Week in Review

Mubarak in Houston

It’s always a thrill to sit down with the leader of an important country, no matter how many times you have done it, and our interview last week with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was no exception.

Mr. Mubarak had twice previously given exclusive interviews to The Washington Times, both times at his presidential palace in Cairo.

The first came about seven years ago: The Egyptian Embassy in Washington had been offering the interview for weeks but unable to provide a date. The call finally came on a Monday, asking, “Can you be in Cairo on Thursday?” Once in Cairo, I was kept waiting for another two days while Mr. Mubarak conducted talks with his neighbor, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

U.S. intelligence at the time had discovered that Libya had excavated a huge chamber in a mountainside and feared it was to be used for a nuclear-weapons program. The Americans had gone so far as to threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on the facility if they were not permitted to inspect it.

The night before the interview, I was invited to dinner by a senior aide to Mr. Mubarak, who was at pains to make sure I would ask about the president’s talks with Col. Gadhafi. The question was already at the top of my list.

Even so, I was startled by the answer.

“That Gadhafi, you know he is a Bedouin,” Mr. Mubarak confided with a chuckle. “But I know how to talk to him.” The president went on to tell me — entirely on the record — that Col. Gadhafi had indeed been planning to conduct a nuclear-weapons program inside the mountainside but that he, Mr. Mubarak, had succeeded in talking him out of it.

Egyptian inspection teams had already been to Libya to inspect the facility, he continued, saying that while a huge cave had indeed been tunneled into the mountain, no equipment had yet been installed.

The story made a big splash in Washington, with the New York Times and The Washington Post sending reporters to see Mr. Mubarak the following day. The president told them both that his inspectors had been inside the excavation and found it empty, but refused to confirm to them that Col. Gadhafi had planned to install a nuclear facility.

If Mr. Mubarak’s purpose was to let official Washington know it need not worry about Col. Gadhafi’s excavation, he succeeded, because the issue died quickly after that. But I wonder to this day why he chose The Washington Times as the messenger.

A welcome offer

Our second interview with Mr. Mubarak came not long after the September 11 attacks, and again made news.

This time the president stressed his own personal war against terrorism in Egypt, noting that he had called for an international conference on the subject some 50 times even before the al Qaeda strikes in the United States.

The catchy angle, though, was a claim that the terrorist group had sleeper cells in America, and the story caused a minor stir in newspaper and television reports across the country for a day or two.

With that history in mind, I was more than happy to travel to Houston for another interview with Mr. Mubarak on the day after his talks with President Bush in Crawford, Texas.

White House reporter Joseph Curl was already in Texas with Mr. Bush and, having covered the two leaders’ joint press conference a day earlier, was an obvious choice to sit in. Photographer Mary F. Calvert stopped in on her way to another assignment in Los Angeles.

We went into the interview assuming Mr. Mubarak once again had a message he wanted to send to Washington.

I had thought it would have something to do with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza, but he had little to add to what had been at the previous day’s press conference.

What had not been reported was that he had offered to train large numbers of police for Iraq. Mr. Curl checked with the White House and was told the offer was being considered favorably.

With concern running high about the poor performance of Iraqi police over the previous couple of weeks, we had another newsy lead on which to hang a story.

• David W. Jones is the foreign editor of The Washington Times. His e-mail address is djones@washingtontimes.com.