Twist of Irony

The comments are matter of fact; the threat is stark. It was late November 1981, around Thanksgiving, Ronald Reagan recalls in his diaries, that he and his top aides first learned of a purported assassination plot instigated by Libya’s eccentric leader, Muammar Kaddafi. “A 'hit band' is supposed to have crossed into the U.S. by way of Canada with me, George B. [presumably Vice President George H.W. Bush], Al Haig [then secretary of State] and Cap W. [presumably Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of Defense] (any or all) as targets." The suspected mastermind ? "Our friend in Libya," the late president wrote in “The Reagan Diaries” (edited by Douglas Brinkley; published this month by HarperCollins).

A few days later, Reagan wrote about a National Security Council meeting to discuss what to do about Kaddafi. "No conclusions reached except that we can't do anything until we find an answer to the 1,700 Americans still working in Libya." Reagan only makes a handful of references to the alleged plot, but his diary entries offer a reminder that the threat of terrorism--and also the difficulty of calculating an appropriate response from Washington--didn't start with the 9/11 attacks.

How serious was the Libyan threat? A former Reagan administration official, who asked for anonymity when talking about details that may still be sensitive, told NEWSWEEK that intelligence reporting at the time suggested a complex plot. The Libyans' alleged plan was to infiltrate a team of assassins into the United States from either Canada or Mexico, the former official said. Once in the U.S., the hit men were supposed to link up with Libyan students already inside the country. These students would help the men stage the murder, then help them flee. The intercepted information was not clear as to whether Reagan or one of his top aides were intended to be the principal target.

According to one of the former officials, in preparation for activating the plan, Libyan agents set out to recruit Libyans studying in the U.S. as members of a helper cell. However, the purported plot was stymied when one of the students that Libya tried to involve in the scheme contacted the FBI.

Two former senior Reagan administration officials recalled that the threat was considered serious enough for bodyguards to be assigned to presidential aides who normally went without them. Longtime Reagan aide Michael Deaver, who served in the White House as Reagan's deputy chief of staff, said that the president authorized Secret Service protection for senior White House advisers James Baker, Edwin Meese and Deaver himself.

Bobby Inman, then an active duty Navy vice admiral appointed by Reagan as deputy director of the CIA, recalled that the Libyan assassination plot was the only occasion on which he was advised by security officials not to do work at home--as he often did--while sitting on the porch of his official Navy residence near the Potomac River. He said his family got mad at him because they were not warned to stay off the porch--only him.

The Reagan administration went on to engage in an escalating series of confrontations with Kaddafi's Libya, which including a terror bombing by suspected Libyan agents of a Berlin discotheque patronized by American soldiers; a U.S. bombing raid on Libya in which, Kaddafi claimed, his adopted daughter was killed, and, ultimately, the horrific December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, for which one alleged Libyan spy was convicted after many years of investigation. (Another Libyan defendant was acquitted in the case, held before Scottish judges at a special tribunal in the Netherlands.)

In an ironic historical twist, Kaddafi has become a poster child in the post-9/11 world as part of efforts by President George W. Bush to persuade alleged state sponsors of terrorism to renounce the tactic and turn their backs on violence. A few months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Kaddafi agreed to give up his efforts to develop nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. Libya even pledged to help the U.S. and its allies in what Bush proclaimed to be a global war on terrorism. As part of the deal under which Kaddafi surrendered his nukes, the Bush administration last year dropped Libya from an official State Department list of countries allegedly involved in state-sponsored terrorism.