K Is for Vendetta

Why does the Bush administration want to believe that Kaddafi has changed his ways?

May 17, 2006 - When the not-altogether-unexpected announcement came this week that the Bush administration was taking Libya off the list of states supporting terrorism and the United States would renew full diplomatic ties for the first time in 34 years, I asked a Saudi friend what he thought.

I figured he’d be interested because, well, the Saudis accused Libyan agents of plotting to murder Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah bin Abdelaziz in Mecca with a rocket-propelled grenade in November 2003. That was just months after Libya swore to the United Nations it had given up terrorism. The Libyans have denied any part in the plot, of course.

Tripoli’s motive appears to have been, in the twisted vision of “Brotherly Leader” Muammar Kaddafi, a matter of honor. At an Arab summit in March 2003, he had accused Crown Prince Abdullah of supporting the Americans who were about to lead the invasion of Iraq. Abdullah was “making a pact with the devil,” Kaddafi said. To which Abdullah responded with courtly ferocity, “Your lies precede you and your grave is in front of you.”

In another age, swords might have been drawn. But in this case Kaddafi allegedly responded by calling in his covert operators and putting the murder plot in motion. They started spreading money around to enlist Saudi dissidents in the alleged conspiracy. One recipient of their largesse as a middleman was Abdulrahman Alamoudi, formerly a well-connected spokesman for mainstream Muslim causes in the United States, who lost favor in Washington when he was caught on tape extolling the virtues of Hamas and Hizbullah. According to a State Department background paper on Libya issued late last year, “In August 2004, the Department of Justice entered into a plea agreement with [Alamoudi], in which he stated that he had been part of a 2003 plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at the behest of Libyan government officials.” Alamoudi is now serving a 20-year sentence in the U.S. on other charges of laundering money for Libya.

The Saudis, after arresting and interrogating several alleged conspirators, put together a detailed picture of the plot. According to one summary prepared by a Riyadh-based analyst in 2004 and shown to me then on condition I not reveal the specific source, the Saudis concluded that in the summer of 2003 Kaddafi ordered Musa Kusa, the director of Libyan intelligence, and others “to work to destabilize Saudi Arabia and to effect the assassination of Saudi leaders, Crown Prince Abdullah being the primary target.” Contacts were to be made through Saudi dissidents in London, and one of Kusa’s trusted officers from the Libyan Foreign Security Apparatus was assigned to handle the task of liaison. Based on “a tip from a friendly intelligence service”—not identified, but presumably American or British—the Saudis were able to arrest the Libyan officer, along with other Libyans, Saudis and Egyptians allegedly involved.

The blend of personal vendetta and state terrorism is typical Kaddafi. This is the guy who hired retired CIA agents in the 1970s to help him murder his political opponents abroad. In the 1980s Kaddafi was the Reagan administration’s favorite villain. The United States would taunt and attack; Kaddafi would riposte with raving rhetoric and clumsy terrorism. In April 1986, amid rumors that Kaddafi had plotted to murder President Reagan, among many other offenses, Washington tried to assassinate the dictator with airstrikes. The attacks on Libya’s two biggest cities (described in detail in the first chapter of my book “Expats”) targeted those places where Kaddafi habitually lived, slept and worked. He survived, as we know, and struck back with a vengeance, stepping up support for terrorists from Japan to Sudan, Northern Ireland to Wall Street. One of his hirelings, a member of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group, was caught on the New Jersey Turnpike in April 1988 with bombs intended for detonation not far from the World Trade Center.

Then, in December 1988, a Pan Am 747 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in the air and on the ground. Investigators eventually fingered Libya, and international sanctions were imposed. After protracted diplomatic negotiations, Kaddafi eventually turned over two of his intelligence operatives for trial, and one was convicted. Kaddafi never admitted personal responsibility but the families of the victims were promised  $10 million each, to be paid out as various sanctions were lifted. With this week’s announcement, the final disbursement should be in the works.

But none of that would have been enough to win back American favor if not for the labors of Musa Kusa on other fronts. In the mid-1990s, Kaddafi began what a senior U.S. official later described as a "strategy to get him out of that sandy hole he'd dug himself into." One major element, according to British sources, was intelligence-sharing about terrorist activities, including and especially those of the Libyan-armed Irish Republican Army. Even more valuable were the massive dossiers Libya had infopiled about Osama bin Laden, who once tried to have Kaddafi killed. There you have it again: the role of vendetta. After September 11, those files became all the more important.

Still the Americans wanted more. They wanted Libya to dismantle whatever weapons of mass destruction it might have.

Dating back to the 1970s, a favorite paranoid fantasy of U.S. and Israeli officials was the notion that Libya might go nuclear. A best-selling 1979 novel, “The Fifth Horseman,” had imagined what might happen if he gave an atomic bomb to terrorists to threaten New York. In 1980, NEWSWEEK suggested on its cover that Kaddafi might just be “the most dangerous man in the world.” But the Libyans didn’t have nearly enough expertise or skills to build nukes. They could barely keep their Soviet-supplied tanks running. When they tried to fight a war in the Chadian desert, their armored columns were defeated by local troops in jeeps with French-supplied antitank missiles. (Furious and offended, once again, Tripoli blew a French airliner out of the skies en route to Chad in 1989, killing all 170 people aboard.)

Yet in the 1990s, just about the same time they started currying the favor of British and American intelligence, the Libyans launched a new clandestine nuclear-weapons program. They didn't invest much cash in it: estimates range from $40 million to $60 million, which would be a fraction of their Lockerbie blood money. But along with some basic enrichment equipment, which United Nations inspectors later discovered was largely left in boxes, they did get a whole lot of information about how the clandestine nuclear network of Pakistani scientist AQ Khan and his associates operated.

In December 2003, with great fanfare, the Libyans turned over to the British and Americans the trove of intelligence from this apparent sting operation. Supporters of the Bush administration crowed that Kaddafi had been intimidated by the toppling of fellow dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Just this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Libya “an important model,” suggesting Iran and North Korea would do well to follow its example of cooperation.

Or maybe not. Kaddafi’s lunacy is something the world, especially the Arab world, has actually learned to live with. He has been around since 1969, after all, longer than any other ruler in the neighborhood. So when Crown Prince Abdullah became King Abdullah last year, one of his first acts was to pardon the alleged assassins in Saudi custody. What good would it be to push the point? There’s so much trouble in the region already. The Americans need some sort of diplomatic morale booster. Kaddafi appears to be contained and to be content pumping oil, for now, but his weird new romance with Washington is not likely to last.

That was certainly the reaction of my Saudi friend, who followed the assassination furor closely and who prefers not to be quoted by name on this sort of sensitive matter. “Libya will always be a midsized country in the region and will always be of limited value to overall U.S. interests,” he said.

Is Kaddafi still crazy after all these years? Maybe he never really was. One thing’s for sure. You wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.