For Ronald Reagan, it was a time to savor a triumph, not indulge in nagging second thoughts. At an intimate Georgetown dinner party for the President, guests took turns heartily congratulating him for the bold midair interception of the four Palestinian hijackers of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. In Boise, admiring supporters erupted in cheers as Reagan declared he was "most proud" of the U.S. Navy F-14 pilots who were able to pinpoint their EgyptAir Boeing 737 target in the Mediterranean darkness and, as he put it puckishly, "persuade" it to land in Italy. His declaration that "there is a new patriotism alive in our country" reflected the widespread joy felt by the American public at finally getting a chance to strike back against terrorism. When reporters asked whether he had any reason to apologize to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Reagan issued a one-word reply: "Never." Richard Wirthlin, the White House pollster, told the President at midweek that his job-approval rating had hit a heartwarming 68%.
Yet even as the President basked in domestic approval, shock waves from the Achille Lauro incident rippled through a world once again shown to be vulnerable, in messy and unpredictable ways, to the instability that terrorism seeks to sow. In Italy, the coalition government of Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, a staunch U.S. ally, suddenly collapsed in an imbroglio triggered by the EgyptAir interception. In Cairo, university students poured into the crowded streets, burning American flags and chanting anti-U.S. slogans, while President Mubarak voiced his own sense of pain and humiliation over the incident. As Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres visited Washington, it also appeared that the Middle East peace initiative advanced by Jordan's King Hussein and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had been dealt yet another severe setback.
Improbable as it might seem, all this geopolitical turbulence, and more, could be traced to the bizarre cruise-liner hijacking, which also resulted in the cold-blooded murder of U.S. Passenger Leon Klinghoffer, 69. Asked a senior State Department official as he surveyed the diplomatic damage: "How could four idiots fail in their mission and still cause so much trouble?"
The fallout from the Achille Lauro proved one thing: that terrorism, horrifying in its immediate impact, can also have dangerous side effects that are as hard to control as they are to foresee. Certainly no one would have forecast the chain of events triggered by the four scruffy young members of a splinter of the Palestine Liberation Front who were being interrogated last week in a maximum-security prison in Spoleto about their role in the Achille Lauro hijacking. Nor could Mohammed Abul Abbas Zaidan, the man U.S. authorities were pursuing with grim determination from Italy to Yugoslavia to the murkier reaches of the Middle East, be described as a major figure of the international terror network. But Washington had turned Abbas, the P.L.F. leader who it believes helped plan the hijackers' mission, into the personification, at least for the moment, of a contest that CIA Director William Casey describes as a "war without borders" (see interview).