Libya case gets US lobbyists $2M

EDITOR'S NOTE _ An occasional look at how behind-the-scenes influence is exercised in Washington.

By ALAN FRAM

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Two decades after a bomb blew Pan Am Flight 103 from the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, the victims' families have finally received the full compensation Libya promised. And a lobbying firm that helped them collect is getting its share: A tidy $2 million.

The payout to Quinn Gillespie & Associates is rare, even for Washington's lucrative influence business. Of 18,989 reported lobbying fees collected last year, just 24 hit the $1 million mark, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which traces political influence in Washington.

A report the lobbying firm filed in January and interviews with participants illuminate a little-noticed side of the long battle the victims' families waged in Washington, including how they were guided behind the scenes by experts in the capital's ways.

Quinn Gillespie's payment covers work it did from 2006 through 2008 helping the relatives plot strategy, generate publicity and arrange meetings at the State Department and elsewhere.

The 1988 blast killed all 259 people on the jetliner, including 180 Americans, plus 11 on the ground. After extended negotiations, Libya agreed to pay restitution of $10 million to each family of a victim. Payment of the final $2 million to each family became stalled, and the families hired the lobbying firm to help them collect it.

"I was a lobbyist for 30 years, and I thought the families were our best lobbyists," said Frank Duggan, a retired attorney who helped the families and initially opposed hiring Quinn Gillespie. "It was worth it. They opened doors we could not have opened."

The Quinn Gillespie report shows the firm collected $1 million in lobbying fees, the only public disclosure the law requires. But the firm's president, J. David Hoppe, and a lawyer for the families, Douglas E. Rosenthal, confirmed that the firm collected another $1 million payment for non-lobbying work, including planning how to attract publicity for the families' cause.

The $1 million lobbying fee was the biggest the firm reported last year out of $16.2 million in lobbying income, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The contract was also unusual for lobbyists because the firm agreed to take its fee only if the relatives were fully paid, which Rosenthal said the families believed was unlikely.

Another firm, Palumbo & Cerrell, also reported a $1 million fee last year for its work lobbying Congress to help dozens of relatives win compensation from Libya for its 1986 bombing of the La Belle disco in Berlin, which was packed with U.S. soldiers. Three people, including two Americans, were killed and 230 wounded.

In August, Libya agreed to pay $1.5 billion to finish payments to the Lockerbie relatives, and to cover the La Belle families and other claims.

In the end, the lobbyists helped pressure a reluctant Bush administration to squeeze the remaining reparations out of Libya, a one-time pariah state, even as the administration seemed more interested in normalizing relations with the oil-rich North African country. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent focus on combatting terrorism, had made the Lockerbie tragedy even less of a government priority.

"People were getting burned out," said Kara Weipz , a leader of the victims' families whose brother, Rick Monetti, was among many Syracuse University students returning from London on the doomed flight. "They had the clout to get us where we needed to be."

After years of hostility, a U.S.-Libya thaw took hold in 2003 when Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi renounced terrorism and agreed to pay restitution of $2.7 billion.

By 2006 Libya was stalling on the final portion. Though they had long been helped by many lawmakers, including Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, the families retained Quinn Gillespie that January to dissuade the administration from restoring full diplomatic ties with Tripoli and removing Libya from its list of countries that sponsor terrorism, a designation that restricts foreign aid and trade.

Those moves would have meant less leverage for the families with Libya, they feared. They were also worried because many victims came from the Democratic-leaning Northeast, at a time when the families needed help from the Republican Bush administration.

"We'd kind of hit a wall," said Weipz. "We knew we definitely needed to be more bipartisan."

The lobbyists and their clients hit a setback in May 2006 when the administration announced it was restoring relations with Libya and taking it off the terrorism list.

"They had to go back to the drawing board," said Rosenthal, the attorney. "They met with the lawyers, the families and came up with the strategy of trying to affect the funding" the administration needed to mend ties with Libya.

That meant getting Congress to block money for a new U.S. embassy in Tripoli and sending an American ambassador there unless Libya agreed to compensate the Flight 103 families, pay reparations for the Berlin disco bombing and settle other claims. Lawmakers did that, using language in legislation and procedural delays that blocked bills bearing the needed money.

"This forced the administration and Libya to realize this was not something that would go away," said Hoppe.

Meanwhile, the lobbyists were arranging meetings and making phone calls to the State Department, the White House and Congress, even as Weipz and others drew publicity with interviews with local news organizations. They never could arrange a session between the families and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, though they had met her predecessor, Colin Powell.

Congress provided a carrot last summer, exempting Libya from lawsuits by terror victims once it fully paid reparations.

In August, Libya agreed to pay the final compensation, money the families said in November they had received.