Word: airstrips
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...King Hussein. When the King's troops began retaliating against the fedayeen, it looked as if the Soviet-backed regimes of Iraq and Syria might intervene. To complicate matters further, guerrillas hijacked four foreign airliners in early September and directed three of them to a dirt airstrip 30 miles from the Jordanian capital of Amman: there they held hundreds of passengers as ransom for imprisoned fedayeen. "Black September," the climactic clash between Hussein and the guerrillas who increasingly threatened his rule, was beginning to unfold. To weigh the situation, Kissinger activated his crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group...
...West. They seized millions of dollars' worth of drugs and airplanes, and scores of smugglers who had figured the harsh, 13,000-sq.-mi. wastes of the desert could serve as a safe private landing field. In one successful two-week camp-out near a remote airstrip, his team bagged a DC-10, two tons of marijuana, a four-wheel-drive truck and four smugglers...
Lawrence's biggest coup was the locally famous Norman-Taylor case. In 1975 nearly 20 agents gave up on a remote airstrip vigil when a smuggler's plane coming in was accidentally spooked and did not return. Changing tactics, Lawrence followed the faint tracks of two trucks that had passed by the site. Forty miles away at 4 a.m. he found tire marks where an airplane had landed on the concrete highway, then a roadside spot marked by footprints, broken shrubbery and more tire tracks. Ten miles later at a dirt turnoff, he found fresh tire tracks that...
...violence touched off a mass exodus of foreign nationals. Somoza permitted a U.S. Air Force transport plane to land at the airstrip near his seaside villa at Montelimar, 40 miles from the capital, and provided an escort of national guardsmen, reinforced by armed U.S. Marines, to protect fleeing Americans. By week's end about 290 American citizens had departed on four evacuation flights...
...troops sent by Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi to help him, had retreated to Jinja, Uganda's second largest city. Some observers thought the Tanzanians had deliberately left the exit route east from Kampala open to permit the Libyans a face-saving exodus by an airstrip at Jinja some 60 miles to the east of the capital...