To the Shores of Tripoli ;

By Ed Magnuson

Once again, U.S. naval power was massed in the Mediterranean and poised to cross the imaginary "line of death" proclaimed by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi as marking his nation's territorial waters in the Gulf of Sidra. Once again, a senior U.S. Navy official insisted that "it is not provocative to assert internationally accepted rights" at sea. And once again no one took seriously the pro forma U.S. assertions that the naval exercises were routine. "Tommyrot!" scoffed a Pentagon source. "Of course we're aching for a go at Gaddafi." Agreed a senior White House aide: "If he sticks his head up, we'll clobber him. We're looking for an excuse."

The U.S. sent Navy jet fighters across the line (slightly north of the 32nd parallel, some 130 miles off the Libyan coast) in 1981, and shot down two Libyan planes after one attacked them. Two months ago the Navy sent two carriers steaming toward the gulf, but did not actually penetrate the disputed waters. This time, Navy officials insisted, a direct challenge to Gaddafi is "inevitable." As President Reagan told TIME last week, "Some ships and planes will cross that line," and "anytime our men are fired upon, we fire back." And now the Navy is better prepared for whatever might follow. It has three carriers in the area: the Coral Sea, the Saratoga and the America. Together, they can launch nearly 200 of the best U.S. fighters and attack bombers.

Despite that firepower, Libya is far from unprotected. Its air force includes some 480 Soviet and aging French-built aircraft. More ominously, a Kresta-class Soviet cruiser is anchored in Libyan waters. Seven other Soviet warships are nearby in the Mediterranean. If Gaddafi should rise to the bait and try forcibly to counter any U.S. movement across his line in the gulf, a prime U.S. retaliatory target might be the SA-5 antiaircraft sites that recently became operational at an airfield south of the Libyan city of Surt. One complication in hitting the sites: an attack could result in casualties among Soviet technicians that man the antiaircraft areas. Nonetheless, both Secretary of State George Shultz, who has long yearned to "put Gaddafi back in his box," and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger reportedly have been angered at the Libyan's recent claim that he does not support terrorists.

While testing Gaddafi's responses, the U.S. also tested Soviet defenses by sending the cruiser Yorktown and the destroyer Caron into the Black Sea, where $ they sailed within six miles of the Crimean peninsula near the port of Sevastopol.

Although the U.S. ships, part of the Saratoga's battle force, intruded upon the Soviets' internationally accepted twelve-mile territorial waters, the Navy said that the action was "neither defiant nor provocative." By charting a course that cut through Soviet waters along a curving peninsula, the vessels were merely exercising a "right of innocent passage" long accepted under maritime custom--and by the Soviet Union itself. Nonetheless, U.S. Charge d'Affaires Richard Combs was summoned to the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow and handed a protest note. Rather than an "innocent passage," said a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, the U.S. action was "a provocative passage, a clear violation of Soviet borders for the purpose of conducting espionage."

The charge was based on the fact that the Yorktown's electronic listening devices can range some 500 miles to snoop on Soviet communications, while the Caron is an intelligence-gathering ship capable of searching out newly established Soviet radar installations. But as U.S. officials noted, the Soviets regularly claim similar rights of innocent passage when sailing within six miles of the U.S. near Florida en route to Cuba, as well as near the coasts of Hawaii.

Such spying, designed to "light up" and thereby test an opponent's defenses, is an ongoing superpower game. Yet Washington seems to be intensifying the byplay: just before the Crimea incident, the U.S., contending that many of the 275 Soviet diplomats at their United Nations missions are spies, ordered the Soviets to cut their staffs by some 40%.

On Saturday, the Administration risked a further chill in superpower relations by conducting an underground nuclear test in Nevada. Delayed several times while the two sides sparred over proposals for verifying any possible long-term ban, it was the first such U.S. explosion in nearly three months. The Soviets announced a unilateral ban on testing last July and recently pledged not to resume tests unless the U.S. did so. American intelligence sources say that the Soviets have been digging holes and tunnels and could begin new blasts within two weeks.

With reporting by Johanna McGeary and Bruce van Voorst/Washington