GLOBALIST
2011-03-07 21:37:01 UTC
Can Buy Me Love
by Christopher Dickey
Christopher Dickey is a columnist for The Daily Beast and Newsweek
magazine's Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor. He is the author
of six books, including Summer of Deliverance, and most recently
Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force—the NYPD.
====================
Before Libyans rose up against him, Muammar Gaddafi used money, and
well-timed diplomatic overtures, to worm his way into the West’s good
graces. In this week’s Newsweek, Christopher Dickey looks at how Bush,
Blair, and Berlusconi gave the brutal dictator a makeover.
The tale is a sordid one, but let’s at least begin in relatively
pleasant surroundings, among the leather armchairs of the Travellers
Club in London. Its rooms have been a favorite rendezvous since the
19th century for gentlemen of international intrigue—and it’s where
Libya’s urbane, white-haired spymaster, Musa Kusa, met with
representatives of the British and American intelligence services in
December 2003. Their purpose was to hammer out a deal to bring Kusa’s
boss, Muammar Gaddafi, in from the cold.
Prime Minister Tony Blairs meets with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi outside
Sirte, Libya on May 29, 2007. (Photo: Stefan Rousseau / AP Photo)
Kusa, now Libya’s foreign minister, affects none of the silly props
and pretenses—the tents and turbans and meandering rants—that have
become Gaddafi’s trademarks. He got his master’s degree at Michigan
State University in the 1970s, and both his children, born in the
United States, are American citizens. “He ought to understand our
ways,” says an American intelligence officer who dealt with him in the
1990s. And he does. It’s Kusa’s grasp of Western ways that has made
him so effective in his primary role as Gaddafi’s enabler, aiding and
abetting the Libyan leader’s pathological behavior. Kusa concocts
excuses, fends off consequences, comes up with compromises, and thus
far has managed to keep his kinsman in power no matter what crimes the
Libyan leader has committed against his own people or against the
world. But what’s really disturbing is the roster of world leaders he
helped to enlist as his fellow enablers: men like Tony Blair, Nicolas
Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, Gordon Brown, and even George W. Bush.
How did they end up collaborating with the once and future
international pariah? The West’s reconciliation with Gaddafi
disconcerted even the likes of former CIA director George Tenet, whose
memoir, At the Center of the Storm, called the negotiations with Kusa
“illustrative of the surreal world in which we had to operate.”
According to Tenet, many in the agency actually suspected Kusa of
masterminding the 1988 bombing that blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the
sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. But by 2003, Western
intelligence services had grown as comfortable with Kusa’s proposals
as they were in the leather armchairs of the Travellers—and they
helped Western leaders feel that way, too.
The really critical moment of excess came in 2009. Abdelbaset al-
Megrahi, the sole Libyan intelligence officer convicted for the
Lockerbie bombing, was serving a life sentence in Scotland, but had
been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, supposedly with three
months to live.
by Christopher Dickey
Christopher Dickey is a columnist for The Daily Beast and Newsweek
magazine's Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor. He is the author
of six books, including Summer of Deliverance, and most recently
Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force—the NYPD.
====================
Before Libyans rose up against him, Muammar Gaddafi used money, and
well-timed diplomatic overtures, to worm his way into the West’s good
graces. In this week’s Newsweek, Christopher Dickey looks at how Bush,
Blair, and Berlusconi gave the brutal dictator a makeover.
The tale is a sordid one, but let’s at least begin in relatively
pleasant surroundings, among the leather armchairs of the Travellers
Club in London. Its rooms have been a favorite rendezvous since the
19th century for gentlemen of international intrigue—and it’s where
Libya’s urbane, white-haired spymaster, Musa Kusa, met with
representatives of the British and American intelligence services in
December 2003. Their purpose was to hammer out a deal to bring Kusa’s
boss, Muammar Gaddafi, in from the cold.
Prime Minister Tony Blairs meets with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi outside
Sirte, Libya on May 29, 2007. (Photo: Stefan Rousseau / AP Photo)
Kusa, now Libya’s foreign minister, affects none of the silly props
and pretenses—the tents and turbans and meandering rants—that have
become Gaddafi’s trademarks. He got his master’s degree at Michigan
State University in the 1970s, and both his children, born in the
United States, are American citizens. “He ought to understand our
ways,” says an American intelligence officer who dealt with him in the
1990s. And he does. It’s Kusa’s grasp of Western ways that has made
him so effective in his primary role as Gaddafi’s enabler, aiding and
abetting the Libyan leader’s pathological behavior. Kusa concocts
excuses, fends off consequences, comes up with compromises, and thus
far has managed to keep his kinsman in power no matter what crimes the
Libyan leader has committed against his own people or against the
world. But what’s really disturbing is the roster of world leaders he
helped to enlist as his fellow enablers: men like Tony Blair, Nicolas
Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, Gordon Brown, and even George W. Bush.
How did they end up collaborating with the once and future
international pariah? The West’s reconciliation with Gaddafi
disconcerted even the likes of former CIA director George Tenet, whose
memoir, At the Center of the Storm, called the negotiations with Kusa
“illustrative of the surreal world in which we had to operate.”
According to Tenet, many in the agency actually suspected Kusa of
masterminding the 1988 bombing that blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the
sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. But by 2003, Western
intelligence services had grown as comfortable with Kusa’s proposals
as they were in the leather armchairs of the Travellers—and they
helped Western leaders feel that way, too.
The really critical moment of excess came in 2009. Abdelbaset al-
Megrahi, the sole Libyan intelligence officer convicted for the
Lockerbie bombing, was serving a life sentence in Scotland, but had
been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, supposedly with three
months to live.