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The testimony of one informant stood out. Offering extensive detail that seemed to parallel other reports, he said that Gaddafi had ordered the assassination of several top American officials if no hit team could reach the President. With that, security was greatly increased not only for the President but for Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as well. Next, Secret Service protection was extended for the first time to Reagan's top aides: James Baker, Edwin Meese and Michael Deaver.
White House aides said it was the steady accumulation of details and incidents that gave credence to the hit-team reports. "No single informant's information is enough to warrant taking the reports too seriously," said an official. "But taken all together, the way one informant's information supports another's, you have to be convinced something is going on." U.S. intelligence officials, for example, started piecing some details together last September when they learned of an alleged Gaddafi plot to kill Maxwell Rabb, U.S. Ambassador to Italy. Rabb was given special protection, and Rome police arrested a suspect. Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports were circulating in France that Gaddafi was planning assaults on other U.S. embassy personnel in Europe. U.S. officials thus grew especially concerned when Christian Chapman, chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Paris, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in November. No suspects were arrested, but again Gaddafi was thought to be the mastermind.
Beyond that, TIME has learned the CIA has solid evidence that Libyan agents were staking out U.S. embassies in Athens and Ankara. During the past few weeks, the Libyans rented rooms in sight of each embassy and were clocking the movements of senior U.S. officials there. Security has been tightened considerably at both missions, as well as at certain other embassies around the world. In Ankara, where Haig planned to visit this week, an Administration official described the security as being in "as high a state of alert as we've ever had."
In addition, TIME has learned that U.S. intelligence agencies have reason to believe that five Libyan-trained terrorists—four Arabs and an East German—flew to Paris two weeks ago, apparently en route to Boston. The information was given to the FBI, which has refused to elaborate on it.
One especially dismaying aspect of all these reports is the prospect that either former agents of the CIA or onetime Green Berets may be involved in the plots. Gaddafi has openly hired ex-employees of those organizations to further his causes. Two notorious former CIA agents now living in Libya, Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil (both wanted in the U.S. on charges of conspiring to sell explosives and to commit murder), are known to have supplied military and terrorist technology to Libya. More than a dozen onetime Green Berets, recruited by Wilson, have trained Libyan troops. Federal investigators are in the process of tracking down for further questioning numbers of CIA agents and Green Berets who have worked in Libya.