Oslo—On November 5, 1985, a small private jet that CBS News had chartered for myself, producer Jennifer Siebens, and a two-man camera crew touched down in Tripoli, Libya after a two-hour flight from Paris, across the Mediterranean. Met at the airport by senior government media types, we were immediately shuttled to our hotel in central Tripoli overlooking Green Square. And green it certainly was. Indeed, they must have emptied the contents of their local Benjamin Moore store of “Clover Green,” since that’s what made the square Green. They’d simply paved it all over and painted it. Not a blade of grass, not a single living thing. Which it turns out was an entirely appropriate metaphor for Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, then and now.
In those days there were two principal reasons that Western journalists were summoned to Tripoli for an audience with the Leader. Either he had done something of which...
