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Yet even after Shultz began his open advocacy of military reprisals in 1983, Reagan continued to express caution. Then late last year several factors combined to push him to a more militant view. Terrorism seemed to be accelerating, exemplified by the massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports. Nonmilitary means of countering the outrages seemed maddeningly ineffective. Evidence for the airport massacres appeared to point to Syria as well as Libya, and when Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead toured Europe early this year trying to organize a political and economic boycott of Libya, he came home empty-handed.
Another decisive event for the President had been the U.S. capture in October of the four Arab terrorists who had hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer. The seizure gave the President new confidence that U.S. military forces could indeed strike effectively against terrorists. When John Poindexter, then deputy assistant for national security, met with the President the morning after the hijackers had been seized, Reagan leaped from his chair in the Oval Office and exclaimed, "I salute the Navy!" Still, Reagan had laid down and stuck to an all-important precondition for any outright reprisal attack: it had to be directed against a target that could be proved responsible for a specific terrorist attack. And for all his open support of terrorism, Gaddafi had always been skillful at covering his tracks in actual incidents. But then the U.S. broke the Libyan diplomatic code and intercepted messages between Tripoli and Libyan "people's bureaus" (as the country calls its embassies). The messages proved, to Washington's satisfaction and eventually to the satisfaction of initial skeptics like West German Chancellor Kohl, that the bureau in East Berlin had dispatched terrorists to place a bomb in a West Berlin disco packed with American servicemen. The bomb exploded early in the morning of April 5, killing U.S. Army Sergeant Kenneth Ford and a Turkish woman and injuring 230 people, 79 of them Americans.
The U.S. claimed further that intercepted messages disclosed orders by Gaddafi to Libyan agents and Libyan-sponsored terrorists to carry out attacks against more than 30 American targets around the world. White House Spokesman Speakes asserted that one plot was for Libyan agents to hurl grenades and open fire with machine guns at lines of people waiting at the U.S. visa office in Paris. This intelligence enabled the Administration to claim that it had struck Libya not only to punish Gaddafi for the Berlin disco bombing but in self-defense, to forestall a new wave of bloodshed. That argument appeared to be crucial in winning the support of the British government. In private communications to Washington, Thatcher insisted that any U.S. action had to be justified as one taken under the inherent right of self-defense recognized in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Whether the strike against Libya really met that condition is at best questionable; Article 51 refers to self-defense "if an armed attack occurs." Nonetheless, the U.S. got political support it urgently needed. "What they really wanted was less the planes than someone along with them," said one Thatcher confidant.