Real Dictators - Colonel Gaddafi Part 5: Reagan vs Gaddafi

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Gaddafi takes his terror onto the streets of London and Berlin. Libyan agents hunt down his opponents across the globe. The Reagan administration launches airstrikes, targeting the dictator and his inner circle. With the stakes higher than ever, Gaddafi's security network works overtime to stamp out dissent. Thousands of schoolchildren bear witness to a gruesome lesson in tyranny. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the morning of April 17th, 1984, a young policewoman heads into central London, ready for a routine assignment. Her name is WPC Yvonne Fletcher. She is popular with her colleagues and great with the public, a rising star on the force. The Met are glad to have her on their team. On a clear spring day, life seems rosy. At 25 years of age, Yvonne has a career mapped out. She's also engaged to a fellow copper from the Bow Street station.

Today's job is to manage a small political demonstration. Employing a bit of friendly banter, diffusing tension, Yvonne is ideally suited to this task. St. James's Square, a leafy Georgian enclosure just off Pall Mall, is an unlikely setting for a political demo. In the sunshine, the 75 or so protesters are corralled behind barriers. While boisterous, they're not unruly, and their presence comes with police authorization. These protesters are Libyan exiles living in Britain.

To Yvonne Fletcher, it's not much different to any other rally. They wave placards, shout slogans. The only thing noticeable is that they have their faces covered with scarves. They don't want to be identified. The object of their anger in this unlikely picturesque setting is the townhouse on the northeast corner, the Libyan embassy, or as it's now styled, the People's Bureau of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Freedom is dead in Libya, the protesters chant. Down with Gaddafi! But Gaddafi's supporters in the embassy are prepared.

They've organised a counter-demonstration. Angry young men, quite happy to have their faces seen, begin massing outside the front door. Wild-eyed, furious, they scream back abuse. In the no-man's-land of the road, Yvonne Fletcher urges calm. She calls for both parties to stay on the pavement. But with her back to the building, she can't see that on the embassy's first floor, the sash windows are being eased up, and submachine guns are being readied. This is part five of the Gaddafi story.

And this is Real Dictators. Though he gives the impression of running a tight ship, the truth is, for Muammar Gaddafi, after a decade in power, Libya is starting to come apart. Ordinary Libyans feel it in their pockets. The policy of land redistribution has been crippling farming. In May 1980, Gaddafi declares that anyone with over 1,000 dinars in their bank account, about a month's wages, will have it confiscated by the state.

Since 1979, Libya has been rocked by another international oil crisis. This one, a by-product of the Iranian revolution. Increased diversification by Western oil importers and the subsequent drop in demand is hitting the Libyan economy hard. In February 1982, in the wake of the Gulf of Sidra incident, a military scuffle with the US, America instigates an oil embargo, exacerbating the situation. Over the first half of the 1980s, in Libya, oil revenues fall by three quarters. Massive public works like the great man-made river irrigation pipeline, a pet project of Gaddafi's, lie unfinished. Many Libyans now live hand to mouth

as a thriving black market. Gaddafi's report card was very mixed by the mid-1970s. So Qaddafi had put a lot of effort into turning Libya into a strong oil exporter. Qaddafi had worked very diligently to make sure that Libya was a vast net oil exporter and that Libya was a member of OPEC, that Libya was a member of sort of the Arab oil cartel. And so Gaddafi had done a lot to develop Libya, at least coastal Libya. At the same time,

while Gaddafi was strengthening Libya's energy sector, while he was working to improve education, his sort of big think projects were going miserably. Abundance of national wealth was wasted. Abundance of national resources were wasted. Abundance of opportunities and chances that were before the Libyans to build their own country as a developed nation.

We were living into a hypocrisy, a hypocrisy kind of world, not real world. Everything in appearance shows that people are in authority, people rule their own country, people rule themselves, whereas it was actually a small minority that ruled the country. Unthinkable as it may have been previously, there is growing opposition to Gaddafi's rule. And the brother leader, typically, has responded without mercy,

with arrests, imprisonments, killings. Some naysayers, unbelievably, think Gaddafi is too soft. Hardline fundamentalists, inspired by the Iranian revolution, dream of a strict Islamic theocracy. At least, they whisper, it would bring order. But most opponents, the moderates, simply balk at Gaddafi's brutality. They appeal for human rights, liberalization, freedom of speech, proper democracy. Unable to express such thoughts at home, it's left for Libyans abroad to echo

their cry. But the ones that do so are told that they're not welcome back. Libya's biggest overseas community resides in Britain. I came to England in 65, late 65, and got into the education system here to go to university, study engineering, aeronautical engineering. Completed my university in 1974. My first indication that I was sought after or wanted or whatever, was in 1973. In 1973, Gaddafi announced what's called the Cultural Revolution. That Cultural Revolution was a sweeping instrument to get rid of all the opponents or absorb them into the system. These people included Islamists, communists, liberals, nationalists, all shades

of opinion and political affiliation. So from that time, I could not go back to Libya. Somebody came from Libya and said to me, look, don't go back. Your name is on the list. You better stay here. So that's when the position began to start with me and with many other students. From then on, really, I was very cautious on how to deal with the regime. I was very careful and I was very apprehensive that they might catch me. But Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, a man who can brook no opposition anywhere, will not leave it at that. He publicly harangues these apostates, these counter-revolutionaries.

He labels them stray dogs and they must be hunted down. Now for Colonel Gaddafi, the Jamahariya was a perfect political system, a system of perfect democracy. And therefore, those who were against it weren't just simply engaged in dissidence. They were actually actively opposing something which they weren't designed to benefit from. And therefore, the policy of getting rid of the stray dogs in the revolution was precisely that. the stray dogs of the revolution was precisely that, removing from the body politic of Libya an element that Gaddafi saw as a genuine threat to his own interests and to his own construction. It's done brazenly and in public. On the 11th of April 1980, Mohamed Ramadan, a journalist with the BBC Arab service, is murdered at the Regent's Park Mosque in the heart of London, shot in the back while leaving with his wife and four-year-old daughter.

He'd been using the Arab media to publish open letters to Gaddafi. That same month, a Libyan lawyer, Mahmoud Abou Nafa, another opponent of the regime, is gunned down at the offices of his legal firm in Knightsbridge. The mastermind is a man named Moussa Koussa, officially the Secretary of the London Embassy, but with nothing ambassadorial about him. He is Gaddafi's hatchet man. Koussa brags about the assassinations in an interview with the Times newspaper. Expelled from the UK, he later becomes Gaddafi's head of intelligence. Hit squads are also active in Italy. In May 1980, in a Rome hotel room, a wealthy Libyan timber merchant is murdered in his bed.

Soon after comes the death of a Libyan timber merchant is murdered in his bed. Soon after comes the death of a Libyan restaurant owner in the city. There are further deaths in Athens, in Bonn. In every case, when arrested, the killer or killers express their satisfaction at having eliminated an enemy of the people. Ashur Shamis, who arrived in the UK to study, is one of many who suddenly finds himself in enforced exile. He's the focus

of the documentary The Colonel's Stray Dogs. Gaddafi considered everybody who's against the revolution is a stray dog. In speeches and in rallies,

he openly said that these people must be killed and these people must be gotten rid of. And, you know, from then on, late 79, things began to take a different direction all over the world. No shame by the killers themselves. And there's no shame from the regime. The regime, you know, made it quite open, quite well known that they are behind these people. I was told on the same day that Mohammed bin Salman has been killed.

Your name also mentioned. Security people in this country, the special branch, contacted me and said, your name was on a list of people to be killed and second only to Mohammed bin Salman. And so that has changed my whole life, lifestyle and life activity. I had to leave my job, I had to go underground.

The dissidents begin to coalesce around a brand new movement, of which Shamis is a founder member. The National Front for the Salvation of Libya. Its leader is a man named Mohamed Youssef Magarief, Gaddafi's former ambassador to India. The thing is that the people who came to the front were a mixture of intellectuals, students, businessmen, ordinary people, you know. So it was open to a large section of the Libyan population. We had a media set up here.

We had a radio station from Sudan, which was also very effective and very good. And it was at that time that other Libyans also began to organize and set up small groups, you know, to fight the regime. And the rest, as they say, is history. But it was 11th of April, 1980, it was the triggering date. Every April, every year, we would organize something, you know, like a demonstration. It is in April 1984, four years after Mohammed Ramadan's death, that the NFSL chooses to mark the anniversary with a demonstration in St. James's Square, London.

At 10.18am, as WPC Fletcher polices the demo, a series of shots rings out. Eleven of them, fired from one or more automatic weapons. Protesters duck, heads swivel back and forth. And there on the tarmac, writhing in agony, is Yvonne Fletcher. She's been hit in the back. Her police colleagues rush to her, but they are still in the line of fire. Her police colleagues rush to her, but they are still in the line of fire. They carry her to nearby Charles II Street, along with a number of protesters who've also been felled.

The bullets apparently sprayed at random. St James's Square is now a war zone. I tell you, quite frankly, we never expected the use of arms from inside the embassy. I mean, who's crazy to use the embassy as a shooting place? Even when the shots were coming out, we thought it was just fireworks, you know, to frighten us. But no, I mean, it was surprising to all of us. It was shocking to all of us that real live bullets were fired from inside the embassy.

I mean, it's crazy. Gaddafi stops at nothing. These people are so trained and so prepared to go all the way, you know, to do whatever they like. They were prepared to die for Gaddafi. They were prepared to go to prison for Gaddafi. Ambulances arrive, and the casualties are blue-lighted to Westminster Hospital.

But an hour and a half later, WPC Yvonne Fletcher is pronounced dead. She is the sole fatality, a tragic and unlikely addition to a long roll of Gaddafi's victims. The TV footage, matched with the evidence of eyewitnesses, suggests that two gunmen fired from those first floor embassy windows. They're probably still inside. Armed officers surround the embassy, itching to storm it. News that the SAS are on their way raises the possibility. Under the terms of the Vienna Convention, the Libyan embassy is sovereign Libyan territory.

It can only be entered with permission, which is refused. Embassy staff protest their innocence to negotiators. Back home in Libya, not one to miss a trick, Colonel Gaddafi goes on TV and, in English, blames the British authorities for the shooting. He proclaims disbelief at how a responsible state like the UK can commit such a crime. In Tripoli, a threatening mob surrounds the British embassy. Gaddafi says he can't guarantee its protection. The phone lines are cut. Britain soon breaks off diplomatic relations.

In London, over ten days, a standoff ensues. The focus now is on whether the Libyans will comply with an issued deadline to leave the country. During this time, a series of bombs are discovered in the capital, including one which goes off in the baggage area of Heathrow's Terminal 2. It injures 22 people, one seriously. These bombs all bear the hallmarks of a Libyan operation. On day 11, while Yvonne Fletcher's funeral is taking place in a packed Salisbury Cathedral, the Libyan embassy sends out 18 sealed diplomatic bags bound for the airport. They most likely contain key forensic evidence secreted inside.

But, under international law, the police have no right to search them. The bags are followed by 30 members of the embassy staff, who are bussed to a special flight, free to leave the country. As painful as their release is to the British public, upholding the principle of diplomatic immunity, playing the game to the letter of the law, is deemed the most pragmatic course by the government. Failure to observe it could have severe ramifications for the UK's consular missions and its expats around the world, not least the 8,000 British oil and construction workers still stuck in Libya.

31 people were inside the embassy for 10 days or nine days, and eventually they had to release them because they had any evidence against any of them. Of course, I mean, most of them, 90% of them, were people who were bureaucrats or staff, you know, in the embassy. They had nothing to do with the shooting. But the people who had to do with the shooting

were outside the embassy. And the person who shot, who actually pulled the trigger, he either escaped very quickly from the back, or he was there under some sort of camouflage, you know, that he is just an ordinary person. And that was the big story, which then carried on and on and on. It got worse and worse. Britain cut the relations for about 20 years or 25 years. Hours later, at Tripoli airport,

protesting their innocence to the cameras, the Libyan diplomats touch down to a fanatical hero's welcome. There was no gunfire, they insist. In St. James's Square, meanwhile, the police, now free to enter the embassy building, find a stash of weaponry and spent bullet casings. The newly constituted National Front for the Salvation of Libya certainly does not lack for backers.

Gaddafi has been making trouble for the regimes in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq. We made contact with these governments, and some of them were very open. They were very ready to help us, to support us. And yes, many of them gave us passports, gave us places to organize our activities, helped us set up a radio station,

and more than that, which is very, very important, helped us train people militarily. So all this, of course, encouraged us, gave us hope. The NFSL embarks on an armed struggle of its own, its intention to galvanize dissident Libyans within the country. Three weeks later, on May 8th, NFSL commandos who'd been training in bases in Algeria and Sudan are sufficiently emboldened to launch an armed attack on Gaddafi's palatial Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli.

The move proves to be premature, a suicide mission. The exact details of events are still shrouded in mystery, but in a firefight with government troops, an estimated 80 people are killed, including half of the NFSL's attackers. Gaddafi scoffs at the would-be assassins. In the wake of the attack, 2,000 people are arrested. Eight are hanged publicly. The most infamous end is reserved for a young man, Sadiq Hamad Shouedi.

A recent returnee from a university secondment in Oklahoma, he is set to complete his postgraduate program back in Libya. But he is, too, a cousin of one of those involved in the raid. The secret police claim to have evidence

of his opposition to Gaddafi, and he's detained. On the morning of the 6th of June 1984, around 6,000 children, some as young as six years old, are bussed to the Suleiman al-Darat sports arena in Benghazi. They are told that they are there

to witness Gaddafi make a speech, but that is not the case. They've been gathered there to watch a show trial. And, wave to the cameras, it's being broadcast live on television. At 4pm, seven judges appear. And out before them, blinking into the spotlights, comes the confused Shwedi, hands bound. He's made to sit cross-legged before the crowd. In the centre of the basketball court, suspended from the ceiling, is a curtain.

The judges read the charges. A litany of accusations about Shwedi's association with a prescribed opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and his intent to kill Gaddafi, their brother leader. His only option, he is told, is to confess. Before the excitable infant crowd, whipped up, encouraged to hurl abuse as if at a villain in a panto, Whipped up, encouraged to hurl abuse as if at a villain in a panto, Shreddy mutters into the microphone, confirming how, yes, he is a so-called stray dog. Pronounced guilty, there is no need to read the sentence.

Shreddy has walked to the centre of the basketball court. The curtain falls. There, before him, is a gallows. There is an audible gasp in the auditorium. Shredi cries for his mother, but the noose is wrestled around his neck. It will be the first of many hangings to be broadcast live on television. For the Libyan state broadcasters, this is the new peak-time entertainment. Methods of hanging as an execution vary. In the Libyan version, there is no trapdoor, no fall to break the condemned person's neck.

Here, the victim simply chokes to death, strangled under their own body weight. When Shwedi flails in the noose, kicking wildly, a young woman dressed in green fatigues rushes from the crowd to tug on his legs, pulling down hard until the writhing stops. She turns, arms aloft, to celebrate at the score of the winning goal in a cup final. Gaddafi likes her style, her ruthlessness, her revolutionary zeal. He will later make Huda Ben Amr, Huda the Executioner as she will become known, Mayor of Benghazi.

The show does not end there. Shredi is still not dead. He is lowered down and taken to Hoari Hospital, where five doctors examine him, before injecting him with a lethal drug. When Shredi refuses to succumb still, one of the doctors, in an unorthodox interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath, fills a sock with sand and rams it down Shredi's throat, holding his nose till he breathes no more. at his throat, holding his nose till he breathes no more. Gaddafi insists that the botched hanging, this cautionary tale, is shown on television three times a day. There will be many more Libyans hanged in the associated purge, many at peak viewing, their deaths too shown on repeat.

This is the new Libya. The Libya that the St. James's Square rally had come to protest. Libya is now a police state. Its citizens governed by terror, by paranoia, in perpetual fear of that late-night knock at the door. Qaddafi's security state was a borderless state organ. It operated in Egypt, It operated in Sudan. It operated in the UK and the European Union.

The security services dealt with all sorts of issues from basically capturing former members of Qaddafi's inner circle to working against radical Libyan fighters that had, say, fought in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. They did all sorts of things near and far. Sophisticated might not be the best word to describe it, but all-encompassing, all-encompassing. I first, for example, started traveling in Libya in 1977. And in that time frame, it began increasingly difficult to travel and do business in Libya. I can remember one time checking into the hotel and

stepping outside and there was a long line of people waiting for cabs and all of a sudden a black sedan pulled up and just grabbed one of the people in the middle of the queue, put him in their car and drove away. You never knew what happened to that person, but probably nothing very good. Another example, I remember one night in the middle of the night, I got a phone call in my hotel room and it was a seemingly German, East German kind of voice. They said, you know, you will come down to the front desk now. So I went down to the front desk and then there was one guy behind the desk. I said, well, what do you want? He is, you know, very rude kind of way. So I didn't call you. So I went back upstairs and

someone had gone through my room in the 10 minutes I was gone. The people themselves, Libyans themselves, were under enormous pressure as to what they could say and what they could do within Libya itself. People were frightened. I remember going to these incredible Roman ruins just outside of Tripoli and going there. And if you used to get the place to yourself, it was completely deserted because there were so few foreign visitors and tourists. And as you were walking around these ruins, there'd be security services and guys behind you and you play cat and mouse with them running after you and then you start talking to people and you realize people were really frightened really really frightened to speak and to be speaking to foreigners

unable to speak freely or to articulate critical thought libyans especially those in public positions, learned to walk a thin line, expressing opinion in code while maintaining a facade of loyalty to the regime. I personally wrote and spoke about many of the issues or the problems that Libya had at the time. And I had really to adopt a style

by which I do not appear to be against the Jamahiriya or the Green Book. I was arguing, for example, for freedom of the press. And in arguing for this kind of view, I had to employ the Green Book itself, saying that my understanding of the Green Book is that it's not against multiplicity of the best, because the Green Book espouses and advances the idea of democracy, and this is part of democracy. And of course, if you look, you know, without taking this out of context today and you read this piece, you would say that Youssef Sawani was actually advancing Green Book ideas. But there were many Libyan intellectuals and writers, men of letters, who had to adopt such an approach.

Though Yousef Sawani did not encounter Gaddafi individually, he did have cause to interact with him in an academic capacity. Gaddafi, you know, came to university on many occasions and came to lecture. And he had his own auditorium that was called the green auditorium. He came to lecture to speak on issues of his own liking every now and then at university and I was a member of the university staff, teaching staff and we had to attend. I think it was obligatory for every university staff member, faculty member, to attend those lectures. And I think that that satisfied some kind of ego for Gaddafi, who, I think, had always felt that he was deprived of proper education.

He felt that he was not on equal footing. He lacked the academic credentials that he could be proud of. So that was part of, I think, the personality kind of inferiority complex that he felt. There is no doubt to those in the West that Gaddafi is now out of control. It seems there's nothing Gaddafi won't do to get under the West's skin. In 1979, international opprobrium is being heaped on the deranged President Idi Amin of Uganda. No problem, Gaddafi lends military support in Amin's war against Tanzania. US President Reagan accuses Gaddafi of being a stooge of the Soviet Union.

So Gaddafi simply opts his visits to Moscow and boasts that Libya will join the Warsaw Pact. Gaddafi simply opts his visits to Moscow and boasts that Libya will join the Warsaw Pact. But it's not just the West. His Arab neighbors have had enough too. Gaddafi's only friend in the region is the similarly outcast Syria. As Libya continued to support terrorism, Gaddafi also spent an increasing amount of time trying to differentiate between revolutionary violence, which he supported openly, and terrorism, which he claimed not to support. The problem with that is that the United States, Great Britain, and other governments failed to see the difference between the two, between revolutionary violence and terrorism. revolutionary violence and terrorism. Consequently, the United States in 1979 put Libya on its inaugural list of state sponsors of terrorism. A second military confrontation with the West has long been brewing.

In the 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident, U.S. and Libyan planes clashed over the Mediterranean. There remains a sense of unfinished business. Gaddafi does not let up. Further attacks follow. On an Egypt Air passenger flight from Athens to Cairo. On airport terminals in Rome and Vienna. Enough is enough. In March 1986, a US Navy carrier group once more enters the international waters of the Gulf of Sidra,

scene of the military confrontation five years earlier, which resulted in the shooting down of two Libyan fighter jets. Where previously there'd been reticence about entering the disputed zone below 32 degrees north, below 32 degrees north. This time three US carriers, America, Saratoga and Coral Sea, have no compunction about doing so. If you'll remember,

Gaddafi had claimed these waters for himself. On March the 23rd, quite brazenly, the US Navy dispatches planes below Gaddafi's so-called line of death. The next day at dawn, cruisers and destroyers follow. And there was a famous cartoon in the New York Times at the time showing a massive aircraft carrier and in front of it a tiny little Libyan patrol boat. And underneath it said, come on, make my day.

The invitation being that in fact the patrol boat should fire on the carrier And underneath it said, come on, make my day. The invitation being that, in fact, the patrol boat should fire on the carrier and it would then be obliterated. And that was the kind of challenge that Colonel Qaddafi could not tolerate. The next day, there are swirling dogfights high above the Mediterranean. US planes also destroy Libyan ground radar installations, which had been locking onto them. By the end of the skirmishes, which range over four days, the main casualties are not planes, but ships.

Missile boats that had been sent out to engage the American task force have been hit by US jets and naval shipboard defences. An estimated 24 Libyans are dead. An enraged Gaddafi declares that it is now a time of war. On April 4th, just a few days later, CIA operatives in West Berlin intercept a cryptic telex from the Libyan embassy in East Germany. It reads, Tripoli will be happy when you see the headlines tomorrow. Hours later, a woman walks into La Belle nightclub. It's a well-known hangout for American servicemen stationed in the city. On a Friday night, the dance floor is packed.

The woman leaves a bag under a table. It's packed with plastic explosives and shrapnel. At 1.45 a.m., as the club is in full swing, the two-kilogram bomb explodes. The scene is one of utter carnage. As the smoke clears, three people, including two American servicemen, lie dead. Another 229 are wounded, some severely, 50 of them military personnel. Later, CIA agents intercept another message sent to Tripoli. Later, CIA agents intercept another message sent to Tripoli. It claims that at 1.30 a.m., a mission had been carried out successfully and without any trace of identity.

The careless communications leave the U.S. in no doubt. Gaddafi is behind it. He is declared public enemy number one. The U.S. government intercepted a communication between the Libyan government and authorities in East Germany, which did not directly state they were behind the attack, but implied that something had occurred that they wanted to see happen without specifically saying that they were responsible. And the U.S. government, in the words of Secretary of State George Shultz, described it as a

smoking gun, which conclusively proved that Libya was behind the Labelle discotheque attack. Subsequently, there's been some controversy as to whether it really was conclusive. There's no doubt that Libya could have been and probably was behind the LaBelle disco attack, but no one took responsibility, as I recall at the time. And so whether or not it was proved conclusively, I don't believe it was. But in any case, the Libyans bared the brunt of the LaBelle discotheque attack. President Reagan takes to the airwaves. He names Gaddafi as the mad dog of the Middle East. Even if his geography is a little off, Libya technically being in North Africa,

the branding is copywriter perfection. The soundbite is picked up around the world. And I think that indicates to some degree the feelings of President Reagan and his administration towards Gaddafi. As the 1980s progressed, there was more and more interest in doing something about Libya. The question is, what can you do? One of the reasons they picked on Libya was because they could, because it was a very public administration. It lacked substantial means to retaliate. At least that's what the US government thought. There is an extra element to bring into play here. Since 1978, Libya has been locked in battle with its southerly neighbour, way across the Sahara Desert. The country of Chad is fighting Libya for control of the disputed Awosu Strip.

It is what this strip contains that is causing alarm bells to ring. Uranium. By securing this territory, Gaddafi will have a vital ingredient for manufacturing a nuclear weapon. Gaddafi has already announced that Libya is manufacturing mustard gas at a facility near Rabta. Could nukes really be next? At 1746 hours, on the evening of Monday, April 14th, 1986, 24 American F-111 strike aircraft climb into the sky above Suffolk, England, the red glow from their engines burning into the twilight. At the same time as the planes take off, the US 6th Fleet manoeuvres into position,

both parties coordinating for a combined night strike at around 2am local time. In their crosshairs are a series of military and strategic locations vital to Gaddafi's military operations. Despite a tip-off from officials in Malta, with whom Gaddafi has struck up friendly relations, the streetlights remain on in Libya's two main cities. Floodlights illuminate public buildings. Car headlights drift lazily along the roads.

As the F-111s roar in at low level, the startled Libyan air defences loose off-surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft fire. But much of the shooting is wild. The attack on Tripoli takes just 11 minutes, the F-111s hitting their targets hard before burning out of Libyan airspace. They even take out five of Gaddafi's transport planes as a bonus. Over in Benghazi, the US Navy planes have done their job. Ronald Reagan goes on television live from the White House.

My fellow Americans, at 7 o'clock this evening, Eastern Time, air and naval forces of the United States launched a series of strikes against the headquarters, terrorist facilities, and military assets that support Muammar Gaddafi's subversive activities. The attacks were concentrated and carefully targeted to minimize casualties among the Libyan people, with whom we have no quarrel. From initial reports, our forces have succeeded in their mission. A laser reconnaissance flight confirms that all the key objectives have been realized, including striking the biggest prize, Gaddafi's headquarters at Bab al-Aziziyah.

But while the US is boasting of a case submission accomplished, Gaddafi is announcing to the world that members of his own family were killed. The exact details are unclear, but, among the dead, he names one as his adopted six-year-old daughter, Hannah. Her existence will later be challenged, but it has the desired effect nonetheless. Gaddafi, the international pariah, has achieved instant victimhood. And allegedly, his adopted daughter died in the attack. Now, that's a subject of some controversy in the sense that during the 2011 revolution, she supposedly surfaced as a working nurse in Tripoli.

So there's always been a question as to who, if anyone, really died. But it's certainly from the Libyan side made for a great story that the American devils attacked Libya and killed a child. By dawn's early light, there's revealed to be destruction in some residential areas of the capital. As many as 300 civilians are dead. It's unclear as to whether this was from incorrect American targeting or Libyan anti-aircraft ordnance falling back to Earth. To a global audience, the scenes of packed hospital wards are extremely disturbing. In Tripoli, angry militiamen chant in the street. Gaddafi stands before the rubble and addresses America, the great Satan, directly,

speaking to the television cameras in English. Your government is a terrorist government. Reagan is the biggest terrorist in the world. You are far from civilization. We are a nation of civilization. It will turn out later, even in Washington, that some in the U.S. intelligence community had had reservations about the strike, suggesting it could be destructive and counterproductive. The bombing of Libya was designed to destabilize the regime.

And in fact, it had the opposite effect. The U.S. government, the Reagan administration, thought that bombing Libya, one effect might be to embolden the Libyan military to conduct a coup and overthrow the Qaddafi regime. And actually, the reverse happened. The bombing showed how weak the Libyan military was and really discredited them in the eyes of the Libyan populace, as opposed to making them a group that might become a rallying point against the revolution. Secondly, the attack invigorated and emboldened the radical minority that constituted the revolutionary committees formed in 1979. They became more aggressive in their efforts to silence voices of opposition,

and as a result, within a year, Gaddafi was in a stronger position power wise than he had been in the past. To make matters worse, the Gaddafi regime responded in a variety of ways that the public, the U.S. public, the public around the world didn't realize until almost two decades later when a report surfaced indicating that within days of the attack on Libya by the United States, Libyans had assassinated two kidnapped Britons and an American who were held in Beirut. They attacked a U.S. embassy employee in Sudan. They directed a missile attack towards a U.S. installation on the Italian island of Lampedusa. And later they worked with Abu Nadab, a non-terrorist, to bomb a U.S. service organization

in Naples, Italy. Even later, there's evidence that they attempted to recruit a Chicago street gang in Chicago, Illinois, encouraging them to attack American Airlines with shoulder-filed weapons. So these activities, and probably others we're not aware of, certainly contradicted the popular myth by the Reagan administration that the raid ended Libyan support for terrorism. The tit-for-tat cycle will only intensify. The tit-for-tat cycle will only intensify. It's inevitable that Gaddafi will plot an act of revenge, to come back with a spectacular.

With his next move, he will truly shock the world. In the next episode of Real Dictators, Gaddafi takes his terror to the skies, bringing down a passenger flight over Lockerbie. He extends his terror network in a desperate attempt to maintain his struggle against the West. As world attention focuses on a new regional dictator, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi becomes a marginalized international outcast. But he won't avoid the headlines for long. That's next time on Real Dictators. We'll be right back. Oliver Baines and Dory McCauley. Sound design, mix and mastering by Tom Pink. Editing and additional effects by George Tapp.

Follow Noiser Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series. If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at realdictators.com. Tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.