Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  For the next three days Red Cell brought down chaos and anarchy.

  It began when Lieutenant “Trailer Court” used a stolen ID and wore a purloined commander’s uniform to check in to the base at 7:00 p.m. Friday, saying he was reporting in for duty early to avoid paying for a motel room. After obtaining quarters at the BOQ, he and other Red Cell operatives, who had infiltrated by various other means, stole a weapons carrier, drove it to an ordnance warehouse, broke in and loaded the carrier with bright blue dummy 500-pound bombs. They rigged the bombs with remote-controlled detonators and parked the vehicle and its load covered in a tarp in the BOQ parking lot.

  In the meantime, Red Cell SEALs infiltrated the base from off the Pacific Coast Highway and through a wildlife refuge that ran north of the base. As the weekend progressed, they videotaped themselves planting “explosives” in the air intakes of F-18 Hornet jets, “destroying” the main Point Magu communications antennas, setting off smoke grenades in the headquarters building, “kidnapping” dependent women at the Magu cafeteria, and racing a car up and down the aircraft flight line pursued by jeeploads of security personnel.

  By Monday, local cops and firefighters were bouncing off the walls, doctors were ready to stage a sit-down strike, and the FBI packed up its goodies and went home because no one was playing fair. There remained one target that Marcinko could not resist. Air Force One was scheduled to depart for Washington at midday.

  Dressed in mechanics’ overalls, two men climbed into the weapons carrier left parked over the weekend at the BOQ and drove it to the far corner of the field where Air Force One was being fueled and serviced. They climbed out of the vehicle, activated “explosives” rigged to the pallet load of 500-pound bombs, set the timer, and walked off. The carrier “exploded” minutes later.

  From what I heard, President Reagan was quite jocular about the entire episode. “I’m just happy real terrorists are not as smart as these guys,” he said.

  Embarrassed naval officials moved quickly to correct security deficiencies uncovered by Red Cell. My reports backed up by videotape led to U.S. senators Pete Wilson and John Glenn goading the National Security and International Affairs Division into a complete review of the Navy’s internal controls for protecting assets and facilities. Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. ordered an extensive reorganization of naval security. Marcinko, Red Cell, and I had certainly made our bones.

  Admiral Lyons recommended my promotion to captain. My fitness report for the period read, “His aggressive leadership was instrumental in developing the navy’s ‘proactive’ antiterrorist stance, and he has helped shape our antiterrorist program for years to come.”

  Promoted himself, Lyons shipped out for Honolulu as commander-in-chief Pacific fleet (CINCPAC), safely removed from the political mainstream in Washington and the Pentagon. Admiral Donald Jones, Lyons’s successor, was a balding, bureaucratic “team player.” He offered a handshake that felt like a dead fish.

  I knew we were in trouble when, in a cold voice, he greeted Marcinko with, “I’m surprised you’re not in jail yet.”

  Marcinko had twisted too many tails and, because of our successes in Red Cell, accumulated a deluge of complaints describing him as a maverick unfit for command. Partly because of that, partly because of actual irregularities in the books of SEAL Team Six when he commanded it, the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) opened a probe.

  On April 6, 1986, he was dismissed from Red Cell and later court-martialed for conspiracy, bribery, conflict of interest, and making false claims against the government, all of which were connected with his extralegal methods of obtaining equipment and materiel for the creation of SEAL Team Six.

  I used what influence I had in attempting to intervene on his behalf with the CNO and Department of Navy. I argued that, well, maybe he had gone too far in carrying out his obligation to build the best CT team in the world, but, damn it, didn’t results show that it took men like him and like former Bos’n Mate Roy Boehm to build tough and effective CT units? We needed two-fisted brawlers in the trenches, not broad-beamed bean counters behind desks.

  “Be careful,” CNO Watkins cautioned me. “You’ll step on your own dick.”

  Eventually, this man Marcinko, who with his crass manners and rogue attitude I considered most instrumental in creating both SEAL Team Six and Red Cell, was convicted and went to jail.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  WORKING AS SHE DID for the CIA, my wife understood completely when I called her at the Agency. “Honey, I’ll be late.”

  “How late?”

  “A day or two. Maybe longer.”

  “Make sure you eat. See you when you get home.”

  We seldom spoke about the details of our work. There was never any, “Well, honey, how was your day? Do anything interesting today?”

  * * *

  Most of the 750 tourists aboard the 23,000-ton Italian luxury cruise liner Achille Lauro went ashore for pyramid-watching in Alexandria, Egypt, that Sunday morning, October 7, 1985. The ship sailed on toward Port Said with the remaining ninety-five passengers aboard, the majority of whom were elderly.

  Somewhere along the route, the ship’s radio operator transmitted a frantic SOS picked up by a ham operator in Sweden. The hurried message disclosed only that “terrorists” had hijacked the liner in the Mediterranean off the coast of Egypt. The ship then lapsed into radio silence and seemed to vanish.

  As soon as the news reached Washington, President Ronald Reagan convened the Terrorist Incident Working Group and put JSOTF on alert, along with units of Army Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. The incident occurred at sea; SEALs would take the lead if American interests were determined to be involved.

  The Terrorist Incident Working Group was one of a hodge-podge of organizations that cropped up in the U.S. government in response to the rising tide of terrorism in the Middle East. I had pushed for a unified approach against terrorism since I arrived at the Pentagon five years ago. Seemed things were finally going my direction.

  Aircraft carrier USS Saratoga was on maneuvers in the Mediterranean. President Reagan ordered its jet fighter assets along with U.S. Air Force electronic intelligence aircraft to join in the search for the missing cruise ship.

  As soon as Brigadier General Carl Stiner, commander of Joint Special Operations Task Force at Fort Bragg, learned of the hijacked ship, he and his staff began planning to take the ship down. He ordered his deputy commander and his ops officer to ready CT units for deployment and arrange transport with Military Airlift Command. The Task Force Command Group consisted of operations and intelligence staff officers along with communications and medical personnel; SEALs with their assault, sniper, and special boat teams; Air Force Special Tactics operators for airfield control and para-rescue; Delta Force operatives; and an Army special helicopter package of ten Black Hawks, six Little Bird gunships and four Little Bird lift ships. It was a major test for JSOTF just to move such a massive force halfway around the world, never mind conducting the operation when it arrived.

  U.S. counterterrorists had never taken down a ship in real life. We had only trained for it, such as when Marcinko and I were building SEAL Team Six and persuaded a Norwegian “love boat” to go along with a mock terrorist scenario in Miami. What we learned was that a cruise ship was the toughest of targets. It required a large boarding party to subdue terrorists before they harmed their hostages while searching rooms, nooks, and crannies for hidden terrorists and possible explosives, controlling passengers and crew, securing everyone aboard, and taking care of any wounded or injured.

  A lot of people at the Pentagon and White House were understandably anxious. I smoked a pack of cigarettes and drank a pot of coffee of my own while we denizens of the Pentagon waited either in SCIF rooms, the second floor “tank,” or in various offices for an announcement that the Achille Lauro was located.

  A week earlier, on October 1, the Israeli Air Force had bombed the Tunisian headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yas
ser Arafat’s bunch, in response to a terrorist attack the PLO conducted against a civilian Israeli yacht. The strike destroyed PLO headquarters and killed sixty terrorists. Washington assumed the Achille Lauro hijacking to be in retaliation for the bombing. Terrorists weren’t that particular who they attacked, as long as the targets were from the despised West.

  On Monday, October 8, the liner reappeared four hundred miles away, bound for the Syrian port of Tartus. Syria was a haven for terrorists. President Hafez Assad exercised considerable leverage and influence over several regional terrorist groups, among them the PLO.

  Pressured by the U.S.—more accurately, threatened—Assad refused to allow the Achille Lauro to dock. That left the ship alone and isolated on the sea. Hijackers were seen from the air singling out passengers and placing them in plain view on deck surrounded by a wall of fuel drums. For the first time the hijackers broke radio silence to negotiate.

  “If we are attacked,” they vowed, “we will set afire these infidels and burn them till they no longer are alive.”

  They demanded the release of fifty Palestinian terrorists captured by Israel. If Israel did not release them by 3:00 p.m., all passengers aboard the ship would be executed.

  After the fact, we learned who the hijackers were and what occurred during and leading up to the hijacking. It was masterminded by the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), an affiliate of Yasser Arafat’s PLO. Pretending to be tourists, Majed Molqi and three henchmen boarded the cruise ship in Egypt with a plan to accompany it to the Israeli harbor at Ashod, its next port-of-call after Egypt. There they would commandeer the vessel, hold the passengers hostage, and negotiate for the release of the Palestinian terrorists.

  Things didn’t work out that way.

  At lunchtime while the ship was under way, the steward had thought it a good time to check out staterooms while everyone was eating. He entered Molqi’s cabin and surprised four men cleaning automatic weapons. His unexpected appearance forced the men to make their move prematurely.

  Most of the ninety-five passengers and ship’s crew remaining aboard the liner, including twelve Americans, were in the dining room when Molqi and his terrorists slunk out of Cabin 82 armed with Soviet AK-47 rifles, pistols, and hand grenades. They burst into the dining room shouting and wildly discharging firearms into the overhead. Two people were slightly wounded. Terrified, the others were quickly subdued and sequestered in the dining room.

  Two of the terrorists immediately stormed the bridge and took control. Molqi ordered the ship’s captain, Gerardo de Rosa, to put the ship into radio silence and head for the Syrian port of Tartus.

  Now, isolated on the sea off Tartus, the terrorists threatened to murder everyone aboard unless their demands were met.

  To show he meant business as his deadline of 3:00 p.m. arrived, Molqi singled out sixty-nine-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, a retired Jewish-American from New York. Klinghoffer was partially paralyzed from two recent strokes and confined to a wheelchair. He and his wife Marilyn were on the cruise to celebrate their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary.

  “The terrorists ordered me to leave him,” Marilyn later related. “I begged them to let me stay with him. They responded by putting a machine gun to my head and ordered me up the stairs. That was the last time I saw my husband.”

  Molqi shot Klinghoffer with a pistol once in the chest and once in the head, then forced the ship’s barber and a waiter to throw the body and wheelchair overboard. His body washed ashore on the Syrian coast a week later.

  Molqi then selected a second victim, another American named Mildred Hodes, and issued a threat over the radio that he would kill her unless Syria allowed the ship refuge in Tartus. Before he carried out his threat, however, the PLF and PLO leaderships appeared to be rethinking the situation. Abu Abbas, PLF leader and mastermind behind the hijacking to begin with, one of Yasser Arafat’s chief lieutenants, broadcast a message over an Arab-speaking radio station directing the hijackers to return to Egypt without harming the hostages. Klinghoffer’s murder had not yet been revealed to the world.

  Achille Lauro set sail at 4:30 p.m. to take advantage of the coming darkness. U.S. E2-C Hawkeye electronics surveillance airplanes and warships from U.S. European Command shadowed the liner until it anchored at Port Said that night.

  Back in the United States, General Stiner received President Reagan’s go-ahead to launch his Task Force. Elements began arriving at Cyprus and Sigonella the same night the cruise ship anchored at Port Said. Italian military leaders and General Stiner’s Americans hammered out a takedown plan in which SEALs from Team Six approached the Achille Lauro after dark Wednesday night in small boats with silenced engines, climbed aboard, found the terrorists, and eliminated them.

  International politics tossed a monkey wrench into the plan before it went into production. Politics in the Cold War could be deceitful and treacherous.

  Yasser Arafat dispatched two emissaries to Egypt to negotiate a peaceful settlement, one of them being Abu Abbas. They, along with ambassadors from Italy and West Germany, went aboard the Achille Lauro bearing a guarantee from Egypt that the hijackers would receive safe passage to their country of choice if they released the hostages without harming them. Up to this point, no one off the ship knew of Klinghoffer’s fate. Earlier, Molqi had forced Captain de Rosa to make a statement as the liner neared Egypt.

  “I am the captain,” he radioed. “I am speaking from my office; and everybody is in good health.”

  Intelligence the CIA picked up indicated Arafat had “under the table” agreements with Egypt and Italy that he would not attempt to bring down their governments if they allowed the PLO to operate freely within their countries. These two countries, therefore, were willing to negotiate with terrorists.

  To Israel and the United States, however, a terrorist attack was the same as a military attack—not to be met with appeasement but with military force. SEAL Team Six continued to refine its plans for a Wednesday night assault on the ship.

  Wednesday afternoon, the Egyptian government announced, “At four twenty p.m. the hijackers, whose number is four, agreed to surrender without preconditions. They surrendered at five p.m.”

  Another announcement followed shortly thereafter, “The four hijackers have left the ship and are heading out of Egypt.”

  That was a lie. While the hijackers had indeed left the ship, they had not departed the country. As soon as he was freed, a distraught Captain de Rosa exposed the truth about Klinghoffer.

  I had never seen CNO Watkins so furious. “Those bastards! Egypt knew the terrorists killed that old man and they still promised to let them go.”

  Nicolas Veliotes, U.S. ambassador to Egypt, contacted Egyptian foreign minister Abdel Meguid. “I want those sons of bitches prosecuted,” he demanded.

  Meguid dodged, insisting the terrorists were already out of the country. President Hosni Mubarak told Veliotes the same thing the next morning. “The terrorists have already left Egypt. I don’t know where they went, but they possibly went to Tunis.”

  Another lie. The hijackers were still sitting in an EgyptAir 737 at Al Mazi Air Base near Cairo while Egypt attempted to find a country that would take them. U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, President Reagan’s National Security Council representative for counterterrorism, suggested that it was not too late to take possible action. Since the EgyptAir flight had not taken off yet, why not use planes from the USS Saratoga to force it down at a friendly airport? He proposed the NATO base at Sigonella in Sicily where SEAL Team Six was staged.

  President Reagan agreed.

  CIA sources reported the terrorists intended to fly to Tunisia. The Egyptian Boeing 737 left Cairo on Thursday carrying Arafat’s PLO negotiators and security officers from an Egyptian counterterrorism unit in addition to the four terrorists. Aerial tankers, an E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, and a C-141 with SEALs aboard took off from Sicily to intercept while six U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats zipped into the sky from the USS Saratoga.

  Fou
r of the jets pulled into escort formation around the 737. U.S. electronic countermeasures jammed the airliner’s transmissions so it could not contact Egypt. Tunisia succumbed to pressure from the U.S. and now refused to allow the Egyptian plane to land. F-14 Tomcats directed the airliner to put down at the NATO air base in Sicily, under orders of U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

  Italy at first refused the plane permission to land, apparently out of fear of offending Arafat and the PLO. But the chairman of JCS, Admiral William J. Crowe, directed it to land whether the Italians liked it or not. A U.S. Navy lieutenant in the Sigonella tower pushed the Italian controller out of the way, took the mike, and ordered the airliner to obey or be shot down. As the plane went wheels down on the runway and rolled out onto the apron, Commander Robert Gormly and a contingent of his SEAL Team Six met it in pickup trucks and surrounded it, prepared to assault the aircraft and take its passengers into custody.

  Fifteen minutes later, with the plane surrounded by eighty or ninety SEALs and Delta operators, squads of Italian troops and carabinieri showed up from everywhere. In pickup trucks and cars, on motorbikes, running on foot, even piled onto three-wheeled construction carts with five or six men in the dump buckets. Like an old Laurel and Hardy movie from the 1920s.

  The outer ring of Americans, outnumbered three to one, faced the Italians. Two heavily armed allied forces squared off against each other with guns pointed, an impasse so tense those of us in SCIFs or in the Tank at the Pentagon felt it vibrating the air. I overheard radio transmissions of a SEAL officer, whose voice I failed to recognize, discussing with Commander Gormly whether he should order his men to open fire on the Italians.

  “The 737 isn’t going anywhere,” Gormly vowed to another American over his radio.

  We at the Pentagon heard veteran SEAL Bobby Lewis, who had the front of the plane blocked with a truck, radio Gormly as a furious Italian officer declared he and his men were boarding whether the Americans liked it or not.