184 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
leadership’s real feeling was of worry that Reagan was abandoning
the policy of rapprochement.
Events in the Mediterranean increased the tension. On 5 April
1986 a bomb killed three people and injured 229 others in West
Berlin’s La Belle discothèque – a venue known to be frequented by
American servicemen. The White House, relying on CIA reports,
held Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi responsible. Libyan-supported
terrorist groups had been targeting US citizens in Western Europe and
the Middle East for a couple of years. Reagan had already issued a
warning that the next time that Libya repeated its behaviour, he would
order reprisals. In March 1986 he had sanctioned naval exercises in
disputed waters in the Gulf of Sirte. Gaddafi ordered his forces to fire
on American planes, and the Americans sank Libyan patrol boats in
reply. After the discothèque explosion, Reagan decided that nothing
less than an attack by F-111 aeroplanes over the Libyan mainland was
appropriate. The French and Spanish governments withheld consent
for flights over their air space, but Thatcher permitted the mission to
start from a British airfield. The raid on Tripoli on 14 April 1986 was
swift and devastating, despite the loss of one American plane. The
Americans indicated that if Gaddafi continued to sponsor terrorist
activity, the same thing would happen again.^33
Libya was a client state of the USSR. Its armed forces used Soviet
military equipment and received training from advisers sent by
Moscow. Although the Tripoli air raid was not a direct challenge to
Gorbachëv, it certainly raised a question about whether Reagan was
the peacemonger he claimed to be. Pravda accused the American
administration of imperialist aggression. As Shevardnadze noted,
the problem was that Soviet leaders were vulnerable to the charge
of hypocrisy when indicting America for imperialism: ‘Eh, if only
it weren’t for Afghanistan!’^34 Gorbachëv and Shevardnadze quickly
decided on a cautious reaction to the Libyan emergency. They were
still hoping for a summit meeting later that year. With this in mind,
they confined themselves to cancelling a scheduled meeting between
Shultz and Shevardnadze. They also informed the Americans that
Soviet flights to Libya were going to continue and that Moscow
expected them to be unmolested.^35 But Gorbachëv refrained from
issuing Reagan with a public rebuke. He did not even write a note of
condolence to Gaddafi, who claimed to have lost an adoptive daughter
in the raid.^36
As Gorbachëv and Shevardnadze were pondering what to do next,