Word: raid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Special Envoy Philip Habib finally seemed on the verge of achieving a deal that would defuse tensions over Syrian antiaircraft missiles in Lebanon. The surprise Israeli raid altered those priorities -and the attention the White House had hoped to focus on them-and presented the President and his chief advisers with their most delicate foreign policy test since Reagan took office...
After he learned of the raid, Haig summoned his senior aides and Middle East specialists to the State Department's seventh-floor operations center. They were still in their Sunday sports clothes. They agreed that the U.S. should not break the news of the attack: to do so would feed the inevitable charges that America had supported the Israeli plans, or at least had known about and failed to stop them. Haig ordered cables sent to U.S. embassies around the world, alerting them that the bombing had occurred. A few leaders on Capitol Hill were also advised...
...questions-and the air of mystery -began to build. From the start, government officials had been convinced that members of the Civil Guard had been involved in the bank raid because of the terrorists' discipline, and the fact that some carried regulation machine guns. The terrorists also addressed their leaders only as "No. 1," "No. 2," or as "Mi primero" (My chief), in military parlance. The government sent the Civil Guard commander to negotiate with the terrorists and assure them that they would get "military treatment," a hint of leniency in a court-martial, if they would surrender...
...important question of who masterminded and bankrolled the operations, the government claimed that ten days before the raid an extreme right-wing paymaster-not further identified -offered each terrorist 5 million pesetas (about $55,000) at a dinner in Perpignan, France, just across the frontier. But that did not account for the fact that the carpenter's shop had been rented five weeks before by a member of the gang...
Faced with these questions, Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo-Sotek>last week told the Cortes, the country's parliament, that "we do not know" who was behind the bank raid. Some high officials believe, however, that members of the political underworld are being recruited and trained for terrorist operations with military or police connivance, and that the financiers are wealthy supporters of the old Franco regime, who are deliberately trying to destabilize Spain. As the evidence mounted, Prime Minister Calvo-Sotelo finally admitted that the bank raid was "not an isolated action of common criminals...