ANGOLA ALGERIA CAMEROON CHAD. CONGO EGYPT.. EQUATORIAL GUINEA GABON LIBYA. NIGERIA SOUTH AFRICA SUDAN TUNISIA OTHERS
Libya: Spies, Oilmen and the Colonel
BY MATEIN KHALID 06-08-2007
ENGLAND has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests". This diplomatic bon mot of a Victorian statesman was so apt as Tony Blair jetted to Tripoli on the first leg of his African farewell tour, gushed about his "easy personal relationship" with Colonel Gaddafi, hailed Libya's emergence into the Lexus–McWorld globalist stage and bagged a $900 million gas exploration contract for BP the same week the Kremlin squeezed its Siberian gasfield.
Tony Blair made no secret of his enthusiasm for the kinder, gentler Libyan Arab Socialist Peoples Jamarhiya that emerged when the quixotic Brother Colonel who seized power 37 years ago in a military coup abandoned his nuclear weapons programme, stopped bankrolling guerillas and secessionist revolutionary movements, handed over the two intelligence agents who caused the midair explosion that killed 290 human beings on Pan Am Flight 007 over the skies Scotland and s
Britain desperately needs Libyan gas since it must replace a third of its electric power plants in the next decade as its existing coal and nuclear stations retire. Moreover, British arms exports to Arab governments are mission critical for BAE, as Tony Blair's intervention to halt a SFO probe of kickbacks on a Saudi fighter jet deal proves. So it was not coincidental that Blair linked M16-Libyan mukhabarat intelligence ties to gas and arms contracts that he hoped to sign with Colonel Gaddafi's regime.
British intelligence is, of course, no stranger to the ancient deserts of Libya, the scene of epic wartime tank battles between Edwin Rommel, Hitler's desert fox and Montgomery. After all, the fabled SAS whose license to kill presence in Arab wars from Suez to Dhofar to Fallujah has shaped the secret history of the Middle East, was born in Colonel Stirling's raid on the Nazi garrison at Tobruk. M16 agents had cultivated the Sufi reformist Sanussi religious orders of Benghazi, whose revolt against Mussolini's brutal Italian colonialists was instrumental in the Axis defeat in North Africa. It was therefore entirely natural that the head of the Sanussi order, Sidi Idris, was crowned King of Libya, with the assistance of British intelligence in 1951 even though Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyraenica to had been distinct regions even during the Ottoman Sultanate.
Libyan oil was discovered by BP in the 1950's. Having learnt the lessons of the CIA–M16 coup to oust Mossadegh, London became the de facto protector of King Idris regime as black gold from the Sirte Basin made the Sannusi monarchy rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.
However, King Idris's palace entourage made a fatal mistake when they fattened their Swiss bank accounts by awarding oil concessions to America's oilmen, particularly Dr Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum, who tried to muscle into the Seven Sisters oil fiefdoms in the Middle East. Not coincidentally, the British Army's signals and cryptology school sponsored several young Bedouin officers from the Fezzan for its communications course in Beaconsfield, whose most famous alumnus was, of course, Muammar Gaddafi. On September 1st 1969, Gaddafi used his (UK educated) knowledge of military ciphers to good use when he engineered the coup while King Idris was on a state visit to Turkey. Both Britain and United States immediately recognised the new military regime, impressed by Gaddafi's Islamic piety and hatred for Soviet Communism. M16 arrested a boatload of mercenaries hired by King Idris's émigré royalists to overthrow Gaddafi's regime before it set sail from Trieste to Tripoli. In fact, the CIA even tipped off Gaddafi of a coup plot within his own Revolutionary Command council's brother officers and spread the word that Libya's Langley connection was sacrosanct. Inevitably, Agency business, the arms bazaar and oil concessions converged with a vengeance in Libya.
Bunker Hunt, Dr. Hammer's Oxy, Conoco, Marathon Oil, Halliburton, Bechtel, the great and the good of the Texan oil batch, made money hand over fist in Libya even after 1969. But they too made a fatal mistake, like King Idris's kleptocrats. They misread the mercurial, messianic young military ruler of Libya who lived in a tent and dreamt he was the new Saladin destined to recover Palestine for the Arabs, who dreamt he was the heir of Nasser after the humiliation of the Six Day War, who used oil as a political weapon before King Faisal's embargo.
Amnesia is mission critical in international relations. So M16 and the CIA are not really interested in introspection on their track record in Libya, even though ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free (yeah right!). Gaddafi, of course, sent Libyan troops to Uganda to save Idi Amin, and the CAR to save the self styled Emperor Bokassa, invaded Chad to seize the uranium mines of the Aouzou Strip, sent guerillas to attack the Tunisian city of Gafsa, helped the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor to the bitter end. Gaddafi's petrodollars financed such luminaries of the Third World as Abu Nidal, Carlos the Jackal, the PFLP, Angolan guerillas, Frelimo, the Provo IRA, Pakistan's black market nuclear component smuggling rings, the Polisario in Western Sahara, the Eritreans, the Basques and the Corsicans. Libya almost provoked a war with Sadat's Egypt in 1977 and with the United States in 1981, when Libyan MIG's buzzed the Sixth Fleet, setting in motion Reagan's bombing raid over Tripoli and Benghazi. Of course, the F-111 jets that bombed Aziziyah Barracks in April 1986 took off from a USAF airfield in the sceptred isle, home of BP (ousted from Libya in 1974) and the Firm, Her Majesty's fabled secret service.
Libya has fascinated me since my boyhood. The world's oldest cave paintings, the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, the legends of Septimus Sevenus Caesar and Omar Mukhtar, the Sufi Zawiyas (Monastries) of Benghazi, Tripoli's Ottoman forts that once housed Barbarossa's pirates and slave traders, the battlefields of the Africa Korps. Yet the history of Libya is so tragic, its politics so sinister.
Arab political reform is a joke as long as Britain and America embrace a regime that has never allowed an election since 1969, that has subverted Arab and African governments, whose bizarre social experiments and Green Books put Chairman Mao to shame. But Western spies and Western oilmen bear a moral responsibility to the Libyan people. So the CEO of Exxon meets the Colonel in a tent, Shell mints money with LNG tankers, the Rothschild Bank advises on Libyan offshore refinery mergers, Harvard Business/School's Michael Porter designs the Libyan economic future. Amnesia definitely helps in a world where friends and enemies are ephemeral but spooks and oil money are permanent.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst