Exit the Colonel (22 page)

While Saif was undoubtedly better educated than his father, his education suffered some of the same holes. It was incomplete and delivered in fits and starts. A senior American consultant and classmates who had extensive dealings with Saif described him as an “intellectual manqué,” someone fascinated with ideas for their own sake, and who might have become a professor, if born into different circumstances. Saif was certainly exposed to ideas and people with ideas. He had access to talented PhD tutors, the most erudite and influential thinkers of the twentieth century, and increasingly to heads of state and the pillars of the international financial world, including Lord Jacob Rothschild, Lord Peter Mandelson, and Britain's Prince Andrew, who collectively began to treat Saif as a bona fide colleague, if not peer.

When Saif returned to Libya, he appeared to regress, very possibly due to the proximity of his father. He was criticized within his imported policy circle for associating with childhood friends, whom they described as more “jesters” than serious advisers.
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Some of Saif's acquaintances speculated Saif trusted the former more than he did the latter, and that the childhood friends entertained and insulated him from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Gaddafi's “court.”
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Saif's OneNine Petroleum, effectively an oil services company acting outside the remit of the National Oil Company, was fronted by an individual Saif had publicly rebuked on at least one occasion for buffoonery and who had spent much of his time lobbying the US Embassy with fantastical schemes. Another of Saif's associates was Dr. Omran Bukhres, a visiting associate professor of computer science at Purdue University, with self-described interest in “mobile computing systems, transaction management, concurrency control, and recovery in heterogeneous distributed database systems.”
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All these individuals used Saif's name as a way to gain access, in most cases, more to their own benefit than his.

The Monitor Group's 192-page “National Economic Strategy” (NES) was based on the same principles Michael Porter had sold to various other rogue states seeking Western favor, including Iran.
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Monitor was allegedly paid between $9 million and $11 million to create the NES, an “organization as
well as a strategy,” whose cochairs were Michael Porter and Daniel Yergin, well known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the history of oil,
The Prize
. Formally, the strategy was meant both to diagnose Libya's economic ills and to create a road map for a globally competitive state:

Informally, the NES became the primary reform vehicle and training ground for a group of individuals who would help push Saif's reform agenda in the lead-up to the 2011 revolution, and would then form a core group of the rebel leadership in its wake. In this respect one might argue that the NES, and Monitor Group, for their flaws and controversy, played an important—if inadvertent—role in shaping aspects of the 2011 Libyan revolution.

In 2005, the NES had a steering committee run by two UK-educated Libyans, Dr. Abdelhafez Zlitni, one of Saif's most trusted aides, and Yusuf Sawani, previously with the Center for Global Studies of the Green Book. The NES strategy team comprised an executive committee, including representatives of the Monitor Group; the UK-based Adam Smith International, which touts itself as “a leading international advisory firm that works throughout the world to help reform and improve economies and institutions”; and Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA, Yergin's parent group). Programmatic work included running training seminars for promising Libyan executives and creating the strategy document itself. Over time, the NES spawned three separate units, the National Competitiveness Council, the Libyan Economic Development Board, and the Libyan Human Assets Office.
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Mahmoud Jibril, who later became the interim prime minister in the postrevolutionary National Transitional Council (NTC), entered the mix in the third phase, as head of the Libyan Economic Development Board.

While much of the NES, like Saif's thesis, was unremarkable, as with many other quasi-official, objective reports on the Libyan economy, it was
deferential (and in the view of many, overly indulgent) to Gaddafi's views and institutions. Representative statements include: “Libya has the only functioning example of direct democracy on a national level.” And “BPCs [Basic People's Congresses] provide a meaningful forum for Libyan citizens to participate in law-making.”

While many argue that a tainted gesture toward reform like this one was better than nothing, it was very clear to those following Monitor's work that its supporters, whether Gaddafi or the US government or both, had agreed at least tacitly that
political
reform was not part of the deal—at least not now.

The NES coordinated both research and data collection and a training segment, both of which informed the final NES document. The Monitor team claimed to have interviewed and trained some two hundred business and government leaders in various key sectors (health care, tourism, construction, transport and logistics, and entrepreneurship), and polled two thousand small and medium-sized enterprises on attitudes to reform, and competencies (though it is highly doubtful there were that many in Libya at this time).

The NES conclusions were, not surprisingly, very similar to studies done thirty odd years earlier. They noted the need for broad and deep economic reform, for the linking of training to jobs, and for improving the quality of training and education across the board. The most useful or solid prescriptions were those closest to Monitor's and Porter's own core competencies—suggesting ways to shore up the banking sector to increase liquidity and investment, and making a case for self-contained industrial corridors. These would be modeled after other high-visibility clusters and exchange programs, such as the New Economic Cities program in Saudi Arabia, Dubai's International Financial Center, and New York University's Abu Dhabi satellite campus, all of which were in some way meant to create pockets of economic, industrial, or educational activity not subject to all the rules that applied to the rest of the country.

Diplomats based in Tripoli soon realized that Monitor's Libyan engagement was deepening, going beyond policy consulting to assisting Saif with his LSE dissertation and August “youth” speeches, the launching point for most of his signature initiatives—from talk of a constitution, to media and cultural projects, to amnesty for former regime opponents. While this was all “officially unofficial”—Saif still had no formal government position—these communications had a strong policy-making air to them. Within a short time,
Monitor had gone from being the author of competitiveness reports and holding training seminars to steering a good part of Saif's reform agenda and “selling” of the Gaddafis to the Western intellectual and political elite.

One of Monitor's most notable successes was a blueprint for a National Economic Development Board (NEDB). Monitor had highlighted the NEDB as the first in a list of actions for pressing issues in 2006: “Establish and fund a Libyan Economic Development Board—an executive body with strong leadership that is held clearly accountable for driving the reform agenda and for setting up the new governance structure.”
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The idea for the board originated with Maria Al Zahrani, a young American-Saudi consultant and LSE classmate of Saif's, hired to liaise between the Libyan government and consultants from Monitor, CERA, and Adam Smith International. Raised in Southeast Asia, where she was exposed to the workings of the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Malaysian Investment Development Authority, Al Zahrani felt Libya could benefit from an institution dedicated to attracting and expediting foreign direct investment. In the fall of 2005, she arranged a fact-finding mission to these two countries, and introduced Saif to the heads of relevant institutions.
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Saif liked the idea of the NEDB and was fascinated with former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's notion of Singapore Inc., which had transformed that city-state from backward to “developed.”
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At a time when Saif's political influence was largely limited to the activities of the Gaddafi International Foundation for Charity Associations, the NEDB became a new and more influential vehicle for Saif and his self-selected reform entourage.

In 2006, Saif appeared safely ensconced as the principal regime mouthpiece for economic and social reform, the Monitor Group next undertook what, a few years before, would have been an even more charged assignment. It attempted to remake Gaddafi himself, even to present him as a “world-class thinker.”

Monitor's efforts on this front began in 2006 and included visits of renowned academics to Libya for direct conversations with Gaddafi. The dialogues were held with many of the same individuals enlisted to develop Saif's public persona, including American political theorist Benjamin Barber (best known for his 1996 book,
Jihad vs. McWorld
); former London School of Economics director Lord Anthony Giddens (who promoted his own version of a Third Way between capitalism and socialism); political economist and noted futurist Francis Fukayama; Harvard political scientist and former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Joseph Nye;
Cass Sunstein (a constitutional adviser to Barack Obama, and the husband of Samantha Power, one of the architects-to-be of the Responsibility-to-Protect rationale for US intervention in Libya in 2011); Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy, also at the Kennedy School; Richard Perle; the list is a long one, and has been repeated in many sources.
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The cornerstone of the Gaddafi makeover was to be a book delivered in 2009 on the fortieth anniversary of the Libyan revolution. The proposal, which leaked to the media, would result in

The price tag for this book was to be $2.9 million. While Monitor in its proposal promised Gaddafi authors “with serious credentials, a reputation for fairness,” and ideally “those who actually know Qadhafi (sic) and have spent time with him,”
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Monitor leadership apparently made arrangements to outsource the work to an intern at the US Libya Business Association (which was heavily lobbying Congresss to pressure the Bush administration to speed up normalization of relations with Libya).
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However, during this undertaking, Monitor ran into increasing difficulties in Libya in 2006 and 2007. The regime designated at least one consultant persona non grata, and rumors emerged of a falling out between the Libyan handlers and Monitor principals. The company ceased operations in Libya in 2007. Company officers attributed the deterioration in the relationship to a number of factors, including their feeling that the reform activities had run their course, and that their services were no longer needed, given the lifting of sanctions, increased infighting within regime circles, and Saif's fundamental lack of influence with his father. The company's headaches with Libya increased in 2008, when documents outlining the extent of Monitor's dealings with the Libyans, raised the question of whether Monitor had been acting as a foreign lobbyist without being registered as such.
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Monitor would admit the book idea, while well-intentioned, was “a serious mistake.”
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While maligned within the dissident community and US academic circles for their role in Libya's repositioning, Monitor principals insist they
laid the groundwork for meaningful change within Libya (and as I argue, this may well be true, but more in line with the law of unintended consequences). While various senior US officials gave the impression that Monitor was acting fully on its own, senior Monitor officials begged to differ, stopping just short of saying they had been working directly with the US government. One Monitor official related how the company had approached then Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, a close friend of the president, before accepting Saif's invitation to oversee the NES, to get his opinion about the Libyans' proposal. Evans told them, with a laugh, that they had “every right to do what they wanted, but so did he to slap handcuffs on them when they got back to the States.”
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In other words, they could not count on support from the US government. Several months later, however, a senior CIA official called Monitor's leaders back and asked if they were still in contact with the Libyans. The message was clear: if Monitor wished to pursue the previously mentioned engagement, it was now “very much in the national security interests of the US government for them to do so.”
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Not long thereafter, Liz Cheney, then deputy assistant secretary for public diplomacy within the State Department (and, not irrelevantly, Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter) entered the scene to discuss ways the Middle East Partnership Initiative, the cultural and educational pillar of the administration's transformational diplomacy, might assist with the implementation of the National Economic Strategy.
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