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Per the FBI website: Good afternoon Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the current threats to the homeland and our efforts to address new challenges, including terrorists’ use of technology to communicate—both to inspire and recruit. The widespread use of technology propagates the persistent terrorist message to attack U.S. interests whether in the homeland or abroad. As the threat to harm Western interests evolves, we must adapt and confront the challenges, relying heavily on the strength of our federal, state, local, and international partnerships. Our successes depend on interagency cooperation. We work closely with our partners within the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center to address current and emerging threats. Counterterrorism Counterterrorism remains the FBI’s top priority, however, the threat has changed in two significant ways. First, the core al Qaeda tumor has been reduced, but the cancer has metastasized. The progeny of al Qaeda—including AQAP, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—have become our focus. Secondly, we are confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet. It is no longer necessary to get a terrorist operative into the United States to recruit. Terrorists, in ungoverned spaces, disseminate poisonous propaganda and training materials to attract troubled souls around the world to their cause. They encourage these individuals to travel, but if they can’t travel, they motivate them to act at home. This is a significant change from a decade ago. We continue to identify individuals who seek to join the ranks of foreign fighters traveling in support of ISIL, and also homegrown violent extremists who may aspire to attack the United States from within. These threats remain among the highest priorities for the FBI and the Intelligence Community as a whole. Conflicts in Syria and Iraq continue to serve as the most attractive overseas theaters for Western-based extremists who want to engage in violence. We estimate approximately 250 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria to participate in the conflict. While this number is lower in comparison to many of our international partners, we closely analyze and assess the influence groups like ISIL have on individuals located in the United States who are inspired to commit acts of violence. Whether or not the individuals are affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization and are willing to travel abroad to fight or are inspired by the call to arms to act in their communities, they potentially pose a significant threat to the safety of the United States and U.S. persons. ISIL has proven relentless in its violent campaign to rule and has aggressively promoted its hateful message, attracting like-minded extremists to include Westerners. To an even greater degree than al Qaeda or other foreign terrorist organizations, ISIL has persistently used the Internet to communicate. From a homeland perspective, it is ISIL’s widespread reach through the Internet and social media which is most concerning as ISIL has aggressively employed this technology for its nefarious strategy. ISIL blends traditional media platforms, glossy photos, in-depth articles, and social media campaigns that can go viral in a matter of seconds. No matter the format, the message of radicalization spreads faster than we imagined just a few years ago. Unlike other groups, ISIL has constructed a narrative that touches on all facets of life—from career opportunities to family life to a sense of community. The message isn’t tailored solely to those who are overtly expressing symptoms of radicalization. It is seen by many who click through the Internet every day, receive social media push notifications, and participate in social networks. Ultimately, many of these individuals are seeking a sense of belonging. As a communication medium, social media is a critical tool for terror groups to exploit. One recent example occurred when an individual was arrested for providing material support to ISIL by facilitating an associate’s travel to Syria to join ISIL. The arrested individual had multiple connections, via a social media networking site, with other like-minded individuals. There is no set profile for the susceptible consumer of this propaganda. However, one trend continues to rise—the inspired youth. We’ve seen certain children and young adults drawing deeper into the ISIL narrative. These individuals are often comfortable with virtual communication platforms, specifically social media networks. ISIL continues to disseminate their terrorist message to all social media users—regardless of age. Following other groups, ISIL has advocated for lone offender attacks. In recent months ISIL released a video, via social media, reiterating the group’s encouragement of lone offender attacks in Western countries, specifically advocating for attacks against soldiers and law enforcement, intelligence community members, and government personnel. Several incidents have occurred in the United States and Europe over the last few months that indicate this “call to arms” has resonated among ISIL supporters and sympathizers. In one case, a New York-based male was arrested in September after he systematically attempted to travel to the Middle East to join ISIL. The individual, who was inspired by ISIL propaganda, expressed his support for ISIL online and took steps to carry out acts encouraged in the ISIL call to arms. The targeting of U.S. military personnel is also evident with the release of names of individuals serving in the U.S. military by ISIL supporters. The names continue to be posted to the Internet and quickly spread through social media, depicting ISIL’s capability to produce viral messaging. Threats to U.S. military and coalition forces continue today. Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States—spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize—either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack. The foreign terrorist now has direct access into the United States like never before. In other examples of arrests, a group of individuals was contacted by a known ISIL supporter who had already successfully traveled to Syria and encouraged them to do the same. Some of these conversations occur in publicly accessed social networking sites, but others take place via private messaging platforms. As a result, it is imperative the FBI and all law enforcement organizations understand the latest communication tools and are positioned to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland. We live in a technologically driven society and just as private industry has adapted to modern forms of communication so too have terrorists. Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication and the use of encryption are posing real challenges to the FBI’s ability to fulfill its public safety and national security missions. This real and growing gap, to which the FBI refers as “Going Dark,” is an area of continuing focus for the FBI; we believe it must be addressed given the resulting risks are grave both in both traditional criminal matters as well as in national security matters. The United States government is actively engaged with private companies to ensure they understand the public safety and national security risks that result from malicious actors’ use of their encrypted products and services. However, the administration is not seeking legislation at this time. The FBI is utilizing all lawful investigative techniques and methods to combat the threat these individuals may pose to the United States. In conjunction with our domestic and foreign partners, we are rigorously collecting and analyzing intelligence information as it pertains to the ongoing threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations and homegrown violent extremists. We continue to encourage robust information sharing; in partnership with our many federal, state, and local agencies assigned to Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, we remain vigilant to ensure the safety of the American public. Be assured, the FBI continues to pursue increased efficiencies and information sharing processes as well as pursue technological and other methods to help stay ahead of threats to the homeland. Intelligence Integrating intelligence and operations is part of the broader intelligence transformation the FBI has undertaken in the last decade. We are making progress, but have more work to do. We have taken two steps to improve this integration. First, we have established an Intelligence Branch within the FBI headed by an executive assistant director (EAD). The EAD looks across the entire enterprise and drives integration. Second, we now have special agents and new intelligence analysts at the FBI Academy engaged in practical training exercises and taking core courses together. As a result, they are better prepared to work well together in the field. Our goal every day is to get better at using, collecting and sharing intelligence to better understand and defeat our adversaries. The FBI cannot be content to just work what is directly in front of us. We must also be able to understand the threats we face at home and abroad and how those threats may be connected. Towards that end, intelligence is gathered, consistent with our authorities, to help us understand and prioritize identified threats and to determine where there are gaps in what we know about these threats. We then seek to fill those gaps and learn as much as we can about the threats we are addressing and others on the threat landscape. We do this for national security and criminal threats, on both a national and local field office level. We then compare the national and local perspectives to organize threats into priority for each of the FBI’s 56 field offices. By categorizing threats in this way, we strive to place the greatest focus on the gravest threats we face. This gives us a better assessment of what the dangers are, what’s being done about them, and where we should prioritize our resources. Cyber An element of virtually every national security threat and crime problem the FBI faces is cyber-based or facilitated. We face sophisticated cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, organized cyber syndicates, and terrorists. On a daily basis, cyber-based actors seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas—things of incredible value to all of us and of great importance to the conduct of our government business and our national security. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy. We continue to see an increase in the scale and scope of reporting on malicious cyber activity that can be measured by the amount of corporate data stolen or deleted, personally identifiable information compromised, or remediation costs incurred by U.S. victims. For example, as the committee is aware, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discovered earlier this year that a number of its systems were compromised. These systems included those that contain information related to the background investigations of current, former, and prospective Federal government employees, as well as other individuals for whom a federal background investigation was conducted. The FBI is working with our interagency partners to investigate this matter. FBI agents, analysts, and computer scientists are using technical capabilities and traditional investigative techniques—such as sources, court-authorized electronic surveillance, physical surveillance, and forensics—to fight cyber threats. We are working side-by-side with our federal, state, and local partners on Cyber Task Forces in each of our 56 field offices and through the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), which serves as a coordination, integration, and information sharing center for 19 U.S. agencies and several key international allies for cyber threat investigations. Through CyWatch, our 24-hour cyber command center, we combine the resources of the FBI and NCIJTF, allowing us to provide connectivity to federal cyber centers, government agencies, FBI field offices and legal attachés, and the private sector in the event of a cyber intrusion. We take all potential threats to public and private sector systems seriously and will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace. * * * Finally, the strength of any organization is its people. The threats we face as a nation have never been greater or more diverse and the expectations placed on the Bureau have never been higher. Our fellow citizens look to us to protect the United States from all of those threats and the men and women of the Bureau continue to meet—and exceed—those expectations, every day. I want to thank them for their dedication and their service. Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and committee members, I thank you for the opportunity to testify concerning the threats to the homeland and terrorists’ use of the Internet and social media as a platform for spreading ISIL propaganda and inspiring individuals to target the homeland, and the impact of the Going Dark problem on mitigating their efforts. I am happy to answer any questions you might have.
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Category Archives: Libya Benghazi Muslim Brotherhood murder
Written Sword by Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings
The Blaze: Trey Gowdy Calls Out Ranking Dem on Benghazi Committee in Scathing 13-Page Letter: ‘This Information Could Have Only From Democrat Members’
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, sent a scathing 13-page letter to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) on Wednesday, urging him to “rise above the political pressure” being put on him by Democrats and keep the “promises” made to the families of the American heroes who died in Libya.
Gowdy scolded Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, for putting on a “public posture” that is “quite the opposite” from the one he has taken during private discussions.
“Not once in any of these conversations have you ever questioned the motivations of the Committee’s work or questioned our mission to uncover the facts surrounding the Benghazi terrorist attacks,” Gowdy wrote. “Your Democrat colleagues and you have contributed nothing substantively to the Committee’s investigation over the past seventeen months—you have not requested a single new witness interview nor have you made one single document request to any Executive Branch Agency.”
The fiery South Carolina congressman then accused Cummings and Democrats of “selectively” leaking information about the Benghazi Committee’s probe “to promote your own false narrative.”
Cummings and other Democrats wrote their own letter on Monday accusing the Republicans of using Benghazi as a political weapon and revealed they plan to release the transcript of an interview with Cheryl Mills to “correct the public record.”
“This is glaringly obvious—no testimony has been disclosed from people interviewed who were on the ground or from national security professionals,” he added .”Instead, the only leaks have been regarding Democrat political figures, and the initial stories have all selectively disclosed testimony to fit with Democrat political narratives.”
He provided a specific instance where information appeared to be intentionally leaked:
Gowdy concluded his letter by vowing to finish the Benghazi Committee’s investigation.
“While it is unfortunate that for over seven months the State Department withheld nearly 1,900 pages of Secretary Clinton’s emails responsive to this Committee’s request, our work must go on,” he wrote. “Simply because you have chosen to play politics with this Committee and the State Department has chosen to play politics by shielding its former Secretary at the expense of the truth does not mean that this Committee was founded on politics, is based on politics, or will veer off course due to the political actions and allegations of others.”
Read the last things he had to say before he signed his name:
The full letter can be found here.
Pentagon: USA is Now ‘Putin’s Prison Bitch’
When Barack Obama surrenders diplomacy and military power in full retreat, others are invited to step in. The Pentagon is keen on the conditions and the attitude is, America is now a lil’ bitch of Putin. this blogger would add Iran and China to that conclusion.
Some argue this began with Barack Obama’s shallow red-line on Syrian use of chemical weapons and deferring action to Russia to solve, perhaps the real opening for Iran and Russia was the failed operation and fallout on Libya, coupled with abandoning the Kurds and Yazidis in Iraq.
From TheHill in part: The ferocity of Russia’s air campaign will all but certainly exacerbate the crisis, fuel additional support for ISIS and further cleanse Syria of Sunni Muslims, improving the demographic balance for the nominally Shiite Assad regime.
Whether the administration was, as The Washington Post reported, “blindsided” by Russian military operations, or whether it quietly welcomed the bombing as some kind of macabre burden-sharing, Moscow’s Syrian initiative makes matters worse. As Nancy Youssef of the Daily Beast recently tweeted that she “overheard” at the Pentagon, “Right now, we are Putin’s prison bitch.”
Russia’s military deployment in Syria is a strategic boon for the Shiite “Axis of Resistance” and its new partner, Russia. This resurgent axis was in part made possible by the absence of a credible U.S. Syria policy, but it will only be bolstered should Washington embrace Russia and Iran as its regional security partners. Already in the Middle East, there is a widely held perception that the U.S. has made this decision. No doubt, the administration will continue to insist that the Iran nuclear deal doesn’t signal a broader regional realignment. Should the U.S. tilt toward Russia and Iran persist, President Obama might find himself alongside Assad, Khamenei, Nasrallah and Putin on the next run of posters. More here.
At real odds, Obama administration vs. Putin:
The Obama administration, by contrast, says its own airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria can succeed only with a political transition that ends with Mr. Assad’s removal.
The administration’s position was ridiculed Monday by Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who said the American airstrikes, which began more than a year ago, had done little militarily. In comments carried by Russia’s official Tass news agency, Mr. Lavrov said that even the Americans had acknowledged their faltering efforts to create a force of so-called moderate insurgents in Syria.
While Barack Obama talks about gun control and pushes a Strong Cities initiative through the United Nations”
From Politico in part: In 2014, Vian Dakhil’s stirring plea for international intervention helped inspire President Barack Obama to order airstrikes and launch a humanitarian effort to rescue thousands of Yazidi Iraqis who were trapped on a mountainside under assault by Islamic State.
A year later, Dakhil, one of two Yazidi members of the Iraqi parliament, says her people have been abandoned by Washington and the international community.
In an emotional, at times tearful, on-stage interview at POLITICO’s “Women Rule” event Wednesday morning in Washington, Dakhil described a full-blown humanitarian crisis — 420,000 Yazidis living in refugee camps in tents with mud floors, women and girls continuing to be kidnapped, 2,200 girls in captivity as sexual slaves, and survivors returning from the horror of ISIL captivity with no resources for psychological support. Thousands of orphans have no homes.
Dakhil, who is credited with saving many Yazidi women and girls from ISIL captivity, said she was not contacted by U.S. officials after the initial announcement. A letter to Michelle Obama received no response, she said.
Could it be that Bashir al Assad is now terrified of his long relationship with Iran and Vladimir Putin’s ride into Syria on his white steed to save Syria will turn into a wider conflict later between the Shiites and Sunnis in the region?
In part from DerSpiegel: Fear of his enemies was the primary reason for Bashar Assad’s call for help to Moscow. “But right after that came the fear of his friends,” says a Russian official who long worked in his country’s embassy in Damascus. The friend he refers to is Iran, the Syrian regime’s most important protector. “Assad and those around him are afraid of the Iranians,” the Russian says. Anger over the arrogance of the Iranians, who treat Syria like a colony, is also part of it, the Russian continues. Most of all, though, the Syrians “mistrust Tehran’s goals, for which Assad’s position of power may no longer be decisive. That is why the Syrians absolutely want us in the country.”
What the Russian diplomat, who wants to remain anonymous, has to say is a bit jarring at first. Without the Shiite auxiliaries from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon — whose recruitment and transfer is organized by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — Assad’s rule would long since have come to an end. Yet his comments are complemented by a number of additional details that add up to an image of a behind-the-scenes power struggle — one which casts a new, scary light on the condition of the Syrian regime and on the country’s prospects as a whole.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has long planned and carried out the most important missions and operations of the Syrian regime. They were responsible, right down to the details, for the sporadically successful offensives in Aleppo in the north and Daraa in the south, which began in 2013. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard is one of those groups intent on continuing the “Islamic Revolution” — the victory of Shiites over the Sunnis. They are a state within a state, one which owns several companies and is answerable only to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. President Hassan Rohani has no power over the Revolutionary Guard whatsoever.
Their goals go far beyond merely reestablishing the status quo in Syria. In early 2013, Hojatoleslam Mehdi Taeb, one of the planners behind Iran’s engagement in Syria, said: “Syria is the 35th province of Iran and it is a strategic province for us.” For several decades, the alliance between the Assads and Iran was a profitable one, particularly in opposition to the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, which long had the upper hand in the region. But today, Assad depends on Iran to remain in power, and Tehran is taking advantage of the situation. To read more from the Russian perspective, click here.
Nuclear smugglers sought terrorist buyers
CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Over the pulsating beat at an exclusive nightclub, the arms smuggler made his pitch to a client: 2.5 million euros for enough radioactive cesium to contaminate several city blocks.
It was earlier this year, and the two men were plotting their deal at an unlikely spot: the terrace of Cocos Prive, a dance club and sushi bar in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
“You can make a dirty bomb, which would be perfect for the Islamic State,” the smuggler said. “If you have a connection with them, the business will go smoothly.”
But the smuggler, Valentin Grossu, wasn’t sure the client was for real — and he was right to worry. The client was an informant, and it took some 20 meetings to persuade Grossu that he was an authentic Islamic State representative. Eventually, the two men exchanged cash for a sample in a sting operation that landed Grossu in jail.
The previously unpublicized case is one of at least four attempts in five years in which criminal networks with suspected Russian ties sought to sell radioactive material to extremists through Moldova, an investigation by The Associated Press has found. One investigation uncovered an attempt to sell bomb-grade uranium to a real buyer from the Middle East, the first known case of its kind.
In that operation, wiretaps and interviews with investigators show, a middleman for the gang repeatedly ranted with hatred for America as he focused on smuggling the essential material for an atomic bomb and blueprints for a dirty bomb to a Middle Eastern buyer.
In wiretaps, videotaped arrests, photographs of bomb-grade material, documents and interviews, AP found that smugglers are explicitly targeting buyers who are enemies of the West. The developments represent the fulfillment of a long-feared scenario in which organized crime gangs are trying to link up with groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida — both of which have made clear their ambition to use weapons of mass destruction.
The sting operations involved a partnership between the FBI and a small group of Moldovan investigators, who over five years went from near total ignorance of the black market to wrapping up four sting operations. Informants and police posing as connected gangsters penetrated the smuggling networks, using old-fashioned undercover tactics as well as high-tech gear from radiation detectors to clothing threaded with recording devices.
But their successes were undercut by striking shortcomings: Kingpins got away, and those arrested evaded long prison sentences, sometimes quickly returning to nuclear smuggling, AP found.
For strategic reasons, in most of the operations arrests were made after samples of nuclear material had been obtained rather than the larger quantities. That means that if smugglers did have access to the bulk of material they offered, it remains in criminal hands.
The repeated attempts to peddle radioactive materials signal that a thriving nuclear black market has emerged in an impoverished corner of Eastern Europe on the fringes of the former Soviet Union. Moldova, which borders Romania, is a former Soviet republic.
Moldovan police and judicial authorities shared investigative case files with the AP in an effort to spotlight how dangerous the black market has become. They say a breakdown in cooperation between Russia and the West means that it is much harder to know whether smugglers are finding ways to move parts of Russia’s vast store of radioactive materials.
“We can expect more of these cases,” said Constantin Malic, one of the Moldovan investigators. “As long as the smugglers think they can make big money without getting caught, they will keep doing it.”
The FBI and the White House declined to comment. The U.S. State Department would not comment on the specifics of the cases.
“Moldova has taken many important steps to strengthen its counter nuclear smuggling capabilities,” said Eric Lund, spokesman for the State Department’s bureau in charge of nonproliferation. “The arrests made by Moldovan authorities in 2011 for the attempted smuggling of nuclear materials is a good example of how Moldova is doing its part.”
Wiretapped conversations exposed plots that targeted the United States, the Moldovan officials said. In one case, a middleman said it was essential the smuggled bomb-grade uranium go to Arabs, said Malic, an investigator in all four sting operations.
“He said: ‘I really want an Islamic buyer because they will bomb the Americans.'”
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“HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF URANIUM?”
Malic was a 27-year-old police officer when he first stumbled upon the nuclear black market in 2009. He was working on a fraud unit in Chisinau, and had an informant helping police take down a euro counterfeiting ring stretching from the Black Sea to Naples, Italy.
The informant, an aging businessman, casually mentioned to Malic that over the years, contacts had periodically offered him radioactive material.
“Have you ever heard of uranium?” he asked Malic.
Malic was so new to the nuclear racket that he didn’t know what uranium was, and had to look it up on Google. He was horrified — “not just for one country,” he said, “but for humanity.”
“Soon after, the informant received an offer for uranium. At about that time, the U.S. government was starting a program to train Moldovan police in countering the nuclear black market, part of a global multi-million dollar effort.
In Malic’s first case, three people were arrested on Aug. 20, 2010, after a sample of the material, a sawed-off piece of a depleted uranium cylinder, was exchanged for cash. That kind of uranium would be difficult to turn into a bomb.
Authorities suspected, but couldn’t prove, that the uranium had come from the melted down Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine, Malic said.
Malic transported the seized radioactive material in a matchbox on the passenger seat of his car. It did not occur to him that the uranium should have been stored in a shielded container to protect him from possible radiation.
When FBI agents came to collect it, they were stunned when he simply proffered the matchbox in his uncovered hand: “Take it,” Malic said.
“Madman!” the American officers exclaimed.
The uranium, fortunately, turned out not to be highly toxic.
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PLUTONIUM FOR FREE
Several months later, a former KGB informant, Teodor Chetrus, called Malic’s source, the Moldovan businessman. Chetrus told him he had uranium to sell, but was looking for a Middle Eastern buyer.
Unlike Malic’s first case, this one involved highly enriched uranium, the type that can be used to make a nuclear bomb.
Smarter and more cautious than the members of the previous gang, Chetrus was a bit of a paradox to the investigators. He was educated and well dressed, yet still lived in his dilapidated childhood farmhouse in a tiny village on Moldova’s border with Ukraine.
In many of the smuggling cases, the ringleaders insulated themselves through a complex network of middlemen who negotiated with buyers in order to shield the bosses from arrest. In this case, Chetrus was the go-between.
But he had his own agenda. Chetrus clung to a Soviet-era hatred of the West, Malic said, repeatedly ranting about how the Americans should be annihilated because of problems he thought they created in the Middle East.
“He said multiple times that this substance must have a real buyer from the Islamic states to make a dirty bomb,” Malic said.
Chetrus and the informant hammered out a deal to sell bomb-grade uranium to a “buyer in the Middle East” over months of wiretapped phone calls and meetings at Chetrus’ house.
The informant would show up with a recording device hidden in a different piece of clothing each time. On the other side of the road would be Malic, disguised as a migrant selling fruit and grains from a van — watching the house for signs of trouble.
In one early phone call, the informant pressed Chetrus to find out whether he had access to plutonium as well as uranium, saying his buyer had expressed interest, according to wiretaps. But Chetrus was suspicious, and insisted that before big quantities of either substance could be discussed, the buyer had to prove that he was for real and not an undercover agent.
Chetrus’ boss decided to sell the uranium in installments, starting with a sample. If the buyers were plants, he reasoned, the police would strike before the bulk of the uranium changed hands — an acceptable risk.
“I have to tell you one thing,” Chetrus told the informant in a wiretapped phone call. “Intelligence services never let go of the money.”
Eventually they worked out the terms of a deal: Chetrus would sell a 10-gram sample of the uranium for 320,000 euros ($360,000). The buyer could test it and if he liked what he saw, they could do a kilogram a week at the same rate — an astonishing 32 million euros every time until the buyer had the quantity he wanted. Ten kilograms of uranium was discussed — about a fifth of what was used over Hiroshima.
The two later met in the dirt courtyard of Chetrus’s house to discuss plutonium. The informant had a video camera hidden in his baseball cap. Chetrus can be seen in an army-green V-neck, talking animatedly as a rooster squawks in the background.
“For the plutonium,” Chetrus said, “if they prove they are serious people, we will provide the sample for free. You can use a small amount to make a dirty bomb.”
He spread his hands wide. Then waved them around, as if all before him was laid to waste.
Malic found the video chilling. “I was afraid to imagine what would happen if one of these scenarios happened one day.”
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A REAL BUYER IN SUDAN
The man behind the bomb-grade uranium deal was Alexandr Agheenco, known as “the colonel” to his cohorts. He had both Russian and Ukrainian citizenship, police said, but lived in Moldova’s breakaway republic of Trans-Dniester.
A separatist enclave that is a notorious haven for smuggling of all kinds, Trans-Dniester was beyond the reach of the Moldovan police.
In a selfie included in police files, the colonel is balding, mustachioed, and smiling at the camera.
In June 2011, he arranged the uranium swap. He dispatched a Trans-Dniester police officer to smuggle the uranium to Moldova, according to court documents. At the same time, he sent his wife, Galina, on a “shopping outing” across the border to the capital.
Her job was to arrange a handoff of the uranium to Chetrus.
Galina Agheenco arrived in downtown Chisinau in a Lexus GS-330, parking near a circus. She met the police officer, who handed her a green sack with the uranium inside.
Meanwhile, the informant and Chetrus, sporting a dark suit and striped tie, pulled up at the Victoriabank on the city’s main drag in a chauffeur-driven gray BMW X5. Inside the bank, Chetrus inspected a safe deposit box with 320,000 euros, court documents show. He counted the bills and used a special light to check whether they were marked.
Satisfied, Chetrus went to collect the uranium package from the Lexus, where the colonel’s wife had left it. When he turned it over to the informant, the police pounced.
The bust, captured on video, shows officers in balaclavas forcing Chetrus to his knees and handcuffing him. Galina was arrested, too.
But the police officer-turned-smuggler managed to escape back to Trans-Dniester, where he and the colonel could not be touched by Moldovan police.
The arrests took Malic by surprise. He and the informant had been told that police would allow the sample exchange to go forward, so they could later seize the motherlode of uranium and arrest the ringleaders.
Malic was furious. Instead of capturing the gang leaders intent on selling nuclear bomb-grade material to terrorists, his Moldovan bosses had jumped the gun.
“What they did was simply create a scene for the news media,” Malic said. “We lost a huge opportunity to make the world safer.”
Tests of the uranium seized confirmed that it was high-grade material that could be used in a nuclear bomb. The tests also linked it to two earlier seizures of highly enriched uranium that investigators believed the colonel was also behind.
A search of Chetrus’ house showed just how dangerous the smugglers were. After police made their arrests in Chisinau, Malic combed through documents in the farmhouse.
He found the plans for the dirty bomb. Worse, there was evidence that Chetrus was making a separate deal to sell nuclear material to a real buyer.
Investigators found contracts made out to a Sudanese doctor named Yosif Faisal Ibrahim for attack helicopters and armored personnel carriers, government documents show. Chetrus had a copy of Ibrahim’s passport, and there was evidence that Chetrus was trying to help him obtain a Moldovan visa. Skype messages suggested that he was interested in uranium and the dirty bomb plans.
The deal was interrupted by the sting, but it looked like it had progressed pretty far. A lawyer working with the criminal ring had traveled to Sudan, officials said. But authorities say they could not determine who was behind Ibrahim or why he was seeking material for a nuclear bomb. AP efforts to reach Ibrahim were unsuccessful.
Consequences for the smugglers were minimal. Galina Agheenco got a light 3-year sentence because she had an infant son; and Chetrus was sentenced to a 5-year prison term. Interpol notices were issued for the colonel and the Trans-Dniester policeman who got away.
Moldovan officials say there were indications from a foreign intelligence agency that the colonel fled with his infant son through Ukraine to Russia shortly after the bust.
The authorities don’t know if the colonel also took a cache of uranium with him.
“Until the head of the criminal group is sentenced and jailed, until we know for sure where those substances seized in Europe came from and where they were going to, only then will we be able to say a danger is no longer present,” says Gheorghe Cavcaliuc, the senior police officer who oversaw the investigation.
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A COOL FACE, A POUNDING HEART
In mid-2014, an informant told Malic he had been contacted by two separate groups, one offering uranium, the other cesium. The Moldovan police went directly to the FBI, who backed up their operations.
Malic volunteered to work undercover, posing as an agent for a Middle Eastern buyer. He did not have much training, and struggled with his nerves, resorting to shots of vodka before each meeting. He went into them with no weapon — showing a cool face while taming a pounding heart.
The FBI fitted him with a special shirt that had microphones woven into the fabric, so that even a pat-down could not reveal that he was wired. They also set him up in a white Mercedes S-Class to look like a gangster.
It worked. At one point, the unwitting smuggler said in text messages obtained by the AP that his gang had access to an outdated Russian missile system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The man said he could obtain two R29 submarine-based missiles and provide technical background on how to use them.
Following the same script as in 2011, the team wrapped up the investigation after a sample of 200 grams of unenriched uranium was exchanged for $15,000 on Dec. 3, 2014. Six people were arrested, five got away.
What worried Malic was what appeared to be a revolving door of smugglers. Three criminals involved in the new case had been taken into custody following the earlier investigations. Two of them had served short sentences and immediately rejoined the smuggling network, helping the new ring acquire the uranium. A third criminal was none other than the man who drove Chetrus to make his uranium deal.
The investigators tracked the new uranium for sale to an address in Ukraine. Although they reported it to the authorities, they never heard back.
As Malic’s frustration grew, so did the danger to him and his colleagues.
Early this year, at the Cocos Prive nightclub in Chisinau, the stakes became apparent. The middleman, Grossu, warned that his cesium supplier was a retired FSB officer with a reputation for brutality.
If there was any trouble, Grossu told a wired informant, “They will put all of us against the wall and shoot us,” Malic recalled.
Grossu’s bosses wanted the cesium to reach the Islamic State. “They have the money and they will know what to do with it,” he said.
The sellers claimed to have a huge cache of cesium 137 — which could be used to make a dirty bomb. As in previous cases, they insisted that the buyers prove their seriousness by first purchasing a sample vial of less-radioactive cesium 135, which is not potent enough for a dirty bomb.
They were busted on Feb. 19. Grossu and two other men were arrested. The suspected FSB officer and the remaining cesium disappeared.
It is not clear whether the Moldovan cases are indicative of widespread nuclear smuggling operations.
“It would be deeply concerning if terrorist groups are able to tap into organized crimes networks to gain the materials and expertise required to build a weapon of mass destruction,” said Andy Weber, former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, who oversaw counter-proliferation until a year ago.
On May 28, the FBI honored Malic and his team at an awards ceremony for the two recent investigations. But by then the Moldovan police department had disbanded the team amid political fallout and police infighting.
Chetrus’ 5-year prison sentence was supposed to run into next year. But Chetrus’ sister said this summer that he had been released in December, which the AP confirmed.
He had served barely three years for trying to sell a nuclear bomb to enemies of the United States.
Blair Tries to Save Qaddafi, Hillary Tries to Kill Him
June 2011: Clinton Arrives in Abu Dhabi for talks on post-Qaddafi Libya
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday for talks with European and Arab partners on planning for a democratic Libya without Muammar Qaddafi, aides said.
The talks in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi will be held on Thursday. They come after US President Barack Obama said NATO’s mission in Libya was forging “inexorable” advances that meant it was only a matter of time before Mr. Qaddafi’s departure. “With each meeting, international pressure is growing and momentum is building for change in Libya,” Secretary Clinton’s spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, told the accompanying press.
“Not only does the Contact Group allow us to sustain the (NATO-led military) coalition, it also allows us to reinvest all these countries in our common effort and to concert views on the next steps,” Ms. Nuland added.
Due to take part are two dozen countries, including key NATO allies Britain, France and Italy, as well as delegates from the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Islamic Conference.
The UAE also plans to invite Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Russia, US officials said.
As the military, political and economic pressure mount on Mr. Qaddafi to step down, the group will discuss “what a post-Qaddafi Libya ought to look like,” a senior US official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Such a place should be a “unified state, (a) democratic state with a smooth transition,” the official said before Secretary Clinton arrived for the talks.
A second official said the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) had set up shadow ministries in its base in eastern Libya and named a civilian to head military in preparation for assuming power when Mr. Qaddafi falls.
The international community has begun to talk among themselves and with the rebel administration about how to offer security and basic services to the people of Tripoli when the Libyan capital is freed, he said.
However, the official added that Washington cannot say whether the NTC “is ready to assume complete control,” and cautioned that there is no international consensus over when Mr. Qaddafi should leave power, where he should go, or even whether he should leave Libya.
“And we in the international community have stepped up our effort as well to be able to be in a position to provide them (the opposition) whatever kind of assistance they might need,” the second official said.
A third US administration official said the Contact Group — which includes NATO allies leading the military action against Mr. Qaddafi as well as Arab partners and the United Nations — would discuss the opposition’s stark need for funds.
The opposition has complained that little has happened since the group last met on May 5 in Rome when Clinton and her partners agreed on a new fund to aid Libya’s rebels and promised to tap frozen assets of Mr. Qaddafi’s regime.
“We understand the (NTC’s) frustration but again the international community isn’t going to let the (NTC) go under financially,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.
DailyMail: Tony Blair warned Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to find safety as his regime began to collapse.
Showing surprising concern for the tyrant’s welfare, Mr. Blair told him: ‘If you have a safe place to go then you should go there’.
There was no mention of facing justice and instead Mr. Blair wanted to broker a deal for Gaddafi. The conversation shines a light once again on his questionable links to the man responsible for decades of authoritarian rule.
The former Prime Minister was criticised over his infamous ‘Deal in the desert’ in 2004 which secured lucrative oil deals for BP and ended Libya’s international isolation. He also wrote Gaddafi grovelling letters which began: ‘Dear Muammar, I trust you and your family are well’.
The conversation between Mr. Blair and Gaddafi was made public as part of the latest batch of emails released from when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State in response to a freedom of information request.
The relevant message is dated February 25, 2011 and was sent by Mr. Blair’s head of strategy Catherine Rimmer to Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s former top foreign policy adviser, who sent it on to her. At the time Mr. Blair was special envoy to the Middle East for the Quartet – the UN, the US, the EU and Russia.
Miss Rimmer notes that ‘Mr. Blair wanted me to let you know that he is making these calls very privately and is not briefing the media’.
She says that Mr. Blair ‘delivered a very strong message to Gaddafi that the violence had to end and that he had to stand aside’.
Miss Rimmer then directly quotes Mr. Blair telling Gaddafi: ‘The absolute key thing is that the bloodshed and violence must stop…if you have a safe place to go then you should go there, because this will not end peacefully unless that happens. ‘If this goes on for another day/two days we will go past the point. I’m saying this because I believe it deeply. If we can’t get a way through/out very quickly this will go past the point of no return.
Another email from February 23, 2011 from Mr. Sullivan to Mrs. Clinton describes how Mr. Blair was suggested to Mrs. Clinton as someone who ‘might have a good relationship’ with Gaddafi. The dictator fled the capital Tripoli and was killed by rebels near Sirte, his birthplace, in October 2011.
Other messages sent and received by Mrs. Clinton reveal more details about how Cherie Blair lobbied her on behalf of her friends in the Qatari government.
Earlier emails showed that in the summer of 2009 and in 2010 Mrs. Blair arranged a meeting between Mrs. Clinton and her friend Sheikha Mozah.
The latest batch show that in the summer of 2011 Mrs Blair also facilitated a meeting with Mrs. Clinton and Fahed al-Atiyah, chairman of the Qatar Food Security Programme.
Nobody for Mr. or Mrs. Blair was available for comment.
Hold on there is more and of course the Obama administration ‘go-to’ country for money and diplomatic support is Qatar…..
The experts said they had found that Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had breached the arms embargo on Libya during the 2011 uprising by providing weapons and ammunition to the rebels fighting Gaddafi forces. The experts said Qatar had denied the accusation, while the United Arab Emirates had not responded.
“Some 18 months after the end of the conflict, some of this materiel remains under the control of non-state actors within Libya and has been found in seizures of military materiel being trafficked out of Libya,” according to the report.
“Civilians and brigades remain in control of most of the weapons in the country, while the lack of an effective security system remains one of the primary obstacles to securing military materiel and controlling the borders,” it said.
Last month the U.N. Security Council made it easier for Libya to obtain non-lethal equipment such as bulletproof vests and armored cars but expressed concern at the spread of weapons from the country to nearby states.
The council urged the Libyan government to improve its monitoring of arms and related material that is supplied, sold or transferred to the government – with approval of the U.N. sanctions committee that oversees the arms embargo.
Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan told the Security Council last month that the government had control of its borders with Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt. Zeidan said in February he wanted the council to lift the arms embargo on Libya, but council members said they never received an official request.
The Gun Smuggler’s Lament
by Elizabeth Dickinson: In 2011, Osama Kubbar ran Qatari-supplied arms to Libyan rebels battling the Qaddafi regime. Today, he is watching from afar as his country is torn apart by two warring governments and a web of rival militias. This is the story of a failed revolution and the people it engulfed.
“Perched in a seaside villa in eastern Tunisia, Osama Kubbar had anxiously waited for days for the final news about his guns. It was May 2011, five months into the Arab Spring, and Kubbar, a Libyan smuggler, was remotely tracking the slow movements across the southern Mediterranean of a fishing vessel he’d arranged to transport 600 Belgian FN rifles, 10 machine guns, 200 grenades, 100 bulletproof vests, and 200 kegs for packing explosives. The boat was bound from Benghazi for his hometown, the coastal city of Zawiya, some 370 nautical miles away, where beleaguered rebels were battling the mightier forces of longtime Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Guns, Kubbar hoped, might help shift the tide in the fighters’ favor.
The voyage, now in its third week, had been arduous. Through frequent satellite- phone calls, Kubbar learned from the crew when the boat’s engine broke down in the Gulf of Sidra, necessitating a several-day maintenance detour to Misrata two-thirds of the way through the trip. Once waterborne again, the vessel avoided lurking catastrophe. Not only can spring weather on the Mediterranean be fierce, but Qaddafi’s henchmen were scanning the sea for rebel aid and threatening to sink any ship that approached land.
The moment of reckoning had finally arrived: After several days hovering near Zawiya’s shore, waiting for an opportune time, the crew on board told Kubbar that docking wasn’t an option. “The boat came close, about five kilometers from shore,” Kubbar recalls, “and the guys said, ‘We cannot go further.’”
Kubbar didn’t waste any time. He called rebel contacts in Zawiya and told them where the boat was floating; they would have to try to get the guns themselves. So under the cover of darkness, fighters in small rubber boats pushed off from the sand, navigated rough waves, and met up with Kubbar’s crew. Then, box by box, they carried the arms ashore.
“I swear to God,” Kubbar says, “you can do a movie about this.”
Three months and four more arms shipments later, Kubbar’s short career as a gunrunner ended when the invigorated opposition officially seized Zawiya. Shortly afterward, Qaddafi was forced from power and killed. “The military was organized. The revolutionaries, it was chaos,” Kubbar remembers. “And it worked to our advantage: If you cannot predict the rebels’ moves, you cannot really counter them.”
Kubbar cuts an unlikely figure for a former smuggler. Muscular and trim, with graying hair and thin-rimmed glasses, he was trained as an electrical engineer. A devout Muslim and vocal opponent of the Qaddafi government, he had been living in exile for more than 15 years when the Arab Spring began. Kubbar halted his day job and started moving weapons to help Libya’s resistance movement—which included his own brother—finally break the yoke of dictatorship. And he was able to do it thanks to a formidable backer: Qatar, his adopted home.
The Persian Gulf emirate, eager to flex its muscles in the Middle East, was the first regional state to turn on the Qaddafi regime in 2011. Through the United Nations, the Arab League, and other channels, it publicly urged international action against the dictatorship—a stance that earned it plaudits from humanitarians and foreign- policy hawks alike. Using its two Boeing C-17 cargo jets, among other means, to illicitly ship aid and arms to Libya, Qatar’s operation nurtured an ecosystem of clerics, businessmen, ex-jihadis, and other middlemen— figures like Kubbar who quietly fed pockets of the revolution with money, guns, and other support. Once Qaddafi was gone, members of that network—many of them Islamists, long-preferred partners of Qatar across the Middle East—used their positions to jockey for power and influence. Kubbar, for one, says he rode his renown as Zawiya’s weapons smuggler to seize property and build a small political career that lasted nearly two years.
Yet the promise of revolution was fleeting. By 2013, Libya had all but collapsed—not despite Doha’s efforts and those of its opportunistic middlemen, but partly because of them. Supporting certain allies, at the expense of national reconciliation, helped drive dangerous political wedges. To be sure, Qatar was not alone. Other countries, most notably the United Arab Emirates, contributed to Libya’s instability by building their own networks on the ground. But where Abu Dhabi also offered material and logistical assistance, Qatar was exceptional in the scale of its provision during the uprising. And while this investment might have paid off at the time, the question now is, to what end? Mieczyslaw Boduszynski, a former U.S. foreign service officer and current professor at Pomona College who has spent time in Libya, wrote in 2014, “[I]t is clear that Qatari engagement has contributed, at least indirectly, to further polarization within the Libyan political scene and to overall state weakness.” (A spokesman for the Qatari government declined to answer questions or comment for this article.)
Today, nearly five years since demonstrators began to agitate for Qaddafi’s removal, Libya suffers from unpredictable violence. It is riven by lawless militias and two rival governments. The humanitarian toll of the conflict is dire. More than 200,000 Libyans are in need of food assistance, according to the World Food Programme. And “scores of those displaced during the 2011 Libyan revolution have been unable to return to their homes,” the Brookings Institution reported in April, “while over a million more have been uprooted in the subsequent violence.”
Some of Qatar’s proxies have stayed in the chaos, still hoping to find fame, fortune, and power. Others have given up or been forced out, including Kubbar. He’s back where he started: living in Doha, watching at a painful remove as the country of his birth splinters. Blending into a crowd of well-to-do expats while sipping a cappuccino one evening at the capital city’s Ritz-Carlton, he boasts about his smuggling, calling it “the most courageous operation to my name.” But his brow wrinkles when he talks about the present: Libya, Kubbar says in his ever-measured voice, “is really messed up.”
The ability of outside actors like Qatar, much less a dissident-turned- smuggler-turned-bureaucrat, to shape Libya’s trajectory is rapidly diminishing. For 51-year-old Kubbar, however, the dream remains steadfast. “The path to the solution is still a long way away, but we should not be negative,” he insists. “I have a strong belief that … the right people will be in charge.”
In 1969, when Kubbar was just 5 years old, a charismatic young military colonel unseated Libya’s monarch, King Idris, in a coup. Promising sweeping political and economic reforms, Qaddafi’s rule blended populist rhetoric with domineering authoritarianism. He used the country’s massive oil revenues to fund free education and health care, but also to buy the loyalty of security forces, expand the army with recruits from sub-Saharan African allies, and increase his personal wealth. He was pitiless toward perceived opponents, imprisoning and torturing thousands in a network of detention facilities. Islamists who offered an alternative ideology to Qaddafi’s socialist state were targeted as heretics.
Growing up in Zawiya, Kubbar knew of Qaddafi’s tyrannical politics, but it was only after moving to the capital to attend university in 1981 that he saw them firsthand. There, he witnessed one of Qaddafi’s so-called revolutionary committees—informal surveillance networks that monitored dissent—execute students who opposed the regime by hanging them on campus.
Although he was horrified, turning political was too dangerous an option. That changed when he left Libya in 1986 to study for advanced engineering degrees at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Safely abroad, Kubbar became fascinated with the Muslim Brotherhood opposition so demonized by Qaddafi. He devoured any literature he could find about the organization—he says he later joined the Libyan chapter, banned at home but operating in exile—and participated in his university’s Muslim Students Association. Sometimes, he delivered speeches at weekly prayer gatherings on campus, decrying Qaddafi’s rule.
A few years after he moved to Canada, Kubbar says he learned that officials in Libya’s intelligence service had visited his father in Zawiya, inquiring about Kubbar’s activities. (Kubbar suspects that one of his classmates alerted the government to his dissent.) Then, in 1995, Kubbar’s uncle was denied an exit visa to visit the United Kingdom. “He was rejected because of my name,” Kubbar guesses. Estimating that he had landed on a blacklist, Kubbar decided he couldn’t safely return to Libya.
For more than a decade, he worked for telecom companies in North America, before moving to Doha in 2009 for a job at Qatar University. He says the Libyans living in the city avoided one another—certainly in public—because they feared the Libyan Embassy was monitoring them. Yet a handful of Qaddafi dissidents knew one other, and when the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, they disregarded potential dangers and started meeting in cafes. They shared videos of protests in Tunis and later Cairo, and they swapped stories about nascent demonstration attempts relayed by family members back home. “Egypt is the center of the Arab world. [That meant] the revolutions were starting to catch on,” Kubbar says of that heady time. “We thought that we should start warming up for Libya.”
On Feb. 17, 2011, protesters in dozens of Libyan cities heeded social media calls for a Day of Rage. In Benghazi, Tobruk, and even parts of Tripoli, demonstrators—led by youths and students—marched, destroyed regime icons, and burned garbage bins. Soldiers fired live ammunition at them. The uprising had begun.
Kubbar spent hours on Facebook and YouTube, following events. He says one video clip particularly seized his emotions. In it, a woman filming herself in Benghazi hysterically screams that the regime is coming to massacre her family. It “really pumped the blood in my veins,” Kubbar says . He rang his brother, Ihab, who was still living in Zawiya. “Go to the streets and tell [the regime], ‘It’s never going to be peaceful until that lady who screamed in Benghazi sits quiet,’” Kubbar recalls beseeching.
In another conversation, Kubbar says Ihab held up the phone so that, even in Doha, Kubbar could hear the noise of crowds in Zawiya chanting, “The people want the fall of the regime.” On Feb. 24, 2011, Qaddafi’s forces killed at least 17 people and wounded another 150 in an attack on the restive city. Afterward, Ihab, then 36, joined neighborhood men who were taking up arms against the government.
Kubbar considered himself just as much a freedom fighter as his brother. “We were just standing up to Qaddafi, and we were naked,” he says of the rebels, who had very few arms and little ammunition at that point. (Ihab carried a hunting rifle that could fire two bullets.) “We had no support.”
That was soon to change.
In late February, one of Kubbar’s Libyan acquaintances in Doha, a newspaper editor named Mahmoud Shammam, gathered together local dissidents. (In the interest of disclosure, Shammam previously edited a now-defunct Arabic edition of Foreign Policy.) A close friend of the ruling emir, Shammam had convinced the Qatari royal family to back supporters of the revolution: The family would pay for a new TV channel, Al Ahrar, devoted to the Libyan uprising and a makeshift office for opposition expats. “He [told us], ‘OK, I can get some support; let us rent a place where we can have an operations room,’” Kubbar says. The group secured an apartment in the Kempinski, a luxury high-rise building in Doha’s chic West Bay. Upstairs from one of the city’s best pastry shops, the Libyans set up computers and phone lines and brainstormed how they could abet the revolution. (The Kempinski’s management declined to comment, saying it does not “disclose any information about tenants or guests.”)
It was no coincidence that Qatar had agreed to help. Over the previous two decades, the small, gas-rich country had been expanding its global leverage aggressively. Qatar had built alliances with Western countries, including the United States, and had funded the world’s most watched Arabic-language network, Al Jazeera. But it had also thrown financial and material support behind Islamic resistance movements across the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and branches of the Muslim Brotherhood; the groups’ organization, discipline, and geographic spread made them excellent conduits for Qatari influence. “Qatar was not identifying with the Muslim Brotherhood for any ideological reasons,” says Salah Eddin Elzein, head of the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, a think-tank arm of the network; rather, he said, Qatar chose to align itself with rising forces. Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, has written that Qatar savvily pursued an “open-door” foreign policy, “creating friends and avoiding enmities by appealing to all sides at once.” Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah, Qatar’s foreign minister, told an audience at Princeton University in 2014 that during the uprisings, his country also felt a “moral duty” to help Arab brethren topple dictators.
Kubbar appreciated Doha’s early patronage, but he wanted to be closer to the front lines. “I’m not going to be sitting here when my people die,” he recalls thinking. So no sooner had the office at the Kempinski opened than Kubbar picked up and moved to Tunisia, from where he believed he could help deliver humanitarian aid—already much needed—to western Libya.
Leaving his wife and two children behind in Doha, Kubbar set out for Ben Gardane, a Tunisian city about 20 miles from the Libyan border. There, he says, he rented a villa with his own money and began to liaise with aid organizations, including a British Islamic charity called Wafa Relief, providing it with lists of goods that Libyan activists and rebels, with whom he was in contact, needed. “It was things like painkillers, and sometimes drugs for chronic conditions.”
On March 7, after Kubbar had been in Tunisia for less than two weeks, he received a dreadful call from his sisters: Ihab had been shot in a firefight with government forces. Fellow rebels found him wounded and crumpled on a slope leading away from Zawiya’s central square; the fighters managed to get him home, but he died soon after.
Kubbar’s father told him not to come home. It was too dangerous, and he couldn’t bear to lose another son. But the revolution was now more personal than ever. On a visit to Doha at the end of March, Kubbar spilled his frustrations to his friends. “There are lots of people doing humanitarian aid,” he remembers complaining. What he needed to do, he said, was run weapons.
Just as Kubbar was losing patience, Qatar was also looking for more direct ways to back Libya’s rebels. Qaddafi was using his air force to target civilians, a galling sight for regional leaders. So Doha launched a whirlwind diplomatic campaign to convince the Arab League and the U.N. Security Council to impose a no-fly zone. Other backers of the plan included the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. On March 17, the council approved Resolution 1973, authorizing the safe area and “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. A week later, Qatar became the first Arab state to agree to patrol the zone.
Doha’s leaders didn’t stop there. They began to supply the rebellion with weapons, despite an arms embargo that the United Nations had also just placed on Libya. “For small states like Qatar,” says Sergio Finardi, head of the consultancy TransArms, which has tracked several illicit Qatari-linked weapons shipments to Libya, its contribution could be “something covert in order to have a foot and play a role in this situation.” (Other countries provided arms too, including the United Arab Emirates and France.) A U.N. panel of experts later found Qatar to be in violation of the embargo, but Doha stated in 2012 that its actions “were in full coordination with NATO and under its umbrella.” In a statement provided to Foreign Policy, a spokesperson for NATO said “no country notified or coordinated national weapons deliveries with” the organization.
Qatar channeled many of its arms deliveries through two brothers: Ali and Ismael al-Sallabi, both Libyan Islamists with extensive connections inside the country. Ali al-Sallabi, an exiled cleric who had served time in Qaddafi’s notorious Abu Salim prison, was a longtime resident of Doha and close with Qatar’s political elite. Soon after rebels won their first significant victory, routing regime forces in Benghazi on March 20, 2011, Qatari jets began moving weapons and ammunition to Benina’s airport, just outside the city. The Sallabis’ network then parceled out materiel to rebels. (Despite widespread coverage of their involvement in gunrunning, Ali declined in an interview for this article to confirm that he directly received weapons shipments from Qatar.)
In Kubbar’s telling, fighters were having difficulty shipping weapons to western Libya, which was still firmly in Qaddafi’s hands. Qatar’s weapons handlers had no point person in Zawiya, Kubbar says, “no contact.” Thus, in early April 2011, Kubbar reached out to Ali al-Sallabi. As Libyan expats in Doha, they were neither strangers nor friends, but Kubbar says, “People from the same movement trust each other.” Once they were in touch, “everything moved so fast.” Kubbar, still in Tunisia, says Sallabi connected him with men in Benghazi who could provide the arms; Kubbar identified a boat and crew; and the first arms were shipped by late April.
Not long after the weapons were unloaded in Zawiya, thanks to the rebels in rubber boats, hostilities there escalated. On the morning of June 11, opposition fighters, some of whom had been trained clandestinely by Qatari, French, and British forces in the nearby Nafusa Mountains, swarmed the city, but it took only 24 hours for Qaddafi’s men to push back the advance. Fighting, bolstered by NATO airstrikes, continued throughout the summer, as did deliveries of Kubbar’s arms—in all, there were three by sea and two by land, he says.
On a Saturday in early August 2011, during one of only three visits he made to his family in Doha during the uprising, a rebel in Zawiya called him to say that the opposition was preparing for the final assault on Kubbar’s birthplace—and then moving on to Tripoli. “You have to come,” Kubbar recalls the man saying. So Kubbar flew to Tunisia, and by Aug. 12, he had crossed by land to his hometown. He wanted to witness freedom firsthand. Videos from the time that he has since posted online show that he traded his Western clothing for Libya’s traditional robe-like Bedouin dress and visited the families of martyrs. In one clip, with a sense of authority and religiosity he still exudes, Kubbar says, “May Allah grant victory for the rebels, repay them, hold and unite them, and win over this dictator.”
Rebels finally took full control of Zawiya on Aug. 20. Three days later, Kubbar claims that his last batch of arms arrived in the city. According to his personal tally, it included 120 cases, each containing 1,500 Kalashnikov bullets; 15 rocket- propelled grenades and 200 munitions for them; and 10 machine guns with 60 boxes of ammunition. This time, his boat was able to dock, and Kubbar says he personally witnessed the distribution of arms to fighters.
Rebels took Tripoli within a matter of days. Transitional leaders didn’t proclaim the country free until Oct. 23, 2011, when Qaddafi was found hiding in a drainpipe and was bludgeoned to death. By then, through the likes of men like the Sallabis and Kubbar, Qatar had poured at least 20,000 tons of weapons into Libya.
In the newly liberated Libya, power vacuums existed everywhere, as did self-proclaimed heroes of the revolution. Regime property was up for grabs, and Kubbar says he claimed an office in Zawiya for himself: a palatial hall once used by Qaddafi’s army deputy chief of staff. “I was the only one who channeled weapons [to Zawiya],” he recalls with bravado, “so even the warlords, they were respecting me big time.” Kubbar says he helped start and lead an NGO, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition of February 17, with the goal of restricting the political power of regime defectors. The group issued public statements and organized political meetings. Kubbar imagined his religious allies would be in power in Tripoli in no time; his mission complete, he’d then head home to Doha.
Qatar, meanwhile, also sought to maintain influence in Libya. An October 2011 Wall Street Journal article reported that Qatar’s military chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, attended a meeting in Tripoli aimed at organizing Libya’s militias. Doha also likely kept money flowing through various political proxies, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a hardened rebel commander who had trained fighters during the uprising. “Qatar’s strategy is sort of to keep these guys on retainer,” explains Frederic Wehrey, of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s not massive support, but you keep the channels open.”
Cracks quickly ran through Libya’s political facade, however. During the uprising, Qatar’s allies repeatedly clashed with the more secular defectors who dominated the National Transitional Council (NTC), the formal opposition body. The two camps had managed their tensions thanks to a common enemy. With Qaddafi gone, these factions began to attack one another in the media and in public statements. “We saw this explosion of the differences between the Islamists and the non-Islamists start to emerge,” remembers Shammam, a secular NTC member. (Despite his early appreciation of Qatar’s help, Shammam says he repeatedly warned Doha against sticking around after Qaddafi was gone.) Many religiously oriented freedom fighters, including some who had Qatar’s backing, believed Libya should look something like Turkey, a democracy run by religious moderates. Ali al-Sallabi was a key architect of this vision. Regime defectors also saw a democracy, but one that wasn’t so colored by religion.
With the political battleground firmly drawn, many of Libya’s new government officials grew intolerant of Doha’s ongoing aid to their rivals. “Qatar was among countries which have provided us with the greatest military, financial, and political support” in ousting Qaddafi, Libya’s U.N. envoy, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Shalgam, told Reuters in November 2011. “We don’t want them to spoil this great feat through meaningless acts of meddling.”
As tensions heated up, Kubbar’s NGO called for former regime figures to resign. In March 2012, Kubbar moved to Tripoli to run for Libya’s new national legislature. According to his platform, posted on Facebook, Libya should be a “moderate Muslim state” with the Quran as “our constitution and the only source of legislation.” He frequently appeared on Al Ahrar and Al Jazeera to promote his candidacy.
But disappointment followed. That July, in Libya’s first democratic election since 1964, Kubbar lost his bid. Broadly speaking, Islamists fared worse than expected. The Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Justice and Construction Party won just 10 percent of the vote. (That said, the fact that the legislature included many seats reserved for “independents” meant that, by not standing as affiliates, other members were able to get into the body; a German think-tank analysis later determined that more than half of independents in the legislature actually had ties to a political party.) Most embarrassing for Qatar was the dismal performance of al-Watan (Homeland), a party formed by rebel commander Belhaj: It failed to win a single seat.
Kubbar was stunned—and bitter. “Leave, and take your council with you,” he wrote in a Facebook diatribe against interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former justice minister under Qaddafi. “I feel nauseous whenever I see your face or read a story about you. I swear to you that the country will not be worse than it is in your presence.”
Excluded from office, Kubbar joined the self-proclaimed High Council of Libyan Revolutionaries, a national organization that, similar to his Zawiya NGO, promised to advocate on behalf of freedom fighters. (By this time, Kubbar had largely abandoned his work with the Revolutionary Youth Coalition of February 17; the organization foundered less than a year after it was created.) As the High Council’s first deputy, Kubbar fixated on the need to pass a proposed political-isolation law that would ban former regime figures from holding public office, including many former NTC leaders and two former prime ministers. The law was widely supported by the groups persecuted under Qaddafi, including tribal and Islamist figures, who hoped to secure further power in the new Libya. “I, Osama Kubbar, support all kinds of escalations,” Kubbar shouted to a crowd gathered outside the legislature in December 2012. “We don’t want this government.”
As the vote over the bill approached the following May, several militias, including ones allied with the High Council, blockaded the Foreign Affairs and Justice ministries as a not-subtle threat to anyone who might consider voting against the bill. Under duress, just four legislators out of 200 dared to do so. Kubbar was thrilled: “It was a step forward,” he said.
The morning after the law passed, Kubbar says he got a call from one of Zawiya’s rebel leaders, a man named Mohammed, who had benefited from his weapons deliveries. Mohammed asked whether Kubbar, whom he called “Dr. Osama,” could meet him at Tripoli’s harbor just a few miles from the headquarters of the High Council of Libyan Revolutionaries. Kubbar went alone and found Mohammed standing near the water.
But just as Kubbar approached on foot, a Land Cruiser drove up and Mohammed pulled a gun. “Come here,” he said, gesturing to the vehicle, where a handful of passengers revealed their own weapons. “Who sent you to kidnap me?” Kubbar remembers asking. The men stayed silent, driving Kubbar to a cell in Tripoli where he says he was kept for two days.
Kubbar won’t discuss the specifics of his captivity, including why he was eventually let go. He believes, however, he was taken in retaliation for his stance on the political-isolation law.
The kidnapping was a wake-up call. Before then, there had been few consequences for Kubbar as he openly ridiculed political opponents and encouraged takedowns of many of Libya’s new leaders. Now, he realized, Libya had changed; new rivalries were emerging, even between onetime friends, and violence was a daily risk.
So Kubbar returned to Doha, where he began working as an advisor on regional strategy for the Qatari armed forces’ Strategic Studies Centre. (He still holds the post today.) Then, alongside others in the capital city who’d once hoped revolution would bring stability, he watched as conflict sank its teeth firmly into Libya.
In May 2014, forces loyal to former army general Khalifa Haftar launched Operation Dignity, a coordinated assault against Islamist and jihadi militias in Benghazi and Tripoli. The following month, Islamists lost in national polls marred by violence and low turnout. They refused to recognize the new government, however, and instead joined several local armed groups in a loose alliance called Libya Dawn. The body declared itself in charge of the country and, by August, had retaken Tripoli from Haftar’s men. Over the following months, the two sides raced toward civil war: In the last half of 2014, between 1,000 and 2,500 people, including many noncombatants, died as a result of aerial bombardments, ground attacks, and other violence.
Today, grim circumstances persist. Militia members have ballooned into the hundreds of thousands, up from just 17,000 at the height of the 2011 uprising, according to NATO figures. No political faction can hope to control them. And new extremists have begun to stake claims. In early 2015, the Islamic State announced its arrival in the coastal city of Derna. By March, the U.S. State Department estimated the group had between 1,000 and 3,000 fighters in Libya, enough to give it a dangerous springboard into the rest of North Africa.
Foreign powers have remained enmeshed in the conflict. Haftar’s forces, for instance, have reportedly enjoyed air and material support from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Qatar, for its part, continued to support proxies until at least 2014, which likely included funneling weapons to Libya Dawn fighters, according to allegations in a 2015 U.N. report. Yet despite these efforts, Qatar has seen its clout shrink mightily as bedlam has descended on Libya. “Qatar is a curse word in Libya,” says Jason Pack, president of the consultancy Libya- Analysis. “Even in Tripoli, they don’t like the Qatari hand. [Qatar is] not somewhere you want to be associated with.”
Many of Qatar’s early beneficiaries are now only marginal players in the post-revolutionary game. Ali al-Sallabi moves between Istanbul and Doha, hosting conferences and meetings, but he says he has stepped back from politics. “There were mistakes,” he says of the revolution, including a failure to prioritize reconciliation between defectors and Islamists. Meanwhile, Shammam has returned to his former life as a journalist, opening an independent online newspaper in Cairo. His regrets echo Sallabi’s: “We could not really understand the difficulty of a transformation.”
For his part, Kubbar says he traveled to Tripoli last December and January to meet with friends in Libya Dawn—“the guys,” he calls them. The effect of the trip was deflating. “The freedom fighters,” Kubbar says, a look of disgust crossing his face, “don’t really have a vision and project for the country.”
Kubbar’s life in Doha is now built around offering commentary on Libya. He writes reports for the Qatari military, joins panel discussions, and still regularly speaks on Al Jazeera. He isn’t fond of U.N.-brokered peace talks underway to end the crisis in his home country—they leave too many doors open for regime defectors—but he also acknowledges that a bad deal may be better than no deal at all. “So many people just want a solution,” he says. “They have had enough of this chaos and need to build a country.”
In another breath, however, he speaks of returning to Libya one day and rekindling the snuffed flame of revolution. “If you have never lived under oppression, you can’t understand,” Kubbar says. “It’s loyalty to this huge investment of bloodshed and martyrs and dignity.
“You cannot really turn your back on this and say, ‘I’m going to walk away.’”