Monitor Group, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., is struggling to explain a multimillion-dollar contract with the Libyan government. The biggest part of the job was giving Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi an image makeover.
In 2007, TV interviewer David Frost and two academics from the U.S. and U.K. sat in a studio in Libya. As something crashed offstage, Frost faced the camera.
"Hello, and welcome to Libya in the Global Age, a conversation with Moammar Gadhafi, who we're delighted is here."
The two-hour program was part of a "Dialogue Around the Ideas of Moammar Gadhafi."
The idea came from Monitor Group, which was founded by Harvard professors. Under two contracts with the Gadhafi government, Monitor paid Western experts to fix Libya's economy and Gadhafi's image.
The foreign policy goal was to transform Gadhafi from a dictator to an "individual thinker" on questions of politics and philosophy. The fee for that service: $3 million a year.
That's according to Monitor documents leaked to Libyan dissidents and posted online.
Frost asked about direct democracy: "Was the inspiration for that Athens and the Athenians, or did you get the idea somewhere else?"
"No one has the right to have authority and power alone," Gadhafi said. "This is what I came to the conclusion of, as a result of the conflict over power throughout human history."
The final touch of the makeover would have been a big biography. Monitor Group says it's sorry it even attempted the book. But it says other parts of the contract were well-intended.
This all happened during a short golden age in U.S.-Libya relations. In 2003, Libya took responsibility for the 1988 airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, and agreed to pay the victims' families. And the U.S. opened an embassy in Tripoli.
Rutgers professor emeritus Benjamin Barber, one of the academics on the David Frost show, said on CNN this week that critics forget how things were.
"And then try to go back and rewrite history, back in 2006 and 2007, when the Bush administration was working hard to create new alliances, and say those of us who were in Libya, trying to work internally for change, is, I think, more than dangerous," Barber said.
But Dartmouth College professor Dirk Vandewalle, the author of A History of Modern Libya, says Monitor Group should have been smarter than that.
"I think very few people that had really watched Gadhafi over the years had any illusions whatsoever," Vandewalle said. "But I think there was also the feeling that in a sense there was an enormous amount of money that could certainly be made as the country opened back up."
Monitor Group never publicly disclosed any of the money it made.
The Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, says Americans need to know when foreign governments try to influence them.
William Luneburg, who teaches lobbying law at the University of Pittsburgh, said FARA was enacted to fight Nazi propaganda in the 1930s.
"Whether it's burnishing Hitler's reputation or Gadhafi's reputation, so that ultimately the United States foreign policy would be consistent with their interests, that seems to squarely sit within what FARA is about," Luneburg said.
After being shown the provisions of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, a spokesman said Monitor Group is examining that question in more detail.
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