Despite Its Peace Overtures, Libya Still Tied to Terrorists

Despite its recent overtures toward reconciliation with the West, there is evidence that Libya is producing significant quantities of chemical weapons at its controversial Rabta pharmaceutical facility and may also be near production at a second plant in the southern desert outside Sabha, according to diplomats and Western experts.

Libya also maintains a nuclear research facility near Tripoli that formerly received Soviet financing but is not believed to be close to gaining the ability to produce nuclear weapons, the diplomats said.

The oil-rich desert nation has closed many of its terrorist training camps and expelled Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal, the sources said. But Libya maintains financial and logistic support to a variety of terrorist groups and national liberation movements throughout the world, they said, and is also believed to be leaving the door open to discreet relations with Abu Nidal at his new headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq.

“Libya is still quite heavily involved, but in a very quiet way,” said one analyst familiar with recent undertakings. “They’re not trying to find high-profile activity which would bring them in bad odor with the Western states directly confronting them. But on the other hand, they’re still helping their own clients in quite distant places, as well as close to home, in states where they think they can influence events and change the regime in a way that is helpful to them.”

Libya in recent months has been involved in aiding rebels and terrorist groups in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Liberia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, and Chad, in addition to various Palestinian groups, Islamic fundamentalists in neighboring Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt and perhaps even the Irish Republican Army, which Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi declared had been cut off in his effort to restore normal relations with Britain, diplomatic sources said.

Western diplomats with access to intelligence reports say there is evidence that Libya is producing significant quantities of chemical weapons at its pharmaceutical plant at Rabta, about 60 miles southwest of Tripoli, despite a fire there last year that officials believe the government set.

“It is the world’s most heavily defended aspirin plant. Much of it is legitimate. There is a section which isn’t,” one envoy said.

Efforts to halt production by blocking the supply of chemical ingredients to Libya have been hampered by the fact that much of the needed ingredients can be obtained through ordinary fertilizer and pharmaceutical supplies, he said.

Diplomats in the Libyan capital say they believe the March, 1990, fire, which Libya blamed on Germany, was deliberately set by the Libyans themselves, probably to make it appear that the plant was no longer operating and to ward off a possible military strike. All foreigners working in the plant were prevented from entering the facility on the morning before the fire, “which means there was goodly time to prepare whatever you wanted to prepare,” one diplomat said.

Kadafi has invited European diplomats to tour the Rabta facility, but they have declined because he refused to allow them to be accompanied by technical experts. “We wouldn’t know what we were seeing, and we didn’t want to be used like that,” one envoy said.

Several sources said there are indications that a second plant is under construction in Sabha, in the desert about 400 miles south of Tripoli. Some diplomats said Kadafi may intend to use it as an alternative to Rabta. However, Western officials in the Libyan capital had no precise information about how advanced the facility is or whether it has started production.

U.S. officials estimated that Libya might have produced as much as 30 tons of deadly mustard gas, enough for 150 bombs, at the Rabta facility in 1989.

There are also reports that Libya seeks to acquire surface-to-surface missiles that might be capable of delivering chemical or conventional warheads as far away as Tel Aviv, Cairo or southern Italy.

According to recent press reports, Libya is believed to be negotiating with North Korea for purchase of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile system, still under development, with a range of 620 miles. Investigators in Germany earlier this month seized a shipment of Libya-bound machinery and launched an investigation to determine whether a German firm was trying to help Libya build rockets.

Kadafi, with his oil fields rapidly deteriorating and little access to U.S. technology, has been seeking to repair relations with the United States by demonstrating that Libya is no longer supporting terrorism.

Egypt, and to a lesser extent Algeria and Morocco, have sought to mediate with the United States on Libya’s behalf, and Kadafi has sent his cousin, Kadaf Dam, to open a Cairo office for direct, high-level negotiations with the Egyptians and, through them, the Americans, diplomats in Tripoli said.

“His contacts with the Americans go through Cairo, as far as we know,” one European envoy said.

However, there reportedly have been no direct meetings between the Libyans and the Americans in Cairo, and diplomats in the Egyptian capital said the United States has made it clear to the Egyptians that it is not prepared to consider resuming relations with Libya.

The United States “has made it very plain at this point (that they) don’t believe the leopard has changed his spots,” one Western envoy said.

Several officials referred to the abortive raid on a beach near Tel Aviv last year by suspected members of guerrilla chieftain Abul Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front; the raiders are believed to have used a boat that sailed toward Israel from Libya.

Also troubling to U.S. officials is evidence that Libya had a direct role in the 1989 bombing of a U.S. airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, providing electronic detonators and the services of at least two Libyan agents for the fatal attack.

However, Western officials are not prepared to absolve the Palestinian group originally suspected of masterminding the attack, Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which is still believed to have undertaken the early phases of the operation with the support of the Iranian government, according to several terrorism experts.

“The Libyans’ role was an essential one at the end of the day, because they provided some important components for the device used and they provided agents who were vital to the final stage of the operation,” said Paul Wilkinson, a terrorism expert at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland.

“But the general view is that they were not by any means in control of, or in sole charge of, the planning and carrying out of the entire operation,” he said. “They took over a stage of something that had already been largely set up in an earlier phase by people who could not finish the job for various reasons, or were unwilling to finish the job because it was too high a risk.”

Many authorities believe that Jibril “got cold feet” and sent his emissaries to a meeting with the Libyans in Tripoli, possibly in September, 1988, Wilkinson said.

Intelligence authorities believe that Kadafi’s second-in-command, Maj. Abdel-Salam Jalloud, was either at the meeting or was consulted by those who were, he said.

Jalloud boasted last year that 22% of Libya’s income, or more than $1 billion a year, finances national “liberation movements.”

But a Libyan official and confidant of Kadafi said in an interview last month that Libya draws a distinction between such liberation movements and terrorism, such as the bombing of airliners and the taking of hostages.

“We support the Palestinians, but we are not responsible for the means they use. We are against hijacking and taking hostages, but we don’t have any control over the Palestinians,” he said.

At the same time, he said, the Libyans understand the frustration of the Palestinians after years of failing to achieve a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“I am not with Abul Abbas and Abu Nidal, but what about the Palestinians who were thrown out of their farms, their houses, and have no future? We would have all stood by the U.S. if they would have stood by the Palestinians when it came time to enforce U.N. resolutions.”