He paused, then reached to his temple and with a dramatic gesture plucked a single strand of hair from his balding head. He held it up before Qaddafi’s intrigued eyes. “What they were trying to do was to make a bubble no thicker than this hair explode. To do it, they had to squeeze it to one thousand times its normal density with a laser beam in a time so short the mind can’t imagine it.”
Qaddafi’s eyes widened. “But why did the secret of the hydrogen bomb come out of that?”
“Because with all experiments like this, the evolution of every ingredient is being constantly recorded by computer. For one tiny, tiny instant just before that little bubble exploded, it took on the one perfect configuration of a hydrogen bomb. Its secret, the exact relationship between its ingredients, is detailed here in the computer printout.”
Qaddafi rose and walked in silence to the entrance of the tent. He stood there scrutinizing the horizon, incarnadined now by the fast-rising sun.
For an instant he forgot what the scientist had just told him.
Instinctively, as he had every dawn in the desert since he was a boy, he studied the sky for some precursor foretelling the arrival of the Bedouin’s timeless enemy, the guebli, the searing wind that rose in the desolate expanse of the Sahara. When the guebli blew, death rode its wings, and man and beast huddled together, as often he had with his father’s herd, seeking protection against the onrushing clouds of sand under which whole tribes had been known to vanish.
This morning, though, the sky was a violent blue, not the silvery gray that heralded the guebli. He looked at it reassured, at the oneness of the vast canopy of sky and the endless horizons of his desert. The world stretching away from his tent was a cruel, harsh world; but it was a simple one in which choices and their consequences were clear: You crossed the sands in search of the well. You found the well and you survived. You did not and you died.
Perhaps now with what his visitor had brought him, he had reached his well, the one for which he had been searching for so many years. For a moment, standing there in the morning sunlight before reentering his tent, Qaddafi thought of the story his father had told him of the kettate, the tattooed fortuneteller, who had appeared at their campsite as his mother screamed in the pain that preceded his birth. She had gone to the tent in which the men of the tribe sipped tea waiting for the birth and shook out on a carpet the twenty-three rigidly prescribed oddments of her trade, an old coin, a shard of glass, a dried date kernel, a bone from a camel’s hoof. Then she proclaimed it would beg a boy. He would be an anointed of God, she announced, a man destined to stand out from all the others, to perform God’s work in the service of his people. She had barely finished when the first part of her prophecy was confirmed. The scream of the midwife rang out from the woman’s tent calling out the ritual phrase that greeted a newborn male: “Allah akhbar-God is great.”
Qaddafi turned back into the tent. From a copper pot he took a thick, creamy bowlful of leben, goat’s curd, and a black wad of dates, the Bedouin’s traditional breakfast. He set them on the carpet and bade his guest eat.
Dipping a date into his curds, Qaddafi pondered, as he often did, on the old woman’s prophecy and how favored indeed he was in Allah’s eyes. Allah had given him a mission, to bring His peoples back to God’s way, to re-awaken the Arab people to their true destiny, to right the wrongs that had been done to his brothers. And He had given him the means to accomplish it, the oil without which those who had so long exploited his people could not survive. To get it from him, the others had had to offer him the means to his vision: wealth, the arms he had bought, the technology he had acquired, the science his people had learned, and now this prospect his visitor had laid before him-the prospect of the ultimate power on earth.
“And, my brother,” he said to Dajani, “we can build this from these documents they brought you last night?”
“It’s a long, hard road with many, many problems. First we must finish our atomic program. There will be difficulties and risks-the danger the Israelis will find out what we are doing and destroy us before we can succeed.”
Qaddafi looked out to the desert stretching away from the tent, a distant gaze in his dark, brooding eyes. “My friend, there has never been greatness without danger. There has never been a great victory without great risks.”
He rose, indicating to Dajani that the conversation was over. “You have done well, my brother,” he said, his voice almost reverent, “ever since Allah sent you here to help us. Now, thanks to you, at last we shall make justice prevail.”
This time he walked his visitor back across the sands to his car. Gently he placed a hand on Whalid’s elbow. A faint, ironic smile crossed his features. “My brother,” he murmured, “perhaps you should not eat so many peppermints. Such things are bad for the good health God gave you.”
The vista laid bare to Muammar al-Qaddafi in his desert retreat was only the last, terrifying consequence of an enterprise the Libyan had pursued from the moment, almost, that he had seized power. Power was something the Bedouin dictator understood instinctively, and what better way to assert his claim to the leadership of a resurgent Arab world than to be the first Arab leader to arm his nation with the ultimate weapon?
Qaddafi had taken his first step on the road to his desert rendezvous in 1969, shortly after he had consolidated his revolution. He sent his Prime Minister, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking with an offer to buy half a dozen atomic bombs from China’s nuclear arsenal. Rebuffed by the Chinese, Qaddafi turned to Westinghouse with a proposal to purchase a 600-megawatt nuclear reactor to desalinize sea water for irrigating his desert. Since no one in the world knew how to do that at anything remotely approaching an economically justifiable cost, the implication that Qaddafi had other uses in mind for the plant was clear. The State Department refused to authorize the sale despite the protests of Westinghouse and its congressional lobby.
The Libyan then sought to buy an experimental reactor from Gulf General Atomic of San Diego. The reactor itself could not have been used to make an atomic bomb, but the fuel that Gulf General was ready to sell Qaddafi along with it-fully enriched uranium-was ideal bomb material. Henry Kissinger’s personal intervention was required to block that initiative.
Qaddafi’s program got into high gear after the 1973 war and his realization that Israel possessed atomic weapons. He himself picked the program’s code name, Seif al Islam-“The Sword of Islam”-and placed it under the direct control of Prime Minister Jalloud’s office. Three principles were to guide it. First, the weapons program would be carried out under the cover of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. Second, Libya would look primarily to Europe for its technology. Third, every effort would be made to staff the program with Arab scientists, men either recruited from universities and nuclear programs or trained at Libyan expense in the best universities in the world.
By the mid-seventies, the CIA began picking up indications that Libya was trying to recruit European nuclear engineers by dangling large Swiss-banked sums of money in front of them. One indication of how far the program’s tentacles could reach was the dismissal of Dr. Klaus Traube, manager of Germany’s Interatom Company responsible for research on the fast breeder reactor. Traube was revealed to have had a close relationship with Hans Joachim Klein, a young Libyan-trained terrorist who participated along with “Carlos” in the Vienna kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in December 1975.