Benghazi (9 page)

Authors: Brandon Webb

BOOK: Benghazi

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With the de facto blessing of the CIA, Waugh and his team landed in Tripoli in August of 1977. After their first meeting with Libyan military officers, the Americans were housed at the Omar Khayamm Hotel in Benghazi. Assigned to train Libyan commandos, Waugh relied on his Special Forces background to gain the trust of the trainees and began casually taking photographs with his CIA-supplied camera, snapping pictures of everything from surface and air missile sites to MIG fighter jets.

Waugh worked with the Libyan commandos for almost a full year but never had a high opinion of their capabilities. In 1978, he returned home and got married before going back to Libya as a singleton operator. This time, the Libyans asked him to conduct a cross-border operation into Egypt to photograph potential military targets, a request that Waugh refused as it would mean his taking part in military operations for the Libyan government, a government not exactly on good terms with America to begin with.

Having refused the recon mission, Waugh was moved to a secret compound in the Green Mountains, east of Benghazi, to train another commando unit. It was on November 4th, 1978, that Waugh learned the US embassy in Tehran had been taken over by Iranian terrorists and Americans had been held hostage in retaliation for the United States's providing asylum for the late shah of Iran. The Arab world perceived this act as a sell-out by America. A Libyan officer who had befriended Waugh warned him at the eleventh hour that the Libyan government would be coming after him and he needed to escape the country immediately.

The officer helped him escape to Benina Airport in Benghazi and handed him a ticket to Frankfurt, Germany, where Waugh's wife was living with family at the time. Though Billy got out of the country in the nick of time, he later learned that his Libyan officer friend had been executed for taking part in an attempted coup against Colonel Gaddafi.

A few years later, in 1982, Ed Wilson was arrested for selling 20 tons of C4 plastic explosives to the Gaddafi regime. It was also alleged that the Libyan commandos trained by the Special Forces veterans he had hired for Gaddafi later went around the world assassinating Libyan political dissidents in places as far flung as Germany and the United States. Wilson maintained his innocence and spent decades in prison trying to clear his name.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, he managed to show at least eighty occasions on which the CIA had been in contact with him after he was no longer their employee, establishing that there was a continuing relationship between him and the CIA. Although he was never able to demonstrate that the US government had allowed him to sell the C4 to Libya, he did show that he had been in close contact with CIA representatives during the time of major arms deals he had made with Gaddafi. Ultimately, this was enough for his release from prison in 2004.

Was Ed Wilson working for the CIA the entire time, or did the CIA simply allow him to run his own entrepreneurial activities and piggyback their own operations onto the tail end of them by recruiting people like Billy Waugh to feed them information? We probably won't know for sure until more documents are declassified.

Gaddafi's reign of terror came to a head with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland and killed 270 people. Secret NSA intercepts pointed toward Gaddafi as the culprit, the bombing of the aircraft done as part of a series of skirmishes between America and Libya that included the US military shooting down two Libyan fighter jets and sinking a number of military boats off the country's coast. In response, Gaddafi had a discotheque in Germany bombed, killing three people. The United States later retaliated by deploying fighter jets to drop bombs on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. The airstrike failed to kill the Libyan dictator but allegedly killed his adopted daughter. This small-scale conflict ultimately resulted in the dictator's ordering the Lockerbie bombing.

These airstrikes were almost certainly planned with the aid of the reconnaissance photos taken by Billy Waugh during his many adventures in Libya.

Another motivation for the Lockerbie bombing was America's and France's assistance to Chad as Gaddafi's pivot from the Arab world to Africa saw him launching a highly unpopular war in the desert nation on his southern border. The so-called Toyota War between Chad and Libya resulted in yet another defeat for Gaddafi in 1987, with heavy losses of both soldiers and war material.

Not content to run an extraction-based economy centered on oil exportation and oppress the people in his own nation, Gaddafi furthered his African ambitions by financing and providing weapons to butchers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and elsewhere. He also provided aid and comfort to other autocrats such as Idi Amin of Uganda and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

For all his sins, the Western world seemed to enter into some kind of detente with Gaddafi starting in the 1980s. Despite the African leader's forays into terrorism and assassination, it seems that the West could not ignore a nation so rich in oil, and with an apparently unhinged leader who had a growing interest in Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Margret Thatcher wrote at the time that the former President of Sudan had once called Gaddafi “a man with a split personalityâboth of them evil.”

After the attacks and counter-attacks between Gaddafi and the West during the 1980s, the Libyan leader sought to rehabilitate his image as the “mad dog of the Middle East,” as Ronald Reagan had once called him. He admitted to responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and turned over two suspects, his own intelligence operatives, for trial in Europe. His concession, and willingness to pay over two billion dollars in damages to the families of the victims, is seen as purely Machiavellian. Ever the shrewd manipulator, by admitting some responsibility for the bombing, Gaddafi succeeded in having UN sanctions against his country lifted.

The fun and games continued through the 1990s as well. David Rothkopf, who discusses conspiracy theories about the power elite in his book
Superclass
, relates a personal story in which the CEO of a major aircraft manufacturer pitches an assassination plot to Representative Pat Schroeder.

Here is the deal. I want to sell a plane to Muammar Qaddafi and he wants to buy one. But we have sanctions in place that won't let me sell to him. The US wants this guy dead. So, what I'm thinking is, if you help me get the okay to sell him the plane, I'll build it with explosive bolts connecting the wings to the fuselage. Then, one day he's up flying over the Med and we push a button. He's gone. I make my sale. Everyone's happy.

It is unknown what ultimately became of this plan.

Ironically, Gaddafi himself faced an internal threat from Islamic extremists in the 1990s that influenced him to cooperate with American and British counterterrorism initiatives. Libya was even used as a center in the rendition flight network for detained suspected terrorists held by American operatives after the 9/11 attacks. One of these rendition prisoners appears to have been an internal political opponent of Gaddafi's named Abdelhakim Belhadj, an Islamic extremist who fought with the Mujahdeen in Afghanistan against the soviets before becoming an emir in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The CIA then arranged for him to be arrested in Malaysia and returned to Libya, where Gaddafi later released him as part of a de-radicalization program. Belhadj became a leader in the Libyan civil war against Gaddafi's forces just a few years later.

With the British, French, and Americans convincing Gaddafi to abandon his Weapons of Mass Destruction program, the Bush administration removed Libya from the list of nations that support terrorism, and both MIâ6 and the CIA increased intelligence-sharing and cooperation with the Libyan regime. Only after the civil war was it evident that the CIA had even written speeches for Gaddafi and helped him set up an extensive surveillance system.

At this point, there was a warming of relations between Gaddafi and the West as he signed agreements with French Prime Minister Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Burlesconi. He also opened the door to Russia, meeting with Medvedev and Putin. The once-ostracized dictator even rated a handshake from President Obama at a G8 summit in 2009.

All of which makes Gaddafi's liquidation, with direct Western assistance, in 2011 all the more interesting.

About the Authors

JACK MURPHY is the managing editor of SOFREP.com and a former US Army Ranger with multiple combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran who served as a Sniper and Team Leader in 3rd Ranger Battalion and as a Senior Weapons Sergeant on a Military Free Fall team in 5th Special Forces Group. Acting as senior trainers and advisers to an Iraqi SWAT team, his Special Forces soldiers conducted Direct Action and other missions across Northern Iraq. Having left the military in 2010, he now studies political science at Columbia University.

BRANDON WEBB is the editor-in-chief of SOFREP.com and a former US Navy SEAL who served combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. President George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Unit Citation to Webb and his SEAL platoon following their deployment to Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. After his final combat deployment, he was Course Manager for the US Navy SEAL Sniper program, arguably the most difficult sniper courses in the world. The author of the bestselling memoir
The Red Circle
, Webb has appeared in the
New York Times
and on ABC News, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, the BBC, and other outlets.

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BENGHAZI
. Copyright Â© 2013 by SOFREP, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062276919

Version 02152013

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