Luck, Planning: Keys to Capture of Hijackers : White House Calls Action a ‘Strong Message’ to Terrorists and Pledges to ‘Do This Again’

The astonishing airborne capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro was possible thanks largely to a combination of lucky circumstances--but also because of increased attention and planning that the Reagan Administration has devoted to counterterrorist tactics, U.S. officials and other experts said Thursday.

After five years of frustration during which President Reagan often threatened to use force against terrorists but never did, the fleeing Palestinian hijackers presented a ready target in an area where the United States had military forces available and a friendly political environment in which to use them.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said that the capture “should send a message, and a strong one, that we will do what is necessary to stop terrorists.”

New Opportunity Remote

“We will do this again,” Speakes promised. “If the opportunity presents itself, we will do exactly the same thing again.”

But several experts on terrorism--and, privately, some Administration officials as well--cautioned that the opportunity is unlikely to arise again soon.

The capture of the Italian liner’s hijackers was clearly a landmark in the Administration’s long effort to devise an effective policy to fight international terrorism, they said, but it cannot serve as an exact model for future incidents.

“We won’t always be this lucky,” said Ray S. Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA.

The Administration was lucky because the terrorists had no secure base, such as Beirut or Tehran, into which they could disappear, as did the perpetrators of earlier hijackings.

It was luckier still that the terrorists ended their shipborne odyssey in Egypt, where the United States has considerable intelligence assets, and that they sought refuge by flying over the Mediterranean, where the U.S. 6th Fleet was able to detect their path.

Nevertheless, the operation displayed the Administration’s ability to mobilize military forces against terrorists, its willingness to order them into action and its ability to carry out a capture without using unnecessary force.

“This was a wonderful achievement,” said Michael Vlahos, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “What was striking was . . . the fluency with which the United States used force, and used force in a way that minimized the disruption to other countries in the area.”

Cline agreed: “This could begin to turn the tide. It establishes a precedent of using force to capture terrorists and for us that’s practically a first.”

The successful capture of the Egyptair jet, forced off course by U.S. F-14 fighters while it flew toward Tunis, touched off jubilation in the Pentagon, where officials long have waited for a chance to erase the memory of the last major U.S. counterterrorist strike, the disastrous attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

Special Forces Unused

Ironically, though, the mission did not require any of the sophisticated “special operations” forces the Pentagon has assembled laboriously and trained since 1980. Officials said that units of the secret counterterrorist Delta Force were standing by in the Mediterranean, but except for the Navy commandos who helped surround the plane when it landed in Sicily, no special forces apparently were used.

Instead, a combination of factors gave the U.S. Navy aviators their opportunity to simply intercept the plane in the air and force it to land at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization air base in Sicily.

From the beginning of their strange seaborne hijacking Monday, the four Palestinian terrorists were operating without the benefit of a state sponsor. Neither Egypt nor Syria nor Lebanon offered them a safe haven from which they could press their demands and into which they could finally escape.

The terrorists who seized a Kuwaiti jet last December were able to land in a relatively hospitable Tehran, and the hijackers of TWA Flight 847 last summer actually took on reinforcements and unloaded their hostages in the Shia Muslim sector of Beirut.

But the Palestinian guerrillas who took over the Achille Lauro were turned away from several Mediterranean harbors, even Syria’s port of Tartus. That, in the words of a Pentagon official, made them “a ship without a country.”

Egypt Was Uncomfortable

Later, when the hijackers surrendered to Egyptian officials, the government of President Hosni Mubarak was visibly uncomfortable with their presence. Egypt said that it would give them safe passage to another country and claimed that they were gone as early as Thursday morning--when, in fact, the terrorists were still in Cairo for most of the day.

The daylong delay in the hijackers’ takeoff, which one official said may have been caused by difficulty in finding a country willing to accept them, was also a boon to the United States.

“The fact that they delayed the takeoff of the plane . . . made it possible for the Administration to act,” Vlahos said.

And the fact that the hijackers were at Al Maza airfield just east of Cairo, where the United States has one of its largest embassies--and one of the CIA’s largest “stations” in the Middle East--probably also helped.

“They were in an airport where the plane could be easily observed,” Vlahos noted.

Ships of the 6th Fleet were already in place off the Egyptian coast when the United States detected the plane’s takeoff, and jets from the carrier Saratoga apparently approached it within an hour, Speakes said. The F-14s were able to intercept the plane over international waters. Their task would have been more difficult, and perhaps politically impossible, had the jet flown overland--for example, to neighboring Libya.

Landing Rights Denied

The action of Greece and Tunisia--and possibly other countries--in denying landing rights was key. If the terrorists had quickly found an airport willing to accept them, Speakes said, “it would be my judgment that (the capture) would not have happened.”

Finally, of course, the Pentagon planned its mission well, the 6th Fleet was in position to help, and the Saratoga’s pilots quickly found the Egyptair jet and talked it into Sicily without firing a shot.

“It was a remarkable feat,” said Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. “I think the system worked extraordinarily well.”

Did Egypt secretly help the United States--while deliberately appearing uncooperative--to escape the anger of the terrorists’ allies?

“I can categorically deny that there was any deal between Egypt and the United States on this matter,” Speakes said.