The Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism (review)

On 7 October 1985, four Palestinian gunmen hijacked the small cruise ship Achille Lauro as it steamed from Genoa, Italy, en route to Port Said, Egypt, and Ashdod, Israel. The hijacking marked the first time that a passenger ship had been seized by armed men since 1961. The Palestinian terrorists easily took the captain and crew of the Achille Lauro by surprise.

The hijackers, ranging in age from 17 to 23, had been recruited by Mohammed "Abu" Abbas, head of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), one of the eight groups that originally formed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the chairmanship of Yasser Arafat. Abbas ordered the seizure of hostages on the Achille Lauro in order to barter them for the release of fifty PLF prisoners held in Israeli jails. As the plot unfolded, however, the situation got out of hand. The leader of the hijackers, Youssef Majed Molqi, threatened to kill the hostages if Israel failed to release the PLF captives. Attempting to use the Syrian government as an intermediary, Molqi warned that if the Israelis refused to comply, "we will start executing at 3:00 P.M. sharp." Syria refused to pass along the threat.

Evidently keen on proving his determination, Molqi shuffled through the passports of passengers on the ship and selected those with Jewish surnames as candidates for execution. Soon after 3:00 o'clock, the hijackers removed Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish appliance manufacturer from New Jersey confined to a wheelchair, from the huddled group of hostages in the lounge and pushed him along the deck to the ship's stern. There Molqi shot him twice and, at gunpoint, ordered members of the ship's crew to throw the body and the wheelchair into the sea. "I chose Klinghoffer, an invalid," Molqi later boasted, "so that they would know that we had no pity for anyone, just as the Americans, arming Israel, do not take into consideration that Israel kills women and children of our people" (p. 19).

Thus began the Achille Lauro crisis, which had lasting repercussions for the governments of Italy (the ship was legally in Italian territory), the United States, Egypt, and Israel and for the PLO, not to mention the tragic effects of the murder on Klinghoffer's family and friends. Michael Bohn, a commander in the U.S. Navy who served on the National Security Council (NSC) staff during the Reagan Administration, found himself in the middle of the crisis. As the director of the White House Situation Room at the time of the hijacking, he was the first to receive word of the event from U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources. As President Ronald Reagan's chief communications officer for national security affairs, he continued to monitor events throughout the crisis. Subsequently, upon retirement from the Navy, Bohn interviewed many of the key actors in the events. He tells the story clearly and in detail, carefully steering a course between the biases that inevitably accompany relations between Palestinians and Jews.

Upon hearing the news about the hijacking and the murder of Klinghoffer, a Navy captain on the NSC staff proposed an aggressive response, and the president approved it over the objection of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The Reagan administration tried to apprehend the hijackers. After much frustration in dealing with terrorist organizations in Lebanon for the release of American hostages held there, as well as with a hijacking of a Trans World Airlines passenger plane, administration officials hoped that they might finally be able to do something about this latest terrorist attack against Americans. Bohn quotes National Security Adviser Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, who later approved the (unrelated) secret machinations that became the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987, as saying early in the crisis: "We were bound and determined to do something to counteract terrorism. This time we had the chance" (p. 61).

While Poindexter and his aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver L. North (who...