Exit the Colonel (19 page)

Khamis (born in 1983) began his career as a member of the national police. He was trained in Russia and ultimately put in charge of a group of better-than-average-trained troops, the 32nd Brigade, aka the Khamis Brigade, whose primary mission was to protect Gaddafi and his sprawling residential compound-cum-fortress and command center Bab Al Azziziya (The Splendid Gate), in a southern suburb of Tripoli.

Ayesha, Gaddafi's oldest daughter (born in 1976) was trained as a lawyer and famously served on Saddam Hussein's defense team in the lead-up to
his execution in 2006.
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She was something of a fashion maven; images of her racy Tripoli wedding soon found their way to YouTube. Following on the heels of her brother Saif, with whom she seemed to have the most in common temperamentally, she interacted with the regime and the outside world primarily through the Watassimo charity organization.

Hannibal (born in 1975) oversaw all of Libya's maritime and ports interests as the head of the General National Maritime Transport Company (GNMTC). He was known as “Captain,” for having taken a few courses at a maritime academy. Not much is known about Saif Al Arab (born in 1982), other than that he also had some military training. Gaddafi adopted two children: a son, Milad Abuztaia Al Gaddafi, and a daughter, Hanna, who became well known as the alleged Gaddafi family casualty in Reagan's 1986 bombing of Gaddafi's compound at Bab Al Azziziya.

Until 2004, Saif Al Islam was the only Gaddafi child to have developed a quasi-public political persona. By mid to late 2005, other members started to emerge, largely due to a series of foreign scandals (also a direct result of the easing of travel restrictions on members of the regime) and internal disputes that were poorly hidden from Tripoli's diplomatic community. Hannibal was one of the first to draw negative attention to himself. In Italy in 2001, he was involved in a drunken brawl outside a disco, which ended after Italian police officers doused him with a fire extinguisher. He was arrested in Paris in September 2004 for driving at 140 kilometers per hour through the Champs Élysées.
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Following Libya's economic reopening, two incidents in 2005 revealed the evolving fissures and tensions within the Gaddafi family to a small group of diplomats and expatriate businessmen. The first involved the ownership of the Coca-Cola franchise; the second involved the distributorship for Caterpillar, the American manufacturer of construction and mining equipment.

Prior to Mu'tassim's alleged banishment from Libya in 2001, he had been the patron for a secondary distributorship of Coca-Cola products, manufactured in neighboring Tunisia. In his absence, Mohammed supposedly moved in to sign a deal with the KA-MUR bottling company, based in Cyprus, and partly owned by the Libyan Olympic Committee, to set up a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Libya proper. When Mu'tassim returned from Cairo in 2003, he demanded the franchise be awarded to him. Mohammed refused to cede control, so Mu'tassim threatened him, the Jordanian managers of the local plant, and various members of the staff, at least one of whom
told the US mission he had been stuffed into the trunk of a car and driven around Tripoli for the better part of an afternoon.

All parties had interests in keeping the feud under wraps, as revelation would have put a serious damper on US business interests in Libya. The subsidiary was not American and the Coca-Cola parent company had not requested assistance, so this matter was not under US diplomatic jurisdiction. Nevertheless, after the KA-MUR executives asked the embassy to intervene, the USLO sent diplomatic notes requesting the government, that is, Gaddafi, help diffuse the situation. Ayesha allegedly interceded with her brothers to lower the temperature, as she would do several times subsequently. The Coca-Cola war proceeded over a period of months in soap-opera fashion without the foreign press learning of it.

Even as the Coca-Cola issue smoldered, another even more dramatic contest unfolded. Mu'tassim sent members of his private militia to take over and shut down the local Caterpillar plant for “operating without proper licenses.” At the time, it was not exactly clear who was fighting whom or why, but Mu'tassim's private militia was onsite for well over a month.

Much later, Ayesha said that she and her brothers conferred before taking any action that might affect their respective or collective interests. By the end of 2005, Mu'tassim and Hannibal had emerged as the clear bad boys of the family. As Assistant Secretary David Welch related some years later, “At the time, of the possible future leaders of Libya, Saif looked to be the best of the available options,”
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even though Mu'tassim's style was perhaps more conducive to keeping a lid on Libya.

While it is very difficult to guess exactly what Gaddafi was thinking in the years following these violent outbreaks of sibling rivalry, certain exigencies were obvious. He needed to ensure that his children, now teenagers or adults, did not present a direct challenge to his rule and, more importantly, that one or more of them would be around to continue the dynasty. (It can be argued that there was never really any sign that Gaddafi saw the succession issue as pressing, even at the age of seventy and after forty-two years in power.) Whether at this point he was truly focused on Saif, or Mu'tassim, or looking to Khamis or someone outside the family is completely unknown.

For all the difficulties, there was also progress. The most visible cultural event came in summer 2006, with American participation at the Tripoli
International Fair, a sprawling commercial trade show in the center of town, which had been held—even during the sanctions—every year since the 1970s. While the Libyan administrators were not very cooperative, at one point selling the US space to another country, the USLO was able to rent a modest two-story structure to host exhibitions from twenty or so US companies and their newly appointed agents. As part of the exhibits, the public affairs officer and I collaborated to import an American band, for a concert to be given at the US national day (every country had its own day during the event).

When USA Day arrived, ten thousand Libyans showed up and treated Luna Angel like a rock star, rushing the stage during the hour-long show. While some in the crowd were reluctant to accept the small American flags that were being passed out—for any number of reasons—the moment seemed cathartic in a way. Oddly, while the European press covered this event, there was not a single mention in the US papers. “In how many other Middle Eastern countries at this time,” quipped one observer, “would you see thousands of youth waving American flags and singing along with an American band? And yet, it's as if this never happened.”

For someone not immersed in the West-Libya political dialogue, social and physical changes in Tripoli were quite visible. Internet cafés and Italian-style cafés were springing up. Downtown, fashionable districts like Ben Ashur and Gargaresh Street were jam-packed with joyriding young men and women, who passed recorded messages to one another on cassette tapes. Green Square sported a shiny new outdoor restaurant and café, Al Saraya, replete with
shisha
(hookah) stations and fancy-clad waiters. This was the place to see and be seen by the new Libyan elite, their protégés, Western suitors, an increasing number of Japanese tourists—and the Libyan government (given the expensive surveillance equipment mounted on the roofs of adjacent buildings).

This optimism and progress was matched by desperation of many informed Libyans. A group of a hundred eight Libyan dissident émigrés produced a white paper entitled, “A Vision of Libya's Future.” In it, they demanded a new regime committed to human rights and built upon democratic foundation.
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The urgency these individuals felt reflected their fear that Gaddafi would actually succeed in reforming himself, at their collective expense. Longtime Libya watcher Luis Martinez characterized the situation: “For those who opposed the Libyan regime, the rehabilitation of Libya seemed to sound the knell for the hopes of democratic change.”
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In the first few years after the opening of Libya, there was also a modest literary renaissance. Some of this outburst manifested itself in journalistic pieces, but also in poetry and short stories. The newest literary products contained only lightly veiled criticisms of the regime, all the while respecting the red lines by only indirectly mentioning members of the Gaddafi family. Just as Sadiq Neihoum and others attempted to do during the monarchy and the early days of Gaddafi's revolution, the new writers tried to expose the arbitrariness and absurdity of government, and the relative backwardness of some of Libya's traditions.

In one story, “Awdat Caesar” (the Return of Caesar) by Meftah Genaw, a statue of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (which at one point during the Monarchy had been pilfered from Leptis Magna, and propped up in what became Green Square during the Gaddafi years) is mysteriously brought back to life to marvel at the physical decay that occurred under Gaddafi's rule. Caesar commiserates with a bronze statue “Nude woman with the Gazelle” (an artistic vestige of Italian rule, that sat on a traffic roundabout just off the square), that might have been erotic had she not been encrusted with dirt and rust.
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(The Statue of the Gazelle would become an objet celebre after the 2011 revolution as a small group of Salafists tried to deface it, for being un-Islamic). In another story, “My Friends When I Die,” an older man takes solace only in the thought of staging a proper funeral when he dies, with money he had set aside for his son's education.
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Many of the writers had connections in the regime that enabled them to publish, bypass state censors, and even win prizes for their work. Other, less subtle pieces of protest fiction were passed between friends or published outside Libya under pseudonyms in Internet newspapers, such as
Libya al Yowm
(
Libya Today
).

Circa 2005, Libya remained on the list of state sponsors of terror, where it had been since 1979. The designation was a key impediment to full normalization with the US and the lifting of the final US sanctions on Libya—itself the key to a much broader and deeper range of commercial activities with the outside world. This was the prize Gaddafi was after.

Removal from the terror list was important to US-Libya interactions, as the list effectively barred a range of important commercial transactions—
not the least of which was the purchase by the Gaddafi regime of quantities of new weapons to replace stocks made obsolete over the previous decades. It was more important to Gaddafi symbolically, as it was the last measure standing between Libya and full diplomatic rehabilitation, a full stop to the impediments placed on Gaddafi in reaction to his reign of terror in the 1980s. Lifting Libya from the terror list was tantamount to the US giving Libya a clean bill of health.

The primary requirement for a state to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism is the president's certification that:

The decision to normalize relations with Libya was technically independent of the decision to lift Libya from the terror list, although in terms of atmospherics, the two were clearly linked. Full normalization of relations (and the upgrading of USLO to embassy status) required the president to notify Congress of the intent to upgrade status, in turn triggering a fifteen-day review period, during which Congress could voice objections.

Those individuals arguing for lifting this last, and highly symbolic, barrier to Libya's reaccession into the international community won out over the diffuse skeptics, as they had in the past. During the congressional review period, the administration was broadsided by a statutory requirement for Congress to publish a list of all countries not fully cooperating in the war on terror. The deadline was May 15, 2005. Given Tripoli's intense cooperation with the US on intelligence, some in Congress and at the State Department felt it was unfair to withhold Libya from the list of countries assisting the US with counterterrorism measures, and, by extension, to retain the state sponsors of terror designation.

Once the office of the President certified a country was in compliance with the terms set for removal from the Terror List, Congress had forty-five days in which to object, via new legislation. The White House was eager to push Libya's removal from the list forward, but was also highly conscious of potential political backlash. Ideally, it would have considered more weightily not only the views of US victims of past acts of terrorism, but various public cases, including that of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian
doctor (known as “the medics”) charged with infecting (variously) 438–461 Benghazi children with HIV back in 1998, and sentenced to death, under highly opaque circumstances. The medics' case remained unresolved four years after the US and Libya had begun negotiations. The fact that Congress had just forced President Bush to back down on the Dubai port operator DP World's bid to operate several container ports on the US Eastern Seaboard (it was denied), constrained the White House's ability to act, had Congress voiced strong objection to moving the Libya relationship forward. In fact, since Libya had committed to settling the Lockerbie claims, Congress seemed more or less likely to approve of removing Libya from the list. It was the Libyans who appeared to be intent on making it difficult, as an almost unbelievable plot began to surface.

Many close to the process said that Libya might have been removed from the list at least a year earlier if not for revelations concerning Libya's 2003 plot to kill then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, following a spat between him and Gaddafi at an Arab League Summit earlier that year.
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The Libyans attempted—successfully—to pass this off as a private matter in which the US was meddling. In support of this view is the fact that the Saudis, while they loathed the Libyans (and vice versa), effectively settled their differences with the Libyans well before the terror list review deadline. As then Assistant Secretary David Welch recounted, “Here they were at each other's throats, the next thing we hear, Mohammed bin Nayef [then Saudi deputy minister for security affairs] is in the Libyan desert falcon hunting with Saif.”
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