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&lt;p&gt;Ever since it came to light that Cambridge, MA-based consultancy the Monitor Group had once represented Colonel Muammar Qaddafi&#39;s Libya, the questions have been swirling. What did the firm do there? How much were they paid? Should they have been there at all? What does this mean for the firm&#39;s reputation&amp;mdash;and for the individuals involved? Was CEO Mark Fuller&#39;s decision to step down earlier this month just a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img style=&quot;margin: 5px 10px; float: left;&quot; title=&quot;A Palestinian boy holds a poster of Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, during a rally to support a Libyan ship making its way towards Gaza in an attempt to thwart an Israeli naval blockade, in Gaza City, Monday, July 12, 2010. Credit: AP Photo/Tara Todra-Whitehill&quot; src=&quot;http://www.vault.com/VCM/blogs/Libya_protest_small.png&quot; alt=&quot;Libya poster of Saif Qaddafi&quot; width=&quot;296&quot; height=&quot;196&quot;&gt;Enter &lt;em&gt;New York&lt;/em&gt; magazine, which this week published a fascinating account of the career trajectory of one of the Colonel&#39;s children: Saif Qaddafi.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to the piece, Saif was instrumental in bringing Monitor in as advisers&amp;mdash;something he did as part of an effort to rebrand the country. It also suggests that Saif wasn&#39;t interested in just providing window dressing: it presents a portrait of a man who seems&amp;mdash;initially at least&amp;mdash;to have genuinely wanted to bring reform to Libya, and deliver some form of democracy in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;However noble his initial intentions, Saif is now, in the words of the article, &quot;the new spokesman for a congenital strain of Qaddafian dementia,&quot; having completed the journey from reformer to active participant in attempting to quash rebellion in Libya&amp;mdash;actions that have made him a man wanted by the International Criminal Court.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Back in 2004, it wasn&#39;t just Monitor that Saif brought on board to help with reform and rebranding. According to &lt;em&gt;New York&lt;/em&gt;, he also hired K Street consultancy C &amp;amp; O Partners, former Department of Energy official Randa Fahmy-Hudome, and a handful of other advisers. But, per the article, it seems that Monitor was the lynchpin of the efforts:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;em&gt; &quot;The most ambitious courtier [of Saif&#39;s ambitions to re-brand Libya] was the Monitor Group. [&amp;hellip;] Co-founder Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, began traveling to Tripoli to meet with Saif, bringing with him energy consultant and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin. In June 2004, Porter, Yergin, Fahmy-Hudome, and C &amp;amp; O head Sandra Charles attended an economic forum Saif was overseeing at Tripoli&#39;s Corinthia Hotel.&quot; &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;At that forum, we learn that the group found Saif &quot;a refreshing change from Muammar,&quot; and that Fahmy-Hudome thought it &quot;was the seminal meeting of launching the new Libya. This was the team that was going to help him do it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Viewed from that perspective, it seems that the firm was possibly just unlucky to have ended up on the wrong side of history; imagine where it--and the Middle East--could have been today had things panned out as Saif intended.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, perhaps the most striking part of the &lt;em&gt;New York&lt;/em&gt; piece is the firm&#39;s methodology. Simply put, it seems that the biggest thing the company had to offer was connections. Because the strategy&amp;mdash;well, frankly it all seems a little PR 101:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;em&gt; &quot;[I]n 2006, Porter presented the Qaddafis with a plan for the rehabilitation of the country that called for a &#39;unique model of &quot;popular capitalism&quot;&#39; starting with the energy sector, which would revive the economy and, eventually, Libyan society. Muammar could do all this, they promised, by 2019, the 50th anniversary of his coup.&quot; &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;/em&gt;Rough translation: make money from oil. Spend said money on things that will benefit your country, rather than siphoning it off for personal enrichment. Stand back and watch the country flourish. (Am I the only person hoping that Porter&#39;s deck for Qaddafi had a slide with something like &quot;stop acting like a dictator&quot; on it?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some other highlights:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; The firm&#39;s yearly fee &quot;reached $3 million.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; For that, the firm &quot;mounted an international public-relations campaign to &#39;enhance international understanding and appreciation of Libya and the contribution it has made and may continue to make to its region and to the world,&#39; according to a memo.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; Said PR campaign involved &quot;bringing to Libya a who&#39;s-who gallery of public intellectuals, including Harvard&#39;s Robert Putnam and Joseph Nye and former LSE director Anthony Giddens.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; Remember all the fuss over Facebook&#39;s PR agency trying to place negative stories about Google in the press?  That&#39;s pretty much a spin on a page out of Monitor&#39;s playbook: some of the intellectuals they hired &quot;wrote glowing stories about the new Libya in the press.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; The sleight of hand didn&#39;t stop there: the magazine reports that the firm offered to ghost a book for Muammar. The price tag: $2.4 million. &lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;All told, it&#39;s difficult to argue on the &lt;em&gt;New York&lt;/em&gt; evidence anything but the firm&#39;s assessment of its own actions, laid out in a recent statement:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;ldquo;Monitor supported, during a period of genuine promise, the processes of reform and modernization in Libya. We made some mistakes along the way.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of those mistakes: failing to disclose to Congress that it was acting as a representative for a foreign government&amp;mdash;something the company has recently said it will register retroactively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether those mistakes were what led to co-founder Mark Fuller relinquishing the chief executive&#39;s position in early May remains open to question&amp;mdash;as does the firm&#39;s future. For his part, Fuller suggested in his parting statement that the move was the culmination of a long-term strategy to &quot;establish more sustainable structures and processes, ones which would require diminished support from the Founders generally, and from me specifically.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Read More:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;New York Magazine&lt;/em&gt;: The Good Bad Son&lt;br&gt; &lt;em&gt;Roll Call:&lt;/em&gt; Monitor Group to Register Work Done for Libya, Gadhafi&lt;br&gt; &lt;em&gt;Monitor Group:&lt;/em&gt; Announcement Regarding Mark Fuller&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;--Phil Stott, Vault.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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