Qaddafi and Terrorism
By the late 1970s Western leaders regarded Qaddafi as one of the world’s most notorious practitioners of international terrorism. They accused him of using it to attain foreign policy objectives that he could not achieve through conventional diplomatic or military means. According to the CIA Qaddafi’s role in international terrorism included the funding of terrorist activities, the procurement of arms and other supplies for terrorist organizations, the use of Libyan camps and advisers for guerrilla training, and the use of Libyan diplomatic posts as bases for terrorist operations.58 The CIA also reported that Qaddafi frequently used Libya’s United African Airlines (UAA) to support terrorist operations, subversion, and armed intervention. Ostensibly a nonscheduled passenger and cargo air carrier, UAA was staffed by several Libyan intelligence operatives and provided transport services for the Libyan armed forces and the Libyan intelligence service. In August 1981 Qaddafi directed the airline to open eighteen new offices in Africa, thus expanding and strengthening his intelligence network on the continent. When Qaddafi dispatched his troops to Chad, UAA airlifted weapons, ammunition, and military vehicles into the country.59
Within a few years of seizing power Qaddafi had established his reputation as a major supporter of international terrorism because of his involvement in a series of sensational terrorist acts. He provided extensive logistical support, funding, weapons, and training for the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. The organization was best known for the brutal massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. Libya was linked to another deadly Black September operation: the attack on the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Khartoum in March 1973. The assault claimed the lives of Cleo A. Noel Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his chargé d’affaires, George C. Moore. That same month the Irish navy intercepted the SS Claudia near the coast of Ireland and, upon inspection, discovered it was transporting weapons to the Irish Republican Army. Qaddafi readily admitted that the arms were from Libya. In December 1973 Palestinian terrorists assaulted a Pan Am airliner at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, murdering thirty-one passengers. Italian investigators learned that the terrorists had traveled from Tripoli to conduct the attack and that Libya had provided them with money and arms. Qaddafi also developed a close working relationship with Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlos,” whose group carried out the spectacular 1975 kidnapping of oil ministers attending a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna.60
In 1981 the State Department reported that Qaddafi spent hundreds of millions of dollars each year on terrorist activities and operated more than a dozen training camps where terrorist organizations, radical groups, and guerrilla movements received instruction in hijacking, assassination, commando tactics, and the use of explosives.61 By the early 1980s Qaddafi was providing funds, training, and logistical support to insurgent movements, opposition groups, and terrorist elements in more than thirty countries, from South America to the Philippines.62 “Libya runs twenty-five terrorist training camps,” observed William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagans first CIA director. “[Terrorism is] their second largest export, after oil.”63 Casey may have exaggerated the number of training camps but there was no denying Libya’s huge role in the world of terrorism.
Qaddafi unabashedly defended his use of terrorism and subversion as a matter of principle, regarding it as a powerful way to avenge every injustice committed against Libya. Political scientist René Lemarchand noted that Qaddafi’s “violently anti-Western disposition and his passionate commitment to a reconstruction of the Arab nation are the product of a uniquely cruel and frustrating historical experience.”64 Similarly, a CIA analyst pointed out that Qaddafi seems “to be motivated by a strong desire to take revenge . . . not so much for what we did to him last year or two weeks ago but for the humiliation of Islam, for the cultural and actual conquest of the Middle East.”65 According to the CIA, “He publicly portrays attacks by groups anywhere in the world as spontaneous events in an ongoing war against colonialism and Zionism and paints himself as a leading player in this war whose revolutionary ideals are shared by the ‘oppressed’ worldwide.”66 A State Department special report concluded that Qaddafi “fancies himself a leader and agent of historic forces that will reorder Third World politics to his taste. His vision provides both a motive and a rationale for providing military and financial aid to radical regimes and for undermining moderate governments by creating or supporting subversive groups and abetting terrorists.” Furthermore, “Qaddafi’s aggressive policies increasingly have focused on undermining U.S. and other Western interests in the Third World, as he sees these as the main barrier to his radical and expansionist goals.”67
Qaddafi’s involvement with international terrorism defined his country’s relationship with the United States. According to Ronald B. St. John, “What Libya saw as justifiable support for national liberation movements, the United States viewed as blatant interference in the domestic affairs of other states, if not active support for international terrorists.”68 During the early and mid-1980s relations between Washington and Tripoli dramatically worsened and eventually led to a series of violent confrontations.
“Swift and Effective Retribution”
Qaddafi’s Claim over the Gulf of Sidra
In 1970 the Libyan Arab Republic demanded and received a substantially higher price for the crude oil it sold to foreign petroleum companies, becoming the first oil-producing country in the world to do so. Over the next five years Libya’s annual oil earnings jumped from $1.35 billion to $6 billion, and with this huge revenue windfall Colonel Qaddafi procured foreign military equipment—mostly from the Soviet Union—at a rate that soon outpaced his country’s security needs and the ability of his armed forces to operate it efficiently. The CIA ascribed Qaddafi’s extravagant arms purchases to megalomania. According to the agency the Libyan leader believed that his huge arsenal, the country’s considerable oil earnings, and his revolutionary ideology would make him the leader of the Arab struggle against Zionism and Western influence in the region. Between 1970 and 1985 Qaddafi spent more than $20 billion on Soviet-made armaments, making Libya one of the largest customers of Soviet military hardware and technical assistance in the world.1
By the mid-1980s Qaddafi’s country of 3.6 million people possessed one of the best-equipped armed forces in the Middle East. The Libyan military boasted 2,800 tanks (including top-of-the-line, Soviet-built T-72s), 2,300 armored vehicles, 535 combat aircraft (including sophisticated French-built Mirages and high-performance, Soviet-built MiG-23s and MiG-25s), 6 Soviet-built Foxtrot diesel-electric submarines, 65 surface combatants (most of which were capable of firing deadly antiship cruise missiles), and one of the most modern air defense networks in the world. In reality, however, Libya’s military strength was considerably more formidable on paper than in fact. Hundreds of battle tanks and combat aircraft remained packed in their shipping crates, and a general lack of technical expertise and operational know-how hampered the effectiveness of the regular military, which numbered seventy-three thousand men in 1985. The Libyans relied heavily on advisers and technicians from the Soviet bloc for the installation, maintenance, and operation of the modern equipment in their large arsenal. In the early 1980s approximately twenty-five hundred Soviet military advisers served in Libya. Furthermore, it was widely reported that pilots from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea as well as some Palestinian groups flew missions for the Libyan Arab Air Force (LAAF) because the quantity of available operational aircraft exceeded the number of qualified Libyan pilots. The normal ratio, by comparison, was two pilots per aircraft.2
The Nixon administration was concerned about the accumulation of French-and Soviet-made arms on the southern littoral of the