The Real Truth About F-14 Tomcats and the Achille Lauro Hijacking

The palestine liberation front was founded by muhammad zaidan better known as abu abbas in 1977. in the late summer of 1985 abbas and a handful of his plf accomplices came up with a terrorist plot to hijack the italian luxury line of the achilles lauro and then use it against israeli targets during a planned port call to ashdod israel so in october 5th 1985 four plf terrorists led by a guy named joseph majed mulkey boarded the kililaro in genoa italy using false passports and representing that they were tourists from latin

america two days later the achille lauro pulled into alexandria egypt and disembarked 635 of the 750 passengers to do a tour of the pyramids the plan was as those who disembarked toward the pyramids the achille lauro was going to relocate to port saeed once the tour of the pyramids was done they jumped back on the bus and joined the ship at port saeed now several of the passengers later remarked that although these four represented themselves as being latin american none of them could speak spanish also they smelled of gasoline but it’s

about that nobody brought that to the attention of the crew or made a big deal out of it so as the ship pulled out of alexandria one of the stewards was bringing a bowl of complimentary fruit to the stateroom of the four terrorists and he caught them cleaning their weapons it turns out they had hidden those weapons in the gas tank of an automobile and that’s why they smelled like gas so they were trying to clean that off of the weapons before they carried out the main part of their mission so at that point the

terrorists just decided to hijack the ship and so they fired into the air and had the stewart take him up to the bridge ordered the captain to take him to tardis syria along the way the terrorists start going through passengers passports looking for jewish or american passengers and they start to separate the passengers accordingly one of the passengers is a retired jewish american named leon klinghoffer and he’s wheelchair-bound now they arrive off the coast of syria and the syrian government tells him basically you can’t dock here

so as a result of that ruling the terrorists fly into a fit of rage and moki winds up shooting klingoffer in his wheelchair once in the head once in the chest and then he has the crew of the achille laurel dump the wheelchair and klingoffer’s dead body over the side now no officials outside the ship know that this has happened yet so at this point yasir arafat head of the plo the palestine liberation organization of which the plf is affiliated starts to negotiate with the egyptian government arafat sent a delegation to negotiate

with the egyptians the delegation included abu abbas it is unclear whether arafat knew that abbas had been the mastermind of the hijacking the reagan administration is also very interested in what’s going on here although again nobody knows that klingoffer has been killed yet so meanwhile in the western mediterranean the uss saratoga with carrier airwing 17 aboard is finishing up a major nato exercise called display of determination once the exercise wraps up they’re headed for dubrovnik for a port call at that time dubrovnik was

part of yugoslavia now it’s part of croatia some well-earned liberty coming up but at the same time they’re aware of the fact that the kililaro has been hijacked and they’ve also been made aware that there are american passengers aboard so the saratoga had been on deployment since august of 1985. it was one of the older carriers in the american fleet at this time kag 17 was comprised of two f-14 squadrons the b devilers vf103 the sluggers as well as two a7 squadrons v81 sunliners v83 rampagers one a6 squadron the v85 black falcons

one ea-6b prowler squadron the vaq-137 rooks an s3 squadron vs30 diamond cutters an e2 squadron vaw-125 tiger tails and the helicopter squadron was an sh-3c king squadron the hs3 tridents the saratoga enters the adriatic still heading for dubrovnik but keeping an eye on the situation with the achilles they prepare two s3s to try to find the achilles but before those estuaries launch they get word that the achille laro has docked at port saeed so after a day of negotiation between the plo the egyptians the israelis and the americans

and the italians they brokered a solution which was they were going to let everyone go on the idea that nobody had been hurt and they were going to release the terrorists basically under their own recognizance so kelly laro pulls into port the four terrorists jump into a waiting harper patrol craft and make their escape the american ambassador to egypt comes aboard and now realizes that leon klinghoffer has been murdered in fact he sees blood on the side of the hull and he’s enraged he calls president reagan

and now reagan wants those terrorists brought to justice he goes to president mubarak mubarak and the egyptian officials say sorry it’s too late they’re already gone which turns out to be a lie so meanwhile centcom led by general carl steiner mobilizes seal team six and delta and they make ready to do whatever is necessary at the same time the uss saratoga is told to turn around you’re not going to dubrovnik at least not right away and the air wing goes into an alert 60 status which means be ready to launch two tomcats and an e2

within 60 minutes so the situation on the ground is developing very rapidly and the national security council gets word that in fact the terrorists are planning to board an egypt air 737 and fly to tunisia and one of the navy officers on the national security team says hey why don’t we pull a yamamoto which was a reference to when emerald yamamoto’s airplane was intercepted during world war ii and shot down so president reagan thinks that’s a great idea he wanted to make sure that what happened to robert stethem navy

diver who was shot in cold blood on the tarmac of the beirut airport didn’t happen again so as night falls in the mediterranean the air wing gets the order launch the alert 60 and within 20 some minutes two vf74 f14s and a tiger tail e2r airborne now they’re not sure what their mission is yet they’re loaded with sidewinder missiles and one of the tomcats has tracers in the event they have to signal the airliner by shooting across its nose so with his tomcats airborne now the battlegroup commander starts to formulate a plant the plan is

to create a dragnet between cairo and tunis tunisia one of the assumptions is the libyans will not allow this egypt air 737 to fly through its airspace so that narrows the window a little bit but it’s still like trying to find a needle in a haystack as one of the e2 controllers framed it later so it turns out that one of the vf74 airplanes that launched launched without a radar which pissed off the e2 controller and so they were put in the penalty box that’s how the sortie wars between sister squadrons used to go you wanted to launch first

and i can just hear the conversation between the pilot and the rio that airplane when the rio announced that his radar wasn’t working i’m sure the pilot who is probably the senior of the two just said i don’t care we’re launching first and that ultimately played out poorly for them meanwhile four vf-103 airplanes have launched including an airplane with a tarps pod reconnaissance pod mounted to the bottom of the airplane so the guy who probably had the best picture overall is the skipper of the tiger tails the e2

squadron and he launches in a second e2 relieves the first e2 so now he’s the intercept coordinator they establish a cap station south of crete opposing race tracks two sections of vf-103 airplanes they’re flying with their lights out so as not to attract attention while they do intercepts so remember these are the days before night vision devices so if you’re flying around without your any collision lights on nobody can see you so the e2 winds up vectoring the 103 slugger airplanes on a number of contacts so they’d run the intercept using the

radar go into pulse mode to pull it behind and then get close enough to shine a flashlight from the rear cockpit on the vertical stabilizer of the airplane and id what it is so the first three airplanes intercepted were not the egypt air 737 there were a variety of of commercial airplanes and transports that by the way were flying on the airways without their lights on which kind of surprised the american air crews that so many airplanes were flying through the sky without any any collision lights on they also got word from the e-2 that floggers

had launched out of libya but when they started to turn to pursue them those floggers immediately landed so finally with the fourth intercept a vf103 section brackets the tails from behind gets close enough so one of the rios can shine his flashlight on the tail and they identify the egypt air tail number which happens to be two eight four three so at that point commander zia the skipper of the tiger tails in one of the e2s goes up the vhf frequency that he believes the egypt air 737 crew is on and says 2843 this is tigertail 603 over he says

that several times gets no response finally the egypt air pilots answer the call so commander zia says egypt air 2843 you are being escorted by two f-14s you are directed proceed to and land immediately at sigonella sicily over the egypt air pilots are confused to put it mildly and they respond say again who is calling and so zia says this is tiger tale 603.

 i advise you are directed to land immediately proceed immediately to sigonella sicily you are being escorted by two f-14 interceptor aircraft vector vector280 for sigonella sicily over so zia winds up saying this a couple more times and with no response he goes up the uhf frequency and directs the sluggers to pull forward and turn your lights on and so they do that and it definitely gets the attention of the pilots as well as everybody else in that egypt air airplane so the egypt air pilots comp would say turning right heading 280. so then the egypt air

pilots complained to commander z that the tomcats are too close it’s unclear whether egypt air knows that tiger tail is not a tomcat doesn’t really matter so he says okay we’ll back away and then he directs the tomcats to give him a little more room which they do so it takes them about an hour and a half to fly from where they intercept the airplanes to sicily along the way they’re trying to communicate with italian controllers and the italians are acting like they have no idea of what’s going on and they’re refusing to let the americans

and this egypt air airplane into their airspace so as this continues the italians say okay you cannot land at sigonella we want you to land at catania which is slightly to the north east of sigonella and i’ve landed at sigonella a number of times during my career it’s a great airfield we used to have p3s anti-submarine warfare airplanes permanently based there back in the cold war days so that’s where the americans wanted to go they did not want to go to catania and oh by the way a c-141 full of sealed team six was already on

deck there waiting for the egypt air airplane to arrive so the tomcats are now talking to the various agencies and they just basically say we’re landing at sigonella one of the tomcats declares an emergency for low fuel so that sort of trumps anything else the 737 pilot is so flustered he winds up getting too low so he waves off the first approach to sigonella tomcats follow him around second time he lands right behind him a second c-141 lands this one has delta force on it so you’ve got two airplanes full of tier one

special operators ready to grab these terrorists now meanwhile the italians have mobilized the carbonyri which is their special police force there’s 300 carbonyri and we have about 60 special operators on these two c-141s the tomcats do not land they’re orbiting overhead in fact the vf 103 airplane took this picture and here’s a tarps picture taken by the ad5 which is the ir camera the infrared camera that’s one of the three cameras on the tarps pod so on this you can see the 737 in the center of the picture and

you can see both of the 141s parked on one of the runways so this is about the time that the standoff between the americans and the italians was getting very tense so obviously the state department and the white house are in comms with the ambassador and the prime minister of italy and the italians are seriously pissed off the americans dragged them into this situation which sort of ignored the fact that the achillera was an italian ship so the stand up between the americans and the italians lasts about six hours so finally about 4 30 in

the morning local time they agreed to allow the carbunieri to board the airplane and grab the terrace at that point they realize that among those on the 737 is abu abbas the mastermind of this terrorist plot so that raises the stakes as far as the americans are concerned that evening an italian airplane launches out of sigonella for rome so the americans are monitoring it they launch behind the italians in an air force t-39 and as a result of them trailing the italians the italians call for their f-104s out of joya de cole an

italian air base on the east coast of italy i’ve also landed there once where i had a broken f-14 back when i was aboard the uss america great base but they launched these f-104s to escort the t-39 that was escorting this italian airplane that had the terrorists aboard heading for rome in response to that the americans launched a section of f-14s to escort the f-104s in company with a prowler so this is causing all kinds of gnashing of teeth the americans are told to stand down that they are not authorized in the

airspace they wind up using the prowler to jam the air control radar to just sort of make a graceful exit and head back to saratoga and then the ship pulled into dubrovnik the next day so the epilogue is the italian prime minister patino croxie let abu abbas go boss was ultimately captured by u.s forces in march of 2004 as he tried to get out of baghdad and head for syria the circumstances of his death are unclear the americans claimed he died of natural causes in their custody so overall this showed a mid 80s

carrier strike group at its best the tomcat particularly doing its thing to thwart terrorists getting away with the murder of an american citizen and although there were a few perturbations along the way ultimately what president ronald reagan said at the press conference following the event proved to be true you can run but you can’t hide all right that’ll do it for this episode if you’re a first-time viewer please ring the bell and become a subscriber so you don’t miss anything give me the likes and comment check the links below for merch and

where to get the punks trilogy my first three novels about a tomcat squadron that were just reissued by the naval institute press if you’d like to support the channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com carol in the meantime i look forward to talking to you again soon [Music] you