Bit by bit, dramatic details of the Achille Lauro affair emerged last week, providing answers to, and fresh questions about, what really happened during the six-day crisis. From the returning passengers and crew came a vivid account of the horror aboard the Italian cruise ship. Marilyn Klinghoffer, 59, returning home to New York City, recalled the anxious hours she spent on an upper deck with machine guns pointed at her head. The hijackers, she recounted, "kept popping their guns and playing with grenades on their belts, like little kids." Falsely told by the terrorists that her husband was in the ship's infirmary, she tried to sneak there for a visit, but was stopped. Only after the hijackers abandoned ship, she said, did she learn that her husband Leon had been slain.
Joaquim Pineiro Da Silva, 27, a Portuguese cabin steward, learned of the slaying after one of the terrorists entered the ship's main lounge and motioned to him and Ferruccio Alberti, the cruise hairdresser. The two men were led to the upper deck, where they found Klinghoffer's body lying facedown in a pool of blood beside his overturned wheelchair. The terrorist gestured that they were to toss both the body and the wheelchair overboard. After hearing the body splash in the waters below, neither man looked over the rail. "I wanted to break into tears, but was unable to," Da Silva recalled last week.
According to reports, the killer was the youngest of the four hijackers. He had been considered "the good terrorist" because he granted bathroom privileges. Captain Gerardo de Rosa, who falsely radioed that no one on board had been harmed, claimed last week that he did not know for certain of the murder until the hijacking ended. "No one could talk openly to me," he said, "since we were constantly covered by a machine gun."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in his interview with TIME last Saturday, revealed that he knew of the Klinghoffer murder when he dispatched the hijackers to Tunisia. But he heatedly denied that he had lied when he said, a day before they left for Tunis, that they were no longer in Egypt. They had been sent somewhere else first, he claimed, though he would not reveal where, in order to be prosecuted by the P.L.O. But when he discovered that the P.L.O. had no responsible authority to receive them, he recalled the four men to Egypt and eventually sent them on to P.L.O. officials in Tunisia.
Details also emerged of the planning of the U.S. interception, some courtesy of a ham radio operator in Chicago who eavesdropped on one of the six conversations between President Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. At the time, the two were aloft in separate aircraft, but Weinberger's Gulfstream C-20 transport had not yet been fitted with a scrambler fully compatible with that on Air Force One. "Weinberger made the comment that it may take shots across the bow," the brother of the ham operator told reporters. "The President said, in essence, I don't care what it takes, I want that plane brought down in friendly territory." Pentagon officials said last week that Weinberger was playing the role of devil's advocate and when Reagan gave the go-ahead, he readily responded, "Yes, sir."