The Sahara desert may well have been just over the horizon, but the immediate view along the coast was pleasantly Mediterranean and old Tripoli was a gem. Overlooking the harbour was a magnificent castle that backed on to a bustling souk, where coppersmiths beat out giant pans and traders sold old swords from the oases far to the south. Outside the walls of the old city there were neat rows of date palms and whitewashed colonnades where men sipped espresso coffee and stole sideways glances at the women, a legacy, perhaps, of all those years of Italian rule.
There was no question of choosing a hotel. The Al-Kabir (‘The Big One’) was chosen for us by the Ministry of Information, so we had to assume that all our phone calls were bugged, if not the rooms themselves. Neither I nor our audience was interested in the NGO conference going on in some vast Hall of the People, but we were interested in the Lockerbie trials and how Libya was coping under years of UN sanctions.
To do this story properly I had to play a ridiculous game of cat-and-mouse with our designated minder, who never wanted to let me and my digital camera out of his sight. His name was Miftah, which in Arabic means ‘key’ or ‘something that opens things up’, but he was quite the opposite, and proved so irritatingly obstructive that my Egyptian colleagues from the Cairo bureau soon dubbed him Ifl, meaning ‘lock’. I learned later that only a few months before my visit, the Metropolitan Police team sent out from London to interview Libyan intelligence officials in the Lockerbie investigation had had similar trouble with Miftah. To try to wear down the British investigators from Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, Miftah and his stooges had arranged for their hotel-room doors to be knocked on at intervals all through the night.
To get away from Miftah and visit the British Embassy in Tripoli for an impromptu interview with the British ambassador, Richard Dalton, I had to let Miftah see me go into our hotel and get into the lift – apparently to my room – but in fact I went down to the garden, climbed through a gap in the fence and out into the street, and quickly flagged down a taxi. I had to employ similar ruses to talk to ordinary Libyans about the sanctions and Lockerbie, as no one was going to speak their mind with some shifty-eyed minder glaring at them from behind my shoulder. Libyans, I found, were equivocal. They liked Britain and wanted to rejoin the world and be friends with the West. But the sanctions were surely unfair; why, they argued, should Libya be punished for failing to hand over two suspects when it was obvious to them that another country had done it?
The Scottish court in the Netherlands had other ideas and in January 2001 the international press were invited to Tripoli to be on hand when the verdict was announced. So confident was the Libyan regime that the court would acquit both their suspects, the Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi and his co-defendant Al-Amin Fahima, that it let a substantial press pack into the country. Anticipation was written all over the faces of the Libyan airport baggage-handlers as our chartered flight from Cairo (via Milan, of all places) disgorged huge metal boxes containing satellite broadcasting equipment. For a people who had just spent seven years as international pariahs, this was welcome attention at last. One man was particularly pleased to see us. As the BBC team checked into the designated hotel, he came sidling up with a look of triumph on his face. In his hand he clutched a yellowed bill, unpaid, apparently, since Kate Adie’s reporting visit on the US Air Force’s bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986.
Bill paid and check-in completed, we milled around the lobby of the large, charmless hotel. But Libyan media minders were quick to seize the opportunity to ‘educate’ some of us on how things worked there.
‘You see, Mr Gudner, we have no government here in Libya.’
‘Really?’
‘That is correct. The country is ruled by the people through the People’s Revolutionary Committees.’
‘I see. And where does the Brother Leader [Colonel Gaddafi] fit into this?’
‘The Brother Leader is there to advise and guide us, but he does not rule. Nobody rules here. You will see.’
Given that Libya had long had the reputation of being a police state ruled by an unelected clique of tribal and military men close to Gaddafi, it was hard to tell if my minder was being serious. But he was. My Egyptian producer told me afterwards that these Libyan minders have very difficult jobs, trying to keep up with the ever-changing official line on how the country’s system is supposed to work. For years they were told to welcome all Arab visitors, but when a disillusioned Gaddafi turned his back on the Arab world and looked to Africa instead, his minions had to adjust accordingly.
In the tense days before the Lockerbie verdict I went to see a Libyan lawyer in the backstreets of Tripoli who had worked on this case since day one, and he showed me piles of papers which he said proved that the men were innocent. And then, on 31 January, nine months after it started, the Lockerbie trial ended with a verdict. The news from Europe came like a bombshell. The Scottish court in the Netherlands had found one man – Fahima – innocent and the other – Al-Megrahi – guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in Glasgow’s notoriously tough Barlinnie jail.
Putting a brave face on the verdict, the next day the Libyans bussed us all out to a former US airbase east of Tripoli to watch the homecoming of the acquitted man. What began as a distant speck over the Gulf of Sirte soon materialized into a C-130 military transport plane of the Royal Netherlands Air Force. I struggled to make myself heard over the roar of its four turboprop engines as I tried to give a live commentary for News 24 back home. The plane taxied to a halt, a door slid open, a ramp extended to the tarmac, and down stepped the VIP passenger, Al-Amin Fahima. A small crowd had been permitted to gather on the runway and Fahima was now swept up by his fans, who chanted while he flashed victory signs to the assembled cameras. Then suddenly the word went up: we were going to be taken to see the Brother Leader.
Off we roared in a convoy of honking cars, escorted by green-uniformed militiamen who leaned out of the windows brandishing machine guns, frantically waving traffic out of the way, until we reached the Bab El-Aziziya barracks. Gates swung open to let the convoy pass, incredibly scruffy soldiers eyeing the Western press pack as if we were from another planet. More imposing were Gaddafi’s female bodyguards, glimpsed briefly through a chain-link fence. Trained in martial arts and a variety of weapons, they looked a tough bunch.
Bab El-Aziziya had special significance for Gaddafi. This was the barracks that the US Air Force bombed in 1986, killing his adopted daughter but missing the man himself. A team of government artists had been busy since then, turning one pockmarked wall into a gaudy mural: there were America’s F-15 warplanes, fleeing before the defiant might of the Popular Resistance Committees who chased them off with missiles and clenched fists.
We disembarked from our bus to find a well-orchestrated uproar. A group of unshaven green-uniformed soldiers was gathered around two men, chanting and thrusting their machine guns in the air. ‘We’ve got back Al-Amin!’ they cried in Arabic. ‘Now give us Abdelbaset!’ At the centre of this mêlée was the newly acquitted Al-Amin Fahima, fresh off his flight from the Netherlands; he looked completely bemused. Next to him was Colonel Gaddafi. Dressed in a cream-coloured robe, he smiled enigmatically in silent approval of this demonstration of Libyan patriotism. I sidled up to him with my minidisc recorder, ready for any eccentric pearls of wisdom that might spill from his lips. He did not disappoint. ‘I hereby announce’, said the good colonel, ‘that in four days’ time I will reveal fresh evidence that will prove to the world that Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing. We have the evidence and I will reveal it to you. You must be here then.’
You could almost hear the press corps groan. Another four days stuck in Tripoli with no bars, no entertainment, no nightlife. One or two of the less well-funded TV networks pulled out that afternoon, but the rest of us felt obliged to stay, knowing that if we left now we would never get visas in time to return for this great revelation. Personally, I was rather glad of th
is hiatus. It allowed me time to wander undisturbed over the fantastic Roman ruins of Sabrata, exploring the ancient theatre and the temple that overlooked the azure waters of the Mediterranean. One day, I thought, Libya will have a thriving tourist industry, but that day I felt as though I had some of its best treasures all to myself.
Finally, the time came for us to return to Gaddafi’s bombed-out barracks and hear what he had to say. Hundreds of chairs had been set out before a lectern, and a solitary camel was tethered nearby, but there was no sign of the colonel. He was still in his tent, conferring with his advisers, we were told. Eventually a limousine made the two-hundred-yard journey from the tent to the open-air auditorium and out stepped Gaddafi. He certainly made an entrance. Dressed in dazzling cobalt-blue robes, he wore a matching blue hat and retro seventies sunglasses. He had definitely gone for the African look, leaving behind all vestiges of Arab conservatism, but unfortunately the effect was wasted by a false start. Gaddafi decided he did not like the height of the lectern so he stood off to one side while another one was fetched. Alone and, I think, a little self-conscious, he did not seem to know what or who to look at, and was visibly relieved when the new and approved lectern was installed.
We waited, pens, microphones and TV cameras poised, as the Libyan leader cleared his throat to begin. What could this new evidence be? Was it a secret tape recording? Was he going to embarrass another country by proving that their agents were behind Lockerbie after all? Some of us journos had been chewing over the possibilities that morning at breakfast. We had decided that to make any positive impact on world opinion the evidence would have to be both tangible and convincing. But Gaddafi’s mind did not work like ours, and within minutes our worst suspicions were confirmed: Colonel Gaddafi had almost nothing new to say, he was just objecting to the decision of the Scottish court and he spent the next few hours railing against the Scottish judges and their judgement. Those journalists who had gone home a week earlier must have been chuckling with delight; we had, on the surface of it, wasted our time. But it was a wonderful piece of Gaddafi theatre, an illustration of how far out of touch with international thinking this man was. Clearly no one had dared tell him that for a government – sorry, ‘Brother Leader’ – to disprove the findings of a reputable court he would need real evidence, not words. Anything less would make him look foolish, which is exactly what happened.
I did feel sorry, though, for the ordinary Libyans, who must have been expecting their leader to have something more impressive up his sleeve than just his own opinions. To this day there are many who still doubt that Libya was really behind the Lockerbie bombing. There is a well-argued school of thought that says Iran was the real culprit, seeking revenge for the shooting down in error of one of its IranAir Airbus passenger jets by the USS Vincennes in the Gulf in summer 1988. Despite the US apology, the Iranians had, after all, promised retribution. Another school of thought maintains it was a three-way conspiracy between Libya, Iran and a radical Palestinian group. The one thing that is clear is that by the turn of this century Libya had had quite enough of being an international pariah and was prepared to pay almost any price, however humiliating, however costly, to get sanctions lifted and the country back on the map. It is an indication of how much things have changed since September 2001 that, after decades of conspiring against the West, Libyan intelligence has since been working in close cooperation with the CIA and MI6 against Al-Qaeda.
‘What were you doing on 11 September 2001?’ has become one of those oft-asked questions, in the way my parents’ generation would ask each other what they were doing on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. I was in Jerusalem, finishing up a stint of Intifada coverage in our bureau before heading home to Cairo. While New Yorkers began their daily commute into Manhattan and Mohammed Atta and his team were preparing to hijack four US airliners, I was packing up my room at Jerusalem’s American Colony hotel. I had one last cup of coffee in its elegant tiled courtyard, then hired one of the hotel’s garrulous Palestinian taxi-drivers to take me to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. He knew a back route that avoided the traffic on the main motorway that connects Jerusalem to Israel’s Mediterranean coast, and I settled back in my seat to enjoy the scenery. But my driver was listening to the BBC World Service in Arabic, and suddenly he slowed the car and turned up the volume. The news was too shocking to take in: New York’s twin towers attacked and destroyed, the Pentagon attacked too and a fourth aircraft hijacked over Pennsylvania. My God, I thought, where will this end? I suspected immediately the hand of Al-Qaeda – who else had the motivation and the capability to carry off something like this? But when I got to Ben Gurion airport and asked an El Al airline official if anyone had claimed responsibility, he replied with a mixture of disgust and self-satisfaction, ‘The Palestinians did it!’ (In fact there were no Palestinians amongst the 9/11 hijackers, and although one of the chief Al-Qaeda planners behind the attack, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, is originally Palestinian, he is thought to have long ago signed up with Bin Laden rather than with any militant Palestinian groups.) Israel’s primary airport was in the throes of an alert; it was natural to assume that whoever hated America enough to attack it this way would want to hit Israel too. The Israeli Air Force was said to be scrambling into the skies ready to shoot down any unidentified aircraft approaching their country’s airspace. When I finally boarded my plane back to Cairo, I was told it was the last to take off that night before the airport was closed to civilian traffic.
And so began a course of events that was to turn me away from mainstream reporting and into the specialist field of investigating the whole Al-Qaeda phenomenon. It was to be another six months before I was appointed as the BBC’s first Security Correspondent, but already, as news networks around the world scrambled to find Arabic speakers and Middle East hands, I found I was in the right place at the right time. In the immediate twenty-four hours after the attacks I sounded out the opinions of ordinary people in the backstreets and cafés of Cairo. Most felt sorry for America, some said, ‘Yes, but . . .’ and then went into a diatribe about US support for Israel, and many insisted that Israel was behind the attacks. ‘We Arabs are not sophisticated enough to carry out such a well-coordinated attack’ was a refrain I often heard.
Not long afterwards I got a call from the Egyptian Ministry of Information.
‘We have some good news for you, Mr Gardner. The president has agreed to your request for an interview.’
‘Oh, that’s great,’ I replied. Like many foreign correspondents in Cairo, I had put in a bid to interview Mubarak from almost the day I arrived. ‘So when will this be?’
‘Don’t worry, you will be informed.’ And that was the end of the phone call. It felt like a secret mission.
A few days later I was told to report to a high-security military airbase on the outskirts of Cairo that I had never even known existed. I got Raouf, the ever-dependable office driver, to take me there, and his eyes widened as the gates swung open and a pair of blue-bereted Presidential Guards stood to attention. Of President Mubarak there was no sign, but I was immediately ushered into a VIP departure lounge and then out on to the tarmac. I was to board a plane to the Sinai resort of Sharm El Sheikh, accompanied by the two most powerful men in Egypt’s extensive media machinery: Safwat Sharif, the longstanding Information Minister, and Nabil Osman, the smooth-talking head of the State Information Service. The plane was so small that when I stood up in the aisle and stretched my arms out I could touch both walls with my fingertips.
We cruised in comfort over the wrinkled mountains and wadis of the Sinai Peninsula, flying over a route that I had hitch-hiked along as a student nearly twenty years earlier. In Sharm El Sheikh we were taken swiftly to President Mubarak’s guest palace, where a room was allocated to us to set up in, complete with the gilt-painted ‘Louis Farouk’ furniture so enduringly popular in Egypt. The president was in the mood for giving interviews and this worked to my advantage. While we were setting up, adjusting lights and chair angles and
I was rehearsing in my head the questions I would ask him, Mubarak was upstairs doing a live interview by satellite link with CNN’s Larry King. By the time he came downstairs he was in a jovial, expansive mood. Dressed in a well-cut suit tailored to his wrestler’s physique, this air-force officer-turned-president gripped my hand tightly. He may have been over seventy years old but he had the strength of a bull. I did my best to show off my Arabic, sending his eyes skyward when I told him I had learned my colloquial Egyptian in the overcrowded and impoverished slum quarter of Gamaliya.
With the attacks on New York and Washington still fresh in everyone’s minds, our interview inevitably focused on Al-Qaeda. President Mubarak talked of the need to resolve the Palestinian issue which was stirring up considerable anti-Western feeling in the region. I then turned to a subject closer to home.
‘President Mubarak,’ I began, ‘your government overcame a violent Islamist insurgency in the mid-1990s. What advice would you give now to Western leaders in tackling the phenomenon of Al-Qaeda?’
The Egyptian leader leaned forward, his square-jawed features breaking into an all-knowing smile. ‘Tell me why they persist in harbouring these Islamic dissidents?’ he asked rhetorically, turning up his palms in that universal Arab gesture that means ‘surely this is a reasonable question to ask’. The Egyptian government was particularly irked by the London-based activities of Yasser El-Sirri, whom it accused of being behind the murder attempt on one of its ministers some years previously. But Arab Islamist dissidents are a wily lot and up until the London bombings of July 2005 they had managed to continue their campaigns against their countries’ secular, West-leaning governments while staying above the UK law: one analyst had cynically nicknamed the capital ‘Londonistan’. ‘I warned Britain ten years ago about this matter!’ Mubarak said to me. ‘I told your government that these people were dangerous and no one would listen to me. Now look what has happened!’
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