"Major Jolloud" by Robert X Cringely

[brooklynite]

An intesting column on Libya by a technology columnist with a prior background as a Middle East reporter:

Long before I became involved with technology I worked as a reporter in the Middle East. My work there introduced me to many important characters of that era. Some of them, like Yassar Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization and King Hussein of Jordan, are long gone from the scene. I effectively predated Mubarak, and in those days Bahrain was mainly known as the only place on the Gulf where drivers were polite and you could legally buy a drink. But one constant that remains is Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, though he’s not what this column is about. It’s about Major Jalloud, Qaddafi’s right-hand man.

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Thirty-five years ago when I knew him, Qaddafi was a young gun and very full of himself, but the sense I always had was that he knew it was all for show and he didn’t really take himself too seriously. I asked him one time, for example, how to spell his name. After all we’ve seen it in print with a G and a K and a Q: which did he prefer? “Spell it any way you like, ” he said (in pretty fair English, by the way — something else that seems to have strategically disappeared over the years). “All that matters is spelling it correctly in Arabic.”

Major Jalloud was something altogether different. Qaddafi’s second-in-command back then, he either didn’t know there was showbiz in the Colonel’s act or he simply didn’t care. Jalloud saw his role as extending the rule of a ruthless tyrant as efficiently and as far as possible. My friend Jacek Kalabinski, who was covering Libya for the Communist radio network in Poland at that time, though he later became a leader himself in the Solidarity movement, put it best: “You can see death in Jalloud’s eyes.”

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