Exit the Colonel (16 page)

USLO requested to see one of the much-vaunted Basic People's Congress in action, in the lead-up to the 2006 General People's Congress. This BPC was held in what looked like a converted schoolhouse. Apathy prevailed, as all the Libyans present appeared to have been dragged away from whatever else they were doing to put on a show for the American diplomats and were not quite sure of their lines. During the hour-long meeting, the local committee extemporaneously praised Gaddafi's revolution and waffled between cautious praise for the new relations with the Americans and warnings of the old tricks of imperialist forces. This scene was frequently repeated in the introductions to an increasing number of foreign think tank personnel and political scientists invited to speak at the Green Book Center, an institution devoted to analysis and commentary on Gaddafi's manifesto.

Throughout the first year, USLO staff people were occupied with a full slate of high-level issues related to the Lockerbie and WMD deals. These included overseeing the removal of surrendered material, passing diplomatic notes back and forth with the People's Secretariat for Foreign Liaison (the Libyan equivalent of a foreign affairs ministry), and arranging visits for Congressional staff (called CODELS), including senior officials from the departments of commerce; health and human services; and the bureau of oceans, environment and science (OES). As part of the WMD deal, the US offered to retrain Libyan nuclear scientists in less threatening fields. The US scientist redirection team, led by Dr. Marie Ricciardone, the wife of then US Ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, expressed frustration that the Libyan interlocutor, Dr. Matouk al Matouk, then deputy
minister of energy and technology, did not seem to take their meetings particularly seriously.

USLO had a host of other soft issues to take on. The OES department sponsored forty-odd US science delegations from 2004 to 2006. Various officials came to confer with Libya's Environment General Authority about cooperation and training on water and environmental issues. The Department of Defense and veterans affairs departments were interested in securing an American cemetery, which had somehow been “misplaced” since the last US diplomats left Libya in 1980 (though its location was well known to both the Libyans and the other Western missions).

Just as Iraq's promise as a haven for Western technology and services appeared to have disappeared, Libya came into view for many of the same companies as a potential replacement. USLO's capacity to deal with commercial inquiries was quickly outstripped. From a US government perspective, the main priorities were to understand better the environment as it related to oil and gas, and to help large US companies to bid effectively on large-ticket contracts like aircraft, telecoms, and infrastructure projects.

As the Libyans eased up on issuing visas for US officials for a time, Libya became the favorite exotic travel destination for a number of US administration officials, mostly Republican political appointees keen to see George W. Bush's transformational diplomacy in action. After visiting the USLO's offices, they were sure to visit the shops on Rashid Street behind the Corinthia to pick up prized Gaddafi paraphernalia, the most popular of which were “Gaddafi watches”—Chinese-made timepieces with pictures on the face of the Leader in various poses. At the start of the rapprochement, one could even find watches with Gaddafi's image superimposed upon an American flag.

As the Americans worked to catch up on lost time (most of the European embassies had reopened in 1999–2000), European diplomats practically reveled in what they saw as the Americans' “small-time” operation and relative disarray, quipping that the “Americans never entertained, and when they did, they offered hot dogs and paper plates.”
⁶

Once the meta-narrative regarding the reasons for the 2003 deal had been set, that is, Libya's giving up WMDs and terrorism for the lifting of sanctions, some of the secondary rationalizations for engagement came into
relief. Accordingly, US and Western business leaders were to serve as a “force multiplier,” setting the stage for deeper reforms by spreading the gospel of American-style capitalism. Among the earliest advocates of this view was Representative Curt Weldon, mentioned in the previous chapter. After a 2004 CODEL of which he was a member, Weldon announced that his aim was to “promote engagement between American and Libyan business interests, and thus foster the country's free market.”
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The subtext was that commercial deals might accomplish what diplomacy and/or military threats could not: change from within, a velvet revolution, perhaps led by the regime's reformist mouthpiece and Gaddafi's son, Saif Al Islam. The attractiveness of this approach was due presumably to the weakness (or limitations) of the original narrative, which held that, while the US had commercial and strategic interests in Libya, there were no levers with which to compel reform. In retrospect, one has to question whether this was really the case.

So the US and other Western countries were determined to proceed with the opening on the basis of so-called “soft” negotiation, untrammeled by requirements and boundaries. As Wyn Bowen of King's College London noted, “The Bush administration's incremental provision of rewards to Libya in response to the passage of key milestones further smoothed the dismantlement effort, despite the fact that this linkage was not deliberately established at the start and that there was some initial opposition within the administration to ‘rewarding' Libya at
all
.”
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As time passed, Libyans with resources who had been uncertain about whether to support the reform efforts began to believe that they had been offered a fait accompli, this time backed by the US and the Western countries. If the US was not willing to push political reform or human rights, they too might as well participate in the process or leave the spoils to others.

Lurking deep beneath the surface of US-Libya interactions was an interesting, counterintuitive, and potentially useful notion of American “exceptionality” within Libya's worldview. To paraphrase, the idea was that in spite of their history of exaggerated “anti-other” rhetoric, the US and Libya had an odd affinity, built through shared past experiences—those of the Libyan business community in the 1960s and recipients of US educational fellowships are cases in point.
⁹

For Gaddafi, exceptionality sprang from a stark reality: the US was the sole (and most important) Western power yet to reestablish diplomatic relations with Libya after the lifting of UN sanctions in 1999. Despite his anti-imperialist rhetoric, Gaddafi was absolutely obsessed with attracting the attention of the US and bringing US leaders to Libya, on terms of quasi-parity. US sanction was the one thing Gaddafi wanted desperately but remained out of reach, tantalizingly so given that the US (as per its historical tendency) did not seem in any rush to consummate the relationship.

Less psychologically complex were latent affinities that a surprisingly high number of Gaddafi's senior advisers, ministers, and National Oil Company (NOC) executives would evince for the US. After dispensing with requisite pro-Gaddafi sloganeering, X or Y minister or his assistant would frequently confide that his years at the University of Arizona or Louisiana State University were “the best of his life.” Prime Minister and NOC head Shukri Ghanem was an example of this group, having received his PhD from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Musa Kusa, the feared head of internal security, held a master's in sociology from the University of Michigan. A large number of these well-positioned Libyans were also products of the Esso-sponsored US fellowships of decades before.

The older generation of Libyans, those with experiences with Americans dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, perceived the US—at least within trading circles—to stand for quality, style, and forthrightness in business. Just as there was a cadre of US-educated technocrats and monarchy-era traders with fond (if outdated) memories of the US and of American customs, there was a community in the US with deep personal attachments to Libya. Every other year since the late 1970s, more than a thousand people have gathered in Texas for a reunion of America-Libyan expatriates, many former oil workers and teachers, to sing the club anthem, “I will be back again Libya.”

Not all attempts to capitalize on these past bonds or assumed commonalities were successful. The embassy attempted to reach out, through a couple of social hours, to the US-citizen families of Libyans educated in the states thirty or so years earlier, to explore their numbers and views. Many had married US citizens and returned with them to Libya, with the US spouse typically converting to Islam. In one such meeting, the dynamic quickly turned hostile. Many of these individuals accused the US of abandoning them or of being indifferent to the Libyan condition. Oil hit the flame as a visiting member of the State Department's intelligence bureau,
INR, with little appreciation of the Libyan context, spent most of the meeting simultaneously arguing against and arousing suspicions that he had been sent by the CIA to press them for information.
¹⁰
In another display of how far worldviews had diverged in thirty years, Ministry of Labor officials were publicly aghast (and privately amused) when confronted with a pair of female US officials dressed as if they were headed to a cabaret. One proceeded to give a slide presentation suggesting that Libya emulate a certain model of hotel financing recently applied to Afghanistan. The Libyans were taken aback a second time by the presentation itself and felt any hint of comparison with that chaos-ridden, resource-poor state highly insulting.

In an effort to amplify the increasing interest by US oil, aircraft and telecom companies senior Libyans tried to exploit the idea, then current in some American commercial circles, that the Americans had already lost the advantage to the European and Asian companies that had returned shortly after the UN sanctions were lifted in 1999. “The Americans are late,” a high-ranking Libyan official told
The Export Practitioner
in 2004.
¹¹

Certainly, the Libyan oil industry benefited most immediately from European and Asian assistance. In the Americans' absence, a number of countries did good business in oil, construction, and general contracting, including Korea (Daewoo); Germany (Belfinger, Berger, Wintershall, Siemens); Sweden (Skanska); Italy (ENI); Spain (REPSOL); France (Total); and Turkey (various construction firms). Yet the trajectory was not always going up. From 2000 to 2004, Libya's trade with Italy and Germany plummeted, particularly in nonrefined products. Even Italy, which was traditionally Libya's number-one trading partner, experienced large-scale fluctuations in trade linked to political disputes; Italian exports to Libya held steady throughout the 1990s at just over $1 billion per year. The figure jumped about 20 percent in the years immediately after the lifting of UN sanctions in 1999, but continued to wobble until 2008.

By the late fall of 2004, Libya's economic opportunities began to enter the peripheral vision of some American companies outside the oil and gas industry. Particularly interested were those whose hopes of quick riches in Iraq and Afghanistan had been dashed by current events. However, there remained downsides to doing business in Libya, including the continuing stigma of secondary (US-imposed) sanctions as well as the barriers to information both within the country and within the US government in terms of what products could and could not be sold. The Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act (FCPA) discouraged many large companies without clear and compelling interests in Libya from pursuing business opportunities, as Libya figured among the most thoroughly corrupt business environments in the world. Bribes and kickbacks were a recognized way of doing business. General Electric's desalination division opted out of Libya entirely at one point, due to the local subsidiary's inability to get anything done without paying significant bribes. The local agent described the endless requests by Libyan partners and officials for cash or favors like accommodation or other forms of hospitality abroad.

In the early days of the US-Libya rapprochement, it was up to the legislative branch, not the executive, to advocate for US business, with oil notably at the fore. Within the Senate, several veteran members, including Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Norm Coleman (R-MN), took strong stances in favor of developing US-Libya commercial ties. In August 2005, President Bush asked one of the highest-ranking US officials to visit Libya to that point, Richard Lugar (R-IN), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to help speed up the normalization process.

Inevitably, these were not wholly ideological gestures. The oil lobby helped to maintain a steady drumbeat as the 2005 deadline for reactivating “standstill agreements” on concessions left in 1984 approached. A former senior State Department official maintained that US oil company influence was “not as high as one might think,” but noted the prominence of ConocoPhillips (one of the original Oasis Group, consisting of Marathon Oil, ConocoPhillips—formerly Continental—and Amerada Hess) in the lobbying efforts. The Sunlight Foundation, whose website describes its mission as “working toward the goal of transparency and accountability in the United States government,” published in late February 2011 a list of seventeen companies on the “who's who” list of US and European conglomerates, which actively lobbied the US government. They included Royal Dutch Shell/Shell Oil, ExxonMobil, BP (British Petroleum), Chevron, Caterpillar, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Fluor Corporation, Raytheon, Marathon Oil, Motorola, Halliburton, Occidental Petroleum, and others, between 2005 and 2010.
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Corporate lobbying of Congress on Libya issues was particularly intense between 2006 and 2008, coinciding with deliberations about lifting Libya from the terror list and a possible repeal of the Libyan Claims Resolution Act (also known as the Lautenberg Amendment), which made it easier for victims of US victims of terrorist acts on foreign soil to seize the assets of those companies in the US, in the form of the US-Libya Claims Settlement
Act.
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These efforts declined after Libya paid, in October 2008, $1.5 billion of $1.8 billion to clear outstanding claims unrelated to Lockerbie and the UTA cases. This payment also cleared the way for visits to the US of senior Libyan officials, including members of the Gaddafi family.