failing to denounce Sadat’s peace initiative and, in 1980, Numayri reproved Libya’s incursion into Chad. The following year, in the aftermath of the bombing of the Chadian embassy in Khartoum, the Sudanese government expelled all Libyan diplomats.52 Numayri was thoroughly obsessed with what he perceived as a genuine Libyan threat to his regime. In response he strengthened his ties with Egypt; he provided weapons and logistical support to Chadian rebel Hissene Habré and several anti-Qaddafi exile groups; he negotiated a military aid package with the United States valued at over one hundred million dollars; and he offered Washington the use of Sudanese military bases in the event Sudan was threatened by an outside force.
Qaddafi was also accused of meddling in the affairs of several other African countries, particularly the nations of the Sahel (the huge grassland region south of the Sahara Desert). Presidents Moussa Traoré of Mali and Seyni Kountché of Niger charged Qaddafi with plotting to overthrow their governments. The popularly elected government of Ghana expelled Libyan diplomats, accusing them of subversive activities. The governments of Senegal and Gambia severed diplomatic relations with Libya, accusing the Qaddafi regime of imprisoning their citizens and forcing them into military training against their will. They reported that Libyan agents hired Muslim tribesmen from drought-battered areas to work in the Libyan oil fields and then forced them to serve in Qaddafi’s “Islamic Legion.” After completing their basic training these “legionnaires” often slipped back to their native countries and performed acts of sabotage and insurrection.53 The widely respected former president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, stated that Qaddafi’s campaign of aggression was “designed to destroy Africa south of the Sahara and create a vast Libyan empire.”54 Similarly, the U.S. State Department called Qaddafi’s announcement of a merger with Chad a valid expression of his “expansionist goals to absorb his Arab and Muslim neighbors in a Libyan-dominated state.”55
Exacerbating his estrangement from his fellow African leaders, Qaddafi came to the aid of two of the world’s most reviled dictators—Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Empire and Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada—during their struggles to remain in power. When Bokassa was overthrown in 1979 two hundred Libyan soldiers were serving in his army. In late 1978 and early 1979 Qaddafi airlifted more than two thousand soldiers and a substantial amount of sophisticated military equipment to Uganda in a vain attempt to help Amin defeat a combined invasion force of Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles. After escaping from the capital at Kampala (which was soon captured by the invading army), the deposed “President for Life” found temporary asylum in Tripoli. Approximately six hundred Libyans were killed and most of their equipment lost during the Ugandan operation—an unmitigated military debacle.56
Many African countries reacted strongly to Qaddafi’s record of aggression. Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, and Senegal severed diplomatic relations with Libya in 1980. That same year Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Nigeria vigorously protested the conversion of Libyan embassies into “people’s bureaus” staffed by revolutionary zealots instead of professional diplomats. Each country responded by expelling the Libyan delegations from their countries. Furthermore, Kenya and Upper Volta (renamed Burkina Faso in 1984) refused to permit Libya to establish people’s bureaus in their countries. By 1981 a total of twelve African countries had either broken diplomatic relations with Libya, expelled Libyan diplomats, or closed Libyan people’s bureaus. Political analyst Ronald B. St. John very aptly noted that “Sub-Saharan Africa was beginning to show the unity which Qaddafi had long advocated, the common bond being opposition to Libyan policy.”57
Qaddafi and Terrorism
By the late 1970s Western leaders regarded Qaddafi as one of the world’s most notorious practitioners of international terrorism. They accused him of using it to attain foreign policy objectives that he could not achieve through conventional diplomatic or military means. According to the CIA Qaddafi’s role in international terrorism included the funding of terrorist activities, the procurement of arms and other supplies for terrorist organizations, the use of Libyan camps and advisers for guerrilla training, and the use of Libyan diplomatic posts as bases for terrorist operations.58 The CIA also reported that Qaddafi frequently used Libya’s United African Airlines (UAA) to support terrorist operations, subversion, and armed intervention. Ostensibly a nonscheduled passenger and cargo air carrier, UAA was staffed by several Libyan intelligence operatives and provided transport services for the Libyan armed forces and the Libyan intelligence service. In August 1981 Qaddafi directed the airline to open eighteen new offices in Africa, thus expanding and strengthening his intelligence network on the continent. When Qaddafi dispatched his troops to Chad, UAA airlifted weapons, ammunition, and military vehicles into the country.59
Within a few years of seizing power Qaddafi had established his reputation as a major supporter of international terrorism because of his involvement in a series of sensational terrorist acts. He provided extensive logistical support, funding, weapons, and training for the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. The organization was best known for the brutal massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. Libya was linked to another deadly Black September operation: the attack on the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Khartoum in March 1973. The assault claimed the lives of Cleo A. Noel Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his chargé d’affaires, George C. Moore. That same month the Irish navy intercepted the SS Claudia near the coast of Ireland and, upon inspection, discovered it was transporting weapons to the Irish Republican Army. Qaddafi readily admitted that the arms were from Libya. In December 1973 Palestinian terrorists assaulted a Pan Am airliner at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, murdering thirty-one passengers. Italian investigators learned that the terrorists had traveled from Tripoli to conduct the attack and that Libya had provided them with money and arms. Qaddafi also developed a close working relationship with Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlos,” whose group carried out the spectacular 1975 kidnapping of oil ministers attending a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna.60
In 1981 the State Department reported that Qaddafi spent hundreds of millions of dollars each year on terrorist activities and operated more than a dozen training camps where terrorist organizations, radical groups, and guerrilla movements received instruction in hijacking, assassination, commando tactics, and the use of explosives.61 By the early 1980s Qaddafi was providing funds, training, and logistical support to insurgent movements, opposition groups, and terrorist elements in more than thirty countries, from South America to the Philippines.62 “Libya runs twenty-five terrorist training camps,” observed William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagans first CIA director. “[Terrorism is] their second largest export, after oil.”63 Casey may have exaggerated the number of training camps but there was no denying Libya’s huge role in the world of terrorism.
Qaddafi unabashedly defended his use of terrorism and subversion as a matter of principle, regarding it as a powerful way to avenge every injustice committed against Libya. Political scientist René Lemarchand noted that Qaddafi’s “violently anti-Western disposition and his passionate commitment to a reconstruction of the Arab nation are the product of a uniquely cruel and frustrating historical experience.”64 Similarly, a CIA analyst pointed out that Qaddafi seems “to be motivated by a strong desire to take revenge . . . not so much for what we did to him last year or two weeks ago but for the humiliation of Islam, for the cultural and actual conquest of the Middle East.”65 According to the CIA, “He publicly portrays attacks by groups anywhere in the world as spontaneous events in an ongoing war against colonialism and Zionism and paints himself as a leading player in this war whose revolutionary ideals are shared by the ‘oppressed’ worldwide.”66 A State Department special report concluded that Qaddafi “fancies himself a leader and agent of historic forces that will reorder Third World politics to his taste. His vision provides both a motive and a rationale for providing military and financial aid to radical regimes and for undermining moderate governments by creating or supporting subversive groups and abetting terrorists.” Furthermore, “Qaddafi’s aggressive policies increasingly have focused on undermining U.S. and other Western
