U.S. Strategy: Keep Attacking Until Kadafi Yields or Is Ousted

President Reagan’s escalating war with Libya’s Moammar Kadafi is based on a single key premise, senior Administration officials said Tuesday: that Libyan-sponsored terrorism can be stopped only by attacking Kadafi until he either retreats or falls in a coup d’etat.

But officials acknowledged that they do not know what course the Libyan leader will take or how many rounds of increasingly bloody warfare will be needed to reach their goal.

In the aftermath of the air strikes against targets in Libya’s two largest cities, Administration aides said that they are watching closely to discern how Kadafi responds--and whether his reaction will touch off another exchange of fire.

“We would prefer not to have to repeat the events of last night,” Reagan said in a speech Tuesday. “What is required is for Libya to end its pursuit of terror for political goals. The choice is theirs.”

But the President and aides involved in planning the attack said that the Administration is now set firmly on a course that makes another battle almost inevitable unless Kadafi--whom Reagan has derided as a “mad dog”--suddenly retreats.

“Either he puts his tail between his legs or he decides to hit us again,” a senior State Department official said. “And if he hits us again, we’ve made it clear that we’ll strike back.”

“Maybe another stringent dose of medicine will work,” he said. “The only problem is that we don’t know how many doses it will take.”

Several officials said they doubt that Kadafi will accede to Reagan’s pressure now, especially in view of reports that his 15-month-old adopted daughter was killed and two of his young sons were seriously injured in the raid.

“The big question mark in our plan is whether the ‘mad dog’ will act rationally,” said one. “If he does, he’ll retreat. If he doesn’t, down the road, he will end up the loser.”

Officially, U.S. spokesmen deny that their aims include engineering Kadafi’s fall. But they readily acknowledge that if American air and naval attacks lead to a military revolt against his 16-year rule, they would consider that a major victory.

“We are not trying to go after Kadafi as such,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said, “although we think he is a ruler who is better out of his country.”

Several officials said they had seen unconfirmed intelligence reports Tuesday of gun battles in Tripoli between units of Kadafi’s revolutionary militia and his regular army in the wake of the U.S. air strikes. “It may mean that a split has developed in the military, and it may be just confusion,” said one.

But another senior official warned that the Administration has few sources of intelligence about Libya’s military. If dissident officers attempt a coup, he said, “we probably won’t know until they do it.”

A more immediate aim of the U.S. air strikes was to forestall Kadafi’s network of terrorists from going ahead with several attacks that Tripoli is reported to have ordered.

Even before the April 5 bombing of a West Berlin discotheque that killed an American serviceman and touched off Monday’s retaliation, U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Libyan agents had surveyed 35 American installations abroad as possible targets. After the U.S.-Libyan naval battle in the Gulf of Sidra last month, they said, an order went out from Tripoli to several suspected terrorists ordering them to carry out plans already in place--apparently including the Berlin bombing.

“The guts of the whole question is, do they go forward or do they get pulled back in,” a State Department analyst said. “The operations are already in place. If this international network has any discipline whatever, they’ll all pause and wait to see if they get a message from Tripoli either to go ahead or to hold off.”

Libya’s reported missile attack on a U.S.-manned navigation facility on Italy’s Mediterranean island of Lampedusa--an attack that resulted only in explosions in the sea--could have been an attempt by Kadafi to save face before calling off the planned terror attacks, he said.

“Kadafi always likes to save face before he retreats,” he said. “But we don’t know yet. It could be the beginning of a campaign to hit us wherever they can.”

A third possibility--and the most troublesome for Reagan--would be a simple change in tactics on Kadafi’s part, an intelligence source said.

Reagan was able to overcome the longstanding divisions over terrorism within his Administration and order Monday’s air strike partly because the evidence of Libya’s direct role in the Berlin bombing was clear, he said.

But using Libyan embassies and agents for terrorism has been a departure from Kadafi’s earlier practice, the source said. Until recently, U.S. intelligence analysts believe, the Libyan leader used Palestinian guerrilla groups and other third parties.

“It’s only been in the last year, the last 12 months or so, that he started targeting Americans with Libyan operatives,” the intelligence source said. “There have been several operations--Paris, Rome, a couple of others I can’t talk about because they were stopped. He didn’t think we’d do anything.”

He said that Kadafi could react to Reagan’s escalation by going back to sponsoring foreign terrorist squads--which would be more difficult to detect and would offer less clear evidence to justify retaliatory strikes.

That is a risk Administration spokesmen said they are prepared to take.

They also had braced for negative reaction from Europe, where several allies expressed regret over the U.S. action. West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl defended the air strike as self-defense, but German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on a visit to Washington, told Shultz that he would have preferred “political efforts to tackle this problem.”

Shultz and White House spokesman Larry Speakes seemed unconcerned.

“The President said we are prepared to do it again and we will,” Speakes said. Other countries may object, he said, but “we will go it alone if necessary.”

Staff writer Michael Wines contributed to this story.