The current events weirdly remind me of Italy-Libya-US crisis of April 1986, when Reagan tried (and failed) a decapitation strike against Gheddafi, and Gheddafi orchestrated a fake missile attack against Italy to cover the fact he had been saved by Italy's PM, Bettino Craxi. /1
This chain of events began in October 1985 with the "Sigonella Crisis", when US Delta Force and Italian NOCS came within seconds from actually shooting each other when Italy refused to handle the Achille Lauro OLP hijackers to US forces it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisi_di_… /2
"Weirdly enough" two months later Abu Nidal orchestrated a terror attack Rome's airport that made 13 dead (including a US diplomat). The Italian intelligence had been forewarned by "friendly Arab sources" about the attack but for "some reason" they couldn't prevent it /3
This gave Craxi a perfect excuse to pretend to re-align with Reagan and things went relatively smoothly until April 5, 1986, when the West Berlin disco "Belle" was bombed and a Turkish woman and two US soldiers died. /4
Reagan decided Gheddafi was the responsible (this has been never proved, BTW) and used this as a casus belli to order a "decapitation strike" against Libya /5
The attack was launched from UK and from US 6th Fleet carriers and (in theory) no other NATO government had been forewarned of this. But for some reason, Craxi came to know about it (possibly a leak from Vernon Walters, US rep. to ONU) and Craxi decided to save Gheddafi's life /6
The reason for Craxi's decisions would require 1000 tweets to be explained, but summing it up, for Italy's interests Gheddafi was more worth alive than dead and Craxi considered the idea of a regime change in Libya "dumb", turning out to be posthumously right. Oh well /7
According to the reconstruction coming from different sources, Craxi phoned Gheddafi asking him to "go to a secure location" before the attack. Gheddafi survived but his adoptive daughter Hanna (9 years old) died, together with dozens of other Lybians /8
At this point Gheddafi "returned the favour" to Craxi staging the launch of two Scud missiles from Sirte towards the island of Lampedusa, so to cover Craxi's tracks. It's not even clear if the missile were really launched, as not radar track or debris were even found /9
Only distant detonations were heard from Lampedusa. This said the Italian government took (or pretended to take) the whole thing very seriously and sent a task force in the Sirte Gulf to patrol it (or pretend to) together with the 6th Fleet. /10
US-Italy rift was technically amended, but the reality is that Reagan and later Bush never forgave Craxi, and it's widely believed that the US Intelligence helped to leak compromising material to Italy's justice, eventually leading to Craxi's downfall among the "Mani Pulite" /11
inquiry in 1992. But this is for another story.... /12
The event "enabling" this was of course the 1980 Ustica disaster, as mentioned two days ago at the center of RWN episode #139 (w/ @TheWarNerd and @MarkAmesExile, BTW their latest ep. gives an excellent overview of Soleimani's assassination)
