“The body is heavy. If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces, it will be finished.”
“Did the sacrificial animal arrive?”
“He has arrived.”
“The federal penitentiary in Atlanta housed some of the country’s most notorious prisoners. 1,800 Cubans fleeing Castro’s regime, 400 hardened criminals, 200 were insane. I’m Jim Calstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office. Castro called them undesirables, the US government called them detainees. In 1987, they staged a bloody revolt. Now the FBI and special operations teams must infiltrate a burning prison to stop the violence before it rages out of control.”
“There was a trust between the detainees and the correctional officers, and that trust was basically the treatment that the detainees got from the correctional officers.”
“There were hardly any inmates in the breakfast area, and normally it would be full of inmates were making a lot of noise and talking and there was hardly anybody in there, so it was really quiet, unusually quiet.”
“They got the door down, and they just came running in and they had these hoods over their head like they were made out of gray t-shirts or gray sweatshirts, and they just had holes poked out for their eyes so they could see.”
“I don’t know if he was trying to hit me or just the telephone out of my hand.”
“He knocked the phone out of my hand, that went across the room.”
“We did realize there was a threat, but I guess you think you can control it. When you work with inmates, you get used to them and sometimes you forget who they really are.”
“Nobody carried weapons. The inmates always vastly outnumber the staff, so if we had weapons in there, we could lose those weapons. The only weapons that we had was weapons in the tower.”
“I try to give him an assessment of exactly what transpired and brought him up to date.”
“We kind of thought that unless there’s some miracle that we would probably just burn up, because there’s no way to get out of one of the cages.”
“It sounded like a war and it was coming up the stairwell.”
“We had staff members in 11 towers that had very good observation over the entire outside compound who logged those employees that they recognized in those areas.”
“Tell me who they are.”
“We started a list of the officers that we thought were hostages.”
“They were trying to talk the guard into opening the door ’cause they wanted to get us out and kill us or do whatever. So the guard had to tell them that they couldn’t open the door and occasionally they would push one off or get in a little wrestle.”
“There was a guy that was up ahead of me and he got hit. I remember seeing him. He was a Cuban. He got hit right behind the ear.”
“I was getting worried because the bullets were going pretty close around where we were.”
“They ran us across to the corner of the building where they couldn’t shoot at us, and that time they took us in the chapel.”
“Go, go, say something!”
“The first thing that I wanted to accomplish was to find out how many hostages had been taken, how many might be injured, what was the threat to those people who were in fact taken hostage.”
“All these people were like on an emotional high, I mean, they’d been prisoners for literally 8–10 years, some of them serving life sentences and now they’re free to roam around the prison. It was like a holiday.”
“Nobody really knew what area that the inmates controlled and they really didn’t know how many hostages were taken. You had 2,500 people housed in that institution. Here’s the administration, there were people running around all over the place, and quite frankly, it was chaos.”
“We began to learn who the hostages might be, where the detainees were holding up, how many were there, what kind of weapons they might have.”
“Bob, I want you to go out and…”
“Listen, we need to put a truck up on the southwest corner of the… everybody got it?”
“I need to know 100% they would not hesitate to kill hostages if it became apparent to them that we were going to try to retake the prison or retake any part of it.”
“Guard! Come out! Guard, guard!”
“Keep your head down. Identify yourself when you get down there.”
“They’re screaming, frantic, you know, come and get us, come and get us.”
“The SWAT personnel informed me that there was a 100% probability that they would be detected going over the wall to try to affect the rescue of the hospital people.”
“We can’t protect the other hostages that are being held in other parts of the prison, and my concern was if, in fact, we were observed, then they would start killing the other employees.”
“If those are FBI agents, you’d go get them.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Hurry up, man.”
“What about right here?”
“Yeah, we can go over. We can go over the wall, we can defend the area with a perimeter and slot them out over the walls, and we’re out of there.”
“They could very well believe that a rescue of the entire prison was underway, and then they can start escaping.”
“Do we go in and take those people out of the hospital and save them, or do we let them be taken hostage?”
“My decision was based on all the information that I had. We will not go for the rescue. I will not authorize the rescue.”
“Pick up if you hear me.”
“I knew that if anything happened to any one of those 27 people that I would forever live with that as being the person responsible.”
“They might be able to bring those tanks, get enough of them underneath our command post where the tunnels ran, and caused an explosion which would have decimated the command post and maybe allowed them to escape.”
“Once we got in the tunnels, we discovered then that, in fact, the Cubans were in there, and oftentimes we’d come in very close proximity to them. Within 10 feet of them there would be a bunch of them, and we’d confront them, and fortunately, every time they turn around and run.”
“We decided the tunnel system was a real threat to the successful resolution of the crisis.”
“Ultimately, we were able to station SWAT teams down there.”
“What do you guys think?”
“What do you think they… I mean, what can…?”
“There were hundreds of media people there. There were networks, there was local TV. They established a tent city right across the street from the prison.”
“Put on all your gear and line up along the walls, and look mean.”
“This is not going to be a nightstick duel with your swords. We’re going to use deadly force.”
“We’re just lucky that our negotiators were able to calm them down, and we didn’t have any loss of life.”
“That tree, it looks like…”
“Maybe they didn’t intend it psychologically to be that way. We interpreted it as: we are going to be here through Christmas.”
“We knew he would absolutely kill a hostage if it would help him escape.”
“I think Tommy Silverstein could become a very grave liability to the Cuban detainees and to their cause and to what they were trying to attain.”
“I was told that they would think about it.”
“I’ve been told he has a pretty good talk with the rest of…”
“They brought several hostages out to the yard and for the benefit of our cameras, so we could see them. They brought these hostages out and they poured gasoline over them, and then they took their cigarette lighters out and began clicking while literally screaming at us, ‘If you want to assault us, go ahead. As soon as you do, we’re setting fire to these men.'”
“I will never ever forget those guys coming through that Sallyport and walking right by me, and the look of relief. They were haggard and they were tired and they were worn out, but this great sense of relief and they’re all smiling ear to ear.”
“When we finally walked out with hostages not one of them having been harmed in any way, we regarded that as a huge success.”
“One of the most important things that sort of focused the American public on the plight of the Cubans and I think that was important. They did have a story to tell, they just told it in the wrong way.”
“Hi there. How are you doing today? Enjoy your flight.”
“You can’t over there.”
“We’re going to land.”
“Okay.”
“Another…”
“I’ve not seen or not heard from…”
“I am going to get you.”
“There isn’t a case against me. I notified some people outside. They were waiting for me.”
“I don’t know that you…”
“He wanted a significant reward and relocation of himself and his family to the United States under the witness protection program. We felt in the inter-agency negotiations that this was a reasonable request. He certainly would be at risk if he and his family stayed in Lebanon, so we obtained authority to do that.”
“Welcome to my home.”
“I know of a major international drug dealer who is looking to do an operation. You could bring the drugs in through Iran into Lebanon and then set up an operation to supply this drug dealer and it would be very lucrative.”
“We did not want any operation that we undertook to involve violations of the sovereignty of another nation.”
“The basic plan was that any counterterrorism operation that occurred outside the United States or its territories would be handled by the military. Anything that occurred inside the United States or its territories, HRT would handle.”
“So we got a situation where we may want to go over and grab a guy overseas. Do you use military teams or do you use HRT?”
“Finally described it as an arrest, so we’re going to use the Hostage Rescue Team, in spite of the fact that we’re going to do it overseas.”
“The idea was to try to take him alive and bring him back here and prosecute him. So I think the idea was to make a bigger political statement and his family.”
“I just briefed President Reagan, it’s a go. Good luck and I’ll talk to you on the other end.”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
“We have to re-contact the witnesses that we had previously interviewed and determine whether or not we could get a commitment from them that they would come to the United States and testify.”
“The crew was told that they were just waiting for technical support to come out on the ship to help them correct some problems.”
“Technicians, right?”
“It wouldn’t blend in. It wouldn’t attract any attention. We made some changes to it. We actually put a satellite navigation system in and making some adjustment to that and put actually put a Loran on it, and it’s electronic navigation equipment.”
“We changed the flag from a Grecian flag to an Italian flag. We’ve changed the home port and the name on the hull and we turned the life preservers all around, which had the name of the boat on it.”
“We had emergency response team. We had a helicopter turning up on the aft deck, ready to immediately respond with automatic weapons and other capabilities to defend against any attempt by pirates or terrorist groups to intercede in the operation.”
“We could get him to the location in international waters to actually execute the arrest but also that we could secure that arrest—that we could keep it from becoming an international incident.”
“They’re away.”
“I tell you one of the things that was really a thrill and actually kind of choked me up was when we came up on the deck, the probably two, three hundred of the crew were up on the deck and they were cheering and clapping, and it just really was kind of emotional experience.”
“The debriefing of the terrorist was very helpful to the US’s intelligence community and getting an overall appreciation and understanding of the dynamics of circumstances in South Lebanon.”
“As long as the flight was completed, it represented the longest continuous flight from the deck of a US carrier that the military had ever performed.”
“It was our hope that by carrying out such an audacious act that we would send a very strong signal to the terrorists that the game had changed, that we would no longer be essentially passive, but we’d be proactive in pursuing them across the entire world if necessary.”
