Is Libya's Rebel Leader CIA-Trained?

The rebel commander the article centred on was Khalifa Haftar, who had returned to Libya from Virginia at the start of the 2011 NATO intervention after roughly two decades in the United States. Haftar had been a senior officer under Gaddafi and led Libyan forces during the disastrous 1987 Chadian-Libyan war; captured during that campaign and disowned by Gaddafi, he became one of the most prominent figures in the Libyan exile opposition and was widely reported to have cooperated with the CIA on regime-change planning during the years that followed. He had lived in Falls Church, Virginia, less than ten miles from CIA headquarters at Langley.

The CIA-connection question was politically combustible because the NATO intervention was being framed as a humanitarian Responsibility-to-Protect operation, not a covert American regime-change effort. Reporters at McClatchy and the New York Times had begun asking similar questions in late March 2011 about how the rebel command structure was forming, who was funding the Benghazi-based opposition, and whether any of the senior commanders had U.S. or U.K. intelligence ties.

Haftar's later trajectory underscored why the question mattered. By 2014 he was leading the Libyan National Army faction in the second Libyan civil war; by 2019 his forces were besieging Tripoli; and the legacy of the 2011 intervention — including questions about which exile figures had been brought back and by whom — has remained politically live in Libya policy debates ever since.