The Watchers by Shane Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

characters were they had chosen a slow-moving, contained vessel to mount their operation. Four months earlier Poindexter and his crisis team had scrambled to keep up with the hijackers of TWA Flight 847, which was en route from Athens to Rome. The terrorists had demanded the release of more than 700 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. For three days they and their 161 prisoners hopscotched around the Middle East, landing to refuel and negotiate as they brandished handguns before throngs of journalists assembled at each airport pit stop. Their demands unmet, the hijackers singled out a twenty-three-year-old Navy diver, Robert Stethem, beat him with the broken arm of a passenger seat, shot him through the head, and then dumped his limp body onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport before rolling cameras. Other passengers were stashed in hiding places in and around Beirut. The ordeal stretched on for two weeks and caused a global media spectacle that the NSC crisis team wished not to repeat.
    TWA 847’s captors had bought invaluable time as they hustled from country to country, involving ever more governments in their escapade. The U.S. military had no time to react. But a ship—that offered some distinct advantages. Presumably the vessel was still in international waters, where the military was freer to act without diplomatic incident.
    But there were other problems. Finding a cruise liner in the vastness of the Mediterranean would be like finding a fly on the wall while looking through a straw. And if the hijackers stayed off the radio, they’d make the search even harder. But if the crisis team could locate the ship and keep it from docking, then a commando team could storm the vessel and take it back. The hijackers also would have no means of escape in the open water. A battle at sea didn’t sound half bad to Poindexter.
    He called a meeting of the Crisis Pre-Planning Group and the Terrorist Incident Working Group, which had been formed in April of 1982 to provide tactical advice and support during an emergency. Ollie North was in charge, leading a team drawn from the State Department, CIA, Pentagon, and FBI. By now the members had their roles down. They knew one another well, and they understood what their agencies could accomplish on short notice.
    More details trickled in over the next few hours. The ship, the Italian passenger liner Achille Lauro , had been hijacked by gunmen after leaving port in Alexandria, Egypt, on the sixth day of a twelve-day cruise. Americans were on board, though it wasn’t yet clear how many. A number of the passengers had disembarked in Alexandria to tour the pyramids, and they had planned to meet up with the ship again in another port.
    The intelligence agencies hadn’t identified the hijackers, who had yet to signal their intentions. Experience had taught the crisis team not to wait for demands and dead bodies. They must get ahead of the hijackers now, anticipate their next move.
    The team members sent word back to their home agencies. First, isolate the ship. The State Department contacted U.S. ambassadors in countries along the Mediterranean littoral; they should ask their host governments to refuse any docking request from Achille Lauro .
    Next, track the ship. The eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency trained their electronic ears for any radio transmissions from the terrorists or others trying to contact them. Meanwhile, the NSC staff fielded intelligence reports from friendly governments in the region, principally Israel. The Navy launched a search for Achille Lauro using radar and aerial reconnaissance. Poindexter advised to not let any aircraft hover over the ship if they did manage to find it. He didn’t want to give the hijackers a reason to start shooting.
    Finally, take the ship. That tricky task fell to an elite military unit, hand-picked from the best of the Army’s Delta Force commandos and the Navy’s counterterrorism squad, SEAL