Extract below of a fascinating story. Full story is on the link
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2241879_1,00.html
It was one of the greatest coups by British intelligence. Gordon Corera reveals for the first time how MI6 persuaded Colonel Gadaffi to surrender his secret nuclear weapons programme
The call came out of the blue, just as the bombs were about to fall on Baghdad. A Palestinian intermediary well known to Britain’s secret intelligence service contacted its headquarters at Vauxhall overlooking the Thames.
He had a message from Colonel Gadaffi of Libya that was short and simple: the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was on the table. And his son, Saif al-Islam Gadaffi, wanted a meeting.
The call, in late March 2003, was news the British government had been hoping for: Gadaffi, one of the longest surviving rogue leaders in the Middle East, wanted to come out of the cold.
Two officers from MI6 went to meet his son in a private room of a discreet hotel in Mayfair. For the young Gadaffi it was a strange and nerve-racking experience.
“I was face to face with the British secret service for the first time in my life — the people who I had regarded for a long time as devils, enemies,” he said later.
He wondered if they would double cross him. Did they and the Americans have an agenda for regime change in Tripoli the same as the one they were embarking upon in Baghdad? He told the MI6 officers he had a message from his father: Colonel Gadaffi wanted to work with the UK and United States to launch a new initiative to reform the Middle East.
A British officer cut to the chase. We would be happy to work together but first there is an important issue to resolve, he explained. What about the weapons of mass destruction? Saif replied that “the leader” was ready to deal with this.
From the hotel, a call was put in to Sir David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign affairs adviser, at Downing Street to discuss how to proceed. Ten minutes later, Manning called back. Downing Street was sceptical but intrigued. Keep going was the message.
The MI6 officers told Saif that this was a fascinating offer and good news. But there was a need to hear it from the mouth of the father, not just the son.
It was the start of a secret and highly successful diplomatic operation by MI6 and the British government. At the end of it Libya amazed the world by both admitting to a secret nuclear weapons programme and announcing it was abandoning it.
On the path to this success, a boat loaded with nuclear equipment was diverted on the high seas to call Gadaffi’s bluff. And the operation led to the collapse of a clandestine global network that was supplying the most deadly nuclear technology to some of the world’s most dangerous states.
The full, startling story of what Libya received and how it was persuaded to give up the bomb can now be told.
FOR several decades Muammar Gadaffi was characterised in London and Washington as a picture-book dictator who supported international terrorism and tried to develop weapons of mass destruction.
In 1984 Britain broke off relations after a police officer, Yvonne Fletcher, was killed by shots from inside the Libyan embassy in London. In 1986 intercepted communications revealed that Libya was behind the bombing of a Berlin disco. Then in December 1988, Pan Am 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 270 people, many of them American. The evidence seemed to point to Gadaffi as the culprit. There was also long-standing concern over Libyan interest in unconventional weapons, primarily mustard gas and other lethal chemicals.
By the mid-1990s, however, Gadaffi’s revolutionary ardour had cooled and Libya was keen to escape the isolation that was damaging it economically.
Slowly, the Lockerbie issue began to move off the agenda. Libya agreed to hand over two suspects to be tried under Scottish law in the Netherlands, and it turned to Britain to negotiate a rapprochement, hoping London could bring the United States on board. Tony Blair received agreement from Washington to move ahead, and he sent letters and envoys to Libya.
Gadaffi was hedging his bets, however. While trying to get negotiations going with Washington and London, he was also pushing ahead with a secret deal to buy a nuclear bomb.
His supplier was one of the most infamous figures in nuclear proliferation, Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist who built a global procurement network for Pakistan’s secret nuclear weapons programme. Khan, a national hero in Pakistan, where the Islamic world’s first nuclear bomb was exploded in 1998, had since begun to turn his network from import to export.
Unlike two of his network’s other customers, North Korea and Iran, which had some nuclear knowledge of their own, Libya agreed to buy the whole works — an entire nuclear weapons capability from start to finish, a turnkey programme that the Libyans would simply have to assemble. Estimates of the cost go as high as $140m.
British and American intelligence had become aware of the Khan network. Gradually, in their efforts to penetrate and destroy it, they began to discover what Libya was receiving.
While the world’s attention in 2002-3 was on Iraq, which was about to be invaded on the pretext that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and a nuclear weapons programme — although he had in fact rejected an offer of a bomb from Khan, suspecting a CIA sting — a series of genuine nuclear dramas was unfolding, largely unseen.
First came the unmasking of Iran’s bomb programme. Following a tip from Iranian dissidents, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found evidence of Khan’s crucial assistance. North Korea was confronted with evidence that it too had a secret nuclear programme based on help from the Pakistani scientist.
Apparently fearing that he was next to be exposed, and potentially even attacked, Gadaffi decided to come clean — almost.
Libya had spent millions but feared that if it got the bomb it would not bring the desired security but invite danger. “We realised that if we obtained weapons then (we would be) in more danger than if we don’t have them,” says Mohamed Azwait, Libya’s ambassador in London.
Saif al-Islam Gadaffi, a student at the LSE, was instructed to see MI6. Three days after his meeting in Mayfair — and as the invasion of Iraq began — a plane took off from an airport near London carrying two MI6 officers to Libya.
The Libyan leader met them in a vast desert tent erected in an army barracks in Tripoli. Many of the key meetings over the coming months would take place here or in a similar tent, the size of three tennis courts, at Sirte, his birthplace and desert hideaway where camels roam among campfires.
Gadaffi gave his visitors a simple message: yes, he would disarm. For a leader accustomed to exercising absolute power, this promise was all that needed to be said on the matter; and he moved the conversation onto other areas.
The MI6 officers were conscious, however, that difficult negotiations lay ahead. Who should they deal with on the matter, one asked. Musa Kusa, Gadaffi answered. It was a name they knew well.
