It was a sudden strike that leaped live right out of the nightly news. At the precise moment that the three networks began airing their evening newscasts last Monday, U.S. attack planes were roaring toward their five Libyan targets. Out of the black Mediterranean night they came, racing through orange cones of frantic antiaircraft fire to punish the man Ronald Reagan calls the "mad dog of the Middle East." As Americans, transfixed at their television sets, listened to the muffled rattle and thump of the assault filtering over the phone lines of network correspondents holed up in a Tripoli hotel, the U.S. attackers delivered their lethal cargo of laser-directed bombs. As quickly as they had come, the warplanes wheeled out to sea, vanishing back into the gloom, all safe but one.
Even for an Administration accustomed to making its moves with television coverage firmly in mind, the timing of the 7 o'clock strike was extraordinary. Ronald Reagan could hardly have written a more gripping script to dramatize his determination to strike out militarily at terrorist regimes. By the time Reagan took to the airwaves to explain and justify the raids, they had already been discussed--and generally applauded--at dinner tables across the land.
Actually, the schedule of Operation El Dorado Canyon, as the strikes were code-named by Pentagon planners, was dictated by the military necessity of hitting Libya in the middle of the night. It was just one factor in an enormously complex operation that involved 150 aircraft and resulted in the launching of more than 60 tons of bombs. The outcome was far from perfect: the U.S. lost one F-111 fighter-bomber along with its two-man crew and unintentionally caused some civilian casualties and damage. But El Dorado also produced more than a few nuggets of military gold, including severe damage to at least eight Soviet-built Libyan planes and Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi's personal headquarters. "We didn't do everything right," says Admiral William Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But on balance, he maintains, the operation "was very successful."
Plans for a strike of some sort against Libya began late in March when U.S. intelligence learned of Libyan intentions to conduct future terrorist acts like the West Berlin disco bombing on April 4. At a National Security Council meeting on April 7, the President clearly decided that the time for action had arrived. His command: "Try to make the world smaller for the terrorists."
Though Reagan did not order up an air strike then and there, it was clear to military planners that such an action was inevitable. The Pentagon brass was concerned, however, that it lacked the firepower to hit Gaddafi with sufficient force. Since the Sixth Fleet's skirmish only three weeks earlier with Libyan forces in the Gulf of Sidra, the fleet's strength had considerably diminished with the departure of the aircraft carrier Saratoga for its home base in Mayport, Fla. There was not sufficient time to order the flattop back to the central Mediterranean to join the carriers Coral Sea and America.