Talking about the murder of disabled jewish new yorker leon klinghofer by Palestinian Militants in 1985. Thank you very much for coming. The usual reminders to silence your cell phones, restrain from flash photography and plan to join us afterwords for the book signing. Welcome, my name is andy kahan, director of author events. Tonight we look back more than 30 years to the brutal murder of a disabled jewish new yorker at the hands of the palestinian terrorists, an incident that shocked the world and continues to reverberate through the culture at large and the lives of families affected. The initial murder, an innocent bystander, the killing of leon klinghofer, in an innocent bystander the killing of leon klinghofer Julie Salamon offers a view of the neverending cycle of the murder of innocents. Initially a long time banking reporter and film critic for the wall street journal, then a tv critic and our reporters at the New York Times, Julie Salamon has written notable nonfiction books about show business, philanthropy, the holocaust, the insanity defense and modern medical care. Her ten previous works include several bestsellers and two novels for children. It is a pleasure to have her return. Please welcome Julie Salamon. [applause] good evening, thank you for coming out on this hot summer night. You are not on vacation but i will try to make it seem like fun. I have a very great film clip im going to show you in a couple minutes just to take you back to this moment in time in 1985, a time we now think of as preterrorism but anybody who has a long memory can remember in the 60s in 70s there were a lot of hijackings and a lot of terrible things going on in the world as there are today, but americans felt somewhat immune from it at that time and in summer of 1985, leon and maryland klinghofer were about to embark on a trip that was really going to be a last hurrah. Leon had had a couple strokes, he was in a wheelchair, marilyn, his wife, was about to celebrate her 59th birthday, she was in remission from cancer. With a group of their friends from the jersey shore they booked tickets on a ship called the Achille Lauro with marilyn. This, what we would now call wheelchair accessible. They didnt use that term but the doors were wide enough, there is an interior elevator so leon could have a nice vacation and they left on this trip on october 3, 1985, believing it was going to be a great voyage with their friends and on the third day, four young palestinians hijacked it. They had been passengers on the ship, but hijacking was not meant to take place the way that it did and that was the story i heard at the time and the story that i knew and it is a true story but it is a much more complicated story as most stories are when you start digging into them. Four years ago i went to an event at the center for jewish history in new york, present by ilse and lisa klinghofer and they had given their family archives to the center for jewish history, and they i go to the same synagogue as they do, we werent friends but we were acquaintances at the time and so i went to this event to show support and it was riveting because the two sisters had been trained by a theater producer in new york, they told the story almost like a piece of theater, the two sisters talking about what it was like to be here in new york finding out about this event going on that eventually resulted in their father being killed and thrown overboard in his wheelchair and they became the center of a Huge International storm, media, this was well before 9 11 so this was a rare event and as they talked they then invited onto the stage the reporter sarah reimer cover their familys story in the New York Times on the front page and then they brought in, who had been a young man at the time, a naval pilot, larry neal who had been one of these pilots of the of 47 superjets stations on a giant Aircraft Carrier in the mediterranean, who was sent up to bring down the civilian airplane that was carrying the four hijackers from egypt to safety in an arab country, they forced it to land, probably illegally in italy so that the hijackers could be taken into custody. As i heard all these stories none of which i was familiar with that time, it is so exciting, i said i think this could be my next book. He had the same thought and so i approached the klinghofer sisters sometime after words and asked if they would participate and if it would be a deep dive into the story is my thought was to do a book called klinghofers daughters which would focus on the klinghofer story and what it would be like to be a victim of terrorism it is there any way to turn that into something useful and good for society. It was going to be a more philosophical work. Shortly into the research i found a part of the story i knew nothing about. Leon klinghofer was killed on the Achille Lauro in california. A palestinian american man who was a piece advocate who worked for an organization for the Arab Antidiscrimination Committee which models itself on the Jewish Antidefamation League promoting the idea of positive presentations of arabs in the media. There was a lot of buying up property in new york, it was opec and all those things, preislamic fundamentalism but these very negative eras, this organization was started to counterbalance those negative portraits. He spent most of his time in synagogues and writing letters to the editor trying to reach across the aisle for these negotiations and when leon klinghofer was filled the local abc affiliate interviewed him for his comment speaking on behalf of palestinians and he said words of condolence, he said terrorism was an outrage, this shouldnt have happened and they asked if he thought Yasser Arafat was responsible for it and the prevailing wisdom at that moment in time was arafat had nothing to do with it. Arafat was the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and in 1985 it was the beginning of peace talks that would lead to oslo and the breakdown of oslo. That arafat was presenting himself to the world as a man of peace. The world didnt know at that time that he also had organizations like the palestinian liberation front doing dirty deeds to keep up his status as a man of action as well. So he said no, arafat is a man of peace and in the interview aired on tv the only piece that aired was the arafat is a man of peace and not the condolences and not the condemnations of the hijacking. The next morning, he had 3 young children, allamerican citizens went to his office, opened the front door and a bomb went off and he was killed. And the people who were believed to be responsible, the case is still a cold case but the fbi investigating the case has always believed the organization responsible for it was the Jewish Defense league which was a far right jewish terrorist organization. All of a sudden were talking domestic terrorism, International Terrorism and it is feeling like a very current story so i thought my scope is going to broaden. I will tell you in my 30 page proposal called klinghofers. I have two paragraphs dedicated to the hijackers. I didnt know much about them. I knew there was this guy who was the mastermind of the hijacking and i figured i would find out about them later but i saw them as somewhat subsidiary characters or caricatures i might say so one day just googling around idly, up pops a book called the curse of the Achille Lauro written in 2016 by his second wife. So i ordered the book on amazon and i read it, it is fascinating, it is a counter narrative to the story, not justifying or saying it was a good thing to do but explaining the politics and history that led to it and what it was like to be married to this person in charge of it. So i thought this is interesting so i look up his facebook, 2019, reporting is a lot easier than it used to be. It could take years to check people down, now you go on facebook, she popped up and i sent her a message on messenger she will never respond to me but she is a writer, i am a writer, i knew that if i said i want to talk to you she might, she got back to me and said she would talk to me. And we began a series of skype interviews that went on for hours and hours and hours over along. Go of time so all of a sudden i have three families involved, three pieces of this story and i was only beginning. But before i could continue i thought as a short little clip so we can show just to take you back into a sense of how this was reported in real time, 1985, could we i was wanted to say this, could we roll the film clip . Thank you. A rescue mission would be dangerous but possible, british commandos parachuted onto the Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1972 when there was a bomb scare in the middle of the atlantic, perhaps 12 palestinian pirates seized the Achille Lauro. French and italian warships are reportedly shattering that italian cruise ship hijacked by palestinian terrorists 420 persons are bored, one unconfirmed report the two americans have been killed. The murder of a 69yearold disabled passenger from new york city angers america. After a 72 hour siege at the negotiations among the plo, italy and egypt succeed in getting the Achille Lauro back to egypt. There, the four terrorists surrendered the ship. At first, the world is led to believe that no one is harmed, the palestinians are promised safe passage out of egypt but the next day the truth is learned and the Us Ambassador to egypt makes the announcement. Klinghofer was murdered. The murder of a 16yearold disabled passenger from new york city angers america. The terrorists are allowed to escape on an egyptian plane to save territory and tunisia. This time reagan takes action. What we want is justice done. In a flawless execution, u. S. Navy and 14 fighter Jets Intercept the egyptian airliner in midair and forced to land a us base in sicily. These Young Americans sent a message to terrorists everywhere, a message, you can run but you cant hide. Battalion courts convict the palestinian hijackers but the Reagan Administration in the public are left dismayed when italian authorities grant freedom to abu abbas the brains behind the hijacking. They found no direct evidence of his involvement. The hijacking of the italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. Evidence these men killed leon klinghofer was fabricated by the United States and syria. Without killing. I do not believe our comrades carried out any abu abbas was captured when us fighters forced him down in italy. The four cruiseship hijackers, the Italian Government permitted him to flee to yugoslavia. Like so many in the middle east, he does not see himself as a terrorist. Hunted everywhere. And those things are great but the palestinians for 40 years. Did he know the time . That is the Corner Office of what used to be the headquarters of the american, Arab Antidiscrimination Committee, the 1900 block of 17th st. In santa ana, suite number 208, that is what is left of that fleet. This is an office was destroyed by a bomb and 7 other people were injured. International terrorism may be taking root here. The man who was killed by that blast, alex okay, age 21, married, father of 3 young daughters. The bomb was powerful enough to shatter glass in several offices. Debris was everywhere, the wall is blown out, the windows were blown out. Today at Western Medical Center where oj died his brother told of numerous Death Threats received by his brother. Dont have an idea who did it but there were calls from people. As investigators searched through the rubble for clues a short distance away, a grieved family. Where there is morning there are two sounds. Alex a theys families in morning. Samuel day describes his brother as a peaceloving man who fled the middle east for a better life in america. A fact he says makes his death even more bitter. The one country where freedom of speech is very much sanctions. In the meantime president reagan condemned the incident calling it heinous and pledged to insist in the investigation. The middleton Jewish Defense we have denied response ability in the bombing but its director told cnn on two different occasions he shed no tears for a day. As you can see i ended up in the middle of the story that was far more complicated than i expected and i hope you will read the book, im not going to go through 400 pages of the book and tell you everything that is in it but i will tell you a little about the journey to writing the book because ultimately what i discovered was the stories of these three families, the abbas family, the day family and the klinghofer family who were brought together by the israelipalestinian conflict and through whose lives we find out an awful lot about the history of that region and also the common humanity in some ways these families shared and the reporting of this book was fascinating, it took me too many archives. The reagan archive has thousands of documents about the Achille Lauro. One aspect of this story i didnt expect to find where the political machinations and how important the Achille Lauro became to reagan because he came into office in 1980 promising to end terrorism because jimmy carter had had the iranian hostage situation which blocked the presidency for him in 1980 and within the first three years of the reagan presidency we had the marine bombing in beirut which had the biggest number of american casualties in a war, in a nonwar since vietnam and this constant inability to keep up with terrorism, you could see how the constant militancy on all sides led to 9 11 and what happened there. In the center of the story is oliver north, i found an incredible document on the iran contra if you remember that scandal that eventually enveloped the Reagan Administration. Oliver north was in a counterterrorism unit in the middle of the white house and he wrote in a document to his boss we have to make the Achille Lauro work because we have 2 diapered attention from iran contra. Never write things on documents that may become declassified one day. It wasnt a snoopy reporter 30 years down the line who will find it. I had many lines of stories going on, the family story, the geopolitical story and the legal story. How do you deal legally with people accused of terrorism, and who has jurisdiction over them, and italian ship, and american victim. The more reporting i did, the more material i started amassing and the question was how do you turn this into a story, how do you turn this into a book. Luckily in terms of amassing the information i interviewed a great number of people who were still alive, the ambassador, on learning leon klinghofer caused an international scandal. He was a very interesting man, married to a sort of rock n roll artist and at the time, part of what he said didnt show on the video clip, he spoke on an unclassified radio broadcast which you are not supposed to do, when he made his announcement, he said some sonofabitch killed leon klinghofer and this went out into the arab world and was not received very well. All these diplomatic gaffes, all these kinds of things that were usually kept there were public at this moment in time so the question for me became how do you tell the story that involves three family tragedies, and ongoing conflict to which there is no resolution, the israelipalestinian conflict and then the politics of the Reagan Administration and eventually my reporting took me to israel, to lebanon, to california, all over the United States, to all these different places because there were many people and many players and eventually i decided i wanted to focus on three families and the other material would weave into this story but the actual construction of the book, which had been likened to a spy thriller which really felt like it when i was writing, i kept saying what is going to happen next and i knew it was very exciting to put the pieces together. I spoke to the sun of ilse klinghofer, one of the daughters, a boy who had never met his grandfather, was killed four years before max was born and i said to max what do you want to know about your grandfather, what do you know . He said i know remarkably little. I know the outlines of the story, i know the boat was hijacked, i know he was killed but i dont know him myself. I want to know the ticktock. What happened minute by minute. What were the events that led to this, what happened and what did it mean . So i thought when i was going through my notes, you have given me the outline for how to write this book and i really kept that in mind. What is the ticktock . The book really goes through this story in a kind of chronology. It is also the kind of chronology we have in life, so the first half of the book is very slowly like life tends to do, the first half of the book takes place in two weeks. The next quarter things are speeding up a little bit, it took place in the year. The last quarter of the book takes place in 20 years because it is the aftermath. In the course of doing this i spoke to both wives, his first wife was a christian palestinian, his second wife was a muslim, secular muslim family. They were a very prominent family, very fascinating women and he had five sons between the two blended families. I interviewed all the children, grandchildren of leon klinghofer and all the ancillary players and through these stories i started to see the difference between the way history is presented to us in textbooks and the way it unfolds in real time for real people. Somebody had asked me where is the value of this narrative to people who were not born yet, people today and i found people in their 20s and they and their friends are reading this book and it is gratify