Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (50 page)

Sixth Fleet aircraft scoured the entire eastern Med looking for the hijacked cruise liner, to no avail. As the planes carrying SEAL Team Six neared the Mediterranean staging base, the terrorists made their presence known. Announcing that they were members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, they demanded the release of fifty compatriots being held in Israeli jails. They also requested entrance to the port of Tartus, Syria, where, it was suspected, they would be reinforced.

To the shock of al-Molqi and the consternation of Abu Abbas, the ship was refused entry into Syrian waters. Syrian president Hafez Assad, never a man adverse to terrorism, had based his decision on political rather than humanitarian considerations. At the time, the Syrian leader was estranged from Yasser Arafat. When the hijackers identified themselves as members of the PLF, a faction close to Arafat, President Assad saw his chance to jab his sometime ally.

This put al-Molqi in an increasingly dangerous position. The hijackers knew that the ship could be retaken. They continued to make threats, and set a three
P.M.
deadline. To show their earnestness, the hijackers selected twenty passengers and sat them in a circle on one of the decks. They knew these hostages would be visible to aircraft. Three
P.M.
came and went.

Leon Klinghoffer had been among the passengers selected for the circle. The terrorists found it difficult to roll Mr. Klinghoffer’s wheelchair up the stairs to join the others, so they left him on a lower deck. Sometime after three, al-Molqi decided it was time to send a message. He clomped down the ladder way to Klinghoffer. Point-blank, al-Molqi fired two bullets into the man in the wheelchair, one round into his chest and a second into his head. Al-Molqi then waved his gun at two crewmen and had them toss Klinghoffer’s corpse into the sea. The wheelchair was tossed over after him.

Intercepted communications between the terrorists and associates in Tartus and Genoa revealed to the gathering American assault forces that the terrorists’ plan was in some disarray. The Syrians still adamantly refused them entry into Tartus, and the PLO was coming to the realization that the operation was headed for a ditch. Abu Abbas ordered the terrorists to return to Port Said, Egypt, expressly commanding that no further passengers be harmed.

This was an interesting contradiction. Although the terrorists claimed that all the passengers were safe, Captain de Rosa had radioed the port authorities in Tartus that one passenger had been murdered. All these communications were monitored, and intelligence data was communicated to the assault force in real time. As night fell over the Med,
Achille Lauro
slipped to the south. She went into radio silence and again disappeared.

The Rastas, along with our three assault groups, were now staged in a hangar in the eastern Med. We’d all been here before. The Team had made several real-world deployments to this base, often to be pulled back at the last second. We called these operations Gerbil Cages because they made us feel like rodents running on a treadmill. As the politicians hemmed and hawed, many of us began to think this op, too, would be another gerbil killer.

We were shielded from much of the political wrangling, and that was just as well. Moose, however, was in the middle of it. As the American ambassador blew a gasket, Craxi’s government dithered. The Italians clearly wanted to cut a deal with the PLO. But now an American citizen had been murdered; for Ronald Reagan and General Carl Stiner, the commander of the joint special operations task force, a deal was out of the question. The Team was assembled, the fist was clenched, we were ready to strike.

The only problem was, we had no idea where to hit. Incredibly,
Achille Lauro,
a six-hundred-foot floating hotel, continued to elude the entire United States Navy. She would be missing for most of the night.

Earlier in the fall, Johnny King had been replaced as my group commander, and Ed Summers was kicked upstairs into operations. Our new group leader was Archie Lane. Old Arch and I did not always see eye to eye, but our working arrangement functioned well. Archie gave a lot of attention to the higher-ups, which left me to handle the jobs he didn’t want to do and the day-to-day operation of our group. The lads called Archie the Watcher, because if the mission involved getting wet, we did the op and Archie watched.

I was assisting the ops guys with paperwork when Ed Summers called me over. “What are you working on?” he asked.

“Loss-of-communication plans,” I said. It was a bullshit job, one that could be done by a monkey with a box of crayons.

“Well, start on this.” He handed me a piece of paper. It read: “Bridge and 0-1 level.”

“The op is a go,” he said. “Your assault element is going to take down the bridge.” It would be the Rastas’ job to attack the bridge of the ship and take back the radio rooms and communications facilities adjoining the pilothouse. It was the nexus of the entire operation. “You’re a lucky fuck,” he said. “We’re launching at 2100 hours tonight, just after dark. You need to brief-back the skipper and General Stiner in two hours.”

Ed walked away. My first task would be to coordinate the flight packages of the several helicopters, troop carriers, and sniper birds that would deliver the Rastas to the ship. A second flight of helicopters, led by Archie, was to clear the lido deck and the cabins and salons farther aft. The other assault groups would take down the engineering spaces, then search and clear the ship’s crew quarters and public areas.

I had the most straightforward and simple portion of an amazingly complex and tricky mission. Though it was basic, my piece of the operation needed to be thought out. I was certain we would run into bad guys when we attacked the bridge. I was equally certain that innocent crew members would be in the pilothouse. The good and the bad would have to be sorted out by the Rastas.

At this time the terrorists claimed to have twenty men aboard
Achille Lauro.
We estimated that, including sleepers (hijackers who were deliberately blended with the hostages), they might have as many as forty. Our estimates were extremely high and reflected American cognitive dissonance. We all knew what it would take to seize a ship; our extrapolations were based on our own experience. We thought we would need a minimum of twenty men. We believed, wrongly, that no one would be so stupid as to attempt a hijacking with only four shooters.

It turns out we grossly overestimated the intelligence and tactical acumen of the PLO. Thinking they might even know what they were doing, we planned for heavy resistance. And we planned to blow their shit away.

We continued to refine and brief the assault, but we had little hard data on the target. What we lacked most were plans for or even pictures of the ship. As we thrashed about on the second iteration, the deliberate attack, no one at SEAL Six even knew what
Achille Lauro
looked like.

Using a clip videotaped from an Italian news broadcast, we had a general idea by midafternoon. The ship’s markings were white over blue, and she wore a white star on each of her two aggressively raked funnels. Her lines were lean and low, and despite the modern air put on by her smokestacks, she was old, laid down on a design put to paper in 1938.

The sum total of our initial hard copy was one threefold eight-by-ten travel brochure. With the help of a couple of the Team’s more artistic shooters, I set about preparing a line drawing of the ship. The drawing was assembled by picking out details of naval architecture from the tiny photos in the brochure. There were lots of pictures of women in bathing caps and waist-high 1950s-era bikinis, but damn few shots of what we really wanted: photos of the bridge and the positions of masts, antennas, and weather decks.

For planning purposes, we had to have not just a sketch but something approaching a scale drawing. In order to fly helicopters around the ship at night, we needed estimates of the height of various masts and the size of decks. I broke out a pair of dividers and was glad I’d paid attention in seventh-grade drafting class. Scaling up from the known size of an internationally approved lifeboat, thirty feet, we were able to estimate dimensions and clearances from the photographs. We soon cobbled together a few sets of working sketches, and these were used for the initial planning briefs.

There was a moment of mirth when a contingent of Italian naval commandos arrived at the hangar. Nattily attired in flight suits and mirrored shades, they all had matching ascots. But they had arrived with a set of ship’s plans. I was standing next to General Stiner when he struck a deal with the Italians. He offered to take them along on the operation and keep them out of the action. In exchange for the plans, the Americans would recover the ship, but the Italians would get the credit. The arrangement would be our little secret.

The plans quickly changed hands.

Using the diagrams, we were able to verify the dimensions of our sketches. The plans were undated, and the brochure showed several modifications not depicted in the drawings.
Achille Lauro
had been frequently modified, if for no other reason than to repair collision and fire damage. We had no way to know which was more recent, the pamphlet or the blueprints, so we amended the diagrams for worst case. All of the assault groups soon had deck and compartment drawings with which to plan their assaults.

I briefed the Rastas on the conduct of the bridge takedown, and we attended a general meeting to coordinate our actions with those of the other assault groups. The afternoon wore on, and as the sun slipped down, we inspected weapons and gear and rehearsed on floor plans marked out with tape on the hangar floor. We were ready.

And that’s when they pulled the plug.

Achille Lauro
had again been found. This time she was heading south in Egyptian territorial waters. Though the ship was still within our grasp, Washington made the decision not to launch the rescue. It was one thing to seize the vessel on the high seas; it was another to do it in broad daylight, under the nose of a putative and touchy ally. Apparently, Washington did not want to offend one of its few Arab friends.

The hijackers sought refuge in the anchorage outside of Port Said, a decision that saved their lives. I have no doubt that come nightfall SEAL Team Six would have reached
Achille Lauro
undetected. Once we were aboard, al-Molqi and his friends would have been as good as dead.

Even as we stood down, events in Cairo put the terrorists farther from our reach. It was announced that the hijackers had agreed to surrender to Egyptian authorities at 4:20
P.M.
The surrender was “without preconditions,” but a deal had been struck. Soon after the ship anchored, the Egyptian foreign ministry let loose with the first of a series of outright lies and half-truths. The foreign minister stated that all the hostages were safe and that the terrorists had left the ship and were now headed out of Egypt.

Standing around a TV in the hangar, we watched a CNN news clip showing the hijackers being taken ashore in an Egyptian navy patrol boat. It was hard not to feel defeated as we watched them mug and flash victory signs for the camera. They looked like college kids who’d pulled a prank.

In the hours after the terrorists had left the ship, international news organizations began reporting that the hijackers had murdered a hostage. The Egyptians backpedaled fast. President Hosni Mubarak told a credulous set of reporters that the hijackers had left Egypt and that he was not sure where they had gone.

They were in fact at an Egyptian airbase, sitting at that moment aboard an EgyptAir 737. Arafat and Abbas were ass-deep in negotiations, trying to find a country that would accept the hijackers. They initially had no takers, but at last Tunisia agreed. Just south of Sicily and to the west of Libya, Tunisia is a moderate Arab state and home of the PLO’s headquarters. It was probably with some sense of relief that Abu Abbas joined al-Molqi and the others aboard the 737. Also accompanying them were about ten members of Egypt’s counterterrorism unit, Force 777, and an Egyptian intelligence officer. Their getaway was almost complete. Abbas and his thugs had every reason to believe that in a few hours they would be in Tunis, farting through silk.

Unbeknownst to Abbas, and unimagined by Hosni Mubarak, the NSA heard every word of the negotiations. They knew Mubarak had detailed a state-owned airliner to evacuate the murderers. They knew Abbas had joined the hijackers. They knew the destination was Tunisia. They even knew the tail number of the aircraft—2843.

On the evening of October 9, SEAL Team Six’s aircraft departed from the forward staging base, heading west across the Med toward home. Aboard our aircraft were Captain Gormly and the operations staff of SEAL Six. The mood aboard the plane was somber. It looked to all hands like another Gerbil Cage, and no one was happy about it. The medical officers passed out sleeping pills for the long trip home. We called the capsules “doggie downers”; they were ass kickers, but I was too wound up to sleep. I was too wound up even to be put to sleep. I slipped my pill into the pocket of my flight suit and tried to read a book.

I could not concentrate. Like everyone else on the plane, I felt that we had been ready to go, and that even if we could not have prevented the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, we certainly could have retaken the ship. As if it had not occurred to me before, I weighed the fact that like the rest of the world, we danced to the tune of the politicians. Bettino Craxi had been powerless against a gang of criminals and had looked for the easiest way out. Mubarak, too, wanted no trouble with the PLO. He was not above lying to the world to allow the murderers to escape. The dance went on.

Maybe twenty minutes into our flight, we found out that we were still dancing. Word reached us that F-14 Tomcat fighters from U.S.S.
Saratoga
would soon intercept the EgyptAir 737. The plane would be forced to land at the U.S.-Italian air base at Sigonella, Sicily. We were back in the game.

Sean’s C-141 was diverted to Sigonella. His assault group would be responsible for setting security on the airplane once it was down, and preventing it from taking off. Our C-141 would land directly behind the 737, take custody of the criminals, and return them to the United States. No one on our aircraft expected the terrorists to come peaceably, and we geared up to assault the 737, an operation we had rehearsed many times. As soon as we were told what was going on, about a dozen guys lined up at the plane’s single toilet to vomit up their sleeping pills. It was simple luck that I had not taken mine.