Our assault group conducted training operations all over the country, moving men and equipment surreptitiously, landing air force C-141s at civilian airports in the dead of night and off-loading our unmarked trucks and SUVs. We were issued in-state license plates for our vehicles, and our visits were always coordinated with local law-enforcement and state police agencies. Before we went out the door, we were briefed on the counterintelligence and operational security picture. Every deployment and exercise had a cover for movement, a cover for action, and a cover for status. All hands were briefed with answers to who we were, why we were there, and what we were doing. None of these answers had anything to do with SEAL Team training.
The cover stories and secrecy had an effect. We all became glib liars, able to use aliases, deflect questions, and deal out misinformation. The real world became a mirage. We avoided “regular people,” or duped them outright. We seldom operated in the same area twice in a year, and if we did, we took great pains with our cover stories, so that we built up a “legend”—a plausible excuse for our repeat appearances. One of my favorite covers was that we were NFL alumni attending a billfishing tournament. Try telling that story inconspicuously in a bar full of sports fans.
We kept the cover stories sharp because we all knew that Lenny and Dougie were never far behind. During and after our excursions, they would sniff around, asking questions of desk clerks and bartenders, assessing the footprint we’d left. If a front organization or cover story was punctured—meaning if someone figured out or even guessed we were SEALs—Lenny and Dougie would make sure casual or determined questions were stonewalled. They were also there to finger the guilty. Any operator who violated security or blew a cover was immediately shown the door. Off duty, they were great guys, but it was their job to bust our chops. We kept a low profile.
Sean, Moose, and I continued to be close, and we hung out off duty whenever we could. Like the rest of the command, we became habitués of the Raven. It was then a slightly down-market bar and grill on the south end of Virginia Beach. It was orders of magnitude nicer than the Casino, and the waitresses, called Ravenettes, were all local belles. Although a constant tide of tourists washed in and out, the Raven’s steady customers were members of SEAL Team Six. We all drank there, and we drank a lot. All SEAL Teams are hard-partying outfits, and Six led the way. Naval special warfare is no place for the weak of heart, limb, or liver. We worked hard and played harder. Hangovers were puked up at the side of the road following the morning run, swim, and obstacle course.
The new-friends rule and the benevolent snooping of Lenny and Dougie kept the operators at Six to themselves. The social circle included fellow Sixers and the small number of wives and girlfriends. The planet may have been our AO, but our world just got smaller and smaller.
Margot and I bought a three-bedroom house in a cookie-cutter development at the south end of Virginia Beach. It was soon furnished and somewhat decorated. Our home was comfortable, and we entertained often. Moose and Sean were frequent guests, and we often had “lost weekend” parties, drunken barbecues that went on for days. I was, I will admit, not the greatest of husbands, but Margot and I seldom argued; she continued to love me, and I continued to need her. My work was kept in separate compartments, and so was my life. On the road I frequently cheated on her, wowing the babe of the night with the sailboat story or the working cover, depending on my mood. They were one-night stands, and then I was gone. I felt guilty, but not enough to stop fooling around. Perhaps I had become one of those people who needs to be loved too badly. I lied as well at home as I did on the road. When I returned home, my adultery, like everything else, was stuffed into a compartment. The compartments, I thought, were airtight. It would be a long time before I learned how much lies cost.
I was away from home a great deal, and often called away unexpectedly. Margot and I developed a sort of silent code. If the trip was planned in advance, I would conspicuously pack my civilian clothes and leave my kit bag open on our bed. Wool sweaters for a two-week trip in August would give her at least an idea that I was heading to colder climes. Likewise, packing a dozen Hawaiian shirts in the dead of winter would tell her I was bound for someplace sunny. Some trips were unannounced, but I would try to give Margot a warning. If I called home from work and left the message “I’ll pick up something on the way home for dinner,” she knew not to expect me for a week. For Margot the trips were doubly hard—she did not know where I was, and I couldn’t telephone her while I was deployed. She would often try to figure out where I was by watching CNN.
Most of the time she was right.
* * *
FULL MISSION PROFILE
IN A WORLD WHERE TERRORIST ACTS were all too ordinary, Mohamed Abul Abbas prided himself on innovation. Known to the world as Abu Abbas, he was a member of the executive council of the PLO, a confidant of Yasser Arafat, and the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF). Abu Abbas would go on to mastermind glider-borne assaults against Israel and pioneer the use of armed speedboats to attack swimmers and vacationers on Tel Aviv beaches. Abbas was nothing if not creative. With Arafat’s go-ahead, he selected four operatives to carry out the most ambitious terrorist act of his career.
The man chosen to lead this operation was Youssef Magied al-Molqi. Al-Molqi was not bright, but he was brutal and eager. Like the glider attacks and the speedboats, this operation would bear the hallmark of Abbas’s harebrained grasp of tactics. Ill-conceived and messily executed, Abbas’s latest brainchild would be a dead-end operation that would end in failure. That probably didn’t occur to al-Molqi, and it didn’t matter to Abbas—he would direct the attack from the safety of a hotel suite.
Their target was the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. The vessel was nearly as sorry as the men who would seize her. If you were looking for a jinxed ship, Achille Lauro would fit the bill. Six hundred and thirty feet long, she entered service in 1947 as Willem Ruys, sailing for the K. R. Lloyd line. She plied the Rotterdam-Jakarta route and then the transatlantic trade, all without success. She was sold to the shipping magnate Achille Lauro in 1964 and renamed for her new owner. It is said that to rename a ship is to invite bad luck, but somebody must have forgotten to tell Signor Lauro. Soon after she was renamed, Achille Lauro was rent by an explosion and fire. It would be the first of many calamities. In 1972 the ship was involved in a collision at sea that would sink the livestock carrier Yousset. Nor was all the trouble nautical. Lauro Lines was soon in financial straits, and in 1982 Achille Lauro would be seized for debt in Tenerife, Spain. By the mid-1980s the ship was a faded princess reduced to churning out cut-rate cruises in the Med.
On October 7, 1985, Youssef al-Molqi and three accomplices—Ibrahim Abdel Atif, Ahmed al-Hassani, and Bassam al-Asker—came aboard Achille Lauro in Alexandria, Egypt. Most of the ship’s 670 passengers had debarked at Alexandria for a day trip to the pyramids. By late morning Achille Lauro weighed anchor and headed out into the Mediterranean, cruising off the coast of Egypt and intending to return that evening to retrieve the day-trippers. As the ship steamed out of Alexandria, al-Molqi and his buddies retired to their second-class cabins and waited.
Remaining aboard the cruise liner were approximately 90 passengers and a mostly Italian and Portuguese crew of 340. Ten of the passengers were American; among these were sixty-nine-year-old Leon Klinghoffer and his wife, Marilyn. While Achille Lauro dawdled off the Egyptian coast, al-Molqi’s accomplices burst into the main dining salon, spraying machine-gun fire into the ceiling. The word was flashed to the bridge that armed men had seized control of the ship.
Thus began al-Molqi’s short career as a pirate.
THE FIRST CLUE the world had of any trouble was a distress call received by a radio station in Gothenburg, Sweden. Before communications were lost with the ship, her captain, Gerardo de Rosa, managed to send one brief message. The news story of the hijacking was soon flashed around the world.
In the operations shop at SEAL Team Six, CNN was constantly playing on
a TV angled in a corner, and it was from CNN, instead of any official message traffic, that SEAL Team Six learned of the incident. In the hours following the hijacking, we remained at standby. There was no notice from the joint command to deploy or to move to a heightened alert status. Although we hung on every tidbit fed us by CNN, higher-ups first thought that this was an Italian ship and an Italian problem.
The prime minister of Italy at the time, socialist Bettino Craxi, refused early offers of help from the Reagan administration. While the Italian government indicated that it was prepared to use force to retake the ship, it saw negotiation as its best opportunity with the hijackers. That might have been a viable course of action; the Italian naval commandos with whom we would soon be working did not make much of an impression. Truth be told, the Italians had no forces or assets capable of retaking the ship. Their only choice was appeasement.
Sometime in the early evening, the information evolved that there were American citizens aboard the ship. They were clearly in danger. Craxi’s firm refusal of help no longer mattered. Under international law, the United States is within its rights to board and seize a vessel under the control of pirates, and the decision was made to deploy SEAL Team Six.
Our load-out went flawlessly. The command had deployed on several real-world operations and frequently practiced recall drills. Within a short period of time, the entire command was staged at a naval air station close to the Team area. There we waited—interminably, it would turn out—for the air force to show up with transports. Several more precious hours passed while we sat at the end of a blacked-out runway amid piles and pallets of gear. Like everyone else at the command, I was fuming. But I wasn’t as mad as Moose, who had been detailed to Rome to serve as the joint command’s liaison with the American embassy. It was an important assignment—he would advise the ambassador directly—but he knew it would put him far from the action. He looked deflated as he left for his plane.
In southeast Virginia the night of Monday, October 7, was cool and misty. There was a restrained sort of eagerness among the gaggle of shooters waiting for the plane. This was a mission the Team had been created for. It was one we knew we could accomplish. We could not know as we waited that this operation would end exactly as it had begun—sitting in confusion on a darkened runway. It would be the wee hours of Tuesday, October 8, before the first of several air force transports touched down and dropped their ramps.
As the planes carrying the Team headed east, a plan was developed to retake the ship. Briefed as the immediate-action contingency, SEAL Team Six was prepared to step from the plane and move directly against the target. This plan was sound and would have worked. But finding our target would be another matter, because Achille Lauro had vanished somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.
Soon after the hijackers had shot up the dining room, they ordered the ship north. Although Captain de Rosa had bravely managed to slip out the one message, the terrorists had stationed armed men on the bridge of the ship and ordered radio silence. The captain had no choice but to obey. As Achille Lauro steamed north, Captain de Rosa knew his ship had become a needle in a haystack.
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.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 36
