Former Libyan minister discusses disclosure of Qaddafi intelligence files

Libyan revolutionaries have laid their hands on classified intelligence documents that reveal numerous secrets about Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, said Dr. Ibrahim Qwaider, a former Libyan minister of manpower, youth, and sport and a prominent opposition figure.

“A committee was formed to study those documents and whatever was leaked from them was intentional and pre-planned,” he said Saturday in an interview on Al Arabiya News Channel’s Panorama program.

Qwaider explained that all Libyan intelligence documents were filed at the Bureau of External Security in Tripoli and copies of them were kept at Gaddafi’s main base of Bab al-Azizia.

Among the documents uncovered is a file on Imam Moussa al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric who disappeared in Libya in 1978 and is said to have been murdered by Qaddafi.

“The National Transitional Council will hand the entire file to Lebanon very soon,” Qwaider said.

According to Qwaider, Qaddafi assisted Iran in the Iran-Iraq war through providing weapons and sending forces from his brigades to fight against Iraq.

“In the meantime, he pretended that he supported the regime of Saddam Hussein under the banner of Arab nationalism,” said Qwaider.

He did the same with Africa, Qwaider added, for while he was supporting the regimes of several African countries he also helped arm rebels in the same countries in order to destabilize those regimes.

Dr. Mohamed Fayez Farahat, an expert at the Cairo-based al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, believes the National Transitional Council (NTC) will deal with the documents with extreme caution and will reveal their content in the way that serves the council’s interests.

“For example, leaking some documents which reveal that the CIA supported Qaddafi against dissidents was most likely meant to determine future relations between the US and the NTC,” he said.

The leaked documents revealed that the relationship between the U.S. and the Libyan regime was deeper than expected. According to those documents, meetings were held between Libyan and American officials weeks before his fall in order to offer Qaddafi advice on ways to stay in power and deal with the international isolation and the NATO strikes.

One of those American officials, the documents state, was an ambassador and former assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, David Welch, who provided Qaddafi with several suggestions on weakening the revolutionaries through seeking the help of foreign intelligence agencies.

Based on the information in the documents, Libyan-American ties go way back, even before Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program, and were remarkably strengthened during the adminstration of George W. Bush. The US even sent terror suspects to Libya for interrogation.

Correspondence between the CIA and Libyan intelligence chief Moussa Kousa also revealed that there were negotiations for establishing a permanent headquarters for the American agency on Libyan soil.

The documents also indicated that Britain’s
MI-6 provided Qaddafi with information and intelligence on his opponents abroad.

Other disclosures include that the Libyan regime cooperated with Yemeni rebels to destabilize the security of Saudi Arabia and supported armed groups in Darfur and the Abu Sayyaf Islamist militia in the Philippines.

(Translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid)