Libyan leader said to be hiding in hospitals by night, and many senior commanders appear to have stopped using phones
David Cameron has been told by UK intelligence that Muammar Gaddafi is increasingly paranoid, on the run, and hiding in hospitals by night with senior commanders in the regime unable to communicate with one another.
The reports from MI6 relayed to the cabinet's national security council this week prompted Cameron to authorise a high-risk escalation of attacks by agreeing in principle to deploy four Apache helicopters into Libya with orders to gun down Libyan regime leaders and assets hiding in built-up areas.
The French had leaked that Britain was likely to deploy helicopters, but the Whitehall ministerial decision was only made today.
The decision was confirmed by British officials attending the G8 summit of world leaders. Diplomatic sources, sounding more confident than at any point since the air assaults, claimed: "He is on the run."
Gaddafi's regime made its most plaintive plea yet for a ceasefire offering to talk to anti-government rebels, move towards a constitutional government, and compensate victims of the three-month conflict.
The Apaches' deployment from HMS Ocean touring off the Albanian coast will not be confirmed until they have flown over Libya. They will be joined by French helicopters under Nato command.
The Apaches, capable of flying as low as 1,000 feet and using heat-seeking missiles to destroy a vast array of targets, will require close on-the-ground co-ordination probably using UK special forces and rebel leaders. Their use has in part been necessitated by Gaddafi trying to hide his military assets in built-up areas that can only be attacked by Tornados at the risk of massive civilian casualties.
British diplomatic sources explained: "There's clearly a link between the upping of the military pressure and what we assess is his state of mind. The more he thinks things are moving against him the better. There is a picture building up of this man who is very paranoid and a regime that's increasingly feeling under pressure and is beginning to fracture.
"The judgment we are making is that that means it is the right time to turn up the heat and try to make it tell.
"What he is doing is moving from a place we won't bomb to another place we won't bomb. The fact that he is moving the whole time shows he is worried about people knowing where he is staying.
"One striking thing is the fact that Gaddafi appears to be moving from hospital to hospital and spending each night in a different hospital. We are getting the sense that a lot of senior commanders have stopped using their phones. They are clearly worried they are being listened to and that is having an impact on their ability to communicate."
Some of the growing UK pressure may be designed to see if it can extract a more serious offer of a ceasefire from the regime. So far Sarkozy, Cameron and President Obama have not viewed the repeated offers of an immediate ceasefire as serious.
The implicit threat in the use of the helicopters is that it will be easy to assassinate Gaddafi. But the French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, insisted that was not the plan. "We don't want to kill him," he said. "Because we are not killers."
Sarkozy admitted at the G8 summit that conflicts over the Nato attack on Libya were having a diplomatic spill-over. Russia's ambassador to France, Alexander Orlov, said the Nato campaign has gone "too far." As a result, he said, Russia did not intend to support a UN resolution warning Syria about its crackdown on anti-government protesters.
The offer from the Libyan regime represents an advance on previous ceasefire bids, which had focused largely on implementing a proposal by the African Union that calls for international monitors to observe a negotiated ceasefire.
Libya's prime minister Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi acknowledged that the revolt that has paralysed Libya was "part of a series of events that are taking place throughout the Arab world".
Libyan officials had previously linked the rebel groups who now control the east of the country to al-Qaida and foreign backers, and had refused to acknowledge a pro-democracy current among the rebels.
Asked about the new willingness to talk to rebels, Mahmoudi said: "We are ready for dialogue with all structures that represent the whole of Libya. Any Libyans can sit on the round table."
The plan was greeted with scepticism by the US and some European states.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/26/gaddafi-paranoid-run-cameron
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