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Sirte, his tribal homeland, where he planned to address the People’s Congress. He liked to pretend that he held no position in the Libyan government; that he was just the “Guide” of the revolution, a behind-the-scenes grey eminence. That allowed him to disown his own government when it was convenient; and to surprise them, by taking them in a whole new direction no one had expected. As we soon learned, it could be quite a spectacle.
    The seven American representatives were seated in the front row of the giant hall of the Libyan National People’s Congress, just to the right of the rostrum. As I surveyed the six hundred members of his rubber-stamp parliament, I also saw some unusual faces: an Iranian cleric with his retinue of trim-bearded intelligence agents, come no doubt to make sure Qaddafi didn’t spill the beans on their involvement in the Lockerbie attack; visitors from black Africa in their colorful tribal costumes; Central Asians in a variety of headgear; and Chinese in expensive European business suits.
    Suddenly the rustling in the great hall stopped. From out of nowhere, a half-dozen Qaddafi girls appeared and took up position at all the exits. They were the Guide’s famous personal security detail, trained in martial arts, and they alone would have been worth the trip. Gone were the blond East Germans Qaddafi used to employ as his personal bodyguard. Today’s Qaddafi girls were Arab and black African, and wore camo and red berets. As I looked closer, I saw that all of them had fingernails at least an inch long, coated in a deep purple gloss that looked like congealed blood.
    As a foreign diplomat remarked to me later, there was a design behind the ghoulishness. Because everyone in the hall had turned their attention to the unusual spectacle of the Qaddafi girls, no one saw the Guide himself whisk in from the wings. The next thing we knew, he was seated at the table up on the stage and was talking to us in a halting whisper.
    The performance, I learned later, was vintage Qaddafi, but with a twist. Instead of a long, rambling diatribe denouncing America and the West, Qaddafi embarked on a lengthy justification of his decision to abandon terrorism and embrace the West. And his message was unequivocal: Yesterday’s enemies were about to become Libya’s friends—or so he hoped.
    “At first, I was just listening to the speech,” California Democrat Susan Davis told me afterward, “but what he was saying was so amazing that I started writing it down so I could report to my constituents. I took twenty-four pages of notes.”
    It was a bizarre performance by any standard. For the first thirty minutes or so, Qaddafi hardly spoke above a whisper. The words we heard through our headsets appeared to be rambling, almost incoherent. He talked about Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Socrates, comparing himself to each. After he had warmed up, he launched into a brutally self-critical account of Libya’s past support for terrorist movements, and announced that those days were gone.
    Libya had helped the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the African National Congress. Now all of them had made their separate peace with their former enemies, leaving Libya behind to fight on. “Are we more Irish than the Irish?” he said. “Are we more Palestinian than the Palestinians . . . ? How can [Arafat] enter the White House and we not improve our relations with the United States?”
    It was time to turn the page, he said. And, most remarkably, at least to all the foreigners present, was the Guide’s apparent willingness to take the blame on himself. “No one separated Libya from the world community,” Qaddafi insisted. “Libya voluntarily separated itself from others” by its actions. “No one has imposed sanctions on us or punished us. We have punished ourselves.” The irony, Qaddafi stated, was that “all these things were done for the sake of others.”
    And on it went for another half hour