Miami Herald

Published Friday, October 12, 2001

U.S. team gets help from unlikely source

BY JOHN WALCOTT Herald Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- A high-ranking U.S. diplomat and a CIA team met secretly last week with the Libyan intelligence chief believed to have planned the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

The Libyan identified members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, and a debriefing team from the CIA's Counterterrorism Center met in London with Musa Kusa, the head of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's External Security Organization, the country's intelligence service, two senior U.S. officials who asked anonymity told The Herald.

The meeting was part of the Bush administration's broad pursuit of information about bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. The president reiterated Thursday night that he would seek help from every possible source, including people who have been involved in terrorism.

The two U.S. officials said Kusa, whom CIA officials call the ``master of terror,'' provided the names of Libyan Islamic militants who have been trained in bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

Kusa also gave Britain's MI6 intelligence service the names of more than a dozen Libyans in the United Kingdom who have links to al Qaeda. MI6 had arranged the meeting.

The officials defended the meetings, saying Kusa isn't under indictment in the United States or France and adding that they welcome any information on bin Laden's terror network.

``If we only talked to people with clean hands, we wouldn't learn much about al Qaeda,'' one official said.

American, British and French officials believe Kusa helped plan numerous terrorist attacks, including the Pan Am bombing, which killed 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland; a 1986 attack on a Berlin discotheque that killed two American servicemen and a German woman, and two attacks on French airliners.

U.S. warplanes bombed targets in Libya in retaliation for the Berlin disco bombing, but the headquarters of the intelligence service was removed from the target list at the last minute because it was in a heavily populated area.

Gadhafi's regime, which 15 years ago topped America's list of nations that sponsor terrorism, has brutally repressed the small Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which is loosely allied with al Qaeda.

The IFG seeks to topple Gadhafi and install an Islamic regime similar to the Taliban's in Afghanistan, but U.S. officials said the IFG poses no real threat to the Libyan government.

The officials said Kusa also appeared to be trying to lay the groundwork for a possible settlement of the Pan Am case, similar to one Libya reached with the French government in the September 1989 bombing of a UTA airlines DC-10 over the Sahara, which killed all 171 people on board. (Kusa is suspected of involvement in the UTA case also.)

A special tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, convicted a low-level Libyan intelligence officer of helping to carry out the Pan Am bombing.

Kusa also is believed to have been Libya's principle contact with the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization when it was based in Libya in the late 1980s and to have planned the murders of a number of Libyan dissidents around the world, including one in Colorado in 1980.

-- Anonymous, October 12, 2001

Answers

This pisses me off. Not the fact that the meetings occured, but the fact that it is now all over the press.

If the US wants cooperation from "unlikely" sources, maybe they should keep their mouths shut about it. Hopefully this spill will not damper this guys cooperation or possibly put his life in jeopardy.

-- Anonymous, October 12, 2001

I also think ALL gift horses SHOULD be looked at very closely.

-- Anonymous, October 12, 2001