Sanctions Are Dropped Against Libyan Defector

Moises Saman for The New York Times

Moussa Koussa, a top Libyan official who fled to Britain last week, at news conference in Tripoli on March 18.

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 5, 2011

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WASHINGTON — The Obama administration dropped financial sanctions on Monday against the top Libyan official who fled to Britain last week, saying it hoped the move would encourage other senior aides to abandon Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the country’s embattled leader.

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But the decision to unfreeze bank accounts and permit business dealings with the official, Moussa Koussa, underscored the predicament his defection poses for American and British authorities, who said on Tuesday that Scottish police and prosecutors planned to interview Mr. Koussa about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and other issues “in the next few days.”
Mr. Koussa’s close knowledge of the ruling circle, which he is believed to be sharing inside a British safe house, could be invaluable in trying to strip Colonel Qaddafi of support.
But as the longtime Libyan intelligence chief and foreign minister, Mr. Koussa is widely believed to be implicated in acts of terrorism and murder over the last three decades, including the assassination of dissidents, the training of international terrorists and the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
“He was both the left arm and the right arm of the regime, its bloodhound,” said Dirk Vandewalle, a Dartmouth professor who has studied Libya for many years.
Mr. Vandewalle recalled a dinner with friends in Libya a few years ago when one man mentioned Mr. Koussa’s name, a dangerous faux pas. “The conversation just stopped,” he said. “People switched to a different topic. Koussa was considered beyond the pale.”
On Tuesday, Scotland’s Crown Office prosecutors said they had met with Foreign Office officials to discuss access to Mr. Koussa. “Steps are being taken with a view to arranging a meeting with Mr. Moussa Koussa at the earliest opportunity in the next few days,” the prosecutors said in a statement.
The British foreign secretary, William Hague, told Parliament on Monday that officials would “encourage” Mr. Koussa “to co-operate fully with all requests for interviews with law enforcement and investigation authorities in relation both to Lockerbie as well as other issues stemming from Libya’s past sponsorship of terrorism and to seek legal representation where appropriate.”
In a BBC interview in Tripoli broadcast on Tuesday, one of Colonel Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, charged that the British government had coerced Mr. Koussa into speaking against the Qaddafi government.
 “The British government said this: you have no immunity unless you cooperate,” Mr. Qaddafi said. “He  is sick, he is sick and old so if you put it this way — no immunity — of course I will come out with the funny stories.”
Brian P. Flynn, a New Yorker whose brother, J. P. Flynn, died in the Lockerbie bombing, said the lifting of sanctions on Mr. Koussa distressed him and other family members of the 270 victims. They have long believed that Mr. Koussa had a role in ordering the bombing, and Scottish prosecutors have requested access to him.
“It’s all logical in the diplomatic game they need to play,” said Mr. Flynn, vice president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103. “But at what cost to our system of justice? He’s a mass-murder suspect.”
Administration officials hastened to say that dropping the sanctions, which were imposed on March 15, had no bearing on the investigation of any crimes that Mr. Koussa might have committed in office. The American Lockerbie investigation has never been closed, and law enforcement officials said the F.B.I. would like to talk with Mr. Koussa.
David S. Cohen, the acting treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement that the sanctions on Mr. Koussa were dropped because he was no longer an official of the Libyan government. He resigned his position before fleeing.
“One of the intended purposes of sanctions against senior officials in the Libyan government was to motivate individuals within the Qaddafi regime to make the right decision and dissociate themselves from Qaddafi and his government,” Mr. Cohen said.
He said that 13 other Libyan officials are on the list of those facing sanctions, which freeze any accounts in American jurisdiction and prohibit American companies from doing business with them, and that more would be added soon.
Mr. Koussa’s flight to Britain came three decades after he was expelled from that country when he told a reporter for The Times of London that he supported Libya’s practice of hunting down and killing Libyan opponents of Colonel Qaddafi around the world.
“I approve of this,” the young diplomat declared in that 1980 interview.
On the face of it, Britain would appear to be the last place Mr. Koussa might be expected to seek refuge. In addition to the Pan Am 103 bombing, the Libyan government supplied arms and explosives to the Irish Republican Army and other terrorist groups, and was responsible for the killing of a British policewoman shot from inside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984. On Friday, a headline in The Daily Mail called him Colonel Qaddafi’s “Fingernail-Puller-in-Chief.”
But Mr. Koussa, by all accounts a canny operator who does not act rashly, clearly calculated that he was better off taking his chances in Britain than sticking with Colonel Qaddafi.
“Any defection is a bet on which side is going to win,” said Paul R. Pillar, a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency who has met Mr. Koussa. “I assume he’s banking on the leverage he has with his inside information, even without a formal grant of immunity. It’s a plea-bargaining situation.”

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Mr. Koussa’s calculation is undoubtedly based, too, on the sterling connections to British and American intelligence officials that he forged as Libya’s central negotiator when Colonel Qaddafi decided in 2004 to give up efforts to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. He came across not as a thug but as an urbane and worldly figure “who would not have looked out of place as a Western ambassador,” Mr. Pillar said.
Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show that in recent years, Mr. Koussa remade himself as the reasonable face of a ruthless and erratic government, meeting with American diplomats to discuss terrorist threats in North Africa, the plight of Sudanese refugees in Darfur, the streamlining of visas for American tourists and even human rights inside Libya.
A graduate of Michigan State University now in his early 60s, Mr. Koussa “is the rare Libyan official who embodies a combination of intellectual acumen, operational ability and political weight,” said a May 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Tripoli. The cables also portray him as a mentor to two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons: Muatassim, who serves as national security adviser, and Seif al-Islam, who was once seen as a proponent of reform. (Seif al-Islam has now proposed taking power from his father, a plan Muatassim is apparently resisting.)
Born and raised in the Tripoli suburb of Tajura, Mr. Moussa had no significant tribal or other power base, said Salem al Hasi, a Libyan human rights advocate who now lives in Atlanta. “Qaddafi wanted to be able to guarantee his loyalty,” Mr. Hasi said.
Mr. Koussa was one of many talented young Libyans sent to the United States for master’s degrees. His 1978 sociology thesis — still in the Michigan State library catalog — was a 214-page study of Colonel Qaddafi.
After his return to Libya, he was dispatched to London to remake the embassy into a “People’s Bureau,” before his too candid comment on the assassination policy ended his stay. He was put in charge of Libya’s Center to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness and Fascism until 1994, when he became the intelligence chief. He held that job until 2009, when he was named foreign minister.
But in the Libyan government, titles have never made much difference. Both when he was overseeing the government’s dark side and when he was negotiating the end of its nuclear program, the only thing that mattered was that he had the trust of Colonel Qaddafi, whom he has now so spectacularly abandoned.
Robert Joseph, a former Bush administration official who helped negotiate the weapons deal, recalls that every other delegation member deferred to Mr. Koussa.
“He was the one deputized by Qaddafi,” Mr. Joseph said. “It was always ‘Let me check with Brother Moussa.’ ”