In December 1981, the White House believed Libyan assassins were coming for Ronald Reagan.

The reports were dramatic.

A hit team had supposedly entered the United States.

Its targets included the president and senior members of his administration.

Security tightened around Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and several senior White House officials. Secret Service and FBI agents searched for the alleged team. Border officials were given names, aliases and descriptions.

Reagan publicly said the United States had evidence.

On December 10, the administration took action.

Americans in Libya were told to leave.

U.S. passports were invalidated for travel there.

The alleged assassins were never found.

Years later, administration officials acknowledged that the 1981 hit-squad intelligence appeared to have been wrong.

That does not mean the Reagan administration invented it.

It does not tell us where the intelligence originated.

And it does not erase the very real evidence we examined last week of Libyan violence against dissidents abroad.

It tells us something narrower.

Washington was making real policy decisions on the basis of claims about Libya that did not always survive scrutiny.

That distinction is going to matter.

Because this installment is not about whether Gaddafi was innocent.

He wasn’t.

Part III established that.

This is about the other side of the relationship.

What did we do?

Sidra

Before the shooting, the theory.

Because by the time Ronald Reagan took office, Washington was not dealing with Gaddafi as a difficult oil negotiator anymore.

It was dealing with a government that had spent a decade trying to rearrange the political map.

Libya had attempted unions with Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco and Chad. It had funded insurgencies and liberation movements across three continents. It had treated Egypt’s peace with Israel as a betrayal and backed the Palestinian factions that rejected the entire process. It had intervened repeatedly in Chad and occupied territory there.

It had fought a border war against Egypt.

And it was paying for all of it with petroleum revenue, from a country whose population was roughly three million people.

From Washington’s side, that was the problem.

Not that Gaddafi was offensive, theatrical or insulting.

That he was assembling an alternative political network across the Middle East and Africa, aimed at governments the United States depended on—and that he could afford to keep doing it.

American policy under Reagan became explicit about the answer. Challenge Libya’s maritime claim. Strengthen Libya’s neighbors. Isolate Gaddafi diplomatically, especially in Europe. Support those working against him.

Now turn the camera around.

From Tripoli, the same decade looked like encirclement.

The United States Sixth Fleet operated freely across the Mediterranean—a sea with Libya sitting on its southern shore.

American weapons and American money sustained Israel.

Washington had rewarded Egypt for making peace with Israel and was arming it heavily.

The United States supported governments in Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco and across the Gulf that Gaddafi regarded not as sovereign states but as clients.

And when Libya made a claim about the waters off its own coast, the most powerful navy on earth announced that it would sail through them specifically to demonstrate that the claim meant nothing.

Both of those accounts are accurate.

That is what makes the next five years intelligible.

Neither government was simply reacting to provocation.

Each was executing a strategy.

And each strategy required the other one to fail.

The confrontation at sea had been building for years.

Gaddafi claimed most of the Gulf of Sidra as Libyan territorial waters, drawing a closing line across the mouth of the gulf at latitude 32°30′ north.

The United States rejected that claim.

The generally recognized territorial-sea limit was twelve nautical miles from the coast—a standard accepted by nearly every state and later codified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Gaddafi’s line attempted to close off a gulf hundreds of miles across.

He called it the “Line of Death.”

Reagan decided to cross it.

In August 1981, the U.S. Navy conducted exercises inside the disputed gulf.

Libyan aircraft approached the American carrier group.

Two Libyan Su-22 fighters engaged two U.S. F-14s.

Both Libyan aircraft were shot down.

Both American crews returned safely.

The episode established the basic pattern that would define the next five years.

Libya would make a maximal sovereignty claim.

Washington would deliberately challenge it.

Gaddafi would threaten.

The United States would call the claim illegal and cross the line anyway.

Then both sides would describe whatever happened next as defensive.

The confrontation returned in March 1986.

American ships and aircraft again operated south of Gaddafi’s claimed boundary.

Libya fired missiles.

The United States struck Libyan missile sites and vessels.

Legally, the American position was much stronger.

Libya’s claim to the gulf was recognized by almost nobody.

But legality does not make the confrontation accidental.

Washington did not stumble across the Line of Death.

It sailed across it deliberately.

The United States was making a point.

So was Gaddafi.

And by 1986, both governments understood exactly what they were doing.

The Economic War

Military pressure was only one part of the campaign.

The other was economic.

And this is where the story loops directly back to Part II.

Sixteen years earlier, when Gaddafi squeezed Occidental Petroleum for better terms, Washington had largely stayed out of the company’s negotiation.

By 1986, Washington was ordering Occidental to stop doing business there.

On January 7, Reagan imposed sweeping sanctions prohibiting most trade and financial transactions with Libya.

Five American companies had major interests there: Occidental, Marathon, Amerada Hess, Conoco and W.R. Grace. Four of the five were oil producers; Grace’s Libyan position was different.

They were required to cease operations by June 30, 1986.

But for several of them, leaving did not mean surrendering the underlying concession rights.

The Oasis Group—Conoco, Marathon and Amerada Hess—negotiated a standstill arrangement with Libya’s National Oil Corporation that suspended their participation while preserving their interests in the same concessions they had left.

Those interests sat dormant through the sanctions years.

In 2005, after a nineteen-year absence, the three Oasis companies returned.

Occidental returned that year as well, negotiating its own agreement with Libya’s National Oil Corporation to resume participation in assets it had left in 1986.

The operations had stopped.

The ownership relationship had not simply disappeared.

That economic pressure landed at a bad moment for Libya.

As we saw in Part II, its oil production had already fallen sharply from the 1970 peak.

World petroleum prices were collapsing.

Foreign investment had weakened.

The state still had to pay for the welfare system, its military, foreign adventures and the patronage networks on which the entire rentier arrangement depended.

Washington was tightening Libya’s access to American companies, capital and technology precisely as its room to maneuver was shrinking.

Again, none of this was secret.

It was policy.

The United States wanted to make Gaddafi’s choices more expensive.

And there were legitimate reasons for doing so.

His regime supported violent organizations.

It pursued dissidents overseas.

La Belle would soon give Washington a particularly strong case for retaliation.

But by this point, the relationship had moved well beyond condemnation.

The objective was pressure.

Isolation.

Economic attrition.

And increasingly, destabilization.

April 15, 1986

Then La Belle exploded.

We dealt with the evidence in Part III.

The Reagan administration blamed Libya, and subsequent German evidence substantially strengthened that accusation.

One piece of context belongs here, and it needs to be handled carefully.

Three weeks before the nightclub bombing, American forces had sunk Libyan vessels and struck Libyan territory during the March operation in the Gulf of Sidra.

Tripoli did not regard that as a freedom-of-navigation exercise.

Whether La Belle was retaliation for it has never been established, and I am not going to assert it.

But by the spring of 1986 the two governments were operating inside a sequence in which each considered its own violence a response to the other’s.

That does not make the bombing of a nightclub defensible.

It does mean neither side experienced itself as the aggressor.

On the night of April 14 in Washington—early April 15 in Libya—the United States launched Operation El Dorado Canyon.

American aircraft struck five targets around Tripoli and Benghazi.

The official target list included military airfields, barracks, a commando facility and the Bab al-Azizia complex in Tripoli, which served both as a military command center and as Gaddafi’s residence.

Reagan told the country that the strikes were an act of self-defense intended to reduce Libya’s ability to support terrorism and deter future attacks.

One American F-111 was lost.

Its two crewmen died.

Libyan military personnel and civilians were also killed.

And then comes one of the most difficult questions in the episode.

Was the United States trying to kill Gaddafi?

The official answer was that the target was his command-and-control infrastructure.

That is true.

Bab al-Azizia was a military command facility.

It was also where Gaddafi lived.

Five F-111s were assigned to strike the compound.

Contemporary press reporting quoted an administration official indicating that if Gaddafi had died in the attack, his death would not necessarily have been regarded as an unintended consequence.

That is suggestive.

It is not the same thing as a documented assassination order.

So the honest conclusion is the uncomfortable one.

Bab al-Azizia was selected because it was a command center.

Everyone involved also knew Gaddafi might be there.

Whether killing him was an unstated objective or simply an acceptable consequence remains harder to prove.

Libya, meanwhile, claimed that Gaddafi’s adopted infant daughter Hana had been killed in the bombing.

That story later became difficult to reconcile with evidence found after the regime fell.

Documents discovered inside Bab al-Azizia referred to a Hana Muammar Gaddafi who had studied medicine in Tripoli and taken English classes years after the 1986 raid. Photographs also appeared to show an adult Hana with members of the family.

That does not conclusively prove that the infant presented as Hana in 1986 survived. One later explanation was that Gaddafi adopted another girl and gave her the same name.

What it does mean is that the regime’s original account cannot be treated as settled fact.

The civilians who unquestionably died do not need embellishment.

Neither does the central point.

The United States had moved from sanctions and naval confrontation to bombing Tripoli and Benghazi.

And Reagan said one purpose of the operation was deterrence.

So put that claim next to what happened afterward.

Thirty-two months later, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

Eight months after that, UTA Flight 772 was destroyed over Niger.

Those attacks do not prove that El Dorado Canyon caused an escalation.

They do tell us something simpler about its stated objective.

Whatever else El Dorado Canyon accomplished, it did not end the violence associated with Libya.

Real and Illusionary Events

Five months after the bombing, the story changes.

Not because Gaddafi suddenly became less dangerous.

Because we get unusually clear documentation of what Washington was willing to do with information.

On August 14, 1986, the Reagan administration approved a secret deception campaign against Libya.

National Security Adviser John Poindexter summarized it in a three-page memorandum to the president.

The program would combine:

“real and illusionary events”

through a disinformation campaign designed to convince Gaddafi that his inner circle was turning against him and that another American military attack might be imminent.

Now, before going further, something has to be said plainly.

Deceiving a hostile foreign leader is not a scandal.

It is ordinary statecraft.

Governments have run deception operations against adversaries for as long as there have been governments and adversaries.

Making Gaddafi believe his own officers were plotting against him is exactly the sort of thing intelligence services exist to do.

If the operation had stayed inside that boundary, there would be very little here worth writing about.

The problem is the delivery mechanism.

Because to make Gaddafi believe something, you have to put it somewhere Gaddafi will see it.

And Gaddafi read the American press.

Ten days after the White House meeting, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story reporting renewed Libyan terrorist planning and preparations for another major American military response.

The Reagan administration then publicly described that reporting as authoritative.

But Bob Woodward subsequently reported that portions of what appeared in the American press had originated in the deception operation itself.

The Journal said afterward that it had not known it might be used in a government disinformation campaign.

That is the line being crossed.

Not deceiving Gaddafi.

Routing the deception through American newspapers and then standing at a podium vouching for the result.

Because the audience for that story was not only a colonel in Tripoli.

It was every American who picked up the newspaper that morning.

They were not the target.

They were the delivery route.

And they were not told the difference.

Think about what that means for everything else.

The United States had a documented case against Gaddafi.

It did not need to invent one.

La Belle was real.

Libyan support for terrorism was real.

The dissident killings were real.

The weapons shipments were real.

And yet the administration still approved a program that mixed true things with invented ones and pushed the mixture into the same newspapers carrying the true things.

Once a government does that, it creates a problem that outlives the operation.

Which claims were intelligence?

Which were strategy?

Which were both?

The people reading were not supposed to be able to tell.

One man inside the administration decided that was unacceptable.

Bernard Kalb was the State Department’s chief spokesman.

On October 8, 1986, he resigned.

His stated concern was what the deception program did to the credibility of the United States.

Kalb understood the institutional problem precisely.

A government spokesman cannot credibly tell reporters what is true if he cannot know whether his own government is feeding them something false through a different door.

Chad

But information warfare was not the most consequential thing Washington did against Gaddafi.

For that, we have to go south.

To Chad.

Gaddafi had intervened repeatedly in Chadian politics and occupied territory in the north, including the Aouzou Strip.

Libyan forces supported factions favorable to Tripoli.

The objective was strategic influence over a neighboring state and control of disputed territory.

This was not defensive behavior.

Libya was projecting power.

One of the men fighting Goukouni Oueddei was Hissène Habré—his former defense minister in the same transitional government, now his armed rival.

Washington wanted to stop Libya’s expansion.

And that brings us to the strongest defense of what came next.

What Washington Was Choosing Between

Washington did not choose Hissène Habré over a democrat.

There was no democrat.

The coalition government had already collapsed into civil war in March 1980. Goukouni turned to Gaddafi for military support, and Libya intervened directly on his side with thousands of troops and heavy weapons.

By December, the stalemate had broken and Habré had been driven from N’Djamena.

Then, on January 6, 1981, Gaddafi and Goukouni announced an agreement envisaging union between Libya and Chad.

That alarmed governments well beyond Washington.

The Organization of African Unity objected.

France objected.

African governments with no particular affection for the United States objected.

The merger never happened.

But the announcement made clear why Libyan influence in Chad frightened its neighbors.

So the choice in front of the Reagan administration was not between a brutal man and a decent one.

It was between a Libyan-backed government with Libyan troops on Chadian soil and a brutal man who would fight Libya.

Framed that way, the decision to support Habré is defensible.

I am prepared to say it was probably defensible.

But that is not the end of the question.

Because the choice did not end when Habré won.

He took N’Djamena in June 1982.

His government then constructed one of the most brutal security systems in modern Africa.

Its political police were called the Documentation and Security Directorate.

The DDS.

It arrested.

It tortured.

It disappeared people.

It killed.

After Habré fell, a Chadian truth commission estimated that his government had been responsible for more than 40,000 political deaths.

Human Rights Watch has said that it cannot independently verify that total.

But surviving DDS archives provide another kind of evidence.

They contain the names of 1,208 people who were killed or died in detention.

And 12,321 victims of torture, arbitrary detention or other abuse.

Habré was eventually tried in Senegal.

In 2016, the Extraordinary African Chambers convicted him of crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture.

He received life imprisonment.

And the American relationship went deeper than general political support.

According to the 1992 Chadian Truth Commission and later Human Rights Watch research, the United States helped finance the DDS and supplied equipment and training.

American officials maintained contact with the organization.

Former DDS officials described relationships with U.S. intelligence personnel.

The caveat belongs immediately beside that evidence.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence that American officials directly participated in Habré’s international crimes or deliberately supported torture and murder as such.

That distinction matters.

But so does the timeline.

The original decision to back Habré against a Libyan-aligned government answers one question.

The continued relationship with his security apparatus after its character became increasingly clear answers another.

So the real question is narrower and harder than the defense of the original policy.

Not:

Was it reasonable to back Habré against a Libyan-supported government?

But:

Having backed him, and having learned what his security service was doing, what obligation followed?

American support continued.

France made essentially the same calculation.

French military power, weapons and intelligence helped Habré resist Libya while his government’s security apparatus committed systematic abuses.

The West did not create Habré’s brutality.

It selected him because he was useful.

And after learning what his regime was, it continued to find him useful.

The Libyan Prisoners

The Chad story also produces a name that will matter later.

Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar had been a senior Libyan officer.

He fought in Chad.

He was captured there.

He later broke with Gaddafi and became associated with a U.S.-backed anti-Gaddafi opposition force built partly from captured Libyan troops.

Human Rights Watch identifies Haftar as the leader of that force.

When Habré fell in 1990, the force lost its sanctuary.

Haftar eventually reached the United States and spent roughly two decades living in northern Virginia.

The War Ends in Court

There is one more thing about Chad that does not fit neatly into either caricature.

The Aouzou Strip dispute eventually went to the International Court of Justice.

Libya claimed the territory.

Chad claimed it.

After years of war, occupation, proxies and thousands of deaths, both governments submitted the dispute to law.

On February 3, 1994, the Court ruled that the Aouzou Strip belonged to Chad.

Libya lost.

Then Libya complied.

The two countries negotiated the withdrawal.

United Nations observers monitored it.

By the end of May, Libyan forces and administration had left the strip.

That belongs in the story too.

The same Gaddafi who had used force in Chad later accepted an adverse international judgment and withdrew.

It does not absolve the intervention.

It does not erase the dead.

But it complicates the caricature of a government incapable of accepting limits imposed by international institutions.

One Allegation

There is one more allegation worth mentioning precisely because it is often presented as settled fact when it is not.

Former MI6 officer David Shayler later claimed that British intelligence had funded or supported an Islamist-linked attempt to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996.

The British government denied the allegation, and it has never been established with anything approaching the evidentiary strength of the American relationship with Habré, the bombing campaign or the documented deception operation.

So that is where it stays.

An allegation.

Nothing in this installment depends on it.

The Campaign

By the end of the 1990s, the case against Gaddafi remained substantial.

He had repressed his own population.

He had pursued dissidents abroad.

His government had supported terrorism.

Libya had intervened in neighboring countries.

None of that changed.

But neither did the record on the other side disappear.

The United States deliberately challenged Libya’s maritime claim.

It imposed sweeping economic sanctions.

It shut down American petroleum operations while several companies preserved their underlying concession interests for another day.

It bombed Tripoli and Benghazi.

It struck Gaddafi’s command compound knowing he might be there.

It approved a deception program that spilled into American journalism and then treated reporting generated inside that environment as authoritative.

And in Chad, Washington and Paris continued backing a government whose security apparatus tortured and killed people because that government remained useful against Libya.

This does not turn Gaddafi into the victim of the story.

It destroys the cleaner story.

The one where violence, deception, proxy warfare and accommodation with brutal governments existed on only one side.

They did not.

The moral asymmetry asserted at the time does not survive the record intact.

The difference was often not whether governments were willing to do ugly things.

It was whose ugly things were considered strategically acceptable.

And then something happened that makes everything we have just covered even stranger.

Lockerbie remained.

Abu Salim remained.

Gaddafi remained Gaddafi.

But the strategic environment changed.

He had been bombed.

Sanctioned.

Isolated.

Treated for years as one of the most dangerous men on earth.

And then the CIA and MI6 started talking to him.

Directly.

The monster had not disappeared.

He was about to become useful.

Next Thursday: When the Monster Became Our Friend.