Muammar Gaddafi
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Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for four decades, and his end supplies John Kiriakou with one of his most-repeated lessons about American promises.

The Libya model

In February 2003, Kiriakou recounts, Steve Kappes, then the CIA's associate deputy director for operations, made a secret trip to Libya and told Gaddafi the United States was about to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein; if Gaddafi didn't want to meet the same fate, he would have to turn over all his weapons of mass destruction. "And that's exactly what he did."

Then came 2011: Gaddafi, disarmed, was overthrown and "lynched by his own people at the insistence of the United States." The Iranians watched, Kiriakou says, and drew the only rational conclusion: develop a homegrown weapons industry and never trust the deal. The gap between what the United States says and what it does is the whole story.

"A terrible policy error"

Kiriakou is unsentimental about the man, "a very bad guy", but the policy verdict is severe: Washington had a healthy working relationship with Gaddafi, who hated al-Qaeda as much as America did. "Flipping sides at the last minute... to overthrow Gaddafi was a terrible policy error. Look at the place now, it's literally anarchy." Libya's aftermath, shifting desert borders, tribal society, gun-running from the first days of the uprising, became a no-man's-land. He cited the Libya disaster in real time as the reason not to repeat the play against Assad, and notes the speculation that Gaddafi's gold-dinar project, a threat to the dollar, was part of why Libya was destroyed.

Gaddafi also features in Kiriakou's standing complaint about the "crazy" reflex: Saddam was crazy, Gaddafi was crazy, bin Laden was crazy, Arafat was crazy, "everybody that we don't like is crazy. They're not crazy."

See also

- Steve Kappes
- Saddam Hussein
- Osama bin Laden
