In August 2010, Libyan journalist Khaled Mehiri shot an email to his editor at al-Jazeera proposing an article about the hollow nature of the Gadhafi regime's anticorruption efforts.
Before the story was even written, the regime knew about it. Libyan security agents had intercepted the email, using an Internet-surveillance system purchased from a French company, Amesys.
For months, the agents monitored the journalist's emails and Facebook messages via the Amesys tools, printing out messages and storing them in a file that The Wall Street Journal recovered in an abandoned electronic-surveillance headquarters in Tripoli.
In January 2011, as the Arab Spring was exploding in neighboring Tunisia and unrest was building in Libya, Mr. Mehiri was summoned for a face-to-face meeting with Moammar Gadhafi's intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi, who Mr. Mehiri says admonished him not to publish remarks by certain leading anti-Gadhafi activists.
The surveillance operation now is causing headaches for Amesys, a unit of French technology company Bull SA. Lawmakers from the opposition Socialist Party in France have called for a parliamentary inquiry into any role the French government might have played in facilitating Amesys's sale of equipment to Libya. Human-rights groups have filed court complaints asking French prosecutors to investigate Amesys for what the groups call possible violations of export rules and complicity in torture. Prosecutors haven't yet ruled on the requests.
The French company acknowledges it sold Web-surveillance equipment to Libya but says it has done nothing wrong. "All Amesys activities strictly adhere to the statutory and regulatory requirements of both European and French international conventions," a spokeswoman said. "We are fully prepared to answer any questions which the legal authorities may ask us."
French government officials said the presidency and the office of then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy were routinely informed of Amesys's negotiations and the subsequent contract in Libya. French authorities, however, didn't vet the Amesys export to Libya because such equipment doesn't require a special license when sold outside France, the officials said. Mr. Sarkozy, who became president in May 2007, declined to comment through a spokesman.
In statements, Amesys and parent company Bull have emphasized that Libya had become a counterterrorism ally with Western governments by 2007, when the contract was signed.
Mr. Mehiri's tangle with the Libyan surveillance apparatus shows how U.S. and European interception technology, though often exported for the stated purpose of tracking terrorists, could instead be deployed against dissidents, human-rights campaigners, journalists or everyday enemies of the state—all categories that appear in Libyan surveillance files reviewed by the Journal.
The story also underscores how the intelligence apparatus overseen by Mr. Senussi, the spy chief, invaded the lives of Libyans amid acquiescence from the West.
Mr. Mehiri calls Amesys's decision to sell Libya an invasive spying tool despite Gadhafi's history of repression "a cowardly act and a flagrant violation of human rights," adding: "To me, they are therefore directly involved in the work of the Gadhafi criminal regime."
Mr. Senussi is wanted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague on war-crimes charges for his role in the brutal crackdown against Libyan protesters this spring. About three weeks ago, forces loyal to Libya's transitional government said they had apprehended him, but the government hasn't confirmed this. His whereabouts remain unclear.
Philippe Vannier, a former head of Amesys and current chief executive of Bull, was seen in Tripoli meeting with Mr. Senussi around 2007, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bull and Mr. Vannier declined to comment on that.
Mr. Senussi was long viewed by human-rights advocates as one of Gadhafi's most ruthless operatives, suspected of a role in the assassinations of Libyan dissidents abroad. A French court in 1999 convicted him in absentia of masterminding the 1989 bombing of a French airplane in central Africa that killed 170 people.
Libyan authorities didn't make Mr. Senussi available for questioning by the French court. It is unclear whether he ever made any public statement concerning the bombing or assassinations.
Mr. Mehiri antagonized the Gadhafi regime with articles that took aim at rights abuses. He wrote about poverty that persisted despite Libya's oil wealth. He came to be considered by some an expert on a mass killing of more than 1,200 inmates in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison in June 1996, after he spent months interviewing relatives and survivors.
Mr. Mehiri, 38 years old, grew up in a small town outside the eastern city of Benghazi and studied journalism there. He worked for various Libyan media outlets, some of which were shut down. When Internet service became widespread in the country around 2004, he worked for online Arabic news outlets, including one of the top Libyan dissident sites, Libya Today. In 2007 he started writing for the website of al-Jazeera, the Arabic television channel based in Qatar.
"I had ambitions to find professional and free journalism in my country," Mr. Mehiri says. "For this reason, I decided not to leave the field and to continue my work no matter the circumstances or threats against me."
Those threats ebbed and flowed, he says. By the mid-2000s, he found himself the defendant in a series of what he calls harassment lawsuits, filed by people he said had ties to the security agencies. Human-rights lawyers came to his defense, helping him avoid stiff penalties or jail time in these cases.
In 2009, however, he was convicted of the criminal offense of working for a foreign news organization without the proper license, after a controversial interview he gave to al-Jazeera. In it, he alleged, based on his reporting about the mass prison killing, that Mr. Senussi was at the prison that day, a conclusion that groups like Human Rights Watch have also reached based on survivor testimony.
Mr. Mehiri says a prosecutor allowed him to remain free on condition he sign in each week at the central judicial office in Tripoli. Harassment by intelligence agencies increased, however, he says, including interrogation by prosecutors who said he was under investigation for spying and threatening state security—crimes punishable by death.
During this period, Gadhafi, long a pariah to Western governments, was reaping the benefits of a newfound acceptance. Libya started to come in from the cold around 2003 by relinquishing its weapons of mass destruction program, agreeing to help fight terrorism and later paying large sums to the families of terrorism victims, including those killed in the airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, for which a Libyan was convicted.
In 2007, Mr. Sarkozy welcomed Gadhafi on an official visit to France, his first in more than three decades.
The Libyan regime saw an opportunity to upgrade its surveillance capability with French technology, according to people familiar with the matter.
Amesys signed its contract with Libya that year, it said, and then in 2008 shipped its "Eagle" surveillance system and sent engineers to Libya to help set it up. The system became fully operational in 2009, the people familiar with it said.
The Libyan government now had a powerful new tool to track its adversaries. The system intercepted traffic from Libya's main Internet service provider and sent it to the monitoring center in Tripoli, which the Journal found in August after rebels overran the capital city.
There, a wall of black refrigerator-size devices inspected the Internet traffic, opening emails, divining passwords, snooping on online chats and mapping connections among various suspects. A sign on the wall in the main room gave the name, French phone number and Amesys corporate email of an Amesys employee, Renaud Roques, to call for technical help. Mr. Roques didn't respond to a request for comment. The Amesys spokeswoman said the company didn't have access to the use made of the equipment in the center.
In an adjoining room, a file on Mr. Mehiri, bound in a green folder marked with the name of Libya's internal-security service, lay amid scores of others stacked in floor-to-ceiling shelves. It shows he had been subjected to electronic surveillance at least as far back as August 2010 and as recently as last February.
The file consists of dozens of pages of emails. All feature the designation "https://eagle/interceptions" in the upper right corner, an indication that agents printed out the messages using the Eagle interception system from Amesys.
The file reveals a journalist working to document the underbelly of Libya, while struggling to fend off pressure from the regime.
In an email to a Human Rights Watch researcher, Mr. Mehiri frets about a defamation suit, which he worries could become a pretext for an arrest. In another email, he tells the researcher the date of the first hearing and updates her on the case of another Libyan journalist.
"Please do not reveal my identity because things are risky here," he writes. "We hope that you support the journalists here in Libya."
Much of the file consists of emails between Mr. Mehiri and other journalists, including editors at al-Jazeera, describing his ideas for articles. One was to be a piece about a Gadhafi son who said there was no strife in Libya. Another he planned was about how Libya was compensating victims of bombings by the Irish Republican Army, which Libya at one point helped arm, but not victims of the Libyan prison massacre.
Mr. Mehiri long suspected his communications were being monitored, but didn't confirm this until a meeting in January with a longtime source, a Gadhafi cousin and policy adviser. He says the man told him the regime had copies of his emails. "He even described the color of the text written by my editors when they were making changes in my copy," Mr. Mehiri says.
A few days later, Mr. Mehiri found himself in a confrontation with the official whose surveillance apparatus had been tracking him. He was summoned to a meeting with Mr. Senussi in Tripoli on Jan. 16. It was two days after the departure from office of Tunisia's president, Zine el Abedine Ben Ali, signaled the full explosion of the Arab Spring.
Mr. Mehiri says he showed up for the meeting in Mr. Senussi's office wearing jeans, tennis shoes and an old jacket, a sign of disrespect in his culture, because he wanted to show he wasn't scared.
The meeting lasted four hours. Mr. Senussi, a man with jet-black curly hair and small, deep-set eyes, talked about the need for reform in Libya and said the government was interested in change, but he also leveled subtle but clear threats, Mr. Mehiri says. He warned not to publish remarks by certain core activists and reminded Mr. Mehiri that he could be picked up by police at will because of his prior conviction.
"He argued about my style in covering events," Mr. Mehiri says. "I spoke about myself, my family, my profession and the origin and history of my tribe. I found out that he already knew all my personal information."
Libyan agents continued to intercept Mr. Mehiri's emails after the meeting. They printed out one he sent two days later to editors at al-Jazeera.
"Tomorrow, journalists here are holding a protest against confiscating people's properties," he wrote. "Should I send a report?"
Surveillance continued after the uprising began. On Feb. 25, Libyan agents intercepted an email sent by a Libyan law professor, Faiza al Basha, to a group that included Mr. Mehiri and employees of the U.S. State Department and a United Nations agency, in which she advocated trying to get Google Inc. to open up a live view of Libya on Google Earth that would "help us track down the security personnel and therefore inform protesters and demonstrators about the locations of the security personnel so they can avoid them." Ms. Basha confirmed making that suggestion "to help the rebels achieve the liberation."
By then, Mr. Mehiri wasn't checking his email. Though he had covered the protests the first few days after they broke out in eastern Libya on Feb. 15, he began to worry that if the regime sent troops to Benghazi, he was likely to pay for his years of criticizing it. Fearing also for his wife and young son, he put down his recorder and reporting pad and went into hiding. He stayed out of view for the rest of the war.
"When I went underground, large amounts of news discussing this crackdown was not published," Mr. Mehiri says. All along, the medium had been the message, he says: "Surveillance alone is enough to terrorize people."
Mr. Mehiri came out of hiding in September, shortly after Libya's rebels gained control of the capital. He's now back at work in Benghazi writing about Libya's political changes for al-Jazeera.
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