What Will Qaddhafi Do?

For a short time in 1969 I probably knew more about Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi
than any other American. I was then a young diplomat attached to the American E
mbassy in Tripoli. Since I was the most junior member of the embassy's political
staff, I was given the worst job -- as liaison officer to the sprawling America
n air base just outside the city. For a year, I settled minor customs disputes,
bailed drunken American airmen out of the Tripoli jai and played a lot of beach
volleyball.
That all changed on September 1, 1969 when then Lieutenant Qaddafi and his Revol
utionary Command Council (RCC) toppled the old king and took control of the coun
try in a single night.
Qaddafi came out of nowhere. Very few Libyans and virtually no foreigners knew a
nything about him, including the intelligence organizations of the US, UK, Sovie
t Union and Egypt. He was raised in the desert and spent nearly all his short Ar
my career out of sight in the Signals Corps -- which, as the only organization c
apable of controlling communications throughout the entire country, proved to be
the perfect place to plan and execute a coup in a land with a few urban centers
separated by a lot of sand.
Needless to say, Washington DC was desperate to know more about a man who now co
ntrolled not just Libya but its burgeoning oil wealth -- and the real estate und
er what was then one of the most important US air bases in the world.
In that pre-Internet world, the only way to gather intelligence was the old-fash
ioned, person-to-person way. Since a number of young officers in the Libyan Air
Force were involved in the coup, and since I was the only American diplomat with
decent contacts among both these Libyans and their American trainers, all of a
sudden my menial job at the air base was replaced by an assignment crucial to US
interests. The Embassy gave me one week to come up with a biographic sketch of
this mystery man, Muammar Qaddafi.
I collared every source I could, but Qaddhafiâ s life was so unknown that I still cam
e up with less than a page. But that page answered the question most important t
o the US at that time: in the middle of the Cold War, was Qaddhafi a Soviet dupe
? The answer was an unequivocal â No.â He thought as little of the Soviets as he did of
s. The basis for his negative feelings toward the Communists was religion. We we
re so naive then, 32 years before 9/11, that we celebrated the fact that the you
ng firebrand now in charge of Libya was a fundamentalist Islamist zealot.
What I wrote in that long-ago report thatâ s perhaps most relevant to what's going on
in Libya today, however, was the assessment of Qaddafi as strong-willed, charis
matic and mercurial.
The man harbored a deep resentment of injustice wherever he found it. I was not
surprised, for example, when Qaddhafi engineered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 19
88 as retribution for the US bombing of his house, a bombing that killed his dau
ghter. But predicting the actions of a man as mercurial as Qaddhafi is not easy.
He can be absolutely statesmanlike one day and deliver speeches of neurotic rav
ings the next.
What do I think now, after over 40 years of tracking this man who in effect jump
-started my diplomatic career? If Qaddhafi goes quietly into exile, I will be ve
ry surprised. I see it as entirely in his character to fight to the death as â a mart
yr for the nation," as he threatens to do, no matter how much havoc and destruct
ion this may cause. As a young man he saw himself as the savior of his country a
nd I am sure he still does. Now, as an elder, he also sees himself as a father t
o all Libyans. His ungrateful children are disrespecting him and they need to be
punished, and he will die rather than suffer their insolence and rejection.
Perhaps the best outcome, and not at all an unlikely one, is that Qaddafi will b
e killed by someone in his own inner circle before he brings the whole country d
own.