Searching for Hit Teams

By James Kelly

With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman's villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It was the headquarters from which Gaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: "Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good."

--The Fifth Horseman, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

It sounded like the plot of an international thriller, as frightening as the fictional tale told in the Collins-Lapierre bestseller in which Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi threatens the U.S. with nuclear blackmail. According to reports received by the U.S. Government, hit teams had been dispatched by Libya to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and other top American leaders. As increasing fragments of evidence about the plot became public last week--some chilling, some bizarre, some literally beyond belief--Washington found itself embroiled in an international confrontation without precedent. If Administration reactions were confusing and contradictory, so were the facts from which decisions had to be made. If intelligence agencies and the Secret Service seemed to be reacting with undue alarm, they could offer a justification that was hard to refute: the true calamity would be to take the threat too lightly--and be wrong.

Despite skepticism in many quarters about the very existence of a hit-team plot, the White House was taking no chances. Security around the President, which had been notably increased since the assassination attempt by John Hinckley last March, was strengthened still more. Air Force One, for example, was equipped with sophisticated electronic gear that would allow its pilot to evade a missile attack, and Reagan sometimes rode in unmarked cars instead of his official limousine. At other times, presidential motorcades featured two similar limousines, both with flags flying.

The rising tensions between the U.S. and Libya were dramatically demonstrated last week in an extraordinary exchange of charges over the existence of the hit teams. Interviewed on ABC'S This Week with David Brinkley (see PRESS), Gaddafi stoutly--and predictably--denied he had sent agents to kill Reagan.

"We refuse to assassinate any person," said the mercurial Libyan leader, a startling statement on the face of it, since his gunmen are believed to have murdered at least a dozen Libyans in exile over the past 18 months because they opposed his regime. Gaddafi continued: "If they have evidence, we are ready to see this evidence." Why then is Reagan taking the rumors seriously, Gaddafi was asked. "Because he is silly, he is ignorant," replied Gaddafi. Next day, when asked about the Libyan leader's remarks by reporters at the White House, Reagan answered, "I wouldn't believe a word he says if I were you." But why didn't the Administration make its evidence public? Reagan smiled slightly. "We have the evidence," he said softly, "and he knows it."

Indeed, the reports of Libyan hit squads stalking U.S. leaders may finally snap completely the badly frayed relations between the two countries. Ever since Reagan took office last January, the Administration has been exploring ways to punish and isolate Gaddafi, whom it sees as the world's premier exporter of subversion and terrorism. After meeting for two days in a row with his National Security Council, Reagan last week called upon the 1,500 American citizens now living in Libya to leave "as soon as possible" and invalidated American passports for travel to that country. The President and his advisers considered other punitive steps, possibly including an embargo on the shipment of Libyan oil to the U.S. (see following story). Administration officials stressed that U.S. policies toward Libya had been under review since the summer; they also admitted that the reports of Libyan hit teams had forced them to speed up their deliberations. Said one senior White House aide: "We might not quite have been at this point yet."

Exactly what proof of the Libyan hit teams did the Reagan Administration have? Details remain sketchy, since the White House refused to make its evidence public. But this much is known: shortly after U.S. pilots downed two Libyan jets in a dogfight over the Gulf of Sidra last August, the Central Intelligence Agency passed word to the White House that it had learned of a Gaddafi plan to kill the President. The report was duly noted by U.S. security officials, but was never made public. Unverified reports of assassination plots against Presidents are fairly common, and are usually dismissed after brief investigations. But during the fall, and especially in the past three weeks, reports from different sources about a Libyan-inspired assassination attempt began to multiply. There was no single informant, as was originally reported; rather, the stories came from at least a dozen sources, ranging from informants who had picked up talk of a plot to spies who worked directly for the CIA.

The findings of the intelligence agencies were documented in a 40-page National Security Council report and presented to top White House aides at the beginning of December. The NSC study listed the names of twelve to 14 alleged members of the hit teams and included brief descriptions of some of the suspects. One informant had originally given U.S. officials the names of ten persons he knew had been trained for the assassination. As U.S. agencies began tracking down sources and pumping them for information, the total and the names kept changing. Conclusions about the suspects were couched in the ever murky language of the world of crime and spies: "reason to believe." The White House had no way to be certain of the reliability of the information, but it finally did conclude that there was indeed "reason to believe." As one White House official put it, "You've got to have some confidence in the CIA. You can't ignore the evidence."

The testimony of one informant stood out. Offering extensive detail that seemed to parallel other reports, he said that Gaddafi had ordered the assassination of several top American officials if no hit team could reach the President. With that, security was greatly increased not only for the President but for Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as well. Next, Secret Service protection was extended for the first time to Reagan's top aides: James Baker, Edwin Meese and Michael Deaver.

White House aides said it was the steady accumulation of details and incidents that gave credence to the hit-team reports. "No single informant's information is enough to warrant taking the reports too seriously," said an official. "But taken all together, the way one informant's information supports another's, you have to be convinced something is going on." U.S. intelligence officials, for example, started piecing some details together last September when they learned of an alleged Gaddafi plot to kill Maxwell Rabb, U.S. Ambassador to Italy. Rabb was given special protection, and Rome police arrested a suspect. Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports were circulating in France that Gaddafi was planning assaults on other U.S. embassy personnel in Europe. U.S. officials thus grew especially concerned when Christian Chapman, charge d'affaires at the American embassy in Paris, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in November. No suspects were arrested, but again Gaddafi was thought to be the mastermind.

Beyond that, TIME has learned the CIA has solid evidence that Libyan agents were staking out U.S. embassies in Athens and Ankara. During the past few weeks, the Libyans rented rooms in sight of each embassy and were clocking the movements of senior U.S. officials there. Security has been tightened considerably at both missions, as well as at certain other embassies around the world. In Ankara, where Haig planned to visit this week, an Administration official described the security as being in "as high a state of alert as we've ever had."

In addition, TIME has learned that U.S. intelligence agencies have reason to believe that five Libyan-trained terrorists--four Arabs and an East German--flew to Paris two weeks ago, apparently en route to Boston. The information was given to the FBI, which has refused to elaborate on it.

One especially dismaying aspect of all these reports is the prospect that either former agents of the CIA or onetime Green Berets may be involved in the plots. Gaddafi has openly hired ex-employees of those organizations to further his causes. Two notorious former CIA agents now living in Libya, Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil (both wanted in the U.S. on charges of conspiring to sell explosives and to commit murder), are known to have supplied military and terrorist technology to Libya. More than a dozen onetime Green Berets, recruited by Wilson, have trained Libyan troops. Federal investigators are in the process of tracking down for further questioning numbers of CIA agents and Green Berets who have worked in Libya.

As part of its search for the hit teams, the U.S. Customs Service last week sent out descriptions and composite sketches of five of the alleged members to about 2,000 Customs and U.S. Border Patrol officials around the country. Stamped EXTREMELY SENSITIVE and running seven pages, the list includes two Iranians, a Palestinian, a Lebanese and a German. Their names: Ibrahim El Haya, Ahmed Jooma, Ahmat Abass, Ali Chafic, Luitz Schewesman. All are estimated to be between the ages of 25 and 36 save for the German, whose age is listed as "appx. 56." Besides giving a physical description of the men, each sketch mentions a habit or two. The item on Ibrahim El Haya, "appx. 36" and an Iranian, for example, said that he "often wears sun glasses. Often wears dark brown leather coat, mid thigh, belted with leather buttons. Smokes Rothman cigarettes." The memo also warned of a second, six-man squad headed by the notorious international terrorist known as "Carlos" (Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez), who is wanted for a string of murders and kidnapings around the world. Over the years, he has been linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Japanese Red Army and West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang.

There was one awkward error in a preliminary list of alleged members of the hit teams, which was first made public by Columnist Jack Anderson. Among the members of these death squads, about whom little biographical information was said to be available, were Nabih Berri and Mohammed Shamseddin, two well-known leaders of Amal, a Shi'ite Muslim political party and militia in Lebanon that is violently opposed to Gaddafi because it believes he kidnaped and killed their spiritual leader, Imam Moussa Sadr, on a visit to Tripoli three years ago. Administration officials blamed the mix-up on a computer error and quickly corrected the mistake, but not before Anderson broadcast the wrong lineup.

The confusing array of members and numbers--Was it five men? Eleven men? One team? Two teams?--was apparently owing to the fact that a host of agencies, including the FBI, CIA and Secret Service, have been gathering and analyzing their own information. Indeed, U.S. officials could not even confirm with absolute certainty that a hit team, or teams, exists. "If we knew exactly who these people were and where they are, don't you think we would put an end to this?" said one White House aide.

Some U.S. officials were willing to concede that the rumors might well be true but felt, not without reason, that Washington was making too much public noise about them. "There are doubts around here," said Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It's not so much whether there is evidence, but why the Administration is making such a big deal about it." Said Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut: "If that's all there is, we're being bombarded with a lot of hype. I need more evidence."

Even some U.S. intelligence sources admitted they had doubts about the reliability of their informants. Said one official: "Gaddafi has been a bastard for ten years. He's been making threats against the President and the U.S. for ten years. Is he serious now? There's a lot of loose talk and allegations out there. Separating that from the truth is the problem." Others believed Gaddafi's long record of making threats was reason enough to take the reports seriously. They pointed out that the unpredictable Gaddafi, faced with an increasingly unfriendly U.S. Administration, might feel he has no choice. "He is scared," said an Israeli foreign ministry official. "Therefore, he may be hitting back." Gaddafi may believe the U.S. wants to kill him. "He has thought since the late 1970s that we were prepared to undo him," said a CIA official. "It is the behavior of America, preparing to assassinate me, to poison my food," said Gaddafi last week. "They tried many things to do this."

On Capitol Hill, a majority of Senators and Representatives were willing to believe that the hit-team threat exists. Some Congressmen, in fact, were ready to impose sanctions on Libya even before Reagan announced the travel restriction. "The situation is serious enough to warrant the level of precautions," said Republican Senator Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico, who was briefed by the CIA. "I don't think the Administration is making it up," said Democratic Representative Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, who also had a CIA briefing. "There's ample evidence that this is a very real threat."

One of the mysteries about the hit team accounts was how details were gradually leaked to the press until, as Senator Dodd put it, the story began "taking on a life of its own." It first became public in mid-November, after reporters began noticing tighter security measures around Reagan and other top officials. The White House vigorously attempted to discourage news coverage of both the threats and the security precautions. Reporters seeking to confirm details of the story with Government officials were advised not to overreact. But as the days passed, the story was enhanced in tantalizing bits and pieces until what had started as rumor became a full-fledged scare. Soon the White House, FBI and Secret Service found themselves forced to react, partly in response to the publicity. Reagan thus was fanning the flames of red-hot speculation when he flatly declared: "We have the evidence."

One skeptical view in Washington is that the CIA might have wanted much of the story to become public. The motive: by portraying Gaddafi as the madman behind a presidential assassination attempt, they could justify covert action aimed at toppling the Libyan leader. Even if that theory were true, however, it did not in itself undermine the credibility of the evidence.

Whatever the source of the leaks and the motives behind them, many felt that the publicity could be dangerously counterproductive. "There are always rumors of that sort of thing," said former President Jimmy Carter. "I always felt it was better not to broadcast these things." "It could just encourage Gaddafi," argued Democratic Senator John Glenn of Ohio. "You feed his ego and make him want to do something that shows he's macho." Others feared that the publicity would build up Gaddafi's importance and win him friends among Arab nations already unfriendly to the U.S. Said Roger Fisher, professor of law at Harvard University: "We built up Castro in the same way. Why do this for Gaddafi? Why make this guy equal to a superpower?"

White House aides have been disturbed by the publicity about the hit men, and for two weeks have urged top Administration officials to try to stem the leaks from their own departments. The aides were especially upset by allegations that the leaks were orchestrated in order to build support for sanctions against Libya. Said White House Chief of Staff Baker, pointedly speaking on the record: "I want to deny as emphatically as I can that this was done as a predicate for any action that might be taken."

In their references to the Libyan leader, U.S. officials seemed to strike a ritualistic note of scorn and horror: Muammar Gaddafi* is not only a menace and a promoter of terrorism but a lunatic as well. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat used to call him "that crazy boy," but the consensus of most Middle East analysts is that Gaddafi is as crazy as a fox. To be sure, he is an erratic and irascible revolutionary, convinced of his own genius and wholly committed to spreading his own political gospel, an eccentric mix of Islam and socialism that is summed up in a three-volume work called The Green Book. But it is clear that he also has a broad streak of sanity and shrewdness. "It would be a mistake to underestimate him," says a State Department analyst. "His accomplishments are not inconsiderable, and those accomplishments make him dangerous."

Gaddafi's most predictable trait is bis unpredictability. "It's almost impossible to evaluate the man in rational terms," says a British diplomat. "With the coming of dawn, he may take off on a completely new tack." He is a man of mercury, quick to anger. Once when his second in command, Abdul Salam Jalloud, made a mistake, Gaddafi had Jalloud's hair shaved off. He often carries a side arm; more than once, he has lost patience and pulled out his gun, aiming it at the person who offended him.

Gaddafi remains generally popular in Libya, but he has become increasingly isolated; he once wandered freely among the people but now usually stays out of sight (and rifle shot). He seldom sleeps in the same house two nights in a row, and his movements are random. When he does appear in public, he often poses and struts for the cameras in an impeccably tailored military uniform, true to his own statement of what his regime is all about: "The strong always rule."

To understand Gaddafi is to understand his heritage. Son of a nomadic livestock trader, he was born in a tent in the desert near the Libyan town of Sirte in 1942 Libya was then occupied by the forces of Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini, and its people were treated, at best, as fifth-class citizens. That bitter memory, as much as his tribal upbringing and education in Muslim schools, shaped Gaddafi.

By 1956, he was organizing student groups in support of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser after the Suez crisis and the Israeli invasion of the Sinai. Expelled for starting a student strike, he finished secondary school with a tutor. He was devout, austere, puritanical and, from years of listening to Radio Cairo, a true believer in Arab nationalism. After graduating from Libya's military academy, he spent several months at Britain's Army Signal School; he would stride through the streets of London in flowing robes and headgear--at that time an act of prideful defiance for an Arab.

Gaddafi came to power in 1969. Then a captain in the Libyan army, he staged a bloodless coup against the country's effete, Westward-leaning monarch, King Idris. Shortly after the coup, Gaddafi proclaimed the principles of his governmental policy, which included the elimination of all foreign bases (including the American-run Wheelus Air Base near Tripoli), neutrality in foreign policy and national unity in a country that until then had been sharply divided along provincial and tribal lines. A year later, Gaddafi announced that not only had these objectives been met but that the minimum wage had been doubled, huge development projects had been started and oil prices had been raised. Libya today ranks among the more prosperous of Arab states with an average per capita income of $7,000.

Still, Gaddafi has failed to realize his real ambitions. He believes that he is Nasser's true heir in the Middle East and nurtures a dream of establishing an Islamic sub-Saharan republic stretching from Senegal to the Sudan. "My problem is I have no country to lead, though I am a great leader," he has complained. "He has a very clear idea of what he wants," says a U S Government official. "But as leader of only 3 million people, he has very unrealistic hopes of putting together a pan-Arab vision based on Nasser's dreams. He has enormous interest in power, but he can't project it in any meaningful sense.

Not that Gaddafi has not tried. "Show me one country which is stricken by the terror disease, and I will show you the Libyan connection," says Yehudit Ronen, a scholar of Libyan affairs from the Tel Aviv-based Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. "Gaddafi has his arm everywhere." Revolutionary movements backed by Gaddafi have ranged from the Palestine Liberation 0rganization to the Irish Republican Army, from Basque and Corsican separatists to the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines. He runs a dozen or more training camps for guerrilla warfare, with advisers supplied by East Germany and Cuba, and is reported to have a slush fund of $1 billion a year for terrorist activities alone. He allegedly tried four times to have Sadat killed, and the Presidents of Niger, the Sudan and Tunisia have all accused Gaddafi of trying to oust them.

Perhaps Gaddafi's most brazen use of force was his invasion of neighboring Chad in November 1980 in support of President Goukouni Oueddei. Barely a month later, Gaddafi declared a merger of the two countries and kept up to 10,000 Libyan troops in Chad as a virtual occupation force. Then, just as abruptly, Gaddafi removed his troops last November after the Organization of African Unity asked him to do so. But he may not stay out: much of Chad is marked on Gaddafi's own maps as part of a greater Libya that also includes sections of Niger and Algeria.

A man determined to prove his own importance, Gaddafi has suffered numerous rebuffs. They must sting. Gaddafi has attempted to work out ambitious mergers of Libya with Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. His present link with Syria is largely symbolic and may well collapse, as the others did, in recrimination. In 1973 Gaddafi ordered an Egyptian submarine, temporarily under his command in Libyan waters, to torpedo the Queen Elizabeth II, which was carrying hundreds of Jews from Southampton to Haifa to celebrate Israel's 25th anniversary. Sadat, who was then still on speaking terms with Gaddafi, countermanded the order. Over the past decade, Gaddafi has continually tried to get hold of an atom bomb--so far with no success, although Libya has two small nuclear facilities (one built by the Soviets, the other by the French) and is buying up huge supplies of uranium from Niger.

Gaddafi preaches democracy; he practices dictatorship. In April 1980, he ordered all Libyan dissidents living abroad to return home or face "liquidation." By the end of that year, at least twelve Libyans had been hunted down and murdered in England, Italy, West Germany, Greece and Lebanon by Gaddafi-anointed hit squads. Most of the victims were little-known private citizens, and it is doubtful that they posed a threat to Tripoli. Instead, their killings were presumably intended to set an example. So Byzantine are Gaddafi's methods that when Libyan Hitman Abdel Nabih Swaiti, who was tried and convicted for attempting to kill a Libyan exile in Rome last June, was found dead of a heart attack in his jail cell two weeks ago, Gaddafi was immediately suspected of being behind his death. The reason: Swaiti may have been poisoned first. An inquiry is now under way. Suspicions also linger that Gaddafi was behind the attempted murder last year of a Libyan dissident in Colorado; Eugene Tafoya, a former Green Beret and a friend of onetime CIA Agent Wilson, was convicted of third-degree assault two weeks ago for the shooting.

Of greatest concern to the U.S. and its allies has been Gaddafi's links with the Soviets. Over the past ten years, Gaddafi has purchased $12 billion worth of Soviet tanks, aircraft, artillery and other military hardware. Some 2,000 Soviet military advisers are now stationed in Libya. In an interview last week with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Gaddafi called the Soviet Union a "friend" and the U.S. a "devil." Said he: "America does not have friends, but only slaves. We refuse to accept slavery and are therefore considered enemies." Yet most analysts feel that Gaddafi is not a Soviet pawn. He has refused to allow the U.S.S.R. to have a military base in his country. "I suspect that the Soviets are in no better position to understand Gaddafi than the Americans or the Europeans," says an Israeli intelligence expert.

Gaddafi has had a long and complicated relationship with the U.S. TIME has learned that as a young officer in King Idris' army, he became friendly with an Arab agent of the CIA known as Charles Boursan, who apparently reported to his superiors in London that Gaddafi was a young leader of promise. There is no evidence that the agency encouraged Gaddafi at any point, but it seems clear that Gaddafi was intrigued by and attracted to the kind of rough-and-tumble, Marlboro-loner cowboy American who occasionally worked for the CIA in the Arab world, and who more commonly represented the smaller oil companies in the area. Representatives of the oil firms with interests in Libya insist that Gaddafi has always treated them with courtesy and respect, even as his political relations with the U.S. plummeted.

These relations were virtually broken off when a mob sacked and burned the U.S. embassy in Tripoli in December 1979, ostensibly to show support for Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini. The following spring, President Carter expelled four Libyan diplomats who were accused of threatening anti-Gaddafi students and exiles in the U.S. Then, after the embarrassing disclosure that his brother Billy had accepted $220,000 in loans from Gaddafi's government, Carter launched a State Department study of U.S. relations with Libya.

Convinced that Gaddafi was not only a Soviet client but a man who sought to overthrow pro-Western regimes in Africa and the Middle East, the Reagan Administration stepped up the study of diplomatic and military options. Meanwhile, Gaddafi was quietly trying to repair his frayed relations with Washington. He sent Reagan a message of congratulations on his Inauguration; no reply was made. In May, the Administration ordered the closing of the Libyan "people's bureau" (as Gaddafi had renamed his embassy in Washington) and the expulsion of its remaining diplomats. Reason: "Libyan provocations and misconduct, including support for international terrorism."

Gaddafi asked Washington to reopen the embassy and even offered to pay for the rebuilding of the burned U.S. embassy in Tripoli. Washington refused. Gaddafi made several subsequent overtures, but was rebuffed each time. The Administration wanted not only payment in cash for the embassy damages and an apology from Gaddafi (who refused, because he claimed that he had not sanctioned the attack) but also the release of a Libyan national who had worked at the Tripoli embassy and had been jailed by Gaddafi on charges of spying.

In late July, a Libyan group called the Free Unionist Officers threatened a campaign of "physical liquidation" against Americans, including President Reagan. Then, in mid-August, came the attack by two Libyan SU-22 fighter planes against a pair of U.S. F-14s as they flew over the Gulf of Sidra during a naval exercise by the U.S. Sixth Fleet in disputed waters that Libya had long claimed as part of its territory. The U.S. planes downed the Libyan jets.

In September, Gaddafi dispatched an envoy, Ahmad Shahati, to Washington with a personal message of reconciliation to Reagan. But U.S. intelligence officials had begun to receive reports that Libyan hit teams were out to kill Reagan. By the time U.S. Charge d'Affaires Chapman narrowly missed being assassinated in Paris in November, Washington had made up its mind about Gaddafi's true intentions. As Haig put it: "I think it underlines the urgency of dealing with the problem [Gaddafi] in an effective, prudent, unequivocal way."

To some students of Gaddafi's elusive persona, it is no great surprise that he would send hit teams in pursuit of a powerful American President who had spurned him. "He feels justified in using terrorism and is able to justify his excesses because of the deprivations of his people during his youth," says a U.S. Government official. "He feels very menaced, and he will strike out at a superpower. It is difficult for a person like that to see the results of his actions. It is all mixed up with his image of himself as a victim, someone persecuted and hounded."

If that analysis of Gaddafi is sound, the desert denizen who sees himself as the slighted messiah of a scorned nation may have launched a frightful new era in modern-day terrorism. To be sure, the 20th century does not lack for examples of political murder. But the threat of assassination of a head of government may now have been elevated by Gaddafi, in an era of worldwide terrorism, to a conscious act of statecraft by a sovereign nation. "For years after World War II, heads of state were considered off-limits to assassination teams," observes Paul Wilkinson, professor of international relations at Aberdeen University, Scotland. "If the reports are true, we are being faced with a sinister new development."

Indeed, some analysts see in hit teams an entirely new form of international belligerence. Says Gaddis Smith, chairman of Yale's history department: "If one places any emphasis on the legal definition of war, this would be an act of war, just as surely as dropping bombs on a country." Others view the notion of hit teams as an inevitable escalation in the level of terrorism of the past few years. "It's ironic that in this day, this era, people are surprised," says Ray Cline, executive director at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "As an educational exercise for the American public, I suppose it [the story of the hit teams] may be a good thing. It will alert Americans to the number of violence-prone governments that would have no hesitation in putting out a contract on others."

With reporting by Douglas Brew/Washington, Adam Zagorin/Beirut

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