Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi Read Online Free PDF Page A

called the Lockerbie talks ‘the London channel,’ ” one participant said. 12
    In September 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sent a personal letter to Qaddafi hectoring him for supporting Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, just as international pressure was mounting on the aging dictator to resign. He also summoned Qaddafi to abandon his WMD programs, a new demand put on the table at the urging of U.S. President George W. Bush.
    In December, Qaddafi sent a rambling eleven-page reply, “essentially saying, why are you picking on me?” a senior British official told me. The established nuclear powers had thirty-thousand warheads, and Israel had more. Anything Libya might have would be a drop in the bucket, Qaddafi wrote.
    Blair was frustrated, and shared it with Bush. Diplomacy alone was failing to get Qaddafi to break with his deadly past. More was needed to bring him around.
    On March 19, 2003, the United States, Britain, and a coalition of some forty countries launched hostilities against Iraq, beginning with a shock-and-awe air campaign that set Baghdad aglow like the land of the midnight sun. Thanks to satellite broadcasting, the air strikes were visible for all the world to see. “Qaddafi watched Baghdad burn on CNN,” one of his close advisors told me. The next day, he instructed Musa Kusa to head back to London, this time without Shalgam. Qaddafi wanted to talk to the CIA.
    Qaddafi was convinced the Americans would find no active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. But, if they looked, he knew they would find one in Libya. He was worried that after Saddam Hussein, he would be next. 13
    CIA Director George Tenet thought it was time to take another pass at Qaddafi. But, with the war in Iraq, he wanted more than just Qaddafi’s personal enemies list. He wanted Qaddafi’s WMD programs, not just the chemical weapons, which everyone knew about. He wanted the nukes, the missiles, the whole works.
    So, Tenet sent his deputy director of operations, Steve Kappes, to London to meet with the Libyans a few days after the Iraq War began. Kappes later told his favorite journalists that he single-handedly won Qaddafi over, and reported back to President Bush in person, to prevent news of the Qaddafi opening from “leaking” to neoconservatives who weren’t keen on rehabilitating the Libyan strongman. After one of his encounters with Qaddafi, Kappes said that he found himself actually starting to like the man, even though he knew he had slaughtered so many innocents. 14
    Tenet reported in his memoir that Kappes was the messenger of the Bush administration policy, not the architect. After speaking to the president about the opening to Qaddafi, Tenet says he briefed Kappes and “put the project in his hands and got back to worrying about Iraq.” 15
    For several months the two sides played poker, as Qaddafi tried to figure out how much the Americans really knew about his programs.
    Behind the scenes, Qaddafi’s son and his advisors in Tripoli were bending his ear, arguing that Libya’s security would be enhanced, not reduced, by giving up the nuclear program. “We had no delivery system,” a top Qaddafi advisor explained to me. “I told the Guide, if Libya were to start a nuclear war, our missiles won’t even reach Malta. If the U.S. starts it, Libya will be erased from the map.” 16
    Qaddafi still held back. “At the same time they carried on negotiations with us, they continued with their WMD programs,” a British official privy to the negotiations told me.
    Two months had gone by since that first meeting with the Americans. Kappes flew back to London to confer with Allen, then the two met with Kusa and Qaddafi’s son on May 14, 2003. Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi was clearly in the driver’s seat, and he was far more direct and thoughtful than the files on him suggested. He spoke rapid-fire English, honed while writing (some said, plagiarizing) his graduate thesis at the London School of Economics. Gone were the days