Judith <iller: Libya and WMD

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008381

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How Gadhafi Lost His Groove
The complex surrender of Libya's WMD.

BY JUDITH MILLER
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:01 a.m.

As the Bush administration struggles to stop Iran and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, it might recall how Libya was persuaded to renounce terrorism and its own weapons of mass destruction programs, including a sophisticated nuclear program purchased almost entirely from the supplier network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's bomb.

When Libya dramatically declared on Dec. 19, 2003, that it was abandoning its rogue ways, President Bush and other senior officials praised Libya and Moammar al-Gadhafi, the surviving dean of Arab revolutionary leaders, as a model that other rogue states might follow. In fact, the still largely secret talks that helped prompt Libya's decision, and the joint American-British dismantlement of its weapons programs in the first four months of 2004, remain the administration's sole undeniable--if largely unheralded--intelligence and nonproliferation success. And a key figure in that effort, Stephen Kappes, is now slated to be the next deputy director of the demoralized Central Intelligence Agency.

Sanctions and Diplomacy

The post-renunciation diplomacy, however, has not been all smooth. Libyan officials expected that after such a radical change, Washington would generously reward Libya--despite Col. Gadhafi's past terrorist sins and his continuing repression at home. But although the sanctions that helped cripple its WMD programs and oil-dependent economy were lifted, and a small U.S. liaison office was established in Tripoli, Libya remained on Washington's list of states that sponsor terrorism, and full diplomatic relations were not restored, until this week. While Libya has clearly dawdled, some critics of the Bush administration now argue that Washington's temporizing toward Libya has undermined its nonproliferation victory and has reinforced rogue-state conviction that disarmament will not get one far with Washington. Moreover, the administration quietly continues to attribute Col. Gadhafi's WMD decision to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a claim that has embarrassed Col. Gadhafi among Libyans and his Arab neighbors. Today, the strongman, or Brother Leader as he prefers to be called, is frustrated, and the leadership coterie is restive.

"Giving up WMD alone should have been enough to warrant normalization of relations with the U.S.," Abdellahi El Obeidi, one of Col. Gadhafi's inner circle who now heads the Foreign Ministry's European division, told me during a three-week visit to Libya in March. "We are not where we should be--not at all."

How and why did Col. Gadhafi, the despotic, still dangerously capricious leader, decide to abandon a lifetime of revolution and terrorism and abandon the WMD programs he had pursued since seizing power in a coup in 1969? What role did American intelligence play in that decision? And how much change can Col. Gadhafi tolerate and still retain power?

Col. Gadhafi's hip, 34-year-old son, Saif-al-Islam, told me in Vienna--where he earned an M.B.A. and lives when he's not carrying out tasks for his father, or studying for a doctorate in political philosophy at the London School of Economics--that his father changed course because he had to. "Overnight we found ourselves in a different world," said Saif, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks. "So Libya had to redesign its policies to cope with these new realities."

But a review of confidential government records and interviews with current and former officials in London, Tripoli, Vienna and Washington suggest that other factors were involved. Prominent among them is a heretofore undisclosed intelligence coup--the administration's decision in late 2003 to give Libyan officials a compact disc containing intercepts of a conversation about Libya's nuclear weapons program between Libya's nuclear chief and A.Q. Khan--that reinforced Col. Gadhafi's decision to reverse course on WMD.

While analysts continue to debate his motivation, evidence suggests that a mix of intelligence, diplomacy and the use of force in Iraq helped persuade him that the weapons he had pursued since he came to power, and on which he had secretly spent $300 million ($100 million on nuclear equipment and material alone), made him more, not less, vulnerable. "The administration overstates Iraq, but its critics go too far in saying that force played no role," says Bruce W. Jentleson, a foreign-policy adviser to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign and professor at Duke University, who has written the most detailed study of why Col. Gadhafi abandoned WMD: "It was force and diplomacy, not force or diplomacy that turned Gadhafi around . . . a combination of steel and a willingness to deal."

Clearly, Col. Gadhafi's decision, which Libyans say predated the Iraqi invasion, was part of a broader shift prompted by the miserable failure of his socialist experiment at home, the collapse of the Soviet Union abroad, and his growing conviction that the sanctions which prevented him from expanding oil production--and which isolated him--were jeopardizing his rule.

A canny survivor, Col. Gadhafi first signaled a willingness to negotiate in the early 1990s, soon after the Soviet collapse, officials say. But Washington had little interest in dealing with him then, given his monstrous record on terrorism. Subsequent feelers to the Clinton administration went nowhere because they preceded a financial settlement with the families of victims of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, in which 259 passengers and crew, most of them Americans, had died. Ultimately, Col. Gadhafi agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the Lockerbie families--$10 million per victim--and millions more to compensate families of earlier victims of terrorist attacks. He also accepted Libyan responsibility for terrorist acts committed by two of his intelligence officers while continuing to deny his own obvious complicity in the crime. By then, the Clinton administration was out of office.

Even before 9/11, the Bush administration was focused on unconventional "new threats" to the U.S., particularly WMD in the hands of rogue states and terrorist groups. In his first speech on national security policy, in May 2001, Mr. Bush said he might use force to limit the spread of WMD to those who "seek to destroy us." Deterrence, he said, "is no longer enough."

Col. Gadhafi was alarmed by the new U.S. agenda, and Libyans say that the 9/11 attacks were a turning point for the Brother Leader, who was among the first to condemn them. Through intelligence channels, he sent the administration a list of suspects. He also called Hosni Mubarak in a panic, convinced that Mr. Bush would attack Libya once the Taliban had been crushed in Afghanistan, according to a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo reported last month by Time. Meanwhile, Washington increased its rhetorical pressure. Though Libya was not included in Mr. Bush's "axis of evil," then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton called Libya a "rogue state" determined to acquire WMD.

In August and the fall of 2002, the British sent emissaries to discuss Libya's unconventional weapons with Col. Gadhafi. At the same time, Saif-al-Islam was trying to develop an intelligence backchannel to convince the U.S. and Britain that his father wanted a WMD deal. Officials said that Saif initially relied heavily on emissaries, including Mohammed Rashid, a Palestinian who had managed much of Yasser Arafat's money. Though officials recalled that the CIA seemed strangely uninterested in what the Libyan leader's son had to say, MI5, Britain's spy agency, reportedly assured Mr. Rashid that Tony Blair would raise Libya with Mr. Bush when the two men met at Camp David in September 2002.

Although the Camp David talks focused mainly on the impending Iraq war, Mr. Bush reportedly accepted Mr. Blair's proposal that they explore Col. Gadhafi's avowed interest in discussing WMD in exchange for lifting sanctions. In October 2002, Mr. Blair wrote a letter to Col. Gadhafi proposing such a dialogue; a few weeks later, Col. Gadhafi replied affirmatively: "I will instruct my people to be in touch with your people," a diplomat quoted his letter as saying. Col. Gadhafi, who Saif says avidly surfs the Net for news, had by now become even more anxious about press reports of Iraqi-Libyan nuclear cooperation. Stories sourced to senior Israeli officials accused Iraq of having sent nuclear physicists to Libya to work on a joint weapons program.

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As U.S. and British troops began flooding into Kuwait, Col. Gadhafi grew agitated, diplomats said. Italian press accounts quote then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as saying that Col. Gadhafi had called him to say he feared he would be America's next target. "Tell them I will do whatever they want," said one diplomat, recounting the call. In early March 2003 just days before the start of the Iraq war, Saif and Musa Kusa, a top Libyan intelligence official, contacted the British to say that Col. Gadhafi wanted to "clear the air" about WMD programs in exchange for assurances that the U.S. would not try to topple his regime, according to several accounts.

In Vienna, Saif told me that the decision to abandon WMD "was my own initiative," an astonishing assertion that no diplomat believes. "The purpose of WMD is to enhance a nation's security. But our programs did not do that," he said. Saif said he had sensed early on that even settling the lingering Lockerbie dispute would not be enough to enable Libya to win Western acceptance. "We needed something bold, something big enough to have impact," he said. "Shock therapy! We knew the Americans would not find yellowcake in Iraq--as we warned them--but that there was yellowcake in Libya, and that this card was worth something." While he rejected the administration's argument that his father had been frightened into abandoning WMD by the invasion of Iraq, the timing of Libya's overture to the British and Americans was affected by the invasion. "I saw WMD as a card in our hands," he said. The invasion of Iraq was "the best time to play that card."

Washington was skeptical. To prevent leaks and sabotage by neoconservatives and other officials opposed to normalizing relations with Tripoli, details of the Libyan overtures and some half-dozen secret meetings that followed the March overture over the next seven months in London, Geneva and even Tripoli were known to only a handful of senior U.S. officials. Yet as American forces became bogged down in Iraq, Col. Gadhafi's enthusiasm for giving up his WMD programs seemed to wane. Libya had yet to acknowledge even that it possessed banned weapons and programs, a senior official told me. And while the Libyans had agreed in principle to let a team of U.S.-U.K. weapons experts visit sites in Libya, no date had been set. "No agreement on a date meant there was essentially no agreement on a visit," the official said. The talks stalled.

The diplomatic lull soon ended, however. Libyans close to the Gadhafi family told me that after Saddam Hussein's sons were killed in a shootout with U.S. soldiers in Mosul in July 2003, Safiya, Col. Gadhafi's wife, angrily demanded that he do more to ensure that Saif and her other sons would not share a similar fate. Then, in early October 2003, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Italy interdicted the "BBC China," a German ship destined for Libya that the Americans had been tracking for nearly a year. A U.S. intelligence official informed the Libyans that the five 40-foot containers marked "used machine parts" that were offloaded from the ship contained thousands of centrifuge parts to enrich uranium, manufactured in Malaysia by the A.Q. Khan network. Stunned by the discovery, Libya fast-tracked its long-promised invitation to the British and U.S. experts to tour suspect sites. A 15-person team, headed by Mr. Kappes, then the CIA deputy director of operations, (who declined to be interviewed for this piece) entered Libya on Oct. 19 on a 10-day mission.

While Col. Gadhafi could have claimed, as Iran now does, that the enrichment equipment was for a peaceful energy program, the pretense was shattered in November when U.S. intelligence gave the Libyans a copy of a compact disc that intelligence agencies had intercepted. According to Saif and Libyan officials in Tripoli, the CD contained a recording of a long discussion on Feb. 28, 2002, about Libya's nuclear weapons program, between Ma'atouq Mohamed Ma'atouq, the head of that clandestine effort, and A.Q. Khan. Denial of military intent was no longer an option.

The inspection team returned in December 2003, with even greater access. They were astonished by what they learned during their visits to weapons sites, labs and dual-use and military facilities. Although Libya claimed that it had no biological or germ-weapons-related facilities, and that its chemical capabilities were less than the CIA had feared, U.S. intelligence had underestimated Libya's nuclear progress.

Libyan scientists revealed that, between 1980 and 1990, they had made about 25 tons of sulfur mustard chemical-weapons agent at the Rabta facility (which the CIA had long ago identified), produced shells for more than 3,300 chemical bombs, and tried to make a small amount of nerve agent. But they had not mastered the art of binary chemical weapons, in which chemicals come together to form a lethal agent only when the bomb explodes. Thanks to sanctions, a U.S. official wrote recently, Libya was unable to acquire an essential precursor chemical.

The nuclear front was more troubling. Not only had Libya developed highly compartmentalized chemical and nuclear programs that were often unknown even to the Libyans who worked at the facilities, they had already imported two types of centrifuges from the Khan network--aluminum P-1s, (for Pakistan-1), and 4,000 of the more advanced P-2s. By 1997, Libya had already gotten 20 preassembled P-1s from Khan and components for another 200. In 2000, it got two P-2 model centrifuges, which used stronger steel, and had ordered 10,000 more. Libya had also imported two tons of uranium hexafluoride to be fed into the centrifuges and enriched as bomb fuel. In fact, it had managed to acquire from the Khan network what it needed to produce a 10-kiloton bomb, or to make the components for one, as well as dozens of blueprints for producing and miniaturizing a warhead, usually the toughest step in producing an atomic weapon.

Many analysts no longer doubted that Libya could have made a bomb, eventually, if the program had not been stopped and it had found a way to supplement its limited technical expertise. Though most of the rotors for the centrifuges were initially missing (many turned up months later on a ship near South Africa) experts said that had the centrifuges been properly assembled in cascades--always dicey in a technologically challenged state--Libya could have produced enough fuel to make as many as 10 nuclear warheads a year. "We definitely would have done it," said Mr. Ma'atouq, head of the program, just before my tour of Tajura, site of Libya's research reactor and its "hot cells" where scientists could separate fuel for a bomb. "Our original goal was to do so between 2006 and 2008, and if the program was accelerated, by 2007, with a year to spare," he said.

Mr. Ma'atouq confirmed Saif's assertion that Libya had decided to renounce the nuclear and other WMD programs, after months of debate within Col. Gadhafi's inner circle. He said that Libyan experts had advised Col. Gadhafi that the programs no longer served Libyan national interests. "We had discussed many options for securing our state," Mr. Ma'atouq recounted. "I'm an engineer, a practical man. And I said: Let's assume we have these weapons. What would we do with them? Who is the target? Who would we use them against? The U.S.? We had no delivery system. Yes, nuclear weapons are a deterrent, but it's better to have nothing at all than a deterrent without a means of delivery."

Initially, Mr. Ma'atouq said, Libya had tried to seek Russian help in building a complete nuclear-fuel cycle. But although the Soviets in 1981 had sold Libya the reactor at Tajura, Mr. Ma'atouq complained that they kept raising the price of related material. No deal had been made by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and by 1995, Libya was left with little choice but to try to develop the bomb indigenously. In 1998, he said, it turned to the Khan network to help "speed things up. We wanted to make the supplier a one-stop shop. We used no other suppliers."

The Khan Network

Relying on the Khan network meant he no longer had to worry about the origin of the equipment and material, or haggle with individual suppliers over the price and (often shoddy) quality of goods on the nuclear black market. He said he never knew (nor wanted to know) where Khan was getting most of what he bought for Libya, though international inspectors say it came mainly from Pakistan, Germany and Malaysia. He claimed that he never knew whether the casks filled with uranium hexafluoride for Libya's gas-enrichment program had originated in North Korea, as U.S. intelligence analysts now believe (based on isotope fingerprints of traces found on the containers).

Col. Gadhafi's decision, though "wise," Mr. Ma'atouq said, had been particularly painful. "I had to prepare the scientists and the technical experts who had worked so hard on different aspects of the program" at Libya's seven separate sites. "It wasn't easy," he said. "This was my program. It was like killing my own baby."

During its second trip in December, the team was taken to sites that U.S. intelligence had not previously spotted and was permitted to photograph and take notes on the astonishing blueprints that few weapons designers had ever seen outside declared nuclear states. The drawings were of a relatively old, crude, but workable design that Pakistan got from China in the early 1960s. The blueprint copies that Khan had provided, as a "sweetener," no less, with their Chinese scribbling still in the margins, had been kept in their original wrappings--a plastic bag from a Pakistani tailor's shop--another bonanza for Western intelligence.

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http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008386

Gadhafi's Leap of Faith
Libya's strongman feared appearing weak.

BY JUDITH MILLER
Wednesday, May 17, 2006 12:01 a.m.

On Dec. 16, 2003, three days after Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole near Tikrit, Robert G. Joseph, who headed counterproliferation on the White House National Security Council, flew to London for a secret meeting with his British and Libyan counterparts to discuss how and when Libya would announce the abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction. "The trip was so close-hold that it was cleared neither with the British Embassy in Washington nor the American Embassy in London," a senior U.S. official recalled. Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Colin Powell knew of it in advance.

Seated around an antique wooden table with senior British and Libyan officials at the Traveler's Club in London--chosen by the British for being a discreet place to meet--Mr. Joseph was stunned by the evasiveness of the draft announcement initially presented by Musa Kusa, Libya's U.S.-educated foreign intelligence chief and de facto head of its six-man delegation. The statement failed to mention even the existence of banned weapons or programs in Libya, nor did it say that Moammar al-Gadhafi, Libya's strongman, was prepared to abandon them. Instead, the draft spoke of the "spirit of Christmas," of all things, and Libya's desire to establish a "WMD-free zone" in the Middle East, according to an official who saw several early drafts. "It was a mushy mess," he recalled.

The Libyans also wanted an explicit quid pro quo: In exchange for Libya's renunciation of WMD, the U.S. would abandon any effort to foment "regime change" in Libya, ensure that sanctions were lifted, and restore diplomatic relations. Mr. Joseph balked. There would be no such deal, or even negotiations about it, he insisted. Libya and the West still had differences to resolve on terrorism and other fronts.

Pan Am 103

Of all the U.S. officials involved in the secret talks, Mr. Joseph was the most skeptical of Col. Gadhafi's intentions, colleagues recalled. He had reason to be. "Bob and I were supposed to be on Pam Am 103 the day it crashed," said Ron Lehman, who heads the Center for Global Security Research at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Messrs. Lehman and Joseph had arrived at Heathrow Airport early enough that morning to get seats on Pan Am 107, direct to Washington, without stopping in New York, 103's destination. So they switched flights. Mr. Joseph later told friends he had seen the long lines of Americans assembling at the gate for the flight that exploded over Lockerbie soon after takeoff. He recalled a lively group of students and thought of his own son and daughter. Mr. Joseph never said a word about his narrow escape to his Libyan interlocutors. But he had no illusions about those with whom he negotiated.

Did Libya not want the world to believe that it had made a voluntary, strategic decision to renounce its weapons and programs? Mr. Joseph asked Musa Kusa, rumored to have been a coordinator of the Pan Am attack, and Abdullahi Obeidi, Col. Gadhafi's close aide who was then Libya's ambassador in Rome. It was not in Libya's or the West's interests for critics to think that Col. Gadhafi had been forced, or bribed, into doing so, Mr. Joseph argued. Libya, moreover, had to be specific about what "eliminating" its programs meant. Would it commit to destroying and removing all dangerous equipment and material? Would it destroy empty chemical munitions and lethal agents, as well as sign the treaty banning such weapons? Would Libya destroy its imported centrifuges? Would it eliminate conventional missiles that violated a treaty banning weapons capable of carrying a 500-kilo payload with a range of more than 300 kilometers?

Because nothing is ever easy with Col. Gadhafi, Tony Blair had to phone the Libyan leader the next day--their first conversation ever--to encourage him to be bold in announcing his decision. Col. Gadhafi was still hesitant, a diplomat recalled, concerned about appearances that he was caving in to pressure. Mr. Blair assured him that both he and George W. Bush would be supportive if Col. Gadhafi's renunciation were explicit. "But until the last minute," said an official who watched amended drafts of Libya's statement as they were faxed back and forth between Tripoli, London and Washington less than four hours before the announcement was scheduled, "we really weren't sure we would have an agreement."

As it happened, the announcement of the renunciation of Libya's WMD programs was delayed by an official reluctance to interrupt the broadcast of a major soccer game that Col. Gadhafi was watching. The statement he was supposed to deliver was read, instead, by Libya's foreign minister. The Brother Leader, as Col. Gadhafi styles himself, had suddenly gotten a cold--in his feet, a diplomat suggested. He had a sore throat and couldn't talk, the Libyans said. The date: Dec. 19, 2003.

Afraid that Col. Gadhafi might change his mind even after having publicly renounced his WMD, U.S. officials rushed to move sensitive nuclear equipment and material out of Libya. The mission fell to the State Department, and specifically to John Bolton, then undersecretary of state for verification and arms control, and Assistant Secretary Paula DeSutter. Donald Mahley, a veteran Foreign Service officer and former Army colonel who was deputy assistant secretary for arms control implementation, was chosen as "on the ground" coordinator.

Over Christmas, a team of experts assembled by Ms. DeSutter pieced together an emergency plan. Because the Libyans insisted on a "small footprint" in Libya, the size of a joint U.S.-U.K. team was limited to 15 experts (10 Americans and five Brits). They had to rotate in and out of Libya to stay under the limit. Even getting to Libya was challenging. "Americans were not allowed to travel there," Ms. De Sutter said. "So when our first team secretly flew in, the airline's computer kicked their reservations and tickets out of the system." The teams also needed licenses for everything, given the sanctions--even to buy Libyan officials a cup of coffee.

And there was the map problem. "I wanted a detailed, but nonclassified, map of the country," said Mr. Mahley. "But there was none in the entire U.S. government." Mr. Mahley said that nothing he had done before, including commanding two companies in Vietnam, facing down the Russians over arms-control disputes, or negotiating the germ and chemical weapons treaties in Geneva, was as complicated as dismantling Libya's WMD infrastructure in less than four months between January and April 2004.

Several things surprised him: first, the relatively small number of Libyans involved in the WMD programs. "Though the Libyans I dealt with were knowledgeable, dedicated, and innovative," he said, "there was almost no bench." "The same six people--most of them American-educated--did almost everything," said Harry L. Heintzelman IV, senior adviser on noncompliance. A second lesson was how relatively easy it was to hide elements of a WMD program, even in an open desert, "if there is a national dedication to do so," Mr. Mahley wrote in a "Lessons Learned" paper for an arms-control newsletter.

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"Tony" Sylvester Ryan, known as "Chemical Tony" to distinguish him from the team's other Tony who helped dismantle banned missiles, recalled being taken to a place they wound up calling the "turkey farm." Other officials said that the site, previously unknown to U.S. intelligence, was where Libyans had hidden unfilled chemical bombs and where they were going to set up centrifuges to enrich uranium. Libya, Mr. Ryan said, came clean in stages: "They'd start by saying 'I think we have only 1,500 unfilled bombs,' and by the end of the visit, they'd acknowledge having stored about 3,000. But we never would have found the place at all if the Libyans hadn't shown it to us."

Team members were also struck by the extent to which sanctions had complicated Libya's hunt for unconventional weapons, especially biological. Though U.S. intelligence officials still debate whether Libya has disclosed all aspects of its early effort to make or acquire germ weapons--in particular, how much help, if any, was provided by Wouter Basson, head of South Africa's illicit germ-warfare program under apartheid--sanctions apparently helped dissuade Col. Gadhafi from building an indigenous program. "The program, if you can call it that, just kind of fizzled out," said a member of the British-led biological team that first toured suspect Libyan sites and interviewed some 25 scientists during a two-week trip in the late spring of 2004.

In 1985, for example, the three Libyans who headed the germ-weapons program, known as the Scientific Medical Research Establishment, got $55 million to build a medical lab with Bio-safety Level Three and Four capacity to handle the most dangerous germs. Though the Libyans said the facility was for peaceful medical purposes, two companies they approached--from Finland and South Korea--both declined, citing the sanctions ban on selling Libya dual-use facilities, officials disclosed. Sanctions also meant that Libya often imported shoddy merchandise at exorbitant prices: for instance, four different systems to fill white plastic bottles with mustard agent, none of which worked. One German system "leaked all over the place," Mr. Mahley recalled. "Seeing the liquid on the warehouse floor, we were hesitant even to look inside without protective gear." The Italians had sold Libya a system that involved filling containers atop trucks. That, too, was a disaster. "In the end," said Mr. Ryan, "they manufactured small tanks themselves, set them on metal legs, put a petcock on the tanks, put on their protective gear, and filled the plastic containers by hand. Not exactly high-tech, but it worked."

Then the Libyans seemingly forgot about the chemical weapons they had stored away. Libyan officials insisted that, contrary to Western intelligence reports, they had never used the weapons in their war with Chad, or anywhere else; and while they had tested agents for potency and filled shells with nonlethal material, they had never field-tested shells filled with chemical agents. The Libyans also shrugged when team members asked about some of the more antiquated spare parts Libya had bought on the black market for its chemical weapons program. "They told us, 'Yeah, we know we've been had. But what were we going to do? Take them to small claims court for selling us junk?' " Mr. Ryan recalled. "They knew they had no recourse if they were sold a pig in a poke."

Although sanctions had made acquisition more expensive and time-consuming, it had not stopped the programs. Instead, Libyans had turned to one-stop shops, like the network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, "father" of the Pakistani bomb, for their nuclear program; and for chemical weapons they improvised. "Libya still pursued WMD, but sanctions raised the cost sharply and impeded the programs" Ms. DeSutter said.

The dismantlement effort did not always go smoothly. A chartered 747 that was supposed to take team member Christopher T. Yeaw and the sensitive warhead design blueprints back to Washington, for instance, broke a wing flap while landing at Metiga Airport, the former Wheelus Air Force Base, which the U.S. vacated in 1970. Because Libya had no spare parts, his return was delayed until the part could be flown in and the wing repaired. In the meantime, Dr. Yeaw, one of the few team members whose "Q" security clearance authorized him to handle such sensitive drawings, could not find a safe enough place to store the blueprints. So for the next two days, "I took it to restaurants, to the restroom. I even slept alongside it in the double bed in our villa," he said. "It was closer to me than my wife--like a baby, which is what the Libyans called it: Chris's 'baby.' "

Aides to Ma'atouq Mohammed Ma'atouq, head of Libya's nuclear program, recalled that the "baby" was the focus of tension between the Americans who came to his office to retrieve the documents and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, who arrived even earlier that same day at the Ministry of Scientific Research, well in advance of the Americans, to examine the two-inch thick sheaf of Xeroxed engineering blueprints. The IAEA thought it should keep the blueprints and asked the U.S. to turn them over, prompting a standoff before the bewildered Libyans. "My mandate was clear: Collect the documents and deliver them to Paula DeSutter in Washington," said Dr. Yeaw, a nuclear engineer who now teaches at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. "So unless they wanted to remove them from my hand, they were not going to get them." Ms. DeSutter, in fact, was waiting at the airport when the unmarked 747 finally taxied into Dulles on Jan. 22, 2004. Dr. Yeaw, fellow members of his team and his "baby" were the only cargo.

Tanks and Bulldozers

The dismantlement mission was completed in record time. In four months, the U.S.-U.K. team managed to airlift 55,000 pounds of the most sensitive documents and nuclear components, including several containers of uranium hexafluoride and two P-2 centrifuges, of some 10,000 that Libya had ordered from the Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan. By mid-February, the inspection team and a representative from the Hague-based Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, which Libya had finally agreed to join, watched Libyans crush with tanks and bulldozers more than 3,200 unfilled chemical weapons shells they had laid out on the desert floor. By March, the team had sent out by chartered ship over 1,000 tons of additional centrifuge and missile parts, including the five SCUD-C missiles (minus warheads), launchers and related equipment. And Russia had removed 13 kilos of fresh, 80% highly enriched uranium from the Tajura reactor--a uniquely successful joint venture in WMD disarmament.

Libya's continuing political repression and human rights abuses have prompted officials to cite Reagan's motto for dealing with the Soviet Union during its own tumultuous transformation: Trust, but Verify. "And this is exactly how we approached the case of Libya," said Mr. Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the U.N., in a July 2004 speech. But not even the very conservative Mr. Bolton defends the halfhearted effort to assure Col. Gadhafi that he was right to renounce WMD. Calling Libya's about-face "an important nonproliferation success" because it "proves that a country can renounce WMD and keep its regime in power," Mr. Bolton told me recently that preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons "requires long-term strategic thinking and concentration."

The preoccupation with the continuing insurgency in Iraq, the inability to stop Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons, and plunging domestic support at home for Mr. Bush may explain Washington's distraction. Libya's removal from the list of state sponsors of terror was also delayed by its alleged plot to assassinate King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, as late as 2003. A new factor that complicated the U.S.-Libyan rapprochement was Congress's refusal to permit a company based in Dubai, a key ally in the war on terror, to operate U.S. ports. Blindsided by the virulence of the opposition, the White House was even less inclined to inform Congress that it intended to remove Libya from the terrorism sponsor list. Moreover, apart from a few men--notably Reps. Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) and Peter Hoekstra, the Intelligence Committee chairman; and Sens. Richard Lugar, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, and Joe Biden--few legislators have taken the time to monitor Libyan affairs closely.

Libyan exile groups expressed dismay yesterday over Libya's removal from the terrorist list. And there will undoubtedly be objections from Congress and elsewhere. But for all the possible questions, Libya stands as one of the few countries to have voluntarily abandoned its WMD programs, and out of options for countering Iran's stonewalling, the White House belatedly opted to do more to make Libya a true model for the region. Human rights abuses are more likely to be remedied in a full bilateral relationship.

Ms. Miller, a former New York Times reporter, is a writer in Manhattan. This concludes a two-part essay on Libyan WMD.

 

she mentioned, did you miss it? and i don't recall Clinton taking him up on the offer.