Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (4 page)

The timeline of Qaddafi’s concessions is crystal clear. The Lockerbie negotiations, which dragged on for a dozen years, were all about his economy. The WMD talks, which took nine months, were about his survival. Getting Qaddafi to renounce terrorism and give up his WMD programs was a huge victory for George W. Bush. Even today, very few Americans know just how successful power diplomacy can be.

THE VERIFIER

The woman put in charge of verifying that Qaddafi really came clean was an old hand at arms control. Paula DeSutter likes to tell the story of coming home from college to her native Alabama one summer and telling her grandmother that she was studying arms control.

“What’s a matter, honey? Don’t you like guns?”

“No, Grams. I don’t like
big
guns,” she said.

During the Cold War, DeSutter worked at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and helped draft the State Department’s annual verification and compliance report. President George W. Bush brought her back in 2002 and made her assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance. She was sworn in that August and was thrilled to be back. They were going to kick butt.

Over the Christmas holiday, she and her team of verifiers put together a conceptual plan of the sites, the people, and the equipment they needed to see in Libya, in order to confirm that Qaddafi’s stated intention of giving up his WMD programs was for real.

On New Year’s Day 2004, she flew with Undersecretary of State John Bolton to London to resolve outstanding issues with their British counterparts before they sent the action team down to Libya.

There were moments of comedy mixed with the drama. Because U.S. laws prohibited any economic exchanges with Libya—even by U.S. government officials—one of her lawyers had to “bust a piggybank” at the U.S. embassy in London to get cash to buy plane tickets for the group. Once in Libya, American Express refused to cash their Travelers Cheques. Although they had gone to Libya to dismantle Qaddafi’s secret nuclear weapons program and to take possession of his missiles and chemical weapons, AmEx wanted a special license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control so they could spend money.

Two weeks later, team members had packed Libya’s top-secret nuclear bomb designs into an oversized briefcase and flew back to Dulles Airport in Washington, where they had expected to discreetly deliver their precious cargo to DeSutter and her verifiers out in the parking lot.

Instead, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham sent plainclothes guards wearing bomber jackets and packing heat to the international arrivals area, who greeted them in front of incoming passengers. It was definitely not discreet, DeSutter thought. The big black case was festooned with IAEA and Energy Department high-security seals. As they frog-marched her men out to the parking lot, they looked like a bunch of kooks out of
Dr. Strangelove
, she remembered thinking.

The sophisticated bomb designs were written in English and in Chinese. They were part of the nuclear bomb package that the inimitable Dr. Khan had sold the Libyans. As the verifiers went over the files, they realized that Dr. Khan had most likely sold the same package to the Iranians as well. It was so obvious that they hadn’t seen it until now.

Iran and Libya had been feeding from the same trough, one of DeSutter’s top aides told me. The Iranians would be guilty of proliferation malpractice if they didn’t get the bomb design, too.
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As DeSutter told Congress that March:

We removed several containers of uranium hexafluoride and centrifuges purchased from [the A. Q. Khan] network for the purpose of enriching uranium. We received detailed descriptions of the Libyan missile research and development activities. We removed five Scud-C missile guidance sets, including their gyroscopes. And we began assisting the Libyans in the preparation of their Chemical Weapons Convention declaration, and witnessed the first destruction of chemical munitions when three chemical munitions were destroyed.
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But was Qaddafi’s conversion the real thing? Or was he just playing with the United States, trying to save himself from Saddam’s fate? I had the opportunity to accompany a congressional delegation led by Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) to Libya in March 2004 to find out. There I met with Qaddafi, his senior aides, and top British, U.S., and European diplomats and learned how the United States ultimately convinced Qaddafi not just to renounce terrorism, but also to give up his clandestine weapons program.

THE STIFF

Qaddafi had summoned his American visitors to the new capital in Sirte, his tribal homeland, where he planned to address the People’s Congress. He liked to pretend that he held no position in the Libyan government; that he was just the “Guide” of the revolution, a behind-the-scenes grey eminence. That allowed him to disown his own government when it was convenient; and to surprise them, by taking them in a whole new direction no one had expected. As we soon learned, it could be quite a spectacle.

The seven American representatives were seated in the front row of the giant hall of the Libyan National People’s Congress, just to the right of the rostrum. As I surveyed the six hundred members of his rubber-stamp parliament, I also saw some unusual faces: an Iranian cleric with his retinue of trim-bearded intelligence agents, come no doubt to make sure Qaddafi didn’t spill the beans on their involvement in the Lockerbie attack; visitors from black Africa in their colorful tribal costumes; Central Asians in a variety of headgear; and Chinese in expensive European business suits.

Suddenly the rustling in the great hall stopped. From out of nowhere, a half-dozen Qaddafi girls appeared and took up position at all the exits. They were the Guide’s famous personal security detail, trained in martial arts, and they alone would have been worth the trip. Gone were the blond East Germans Qaddafi used to employ as his personal bodyguard. Today’s Qaddafi girls were Arab and black African, and wore camo and red berets. As I looked closer, I saw that all of them had fingernails at least an inch long, coated in a deep purple gloss that looked like congealed blood.

As a foreign diplomat remarked to me later, there was a design behind the ghoulishness. Because everyone in the hall had turned their attention to the unusual spectacle of the Qaddafi girls, no one saw the Guide himself whisk in from the wings. The next thing we knew, he was seated at the table up on the stage and was talking to us in a halting whisper.

The performance, I learned later, was vintage Qaddafi, but with a twist. Instead of a long, rambling diatribe denouncing America and the West, Qaddafi embarked on a lengthy justification of his decision to abandon terrorism and embrace the West. And his message was unequivocal: Yesterday’s enemies were about to become Libya’s friends—or so he hoped.

“At first, I was just listening to the speech,” California Democrat Susan Davis told me afterward, “but what he was saying was so amazing that I started writing it down so I could report to my constituents. I took twenty-four pages of notes.”

It was a bizarre performance by any standard. For the first thirty minutes or so, Qaddafi hardly spoke above a whisper. The words we heard through our headsets appeared to be rambling, almost incoherent. He talked about Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Socrates, comparing himself to each. After he had warmed up, he launched into a brutally self-critical account of Libya’s past support for terrorist movements, and announced that those days were gone.

Libya had helped the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the African National Congress. Now all of them had made their separate peace with their former enemies, leaving Libya behind to fight on. “Are we more Irish than the Irish?” he said. “Are we more Palestinian than the Palestinians . . . ? How can [Arafat] enter the White House and we not improve our relations with the United States?”

It was time to turn the page, he said. And, most remarkably, at least to all the foreigners present, was the Guide’s apparent willingness to take the blame on himself. “No one separated Libya from the world community,” Qaddafi insisted. “Libya voluntarily separated itself from others” by its actions. “No one has imposed sanctions on us or punished us. We have punished ourselves.” The irony, Qaddafi stated, was that “all these things were done for the sake of others.”

And on it went for another half hour or more.

That evening, he gave the first detailed public account of the reasons behind the surprise announcement he had made on December 19, 2003, that Libya was abandoning its previously secret nuclear weapons program. “Yes, there was such a program,” he said, to the astonishment of many people in the room. Libya chose to declare it to the United States and Britain and seek their help in dismantling it “because it is in our own interest and for our own security.” At another point, he said, “We got rid of it. It was a waste of time, it cost too much money.”

After the speech, Representative Weldon was ecstatic. He had promised his congressional colleagues a show and, by golly, they got their money’s worth. “We were part of history tonight,” he told reporters who were there. “Colonel Qaddafi’s statements were unequivocal. There were no ifs, ands, or buts. It reminds me of the sea change that occurred when the Berlin Wall came down, or when Yeltsin stood on top of a tank in front of the Russian White House. As startling as it is to us, we’d better take advantage of it.”

After the speech, Weldon and his colleagues were shown into a private reception hall to greet the Libyan leader. Qaddafi was wearing one of his typical outlandish uniforms: black silk shirt, white suit with wide lapels, festooned with U.S.-style battle decorations across the chest. He whispered something to his chief of staff, Nouri al-Mismari, who then pointed to the pin Weldon was wearing with the American and green Libyan flag intertwined. Curt took it off and was about to hand it to him when Mismari whispered in his ear. “Pin it on him,” he said. As he did so, everyone started taking pictures.

Qaddafi was beaming like a six-year-old with his first bicycle.

THE SENATOR

The next morning Weldon and his delegation were joined by Senator Joe Biden, who flew into Sirte on his own Gulfstream 5. Curt met him on the tarmac, then briefed him on the extraordinary events of the previous twenty-four hours in the airport VIP lounge. Biden was accompanied by a reporter, Daniel Klaidman. Qaddafi’s men called him, “Mr.
Newsweek
.”

Shortly after 1:30 PM, we were all brought to Qaddafi’s tent complex. This time, Qaddafi was wearing his Bedouin outfit: a thick dark brown cape made of stiff wool, and a black sheepskin cap. He grunted as he greeted Biden and the rest of us in the tiny room. He seemed much taller than he had been last night. Elevator shoes? It was also clear that he understood English, as he responded to Biden’s small talk before his translator had finished the Arabic. I dubbed him “The Stiff” that afternoon because of his demeanor.

Biden came in his preachy mode, prepared to talk about the requirements of American-style democracy, not just Qaddafi’s apparent new opening to the West. At one point, he asked Qaddafi if the People’s Congress had the power to overthrow him. The translator gulped, but Biden insisted that he render it word for word. Qaddafi didn’t flinch. “Of course not, because I am the Founder of the Revolution.”

“Gee, I’d like to have your job security,” Biden said. For the first time, Qaddafi laughed.

After Qaddafi emerged from his one-on-one with Biden, a
Washington Post
reporter asked him if he was planning to allow Islamic organizations to operate in Libya. The answer was not just no, but hell, no.

“We don’t want to involve Allah, or God, in material affairs like infrastructure and sewage. He has nothing to do with that,” Qaddafi said. “We need technology for infrastructure. We are talking about sewage, water, electricity, housing. Allah is another thing. How can we involve Allah in such things of daily life?”

I asked him about Lockerbie. “Last night you said you were going to tell the Libyan people the whole truth. Were there others involved—other countries involved—besides the two people taken to the Scottish court?”

“Lockerbie is buried and we don’t want to dig it out,” he said. “We’re finished with Lockerbie. It’s something of the past.”

Later that evening, at a dinner hosted for Biden by the governor of Sirte and local notables, the future vice president related more of his exchange with Qaddafi, adding a comment no one paid much attention to at the time.

“Qaddafi raised the issue of the double standard. He could understand the United States getting rid of Saddam Hussein, who had killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. ‘But you will not do that with the Saudis,’ he said. ‘And you should.’

“I think that is a legitimate criticism, that we selectively support democracy. And I say to my friends in Saudi Arabia, you are becoming too heavy a burden for us to carry. I’m ready to cut a deal with Russia for the six percent of our oil supplies that we import from you. I’m not going to be blamed for your lack of openness. It just breeds anger and hatred of America,” Biden added.

For all the changes Qaddafi put in place over the next seven years, he never held elections, which, in Biden’s view, were the hallmark of a democracy. The breathtaking arrogance and naïveté of that approach would contribute heavily to the decision made by the Obama White House to cast Qaddafi aside despite all of the benefits his newfound alliance with America had brought.

INSIDE THE WIRE

The U.S. officials in charge of eliminating Qaddafi’s WMD factories and materials were stunned by the cooperation the Libyans offered them. Some of the verifiers reported back to Paula DeSutter that their experience on the ground had been sobering. “Many of the places they showed us we had never heard of before,” one of them told me. “It shows you the limits of international arms inspections. Without Qaddafi’s cooperation, we never would have found most of this stuff.” It also showed the limits of U.S. intelligence collection against hard targets such as Libya or Iran.