3 U.S. Officers’ Malta Role Described as Liaison

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said Tuesday that three U.S. officers accompanied Egyptian commandos to Malta, where the commandos later stormed a hijacked EgyptAir jet, but he said the officers were on the mission for “liaison purposes.”

The three Americans, including Gen. Robert D. Weigand, former commander of a Special Forces training center at Ft. Bragg, N.C., flew with the Egyptian commandos from Cairo but did not participate in the storming of the plane, the State and Defense departments disclosed Monday.

In an interview from Brussels with NBC’s “Today” show, Weinberger also said the U.S. officers could not have prevented the loss of 58 lives when the four hijackers threw grenades at the passengers as the commandos stormed the airplane Nov. 24.

Two Others Murdered

The hijackers killed two other passengers before the raid by shooting them in the head.

“I think the large loss of life was caused by the suicidal impulses of the hijackers, who threw hand grenades in an extremely confined narrow area when they must have known that that would cause their own injury or death as well as the deaths of a great many people nearby,” Weinberger said.

Weinberger, who was attending a meeting of NATO defense ministers here, refused to provide further details on the operation.

‘Deal With It Quickly’

“The best way to deal with (terrorism) is to deal with it quickly and in as effective a manner as possible, and that clearly involves not discussing before, during or after what we would do or how we would do it,” he said.

Pentagon sources said that while the Egyptian commandos flew aboard a C-130 transport to Malta, several F-18 fighters and an E-2 surveillance plane based aboard the aircraft carrier Coral Sea were flown to Sigonella, Sicily.

“They sat there in case they were needed,” one source said. “The Egyptians were concerned the Libyans might find out about the C-130 and try to intercept it.”

‘As a Contingency’

The source said the U.S. aircraft were flown to Italy to be near the C-130 “more or less as a contingency. . . . “ They were not called upon to defend the transport airplane, the source said, adding, “I don’t think they ever got near it.”

The Coral Sea was in the eastern Mediterranean near Lebanon at the time, the source said.

However, another source said several Air Force planes were airborne in the area when wounded Egyptian commandos were flown home.

Report of U.S. Aid

Late last week, a senior Maltese official said the U.S. officers had helped coordinate the Egyptian commando assault on the airliner.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said Tuesday that “in our judgment, the use or non-use of any particular form of U.S. assistance was not a determining factor in the execution of this difficult rescue operation.”

Asked if the outcome might have been different with U.S. help, Redman reiterated U.S. support for “the difficult decision” made by the Egyptians to storm the plane and said all the deaths were the responsibility of the hijackers.