Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi Read Free Page B

OF TRIPOLI
    For several weeks in March 1986, U.S. and Libyan warships and combat jets had been dancing toward war in the Gulf of Sidra, the giant bay stretching from Misrata, just outside of Tripoli, all the way to Benghazi. Qaddafi drew a straight line across the Mediterranean between those two points and claimed everything south of it as Libyan territorial waters. He dared anyone—meaning the United States—to cross this “line of death.”
    Qaddafi’s exclusion zone included waters seventy miles from the nearest Libyan coastline, far beyond the twelve-nautical-mile limit recognized as the international standard. President Ronald Reagan asserted the right of the United States and its NATO allies to conduct naval operations in international waters and on March 23, 1986, ordered three U.S. carrier battle groups—USS America, USS Coral Sea , and USS Saratoga —with 225 aircraft and some thirty warships, to cross Qaddafi’s double-dare line. It was a formidable armada only a madman would try to oppose.
    U.S. warships crossed the line of death twice that year without incident. However, on March 24, 1986, the Libyans responded, sending missile boats and MiG-23 Flogger and MiG-25 Foxbat fighters jets to counter the Americans. In every engagement, the Americans blew away their Libyan counterparts or forced them to flee before the shooting began. The Americans sunk two of Qaddafi’s French-built Combattante II missile boats, a Soviet-built corvette, and killed thirty-five Libyan sailors. Qaddafi was humiliated and vowed revenge, publicly calling on Arabs everywhere to kill Americans. 1
    Operation Prairie Fire appeared to be a resounding success, projecting precisely the image of a strong America that President Reagan had worked so hard to build after the “malaise” of the Carter years.
    Just one week later, Qaddafi took his revenge. America was still vulnerable, and he proved it with cowardly skill.
    On April 2, 1986, a member of the Abu Nidal terrorist group, which was then based in Libya and armed by Qaddafi, placed a bomb made with Semtex H plastic explosive under the seat of TWA flight 840 as it was on approach to the Athens airport on the short flight from Rome. Because of the relatively low altitude at the time of the explosion, the plane did not explode. But four passengers—all Americans—were sucked out of the hole in the fuselage. Pilot Pete Peterson was welcomed as a hero for his skill in safely landing his badly damaged aircraft at the Athens airport. While Qaddafi quickly announced he had nothing to do with the attack, it was well known that the Abu Nidal organization were his protégés.
    Just three days after TWA 840, a bomb exploded in the early morning hours at La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, Germany, a favorite haunt of American soldiers. Sergeant Kenneth T. Ford, twenty-one, and a twenty-nine-year-old Turkish woman, Nermin Hannay, were sitting near the disc jockey’s booth and died instantly. Sergeant James E. Goins, twenty-five, died two months later of his injuries. Another 230 people were wounded, including seventy-nine American servicemen, many of whom lost limbs or were permanently disabled. The terrorist had placed a bomb filled with shrapnel and two kilograms of Semtex beneath a table by the dance floor, then left the scene before it went off. That was ten times the amount of the deadly plastic explosive used on TWA 840.
    President Ronald Reagan pointed the finger at Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the outlandish Libyan dictator who portrayed himself as a one-man army out to defeat American and Zionist “imperialism.” This was the same Qaddafi who often elicited smiles—even smirks—because of his flair for the exotic, dressing alternately in designer capes and Bedouin hats, or in outlandish military uniforms that bore a greater resemblance to Sergeant Pepper than to Sergeant Shaft.
    Reagan wasn’t amused when he took the podium at a White House press conference on April 9, 1986. Notorious