In 2002 the CIA and MI6 began co-operating with the Libyan External Security Organisation (ESO), Col Muammar Gaddafi’s notorious overseas intelligence agency. The CIA and MI6 built relationships with Libya, the two agencies assisted Libyan spies in the kidnapping of Gaddafi’s enemies. Two leading figures in the Libyan opposition who had fled the country were kidnapped, one from Hong Kong, one from Thailand, and flown back to Tripoli along with their wives and children. Both men were tortured. MI6 gave their Libyan counterparts questions for the prisoners, who, under extreme duress, led them to other Libyan dissidents in exile.
Opponents of the Gaddafi regime who had been living legally in the UK for years were detained by British police, and the British government made a determined attempt to have them deported to Tripoli. Asylum seekers and British-Libyan nationals in Manchester and London were menaced by Gaddafi’s agents, who were invited into the UK and permitted to operate on the streets of Britain alongside MI5. British intelligence handed over details of the targets’ telephone calls to the ESO, and their relatives and friends in Libya were arrested and threatened. The rapprochement between the Gaddafi regime and the west – and Tony Blair’s government in particular – went far deeper than was previously known.
Details of the dark arrangements made by the intelligence agencies of the US, UK and Libya have been gleaned through interviews with government officials and victims of rendition, British government documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, and material that emerged during a lengthy Scotland Yard investigation and a number of civil trials. Several extraordinary caches of secret British, American and Libyan intelligence documents that were discovered amid the chaos of the Libyan revolution in 2011, scattered around abandoned government offices, prisons and officials’ private residences. Many of the most intriguing documents were found by Libyan civilians and human rights activists in September that year inside ESO’s offices. Others came to light in various government outposts after Gaddafi was captured and killed the following month. All together, they amount to many thousands of pages. They show that, in their eagerness to get close to Gaddafi and influence the dictator’s future conduct, Britain’s intelligence agencies were prepared to commit serious human rights abuses on his behalf.
On 20 September 2001, four days after the CIA briefing on the revved-up rendition programme, MI6 spy chief Mark Allen was sitting face-to-face with a senior Libyan intelligence officer. Moussa Koussa had been close to Gaddafi for more than 20 years, and at the time of the meeting was head of the ESO, the organisation that was thought to have organised many of Libya’s terrorist attacks. Gaddafi trusted Koussa, and respected his advice. Allen said he was “very interested in joint penetration operations” against an organisation called the Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya, or the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Although some LIFG members had joined al-Qaida in Afghanistan, its leadership had for years rejected the overtures of Osama bin Laden, and remained focused on the overthrow of Gaddafi. Despite this, Allen clearly believed LIFG members could provide information about the threat from al-Qaida. In particular, he expressed interest in one of the LIFG’s military leaders, a 35-year-old veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war by the name of Abdel Hakim Belhaj. On 13 November 2001, Bush signed a military order authorising the widespread use of rendition and torture. A few days later, ESO and MI6 met again. By now, the Libyans noted, MI6 were “determined to experiment with recruiting sources”.
By August 2002, relations between Britain and Libya were tentatively restored, with the goal of what Blair would later call the “huge prize” of security co-operation with Libyan intelligence. Gaddafi’s son Saif was admitted to the London School of Economics at his second attempt. During a preliminary telephone conversation, Blair and Gaddafi exchanged pleasantries. Junior foreign office minister Mike O’Brien visited Gaddafi at Sirte, the dictator’s birthplace, and delivered a letter from Blair. It was the first British ministerial visit since 1984, when the UK had severed diplomatic relations after a police officer, Yvonne Fletcher, was murdered by shots fired from inside the Libyan embassy in London. Gaddafi was regarded as dangerously insane. He may be a madman, those in the higher reaches of the British government appear to have concluded, but at least he’s our madman.
Gifts of dates and oranges from Tripoli began to appear at MI6’s headquarters on the south bank of the Thames, while on 20 September 2003, on the first anniversary of the two men’s initial meeting, Koussa was invited to “a banquet dinner at the Goring”, a luxury hotel. It was Koussa’s first visit to the UK in decades. In June 1980, as head of the Libyan People’s Bureau, as his country’s embassy in London was then known, he had given an extraordinary interview to the Times in which he admitted having given his personal approval for the murder of two Libyans resident in the UK. Lord Carrington, then the foreign secretary, had barely permitted Koussa’s feet to touch the ground as he was bundled out of the country. And here he was, 23 years later, being wined and dined.
There were talks about “bilateral and international issues”, intelligence sharing, and about MI6’s desire that Saif Gaddafi should be safe and comfortable while living in London. The conversation then turned to the dictator’s political opponents living in the UK. “What we need to deal with these individuals who reside in the UK,” a senior MI6 officer is reported as saying, “is tangible evidence to take instant actions against them.” On 25 November 2002, the Libyans passed MI6 a list of 79 Libyan opposition activists, who they referred to as “heretics”, living in the UK. Most, if not all, were said to be members or supporters of the LIFG, dedicated to the overthrow of Gaddafi and the establishment of an Islamic government in Tripoli. It had announced its existence through a series of clashes with Gaddafi’s forces in the east of the country. For many years it had two leaders: Belhaj was its military commander, while another man, Sami al-Saadi, was its spiritual leader. The US government listed it as a terrorist organisation but it was not proscribed in the UK at this time, however. Many of its members had fled to Britain where the LIFG was tolerated by the government. They were able to regroup and raise funds. From late 2002, however, as the rapprochement between London and Tripoli warmed up, Libyans resident in the UK were stopped and questioned at airports, and there were police raids on family homes in London and Manchester. he UK-based Libyan author Hisham Matar – whose father, a noted member of a different dissident group, had been disappeared by the Gaddafi regime in 1990 wrote “None of us felt safe.”
The secret papers show that by then Allen was regularly meeting with a senior CIA officer, Stephen Kappes, to discuss ways they could make sure Gaddafi abandoned his ambitions to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weaponry. During their conversations with Koussa, no sanctions were threatened; there was little need, as all three men knew Gaddafi was terrified of being invaded by the US. At meetings in Tripoli, MI6 officers discussed not only the WMD programme, but ways of targeting Libyan “heretics” around the world. British intelligence officers told the Libyans they had intercepted Sami al-Saadi’s telephone calls from his home in Tehran.
At one meeting between the ESO, MI6 and MI5, the British passed over a briefing paper that MI5 had prepared. “Greetings from the British Security Service,” it read. “We … wish to share with you information that we have that may be of interest.” It contained details about the whereabouts and movements of Gaddafi’s opponents in London, Brighton, Peshawar and Los Angeles. MI5 also passed on details of “UK-based Libyan extremists”. British intelligence was starting to track the LIFG leadership. ESO asked the British if they could help capture Belhaj, who was in China with his Moroccan wife, Fatima Bouchar. MI6 replied that they must first sound out the Chinese.
In February 2004 the LIFG commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Bouchar, who was four-and-a-half months pregnant, attempted to board a commercial flight from Beijing to London, where he hoped to claim asylum. Instead, the Chinese authorities deported the couple to Malaysia. On arrival in Kuala Lumpur they were detained.
Among the secret papers discovered in Koussa’s own office was a fax from MI6, dated 1 March 2004, which informed the Libyans of the couple’s location, and copies of letters from Koussa to the Malaysian ambassador to Libya, requesting his assistance. There is also a fax from the CIA, dated 6 March 2004, about “the capture and rendition” of Belhaj. “We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” it says. The following evening, the Malaysian authorities put the couple on a commercial flight to London, via Bangkok. In Bangkok, they were taken off the aircraft, hooded, and taken to a CIA detention centre somewhere within Don Mueang international airport. Belhaj says he was beaten and hung from hooks, and blasted by loud music. Bouchar told me that when she was dragged away from her husband, she feared he was going to be killed. “They took me into a cell, and they chained my left wrist to the wall and both my ankles to the floor. I could sit down but I couldn’t move.” Bouchar was chained to the wall for five days, and given water but no food. “They knew I was pregnant. It was obvious.” She was forced to lie on a stretcher, and was bound to it, head to foot, with sticky tape. They put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, hear or see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied. But my right eye was open. It was agony.”
After five days, the pair were taken to Tripoli on a flight that took 17 hours. On arrival they were driven separately to Tajoura prison, east of the city. Belhaj says Koussa greeted him in person. Then he was chained to a wall, he says, and beaten. Almost immediately, MI5 and MI6 began sending questions that they wanted the Libyans to put to him. Many concerned the lives of other Libyan dissidents around the world. And the questions would keep coming. They are all there, in the secret papers discovered in Tripoli: more than 1,600 questions.
Nine days after the couple’s arrival at Tajoura, Allen congratulated Koussa on the “safe arrival” of Belhaj. “This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years.” He added that “amusingly”, the CIA had asked that MI6 channel all requests for information from Belhaj through them. “I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence … was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this.”
The LIFG spiritual leader Sami al-Saadi had also moved to China with Karima and the four children. The family had travelled to Hong Kong after al-Saadi approached MI5 via an intermediary to ask if they would be allowed to return to London. He was under the impression he was to be interviewed by British diplomats in Hong Kong. Instead, the entire family was detained by Hong Kong immigration authorities.
Al-Saadi’s eldest child, Khadija, then aged 12, recalls how she and her younger brothers, Mostapha, 11, and Anes, nine, and six-year-old sister Arowa, were separated from their parents before they were all taken aboard an Egyptian airliner, which was empty but for a small number of Libyan men. “After a while I was allowed to go into the next compartment and see my mother,” she says. “She was crying. She told me they were taking us to Libya. Initially, I didn’t believe it. Then I realised it was true, and I was very scared. I thought we would all be killed. Then I was told to go and say goodbye to my father. He was handcuffed to a seat in another compartment and had a drip in his arm. I fainted.” After the aircraft landed in Tripoli, Khadija watched as her parents were taken off and hooded, and then their legs bound with wire. Mostapha and Anes were blindfolded. The family was then driven in a convoy of vehicles to the prison at Tajoura. Al-Saadi says he was beaten, threatened and subjected to electric shocks. Khadija knew her father was being tortured: every few days he was brought to see his family for a few minutes before being taken away again. “I think they were doing it to increase the pressure on him.” The children decided to embark on a hunger strike, “but they didn’t care whether we ate anything or not”. The children were released, along with their mother, after 10 weeks, and allowed to enrol in school. Al-Saadi, like Belhaj, would spend six years in Gaddafi’s prison.
Later that summer, Allen left MI6 and was appointed as an advisor to BP. At the end of the year he was knighted.
In 2005, the LIFG was banned in the UK. Three members were prosecuted for providing it with funds and false passports, and sentenced to between 22 and 45 months in prison. A number of other LIFG supporters in the UK were detained on the basis of information they say was extracted under torture from Belhaj and Al-Saadi. They were subjected to British control orders – detained pending deportation to Libya. Some of them had been granted asylum from the Gaddafi regime, and had been living peacefully in the UK for years. But now, it seemed, control orders were being used as instruments of international diplomacy. The UK government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Gaddafi regime under which the Libyans pledged not to execute, torture or mistreat anyone who was forcibly returned. At one point, the British government suggested – in all seriousness – that Libyan compliance with the Memorandum could be monitored by a body called the Gaddafi Foundation, which was run by the dictator’s son, Saif. Such was Libya’s appalling human rights record, however – with opponents of Gaddafi facing murder, torture and arbitrary detention – that the government was never able to deport its detainees: in one judgment after another, the courts ruled that anyone returned to that country would have no chance of a fair trial.
In April 2007, Blair wrote a personal letter to Gaddafi. “Dear Mu’ammar,” he began, "With regret, I should let you know that the British Government has not been successful in its recent Court case here involving deportation to Libya.” Blair thanked Gaddafi personally for the help he had given the British government in its attempt to secure deportation, and for the “excellent co-operation” between the two countries’ intelligence agencies. “Best wishes,” he signed off, “yours ever, Tony.”
The British was anxious that their joint operations with Libya should never be made public. MI5 warned that steps should be taken jointly to “avoid being trapped in any sort of legal problem and to avoid also that those joint plans be discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. With the role that MI6 played in the kidnap of Belhaj, Al-Saadi and their families now laid bare, Sir Richard Dearlove, the agency’s chief at the time, made a rare public statement in defence of MI6’s conduct. Government ministers had approved their actions, he said: “It was a political decision, having very significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to co-operate with Libya on Islamist terrorism.”
Meanwhile, in Tripoli, Belhaj and Al-Saadi were interrogated by two British intelligence officers. On one occasion, when left alone with his British visitors, Belhaj says he indicated that they were being covertly recorded, displayed the scars on his arms, and indicated through sign language that he was being suspended by his arms and beaten. The British clearly understood, he says: one gave a thumbs-up sign, while the other nodded her head.
Not that British intelligence believed the detention and interrogation of these men had made the UK – or indeed the world – a safer place. Among the papers discovered during the revolution was an MI5 memorandum prepared in advance of a visit to Tripoli in February 2005 marked “Secret, UK/Libya Eyes Only”, which contains a remarkably candid assessment. The detention of Belhaj and Al-Saadi had resulted in the LIFG being “cast into a state of disarray”, the memo states, before adding that these men had always jealously guarded the group’s independence from the worldwide jihadist movement, but in their absence, it was now falling under the influence of others who may be pushing it towards al-Qaida’s agenda.
Belhaj, Al-Saadi and several of the men who were detained and subject to control orders in the UK, or had their assets frozen on the basis of information being extracted from Gaddafi’s prisoners, brought damages claims against the British government and MI6 for the mistreatment they had suffered. Al-Saadi settled his claim in 2012 when Britain paid him £2.23m in compensation. Belhaj brought proceedings against not only the British government, but also against Allen and Jack Straw, who had been foreign secretary, and responsible for MI6, at the time that the agency assisted with his kidnap. Belhaj said he would settle for just £3 – £1 each from the government, Allen and Straw – providing both he and his wife received an unreserved apology. That was unlikely to happen, however: Scotland Yard had embarked upon a criminal investigation of the intelligence agency’s role in the Libyan rendition operations, and to make an admission of liability would be to invite arrests.
Allen faced potential charges of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring kidnap, false imprisonment, assault or torture, and misconduct in public office. The police report contained evidence that Allen had been in contact with Koussa about the two rendition operations. However, in June last year, the CPS decided that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against Allen. Belhaj’s British lawyers are currently seeking a judicial review of the CPS decision to not prosecute Allen, and the couple’s damages claim is yet to be heard in the high court. Government lawyers fought for years to have the claim struck out, finally losing at the supreme court earlier this year. A hearing is expected next year.
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