Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The total isolation of Libya began in 1991, when the United States and Britain indicted two Libyans suspected of involvement in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, and the French indicted four Libyan suspects in the 1989 explosion of the French airliner UTA 772 over the Niger desert. Libya refused to surrender any of the suspects, and the following year, the United Nations approved economic sanctions. Only in 1999 did Libya allow the Lockerbie suspects to be brought to trial, under Scottish law, in The Hague. (A financial settlement was reached that year with French authorities as well.) The Scottish court convicted one of the suspects and acquitted the other. Libya long denied any wrongdoing but eventually accepted that it had to admit to it, as a pragmatic matter, though Libyan officials see it as a forced confession. Qaddafi never accepted personal guilt.

The Lockerbie question, a closed book to most Americans, was brought up repeatedly while I was in Libya. One official said, “I can’t believe the Libyans at that time could have pulled off something that big. Something that stupid—that is completely believable. But not something that big.” Western investigators continue to argue whether Libya had direct involvement in the event. Initial inquiries suggested that the bombing was the work of the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, a terror group funded by Iran, and both a former Scottish police chief and a former CIA officer later submitted statements claiming that the physical evidence inculpating Libya had been planted. Because of such problems, Robert Black, the QC (Queen’s Counsel—a very high-ranking lawyer) and Edinburgh law professor who helped set up the trial, told the Scotsman this past November that the Lockerbie verdict was “the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for a hundred years” and would “gravely damage” the reputation of the Scottish criminal-justice system. The case is under consideration by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. Because Libya supported foreign terrorist groups, though, the regime could have been implicated even if it was not the main author of the disaster.

In recent years, US diplomatic relations with Libya have warmed slightly. In 1999, the United States agreed to the suspension of UN sanctions, but not its own, which it renewed in August 2001. Then came 9/11. Qaddafi condemned the attacks, called the Taliban “godless promoters of political Islam,” and pointed out that six years earlier he had issued a warrant for Osama bin Laden’s arrest. In August 2003, the Libyan government pledged to deposit $2.7 billion in the Bank for International Settlements, in Switzerland, to compensate the families of those lost on Pan Am Flight 103. Four months later, after secret negotiations with a British-led team, Libya agreed to renounce its WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program, and American sanctions were eased.

Qaddafi had made similar overtures to both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton but was spurned—in part, according to Martin Indyk, who was Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, because Libya’s weapons programs were not considered an imminent threat. This contention has been borne out. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, described Libya’s nuclear program as “at an early stage of development”—many of the centrifuges had evidently never been uncrated. But John Wolf, who as George W. Bush’s assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation played a key role in dismantling Libya’s program, maintains that something of real value was secured—more by way of information and evidence than by the removal of a present threat. “The Libyans had the design of a nuclear weapon, sold by the A. Q. Khan network,” he told me, referring to the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. “Libya’s decision to turn over not only equipment but also the documentation, shipping invoices, plans, et cetera, provided a treasure trove of materials that were instrumental in establishing the credible case that mobilized countries against implicated individuals and companies abroad. We would not have been able to convince many of these countries or the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association) of the cancer-like nature of the festering A. Q. Khan network without that documentation. The information that enabled us to break up the network was critical.”