International Terrorism, 1985
“I have killed the American,” Youssef Majed Molqi told the captain of the Achille Lauro. As Molqi delivered this news on the cruise ship’s bridge, the 69-year old Leon Klinghoffer’s corpse and wheelchair sank into the waters off the Syrian coast. It was October 8, 1985, day two of one of the most harrowing terrorist attacks of the 1980s.
The summer of 1985 had been bloody in the Mediterranean as the Arab-Israeli conflict spilled over into international waters. Palestinian terrorists killed several Israeli tourists in Cyprus; Israeli warplanes responded with a fierce attack on the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters in Tunisia; and a Hezbollah-aligned organization hijacked a TWA flight and beat to death an American serviceman onboard. Despite this turmoil, the vacationers who embarked on the Achille Lauro in Genoa hardly imagined that the escalating violence would touch them.
The voyage began smoothly, down the scenic Italian coast and then across a calm sea to Egypt. Passengers enjoyed quiet autumn weather, and everyone seemed to get along. A few passengers noticed something strange, though. Among the mostly elderly and sociable travelers were four young men who kept to themselves. They claimed to be Argentinean, but they couldn’t understand a word of Spanish spoken by Americans aboard. Still, no one thought much of them—until lunchtime on October 7, when they appeared in the main dining hall brandishing Kalashnikovs and grenades.
The four men, firing in the air and screaming in Arabic, corralled the terrified passengers in the dining room and seized control of the ship. They announced that they were members of the Palestine Liberation Front, a small terrorist organization affiliated with the PLO. Their leader, Youssef Majef Molqi, ordered the captain to set a course for Syria. Then they began to segregate hostages with American or British passports and with Jewish-sounding last names from the rest of the passengers.
As the ship arrived in Syria, Molqi announced the hijacking, demanded that 50 PLF members be released from Israeli prisons, and asked Syria for assistance. The Syrian government told him to “go back where you came from.”
As the world learned of the hijacking, several states and organizations went into action. The U.S. government dispatched Navy SEAL and Army Delta-Force teams, and the Italians sent their own special forces. The PLO, eager to earn legitimacy after decades of terrorism, quickly denounced the hijacking. Yasir Arafat sent Abu Abbas, the head of the PLF, to negotiate with his operatives aboard the Achille Lauro.
That was a mistake. Molqi’s team was not a rogue cell acting on its own initiative; they had planned the entire operation with Abbas. Abbas—not to be confused with the current president of the Palestinian Authority—was a charismatic career terrorist who made violent assaults on Israel his life’s work. His operations were often marked by their novelty, involving hang gliders, hot-air balloons, and speedboats. They would be almost comic if not for their brutality; in one particular ugly assault his men stormed an Israeli apartment complex, shot several adults, and bludgeoned to death a four-year-old girl. Samir al-Qantari, who was captured after killing that girl and shooting her father, was at the top of the list of prisoners the Achille Lauro hijackers demanded be released. Regardless of the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause—and even the right to resist the Israeli military—men like al-Qantari were by no definition innocent victims deserving liberation.
Snubbed by Syria, Molqi’s team chose drastic action. They selected Leon Klinghoffer, a retired Jewish New Yorker recently disabled by a stroke, who with his wife had been enjoying his thirty-sixth wedding anniversary aboard the Achille Lauro. He was separated from his wife Marilyn and rolled out in his wheelchair onto the ship’s main deck, where Molqi shot him twice and forced the ship’s crew to dump his body overboard.
After the execution the PLF ordered the Achille Lauro to head for Egypt. There Abu Abbas and PLO operatives somehow persuaded the four hijackers to relinquish their hostages and leave the ship. The hijacking ended—but the conflict was just beginning.
The PLF team had hijacked an Italian ship and murdered an American citizen with apparently no consequences. The Italian and U.S. governments were outraged, and they lobbied Egypt to arrest the hijackers. Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, found himself trapped between his commitment to the Palestinian cause and his increasingly friendly relationship with the United States. He claimed, erroneously, that the hijackers had already left Egypt. Israeli intelligence soon learned otherwise, discovering that Molqi’s team and Abu Abbas were in the country but about to leave on an EgyptAir jet bound for Tunis.
The Reagan administration, having done little after several recent terrorist attacks on Americans, saw an opportunity. Acting quickly, it scrambled F-14s from the Navy’s Mediterranean Sixth Fleet and located the EgyptAir plane. The U.S. jets intercepted the 737 in the middle of the night and forced it to land at a NATO base in Sicily. Navy SEALs and Italian Carabinieri special forces surrounded the airliner. After a brief standoff, Molqi, Abbas, and the other PLF terrorists surrendered to Italian authorities.
Though this daring high-altitude gamble succeeded in catching the bad guys, no one was happy. The Achille Lauro was under Italy’s jurisdiction, and in 1973 the Italian government had promised not to interfere with the PLO’s actions, as a way of avoiding terrorist attacks on Rome. They were, essentially, afraid to act. The PLO was equally unhappy, furious that Abu Abbas had besmirched the reputation of an organization struggling to go straight. One member of the PLO Executive Committee declared: “Not even the Israelis could have achieved so much damage in so little time. Abbas has a lot to answer for.”
It grew increasingly clear that Abbas had organized the hijacking, yet Italy allowed the terrorist leader to go free. Over the years Abbas’s line on the Achille Lauro affair varied, as he alternately claimed that Leon Klinghoffer never existed, that he “created troubles” for the hijackers, that the entire incident was “pure accident,” and that—a grotesque joke—Klinghoffer died “trying to swim for it.”
Molqi’s team was not as lucky. Italy successfully tried the terrorists, eventually handing down moderate sentences. Youssef Majed Molqi got 30 years in jail, the others got between 15 and 25. Each was also ordered to pay $20,000 to Leon Klinghoffer’s daughters. None ever sent a cent to the family, though they did willingly pay to replace items broken on the Achille Lauro during the hijacking.
The Italian court later admitted that the sentences seemed lenient but were reasonable because the terrorists were “soldiers fighting for ideals . . . that cannot be considered devoid of valid motivation.” This shocked many Americans, who asked themselves what Molqi’s childhood in a refugee camp and legitimate antipathy towards Israel had to do with an elderly American stroke victim.
On the surface, the Achille Lauro affair might seem relatively minor. A ship was detained for 51 hours, one man died. Not much of a story in light of the terrorism and state-sanctioned violence the world has seen since. But the event perfectly portrays an earlier era of terrorism, a time riddled with complex alliances, backdoor negotiations, and hundreds of splinter groups like the PLF. Twenty years later, when American forces captured Abu Abbas in Iraq, he seemed like an artifact from an earlier period. He died in American custody in 2004. The PLF claimed he was assassinated; the Pentagon reported that he had succumbed to natural causes. He was buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Damascus, Syria.