Word: gaddafis
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...Despite President Bush's avowed goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East, Gaddafi's hold on power may be stronger than it was two decades ago, when President Reagan denounced him as a "mad dog" who threatened global security with a "reign of terror." In 1986, in response to a terrorist bombing in Berlin that killed two American servicemen, U.S. aircraft bombed targets, including Gaddafi's home, in what amounted to an aerial assassination attempt...
...remarkable things about Gaddafi's political transformation is how he achieved it with the help of two institutions that fed his greatest paranoia about the West: Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Gaddafi personally met with top British and American spooks, including the then CIA covert operations deputy chief Stephen Kappes, who is now the leading candidate to become CIA Deputy Director under incoming head Michael Hayden. The Libyan leader became on a first-name basis with them and his officials took them out to Tripoli's faded restaurants...
...Gaddafi had taken heart from the willingness of the U.S. and Britain to reach a compromise agreement over Lockerbie. As those negotiations neared their conclusion with a partial lifting of sanctions, Seif al Islam secretly met with three MI6 officers in a hotel room in London?s posh Mayfair district late one Sunday afternoon in March 2003. (An aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Mohammed Rashid, arranged the rendezvous...
...equally important breakthrough came the next day when he flew to his father, who was on a state visit to Burkina Faso, and received his blessing for the initiative. "I will see if we can be friends," he quotes his father saying over a lamb and rice lunch. Gaddafi dispatched foreign intelligence chief Musa Kusa to Geneva in mid-April for a meeting with top MI6 and CIA officials, who traveled secretly to Tripoli in September for a face-to-face with Gaddafi himself. The Libyans agreed in principle to throw its WMD projects wide open...
...Seif al Islam says that Gaddafi?s confidence grew as the number of messages from the British and U.S. governments came in via MI6 and the CIA. The key breakthrough occurred on Sept. 6, 2003, when a British air marshal flew in to Tripoli on a Royal Air Force plane and handed Gaddafi a personal letter from the British Prime Minister formally agreeing to Gaddafi's conditions for proceeding. That paved the way for the visit of the MI6-CIA technical team to inspect all of Libya's top-secret WMD sites and report back to their governments...