by Andy McNab
I told him I needed a stretch of coastline as close as possible to Tripoli. This wasn't as tough as it sounded. The rule when coming ashore was to head for the lights and then veer a little to the left or the right. If we ended up on some endless, sandy beach miles from nowhere, great, no one was going to spot us – but we'd look like a right couple of dickheads in the morning, scratching our arses and wondering what to do next.
Better to come ashore as close to civilization as possible, get into the city and blend in as best we could in a country where foreigners were still eyed with suspicion.
Either way, I reckoned that was going to be the easy bit. 'You still confident about finding a man who'd presided over Libya's foreign intelligence operations, in a country that's still effectively a police state?'
Lynn continued to stare straight ahead, only glancing down from time to time to check our course on the GPS.
'I know him extremely well.'
'You'd better tell me what to expect.'
Mansour was a few years older than Lynn. 'Like me, he was a classicist – he graduated from Tripoli university then joined the army, passing out from the Tripoli military academy. He spent the next four years as an ordnance officer, working extensively with the Soviet weapons advisers who were crawling all over Libya by then, busy arming Gaddafi to the teeth.
'Mansour is from the Al-Waddan tribe, whose power base is some Godforsaken hole out in the desert, several hundred kilometres south of Tripoli. Tribe matters in Libya, and the Al-Waddan family wasn't part of the elite that helped hoist Gaddafi to power, as far as I know. But somehow Mansour managed to transcend all that.'
Lynn started fucking about with a couple of dials; I thought he was actually starting to enjoy himself.
'Mansour is highly intelligent and cultured – the fact that he has a classics degree should tell you everything you need to know. He has a natural flair for languages – speaks fluent English and is damn-near fluent in Russian and German too. This, and the fact that he didn't eat his peas with a knife, ensured that it wouldn't be long before he was recruited by military intelligence. But above all, the powers-that-be recognized that Mansour could blend in.'
'When did you first come across him?'
'I was posted to Libya in the mid-eighties, just before things went tits-up between London and Tripoli. The Colonel was well into his campaign to support what he called "liberation movements", the Provisionals amongst them. GCHQ provided us with some intelligence drawn from comms traffic between Tripoli and the Republic, but essentially we were in the dark.
'I was dispatched to Tripoli, ostensibly to carry out a review of our embassy's security, but with a brief to keep my eyes and ears open. We had some assets in-country. It was my job to collate everything they knew – put the whole int package together and advise on possible . . . outcomes. We knew that Libyan military intelligence was trying to muscle in on Gaddafi's foreign operations and that the army and the Jamahiriya Security Agency were locked in a power struggle for control of the operation.'
Some of this I remembered from the Bahiti job. The JSA was Libya's main intelligence agency; their version of the CIA. It was divided into 'internal' and 'external' security directorates – the former responsible for maintaining Gaddafi's iron grip on Libya's fickle tribal society, which owed him very little and had, on a number of occasions, risen up against him; the latter for Libya's operations on foreign soil, including its support of terrorist organizations like the Provisional IRA.
69
Lynn punched a few buttons on his hand-held GPS, then continued. 'What made Mansour interesting was his background. The JSA were pretty bloody amateurish on many levels – it was only really in the early eighties that they began to constitute a serious external threat to the West.
'Mansour was as independent-minded as they came in the Colonel's Libya, and well trained, having done stints with both the Stasi and the GRU during the seventies and eighties. From what we could make out, he was the architect of the Libyan army's attempt to muscle in on the Colonel's foreign operations – and was well equipped to do so thanks to his Soviet connections.'
I presumed that the JSA weren't overjoyed to have him on their patch. 'So, how did he get in on the act with PIRA?'
'Basically, he turned himself into a one-stop shop. He got things done. You can imagine, Nick, how the Libyan bureaucracy must have come close, on occasion, to driving even the Provisionals mad. But Mansour was Istikhbarat al-Askaria – military intelligence. He was Libyan army, and an ordnance officer to boot, and the Provos loved him. It meant they could cut out the middlemen and walk right into the store. Semtex? Not a problem. RPGs? By the truckload. SAM-7 shoulder-launched surface-to-air? Piece of cake.
'Furthermore, because of his links with the GRU, the Soviet army's military intelligence arm, he could arrange for all the training to take place in Libya. And then, one day, even he surpassed himself: he offered PIRA the complete package – weapons, training and the shipment.'
'And that's when you turned up?'
Lynn shook his head. 'Sadly, WPC Yvonne Fletcher was gunned down outside the Libyan People's Bureau in the middle of London and, in the ensuing fall-out, our embassy was shut down and our operation with it. After that, the picture started to go fuzzy again. We knew that the rivalry between the JSA and the Istikhbarat had intensified, but from the weapons that were pitching up on both sides of the Irish border, it was pretty bloody obvious to us that a shipment or two had got through.
'So in '87 we decided to put a stop to it. Well, get you to put a stop to it.' Lynn glanced at me. 'There were two big planned shipments to the Provisionals that year. The Eksund – a JSA-funded operation – was the first, and intercepted by the French. The next one was the Bahiti, handled by the Istikhbarat, Mansour's group.'
My mind drifted back to the night Lynn spoke about this nickname of his. He checked his watch. I checked mine. It was coming up to three o'clock.
I disappeared into the galley and made us a couple of strong, black coffees. Gary had had the boat stocked up for his client, and from Harrods Food Hall by the look of it. There was tinned caviar and Russian champagne on board, but, more importantly right now, ground Colombian coffee – the perfect antidote to the way I was feeling.
When the bitter black liquid started to get to work, I asked Lynn what I'd been dying to ask him from the beginning: why Leptis? What was it about that name?
70
Lynn was in full flow now. Maybe it reminded him of the old days.
'I'd read his file, seen photographs of him, knew his vices, and then, blow me, I went and ran straight into him. At some diplomatic do or other. It must have been a month before the Yvonne Fletcher shooting. What an impressive fellow he was, too. Think Omar Sharif . . .'
'Did he know who you were?'
Lynn shook his head. 'Unless, of course, we seriously underestimated the Libyan intelligence machine.'
'So what did you talk about?'
'He simply asked me who I was, what I was doing in Libya and how I liked his country. I told him I'd just visited Leptis Magna – the most majestic place I'd ever been to on God's earth. The only place I've got hopelessly lost – lost in the beauty of my surroundings. I knew, of course, that we shared a common enthusiasm – Classics; him at Tripoli, me at Cambridge – but I meant every word. Not unnaturally, that's what we spoke about for the rest of the evening: the Romans in Libya. But something about my enthusiasm for Leptis Magna tickled him. He christened me "Leptis". Never called me anything else.'
'That was it?'
'There was a bit more to it than that. He told me he was a great admirer of Septimus Severus. Severus was born in Leptis and went on to become emperor.'
The list of O-levels I'd never got close to was headed by Latin and Greek, but a little voice in my head told me that, ancient history or not, I should listen to every word of this – not just because Lynn was a real anorak when it came to this sort of stuff, and I could see how his passion for it bound him to
Mansour, but because I knew there was a whole lot more to it than met the eye.
'So Leptis Magna is a ruin, basically – and you told him that it was the hottest thing you'd visited since you'd been in Libya?'
'My dear fellow, you have to understand that Leptis isn't any old ruin – it is the finest surviving example of a city of the ancient world, and by far the best preserved. When we were at Cambridge, my wife and I dreamed of visiting Leptis together, knowing full well that it was damn-near impossible to get near it.'
'Because by then Gaddafi had taken control?' Lynn's wife was at Cambridge with him. I made a mental note.
'Precisely. Gaddafi took over in '69 after executing a perfectly planned coup. He came to power on a particularly interesting ticket: a mix of Arab pan-nationalism and egalitarianism that saw almost all traces of Western influence in Libya washed away within the next few years. He chucked out the British and Americans, closed down their military bases, threw out the Jews and the Italians, nationalized all the banks and threatened to do the same with the foreign oil companies.
'Then, in the mid-seventies, he disappeared into the desert, emerging months later with a manifesto for the Arab revolution, enshrined in something he called "The Third Universal Theory" – the Colonel's view on how to solve the ills of global society.
'The West looked on Gaddafi as a joke, with his loop shades and light blue suits, but it didn't appreciate – I guess none of us did – that the Third Universal Theory wasn't just for the Libyan masses; it was supposed to be a blueprint for everybody. Which was why, when the world didn't embrace his ideas, the Colonel decided to implement them by force.'
'And Mansour was the enforcer?'
'One of them, yes. This, to me, was what made his remark about Septimus Severus so intriguing. You see, Nick, Septimus was proclaimed emperor by his own troops after the assassination of the emperors Commodus and Pentinax in AD 193. Septimus was a soldier, but a soldier with a vision – he saw Leptis Magna as a potential rival to the power of Rome. He saw Africa as the empire's real centre of gravity.'
'Like Gaddafi and Libya?'
'Precisely. Gaddafi was the Great Leader; the man who would unite Africa against the corrupt capitalism of the West. And, despite the blue suits, for a while he really did give us a run for our money.'
'Sounds like you admire him.'
'Gaddafi?' Over the relentless pounding of the waves on the bottom of the boat I caught Lynn's laugh. 'I think Gaddafi is a joke. But when I returned to London I wrote a brief, which I wanted the suits to take very seriously indeed. I pointed out that the Colonel was underpinned by some extremely smart people – people like Mansour. Plotters. Cultured, intelligent Arabs. Not the nomadic ragheads of Whitehall myth and prejudice. You see, Nick, Septimus Severus really was a visionary, and his city, which he renovated following his victory against the Parthians in AD 203, became a lasting testament to his achievements. That's why I'd always wanted to visit Leptis Magna; and that's what I told Mansour.'
'And the brief?'
'I told them that we needed to pay heed to the lessons of history. Mansour's remark about Severus betrayed his ambitions. It told me he was intent on seeing through the Colonel's vision – and that we needed to pay a great deal of attention to that.'
'Pound to a penny the suits shelved it.'
Lynn turned to me and smiled. 'Of course. What did some upstart Classics scholar, a major with ten years' army experience, know? But within a year, Gaddafi's revolutionaries had taken over the Libyan People's Bureau in London, poor Yvonne Fletcher was dead, the Berlin night club had been blown up, the Americans had bombed Tripoli, and, and, and . . .'
He wasn't wrong. The rest was history.
71
I pretty much had the whole picture now. Lynn's brief encounter with Mansour saw them bonding over ancient history at a diplomatic party in Tripoli in 1984. Not long afterwards, Britain's relations with Libya broke down over the death of Yvonne Fletcher and the embassy was pulled out. Meanwhile, Mansour accelerated his plans to arm Britain's Public Enemy Number One, PIRA – only we got wind of it and decided to shut down the arms pipeline once and for all. That's when somebody must have dusted off Lynn's brief and decided to send him back in – undercover this time.
'What happened to Mansour after the Bahiti?'
'Gaddafi had more than $300 million personally invested in those two shipments. The Eksund's seizure by the French was bad enough; but when the Spanish took the Bahiti . . .' Lynn checked the handheld GPS again and adjusted the Predator's course.
'The Eksund and the Bahiti were public relations disasters. Not just for the IRA, but for the Libyans as well. For Gaddafi, the final straw was Enniskillen – the only time PIRA deliberately targeted civilians. He had set himself up as the liberator of the masses, and at Enniskillen it was the innocent who died – eleven of them, God rest their souls . . .'
Ahead, I could make out a faint glow on the horizon – the lights of the Sardinian coastline.
Lynn saw them too, made another course adjustment and settled back into his seat. 'To cut a long story short, Nick, the Colonel threw Mansour into prison and he sat there under lock and key for the next five years. Not a particularly good time for him, no doubt, but it did tell us one very useful thing – that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie. In fact, prison, in a sense, was Mansour's saving grace.'
'What do you mean?'
'Because we knew he was clean, because he had to have been out of the loop over Lockerbie, we agreed to accept Mansour as an emissary when the Colonel decided in the late nineties he'd had enough of international sanctions. In 2001, Mansour flew to London on Gaddafi's orders and met with his counterparts in the Firm and the Agency.
'Because of what happened in '87, I obviously couldn't meet him personally, but I was there, in the background. By this time, the Colonel had already handed over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, enabling the UN-imposed sanctions on Libya to be lifted. But we wanted to take things further, especially after 9/11, by getting Libya to renounce its WMD and ballistic missile programmes.
'Unfortunately, the temptations of London proved too much for our old friend Mansour and he was covertly photographed in his London hotel suite with a prostitute. The Americans were all for hanging him out to dry, and because of his role in the PIRA shipments, there were a good many people on our side of the pond who'd have happily gone along with them.'
The look on Lynn's face in the reflection of the windscreen gave him away and in that instant the last remaining piece of the puzzle fell into place.
'You saved his arse?'
In his twisted, public-school view of the world, Lynn had believed that he owed Mansour one. Never mind that the Libyan had overseen shipments of weapons to the Republic. Never mind that Mansour was indirectly responsible for the death of God knows how many British troops – mates I'd served with and Lynn, too, in all probability.
This was why I hated spooks. Now I was lumbered with one that had gone soft in the head. And in a country where every pair of eyes would be on us and, if we put a foot wrong, we'd be dead.
'You still haven't answered the question. How are we going to find Mansour?'
'Oh, that's the easy bit. When we were monitoring him back in the eighties he showed himself to be a bit of a creature of habit. There was a shisha shop – a place where Mansour always used to go to smoke, day in and day out – in the Medina, the old walled city. It was called Osman's. His mosque was nearby. That's where we need to start looking.'
'He may not be sitting there with a welcome sign,' I said. 'If he's still a player, he might well disappear for the next couple of days – or be completely swamped by security.'
72
Cagliari in the cold drizzle of a winter morning was a shit-hole – the hangover after the glittering Italian party the night before. We approached the harbour just before first light. A blue and white ferry, long in need of a lick of paint, blew its foghorn mournfully as we threaded our way through a set of rusty mark
er buoys towards the marina. The town loomed above us: banks of nondescript, colourless apartment buildings stared back at me from a hillside devoid of greenery except for a few moth-eaten palm trees.
'What do you mean? Why would Mansour suddenly be in the limelight?'
I told him what I'd read at the café. The British Foreign Secretary was hitting Tripoli either today or tomorrow, so if Mansour was still the man Gaddafi turned to when he wanted somebody to talk turkey with the Brits, our man was going to be down at the embassy nibbling at the vol-au-vents, not toking away in the shisha bar and waiting to invite us home.
The Secretary of State's visit couldn't have come at a worse time. However much 'liberalizing' had been going on in Libya in recent years, Colonel G would want to ensure that nothing marred the proceedings – which meant additional security and lots of it: around state buildings, embassies and on the streets themselves.
