the release of more than 700 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. For three days they and their 161 prisoners hopscotched around the Middle East, landing to refuel and negotiate as they brandished handguns before throngs of journalists assembled at each airport pit stop. Their demands unmet, the hijackers singled out a twenty-three-year-old Navy diver, Robert Stethem, beat him with the broken arm of a passenger seat, shot him through the head, and then dumped his limp body onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport before rolling cameras. Other passengers were stashed in hiding places in and around Beirut. The ordeal stretched on for two weeks and caused a global media spectacle that the NSC crisis team wished not to repeat.

TWA 847's captors had bought invaluable time as they hustled from country to country, involving ever more governments in their escapade. The U.S. military had no time to react. But a ship—that offered some distinct advantages. Presumably the vessel was still in international waters, where the military was freer to act without diplomatic incident.

But there were other problems. Finding a cruise liner in the vastness of the Mediterranean would be like finding a fly on the wall while looking through a straw. And if the hijackers stayed off the radio, they'd make the search even harder. But if the crisis team could locate the ship and keep it from docking, then a commando team could storm the vessel and take it back. The hijackers also would have no means of escape in the open water. A battle at sea didn't sound half bad to Poindexter.

He called a meeting of the Crisis Pre-Planning Group and the Terrorist Incident Working Group, which had been formed in April of 1982 to provide tactical advice and support during an emergency. Ollie North was in charge, leading a team drawn from the State Department, CIA, Pentagon, and FBI. By now the members had their roles down. They knew one another well, and they understood what their agencies could accomplish on short notice.

More details trickled in over the next few hours. The ship, the Italian passenger liner
Achille Lauro
, had been hijacked by gunmen after leaving port in Alexandria, Egypt, on the sixth day of a twelve-day cruise. Americans were on board, though it wasn't yet clear how many. A number of the passengers had disembarked in Alexandria to tour the pyramids, and they had planned to meet up with the ship again in another port.

The intelligence agencies hadn't identified the hijackers, who had yet to signal their intentions. Experience had taught the crisis team not to wait for demands and dead bodies. They must get ahead of the hijackers now, anticipate their next move.

The team members sent word back to their home agencies. First, isolate the ship. The State Department contacted U.S. ambassadors in countries along the Mediterranean littoral; they should ask their host governments to refuse any docking request from
Achille Lauro
.

Next, track the ship. The eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency trained their electronic ears for any radio transmissions from the terrorists or others trying to contact them. Meanwhile, the NSC staff fielded intelligence reports from friendly governments in the region, principally Israel. The Navy launched a search for
Achille Lauro
using radar and aerial reconnaissance. Poindexter advised to not let any aircraft hover over the ship if they did manage to find it. He didn't want to give the hijackers a reason to start shooting.

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.