Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Author:Tony Horwitz [Horwitz, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593184486
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

10

LIBYA

The Colonel’s Big Con

Woman is a female and man is a male.

—MUAMMAR QADDAFI, The Green Book

The summons came, like so many others, on a bad phone line in the middle of the night. America had shot down two Libyan warplanes over the Mediterranean earlier that day, and after dialing twenty times, a colleague in Cairo finally got through to Tripoli.

“Please,” the Libyan official shouted through the static, “tell all journalists, come.” Then the line went dead.

“That’s it?” Geraldine asked when a correspondent called us to share the news. “‘Please, all journalists, come’?”

“That’s it.” There was a flight to Italy in the morning, he said, and a connection to Libya in the afternoon. “If we’re lucky, we’ll all get stranded in Rome.”

Tales of journalistic woe in Libya were legendary. Not-so-secret police shadowed your every step. There were no decent phones. No one to talk to. And worst of all, no booze. “You feel depressed all the time, and followed in your depression,” said a Yugoslav reporter named Bosko. “Libya is the Romania of the Middle East.”

Libya was also one of those Middle Eastern countries—Iran and Saudi Arabia were two others—that routinely ignored journalists’ visa requests for months, then granted entry with a few hours’ warning, to everyone. But even by these minimalist standards, the invitation to Libya seemed thin.

The Italian agent issuing my ticket to Tripoli was skeptical. “American journalist?” he asked, checking my passport in Rome. “Horwitz? No visa?” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Buona fortuna. I wish you much luck.”

Twenty reporters were already at the airport bar, taking on liquids in preparation for the thirsty days ahead. The Middle East press corps, at least at the time of my tour, had its share of old-school hard drinkers.

“In a few hours you’ll be dreaming of this,” declared one veteran Englishman, holding aloft a glass of white wine. The only booze available in Libya, he added, was bathtub gin called “flash.”

“First you get drunk, then you go blind.” He chuckled, refilling his glass. “Then the Libyans give you eighty lashes.”

The Jerusalem-based press corps was rather more sober, searching bags and pockets for stray shekels, El Al stickers and forgotten laundry receipts written in Hebrew. Libya wasn’t the sort of place where you wanted to arrive carrying any evidence of contact with the Zionist entity.

Not that an American passport was anything to crow about. Qaddafi liked to call the United States “Enemy Number One of Humanity,” and he had once advised young soldiers to “drink the blood” of Zionists and Americans. Now, to make the relationship even worse, the United States was claiming that a factory in Rabta, south of Tripoli, was about to produce poison gas; there was even talk of an American air strike on the plant. The Libyans were apparently letting us in to present their side—that the Rabta plant made medicines.

“Aspirin, extra-strength,” quipped a half-drunk reporter. “And deodorant.”

“Spray-on,” a companion chimed in. “The kind you wear a gas mask while using.”

I made the naive suggestion that if the Libyans were really producing mustard gas, they’d be crazy to let us in to document the fact.

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