Kiriakou has said he always believed Muammar Gaddafi was responsible for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and that the motive was retaliation for the death of Gaddafi’s young daughter in the American bombing of Libya in 1986 — an air raid on Gaddafi’s tent which the Libyan leader himself survived. [1]
The argument on air
Kiriakou recounts having “got into it” with Sean Hannity over precisely that point. Hannity’s position, as Kiriakou reports it, was the reverse of his own: that the killing of the child had been carried out in revenge for Lockerbie. [2]
Kiriakou’s rebuttal was chronological rather than political. The bombing that killed the girl came three years before Lockerbie. “In that case,” he says he replied, “Reagan must have been clairvoyant then.” It was, he adds, “just not possible. Did not happen.” [3]
He describes the effect on the programme in a single line: “and they hear them like go to break, go to break.” [2] Kiriakou’s own summary of the exchange is that he embarrassed Hannity. [2]
The point of the story
Kiriakou tells the episode as an illustration of a broader habit rather than as a scalp. The claim he was correcting was not obscure — it inverted the order of two of the best-known events in the American relationship with Libya — and it was being asserted confidently on cable television. His own account of Gaddafi elsewhere is not a defence of the man: he says he believed Gaddafi did order Lockerbie. What he objected to was a causal story that ran backwards in time. [3]
The exchange also sits alongside Kiriakou’s separate account of Saudi pressure on Washington to remove Gaddafi, and his description of what Washington actually feared in the Libyan leader — a unified African currency rather than terrorism. [4]