Libya Raid Had French Target, Defector Says

MOSCOW — A former U.S. Navy intelligence specialist who defected to the Soviet Union told millions of Soviet television viewers that the United States targeted the French Embassy when it bombed Libya in 1986.

Glenn Michael Souther, 31, said he had access to secret photographs used to plan the April 14, 1986, bombing attack on Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman, Col. David Shea, said: “Any suggestion that we would intentionally bomb an embassy is absolutely ludicrous and not worthy of any further response.” The French government had no comment.

Souther, who disappeared a month after the bombings while the FBI was investigating him for alleged espionage, appeared Wednesday on a one-hour, prime-time special on state-run television, “The Camera Looks at the World.”

Two or three days before the raids, Souther said, he was working in a Navy laboratory that processes satellite photographs and learned that one target was the French Embassy.

‘You Won’t Believe This’

“One of the lower-ranking guys in the laboratory came up to me and said, ‘Glenn, you won’t believe this. We’re bombing this building, and right here is the French Embassy,” Souther said as pictures of the American warplanes swooping toward targets came up on the screen. He spoke in both Russian and English.

An announcer then charged that the French Embassy was targeted in retaliation for France’s refusal to allow U.S. bombers to fly over its territory en route to Libya.

Foreign reporters who visited the bombed area after the raid saw damage to the French Embassy in the Bin Ashur neighborhood of Tripoli.

The United States said that its warplanes bombed “terrorist-related targets” in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya, and that civilian structures were hit by mistake.