Revealed: Gaddafi threat to Britain over Megrahi
- TOP-LEVEL CONTACT: Tony Blair shakes Gaddafi’s hand during the now-infamous desert tent meeting in 2004 as Britain tried to bring the dictator ‘in from the cold’. Picture: PA
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5 Sep 2011
THE Gaddafi regime threatened Britain there
would be “dire consequences” for UK-Libya relations if the man convicted of the
Lockerbie bombing died in his Scottish jail cell.
The extent of lobbying by the Libyan Government in
the lead-up to Abdelbasset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi’s release on compassionate
grounds in August 2009 was revealed yesterday after reporters found confidential
documents in the abandoned British Embassy building in Tripoli.
According to one, senior Foreign Office official
Robert Dixon wrote to then Foreign Secretary David Miliband in January 2009,
stating Muammar Gaddafi wanted Megrahi back home in Libya “at all costs”.
“Libyan officials and ministers have warned of dire
consequences for the UK-Libya relationship and UK commercial operations in Libya
in the event of Megrahi’s death in custody,” he wrote.
Mr Dixon added: “We believe Libya might seek to exact
vengeance.”
Other documents found in the Embassy in Tripoli suggest MI5 traded information with the Libyan security service
Megrahi was the only man convicted over the bombing
of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988, an attack in which 270
people died.
Diagnosed as suffering from terminal prostate cancer,
he was released from Greenock Prison after doctors told the Scottish Government
he had only three months to live.
After a review of the paperwork in the case, Cabinet
Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell said in February ministers in the last Labour
Government believed Megrahi’s release would be the “best outcome” as they feared
that UK interests in Libya would be damaged if he was allowed to die in a
Scottish jail.
It is also claimed that Prince Andrew was also to be
used as a high-profile go-between in attempts to free Megrahi.
A spokesman for Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill,
who took the decision to release him, said: “The Scottish Government were the
only ones playing with a straight bat – in stark contrast to the astonishing
hypocrisy of the last UK Labour Government.”
In return, MI5 received updates on information disclosed by terrorist suspects under interr-ogation in Libyan prisons.
Also found was a letter then prime minister Tony Blair wrote in 2007 to help Gaddafi’s son Saif with his PhD thesis. It begins “Dear Engineer Saif” and is signed off: “Best wishes, yours sincerely, Tony Blair”.
Documents had already been found in the Tripoli offices of former head of Libyan intelligence Musa Kusa that indicated close co-operation between British intelligence and the former Gaddafi regime.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said yesterday: “These chilling revelations show just how cosy British authorities became with a regime known to torture.”
Details also emerged in the documents of a trip to Britain arranged for Gaddafi’s sons Saadi and Khamis, who are said to have been in charge of a brigade that massacred civilians during the recent fighting.
They watched an SAS combat display in Hereford and were wined and dined at the Cavalry and Guards Club in Mayfair.
The papers found in Kusa’s office also included commun-ications between British and Libyan security ahead of Mr Blair’s now infamous desert tent meeting with Gaddafi in 2004.
Britain is said to have helped Gaddafi with speech-writing.
Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “[The documents] relate to a period under the previous governments ... I have no knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes at that time.”
Former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling told The
Andrew Marr Show: “There is no doubt that from our point of view we wanted to
bring Gaddafi in from the cold because at the time we thought that was possible,
and there is no doubt that Gaddafi wanted Megrahi out.”
Other documents suggested British security service
MI5 traded information with its Libyan counterparts, providing intelligence on
British-based Libyans opposed to the Gaddafi regime.In return, MI5 received updates on information disclosed by terrorist suspects under interr-ogation in Libyan prisons.
Also found was a letter then prime minister Tony Blair wrote in 2007 to help Gaddafi’s son Saif with his PhD thesis. It begins “Dear Engineer Saif” and is signed off: “Best wishes, yours sincerely, Tony Blair”.
Documents had already been found in the Tripoli offices of former head of Libyan intelligence Musa Kusa that indicated close co-operation between British intelligence and the former Gaddafi regime.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said yesterday: “These chilling revelations show just how cosy British authorities became with a regime known to torture.”
Details also emerged in the documents of a trip to Britain arranged for Gaddafi’s sons Saadi and Khamis, who are said to have been in charge of a brigade that massacred civilians during the recent fighting.
They watched an SAS combat display in Hereford and were wined and dined at the Cavalry and Guards Club in Mayfair.
The papers found in Kusa’s office also included commun-ications between British and Libyan security ahead of Mr Blair’s now infamous desert tent meeting with Gaddafi in 2004.
Britain is said to have helped Gaddafi with speech-writing.
Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “[The documents] relate to a period under the previous governments ... I have no knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes at that time.”
Ex-head of MI5 retains power to raise alarm
Published on 5 Sep 2011
COMMENT: ANNE SIMPSON
Either to stay on the right side of any pension
arrangements, or continue to keep loved ones in the dark, they reserve their
truly scandalous secrets for the grave, leaving post-burial historians to do the
digging, and thriller writers to put fictional flesh on the bones.
Tomorrow, though, might be different when Eliza
Manningham-Buller delivers the first of three Reith lectures for Radio 4. Ever
since 2007 when she stood down as director general of MI5, she hasn’t shirked
from saying out loud what governments don’t wish to hear. Last year her
testimony to the Chilcot inquiry into the lead up to war in Iraq amounted to a
scathing indictment of the Blair administration.
Ms Manningham-Buller made it clear she warned the
Prime Minister that invasion – on the basis of “fragmentary intelligence” –
would “undoubtedly” increase the terrorist threat to Britain. But her advice was
superseded by that from MI6 which, she said witheringly, had “over-promised and
under-delivered” when it came to Iraq. Rivalries between national security
agencies are nothing new, of course. Those trained in covert activity never stop
being watchful of everyone.
In the early 1980s the British traitor Michael
Bettaney, working in MI5’s counter-espionage unit, shared an office with two of
Ms Manningham-Buller’s assistants. At the time she was one of only five people
who knew that Oleg Gordievsky, deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet Embassy in
London, was actually a double agent. Mr Gordievsky’s evidence was crucial to
Bettaney’s Old Bailey conviction in 1984, but had his name been mentioned
previously in Bettaney’s presence, the Russian would have been the target of an
inevitable Soviet hit squad. Later, Mr Gordievesky acknowledged that Ms
Manningham-Buller’s ability to keep a secret had saved his life.
Recently the political philosopher John Gray
downplayed the significance of the British “ice-cold deceiver”, Kim Philby,
because, in gazing outwards from his Moscow flat, Philby failed to predict the
future. Today cyber-intrusion deludes us into thinking there are no secrets left
to leak; even WikiLeaks – which last year “revealed” much already guessed – was
overtaken by the more immediately gripping sensations of News International’s
hackgate.
So, how do spies now occupy their time? We’re beyond
the days when spooks looked dingier than a private eye’s raincoat, walked with a
limp and had half a finger missing. In Russia itself some veterans, who acquired
a gourmand’s girth while sleuthing, have become food writers, recalling past
moments in grand restaurants beyond the Iron Curtain, when, seduced by sensual
vapours from the kitchen, they put the Motherland on hold and forgot to activate
the tape recorder hidden in the table napkin.
My only brush with a spy began at the Soda Fountain
in Fortnum and Mason when Misha – not his real name – was the appointed Russian
official organising my trip to Moscow to report on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
His wife, he grumbled, hadn’t taken to London. So she stayed indoors bringing
resentment to the boil. And the media didn’t help matters, he said. “I take you
journalists to lunch. I buy you alcohol and lobster thermidor, and in return you
tell me nothing.” That should have been a clue, although the Moscow assignment
proceeded without any creepy incidents: no bugged cocktail olives, no lumpen
stalkers watching morosely from the shadows.
But six months later Misha was among a dozen Soviets
evicted from Britain for spying. On television that night we caught a glimpse of
him at Heathrow, looking like an unhappy whippet. In tomorrow’s recorded
lecture, MI5’s former boss will refer to 9/11 by exploring whether that heinous
event was a terrorist attack or an act of war. “Or was it something different?”
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller may be a retired spy-catcher, but she still knows
how to raise an alert by asking a cryptic question.
The Reith Lectures begin on Radio 4 on Tuesday at
9am.
