Piecing Together the Drama

By Jill Smolowe

Bit by bit, dramatic details of the Achille Lauro affair emerged last week, providing answers to, and fresh questions about, what really happened during the six-day crisis. From the returning passengers and crew came a vivid account of the horror aboard the Italian cruise ship. Marilyn Klinghoffer, 59, returning home to New York City, recalled the anxious hours she spent on an upper deck with machine guns pointed at her head. The hijackers, she recounted, "kept popping their guns and playing with grenades on their belts, like little kids." Falsely told by the terrorists that her husband was in the ship's infirmary, she tried to sneak there for a visit, but was stopped. Only after the hijackers abandoned ship, she said, did she learn that her husband Leon had been slain.

Joaquim Pineiro Da Silva, 27, a Portuguese cabin steward, learned of the slaying after one of the terrorists entered the ship's main lounge and motioned to him and Ferruccio Alberti, the cruise hairdresser. The two men were led to the upper deck, where they found Klinghoffer's body lying facedown in a pool of blood beside his overturned wheelchair. The terrorist gestured that they were to toss both the body and the wheelchair overboard. After hearing the body splash in the waters below, neither man looked over the rail. "I wanted to break into tears, but was unable to," Da Silva recalled last week.

According to reports, the killer was the youngest of the four hijackers. He had been considered "the good terrorist" because he granted bathroom privileges. Captain Gerardo de Rosa, who falsely radioed that no one on board had been harmed, claimed last week that he did not know for certain of the murder until the hijacking ended. "No one could talk openly to me," he said, "since we were constantly covered by a machine gun."

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in his interview with TIME last Saturday, revealed that he knew of the Klinghoffer murder when he dispatched the hijackers to Tunisia. But he heatedly denied that he had lied when he said, a day before they left for Tunis, that they were no longer in Egypt. They had been sent somewhere else first, he claimed, though he would not reveal where, in order to be prosecuted by the P.L.O. But when he discovered that the P.L.O. had no responsible authority to receive them, he recalled the four men to Egypt and eventually sent them on to P.L.O. officials in Tunisia.

Details also emerged of the planning of the U.S. interception, some courtesy of a ham radio operator in Chicago who eavesdropped on one of the six conversations between President Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. At the time, the two were aloft in separate aircraft, but Weinberger's Gulfstream C-20 transport had not yet been fitted with a scrambler fully compatible with that on Air Force One. "Weinberger made the comment that it may take shots across the bow," the brother of the ham operator told reporters. "The President said, in essence, I don't care what it takes, I want that plane brought down in friendly territory." Pentagon officials said last week that Weinberger was playing the role of devil's advocate and when Reagan gave the go-ahead, he readily responded, "Yes, sir."

Before Reagan approved the mission, TIME has learned, Israel was asked to help back it up. Major General Uri Simhoni, the Israeli defense attache in Washington, promised that if the U.S. plan went awry, "we will intercept (the Egyptian pilot) and force him to land at one of our air force bases in the Negev."

The Egyptian pilot said that the four U.S. F-14 jet fighters had threatened to fire if he did not cooperate. Abul Abbas, in an interview with Yugoslav Journalist Dobrica Pivnicki last week, hinted that shots were fired. "Suddenly, we heard a series of unusual sounds, and we perceived the flashes of shots," he said. A senior U.S. official firmly countered, "We did not fire a shot." No warning shots, no tracers? "Nothing except some very unmistakable English."

When Italian controllers denied permission for the intercepted EgyptAir Boeing 737 to land at the Sigonella air base in Sicily, the American military escorts declared a "fuel emergency" and ordered the 737 down. The pilot aborted his first approach. But he swung around, came in again and soon found himself surrounded by Italian carabinieri and some 50 U.S. Delta Force commandos, who had piled out of U.S. C-141 transport planes that had landed within moments of the EgyptAir craft and were proceeding on orders from the White House to take custody of the terrorists.

The Italian and American armed forces both converged on the 737. When it ; became clear that the Italian paramilitary forces did not plan to surrender custody of the terrorists, Major General Carl W. Stiner and an Italian colonel got into a sharp debate. The U.S. commandos, said a Washington official, "were pulling back the bolts" on their rifles. Abbas, in his Yugoslav interview, concurred. "American and Italian soldiers were threatening each other with their weapons, ready to shoot," he said.

After the commandos were ordered by Washington to stand down, Stiner refused to give up entirely. When the 737 took off for Rome 17 hours later, carrying Abbas and another Palestinian official, Stiner hopped into a T-39 trainer jet. He took off from a taxiway without tower permission and shadowed the 737 to Rome, where he made an emergency landing. In his resignation speech last week, Prime Minister Bettino Craxi announced that Italy had filed a protest over both the T-39's landing and the pursuit of the 737 by an F-14 to within 25 miles of Rome. In any event, Abbas proved victorious in the game of cat and mouse. He soon headed for Belgrade, leaving a trail of diplomatic disputes in his wake.

With reporting by David Halevy and Bruce van Voorst/ Washington