So I work for a large mulinational corporation in the tech industry. Needless to say, we hire a lot of non-americans to work here. While a bunch of us were discussing the recent events in Afganastan, one guy, formerly of the Congo in Africa, was rather surprised to find out that none of us Americans knew how we took care of Kadafi (Gadafi, Gadoffee, whatever, the guy in charge of Lybia).
According to my friend, Kadafi received in the mail one day a large photo album with a letter from a U.S. organization (CIA, FBI, NSA, or something. He didn’t know for sure). Inside the photo album was a bunch of pictures of Kadafi. Not like newspaper clippings, but pictures of him in the shower, in bed with his wife and children, talking on the phone in his living room, and other pictures of the sort. In effect the message was, “Look at how easily we could have gotten you. Play nice or we will get you.”
I had never heard of this before. Then again, I was in grade school while all of this played out. Anyone else heard this story? I questioned my coworker about this relentlessly. There was no other real information he could provide me with, other than the rest of the world pretty much knew this is what happened.
Well, for better of for worse, there you have it. My first thread. Don’t be gentle. I like the pain.
I have no substantive info either way, but this smacks of UL. Every public official is well aware that there is no way to protect yourself from a dedicated assassin, even more so if the assassin is a group rather than an individual. It is simply not possible to protect yourself and still interact with the world. I suspect that Kadafi is sufficiently paranoid about the threat from both internal and external opponents that pointing it out would be meaningless.
Quite the contrary, providing a target with physical evidence of both your intent and your intel capabilities would likely turn into a public relations nightmare for the agency making the threat.
I remember this, it was around '85 or '86 (give or take another year), but I don’t completely remember the details.
I seem to recall Libya had shot down a passenger plane. I could very well be wrong about that, but I do know he did something like that. We bombed them for an interval, and to my knowledge Kadafi hasn’t “acted up” since then. I also seem to recall (but I’m not positive) that Kadafi’s young daughter was killed in the bombing.
Sorry, I didn’t read the OP carefully earlier, I just skimmed over and missed that about the personal warning to Kadafi mentioned in the OP. I’ve never heard of that either, so I can’t confirm whether there’s any truth to it or not; I’m fairly certain if there is, however, it’s of course related to what I posted about earlier.
Let me chime in with this: I have heard a fair amount of speculation recently about why Qadafi was silenced (more or less) since the mid 1980’s.
I believe at the time, he was the anti-christ that would rise up from the middle east…he was (didn’t you know!) part of various Nostradamus quatrains that promised the anti christ would end the world…blah…blah…blah.
In any event, it is probably open to Great Debate -hint- about where the once-most-evil man in the world has “gone”.
Did the modest bombings and subsequent loss of a family member affect him that much?
Shadowfyre is repeating what I would classify as speculation, but I would love to hear various fact based theories on why Qadafi went low key. Can we really base his position on anything factual?
I do not believe anything presented in the OP - but something has kept him under wraps for the last 13-14 years…or has he not been under wraps as we think. That’s the million dollar question(s).
It could also be that a combination of the army’s pretty resounding defeat in Chad combined with the UN sanctions and embargo put a damper on his military and expansionist plans. The fall of the Soviet Union removed a major source of funding and inspiration for him. Also, events recently, especially the Gulf War, were a pretty major blow to any pan-Arab movement.
Defeat? I think it’s more that he realized that maybe he did not need to be the official Guy Who Needs To Be Bombed, that maybe he could shut up, get out of our face, and make mischief quietly. Essentially his big public stand throughout the 1990s was refusing to turn over the Lockerbie bombing suspects, and eventually he settled over that.
Captain Amazing, that is a very good list of factors. I don’t think he needed any funding from the Soviets, what with all that oil, but their fall probably did cost him in access to advanced weapons/terror technology, in availability of leftist terrorist cells in the West, and most importantly in the loss of the concept of an inevitable World Revolution. This ties in with the collapse of any hope for ideological Pan-Arabism. During that same time period, Islamic-based radicalism swept in and left the Colonel and other “old-school revolutionaries” behind, as an artifact from the 60s and 70s, in the hearts and minds of a new generation of would-be warriors.
Libya by itself does not have the population to project power so [K/G/Q]addafi had to resort to training, equipping, funding and harboring outside terrorists (e.g. Abu Nidal). But those other guys seem to have cared less for Muammar’s, um, offbeat ideas about a Great Arab People’s Republic, than for his cash and Semtex. Though there were “security alerts” and the such, I don’t recall during the big 80’s confrontation major public handwringing as to whether taking on Libya could trigger a great US/Arab-World jihad. Maybe that was it, for him. The revelation that after all, no matter how much aid he provided to others in “the struggle”, when they came out for him he stood alone.