Tripoli
Coming pretty much straight from the London riots to the Libyan revolution has made me more contemptuous than ever of Britain’s self-pitying, self-indulgent, social-security-claiming insurrectionaries. For all the fear and death, Tripoli’s uprising has been far more disciplined. Cool young rebels, in their bandanas and Free Libya T-shirts, guard the streets. Barely a shop has been looted, and trainers are still changing hands in the normal way. Only one group of people, in fact, is brazenly disregarding private property and disrespecting the law: western journalists.
So here’s the routine. You screech up to the relevant premises. Actually, that’s an exaggeration: there are no addresses in Libya, so you drive wearily up to the relevant premises, having spent an hour or two asking round the neighbourhood for it. There are none of the handy ways we find people in England, such as the electoral roll (there hasn’t, until now, been much call for voting in these parts). Last week was also Eid, the end of Ramadan, so the streets were almost empty of people to ask: imagine trying to find Peter Mandelson’s house on Christmas Day, knowing only that it is somewhere in north London.
You then talk your way in (or, in the case of the British ambassador’s residence, climb over the wall). At government offices, as Libya’s new rulers start to get their acts together, things are tightening up, so our focus has shifted to the private homes of senior regime members, now deserted as their former occupants join 4 x 4 convoys to Algeria and Niger. This also has the advantage of allowing important sociological commentary on the Gaddafi elite lifestyle.
At Hannibal Gaddafi’s pad (black walls and blood-red carpets), somebody had tried to burn down one of the six or so bathrooms: the bonfire of the vanity units. The home of Said Rashid, deputy head of the intelligence service who was named in the Lockerbie bombing indictment, was comparatively tasteful: the marble-covered fridges still hummed, the drinks were still cold, and a lovely carved wooden door guarded the great man’s study. ‘He stole that from a mosque,’ said our escorts, quietly.
The documents themselves are piled in cupboards and strewn, ankle-deep, across the floors in a swirl of discarded clothes and instruction manuals for electronic goods, circa 1980. The documents are, of course, nearly all in Arabic. Quick and dirty translations are required in situ, sifting out the junk and taking pictures of the potential gems. The process is unbelievably time-consuming, not least because you keep stumbling across new rooms and bunkers with fresh caches of material.
At the risk of generalisation, Gaddafi’s top henchmen appeared to be obsessed by two things: their health — they have cupboards full of medical reports — and their houses. The vast amounts of effort, paperwork and architects’ drawings which went into these monstrosities make the final results even more painful. And top state secrets? Pickings are rather thin, as yet — though I did get rather a jolly insight into Matouk’s time as a ‘student’ in Edinburgh, where his ‘unhygenic’ lifestyle left his landlord ‘distressed’ and all his furniture ‘badly stained’.
•••
The best find, of course, was not by journalists at all, but by the pressure group Human Rights Watch, whose researchers happened on the office files of Moussa Koussa, the now defected head of the External Security Organisation and Mr Rashid’s boss, in an ordinary domestic-looking building behind the half-finished Intercontinental Hotel.
It was these documents which revealed Britain’s rather too close intelligence co-operation with the Gaddafi regime, in particular its involvement in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the man who is now, inconveniently for us, the military commander of Tripoli. Reading the papers leaves an even nastier taste in the mouth than Hannibal Gaddafi’s carpets, and the very strong impression that intelligence is not a job suitable for a fully grown adult.
The ‘air cargo’ was not a packing case but a man, being sent to what Allen must have known would be vicious torture. His mixture of misplaced imperial swagger and over-anxious desire to please could sum up Britain’s policy in the Middle East. The other documents, too, show the spooks in a poor light: an intelligence report on ‘North African extremist networks in Pakistan’ reads like a Ladybird book (‘There is reporting that they use internet cafés’ is among the exclusive insights).
Perhaps the most striking thing is the almost complete absence of the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service from the papers or the delegations to discuss the new Blair-Gaddafi rapprochement; policy on Libya, as on Iraq, appears to have been run by MI6 and No. 10. But on Libya, as on Iraq, can there ever have been two organisations which have got it so wrong?
Quite how the documents were located — this was a very obscure building — is an interesting question. One Human Rights Watch researcher said that the group simply stumbled across them while searching for a secret jail. Another said they had a tip-off. And certainly, the discovery can have done Libya’s new rulers very little harm. They were previously somewhat indebted to Britain and the West — for the air strikes that saved their bacon, and needing their agreement to release frozen Libyan funds — and the embarrassment caused to Britain and America by the documents has perhaps helped even the balance of the relationship a little.
For now, the document hunt continues. Meet me in five minutes in the lobby of the Radisson Hotel. I’ve got a lead on someone who’s offering to sell me Saif Gaddafi’s laptop.