Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, meeting in the dead of night in his capital with officers from the US Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, appeared eager to do away with his weapons programs, US officials said on Saturday.

　　Those secret meetings over recent months led to Friday's surprise announcement that Libya would cease work on its programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, including an effort to refine uranium for use in nuclear devices, the officials said.

　　The United States and Britain portrayed the announcement as a significant breakthrough in their efforts to curtail the spread of such weapons and keep them from a terrorist organization or hostile country.

　　It is clear, however, that Gadhafi has tried in recent years to ease tensions with the West, and this step was expected to further improve Libya's international standing.

　　Gadhafi initiated the talks and the subsequent onsite inspections in March after he agreed to settle the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, with cash payments and an admission of complicity.

　　US President Bush said the ouster and capture of Saddam Hussein and US efforts to check weapons pursuits by North Korea and Iran played a role in Gadhafi's decision.

　　Gadhafi's son said on Saturday his father went ahead after receiving assurances that the United States was not plotting against him. Libya also claimed it had acted on its own to serve as an inspiration for the rest of the world.

　　Most significant among the discoveries was that Libya had built a working centrifuge for uranium enrichment. To make weapons-grade uranium, a raw form of the substance can be passed through a series of centrifuges that slowly create a product capable of nuclear fission.

　　Such programs need hundreds of centrifuges, called a cascade, to make significant quantities of uranium over a reasonable time. The inspection teams saw only one or a few centrifuges, and the Libyans denied that any enriched uranium had been produced.

　　The intelligence officials refused to say how Libya obtained centrifuge technology.

　　Gadhafi was described as agreeable, laying out proposals for disarming and allowing inspections. He provided information about Libyan weapons programs that Western intelligence agencies had been unaware of.