Libyans challenge US aircraft

One of the useful and now irreplaceable words invented, I don't know how long ago, by American newspapermen is the noun 'a wrap-up'. It's literal meaning is obvious – from wrapping something up like a parcel, something you've packed, tied up and sent off. Turned into a noun by newspapermen, it meant, it means, not so much the end of a story as a quick summary of a chain of events before you dispose of them once for all.

However, like many another bit of professional jargon, its main function is to make the professional feel that he's settled something when, in fact, he's only defined it. We've all suffered from doctors who listen to the symptoms and keep their brows conscientiously wrinkled until – ha ha! – they can diagnose the ailment, at which point the patient has an urge to say, 'Don't name it! Cure it!'.

So, when a reporter who's been working on a story for some time is told by his editor to do a wrap-up, the reporter vents a sigh of relief and does his duty. The story itself – a street riot, an aerial attack, whatever – slips out of the headlines.

The trouble is that history has never heard of a wrap-up and a month or a year later the story flares up again and the reporter discovers that the story never did die but has had a life of its own.

Well, this unpleasant truth occurred to me as I was about to do wrap-ups on a couple of stories that we've talked about lately and one we haven't. The most glaring example of an old and provocative story which suddenly hit the headlines last week as a new one is the spurt of aerial combat off the coast of Libya between two Libyan jets and the air arm of the United States Sixth Fleet during its manoeuvres in the Gulf of Sidra which, now we are told, involved over 40 interceptions of Libyan planes without a shooting incident.

But the story starts by no means last week. It starts in September of last year when an American reconnaissance plane, at least a couple of hundred miles off the Libyan coast, was attacked by a couple of Libyan MiGs. The American, at that time, beat it and landed safely in Athens. Since there was no gunfire, no dead man, there was no news. A few days later, four Libyan planes again went up to challenge the same type of American reconnaissance craft but this time a small fleet of carrier-based American fighters came winging in to help. So that when the Libyans radioed Tripoli for orders – these radio exchanges were taped by the Americans – the Libyans were told to hold their fire and get back to base. Again, no casualties and, as far as we were concerned, no news.

So, when the Reagan administration decided to repeat President Carter's experiment of holding manoeuvres well inside what Colonel Gaddafi regards as his territorial waters, the Sixth Fleet certainly guessed there might be trouble. Indeed, last Sunday, Secretary of State Haig said outright that the fleet anticipated an attack and if that expectation meant provocation to Colonel Gaddafi, he was obligingly provoked.

Now why did the Americans go there and why did the Colonel respond so incessantly with 40-odd harassments of the American manoeuvres? Well, the simple, silly answers given by many a foreign tabloid is that Mr Reagan, like other civilian presidents is enjoying the discovery that he's commander-in-chief of the armed forces and that Colonel Gaddafi is a tinpot dictator mad enough to start talking about saving Libya from an American invasion and offering to fight to the last Libyan to prevent it, even if, he was reported as saying, it meant the start of the Third World War.

The truth seems to be far from these fantasies though I would be willing to bet that none of us will know the whole truth until the protagonists have been long in their graves.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I'm giving you the American story. The Libyans and the Russians will, no doubt, be quick to publish their own. The theory of the Pentagon is that Colonel Gaddafi is a frightened or vulnerable man on several counts: that he fears the intentions of America's ally, President Sadat of Egypt, on his oil; that he fears the Israelis, who take a furious view of Libya's supply of arms to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Certainly, his attack immediately drew support from a host of Arab radicals and an amazingly florid compliment from the PLO's Yasser Arafat who called the rash attack of the Libyan pilots, 'an heroic act which forced America, the head of world terrorism' – look who's talking! – 'to stop its manoeuvres in our territorial waters.'

On the American side, the risk of something bigger than an aerial sortie was taken in order to see if the Soviet Union is going to give more than lip service to its protection of Libya, Syria and the PLO. It's calculated here that a strong personal motive of Colonel Gaddafi was the fear of being overthrown inside his own country. By screaming that the United States is working through the CIA to overthrow him, he could strengthen himself with his own people and, by baiting the Americans into actual military action, could say, in effect, to his Russian protector, 'Well, are you my protector or aren't you?'.

All we can say for now, by way of a very half-hearted, semi wrap-up, is that if Colonel Gaddafi is as shrewd as Washington figures and if the Pentagon has correctly diagnosed his motives, then it does seem a pity that President Reagan should have put on a baseball cap and appeared on the bridge of the carrier Constellation and, like the exec officer taking over the Caine Mutiny, recite the macho line, 'Let friend and foe alike know that America has the muscle to back up its words'.

What words? At best, this can only mean the important words echoed by other allies outside this quarrel that the United States does not regard the Gulf of Sidra as sacrosanct and will continue to consider international waters as beginning outside the 12-mile limit.

While there seemed to have been general approval by America's allies, the misgivings of some of them were most strongly put by a Madrid newspaper which wrote: 'While Carter's excessive weakness was a threat to Western stability, the whole world now feels insecure after Reagan's show of strength.' The whole world is surely a wild exaggeration but there are lots of Americans who wish President Reagan would not appear to simplify these delicate matters by flexing his biceps so publicly.

By the time some of you hear these words, the air controllers' strike may have written several new chapters but, as far as the government's concerned, it's all wrapped up. There is no strike, the government says, it's all over. The Federal Aviation Administration, which is the government arm in the dispute, assumed that the 12,000 sacked controllers are gone for good and this week it invited applications for new employees. So far they've had 60,000. The controllers' union in melancholy trouble. A month from now, it can legally lose its certificate and the strikers have been told that as government officials who broke their oath never to strike, they may no longer be eligible for mortgages on their houses, since those mortgages were insured by the government's housing authority.

There's nothing final about these threats and warnings. My own hunch is that sooner or later, the principle that no government employee has the right to strike will be challenged by the courts and if the strikers then won, the appeals for compensation, back pay, reinstatement and the like, would be a flood, a very expensive flood, inundating the courts and the bureaucracies that would have to handle them.

In the meantime, the lively issue is about the safety of the air that the supervisors, the military and the new boys fresh from the government training centre in Oklahoma City are now policing. The captain of the plane in which I flew back from London told me that things were, if anything, better than normal since the transatlantic planes were being separated by 5,000 feet instead of the usual 2,000 and that planes did not leave Europe until first Gander and then the American terminal airport had given them a slotted time in which to arrive.

By the way, the FAA published a comparative study of near misses for the month ending in the third week of August last year and this year. Last year there were just over 300. This year, eleven. The American Pilots' Union, which has 33,000 members, passed a unanimous resolution this week declaring the American airspace to be unequivocally safe. That, so far, is easily the most reassuring statement we've had since pilots have less desire than most of us to commit suicide and would be the first to announce their doubts.

Nevertheless, the government has started on two independent studies of air safety, both of which will take several months. The only snag looming ahead of the government's assurances of unequivocal safety is the upshot of the meeting of the International Air Controllers Association. They would still, I imagine, have the power to freeze the Atlantic airspace if they chose, though as I pointed out last time transatlantic, or even transoceanic, flights constitute a very small percentage of American civil aviation.

As I talk to you, all we know is that the international controllers have announced that they're going to do something in support of the striking or sacked Americans but don't propose to say just what.

Well, having flown the Atlantic one day and arrived in New York at precisely, to the minute, we'd been ordered to, I adjusted my Circadian rhythms by going round my corner and catching Art Hodes, the old Chicago pianist, returned to New York briefly to prove, in his modest way, that he's still the greatest of all classical blues pianists. Deeply refreshed by a night's exposure to the most genuine and enduring of all American music, I then flew to San Francisco and, once again, enjoyed what the pilots tell me is the new, or perhaps the more cautious, discipline of being slotted from the point of departure into a precise arrival time at your destination.

I came here to find Californians absorbed, or scared, by a quite different aviation problem, that of small fleets of planes spraying the fruit fields – and California is the fruit and salad bowl for America and even more for Japan – spraying against the infestation of the deadly Mediterranean fruit fly.

But that is another, an alarming story and another talk.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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