Libyan Army General Khalifa Haftar a CIA operative: Analyst

The Central Intelligence Agency was behind the overthrow of Libyan ruler Mummer Gaddafi and that Libyan Army General Khalifa Belqasim Haftar is a CIA agent, an American political commentator says.

“The US intelligence, and specifically the CIA, has been intimately involved in the operation in Libya from the beginning; and in fact the starting point would be many years earlier during the Reagan administration because as we know that the Reagan administration using the CIA attempted a number of times to overthrow the regime of Libyan leader Mummer Gaddafi, failing of course on multiple points in the 1980s,” Eric Draitser, the founder of StopImperialism.com, said on Monday during a phone interview with Press TV.

“And it was from those covert operations that the CIA established a network of contacts, a network of agents and operatives that it would use and employ at various times to destabilize and ultimately to overthrow the government of Gaddafi, and one of those principal agents was a former general under Gaddafi named General Haftar, who is now commanding the Libyan National Army, as it is called, in the city of Benghazi,” Draitser said.

Haftar, who had been an army chief-of-staff under Gaddafi, spent nearly two decades in the United States and is a US citizen.

“He came back to Libya in 2011 during the destabilization and overthrow of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya government led by Gaddafi. So, the CIA imported their man, their general into Libya right at the moment when the US and NATO were bombing the country, and were destroying the country, and overthrowing the government,” Draitser stated.

Gaddafi was deposed in August 2011after ruling the country for more than four decades. He was slain on October 20 of the same year.

Since 2011, Benghazi has been the scene of numerous attacks and political assassinations amidst increasing power struggle among several militias who fought against Gaddafi during the uprising.

On September 11, 2012, the US mission in Benghazi came under an attack that resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomats.

According to CNN, up to 35 CIA operatives were working in Benghazi during the attack.

“There are also very close links between the CIA and some of the so-called terrorist organizations operating in Benghazi, specifically one of them back on September 11, 2012 attack on the so-called ambassador’s residence in Benghazi, which is really an annex of the CIA… where so-called Ambassador Christopher Stevens was organizing payments and weapons and fighters to send to Syria to continue the war against Bashar al-Assad. So, the CIA was not only involved in the overthrow [of Gaddafi] they were themselves attacked,” Draitser stated.