Inside SEAL Team Six(43)

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When I arrived at ST-6, based in Dam Neck, Virginia, in November of 1985, ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ And they weren’t happy.

The Boeing 727 flight from Athens to Rome had been hijacked by two Hezbollah Shiite terrorists armed with pistols and grenades and redirected to Beirut, Lebanon. In a bid to force airport officials to refuel the plane, the terrorists grabbed twenty-four-year-old U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem from his seat, pushed him toward the cockpit door, bound him with rope, then proceeded to torture and then beat him beyond recognition. When a battered, bleeding Stethem refused to plead to the tower through a transmitter to send a fuel truck, one of the hijackers shot him in the head and dumped his body on the tarmac.

What’s not generally known is that a SEAL Team Six operator had the hijacker in his sights but was never given the order to shoot. Other ST-6■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​

The standoff ended two weeks later when the remaining passengers were set free in exchange for the release of over seven hundred Shiite prisoners in Israel.

Both of Stethem’s brothers became Navy SEALs.

Later, when the pilot of Flight 847 was asked for his impression of Robert Stethem, he answered, “He was the bravest man I’ve ever seen in my life.” Stethem was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for bravery, and the Navy’s thirteenth Aegis destroyer was christened the USS Stethem and commissioned in 1995.

Soon after the TWA Flight 847 hijacking, ST-6 prepared to raid the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship that had been commandeered by four heavily armed Palestine Liberation Front terrorists off the coast of Egypt on October 7, 1985. While President Reagan was considering whether to disable the ship or launch a full-scale rescue op, the terrorists murdered an elderly Jewish passenger named Leon Klinghoffer and tossed his body overboard.

After two days of negotiation, the hijackers agreed to abandon the liner in exchange for safe conduct to Tunisia. But President Reagan was determined to bring them to justice, and he ordered F-14 Tomcats to intercept the Egyptian airliner the hijackers were traveling on and then direct it to the U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella, in Sicily. SEAL Team Six waited there to take the hijackers into custody, but Italian authorities insisted on arresting the terrorists themselves.