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News of the incident reached Washington within six minutes. As soon as he was notified by the U.S. European Command, at 1:26 a.m. E.D.T., the director for operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Lieut. General Philip Gast, called General David Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The Defense Secretary in turn alerted other key Administration officials, including National Security Adviser Richard Allen and White House Counsellor Edwin Meese III. Allen and Meese, who were in Los Angeles with President Ronald Reagan, received the news at 11 p.m. local time, but decided that there was no need at the moment to waken the President. The two aides monitored the news for the next 5½ hours before calling Reagan, in his suite on the same floor of the Century Plaza hotel, at 4:24 a.m. Meese said later, "The President was in charge, and if there had been any action he needed to take, he would have been awakened." Reagan saw nothing wrong with the delay. Said he: "If our planes were shot down, yes, they'd wake me up right away. If the other fellows were shot down, why wake me up?"
Libya's immediate reaction to the air clash was relatively mild. The Tripoli government claimed that eight U.S. F-14s had attacked its planes and that one F-14 had been shot down, and at first did not acknowledge the loss of any Libyan aircraft. Colonel Gaddafi, in Aden to sign a political and economic cooperation agreement with the radical regimes of South Yemen and Ethiopia, called for Arab mobilization against the U.S. But his government said that it would take no action against Libya's 2,000 American residents, most of whom are oil-company employees and their families. Nor was there any indication by week's end that Libya, which ranks as the third largest supplier of oil to the U.S., after Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, planned to turn off the taps, for the very good reason that Libya has priced its oil too high and is having trouble finding buyers.
The Reagan Administration insisted that the air clash had come as a complete surprise. A senior White House official described as "preposterous" reports that the U.S. had provoked the incident, explaining, "There could not have been a provocation because the exercises were in international waters." Provocation is, of course, a loaded diplomatic term. There is no doubt that the site of the U.S. action was a challenge to Gaddafi's assertion that he controlled the Gulf of Sidra and that staging the exercise there had been intentional. When asked whether the naval exercise was meant as a lesson to Libya, one State Department official replied: "Look at a map."