Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...week these uncertainties stoked tensions toward a fever point. It began with American officials pointing a menacing finger of suspicion at Libya as instigator of the bombing of a West Berlin disco that left an American serviceman and a Turkish woman dead. Then the Pentagon cryptically noted that the Sixth Fleet, which had scattered after the Gulf of Sidra battle, was steaming back toward Libya. Almost simultaneously, President Reagan at his Wednesday-night news conference called Gaddafi "this mad dog of the Middle East" and proclaimed that the U.S. would "respond" whenever the perpetrator of a specific terrorist act could...
...American people--and allies around the world--only if it had hard evidence to prove Libya responsible for a specific terrorist act. And such evidence was always lacking--until the early hours of Saturday morning, April 5. Then a bomb went off in La Belle disco in West Berlin, which was packed with off-duty American soldiers spending some of the pay they had collected earlier that night. U.S. Army Sergeant Kenneth Ford, 21, and a 28-year-old Turkish woman were killed; 230 people, 79 of them Americans, were injured...
...indisputable evidence" that the bombing was the work of a Libyan terrorist network. Though no one would disclose it publicly, the evidence is known to consist largely of intercepted messages from the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to the "people's bureau" (as Libya calls its diplomatic missions) in East Berlin, which is believed to have dispatched a terrorist to bomb the disco. One message, sent a few hours after the blast, guardedly congratulated the East Berlin bureau for a job well done...
Indeed, it appears that the U.S. almost learned about the bombing plot in time to warn American soldiers to stay out of Berlin's nightspots before & the terrorists struck. Military police were already moving to alert G.I.s in the streets of Berlin when the bomb decimated La Belle disco. "We were about 15 minutes too late," NATO Commander General Bernard Rogers told a school audience in Atlanta last week. According to high-ranking intelligence officials, the U.S. intercepted a message from Gaddafi's headquarters to his henchmen in the Libyan "people's bureau" in East Berlin informing them that terrorists...
...allies seeking to sidestep firm measures against the supporters of terrorism. Not everyone was satisfied with what Washington felt it could safely reveal. West German intelligence officials, who were provided with abbreviated and heavily edited summaries of the intercepted transmissions, accepted that there was some Libyan complicity in the Berlin bombing but were unwilling to hang all the blame on Gaddafi...