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July 2, 2012

Gadhafi-Era Spy Tactics Quietly Restarted in Libya

By MARGARET COKER in Tripoli, Libya, and PAUL SONNE in London

Libya's caretaker government has quietly reactivated some of the interception equipment that fallen dictator Moammar Gadhafi once used to spy on his opponents.

The surveillance equipment has been used in recent months to track the phone calls and online communications of Gadhafi loyalists, according to two government officials and a security official. Two officials say they have seen dozens of phone or Internet-chat transcripts detailing conversations between Gadhafi supporters. One person said he reviewed the transcript of at least one phone call between Saadi Gadhafi, the exiled son of the former dictator, and one of his followers inside Libya. Saadi Gadhafi, who is in Niger, couldn't be reached for comment.

Libya is among the post-Arab Spring nations grappling with a difficult question as they move toward democracy: Whether or not to use the security tools left behind by former dictators. Libya plans elections this Saturday.

One of the government's main security concerns is to keep the country safe from a pro-Gadhafi counterrevolution. The risk is that Libya could follow a pattern seen in other post-authoritarian countries, from Russia to Iraq, in which new leaders weaken the rule of law in the interest of power or stability.

Since Gadhafi's overthrow in a bloody conflict last year, Libya's caretaker government has created two new national-security agencies--one called Preventive Security, for domestic intelligence, and one called Foreign Security, for operations abroad.

The effort is headed by 50-year-old Salem al-Hasi, a long-exiled anti-Gadhafi activist and Islamic scholar who, in just months, has gone from working as a language teacher at a U.S. military college in Georgia to serving as Libya's new national intelligence chief.

Electronic surveillance is a sensitive subject for Libya's new leaders. In an interview, Mr. Hasi's deputy denied that Libya has put Gadhafi-era surveillance gear to use. "We don't have the staff or know-how to do this," said Mustafa Nu'ah, the deputy, in a brief phone interview.

Mr. Hasi didn't respond to requests for comment.

Two government officials and a high-ranking security official, however, confirmed that such operations have begun. These people say they receive routine security briefings, including readouts of intercepted phone calls and Internet chats. One of the officials said he has seen "dozens" of intelligence files of suspected Gadhafi loyalists plotting against the new government. They declined to explain the process or criteria used to decide whether someone is placed under surveillance or considered a threat.

Many in Libya's caretaker authority--the National Transitional Council, or NTC--said the value of the tools is obvious. Ahead of the anniversary of the country's uprising, for example, officials went on heightened alert and switched on phone-interception equipment, fearing an attack by Gadhafi loyalists, according to one individual with knowledge of the matter.

Some Libyan activists say the lack of transparency on security issues suggests a shaky commitment to the rule of law. "In a few short months, the NTC has shown a pattern of creating bad laws that breach human rights," says Elham Saudi, a British-trained lawyer and head of the nongovernmental group Lawyers for Justice in Libya, the group that the International Criminal Court worked with to gather evidence of possible war crimes by Gadhafi. "The lack of respect for rule of law is astonishing."

There are some signs the new government is defining potential enemies of the state in a way that reaches beyond the former dictator's family members or henchmen. "The revolution must use all means necessary to rid the country of enemies," says Adel al-Morsi, who in April became the commander of the Tripoli branch office of Preventative Security. He says his definition of security threats includes schoolteachers who don't let children sing the new national anthem and businessmen who became wealthy in Gadhafi's time.

Mr. Hasi was appointed by the NTC, Libya's unelected caretaker parliament. It remains unclear whether he will be required to resubmit his candidacy after this week's planned elections. The vote will be the first since before Gadhafi seized power in his own revolution in 1969.

In some of his only public statements since taking his new job, he acknowledged the lingering toxic effects of Gadhafi's police state and emphasized his commitment to reform. There is a "long way to go" before Libya can "put the security services at the service of the state, not the rulers," Mr. Hasi said in a February interview with the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.

Since taking power last fall, the caretaker government has aggressively sought to root out Gadhafi sympathizers. An organization called the Committee for Integrity and Patriotism, for instance, vetted election candidates for ties to the former regime and has excluded at least 320 of them from running, or roughly 7% of all candidates who registered.

The committee didn't respond to requests for comment and hasn't made public the reasons for blocking candidates.

The NTC also passed a law that, among other things, prohibits acts that "glorify" the former regime. The Libyan Supreme Court has ruled the law unconstitutional, but it is unclear how the court can enforce the decision. NTC members say such strict laws are necessary in the current period of political upheaval.

In another episode, a regional militia that arrested Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam Gadhafi recently detained a legal team visiting from the International Criminal Court at The Hague for allegedly passing the younger Gadhafi a letter containing coded communications. The younger Mr. Gadhafi is wanted on war crimes by the court at The Hague, but Libya wants to try him inside the country instead. The ICC, which called the detention illegal and a violation of attorney-client rights, said Monday that its staff had been released after nearly a month in detention.

Ajami al-Ateri, a spokesman for the regional militia, said the ICC team's work was "not in the national interest" of Libya.

Gadhafi's police state cast a dark shadow over his nearly 42 years in power. Libyan assassins roamed the globe, killing exiled political dissidents. Opponents who remained inside the North African country say Gadhafi used arbitrary arrests and torture to terrorize them.

More recently, Gadhafi quelled dissent with help from secret electronic surveillance tools, which were first documented in detail last summer by The Wall Street Journal. The equipment, sold to the Gadhafi regime by companies in France, China and South Africa, allowed Libyan agents to monitor phones and capture email and Internet chats.

Intelligence files recovered and reviewed last year by the Journal showed that many of Gadhafi's surveillance targets were Libyan human-rights activists and people critical of the dictator or his family. Much of the equipment was switched off last year, when Gadhafi was fighting for survival, and stayed dark until at least last autumn, according to people familiar with the situation.

But by the end of 2011, security chaos was spreading. Hundreds of local militias acting as vigilante gangs set up makeshift prisons and instituted business shakedowns. Human-rights groups estimate that upward of 3,000 people remain jailed by militias without judicial review.

The caretaker leaders blamed unrest on pro-Gadhafi insurgents. Some Libyan militia commanders began lobbying for access to Gadhafi-era phone taps and Internet interception equipment.

Mr. Morsi, a 42-year-old former semiprofessional soccer player from Benghazi who was jailed five times by Gadhafi's secret police, says he has seen several transcripts of monitored phone calls and Internet chats showing that dissidents are plotting an armed insurgency with exiled Gadhafi family members. "We won't be safe until they are all eliminated," he said.

He declined to confirm or deny whether Gadhafi-era security equipment was back in use.

The full breadth and depth of the current intelligence operations across Libya are unknown. It isn't clear how much of the old surveillance apparatus has been reactivated.

One person familiar with the setup said some of the online tapping devices have been removed from Libya's main Internet service provider since the regime's fall. At the same time, the number and type of people subject to interceptions isn't clear, nor is the process by which people are deemed targets. People with knowledge of the operations declined to say whether they led to arrests.

Senior government officials bristle at the suggestion that any new Libyan security official would abuse his power. "The people who are now taking care of government are patriots and heroes," said Amin Belhaj, a member of the NTC's security committee who supports electronic surveillance. "They are devoted to changing the country for the better." Included on Mr. Belhaj's list of heroes is Mr. Hasi.

Mr. Hasi, originally from the Libyan town of Shahat, is known for his onetime membership in the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, a 1980s-era anti-Gadhafi group that had ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a book by Bob Woodward on CIA history. In 1984, the group tried and failed to assassinate Gadhafi. Some of the members, including Mr. Hasi, moved to the U.S.

From 1997 to 2000, Mr. Hasi worked as an assistant manager at a soccer-equipment store in Roswell, Ga., according to a résumé he posted on his website. He later opened a flier and brochure-making business in the Atlanta area, the website says.

He also kept up with events in Libya and volunteered at Amnesty International, where he served as an expert on North Africa from 2004 until the end of last year, according to a spokeswoman for the nonprofit. She described Mr. Hasi as a long-standing human-rights activist.

Eventually, Mr. Hasi settled on teaching Arabic continuing-education classes at Atlanta-based Emory University. In 2009 he started an Arabic program at North Georgia College & State University, one of the U.S.'s six senior military colleges. Most students he taught were military cadets.

"He was a very regal, respectful, calm presence who really had a knack for teaching," said D. Brian Mann, department head for foreign languages at North Georgia. Mr. Mann said some students "were practically in tears to see him go," but they understood his motivation. "Obviously he had this on his mind for 30 years."

Within the Libyan-American expatriate community, Mr. Hasi is known as a devout Muslim. He wrote theological commentary for a popular Cairo-based online Islamic forum for English-speaking Muslims. Queries he answered range from the esoteric--such as "Was Eve made of the rib of Adam?"--to those of a political nature.

In a spring 2003 post discussing what Islamic law said about the treatment of U.S. soldiers taken hostage in Iraq, he wrote that mistreatment was forbidden. "It is safe to say that if any prisoner of war was mistreated, as revenge or for any other reason, then he/she was treated against the guidelines of Islam on this particular issue," his post said.

Mr. Mann says Mr. Hasi requested a leave of absence and left for Libya, for the first time in years, around early September 2011. Around that time, rebels had ousted Gadhafi from Tripoli. Mr. Hasi told his boss he wanted to see his sick mother and aid his brothers who were fighting in the uprising.

He didn't return to teaching. In December 2011, he called his boss to say he wouldn't be coming back to teach because he had been offered a high-level position in the Libyan government. In February, Libya's 71-member parliamentary body voted Mr. Hasi into the security job.

He returned to the U.S. around that time and stopped in to see Mr. Mann. "He was still the same Salem, but he just carried himself a bit differently," Mr. Mann said.

In his interview in the Arab-language newspaper, Mr. Hasi credited his selection to the ideas he presented about reforming Libya's security agencies. "I hope God will help us to get rid of the image and the bad reputation the Libyan security services had in the world," he said in the published remarks. He described turning Libya's security apparatus "into civilized services at the service of the country, based on the protection of the country and the citizens."

Write to Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com and Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com