By JOHN WALCOTT
Knight Ridder News Service
October 21, 2001
taken from Fort Worth Star Telegram
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, and the Libyan identified members of
Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, U.S. officials said.
William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near East
affairs, and a debriefing team from the CIA Counterterrorism
Center met in London with Musa Kusa, the head of Libyan
leader Moammar Gadhafi's External Security Organization,
two senior U.S. officials said. Both asked not to be identified.
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 will seek help
from every possible source, including people who have been
involved in terrorism.
"If you want to join the coalition against terror, we'll welcome
you in," President Bush said during a White House news
conference.
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, Britain or France and adding
that they welcome any information on bin Laden and his
terrorist 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 that 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 U.S.
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 government, 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 government similar to the Taliban's in Afghanistan, but
U.S. officials said the IFG poses no 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. Jean-Louis
Bruguiere, the French magistrate who is investigating the UTA
case, said Kusa is among those wanted for questioning in the
case.
The Libyan government, U.S. officials said, is expected to
propose a financial settlement and may offer to accept
responsibility for the Pan Am bombing while denying any prior
knowledge of the attack. A special tribunal in The Hague,
Netherlands, convicted a low-level Libyan intelligence officer
of helping to carry out the bombing. Administration officials
declined to comment on any possible Libyan settlement offer.
Kusa is also believed to have been Libya's principal contact
with the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization when it was
based in Libya in the late 1980s, and to have planned the
killings of a number of Libyan dissidents around the world,
including one in Colorado in 1980. Kusa was expelled from
Great Britain in 1980. He took over as head of the Libyan
intelligence service in 1994.