Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (3 page)

If you want this relationship to develop, you’ve got to put Lockerbie behind you, he said. That’s the only way to bring Libya back into the community of nations. You’d be surprised how quickly we could discover a mutual interest in fighting al Qaeda and their Islamist friends.

We have more files on these guys, Kusa said. Libyans who went to Afghanistan to fight the great jihad. I could see about making them available.

A few weeks later, he brought files on hundreds of LIFG
terrorists—and
more. Why not come to Tripoli and speak with the Guide [Qaddafi] directly, Kusa suggested.

So it was in early 2002 that Mark Allen, top British spy and falconer, the sport of Arab royals, traveled to Libya to meet with Colonel Qaddafi, the self-proclaimed champion of the common man. Qaddafi received him in his giant tent complex in Tripoli, the Bab al-Azizia Barracks. Allen was a good pitchman. He knew from long experience to appreciate the bitter Bedouin coffee Qaddafi offered him, letting the
boab
refill the tiny cup three times then gently shaking it to signal he was satisfied. He nodded appreciatively at the lavish cushions on the couch, embroidered with sayings from Qaddafi’s Green Book.

The two men spoke mostly in Arabic, although Qaddafi understood much more English than he liked most visitors to know. Allen made the same pitch he had made in London to Qaddafi’s spy chief, adding that if they could put Lockerbie behind them, Britain would help get the United Nations sanctions removed for good.

I hear that some of your advisors want to open Libya up to Western investors and technology, Allen said.

Have they told you this? Qaddafi gave his intelligence chief a sharp look.

Allen laughed. Nothing more than they have been quoted saying in your own newspapers.

The key to getting the sanctions lifted permanently was compensation for the Pan Am 103 victims, Allen went on. I understand that you have agreed to this. But the Americans are insisting that you go a step beyond that and publicly renounce terrorism as well.

Qaddafi played along, as though he had expected this. We are victims of terrorism just like you, he said. Al Qaeda tried to kill me twice! If we agree to the principle of paying compensation for Lockerbie, it is because we want to put this file behind us.

The diplomat who recounted this exchange to me summarized it bluntly. “In other words, Qaddafi wasn’t admitting guilt. He was being practical.”
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That August, British foreign minister Mike O’Brien followed in Allen’s footsteps, traveling to Qaddafi’s summer residence in a luxuriously appointed white tent complex in the desert outside Sirte, Qaddafi’s home town. O’Brien became the point man in the Lockerbie negotiations for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, along with Assistant Secretary of State William Burns on the American side. Qaddafi appointed Foreign Minister Mohamed Abdelrahman Shalgam as the official head of his negotiating team, even though to the Americans and the Brits it was clear that his eldest son, Saif al-Islam, was really in charge. “We called the Lockerbie talks ‘the London channel,’ ” one participant said.
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In September 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sent a personal letter to Qaddafi hectoring him for supporting Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, just as international pressure was mounting on the aging dictator to resign. He also summoned Qaddafi to abandon his WMD programs, a new demand put on the table at the urging of U.S. President George W. Bush.

In December, Qaddafi sent a rambling eleven-page reply, “essentially saying, why are you picking on me?” a senior British official told me. The established nuclear powers had thirty-thousand warheads, and Israel had more. Anything Libya might have would be a drop in the bucket, Qaddafi wrote.

Blair was frustrated, and shared it with Bush. Diplomacy alone was failing to get Qaddafi to break with his deadly past. More was needed to bring him around.

On March 19, 2003, the United States, Britain, and a coalition of some forty countries launched hostilities against Iraq, beginning with a shock-and-awe air campaign that set Baghdad aglow like the land of the midnight sun. Thanks to satellite broadcasting, the air strikes were visible for all the world to see. “Qaddafi watched Baghdad burn on CNN,” one of his close advisors told me. The next day, he instructed Musa Kusa to head back to London, this time without Shalgam. Qaddafi wanted to talk to the CIA.

Qaddafi was convinced the Americans would find no active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. But, if they looked, he knew they would find one in Libya. He was worried that after Saddam Hussein, he would be next.
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CIA Director George Tenet thought it was time to take another pass at Qaddafi. But, with the war in Iraq, he wanted more than just Qaddafi’s personal enemies list. He wanted Qaddafi’s WMD programs, not just the chemical weapons, which everyone knew about. He wanted the nukes, the missiles, the whole works.

So, Tenet sent his deputy director of operations, Steve Kappes, to London to meet with the Libyans a few days after the Iraq War began. Kappes later told his favorite journalists that he single-handedly won Qaddafi over, and reported back to President Bush in person, to prevent news of the Qaddafi opening from “leaking” to neoconservatives who weren’t keen on rehabilitating the Libyan strongman. After one of his encounters with Qaddafi, Kappes said that he found himself actually starting to like the man, even though he knew he had slaughtered so many innocents.
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Tenet reported in his memoir that Kappes was the messenger of the Bush administration policy, not the architect. After speaking to the president about the opening to Qaddafi, Tenet says he briefed Kappes and “put the project in his hands and got back to worrying about Iraq.”
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For several months the two sides played poker, as Qaddafi tried to figure out how much the Americans really knew about his programs.

Behind the scenes, Qaddafi’s son and his advisors in Tripoli were bending his ear, arguing that Libya’s security would be enhanced, not reduced, by giving up the nuclear program. “We had no delivery system,” a top Qaddafi advisor explained to me. “I told the Guide, if Libya were to start a nuclear war, our missiles won’t even reach Malta. If the U.S. starts it, Libya will be erased from the map.”
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Qaddafi still held back. “At the same time they carried on negotiations with us, they continued with their WMD programs,” a British official privy to the negotiations told me.

Two months had gone by since that first meeting with the Americans. Kappes flew back to London to confer with Allen, then the two met with Kusa and Qaddafi’s son on May 14, 2003. Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi was clearly in the driver’s seat, and he was far more direct and thoughtful than the files on him suggested. He spoke rapid-fire English, honed while writing (some said, plagiarizing) his graduate thesis at the London School of Economics. Gone were the days when he would keep a pet tiger at his palatial apartment in Vienna. Tutored by Musa Kusa in the affairs of state, he was now his father’s negotiator-in-chief.
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The younger Qaddafi asked for a written guarantee of what the United States would offer if Libya gave up as-yet-unspecified WMD programs. Allen’s reply, sent one month later, was a remarkable mixture of official diplomacy and the familiar.

“Greetings to Musa from Steve and Mark. We hope that you are well,” the cable began. “Condoleez[z]a Rice has told CIA that if Libya proceeds with its proposal to destroy its WMD programmes, Libya would be welcomed back to rejoin the community of nations and all that goes with that . . .” He then outlined all the good things Britain and the United States would do for Libya to make that happen, including a visit to Qaddafi’s tent by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, something Saif al-Islam made clear his father wanted.
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Kappes traveled to Libya with Allen for his first meeting with Qaddafi later that summer, where they pressed the Libyan leader for details on his weapons programs. Qaddafi hemmed and hawed. No matter how many times they asked for specifics about his chemical weapons stockpiles, his delivery systems, and his nuclear program, Qaddafi changed the subject. Who’s going to guarantee my security if I announce that I am giving up these weapons? he asked.

Meanwhile, Libyan nuclear weapons scientists were rushing to complete their secret bomb program. It was almost as if Qaddafi wanted to have the bomb before he gave it up, so that he could get a better price.

For several years, the Libyans had been working with Pakistani bomb-maker A. Q. Khan and his far-flung Bombs R Us network of middlemen and suppliers. At the very moment Qaddafi was talking with the British and American spies, Ma’atouq Mohamed Ma’atouq (Qaddafi’s “Minister of Bad Things,” as the Americans later called him) placed an order with Khan’s business partner in Dubai, a Sri Lankan named B. S. A. Tahir. The Libyan wanted parts for several thousand advanced P-2 centrifuges, so that they could make highly enriched uranium needed for the bomb.

Tahir sent the order to a machine shop in Malaysia, Scomi Precision Engineering, which he had set up for the clandestine bomb supply line a few years earlier. What none of them knew was that an employee at Scomi, a young Swiss engineer named Urs Tinner, had dual loyalties. As soon as he saw the order come in, he phoned a contact at the CIA.

The tip-off from Tinner allowed the CIA to track production of the Libyan centrifuges, and have eyes on as they were transported from the machine shop to a shipping company, packed into containers, and loaded onto a German-owned cargo ship,
BBC China
. U.S. spy satellites tracked the ship to Dubai, and later, through the Suez Canal. Just as it steamed out into the Mediterranean, a U.S. warship, working with Italian customs, intercepted the
BBC China
and forced it into the port of Taranto, Italy. They seized the five containers of Libyan centrifuge components, labeled “used machinery,” on October 4, 2003. President George W. Bush outed the Malaysian company and others in the A. Q. Khan network in a dramatic speech at the National Defense University a year later.
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“It was a big shipment—the guts of what he needed,” a U.S. official involved in the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative told me. PSI was a newly minted program, promoted by Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John R. Bolton, to enhance cooperation among friends and allies of the United States to interdict shipments of WMD gear on the high seas. “That seizure broke the back of Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program. Without it, he would have had to go back to square one.”

Kappes had a moment of panic when news of the
BBC China
seizure became public. He told everyone on Capitol Hill (and his preferred journalists) that it risked scaring the Libyans off, blowing the whole operation. But, in fact, the opposite occurred. As with the invasion of Iraq six months earlier, the additional pressure unlocked a door in Tripoli. Suddenly, Kusa told Allen they should come to Libya immediately to make the final arrangements for the inspection team.

On October 19, 2003, Kappes and Allen returned to Tripoli along with a fifteen-member technical team of U.S. and British weapons experts to map out the scope of the Libyan program. They flew into Wheelus Air Base outside Tripoli on a CIA black aircraft, a Boeing 737 that was being used to render terrorists captured overseas to secret CIA prisons around the world.
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Saif al-Islam later told reporter Judith Miller that the initiative to give up WMD was his, not his father’s, “an astonishing assertion that no diplomat believes.”

And yet, that is very likely the case. Every step of the way, Qaddafi hesitated, stalled for time, played coy on the equipment and weapons he possessed. Saif al-Islam and other key advisors I interviewed later in Tripoli convinced Qaddafi that the game was up and the United States had him dead to rights.

Just to make sure the Libyans followed through on their pledges to open up their nuclear weapons facilities to the technical team, Kappes and Allen gave Musa Kusa a CD-ROM when they arrived in October that contained an audio recording of a February 28, 2002, discussion between Ma’atouq Ma’atouq, the Minister of Bad Things, and A. Q. Khan. It contained a candid review of Libya’s entire nuclear weapons program. All the cards were now on the table.
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Before making his historic renunciation of his WMD programs on December 19, 2003, Qaddafi sought counsel from an unusual source—Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. During a private meeting at Qaddafi’s tent, in Tripoli, he asked Kuchma how America had treated him when he gave up his nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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The final event that sealed the fate of Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program took place on December 13, 2003, along the borders of the Tigris River just south of Tikrit, Iraq when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division pulled a bearded, long-haired Saddam Hussein out of a spider hole hidden on a small farm. The Americans broadcast footage of Saddam’s capture the next day. “When Qaddafi watched a U.S. medic probe Saddam’s hair for lice and poke around his mouth, he turned white,” a Qaddafi confidant told me in Sirte.

Until Saddam’s capture, “We were still negotiating. Both sides were sparring back and forth,” a British official involved in the talks over Qaddafi’s WMD programs told me. “Things radically changed course after that.” Just six days later, Qaddafi made his public announcement that Libya was giving up its WMD programs and had invited U.S. and British experts into his country to verify the dismantling of his weapons plants.

Leading Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, later argued that the Libyan case showed that diplomacy worked better in the war on terror than force. “If diplomacy was so effective,” a Bush administration official involved in the weapons cleanup effort told me, “why did Colonel Qaddafi continue to procure equipment at the same time our diplomats were talking?”