Word: canal
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Reality is nasty stuff, tending as it does toward onrushing appointments for root-canal surgery and tuition bills. So it is extremely sad to report that one of the century's most dependable mechanisms for reality avoidance, the many-times-retold spy thriller whose gray secret is the mole in the British intelligence service, is in deep trouble. This is not really the fault of Frederick Forsyth, whose prose and plotting are no clunkier than those of other literary spy masters who borrowed the mole genre after John le Carré was through with...
Since nobody has yet managed to locate the "smoking gun," as some diplomats put it, there was no certain way to determine just which country or group is responsible for what appeared to be an elaborate act of terrorism and harassment. In the beginning, Egypt, which operates the Suez Canal, had two prime suspects, Iran and Libya. The Iranian government of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini was known to be angry and frustrated over its inability to stop its enemy Iraq from attacking tankers using Iranian oil facilities in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians were also upset about Iraq...
...ships and helicopters of three nations-the U.S., Britain and France-joined the search last week, but the mystery of the Red Sea mines remained unsolved. As the toll of vessels damaged by explosions while sailing either to or from the Suez Canal reached 19, British and French ships and U.S. helicopters were hard at work trying to locate and identify one or more of the mines that were presumed to be causing the trouble. By week's end none had been recovered, though a Cairo newspaper reported that an Egyptian team had detonated a mine...
Muammar Gaddafi is the sworn enemy of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, as the prime suspect. Central to this view is the fact that a Libyan cargo ship, the Ghat, entered the northern end of the canal on July 6, then traveled southward through the canal and the Gulf of Suez to the Ethiopian port of Assab on the Red Sea, where it unloaded its cargo and eventually headed back toward the canal. According to Egyptian officials, that round trip should have taken the Ghat about eight days. In fact, it took 15 days. Long before the Ghat left...
...some clues about its origin. Whenever that occurs, it could prove costly to the culprits, whoever they may be. Egypt's Mubarak vowed that as soon as the mystery is solved, the ships of the nation or nations responsible for the mining will be banned from the Suez Canal. -By William E. Smith. Reported by Philip Finnegan/Cairo, with other bureaus