Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  Two decades later, however, he had come to be regarded as public enemy number one, funding global terrorism and denouncing the West with a deep, religious-like fervour. He refused interviews with Western journalists, except at his windy press conferences, so when Tiny Rowland offered me the chance to meet him I seized it. Tiny insisted that I had to do the interview myself, but I took Colin Smith, a seasoned foreign correspondent, and photographer Sue Adler with me.

  • • •

  When we arrived at Gaddafi’s desert camp it was almost dusk and the leader was playing volleyball with some of his guards, including his female guards, the Green Nuns. He was standing at the net in a claret-coloured track suit with white leather slip-ons. The troops wore drab olive uniforms and some had holstered .38 pistols in their belts. He was at once one of the boys and about as inconspicuous as a flamingo among a flock of pigeons.

  Since the American attempt at aerial assassination in April 1986, ten months before, using F1-11s from RAF Lakenheath, Gaddafi, who had always prided himself on retaining his nomadic Bedouin ways, had become more of a moving target than ever. He rarely seemed to spend time in Tripoli now and his smashed living quarters in the Aziziya barracks, a two-storey house in the Italian colonial style, had already taken on the air of a museum. We were taken there first when we arrived in Tripoli.

  Guides pointed to his children’s exercise books among the fallen ceiling plaster on a dressing table and showed us the famous tent near the tennis courts where, they reminded us, the leader used to give audience to such coevals as Indira Gandhi and Fidel Castro.

  The house, or what remained of it, was an impressive testament to pinpoint bombing. It was clear that the F1-11s were trying to do more than hurt Gaddafi’s feelings. To remind one that surgical strikes exist only in the minds of air force generals, the Libyans were generous in their distribution of morgue and hospital pictures of civilians hit by the strays.

  It had always been assumed that Gaddafi survived because he was sleeping in an underground bunker a few yards away from the house. He denied this to us, though, when we met him later. When we asked him to describe the raid, it became obvious that he had not been in the room where his wife, who has back trouble, was strapped to her bed in traction.

  ‘All of a sudden the attack started on the house,’ he said, ‘so I put on my military uniform quickly because I was wearing my sleeping clothes, and so when I was sure the attack was on the house I ran to rescue the children.’ The nearest bomb to the house seems to have fallen on the football field in front.

  The bombs were falling everywhere. You can see for yourself. The house was about to fall at that moment. Some of the children were pulled from under the ruins. The electricity was cut and we had to use hand torches. And there was nobody with me at the house except one relative. So we tried to rescue the children and the girl we adopted was killed.

  Despite the extensive publicity Gaddafi had given his family from time to time, outsiders had not heard of fifteen-month-old Hanna until after the raid. Since then, Gaddafi had taken to wandering about Jamahiriya (the State of the Masses) in his custom-built yellow bus, a huge Daimler-Benz said to be armour-plated and complete with living quarters, conference and communication rooms.

  To find the leader’s bus involved us in a 45-minute flight in a Lear jet to a fair-sized military airfield somewhere in the desert that constitutes most of Libya apart from its fertile coastal strip. The men from the Ministry of Information assured us that we were going to a place in Gaddafi’s home province of Sirte called Waddan.

  If this was so, we took rather longer than we should have done, even bearing in mind that our Lear jet, which we picked up on landing at Tripoli, flew a circuitous route, first out to sea, then east along the coast instead of directly south-east. And if it was Waddan, the airfield must have been of recent construction, because it is not shown on maps.

  It is possible that we were at Sabha, about 170 miles to the southwest of Waddan, which had had an airfield for years and was the place where Gaddafi was due to address the General People’s Congress to mark his anniversary as Leader of the Revolution.

  Wherever we were, we were fed heavily on mutton, spaghetti and chips in a little hilltop fort garrisoned by long-haired soldiers carrying paratroopers’ Kalashnikov rifles. One of our escorts had invaded Israel with the Libyan Army in 1948 and another had acquired in Chicago a taste for whisky sours – a taste he could no longer indulge.

  Immediately after the meal, a red telephone rang and we were told that the leader was ready to receive us. We set off in a couple of government Chevrolets – for the Jamariya not only bears no grudge against the American people in general but also retains a remarkable affection for their products.

  The cars took us along a tarmac road and then suddenly lurched off left down a barely visible dirt track through the desert scrub. Soldiers leaning nonchalantly against their Ranger Rover watched us go by. On the skyline, to our left, was a single-storey building with what looked like a large radio mast. Nearby was the distinctive silhouette of ground-to-air missiles mounted on a tracked launcher.

  But we veered to the right, were waved through a checkpoint by grinning soldiers in bush hats, and drove towards two single-storey buildings, one timbered and the other made of ferro-concrete. Next to the latter, a Bedouin-style tent was pitched. There were several vehicles parked around, including a mobile canteen for the troops. About 400 yards beyond this camp site, a large yellow bus was parked in a wadi.

  The volleyball court was a few yards from the tent. ‘The leader is playing,’ said one of our escorts, obviously delighted at the show being put on for us: ‘You can take pictures.’ Sue Adler went to the net and so did a man with an old-fashioned film camera from Libyan television, who also took pictures of us.

  Gaddafi leapt about in a fairly nimble manner for a man of forty-four and included some tomfoolery in the form of back-heel soccer kicks. It was enough to dispel any lingering rumours that he had been crippled by the American bombs, though there have been persistent reports that he was slightly wounded in the left arm. When the light began to fade, the game was deemed to be over and we were ushered into the tent.

  Despite all the careful evasions and the very visible security we had witnessed in the four hours since we left Tripoli, all precautions now seemed to fade away. None of us was searched. The leader’s only concern appeared to be that he should not be photographed in the tent in his tracksuit and summoned a dark-green burnous, the hooded cloak worn throughout North Africa.

  He also summoned a brazier of hot charcoal, for it was suddenly getting quite cold. Inside the tent, Gaddafi sat in a quilted leather armchair below a low desk on which there was a red telephone and some writing equipment. Occasionally he would scribble a note in green felt tip and pass it to an aide. The tent was lit by electric light. Mattresses lay alongside its brightly decorated interior walls.

  For the next hour – with a five-minute interlude for his evening prayers – we questioned Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Leader of the Libyan Revolution, on subjects ranging from international terrorism to the American ‘cowboy attack’ on his house, and his thoughts on President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

  During the course of this discussion we learned that he had increased aid to the IRA as a direct result of Britain’s involvement in the American raid; that he welcomed Charles Haughey’s success in the Irish elections; that the families of those killed in the air raids might wreak their revenge in Britain and the US; that he thought hostage Terry Waite might be a spy; that he thought the West was about to embark on another Crusade with the intention of re-colonising the East – and that he believed Americans and the British fell ‘somewhere between monkeys and human beings’.

  Throughout the interview Gaddafi seemed relaxed and calm – ‘serene’ was our photographer’s description – and at times, it must be said, exuded a great deal of charm. Certainly, there was nothing of the ‘mad dog’ about his demeanour or any hint that here was a man
who was running a regime which ruthlessly hunted down its exiled opponents abroad and had just televised the public executions of seven dissidents at home.

  When we asked him about this, he said the condemned men had been American agents trained in Pakistan for the purpose of assassinating Soviet advisers. This, apparently, was explanation enough. They hadn’t actually killed the Russians, he added.

  By this time the heat and unaccustomed exercise were clearly having some effect on the leader’s digestion, because a distinct and unmistakable aroma began to fill the tent. I didn’t dare look at my colleagues as faint noises betrayed the source of the smell. Suddenly, Gaddafi rose to his feet and solemnly announced: ‘It is time for me to pray.’ The leader quitted the tent in some haste for what was clearly a five-minute comfort break.

  • • •

  What emerged strongly from the interview was the chilling naivety of a man who rarely seemed to think through the human consequences of his actions. A man who ‘supports just causes everywhere’ and passed round the plastic explosive, yet blocked out the reality of the bomb in the shopping mall, even though he screamed his head off when it happened near him.

  Ten months later, his predominant emotion about the US air raid appeared not to be rage but indignation – at the fact that the Americans had not taken him seriously enough to grant him the immunity normally given to even hostile heads of state. ‘I expended an attack, but I thought it would be on military targets,’ he told us. ‘I didn’t think it would be concentrated on my family’s house.’ Like Wellington at Waterloo, he seemed to think that generals have better things to do than try to kill each other.

  • • •

  When I met Gaddafi again, five years later in 1992, it was also in a tent, but this time in the Aziziya barracks in Tripoli. The visit had been arranged by a shadowy Arab billionaire, Dr Ashraf Marwan, who flew me to Tripoli in his private plane. He had married the daughter of President Nasser of Egypt and was later chief of staff in the private office of his successor, Anwar Sadat.

  By the early 1970s, when he met Tiny Rowland, he had risen to be head of Egypt’s intelligence service, involved in arms trading, and was a friend of Gaddafi’s head of security, with whom he had worked when Egypt and Libya were briefly united as a single country. When I met this grizzled head of security at Tripoli airport, I admired an ornamental stick he was carrying. When he said that it had been a gift from Tiny Rowland, my head began to spin.

  Marwan became closely embroiled with Rowland, Fayed and Khashoggi and sold an airline to Lonrho. It was later discovered that while working for Nasser and Sadat he had been an Israeli spy, passing on advance intelligence about the coming war of 1973. He must clearly have become a marked man.

  It was somehow unsurprising that he should eventually die in mysterious circumstances in 2007 by falling off the fifth-floor balcony of his apartment in Carlton House Terrace in London. The police assumed he was murdered, because two ‘Arab-looking’ men were seen by a witness looking over the balcony after he had fallen, but no charges were ever brought.

  • • •

  By the time I met Gaddafi for the second time, the revolutionary talk had stopped altogether – a change brought about, in my view, by the trauma of the bombing raid that nearly killed him in 1986. He admitted to ‘errors’ in the past. ‘There were times in the mid-70s’, he said, ‘when we might have behaved in a way that was not in accordance with international law, but not now. Curiously, when I really was a revolutionary, an extremist, my image was not so black with the British and Americans as it is today.’

  When I asked him if he was a changed man, he replied: ‘By the passage of time everyone changes, through experience. In the 1970s we supported liberal movements without knowing which were terrorists and which were not. In the 1980s we began to differentiate between terrorists and those with legitimate political aspirations.’

  So Gaddafi’s ‘conversion’ to peace with the West – the ‘conversion’ which Tony Blair officially recognised and welcomed with a visit in 2004 – had already begun twelve years before. Gaddafi denied then that he had chemical weapons and told me he would consider renouncing international terrorism and allowing outside inspection of alleged chemical and nuclear installations as part of a deal with the West. His Minister of Planning, Omar Montazer, said such a deal might allow Western oil companies to return to Libya.

  All this appeared in The Observer on 26 January 1992. Gaddafi might well have said to Blair when he welcomed him twelve years later: ‘What took you so long?’

  • • •

  Much later, after the so-called Arab Spring, when David Cameron sent British troops into Libya, originally as a humanitarian act to save the besieged people of Benghazi, it seemed commendable. But when he went on, in total ignorance of the country’s politics, culture and history – and against the firm advice of his military chiefs – to seek the destruction of the Gaddafi regime, he effectively destroyed the country as well, reducing it to ungovernable chaos and the status of a ‘failed state’.

  One could hardly mourn Gaddafi, just as one could never mourn Saddam Hussein, but one could mourn for the Libyan and Iraqi people and the destruction of their countries that followed the decision to have these leaders hunted down and killed. I couldn’t help contrasting Libya’s collapse with the country I had first visited nearly fifty years ago, a country full of riches, hope and ambition, all of which were eventually smashed.

  CHAPTER 17

  LEN

  One of the many perks of being a national newspaper editor is that you get to meet, not just politicians, but some of your favourite people from the worlds of theatre, music and sport. Occasionally you make a new friend among them, as I was lucky enough to do with Len Hutton. I first met him when I was asked by the Observer sports desk to arbitrate on his contract with the paper; he wanted more money than their departmental budget could cope with. There had always been stories about Len being notoriously tight-fisted. I was thrilled to meet him because England’s most famous cricketer had been one of my childhood heroes.

  This good-natured negotiation became an annual event, eventually conducted on the golf course after Len said to me: ‘I tell you what. I hear you live in Wimbledon. If you can get me a game on the Royal Wimbledon course, then we’ve got a deal.’ I wasn’t actually a member, but I had no trouble finding someone to sponsor us. The friendly relationship between us became warmer and more personal after I had interviewed him for the Maestro series on BBC Television to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his world-record score of 364 against Australia at the Oval in 1938.

  I gave a lunch at The Observer, in a dining room overlooking the Thames, to mark that special anniversary. As well as Len himself, I invited two other former England captains who had also done some writing for the paper, Ted Dexter and Mike Brearley. Ted had co-authored a couple of thrillers in a cricket setting with Clifford Makins, the paper’s eccentric and somewhat alcoholic sports editor. Makins, I recall, arrived at the lunch in a pair of trainers and promptly fell asleep over the soup, which nobody seemed to mind. At one point in the lunch Len appeared anguished for a few seconds when asked about a particular England batsman before delivering the verdict: ‘He were just no good.’

  I recalled a conversation I once had with Len about Brearley. Len had tapped his head meaningfully and said: ‘Clever chap, that Brearley. Cambridge University, you know.’ I said: ‘Yes, Len, I know.’ To which Len went on, with a deadpan face but with a wink in his voice: ‘He’s so clever, you see, that he never captained a team in the West Indies. That’s what I call really clever.’

  • • •

  Len Hutton aroused remarkably strong feelings for a man who rarely showed emotion himself. Roy Hattersley remembers playing for Sheffield City Grammar School immediately after the Second World War: ‘I touched the peak of my cap between every ball in the way that Len Hutton touched his.’

  Playwright Harold Pinter also idolised Hutton and once wrote a poem about him and distribute
d it among his literary friends. It went like this:

  I saw Hutton in his prime.

  Another time.

  Another time…

  Puzzled by the lack of reaction, Pinter rang a cricket-loving fellow playwright, Simon Gray, and asked: ‘What do you think of my poem?’

  After a pause, Gray replied: ‘I’m afraid I haven’t finished it yet.’

  Pinter wrote more eloquently of Hutton in an essay:

  He was never dull … His play was sculptured. His forward defensive stroke was a complete statement. The handle of his bat seemed electric. Always, for me, a sense of his vulnerability, an uncommon sensibility. He never just went through the motions; nothing was glibly arrived at. He was never, for me, as some have defined him, simply a master technician.

  Pinter’s obsession with cricket was such that he told an Observer interviewer: ‘Cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth … certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either. Everyone knows which comes first when it is a question of cricket or sex. All discriminating people recognise that.’

  • • •

  I got to know Pinter slightly. We had fallen out during the First Gulf War about a poem of his I refused to publish because it used foul language about George Bush and I didn’t think readers of a family newspaper would like it. He cursed me so strongly that I never expected to hear from him again. But when I became involved in a public campaign about David Gower, who had been unfairly left out of an England squad to tour India, we made up.