More on BP's £200,000 a year advisor. BP has made no moves of any sort to distance itself from either Allen or his reprehensible conduct.
He likes to proclaim in his Who’s Who entry that he enjoys the arts of Islamic calligraphy and falconry in his spare time.
But one boast the veteran Arabist Sir Mark Allen is unlikely be making to the pinstriped cronies he mixes with in London’s clubland is that he was the man who brought Colonel Gaddafi in from the cold.
Or that he forged close links with Gaddafi’s son, Saif, who has a PhD from the London School of Economics, which tarnished its name accepting vast sums from the Gaddafi clan.
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As an MI6 spy, Sir Mark has for decades moved in a shadowy world that could have come from the pages of a John le Carré novel.
The 61-year-old father of two is thought to be the author of a fawning 2004 letter to Gaddafi’s ruthless former intelligence chief, Musa Kusa, discovered in an abandoned Libyan government building.
The letter appears to show that MI6 provided intelligence which led to the rendition of a Libyan dissident who was tortured.
Quite what all those other Libyans who were also tortured at Mr Kusa’s behest – he is known in Libya as the ‘fingernail-puller-in-chief’ – will make of the letter’s solicitous enquiries after the Kusa family is open to question.
Few Britons can claim to have met Gaddafi as many times as Sir Mark.
It was he who paved the way for Tony Blair to visit the dictator in Tripoli in 2004 and strike a pact with the dictator who promised to renounce weapons of mass destruction.
The deal helped secure extensive drilling rights in Libya for the oil giants BP and Shell, and it came as little surprise that Sir Mark should soon move seamlessly at around this time from the diplomatic service to become a £200,000-a-year adviser to BP.
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Working under diplomatic cover in Abu Dhabi and Cairo, he quickly developed contacts in the Arab world that were ‘second to none’. In 2003, he met Gaddafi and set in train Labour’s love-in with the tyrant. He was even said to have held a secret London meeting with Kusa, the Libyan spy chief, in the Travellers Club in Pall Mall. That summer, sanctions against the country were lifted.
But in 2004 Sir Mark quit the service early when he learned he would not be succeeding his boss Sir Richard Dearlove as head of MI6, and joined BP, although he never quite left his old diplomatic role behind.
In 2007, Sir Mark had made two telephone calls to Jack Straw, the then Justice Secretary, to discuss a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya, although BP insists it had not lobbied specifically for Megrahi’s inclusion in any deal.
It just so happened that negotiations over prisoners were blocking a £15billion oil drilling deal that Sir Mark was helping to broker between BP and the Libyan regime. Weeks after those telephone calls, Mr Straw allowed Megrahi to be part of the prison transfer agreement with Libya. It was a decision that put the White House on a collision course with the UK. And last year the American Senate Committee announced that it wanted to cross-examine the former spy over his role in the shameful affair.
In one of Sir Mark’s books, Arabs, he admits he has ‘avoided’ naming sources, adding: ‘Those who read it and see their influence in it will know how much I owe them.’ How much he owed Musa Kusa is clear from the tone of that 2004 letter.