The North African desert state of Libya became independent in 1951. The former Italian- colony came under Anglo-French administration in the Second World War. It was given independence partly because of the influence of the United Nations but largely because an indigenous ruler had been found who was pro-Western and would keep the Soviet Union out of Libya. 

The Emir of the Sanusi Brotherhood, Idris, became Head of State as well as King of Libya.
Idris not only continued to allow the Americans to use the huge Wheelus airfield, on the outskirts of Tripoli, which they had developed in the war; he approved when they enlarged it in the 1950s and 1960s. Wheelus was a training base for NATO and in particular for American long-range land-based bombers. Idris shared NATO's concept of Libya's strategic value because of its 1200-mile coastline opposite southern Europe from Sicily to Cyprus.

The expansion of Wheelus attracted Libyan student protests in the 1960s as young educated Libyans, affected by Nasserism and pan-Arabism, began to question Idris' close ties with the West.

The Emir of the Sanusi Brotherhood, Idris, became Head of State as well as King of Libya.

Dissatisfaction was also growing at government autocracy. The government was dominated by the tribal nobility and family heads; the King controlled the Cabinet through his control of the Prime Minister; within a year of independence the progressive National Congress Party was banned for the crime of winning an election, and thereafter a small clique ruled Libya. By 1969 Idris had become enfeebled and Omar Shalhi in the Cabinet and his brother Colonel Abdul Aziz Shalhi, the army commander, were in effective control of the government.

The Shalhis made efforts from 1967 to modernize the government by bringing a number of technocrats into the Cabinet and the senior civil service and to enlarge and re-equip the army in the wake of the Six Day War. But these efforts were too little and too late. In any case, the Shalhis were heavily involved in financial corruption and misguided economic policies in the wake of the oil boom.

Oil was discovered in Libya in the 1950s. An influx of foreign firms was followed by an increase in bribery and the growth of an emerging Libyan bourgeoisie which manipulated high offices for business advantage. As in many newly self-governing African states, the new economic class was not entrepreneurial, almost no capital went into industry; instead, the Libyan business class invested in real estate and speculated in property. Meanwhile, socialist ideas spread among students and junior army officers.

Two coups were planned for September 1969: one by the colonels, who wanted to reorganize the royal government, and one by junior officers, who planned to replace it with a Nasserite regime. The junior officers got their blow in first. When Colonel Shalhi was arrested on 1 September by the coup-makers, he exclaimed: 'Go away, you fools! It's not today, it's on the fourth!'

The coup was conceived, organized and carried through by the Free Unionist officers, led by the 29-year-old Major Mu'ammar Gadafi. The coup took place ten years after Gadafi began to plan it while at secondary school in the desert town of Sebha.

Gadafi joined the military academy specifically to equip himself to carry out a revolution and to be in a position to do so. He believed the military was the best means to achieve revolution. Significantly, nearly all Gadafi’s co-conspirators in 1969 were in his class at the academy, the class which graduated in 1963, among them his close colleague Major Jalloud. What motivated Gadafi, Jalloud and the others? Gadafi has written:

Our souls were in revolt against the backwardness enveloping our country and its land, whose best gifts and riches were being lost through plunder, and against the isolation imposed on our people in a vain attempt to hold it back from the path of the Arab people and from its greatest cause.6

The young officers aimed to use Libya's oil wealth to benefit the Libyan people as a whole, by a socialist transformation of society, and to ensure that Libya played its part in the movement for Arab unity. In this respect their objectives were similar to those of Nasser's Free Officers on whom they partially modelled themselves. But the young Libyan officers, many, like Gadafi, with a puritanical desert background, and uninfluenced by the cosmopolitanism that affected the Egyptians, were also Islamic fundamentalists. Far more than Nasser, Gadafi intended to create a socialist society in accordance with the Koran.

Another objective of Gadafi and his followers was to bring an end to Libya's incipient regionalism, and to weld more effectively in one nation the people of the oases and the desert with the urban communities of the coastal towns. Gadafi was born in Sine, the son of a nomad; Jalloud came from a Fezzan oasis; they were determined that the interior communities should share in the economic prosperity of the country.

The Free Unionist Officers formed a cell organization to maintain secrecy while they worked out details of the coup. They denied themselves alcohol, gambling and night clubs, and practised their daily prayers assiduously, but played cards in order not to attract attention. The first of September was chosen as the date of the coup for two reasons; at that time King Idris was out of the country (in Turkey); and on 2 September many young officers were to be posted abroad to attend courses in Britain.

The first step in the coup was the seizure of the military camp of Gurnada near Benghazi; and of the weapons and armour stored there, including tanks. Gadafi was a signals officer and he made good use of the new military signals system, installed only a month earlier, to co-ordinate the activities of the coup officers. The second step was the capture of the radio station at Benghazi. The third was to move on the major cities, Tripoli and Benghazi.

The coup was received by the mass of the people with spontaneous and joyful enthusiasm. The young majors set up a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), to run an army-state as in Egypt, but hopefully one that would lead to more far-reaching and revolutionary social change than in Egypt. Gadafi would also impose a theocracy, a state based on religious principles. Gadafi's twentieth-century social revolution would be based on oil and the Koran. His coup was a reform coup but he would blend traditionality with modernity in his efforts to transform Libya.