Back in 1989, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi still ruled Libya with an iron fist, I flew into Tripoli airport. In those days, because of his support for terrorist groups around the world, and the US bombing of Tripoli in April 1986, you couldn't fly direct from London to Libya, so I had a 19-hour stop-over in Belgrade airport. On the final approach to Tripoli airport, from my window seat, I could clearly see surface-to-air missile installations all around the airport and every few hundred yards along the periphery of the runway. Clearly the Colonel had no shortage of cash, which (I'm guessing) the Russians were happy to exchange for military hardware. The Colonel's image was everywhere around the city and Libyan TV was pure propaganda, but the country did seem peaceful... at least on the surface. Not so now. After Gaddafi's demise in 2011, Libya fell apart, with warlords and warring tribal factions all making land grabs, Almost a decade on it's no better, as Alan Warnes found out when he researched this month's Intel Report (page 30).
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