In retaliation for President Nixon’s decision to resupply Israel during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War and in an attempt to make aerial surveillance of his country more difficult, Qaddafi made a fateful announcement on 11 October 1973.3 He said that the entire Gulf of Sidra is “located within the territory of the Libyan Arab Republic . . . extending north offshore to latitude 32 degrees and 30 minutes, constitutes an integral part of the territory of the Libyan Arab Republic[,] and is under its complete sovereignty.”4 By proclaiming the huge gulf to be Libyan internal waters Qaddafi blatantly repudiated several longstanding international conventions. To support Libya’s claim he advanced his own interpretation of international law. First he argued that the Gulf of Sidra was a bay, although its 250-mile-wide opening far exceeded the 24-mile-wide maximum size allowed to enclose internal waters by Article 7 of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone. Second he stated that Libya’s claim over the Gulf of Sidra was historic, but W. Hays Parks, an authority on international law, explained that “such a claim must be long-standing, open, and notorious—with effective and continuous exercise of authority by the claimant—and one to which other states acquiesce.” Qaddafi’s declaration of sovereignty over the Gulf of Sidra dated from 1973, hardly a longstanding claim. Furthermore, by the mid-1980s only two countries—the post-Numayri regime in Sudan and Burkina Faso—had recognized Qaddafi’s claim.5
Principal Libyan military installations, mid-1980s
Libya: A Country Study, ed. Helen C. Metz, 1989
On 11 February 1974 the U.S. Department of State issued a démarche that called Libya’s claim of sovereignty over the Gulf of Sidra “unacceptable as a violation of international law.” The note made a further declaration: “The United States Government views the Libyan action as an attempt to appropriate a large area of the high seas by unilateral action, thereby encroaching upon the long-established principle of freedom of the seas. . . . The United States Government reserves its rights and the rights of its nationals in the area of the Gulf of Sidra affected by the action of the Government of Libya.”6 Similar protests were issued by the Soviet Union and several other nations.7
The United States and other maritime powers enjoyed a long history of operating in the international waters of the Gulf of Sidra and were understandably concerned about Qaddafi’s assertion of sovereignty over the gulf for two important reasons. First, the gulf forms a large indentation—120 miles at its deepest—in the North African coastline and is therefore a convenient location for naval forces to conduct surface and air exercises free of commercial fishing zones and away from the busy shipping lanes and air routes of the central Mediterranean. Acquiescence to Libyan sovereignty would have severely complicated and restricted training opportunities for the U.S. Sixth Fleet and other navies operating in the Mediterranean. Second, if left unchallenged Qaddafi’s claim would have encouraged other nations to advance their own unreasonable claims of extended territorial seas, creating, in the words of Parks, “the danger of international maritime anarchy.” At the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, held from 1973 to 1982, the U.S. delegation fought vigorously to maintain maximum operational mobility for its naval forces worldwide. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea extended territorial sea limits from three to twelve nautical miles but also reaffirmed important sections of the 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone including the definition of what constitutes a bay. The convention denied any recognition whatsoever of Libya’s claim over the Gulf of Sidra.8 Although the United States did not sign the 1982 convention, it accepted the convention’s twelve-mile limit for denoting territorial waters.9
President Carter’s Libya Policy
On three occasions between 1973 and 1979 the United States challenged Qaddafi’s illegal claim of sovereignty over the Gulf of Sidra by conducting routine naval exercises in the disputed waters. In late 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, and Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, the chief of naval operations, proposed a large-scale freedom of navigation (FON) exercise designed to assert U.S. rights in the gulf and underscore Qaddafi’s inability to back up his claim with military force. Carter’s Libya policy, however, was influenced by his desire to maintain economic relations, avoid military confrontation, and prevent closer cooperation between Tripoli and Moscow. Carter rejected the FON plan out of a concern that a bold challenge to Qaddafi might provoke a military incident, endanger Americans living and working in Libya, or embarrass Arab and other Muslim leaders who were trying to negotiate the release of American hostages being held since 4 November 1979 by radical Iranian students at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.10
Despite Carter’s cautious policy toward Libya, relations between Washington and Tripoli rapidly deteriorated. On 2 December 1979 a large mob gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, demonstrating against the United States and shouting pro-Iranian slogans. Before long the crowd overran, sacked, and burned the embassy while a single Libyan policeman looked on. The Carter administration immediately lodged a stern protest with the Libyan government. The United States demanded that Libya admit responsibility for the attack and destruction of the embassy, since it had not provided adequate protection for the facility. The Libyans responded with expressions of regret for the incident but denied any responsibility. After the Carter administration threatened to suspend operation of the U.S. mission in Tripoli the Libyan government agreed to compensate the United States for the damages. In April and May 1980 the Carter administration expelled six Libyan diplomats because they were engaged in a “campaign of intimidation” against Libyan exiles living in the United States. In May the administration finally closed the American diplomatic mission in Tripoli.11
On 16 September two Libyan MiG-23 Floggers allegedly fired missiles at an unarmed U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane flying in international airspace. The American plane escaped unharmed. Since the evidence surrounding the incident was not conclusive, the Carter administration neither acknowledged the suspected attack nor sent a formal protest to Tripoli. Five days later another confrontation took place when eight Libyan fighters flown by Syrian pilots attempted to intercept an RC-135 operating two hundred miles off the Libyan coast. This time, however, the electronic surveillance plane was accompanied by a trio of F-14 Tomcat fighters from the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67). The Tomcats immediately challenged the aggressors, who wisely broke off the engagement and returned to base. Once again the administration did not publicly acknowledge the incident. Carter did not want to escalate tensions between the United States and Libya during his reelection campaign.12
On 22 October the Libyan people’s bureau in Washington purchased advertising space in the Washington Post and reprinted a letter from “Brother Leader” Qaddafi to Carter and his Republican opponent in the election, former California governor Ronald Reagan. Qaddafi claimed that “several aggressive measures have been taken by America against Libya, as represented in . . . the taking of very hostile political and media attitudes.” He stressed that an armed conflict between the United States and the Arabs could “only be avoided if America stops the military steps it has taken which threaten the independence of the Arab homeland.” He warned that if the United States persisted in its aggressive policies toward the Arab nation, the Arabs would be entitled to exercise the right of self-defense to protect their homeland. Finally, in regard to his own country, Qaddafi demanded that the United States stop its “surveillance planes from spying across Libyan borders.”13 In light of the recent Libyan attack on U.S. aircraft and the nearly identical one in 1973, administration officials were convinced that Qaddafi was prepared to use force to defend his airspace and obstruct American intelligence-gathering activities.
In the fall of 1980 the Pentagon again proposed a FON exercise for the Gulf of Sidra, but Carter could not risk another