Word: keflavik
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ambassador to the U.S., called on the State Department to talk over the latest "incident" to rag sensitive Icelandic tempers. Ambassador Thors put it plainly: Icelanders were hopping mad because a U.S. sentry forced two of their people to lie on wet ground at the NATO Airbase in Keflavik while he called a sergeant to check their credentials (TIME, Sept. 21); Pritchard's departure would help smooth things over...
...weeks relations between Iceland's 170,000 citizens and the U.S. garrison at the great NATO base at Keflavik Airport had been growing steadily touchier. On the Fourth of July a group of U.S. airmen went on a drinking spree at Thingvellir, a pastoral spot sacred to all Icelanders as the first meeting place (in A.D. 930) of the Althing, the oldest continuous Parliament in the world. Last month a U.S. officer's wife was arrested on the suspicion of drunken driving. She phoned the airbase and almost immediately the Icelandic police were surrounded by U.S. troops...
Then came the mud-puddle incident : four civilians confidently entered a restricted area of the Keflavik base, were challenged by a U.S. sentry and ordered to lie flat on the muddy ground for 15 minutes while a sergeant was summoned. Last week every daily newspaper in the capital city of Reykjavik was spread with flaming headlines. The "intruders" proved to be two officials of the Icelandic Civil Aviation Administration and two American pilots bound for a hangar where the Americans' plane was being repaired. A U.S. spokesman hastily explained that it was a mistake on both sides: the area...
Quarrel with Overtones. These odd encounters were the opening skirmishes in a conflict with deadly serious overtones. Iceland is a NATO member, and the U.S. airbase at Keflavik is a keystone in NATO defense. Yet in their anger at Britain, Icelanders, spurred on by Minister of Fisheries Ludvik Josepsson, a Communist, were muttering about withdrawing from NATO and closing down the U.S. airfield...
...broke radio silence for the first time since leaving Hawaii to send off a three-word encrypted signal to the Navy that said something like: "Here we are!" Thirteen miles off Iceland a helicopter arrived out of nowhere, lifted Anderson off for a preplanned hop to Iceland's Keflavik Airfield, where a Navy plane was waiting to fly him to Washington. The helicopter lowered the crew's first outside-world tribute direct from the President of the U.S. It read: "Congratulations on a magnificent achievement. Well done...