an attempted coup in Libya failed to unseat the monarchy of King Idris I. Many of the coup plotters and their supporters were killed or imprisoned. One who was not was Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, who escaped into exile in Syria, where he was sheltered by the Baathist regime of Hafez el-Assad.

From his sanctuary in Damascus, the exiled Qaddafi would gradually establish a network of terrorist connections extending from the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the IRA. This network would become infamous for attacks on civilian targets, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am 747, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, with the loss of all on board, and a similar attack on French UTA DC-10 over Niger in which 170 people died. U.S. attempts to pressure the Assad regime to surrender Qaddafi for trial met with no success; neither did repeated attempts at the terrorist leader's assassination by Israel's Mossad.

A new story by Eric LippsQaddafi was finally captured while trying to flee during the U.S. invasion of Syria which followed that nation's 1999 attack on Israel, which has featured an unsuccessful attempt to use a nuclear device purchased from Pakistan. The device failed to achieve a nuclear explosion, but its conventional explosive trigger scattered lethal plutonium over a small area along the Israeli border. It was Qaddafi's attempt at a nuclear attack rather than a purely conventional one which would produce the firestorm of public outrage which would force President Clinton to take military action.

At Qaddafi's trial before the international Court of Justice in The Hague, it would be revealed that the Libyan had been instrumental in persuading Assad to obtain the nuclear device and carry out the attack. Assad himself would not be tried, having disappeared during the invasion; persistent rumors had him locked away in some secret U.S. or Israeli prison, but no proof of this would emerge.