Libya Feature: The Caterer, The Memory Stick, and the Fall of Qaddafi's Tripoli (Nakhoul)
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime was delivered by a caterer, on a memory stick.
Abdel Majid Mlegta ran the companies that supplied meals to Libyan government departments including the interior ministry. The job was "easy," he told Reuters last week. "I built good relations with officers. I wanted to serve my country."
But in the first few weeks of the uprising, he secretly began to work for the rebels. He recruited sympathizers at the nerve center of the Gaddafi government, pinpointed its weak links and its command-and-control strength in Tripoli, and passed that information onto the rebel leadership on a series of flash memory cards.
The first was handed to him, he says, by Gaddafi military intelligence and security officers. It contained information about seven key operations rooms in the capital, including internal security, the Gaddafi revolutionary committees, the popular guards --- as Gaddafi's voluntary armed militia was known -- and military intelligence.