The Daily - Qaddafi's Son is Alive, and He Wants to Take Back Libya

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

Before the Arab Spring, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the second son of the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was establishing himself as a serious figure internationally. Then, the Arab Spring came to Libya.His father and brothers were killed and Seif himself was captured by rebels and taken to the western mountains of Libya.For years, rumors have surrounded the fate of Seif. Now he has re-emerged, touting political ambitions, but where has he been and what has he learned?Guest: Robert F. Worth, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Love listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: In his first meeting with a foreign journalist in a decade, Seif al-Islam Qaddafi described his years in captivity — and hinted at a bid for Libya’s presidency.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

So in May of this year, I was in Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And one morning, my friend Tahir picked me up. He's a tall, muscular guy, bodybuilder with a very cynical sense of humor. And we drove out from the city to the outskirts near an old Qaddafi military base. This tree is new. We got out of the car. It's not new, but it's way bigger. And we walked to a warehouse. It wasn't on the wall there. I don't see see anything. That is now rusted and almost collapsed. The guards used to hang out here. Here was the kitchen, I think.

And we had come there because Taher had been held there, along with a lot of other Libyans, in 2011, during the uprising against the Qaddafi regime, which had been in power for 40 years. Tahir, can you say again who sat where and when? That corridor, guys from Zawiyat, I joined them. Here from Tawarik and Tabu. Up against the wall, there were people from Zlitin. There were a lot of them.

About 150 people were crammed into this shed and the Qaddafi guards tortured them on a daily basis for months. They would beat them, they would use electricity. They would use electricity. And the car was parked here. Right, the car where they would make you, they would put you in there and make you stay for days on end. There was a van that had a metal compartment inside it and they would take the prisoners and put them in there with no food or water for many hours, sometimes days at a time. Yeah, I sat there for nine days in the car. It was a free sauna. Tahir called it a free sauna.

It's kind of a typical cynical Tahir joke. But he eventually escaped the prison thanks to some relatives who intervened for him. And a few weeks later, the guards at that prison site got an order from higher-ups in the Qaddafi regime. And they threw hand grenades into that shed, packed with 150 people, and then they opened fire on them. Yeah, I remember when we came here,

there were corkises all over the place. They were on top of a wall. Yeah, dead bodies over here with their hands tied. It became known as one of the most horrific crimes ever committed by the Qaddafi regime in its 40 years in power. The reason I came back to the site of the massacre this year, the reason I came back to Libya at all, was because 10 years after the toppling of the Qaddafi dictatorship, one of Qaddafi's sons, who had played an important role in the regime, has reemerged from hiding and has plans to return to power.

And he has actually a real chance to take the country back. From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. In the decades since Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, the country has devolved into chaos. Now, Gaddafi's son, Saif, is plotting a political comeback. I spoke with my colleague Robert F. Wirth about Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and what his return means for Libya. It's Friday, October 22nd. So Robert, tell me about Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. So, Robert, tell me about Saif al-Islam Gaddafi.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was the son, the second son, of Muammar Gaddafi, the notorious Libyan dictator. And his father had taken power in 1969 in a coup and had really become identified completely with the country, especially to people outside of it. So Saif al-Islam grew up in the shadow of this eccentric, almost all-powerful dictator. But as he grew up, Saif gradually established this role for himself. He went to the London School of Economics. He impressed a lot of foreigners as being serious. He went to Davos. He knew the Bushes. He knew Tony Blair. He was becoming established as this figure who was different from his father, was seen as not this crazy eccentric, but as a young man who could potentially rule the country, who understood economics, who could take Libya in a new direction.

He talked about reform a lot. That was a big word for him. And so he was the guy who was supposed to bring Libya into the modern era. So in this brutal Gaddafi dictatorship, it sounds like he was kind of a rare figure. I mean, someone who might actually be able to bring change to this country after so many years of authoritarian rule.

Yes. This obviously was not going to be a full democracy. It was not going to be real democratic institutions, but kind of a neoliberal, slimmed-down version of the dictatorship, making Libya more presentable to the rest of the world. So that is what SAFE seemed to stand for. Then in 2011, the Arab Spring began, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt. At the time of the first protests broke out, Saif was not in Libya.

He was in Austria on a ski vacation, I think, and then later in London where he had a house. And he told friends that he was in favor of the protests across Arab world, that he was in favor of some kind of change, some greater democracy. And then the dictator of Tunisia was overthrown, and then the Egyptian of Tunisia was overthrown. And then the Egyptian dictator was forced out. And he, in mid-February, came back to Libya. And that's when the protests there started. They started peacefully, as they had elsewhere in the city of Benghazi in eastern

Libya. But Saif's father's regime cracked down brutally on those protests, and the protesters began to arm themselves and fight back. Things got violent pretty quickly. And so Saif soon found himself in a position where he was either going to have to be with his father's regime or against it. There was no middle ground. So what did he do? On February 20th, there was an announcement that Saif was going to give a speech. And it was a much, much anticipated speech. Some people thought that he was going to announce that his father was stepping down,

that he was going to take over. So he appeared on the screen looking very uncomfortable, hunched over, wearing a dark suit with a map of the world behind him. Today we're at a crossroads and a historical decision for us, all Libyans.

Either we agree today... And he began to talk about the protests. He described them, how they'd started, and then he began to describe them as a conspiracy. This was language his father's regime had already used. In this moment, tanks are spreading around with drunken people in the middle of Benghazi. He said the protesters were drug takers, that they were bad people.

And he began to predict. Five million people will take arms. We're not Egypt, we're not Tunisia. We will all have weapons. That if these protests were allowed to go on, if this conspiracy, as he described it, took root, Libya would head into a terrible, cataclysmic civil war. Blood will flow, rivers of blood, in all the cities of Libya.

That there would be rivers of blood, he said, that it would be tribe against tribe, town against town, even family against family. And this could have been seen as simply a prediction. Instead of crying over 84 killed people, we'll be crying over thousands. But in the context of that moment, with his father's regime already cracking down brutally on the protesters, it sounded to a lot of Libyans like a direct threat. That he was saying, if you continue with these protests, we will destroy you. Wow. I mean, he's clearly siding with his

father at this point, right? What happened? Why did he have this really sharp turnaround? Before giving that speech, Saif met with his father, and no one, I think, will ever really know what happened in that conversation. But it seems he didn't have the strength to break away. Perhaps he would have been killed, who knows? But he seems to have decided that if he was going to be with his father, he had to be all the way in. And from that point on,

he was 100% with his father's regime. Well, what happened next? Well, the country went through eight months of brutal civil war. And in August, the capital went through eight months of brutal civil war. And in August, the capital, Tripoli, which is where the Gaddafis, of course, had been based, collapsed and fell to the rebels. And Gaddafi himself and his sons and their loyalists fled. And later, there was this scene that became very famous. Gaddafi himself was captured while hiding in a drainpipe, and he was dragged out and then killed.

Two of Saif's brothers were also killed. Saif tried to flee the country to the south, but was captured by rebels who put him on a plane and flew him back to their home base, the western mountains of Libya, an area called Zintan. Okay, so Gaddafi's dead. Saif is missing. Remind us what ended up happening next in Libya. Libya, after the overthrow of the Gaddafis, went through a period of sort of dizzying moment of transition.

And for a little while, it seemed as if things might go well. There was a preparation for elections, and there were elections that took place in July of 2012. It was possible to believe then that the country was going to be on an upward arc. But it became clear pretty soon that the people who really ran things were the militias, that these were private armies, lots and lots of them. And they all had agendas of their own. And gradually, the country fell apart on multiple lines from east and west, Islamists versus non-Islamists. Pretty soon, there were two

nominal governments of Libya. At one point, there were even three countries in a state of civil war by 2014, and it just got worse. But by 2020, finally, there was a ceasefire and a government was put in place with a plan for elections in December of this year. All the same, I think it's fair to say that over the past 10 years, Libya has suffered such a brutal civil conflict and been torn in so many pieces that much of what Saif said in his infamous speech back in 2011 seems to have come true. So what happened to Saif? Saif, early on after his capture, was definitely in Zantan, this mountainous region where the group that captured him is based. There were photographs, there was proof that he was still alive up through 2014. But after that, he kind of disappeared. There were all kinds of

rumors that he had gotten married, that he had children, rumors that he was dead, had been assassinated by rivals. There were rumors that he had become more religious, that he had children, rumors that he was dead, had been assassinated by rivals. There were rumors that he had become more religious, that he'd become more serious, that in effect he'd become a different person, maybe a wiser person. And because I had covered the Arab Spring from the beginning and had spent time in Libya, and he was this central figure, I really, really wanted to find out what the truth was and to meet him in person. But he's this ghost, right? I mean, how do you get in touch with a ghost? I had spent years asking people, anyone connected with Libya, what they thought, you know, was he still alive? How would I find him? None of them seemed to know. And then I managed to get in touch with a former military contractor in the U.S.

who had known him and had stayed in touch with him. And I couldn't quite tell how serious this guy was. He lived in New Jersey. So I drove up and met him at his house. And he said, well, do you want to talk to Safe? So I said, sure. And next thing I knew, we were in this guy's kitchen on WhatsApp talking to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi.

But how did you know it was him? Well, I didn't. I mean, it sounded a lot like his voice. This is a guy who's been hundreds and hundreds of hours on Libyan television, given all kinds of speeches. So I was pretty sure it was him. And he, from the beginning, he invited me to come to Libya. After the initial conversation in New Jersey, I went home and we had a couple more phone conversations. We also exchanged a bunch of texts, mostly about

logistics, you know, because it was not a simple thing to get to Libya. So we go back and forth and he would respond and he often used emojis. It was weird. He seemed to love that. It's like a face with a monocle doing a kind of quizzical expression. That was his favorite. Wait, what was he trying to express with a face with a monocle? I don't know. It was bizarre. Everything he said was a little sort of strange and hard to interpret. But he did make very clear that he has large political ambitions. And that made me want to meet him even more to find out what had happened to him and what his plans were for Libya. what his plans were for Libya. It wasn't easy to make it happen because of Libya's civil war and all the chaos there. It took two and a half years

before we finally got the logistics together. But in the spring of this year, I finally got on a plane and made my way to Libya. We'll be right back. Robert, you fly to Libya to meet Saif. What happened when you got there? I arrived in Libya, and I get a call from this guy whose name I'd been given, Salim, and he says, I'll pick you up tomorrow morning.

So I got up with a photographer I was working with, Jihad Nga. And this guy was in this beat-up sedan. We get into it, and he starts driving off. We said a few words to him, but almost nothing. And we thought, you know, we'd get there, and it turned out to be either we were captured by ISIS or it was some kind of elaborate con game. I mean, we just, we were nervous. We didn't know what was going to happen. So this guy, Salem, drives us out of the city and we drive through the desert. We get to the mountains. There's steep switchbacks. There's steep switchbacks. And then the driver pulls over and a big white SUV pulls up behind us.

Uh-oh. So we get into the back of this big white SUV and there's one guy in the front. And this guy drives without saying a word to us. But after only about 20 minutes, he goes down this lane and then there's this beautiful, sumptuous villa. And we walk to the door. We're led by the driver. The door opens and I hear this voice saying, welcome.

And I walk in and there he is. He was wearing this big gown as if he were some grand sheikh. And he had a big beard but it was definitely him and he greeted us and the house was empty there didn't seem to be anybody else in it as far as we could tell he led us into this living room i turned on my audio recorder and there was this sort of odd moment i mean just kind of strange pause, because after all, two and a half years to reach this guy, and there he was. I had to sit for a moment and think, what am I going to ask him? So let me start.

You know, it's amazing to me. I know people, many people in Libya. They think you're dead. They don't know if you're alive. Yes. Can you tell me, I mean, just a basic question. What is your status? You're no longer a prisoner? Yeah, I'm a free person right now, of course.

And, you know, I can move freely to a certain extent inside the country because of the security reasons. I can move, but of course not everywhere, anytime. He said he was not a captive. He said he'd been free for a couple of years. But initially he had indeed been a prisoner. Yeah. A special one.

Special prisoner. He'd been kept in a couple of places. One of them was in a kind of cave where there were no windows. He couldn't see the sun. Very, very small places, he described it. But I think his captors were always very pragmatic about this, that they saw him as a playing card. They figured they could sell him, literally sell him for a lot of money

because he was a wanted figure. I mean, he was wanted, you know, by all kinds of people. But I think as Libya's civil war raged and the country fell apart, I think these guys realized that they still had a playing card, but it was a different kind of playing card, that Saif actually could be a viable political leader. And if so, he would be with them, right? I mean, they would have been the people who had protected him all this time. And how do you see your future in the country? Are you planning to run for office?

And how do you see yourself participating in public life in Libya? Well, now we are like, how can I say it? Now we are a political group in the country. So we have our influence, our weight, and we are preparing ourselves to participate in the coming election. And he made very clear that he's spent a lot of his time building up a political movement.

But for myself, personally, to participate, I think it's too early right now to decide, for different reasons. He was coy with me about whether he's actually going to run for president, but I think he is. And in any case, he's networking behind the scenes, he's backing candidates, and it's clear that he's planning a return to power of some kind.

And that was why I was there. He invited me to Libya to interview him because he saw this as a way to reintroduce himself to the rest of the world. But does he really have a chance to return to power? There's very limited polling data in Libya, and they're not very reliable. You can imagine how difficult it is to do solid polling of any kind in such a war-torn, fragmented country. But there have been some, and they suggest quite a bit of support for SAFE. In one part of the country, in the south, there was a poll suggesting that 57% of people have strong confidence in SAFE, much higher numbers than other public figures or even institutions.

And that's in accord with a lot of what I heard. I spoke to many, many people in Libya when I was there in May. And it's funny, people would say, almost in the same breath, that they weren't sure he was even alive or that they thought he might be dead, but I'll vote for him. So who is Saif Gaddafi now, though?

I mean, which version are Libyans actually getting? Do you think you've changed as a person? Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. I don't think he's learned much of anything during his years of exile. Is it possible to say how? How? With many things. Many things. He hasn't reflected deeply on the meaning of the revolution.

He didn't seem to have much sympathy for ordinary Libyans. And all of a sudden they became snakes. They attacked us and they stabbed us in our backs. And they were like devils. He saw even the aspirations of the people who went into the streets in 2011, who were, after all, asking for something, anything better than what they had,

better than a brutal dictatorship, right? And he had no sympathy for those aspirations whatsoever. Let me ask you this. Are there things, the decisions your father made, that were wrong? I mean, after all, he was in power for a long time. What would you, if you had to criticize something about his decisions over his whole time in power, which ones would you say would you criticize?

I asked him several times about his father and gave him the opportunity to say, to make any kind of criticisms. Maybe some socialist reforms in the 80s. Yeah. And he realized this, by the way, afterwards. And we started, like, giving back those, you know, contractors and businessmen, back their assets and their companies. He made only the tiniest, most formal criticisms

that some of his father's economic policies were mistaken, but that his father then had recognized their mistakes were made and corrected those mistakes. And are you, are there also times when you are critical of your own, or your father? Do you think that there was a failure to move far enough with reform before 2011 came? Maybe, you know, the reforms didn't move as quickly as we wanted, of course. But it was moving. It was moving. Didn't move as quickly as we wanted, of course. But it was moving.

You know, it was moving. Everything was okay. Maybe not very fast, but fast enough. So he was really idealizing his father and essentially saying that everything had been a mistake. He was going to pick up where things left off 10 years ago and deliver a better future for the country. If the Libyans choose a strong president, the only thing is a strong president.

That's it. The Libyans will choose a strong one. So everything will be solved automatically. It's as simple as that. And that he had the authority to rebuild the state, which of course is a vast, vast and difficult enterprise. He made it sound simple. At one point, I asked him about a really humbling experience

he went through when, at the end of 2011, his father's regime has collapsed and he was on the run. And at that point, he was utterly dependent on ordinary Libyans. At that time, in order to survive, he was dependent on them to shelter him. I wanted to know if that experience changed his perspective. And he seemed surprised by the question. He said, changed his perspective. And he seemed surprised by the question. He said, we're like fish and the Libyan people are like a sea for us.

That's where we get support. That's where we hide. The Libyan people are our ocean. I was really struck by that. It just seemed to make so clear that this guy, even after this decade in the wilderness, living almost entirely

alone and having had these humbling experiences, still thinks of himself as part of this really royal family, utterly different and apart and somehow born to rule. So he'd essentially learned nothing. That was my sense. And I was even in curious sort of, you know, on a personal level, who is this guy? Tell me about your life since 2011. Yes. What has your life been like since then? I mean, are you married?

No. So is it a lonely life you're living? Yes, unfortunately. So I said, what do you do every day? When you get up, what do you do? Well, I spend a lot of time reading and writing. Yeah? What are you working on? Anything special, a project?

Yes. Yes. What is it? In English. The word in English. Oh, I think Ipocrates. Ipocrates. Is this partly about your experience? Yes. Inshallah it's going to be a good book.

I will send you a copy. I asked him, do you read? He said, yeah, I read. Is there any books that I would recognize that you... Oh. Oh, a lot. Yeah. A lot.

When I then said, what do you read, he seemed surprised by the question. And I think he still has the habits of a dictator's son where he expects people to fawn over him. You know, it's like, oh, he reads. He reads how wonderful, you know. You know, Robert Greene, a writer, Robert Greene. I don't think I know Robert Greene. Yeah.

He wrote books about the war, about mastery, about how to. Robert Greene, he's from San Francisco. He wrote very five books. Very good books, by the way. He said a contemporary writer named Robert Greene, who writes these books about how to be a success and get laid, he just seemed like a callow figure who was focused on his own success and his own viability and his own visions of revenge.

It's just not a portrait of a reformer at all. You carry the legacy of your father. Is it good or bad in terms of your connections with the Libyan people? What's the, I mean, has it changed? Of course it's good because this is my asset. This is the asset I'm using right now. I think he probably understands that he's not an inspiring character, that he doesn't have the ability to bring a lot of people with him, that he, what he really, all he has is his father's legacy. But tell me how that worked. worked so people people at that time were blaming your father did they took the war what what made them realize that there was it was a different legacy than they thought the the people and after 10 years they realize everything it was a mistake it was a big mistake yeah it was a big mistake the world so uh he's not not a a single Libyan who is happy right now.

I think he knows that Libyans want this notion of someone who hasn't been involved in all of the massacres and the corruption and all the terrible things that have gone on for the past 10 years. It's been 10 years, you said. You didn't have an interview. Yes. You were staying quiet for, on purpose, right? Quiet, quiet. On purpose. Yeah. Tell me why. Yeah, because many cats are fighting each other now. So they are fighting.

And they want to bother them. You're waiting for the moment, the right moment. Yes. I start telling you a lot of secrets, by the way. Good. So I think he understands that his mystery is a big part of his appeal for Libyans, that if he were to go on the airwaves and be accessible every day,

that would actually diminish his magnetism. When are you going to publish it? Probably about two months. Two months? Yeah, so if there's changes in Libya, I can... When the interview wrapped up, it was time to take pictures. But Saif began to sort of hide his face with a cloth. He kept turning to the side.

And finally, I asked him what was it all about. He said he wanted the pictures to convey this impression that, you know, it's recognizable, it's Saif, but he's not clear. He's like a phantom, like a spirit. And he then said, I've been away from the Libyan people for 10 years. You need to come back slowly, like a striptease. And he even laughed. He said, you need to play with their minds a little. Hmm.

So if all he has is his mystique and his father's name, what does it tell you about Libya that he might have a real shot at this? I think it tells you something about the desperation of people who've seen their country torn to shreds over the past 10 years, that there's some nostalgia for this perhaps imagined stability and calm of what came before. There are plenty of people still, I should say, who remember the horrors, the atrocities of the Qaddafi regime, like my friend Tahir, who brought me to the site of that massacre that took place 10 years ago. But you have to remember also that there are many young people who barely remember the events of the revolution. And what they remember is just everything they've seen over the past 10 years, all the corruption, all the killing.

And for people like that, they desperately want something different. When your country's been reduced, almost literally, to cinders and ashes, you'll take almost any alternative, even if that means Seyf al-Islam Gaddafi. Thank you, Robert. Thank you for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Ali, Harvey Ali, age 25 and from North London, has been charged with murder. On Thursday, British police identified a 25-year-old man they say was responsible for the death of a conservative lawmaker, David Amos. Prosecutors charged Ali Harbi Ali, a British citizen of Somali heritage, with murder, and said he attacked Amos because the lawmaker had voted for airstrikes on Syria. They said Ali had, quote, both religious and ideological motivations and will be prosecuted as a terrorist. And the White House and congressional Democrats are moving toward abandoning their plan to raise corporate and individual income tax rates as a way to pay for President Biden's social spending package. pay for President Biden's social spending package. Democrats are backing away from the plan at the urging of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a moderate Democrat from Arizona, who is opposed raising

either rate. Instead, Democrats are drafting a plan that includes new ways to tax the wealthy and multinational corporations, which cinema seems to support. Today's episode was produced by Daniel Guimet and Aastha Chaturvedi, with help from Jessica Chung and Rochelle Bonja. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Alicia Baitube,

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.