Terrorism: The Voyage of The Achille Lauro

By the time the Italian liner Achille Lauro had reached Alexandria, on the fifth day of a Mediterranean cruise, its 755 passengers had settled into the pleasant routine of shipboard life. There were Ping Pong tournaments, shuffleboard games and lazy afternoons around the pool. In the evening there were dinner and dancing followed by midnight buffets, and every night a troupe of Polish dancers put on a ballet performance.

Among the American passengers was a group of eleven old friends from New York City and northern New Jersey. Mostly in their 60s and 70s, they liked to vacation together on the Jersey shore and sometimes called themselves “the beach people.” On Sunday, the night before the 23,629-ton Achille Lauro reached Alexandria, they celebrated the 59th birthday of Marilyn Klinghoffer of Manhattan. It had been her idea that they should all take the eleven-day cruise from Genoa to Naples, Alexandria, Port Said, Ashdod, Limassol, Rhodes, Piraeus, Capri and back to Genoa.

Next morning, when 666 passengers left the ship for a day of sight-seeing and shopping in Cairo, Marilyn and her husband Leon, 69, stayed aboard. A retired appliance manufacturer, Leon had been confined to a wheelchair after suffering two strokes during the past three years. Another member of the group, Mildred Hodes, of Springfield, N.J., had planned to join her husband Frank on the Cairo trip, but at the last moment she changed her mind. That decision very nearly cost Mildred Hodes her life.

Few of the passengers had noticed the four Palestinians who had boarded the ship at Genoa. They kept to themselves and did not take part in any shipboard activities. One of the Achille Lauro hostesses later recalled asking the young men their nationality and receiving the improbable and barely intelligible reply, “Norwegian.”

Once his passengers had disembarked at Alexandria, Captain Gerardo De Rosa ordered the anchor raised, and soon the Achille Lauro was sailing for Port Said, at the northern approach to the Suez Canal, under a brilliant blue sky. + There, late that evening, he was scheduled to pick up the passengers who had gone to Cairo and proceed to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

Exactly what happened next is not known, but it seemed that the four Palestinians intended to remain quietly aboard the liner until it reached Ashdod. There, according to this theory, they would launch a terrorist attack, seize Israeli hostages if possible, and demand the release of 50 Palestinians, including many from their own organization, the Palestine Liberation Front, who were being held in Israeli prisons. But something went wrong–probably the chance discovery of their weapons and ammunition by a member of the crew. According to the Italian news agency ANSA, they later told Italian authorities that they had not intended to take control of the ship at all but had done so after a waiter spotted them cleaning their guns.

In any event, they decided to attack. Just four hours after the Achille Lauro had left Alexandria, the four Palestinians, armed with Soviet-made submachine guns, hand grenades and explosives, seized the ship. Firing their weapons wildly, the terrorists used the ship’s loudspeaker system to summon all passengers to the dining room. “We were getting ready for dessert,” one of the American passengers, Viola Meskin, of Union, N.J., later recalled, “when suddenly we heard gunshots, and someone yelled, ‘Get down on the floor!’ We heard moaning and groaning. The bandits had struck men in the kitchen, we were told. Then they started to threaten us and show their power. They had hand grenades in their hands, and they would remove the pins and play with them. They constantly had their guns ready for shooting. We were all on the floor.” Later on, the gunmen separated the Americans and Britons from the others and placed gasoline cans close to them. Carina Tubby, 21, a dancer in a sixmember British troupe on board, was told by the gunmen that if their political demands were not met, she and the other Britons would be killed along with the Americans. Says she: “I remember thinking I didn’t even know what their demands were, and that they might kill me for something I didn’t know anything about. It seemed so unfair.” On the bridge, one of the gunmen fired more shots and then ordered De Rosa to sail in a northeasterly direction toward the Syrian port of Tartus. A hijacker brandishing a submachine gun kept De Rosa under constant guard.

That night, as the ship was cruising about 30 miles north of Port Said, De Rosa made contact with Egyptian port authorities by radio and told them what had happened. The hijackers, who had identified themselves as members of the P.L.F., demanded the release of the 50 prisoners being held in Israel. Among these was Sami Kuntar, a well-known terrorist who in 1979, with three others, had staged an attack on the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, killing three people. If their demands were not met, the hijackers of the Achille Lauro warned, they would blow up the ship.

At about that time, the passengers who had spent the day in Cairo arrived in Port Said. There would be a delay, they were told, because of heavy traffic in the port. Not until midnight did an Italian consular official advise them that the Achille Lauro had been hijacked. Buses then took them back to Cairo, where they arrived after 3 a.m. For them, the waiting had just begun. In the lobby of the Concorde Hotel, Frank Hodes remarked the next day, “We are sitting here in total silence. We are getting no information at all.” Charlotte Spiegel of New York City added, “We have no idea what’s going on. I only want to feel my friends in my arms again.”

On the ship, the sense of panic increased as the gunmen became more desperate. Neither crew nor passengers seem to have considered trying to overwhelm the terrorists; they were too well armed and too erratic, and besides, very few people realized that there were only four gunmen on board. “From the way they were behaving,” a diplomat who visited the ship later observed, “it seemed more likely that there were 20 hijackers rather than four.”

The situation reached crisis point early Tuesday afternoon as the gunmen awaited permission from Syrian authorities for the Achille Lauro to dock at Tartus. The hijackers had asked by radio to be put in touch with the Italian and American ambassadors in Damascus, hoping to negotiate the release of their 50 comrades in Israel. A Lebanese radio station monitored the chilling sequence of threats by one of the gunmen. At 12:30 p.m. Tuesday: “Any delay in the arrival of the ambassadors will be damaging.” At 12:32 p.m.: “There is no time to lose, and the first ultimatum set for 4 p.m. has been brought forward to 1 p.m.” At 12:58 p.m.: “We are not willing to wait any longer, and the first passenger will be killed at 1 p.m. We will communicate the name and nationality of the passenger.” At 1:26 p.m.: “What is new at Tartus? We will immediately kill the second. There is no shortage of passengers to kill.” Another monitor in Lebanon reported a hijacker’s saying, “We threw the first body into the water after shooting him in the head. His wife is wailing about it.”

At exactly what point these sadistic threats became reality is not known. But in a now familiar ritual of terrorism, the hijackers had decided to underscore their seriousness by taking a sacrifice. First they separated Leon Klinghoffer from his wife. “No,” said one gunman to the wheelchair-bound passenger. “You stay. She goes.” Marilyn Klinghoffer never saw her husband again. For the next 24 hours she and her friends were consumed by anxiety. When the hijacking was finally over, they looked all through the ship for him, though they expected the worst. Some passengers had noted that the trousers and shoes of one of the hijackers had been covered with blood. And besides, as one recalled, “We had heard gunshots and a splash.” Giovanni Migliuolo, the Italian Ambassador to Egypt, later chillingly reconstructed the event: “The hijackers pushed (Klinghoffer) in his chair and dragged him to the side of the ship, where, in cold blood, they fired a shot to the forehead. Then they dumped the body into the sea, together with the wheelchair.”

Shortly after the murder, the gunman with the bloodstained clothing appeared on the bridge, told Captain De Rosa what had happened and ordered him to advise the Syrian authorities in Tartus. He also said that the second victim would be “Miss Mildred,” evidently referring to Mildred Hodes, but he did not follow through on that threat. For a while, some passengers and crew members thought the gunmen might also have murdered an Austrian woman, Anna Hoerangner, who was missing. Eventually it was discovered that though she had been knocked down a flight of stairs by a hijacker at the time of the takeover, she had managed to make her way to an unlocked cabin. There she remained in hiding for two days, huddled under a bed or locked in a toilet.

But the hijackers’ murderous gambit did not succeed. Syria refused to allow the Achille Lauro to enter its territorial waters, as did Cyprus; no government wanted to borrow trouble by becoming unnecessarily involved. At 7 p.m. Tuesday, the ship raised anchor and sailed away from the Syrian coastline. Perhaps fearful of an attack, a hijacker who identified himself as the squad’s leader and called himself Omar warned, “We will hit any ship, any plane that tries to approach us.” Throughout the night, Captain De Rosa sent , messages asking would-be rescuers to hold off. “Please do not attempt anything against my ship,” he urged. “Everyone is all right, and we will soon be freed.”

By 6 a.m. Wednesday, the Achille Lauro was anchored 15 miles off Port Said, and the Egyptian Foreign Ministry was moving swiftly to try to resolve the crisis. Mohammed Abbas Zaidan, secretary-general of the P.L.F., arrived from Tunis to join the discussions. Better known as Abul Abbas, he tried to negotiate a settlement and clarify the hijackers’ demands. Abul Abbas’ precise role in the planning of the P.L.F. raid that apparently misfired is not known, but there was little doubt that he exercised considerable influence over the hijackers. When he addressed the gunmen aboard the ship, they replied, “Commander, we are happy to hear your voice.” Abul Abbas then told the hijackers that if they surrendered, the Egyptians would guarantee them safe passage out of the country. He instructed them to prepare to release the ship, and they answered, “We shall obey.” Shortly before dusk Wednesday, the four gunmen came ashore aboard a squat, battered tugboat of the Suez Canal Authority. Journalists at the entrance of the harbor caught a glimpse of the hijackers as they passed. Then they disappeared, not to resurface until they landed in Sicily some 30 hours later.

In New York, Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer had been waiting for two days for news of their parents. Finally, on Wednesday, they broke out champagne for relatives and friends after being told by the State Department that Marilyn and Leon, along with the other passengers, were safe. The celebration was still going on a couple of hours later when the family received another telephone call, raising grave new doubts. This time the State Department said it was uncertain whether Leon Klinghoffer was alive or dead.

The U.S. had heard reports as early as Tuesday afternoon that an American aboard the Achille Lauro had been killed. On Thursday evening, after more than 48 hours of conflicting rumors, the State Department ordered the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Nicholas Veliotes, to visit the Achille Lauro and determine the fate of the Americans aboard. Accompanied by envoys from Italy, Austria and West Germany, the ambassador was taken to the ship by tugboat about midnight. After a quick investigation, he called his embassy in Cairo over a ship-to-shore radio and gave his colleagues some instructions. “Leon Klinghoffer is dead,” he announced grimly. “He was murdered by the terrorists off Tartus. The terrorists then showed the captain the passport of Mildred Hodes and said, ‘O.K., but you tell those Syrians that we’ve killed two.’ They then kept a gun on them constantly and anyone else near the radio and threatened to kill anyone who told the truth.”

Continued Veliotes: “I want you to do two things. In my name, I want you to call (the Egyptian Foreign Minister), tell him what we’ve learned, tell him the circumstances, tell him that in view of this and the fact that we, and presumably they, didn’t have those facts, we insist that they prosecute those sons of bitches. The second 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.”

On Thursday morning, Marilyn Klinghoffer, dazed and shocked, went ashore briefly to make a telephone call to her family in New York. The next day she and the other surviving members of the “beach people” were taken to Cairo to prepare for the long, sad flight home, with a detour to Italy, where she helped pick the four hijackers out of a lineup. On Saturday, after waiting two days for the Egyptian government to permit the Achille Lauro to leave Port Said, the ship’s owners announced that the remainder of the eleven-day cruise had been canceled.