The case of the missing assassins from Libya

Press, 20 January 1982, Page 18

The case of the missing assassins from Libya

By

HAROLD JACKSON,

Washington, in “the Guardian,” London

The staid district of northwest Washington which houses the Naval Observatory has been the setting for unprecedented pandemonium these past weeks. With howling sirens and flashing red lights, a convoy of vehicles periodically screams out of the grounds. It includes a couple of vast black Cadillacs, six police and secret service squad cars, and a van carrying a heavily-armed SWAT team.

The occasion? Usually the Vice-President Mr George Bush, heading from his official residence to a private dinner — though this manner of arriving in a posh and peaceful backwater seems likely to reduce Mr Bush's evenings out dramatically. "He doesn't like being a moving showcase,” his press secretary said, “but there's not much he can do about it.” The blame for this extraordinary show of force was laid at the door of two Libyan hit squads said to be roaming the country looking for a passing Vice-President or other handy official. Now the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr William Webster, has joined the. ranks of those who wonder if the squads ever existed. He told a television interviewer he would have been a lot happier without last month's blare of publicity from the Administration and agreed that it might all-have been a plant to make the Whit&tHouse look silly. Certainly* it/seemed to be in time withj.jan/jextraordinary bout of spy 'mania which has recently swept Washington. Mr Webster's own agency contributed its share.

The F.8.1.’s special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Mr Theodore Gardner, recently told “The New York Times” that the forest of aerials on the Russian embassy had been specially installed to allow the K.G.B. to monitor phone calls in the White House and the Pentagon. "There’s a tendency when you’re in a room by yourself,” Mr Gardner commented, “to assume the phone is a private instrument. It is not." It sounded like something out of Len Deighton — and that's more or less what it has turned out to be.

The embassy later explained that the aerials were part of its normal long-distance radio communication with Moscow' 8000 kilometres away. They had been bought from a local shop and installed to. comply with the District of Columbia’s planning laws. More to the point, they were put up under the terms of a bilateral agreement signed on June 23, 1969 and “it should also be noted that the type of antenna had been selected on the advice of the Department of State.” Mr Gardner is sticking to his story, but his audience, is diminishing. That seems to be the position with the hit squads too. They started vanishing into the fog just before Christmas. In the original version — on information from a defector woo had seen them in training — they were said actually to have arrived in the United States, probably over the lightlypoliced Canadian border. The next bit of public information came when an alert reporter .noticed a set of swar-thy-looking photographs pinned to the staff notice board at the

immigration post in San Ysidro, Texas. Then the official account became that the team had not actually arrived but was thought to be in Mexico and heading north. At some stage Carlos — the man who staged the Munich Olympics massacre and the O.P.E.C. hos-tage-taking — emerged as the organiser.

Colonel Gadaffi’s dismissal of the charges as “silly” was regarded as no more than might be expected from a mad terrorist financier and Mr Reagan switched on the lights of the national Christmas tree from the safety of the White House East room, in the carefully vetted company of his staff's small children. Then the White House went coy and refused to discuss details of the security operations. At the same time, a story wafted through the press corps that the storm of publicity had made the Libyans think again and the whole operation had been called off. But the dramatic security precautions persist and there are still noisy decoy processions howling nightly around the capital. Mr Webster’s carefullyphrased doubts were expressed more robustly by one of the Congressmen privately briefed on the flap. “I could never discover just what it was that made them take this threat any more seriously than they would any ol the others that must come to the White House every day.” he said. The State Department had published its own detailed study of the threat posed by Libya, but it came out at the height of the furore and got swamped. It made no mention of hit squads.