ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s, U.S. military forces stationed in West Germany were again the target of several brutal terrorist attacks. On August 8, 1985, a car bomb exploded outside the headquarters building at the Rhein-Main Air Base, killing two Americans and wounding twenty people, both Americans and West Germans. 1 The incident was the most serious attack on a U.S. installation since the bombing of Ramstein Air Base in 1981, when twenty-two people were wounded. A few days after the Rhein-Main attack, the Red Army Faction claimed responsibility in a letter sent to the Frankfurt office of the British news agency Reuters. 2 Equally chilling was the terrorist attack on the La Belle Club, a discotheque popular among U.S. military personnel in West Berlin, on April 5, 1986. The explosion killed a U.S. soldier and a Turkish woman and left two hundred and thirty others burned and wounded. A Jordanian arrested on suspicion of involvement in the West Berlin bombing had, according to West German government representatives, clear ties to the Qaddafi regime in Libya. 3
