Further progress:
Launching googlearth from a terminal prompt produces the error message:
/usr/lib/googleearth-bin: error while loading shared libraries:
libcurl.so.4 cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
Jessie has the following libcurl3 packages:
libcurl3
libcurl3-gnutls
libcurl3-ncs
but only the following libcurl4 packages:
libcurl4-gnutls-dev
libcurl4-nss-dev
libcurl4-openssl-dev
Would any of these satisfy googleearth-bin?
RLH