Exit the Colonel (6 page)

The popular response to the resulting disruption was often anger, not only at the foreigners but at those who had let them in. People saw King Idris as an accomplice of the West and therefore of Israel, and as a projection of a newly enriched minority which monopolized revenues drawn from the oil companies. Sadiq Neihoum (the author of the black dog parable) wrote fiery columns in the popular Benghazi paper
al Haqiqa
(
The Truth
) in June 1969, lambasting American materialism:

Neihoum took further aim at religious hypocrisy, materialism, and a blind dependence on technology, themes that would become Gaddafi's perennial favorites. Many Libyans assumed Neihoum was the source of some ideas expressed much less articulately in Gaddafi's infamous
The Green Book
, in particular, the concept of creating a “Third Way” between capitalism and communism.

Because of its disruptive social impact, the discovery of oil caused the three existing Libyan provinces to decide they would benefit economically under one administration rather than three. In 1963, the federal constitution was quietly revised to abolish the regional governments and include all into the Kingdom of Libya (1963–1969). For a time, King Idris was engaged in state affairs, assisted by Tripolitanian technocrats and the Senussi family itself.
⁵¹

Libya in 1951 was quite different from the Libya of 2010–2011. The role of tribes and, in general, regional solidarity and cohesiveness was far greater. Libyans did not travel widely, and families stayed together. Socially, the country was highly conservative, particularly in the interior, where the Bedouin followed an austere existence, and many still believed in black magic. At the
same time, a free flow of people and ideas across the Egyptian border made for a highly fluid and in some ways even permissive subculture, particularly along the coast. In the mid- to late 1960s, Benghazi, like Alexandria and parts of Cairo, was a center for Italian fashion, where women of means dressed in miniskirts and people gathered at night in noisy cafés.
⁵²

Idris's Kingdom of Libya was not by any means a paragon of virtue. The atmosphere became one of clientelism on a grand scale. While Idris himself lived an ascetic lifestyle, for others, wealth was ensured by access to the king and tribal connections. Ministers, traders, and their acolytes made fortunes, while large segments of the population remained extremely poor.

Free at last from foreign control, Benghazi reasserted itself as the capital of Libyan letters and produced a number of talented intellectuals and writers, including—in addition to Sadiq Neihoum—Mohammed Khalifa Telissi, Miftah Moubarak, Mohammed Hammi, Wahbi Bouri, Kamel Maghur, and others. Many of the intelligentsia also turned their pens into swords, exposing the aforementioned social and political ills.

The Libyan-US relationship deepened in the 1960s with clarification of Libya's position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and a feeling on the part of many in the Idris government that the United States was in the best position to guarantee Libya's security, particularly given increasing presence of the big oil companies. At the same time, more and more Libyan citizens (many of whom would have some influence in Gaddafi's Libya) increasingly distrusted the United States and resented its extensive presence in significant aspects of Libyan internal and external affairs, and its support for Israel. This distrust would find a new voice in a twenty-seven-year-old officer in the Libyan army, who was about to change the course of Libyan history.

The mechanics of Gaddafi's September 1, 1969, bloodless coup remain obscure. Many Libyans still believe it was the work of the CIA and British Intelligence—still concerned by Soviet-Libya contacts—in conjunction with Idris's decidedly hands-off, even disdainful, approach to governing his own country. Indeed, at the time of the coup, Idris was sojourning at a health resort in Turkey.

In many ways, Gaddafi in 1969 was an extremely unlikely potential head of state. He was not well educated, was not from the commercial elite or a senior army officer, and had not served in any government position. He had received a highly accelerated but basic primary education in village schools from Sirte to Sebha, and graduated from the Royal Libyan Military Academy in Benghazi in 1965. Yet, in circumstances that also remain obscure, he was selected for a four-and-a-half-month elite military training course in Britain,
⁵⁴
and managed to secure an audience with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser en route back to Libya
⁵⁵
(which led others to speculate that he, Nasser, was involved or at least had been forewarned of Gaddafi's plans).
⁵⁶

Many believe Gaddafi, who was only twenty-seven on the day the Revolutionary Command Council took power,
⁵⁷
benefited from the Keystone Kops atmosphere engendered by multiple planned putsches; the most promising was to have been orchestrated by Libyan Army commander Abdelaziz Shalhi and set for September 5. The fact that Gaddafi's coup of September 4 was swift and bloodless was at least partly due to ambiguity in King Idris's status as leader. (He had resigned several times previously, most recently on August 4, 1969—at each step, his cabinet and the people of Cyrenaica “refused” his motion.) Other weaknesses included deep resentment at widespread government corruption, and the incompetence of Idris's two praetorian guards, CYDEF [Cyrenaican Defense Forces] and TYDEF [Tripoli Defense Forces] , staffed by tribes loyal to the Senussia.)

Attributing Gaddafi's ascendancy solely to the above factors is likely a mistake. Musa Kusa, who became Gaddafi's head of intelligence more than a decade later,
⁵⁸
claims in a 1978 master's thesis that Gaddafi had begun methodically planning his coup more than eight years before its execution. Gaddafi had spent years identifying potential allies, particularly while living in Misurata from 1962 to 1963, pushed those he trusted into military training, and further cultivated his closest partners (the future Revolutionary Command Council): “[Gaddafi] studied all the weak points in the old regime and formulated new connections
between his movement and the Libyan university students. In addition, he built his own political ideology and set forth the political principles of the country.”
⁵⁹

In 1970,
The Atlantic
magazine said of the coup, “It's the kind of planning operation that would have got a double A-plus at Fort Leavenworth.”
⁶⁰

CHAPTER 2

Threats and Adaptations

A
lthough the CIA had accreted a thick file on Gaddafi, few profiles of the man have emerged to explain the psychology behind his behavior. Ronald Reagan called him the “mad dog of the Middle East”; Sadat called him “the wild man of the Middle East”
¹
Others called him much worse. Many assumed he was simply unstable—yet a man who survived for forty-two years as ruler of a fractious nation cannot be dismissed so easily.

Almost from the moment he usurped Idris's place, Gaddafi had to watch his back. Within a few months, Abdullah bin Abid nicknamed the “Black Prince,” a member of the Senussi clan, mounted a countercoup from Chad. This effort was apparently something of a farce, and the perpetrators were quickly neutralized. More seriously, the British MI6—far more concerned with Gaddafi's Soviet sympathies than were the Americans—began plotting what, according to Stephen Dorril's history of the MI6, was an almost equally ill-effected British plan to kill Gaddafi and return Idris to the throne, using a mixture of French and Belgian mercenaries (a ruse to deflect attention from the British).
²
The mercenaries were to break into a Tripoli prison, free the prisoners using plastic explosives procured in Eastern Europe and smuggled into Italy, and employ them to help stage the coup. The mission was scuttled after the Yugoslavian government discovered the plot and
confiscated the weapons. The Americans ordered the British to stand down, or they would tell the Libyans and the Italians of the plot.
³

Perhaps Gaddafi was lucky that these early attempts were soft; they alerted him to the need for vigilance. In an effort to identify a place of comfort—or safety—internally, politically, and in the international sphere, Gaddafi found he had to periodically reinvent himself and hone his coercive powers. Yet, none of these reinventions solved the core problems of ruling Libya and probably confirmed in his mind the notion that ad hoc solutions to government were somehow safer than formal institutions like the Libyan army, which was perpetually the object of his mistrust. Each stage in the political career of Muammar Gaddafi was ultimately an exercise in buying time until the inevitable failure of the current stratagem.

If the 1970s were a period for experimentation and discovering what worked and what didn't, the 1980s were one of churlish intolerance, as Gaddafi cracked down on a population he expected to be more appreciative of his efforts. In the 1990s, it was the people's turn: stymied by international sanctions, Gaddafi found himself locked in a room of snakes—a determined Islamist opposition was effectively in an open war with Gaddafi; and a recalcitrant inner circle was thoroughly tired of the stigma and restrictions resulting from Gaddafi's policies.

The constant quest to be the center of attention regardless of the cost explains much of the extreme variance in Gaddafi's policies, as well as his personal behavior. Though clearly an intelligent man, Gaddafi's rougher edges, such as his tendency to extreme, disjointed verbosity and his less than fluid writing style, have been attributed to his lack of formal education. The well-known Libyan writer Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih, who held a number of cultural posts in the Gaddafi leadership, called Gaddafi's mind-set one of “highschool ideas” linked to an accelerated transition at an early age from an essentially illiterate Bedouin child to army conscript: “Gaddafi had most of his primary school education fast-tracked in two years—while the man was not unintelligent, there was no time for intellectual development.”
⁴
US ambassador David Mack, posted to Libya as a vice consul in the early 1970s, confirms Fagih's assessment: “There was an enormous gap between his ideas (increasingly fantasies) and reality—he was young and acted as many young people do, of course with some differences.”
⁵

Yet Gaddafi also possessed what might be called “selective emotional intelligence.” His ability to read the motives and weaknesses of others was among his greatest assets. In his 2012, 585 page exposé on Gaddafi's inner circle,
Ašḫāṣ ḫawl al-
(
The People Around Gaddafi
) Abdelrahman Shalgam, Gaddafi's former foreign minister and ambassador to the UN, says that Gaddafi had “mastered the art of controlling people, and possessed an exceptional ability to discern people's underlying natures, and dissect their psychologies, and probe their sensitivities.”
⁶
(Shalgam was one of the first of Gaddafi's diplomatic circle to defect.)