Word: raids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...raid was a total surprise. The city was ablaze with light, and not a single air-raid alarm sounded. The Libyans hastily put up a hail of antiaircraft fire, but their Soviet-made SAMs, fired without radar guidance, were wildly inaccurate. "We forced the Libyans to turn off their radar," says Navy Secretary John Lehman. "They knew if they turned them on to guide their missiles, they would get a HARM down the throat." Nor was any defense mounted by the Libyan air force, whose pilots are notoriously poor night flyers. Five F-111s were assigned to hit Colonel Gaddafi...
Reprisals: the corpses of three Western hostages seized in Lebanon, including American Peter Kilburn, dumped on a road outside Beirut two days after the raid...
Libya's only military riposte to the raid was feeble. On Tuesday afternoon it launched two Soviet-made SS-1 ballistic missiles, each with about a ton of dynamite in its warhead, in the general direction of the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa. Fired from a military base near the Tunisian coast, they were evidently aimed at a Coast Guard navigational aid facility located on Lampedusa. Both missiles exploded three miles short of land...
...pilots were being hunted down by local citizens "like mad dogs." Authorities made no attempt to prove either claim, but few Libyans expected Gaddafi to let matters rest where they stood. Nor did those on the front line of the U.S. side seem to think that last week's raid put an end to the contest of wills between Gaddafi and Washington. On the day after the raid, TIME Correspondent Sam Allis noticed that someone had scrawled a message on the circular rear end of a Sidewinder missile stored on the deck of the carrier America. The grim inscription: THIS...
...late-hour mission, the U.N. Ambassador was dispatched to win the backing of U.S. allies for a raid...