Faisal Zagallai opened the door to his apartment in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October 14, 1980.

He was a graduate student at Colorado State University.

He was also a Libyan dissident.

The man at the door was Eugene Tafoya, a former Green Beret.

Minutes later, Zagallai had been shot twice in the head.

He survived.

One bullet severed his optic nerve. He was permanently blinded in one eye.

Tafoya admitted shooting him but claimed self-defense. Prosecutors alleged something much darker: that Tafoya had been recruited through the network of former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson as part of an effort to silence opponents of Muammar Gaddafi abroad.

Contemporary reporting described the trial as an unusual public examination of evidence that Libya might be using Americans to pursue dissidents inside the United States.

Then the case narrowed.

Judge J. Robert Miller excluded significant portions of the prosecution’s evidence connecting Tafoya to Wilson and the Libyan government. A Fort Collins investigator complained that the rulings had “crippled” the prosecution’s case.

The jury acquitted Tafoya of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

It convicted him instead of misdemeanor third-degree assault and conspiracy to commit third-degree assault.

He received the maximum two-year sentence. With credit for roughly seven months already served, about sixteen months remained.

A Libyan dissident had been shot twice in the head in an apartment in Colorado.

The prosecution had begun as an investigation into an alleged international assassination operation.

It ended as a misdemeanor assault case.

There is no need to invent why.

What we do know is that Zagallai was not the only opponent of Gaddafi who discovered that leaving Libya did not necessarily put him beyond the regime’s reach.

The Stray Dogs

By 1980, Gaddafi’s government had begun referring to Libyan opponents overseas as “stray dogs.”

The language was not metaphorical in any comforting sense.

Libyan officials openly called on exiles to return. Those who refused could be treated as enemies of the revolution wherever they lived.

And then people started dying.

In April 1980, Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan left Friday prayers at the Regent’s Park Mosque in London.

Ramadan was a Libyan journalist associated with the BBC Arabic Service and a critic of Gaddafi.

He was shot outside the mosque and died shortly afterward.

Other Libyan opponents were attacked or killed in Britain, Rome, Athens, Bonn and elsewhere as the campaign widened.

What makes the episode particularly difficult to dismiss is that Libyan officials themselves were not always discreet about it.

Moussa Koussa, then Libya’s ambassador in London, was expelled from Britain in 1980 after publicly defending the liquidation of opponents overseas and indicating that further action against Libyan exiles could follow.

This was not a case where an American intelligence agency whispered something into a journalist’s ear and an allegation became history through repetition.

The regime had announced the principle itself.

Opposition was treason.

Distance did not erase it.

And the same revolutionary state that hunted opponents abroad was becoming increasingly unforgiving toward dissent at home.

The Revolution Turns Inward

Gaddafi had taken power promising revolution.

By the 1970s, revolution increasingly meant eliminating institutions that could exist independently of him.

Political parties were criminalized.

Independent political organization became effectively incompatible with loyalty to the state.

In 1973, Gaddafi used a speech at Zuwara to announce a new revolutionary program: existing laws deemed contrary to the revolution were to be suspended, political opponents purged, the population mobilized and a cultural revolution launched.

Then came the Revolutionary Committees.

In theory, they were instruments of popular participation.

In practice, they became ideological enforcers.

They monitored.

They intimidated.

They punished.

And occasionally they turned punishment into spectacle.

One of the people swallowed by that system was Sadiq Hamed Shwehdi—also rendered in contemporary records as Assadeq Hamed Al Shuweihdi, one of several transliterations of the same Arabic name.

A submission reproduced in a 1986 United Nations Special Rapporteur report listed him as having been hanged in Benghazi on June 5, 1984. That report reproduced information submitted to the Rapporteur rather than making an independent criminal finding, a distinction worth keeping clear.

The execution itself is well documented.

Shwehdi was an engineer and former student.

He was condemned before a large audience inside a Benghazi sports venue.

The execution was televised.

And during the hanging, a young regime supporter named Huda Ben Amer reportedly helped pull his body downward as he struggled.

She later rose through Gaddafi’s political system.

Eventually she became mayor of Benghazi.

A political prisoner hanging in a sports arena.

Television cameras rolling.

A supporter helping complete the execution.

And years later, that supporter governing the city.

This was not simply authoritarianism conducted quietly behind prison walls.

The terror could be public.

It could be instructional.

It could be celebrated.

And the worst single episode would take place behind those prison walls twelve years later.

Abu Salim

Abu Salim prison sat in Tripoli.

It held many of the people Gaddafi’s government considered particularly dangerous: Islamists, dissidents, suspected militants and other political prisoners.

On June 28, 1996, prisoners protested conditions and seized guards.

Negotiations followed.

By the next day, security forces had surrounded sections of the prison.

Then came the gunfire.

Hussein al-Shafai, a former prisoner who was working in the kitchen at Abu Salim and whose account became central to Human Rights Watch’s documentation of the killings, described sustained shooting over several hours.

Human Rights Watch has generally described approximately 1,200 prisoners as having been killed. Al-Shafai reached a similar figure by a method worth pausing on: he compared the number of meals he prepared before and after the killings.

And the Gaddafi Foundation—the organization run by Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, which later took up the families’ case—put the number at 1,167.

That is the lowest of the three, and it came from the regime’s own institution.

No independent accounting was ever permitted.

For years, families received almost nothing.

No bodies.

No credible explanations.

In some cases, relatives were eventually informed that a prisoner had died without being told when, how or where he had been buried.

The Libyan government promised investigations that never produced a satisfactory public accounting.

Eventually, families began gathering publicly in Benghazi.

They wanted answers.

Their lawyer was named Fathi Terbil.

The bodies still had not come home.

Yvonne Fletcher

On April 17, 1984, opponents of Gaddafi gathered outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in London’s St James’s Square.

British police officers were there to control the demonstration.

Then gunfire came from inside the bureau.

Eleven protesters were wounded.

Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was shot in the back.

She was twenty-five years old.

She died later that day.

The shooting triggered an eleven-day siege.

Eventually, Britain broke diplomatic relations with Libya.

The people inside the bureau were allowed to leave under diplomatic immunity.

No one was convicted criminally for Fletcher’s killing.

But the case never disappeared.

In 2015, British authorities arrested former Libyan official Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk on suspicion of involvement in Fletcher’s death.

Prosecutors ultimately declined to bring a criminal case because evidence central to the prosecution could not be disclosed for national-security reasons.

Then came a civil case.

In 2021, the High Court found Mabrouk jointly liable for Fletcher’s killing.

That was a civil judgment, not a murder conviction, and the burden of proof was correspondingly lower.

But the judge’s conclusion was still stark: Mabrouk had played a central role in the plan to use violence against the demonstrators.

There is enough in the record without embellishing it.

La Belle

We encountered La Belle in Part I.

Here it belongs in full.

On April 5, 1986, a bomb exploded inside the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin.

The nightclub was popular with American servicemen.

Sergeant Kenneth Ford and Nermin Hanay, a Turkish woman, died in the immediate aftermath.

Roughly 230 people were wounded.

Sergeant James Goins later died from his injuries.

The Reagan administration blamed Libya almost immediately.

At the time, Washington cited intercepted communications between Tripoli and the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin.

Critics questioned the accusation.

Then Germany reunified.

Stasi records became available.

And the evidentiary picture strengthened substantially.

The files showed that East German intelligence had monitored the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin and had known a great deal about what was being planned there.

In November 2001, after a trial lasting years, a Berlin court convicted four defendants, among them a Libyan who had worked at the People’s Bureau and the German woman who carried the bomb into the club.

The court’s findings linked the operation to Libyan intelligence.

Whatever one thinks of the American response, the central accusation about Libyan responsibility for La Belle was substantially borne out.

That is important for this series.

If I am going to tell you when an American claim outran the evidence, I also have to tell you when the evidence caught up with the claim.

La Belle did.

UTA Flight 772

Lockerbie is the name everyone remembers.

UTA Flight 772 usually is not.

On September 19, 1989, the DC-10 was flying from Brazzaville toward Paris when a bomb destroyed it over Niger.

All 170 people aboard died.

The wreckage scattered across the Ténéré desert.

French investigators pursued the case for years.

In March 1999, a French court convicted six Libyan officials in absentia and sentenced them to life imprisonment.

One of those men was Abdullah Senussi.

Gaddafi’s brother-in-law.

And one of the most powerful figures in Libya’s intelligence apparatus.

UTA 772 is frequently lost when discussion of Libyan terrorism collapses into arguments about Lockerbie.

One hundred seventy people died, and a French court traced responsibility deep into the Libyan security state.

What He Said He Was Doing

Everything in this installment so far is what Gaddafi’s government did.

Before the next section, it is worth stating what Gaddafi said he was doing.

Because he never described any of it as terrorism.

Libya drew a distinction, insistently and for decades, between terrorism and national liberation.

Terrorism, in the Libyan account, meant violence against civilians for no political purpose. Criminal acts. Individual atrocities.

National liberation meant armed struggle against occupation, against colonial rule, or against governments that existed only because a foreign power kept them in place.

Movements in the second category, Gaddafi held, deserved support.

Money.

Weapons.

Training.

Sanctuary.

And by his own standard he was consistent.

Libya funded the Polisario Front fighting Morocco over Western Sahara.

It funded Palestinian organizations that rejected negotiated settlement with Israel.

It funded liberation movements across Africa, including movements fighting white minority rule.

It funded insurgents in Latin America and Asia.

Some of those organizations are now governments. Some were regarded at the time as legitimate by much of the world and as terrorists by Washington.

Sometimes the same organization appeared on both lists at once.

That is a real argument. It deserves to be stated at full strength.

So let us test it.

The liberation framework explains a great deal of what Libya did.

It does not explain all of it.

It does not explain Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan, shot outside a London mosque for criticizing Gaddafi on the BBC.

It does not explain Faisal Zagallai, shot twice in the head in an apartment in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Those men were not colonial administrators or occupying soldiers.

They were Libyans who disagreed with their own government.

It does not explain a bomb in a discotheque full of off-duty American servicemen.

It does not explain 170 people on a flight from Brazzaville to Paris.

And it does not explain what comes next in this installment.

Because the Provisional IRA was not fighting a colonial garrison.

It was waging an armed campaign against an elected government in a parliamentary democracy.

And Libya sent it weapons by the ton.

So the honest reading is not that Gaddafi had no principles.

He had a published political theory, and he spent four decades and an enormous amount of money acting on it.

The honest reading is that the theory accounted for some of what he did and supplied vocabulary for the rest.

Revolutionary language is useful that way.

It can describe arming a liberation movement and murdering a journalist in London using exactly the same words.

The IRA

Libya’s support for foreign violence did not always require Libyan operatives to carry it out.

Sometimes it supplied the weapons.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army received multiple Libyan arms shipments during the 1980s.

Rifles.

Machine guns.

Rocket launchers.

Explosives.

And Semtex.

Several shipments got through.

One did not.

On October 30, 1987, French authorities intercepted the Eksund off Brittany.

It was carrying roughly 150 tons of Libyan-supplied weapons and ammunition destined for the IRA.

And that was only the shipment that was caught.

Several earlier consignments had already reached Ireland.

The consequences lasted.

Libyan-supplied Semtex became particularly valuable to the IRA because the explosive was powerful, compact and difficult to detect.

The flow of Libyan arms materially strengthened the IRA’s arsenal and helped sustain its campaign into the following decade.

This was not a vague ideological association.

It was physical support.

Ships.

Cargo.

Weapons.

Explosives.

Rabta

In 1988, Washington made a serious allegation that many Europeans initially doubted: Libya was building a chemical-weapons production facility, with help from West German companies.

One company in particular was Imhausen-Chemie.

The Reagan administration alleged that West German commercial firms had helped construct the complex and that Rabta was intended to produce chemical warfare agents.

Bonn initially disputed the strength of the American evidence tying German companies to the project.

That skepticism mattered.

There were really two questions.

Had German firms helped build what Washington claimed they had?

And was Libya actually pursuing chemical weapons there?

Then the record developed.

German investigations subsequently established significant corporate involvement connected to Rabta.

And fifteen years later, Libya itself removed any serious doubt that a chemical-weapons program had existed.

In 2004, after joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, Libya submitted its declaration to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

It declared approximately 23 metric tons of mustard agent.

More than 1,300 metric tons of precursor chemicals.

And 3,563 unfilled aerial bombs specifically designed to disperse chemical warfare agent.

The limitation matters.

Libya declared no filled chemical munitions.

The bombs were empty.

The mustard agent existed in bulk.

There was a real chemical-weapons program and real production capacity.

That is not the same thing as a deployed battlefield arsenal of assembled chemical bombs.

The OPCW later identified Rabta itself as containing former declared chemical-weapons production facilities when Libya sought permission to convert them for pharmaceutical use.

So the careful conclusion is stronger than the maximalist one.

Not every dramatic claim made about Rabta in 1988 was automatically vindicated.

But the central allegation survived.

Libya had pursued chemical weapons.

It possessed mustard agent.

It possessed specialized delivery munitions, though unfilled.

And Rabta was part of the declared production infrastructure.

Edwin Wilson

Then there was Edwin P. Wilson.

Wilson was a former CIA officer who went into business with Libya after leaving formal agency employment.

He was operating outside official authorization, and the CIA disputed his claims that his Libyan work reflected an ongoing agency relationship.

Among the things he helped provide was approximately twenty tons of C-4 plastic explosive.

Wilson was convicted in 1983 for illegally exporting explosives to Libya.

In 2003, a federal judge vacated that conviction after finding that the government had used false evidence concerning Wilson’s continuing contacts with the CIA.

Libya acquired enormous quantities of military-grade explosive through Wilson’s network.

Lockerbie

And then there is Lockerbie.

December 21, 1988.

Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Scotland.

Two hundred seventy people died.

Eleven were killed on the ground.

In 2001, a Scottish court sitting at Camp Zeist convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi of murder.

His co-defendant, Lamin Fhimah, was acquitted.

The legal history afterward became complicated.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s conviction back for another appeal.

Megrahi abandoned that appeal in 2009 before his compassionate release.

A later posthumous appeal was rejected in 2021.

And the case remains active in the United States.

Abu Agila Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi was indicted in 2020, brought into U.S. custody in 2022, and pleaded not guilty.

His trial was scheduled for August 2026.

On August 24, Judge Dabney Friedrich postponed it after newly discovered evidence required additional defense review.

[UPDATE THE MAS’UD PROCEDURAL STATUS FROM D.D.C. CASE 22-CR-00392 ON PUBLICATION MORNING.]

That unsettled legal posture matters.

Lockerbie is the one major item in this installment where the evidentiary history remains unusually contested.

So I am not going to ask it to carry more weight than the record presently supports.

It does not need to.

The Case

If the story ended here, there would not be much mystery.

Muammar Gaddafi ruled a repressive state.

His government imprisoned political opponents.

It publicly executed dissidents.

It hunted opponents beyond Libya’s borders.

A dissident was shot twice in the head in Colorado.

A British police officer was killed by gunfire from Libya’s diplomatic mission.

A German court substantially validated Libyan responsibility for La Belle.

A French court convicted senior Libyan officials for the destruction of UTA Flight 772.

Libya materially armed the IRA.

It pursued a chemical-weapons program it later admitted existed.

More than a thousand prisoners were killed at Abu Salim.

None of that becomes less true because Libya had once been colonized.

None becomes less true because Western governments cared about oil.

None becomes less true because the United States sometimes made claims that did not hold up.

And none is excused by whatever comes next.

The case against Gaddafi was real.

It was serious.

And some of the worst things Americans were told about his government were true.

That case deserves to stand on its own.

So it will.

Next Thursday, a different question: What did we do?