How Gaddafi caterer helped to bring end to his regime

Abdel Majid Mlegta ran the companies that supplied meals to Libyan government departments, including the interior ministry. The catering job was easy, he said. “I built good relations with officers. I wanted to serve my country.”

But in the first few weeks of the uprising, he secretly began to work for the rebels. He recruited sympathisers at the nerve centre of the Gaddafi government, pinpointed its weak links and its command-and-control strength in Tripoli, and passed that information on to the rebel leadership on flash memory cards.

The first was handed to him, he says, by Gaddafi military intelligence and security officers. It contained information about seven key operations rooms in the capital, including internal security, the Gaddafi revolutionary committees, the popular guards – as Gaddafi’s voluntary armed militia was known – and military intelligence.

The data included names of the commanders of those units, how many people worked in each centre and how they worked, as well as crucial details such as the numberplates of their cars, and how each unit communicated with the central command led by intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi and Gaddafi’s second son, Saif al-Islam. That memory card – which Mr Mlegta later handed to Nato – provided the basis of a sophisticated plan to topple the Libyan dictator and seize Tripoli. The operation, which took months of planning, involved secretly arming rebel units inside the capital. Those units would help Nato to destroy strategic targets in the city – operation rooms, safe houses, military barracks, police stations, armoured cars, radars and telephone centres. At an agreed time, the units would rise up as rebels attacked from all sides. The rebels called the plan Operation Dawn Mermaid.

The rebels were not alone. British operatives infiltrated Tripoli and planted radio equipment to help to target air strikes and avoid killing civilians, according to US and allied sources. The French supplied training and transport for new weapons. Washington helped at a critical late point by adding two extra Predator drones over Tripoli, improving Nato’s ability to strike. Also vital, say western and rebel officials, was the covert support of Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Doha gave weapons, military training and money to the rebels.

By the time the rebels were ready for the final assault, they were so confident of success that they named the date and time of the attack: Saturday, 20 August, at 8pm, just after most people in Tripoli broke their Ramadan fast. “We didn’t make it a secret,” said Mohammed Gula, who led a pro-rebel cell in central Tripoli. “We said it out on the street.”

Planning began in April, two months into the uprising. Rebel leader Mahmoud Jibril and three other senior insurgents met in the Tunisian city of Djerba.

The three were Mr Mlegta, who by then had fled Tripoli and joined the rebels as the head of a brigade; Ahmed Mustafa al-Majbary, head of logistics and supplies; and Othman Abdel-Jalil, a scientist who became co-ordinator of the Tripoli plan.

Before he fled, Mr Mlegta had spent just under two months working inside the regime, building up a network of sympathisers. At first, 14 of Gaddafi’s officers were prepared to help. By the end there were 72. Like many, Ashkal wanted to defect, but was asked by the National Transitional Council to remain in his post where, Alhasi says, he would become instrumental in helping the rebels enter the city.

The rebel planning committee – another four men would join later – knew that the targets on the memory sticks were the key to crippling Gaddafi’s forces. The men included Hisham abu Hajar, chief commander of the Tripoli Brigade, Usama Abu Ras, who liaised with cells inside Tripoli, and Rashed Suwan, who helped financially and co-ordinated with the tribes of Tripoli to ease the rebels’ entry. According to Mlegta and to Hisham Buhagiar, a rebel colonel and the committee’s seventh member, the group initially drew up a list of 120 sites for Nato to target in the days leading up to their attack.

Rebel leaders discussed their idea with French president Nicolas Sarkozy at a meeting at the Elysee Palace on 20 April.

After presenting the rebels’ plan “from A to Z”, Mr Mlegta handed Nato officials three memory cards: the one packed with information about regime strongholds in Tripoli; another with updated information on regime sites as well as details of 65 Gaddafi officers sympatheric to the rebels who had been supplied with Nato radiophones; and a third with the plot to take Tripoli.

The leaders slimmed the 120 targets down to 82 and “assigned 2,000 armed men to go into Tripoli and 6,000 unarmed to go out [onto the streets] in the uprising”.

Morale got a boost when rebels broke into government communication channels and recorded 2,000 calls between the regime’s top leadership, including a few with Gaddafi’s sons, on everything from military orders to sex. The NTC mined the taped calls for information and broadcast some on rebel TV, which frightened the regime, according to an NTC source. “They knew then that we had infiltrated and broken into their ranks.”

British undercover personnel carried out some of the most important on-the-ground missions by allied forces before the fall of Tripoli. One of their key tasks was planting radio equipment. This involved dangerous missions to infiltrate the capital, locate targets and plant equipment so bomber planes could precisely target munitions, destroying sensitive targets without killing bystanders. Operation Dawn Mermaid was meant to begin on 10 August, according to Mohammed Gula, the political cell leader in central Tripoli. But “other cities were not yet ready”, and it was put off for a few days.

In the meantime, the rebels had captured several cities. By 17 or 18 August, recalls Gula, “when we heard that Zawiyah had fallen, and Zlitan looked like it was about to fall, and Garyan had fallen, we decided now is the time.” On 19 August, came a breakthrough: Abdel Salam Jalloud, one of the most public faces of Gaddafi’s regime, defected. Jalloud had been trying to get out for three months, according to an NTC official. The rebel leadership was ready. But Nato wanted more time. “Once they got control of Zawiyah, we were sort of expecting that they would make a strategic pause, regroup and then make the push on into Tripoli,” a senior US defence official said. “We told Nato we’re going to go anyway,” said a senior NTC official.

The signal to attack came soon after sunset on 20 August in a speech by NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil. “The noose is tightening,” he said. A “veritable bloodbath” was about to occur.Within ten minutes, rebel cells across Tripoli started moving.