Libyan Foreign Minister Mussa Kussa, speaking at a hotel in Tripoli on Monday, March 7, 2011, told journalists there was a Western “conspiracy” against Libya. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

(Update: Britain refused on Thursday to offer Libyan Foreign Minister Mussa Kussa immunity from prosecution after his apparent defection, but said his departure would hearten rebels fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi's regime. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the resignation of Kussa, one of the most senior members of Gaddafi's government, shows that the Libyan leader's regime is "fragmented, under pressure and crumbling.")

(CNSNews.com) – Mussa Kussa, the Libyan foreign minister who flew to Britain Wednesday and said he was defecting from the Tripoli regime, is described as a “master of international terrorism” and the man responsible for exporting Muammar Gaddafi’s revolution.

Kussa (whose name is also rendered Musa Kusa or Moussa Koussa) was Libya’s ambassador to London in 1980, but in June of that year the government expelled him after he publicly approved the sentence of a Libyan People’s Revolutionary court to kill two unidentified Libyan exiles in Britain. At the time the regime was engaged in a campaign against exiled opponents, at least two of whom had been murdered in London alone.

(Coincidentally, news of reportedly defecting Kussa’s arrival in Britain came on the same day that the British government said it was expelling five Libyan diplomats loyal to Gaddafi, on the grounds they could pose a threat to national security.)

Before he was appointed foreign minister in 2009, Kussa served as head of Gaddafi’s intelligence agency for 15 years, and he reportedly played a key role in negotiating an end to Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programs in 2003.

Back in the 1980s, Kussa was reportedly involved in shadowy intelligence-security work. In his 1992 book Target America and the West, U.S. terror researcher Yossef Bodansky wrote that Kussa headed a project launched in 1986 to escalate terrorism in Western Europe and the United States.

Bodansky described him as “a senior intelligence official who became Libya’s Vice Foreign Minister in charge of the Office for the Export of the Revolution.”

During the late 1980s Libya was implicated in two major terrorist attacks – the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, in which 270 people were killed; and the 1989 bombing of a French airliner, UTA flight 772, which went down over Niger, killing 170 people.

Libyan Foreign Minister Mussa Kussa reads a statement to foreign journalists at a hotel in Tripoli on Friday March 18, 2011. (AP Photo / Jerome Delay, file)

In 1991, Kussa was named as one of several Libyans wanted for questioning by a French investigative judge probing the UTA atrocity. While Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere did not name Kussa as a suspect, he did ask Interpol to seek him for questioning in the investigation.

A French court later sentenced six other Libyans, one of them Gaddafi’s brother-in-law Abdallah Senussi, in absentia to life imprisonment for the UTA bombing.

A 1992 article in the monthly U.S. publication Defense & Foreign Affairs’ Strategic Policy listed Kussa among the “extremists” in the Libyan power structure, and called him a “master of international terrorism, officially responsible for the Export of the Revolution.”

In a 2004 Washington Post column, former U.S senator and Democratic presidential aspirant Gary Hart recalled Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis telling him, after a 1992 visit to Libya, that Kussa was “the most dangerous man in the world.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a 30-minute meeting with Kussa on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City last September.