The Eighties in America - Salem Press (2009)

No organization claimed responsibility for the
bombing. German investigators pursued several
leads, including neo-Nazi German nationalists, the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Lib-
yan agents seeking revenge for an American naval at-
tack in the Gulf of Sidra in late March. Seizing upon
the Libyan connection and citing two coded mes-
sages emanating from the Libyan embassy in Berlin,
the United States used the La Belle nightclub bomb-
ing as justification for an aerial attack on Tripoli and
Benghazi on April 15.
That attack occurred as the Cold War threat of
the Soviet Union was on the wane, and the Ronald
Reagan administration sought to replace it with
the threat of international terrorism. Libyan leader
Muammar al-Qaddafi, who actively supported the
PLO and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), was an
obvious target. A majority of Americans approved of
the action, but international reaction was mainly
negative.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, examina-
tion of East German Stasi (secret police) files led Ger-
man and American investigators to Libyan Musbar
Eter, who implicated Palestinian Yasser Chraidi, a
driver at the Libyan embassy in East Berlin in 1986;
Ali Chanaa, a Lebanese-born German citizen who
worked for the Stasi; and Verena Chanaa, his Ger-
man wife. Arraigned in 1996, the four were con-
victed in November, 2001, of murder and attempted
murder after a lengthy trial described by commenta-
tors as murky. A 1998 documentary for German ZDF
television claimed that Eter worked for both the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israeli intel-
ligence, that Chraidi was not the mastermind and
possibly was innocent, and that evidence pointed to
several people who were never prosecuted. Follow-
ing the verdict, Qaddafi agreed to pay compensation
to German victims of the bombing as part of a
German-Libyan commercial treaty, but he denied di-
rect Libyan responsibility for the attack. American
victims have yet to be compensated.

Impact The bombing provided justification for a
military attack on Libya. After having faded from the
public consciousness, the incident assumed fresh
immediacy following the 1998 bombings of Amer-
ican embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which
prompted American missile strikes against alleged
terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and the Sudan. The
La Belle bombing and its aftermath established a

pattern of immediate and massive American retalia-

tion against targets whose connection to the terror-

ist attack was never subsequently proven.

Further Reading

Chomsky, Noam.Pirates and Emperors: International

Terrorism in the Real World.New York: Black Rose

Books, 1987.

Davis, Briant.Qaddafi, Terrorism, and the Origins of the

U.S. Attack on Libya.New York: Praeger, 1996.

Kaldor, Mary, and Paul Anderson.Mad Dogs: The U.S.

Raids on Libya. London: Pluto Press, 1986.

St. John, Ronald Bruce.Libya and the United States:

Two Centuries of Strife. Philadelphia: University of

Philadelphia Press, 2002.

Martha A. Sherwood

See also Foreign policy of the United States; Libya

bombing; Middle East and North America; Pan Am

Flight 103 bombing; Reagan, Ronald; Terrorism;

USSVincennesincident.

When Harry Met Sally...

Identification Romantic comedy film

Director Rob Reiner (1945- )

Date Released July 12, 1989

When Harry Met Sally.. .was one of the most critically

and popularly successful romantic comedies of the 1980’s.

Clever scripting, memorable performances, and a sound

track made up of vocal standards drove the film’s popular-

ity, and many of its lines and ideas entered the cultural vo-

cabular y of 1980’s America.

Nora Ephron, the accomplished screenwriter and

director, wrote the Oscar-nominated script forWhen

Harr y Met Sally.. ., directed by Rob Reiner. It tells a

story about college classmates Harry Burns and Sally

Albright, who after graduation periodically run into

each other during their early adulthood. The neu-

rotic, depressed, Jewish Burns, played by comic ac-

tor Billy Crystal, and the optimistic, sweet, Protestant

Albright, played by Meg Ryan, first meet through a

friend on a shared drive from college to New York,

where both are moving. They dislike each other and

decide not to keep in touch once they arrive at their

destination. They meet again five years later on an

airplane and then again five years after that, this

time in a bookstore. After this meeting they become

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When Harry Met Sally... The Eighties in America