Grand Hotel in Tripoli Reflects Kadafi’s Society

A set of nondescript brown steel doors on the west side of the state-owned Grand Hotel looks like a fire escape or a servant’s entrance. Loitering near them, however, invites arrest.

The doors lead to Col. Moammar Kadafi’s simply furnished 20-room suite on the hotel’s first floor.

Casual sightseers who rest on a cement block outside the hotel to view the Mediterranean--a view largely obscured by Tripoli’s military and commercial harbor facilities--are invariably suspected by Libya’s all-seeing secret police of harboring ill feelings toward the country’s leader.

Only Kadafi has the keys to this, his private entrance. Hotel employees never know when he uses the suite.

Rumor has it that Kadafi wanted to claim the hotel’s 10th-floor presidential suite but dropped the idea when he got stuck in the elevator on his first visit.

The Grand Hotel, with its marble lobby and elegant interior, is in more ways than one an instrument of Libyan policy and a microcosm of Libyan society.

Increasingly, it serves as a rest house for Libya’s invited foreign guests. It is equipped with sophisticated telephone bugging devices and a staff forced to accommodate secret service agents in its ranks, and the bills of some of its guests are paid by Libyan intelligence.

Among its regular guests is Abu Nidal, the radical Palestinian leader believed responsible for the Dec. 27 attacks on airports in Rome and Vienna in which 16 travelers, including five Americans, were killed and 121 others wounded. According to diplomats, Abu Nidal has spent up to a week of every month in the hotel, refusing to speak to strangers.

Other recent guests include Goukouni Oueddei, leader of the opposition in Chad; a number of Chadian guerrillas, who would ask foreigners for Western cigarettes or chocolate; Abu Moussa, a prominent Palestinian opponent of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, and officials of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

A recent guest reported seeing maids sorting trash from the rooms into separate plastic bags neatly marked with the room numbers, presumably for sifting by intelligence agents.