(3 of 9)
For most of last week it was the angry recriminations among allies that held the world's attention. Initially, it had been mostly Egypt that felt aggrieved, but the U.S. and Italy were soon at sharp odds when Reagan learned on Saturday, Oct. 12, that he had been denied part of his goal in the airintercept operation. By that time, the four P.L.F. hijackers aboard the Boeing 737 at the Sigonella air base in Sicily had been taken into Italian custody and charged with murder, kidnaping and hijacking. But the mysterious Abul Abbas had literally flown the coop, aboard a Yugoslav JAT jet bound from Rome to Dubrovnik and Belgrade. Back at Camp David, when President Reagan received word from Deputy National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter of Abbas' escape, he cursed mildly.
U.S. Ambassador to Rome Maxwell Rabb had more elaborate things to say. More than 13 hours before Abbas' flight, at 12:30 a.m. EDT, Rabb had delivered a formal request to the Italian Justice Ministry for Abbas' provisional arrest on charges of complicity in hijacking and murder. According to the Italians, the evidence offered by the U.S. to support that request was inadequate. The formal reason Craxi later gave for denying the request was that the EgyptAir Boeing 737 in which Abbas had ridden along with the hijackers was Egyptian government territory. In addition he noted that Abbas carried an Iraqi diplomatic passport, which allegedly gave him diplomatic immunity.
On the same day, however, WAFA, the Palestinian press service based in Tunis, reported that P.L.O. Chairman Arafat had sent Craxi a message warning him against turning Abbas over to the U.S. If the Italians did so, Arafat reportedly said, "uncontrollable reactions could result, as happened in the affair of the Achille Lauro."An irate Rabb later declared that he was "not happy with what happened today."
Craxi's actions also alienated someone else: his Defense Minister Giovanni Spadolini. The leader of the small (29 members in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies) Republican Party within Craxi's five-party coalition, Spadolini had grown increasingly unhappy with Craxi's foreign policy in the Middle East, which in the Defense Minister's view was increasingly pro-P.L.O. and ( excessively anti-Israel. But what bothered Spadolini even more was that Craxi made the decision to release Abbas without consulting him. Incensed, the Defense Minister announced in advance that he would not attend a Cabinet meeting that Craxi had called for Monday afternoon to discuss the growing difficulties with the U.S. A coalition crisis was looming.
In Egypt, matters were already at full boil. On the same day that the strange drama with Abbas played out in Rome, Mubarak was pronouncing himself "deeply wounded" by the EgyptAir interception. Said Mubarak at a Cairo press conference: "We had not expected this attack from a friend." Four hours before Mubarak spoke, the first of several anti-U.S. demonstrations broke out at Cairo University. Among the slogans chanted by several hundred outraged students: "The Americans are our enemy!" The next day at a press conference in Khartoum, the capital of neighboring Sudan, Chairman Arafat added his own sneers. Said he: "Reagan the cowboy (committed) an act of piracy."