Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  ‘They [the British] knew I was being tortured, I have no doubt of that,’ he told Kim Sengupta of the Independent. ‘I hoped they would do something about it. I was too terrified during the meeting to say out loud what was being done to me because I thought the Libyans [secret police] were taping what was going on. When the Libyan guards left I made sign movements with my hands.

  ‘The British people nodded, showed they understood. They showed this understanding several times. But nothing changed, the torture continued for a long time afterwards.’

  The papers now disclosed show that the British did nothing to help. Rather, they – and in particular Sir Mark Allen – repeatedly asked the Libyan secret police for information about Belhaj. Allen wrote to his Libyan counterpart, ‘I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.’

  Speaking to the Independent in a Tripoli hotel years later, after the fall of Gaddafi, Belhaj described being interviewed by three British agents, one woman and two men, at the headquarters of Musa Kusa, Gaddafi’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The two questioning sessions each lasted about two hours. ‘The name of the female officer is known to the Independent but it is not being published for security reasons,’ wrote the Independent’s Kim Sengupta. ‘Documents show that she was one of the most frequent visitors to Tripoli under the Gaddafi regime.’

  Cori Crider, a lawyer at the anti-death-penalty organisation Reprieve, told the Guardian that neither Blair nor his then Foreign Secretary, Mark Allen’s chum Jack Straw, was prepared to give the apology that she believed Belhaj was owed. She said, ‘Instead they are running a specious and immoral argument that British courts cannot judge British officials when they are said to have conspired with foreign torturers.’10

  Allen was to be questioned, in secret, by the Gibson Inquiry into allegations of collusion in torture and inhumane practices used by MI5 and MI6 (where they are known as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’). But the inquiry was brought to an abrupt halt in January 2012 when Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke said that the Crown Prosecution Service’s announcement of new criminal investigations to be carried out by the Metropolitan Police meant that the inquiry could not carry out its mandate as envisaged.11

  In 2004 Allen’s bid to become head of MI6 failed, despite support from his friend Jack Straw. Blair appointed instead Sir John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who played a leading role in drawing up the Iraq weapons dossier, and we now know from his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry that Allen was strongly against the invasion of Iraq. Allen resigned the same year and retired from public service.

  Prime Minister Blair however cleared him to take work immediately as a special adviser for BP, despite rules that would normally have prevented a former civil servant from taking money from a large corporation so soon after retirement.

  As Blair’s premiership was coming to an end in 2007, Allen was using his contacts in both the United Kingdom and Libya to resolve the issues surrounding the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. Al-Megrahi had been found guilty by a Scottish court of the bombing of a Pan Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. We now know that, contrary to what we were told at the time, the British government was closely involved in the decision to release al-Megrahi, and saw it as part of the ongoing negotiations with Gaddafi.

  On 29 May 2007, a month before he left Downing Street, Blair visited Libya, meeting Gaddafi and his Prime Minister Al Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi in the then-beautiful city of Sirte, subsequently utterly ruined after the battle in which Gaddafi died. It was one of Blair’s last international meetings as PM. He was accompanied by BP chairman Peter Sutherland, who subsequently announced the company would return to Libya after a thirty-year absence. Blair also pledged to provide support for Gaddafi’s military, and signed up to ‘exchanges of information on NATO and EU military and civil security.’

  Part of the meeting’s purpose was to try to deal with the al-Megrahi issue, for Gaddafi was very keen to get al-Megrahi home. It seems that, on this trip, a deal was thrashed out that included prisoner transfer (though not necessarily of al-Megrahi), just before BP announced an investment of about £454 million to prospect for £13 billion worth of oil in Libya.

  Immediately afterwards, Allen, who had been using his Libyan contacts in BP’s drive to win gas and oil contracts in the country, flew with the then-BP boss Lord Browne to meet Gaddafi in the desert and signed a contract with Libya.

  But there was a hitch. By November it had still not been ratified because of delays in finalising prisoner transfers, which had been arranged between Blair and Gaddafi in tandem with the BP deal. The sticking point was that the British government still wanted to exclude al-Megrahi from the deal.

  What was to be done? Allen could have gone to Blair, who he was sure would have helped, if only he was still Prime Minister, but he wasn’t, and his successor Gordon Brown was thought to be a bit too straitlaced for these manoeuvres. Allen made two calls to Jack Straw, asking for the agreement to be speeded up. Within six weeks of his second call in November 2007, Straw had written to Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill to say al-Megrahi would be included.12

  The prisoner-transfer agreement was eventually signed in November 2008. Although the UK government originally wanted to exclude al-Megrahi from its provisions, the final version of the agreement included him and could have been used to authorise his return to Libya. However, the Scottish government refused to send al-Megrahi to Libya under the prisoner-transfer agreement. Instead, it allowed his release on compassionate grounds because he was suffering from terminal cancer.

  But Lockerbie was not the only airline bombing for which Gaddafi was held responsible, and the very next year – 2008 – another one came back to bite him. Just nine months after Lockerbie, on 19 September 1989, UTA Flight 772 from Chad was blown up, killing all 170 passengers. After a long legal battle by relatives of those who had died, a US court ordered Libya to pay $1.5 billion (£1 billion) to the relatives of the seven Americans killed. This meant that the proceeds of Libyan investment deals in the US, mainly in oil and gas, could be seized.

  FORMER PM AT GADDAFI’S SIDE

  Whom could Gaddafi turn to in this crisis but his old friend Tony Blair? It was 2008 and Blair was no longer Prime Minister, but he was ready to busy himself in a good cause.

  His chief of staff in the Quartet office, Nick Banner, had a word with David Welch, the US official who was negotiating with Libya over compensation. Blair, due to meet Gaddafi on 10 June , was in touch with Sir Vincent Fean, British ambassador to Libya. Fean sent an email to Blair’s office, obviously in reply to a request.

  TB should explain what he said to President Bush (and what Banner said to Welch) to keep his promise to Col Q [Gaddafi] to intervene after the President allowed US courts to attach Libyan assets. He [Blair] could express satisfaction at the progress made in talks between the US and Libya to reach a govt to govt solution to all the legal/compensation issues outstanding from the 1980s …

  Blair spoke to Gaddafi, and approached Bush. Bush signed the Libyan Claims Resolution Act in August 2008. This meant that Libya made a one-off payment of $1.5 billion for all the bombings – the UTA flight, Lockerbie and a Berlin discotheque bombing – and had immunity thereafter from all terrorism-related lawsuits. The UTA relatives got about $100 million instead of the $1.5 billion they were awarded by the courts.

  The American lawyer who represented the UTA relatives said his clients ‘got screwed’ by the Act. ‘It sent the wrong message to terrorist states – don’t worry about these lawsuits and judgements as the politicians will eventually fix it.’ He said he had heard rumours at the time of Blair’s involvement, but did not get the proof until 2013.13

  Blair met Gaddafi again in January 2009, when JP Morgan was trying to negotiate a deal between the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) and a company run by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a friend of Lord Mandelson (to whom we will return in Chapter 8). The multibillion-dollar deal, which
later fell through, would have seen the LIA provide a loan to Rusal (owned by Deripaska), the world’s largest aluminium producer.

  Blair has denied that he acted as an emissary in this matter. But it came just a few months after Deripaska spent £300,000 co-funding a project set up by Blair – ‘Breaking the Climate Deadlock’ – which lobbied governments over climate change.14

  JP Morgan has said Blair had no knowledge of the Rusal proposal. Blair’s spokesman said, ‘Neither Tony Blair nor any of his staff raised any issue to do with a Russian aluminium company.’ He added that the ‘bulk of the conversations’ with Gaddafi had been about Africa and how Libya could develop infrastructure. More than once Gaddafi raised the issue of the Lockerbie bomber’s release, but Blair claims he always repeated, ‘It is a matter for the Scottish government.’15

  Even if all that is true, Blair’s links to the LIA, his role as a Middle East peace envoy, a fundraiser in Africa and a business adviser all sit uneasily together.

  It is no wonder that Youssef Sawani, executive director of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, told the Washington Times in 2010 that Gaddafi ‘talks regularly to Blair as a friend’ and ‘consults him on many issues.’

  After Blair resigned as Prime Minister, Libya under Gaddafi was a natural place for him to exercise his entrepreneurial talent. Blair’s spokesman has said that ‘he has not spoken to or met Mohammed Rashid since leaving office’. Then again, he did not need to. The channel Rashid had opened up allowed Blair to develop his own relationship with both Saif al-Islam and his father Gaddafi. Now that Rashid is on the run after his fraud sentence, Blair seems in no hurry to acknowledge his old friend.

  It’s clear that during Gaddafi’s reign, Blair courted the LIA and the National Oil Corporation (NOC) on behalf of British companies, and it is claimed that he performed the same service for JP Morgan clients. Both the LIA and the NOC were massive and corrupt institutions with fabulous wealth. There have been reports of regime figures describing Blair lobbying extensively for clients, and in return he intervened personally to aid the Gaddafi clan on several occasions.

  The closeness of the relationship is indicated by a letter of 5 March 2007 from Blair to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a personally signed letter on Downing Street headed paper addressed in Blair’s own handwriting to ‘Engineer Saif’, which thanked Saif for showing him ‘your interesting PhD thesis’. Blair later denies proofreading the thesis or helping in any way.

  He did try to persuade Oxford University to give a place to Saif, and is thought to have been instrumental in the eventual decision of the LSE to admit him. Perhaps his heavy representation on the LSE’s Ideas Board may have given him some leverage there.16

  After he ceased to be PM, Blair kept the relationship in good repair. In June 2008, January 2009 and April 2009, Blair and his entourage visited Gaddafi on a private jet provided by Gaddafi for around £150,000. The Daily Telegraph claims a total of six meetings.

  Between leaving No. 10 and the revolution that saw the capture and killing of Gaddafi, Blair visited Libya – which has enormous oil reserves – several times, but his spokesman has frequently refused to explain the purpose of his visits. The relationship continued right up to Gaddafi’s fall. During the Libyan Revolution, Blair telephoned Gaddafi twice on 27 February 2011, reportedly to ask him to stop the violent crackdown. Gaddafi might reasonably have expected a little help at the time of his greatest need, but that was the last time the two spoke, and a few weeks later Gaddafi was being put to death in the most horrible and humiliating way. Perhaps Blair shed a tear for his old chum. Then again, perhaps he didn’t.

  BARONESS SYMONS PLAYS HER PART

  Blair’s old crony Baroness Symons left it even later than Blair himself to disengage from Gaddafi. Symons, whose peerage came at Blair’s hands so that he could bring her into his government, left it until March 2011 to sever her links with the National Economic Development Board of Libya, to which she was a paid adviser. In fact, only a matter of days earlier she appeared to praise Gaddafi’s ‘sound ideology’. She had joined the board shortly before the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.17

  Liz Symons is one of the most shadowy figures in Blair’s wake. Until eight months before the Labour landslide general election victory of 1997 she was a trade union official, working first for the Inland Revenue Staff Federation before becoming general secretary of the First Division Association (FDA), a small trade union for senior civil servants.

  Her life took a radically new turn on 7 October 1996 when, on the recommendation of the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, she became Baroness Symons of Vernham Dene, while still in her post at the FDA. Normally, trade union general secretaries were not elevated to the Lords until their retirement, and generally not even then unless they were from unions that had bank-rolled the party, which the FDA did not. But Blair had plans for Liz Symons: she went straight into a ministerial role following the election victory in May 1997.

  She is a friend of Blair and is married to Phil Bassett, one of Blair’s closest advisers and a former Financial Times industrial correspondent. She was Blair and Bassett’s type of trade unionist: no one could remember the last time the FDA had even held a strike ballot, let alone taken strike action.

  She served as a frontbench spokesperson in the Lords on trade and investment in 2001–3. On 14 September 2001 she addressed the Lords on behalf of the Blair government in the aftermath of 9/11. On 18 October 2001 she told the Lords, after the UK had joined in attacks on terrorist targets in Afghanistan, ‘As both President Bush and the Prime Minister made clear from the outset, the terrain, the weather and the complexity of the targets mean that we can expect no early conclusion to this campaign. It will indeed be a long haul. It may take months, not days or weeks.’ Twelve years later, British troops were still there, not leaving until 2014.

  Later, Symons was the main cheerleader for Blair in the Lords on Iraq and a fully paid-up member of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ club – an odd role for the trade-and-industry spokesperson. On 24 September 2002 she told the Lords, citing what came to be known as the ‘dodgy dossier’ as evidence, ‘As the statement made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister makes clear, our briefing paper cites example upon example of Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. To an unprecedented extent, the paper draws on intelligence material and leaves no doubt that Iraq’s growing arsenal of such weapons can no longer be tolerated. It demonstrates that the Iraqi regime is increasing its capacity to terrorise and intimidate through the amassing of chemical and biological weapons.’

  (WMD were, of course, not found in Iraq after the war, despite an extensive search.)

  Symons then became minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 2003 to 2005, where she was Minister of State for the Middle East, and widely known as Tony Blair’s ‘Middle East envoy’. She was also Minister for Defence Procurement. All of this work as a minister, until standing down in 2005, inevitably gave her excellent contacts and an insider’s knowledge and expertise.

  By then she and Bassett were on the road to becoming wealthy, though not perhaps on the Blair scale: according to the Guardian, in 2003 they were already dividing their time between a country house in Hampshire and a mansion flat overlooking Westminster Cathedral, and their son attended the £20,000-a-year public school St Paul’s. But she was about to get a whole lot richer.

  As soon as she was no longer a minister, she started to make herself seriously wealthy from consultancy work, although Blair still had two more years as PM and New Labour had five more years in government. She became the Prime Minister’s new special envoy to the Middle East, but in the private sector she was also earning around £100,000 a year.

  Some of this came from a consultancy with DLA Piper, which earns millions of dollars in the United States by acting as a lobbying firm in Washington for multinational corporations. Documents the company has deposited in the US capital reveal that in the past few years it has earn
ed more than $6 million in lobbying fees from tobacco firms. The firm has also earned $7 million from lobbying for two American defence giants, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, the company that makes cruise missiles for the US military.

  Symons also has a non-executive position in the boardroom of P&O, the subject of a takeover bid from the Middle Eastern firm Dubai Ports World, which is understood to be owned by the Emirates’ royal family.

  She also took up a boardroom job with British Airways, where she earned £35,000 for fifteen days a year. The lucrative position also provided her with free first-class BA flights for her and her husband. He, in turn, became the special adviser to Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs.

  Since 2010 Baroness Symons has been chairman of the Mayfair-based Arab–British Chamber of Commerce (ABCC). Despite its official-sounding name, this is a private company that specialises in building business and commercial relationships between the UK and the twenty-two member states of the Arab league.

  The company promoted Libya during the Gaddafi era as well as many other unsavoury Middle East and North African dictatorships and monarchies including Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Sudan and Yemen. Its profile on Iraq is illuminating: ‘In its contemporary history, Iraq has been exposed to many wars which have caused large fatalities to the Iraqi people and shattered the economy. The latest war in 2003 and the subsequent violence left the economy severely damaged.’ Baroness Symons, of course, was one of the cheerleaders for that war.

  The ABCC were promoting trade with Iraq with an event entitled ‘Opportunities in Iraq: The Way Forward’. Its website read,

  The Chamber is to organize an event promoting trade relations between Iraq and the United Kingdom. The event will focus on the vast investment opportunities Iraq has to offer, bringing valuable business opportunities to the attention of potential investors to the state. Given Iraq’s recent growth statistics, the event will be a significant draw for British investors who have an interest in exploring future business potential in the country.