Asked on air whether the Saudis had been frightened of Muammar Gaddafi, Kiriakou answered that he could say “with 100% certainty” that they were. [1] What frightened them, in his account, was the combination: Gaddafi was at once too popular and too unpredictable. [2]
The approach
According to Kiriakou, the Saudis came to the United States and asked that Gaddafi be overthrown “by any means necessary” — and offered to pay for everything. [2] The American response, as he renders it, was to tell them to relax: “we don’t really have reason.” He dates the exchange to roughly a decade before Gaddafi was in fact overthrown. [3]
What took the request off the table, in Kiriakou’s telling, was not American reluctance but a decision by Gaddafi himself. When the Libyan leader announced that he would focus on African unity rather than on the Middle East, the Saudis backed off from seeking his overthrow — and Kiriakou says flatly that this “saved his life.” [2]
Why Washington was uneasy
Kiriakou separates the Saudi motive from the American one. Discussing Gaddafi’s domestic record — a subject raised by his co-host, who listed nationalised oil wealth, free education and health care, and state-funded weddings — Kiriakou agreed that Gaddafi was “wildly popular,” and identified a distinct thing that alarmed Washington. [4]
That thing was currency. Gaddafi supported a unified currency for Africa. Kiriakou sets the proposal against the oil economies of the Gulf, where the Saudis and the Kuwaitis deal in dollars and oil is bought and sold in dollars, and summarises Gaddafi’s position as: “No, we need something like the Europeans have with the Euro.” The American reaction, in Kiriakou’s rendering, was “Oh my god, that’s going to wreck us.” [5]
He also endorses, without qualification, the observation that Gaddafi governed as a secular ruler despite being Muslim, and notes his corps of female bodyguards. [5]
Lockerbie
Pressed in the same exchange on whether Gaddafi was in fact responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Kiriakou said: “I always believed that he was.” Asked for a motive, he gave one — retaliation for the death of Gaddafi’s daughter in the American bombing of 1986. [6] That chronology is the basis of a televised argument he recounts having had with Sean Hannity, described separately.