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Hello hello, hello and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the hijacking of the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro.
It's a story that brings together terrorism guns grenades, the Middle East and a diplomatic incident that almost caused two close NATO allies to turn their guns on each other.
So let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
If you look up the definition of cruise ship in a dictionary, you'll probably find something like a large ship that carries people on voyages for pleasure, typically calling in at several places.
For one American couple, Leon Klinghoffer and his wife Marilyn, this was exactly what they were hoping for.
They were celebrating their 36th wedding anniversary and bought a ticket on the Achille Lauro, a large ship that would take them from Genoa in northern Italy around the Mediterranean, stopping at Naples and Syracuse, then continuing to Egypt Israel, Cyprus and Greece, before returning to Genoa 11 days later.
It would be a wonderful trip, one that was firmly in the for-pleasure category.
Leon Klinghoffer, however, would never make it off the ship.
Or at least, would never make it off the ship alive.
On October 14th 1985, his lifeless body washed up on a Syrian beach with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
Eleven days beforehand, he and 750 or so other passengers had embarked at Genoa in northern Italy.
The ship wasn't a classic luxury liner, but it was perfectly well-equipped. two swimming pools on the roof, a cinema, a gym, and cabins with private balconies, which was something of a novelty for cruise ships at that time.
Most of the passengers were Italian.
It was an Italian cruise liner, after all, but there were some Brits and Americans too, as well as a smattering of other nationalities.
There were also four young men who kept themselves to themselves.
One of them had been on the same cruise a few times before, which seemed odd, but he had a valid ticket.
A member of staff recognised him and, trying to strike up a conversation, asked him where he was from.
He didn't seem very interested in talking, and replied with one word, Norwegian.
This also seemed a little odd, as he didn't have classic Nordic features.
He had dark hair and olive skin.
He looked more like a southern Italian or someone from the Middle East than someone from Scandinavia.
Another member of the group, when asked, said that he was Argentinian, but he didn't seem to understand when a passenger engaged him in Spanish.
Odd again, but the men had valid tickets, they were paying customers.
Perhaps they simply preferred their own company.
On Monday, October 7th, four days after setting off and after stops in Naples and Syracuse, the cruise ship pulled in to Alexandria in Egypt.
The plan was for the passengers to disembark and go on a tour of the pyramids.
While this was happening, the ship would make its way to Port Said, a couple of hundred kilometres to the east, and the passengers would rejoin the ship there.
And, sure enough, most of the passengers got off, climbed into buses and headed off to visit one of the seven wonders of the world.
Just shy of a hundred passengers remained on board.
Shortly afterwards, the four quiet, odd men revealed themselves as not so innocent after all.
As the remaining passengers were having their lunch in the ship's dining room, the men charged into the room with machine guns, firing their weapons in the air.
There were shrieks and cries from the terrified passengers.
The men were heavily armed, guns, grenades and ammunition wrapped around their waists.
Quickly, they rounded up all the passengers on board and frog-marched them into the dining room.
The ship's captain was called and instructed to set sail for the Syrian port of Tartus.
The captain had no option but to obey, and the ship steamed northwards.
At the beginning, it was unclear who these men were and what they wanted.
Their motivations seemed to be political, as they said things like, Reagan no good, Arafat good.
Yasser Arafat, as you may remember, was the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.
But the men hadn't made any demands.
They hadn't explicitly stated what they wanted.
It was also unclear how many attackers were on board the ship.
They told the captain there were 20 of them, but the captain could only see four.
And in fact, this claim of 20 was a bluff.
There were only four.
The men instructed the ship's crew to continue as if everything was normal, not to send out any sign of distress or notify the coast guard that anything had happened.
But Before they had the chance to shut down the radio systems, an officer on the ship was able to send out an SOS message, which was picked up by a monitoring station all the way up in Sweden, in Gothenburg to be precise.
The Swedes notified their international allies that this ship had been taken hostage, and it was here that things started to ratchet up a notch.
Given the that there were Americans on board, the US Defense Department soon sprang into action.
Special forces were dispatched to the region and American allies were instructed not to allow the ship to dock, so that it remained in international waters.
International waters, of course, meaning that the ship wasn't under the jurisdiction of any country and could be stormed by Marines without it being considered an attack in the sovereign territory of another nation.
The other major international player here was Italy.
The ship was an Italian ship.
It had set sail from Italy and most of the passengers, and therefore most of the hostages, were Italian citizens.
But Italy was more cautious in its response than the US.
At this point in the mid-1980s, Italy had taken on the role of something of a regional power broker in the Mediterranean and had been nurturing its relationship with Arab states in the region.
Nobody had claimed responsibility for the hijacking, and the men hadn't yet issued any demands, so the Italians were cautious about pointing the finger at anyone.
Suspicion however, fell immediately on the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO for short.
The gunmen had been expressing their support for Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO, and the international community suspected the PLO was behind it.
Yasser Arafat, however, denied it.
And he didn't just deny it, he offered to send assistance in putting an end to the incident.
The following morning, 24 hours after the gunmen had stormed the dining room, things became a little clearer.
The men started questioning the hostages, asking their nationality and taking their passports.
They were looking for British and American citizens, Jews in particular.
When they discovered an elderly man was Jewish, they hit him over the head with their guns.
And at 11 o'clock that morning they issued their first demand via a radio broadcast to the Syrian authorities, with an instruction for the message to be passed on to Israel.
The men were from the PLF, the Palestinian Liberation Front, And unless 50 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli prisons, they would start executing the hostages.
Israel had until 3pm, five hours.
Now as a brief overview of the very complicated situation in the Middle East.
At that point, Israel as a state was less than 40 years old.
Since its creation in 1948, the region had seen repeated wars, mass displacements and a bitter, unresolved struggle between Israel and the Palestinians.
A struggle that seems, unfortunately, no closer to a resolution.
And by the mid-1980s, this conflict was no longer confined to Israel and the occupied territories.
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon had driven Yasser Arafat and the PLO out of Beirut, scattering Palestinian factions across the region.
Hundreds of militants were in Israeli prisons and smaller splinter groups carried out attacks abroad to try to force prisoner releases.
One of these groups was the Palestinian Liberation Front, the PLF.
It was loyal to a man called Abu Abbas and, while it was technically linked to the PLO, the main umbrella group led by Yasser Arafat, it often operated more independently and in this case, it's believed, without Arafat's direct authorisation.
So, to put it simply, it seemed like these men were trying to use the Achille Lauro as a bargaining chip.
They thought that, with almost a hundred hostages, including Americans, the Israelis would have no choice but to comply.
But there was a problem.
Both Israel and the United States had a very strict policy of not giving in to terrorist demands.
And with Syria refusing to let the Achille Lauro dock, the ship was left circling at sea, stuck in limbo, with armed men threatening to kill its passengers.
As the deadline approached, the tension on board the ship was unbearable.
Hostages sat in fear, not knowing if they would live or die.
The hijackers were growing more agitated.
The hours ticked by with no response.
As 3pm approached, the gunmen started to move.
By this point, the hostages had been shepherded to an upstairs lounge.
That is, all but one of the hostages.
One man, a 69-year-old American called Leon Klinghoffer, was confined to a wheelchair and had no way of making it up the stairs.
The gunman we can certainly use the word terrorists at this point had decided to let him stay there.
And shortly before 3pm, one of the terrorists returned to find him.
He wheeled Klinghoffer to the rear deck out of sight of the other hostages and shot him once in the chest and then in the head.
He ordered the ship's staff to throw his body into the sea and importantly, not to tell any of the other hostages what had happened.
When his wife Marilyn asked what had happened to her husband, the terrorists told her that he wasn't feeling well and had been taken to the ship's infirmary.
Don't worry, they told her, you'll see him soon.
The men informed the Syrian authorities that they had killed one of the hostages and would continue to do so until their demands were met.
Pass on the message to the Israelis, they said. but the Syrians refused.
Syria, it seemed, would be of no assistance.
A breakthrough came with the help of one of the men offered by Yasser Arafat to assist.
As a reminder, Arafat was the leader of the PLO and the terrorists said they were part of the PLF, a splinter group of the PLO.
One of these men, Abu Abbas, secretly sent a message to the ship using the code name Abu Khalid.
The message instructed the men to treat the hostages kindly and to return immediately to Port Said in Egypt.
When the hijackers heard this message, they reportedly responded very positively and immediately ordered the ship to turn around and head for Port Said as instructed.
They hadn't intended on hijacking the ship, they said.
They had planned to travel to Israel and launch an attack there in retaliation for the Israeli attack on the PLO headquarters in Tunis a week before.
But there had been a mistake and they'd had to change plans.
We'll release the hostages, don't worry, they said.
Now, the irony here is that the man who sent this message to the hijackers, Abu Khalid, was Abu Abbas, the man supposedly negotiating with the gunmen alongside the Egyptians and the Italians.
He was not some well-intentioned peace negotiator.
He was the leader of the PLF, and the very man who had planned and orchestrated the entire mission.
He was the terrorist's boss, not some kindly diplomat.
When the Americans joined the DOS and realised his role in the mission.
This created a delicate situation indeed.
He was a PLO loyalist, and much of the international community, including the United States and Italy, had been trying to foster closer relations with the PLO as its primary link to Palestine.
But this PLO loyalist had been outed as someone who the terrorists recognised by name, someone it looked highly likely had organised the entire mission.
Still, if the PLO were accused, there was the risk of the situation blowing up, and Abbas seemed like the best person to defuse it.
The ship neared Port Said, entering Egyptian territorial waters and making any kind of American military intervention impossible.
The captain radioed in to the Egyptian authorities and told them that everyone on board was safe and unharmed.
The terrorists would release the hostages on the condition that they would be granted safe passage out of Europe.
It seemed like diplomacy had prevailed.
The Italian foreign minister proudly boasted of Italy's role as a mediator in the crisis, diffusing an extremely delicate situation without a drop of blood being spilled.
In the afternoon of October 9th, the Achille Lauro arrived back in Port Said and the hijacking formally ended.
The gunmen released the hostages and, to the relief of the Italian and American authorities, the passengers walked free.
As you know, though, not every passenger walked free.
The captain had told the authorities that everyone was safe and well, but he knew that Klinghoffer had been murdered by the terrorists.
He had only lied because one of the terrorists was pointing a gun to his head.
And when he told the Italian authorities later that day about Klinghoffer, this added a whole new dimension to the situation.
The Egyptians, with the help of the Italian authorities, had allowed four murderers to get off scot-free and it looked like they were going to help them flee the country.
And, what's more, the murdered man was American.
The Americans were furious and demanded the Egyptian authorities prosecute the men.
Or to quote the American ambassador, we insist that they prosecute those sons of bitches.
But at this time the terrorists now outed as murderers were about to board a commercial flight out of the country to Tunis, where the PLF was headquartered.
So, to take stock, We have these four men getting on this plane, assisted by the Egyptian authorities.
In fact, it's not just the four men at this point.
It includes Abu Abbas by now, clearly the leader of the mission, but the man who was pretending to be working with the Egyptians and Italians to defuse the situation.
It's now clear that a man was murdered on the boat.
The Americans are furious. and the Italians are sort of stuck in the middle.
A plan is hatched to intercept the plane on its way to Tunis.
The Americans thought this would be possible because Egypt had pretty poor relations with Libya at this point, so the plane would have to go through international airspace.
And sure enough, as the Egypt airplane crossed the Mediterranean, four US Navy F-14 fighter jets pulled up alongside it and instructed it to follow them to a NATO base in Sicily.
The pilot tried to radio in to the Egyptian authorities, but the Americans had scrambled the airwaves, making communication impossible.
Being tailed by American fighter jets, the pilot had little choice but to agree.
It was forced to land at the NATO base at Sigonella on the Italian island of Sicily.
And this is where the story took an extraordinary twist.
The Americans expected to take custody of the hijackers immediately.
It was an American mission, a NATO airbase, and these men had killed an American citizen.
It was an American problem to resolve.
But the Italians refused.
The Achille Lauro was an Italian ship.
The passengers were mostly Italian citizens and the crime, the Italians argued had been committed under their jurisdiction.
Tensions escalated rapidly.
At one point, American and Italian soldiers faced each other on the runway at Sigonella, the Sicilian base, weapons loaded, in a standoff between two NATO allies.
Eventually, after tense negotiations and Italian promises that the men would be prosecuted, common sense prevailed.
The Italian authorities took custody of the hijackers, arrested them and later put them on trial in Italy.
Abu Abbas, however, slipped away.
Despite being the mastermind, he was allowed to leave Italy a free man, supposedly because there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute him at that point.
He flew on to Yugoslavia, then to the Middle East, and for years remained at large.
The four gunmen, though, would not escape justice.
In 1986, they were tried and convicted in an Italian court.
One received a 30-year sentence, two received life sentences and the fourth, who had cooperated with the investigators, received a shorter term.
And as for the Achille Lauro herself, it was not all plain sailing, as the expression goes.
In 1994, while sailing off the coast of Somalia en route to South Africa, and with almost 900 passengers on board, she caught fire.
The crew tried to fight the fire, but it spread uncontrollably.
The morning afterwards, the ship was evacuated.
Two passengers died in the process, as the rest were ushered away in lifeboats.
They watched as the Achille Lauro burned and slowly slipped between the waves, lost forever in the Arabian Sea.
And as for its legacy, it had consequences far beyond the tragedy of Leon Klinghoffer's death and the courtroom trials of the gunmen.
It shocked public opinion, hardened attitudes against negotiating with terrorists and pushed governments to act.
Shortly afterwards, the world's major powers had agreed the Suez Convention, a treaty that made ship hijacking an international crime.
It was also seriously damaging in Italo-American relations.
Italy's decision to let Abu Abbas walk free left Washington furious and exposed deep cracks in the NATO alliance.
And for Palestinians, the image of a murdered, wheelchair-bound terrorist was catastrophic, undermining Yasser Arafat's efforts to present the PLO as a credible diplomatic partner.
So, as a final thought, the Achille Lauro may now lay on the seabed rusting away, but its name remains tied to one of the most infamous acts of terrorism of the 1980s.
One in which only one person died, but that serves as a reminder of how a single act can shake governments, strain alliances and even change international law.
Okay then, that is it for today's episode on the Achille Lauro.
I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learned something new.
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode.
Do you remember the Achille Lauro crisis?
How could it have been handled differently?
And what do you think some of the long-lasting consequences have been?
I would love to know, and the place for that is our community forum, which is at communityleonardoenglishcom.
You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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