In the 1986 Act the States awarded itself the right to ask politely for the murderer of an American to be extradited back to the States. If the answer was ‘No’, or seemingly endless delay amounting to a snub, that was the end of ‘Mr Nice Guy’. The USA had entitled itself to send in a covert team of agents, snatch the ‘perp’ and bring him back for trial.
As FBI terrorist-hunter John O’Neill put it when the act was passed, ‘From now on, host country approval has got jack shit to do with it.’ A joint CIA/FBI snatch of an alleged murderer of an American is called a ‘rendition’. There have been ten such very covert operations since the Act was passed under Ronald Reagan, and it all began because of an Italian cruise liner.
In October 1985 the Achille Lauro, out of Genoa, was cruising along the north coast of Egypt, with further stops on the Israeli coast in prospect, and carrying a mixed cargo of tourists, including some Americans.
She had been secretly boarded by four Palestinians from the Palestine Liberation Front, a terrorist group attached to Yasser Arafat’s PLO, then in exile in Tunisia.
The terrorists’ aim was not to capture the ship but to disembark at Ashdod, a stopping point in Israel, and take Israeli hostages there. But on 7 October, between Alexandria and Port Said, they were in one of their cabins, checking their weapons, when a steward walked in, saw the guns and started yelling. The four Palestinians panicked and hijacked the liner.
There followed four days of tense negotiations. In from Tunis flew Abu Abbas, claiming to be Arafat’s negotiator. Tel Aviv would have none of it, pointing out that Abu Abbas was the boss of the PLF, not a benign mediator. Eventually a deal was struck: the terrorists would get passage off the ship and an Egyptian airliner back to Tunis. The Italian captain confirmed at gunpoint no one had been hurt. He was forced to lie.
Once the ship was free it became clear that on Day Three the Palestinians had murdered an old American tourist, 79-year-old, wheelchair-bound New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer. They had shot him in the face and thrown him and his chair into the sea.
For Ronald Reagan that was it; all deals were off. But the killers were airborne, on their way home, in an airliner of a sovereign state, friendly to America and in international airspace; that is, untouchable. Or maybe not.
The flat-top USS Saratoga happened to be steaming south down the Adriatic, carrying F-16 Tomcats. As darkness fell the Egyptian airliner was found off Crete, heading west for Tunis. Out of the gloom four Tomcats suddenly flanked the airliner. The terrified Egyptian skipper asked for an emergency landing at Athens. Permission denied. The Tomcats signalled he should accompany them or face the consequences. The same EC2 Hawkeye, also off the Saratoga, that had found the Egyptian plane passed the messages between the fighters and the airliner.
The diversion ended when the airliner, with the killers and Abu Abbas, their leader, on board, landed under escort at the US base at Sigonella, Sicily. Then it became complicated.
Sigonella was a shared base: US navy and Italian air force. Technically it is Italian sovereign territory; the USA only pays rent. The government in Rome, in a pretty high state of excitement, claimed the right to try the terrorists. The Achille Lauro was theirs, the airbase theirs.
It took a personal call from President Reagan to the US Special Forces detachment at Sigonella to order them to back off and let the Italians have the Palestinians.
In due course, back in Genoa, home city of the liner, the small f
ry were sentenced. But their leader, Abu Abbas, flew out free as air on 12 October and is still at liberty.* The Italian Defence Minister resigned in disgust. The Premier at the time was Bettino Craxi. He later died in exile, also in Tunis, wanted for massive embezzlement while in office.
Reagan’s response to this perfidy was the Omnibus Act, nicknamed the ‘Never Again’ Act. It was not finally the bright kid from Wisconsin but the veteran FBI terrorist hunter Oliver ‘Buck’ Revell, in retirement, who took a good dinner off the old senator and told him about ‘renditions’.
Even then it was not thought that for Zilic a ‘rendition’ would ever be needed. Post-Milosevic, Yugoslavia was keen to return to the community of civilized nations. She needed large loans from the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere to rebuild her infrastructure after seventy-eight days of NATO bombing. Her new President Kostunica would surely regard it as a bagatelle to have Zilic arrested and extradited to the USA?
That certainly was the request Senator Lucas intended to proffer to Colin Powell and John Ashcroft. If worst came to worst, he would ask for a covert rendition to be authorized.
He had his writer-team prepare from the full 1995 report of the Tracker a one-page synopsis to explain everything from Ricky Colenso’s departure to Bosnia to try to help pitiful refugees to his presence in a lonely valley on 15 May 1995.
What happened in the valley that morning, as described by Milan Rajak, was compressed into two pages, the most distressing passages heavily highlighted. Fronted by a personal letter from himself, the file was edged and bound for easy reading.
That was something else Capitol Hill had taught him. The higher the office, the shorter the brief should be. In late April he got his face-to-face with both Cabinet secretaries.
Each listened with grave visage, pledged to read the brief and pass it to the appropriate department within their departments. And they did.
The USA has thirteen major intelligence (information) gathering agencies. Between them they probably garner 90 per cent of all the intelligence, licit and illicit, gathered on the entire planet in any twenty-four-hour period.
The sheer volume makes absorption, analysis, filtration, collation, storage and retrieval a problem of industrial proportions. Another problem is that they will not talk to each other.
American intelligence chiefs have been heard to mutter in a late-night bar that they would give their pensions for something like the British Joint Intelligence Committee.
The JIC meets weekly in London under the chairmanship of a veteran and trusted mandarin to bring together the smaller country’s four agencies: the Secret Intelligence Service (foreign); the Security Service (home); the Government Communications HQ (SIGINT, the listeners); and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.
Sharing intel and progress can prevent duplication and waste, but its main aim is to see if fragments of information learned in different places by different people could form the jigsaw puzzle that makes up the picture everyone is looking for.
Senator Lucas’s report went to six of the agencies and each obediently scoured their archives to see what, if anything, they had learned and filed about a Yugoslav gangster called Zoran Zilic.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, known as ATF, had nothing. He had never operated in the USA and ATF rarely if ever goes abroad.
The other five were Defence Agency (DIA), who will have an interest in any arms dealer; National Security Agency (NSA), the biggest of them all, working out of their ‘Black Chamber’ in Annapolis Junction, Maryland, listening to trillions of words a day, spoken, emailed or faxed, with technology almost beyond science fiction; Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who will have an interest in anyone who has ever trafficked narcotics anywhere in the world; the FBI (of course), and the CIA. Both the latter spearhead the permanent search for knowledge about terrorists, killers, warlords, hostile regimes, whatever.
It took a week or more and April slipped into May. But because the order came right from the top, the searches were thorough.