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you like guns?”
    “No, Grams. I don’t like big guns,” she said.
    During the Cold War, DeSutter worked at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and helped draft the State Department’s annual verification and compliance report. President George W. Bush brought her back in 2002 and made her assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance. She was sworn in that August and was thrilled to be back. They were going to kick butt.
    Over the Christmas holiday, she and her team of verifiers put together a conceptual plan of the sites, the people, and the equipment they needed to see in Libya, in order to confirm that Qaddafi’s stated intention of giving up his WMD programs was for real.
    On New Year’s Day 2004, she flew with Undersecretary of State John Bolton to London to resolve outstanding issues with their British counterparts before they sent the action team down to Libya.
    There were moments of comedy mixed with the drama. Because U.S. laws prohibited any economic exchanges with Libya—even by U.S. government officials—one of her lawyers had to “bust a piggybank” at the U.S. embassy in London to get cash to buy plane tickets for the group. Once in Libya, American Express refused to cash their Travelers Cheques. Although they had gone to Libya to dismantle Qaddafi’s secret nuclear weapons program and to take possession of his missiles and chemical weapons, AmEx wanted a special license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control so they could spend money.
    Two weeks later, team members had packed Libya’s top-secret nuclear bomb designs into an oversized briefcase and flew back to Dulles Airport in Washington, where they had expected to discreetly deliver their precious cargo to DeSutter and her verifiers out in the parking lot.
    Instead, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham sent plainclothes guards wearing bomber jackets and packing heat to the international arrivals area, who greeted them in front of incoming passengers. It was definitely not discreet, DeSutter thought. The big black case was festooned with IAEA and Energy Department high-security seals. As they frog-marched her men out to the parking lot, they looked like a bunch of kooks out of Dr. Strangelove , she remembered thinking.
    The sophisticated bomb designs were written in English and in Chinese. They were part of the nuclear bomb package that the inimitable Dr. Khan had sold the Libyans. As the verifiers went over the files, they realized that Dr. Khan had most likely sold the same package to the Iranians as well. It was so obvious that they hadn’t seen it until now.
    Iran and Libya had been feeding from the same trough, one of DeSutter’s top aides told me. The Iranians would be guilty of proliferation malpractice if they didn’t get the bomb design, too. 23
    As DeSutter told Congress that March:
    We removed several containers of uranium hexafluoride and centrifuges purchased from [the A. Q. Khan] network for the purpose of enriching uranium. We received detailed descriptions of the Libyan missile research and development activities. We removed five Scud-C missile guidance sets, including their gyroscopes. And we began assisting the Libyans in the preparation of their Chemical Weapons Convention declaration, and witnessed the first destruction of chemical munitions when three chemical munitions were destroyed. 24
    But was Qaddafi’s conversion the real thing? Or was he just playing with the United States, trying to save himself from Saddam’s fate? I had the opportunity to accompany a congressional delegation led by Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) to Libya in March 2004 to find out. There I met with Qaddafi, his senior aides, and top British, U.S., and European diplomats and learned how the United States ultimately convinced Qaddafi not just to renounce terrorism, but also to give up his clandestine weapons program.
    THE STIFF
    Qaddafi had summoned his American visitors to the new capital in