Five Hours from a War Between Italy and the U.S.
Sigonella, October 11, 1985. Two NATO armies faced each other across a Sicilian runway with the safeties off, and Italy walked out of that night a country instead of an airbase.
Italian Memories is a weekly series. Every Wednesday, one fact, one face, or one date that made us who we are. Some of these stories are wounds. Others are triumphs.
Sigonella, Sicily. A little after midnight, October 11, 1985. An Egyptair Boeing 737 sits on the runway of an Italian air force base. Its passengers are still on board. In the dark around it, the night forms circles.
Closest to the plane, about fifty men: conscripts of the Vigilanza Aeronautica Militare — kids doing their military service — and a few carabinieri, rifles raised. Around them, a second ring of American special forces, sixty or so. Minutes earlier they had come off two transport planes that landed with no lights and no radio. Around the Americans, a third ring, still filling in: more carabinieri, called from Catania and Siracusa, surrounding the men who are surrounding the men who are surrounding the plane.
Three rings of soldiers, guns up, on one strip of Sicilian tarmac. Two of them belong to the same alliance.
Italians remember this night as the one time the country stood up to the United States — to Reagan, the strongest ally it had. L’Italia è un grande paese, Bettino Craxi liked to say that autumn. For a few hours on a runway near Catania, the phrase was allowed to mean something. The memory is true. It is also edited. The standoff was fought over a 69-year-old American in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, who had been shot and thrown into the sea days before — and over the man who planned that killing, who would walk free with a safe-conduct from Italy in his pocket. Sigonella is the proudest night of the Republic and the one it remembers most selectively. The two facts are the same fact.
If you have spent this June watching Washington and Rome trade blows — an American president saying the Italian prime minister begged him for a photo, Giorgia Meloni answering that Italy and I do not beg, her foreign minister cancelling a trip to Washington, American troops threatened with pullout from Italian soil — and decided the alliance has never looked this bad, sit down. Four decades ago it wasn’t a war of words. It was loaded rifles, three rings deep, on a runway in Sicily
The Fruit Tray
It started with a steward carrying fruit. The Achille Lauro had left Genoa on October 3, an Italian cruise ship on an 11-day loop through Egypt, Israel, Cyprus and Greece. On October 7, off Alexandria, most of the passengers — about 650 — went ashore to see the pyramids at Giza. Fewer than a hundred stayed on board, mostly the old: grandparents minding grandchildren while the parents took the buses. That afternoon a cabin steward brought fruit to a stateroom, opened an unlocked door, and found four young men cleaning guns.
