In 2002, LAP scored another propaganda hit by planting a story Gadhafi had received a hair transplant. Later that year he arrived at an African summit with a container ship loaded with one thousand goat carcasses and distributed them to his fellow delegates. Afterward Jaafar Nimeiri, the former president of Sudan, described him as “a man with a split personality—both of them totally crazy.” LAP was able to use this to great effect. It also focused on Gadhafi’s sexual activities. Having fathered seven children by two wives, he had taken to offering interviews to foreign female journalists if they slept with him. That also became another item for LAP to promote around the world. More recently, in 2003, LAP planted stories that Gadhafi was terminally ill with cancer. But in mid-December 2004, his image as a buffoon who possessed a powerful nuclear arsenal, which he frequently threatened to unleash against Israel, was about to dramatically change.
Mossad’s London Station was situated deep within the Israeli Embassy in the fashionable district of Kensington. Accessed only by swipe cards that were changed regularly, and with a separate communications system from those of the main switchboard, the station was the most protected within a building where security was paramount. Each of the station’s offices had a keypad door and a safe, the combination of which was known only to the office’s occupant. Often a technician from Mossad’s Internal Security Department,
The staff worked under the direction of a man they all called Nathan. He had seen service in Asia and Africa before taking over as station chief. His formal duties included liaising with MI5 and MI6, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, and foreign intelligence services based in the capital. He was a familiar face on the capital’s diplomatic cocktail circuit and regularly dined at one of the city’s members-only clubs alongside senior British politicians. It was one of those clubs, the Traveller’s in Pall Mall, that focused Nathan’s attention on that cold winter’s day in December.
As Londoners made their way to another round of Christmas office parties, seven individuals arrived separately at the club, long a favourite meeting place for the senior officers of Britain’s intelligence community. Situated within walking distance of the Ministry of Defense, Foreign Office, Home Office, and Downing Street, it was comfortable and discreet, a place where secrets could be shared over one of the finest steaks in clubland or a reputation gently questioned over a postdinner port in the club’s lounge.
Six pinstripe-suited men and a woman in a black dress made their way past the club porter’s lodge to a back room. It had been booked in the name of William Ehrman, the director general of defence and intelligence at the Foreign Office. A self-service buffet of tea, coffee, soft drinks, and the club’s famed selection of sandwiches had been set up on a side table: the food did not include ham out of deference to the three men already waiting in the room with Ehrman. They were Musa Kusa, the head of Libyan intelligence, Ali Abdalate, the Libyan ambassador to Rome and Mohammed Abul Qasim al-Zwai, the Libyan ambassador to London.
They were introduced by Ehrman to Eliza Manningham-Buller; John Scarlett, head of MI6; David Landeman, head of counterproliferation at the Foreign Office; and two high-ranking officials from Ehrman’s department. He showed them all to opposite sides of a long mahogany table. At precisely twelve thirty on the mantle clock over the gas-fired Adams fireplace, Ehrman spoke.
“Gentlemen, we have come a long way. Let us now move to resolution.”
So began a meeting that would last six hours to negotiate one of the most stunning breakthroughs in international diplomacy in decades. The meeting was to draft and approve every word of the text that would enable Colonel Gadhafi, the man President Reagan once called “the mad dog of the Middle East,” to voluntarily give up Libya’s weapons of mass destruction.
Over the years Gadhafi had created an arsenal that was the most powerful on the continent of Africa. Close to its southern border with Egypt was the Kufra biological and chemical factory. Concealed deep below the desert sands, it was beyond the bunker-buster bombs the United States had given to Israel’s air force. The possibility of launching a successful sabotage attack had also been ruled out after a deep-cover Mossad agent managed to obtain a blueprint of the heavily guarded warren of laboratories where nuclear scientists from the former Soviet Union and former East Germany worked.
