It was, however, to the explosion of India’s atomic “device” in the Rajasthan desert on May 19, 1974, that the Libyan owed his access to the secret of the atom. Pakistan’s Zulficar Ali Bhutto vowed that night that his countrymen would one day possess nuclear weapons to rival his neighbors’ even if they had “to eat grass” to get them. Given the impoverished state of Pakistan’s treasury, his might have been an idle boast had it not been for a secret deal Bhutto negotiated with Qaddafi. Its terms were simple: in return for Libya’s financing Pakistan’s purchase of a plutonium-reprocessing plant and several reactors from France, Qaddafi would receive some of the plutonium the Pakistanis intended to divert from the plant and access to their advanced nuclear technology.
That arrangement ultimately collapsed when the French, under pressure from the United States, agreed to abandon the sale.
In the meantime, Bhutto’s overthrow and subsequent execution had brought a brief chill to Libyan-Pakistani relations. The combination of Libyan financing and Pakistani technology was too promising, however, to be lost in a clash of personalities, and the original collaboration was renewed in General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq’s pursuit of the “Islamic Bomb.”
While his cooperative effort with Pakistan continued, Qaddafi also pursued his attempts to set up a purely national program. In 1976 he persuaded Jacques Chirac, then France’s Prime Minister, to sell him the nuclear reactor for desalinizing sea water the Americans had earlier refused him.
President Giscard d’Estaing quietly let the project fade until, under the pressures on France’s balance of payments created by the 1979-80 oil price rises, he reluctantly authorized the reactor’s sale.
The most dramatic confrontation in Qaddafi’s long pursuit of the atomic bomb, however, had for its setting a place as remote from the goatskin tents in which he enjoyed resting as could be imagined. It was an ornate salon in the Palace of the Czars, the Kremlin. Qaddafi’s interlocutor that December day in 1976 was not a Russian but the proudest industrial baron of the nation that had once colonized Qaddafi’s people. Who could have better symbolized the unsettled and indulgent world whose way of life was menaced by the austere visionary emerging from his deserts than Gianni Agnelli: aristocrat, playboy, heir to a technological complex as sophisticated and as powerful as any in the world, the Fiat Motor Company.
Agnelli was the supplicant that day. He had come to Moscow in secret because he needed something Qaddafi had to offer, money. Qaddafi already owned ten percent of his firm, purchased a few months before for $415
million, more than triple the market value of the shares. To an astonished Agnelli, he proposed to buy even more or release to him large investment sums if Agnelli could convert part of his company, with Soviet help, into an advanced weapons industry, including a major branch devoted to nuclear research and development.
It was a diabolical proposition. Agnelli was being asked to set an unstable nation just across the Mediterranean from his homeland on the road to weapons of mass destruction in return for the funds that might save his industrial giant from collapse. The Italian’s readiness to consider the proposition, however briefly, was one more confirmation of the premise underlying Qaddafi’s enterprise: that the day would come when, under the pressure of the energy crisis, there would be nothing in the West that was not for sale.
Whalid Dajani drove along the eucalyptus-and laurel-lined highway leading to the Libyan capital, sweating profusely, his mind still back in the desert, on the harrowing hours he’d lived since they’d brought him the transcript of Prevost’s phone call a week ago. He could feel in his stomach the ache of the ulcer his doctor had warned him he was developing.
A man is dead because of me, he thought. A man like me, who had the ideals I once had. My God, he reflected, how far I’ve come, how far away I am from what I set out to be. He saw ahead, not the highway into Tripoli, but the other terrible road on which he was embarked.
“Since Allah sent you here to help us,” Qaddafi had said. Whalid smiled bitterly. Allah had had nothing to do with it. It had been his brother Kamal and it had all begun that morning in January 1977 when Kamal had arrived in Paris.
The debarking passengers of Austrian Airlines Flight 705 from Vienna to Paris mounted the futuristic walkway of Charles de Gaulle Airport and clustered around the passport-control desk of Gate 26. Kamal Dajani was wearing a beige suede jacket and blue jeans, an Austrian Airlines carry-on bag hanging from his shoulder. A dark suntan, the product, presumably, of the ski slopes of the Tyrol, burnished his lean face and emphasized the delicate blue of his eyes.
He presented the passport oflicer at the desk an Austrian passport identifying him as Fredi Mueller, an agricultural-machinery salesman from Linz, then strolled casually into the lobby and on to the nearest men’s room.
He hesitated a moment before entering the last stall in line. He locked the door and set his airline bag on the floor. An instant later, a hand pulled it into the adjacent stall, then slid an absolutely identical bag back to his feet.
Kamal opened it up and methodically checked its contents: a Walther P-38 automatic; three magazines of 9mm. ammunition; two U.S. Army fragmentation grenades; a switchblade knife; a red guide, Paris par Arrondissement, on which he could locate his destination and the safe house whose address he had committed to memory; another set of identity papers, these French, identifying him as Mohammed Yaacef, an Algerian postgraduate student studying in France; a small vial of liquid; and, finally, five thousand French francs in assorted notes and coins. As he passed the toilet attendant on the way out, he sent a one-franc coin clattering into the saucer beside her. No need, he thought, to give her any reason to glare at him.
Forty minutes later, he got out of a taxicab at the junction of the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain at the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. He crossed the Place du Luxembourg and strolled along the iron fence of the Luxembourg Gardens down to the Rue d’Assas. There he turned left until he reached number 89 at the corner of the Rue Tavard opposite the Tarnier Maternity Clinic. The building’s ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and as Kamal climbed to the first floor he savored the odor of warm bread and fresh croissants that seemed to impregnate the dark stairwell.
He knocked at the first door on the left. Inside, he heard the thump of bare feet on wood, then felt someone staring at him through the door’s peephole. “It’s me,” he whispered in Arabic, “Kamal.”
His sister Laila opened the door. For an instant brother and sister looked at each other. Then, with half-stifled cries, they fell into each other’s arms.
“Five years,” Laila whispered. “Why so long?”
“I had no choice,” Kamal replied.
She beckoned him inside. Before closing the door, she glanced down the stairwell, making sure he had not been followed. Then she fixed the door with a double lock.
“Show me what they did to you,” Laila demanded as soon as they reached the sitting room. She was a year younger than Kamal, yet she had always managed to treat him with an air of superiority as though somehow the mere fact of having been born a female had given her a head start in life.
Grudgingly, Kamal removed his jacket and shirt. The scar along his neck ran down to an ugly tangle of scar tissue planted like the imprint of a tiger’s claw below his left shoulder blade.
Laila gasped at the sight of that most visible heritage of the career her brother had begun crawling under a screen of machine-gun fire at a training camp for commandos of the Refusal Front on a windswept plateau above Damascus.
“They told me you were dead.”