Purpose of Evasion

PREFACE

June 14, 1985 — terrorists hijack a TWA jetliner: an American serviceman is executed; thirty-nine other Americans are held hostage for seventeen days.

December 27, 1985 — terrorists attack the Rome airport: twenty people are killed; five of them, Americans.

April 2, 1986 — a terrorist bomb explodes aboard a TWA 727 en route from Rome to Athens: four Americans are killed.

April 4, 1986 — terrorists bomb La Belle Club, a West Berlin disco: two American servicemen are killed.

April 5, 1986 — a U.S. spy satellite intercepts a cable from the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin to Tripoli. The president, citing it as proof that Libya sanctioned the bombing, decides to retaliate.

April 14, 1986 — U.S. Air Force F-111 bombers from Lakenheath, England, and U.S. Navy A-6 Intruders from carriers in the Gulf of Sidra attack Libya.

The result: military facilities in Tripoli and Benghazi are destroyed. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound is hit, but he is unharmed. Two F-111 bombers are hit by Libyan missiles. One is destroyed. Its crew is lost.

In the aftermath many questions were asked, the most incisive being: Why use F-111s based in England — a 5,800-mile, 14-hour round trip, requiring many inflight refuelings — when A-6 Intruders, based on carriers 200 miles from Libya’s shores, could have been used exclusively?

The official answer: To showcase military hardware and coordination skills, proving to Americans and the world that years of increased defense expenditures had paid off.

All that is history. What follows is fiction.