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Indeed, the reports of Libyan hit squads stalking U.S. leaders may finally snap completely the badly frayed relations between the two countries. Ever since Reagan took office last January, the Administration has been exploring ways to punish and isolate Gaddafi, whom it sees as the world's premier exporter of subversion and terrorism. After meeting for two days in a row with his National Security Council, Reagan last week called upon the 1,500 American citizens now living in Libya to leave "as soon as possible" and invalidated American passports for travel to that country. The President and his advisers considered other punitive steps, possibly including an embargo on the shipment of Libyan oil to the U.S. (see following story). Administration officials stressed that U.S. policies toward Libya had been under review since the summer; they also admitted that the reports of Libyan hit teams had forced them to speed up their deliberations. Said one senior White House aide: "We might not quite have been at this point yet."
Exactly what proof of the Libyan hit teams did the Reagan Administration have? Details remain sketchy, since the White House refused to make its evidence public. But this much is known: shortly after U.S. pilots downed two Libyan jets in a dogfight over the Gulf of Sidra last August, the Central Intelligence Agency passed word to the White House that it had learned of a Gaddafi plan to kill the President. The report was duly noted by U.S. security officials, but was never made public. Unverified reports of assassination plots against Presidents are fairly common, and are usually dismissed after brief investigations. But during the fall, and especially in the past three weeks, reports from different sources about a Libyan-inspired assassination attempt began to multiply. There was no single informant, as was originally reported; rather, the stories came from at least a dozen sources, ranging from informants who had picked up talk of a plot to spies who worked directly for the CIA.
The findings of the intelligence agencies were documented in a 40-page National Security Council report and presented to top White House aides at the beginning of December. The NSC study listed the names of twelve to 14 alleged members of the hit teams and included brief descriptions of some of the suspects. One informant had originally given U.S. officials the names of ten persons he knew had been trained for the assassination. As U.S. agencies began tracking down sources and pumping them for information, the total and the names kept changing. Conclusions about the suspects were couched in the ever murky language of the world of crime and spies: "reason to believe." The White House had no way to be certain of the reliability of the information, but it finally did conclude that there was indeed "reason to believe." As one White House official put it, "You've got to have some confidence in the CIA. You can't ignore the evidence."