The Watchers (7 page)

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 his 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.

The president had not authorized them to fire, but he was willing to let the fighters scare the hell out of the airline pilot. They could blast their cannons across his path if he didn't yield. Once they secured his cooperation, the Navy planes would escort the pilot to the NATO base of Sigonella, near the coast of Sicily, where they'd force him to land. The base was on Italian soil, but the United States had long maintained a military presence there, which was under the command of a Navy captain.

The Hawkeyes and Tomcats took their positions, and the description of their target came in over the radio. EgyptAir flight 2843. A Boeing 737, tail number SU-AYK. The Hawkeyes' commanding officer scanned the dark skies for aircraft traveling west, possibly toward Tunis, the PLO's headquarters and a logical safe zone for the hijackers.

The skies were busy. Planes taking off from Egypt diverged along a number of standard travel routes over the Mediterranean. The Hawkeye got a hit and sent a pair of fighters in for a closer look.

As the pilots approached they could make out the shape of a 737 against the starry sky. One Tomcat moved in for a closer look. The radar operator, seated in the rear of the cockpit, peered through the dark at the plane's logo. EgyptAir.

“Get the flashlight,” the pilot said. The fighter closed within feet of the two-engine jet. The radar operator shined a beam on its tail. SU-AYK. The pilot radioed back—contact confirmed.

Flight 2843 was already on a westbound course, taking it in the direction of Sigonella. The Tomcats fell in behind it, running without any lights and keeping enough distance to disappear into the black sky. The Hawkeye commander tuned his radio to intercept the airliner's communications. The pilot was looking for a place to land, radioing airports at Tunis and Athens. Each turned him down—Poindexter and the crisis team already had sent word to each country to deny the plane landing rights.

His choice of escape routes diminishing, the pilot took up a holding pattern south of Crete. He radioed Cairo, where controllers told him to change course and come back to Egypt. Now was the time to pounce.

The Tomcats pushed forward, fell in behind the tail, and blasted their lights onto the 737, illuminating it as if under a spotlight. The Hawkeye commander broke through on the radio: “EgyptAir 2843, you are being escorted by U.S. Navy fighters and are instructed to proceed to Sigonella.”

Alarmed passengers, the
Achille Lauro
hijackers among them, looked out their windows and saw the F-14s zip alongside the aircraft. The fighters pulled up to the cockpit, locking eyes with the airline pilot, and dipped their wings—the international signal for forced landing.

“I am following your orders,” the pilot declared, with remarkable calm. “Don't be too close. Please.” He set the plane on a new heading and sped across the Mediterranean to his landing spot.

 

Stiner and his JSOC team caught up with the improbable band of fighters and a civilian jet in the air. A few of his men were already on the ground in Sigonella, allegedly for a refueling stop. The ground team would surround the EgyptAir plane on the ground, whisk the hijackers onto their military transport, and then take off before anyone could stop them.

The plane touched down at 1:30 in the morning, as if forced from the sky by some invisible hand. As the pilot taxied off the runway, a team of Navy SEALs surrounded him. Stiner's transport planes, running with their lights off, landed on the main runway, blocking any escape. More JSOC troops poured out, and snipers took aim at the airliner's doors. Stiner picked up the radio and informed the pilot he was about to be boarded.