"Operation El Dorado Canyon": Spain in the Libyan hornet's nest

The publishing house "Doble Identidad" has just published the novel Operation El Dorado Canyon, based on the true story told by the spy and author of the work Jaime Rocha, an agent of the Spanish secret services who found Gaddafi in the place where he was hiding in Tripoli in 1986. The Spanish officer, now retired, tells in great detail the ins and outs of the Operation approved by Ronald Reagan to end the life of the man who was then considered "the most dangerous leader of anti-Western terrorism".  

In 2003, President Aznar made an official trip to Libya, a short 24-hour visit, to have a private meeting with Muamar Gaddafi. This was the first time after the UN embargo against Libya was lifted.  

Some of us journalists who were travelling in the Spanish retinue were struck by the discomfort that the Spanish president ostensibly experienced when, led by the Libyan colonel himself, he entered the pavilion bombed by planes from U.S. Sixth Fleet in 1986, in which Gadafi's adopted daughter Hana died. From the hand of his host, Aznar had to listen to what the leader of the Yamahirya told him. "It was here that the bombs struck... There - pointing to a spot on the floor of a room - was the girl..." The Libyans left the pavilion as a shrine, and it has probably been a must for all the guests of the chieftain of the Ghadafa tribe.  

The surprise American attack on Gaddafi was undoubtedly a milestone in Libya's turbulent history. After the attacks against the American forces in Beirut in October 1983, which left 241 dead, the subsequent attack in 1985 on the El Descanso restaurant, near the Spanish-American base of Torrejón de Ardoz in Madrid, in which 18 people died, and the three people killed in the attack on the La Belle discotheque in Berlin in 1986, the American president Ronald Reagan ordered "Operation El Dorado Canyon", the aim of which was to assassinate Gaddafi. The NATO allies did not approve the operation commanded by the White House, but the Americans set out to carry it out themselves.  

What we did not know during Aznar's visit to Tripoli -we have now learned thanks to the author Jaime Rocha, the indirect Spanish protagonist of the operation-, was that Spain played a relevant role in the operation launched by Reagan. In 1986 the director of the CIA, William Casey, asked for help from General Emilio Alonso Manglano, who was then in charge of Spanish espionage, the Superior Center of Defense Information (CESID) . The Americans, despite their gigantic global espionage apparatus, did not know where Gaddafi was. The Yamahirya leader's ability to hide was legendary. Captain Jaime Rocha, one of Manglano's closest agents, offered to go to Libya, as he tells in his recently published novel. He spent ten days in Tripoli, "photographing what moved and what did not move," and facilitated the location of the leader.  

This is the first time that a Spanish agent tells in first person an action that placed the Spanish services at the top of international espionage. Rocha had already been in Libya years before, and had met Gaddafi personally; in 1986 he returned to discover his whereabouts.  

At that time, in the 80s, Gaddafi's Libya was creating serious problems for the West, including Spain. The number-two man at the embassy in Madrid, Saed Esmaiel, was trying to get a small group of Franco's old guard under the command of Colonel Carlos Meer, José Antonio Assiego and Enrique Moreno, to get involved in an attack on American soldiers in Spain. De Meer, who was Franco's last civilian governor in the Balearic Islands and director of the cabinet of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, travelled to Libya in 1986 with the intention to obtain the financial support of Muamar Gaddafi for his coup d'état operations in Spain, something in which the Libyans were not interested, although they were interested in using Franco's group against the Americans in Spain.  

When the Prime Ministers of Malta, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and Italy, Bettino Craxi, warned that unauthorized aircraft were flying south over Malta's airspace towards Tripoli on April 14, 1986, Gaddafi and his family left the El Azizia barracks just before the bombs dropped on them from 13 U.S. Air Force planes. Gaddafi was unharmed, but Hanna, his 15-month-old adopted daughter and 60 other civilians were killed, leaving two of his children injured. The publication of Rocha's book is essential to understand the Spain of the Transition, and the role it played and still does in the political evolution of the neighbouring Maghreb.