TARGET GADDAFI, AGAIN

By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

BY THE END OF 1992, DRAWING on satellite photos and reports from spies on the ground, the CIA team decided it had enough data to produce a computer model of the secret plant. When the experts gathered around a terminal at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, what they saw on the video screen took their breath away. It was a huge underground chamber of several thousand square feet, almost three stories high. Two years earlier, Washington had succeeded in an international campaign to close down Libya's chemical-weapons plant at Rabta. Now Muammar Gaddafi was building a second nerve-gas plant near the town of Tarhunah just like the one at Rabta. Only this time it was carved into the side of a mountain where no spy-satellite eyes could see the factory inside and no American jets could destroy it.

During the four years since, intelligence sources tell TIME, the U.S. government has waged an intensive covert battle to prevent Gaddafi from finishing his new factory. And to a degree, the highly secret campaign--known within the CIA as the "Rabta-II Operation"--has succeeded. Gaddafi wanted Rabta-II to be producing chemicals by last year, but construction is far behind schedule. That's because CIA officers and State Department diplomats have disrupted the global network Libya set up to smuggle in foreign workers and equipment for the project. But Clinton aides concede Gaddafi remains determined to finish the facility, and the best Washington has done as yet is delay the inevitable. Last month in congressional testimony, CIA Director John Deutch admitted that Libya was still busy building what he called "the world's largest underground chemical-weapons plant."

In 1990 Gaddafi shut down the Rabta plant after Washington threatened to attack it with warplanes and publicly identified European companies that had provided equipment. But U.S. satellites soon discovered that Rabta's equipment had been moved and stored in underground bunkers a mile away.

The next year the agency learned why. The CIA has never had much luck penetrating the inner circles of Gaddafi's government. But because Libya has few skilled workers, it imports thousands of foreign technicians for big construction projects. The agency was able to develop a network of informants among the foreign workers, and one of them now reported that Gaddafi had big plans for the Rabta hardware. Much of it would eventually be moved to a new chemical-weapons plant inside a mountain near Tarhunah. CIA spy satellites immediately began pointing their cameras at the mountain. Secret cables went out to CIA stations worldwide ordering case officers to collect intelligence from foreign firms Gaddafi might have enlisted for the project.

A former senior CIA official recalls that in early 1992 "alarm bells started ringing at the agency." Analysts feared that Libya intended the plant to have the same capacity as the original Rabta facility, which over two years produced about 100 tons of mustard gas and nerve agents. Unless destroyed, the experts concluded, the new factory could keep Gaddafi's favorite terrorists well stocked with chemical poisons for decades.

Gaddafi appeared to have received some topflight help in designing the plant so it would be virtually impregnable. CIA clandestine officers suspected that he had got hold of blueprints the former Soviet Union used to build its large network of underground bomb shelters during the cold war. Only a direct hit by a nuclear warhead on top of the mountain could take out the plant. Sneaking a conventional bomb through the front door would be impossible, and a precision-guided projectile fired from an attack jet or a cruise missile could never be programmed to twist and turn its way into the mountain's entrance and destroy the equipment inside.

The entrance is located in the middle of a long, narrow valley between two mountain peaks. A two-lane road wide enough to accommodate two tractor-trailer trucks side by side runs into the entrance. But less than a hundred feet inside, the two lanes split around a giant rock wall. The lanes rejoin on the other side into a huge chamber for the factory. Other chambers that connect to the main one are being dug. The Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees Delta Force and seal Team-6, studied the Tarhunah layout and concluded that a commando raid would be a suicide mission.

The only way to stop the Tarhunah project, the CIA decided, was to bog down its construction. Agency experts on chemical factories and tunneling used computers to build elaborate construction-flow charts that identified choke points. To buy equipment, Gaddafi had set up a purchasing network, operating through front companies and middlemen around the world. CIA and State Department officials persuaded governments in Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Denmark, Austria, Britain and Poland to stop deliveries of equipment Libya had bought from their companies.

The CIA decided that this interdiction method could also cripple some critical equipment that Gaddafi had already purchased--60-ton rotary boring machines used to tunnel into the mountain. Analysts traced them to the German manufacturer Westfalia-Becorit. The firm's executives told German officials they legally delivered the machines to a Thai company, which claimed Libya bought them to build road tunnels for a river irrigation project.

In early 1993 a CIA team marched into the offices of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and spread out before his aides their satellite photos and intelligence reports on Tarhunah. The analysts had identified a key part in the boring machines: the large bits at the front, which would quickly wear out as they cut a hole six yards high and eight yards wide into the mountain. These had to be constantly replaced. Stop the supply of spare bits, the CIA men told Kohl's advisers, and the boring machines would soon become useless. Embarrassed by revelations in 1988 that German companies had helped equip the original Rabta plant, Kohl quickly ordered Westfalia-Becorit to shut down the spare-parts pipeline.

The CIA at first thought disabling the boring machines would set the Tarhunah project back 10 years. But the agency has never had detailed intelligence on how much progress the Libyans had made with the tunneling before the drill bits wore out. Moreover, Gaddafi has skillfully found ways around Washington's roadblocks. When European sources for equipment dried up, Libya began prowling for suppliers in China, India and Southeast Asia, where export controls on chemical weapons-related equipment are loose. The State Department has found that Thai companies, operating behind their government's back, are still supplying construction workers for the plant. Westfalia-Becorit's managers say Gaddafi could even find bits from other companies. The CIA refuses to comment on whether or not he has.

The White House now believes the factory could be operating by the end of this decade. "You never stop anything like this," a U.S. intelligence source says. "You only slow it down and buy time." When time runs out, as the CIA harriers fear it will, an unstable international outlaw will have the means for limitless manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.