Sixty miles south of Tripoli, the country’s capital, was a chemical weapons factory at Rabta that produced mustard gas, a First World War weapon, and more up-to-date nerve agents. These were also manufactured at the Tajura Nuclear Research Center, sited on the Mediterranean coast. In all, there were ten weapons of mass destruction facilities. All were guarded by long-range Scud missiles built with the help of North Korea.
On that December day the meeting in the Traveller’s Club back room was the climax of efforts to end Gadhafi’s thirty-five years of torrid relations with the West and allow Libya to be finally removed from the list of pariah nations.
The road to redemption had begun with the collapse of Soviet communism, which had erased Libya’s hope that the continuous U.S. pressure would end. There had been the failure of a succession of economic programs that had made Gadhafi eager to attract foreign investment. Finally he had come to realize the ever-growing Islamic militancy was a threat of retaliation against his own regime and its long record of supporting terrorism. Even before Saddam had been captured, Libya had begun to ostracize the terrorist groups it had once embraced; at times Gadhafi had increasingly sounded almost like a moderate voice. In April 1999, Libya had agreed to allow two of its intelligence officers to stand trial under Scottish law for the destruction of the Pan Am 103 flight over Lockerbie. After the September 11 attacks, Gadhafi had secretly provided information to the CIA and FBI on al-Qaeda. In 2002, he had supported a Saudi initiative to offer Israel diplomatic recognition (yet to happen), and he had told Arafat not to declare a Palestinian state. All this had been summarized by his son Saif ul-Islam Gadhafi: “If we have the backing of the West and the United States, we will achieve more in five years than we could achieve in another fifty years.” The proof was the presence of his father’s emissaries in the bastion of the English establishment.
During the meeting, Ehrman and Musa Kusa took turns using a telephone in an adjoining room to make calls. Ehrman’s were to prime minister Tony Blair, who was on a visit to his Sedgefield constituency in the north of England. Using a second phone call, Blair kept President Bush in the White House updated on progress. Kusa’s calls were to a phone in a Bedouin tent where Gadhafi was enjoying another of his desert sojourns.
In the preceding months, Kusa had, under Libyan diplomatic passport, traveled to London several times. As the man most trusted by Gadhafi, his mission was to agree to a text that would ensure the Libyan leader did not lose face and satisfy the British team that he could not renege. In an MI6 safe house near Gatwick airport, Kusa and document drafters from the Foreign Office agonized over every word. Time and again, when a breakthrough seemed to be close and a draft was sent to Libya on a secure fax, it came back with suggestions and amendments that were unacceptable to the Foreign Office.
A further complication was Kusa’s suspicion of the need to involve Washington. Initially the Bush administration was also dubious about approving any deal with Libya. But as the secret meetings went on, the CIA asked to participate. Again Kusa was hesitant at their presence. He feared that Israel would learn of the plan from the CIA and possibly sabotage it. A Washington official involved in the negotiations said later: “Kusa was paranoid that the Israelis would want to torpedo the negotiations so that it could attack Gadhafi’s weapons sites. The Brits were finding that trying to do a deal with Gadhafi involved a lot of walking on eggs without breaking one.”
It had been like that from the August day in 2002 when Mike O’Brien, the Foreign Office minister, had visited Gadhafi in his desert tent. He was the first British envoy to do so. He was kept waiting for several hours before two female bodyguards finally ushered the gently perspiring minister into Gadhafi’s presence.
“Gadhafi sat with dark glasses on and spoke through a translator, though I knew he had learned English at a course in England. When it became appropriate I raised the matter of his weapons of mass destruction. To my astonishment he did not deny he possessed them, adding that this was a serious issue. Time and again he emphasized he was genuinely interested to improve relations with the West and in particular to attract foreign investments to the Libyan oil and gas industries,” O’Brien later recalled.
O’Brien returned to London convinced that Gadhafi was “genuinely ready to do a deal.” But there was still a way to go. O’Brien made further visits to Libya. Though he was certain he had taken every possible precaution to maintain secrecy, the deep-cover Mossad agent in Libya had picked up his trail.
