Not-so-secret Police

One irritating thing about our time in Libya was that you had to be careful what you said to Libyans you didn't know well, because they might turn out to be be secret police. Nobody knew how many secret police there actually were in the country and I suspect that were many fewer than we all thought. However, there is no doubt that many Libyans supplemented their incomes by acting as informants for the authorities.

I operated by the rule-of-thumb that any Libyan who had long hair, dressed in groovy clothes, said he listened to rock music and made scathing remarks about the government was probably either in the secret police or was an informant.

Some members of the secret police didn't try to keep their jobs hidden: One of our friends at Ghadames told us he was secret police the first time we met him.

Others tried to conceal their identity but weren't very successful. A good example was a student in an elementary level class that I taught. One day we were practicing the names of jobs. Part of the lesson went like this.

Me: What's our job, Ali?
Ali: I'm an engineer.
Me: Really? What's your job, Mohamed?
Mohamed: I'm a waiter.
Me: Right. What's your job, Saleh?
Saleh: I cannot tell you.
Me: Oh. Why not?
Saleh: I cannot tell you my job, because I am secret police.
Me: Well, you'd better not tell us then.
Saleh: No, I cannot tell you.
Me: That's fine. So we don't know that you're secret police.
Saleh: Yes, because I cannot tell you my job.

Did he not realize what he was saying? Or did he want to warn us all that we should be careful about what we said in class? Or was he just joking? I never found out. But I noticed that the other students were never very friendly to him in later lessons.