Cat and Mouse with Gaddafi

The public explanation was disarmingly simple: the Navy, U.S. officials said, was engaged in "a show of resolve" that it would not be deterred from operating in international waters. But the show was certainly impressive. The aircraft carriers Coral Sea and Saratoga, carrying about 100 supersonic aircraft, cruised toward the Gulf of Sidra off the coast of Libya. Sailing protectively with them were at least 23 auxiliary vessels from the U.S. Sixth Fleet. The jet fighters blasted off the carriers on patrols that seemed to edge ever closer to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Soviet-armed nation.

In fact, the U.S. maneuvers were far from routine. The Navy did indeed seem intent on challenging Gaddafi's claim that the 300-mile-wide gulf belongs to Libya. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who devised the strategy and won White House support, had another purpose as well: to show Libya what it might confront if it promotes more terrorism. The U.S. contends that Gaddafi was at least partly responsible for the Christmas-week massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports. Beyond that, senior U.S. officials seemed eager to provoke Gaddafi into a military response. Said one Pentagon official: "If they don't react, we've exposed them as a paper tiger."

If Libya tried to interfere with the fighter patrols, the Navy pilots would undoubtedly defend themselves, as in 1981, when they knocked down two Libyan jets over the gulf after one had opened fire. But targets within Libya also look tempting to some U.S. strategists. One is an expanding military air base, nine miles south of the coastal city of Surt, where intelligence satellites show construction of twelve Soviet SA-5 ground-to-air missile sites. Another potential target is a nuclear-reactor project being built along the coast with Soviet help. A dangerous complication: the reactor and the batteries may both be tended by Soviet advisers.

Gaddafi branded the Navy exercise "aggressive provocation," which seemed roughly accurate. Ordering his armed forces on "total alert," he sent aircraft to fly over the gulf "to defend Libya's territorial waters." On Friday four Libyan MiG fighters headed toward the U.S. carriers, which were then about 300 miles offshore and well north of the point that Gaddafi calls "the line of death" and has staked out as his sea boundary (midway between the 32nd and 33rd parallels, 130 miles from the Libyan coast). When Navy jets were directed toward the Libyan aircraft, the Libyan pilots quickly turned back. "It looks like a cat-and-mouse game," observed a Western diplomat in Cairo.

At week's end Gaddafi headed into the gulf aboard a missile-carrying patrol boat, boasting that he would sail to "the line of death, where we will stand and fight." Despite such tough talk, Gaddafi has actually been scrambling to avoid a confrontation. His intermediaries last week offered Italy a secret pledge not to harbor terrorists. (It was rejected; Italy wants a public promise.) "Our impression is that Gaddafi is scared," said an Italian official. The pressure on the Libyan dictator can only increase as U.S. forces approach--and probably cross--his unenforceable boundary.