Was the long running Libya-U.S. feud merely a product of Israeli actions?
washington-report.org
The current U.S.-Libyan problems were deliberately instigated by Israeli actions. Unfortunately, and this is the sinister part of it, the U.S. media observe a nearly total taboo in discussing this Israeli role, although the facts are indisputable.
For example who, besides the Libyans themselves, remembers that the first victims in the brutal and seemingly endless tit-for-tat acts of retaliation involving Libya and, later, the U.S. were the 111 passengers and crewmembers killed in the crash of a Libyan commercial airliner downed on Feb. 23, 1973 by Israeli guns as it descended, slightly off course during a dust storm, over Israeli-occupied Egyptian Sinai for a routine landing at Cairo International Airport?
The Israelis called it a case of mistaken identity. It is not clear whether U.S. journalists ever asked why the Israeli soldiers along the Suez Canal were firing ground-to-air missiles at a civilian airliner at all, regardless of its identity. Nor why the U.S. media obstinately refuse to recognize the role of this early outrage, only four years after Qaddafi came to power, and Western indifference toward it, in the shaping of his mindset about the West in general, and the U.S. in particular.
Whether the Israeli killing of such a large number of Libyan and Egyptian civilians was or was not accidental, the next documented Israeli intervention was a deliberate and successful attempt to instigate hostilities between Libya and the United States in February 1986. It led directly to the April 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya's two major cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, in which there were some 40 Libyan casualties, including the death of Qaddafi's infant adopted daughter. (She had been orphaned when her father, a former Syrian air attache' in Libya, was killed in aerial combat with Israel.) If, indeed, the two accused Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, it clearly was direct retaliation for the U.S. attack.
The manner in which Israel's Mossad tricked the U.S. into attacking Libya was described in detail by former Mossad case worker Victor Ostrovsky in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two revealing books he wrote after he left Israel's foreign intelligence service. The story began in February 1986, when Israel sent a team of navy commandos in miniature submarines into Tripoli to land and install a "Trojan," a six-foot-long communications device, in the top floor of a five-story apartment building. The device, only seven inches in diameter, was capable of receiving messages broadcast by Mossad's LAP (LohAma Psicologit-psychological warfare or disinformation section) on one frequency and automatically relaying the broadcasts on a different frequency used by the Libyan government.
The commandos activated the Trojan and left it in the care of a lone Mossad agent in Tripoli who had leased the apartment and who had met them at the beach in a rented van. "By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan," Ostrovsky writes.
"Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world," Ostrovsky continues. As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What's more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it.
"The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new stream of information. To them it seemed suspicious that suddenly, out of the blue, the Libyans, who had been extremely careful in the past, would start advertising their future actions. "The French and the Spanish were right. The information was bogus."
Ostrovsky, who is careful in what he writes, does not blame Mossad for the bombing, only a couple of weeks after the Trojan was installed, of La Belle Discotheque in West Berlin, which cost the lives of two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. But he convincingly documents the elaborate Mossad operation built around the Trojan, which led the U.S. to blame Libya for the bombing of the Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers. The plot was given added credibility since it took place at a time when Qaddafi had "closed" the airspace over the Gulf of Sidra to U.S. aircraft, and then suffered the loss of two Libyan aircraft trying to enforce the ban, which were shot down by carrier-based U.S. planes.
A Prompt Reaction
The U.S. reacted promptly to the attack on the Berlin nightclub. On April 16, 1986 it sent U.S. aircraft from a base in England and from two U.S. carriers in the Mediterranean to drop more than 60 tons of bombs on Qaddafi's office and residence in the Bab al Azizia barracks, less than three blocks from the apartment containing the Trojan transmitter, and on military targets in and around the two Libyan cities. Some of the U.S. missiles and bombs went astray, inflicting damage on residential buildings, including the French Embassy in Tripoli. The planes flying from England were forced to skirt both French and Spanish airspace, and one of them, a U.S. F-111, was shot down over Tripoli, killing the two American crew members.
"Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad's greatest successes," Ostrovsky writes. "It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had promised-a strike that had three important consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hezbollah as the number one enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted the Mossad's image of itself, since it was they who, by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right"
"After the bombing, the Hezbollah broke off negotiations regarding the hostages they held in Beirut and executed three of them, including one American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they were rewarded for their non-participation in the attack by the release at the end of June of two French journalists held hostage in Beirut."
Ostrovsky doesn't mention, however, the other apparent direct result of the Mossad "success": the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
Despite the refusal by mainstream American media to revisit the well-documented facts presented above, they contain some obvious political lessons for the United States. For example, the U.S. government might decide to continue its sanctions on Libya in retaliation for the deaths of the 270 victims of the Pan Am bombing, regardless of the verdict of the Scottish judges. In that case, however, true justice would also require imposition of similar U.S. sanctions against Israel for deliberately instigating the U.S. bombing of Tripoli, in retaliation for the bombing of La Belle Discotheque, a crime which the Israelis knew from the beginning that the Libyans had not committed. |
