16 The File

Sen. Peter Lucas was an old hand on Capitol Hill. He knew that if he were going to secure any official action as a result of the file on Ricky Colenso and the confession of Milan Rajak, he would have to take it high, right to the top.

Operating with section or department heads would not work. The entire mindset of civil servants at that level was to pass the buck to another department. It was always someone else's job. Only a flat instruction from the top floor would achieve a result.

As a Republican senator and friend over many years of George Bush Sr., Peter Lucas could get to the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the new attorney general, John Ashcroft. That would cover State and Justice, the two departments likely to be able to do anything.

Even then, it was not that simple. Cabinet secretaries did not want to be brought problems and questions; they preferred problems and solutions. Extradition was not his speciality. He needed to find out what the United States could do and ought to do in such a situation. That needed research, and he had a team of young interns for precisely that purpose. He set them to work. His best ferret, a bright girl from Wisconsin, came back a week later. "This animal Zilic is arrestable and transferable to the United States under the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984," she said.

The passage she had discovered came from the Congressional Hearing on Intelligence and Security of 1997. Specifically the speaker had been Robert M. Bryant, assistant director of the FBI, addressing the House Committee on Crime.

"I've highlighted the relevant passages, Senator," she said. He thanked her and looked at the text she laid before him.

"The FBI's extraterritorial responsibilities date back to the mid1980s when Congress first passed laws authorising the FBI to exercise federal jurisdiction overseas when a U.S. national is murdered," Mr. Bryant had said four years earlier.

Behind the bland language was a staggering act that the rest of the world had largely ignored and most U.S. citizens as well. Prior to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the global presumption was that if a murder was committed, whether in France or in Mongolia, only the French or Mongolian governments had jurisdiction to pursue, arrest, and try the killer. That applied whether the victim was French, Mongolian, or a visiting American.

The United States had simply arrogated to itself the right to decide that if you kill an American citizen anywhere in the world, you might as well have killed him on Broadway. Meaning U. S. jurisdiction covers the whole planet. No international conference conceded this; the United States simply said so. Then Mr. Bryant went further.

"Éand the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986 established a new extraterritorial statute pertaining to terrorist acts conducted abroad against U.S. citizens.

*Not a problem*, thought the senator. *Zilic was not a Yugoslav army serviceman nor a policeman. He was freelance, and the title of terrorist will stick. He can be extradited to the United States under both statutes.*

He read on: "Upon the approval of the host country, the FBI has the legal authority to deploy FBI personnel to conduct extraterritorial investigations in the host country where the criminal act was committed, enabling the United States to prosecute terrorists for crimes committed abroad against U. S. citizens."

The senator's brow furrowed. This did not make sense. It was incomplete. The key phrase was, "Upon the approval of the host countryÉ" But cooperation between police forces was nothing new. Of course the FBI could accept an invitation from a foreign police force to fly over and help them out. It had been going on for years. And why were two separate acts needed, in 1984 and 1986?

The answer, which he did not have, was that the second act went a mile farther than the first, and the phrase, "Upon the approval of the host countryÉ" was just Mr. Bryant being comforting to the committee. What he was hinting at but not daring to say was the word "rendition."

In the 1986 act, the United States awarded itself the right to ask politely for the murderer of an American to be extradited back to the States. If the answer was, "No," or seemingly endless delay amounting to a snub, that was the end of "Mr. Nice Guy." The United States had entitled itself to send in a covert team of agents, snatch the "perp," and bring him back for trial.

As FBI terrorist-hunter John O'Neill put it when the act was passed, "From now on, host country approval has got jack shit to do with it." A joint CIA/FBI snatch of an alleged murderer of an American is called a rendition. There have been ten such very covert operations since the act was passed under Ronald Reagan, and it all began because of an Italian cruise liner.

In October 1985, the *Achille Lauro*, out of Genoa, was cruising along the north coast of Egypt, with further stops on the Israeli coast in prospect, and carrying a mixed cargo of tourists, including some Americans. She had been secretly boarded by four Palestinians from the Palestine Liberation Front, a terrorist group attached to Yasser Arafat's PLO, then in exile in Tunisia.

The terrorists' aim was not to capture the ship but to disembark at Ashdod, a stopping point in Israel, and take Israeli hostages there. But on October 7th, between Alexandria and Port Said, they were in one of their cabins, checking their weapons, when a steward walked in, saw the guns, and started yelling. The four Palestinians panicked and hijacked the liner. There followed four days of tense negotiations. In from Tunis flew Abu Abbas, claiming to be Arafat's negotiator. Tel Aviv would have none of it, pointing out that Abu Abbas was the boss of the PLF, not a benign mediator. Eventually a deal was struck; the terrorists would get passage off the ship and an Egyptian airliner back to Tunis. The Italian captain confirmed at gunpoint that no one had been hurt. He was forced to lie. Once the ship was free, it became clear that on day three the Palestinians had murdered a seventy-nine-year-old, wheelchair-bound *New Yorker*, Leon Klinghoffer. They had shot him in the face and thrown him and his chair into the sea.

For Ronald Reagan that was it; all deals were off. But the killers were airborne, on their way home, in an airliner of a sovereign state, friendly to America and in international airspace; that is, untouchable. Or maybe not. The flattop USS * Saratoga * happened to be steaming south down the Adriatic carrying F14 Tomcats. As darkness fell, the Egyptian airliner was found off Crete, heading west for Tunis. Out of the gloom four Tomcats suddenly flanked the airliner. The terrified Egyptian pilot asked for an emergency landing at Athens. Permission was denied. The Tomcats signalled the pilot that he should accompany them or face the consequences. The same EC2 Hawkeye, also off the * Saratoga *, that had found the Egyptian plane, passed the messages between the fighters and the airliner.

The diversion ended when the airliner, with the killers and Abu Abbas, their leader, on board, landed under escort at the U. S. base at Sigonella, Sicily. Then it became complicated.

Sigonella was a shared base: U. S. Navy and Italian air force. Technically it is Italian sovereign territory; the United States only pays rent. The government in Rome, in a pretty high state of excitement, claimed the right to try the terrorists. The *Achille Lauro* was theirs; the air base theirs. It took a personal call from President Reagan to the U. S. Special Forces detachment at Sigonella to order them to back off and let the Italians have the Palestinians.

In due course, back in Genoa, home city of the liner, the small fry were sentenced. But their leader, Abu Abbas, flew out free as air on October 12th and went on to hide for years on the outskirts of Baghdad.*