It was a textbook coup. At 3 a.m., shortly before the most faithful Moslems would answer the call to early morning prayers, columns of trucks loaded with troops rolled through Tripoli, spearheaded by British-made Centurion tanks. Swiftly, soldiers surrounded army headquarters, the security police building, the Royal Palace and the national radio station. Teleprinters in the national news agency fell silent. The borders were sealed tight, and at the airports, controllers got orders to suspend all air traffic indefinitely.
Libya had long been ripe for a coup. Flanked by socialist regimes in Algeria and Egypt, the kingdom was rolling in oil wealth, but much of it was being pocketed by corrupt officials. The country was ruled by a frail and feeble old man, King Idris, 79, who had offered to abdicate five years ago but was persuaded to stay on by the Cabinet. Crown Prince Hassan Rida, 40, obviously lacked the capacity for leadership. Even so, neither foreigners nor Libyans had expected the upheaval to come before the death of Idris, who is both the father of his country (with Britain as midwife) and the religious leader of the potent Senussi, a Moslem sect.
When Libyans woke on Monday morning last week, the radio had returned to the air and was blaring Sousa marches. Startled listeners were told that the King, who was at a Turkish spa being treated for poor circulation in his legs, had been overthrown and Parliament dissolved. The Kingdom of Libya, said Radio Triooli, was now the "Libyan Arab Republic" controlled by a Revolutionary Council of army officers. An around-the-clock curfew was imposed.
Legalized Regime. Throughout the week, extreme secrecy was maintained, and almost no foreigners were allowed to cross the borders. Much of the coup seemed to be run by radio; an announcer would say which officials had been dismissed and which kept in office and all, amazingly, seemed to obey. Only one name was given prominence in connection with the coup—Colonel Saaduddin Abu Shweirib, who was made the army's new Chief of Staff. Shweirib, who is in his 30s, studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Sacked from the army in 1967 because he was suspected of republican sympathies, he has since worked as a notary public—prompting some wits to point out that he could legalize his own regime. If it is his regime. Reports in some Arab capitals said that Shweirib was merely a front man.