Gadaffi’s revenge: more guns for I.R.A.

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 21

Gadaffi’s revenge: more guns for I.R.A.

This month is the tenth anniversary since Colonel Gadaffi gave up formal control of the Libyan Government and became selfstyled “Leader of the Revolution,” launching a decade in which the deadly influence of his tiny country has been felt around the globe. Since American bombers tried to destroy him last April, Gadaffi has rarely been seen. COLIN SMITH and DONALD TRELFORD tracked him to his desert hideaway for an exclusive interview with the London “Observer.”

"Britain is a great nation and America is a super-Power. We believe now that by doing this (conspiring and attacking a small nation and attacking a family in the middle of the night when they are sleeping), both the Americans and the British, they are not humans, but they fall somewhere between — between monkeys and human beings.” The Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, made this attack in an exclusive interview with the “Observer” from one of the remote desert camp sites where he has spent an increasing amount of time since the United States 48th Tactical Fighter Wing destroyed his Tripoli home in an attempt to kill him last year. He says that in retaliation for Britain’s involvement in the “murderous raid” (a 15-month-old adopted daughter was killed) he has increased arms supplies to the Irish Republican Army (the 1.R.A.). The American planes were based at the R.A.F. station, Lakenheath.

Gadaffi greeted Mr Charles Haughey’s victory in the Irish election: “We welcome the success of our friend.”

Libya first gave arms and explosives to the Provisional I.R.A. in the early 19705. In 1973, a ship called the Claudia was intercepted off Ireland with five tons of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Tripoli on board.

Later, Gadaffi is thought to have stopped sending arms after a delegation of Loyalist paramilitaries persuaded him that Northern Ireland was not a colonial situation. But when Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Libya in April, 1984, following the killing of Woman Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in London, he resumed supplies. Asked if he regretted the killing of the policewoman, Gadaffi replied: "Of course. Yes, of course.”

Last year, security forces in Northern Ireland claimed that in 1985 the Libyans had given the Provisional I.R.A. more than a million pounds to buy weapons on the open market. Mr Haughey visited Tripoli last year to clinch a deal to sell the Libyans a huge quantity of Irish beef.

Gadaffi also said that the behaviour of America and Britain justified terrorist reprisals. And he warned that unless the American and British people put President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher "on trial,” Libyans would “take revenge” in Britain or America.

“Because those who were killed have relatives,” he says. “They have families. If a father has died, a son who has his father dead or a father who has his son dead, or a brother, they will take revenge against those who killed them.” Gadaffi said that he thought Mr Terry Waite, who negotiated the freeing of several Britons held in Libya three years ago, might be a spy. “Before, we thought he was a religious man,”

Asked about the recent televising of the execution by hanging and firing party of seven men accused of murder and anti-State activities, Gadaffi said: “They were secret terrorist groups, like the Red Brigades and the Baader Meinhof groups, just like that. They were Libyan people. They killed people here, secretly. And they were convicted of intentional murder. Premeditated murder.” Gadaffi claims that Americans had a plan (code-named Operation Ramadan) to topple him in 1985 with the aid of Egyptian troops who were to invade across Libya’s eastern border. “They were planning to use 852 bombers. And there were other plans to kill me. We were surprised to have these plots, these diabolical plots, coming from a State which is supposed to be a super-Power.”

He says that his family is still suffering “psychologically” from last April’s raid, in which two of his children were wounded in addition to the death of an adopted daughter. “My psychological build-up is different from theirs,” he says. “I am a military man and I am leading the battle. But I was disappointed with a super-Power conspiring and attacking a small nation and attacking a family in the middle of the night when they are sleeping.” Since the American attempt at aerial assassination, Gadaffi, who has always prided himself on retaining his nomadic Bedouin ways, has become more of a moving target than ever. He rarely seems to spend time in Tripoli now and his smashed living quarters in the Aziziya barracks, a two-storey house in the Italian colonial style, have already taken on the air of a museum.

Guides point to his children’s exercise books among the fallen

ceiling plaster on a dressing table and show you the famous tent near the tennis courts where, they remind you, the Leader used to give audience to such as Mrs Gandhi and Fidel Castro.

It has always been assumed Gadaffi survived because he was sleeping in an underground bunker a few yards away from his house. He denied this to us, though when we asked him to describe the raid it became obvious that he had not been in the room where his wife, who has back trouble, was strapped to her bed in traction. “All of a sudden the attack started on the house,” he says, “so I put on my military uniform quickly, because I was wearing my sleeping clothes, and so when I was sure the attack was on the house I ran to rescue the children.

The bombs were falling everywhere. You can see for yourself. The house was about to fall at that moment. Some of the children were pulled from under the ruins. The electricity was cut and we had to use hand torches.

“There was nobody with me at the house except one relative. So we tried to rescue the children and the girl we adopted was killed.” Despite the extensive publicity Gadaffi has given his family from time to time, outsiders had not heard of 15-mohth-old Hanna until after the raid.

Recently, Gadaffi has taken to wandering about Jamahiriya (the State of the Masses) in his custom-built yellow bus, a huge Daimler-Benz said to be armourplated and complete with living quarters, conference and communication rooms. To find the Leader’s bus involved us in a 45-minute flight in a Lear jet to a fair-sized military airfield somewhere in the desert that constitutes most of Libya apart from its fertile coastal strip. The men from the Ministry of Information assured us that we were going to a place called Waddan in Gadaffi’s home province of Sirte.

If this was so, we took rather longer than we should have done, even bearing in mind that we flew a circuitous route, first out to sea from Tripoli, then east along the coast instead of directly south-east. And if it was Waddan, the airfield must have been of recent construction because it is not shown on maps.

It is possible that we were at Sabha, about 170 miles to the south-west of Waddan, which has had an airfield for years and is the place where Gadaffi, on the next day, addressed the General People’s Congress to mark his tenth anniversary as Leader of the Revolution.

We were fed heavily on mutton, spaghetti, and chips in a little hilltop fort garrisoned by

long-haired soldiers carrying paratroopers’ Kalashnikov rifles. One of our escorts had invaded Israel with the Libyan army in 1948 and another had acquired in Chicago a taste for whisky sours — a taste he can no longer indulge. Immediately after the meal we were told that the Leader was ready to receive us. We set off in a couple of Government Chevrolets — for the Jamariya not only bears no grudge against the American people in general but also retains a remarkable affection for their products. The cars took us along a tarmac road and then suddenly lurched off left down a barely visible dirt track through the desert scrub. Soldiers leaning nonchalantly against their Range-Rover watched us go by. They included one of Gadaffi’s female bodyguards, the Green Nuns. On the skyline, to our left, was a single-storey building with what looked like a large radio mast. Nearby was the distinctive silhouette of ground-to-air missiles mounted on a tracked launcher.

But we veered to the right, were waved through a checkpoint by grinning soldiers in bush hats, and drove towards two single-storey buildings, one timbered and the other made of fero-concrete. Next to the latter, a Bedouin-style tent was pitched. There were several vehicles

parked around, including a mobile canteen for the troops. About 400 yards beyond this camp site a large yellow bus was parked in a wadi. A volleyball court was a few yards from the tent. “The Leader is playing,” said one of our escorts, obviously delighted at the show being put on for us: “You can take pictures.” Gadaffi leapt about in a fairly nimble manner for a man of 44 and included some tomfoolery in the form of backheel soccer kicks. It was enough to dispel any lingering rumours that he had been crippled by the American bombs, though there have been persistent reports that he was lightly wounded in his left arm.

Throughout the interview Gadaffi seemed relaxed and calm, and at times exuded a great deal of charm. Certainly, there was nothing of the "mad dog” about his demeanour or any hint that here was a man who was running a regime which ruthlessly hunted down its exiled opponents abroad and had just televised the public executions of seven dissidents at home. When we asked him about this, he said the condemned men had been American agents trained in Pakistan for the purpose of assassinating Soviet advisers. This, apparently, was explanation enough. They had not actually killed the Russians, he added: But what did emerge was the chilling naivety of a man who rarely seems to think through the human consequences of his actions. A man who “supports just causes everywhere” and passes round the plastic explosive; blocks out the reality of the bomb in the shopping mall, even though he screams his head off when it happens near him. Ten months later, his predominant emotion about the United States air raid appeared not to be rage but indignation. The fact that the Americans had not taken him seriously enough to grant him the immunity normally granted (another exception was Castro) to heads of State. “I expected an attack, but I thought it would be on military targets,” he told us. “I didn’t think it would be concentrated on my family’s house.”

Even more of a Bedouin

Mutton and spaghetti