WASHINGTON — Two senior CIA officers secretly traveled in 1986 to Baghdad hoping to persuade Iraq to hand over the Palestinian terrorist behind the Achille Lauro hijacking, according to a former CIA officer.
Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center at the time and one of the two who made the trip, writes that he attempted to arrange for the capture of Mohammed Abul Abbas, whose terrorist group killed Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-using American Jew, during the 1985 Italian cruise ship hijacking.
Clarridge’s book discloses the terms of a top-secret deal forged by then-CIA Director William Casey with President Saddam Hussein’s government.
The United States was to provide Iraq with U.S. satellite intelligence for its war with Iran.
In exchange, the Iraqis were to end their terrorism around the world and turn over terrorists they were harboring, like Abbas.
Baghdad, however, reneged.
“Although we had given the Iraqis intelligence to improve their battlefield performance — particularly in the air — they were not fulfilling their end of the agreement,” Clarridge writes in “A Spy for All Seasons,” which details dozens of CIA operations during his 33-year career.
The CIA cleared for publication all the accounts Clarridge describes.
Under the 1986 plan, the Iraqis were to fly Abbas, who was then living in Iraq, to Yemen, according to Clarridge. U.S. officers were supposed to intercept and force down the plane, seizing Abbas without implicating Iraq.
But senior Iraqi officials with whom Clarridge and the other officers met in Baghdad considered the plan “insane,” Clarridge writes. The CIA officials never met with Hussein.
Clarridge expresses frustration that the Iraqis “had suckered the U.S. government into a deal with no intention of fulfilling their end of the bargain.”
Abbas remains at large, 11 years after the Achille Lauro hijacking. He attended a Palestine National Council meeting in Gaza in 1995.
Susan Heller, who manages the Klinghoffer Memorial Foundation of the Anti-Defamation League, said: “We’re heartened to know that the American government pursued the apprehension of Abul Abbas seriously in the months after the Achille Lauro attack, and we hope that their pursuit of him continues.”