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FROM TERRORIST TO FRIEND
Itâs hard to believe that a U.S. president could once look to Libya as a success story. To most Americans, Libya has become synonymous with chaos, a wild and dangerous place where, as in Iraq, American dreams of democracy went to die. President Obamaâs hesitation to use U.S. military might against Qaddafi in early 2011 prompted his political opponents to accuse him of leading from behind, even though U.S. aircraft, U.S. airmen, and U.S. taxpayers bore the brunt of the NATO-led no-fly zone over Libya during the first few months of the conflict, at a cost to taxpayers of $550 million for the first two weeks alone.
The debacle in Benghazi and the image of U.S. weakness it projected to the world only heightened this sense of futility. It prompted at least one prospective Republican presidential hopeful, Senator Rand Paul, to argue in favor of a broad American pullback from around the world and a major military downsizing. It also will undoubtedly become a campaign issue should former secretary of state Hillary Clinton enter the 2016 race.
As they contemplated a similar U.S. military involvement in Syriaâs bloody civil war over the summer of 2013, politicians of both parties became increasingly worried that U.S. military aid could fall into the hands of jihadi terrorist groups, such as the ones who benefited from the U.S.-Qatari arms pipeline to the Libyan rebels who ousted Qaddafi.
But one U.S. president could look to Qaddafiâs Libya as a success story. And itâs a story that has never been fully told.
THE MAD DOG OF TRIPOLI
For several weeks in March 1986, U.S. and Libyan warships and combat jets had been dancing toward war in the Gulf of Sidra, the giant bay stretching from Misrata, just outside of Tripoli, all the way to Benghazi. Qaddafi drew a straight line across the Mediterranean between those two points and claimed everything south of it as Libyan territorial waters. He dared anyoneâmeaning the United Statesâto cross this âline of death.â
Qaddafiâs exclusion zone included waters seventy miles from the nearest Libyan coastline, far beyond the twelve-nautical-mile limit recognized as the international standard. President Ronald Reagan asserted the right of the United States and its NATO allies to conduct naval operations in international waters and on March 23, 1986, ordered three U.S. carrier battle groupsâUSS America, USS Coral Sea, and USS Saratogaâwith 225 aircraft and some thirty warships, to cross Qaddafiâs double-dare line. It was a formidable armada only a madman would try to oppose.
U.S. warships crossed the line of death twice that year without incident. However, on March 24, 1986, the Libyans responded, sending missile boats and MiG-23 Flogger and MiG-25 Foxbat fighters jets to counter the Americans. In every engagement, the Americans blew away their Libyan counterparts or forced them to flee before the shooting began. The Americans sunk two of Qaddafiâs French-built Combattante II missile boats, a Soviet-built corvette, and killed thirty-five Libyan sailors. Qaddafi was humiliated and vowed revenge, publicly calling on Arabs everywhere to kill Americans.1
Operation Prairie Fire appeared to be a resounding success, projecting precisely the image of a strong America that President Reagan had worked so hard to build after the âmalaiseâ of the Carter years.
Just one week later, Qaddafi took his revenge. America was still vulnerable, and he proved it with cowardly skill.
On April 2, 1986, a member of the Abu Nidal terrorist group, which was then based in Libya and armed by Qaddafi, placed a bomb made with Semtex H plastic explosive under the seat of TWA flight 840 as it was on approach to the Athens airport on the short flight from Rome. Because of the relatively low altitude at the time of the explosion, the plane did not explode. But four passengersâall Americansâwere sucked out of the hole in the fuselage. Pilot Pete Peterson was welcomed as a hero for his skill in safely landing his badly damaged aircraft at the Athens airport. While Qaddafi quickly announced he had nothing to do with the attack, it was well known that the Abu Nidal organization were his protĂ©gĂ©s.
Just three days after TWA 840, a bomb exploded in the early morning hours at La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, Germany, a favorite haunt of American soldiers. Sergeant Kenneth T. Ford, twenty-one, and a twenty-nine-year-old Turkish woman, Nermin Hannay, were sitting near the disc jockeyâs booth and died instantly. Sergeant James E. Goins, twenty-five, died two months later of his injuries. Another 230 people were wounded, including seventy-nine American servicemen, many of whom lost limbs or were permanently disabled. The terrorist had placed a bomb filled with shrapnel and two kilograms of Semtex beneath a table by the dance floor, then left the scene before it went off. That was ten times the amount of the deadly plastic explosive used on TWA 840.
President Ronald Reagan pointed the finger at Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the outlandish Libyan dictator who portrayed himself as a one-man army out to defeat American and Zionist âimperialism.â This was the same Qaddafi who often elicited smilesâeven smirksâbecause of his flair for the exotic, dressing alternately in designer capes and Bedouin hats, or in outlandish military uniforms that bore a greater resemblance to Sergeant Pepper than to Sergeant Shaft.
Reagan wasnât amused when he took the podium at a White House press conference on April 9, 1986. Notorious left-wing reporter Helen Thomas, who was born in Lebanon and later in life revealed herself to be a rabid anti-Semite, asked Reagan if U.S. policies werenât to blame for the attacks on America.
âWell, we know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution,â Reagan said. âAnd where we figure in that, I donât know. Maybe weâre just the enemy becauseâitâs a little like climbing Mount Everestâbecause weâre here. But thereâs no question but that he has singled us out more and more for attack, and weâre aware of that.â2
What Reagan couldnât say was that the NSA had intercepted communications between Qaddafi himself and intelligence officers working out of the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, ordering them to carry out the disco attack in a manner âto cause maximum and indiscriminate casualties.â3
Less than one week later, Reagan ordered air strikes on Libya, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, widely seen as an attempt to assassinate Qaddafi. In addition to Libyan military barracks, air defense sites and air bases in Tripoli and Benghazi, U.S. jets hit a residential compound used by Qaddafi and his family, killing his three-year-old adopted daughter, Hana, and wounding his youngest son, Khamis. The boy grew up to command the notorious Khamis Brigade, the best-trained and best-equipped unit in the Libyan armed forces, responsible for several military victories and atrocities against rebel forces in the 2011 civil war.4
Contrary to Reaganâs expectation, the air strikes didnât put the âmad dog of the Middle Eastâ out of the terrorism business. Just four days before Christmas 1988, as Reagan was preparing to hand over the White House to President-elect George H. W. Bush, Pan Am Flight 103 departed Heathrow Airport headed for New York. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, a block of Semtex plastic explosive hidden in a suitcase ripped a giant hole out of the Boeing 747, splitting the plane into pieces. The cockpit of the Maid of the Seas landed virtually intact near a churchyard in Lockerbie, Scotland, and became an iconic image. One wing of the aircraft, filled with jet fuel, burst into flames on impact, killing eleven people on the ground. With the 259 passengers and crew, 189 of them American, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on America since Iran hit the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in October 1983.
While the CIA and other U.S. government agencies initially suspected Iran of carrying out the Lockerbie attack, the discovery of a fragment of the detonator used in the bomb ultimately allowed prosecutors to trace it through the Swiss manufacturer to a batch sold to a Libyan intelligence operative.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, a new pro-Western government led by playwright VĂĄclav Havel came to power in Czechoslovakia. Havel startled the world in March 1990 by announcing that his communist predecessors had exported one thousand tons of Semtex plastic explosive to Libya. Here was an opportunity to unlock some of the Soviet Blocâs best-kept secrets, so I traveled to Prague to find out more. I wasnât disappointed.
Although the actual amount turned out to be closer to seven hundred tons, it was still enough to keep terrorists busy for the next one hundred fifty years, as Havel said. Officials at Omnipol, the arms export emporium of the former communist regime, told me that Libya accounted for 98 percent of all their Semtex sales. Qaddafi may have used some of the explosives to blast huge tunnels for his Great Man-Made River project, the ostensible end use for the sales. But he also re-exported the deadly plastic explosive to every terrorist group imaginable, including the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Ahmed Jibrilâs PFLP-GC (a prime suspect in Pan Am 103), the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF) of George Ibrahim Abdallah, the Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the Organization of 15 May-Abu Ibrahim (based in Iraq), and Yasser Arafatâs praetorian guard, Force 17.5
Crippling international sanctions and a travel ban imposed by the United Nations in reprisal for the Pan Am 103 attack kept ordinary Libyans in a box throughout the 1990s, but they did little to keep Colonel Qaddafi at bay. He continued to provide arms, plastic explosives, money, and training to terrorist groups around the world and, in the late 1990s, turned his sights to acquiring a nuclear weapon.
For three successive American presidentsâReagan, Bush 41, and ClintonâQaddafi remained a deadly pariah, who seemed to revel in his âmad dogâ image.
After the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, all that began to change.
THE FALCONER
In a way, it was Osama bin Laden who first pushed Qaddafi toward the West. But it took a fellow falconer to close the deal.
Libyans who had gone to Afghanistan to fight the great jihad against the Soviet Union came home to wage jihad against Qaddafi in the 1990s. In 1994, they stormed a prison in Benghazi to liberate fellow Islamists and declared their allegiance to bin Laden. After nearly eighteen months of running gun battles with regime forces, they announced the formation of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in September 1995. Their initial communiquĂ©, issued by Libyan exiles granted political asylum in London, called Qaddafiâs rule âan apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almightyâ and declared its overthrow to be âthe foremost duty after faith in God.â6
In February 1996, an LIFG member threw a bomb beneath Qad-dafiâs motorcade that killed several of his bodyguards. A former MI5 officer, David Shayler, later told Britainâs Observer newspaper that British intelligence financed the assassination attempt âto the tune of $160,000.â7 In November, another LIFG operative tossed a grenade at Qaddafi while he was visiting the desert town of Brak.
Qaddafi the terrorist had become a target of bin Ladenâs terrorist gang. So when the 9/11 attacks hit America, Qaddafi condemned bin Laden publicly, asked Libyans to donate blood, and said the United States was justified to retaliate.
In his account of Qaddafiâs turnaround, former CIA director George Tenet called Qaddafiâs 9/11 statement âan interesting sign,â and felt it was a good time to revive an intelligence back channel established two years earlier by the second in command of the CIAâs counterterrorism center, Ben Bonk.8
To get the ball rolling, the White House quietly designated the LIFG as an international terrorist organization on September 25, 2001, and froze their assets in the United States. In mid-October, Tenet dispatched Bonk to London for a face-to-face meeting with Qaddafiâs intelligence chief, Musa Kusa, at the home of Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan. The Libyan handed over information on LIFG members that helped the United States identify several top deputies to Osama bin Laden when they were picked up in counterterrorism raids in Pakistan and Egypt later that year.9
However, when Bonk moved on to another CIA job a few months later, the back channel languished. It fell to a lifelong British spy named Mark Allen to revive it.
Allen was head of the counterterrorism division of MI6 (formally known as the Special Intelligence Service), putting him a notch higher in the bureaucracy than Bonk. Allen had learned Arabic at Oxford decades earlier and spent a summer as a young man crisscrossing the Jordanian desert on a camel he had purchased at a local souk. Sitting on his haunches sipping bitter coffee with Bedouins, he fell in love with their simple lifestyle. At twenty-eight, he published a book on falconry with a preface by Wilfred Thesiger, a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia. He later went to hone his language skills at Britainâs fabled spy school in the mountains above Beirut, the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. How many American spies could boast of such training?10
On what he claimed was a personal initiative, Allen began talking to Musa Kusa separately after that initial meeting at Prince Bandarâs London mansion.
Allen knew that Qaddafi was seeking an exit from sanctions, which had been suspended, but not removed, two years earlier when Libya handed over two intelligence agents found guilty in a Scottish court for their role in the Pan Am 103 attack. And he knew that Musa Kusa had Qaddafiâs ear. So, he invited him one afternoon in late 2001 to the Travellers Club, a posh London watering hole frequented by diplomats, millionaires, and spies.
The 9/11 attacks have changed the world, Allen began. Thatâs why my American colleague sought you out. Itâs no longer possible to conduct murder and mayhem and think you can retreat back home and no one will find you. Look whatâs happening to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
If you want this relationship to develop, youâve got to ...
