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

when he would keep a pet tiger at his palatial apartment in Vienna. Tutored by Musa Kusa in the affairs of state, he was now his father’s negotiator-in-chief. 17
    The younger Qaddafi asked for a written guarantee of what the United States would offer if Libya gave up as-yet-unspecified WMD programs. Allen’s reply, sent one month later, was a remarkable mixture of official diplomacy and the familiar.
    “Greetings to Musa from Steve and Mark. We hope that you are well,” the cable began. “Condoleez[z]a Rice has told CIA that if Libya proceeds with its proposal to destroy its WMD programmes, Libya would be welcomed back to rejoin the community of nations and all that goes with that . . .” He then outlined all the good things Britain and the United States would do for Libya to make that happen, including a visit to Qaddafi’s tent by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, something Saif al-Islam made clear his father wanted. 18
    Kappes traveled to Libya with Allen for his first meeting with Qaddafi later that summer, where they pressed the Libyan leader for details on his weapons programs. Qaddafi hemmed and hawed. No matter how many times they asked for specifics about his chemical weapons stockpiles, his delivery systems, and his nuclear program, Qaddafi changed the subject. Who’s going to guarantee my security if I announce that I am giving up these weapons? he asked.
    Meanwhile, Libyan nuclear weapons scientists were rushing to complete their secret bomb program. It was almost as if Qaddafi wanted to have the bomb before he gave it up, so that he could get a better price.
    For several years, the Libyans had been working with Pakistani bomb-maker A. Q. Khan and his far-flung Bombs R Us network of middlemen and suppliers. At the very moment Qaddafi was talking with the British and American spies, Ma’atouq Mohamed Ma’atouq (Qaddafi’s “Minister of Bad Things,” as the Americans later called him) placed an order with Khan’s business partner in Dubai, a Sri Lankan named B. S. A. Tahir. The Libyan wanted parts for several thousand advanced P-2 centrifuges, so that they could make highly enriched uranium needed for the bomb.
    Tahir sent the order to a machine shop in Malaysia, Scomi Precision Engineering, which he had set up for the clandestine bomb supply line a few years earlier. What none of them knew was that an employee at Scomi, a young Swiss engineer named Urs Tinner, had dual loyalties. As soon as he saw the order come in, he phoned a contact at the CIA.
    The tip-off from Tinner allowed the CIA to track production of the Libyan centrifuges, and have eyes on as they were transported from the machine shop to a shipping company, packed into containers, and loaded onto a German-owned cargo ship, BBC China . U.S. spy satellites tracked the ship to Dubai, and later, through the Suez Canal. Just as it steamed out into the Mediterranean, a U.S. warship, working with Italian customs, intercepted the BBC China and forced it into the port of Taranto, Italy. They seized the five containers of Libyan centrifuge components, labeled “used machinery,” on October 4, 2003. President George W. Bush outed the Malaysian company and others in the A. Q. Khan network in a dramatic speech at the National Defense University a year later. 19
    “It was a big shipment—the guts of what he needed,” a U.S. official involved in the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative told me. PSI was a newly minted program, promoted by Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John R. Bolton, to enhance cooperation among friends and allies of the United States to interdict shipments of WMD gear on the high seas. “That seizure broke the back of Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program. Without it, he would have had to go back to square one.”
    Kappes had a moment of panic when news of the BBC China seizure became public. He told everyone on Capitol Hill (and his preferred journalists) that it risked scaring the Libyans off,