UK’s secret mission to beat Gaddafi

By MARK URBAN
BRITISH efforts to help topple Col Gaddafi were not limited to air strikes. On the ground – and on the quiet – special forces soldiers were blending in with rebel fighters. This is the previously untold account of the crucial part they played.
The British campaign to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi’s regime had its public face – with aircraft dropping bombs, or Royal Navy ships appearing in Libyan waters, but it also had a secret aspect.
My investigations into that covert effort reveal a story of practically minded people trying to get on with the job, while all the time facing political and legal constraints imposed from London.
In the end, though, British special forces were deployed on the ground in order to help the UK’s allies – the Libyan revolutionaries often called the National Transitional Council or NTC. Those with a knowledge of the programme insist “they did a tremendous job” and contributed to the final collapse of the Gaddafi regime.
The UK’s policy for intervention evolved in a series of fits and starts, being changed at key points by events on the ground. The arguments about how far the UK should go were thrashed out in a series of meetings of the National Security Council at Downing Street. Under the chairmanship of Prime Minister David Cameron, its key members were chief of the defence staff Gen Sir David Richards, defence secretary Liam Fox and foreign secretary William Hague.
Cameron’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn was a key voice in urging action following start of the Libyan revolution last February, Whitehall insiders say.
The first significant involvement of British forces inside Libya was a rescue mission mounted a couple of weeks after the rising against Gaddafi broke out. On March 3, Royal Air Force C130 aircraft were sent to a desert airstrip at Zilla in the south of the country to rescue expatriate oil workers. Many had been threatened by gunmen and bandits.
This airlift of 150 foreigners, including about 20 Britons, to Valletta airport in Malta went smoothly, despite one of the aircraft being hit by ground fire soon after taking off.
Accompanying the flights were about two dozen men from C Squadron of the Special Boat Service (SBS), who helped secure the landing zone. It was a short-term and discreet intervention that saved the workers from risk of abduction or murder, and caused little debate in Whitehall.
Events, though, were moving chaotically and violently onwards, with the Libyan armed forces breaking up and Benghazi emerging as the centre of opposition.
The government sought to open contacts with the National Transitional Council both overtly and covertly.
It was the undercover aspect of this relationship that almost brought Britain’s wider attempt to help the revolution to grief. The Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, sought to step up communications with some of its contacts in the opposition. It was decided to send a pair of the service’s people to a town not far from Benghazi to meet one of these Libyans.
MI6, people familiar with what happened say, decided to avoid the Royal Navy frigate in Benghazi at the time, or any other obvious symbol of national power as the base for this meeting. Instead, they opted to be flown from Malta into Libya at night by Chinook helicopter in order to meet local “fixers” who would help them get to the meeting.
In planning this operation, SIS chose to use a highly sensitive arm of the special forces, E Squadron, in order to look after its people. Six members of E Squadron, which is recruited from all three Tier 1 units (SAS, SBS and Special Reconnaissance Regiment) duly boarded the Chinook to “mind” the intelligence people.
They were equipped with a variety of weapons and secured communications gear. In keeping with E Squadron’s sensitive role, they were in plain clothes or black jumpsuits (accounts vary), and carried a variety of passports.
The plan unravelled almost immediately. The landing of their helicopter aroused local curiosity.
The Libyan revolution, like many others, was accompanied by a good deal of paranoia about foreign mercenaries and spies, and the British party could not have appeared more suspicious.
They were detained and taken to Benghazi, the men on the ground having decided that to open fire would destroy the very bridge-building mission they were engaged in.
This debacle in Benghazi rapidly became even more embarrassing, as the Gaddafi government released an intercepted phone call in which a British diplomat pleaded with the NTC for the team’s release.
As a result of what happened with E Squadron, those who would advocate using special forces to help topple the regime were sidelined for months. It also caused great difficulties for MI6, which had plans to turn some key figures in Gaddafi’s inner circle.
When, on March 19, Colonel Gaddafi’s tanks were bombed as they entered Benghazi, the conflict entered a dramatically different phase. High-profile military action was under way, and the leaders of the UK, US, and France were increasingly committed to the overthrow of the Libyan leader.
But the means that could be used would be tightly limited as a result both of the unhappy experience of Iraq, and the terms of the UN resolution that had authorised the air action.
Yet, key figures in the Downing Street discussions were convinced that air strikes alone would not achieve the result they wanted. At sessions of the National Security Council, Richards and Fox made the case for planning to provide training and equipment for the revolutionary forces of the NTC.
At a meeting near the end of March, we have been told, authorisation was given to take certain steps to develop the NTC’s embryonic ground forces. This involved the immediate dispatch of a small advisory team, and the longer-term development of a “train and equip” project. Ministers were advised, say those familiar with the discussion, that this second part of the plan would take at least three months to implement.
When half a dozen British officers arrived at a seaside hotel in Benghazi at the beginning of April, they were unarmed and their role was strictly limited.
They had been told to help the NTC set up a nascent defence ministry, located in a commandeered factory on the outskirts of the city.
The first and most basic task of the advisory team was to get the various bands of Libyan fighters roaring around in armed pick-up trucks under some sort of central coordination. As reporters had discovered, most of these men had little idea of what they were doing, and soon panicked if they thought Gaddafi’s forces were attacking or outflanking them.
There were a number of legal issues preventing them giving more help.
Some Whitehall lawyers argued that any type of presence on the ground was problematic. Legal doubts were raised about arming the NTC or targeting Gaddafi.
Once the air operation was put on a proper Nato footing, these issues became even more vexed, insiders say, with the alliance saying it would not accept men on the ground “directing air strikes” in a way that some newspapers, even in late spring, were speculating was already happening.
The British government’s desire to achieve the overthrow of Gaddafi while accommodating the legal sensitivities registered by various Whitehall departments led to some frustration among those who were meant to make the policy work.
“It just seemed to me an unnecessarily muddled way of going about a business that we all knew the underlying aims of,” one said. “It was almost as if we have lost the ability to define a clear objective and go for it.”
However, the accidental bombing of NTC columns by Nato aircraft in early April provided those who wanted more direct assistance with a powerful argument.
British and French officers on the ground were permitted to co-ordinate more closely with the NTC for the purposes of “deconfliction” or preventing such accidental clashes from happening again.
Under the deconfliction rubric, British advisers made their way to places like Misrata, then under siege, where the RAF was focusing its air strikes.
The stage was set then for months of bombing which, as it progressed, both exhausted the stocks of precision weapons available to some Nato allies and the patience of many politicians for what was going on.
Insiders say that, discreetly, they were soon doing more than deconfliction, actually co-ordinating certain Nato air attacks.
Taking as his cue the March approval in principal for a training programme, Richards had started a series of low profile visits to Doha, the capital of Qatar.
This Gulf emirate had taken a leading role in backing the NTC, and its defence chief was by June brokering an agreement with the UK and France to provide material back-up as well as training for the NTC.
When, on Oct 20, Gaddafi was finally captured and then killed by NTC men, it followed Nato air strikes on a convoy of vehicles carrying leading members of the former regime as they tried to escape from Sirte early in the morning.
Had British soldiers on the ground had a hand in this? Nobody will say yet.
In keeping with its long standing policies on special forces and MI6 operations, Whitehall has refrained from public statements about the nature of assistance on the ground.
The ministry of defence reiterated that policy when asked to comment on this story.
Speaking at a public event late last year, though, Richards commented that the NTC forces “were the land element, an ‘army’ was still vital”.
He also noted that “integrating the Qataris, Emiratis and Jordanians into the operation was key”.
He did not, however, allude to the presence of more than 20 British operators on the ground.
But given that the UK’s earlier relationship with Gaddafi and his intelligence services caused great embarrassment, it could be that attention will one day focus more closely on British assistance to the NTC, particularly if the Libyan revolution comes unstuck.