Exit the Colonel (21 page)

The rise of the reformists was not wholly a gesture to outsiders; appointing these individuals helped to appease internal constituencies as well. Not just foreigners but also Libyans had to be convinced that something better was coming. As noted, only external and internal pressure on Gaddafi could be eased long enough for him to regroup, he might be able to refashion the Libyan polity into something more modern, though equally totalitarian: a new Tunisia, for example.

The creation of such a reformist-reactionary dichotomy was really a variation on an old standard, an economic
infitah
, or opening, without addressing any of the fundamental political and institutional issues. Yusuf Sawani, recruited to help revamp the relevance of Gaddafi's
The Green Book
in the age of globalization, thus proclaimed the reformist-reactionary distinction
wahmy
, or imaginary, in his postrevolution interview with pan Arab
Asharq Al Awsat
.
⁶

Many outside Libya took the fact that Gaddafi's son Saif played a front-man role in the Lockerbie negotiations as an incremental step toward naming a successor, in the same way that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had begun to push his son Gamal onto the public stage.

Saif's transformation into a serious political actor was not instantaneous. His first interviews with foreign media were not an unmitigated success. Saif tried painfully hard to appear affable and in control, despite
what was then a very poor command of English. Interviewers were also put somewhat on edge by the jarring proximity of two white Bengal tigers, which he kept as pets.
⁷

Saif's higher education was, at least in part, a calculated attempt by Gaddafi to smooth these rough edges. After receiving undergraduate degrees in architecture and engineering at Al Fateh University in Tripoli, Saif completed his first master's thesis, republished by his own publishing house in 2002, under the title
Libya and the XXI Century
.
⁸
The text is a mixture of Libyan-accented English with denser, more academic prose. Its analysis seemed to have outpaced his academic exposure to date. Saif's thesis explicitly references the theory of competitiveness concepts articulated by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter.
⁹
Budding reformist as he may have been, Saif champions an independent judiciary, necessary to “create trust and credibility in the country's laws and regulations,” and more investment in education. He concludes, reasonably, “If you want to apply some formal rules, which don't go with informal rules, you get a mess”—which the Libyan state certainly was.
¹⁰
There is, tellingly, no explanation of how the mechanisms he proposed might be reconciled with the nonstate state his father had fashioned over the decades. One has to wonder if Saif intended any irony with the placement of a citation from
The Green Book
inserted into the dedication: “Ignorance will come to an end when everything is presented as it really is.”
¹¹

Saif's master's thesis proved very consistent with Gaddafi's
infitah
themes. It used language that was strong but unobjectionable, accompanied by no real analysis as to how to get from A to B. The text also paid careful deference to the notion that whatever happened in Libya, it would be underpinned by fundamental adherence to hidden principles contained within his father's
Green Book
. Thus, he concludes:

The essay catalogues a series of Libya's economic ills, concludes with a list of standard neoliberal reform prescriptions—for reducing barriers to trade, privatizing state-run industry, and fostering a climate of innovation.

It was a valiant first effort, but a dissertation wasn't enough to complete Saif's Western, reformist realignment. He needed to be branded and packaged.

In the years that followed, Saif appeared to have an active role in his own repositioning. Associates described how he pursued Michael Porter, going so far as placing one of his aides in a seat next to him on a flight from the US to London in 2003, with the express purpose of inviting Porter to dinner. Saif was waiting to greet Porter at Heathrow when the plane landed.
¹²
The subsequent conversations with Porter led to the involvement of the Monitor Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based strategy consultancy run by Harvard Business School professor Mark Fuller, under Porter's oversight.

Saif approached Monitor in early 2004 with a proposal that it assist him and a small group of well-educated Libyan-American academics and businessmen to implement an economic reform and commercial competitiveness strategy for Libya. Accordingly, Monitor executives traveled to Libya in mid-2004, where they met with Saif and various government officials (though not Gaddafi himself), and hashed out the framework for a three-year effort that would be known as the National Economic Strategy (NES), one of the outputs of which was to identify five industry clusters outside oil where Libya might seek to develop a comparative economic advantage.
¹³
Libya-focused academics, policy analysts, diplomats, and others subsequently heaped criticism on the NES for being light and jargon-filled (a prominent US expert on Libya quipped that one of his graduate students could have written the plan in a few weeks).

In a further attempt to cast himself as an earnest, West-leaning reformist, Saif drew upon the imprimatur of the London School of Economics (LSE). In the months after the beginning of Libya's 2011 revolution, Saif's controversial relationship with LSE was the subject of the “Woolf Inquiry,” a 186-page report published by the school in October 2011.
¹⁴
The document describes in great detail how Saif, through various intermediaries, attempted to gain admission to various departments for a PhD in the management or government programs, which had rejected him initially in 2001. LSE admitted him to the master's program in philosophy in 2002.

In the following years, various LSE faculty and administration championed Saif's bid for a PhD. Some were sympathetic to Saif or his supporters; some saw potential social value in helping educate and build up the perspective of a potential reformer. Others apparently recognized an opportunity for personal enrichment if they were to advance Saif's interests. Saif,
although admitted to the PhD program in philosophy, chose to follow the advice of a senior LSE administrator to pursue a master's. Other sympathetic faculty suggested that Saif pursue a master's in philosophy, policy, and social value (PPSV) to prepare him for subsequent admission to the PhD program. Saif began the program in August 2002 and was finally admitted to the PhD program in the same subject the following year.

LSE's Woolf Inquiry (named for its chairman, former Chief Justice Lord Woolf) documents a range of faculty opinions expressed during Saif's admission and matriculation—that he was getting “undue” outside assistance or possibly not taking his own exams, among other concerns. The report hints at, but does not flag (for obvious reasons), persistent nudging by senior UK government on Saif's behalf. In December 2011, reports in the British press alleged that the Foreign Office had tried to pressure Oxford University to accept Saif into an master's program in development economics in 2002: the head of the department of international development at Oxford told LSE administrators that “the Foreign Commercial Office [FCO] would appreciate help in this case since Libya was opening up to the West again.”
¹⁵

The overall picture is of piecemeal and uncoordinated decision making. Individual influence created situations from which retreat was difficult, by either the school or the candidate. The report examines justifications for making an exception for Saif in the admissions process, continuing to support Saif's course of study, and ultimately accepting a large amount of money to support a Center for North African Studies. The authors obliquely blame budgetary pressures for private universities being tempted to accept grants from possibly questionable sources.

Several points stand out regarding the LSE episode and the university's public soul searching after the revolution. First is that the university administration was clearly very happy for the attention and, in particular, the funds Saif brought with him, as evidenced by the ease with which the views of LSE's most distinguished Middle East academic, Fred Halliday (allegedly on good personal terms with Saif), were “rubbished” (dismissed) by senior members of the LSE faculty.”
¹⁶
In his last formal publication, a collection of essays on various Middle Eastern states, Halliday minces no words about the nature of the Libyan state:

Second is the fact that practically everyone who touched Saif's file—however inclined they were to support his candidacy—was aware that he would need extra help with his studies, not only because of his relatively weak university-level preparation, but also because he was “far from an ordinary student. He embarked on a challenging academic venture at the same time as he was playing a central role in Libyan, and indeed world, politics.”
¹⁸

Third is the obvious involvement of the UK government and Saif's coterie of US-government-endorsed advisers. As with everything else connected with Libya, it was not just LSE and Saif that were benefiting, but a range of other actors, including Saif's advisers (the Monitor Group, among them) and the UK government. Sir Mark Allen, the former MI6 head who is most often credited with leading the earliest negotiations with Libya, maintained a relationship with LSE through LSE IDEAS, a research center, and served as an adviser to British Petroleum.
¹⁹
Cherie Blair, the prime minister's wife, was at the time an LSE governor and honorary fellow.
²⁰
LSE's director, Sir Howard Davies, served as the prime minister's economic envoy to Libya while Saif was a student at LSE.
²¹
Baroness Elizabeth Symons, a close ally of Blair, was appointed to various senior posts within LSE, the UK Trade Office, and the Libyan National Economic Development Board.
²²
Thus, LSE was linked through Saif to the highest levels of the UK government and was the principal beneficiary of the prime minister's own lobbying efforts on Libya's behalf.

The worst of LSE's infractions appear to be unconnected with Saif's admission or monitoring of his work (these might be considered customary in private institutions), but linked to the active solicitation by faculty members, including Saif's part-time adviser David Held, while Saif was still a student. In return, the school received £1.5 million to support training programs and to endow the new Center for North African Studies. In this case, at least, one has to somewhat admire Saif's apparent legerdemain in matching the school's request with bribes paid by Turkish, Scottish, and Italian companies to gain access to the Libyan market.
²³
According to the Woolf Inquiry, LSE was aware of the likely provenance of these funds, but felt that the process had gone too far for the school to withdraw without considerable embarrassment to all sides.
²⁴

Ironically, the brouhaha over his admission notwithstanding, Saif's tenure at the LSE appeared to have been a critical point in his political and intellectual development, whatever his subsequent role in attempting to tamp down the 2011 revolution.

Many who met Saif in the early 2000s and before reported that he lacked gravitas or was not particularly smart. Several of his erstwhile professors, classmates, and advisers have staunchly refuted or revised these characterizations. “Saif . . . was reserved and thoughtful,” said one former LSE classmate. “When I first met him I thought he might not be all that smart. His deliberate, measured speech combined with his obstinately practical interests struck me as pedestrian. Looking back, however, I see Saif differently. He spoke slowly because he wasn't confident in English, and he was practical because he was next in line to rule a country of six million people. You could say we had different interests.”
²⁵
Another of his classmates recalled Saif to be “chivalrous and thoughtful; someone who did not like flattery, hated personal questions, and was on occasion, fearful of London traffic.”
²⁶

Yehudit Ronen, a researcher at Tel Aviv University and author of a book on Libya, said, “[P]ortraying Saif Al Islam as simply a man of the good life, rushing from one glamorous event to the next, is not accurate. He is busy carrying out missions in the service of the Libyan state, and his influence is prominent in much of its enterprise.”
²⁷

Ronen also referred to Saif as a “Shenkinite,” after a street in Tel Aviv known for its Bohemian atmosphere. (Though the term has a meaning Ronen may not have intended. It suggests “intellectual poser” more than “intellectual.”
²⁸
) Assistant Secretary David Welch described Saif as “pleasant in person, someone who enjoyed his life, but was rather ‘soft' (at least, compared to many of his brothers).”
²⁹
According to some who knew him outside Libya, Saif was painfully aware of the mixed impressions he made on people, both good and bad, as well as the assumptions they made about his motives and intellect. During his time at LSE, Saif confided to a classmate that he was aware that some thought he was “not particularly smart,” but that, if he “worried about what people said about him in the shadows, he would drive himself mad.”
³⁰
Perhaps tellingly, Saif allegedly added that he thought the perception could be strategically useful, as people underestimated him. Another non-Libyan associate said Saif confessed to feeling as though the Gaddafi name had been a kind of curse, the implication being that he
perhaps would have preferred to give up the limelight for a normal life—however he might have imagined this (Saif had never lived a normal life).