Vengeance Is Theirs : Leon Klinghoffer’s Daughters Win a First Round in Crusade to Avenge His Achille Lauro Death and to Open U.S. Courts to Terrorism Victims

The face flashed across the screen--a Palestinian, somewhere in the Middle East, smiling faintly.

Lisa Klinghoffer, six months pregnant, was in her Greenwich Village apartment watching television with her husband. She saw the face and went cold, stiffening as if someone had splashed ice water on her spine.

“I was paralyzed,” said Lisa, 38.

Then came the heat.

“I started shouting. There he was, five years later, Abul Abbas, in the news again,” she said, her throaty voice pitched and angry.

Five years ago, Abbas, the leader of a small guerrilla faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, masterminded the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. During the siege of the ship, Lisa Klinghoffer’s father, Leon, an elderly man in a wheelchair, was shot and pushed overboard.

“It just brought the whole thing back again, seeing him on the news,” Lisa said of Abbas, who made headlines again in June for masterminding a raid--aborted by Israeli soldiers--on beaches near Tel Aviv. “The whole five years that we’ve gone through, I mean. I realized that this was potentially a massacre of hundreds of families. Thousands of people would be going through what we go through every single day.”

Ilsa Klinghoffer, 32, speaks more softly than her older sister. She is the quieter, more measured one. “You have to understand,” she said, staring at her sister not so much for reassurance but more as a reminder of their stark tragedy, “we’re trying to gain justice. But our parents, I believe, would have wanted us to have happy lives, and families, and not let this paralyze us. But sometimes things simply overtake us.”

Two weeks ago, the Klinghoffer sisters were overtaken again. But for the first time, there was an ounce of satisfaction.

It came in a message on Lisa’s answering machine.

“Our lawyer called (and) said, ‘I just wanted to let you girls know we won (and have been legally permitted) to sue the PLO,’ ” recalled Lisa. “And that’s all he said. We sat there with our mouths opened. You don’t know how these things are going to turn out. We’ve had this lawsuit for all these years.”

Ilsa, almost inaudibly, inserted her own reaction. “It’s beyond what most people would try. People said to us ‘What? Sue the PLO? Are you crazy?’ You have to understand what our mother was like. She would have fought until the very end. And that’s what we’re doing.”

The image of an old man in a wheelchair shot and shoved into the Mediterranean has yet to fade from the American consciousness, even though there are fresher images of helpless victims and more recent terrorist events. There was the little American girl sprayed by gunfire at the El Al counter in Rome’s airport. Americans died during a similar melee in the Vienna airport. And there were the 259 people, mostly Americans, blown apart in a jumbo jet over Locherbie, Scotland.

Yet the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a crippled Jewish tourist on vacation in the Mediterranean, seemed in the 1980s to put a face on the tragedy of Americans getting caught in the cross-fire of the chaos of the Middle East as did no other event.

And now, in the 1990s, his daughters are trying to get the people responsible to pay.

Just last month, they won an initial step--the permission to proceed--in a civil lawsuit in federal court seeking damages from the PLO for their father’s death. Although their victory may be more symbolic than practical, it could pave the way for others to seek American-style revenge via the courts for terrorist-caused deaths.

Bert Amerman, a New Jersey high school principal whose brother died in the Locherbie bombing, said he hopes the Klinghoffers might lead the way for other families to seek retribution.

But more important, he wants government held accountable: President Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he said, must acknowledge that “Iran, Syria and other nations are involved in acts of terrorism and they (Western leaders) can’t do business with them (such governments) until they (acts of terrorism) stop.”

The Klinghoffer sisters--upper-class women schooled not in international diplomacy but in the rhythms of Manhattan’s fast-paced life and Jewish tradition--aren’t interested in the nuances of foreign policy.

They want to educate the world about terrorism through a foundation they have set up under the umbrella of the Anti-Defamation League.

And they want to discredit the PLO.

But more than anything, they are consumed by a desire for vengeance for their father’s death.

Abbas, in a press conference in Algiers, in 1988, discussed Leon Klinghoffer’s demise. “Maybe he was trying to swim for it,” Abbas was quoted as saying, again with a half-smile. Later, he compared the Achille Lauro hijacking to an accident that happens in the course of driving a car. Asked whether he regretted Klinghoffer’s death, Abbas replied: “Who is Klinghoffer? . . . I wish that the names of our victims and martyrs were as well known as the name Klinghoffer.”

Lisa Klinghoffer referred to those Abbas remarks in an interview last week, replying bitterly: “Nobody seems to understand that these people don’t value human life the way we do.”

She and her sister don’t distinguish between Abul Abbas’ open mockery and remarks made by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. The sisters are not interested that mainstream Palestinians may not approve of Abbas, although he is a member of the 15-person PLO Executive Council, or that Arafat has the impossible task of holding together a coalition of Palestinian groups while trying to maintain credibility before the world.

“My mother wanted to get the PLO any way possible and so do we,” said Lisa, whose mother died of colon cancer four months after surviving the 52-hour nightmare aboard the Achille Lauro. “She wanted to establish responsibility for my father’s death. And that’s what we want.”

Klinghoffer’s widow, Marilyn, filed a lawsuit against the cruise line and the PLO almost immediately after she got home from the hijacking. Despite the cancer that was overcoming her, she labored to learn how to stop terrorism and who was responsible for the Achille Lauro incident.

Before the House Foreign Relations subcommittee, Marilyn Klinghoffer, who was beaten by the Achille Lauro captors and later spit in their faces when she was identifying them for authorities in Italy, said she believed her husband’s death had made a difference in how Americans perceived their vulnerability abroad.

“What happened to the passengers on the Achille Lauro could happen to anyone,” she testified then.

A few months later, she was dead.

Ilsa Klinghoffer had planned to marry Paul Dworin, a magazine publisher, long before the hijacking incident. She had picked a date and place. Then, her father was gone.

“I wanted to cancel, but my mother insisted we get the dress and continue on,” recalled Ilsa, a slight woman with frosted blond curls. “Then, after she died, I wanted to cancel again. But I talked to the rabbi and my grandmother and they said you just have to go on.” And there was a wedding, scaled down to 150 guests, and Ilsa’s brother-in-law, Jerry Arbittier, walked her down the aisle.

Although the Klinghoffer daughters reached a financial settlement with the cruise line two years ago for an undisclosed amount, they have pursued the civil case against the PLO.

“We’re not in this for millions of dollars,” said Lisa, who talks every day on the phone to her sister and lives two blocks from her. “We’re in this to finally get someone to take responsibility.”

The federal judge’s decision that the PLO could be sued in an American court has been viewed by some experts as an important step in the war against terrorism.

“Maybe Western governments, including the U.S., have failed politically and militarily to put a stop to terrorism,” said a State Department official who asked not to be named. “Maybe this kind of suit could lead to a different deterrent. An economic one.”

But Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, disagreed. While it is one thing to win the right to sue the PLO, it’s another to win the case, he said, adding: “I think it’s going to be interesting to see if the court can determine how much control Yasser Arafat has over its constituent groups and people like Abul Abbas. . . . The PLO is one of the wealthiest terrorists groups in history. If you could win a settlement, they have a deep enough well that one can dip into and hurt them. But stop terrorism? I doubt it.”

Meantime, politicians in Washington are considering legislation to codify the right of American victims to seek civil damages from their foreign assailants.

There have, in fact, been many attempts by victims of torture and terrorism to sue for damages. But they have been mostly unsuccessful and experts believe they would fail as readily in litigation against terrorists.

The problem is that unlike the PLO, most terrorist groups are elusive. They don’t have property, cars or bank accounts in the United States.

Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and now the PLO’s attorney, argued to the court that the PLO couldn’t be compared to terrorist groups. He said the PLO is, in fact, a state and should be immune from prosecution under international law.

But U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton wrote of the PLO: “Although it claims the attributes of a state, it controls no defined territory or populace and is not recognized by the United States.”

The PLO itself long has denied responsibility for the Achille Lauro hijacking; the group’s advocates say that if PLO Chairman Arafat hadn’t mediated a peaceful resolution of the incident, many more of the 440 passengers caught aboard in the siege would have died.

Discussing the Klinghoffer case and American courts, Zuhdi Labib Terzi, the PLO’s permanent observer to the United Nations, said: “I don’t understand your system of justice. It is not logical.”

A seasoned diplomat who was raised in Jerusalem and studied law there in the 1940s, Terzi said Abul Abbas’ culpability for the incident is his alone, not the PLO’s.

“The PLO is the embodiment of the Palestinian people and it should not be blamed,” he said.

He compared Abbas to Adm. John Poindexter, former President Reagan’s national security adviser, who was convicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, and Col. Oliver North, also convicted in that scheme.

“If I were to hold the government of the United States responsible for every single act committed by an American, even if it was this Mr. Poindexter, or Col. South, or is it Col. North, where would the U.S. government end up?”

In an interview in the United Nations lounge reserved for members, Terzi leaned forward several times in his bamboo chair, when describing what he believes is a conspiratorial effort by the Klinghoffers and the U.S. government to discredit Palestinians.

“There is not an indictment of Abul Abbas in this country,” he noted. “Your government dropped it. Yet in the courts, they are seeking damages for the loss. The aim of the Klinghoffers and the U.S. government is strictly political and against the diplomatic trend of the times.”

He said the only assets the PLO has in the United States are its mission building on East 65th Street and a car, valued together at $360,000. But other experts have said the PLO’s holdings in this country may be considerably larger.

Terzi said the PLO had offered to include Klinghoffer in its list of “victims of the struggle,” but “his people” refused. “He is one of the martyrs of the conflict that is going on over the question of Palestine.”

Leon Klinghoffer, 69, had lived his days far from the fierce conflicts of the Middle East.

He was a small-appliance manufacturer who had worked first to overcome his modest Lower East Side beginnings, then labored for a decade to recover from two strokes. He was hard of hearing and spoke with slurred speech, but was determined to enjoy a normal life. His wife, a small woman 11 years younger than he, worked for a publishing concern and was the vocal one in the family. Together, they had a comfortable life, sending their daughters to private school and summer camps. They had an apartment in Greenwich Village, a weekend place on the Jersey shore and lots of good friends.

Their Mediterranean cruise, which ended in tragedy, was their 36th anniversary present to each other. It was to be a 12-day voyage on an aging pale-blue vessel with stops at the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Greece and historic Israel. The Klinghoffers had gone with nine friends with whom they had shared summers for decades in Long Branch, N.J.

“This was a happy holiday for our parents,” Lisa recalled. “They weren’t devil-may-care types. If they had had even an inkling of problems, if there had been any governmental warnings or anything, they wouldn’t have gone.”

Ilsa added: “My father, with all his problems, wanted to live more than anybody. And my mother, too. They never talked about death.”

The trouble aboard the Achille Lauro began a few days into the cruise when a ship waiter discovered four young Palestinian guerrillas cleaning their weapons in their room. Their plan had been to go ashore at the Israeli port of Ashod to take Israeli hostages but they panicked and took over the ship.

In 1986, an Italian court convicted the Palestinian hijackers and sentenced them to 30 years in prison. Abul Abbas and two others in the case were convicted, in absentia, and sentenced to life imprisonment. They remain fugitives.

The Klinghoffer sisters did not attend the trial in Genoa because the Italian government couldn’t guarantee their security.

“In my heart, I wanted to be there to bear witness,” said Lisa, who has never lived more than three miles from the place where she grew up in Greenwich Village. “But at the time, I was very vulnerable. People say my being there wouldn’t have changed the verdict, but I always felt that my being there would have made a difference. Maybe they would have gotten the maximum sentence.”

Later in the interview, the subject returns to the Arab-Jewish struggle and the Middle East peace negotiations that the President recently suspended because of the alleged PLO involvement in the Tel Aviv beach attack. Ilsa, a health administrator who has a 17-month-old son, had to return to work. Lisa, an artist, had a doctor’s appointment.

Yet they both lingered, their frustration keeping them.

“You know,” Lisa said finally, looking at her perfectly polished nails, “everybody wants peace in the world. But you have to know how to go about it and who you’re dealing with. In some cases, some people want it so badly that they don’t really care who they deal with, even murderers.”