The Foreign Service Journal, April 2019

60 APRIL 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL D. Thomas Longo Jr. was an FSO from 1969 to 1993. He served in Ankara, Budapest, Düsseldorf, Palermo, Ottawa and Washington, D.C. Before join- ing the Foreign Service, he served in the Navy from 1963 to 1967. He received a State Department award for “exemplary performance to keep U.S.-Italian relations on course during the Achille Lauro affair.” I n late 1985 Italy was crucial in NATO negotiations with the then-Soviet Union on the issue of Intermediate- range Nuclear Force missiles in Europe. Essential was Italy’s commit- ment to deploy some INF (Intermediate- Range Nuclear Force) missiles on her soil for NATO to counter the Soviets’ installation of SS-20 missiles in Western Europe. Italy’s site for the missiles was a former abandoned World War II air base in southeastern Sicily near the town of Comiso. At the time I was head of the State Department’s Italy desk. As such, I was the everyday point person in Washington for both U.S. Embassy Rome, headed by Ambassador Maxwell Rabb, and the Italian embassy in Washington under Ambassador Rinaldo Petrignani. In October 1985 four Palestinian ter- rorists hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean. They killed an elderly American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, and threw him and his wheelchair overboard. Days later the ship docked in Egypt, and the hijackers and their ringleader were being flown to safety aboard an Egyptian state airliner when, with no advance notice to the Italians, U.S. Navy jets intercepted the airplane over the Mediterranean and forced it to land at an Italian NATO base in Sigonella, Sicily, some 100 kilometers north of Comiso. Moments of high drama followed in Washington. I hurtled into the State Department at night to interpret on the telephone between then-Secretary of State George Shultz and his Italian coun- terpart, Giulio Andreotti, and then at the White House between President Ronald Reagan and Italian Prime Minister Bet- tino Craxi. At the White House I helped to defuse an extremely tense situation at Sigonella, where American commandos and Italian Carabinieri surrounding the Egyptian airliner containing the hijackers were brandishing weapons around each other. The United States had sent the comman- dos to Sigonella to grab the hijackers and fly them to the United States for prosecu- tion since they had killed a U.S. citizen. Citing constitutional and legal rea- sons—since the ship was Italian and at Sigonella the culprits were now within Italian territorial jurisdiction—Craxi refused, begging Reagan’s understanding. I can still hear Craxi’s voice quavering at the prospect of Americans and Italians shooting at each other on the runway. Reagan and Craxi agreed the Italians would assume custody pending a legal extradition request fromWashington through diplomatic channels. The issue was calmed for the moment. The Achille Lauro Affair, 1985 BY TOM LONGO REFLECTIONS Above: The Achille Lauro. Inset: “Good-Bye Bettino.” Reagan spanks Craxi on the cover of a leading Italian newsweekly. Such polemics roused Italy’s democratic parties to fear and anger and encouraged the Communist Party of Italy to try to seize the moment. COURTESY OF THOMAS LONGO D.R. WALKER/CC BY-SA 3.0