I was afraid of Muammar Gaddafi before I knew anything about Libya.

I was a kid in the 1980s. To me, Gaddafi was not really a head of state. He was something closer to a movie villain who happened to exist in real life.

He had the sunglasses, the military uniforms, the bizarre costumes, the tents, the angry speeches. He looked exactly like the kind of dictator Hollywood would invent if Hollywood were trying too hard.

And Hollywood barely had to invent him at all.

In Back to the Future, released in 1985, Doc Brown gets the plutonium for his time machine from Libyan terrorists who want him to build them a nuclear bomb. They eventually show up at the Twin Pines Mall in a Volkswagen van and machine-gun him.

Nobody needed an explanation.

They were Libyans.

Then came Iron Eagle in 1986, one of my favorite movies as a kid. The country is fictional. The dictator is fictional. But nobody watching it in 1986 had much trouble understanding who the bad guy was supposed to be.

Neither did film critic Kevin Thomas.

Reviewing Iron Eagle in the Los Angeles Times on January 17, 1986, Thomas described its setting as a “fictional Middle-Eastern country—read Libya.” 

And hovering over all of it was Ronald Reagan.

On April 9, 1986, Reagan publicly called Gaddafi the “mad dog” of the Middle East.

But if I am going to argue in this series that history can be manipulated by selecting certain true things while leaving other true things outside the frame, I cannot do the same thing here.

Four days earlier, on April 5, a bomb had exploded inside the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, a nightclub popular with American servicemen.

Sergeant Kenneth Ford and a Turkish woman, Nermin Hanay, were killed in the blast. More than two hundred people were injured. Sergeant James Goins later died from his wounds. A German court would eventually convict four defendants in connection with the attack, and evidence developed after German reunification substantially strengthened the case for Libyan involvement. 

Six days after Reagan’s April 9 remarks, American bombs fell on Tripoli and Benghazi.

Reagan addressed the nation on the night of April 14 in Washington as Operation El Dorado Canyon was underway; the strikes hit Libya in the early hours of April 15.

We will come back to La Belle, the evidence against Libya, and whether the American response was justified in Part III.

Because the inconvenient facts have to stay in the story too.

If Gaddafi sponsored terrorism against American servicemen, that matters.

And a substantial part of the case against him was real.

This series is not going to turn Muammar Gaddafi into Che Guevara with better sunglasses.

His government imprisoned political opponents. Libyan agents pursued dissidents abroad. His regime supported violent organizations operating well beyond Libya’s borders.

Later we are going to deal directly with Abu Salim prison, Yvonne Fletcher, La Belle, UTA Flight 772, the IRA, Lockerbie and the uglier parts of Gaddafi’s rule.

Some of them are very ugly.

If we’re going to question the story we were given, we have an obligation to confront the evidence that supports it too.

But that raises a different question.

What if the story wasn’t false?

What if it was simply incomplete?

Because propaganda doesn’t always require inventing something that never happened.

Sometimes the most effective propaganda is curation.

Choose the true things that tell one story.

Leave the other true things outside the frame.

And almost nothing about the Libya I eventually discovered as an adult was inside the frame I was given as a child.

Before Gaddafi

To understand the strange man in the sunglasses, we have to go backward.

Not to 1986.

Not even to 1969.

To Italy.

Libya did not exist as the independent country we recognize today when Italy invaded the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in 1911.

Italian rule was never simply a matter of planting a flag over Tripoli. Resistance continued for years, particularly in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. The most famous resistance leader was Omar Mukhtar, an elderly Qur’anic teacher who became the leader of a remarkably persistent guerrilla campaign against Italian occupation.

Under Benito Mussolini, Italy decided to crush that resistance decisively.

General Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani pursued what Italian authorities called the “pacification” of Cyrenaica.

That word does a remarkable amount of work.

Beginning around 1930, Italian authorities forcibly removed large portions of the nomadic and semi-nomadic population from northern Cyrenaica. Families were driven from their land. Livestock were destroyed. Movement was restricted. Large numbers of civilians were confined in concentration camps farther south.

The purpose was military: separate the civilian population from Mukhtar’s resistance and the guerrillas would lose food, shelter, intelligence and recruits.

The civilians paid the price.

Modern historians disagree substantially over how many Libyans died during the wider colonial campaign and in the camps. The estimates vary enough that pretending there is one universally accepted number would be dishonest.

There is also no need to inflate it.

Even the lower estimates describe forced displacement, hunger, disease and death on a staggering scale.

And this was not some distant medieval episode to the generation that eventually produced Gaddafi.

It was living memory.

Mukhtar was captured in September 1931.

The Italians subjected the elderly resistance leader to a summary military trial.

On September 16, 1931, they hanged him publicly.

That history matters.

For Libyans, foreign political and military power was not an abstract concern.

It had occupied their country.

It had driven people from their homes.

It had put civilians behind fences.

It had executed their resistance leader.

Only twenty years after Mukhtar’s death, Libya finally became independent.

Independence—With Company

Italy lost its empire after World War II.

In 1949, the United Nations called for Libya to become an independent sovereign state. The Kingdom of Libya was established under King Idris I in December 1951.

Formal colonial rule was over.

Western strategic influence was not.

Britain retained military facilities in the country.

The United States operated Wheelus Air Base outside Tripoli, one of America’s most important military installations in the Mediterranean region.

At first, Libya badly needed the money.

This remained an extremely poor country, dependent on foreign assistance and military-base revenues.

Then, in 1959, Esso Standard Libya discovered a major commercial oil field at Zelten.

Everything changed.

Exports began in 1961.

By 1965, Libya had become the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter. 

By the end of the decade, production had climbed above three million barrels per day.

Three million barrels.

From a country whose population was only around two million people.

And Libyan oil had two enormous advantages.

First, it was desirable low-sulfur crude.

Second, it was sitting almost on Europe’s doorstep.

That second advantage had become especially important because the Suez Canal had been closed since the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Persian Gulf crude destined for Europe now had to make the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.

Libyan oil did not.

It was already on the Mediterranean.

By 1969, Libya supplied more than a quarter of Western Europe’s oil imports. 

A desperately poor former colony had become one of the most strategically important petroleum producers in the world in roughly a decade.

And then the monarchy fell.

The Young Officers

King Idris was not Mussolini.

Libya was independent under him.

But his monarchy was conservative, closely aligned with Britain and the United States, and increasingly vulnerable to a simple question:

How independent was Libya if foreign military forces remained on Libyan soil while foreign companies controlled much of the country’s most important resource?

At the same time, Arab nationalism was sweeping the region.

In Egypt, the Free Officers overthrew King Farouk in 1952. General Muhammad Naguib initially became the public face of the new regime, while Gamal Abdel Nasser subsequently outmaneuvered him and consolidated power by 1954.

Nasser became the towering figure of Arab nationalism.

One of the young men watching him was Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi came from a Bedouin family near Sirte. He entered the military, admired Nasser and helped organize a clandestine Free Officers movement modeled on the Egyptian example.

While King Idris was abroad receiving medical treatment, they moved.

September 1, 1969.

The monarchy collapsed with remarkably little bloodshed.

King Idris never returned.

At the center of the new Revolutionary Command Council was a 27-year-old army officer named Muammar Gaddafi.

The United States did not immediately treat the coup as a catastrophe.

Washington already understood that Idris’s government was fragile. American officials initially hoped they could maintain a workable relationship with the new regime.

There were simply a few problems.

One of them was sitting outside Tripoli.

“We Would Like You to Leave”

The Americans had Wheelus.

The British had their own bases.

For officers who had just overthrown a Western-aligned monarchy, that arrangement was difficult to reconcile with sovereignty.

So the new Libyan government wanted them gone.

Washington understood that this was not simply one eccentric colonel’s obsession. Opposition to the foreign bases had existed before Gaddafi and reflected genuine Libyan political sentiment.

Negotiations began.

Britain agreed to withdraw its forces.

The United States did the same.

On June 11, 1970, the Americans formally handed Wheelus Air Base over to Libya.

Washington chose accommodation.

That point matters.

The United States did not attempt to overthrow Gaddafi because he demanded the base.

It negotiated its withdrawal.

And what American policymakers were discussing privately while those negotiations unfolded is one of the most revealing parts of this story.

The Conversation Behind the Conversation

On November 24, 1969, senior American officials met in the White House Situation Room to discuss Libya.

The meeting record was classified Top Secret/Sensitive at the time. It has since been declassified and published by the State Department in its official Foreign Relations of the United States series.

These are meeting minutes rather than a verbatim transcript, so they should be read as the government’s contemporary record of the discussion rather than quotation marks around every syllable anyone spoke.

But the hierarchy recorded in those minutes is unusually plain.

Assistant Secretary of State David Newsom explained that:

“The major U.S. interest in Libya was considered to be oil.”

Why?

The American balance of payments.

And European dependence on Libyan petroleum.

The minutes record Newsom explaining that the central problem was protecting American oil interests while simultaneously responding to Libya’s demand for withdrawal from Wheelus and trying, if possible, to prevent the new government from moving further toward radicalism. 

Then G. Warren Nutter, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, raised an uncomfortable question.

The minutes record Nutter characterizing American policy as avoiding a confrontation with Libya because Washington did not want to risk losing American oil properties.

What, he asked, would happen after the United States yielded on the base and other military issues if the Libyans then:

“proceeded to nationalize the oil properties.”

And later in the same meeting, the hierarchy was stated even more plainly.

Newsom was recorded as saying that:

“the base was secondary to our oil interests.” 

Read that again.

November 1969.

Long before Reagan.

Long before La Belle.

Long before Lockerbie.

Long before most Americans had ever heard of Muammar Gaddafi.

Behind closed doors, American policymakers were already thinking about two things:

The military base.

And the oil.

And the government’s own historical record tells us which one ranked higher.

But there is another fact we need to keep inside the frame.

Washington did not respond by trying to force Gaddafi back into line.

It negotiated its way out of Wheelus.

And when Libya began confronting Western oil companies in 1970, the State Department largely left the companies to negotiate their own terms. In July, Washington instructed its embassy that decisions about Libyan demands were for each company to make according to its own interests. 

That matters.

I am not arguing that a meeting in November 1969 proves everything that happened between Libya and the United States seventeen years later was secretly about petroleum.

It plainly doesn’t.

Gaddafi would give Western governments legitimate reasons to oppose him.

The conflict would evolve.

So would Gaddafi.

The narrower point is more interesting.

From the first months of Gaddafi’s rule, American officials understood the relationship in terms of sovereignty, military access and petroleum.

And privately, they ranked petroleum above the base.

The conflict was already there.

It just had not become violent yet.

Then Another Route Disappeared

Libyan oil already possessed an enormous geographic advantage when Gaddafi seized power because Suez had been closed for nearly three years.

Then, in May 1970, the situation tightened.

The Trans-Arabian Pipeline—TAPLINE—was damaged in Syria.

TAPLINE had been carrying roughly 500,000 barrels of Saudi oil every day directly to the Mediterranean.

Now that route was gone too.

At roughly the same time, Libya began cutting production from several foreign oil companies.

A State Department assessment later calculated that the combination of TAPLINE’s closure and Libyan production cuts removed more than one million barrels per day from Mediterranean terminals at their maximum impact.

Replacing that oil from the Persian Gulf while Suez remained closed required five to six times as much tanker capacity.

The combination virtually exhausted the unused capacity of the world’s tanker fleet and sent charter rates sharply upward. 

In other words, Gaddafi had stumbled into an extraordinary moment of leverage.

Europe needed oil.

Suez was closed.

TAPLINE was down.

Tankers were stretched.

Libya was producing millions of barrels of desirable crude a day directly across the Mediterranean.

And one of the companies most exposed to Libya was Occidental Petroleum.

Occidental

Occidental was run by Armand Hammer, one of the most famous international businessmen of the twentieth century.

Hammer had dealt with governments around the world.

He understood negotiation.

He understood power.

And he understood oil.

The Libyan government began demanding dramatically better terms from the foreign petroleum companies.

The companies resisted.

So Libya found the pressure point.

Production.

Occidental was particularly vulnerable because it did not have the enormous worldwide production portfolio of companies such as Exxon or Mobil. If Libya squeezed Occidental’s production, Hammer could not simply replace those barrels somewhere else.

And Libya knew it.

The government began cutting Occidental’s output.

It demanded better terms.

The assumption across much of the petroleum industry was that a small producer like Libya could not dictate terms to international oil companies.

Libya needed the revenue.

The companies had the technical expertise.

They controlled transportation and marketing.

They understood the global petroleum system.

And this was a country of barely two million people challenging some of the most powerful corporations on earth.

But the Suez Canal was closed.

TAPLINE had gone down.

Europe was squeezed.

Tankers were scarce.

And Libya’s oil was sitting right where Europe needed it.

Gaddafi throttled production.

He demanded more.

And then he waited.

The oil companies were about to find out who needed whom more.

That is where we’ll pick this up next Thursday.

Because Libya was not merely about to win a better petroleum contract.

It was about to demonstrate something to every oil-producing country watching from the sidelines:

The system could be told no.