Chronology of Events

The confrontation between U.S. and Libyan forces in and over the Gulf of Sidra began as a forceful and widely publicized U.S. military maneuver to support President Reagan’s contention that the gulf is an international body of water.

It escalated into violence when the forces of Col. Moammar Kadafi defended his claim that the entire gulf is Libyan territorial water.

Here, according to White House spokesman Larry Speakes, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and other Pentagon officials, is how the episode unfolded. All times are Pacific Standard Time, which is nine hours earlier than local time in the Gulf of Sidra.

Sunday, 1:20 p.m: U.S. fighters and ground-attack aircraft--F-14s, F/A-18s and A-7s from 6th Fleet ships in the Mediterranean Sea--flew south across latitude 32 degrees, 30 minutes, which demarks the northern edge of the gulf. Kadafi had designated latitude 32-30 as the “line of death” for foreign forces that crossed it.

Monday, 3 a.m.: A U.S. “surface action group” consisting of a guided-missile cruiser, a destroyer and a guided-missile destroyer crossed latitude 32-30 to begin operations below the “line of death.”

4:52 a.m.: Libya fired two Soviet-made SA-5 surface-to-air missiles from a missile battery at the coastal town of Surt, in the region where Kadafi was born. The long-range weapons, designed to strike targets up to 150 miles away, missed U.S. aircraft flying over the gulf.

Later: Two Soviet-made Libyan MIG-25s were intercepted over the gulf by U.S. aircraft and turned back. No shots were fired.

9:45 a.m.: Two additional missiles--believed to be an SA-5 and an SA-2--and possibly another, unidentified missile--were fired, also missing their targets. The SA-2 is an older, slower, shorter-range missile used by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

10:14 a.m.: Another SA-5 was fired, again striking no U.S. aircraft.

11:36 a.m.: A U.S. A-6 ground-attack aircraft from the carrier America fired two Harpoon missiles, 14-foot cruise missiles that fly just under the speed of sound. They struck a Libyan high-speed guided-missile patrol boat, leaving it on fire and dead in the water.

12:06 p.m.: A U.S. A-7 aircraft from the carrier Saratoga fired a HARM missile at the Libyan SA-5 missile battery. The weapon--a 13-foot supersonic High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile that can home in on the electromagnetic radiation emitted by radar installations--struck two radar sites and put the entire Libyan missile battery out of action.

1:19 p.m.: A second Libyan patrol boat headed out to sea, leaving the port of Benghazi, and was “severely damaged” in another aerial attack shortly afterwards.