“The liberals will escape or be killed,” the son, Seif el-Islam el-Qaddafi, vowed in an hour-long interview that stretched past midnight. “We will do it together,” he added, wearing a newly grown beard and fingering Islamic prayer beads as he reclined on a love seat in a spare office tucked in a nearly deserted downtown hotel. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?”

The leading Islamist Mr. Qaddafi identified as his main counterpart in the talks, Ali Sallabi, acknowledged their conversations but dismissed any suggestion of an alliance. He said the Libyan Islamists supported the rebel leaders’ calls for a pluralistic democracy without the Qaddafis…

It also revealed, in Mr. Qaddafi’s avowed embrace of the Islamists, a sharp personal reversal for a man who had long styled himself as a cosmopolitan, Anglophile advocate of Western style liberal democracy. He continues to refer to the Islamists as “terrorists” and “bloody men,” and says, “We don’t trust them but we have to deal with them.”