Here's some Breaking news on the reason why Libya just joined our side, and capitulated to be nice Subjects. Oh me Oh my Conspiracy research has all the good stuff and never bores.
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U.S. News & World Report, Dec 20, 1993 v115 n24 p36(4)
Qadhafi's big adventure.
(lobbying in the U.S. by Libya; Muammar Qadhafi) (includes related article on witness to 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103)
Edward T. Pound, Brian Duffy
Abstract: Dept of Justice officials are investigating reports that prominent US citizens met with Libyan officials who desire to improve relations with US officials. Libya hopes to lessen economic sanctions and resolve the legal questions that surround the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 U.S. News and World Report, Inc.
On a September afternoon in 1992, Bobby Burchfield, the top lawyer for the Bush-Quayle campaign, ushered two men into his office. The first he knew slightly. Gordon Wade was a former chairman of the Republican Party in Kentucky and a respected businessman. The second man was a Libyan. Wade introduced Mohammed Bukhari as Muammar Qadhafi's minister of finance. Bukhari had a story to tell. The Libyan government had been approached by representatives of the Bush-Quayle campaign, Bukhari said; the emissaries had asked for a campaign contribution. The Libyans, Bukhari said, had paid. That was impossible, Burchfield replied. But if Bukhari would give him the name of the Bush-Quayle "representatives," he would look into the matter. Bukhari thanked Burchfield and continued. "Mr. Bukhari then conveyed to Mr. Burchfield Libya's desire to have improved relations with the United States," Wade wrote in a memorandum about the meeting. The memo was obtained by U.S. News. Despite his polite questioning of Bukhari, Burchfield was aghast. Accepting campaign contributions from Libya was simply illegal. Bukhari had provided no evidence it had happened. "There was never any money given by the Libyan government to the Bush campaign," Burchfield says. "Period."
Today, Mohammed Bukhari's unusual visit to Washington is a principal focus of a criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney in Washington, Eric Holder. According to law enforcement officials and people interviewed by Justice Department lawyers in connection with the inquiry, the investigation centers on substantial illegal payments allegedly made by the Libyan government to American citizens to lobby government officials in Washington. Some lobbying was directed at the highest levels of the White House. The objective: to ease international sanctions imposed on Tripoli and help resolve a legal impasse over the fate of two Libyan men indicted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The bomb exploded five years ago this month, destroying the Pan Am jet and killing 270 people.
Records seized. Bukhari's travels in the United States are now under scrutiny by the Justice Department. Although he was issued a visa for the purposes of attending the annual Washington meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, U.S. News confirmed that Bukhari traveled to Dallas. One possible reason: to discuss a $200 million purchase of U.S. real estate by Libya. Investigators want to know whether the discussions involved a man named Henry Billingsley, a son-in-law of Texas real-estate developer Trammell Crow, a big contributor to Republican candidates. The investigators believe that the proposed transaction, which involved commercial property in Texas and Illinois, grew out of Libyan efforts to secretly invest government funds abroad in order to avoid the sanctions imposed by the United Nations and Washington. The Libyan effort apparently fell through after U.S. investigators began inquiring about it. Francis Hubach, an attorney for Crow, says that "neither Trammell Crow Co. nor Trammell Crow have conducted business with Libyan nationals now or in the past." Billingsley, whose business records have been seized by the Justice Department, says he was questioned by U.S. investigators, but only "in reference to someone else." He says he has no financial relationship with Libya: "I have not done any business with that country."
The real-estate talks appear to be the most ambitious of many Libyan efforts to win influence and friends in the United States. They also may have grown out of a relationship between Mohammed Bukhari and a man named A. William Bodine, a prominent New York financial adviser who manages investments for Saudi Arabian businessmen and others in the Middle East. Bodine and Billingsley were college roommates at the University of California at Los Angeles. In the spring of 1992, Bodine and Gordon Wade met in Geneva with Bukhari to discuss the impact the international sanctions were having on the Libyan people. Wade recalls the meeting: The Libyans had run out of several important medicines, Bukhari complained, and children were suffering. Through a GOP contact, Wade says, he arranged for the news to be carried to the Bush administration. "Bodine took a list of medicines to the White House that the Libyans had run out of," Wade says. Richard Haass, the National Security Council aide for Middle East affairs, met with Bodine but says he barely recalls what was discussed. Wade believes the meeting was a success: The Libyans were told they would get the needed medicines.
Making friends. That led to future contacts between Bodine, Wade and Bukhari. It "proved to the Libyans that we knew somebody," Wade says. "Then the next thing that occurred, they wanted to contribute money [to the Bush campaign]." Though Burchfield insists that no such contributions were made, people acting on behalf of the Libyans managed to gain access to top presidential aides. "There may have been one or more calls made to the president that he referred to me," says Brent Scowcroft, George Bush's national-security adviser. "The people who came to me were well-known businessmen whose calls I would return." Scowcroft would not name those who spoke with him about Libya. He has been questioned about the matter by federal investigators.
Justice Department lawyers are trying to determine whether the Libyans made payments to anyone to gain influence in Washington. A grand jury has subpoenaed the financial records of Bodine and Wade. Bodine declines to comment on the matter. Wade, an international financial consultant based in Miami, says he received no money from Libya. He recalls meeting with Bukhari and Bodine in Washington, D.C., in September 1992. Wade was in Washington representing another client, he says, and was asked by Bodine to meet with Bukhari. "The Libyans wanted to contribute money to the political candidates. Because I knew about political contributions ... I was brought in. I said, `No, you can't do this.' " Bodine sought to arrange other contacts for Bukhari in Washington, but it is unclear whether he was successful. "He called me," says G. Henry Schuler, a Libya specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "He asked who he could take Bukhari to see. He really had no idea."
Fruitful or not, Mohammed Bukhari's efforts to cultivate friends in Washington represent just the tip of a vast iceberg. The Libyans are offering big money: The well-connected Washington firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld was offered $5 million--both before and after the 1992 presidential election--to represent the accused Libyan bombers; the firm declined the offers. State Department records show that more than 80 people, Americans and non-Americans, have approached U.S. officials with offers from the Libyan government. Some of the proposals involve trying the two defendants in the Pan Am 103 case in a third country; others have involved offers to pay families of those who died on Pan Am 103. The intermediaries range from small-town businessmen to former congressmen to international financiers like Adnan Khashoggi and Tiny Rowland, the head of the London-based Lonrho investment company. Lonrho formed a Caribbean shell company with Libya and invested more than $1 million to bankroll a film on the bombing of the Pam Am jet over Lockerbie; the film would have shown the Libyans were blameless. (Lonrho backed out of the film venture last week.) Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian, and Yaacov Nimrodi, an Israeli businessman involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, have received a multimillion-dollar fee from the Libyans, U.S. government officials say. Because they are not American citizens, the fee is not improper. It is unclear what the payment was for. Khashoggi and Nimrodi did not return phone calls seeking comment.
The list goes on. F. Lee Bailey, the well-known criminal defense lawyer, has traveled to Libya at that government's expense to discuss the Pan Am 103 case. In Washington, former congressmen David Bowen and John Murphy were fined by the U.S. Treasury Department for illegal lobbying on behalf of Libya. Murphy traveled to Libya with consultant Albert Grasselli, who was also fined. "It seems everybody on the streets of Washington has met with Libya now," says Michael Ledeen, a foreign-policy consultant to the Reagan administration who was approached in early 1993 by a top Libyan official to discuss the Pan Am 103 case. Says R. Richard Newcomb, director of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control: "They are using every available means to do what they have to do not to comply with the U.N. sanctions and try to find people who are well connected, [even] sitting leaders."
Making money. U.S. News sent a detailed list of questions about the Libyan lobbying activities in Washington to Col. Youssef El Debri, Libya's director of national security. Debri failed to reply to the magazine's inquiries.
Clearly, Libya has much to be concerned about. Citing Qadhafi's refusal to turn over the two indicted men, the United Nations Security Council last month voted to impose tougher sanctions on Tripoli. The sanctions could cripple Libya financially. A chart prepared by the U.S. Treasury Department shows a welter of interlocking investment companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Some have been easy to track. In the United States and overseas today, as a result of the international sanctions, $958.1 million in Libyan assets remains frozen and unavailable for Qadhafi's use.
RELATED ARTICLE: The prosecution's prize witness
If Muammar Qadhafi ever does allow the two men charged with blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 to stand trial, American prosecutors will have an ace up their sleeves: a high-ranking Libyan intelligence officer who has defected to the United States. According to knowledgeable U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials, the man, Abd Al-Majid Jaaka, is currently enrolled in the Federal Witness Protection Program under an alias. The officials say Jaaka walked into the U.S. Embassy on Rome's Via Veneto and asked to talk to police. The FBI's legal attache interviewed the man, and he was flown to the United States.
Law enforcement officials say Jaaka has promised to testify in detail about how the two indicted men, Abdel Basset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah, prepared the explosives used to blow up the Pan Am jet, then smuggled them aboard a connecting flight. Not only would Jaaka testify in court, U.S. officials say, he has also provided other valuable evidence against the two Libyans, including a diary that belonged to Fhimah.
A brown suitcase. Jaaka was in a position to know a lot. A ranking officer in the Libyan intelligence service, Jaaka was working in December 1988 as an employee of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta. CIA officials say Libyan operatives often work abroad posing as employees of the state-run airline. On December 20, according to Jaaka, Megrahi and Fhimah arrived in Malta on an LAA flight from Tripoli. Megrahi, a senior Libyan intelligence officer, was traveling under an alias. Fhimah, who had once run the LAA office in Malta, was not. According to Jaaka's testimony and other evidence, the two men had with them a brown, hard-sided Samsonite suitcase. That was the suitcase that carried the bomb aboard Flight 103, forensic evidence shows. Fhimah's diary entry for December 15 shows that he obtained Air Malta baggage tags that allowed the suitcase to be loaded aboard an Air Malta flight on December 21, transferred to a Pan Am feeder flight in Frankfurt, Germany, then loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 at London's Heathrow Airport early that evening. The plane blew up just before 7 p.m.; 270 people died.
Jaaka's testimony would bolster a highly technical case. Forensics specialists have traced a microchip recovered from the wreckage of the Pan Am jet to a consignment of timers produced by a Swiss firm for the Libyan government. Several of the timers were taken from a Libyan intelligence officer named Nayli Ibrahim after his arrest in Dakar, Senegal, on Feb. 20, 1988. Forensics tests linked the microchip recovered from the jet's wreckage in Scotland to the timers taken from Ibrahim. Jaaka's testimony would link the timer and explosives to the Libyans now wanted for trial in the United States.
Bus. Coll.: 74Z2287
Mag. Coll.: 71L1233
Article A14631562
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