Word: mediterraneans
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...interests are clearly at stake. Some French commanders quietly continue to participate in infantry exercises with NATO forces in West Germany. French ships openly joined some 50 other vessels of the U.S., Britain, Italy and Greece in the alliance's "Operation Eden Apple" naval maneuvers in the Mediterranean last week...
...invade another country. But in their final communiqué, they issued a double-edged warning that 1) they were "wholly determined to defend the members of the alliance against any armed attack," and 2) "Any Soviet intervention directly or indirectly affecting the situation in Europe or in the Mediterranean would create an international crisis with grave consequences...
...Russians were equally adamant in defending the buildup of their fleet in the Mediterranean (see following story). "The Soviet Union is known to be a Black Sea and, hence, Mediterranean power," the government newspaper Izvestia proclaimed, declaring that Soviet ships were in the Mediterranean to stay. In Red Star, the organ of the Soviet Defense Ministry, Vice Admiral Nikolai Smirnov said it was "imperative for the Soviet Union, in the interests of security," to strengthen its fleet. The presence of Soviet ships in the Mediterranean, the admiral wrote, "does not allow the Sixth Fleet to carry out the Pentagon...
Invited or not, the Soviet navy has made itself at home all over the Mediterranean in sharply increasing numbers. Acting as if they had nothing to lose but their anchor chains, the Russians are everywhere now-tailing the U.S. Sixth Fleet, showing the Red Flag from the Dardanelles to Gibraltar, resorting to old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy to keep the big powers baffled and the smaller ones uneasy...
Snap of the Fingers. Black-bereted naval infantrymen, the Soviet version of Marines, stroll the streets of Damascus. Intelligence trawlers refuel at what has become the Soviets' main Mediterranean port of call, Alexandria. Soviet patrol boats tie up 1,700 miles to the west at the Algerian port of Mers-el-Kebir. Soviet subs play hide-and-seek with NATO patrols underneath the heel of Italy. Overhead, from bases in Egypt, Soviet "Badger" class planes, their red stars painted over with Egyptian markings, wing daily across the Mediterranean to shadow Allied fleets...