5 Hours From Reagan’s OK to Sicily Landing : Interception: 737 Pilot Had Little Choice

The Navy F-14 fighters that knifed through the night Thursday to intercept an Egyptian airliner and its terrorist passengers had permission from President Reagan to fire warning shots if necessary to persuade the pilot to follow them to an air base in Sicily, U.S. officials said Friday.

Recounting the confrontation over the Mediterranean, the Administration officials said that the Navy pilots were under instructions not to shoot down the Egyptian plane carrying the four Palestinians who had hijacked an Italian cruise ship and murdered an elderly American tourist. But the four Tomcat fighters could and did lock into such a tight formation around the unsuspecting 737 before flicking on their running lights, that the Egyptian pilot could only obey or risk collision.

And, according to Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., at the instant the fighters flipped on their lights, the Egyptian pilot’s radio erupted with orders from an airborne Navy command post to follow the interceptors to Sicily “or else.”

The U.S. warplanes fired neither their Phoenix missiles nor their cannons, but the instructions were so stern, one U.S. official said, that “no aircraft pilot is going to ignore such warnings.”

The successful capture of the hijackers, hailed Friday as a signal victory in the often-frustrating U.S. campaign to combat terrorism, was part of an operation so hastily assembled that its planners did not even have time to give it a code name.

According to a reconstruction of the events based on interviews with a range of Pentagon, White House and State Department officials, the operation moved with extraordinary speed:

--Within 45 minutes after Reagan, huddling with aides at a Sara Lee bakery in Chicago where he was delivering a speech, approved the broad outlines for the possible interception, U.S. warplanes were launched from the aircraft carrier Saratoga as it steamed through the Ionian Sea south of Greece and swiftly positioned themselves above the wine-dark Mediterranean.

--About three hours later, as Air Force One flew through the autumn afternoon back to Washington, Reagan--informed that an airliner bearing the terrorists had taken off from an airfield in Egypt--gave the final order to intercept.

--And barely five hours after plans for the operation were given preliminary presidential approval, the terrorists were on the ground in Sicily and in the custody of U.S. and Italian troops.

America, the President declared Friday, had “sent a message to terrorists everywhere . . . ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’ ”

By dinnertime, Thursday was a day of triumph for Reagan. But it had begun with an early morning presidential speech-making trip to cold, drizzly Chicago.

According to aides, Reagan set out deeply frustrated about the possibility that the hijackers would go free. The aides said that before the Egyptians had engineered the surrender of the terrorists and the release of the cruise liner, Reagan had set in motion a possible military action to rescue the 500-plus hostages from the ship.

Helicopter Assault Plan

The President himself told a group of high school students in Chicago that “we had moved, we were ready and prepared and then” the Egyptians negotiated the release of the hostages. Administration officials said Friday that alternative plans had been drafted to overwhelm the hijackers with a helicopter assault or to to have Navy Seals board the ship stealthily from the ocean.

What Reagan did not tell the students was that a short time before, after he finished a long-planned speech to about 3,000 bakery employees gathered in a Sara Lee warehouse, national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane had advised him of intelligence reports that the hijackers soon would leave Egypt by airliner, apparently bound for Tunis.

McFarlane outlined a four-part mission defined by a Pentagon official as “locate, intercept, positively identify and then escort the aircraft and hijackers to a directed landing at Sigonella airfield” in Sicily.

As McFarlane recalled it at a briefing Friday, Reagan had questions about “risks, possible gains, losses and the possible attitudes of and assistance to be offered by other countries,” as well as what-if concerns should the scenario go awry.

“As he was being briefed, he was obviously very interested in staying very much informed . . . and asked often: ‘Where does it stand now? Now? Now?’ And occasionally with questions, ‘Well, what about this?’ . . . and ‘What else can be done?’ ”

About 1:30 p.m., officials said, the President gave “a general, in-principle approval to proceed” with the order not to “execute the plan without direction from me.”

Swept-Wing Fighters

The Pentagon scrambled. From gray offices along the Potomac, orders went through the chain of command to the Saratoga. By 2:15 p.m. EDT--it was already night in the Mediterranean--the carrier had launched four F-14s, the swept-wing fighters capable of flying twice the speed of sound, as well as one twin-prop E-2C flying command post. Eventually, three more F-14s and another E-2C would be launched, along with four KA6D tankers for refueling.

Totally blacked out and running under full radio silence, the U.S. planes headed to a location south of Crete “and loitered there until the Egyptian plane took off,” Navy Secretary Lehman said Friday in an interview with Cable News Network.

It was then, at 4:37 p.m. EDT, that Reagan gave the final green light.

The E-2C, with its antennas arrayed in a disc mounted atop the fuselage, began checking out aircraft in the area. It “sorted out, in total darkness, sorted out which aircraft was which,” Lehman said.

Once it singled out the Egyptian 737, he added, it “computed the tracks that it would be proceeding on and then vectored the F-14 interceptors . . . in total darkness and total silence and total lights out.”

“We knew where they were, they didn’t know we were there,” another Pentagon official said. While being shadowed surreptitiously, the 737 sought, and was denied, permission to land in Tunis, turned toward Greece and was denied permission to land there.

Lights On

Then, as one of the E-2Cs contacted the 737 by radio, the F-14s surrounding the Egyptian plane flipped on their wing and tail lights. The Pentagon did not release a transcript of the plane-to-plane conversations, but Lehman said, “The E-2C told the Egyptian airplane to head for Sigonella or else, and to follow the lead of the F-14s which were flying in close wing-on-wing formation surrounding the 737.”

The F-14s, meanwhile, were using “standard . . . well-rehearsed, international” signals that involved tipping wings, a Pentagon official said. He said the 737’s pilot tried unsuccessfully to contact Egyptian authorities by radio, but he refused to say whether the E-2C used electronic jamming devices to block such communications.

Flying at 34,000 feet, with fighters almost touching its wings to the port and starboard, forward and aft, the passenger jet had no good choices. It could neither outrun nor outmaneuver the swift, sleek interceptors. And to try to steer its own course would have quickly brought it into a collision with one of the warplanes.

At about 6:10 p.m. EDT, “the Egyptian crew . . . complied with the inevitable and followed the lead F-14 into Sigonella,” Lehman said.