The Professors and Qaddafi's Extreme Makeover

In 2006 and 2007, a dozen Western intellectuals traveled to the North African desert for intimate conversations with the man who likes to call himself the Brother Leader. Muammar Qaddafi received his visitors in a carpeted Bedouin-style tent, where they sat on plastic chairs and sipped tea while discussing the dictator's thoughts on economics and politics.

The meetings were arranged by the Monitor Group, a Cambridge (Mass.) consulting firm co-founded in 1983 by Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management expert. As Politico first reported on Feb. 21, the Qaddafi regime paid Monitor a fee of $3 million a year, plus expenses, to run what the firm called "a sustained, long-term program to enhance international understanding and appreciation of Libya." Monitor, which has 1,500 employees worldwide, organized roundtables and produced thick studies on stimulating business in the isolated oil state. It provided research for a PhD thesis Qaddafi's son Saif al-Islam submitted to the London School of Economics.