Heading the Libyan team was Mustapha Khaled, known as Hossan, who arrived shortly after Zawahiri's visit in September 2000. Hossan stayed two months at the Meikles Hotel in central Harare before relocating to the farms Libya had acquired in the Zanu-PF heartland of Mashonaland Central. As more Libyans arrived, they moved straight to these farms. Conscious of the growing significance of the Libyans, next time I was in Harare I managed to contact Arthur, a somewhat shadowy figure who had, he told me, left the CIO a year previously in order to join the opposition MDC-while maintaining sufficient contact with friends in the CIO to know what was going on. This somewhat equivocal position meant one not only had to go through various cloak-and-dagger contortions to meet Arthur, but it was safest to assume that he might be trading information back with the CIO. The thing about Arthur was that he kept a particularly close eye on whatever the Libyans were up to. I finally met him in a parking lot overgrown with weeds outside a bedraggled shopping center with many of the shops boarded up, a commonplace sight in today's Zimbabwe.

I asked Arthur about Hossan. "He's one of the most powerful men in Zimbabwe", he averred. "While he was staying at Meikles Hotel I stole his cell phone and checked the numbers on it: Hossan had on it all the private cell phone numbers of the whole government, including Mugabe himself. You must realize how rare that is."

Arthur had replaced the cell phone so that Hossan had never realized it was gone. "Hossan's team knows all about rough stuff. They've been providing the key training for the Green Bombers (Mugabe's youth militia)-in fact they're the ones who gave them their green "Third Chimurenga" t-shirts. They were also the source of the drugs needed to make those kids sufficiently aggressive to beat and torture people they might have regarded as friends only weeks before." This, I later discovered, was veterinary PCP, a heroin derivative-more commonly known as Angel Dust. But at that point in our talk, three other black Zimbabweans hove into view, much to Arthur's discomfort, and he made a point of greeting them elaborately and would not acknowledge me again while they remained in sight.

"The Libyans stayed close to Mugabe throughout his presidential re-election campaign [in April 2002] and were clearly under orders from Qaddafi to look after him", Arthur continued. "A big delegation-including two of Qaddafi's General People's Congress central committee members-attended Mugabe's final rally in Bulawayo. Hossan's team had orders to remain with Mugabe through the election aftermath and, should there have been enough serious trouble for it to be advisable for Mugabe to leave, they were to fly him away to Libya. Mugabe told them that in that case he would need two weeks to destroy incriminating files and other evidence in Harare."

Arthur also reminded me that when Qaddafi had passed through Harare en route to the African Union meeting in Durban, he had lectured the local Muslim Asian community on the need for them to be more militant and had even threatened to have PAGAD strong-arm men sent up from Cape Town to knock them into line if necessary. This confirmed what I had learned from other sources about a possible link between Qaddafi and PAGAD.

Arthur had reminded me to recall that almost on the eve of 9/11, Mugabe had been Qaddafi's guest in Tripoli for the 32nd anniversary of Libya's "national revolution." This stirred distant memories of reading Qaddafi's speech in the Herald on that occasion, so I set off to try to track that down. It was distinctly unsafe for me to go into the Herald building-Jonathan Moyo's hangout and the sort of place where I might well meet the Zanu-PF war vets who had tried to beat me up on my last visit to Zanu-PF headquarters-but there was nothing for it. It took me the best part of a day to overcome the endless bureaucratic and other difficulties in getting back copies of the Herald but I finally found what I wanted.

Saturday, September 1, 2001, had indeed found Mugabe in Tripoli once more as Qaddafi's guest. Qaddafi called on his assembled African allies-Sudan's President Moar Bashir, Chad's President Idriss Deby and Benin's General Mathieu Kerekou-"to support the hero, President Mugabe, since Zimbabwe is a strategic country." But Qaddafi seemed to have remained close enough to Al-Qaeda to have a pretty good idea that a major blow was about to be struck against the Americans-this was just ten days before 9/11-for he openly boasted of Bin Laden's prowess and mocked the United States for failing to catch him after the East Africa embassy bombings:

"We no longer wage war with the old weapons. Now they can fight you with electrons and viruses. The crazy world powers that have invested huge amounts of money in weapons of mass destruction have found themselves unable to fight the new strain of rebellion. As a simple example, the U.S.A. is unable to fight someone called Osama bin Laden. He is a tiny man, weighing no more than 50 kg. He has only a Kalashnikov rifle in his hands. He doesn't even wear a military uniform. He wears a jalabiyah and turban and lives in a cavern, eating stale bread. He has driven the U.S.A. crazy, more than the former Soviet Union did. Can you imagine that?"

This whole passage-quoted approvingly in the Herald-suggests strongly that Qaddafi had been in recent contact with Bin Laden, was aware of his living conditions in the caves of Afghanistan and also knew that some fiendish new strike, employing unconventional weapons, was about to hit the United States. It seems quite possible that Qaddafi imparted what he knew to Mugabe, for he must have realized that any such strike would have major implications for anyone who had been lending assistance to the likes of Zawahiri.

When the September 11 strike took place, Qaddafi quickly distanced himself from it as publicly as he could, clearly fearing U.S. reprisals. Mugabe himself said nothing-but within the CIO in Harare there was panic. "Those of us who knew about the contacts with Zawahiri were scared stiff", Walter had told me. "We thought this might be the end of everything. We had visions of b-52s over Harare. One thing I can tell you is that that whole style of suicide bombing bears the Libyan hallmark. They are the modern masters of kamikaze warfare and they have taught those who practice it all they know. None of us who spent much time in Libya had much doubt that Qaddafi's hand was present in the September 11 events."

The printing of Qaddafi's September 1 speech in the Herald had caught the eye of several MDC members, including a white farmer I knew from other contacts. "When September 11 occurred, I went back and looked at it again", he told me. "We began to wonder who represented Afghanistan in Harare." I had wondered about that myself and had driven round to where the old phone book said the embassy had been. It was empty, and no one in the Spanish embassy next door could remember when it had last been open. In the end, I discovered that the ex-ambassador, Mohammed Sahi Daneshjo, still lived in Harare. But the embassy had been closed in 1992, four years before the Taliban had come to power in Kabul. "We checked all that out too", said my white farmer friend. "But then we noticed an Afghan we call Mr. Moosa who clearly had far more clout." Moosa, who was in the motor trade, had got into a trifling dispute with a florist near his premises over parking spaces. Amazingly, the CIO immediately materialized and warned off the florist in no uncertain terms. Mr. Moosa was, they said, a very important person and under the government's protection. The same happened when some of Moosa's workers complained they had not been paid and threatened a strike. Again the CIO arrived in force to warn the workers that they had better not dream of upsetting a person enjoying President Mugabe's protection. "Quite clearly", my farmer friend told me, "Moosa has the ability to pick up the phone to the presidency or the CIO and make things happen double-quick. So we managed to get through to one of the very top people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ask him what was so special about Moosa. He confirmed that Moosa was a special case and that 'we're looking after him.' For us that was virtual confirmation that he was effectively the Taliban ambassador, perhaps even the Al-Qaeda ambassador. He clearly has a hotline to Mugabe which in turn means they have some on-going deal."

My farmer friend had organized a few fellow MDC members to take a quiet look into Moosa's affairs. His business was situated on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Harare but whenever anyone went there to buy anything from him they were always told that that item was not in stock. "We concluded it was a front company, providing a phone, fax, e-mail, a bank account and able to take delivery of containers. After a while we concluded that that was the real Taliban embassy here. They obviously wouldn't have wanted to have one openly", my farmer friend concluded.