Exit the Colonel (42 page)

Many of the African countries and their rulers were far less active in their backing of Gaddafi than he might have hoped or expected and far less supportive than his former allies in the Bush administration. South Africa, Burkina Faso, and Senegal all offered to broker cease-fires, individually and through the offices of the African Union. An African Union (AU) delegation, led by South African President Jacob Zuma, also included President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania, Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali, and Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville. They arrived in early April to try to broker a cease-fire. Gaddafi accepted the plan, while the rebels rejected any deal that would leave Gaddafi or any of his family in place. When the same delegation arrived in Benghazi to meet with NTC officials, they encountered hostile demonstrators outside the Tibesti Hotel. Lévy described how he jumped on the back of a truck with a microphone, under the eye of US envoy Chris Stevens (who had no recollection of the event), and announced to the crowd, “I am French, a friend of Libya, and I beg you to stop. The world is watching you, following you with admiration. If you give your movement an air of brutality, of violence, you will lose the advantage of your admirable revolution.”
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Ugandan president Yoweri Musevini and Rwandan president Paul Kegame were far more circumspect. In an interview with the pan-African
Jeune Afrique
, Musevini rattled off a balance sheet of Gaddafi's good and bad deeds in Africa. While there were things to admire, such as a bold vision for African economic union and confronting the Western oil companies in the early 1970s, Musevini intimated that Africans on the whole detested Gaddafi's meddling. Particularly offensive were his attempts to rally tribal rulers, “local kings,” against governments to stir up domestic opposition, exploiting religion to political ends and even attempting assassinations. In Gaddafi's mind, Musevini said the “ends justified the means.”
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In an op-ed entitled, “Rwandans Know Why Gaddafi Must Be Stopped,” Kegame argued that the AU should have been more actively consulted, if
only to help prevent more such disasters within Africa: “While the support may not have been military, the AU could have offered something far more valuable—political support and moral authority for the coalition's actions on the ground.”
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Nevertheless, Kegame did not raise his voice in support of Gaddafi staying in power.

Libya still had its advocates. Curt Weldon, the former congressman, was one of the first to return to Libya. He was invited by a senior Gaddafi staff aide and, with at least the tacit backing of the US government, he sought to convince Gaddafi to step down.
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In an op-ed published in the
New York Times
in April, Weldon intimated that he felt US had let the Libyan people—not Gaddafi—down, by not supporting the opening more forcefully:

Curiously, Weldon laid the blame for the failure of the “opening” on US business:

Saif Al Islam reached out to various parties in the weeks and months following his disastrous speech of February 20 and was, despite his public rhetoric, said to have tried to convince his father and brothers to compromise.
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Though he called Libya's erstwhile champion Tony Blair, the former prime minister reportedly firmly rebuffed him. On March 18, he called Secretary Clinton to talk her out of intervention. She refused to take his call and had Ambassador Cretz tell him that loyalist troops needed to stand down immediately and Gaddafi needed to relinquish power.
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Saif tried to send messages to Sarkozy via Bernard-Henri Lévy, who apparently told him
that without decisive action on the ground favorable to ending the conflict, he was wasting his time.

Here a detail emerges that may be critical in understanding Saif 's (and Gaddafi's) overall calculus. Lévy told Saif 's emissary that Saif would do himself and his family well to “negotiate an exit.” The emissary pointed to the television, at that moment broadcasting images of Hosni Mubarak being carted off to his jail-hospital. His point: the Gaddafis could not hope for so merciful a fate. “Mubarak,” Lévy's interlocutor said, “did not have blood on his hands, he had accepted to leave power without spilling blood.... There's no comparison with Saif, who, himself has much, much, blood on his hands.”
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With the regime crumbling around him, Saif may have believed that there simply was no exit for him.

As the months wore on, however, the West's optimism for a somewhat neat exit for Gaddafi began to fade. While the siege of Misurata had been broken by mid-May, rebel forces appeared to be losing the initiative. Intensive NATO strikes had not dislodged Gaddafi, nor had they decisively weakened his support in the west. There had been no palace coup.

David Welch's successor at the State Department, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, met with Gaddafi advisers in Tunisia on July 17. Feltman and other State Department officials insisted there was no talk of a deal (as Gaddafi's spokesman claimed): the meetings were solely to convey to Gaddafi that he must step down. At the same time, there were indications that Washington was growing weary of stalemate and had started to explore “outs,”
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including those that might leave Gaddafi in Libya, perhaps even in some position of influence.
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A Gaddafi spokesman framed the meeting with three US officials in Tunis as a path to a possible “arrangement.” The Russians continued working, as they would later with Syria, on a compromise to secure a cease-fire and little else.
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In mid-July, Gaddafi senior sent four representatives via Paris to Israel to meet influential Israeli parliamentarians, Tzipi Livni and Meir Shitreet.
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During the meeting, the Libyans allegedly broached the possibility of providing Israeli Jews of Libyan descent funds with which to start a pro-Libya Jewish party. According to Al Jazeera, the visit was meant to “improve the Israeli view of Gaddafi” and signal Gaddafi's inclination to support normalization of relations with the Jewish state. The Israeli interlocutors were said to have described the idea simply as “strange.”
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The fact that these meetings took place at all seems to lend credence to the notion that the question of Israel had played a role in the earlier rapprochement, and that
perhaps Gaddafi felt the Israelis either “owed” him or would see some use in mediating with the Americans.

On the heels of Assistant Secretary Jeffrey Feltman's meeting with a Libyan delegation in Tunis, the Libyans apparently held out hope for help from some of those who drove the original US-Libya rapprochement. Former Assistant Secretary David Welch met with two Gaddafi envoys at the Cairo Four Seasons Hotel on August 2, 2012, a few days after the assassination of rebel military commander Abdelfattah Younes (but into the final stages of the NATO campaign).
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Details emerged from a cache of documents found in government offices by an Al Jazeera crew after the fall of Tripoli in August.
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The Libyans, Fuad Abu Baker Al Zleitny and Mohammed Ismail—one a Gaddafi aide, the other a close associate of Saif—wrote in their minutes that Welch had requested the meeting (Welch maintains the opposite, that the two men had contacted him about the meeting).
Asharq Al Awsat
claims Welch opened the discussion by saying, “The situation is very serious, and I say this without exaggeration, as a friend who is well informed of the situation. It is necessary to take matters in all seriousness, and with responsibility and care.”
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The article claims Welch then proceeded to outline a series of steps that the Libyans could take to help their position vis-à-vis NATO and the Americans, because even though there was “little love for Libya in the US,” there was opposition to US intervention within Congress and the administration, and among some intellectuals.

The Libyans say Welch enumerated a list of “confidence-building measures” that Gaddafi might use to focus US attention on a “solution” acceptable to all sides. Welch and sources close to him insist that many of these statements were either exaggerated by the interlocutors to make his comments “more palatable” to Gaddafi, or else were taken out of context. Among the alleged “prescriptions” were that Gaddafi provide critical intelligence about links between specific members of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) and Al Qaeda and other extremist elements (information that might then be delivered to the Americans through the good offices of countries like Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, or Israel), and provide specific information about the probable location of munitions, particularly shoulder-launched missiles.
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Welch allegedly encouraged the Libyans to exploit the evolving situation in Syria to their advantage, and said that what happened in Libya “would not have happened under a Republican administration,” and that the US leadership was surrounded by “inexperienced advisers.”
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After the story broke on
Al Jazeera
English and in the US press, Foggy Bottom distanced itself from Welch. A State Department spokeswoman stressed Welch's meeting was “personal,” while some US officials questioned whether Welch had obtained proper approvals. A State Department official said Welch was frequently in Libya after he joined Bechtel, but was, “like any good diplomat-turned-businessman, exploiting his contacts.”
⁴⁰

Welch insists he cleared the meeting with the Libyans with the Department in advance, and that the Department had confirmed this in a late Friday press briefing, where it attracted little media attention.
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This claim is borne out by a September 1 briefing in Paris, in which State Department officials confirmed that Welch was in touch with the Department “both before and after” the meeting.
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The idea that the Department knew of and sanctioned the meeting is further bolstered by the fact that both the US administration and NATO were, in late August, and with no obvious end to the conflict in sight, beginning (privately, not publicly) to consider some form of negotiated solution.
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Regardless of who said and recorded what, and on whose authority, during the Welch-Libyans meeting, the encounter is interesting in its consistency with the statements and actions of others who had been at the center of the rapprochement process, whether Democrats or Republicans: Many clearly felt protective of the structures and relationships they had worked to build. Former Assistant Secretary Martin Indyk, a Clinton partisan, once-senior American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffer, and Welch's predecessor, said after the 2011 Libyan revolution that he felt the US had violated its commitments to Gaddafi, and that—while this was an obvious loss for Gaddafi—the “loss” of Libya would prove harmful to broader US regional interests, particularly the prospect of averting conflict with Iran.
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The NTC had been a target for those in the US and EU who doubted the rebels' political competency and/or ability to influence Libyan popular opinion or manage whatever might happen after Gaddafi stepped down. Contrary to the complaints of many foreign policy observers and intervention skeptics, the NTC was not led by a group of complete unknowns. From the beginning, the public leaders of the NTC were in fact well known to the US and its European allies through various previous dealings with the Gaddafi regime and its reformist elements.

Mahmoud Jibril, the NTC's alternating prime minister–foreign minister, had a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and since 2007 had been a prominent member of Saif 's team as head of the National Economic Development Board. Fathi Terbil, who held the Youth Affairs portfolio, was one of the key advocates for the victims of the Abu Selim massacre. Fathi Baja was known for his biting criticism of Gaddafi's regime in Saif 's new media organization. Ali Tarhouni was the first and for a time the only person within the council to hold the title of minister (most of the others were named heads of committees, making decisions and statements about specific issues). Tarhouni had been in exile in the US since 1973 and had been condemned to death for sedition in absentia by a Gaddafi court. In March, he left his position as a professor of economics at the University of Washington in Seattle to serve the just-formed NTC.
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The head of the council, Mustafa Abdeljalil came to the attention of the West through his previous efforts as minister of justice (from 2007) to moderate Gaddafi's stance on the Benghazi nurses. Abdeljalil's vice president-to-be, Abdelhafiz Ghoga was no stranger to Libyans, if less well known to the West. A lawyer and son of an ambassador, he oversaw the Libyan Bar Association for many years.

Mahmoud Shammam, a journalist living in exile in Doha until recently, headed the communication committee. General Omar el Hariri, one of Gaddafi's companions in arms in 1969, participated in the attempted coup of 1975 and was subsequently imprisoned until 1990. He became Abdelfattah Younes's chief of staff after Younes's defection to the rebel side and was then made nominal defense minister. Other members included Abdalla al Mayhoub (former dean of the faculty of law of the University of Benghazi), and Ahmed Al-Zubeir Al Senussi (the past political prisoner and focal point of the future Cyrenaican “autonomy” movement in 2011). In the early days of the NTC, there were thirty-one members, many of whom remained anonymous because of their connections in the west, which was of course, still under Gaddafi control.