The Libyans were certainly aware of their sway over the Europeans. In 2004, one senior Libyan official taunted the US, saying it would fail in efforts to keep Europe in line with the sanctions, for this very reason. In March 1999, Gaddafi was comfortable enough with the status quo to assert publicly that relations between Europe and Libya were already “very good.”
8
Though the UN sanctions were lifted in 1999, European Union embargoes and US sanctions were still in place. With the odor of commercial opportunities wafting from Libya, the United States found it increasingly
difficult to fight European resentment of US legislation designed to prevent the Europeans from deepening their relationships with Libya. Italy was particularly vocal in pushing the United States to reestablish relations with Libya, and for largely commercial reasons. Like France, Italy had kept up surreptitious trade with Libya during the sanctions, and Libya continued to invest in Italy. Tamoil, the downstream marketing arm of the Libyan National Oil Company (NOC), was (and continues to be) a major retail petrol presence in Italy and Switzerland.
9
Dating back to 1977, industrial conglomerate Fiat received large sums from Libyans (Gaddafi bought $415 million in Fiat stock in 1976, for which the Italians paid him $3.1 billion ten years later).
10
For European investors, the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, or ILSA, was particularly irking. Technically it mandated severe punishment for any foreign company that invested more than $40 million in the Libyan energy sector. Many of the oil-importing European countriesâFrance and Germany, in particularâfelt that this was overreaching. By 1997, even within American policy circles, conventional wisdom was that, in the words of Libya watcher Ronald Bruce St. John, ILSA “had the opposite effect [of what was intended], damaging U.S. political interests. St. John suggested that Libya's standing in United States foreign policy had “grown out of proportion to the threat that Libya posed.”
11
The inevitable breakthrough occurred in 1998, via an aperture created by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government and the Libyans, who offered as an added inducement the possibility of clarity with respect to the killing of Yvonne Fletcher, a British policewoman who had been felled by shots fired from within the Libyan embassy in London in 1984.
12
In 1998, Al Qaeda emerged as a major threat to US security interests after the bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi, followed by the bombing of the USS
Cole
in the Aden, Yemen, harbor in 2000. These acts of terror likely played a significant role in heightening the CIA's and MI6's interest in whatever intelligence Gaddafi might have to offer them. Further, Gaddafi's campaign to buy political influence and position himself as a mediator in various “new” African conflicts, in places like Somalia, South Sudan, Eritrea, and Kenya suggested to many in Western intelligence agencies that Libya could be helpful with information concerning the movements
of Al Qaeda and its affiliates in the region, and the actions of other “states and issues of concern,” whether Sudan and Darfur or the rise of the Islamic Courts Council in Somalia.
13
To access this information, Sir Mark Allen, alternately head of counterterrorism and chief for North Africa and the Middle East at the British Secret Intelligence Service, led secret talks, in particular with Gaddafi's second son Saif Al Islam, who would play a pivotal role in the US-West rapprochement, in 1999. At least one of the meetings was held at London's Travellers Club, in the presence of British diplomat Nigel Sheinwald, US counterterror and nuclear counterproliferation officers William Ehrman, David Landsman, Stephen Kappes, and Robert Joseph. The Libyans were represented by Musa Kusa, then Gaddafi's head of external intelligence (himself suspected of involvement in Pan Am 103), and former General Secretary of the General Peoples' Committee (Prime Minister) Abdulati Al Obeidi.
14
The United States and the UK were also newly interested in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), after one of its members, Anas el Libi (Nazih Abdul Hamid al Raghie's nom de guerre) was linked to the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, and another member, Abu Layth al Libi, left to join Al Qaeda leadership.
15
Former senior Clinton officials said they doubted a direct link between the new interest in whatever information that Libya might have on Al Qaeda and the embassy bombings, but that it “was not impossible.”
16
Even so, as one senior Clinton administration official put it, the US “continued to maintain a healthy skepticism as to the possibility that Gaddafi could be reformed.” In 1997, the newly appointed Secretary of State Madeline Albright and national security adviser Samuel (Sandy) Berger seemed favorable to a reexamination of US policy toward Libya.
A fundamental shift in US policy context came in 1998, as key members of Clinton's cabinet and State Department officials expressed the view that continued maintenance of sanctions on Libya would be a costly and ultimately losing battle. In light of increasing pressure from the families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing, among others, the officials argued that time was right to test Gaddafi's resolve. The underlying goal was, in the words of Martin Indyk, then assistant secretary for Near East affairs, to “attempt to graduate a rogue state,” and then use it as a model for the conversion of other problematic states, such as Iran.
17
The British, led by Tony Blair and MI6, had by then already started to vigorously lobby the US and the UN for easing of sanctions on Libya. King Hussein of Jordan and
other moderate Arab leaders, including Hosni Mubarak, had expressed to Clinton their view that the sanctions had served their purpose. But it fell to Saudi Arabia, in the person of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to midwife a new US-Libya engagement.
Gaddafi had sought to involve the Saudis in mediation early on for the influence the kingdom had with the Americans. Rihab Massoud, then political minister at the Saudi embassy in Washington, described the Saudi ambitions: “Anytime we can help an Arab country is our advantage. Domestically, this is during the time when our Prince took over from the King who had been ill [King Fahad]. This was a new introduction to world issues. Also, things were going really badly in the Middle East peace process. We needed something to work.”
18
Rumors abounded that Gaddafi had promised Prince Bandar a hefty sum for his efforts.
19
Another regional power that Gaddafi had lobbied fiercely was Nelson Mandela's South Africa. Gaddafi had funded Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), and the two countries had shared interests on the continent. Indeed, the Saudis and the South Africans would work in concert; there was significant reason to believe that by late 1998, this alliance had tacit approval of at least the UK, and likely the US. In her study on the South AfricaâSaudi Arabia mediation, author Lyn Boyd Judson argues that the Western leadership sanctioned Mandela's involvement for its usefulness in quieting expected objections from the left in both the UK and the US. Massoud told Judson in 2004, “We needed someone. What better symbol than Mandela. He is the epitome of morality.”
20
Mandela's own motives were described variously as loyalty to Gaddafi for supporting the ANC in its darkest moments and a policy of purposeful, postapartheid evenhandedness in international affairs. There were those who suggested that exigencies of Mandela's upcoming 1999 presidential campaign, that is, Libyan cash, also played a role.
21
According to Judson, these relationships were not fully known to President Clinton until he was “tag-teamed” by Bandar and Mandela in March 1998. Mandela's chief of staff Jakes Gerwel later said the South Africans were “surprised to find how little Clinton knew about this matter, i.e., the South African-Saudi-Libyan dealings, and what exactly Gaddafi had agreed to regarding turning over the Lockerbie suspects, by this point.”
22
He attributed this to the compartmentalized, multilayered nature of the US government bureaucracies and the fact that Sandy Berger had neglected to brief Clinton.
23
In 1998, Secretary Albright successfully pitched to President Clinton a “take it or leave it” offer for the Libyans. The main preconditions for dialogue with the Libyans were tripartite: an end to state-sponsored terrorism, acceptable compensation for the Lockerbie victims, and agreement on a mechanism for bringing the accused to justice. Since Libya had already credibly wound down its support for terror since 1994, all that remained was addressing the Lockerbie issue.
24
Less blatant conditions included abandonment of efforts to lobby other states for the lifting of UN sanctions, and a verifiable closing of the military training camps Libya had been hosting on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other radical Palestinian groups.
25
Additional concerns included Gaddafi's attitude toward Israel and the Israeli conflict (Gaddafi, for many years an in line with his early Pan Arab position, had been extremely critical of Israel, and, more or less independent of this, had written a treatise on Israeli-Palestinian relations, advocating a one-state solution he called “Isratine”). On various occasions he had called both the Palestinians and the Israelis “idiots.”
26
The US was also concerned about Libya's ambitions in Africa, where Gaddafi continued to stir trouble. Interestingly, Gaddafi's anti-Israel rhetoric did diminish markedly in the wake of direct negotiations with the US.
The US insisted that talks occur in absolute secrecy. It did not want the British to hijack negotiations for their own political and economic purposes; Clinton feared any leakage would hurt the Democrats' prospects in the coming presidential election. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were not at the forefront, as the US did not believe that Libya's nuclear weapons or its chemical arsenal posed an immediate threat. Further, since the State Department and the CIA did not share information on Libya's WMD capacity, different agencies had different views of the underlying threat.
27
To the surprise of US negotiators, Libya swiftly responded substantively to all of their requests.
28
“The stance of the Libyans,” Assistant Secretary of State Indyk recalls, was one of “we will jump, you tell us how high.”
29
A group of commentators (many of whom later became fixtures within the so-called Republican neoconservative movement) immediately lashed out. John Bolton, the cantankerous, unruly-haired future US ambassador to the UN, accused the administration of “giving in” to Gaddafi.
From his perch at the American Enterprise Institute, he objected to the administration's assurances that it would not allow a trial of Megrahi and Fhima to “undermine” Gaddafi's regime. Those assurances were embodied in a series of concessions on how the suspects could be interrogated in custody, effectively “shielding” Gaddafi from criminal liability. Bolton also took issue with US agreement to the Libyan request that the UN would solely oversee prison conditions for the accused. As Bolton wrote, “this implicit admission that Scottish jails are not up to, say, Libyan standards is breathtaking.”
30
In May 1999, the Clinton administration, represented by Assistant Secretary Indyk and his deputy, David Welch (who held Indyk's position under George W. Bush), began direct negotiations with the Libyans. Indyk was the point person for three meetings at a Saudi guest house in Geneva, Switzerland. Prince Bandar presided over the meetings. Musa Kusa, then head of Gaddafi's external security apparatus, served as the lead negotiator, while the number-two Libyan delegate was regime insider (and former prime minister) Abdelati Al Obeidi. Several US officials described Kusa as looking like the “impersonation of evil.” Others said he looked like a university professor, a bit more distinguished than many of his colleagues who “looked perpetually as if they had just rolled out of bed.”
31
At the first meeting, Indyk was impressed that the Libyans were negotiating seriously and reported as much to the White House. However, the second meeting went less well. Around this time, Gaddafi had made public remarks critical of Clinton, to which the US interlocutors objected strenuously, telling their Libyan counterparts that such comments were not only unhelpful, but could end the dialogue. In response, Kusa reportedly threw up his hands and said, “There are limits to what I can do.” By the third meeting, the Libyans had returned to their initial conciliatory mode and agreed to more active collaboration on intelligence issues.
Gaddafi's Lockerbie Tactics: A Foreshadowing
For all Gaddafi's powers of persuasion and manipulation, there would still have to be consequences for his support of terror. So the Lockerbie families helped to create pressure and context for both civil and criminal trials of Megrahi and Fhima. Even when many (including in the government) saw the notion of seeking a trial of the two suspects as legally impossible and undesired, the families and their lawyers pressed for and won an
amendment to the 1976 Sovereign Immunity Act, governing under what conditions a foreign state may be sued in US courts. The amendment set the stage for a civil trial to proceed, which it did in 2002.
The families' maneuvers helped pressure Gaddafi to agree to a variant of the plan he had proposed in 1993, according to which the Libyan suspects would be tried by a panel of Scottish judges. True to this framework, Gaddafi turned over both Megrahi and Fhima in April 1999, in the process addressing one of the fundamental conditions for the lifting of UN sanctions. Along the way, he had attempted to buy influence in Washington by approaching a series of lawyers to mediate a comprehensive settlement. He then undermined them by trying to pit the families against each other, attempting to bribe them or otherwise disrupt the process.