“Read it in the papers, seen it on TV…”: the 1981 Libyan hit squad scare as a case of simulated terrorism in the United States

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the study of political simulations of terrorism as a hyperreality with a historical analysis of the Libyan hit squad scare that haunted the United States over several weeks in late 1981, when the US media and Reagan administration officials warned of an imaginary hit squad of terrorists sent to Washington by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to assassinate President Reagan. Through an analysis of a range of declassified documents, mainly from the Reagan Library, most of which are processed here for the first time, the emergence of the rumour, which was planted in the US media through fabricated intelligence documents, will be traced to a small group of officials within the Reagan administration who tried to gain public support for the US government’s policy towards Libya.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• Reagan administration
• propaganda
• news media
• CIA
• Libya

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The author further owes a debt of thanks to Richard Jackson and the three anonymous referees for supportive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cassone’s hit was not the only cultural product of the scare. It is probably not surprising that especially the then vibrant Punk movement has referred to the Libyan hit squad. Already in 1982, Tongue Avulsion released the punk song “Libyan Hit Squad”. Fang, a hardcore punk band from the San Francisco Bay Area, produced a song with the same title and a Florida punk band even named itself “Libyan Hit Squad”.

2. The founder of Amal, Moussa Sadr, disappeared during a visit in Tripoli in 1978. It was generally assumed that Gaddafi had assassinated him.

3. A démarche is a formal diplomatic instrument with which a government informs another government about its official positions, views and requests on a particular topic.

4. NSC staff member Geoffrey Kemp informed National Security Advisor Richard Allen that the recommendations of the SIG meetings would probably not circulate in written form due to their sensitive character. The NSC memo cited above is indeed the only document on the SIG and this Covert Action plan against Libya that the author could find during his archival research.

5. Hersh (1987, 24–26), who had conducted interviews with more than 70 officials of the White House, the State Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of Defense, cites a member of the McFarlane Group: “We came out with this big terrorist threat to the U.S. Government. The whole thing was a complete fabrication.” He reports that within the administration, the CIA as well as Haig, Clark, McFarlane and Ledeen from the State Department were suspected of leaking the hit squad rumours. Hersh further concludes that Casey probably conducted his own operation as he was feeding the disinformation into the intelligence system so that it would be seen as separate, independent reports and be taken seriously by other government agencies. In any case, Casey repeatedly expressed great concern about Libyan terrorism against the United States and President Reagan at CIA staff meetings and in internal CIA memos during the fall of 1981 (CIA 1981a, 1981b).

6. Martin and Walcott (1988, 229) write that Ghorbanifar had already given the CIA false information about the hostages in the US embassy in Tehran in 1980.

7. Particularly through President Ford’s Executive Order 11905 (February 1976), the Levi Guidelines (for the FBI, April 1976), President Carter’s Executive Order 12036 (January 1978) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Adrian Hänni

Dr Adrian Hänni is a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University and a lecturer for Political History at Distance Learning University Switzerland. He received his PhD in History at the University of Zurich in 2013 for a critical historical study on terrorism in the United States. He has published research on propaganda, intelligence services, terrorism, and the Cold War.