Renegade US Group Wanted to Help Gadhafi—for $10M

Terrorism expert Neil Livingstone hopes to be Montana's Republican nominee for governor next year—but voters may be turned off by his involvement in a bizarre scheme to help Moammar Gadhafi get out of Libya. Livingstone and the rest of his team—a veteran CIA officer, a Republican political operative convicted of scamming a baseball PAC, a Kansas City lawyer, and a Belgian engineer—offered to find Gadhafi an escape route and a way to keep some of his billions in return for a fee of at least $10 million, the New York Times reports.

"The idea was to find them an Arabic-speaking sanctuary and let them keep some money, in return for getting out," according to Livingstone, who says the plan was aborted after the team failed to receive US government permission to receive funds from Libya. After the fall of the Gadhafi regime, however, a letter was found from the Belgian to Gadhafi offering the team's lobbying services to win US government support for the dictator. Livingstone—described in the letter as the "recognized best American anti-terrorism expert"—says he hadn't seen the letter before this week, and it greatly distorts the team's intentions. (More Moammar Gadhafi stories.)