LIBYA'S QADDAFI: SHATTERED DREAMS FEAR OF COUP PLOTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000505250063-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 2, 2010
• Sequence Number: 63
• Publication Date: May 4, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/02 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000505250063-7
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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
4 May 1984
Libya's Qaddafi:
shattered dreams,
fear of coup plots
He seems little like the idealist
who overthrew King Idris in '69
By John Cooley -
Special to The Rvistfan Science Monitor
London '
A scowl furrows his brow. His face showing the
strain of living for years under threat of assassi-
nation, Muammar Qaddafi listens.
The Libyan leader tries to concentrate for a moment
on the questions newsmen fire at him at a Tripoli news
conference. His thoughts seem far away.
Even as Colonel Qaddafi accuses Britain of framing
his former emissaries in
London for the murder of a
British policewoman to pro-
voke Britain to break ties
r with Libya, his eyes seem
to look beyond the TV cam-
s eras in the security-
cordoned room.
Isolated from neighbors
whom he has alternately
helped with money and
arms and harmed with con-
spiracies, Qaddafi is a lead-
er haunted by his past, say
former intimate friends and
associates. They say his
thoughts are often filled by
memories of disastrous
military adventures, such
as his support for Ugandan
dictator Idi Amin, or his
:, j~. present encounter with the
Losing his hold on Libya? French-backed regime in
neighboring Chad. ',
Perhaps other specters cross his vision: shattered
plans for Libya's union with Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Al-
geria. and even Syria.
The TV cameras show Qaddafi return from his rev-
erie. He faces the reporters again and offers France a
ca.-rot: mutual withdrawal of French and Libyan troops
from Chad. Then he wields a stick against Britain: a
threat to again aid guerrillas from the outlawed Irish Re-
publican Army.
The troubled leader on the television screen seems to
have limie in common with the idealistic and unknown
young man this reporter first met in Tripoli in 1969,
only days after he and a baker's dozen of like-minded
other young lieutenants had overthrown the Western-
protected King Idris.
Qaddafi is zealous, puritanical, and conspiratorial.
His moods vacillate between elation and depression, al-
though he is still charged with a sense of mission. That
mission, he often said in so many words, was to continue
the struggle for Arab unity and liberation begun by his
idol. Egypts late President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Now, Qaddafi's Libyan opponents say - with much
evidence to support them - Qaddafi's direct personal
hand on Libya's tiller is partly replaced by a kind of rev-
olutionary directorate. Its members are young zealots,
scarcely known even in Libya. Qaddafi. denying that he
is chief of.state. can approve or disavow their acts and
decisions as he chooses.
gaddafi's opponents say this inchoate system breeds
chaos.
"Opposition is sweeping Libya like a growing storm,"
says Muhammad Magarief, once a financial controller,
who is shocked by Qaddafi's reckless spending of
Libya's oil wealth on foreign adventures.
Abdul Hamid Bakkoush, who served as prime minis-
ter for King Idris, agrees. He adds that overthrowing
Qaddafi, protected as he is by loyal tribesmen and East
German security guards, may not be easy.
Many close observers wonder about Qaddafi's sanity.
Newsmen in Libya recently reported that he is said to de-
pend heavily on tranquilizers, and that he acts like a man
in physical danger.
The_confusion evident in Qaddafi's thinking and ut-
terances is matched by apparent incoherence in his poli-
cies. Dreams he had as a student at the Libyan military
academy centered on Arab unity and liberation. But with
each foreign misadventure, these dreams have faded.
By the time the United States suspended di loma 'c -
ties wit t va m 1 81, a a i ha to lash ut at
neig rs and a alienated friends, including US and
other Western intelligence a ncies. which at first felt his
anticommunist, Muslim deserved ro .
Qadaffi's targets had included Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia,
and Morocco. Then his tactics began to change. He in-
dulged in a series of on-again, off-again flirtations with
"reactionary" regimes, as he had called them, like those
of the Moroccan and Saudi Arabian kingdoms.
Qaddafi first offered, then withdrew, help for
Moroccan King Hassan's adversaries, the Polisario guer-
rillas fighting Morocco for control of the former Western
Sahara. Qaddafi kept up sporadic pressure on Tunisia.
He has even turned against Algeria, which he once
termed a "revolutionary sister state."
Recently he has financially supported an Islamic fun-
damentalist group headed by Ahmed Ben Bella, Alge-
ria's first president after independence, now considered
in Algeria a subversive nuisance to President Chadli
Beniedid's government.
In the Mideast, Qaddafi helps various radical Pales-
tinian guerrilla groups, but spurns as an enemy the
mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, i
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/02 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000505250063-7