Anas El Gomati
The Americans began visiting Haftar regularly, and he was on occasion permitted to leave the camp to meet with the dictator who ruled Chad, President Hissène Habré. According to former detainees and opposition figures, Haftar soon took control of food distribution, medicine and communications inside the camp, and enforced discipline among the prisoners. Survival required obedience to him.
In August 1987, Habré informed the leader of the main Libyan opposition movement in exile that Haftar and the captives wanted to join forces with them. “It was a shock,” recalled Mukhtar Murtadi, then a senior member of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL). “He had enforced Gaddafi’s system. Now he wanted to be an ally. We didn’t know how to place him, but we saw a chance to hurt the regime.”
Murtadi visited Haftar shortly afterwards. What he found unsettled him. The prison compound was a vision of suffering: barracks crammed with prisoners, 50 or 60 to a cell, the reek of sewage and sickness, men wasted by hunger and heat. And at the centre, untouched by any of it, a small villa with a porch, a kitchen and running water: Haftar’s quarters. For their meeting, Haftar emerged freshly showered, wearing a spotless white kaftan, his beard neatly trimmed. “He didn’t look like a prisoner,” Murtadi recalled. “He looked like a guest.”
In June 1988, Haftar announced he was establishing the NFSL’s armed wing. He called it the Libyan National Army, a name he would revive decades later. It was an army without territory or a state, but the title was enough. It turned a discarded prisoner into a commander again, and gave the CIA something to recognise and support.
The CIA trained Haftar and his men in guerrilla warfare in camps outside Chad’s capital, N’Djamena. In Washington, they were known as the Libyan Contras. “He had a way of commanding the space,” recalled a former NFSL member who trained with Haftar. “Tall, broad-shouldered, rigid. He made you feel he was in charge, even in a dusty tent.”
Then, in December 1990, the arrangement collapsed when a Chadian general backed by Gaddafi suddenly overthrew Habré. The Americans scrambled to extract their assets. “We got 300 of Haftar’s men on to a C-130. No bags. We cheered when the plane took off,” a former CIA officer who worked on the Libya desk told me. For the next six months, Haftar and his men were shuttled between African capitals as governments weighed American pressure against Libyan threats. Gaddafi wanted them captured.
View image in fullscreen The spectre of a CIA-trained army led by his former colonel, broadcasting into Libya, recruiting defectors, became an obsession for Gaddafi. As his paranoia grew, he sent hit squads across Europe and the Arab world to hunt opposition figures – or “stray dogs”, as he called them. Inside Libya, people vanished for a rumour or a joke. Of the more than 1,000 Libyan soldiers captured in Chad, only about 300 had made it to the US by May 1991. The rest were scattered or returned to Libya. Many were never seen again.
My father, one of Libya’s most distinguished physicists, had left Tripoli in the 1970s to complete his doctorate in England. In the universities he left behind, students were being hanged from campus gates for their politics. It defined him, and he made enemies of the regime for saying so. Growing up in the northern English city of York in the early 1990s, I spent summers with my mother in Tripoli while he remained in England. It was too dangerous for him to return.
In Tripoli, surviving depended on pretending. When a relative disappeared, my aunt told the neighbours he was on holiday. I found her sobbing in the kitchen at midnight, hands pressed over her mouth so no one would hear. At dinner, my cousin kicked me under the table when I mentioned my father’s missing friend Hussein. I learned to pretend he did not exist. Every morning, during our stays in Tripoli, a Peugeot surveillance car with tinted windows would park outside my uncle’s house. It was still there when the streetlights came on. We pretended not to see it and the men inside pretended not to watch us.
In late 1995, my mother left our home in England and flew to Tripoli for her brother’s funeral. Weeks passed, then months. We learned that she had been detained at the airport in Tripoli. Intelligence officers instructed her to tell my father to come to Libya, that they only wanted to talk. She sent the opposite message through a family friend: it’s not safe, don’t come, look after the children. She was saying goodbye. She did not know if she would see us again. She was kept under house arrest until mid-1996, when a relative bribed a senior military official to return her passport. She was given hours to leave, crossed by land into Tunisia, and flew home. We met at the airport. She was thinner than I had ever seen her. She held me for a long time, then asked me what I wanted for dinner. We talked about everything except where she had been.
Haftar would later build his own system on the same foundations: the disappearances, the silence, the pretence that nothing was wrong.
As Libyans across the west navigated these fears, Haftar was building a new life in the US. By the summer of 1991, he was living in a one-bedroom apartment at Skyline House in Falls Church, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters in Langley. He never truly settled into American life, being chauffeured between Langley meetings and community gatherings, where he appeared withdrawn and socially awkward.
Salah Elbakkoush, a Libyan dissident who lived in the same building, recalled a scene in Haftar’s apartment that characterised his American years: a former Libyan prisoner of war served them tea in silence, head bowed, just as he had in the Chad prison camp. “Here we were in suburban Virginia,” Bakoush said, “and this broken man was serving us like nothing had changed. It told me everything about Haftar. He wasn’t building a new life. He was recreating his old one.”
The CIA had resettled Haftar, but the arrangement came with expectations. “Washington was full of useless dissidents,” the former CIA officer told me. “The agency wanted more; useful intelligence from inside the country. The quid pro quo was simple: we’re glad to resettle you, but we need actionable intel from your own networks. Otherwise you’re just a burden.”
In 1992, the CIA and NFSL began planning a coup inside Libya. Haftar was tasked with recruiting regime officers willing to defect. For more than a year, he travelled to Zurich to meet Libyan military officers who were willing to risk everything to overthrow Gaddafi. On those same trips, Haftar also, it later emerged, met secretly with Ahmad Gaddaf al-Dam, Gaddafi’s cousin and a senior regime fixer.
According to Mukhtar Murtadi and the then-leader of the NFSL, Mohamed Megareyef – both of whom worked closely with Haftar during this period – Haftar played both sides. To the Americans and the NFSL, he claimed his meetings with regime figures were intelligence gathering, part of the preparation for the coup. To Gaddafi’s people, he offered something more valuable: the names of every officer who had pledged to betray the regime. In October 1993, the coup was launched inside Libya. It failed within hours. The regime arrested hundreds of conspirators. Most were executed.
The full truth may never be known. But what followed told its own story. In 1995, Haftar received a villa in Cairo as a personal gift from Gaddafi, something he would openly admit decades later, when it no longer mattered. That same year, Haftar broke with the NFSL and founded a rival organisation, the Libyan Movement for Change and Reform. The split proved fatal to the opposition: infighting consumed what remained of the NFSL. Gaddafi had wanted the exiles divided. He got his wish.
The former CIA officer was hesitant to confirm how or if the relationship with Haftar officially ended. What is clear is that by the mid-1990s, US intelligence considered Haftar an unreliable cold-war asset with no war left to fight. But his ties to Gaddafi endured. In 2005, Gaddafi visited Haftar’s family at their villa in Cairo. Haftar was not there but in leaked audio of the meeting, Gaddafi told his eldest son that Haftar was like a brother to him.
By 2011, Haftar had lived in Virginia for two decades, long since abandoned by the CIA but still holding his US citizenship and his grievances. When the Libyan revolution erupted that February, he watched it on television. “His eyes were fixed on the TV screen,” recalled a Libyan dissident who met him at that time. In early March, Aly Abuzaakouk, a prominent dissident and later parliamentarian who had known Haftar for more than 20 years, drove him to Dulles airport for his return to Benghazi. “We hugged,” Abuzakook told me. “But the man who arrived in Libya was different from the one I dropped off. I believed he was joining the revolution, but he was going to take it over.”
When Haftar landed in Benghazi on 15 March 2011, he arrived late to a revolution that did not need him. Gaddafi still held Tripoli and the west. In the east, revolutionaries had formed a transition council: a loose coalition of defectors, lawyers and academics determined to replace military rule with civilian government. On the ground, power rested with protesters who had formed armed brigades and paid for it in blood. They distrusted career military officers, people with foreign ties and officials with old-regime baggage. Haftar embodied all three.
Within days, Haftar’s sons began approaching brigade commanders, speaking of their father’s desire to “protect the revolution”. A week later, the council’s military spokesperson announced Haftar as their new commander, without consulting the political leadership. “I control everybody,” Haftar told the New York Times that April. “The rebels and the regular army forces.” This was pure bluster: at the time, he controlled no one. The war moved on without him.
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Anas El Gomati is the founder of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, the first Libyan think tank, and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research focuses on socioeconomics, democratic governance, the security sector and political Islam in Libya. He is also a visiting lecturer at the NATO Defense College in Rome, where his work focuses on political analysis and public policy.
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