Exit the Colonel (20 page)

Ultimately, a Libya-Saudi reconciliation was effected at the margins of the twenty-first Arab League Summit, held in Doha on March 30, 2009, when Gaddafi unexpectedly apologized in his own unique manner to now King Abdullah, saying, “I consider this personal problem between us to have ended, and I am ready to visit you, and to have you visit me.”
⁴¹
Musa Kusa purportedly added, off camera, “If we had really wanted Abdullah dead, we would not have failed.”
⁴²
With one major roadblock cleared, another popped up. Gaddafi made disparaging remarks about the US and Bush on Libyan television, and Welch was again in the position—and not for the last time—of reminding the Libyans that this kind of sounding off was most certainly not serving Gaddafi well in Washington or with the Bush White House.

Despite serious misgivings in various parts of the US government, on May 15, 2006, Libya was finally removed from the terror list. The influence of individual members of the Bush administration and State Department in pushing the Libya-US rapprochement past this last, critical goalpost was substantial. One former official with access to Saif said that senior US officials had reassured Saif, at the point when removal from the terror list looked most in jeopardy, that the Saudi issue would, ultimately “not be an issue.”
⁴³

Gaddafi reveled in his newfound power. Sensing how much the outsiders wanted to strike deals for their own purposes, Gaddafi began immediately to divide and conquer, demanding higher and higher prices. A
Vanity Fair
article quotes a “frequent visitor” to Libya describing Gaddafi's strategy as the “deep stack . . . in which a rich player with mediocre cards intimidates opponents into folding by raising the stakes to levels so high that they dare not call his bluff. And that, says one frequent visitor to Libya, is the way Qaddafi does business.”
⁴⁴

With Libya off the terror list, Gaddafi felt redeemed and moved quickly to call in previous favors (that is, funding to foreign states) to positions of symbolic importance, such as the rotating leadership of the African Union, something he had craved for years. Much to the chagrin and outrage of the US and Europe, Libya was elected by secret ballot to the chairmanship of the UN's Human Rights Commission on January 20, 2003—three years
before
its removal from the Terror List.
⁴⁵
The
New York Times
called it an “act of such absurdity that it may finally force some serious thinking about reforming the commission.”
⁴⁶
Even after all of its gestures in service of Libya, the US couldn't help but object to Libya's election, admitting in the process that Libya's human rights record was “horrible.”
⁴⁷
US ambassador to the commission, Kevin Moley, said, “It is especially sad today when America celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King, a champion of human rights, that a nation which flaunts human rights abuses, would be elected chair.”
⁴⁸
It all served to prove to Gaddafi that virtually everyone could be bought and that, in fact, the Western countries were neither united in policy nor paying careful attention to his actions.

CHAPTER 5

The Great Makeover

T
he fact that Gaddafi was able to waltz back onto the world stage in such a dramatic manner within a relatively short time after the 2003 WMD deal is a testament to a number of factors, not least of which were Gaddafi's own manipulations, tied to past largesse and the promise of future spending. His success was also the product of an extensive makeover process in which the US and UK were heavily implicated. Many institutions and individuals in the West and Libya participated in this recasting of Gaddafi's regime. Some were believers, in that they felt fundamentally that Libya could be reformed; others, many in the academic community, were reluctant pragmatists, dubious about where Libya was headed, but hard-pressed to turn down an opportunity for involvement in what they saw as an interesting experiment. Others were simply after the money.

Whatever the views of those on the outside, there was never any discernible sign that Gaddafi had fundamentally changed his way of thinking. In fact, to the contrary, there were ample indications that Gaddafi was progressively more “checked out.” (During meetings with Western diplomats, Gaddafi often remained awkwardly silent; while he could pull together to deliver marathon speeches, often he appeared under the influence of sedatives.) At the same time, he delegated more of the hard decisions to those around him, while thoroughly enjoying the new opportunities to thumb
his nose at enemies and suitors alike. It was almost as though Gaddafi had grown tired of governing, per se, and preferred to indulge his nuttier side.

The question is whether the beginning of Gaddafi's makeover preceded the opening to the West or followed from it. Very likely it was a bit of both. In order to convince the US government (as opposed to the Europeans, who were very much on board with the rapprochement as of 1999) that Libya was serious, Gaddafi's advisers and, to some degree, Gaddafi himself, understood that he had to make some effort to appear reasonable. Saif Al Islam appeared to have played an outsize role in this process, both in communicating this need (and opportunity) to his father and in serving as his effective stand-in during critical periods in the negotiations.

Many internal and external advisers clearly came to the same conclusion. If a Libyan makeover were possible, there would need to be an acceptable proxy for Gaddafi, one who was preferably not too reminiscent of him. There were few candidates better suited to this role than Saif Al Islam Gaddafi. Even as early as 1997, Saif was the most urbane and accessible of Gaddafi's children. He betrayed no noticeable signs of the sociopathic tendencies of many of his siblings, such as Mu'tassim, Hannibal, or Khamis. Even his hapless brother Saadi's acts of rage seemed to come from an inability to “find himself” in Gaddafi's shadow. The fact that Saif seemed genuinely uncomfortable being cast in this role served the purpose even better. Finding the right person to represent the regime was not an easy task, nor was it the end of the story. A whole range of processes had to be set in place in order to lend credence to a strategy that would emerge, again by design, as half-real, half-fantasy.

As of 2003, Libya had engaged a number of parties to help it navigate the critical juncture in Washington. Sandra Charles, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Defense, was head of C&O Resources, a “Washington process” advisory firm that did work for other governments, including the Saudis. A former US congressman on a trip to Libya suggested to Saif Al Islam that he enlist Charles to advise the Libyan government (in fact, Saif himself) on strategic issues related to the US-Libya relationship. Charles maintains that the Libyans and Saif, who was then thirty-one, were particularly uninitiated in the way Washington worked. “While there were many who wanted to jump right into the PR [public relations],
we did not see the point of messaging until Libya understood what it was they needed to re-image—“and there were so many things,” Charles said.
¹
Charles met with Saif in Libya in summer 2004. She conveyed to him the necessity of addressing a range of unresolved issues before making much progress on the US side. Her key recommendations included either deporting or transferring to a foreign hospital the long-standing dissident Fathi Al Jahmi; pardoning the Bulgarian nurses accused of infecting Benghazi children with HIV (see chapter 6); contributing to the African Union Peacekeeping force in Darfur, Sudan; proactively speeding up the dismantling of chemical weapons stocks; and helping resolve remaining administrative issues in order to open a full-fledged US Embassy in Tripoli. Above all, Charles advised the Libyans, if they wanted to make progress, they would do well to “keep a low profile.”

The same year, independent of C&O Resources, the Libyans signed a $1.4 million contract with Randa Fahmy Hudome, a former consultant to the Bush campaign on Arab American issues, to become their primary media consultant and lobbyist. After the 2004 election, and while still working for the Libyan government, Hudome was awarded a post as senior aide to Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. She was also involved in an Arab American campaign to promote President Bush's efforts in the area of “human rights, democracy and self-determination.”
²

Hudome was criticized in many corners of Washington for her ongoing connections with the Bush campaign and the Department of Energy, even as she served as a lobbyist for the Libyan government. Other Washington lobbyists described Hudome's efforts as “overzealous,” citing, among other things, her suggestions that Saif Al Islam be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve the Lockerbie issue.
³
Another US government official who went back and forth between the Department of Energy and Libya-related consulting contracts was David Goldwyn, the first chairman of the US-Libya Business Association, itself dominated by US oil interests.

For those individuals and entities trying to help Saif and Gaddafi create a more sympathetic image of Libya and its leader, there was an obvious physical stumbling block. Thirty-six-odd years of insularity had physically transformed Gaddafi from a charismatic young revolutionary into a puffy, cranky, vain individual, albeit with a touch of, as
Vanity Fair
put it, “Sartorial Genius.”
⁴
This was something of a mixed blessing; eccentricity was easier to explain away than pure thuggery. It might even provide an engaging distraction from the darker chapters in his past. Still, it would be difficult to
make a case that he was a serious statesman, let alone one upon whose word the international community could rely, especially when Gaddafi himself was so transparently desperate to be taken seriously, insisting upon being front and center and speaking his piece however and whenever he wanted.

Assuming Gaddafi's real goal was to create only the
appearance
of credible reform long enough for him to decide what to do next, he was very well served by a proxy opposition or, rather, a group that appeared to be pushing him to do things he did not want to do, while in fact being completely under his control.

The creation of multiple warring interest groups was a Gaddafi forte and, in this case, fit perfectly with what the West wanted to see. Just as Saif Al Islam became the designated family reformist, Gaddafi invited (to a large degree, via Saif) individuals with Western training in sciences and administration to play the role of “the reformists” and satisfy the West that all agreements were—at least nominally—being adhered to (while the West itself decided what it wanted to do next with Libya). The outside world saw Gaddafi's appointment of West-savvy technocrats like Shukri Ghanem as prime minister in 2004 and Mohammed Al Badri as head of the National Oil Company as extremely positive moves. At the time, so-styled regime “reactionaries,” like Baghdadi Ali Mahmoudi, Tourism Minister Amaar Al Tayef, and former education minister Ahmed Ibrahim, appeared to be losing influence with Gaddafi. In fact, as we will see, not all reformists were really reformists, and not all antireformists had strong views against Libya's opening. As former Foreign Minister Abdelrahman Shalgam notes in his 2011 memoir, while Saif respected Ghanem, in some ways he preferred Baghdadi as Prime Minister, for being far more “obedient.”
⁵

The legerdemain occurred with the suggestion that this reform-reactionary dynamic had somehow occurred
organically
, that is, that there was indeed a reform movement, per se, that encompassed a group of people with similar uniform ideas and a coherent strategy for implementing those ideas. This was a story the Western media and international diplomatic corps could digest, and it jibed with the previous narrative that Gaddafi had been frightened by the US invasion of Iraq into giving these people a greater voice. The defects in these perceptions arose from the fact that no individual rose to a position of any influence in Libya without Gaddafi's say-so, and
that the hand that giveth could just as easily taketh away (which it did, frequently). Further, it was perfectly possible for individuals to be reformist on one issue—economic freedoms for example, which might benefit them personally—and to be completely counter-reformist on others, such as controls on corruption or reforms to the political process, that might threaten their position in the overall patronage structure. It is very possible that Saif was in this latter camp, in that he was pro-change relative to the vast majority of the talentless bureaucrats he called “fossils,” but unable to square his own role within this process with an outcome in which the Gaddafi family—or he himself—was not ultimately at the controls. Saif may have had in mind for Libya-sans-Gaddafi Sr. something along the lines of Tunisia under Ben Ali (economically prosperous, but a police state) or, better yet, the UAE, where capitalism ran wild but civil society, social protections, and a robust rule of law were virtually nonexistent.