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

blowing the whole operation. But, in fact, the opposite occurred. As with the invasion of Iraq six months earlier, the additional pressure unlocked a door in Tripoli. Suddenly, Kusa told Allen they should come to Libya immediately to make the final arrangements for the inspection team.
    On October 19, 2003, Kappes and Allen returned to Tripoli along with a fifteen-member technical team of U.S. and British weapons experts to map out the scope of the Libyan program. They flew into Wheelus Air Base outside Tripoli on a CIA black aircraft, a Boeing 737 that was being used to render terrorists captured overseas to secret CIA prisons around the world. 20
    Saif al-Islam later told reporter Judith Miller that the initiative to give up WMD was his, not his father’s, “an astonishing assertion that no diplomat believes.”
    And yet, that is very likely the case. Every step of the way, Qaddafi hesitated, stalled for time, played coy on the equipment and weapons he possessed. Saif al-Islam and other key advisors I interviewed later in Tripoli convinced Qaddafi that the game was up and the United States had him dead to rights.
    Just to make sure the Libyans followed through on their pledges to open up their nuclear weapons facilities to the technical team, Kappes and Allen gave Musa Kusa a CD-ROM when they arrived in October that contained an audio recording of a February 28, 2002, discussion between Ma’atouq Ma’atouq, the Minister of Bad Things, and A. Q. Khan. It contained a candid review of Libya’s entire nuclear weapons program. All the cards were now on the table. 21
    Before making his historic renunciation of his WMD programs on December 19, 2003, Qaddafi sought counsel from an unusual source—Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. During a private meeting at Qaddafi’s tent, in Tripoli, he asked Kuchma how America had treated him when he gave up his nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. 22
    The final event that sealed the fate of Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program took place on December 13, 2003, along the borders of the Tigris River just south of Tikrit, Iraq when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division pulled a bearded, long-haired Saddam Hussein out of a spider hole hidden on a small farm. The Americans broadcast footage of Saddam’s capture the next day. “When Qaddafi watched a U.S. medic probe Saddam’s hair for lice and poke around his mouth, he turned white,” a Qaddafi confidant told me in Sirte.
    Until Saddam’s capture, “We were still negotiating. Both sides were sparring back and forth,” a British official involved in the talks over Qaddafi’s WMD programs told me. “Things radically changed course after that.” Just six days later, Qaddafi made his public announcement that Libya was giving up its WMD programs and had invited U.S. and British experts into his country to verify the dismantling of his weapons plants.
    Leading Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, later argued that the Libyan case showed that diplomacy worked better in the war on terror than force. “If diplomacy was so effective,” a Bush administration official involved in the weapons cleanup effort told me, “why did Colonel Qaddafi continue to procure equipment at the same time our diplomats were talking?”
    The timeline of Qaddafi’s concessions is crystal clear. The Lockerbie negotiations, which dragged on for a dozen years, were all about his economy. The WMD talks, which took nine months, were about his survival. Getting Qaddafi to renounce terrorism and give up his WMD programs was a huge victory for George W. Bush. Even today, very few Americans know just how successful power diplomacy can be.
    THE VERIFIER
    The woman put in charge of verifying that Qaddafi really came clean was an old hand at arms control. Paula DeSutter likes to tell the story of coming home from college to her native Alabama one summer and telling her grandmother that she was studying arms control.
    “What’s a matter, honey? Don’t