Almost no one outside knew it, but inside the White House Situation Room, a quiet revolution was taking place.
The meetings were heated; the president’s divided advisors were debating a new military operation against a foreign country. Always a solemn undertaking, but here complicated by the fact that the country in question had only ever attacked the US through proxies.
Disagreements tilted toward mistrust; progress stalled. They argued about what they were arguing about. It was increasingly clear they weren’t just considering an act of war; they were considering a new kind of war. And it was increasingly clear that before they could agree on whether or not to execute it, they needed to define it. The President changed tack; he tasked his staff with drawing up a document that might at least address some of the unanswered questions.
What justifies military action against a foreign country, when it’s the country’s terrorist proxies threatening US interests?
What would the goal of that military action be?
The National Security Advisor led an inter-agency, multi-draft process to assemble a document that, once completed, provided a blueprint for the new kind of action. The document, despite its Top Secret classification and its anodyne title “National Security Decision Directive 138,” represented a seismic shift in how the US considered military intervention. NSDD 138 asserted that whenever “we have evidence that a state is mounting or intends to conduct an act of terrorism against us, we have a responsibility to take measures to protect our citizens, property, and interests.” It ordered the military to develop a “strategy that is supportive of an active, preventive program to combat state‑ sponsored terrorism before the terrorists can initiate hostile acts.”
Now the United States had a legal framework to launch attacks in other countries without being at war with them. The US could attack countries that hadn’t attacked the US, if those countries supported terrorists who had, or even if they were supporting terrorists who might. The US, in other words, could launch “preemptive’ strikes.
Two weeks after President Reagan signed the secret new directive, the Libyans struck again.
A gunman inside the Libyan embassy in London opened fire on protestors outside, injuring ten and killing a police officer, while back in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi sent soldiers to surround the British embassy and hold its staff hostage. To Reagan, this was exactly the kind of blatant, unprovoked attack that proved the threat from Libya, and to which he was compelled, by the new directive to respond.
Still, the Secretary of Defense advised caution. Aside from the question of how, practically, to carry out an attack all the way in Libya, with no pre‑positioned forces— the military strategy NSDD 138 ordered but which had not yet been produced — Cap Weinberger argued that an operation against Libya would not be a proportionate response. The Libyan attacks had not been against US citizens. If the US attacked Libya now, it would be an escalation, not a reciprocation.
Reagan found himself talked down for the moment, if just barely. He’d hold back for now, but his restraint was fraying.
Soon NSDD 138 was tested again. At approximately 9:10 a.m. local time on Dec. 27, 1985, four men in blue jeans walked into the departure hall of the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome carrying Kalashnikovs and grenades, approached the desk of El Al Airlines, the national carrier of Israel, and opened fire.
At the exact same time, next door in Austria, a nearly identical attack was underway at the Vienna International Airport departure hall. By the time authorities at the two airports managed to take back control, the attackers had injured over a hundred people and killed sixteen—among them, four American citizens.
When Reagan met with his National Security Council in the aftermath, he was unambiguous. “I think we’re all agreed,” he said, “we must do something in view of the massacres in the airports at Rome and Vienna.” He believed proof of Libya’s involvement was unambiguous: Investigators had quickly traced the attackers’ weapons and passports to Libya and matched their grenades to a Libyan military stockpile. Reporting from intelligence sources, meanwhile, suggested money had been transferred from Libya to the extremist group whose men had carried out the attack.
So this time, it seemed irrefutable that the blood of the innocent civilians was on Gaddafi’s hands.
This time, the blood of American citizens was on his hands too. And this time, there was pressure to act from outside the Situation Room too. The major newspapers ran three-column-wide photos of the carnage at the airports, with above‑the‑fold banner headlines — the news-consuming public was beginning to wonder whether Reagan was going to do something about it. The rising scourge of terror was now impossible to ignore. Common sense, the public, and NSDD 138 all seemed aligned toward action.
The only argument available to those like Secretary of Defense Weinberger still campaigning for restraint was even more brittle than the one he’d used last time: Yes, this time Americans had been killed. And yes, all signs point to Libya. But the Americans at the airports in Rome and Vienna had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The attack seemed to be targeting Israeli interests, not American ones. And since there was no proof that Libya was specifically, deliberately targeting the American victims, an attack deliberately targeting Libya would still be — technically — disproportionate.
Even more reluctantly this time, Reagan acquiesced. It felt like half the NSC staff was braying for military action against Libya, but for now, Reagan would take every step just short of war available to him: he imposed an embargo; froze assets, and ordered an impressive, intimidating military presence off the Libyan coast. And in the meantime he wanted the military solving the operational problem: how they’d actually go about launching a long‑range attack, with limited support from allies, against a dangerous adversary on foreign soil. He wanted the plans on his desk and ready to go.
The Libyans had done perhaps the worst they could do without triggering an American response. The only trespass left — perhaps the only line Gaddafi hadn’t crossed — was an attack that killed Americans on purpose.
Residence of Ali Chanaa – Stasi code name “Alba”
Lindenstrasse, Kreuzberg
West Berlin
Just as CIA handlers in West Berlin began hearing from their assets about a plot against Americans, Musbah Eter’s team at the Libyan embassy took receipt of 1,500 grams of plastic high explosives delivered via diplomatic courier.
Now, inside a small Kreuzberg apartment on Lindenstrasse, all the bomb components were in one place.
Eter gathered the group around the kitchen table and got to work. He used a ballpoint pen to gauge out a hole in a small block of the flexible plastic explosives. He slipped the detonator, a thin aluminum tube with exposed wires on one end, from the pack of cigarettes he’d hidden it inside of, and inserted it into the hole.
He took another device from the cigarette pack: a small, rectangular timer like a digital watch — the time delay device. Hunched over the table, he wired it into the detonator, as he’d been trained. He pressed nails and small pieces of steel into the block. He wrapped the whole parcel in tape.
The bomb was now assembled.
Eter turned to Verena and addressed her in German. “You could help teach a lesson to the American guests,” he said. He’d chosen a soft target, a nightclub called La Belle that was frequented by American servicemen and had lax security, but it occurred to him that a woman carrying a large bag would draw less attention than a man, and it didn’t hurt that Verena was a German citizen. He appealed to her sense of fate; he offered her a chance at heroism.
She seemed to consider it.
Eter waited.
When she replied, she said she had a better idea. Wouldn’t two women be even less conspicuous than one? Why not have her sister join? Eter had no objection. He slipped the bomb into a travel bag, made sure Verena had taxi money, and told her that when it was done, she should not go directly home, but instead follow a roundabout route and switch taxis at least once.
At around 10:30 pm the two women walked out of the apartment into West Berlin, headed for the target.
Eter crossed back into East Berlin. His team sent a coded cable back to their bosses in Tripoli to tell them the plan was in motion.
National Airborne Operations Center
Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger was on his way to a meeting with Pacific allies when he received a transmission about a bombing in West Berlin. He passed it to a deputy. “Is this finally our smoking gun?”
The deputy read it. “I believe this is indeed a smoking gun.”
Jeffrey E. Stern’s The Warhead published by Dutton is out now. This lightly adapted excerpt is reprinted here with the permission of the author and publisher.
