Adie, a veteran of Tiananmen Square, Tripoli and the Gulf, succeeded where sanctions had failed: she had brought the government to its knees.
The extent of the Libyan anguish emerged last week in an extraordinary telex to the BBC, in which Tripoli bemoaned the pugnacious temperament of Adie and pleaded for her to be withdrawn.
‘All our attempts to obtain a common and satisfactory solution were gone with the wind,’ lamented the telex. ‘We are demanding never ever send Kate Adie to Libya whatever the reasons are.’
By that stage, Saleh was at his wits end. Wandering into the lobby of the Bab al-Bahar hotel, he fainted. Coming round, he muttered, ‘If you ask me to choose Kate Adie or prison I would not hesitate to choose the prison.’
Grimacing as he relived their last encounter, in a crowded hotel lobby, Saleh said: ‘She said she should be filming demonstrations. I told her there were no demonstrations or clashes. But she insisted we find some.’
Deploying ruthless hyperbole, Adie said Libya was treating the foreign press ‘in a manner that had gone out of fashion with Stalin’.
Saleh respectfully suggested Adie should leave. But that was like waving a red flag at a bull. ‘If you are throwing me out it will be very bad for your country,’ she stormed.
Saleh went on: ‘I felt shy, so small, like an ant. I am from a good family but she was treating me as if I was a slave or an illegal boy [bastard]. But because of her age I am not allowed to shout or attack her. I must treat her like a mother or a grandmother.’
His next step was to assign an underling to Adie. The colleague was soon on the phone. ‘He was calling me all the time and begging me to release him. He said, “Saleh what have you done to me?”’
The ministry adopted new tactics. The BBC was banned from filming, as were other television crews. But Adie soon found her way round that. ‘Kate Adie said I had to choose between going to the souk [market] with her or have her shout at me. I took her to the souk,’ recalls Omar, the replacement minder.
As a last resort, the information ministry hosted ‘a farewell dinner’ in which, it was hoped, Adie would get the message. The next day, to their horror, officials received intelligence that she had embarked upon another embroidery square, her favourite method of whiling away time.
In the end, she left on Thursday. ‘We have sanctions,’ said one official, ‘but even worse is Kate Adie.’
Lockerbie drama turns to farce
3 October 1993
Although Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, is on the brink at last of surrendering the two men suspected of the Lockerbie bombing, justice is far from being done.
After one of the biggest international investigations ever mounted, the expenditure of more than £12 million of British taxpayers’ money, and interviews with 16,000 witnesses in 53 countries, most of the evidence indicates that those who made the decision to bomb Pan Am flight 103 will be nowhere near the court.
Libyan sources said yesterday that, under threat of increased United Nations sanctions, Gadaffi had decided to hand over the suspects for trial in Scotland.
Few who have investigated the case think these men, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, initiated or planned the operation.* They are low-level intelligence operatives. One is obviously slow-witted. They are accused of smuggling a suitcase bomb aboard a plane from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was loaded aboard the Pan Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, killing 270 people, at Christmas 1988.
Critics say the American and British governments have ignored evidence that the attack was ordered and paid for by Iran, in retaliation for America shooting down an Iranian jet, and that Iran contracted out the bombing to Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC, a radical Palestinian faction based in Damascus, with Syrian connivance.
According to a well-documented line of investigation, Jibril only turned to Libya for help in completing the operation after his own men were arrested by German police. Neither Washington nor London wanted to alienate the Syrian and Iranian leaderships at the time of the investigation, which coincided with the Gulf War.
Relatives of the victims are enraged. ‘It’s like trying the hit man and ignoring the person who paid him to pull the trigger,’ said Susan Cohen, whose daughter, 20, was killed. ‘Nobody thinks that these two guys sat in a café and decided to bomb an aeroplane.’
Even the conviction of the Libyans is by no means certain. Prosecutors fear they may have insufficient evidence. No witness, fingerprint or any other forensic evidence links either of them directly to the explosion.
None the less, all the might of the British and American governments has been brought to bear on Gadaffi through the UN to surrender the men, and Libyan sources said yesterday that he had finally been convinced that neither country would accept any compromise.
Travel and diplomatic sanctions were imposed last year, and on Friday the UN security council tabled a draft resolution imposing further sanctions if Gadaffi does not surrender. Apparently at the request of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary-general, the vote has been delayed to give Gadaffi time to declare his intentions. The denouement could come this week.
Gadaffi has been assured that the pair will get a fair trial in Scotland, where the stringency of evidence laws would give them the best chance of acquittal. He has also been promised that they would not be interrogated by MI6 or any other security agency. Security sources see this as an important concession because the men cannot be forced to reveal any Libyan secrets.
The British have even told the Libyans that Scottish cells are ‘very comfortable’ and that the men will be taught English – a puzzler for Libyan negotiators, who thought the Scots spoke Scottish. The farce continues.
Gulf War
Under fire
27 January 1991
Hussein stood alone in the carpet souk on the eastern bank of the Tigris, fingering his ivory worry-beads and gazing at the huge sun setting behind the Ottoman tenements on the far side of the river. The dying sunlight washed his dishdasha robe a wintry red.
The market square of the souk usually bustled at this time of the early evening as people stopped to gossip or do last-minute shopping on the way home from work. But it was 15 January, the United Nations’ deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. Baghdad was silent and edgy. The souk was deserted.
Hussein greeted me with far more warmth than our acquaintance merited. I had visited him on and off in his shop over the past five months, using the excuse of fingering a Kurdish bangle, or looking at a carpet, to pick up the rumours and rhythms of daily life in Baghdad. For him, it had been an excuse for a rare talk with a foreigner, something that for an Iraqi is akin to a visit to the confessional.
Now, in this chance encounter, we seemed the only people left in the capital. We walked to his shop under the vaulted roof of the souk. Inside, there was none of the usual salesmanship or the ritual cup of sugared tea. ‘Would you like a whisky?’ he asked, and picked up a half-full bottle of Whyte & Mackay. He poured us two tea glasses full.
Amid the clutter of piled up carpets, silver necklaces, antique frames, heavy Kurdish belts and, beside the ubiquitous picture of Saddam Hussein, a likeness of President John F Kennedy beaten into a copper plate we discussed whether he should stay in Baghdad or take his family to a place safe from American bombs, as other merchants had.
Tareq, who owned the House of Antiquities across the street, had taken his wife and sons to Kurdistan in northern Iraq. ‘The Americans like the Kurds, they won’t bomb them,’ he had said.
Hussein agonised.