Until the end, Gaddafi tried to water down the basic conditions governing the trial and rendition, whether by substituting a panel of international judges for the potentially less sympathetic Scottish judges or by stipulating that the sanctions be lifted the moment a deal on extradition had been signed, not after the delivery of the suspects. Gaddafi's main concern was clearly that the trial not be used to undermine his regime.
Gaddafi's concerns appeared to revolve around two primary issues. First, there was no telling what information might be gleaned from the suspects themselves once they had been handed over, or whether the US and other parties would seek further consequences as a result. Second, on the home front, there remained the possibility of domestic consequences if Gaddafi appeared weak on the issue of rendition. Gaddafi got a major concession on the first point from UN Secretary Kofi Annan, who provided him with a sealed letter allegedly assuring him the proceedings would not be used to justify regime change. Further arrangements were agreed to whereby the suspects would not be exposed to those who might try to gain testimony from them that might implicate Gaddafi personally.
To protect himself at home, Gaddafi was said to have struck a deal with at least one prominent dissident to use his good offices with the Megaraha tribe to acquiesce to the transfer of Megrahi (against the protestations of former RCC member Abdelsalam Al Jelloud, a member of the tribe).
32
By March 2000, George W. Bush was in the White House, and Libya matters appeared to be temporarily frozen while the administration addressed a long list of more urgent matters. One early action President Bush did take was to lift the ban on American citizens traveling to Libya that had been in place since 1981. American oil executives could now
pick up discussions with the Libyans about so-called “standstill” agreements, according to which the facilities and concessions of US oil companies previously operating in Libya had been frozen from 1986, the year President Reagan had severed all economic ties with Libya for a period of approximately twenty years. Indyk broached lifting the ban on US citizen travel in 1999 and was told by more senior State Department officials it could not happen as long as the Lockerbie issue remained unresolved.
33
In light of the shifting policy, in early 2004, the State Department sent four consular officials to Libya for a single day to assess safety conditions.
34
In April 2001, a Department of Energy task force recommended a comprehensive review of sanctions against Libya; about the same time the
Washington Post
published an article arguing that the US would do well to reevaluate its relations with Libya.
35
In the summer of 2001, prior to 9/11, the State Department ceased referring to Libya and Iran as “rogue states,” instead using the term “state of concern.”
36
Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William J. Burns met with Libyan chief of intelligence Kusa in London in October 2001âone month after 9/11âto discuss the future of US-Libya relations.
37
President Bush omitted Libya from his 2002 State of the Union “Axis of Evil” speech on January 29, 2002 (naming Iran, Iraq, and North Korea). Between 2000 and 2002, the official attitude toward the Gaddafi regime had transformed dramatically.
Settlement of the Lockerbie claims proceeded on track during these developments. While the financial terms were still not definitively settled, the amount seemed to be a staggering $2.7 billion. Though many at the State Department found this payment “undignified,” clearly the agreement itself was in alignment with the plan that the department had laid out for Gaddafi during the Geneva talks. Authors Allan Gerson and Jerry Adler said,
If Kaddafi were to offer to settle the families' claims on terms acceptable to themâwhich meant a sum large enough to be considered punitiveâand set up an escrow account in Switzerland for that purpose, the administration might have the cover it needed for a comprehensive settlement, consistent with the UN Security Council resolutions.
38
According to senior administration officials, the State Department took no position on the formula worked out by the two sides, which in effect tied payment of three separate installments of the $10-million-per-family
award to specific advances in Libya-US relations: Libya would make an initial payment of $4 million to each family upon full lifting of the UN sanctions; a second tranche of $4 million upon the lifting of secondary (US) economic sanctions and normalization of US-Libya relations; and a third payment upon the removal of Libya from the US list of state sponsors of terrorismâthe final barrier between Libya and acceptance by the international community. There were specific dates by which the US government, not a direct party to the agreement, had to meet each of these conditions.
The US may have felt it had scored a major victory. However, Gaddafi and his advisers may have been the ones cheering. Despite the vehemence with which he objected to the terms of the trial and tried to dodge payment of any damages that might imply guilt, the provisions of this agreement implicitly forced the US government to take certain actions in service to the bilateral relationship. In effect, the agreement turned the Lockerbie families, from the principal impediment to lifting sanctions and normalization of relations, into a strong force in favor of resolution. Even so, many of the families said they saw the process as a reckoning. For them, it was a means of producing closure and bringing Gaddafi to justice, in the absence of any other means.
39
In an interview with Fareed Zakaria in 2011, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that he believed the Lockerbie families' pressure was the factor that led the US to “mistakenly accelerate the process of peace making.”
40
Nevertheless, the Libyan regime saw itself as the ultimate beneficiary of these machinations.
In the end, the UN registered its approval of Libya's decision to remit the two accused to the agreed-on venue in UN Security Council Resolution 1192, strongly encouraging Libya to comply with previous resolutions. On January 31, 2001, after a trial that lasted nine months, a panel of three judges acquitted Fhima and convicted Megrahi of 270 counts of murder, sentencing him to life in Glasgow's Barlinnie prison. The fact that only one of the two accused was convicted and on virtually identical evidence seemed to some like political influence.
On August 20, 2003, the Libyan government accepted responsibility (though not guilt) for Lockerbie and agreed to pay US$2.7 billion to the victims' families.
41
On December 19, 2003, almost four years after the lifting of UN sanctions, Gaddafi announced Libya's “voluntary” abandonment of its WMD program, according to a script that appears to have largely been drafted by the UK and US intelligence agencies.
42
The Al Qaeda attacks against the US on September 11, 2001, fundamentally changed the dynamics of the Bush administration and forced a radical re-focusing of US foreign policy. With respect to Libya, however, 9/11 simply accelerated (if substantially) forces that were already in play.
The doctrine that emerged to guide George W. Bush's subsequent actions was one of “preemption, military primacy, new multilateralism, and the spread of democracy.”
43
Gaddafi knew when to insert the proper emphasis: “We have been terrorized by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe,” he proclaimed.
44
There had been tremendous blowback from the fact that the US was unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraqâor a direct link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In this context, Libya became doubly usefulâif we recall, when US-UK-Libya discussions began in the late 1990s, the US was virtually unconcerned about Libya's WMD program, with the exception of its chemical weapons capacity, and even this was not the primary area of focus. If, however, Gaddafi could be portrayed as having been frightened enough by what was happening in Iraq to unilaterally surrender his weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration could claim the Iraq operations, however flawed, had salubrious effects. According to one widespread interpretation, Gaddafi's peace offer emerged full-blown just as the US discovered Saddam Hussein in a spider hole in Iraq. Gaddafi, according to this viewâand with profound irony, given what ultimately happened to himâwas scared witless by the thought of experiencing a similar fate.
While Gaddafi's fear may have been a factor behind his attempts to accelerate talks with the new US administration, it cannot be taken as the central motive.
45
For Gaddafi, the post-9/11 US obsession with fighting Islamic terrorism offered a perfect opportunity to solidify earlier gains. Not only could he claim to possess intelligence that the US desperately wanted, but, should the US accept his offer, he could use the world's superpower to, in effect, wage his own internal battles. No matter that Libya's Islamists were not exactly synonymous with Al Qaeda. Several other Arab states were doing the same collaborative calculus at this time.
Bush administration officials continue to insist that Saddam's fall pushed Gaddafi to make a deal. Condoleezza Rice frames Gaddafi's decision to abandon WMD as a “nonproliferation breakthrough” that was aided by the toppling of Saddam Hussein. In her memoir, she writes, “Despite the trials and tribulations in Iraq, we registered some gains. For instance, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was beginning to have a salutary effect on other parts of the non-proliferation agenda.”
46
Vice President Dick Cheney made the connection even more bluntly: “[O]ne of the great by-products of what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is that five days after we captured Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya came forward and announced that he was going to surrender all of his nuclear materials.”
47
Martin Indyk would later riposte, “The implication is clear. Get rid of one dictator because of his supposed WMD programs and others will be so afraid that they will voluntarily abandon their weapons programs. Therefore, even if no WMDs were found in Iraq, we still made the world a safer place. The perfect comeback.”
48
While there was significant intelligence to indicate that Gaddafi was highly disturbed by what was going on in Iraq and sped up existing talks about a specific deal that involved WMD, the linkage between Saddam's actual capture and a decision by Gaddafi is specious.
49
As Rice indicates in her memoir, Gaddafi's decision came before, not after Saddam's capture:
The Saturday before the Libya announcement [i.e., December 13, 2003], I'd called in Dan Bartlett to tell him about the coming good news [the Libya announcement]. I was surprised when he looked disappointed. “I thought you were going to tell me that we had found Saddam,” he said. “That will be next week,” I said in jest.
50
As one former State Department official said, “The capture of Saddam was a reinforcing factor that injected some additional vigor into an ongoing process.”
51
In further irony, various former US officials, including Wayne White, then deputy director of the Near East/South Asia State Department's office within the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), attested that Gaddafi's worries that he might be next were altogether unfounded. Libya was “nowhere near the top of the US âhit list' for regime change.”
52
More troubling is the Bush administration's apparent short memory. Rice speaks as if Gaddafi's renunciation of past bad habits had no additional context:
Even more startling developments were emerging in Libya. In the spring of 2003 we heard through the British that Muammar Qaddafi wanted to open negotiations with the United States and the United Kingdom, with the carrot being an end to Libya's WMD programs. At first we didn't put much faith in the overture but we ultimately decided to send a joint CIA/MI5 team to assess the situation. It returned with a positive report: Qaddafi was serious.
53
Indeed, Gaddafi had been deemed “serious” by Indyk and his colleagues in the Clinton administration several years before, in 1998.
Just as the US and, by default, its allies in Iraq, had their own explanation for Gaddafi's conversion, Gaddafi had his. He knew what the Americans wanted and knew he could use the international climate to potentially kill two birds with one stone. Not only could he claim to possess intelligence that the US desperately wanted, but, should the US accept his offer, he could use the world's superpower to, in effect, wage his own internal battles. No matter that Libya's Islamists were not exactly synonymous with Al Qaeda. Several other Arab states, including Tunisia and Egypt, were doing the same calculation.
WMD: What Libya Hadâand Didn't Have
There is little doubt that Libya had many, if not most, of the pieces needed to make a nuclear weapon. Was Gaddafi anywhere close to actually making a functioning nuclear weapon? The strong majority of international analysts in this domain think not. Gaddafi had acquired a “significant” number of L-1 centrifuges through the notorious A. Q. Khan nuclear supply network
54
as well as “instructions for how to manufacture parts for, and build, a nuclear detonation mechanism.” By 2000, Libya had started to install centrifuge cascades at the Al Hashan facility, just outside Tripoli. As of 2003, Libya was also known to have had about forty Frog 7 short-range missiles, three hundred midrange missiles, and eighty Scud B launchers with a range of 280 to 300 kilometers. Libya had tried to build its own short-range missile, first the
Ittisal
, then the
Al Fateh
and
Al Fajr
, and was seeking to build or
buy longer-range missiles. International inspections after 2003 found five Scud C missiles and a hundred Russian Scud B missiles. Libya ultimately admitted to maintaining a uranium enrichment program at an initial level and to working on biological weapons, but claimed it had long since abandoned the program and had dismantled its Al Hashan centrifuges by 2002.