A dapper man, with thick grey hair, an icy manner and a fondness for Italian handmade suits, he has been dubbed the Envoy of Death and the Fingernail-Puller-in-Chief. Whatever his moniker, the truth is that, as the main apologist for the Gaddafi regime, he has been up to his eyeballs in murder and torture for years.
Musa Kusa has a sociology degree from Michigan State University where – surprise, surprise – his thesis was a potted biography of Gaddafi. Being well-born to a prominent Tripoli family, he managed to secure an interview with Gaddafi himself for the thesis and before long he was invited to join the dictator’s ruling clique.
Ever since, he has enjoyed the closest relationship with the dictator.
Right-hand man: Musa Kusa listens as Colonel Gaddafi speaks in 2009
From 1979-80 he was in charge of security at all Libyan embassies in northern Europe, during which time half a dozen exiled Libyan dissidents were cold-bloodedly assassinated in Europe by agents acting on his orders.
Libya had a systematic policy of assassination of enemies of the state. In 1980 Gaddafi himself brazenly wrote a letter to the then German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, demanding permission to kill a couple of Libyan dissidents in West Germany. Schmidt gave the letter short shrift.
In 1980, Musa Kusa became Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain. Within months, though, he was expelled after telling journalists outside his embassy: ‘The revolutionary committees have decided last night to kill two more people (Libyan dissidents) in the United Kingdom. I approve of this’.
Unless the British authorities co-operated, he warned that Libya would encourage terrorism throughout the British mainland by funding the IRA and providing them with weapons. It was a cynical form of blackmail of the type that Gaddafi tried on the German government by threatening to support Leftist terrorists.
In truth, the IRA already had links with Libya going back to the early 1970s. These were fuelled by a mutual loathing of ‘colonial’ Britain. Even the Provos’ Green Book – a training manual and statement of creed – was copied from Gaddafi’s own Green Book, which sets out his philosophy and is widely distributed throughout his country.
Arms shipments from Libya to the IRA godfathers included small arms, rifles, anti-tank mines and Semtex explosives. Libya also gave the IRA millions of pounds. And Musa Kusa was heavily involved throughout these dealings.
Following his brief spell in London, he became the Tripoli-based head of the Mathaba, the fearsome Libyan Bureau for External Security. This role helped him increase his covert support for the IRA.
After the infamous campaign of hunger strikes by Provisionals in the Maze prison south of Belfast in 1981 – which impressed Gaddafi as well Musa Kusa – the IRA secured even larger quantities of explosives and ammunition.
Libya's former Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, left, addressing the media just a fortnight ago
In 1984, Musa Kusa’s number three in Libyan Intelligence, Nasser Ashour, secretly visited Ireland. He offered the IRA US$10million and 300 tons of weapons.
From then onwards Gaddafi’s regime supplied the IRA with five shipments of weapons. As well as one million rounds of ammunition, they included sophisticated items like rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 12 Russian machine guns, 50 SAM ground to air missiles, flame throwers and two tons of Czech-manufactured Semtex.
With Musa Kusa’s encouragement, 30 IRA terrorists went to Libya to learn how to use the anti-aircraft missiles to down Army helicopters. Such weapons and the Libyan money enabled the Provos to press on with their ‘Long War’ against the British with renewed vigour.
But it wasn’t just through the IRA that Musa Kusa perpetrated his murderous acts. He was involved in the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was shot from an embassy window while policing a protest outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984. Her killer has never been brought to justice and while some have pointed the finger at Musa Kusa himself, intelligence agents believe it was not actually he who pulled the trigger.
He would have had a very personal interest in securing the man’s
release, as part of an agreement that in return for his freedom Megrahi
would never reveal who had ordered and organised the bombing. It was, of
course, Musa Kusa.
What is certain is that he knows who did, and was involved in covering up for them, perhaps even spiriting them out of the country.
Intelligence agencies are also convinced he was the man who co-ordinated all operational aspects of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing which blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the air, killing 270 passengers.
In that capacity he would have been the vital link between Gaddafi and the Lockerbie bomber Abdulbaset Al Megrahi.
This may explain why in October last year, it was Musa Kusa who travelled from Libya to see British and Scottish officials dealing with Megrahi’s application for compassionate release.
On the first occasion Musa Kusa was listed as ‘an interpreter’ rather than Minister of Security.
He would have had a very personal interest in securing the man’s release, as part of an agreement that in return for his freedom Megrahi would never reveal who had ordered and organised the bombing. It was, of course, Musa Kusa.
Flight 103 was not the only aircraft he tore from the skies. Western intelligence agents are convinced he systematically planned the deaths of 170 passengers blown up over Niger after Libyan agents planted a bomb on a flight from Chad to Paris.
A memorial stone in memory of victims of Pan-Am flight 103 is pictured in a garden of remembrance near the village of Lockerbie
In the 1990s, Musa Kusa is widely thought to have organised the permanent disappearance of Libya’s former UN ambassador, Mansur Kikhia, who vanished from his exile in Cairo, never to be seen or heard of again.
By 2003, he was at the heart of the MI6-led negotiations which brought the Mad Dog Gaddafi back into the civilised world, after Gaddafi offered to give up Weapons of Mass Destruction and renounce support for terrorism.
This late-life conversion was made easier by the fact that, in 1998, Libya was the first state to seek an arrest warrant for Osama Bin Laden, and one of the first countries to condemn the attacks on 9/11. After the 2003 deal President George W Bush trumpeted the fact that ‘Libya has turned its back on terror’.
Not, however, on assassination. Shortly before the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, Gaddafi and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia clashed at an Arab summit over the legitimacy of the Iraq War launched by the coalition. The Saudi prince supported the invasion while Gaddafi vigorously opposed it. Things turned nasty when Abdullah said: ‘Your lies precede you and your grave is in front of you’.
The crimes I have described are probably only a handful of those for
which Musa Kusa has been directly or indirectly responsible. He will
have information on all manner of atrocities as well as on the Libyan
arming of several terrorist organisations in Britain, Germany, Japan and
the Middle East.
In 2004 the Saudi authorities detained four Al Qaeda recruits in the Hilton Hotel in Mecca who planned to fire rocket-launched grenades at Crown Prince Abdullah’s motorcade.
This followed the arrest and interrogation of a Libyan intelligence officer in Saudi, and an American Muslim with links to Libya in Washington.
They both named Musa Kusa as the key figure in organising this attempt to kill Abdullah, who today is the King of Saudi Arabia.
The American Muslim confessed that he had gone to London – naturally, where else? – to establish contacts with Islamist terrorist organisations which had fixed him up with the Al Qaeda connections in Saudi.
The crimes I have described are probably only a handful of those for which Musa Kusa has been directly or indirectly responsible. He will have information on all manner of atrocities as well as on the Libyan arming of several terrorist organisations in Britain, Germany, Japan and the Middle East.
This is the man that Britain is now harbouring.
The Blair New Labour government, and elements in MI6, big business and academia, indulged in sordid dealings with the Gaddafi regime, which shamed this country.
Musa Kusa must be tried in a court of law and be held accountable for his countless crimes. Anything less will be greeted with outrage by the British and America public.
Michael Burleigh is author of Blood And Rage, A Cultural History Of Terrorism
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