Libyan Ex-Diplomat: Gadhafi 'Unstable,' Possibly Hiding Underground

Experts get in Gadhafi's head, amidst a report his son's been killed.

ByABC News
March 22, 2011, 7:53 AM

March 22, 2011— -- Psychological analysts in the CIA spend a lot of time and effort trying to get inside the mind of someone like Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, whose well-documented quirks leave little doubt that it's a strange place.

But according to a former CIA analyst and a Libyan diplomat, suspicion over his own security and devastating allied bombing may have driven the "mad dog of the Middle East" into a new, potentially dangerous depression.

"We know he is unstable," former deputy Libyan ambassador to the U.N. Ibrahim Dabbashi told ABC News. "I think he will kill as much as he can and he will destroy as much as he can."

Gadhafi has also become suspicious of his infamous 40-strong all-female bodyguard contingent in the last couple weeks, Libyan diplomats said, before a popular uprising threatened his 42-year reign in the North African nation.

"I believe he must feel abandoned and it is inconceivable to him, having given 42 years of his life to the leadership of Libya, that everyone does not love him," Jerrod Post, former CIA psychological profiler and professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs at the Elliot School of International Affairs, told ABC News.

Potentially adding to Gadhafis' woes is an unconfirmed report from an official in the Libyan U.N. mission that one of Gadhafi's son's, Khamis Gadhafi, perished Monday. The official told ABC News that Khamis, who according to leaked State Department documents was the head of an elite military unit charged with protecting the regime, died from severe burns after being injured in a kamikaze attack by a disaffected Libyan pilot on the central command and control headquarters of the Gadhafi family.

ABC News has not been able to independently confirm the official's claim.