Exit the Colonel (15 page)

While Jahmi's case was certainly worthy of scrutiny, the overwhelming emphasis on his plight had detrimental side effects. Most importantly, it detracted attention from the human rights atmosphere in Libya as a whole, obscuring the more severe offenses, which by the 2000s were coming to light. Former US intelligence officials said that there was “some reporting” as early as the 1990s suggesting there had been an ugly confrontation with casualties at the prison
⁷³
(Abu Selim prison in 1996), but the precise magnitude of casualties was unknown at that time. By 2003, however, anyone who claimed not to know about Abu Selim was simply not listening. The
National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), the primary expatriate dissident group, had been attempting to draw the attention of international media sources for years. Ibrahim Sahad, the NFSL's head in 2011, complained he got nowhere: “The media and governments demanded proof.” Sahad said, “We came back with certified testimonials from an eyewitness, but this was still not good enough.”
⁷⁴

A senior officer with Human Rights Watch said his organization fully realized the deficiencies in the wider approach but decided to work with what they had, using Jahmi as a specific example of a number of different human rights issues, from freedom of speech, to habeas corpus, to torture, etc.
⁷⁵
At a higher policy level, however, this attention was likely counterproductive, as it only served to increase Jahmi's value to Gaddafi as a lever, exposing the limits of US influence. Gaddafi himself may, in fact, have preferred the spotlight on Jahmi, precisely because it distracted from more wide-scale abuses of power.

The interesting thing about the Libya deal is that there had really never been a consensus within Western policy circles regarding what to do with Libya. There were significant portions of the governing establishment in the US and Europe—even those close to the incumbent heads of state—that were uncomfortable about what was happening. At the same time, there emerged a series of powerful and politically adroit advocates for the rapprochement who were able to keep it moving, while convincing some skeptics that Gaddafi could ultimately be held accountable.

While profit, personal and corporate, was not the primary driver behind the deal, the promise and temptation of large commercial deals were both part of what sealed the advances at each step. The fact that the Lockerbie compensation was tied to specific advances in US-Libya relations created undeniable pressure for the process to keep going, at least until, and unless, something completely untoward happened.

It was the same for the oil interests: once the American oil companies were allowed to start negotiations on a return to their former properties, the lobbying efforts began in earnest. As for Gaddafi, he was looking pretty good—to an anxious, exhausted public (and his closest aides), he seemed to have pulled off the impossible (indeed, a Gaddafi confidante told one Western diplomat in a moment of indiscretion that he and his colleagues were “stunned” the US went for the deal). Some of the most cynical (or realistic, as the case may be) on both sides conceded that perhaps something good would come out of all of this. Others were left with a queasy feeling
that, however things proceeded from here, the chances were still good that the ending would not be pretty. The chances of Gaddafi's conversion being sincere were about as likely as sticky, three-fingered aliens landing on the White House lawn. No one, however, predicted that the end was so near—or that the WMD deal itself would be directly implicated. The other main point worth reflecting upon is summarized by the quote at the head of the chapter: The US actions, while they were not an expression of US interests to do harm to ordinary Libyans, were the last barrier between the Libyan regime and a slew of deals that had the potential either to be good, or very bad, for Libya as well as US interests in the region.

CHAPTER 4

The Americans Return

W
ith the 2003 deal in hand, the US and Libya took practical steps to move the relationship forward. As a matter of priority, the Americans sent a team to Tripoli to help with removal of key elements of Libya's WMD program. In early February 2004, the State Department announced the “possibility of assigning a small number of personnel to each other's capitals, in the absence of functioning embassies”
¹
and, nudged by the oil companies, lifted the ban on US citizens traveling to Libya.

Soon after, a team of American doctors arrived to assess the Libyan medical and humanitarian-response infrastructure. At Libya's request, the US agreed to host Libyan specialists to explore future educational exchanges. About a dozen senior Libyan educators and administrators arrived in Washington in summer 2004 for consultations and a tour of US universities. Shortly thereafter, a smaller US delegation flew to Tripoli for meetings with the heads of a number of Libyan universities. There was talk of holding a demonstration match between US and Libyan wrestling teams, though this ultimately never happened.
²

In July 2004, the US presence was upgraded from an “interests section” within the Belgian embassy (a Belgian diplomat passed messages back and forth between the US and Libyan governments and was the point of contact with any US citizen in trouble) to a liaison office, one diplomatic rung below
a full-fledged embassy. This action released the second tranche of Libya's promised compensation to the Lockerbie victims' families.

The US Liaison Office-Tripoli (USLO) was housed on the fifth and sixth floors of the newly constructed, sand-colored Libyan-Maltese Corinthia Bab Africa (Gate to Africa) hotel, a joint Libyan-Maltese concern. Completed the year before, the hotel, according to reliable sources, was built on the site of a Jewish cemetery—a hallmark Gaddafi maneuver, in the same vein as installing a sewage drain outside the Libyan Officers' Club, at the beginning of Gargaresh Street (which not only created a foul smell on-site, but polluted much of the Tripoli corniche). These were not-so-subtle reminders of just who had the power to make and unmake, practically anything in Libya.

Never between 1993 and 2003 had Libya enjoyed priority attention within US government agencies. Dating back to 1991, the attentions of the State Department's NEA (Near East and South Asian Affairs) Bureau and its Maghreb (North Africa) desk were taken up almost entirely with the Algerian civil war. Though Libya was the next on the list, any resources devoted to it had to be split with Morocco and Tunisia. Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) estimates that INR had at best a fraction of one man-year devoted to Libya during the years 1992–1997, with the CIA devoting perhaps three full-time people to the country over that same period. A significant amount of the collective effort was devoted solely to tracking Gaddafi's outreach to the West, as opposed to what else was happening within the country.
³
According to White,

Diplomats newly posted to reporting assignments in Libya would typically “read in” on past reporting on issues in the Libya-US and Libya-West
relationships—the vast majority of this information was limited to details of the early negotiations starting in 1998 discussed above. The more curious members of USLO staff supplemented this information with a small number of academic books on Libya then in print. Academia had virtually ignored Libya, and for obvious reasons: it was isolated; access was highly limited; and there was very little reliable data to be had on practically any related subject of interest.

During its first two years on the ground in Tripoli, USLO suffered both a lack of local capacity and restrictions in staff movement.
⁵
A typical, fully functioning embassy in a country of modest economic import typically might host a combined team of at least five reporting officers divided among economic, commercial, and political issues. Of course, USLO was never meant to be a fully functioning embassy. It was rather an outpost, meant to scout out the scene and begin to build structures that would ultimately support a full diplomatic presence. Matters were made even worse by the fact that, throughout the first two years, only one or two staff members understood enough Arabic to read a newspaper. This was a critical impediment to information gathering, especially when a large fraction of Libyans, even senior government ministers, spoke poor English.

Deposited in Libya after an official absence of more than 20 years, US diplomats had little idea what to expect. There were few other countries at that point—for example, North Korea and, to a far lesser degree, Iran—where the veil had been drawn so closely. We found the capital of Tripoli an austere and crumbling city; much of the newer architecture represented the tastes of low-end ex–Soviet bloc or Korean contractors. The concrete drab was enlivened somewhat by colorful handmade drawings, pastel-green upraised fists, and slogans and aphorisms associated with Gaddafi's revolution. There were few public signs or billboards other than those celebrating Gaddafi: “Libyans' hearts beat as one for you” read one prominent billboard downtown. A single dilapidated movie house catered to expatriate South Asian workers; there were no theaters, no concert halls, and very few public diversions, other than a few threadbare cafés and a couple of restaurants catering excusively to foreigners.

Culturally and architecturally, the Old City was the most interesting part of Tripoli, largely because it was one of the few places with clear links
to a pre-Gaddafi past, however neglected: dilapidated homes of members of the Karamanli dynasty, the ruins of the nineteenth-century American consulate, along with a few Roman ruins and Ottoman-era mosques. Circa 2004, the Old City was a warren of leaky residences and tiny groceries, populated by some of the poorest of Tripoli's residents, including many indigent African squatters. The narrow, unpaved alleys, at times marbled with garbage and sewage, would turn into noxious ooze that was difficult to traverse when it rained. It was possible to walk from the Corinthia Hotel clear across the Old City via a breach in the surrounding wall to Green Square, a ceremonial esplanade and the symbolic epicenter of Gaddafi's Revolution. The square was bounded on one side by Al Qasr Al Hamra (the Red Castle), from which Yusuf Karamanli is said to have watched the
Philadelphia
burn back in 1803. Gaddafi had converted the palace into a surprisingly interesting museum containing, among other artifacts, his 1970s campaign car—a powder-blue VW bug, which he had driven across Libya to commune with the masses.

If anything odd happened—and it often did—it happened in Green Square. Two US diplomats were rather stunned, on September 4, 2004, to encounter a late celebration of the anniversary of Gaddafi's Al Fateh (“The Conquering/Victorious”) revolution. Rounding the square, the parade included ten large ostriches chained to the back of a flatbed truck, swaying back and forth amid the stop-and-go traffic. Just behind was a truck, the side of which read in Arabic, “Female Revolutionary Veterinary Corps.” Another truck carried giant cardboard models of the National Supply Company's refrigerators. To the side, a group of young Tunisian men laughed hysterically while videotaping the proceedings. “This is far more entertaining than anything [Tunisian President] Ben Ali gives us,” one quipped.

The Libyan manner of conducting affairs of state posed continual protocol conundrums for the Western diplomatic corps, which by and large was not accustomed to being treated as chits in a battle of egos between Libya and the countries they represented. Gaddafi frequently summoned senior diplomats to hear him speak at various locations in Libya. These speeches were often held at the Italian-built, black marble Ouagadougou Hall in his hometown of Sirte, or in Green Square. Those countries important enough (or whose staff was sufficiently fed up with or informed about Gaddafi's brand of hospitality) begged off. The others would assemble at the requested hour at the old Wheelus Air Base (since renamed Metiga Airport), where they waited hours for the arrival of an ancient Libyan
Arab Airline 727-200, retrofitted with Soviet engines. After the half-hour flight to Sirte, they would be driven around for a while in buses with curtains drawn and then deposited in front of the hall. There they would listen to Gaddafi's three-hour (or longer) speech. Anyone who witnessed such scenes had a hard time deleting the image of Gaddafi's flamboyant minister of protocol, Nouri Al Mismari, stoking the assembled representatives of various Basic People's Congresses into “spontaneous” expressions of devotion for the Leader, using a large, leather whip. (On one occasion, while Gaddafi droned on with the periodic whipping in the background, half of those present in the diplomats box were asleep; the ambassador of a major Asian country was reading James Michener's
Hawaii
in French, while Rana Jawad, an intrepid young BBC reporter, was in a visible altercation on the other side of the hall with Gaddafi's security, who had tried to confiscate her camera.)