TRIPOLI, Libya -- Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi yesterday welcomed U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to his high-security personal compound in symbolic recognition that, after nearly three decades of animosity, the U.S.-Libyan relationship is officially normal -- if not entirely friendly.

Mr. Gadhafi, once called a "mad dog" by former President Ronald Reagan, shared a Ramadan meal with Ms. Rice and inquired politely about her health and recent U.S. hurricanes.

"We have a lot to talk about," Ms. Rice told Mr. Gadhafi as they met in a plush reception room of the Bab al-Azizia complex that U.S. warplanes bombed in 1986.

U.S. officials portrayed the meeting as the reward for a five-year rehabilitation that has seen Mr. Gadhafi dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program and begin settling claims for past acts of Libyan terrorism, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The government-controlled Libyan media put a different spin on it, reporting that the meeting was proof "of how much the Americans need Libya," a U.S. official said.

The Bush administration considers Libya's reform as one of its top foreign policy achievements, and a model for other adversary states, such as Iran. The Rice appearance was the highest-level U.S. visit since then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon stopped in Libya in 1957.

But Mr. Gadhafi, who has called Ms. Rice "my darling black African woman," seemed to have a more casual attitude toward the encounter. He left her and the U.S. contingent waiting in their hotel for about an hour past the scheduled meeting time, until Ms. Rice ordered her motorcade to head toward the complex anyway. They circled it for about 15 minutes before it was clear that the Libyan leader was ready to receive them.

Mr. Gadhafi had them ushered them into a reception room with a crush of TV crews and reporters, in a scene of pandemonium.

Ms. Rice told Mr. Gadhafi that President Bush was "so excited" at the prospect of an improvement in U.S.-Libyan relations. Even so, both she and Mr. Gadhafi have been making clear that mistrust still hangs over the relationship like a dusty Saharan haze.

Talking to reporters en route from Lisbon, Portugal, Ms. Rice made clear that the visit was not a sign that "everything has been resolved between us. There's a long way to go." And in a TV address to his nation Monday, Mr. Gadhafi said it was "not necessary for us to be friends with America," and classified the two countries as "neither friends nor enemies."