There might not be a better book to read, to get a handle on what Washington means about 'national security' then Coleman's account of the Lockerbie tragedy....
TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS
FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE
INSIDE THE DIA
BY DONALD GODDARD
WITH LESTER K COLEMAN
Foreword:
Spies are not encouraged to keep diaries, send memos or make carbon copies of reports. If they attract suspicion,
'deniability' is their only hope.
But if a spy is cut off by his own country, deniability works like a hangman's noose. With no written record to
call on and no access to official files, he must rely for the most part on memory to defend himself, so that, in the
end, it usually comes down to his word against his government's.
This can give rise to questions of credibility -- a troublesome factor in intelligence work at the best of times. At
the worst of times, it can kill. With most people disposed to give those in authority the benefit of the doubt, why
should anybody believe him? If spies are trained to lie, deceive and dissemble, they may argue, how can we
accept what he says without proof?
No one in modern times has suffered more from this presumption of guilt than Lester Knox Coleman III, until
recently a secret agent of the United States' Defense Intelligence Agency.
His crime was to find himself in possession of information of such acute embarrassment to the American
government and, to a lesser extent, the governments of Britain and Germany, that officials in Washington were
unwilling to rely solely on his discretion. Though he had given them no cause to question his loyalty, the stakes
were so high they felt they needed insurance, and so sought to muzzle him by means of a trumped-up criminal
charge, to be suspended in exchange for his silence. This procedure had always worked well in similar cases,
particularly when combined with other forms of intimidation, like death threats against the agent and his family.
But when Coleman failed to cave in as expected and instead escaped to Sweden with his wife and children, he
presented his government with an awkward problem. No longer in a position to enforce his silence, and
unwilling to risk a public extradition hearing in a neutral court, Washington decided instead to try to defuse the
explosive potential of what he knew by destroying his character and reputation. If it could not stop him talking, it
could at least try to stop people believing what he said.
In this, it was more successful, although the irony is that, if the American government had trusted its own
security vetting system in the first place, the problem would probably not have arisen. Coleman would have
revealed nothing of what he knew; this book would not have been written, and America would have avoided the
embarrassment that is now inescapable. By misjudging its own man, Washington brought about the very
situation it was most anxious to avoid.
After more than two years on the run from America's state security apparatus, the 'octopus', Coleman believes
that the lives and safety of his young family now depend on 'going public', on telling his story to the only jury
left that can save him.
I hope he is right.
This is the first time that a fully-fledged Western intelligence agent has come in from the field and publicly
debriefed himself, right down to the nuts and bolts of his various missions. That would be interesting enough in
itself, but in Coleman's case, his testimony is also sharply at variance with the official version of events leading
up to the Lockerbie disaster, with official accounts of Anglo-American attempts to secure the release of Western
hostages in Beirut, with the official line on Lt. Colonel Oliver North and Irangate, and, in general, with the
official gloss on Western policy in the Middle East since 1985.
As this is a personal story, Coleman is naturally the primary source for it. Such documents as he does possess,
and others that have come to light, not only support his version of events, but also reflect a paranoid
determination on Washington's part to destroy him that may, in itself, be a measure of his truthfulness. Certainly
no one, in or out of government, has cared to attack the substance of what he has had to say, other than with flat
denials; nor have I, or has anyone else, so far identified in his story more than a few minor discrepancies of the
kind that must inevitably occur in anybody's mostly unaided recollection of a complicated life, and whose
absence would tend to undermine its credibility rather than reinforce it.
In any disputed account of events, the test is always, who benefits?
In this case, not Lester Coleman. Sticking to his story has him a penniless fugitive whose life probably depends
on establishing the truth.
Corroboration there has been in plenty. Besides the sources identified in the text, I should also like to thank those
many others, mostly in law enforcement and government service on both sides of the Atlantic, who would not
thank me if I broke my promise of anonymity. These are difficult times for bureaucrats still attached to the idea
of accountable government.
I am also obliged to Pan Am's attorneys for declining to help me with my researches, thereby -- I hope -- denying
room to those government supporters who might otherwise wish to accuse me, as they did Time magazine, of
conspiring with the airline to pervert the course of justice.
More positively, in the matter of research, I am indebted to Katarina Shelley for her diligence and enterprise; to
Carol, for making the book possible anyway, and, for his unshakable faith in the enterprise, to Mark Lucas, of
Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, who had to work harder than either of us had bargained for to bring Lester Coleman in
from the cold.
D.G.
August 1993
Chapter 1:
All governments lie, some more than others. To protect themselves or 'the national interest', American
governments lie more than most.
The story of Washington's blackest lie in modern times began, typically, with a bureaucratic blunder. In the
spring of 1988, Special Agent Michael T. Hurley, the Drug Enforcement Administration's attache to the
American Embassy in Cyprus, was given a clear warning by an American intelligence agent that security had
been breached in a 'sting' operation the DEA had mounted against Lebanese drug traffickers running heroin into
the United States via Nicosia, Frankfurt and London.
Seven months later, on 21 December 1988, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am Flight 103 from
Frankfurt to New York, killing all 259 passengers and crew. Eleven more people died on the ground as the
wreckage of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, Maid of the Seas, rained down on the Scottish border town of Lockerbie.
Among the victims were at least two, possibly five or more, American intelligence agents, who had disregarded
standing orders by choosing to fly home from Beirut on an American-flag airline, and a DEA Lebanese/American
courier who had previously carried out at least three controlled deliveries of heroin to Detroit as part
of the 'sting'.
Those involved in this operation, along with those who had authorized, condoned or used it for other purposes,
recognized at once that their neglect of the warning in May had cost 270 lives, that terrorists had slipped through
the reported breach in security and converted a controlled delivery of heroin into the controlled delivery of a
bomb -- probably in revenge for the 290 lives lost in July when the US cruiser Vincennes had shot down an
Iranian Airbus 'by mistake'.
The US government would lie about that catastrophic blunder, too, but the more immediate problem was the
Lockerbie disaster. Like a woodlouse sensing danger, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) rolled up in
an armor-plated ball to protect its bureaucratic ass.
This worked, more or less, for two years, but the problem refused to go away. When the DEA's obduracy began
to attract as many embarrassing questions as it deflected, the agency started to lie, with the grudging connivance
of the intelligence community and the ungrudging assistance of the Bush administration.
It lied to the media and the public, of course, but it also lied to Congress. And the more it lied, the harder it got to
keep the story straight.
For one thing, there was the problem of the intelligence agent who had warned Hurley about the disaster waiting
to happen months before the downing of Flight 103. Like most of his colleagues in the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), Lester Knox Coleman III had found little to admire in the work of the DEA overseas.
And for another thing, there was the problem of Pan Am and its insurers, who had commissioned their own
investigation into the disaster. The more they picked up about the DEA connection, the less they felt inclined to
pick up what was beginning to look like a $7-billion tab.
For those watching the situation from Washington, a recurring nightmare was that these two problems might
come together like match and tinder; that Coleman would meet up with Pan Am's attorneys and tell them what
he knew. Because if that happened, they might between them start a fire that would blacken the reputation, not
just of the DEA, but of the United States itself. If the truth came out, it would not only undermine America's role
as moral and political exemplar to the world, but inflict intolerable damage on its policy objectives in the Middle
East.
The risk was simply not acceptable. The 'national interest' now required the DEA sting never to have happened,
and Lester Knox Coleman III not to exist -- at least as a credible witness.
It was a job for what Coleman had come to think of as 'the octopus' -- America's state security apparatus.
***
Nothing feels right at four in the morning.
He frowned at the ceiling, trying to recall what had woken him. Careful not to disturb Mary-Claude, he slipped
out of bed to look at the babies.
They were sound asleep -- the seven-month-old twins, Joshua and Chad, sprawled in their crib like abandoned
dolls, so quiet he bent over them suddenly to make sure they were breathing, and Sarah, curled up like a tiny
blonde edition of her mother. He watched until she stirred and sighed, threatening to wake, and tiptoed away.
Still restless, he pulled on a T-shirt and shorts and went downstairs to the refrigerator. It was probably nothing --
just the usual uneasiness in the final days before a mission. And worse this time, for he had been out of it for two
years, since May 1988, when Control had called him home after Tony Asmar's murder in Beirut and the row
with Hurley.
After a two-year lay-off, the adrenalin had naturally started to surge again at the prospect of reentering the
bloody arena of Lebanese politics, particularly as Operation Shakespeare was probably the most sensitive
assignment the DIA had yet given him. Also, he was still not comfortable with the idea of using his alias on the
first leg of the journey.
He had never done that before. It was a sensible precaution if the intention was not to alert the Israelis or if the
general sloppiness of the DEA in Cyprus had set him up as a target, like Asmar, but it still bothered him. It was
one thing to return to the Middle East as Lester Coleman, award-winning TV and radio newsman, and quite
another to arrive without antecedents or connections as Thomas Leavy, American businessman.
And anyway, why couldn't Control just have given him a passport in the name of Thomas Leavy instead of
getting him to apply for a real one, using his phony papers? The agency had always been good with documents.
Needing air, he opened the casement doors to the balcony. Except for a vulgar canopy of stars and the faint fuzz
of phosphorescence along the beach where the waters of the Gulf lapped ashore, the night was velvet black, and
so still his ears sang in the silence.
He loved this place, out of season. While waiting for a lull in the fighting in Beirut, he had decided to take the
family away on holiday, renting the last in a row of beach-house condominiums at the edge of Fort Morgan
National Seashore Park, a beautiful stretch of the Alabama coast, near the Florida state line. As it was only 2
May, there was no one else around, apart from a nice enough young fellow just down the street, holidaying there
on his own.
He had wondered about that, too.
Disinclined to go back to bed, Coleman stretched out on the couch and reached for the file he had put together on
General Michel Aoun, the Maronite Christian commander of the Lebanese Army and the country's acting
President. Having persuaded Aoun to receive him and Peter Arnett in the shell-shattered ruins of the presidential
palace at Baabda, he needed to be on top of every nuance in Lebanon's murderous factionalism if he was to stay
on afterwards and begin to explore Aoun's constituency in the maelstrom of Beirut, the support he was getting
from the Israelis, and in particular, his military alliance with Saddam Hussein against the Syrian army of occupation. Control had received reports that the Iraqi forces were getting ready to pull out, and wanted to know
why.
He woke again, with a start, around seven. Somebody was hammering on the front door. It was light now, and he
went through to the kitchen, which overlooked the street, to see who it was. As he looked out, a young man in a
blue FBI windbreaker glanced up from below, hand on holster, and tried to hide behind a telephone pole.
Coleman pulled back from the sliding glass door, and tried to think. What now? What possible reason could
there be for an early-morning visit from the FBI? Some inter-agency training gimmick to pep him up after a twoyear
lay-off? Some far-out psychological game, maybe to test the solidity of his cover story before the mission
got started?
The hammering began again, and that made him angry. If they kept this up, they would wake the children.
Whatever was going on, Control had no right to bother his family. Ignoring the commotion, he went upstairs and
gently shook Mary-Claude awake. Brought up in East Beirut during the civil war, she had learned to sleep
through almost anything, even artillery bombardments,
'Oh, God,' she groaned, shaking him off. 'What's the matter?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'There's somebody downstairs trying to get in.'
It was a moment before this registered. 'Oh, my God,' She sat up, wide-eyed with alarm, 'Have you called the
police?'
'No, no,' He shook his head. 'I don't know what they want, but I think it's the FBI.'
'The FBI?' She was bewildered. He had never told her he worked for the American government, and like a good
Lebanese wife she had never questioned him, but she had always known he was a spy. 'Why are they here? Have
you done something wrong?'
Before he could think of anything reassuring to say, the hammering at the door began again.
'Oh, my God.'
'No, don't worry,' he said. 'It's a mistake. They probably came to the wrong house. I'll take care of it.'
'We have to open up, right? I mean, maybe they'll go away.'
'No.' He pulled himself together. 'Get dressed. See to the children. I'll go find out what this is all about.'
He returned to the kitchen, dragged open the sliding glass door and stepped out on the balcony. The agent he had
seen before was no longer hiding behind the pole, but before Coleman could challenge him, a woman in an FBI
windbreaker emerged from the car port under the house and looked up at him, also hand on holster.
'Are you Lester Knox Coleman?' she asked.
'Yes.'
'This is the FBI. We have a warrant for your arrest.'
'Oh, really?' He took a deep breath to steady himself. 'Is this a joke? What for?'
'If you'll open the door, Mr. Coleman,' she said, 'we'll be glad to talk to you about it. Do you mind opening the
door?'
'No, no,' he said. 'I'll be happy to open the door. Just wait a minute.'
He went inside again, fumbled with the locks and stood back, bracing himself as a third agent, older than the
other two, flung open the door and grabbed him. Offering no resistance, Coleman allowed himself to be spun
around, jammed up against the wall and patted down. His arms were then pulled out behind him and handcuffed
together.
'You're under arrest,' announced the agent.
'Yes,' he said. 'So I see. Now would somebody mind telling me why?'
Joined at this point by his colleagues, the agent turned him around to face them.
'I'm Special Agent Lesley Behrens,' the woman said, 'I have a warrant here, issued in Chicago. You're charged
with making a false statement on a passport application.'
He frowned, trying to cope with a sudden inkling of what the onset of madness might be like.
Thinking about it afterwards, in a filthy cell in Mobile City Jail, he could recall very little of what passed
between them after that. They seated him on a stool at the bar. They asked him routine questions, to which he
presumably responded with routine answers, but nothing registered.
Unable to withstand more than a split-second glimpse of such fathomless duplicity, all he seemed able to do was
shake his head. The sudden collapse of every certainty in life was too much to grasp all at once. Each time he
braced himself to consider his position, his mind simply tripped its overload switch.
It got going again when Mary-Claude appeared on the stairs with Sarah, who had started to cry. Trapped by her
Lebanese upbringing between loyalty to the family and respect for authority, his wife smiled down on them
uncertainly.
'Hi,' she said.
Then she saw the handcuffs, and all softness of manner disappeared. 'What is this?' she demanded, looking about
her as though for a weapon. 'What's the problem here? What are you doing to my husband?'
'No problem,' he said easily, knowing how headstrong she could be. 'It's a mistake, that's all. Somebody's made a
mistake.'
'Mistake?' She advanced down the stairs, Sarah clutching her hand and now crying in earnest. 'Why are you
treating him like this? This is my journalist husband that I'm so proud of. What has he done?'
Mary-Claude's English -- her third language, after Arabic and French -- sometimes fractured under stress, but her
outrage was plain enough. They all began to talk at once, except for the older agent, who gave Sarah a smile,
trying to coax one from her in return.
Still passionately demanding an explanation from Special Agent Behrens, Mary-Claude suddenly noticed that in
her hurry to get dressed she had left the front of her shorts undone, and stopped in mid-flight.
'I'm sorry,' she muttered, turning away to zip them up.
Her sudden embarrassment gave Agent Behrens a chance to resume command. She ordered Mary-Claude to go
back to the bedroom to look for her husband's papers -- all she could find -- and bring them downstairs.
Mary-Claude hesitated, unable to catch Coleman's eye as Behrens was standing between them, then did as she
was told, rather than risk making matters worse for him out of mere stubbornness.
He watched her go. Though still in free fall, he had already begun to doubt that Control had played any part in
this. After months of painstaking preparation for a mission of obvious importance, that made no sense at all.
Therefore, it had to be the DIA. No other agency, apart from his own, even knew of his other identity. Except the
CIA, of course, which had always worked in lockstep with the DEA in Cyprus and had actually supplied him
with his Thomas Leavy birth certificate in the first place.
'Oh, my God,' he said, losing his way again.
It was no use talking to Behrens and her partners. They obviously knew nothing, and he could certainly tell them
nothing. It was up to Control to straighten this out. Somebody at Arlington Hall or the Pentagon had to pick up
the phone and have a quiet word with the director of the FBI and that would be the end of it. Although there
wasn't much time. He was due to leave in two days. If they tangled him up with all the formalities of arrest and
arraignment and insisted on shipping him back to Chicago, they could blow the whole operation.
'Look,' he said, in case there was just an outside chance he could fix this himself. 'Maybe there's something I can
help you with here. I mean, I can't tell you much except that something is seriously wrong and somebody is
going to get into a helluva lot of trouble, but I think you might be interested in that stuff.'
He nodded toward the videotape cassette on the table, next to his file on Aoun, his passport and his wallet
containing the Thomas Leavy birth certificate. He had spliced the tape together as a record of his tour of duty on
secondment to the DEA in Cyprus. There was some interesting footage on Lebanese dope trafficking, some
narcotic reports he had compiled, media clips on the subject, and, at the end, an audio recording of his last
telephone conversation with Hurley before coming home, a conversation that not only warned him about 'the
disaster waiting to happen', but clearly indicated that he worked for another government agency.
'Why don't we take that along with us?' he suggested.
'We'll take anything you want to give us,' said Behrens.
And that was interesting, too. He was getting a better grip on this now. So far, they had made no attempt to
search the house, although with an arrest warrant they were legally entitled to do so, and no one had escorted
Mary-Claude upstairs to make sure she didn't dispose of incriminating evidence. So what kind of charade was
this anyway? They hadn't even read him his rights. Was it a DIA game after all? To see if he'd crack under
pressure?
Mary-Claude reappeared on the stairs.
'I'm sorry,' she said defiantly. 'I can't find his papers. I can't find anything.'
He smiled at her, and nodded his approval.
'Are you sure?' asked Agent Behrens coldly. She advanced to the foot of the stairs. 'They're not down here. There
must be something. What about his pockets? Have you looked in his pockets?'
Mary-Claude retreated a pace, afraid they would come up and search the bedroom themselves. 'All right,' she
said. The twins were awake now, and screaming for attention. 'All right, I'll look again.'
'Okay.' Behrens turned back to the others. 'Take him out to the car,' she said. 'I'll be with you in a minute.'
Coleman offered no resistance as they took him by the arms. Whatever this was -- a training set-up, a DEA setup
or a bureaucratic foul-up -- the game had to be played to a finish. If the operation was cancelled or delayed, it
wouldn't be his fault.
'I'll be back shortly, Mary-Claude,' he called out after her. 'Don't worry. Call the lawyer. Call Boohaker. He'll
know what to do.'
Mary-Claude closed the bedroom door behind her and tried to pacify the twins, but they were hungry and cried
all the harder.
'Why am I so nervous?' she asked them, getting mad. 'I am a citizen. I have my rights. This is my house. I don't
have to give her anything. I must calm down and go tell her to get the hell out of here. Then I'll come back and
get your bottles ready.'
She marched downstairs, pointedly ignoring Special Agent Behrens, and picked up the phone.
'Who are you calling?' Behrens asked.
'I'm not going to give you anything,' said Mary-Claude. 'And I'm not going to answer any of your questions. I'm
calling my lawyer. I don't know what's right, what's wrong, and I want my lawyer's suggestion. '
'Okay.' Behrens considered her for a moment. 'Okay, don't bother. I'm going now.'
As the door closed behind her, Mary-Claude put down the phone. She could not think straight, what with the
shock, the twins bawling for food and Sarah pulling at her shorts, asking 'Where did Poppy go?' In an unfamiliar
house, in a country she hardly knew, thousands of miles from her family, with her husband suddenly taken away,
and three babies to care for, she had never felt more lonely and frightened in her life.
She was so rattled she used the wrong measuring cup for the twins' formula and had to mix it all over again.
Then, after each had finished his bottle, she paced up and down, waiting for them to settle before she called
Boohaker, who was shocked to hear what had happened. He promised to do the best he could and to call her
back when he had some news.
Rather than sit around watching the telephone, she got the children dressed and put them in the car, with the idea
of going to the market to buy a few things they needed. She was about to drive off when, as an afterthought, she
went back into the house for Coleman's papers, in case the FBI decided to break in and get them while she was
away.
By the time Mary-Claude returned from the market, about an hour later, the idea of keeping his papers from
prying eyes had become an obsession. If the FBI was so eager to have them, it could only mean they would do
her husband harm if the agents got hold of them. She put her now sleepy children to bed and, except for
Coleman's clothes, carried everything of his she could find into the bathroom.
With no way of knowing what was harmful and what was not, she tore all his papers into shreds, including his
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadcast engineer's license, and chopped his ID cards into pieces,
hurting her hand with the scissors. Not sure what to do next, she then made a heap of everything in the bathtub
and set light to it.
Watching the smoke rise, she felt that even the war in Lebanon had been easier to live through than this. In a
war, you knew that anything could happen at any time, but you also knew there was nothing you could do about
it. Now, for all she knew, her husband's fate might rest with her. She wrung her hands and was still trying to
decide if there was anything else she ought to do when the smoke set off the fire alarm.
'Oh, my God, what is this?'
She rocked back and forth in despair until she realized what she had done. Jumping up to shut off the alarm
before its noise woke the children, she turned on the shower to put out the flames, and in a tearful fury flung the
sodden remains into the toilet and flushed them away. Only then did she notice the marks that the fire had left in
the bathtub. As she scrubbed away at them hopelessly, that seemed like the saddest thing of all somehow.
Meanwhile, Coleman was still grappling with bewilderment in the back of the car. Within days of leaving on a
mission of national importance, an operation that might well affect the whole course of US strategy in the
Middle East, he was riding into Mobile between two FBI agents to answer a trumped-up passport charge? It was
crazy.
'You want to share the joke with us?' Behrens asked.
'No, I don't think so. It's only funny if you know the whole story.'
'Then why don't you tell us about it? You got a passport already. Why in the world would you want another one?
In another name?'
'Hell, I don't know. I'm a journalist, right? Maybe I was researching a story about how easy it is to get false
identification.'
'Well, now you know it's not that easy,' she said. 'If that's true, you should have got authorization first.'
'Yeah. And you should have read me my rights first.'
The older agent sighed. 'Okay,' he said tiredly. 'Read him his rights.'
'Fine, but why don't we all get more comfortable?'
Coleman handed them the handcuffs. For an amateur magician of his calibre, it was a simple enough escape
trick. You just had to flex your wrists in a certain way as they were fastened on.
The government was not amused. Its agents put the handcuffs back on. Tighter.
'Oh, come on,' said Coleman. 'You know this is bullshit. What's it all about?'
Chapter 2:
The agents couldn't tell him because they didn't know but it was about the terrorist attack that destroyed Pan Am
Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
Given a limited capacity for moral outrage and a steady diet of sanitized brutality in the media, people can show
an alarming tolerance for atrocities that do not affect them directly. More die every day from 'ethnic cleansing' in
the Balkans or from genocide in Iraq or starvation in the Horn of Africa than the 270 who died on 21 December
1988, when Flight 103 went down, but there was something so utterly desolating about that particular mass
murder that almost everyone in the Western world felt they were affected. Just as the whole Muslim world had
felt affected earlier in July when 290 pilgrims on an Iranian Airbus died in the twinkling of a SAM from the USS
Vincennes.
Perhaps it was because the victims were so completely unprepared. It was just before Christmas -- a season, if
not always of goodwill, then at least of less ill will. A sentimental time, with people more open, more vulnerable.
Traditionally, a time for families to reunite and celebrate their children and remind themselves of what life is all
about -not for families to be savagely torn apart and the bodies of their children strewn across the ground.
The young people who boarded Flight 103 were in high spirits. Thirty-five of them were students of Syracuse
University looking forward to getting home for Christmas, and the mood was infectious. Even before Captain
James MacQuarrie lifted the 747 off from Heathrow's runway 27L at 18.25 hours, they had a party going. The
holidays had begun.
Half an hour into the flight, just north of Manchester, the Maid of the Seas leveled off at 31,000 feet, preparing
to swing out over the Atlantic on the long great circle route across the ocean. Drinks were being served.
Passengers moved about in the cabin, although when seated they had been advised to keep their seatbelts on
because of some light turbulence. Mothers settled their babies. People eased off their shoes, making themselves
more comfortable. When would dinner be served? What was the movie? Warm and enclosed against the night,
no one could have known their last minutes were draining away. No one was ready.
The bomb went off in the cargo hold a few seconds before 19.03.
Everybody would have heard it. Though only a small bomb, it punched a hole in the fuselage and put out the
lights. Then they would have known -just a fraction before the shock waves, the explosive decompression and an
airspeed of 500 miles per hour wrenched the aircraft to pieces.
All alone in the dark, as a shrieking, roaring wind stripped the cabin bare, then they would have known, those
who were still alive. Whirled out into the frozen void, lungs bursting, then they would have known.
Six miles up and falling through space, the actual stuff of nightmare, then they would have known, those still
aware. It would be two to three minutes yet before the earth received them ...
It was a terrible way to die.
The victims on the ground were even less prepared. Far below in Lockerbie, the streets were quiet, spangled with
colored lights from Christmas trees in front-room windows. Families were sitting down to an evening meal or
watching television, relaxing after the day ...
Scything out of the night sky, the wings of the aircraft, loaded with a hundred tons of fuel, exploded on impact at
the end of Sherwood Crescent, cremating 11 people in an awesome orange fireball that rose slowly to a thousand
feet.
Death had never been more arbitrary, nor any crime more wicked.
The truth about Flight 103 will probably never be known in all its particulars. Too many people have tampered
with the evidence. Too many people have lied about it or stayed silent. Too much remains hidden behind the
cloak of national security and legal privilege. Even the facts that are not in dispute have been used to support
theories at total variance from one another, according to the degree of culpability to be concealed or the political
requirements of the governments concerned.
But if the whole truth is never likely to he known, enough of it has emerged from the fog of lies and evasion to
point a finger at those responsible. And there may still be other witnesses who, like Lester Coleman at the time
of his arrest, have yet to realize that they hold a piece of the evidence, pinning the guilt down more precisely.
It is now widely accepted that the sequence of events leading to the Lockerbie disaster began on 3 July 1988, in
the Persian Gulf. While sailing in Iranian territorial waters, the US Aegis-class cruiser Vincennes somehow
mistook a commercial Iranian Airbus that had just taken off from Bandar Abbas airport for an Iranian F14
fighter closing in to attack and shot it down, killing all 290 passengers on board, most of them pilgrims on their
way to Mecca.
Predictably, the United States government not only sought to excuse this blunder but lied to Congress about it,
lied in its official investigation of the incident, and handed out a Commendation Medal to the ship's air-warfare
coordinator for his 'heroic achievement'. (Although he earned nothing but notoriety for the kill, the cruiser's
commander, Capt. Will Rogers III, still insists that the Vincennes was in international waters at the time, and that
he made the proper decision. After being beached in San Diego for a decent interval, he was allowed to retire
honorably in August 1991.)
The Iranians were incensed. Paying the US Navy the compliment of believing that it knew what it was doing, they chose to construe America's evasive response to their complaint before the UN Security Council as a cover up for a deliberate act of aggression rather than as an attempt to hide its embarrassment. (They were already smarting from what they perceived to be America's failure to honor its secret arms-for-hostages deal.)
To reaffirm the power of Islam, and in retribution for the injury, the Ayatollah Khomeini himself is said to have ordered the destruction of not one, but four American-flag airliners. But discreetly. Not even the most implacable defender of an unforgiving faith could afford to provoke an open war with 'the Great Satan', particularly at a time when he was obliged to look to the West for technology and trade to rebuild an Iranian economy all but shattered by the long war with Iraq.
His minister of the interior, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was placed in charge of planning Iran's revenge. At a meeting in Tehran on 9 July 1988, he awarded the contract to Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army officer and head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), based in Damascus. Although Jibril later denied his complicity in the bombing, he was reported to have bragged privately that the fee for the job was $10 million. Unnamed US government sources let it be known that the CIA had traced wire transfers of the money to Jibril's secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Spain.)
Certainly, his terrorist credentials were not in dispute.
In 1970, the PFLP-GC had blown up a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, killing 47 passengers and crew, and had only narrowly failed to destroy an Austrian Airlines flight on the same day. The bomb malfunctioned.
Two years later, in August 1972, the pilot of an EI Al flght from Rome to Tel Aviv managed to make an emergency landing after a PFLP-GC bomb exploded in the cabin at 14,000 feet, injuring several passengers. And later on, Jibril's terrorist cell in West Germany succeeded in exploding bombs aboard two American military trains.
The group was known for the sophistication of its explosive devices. Bombs designed to destroy an aircraft in flight often featured a barometric switch that could be used, with or without a timer, to detonate a charge at a predetermined altitude -- and two such devices were seized by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German Federal police, on 26 October 1988, eight weeks before the fatal flight of Pan Am 103 left Frankfurt, en route to London, New York and Detroit.
Jibril had chosen Frankfurt as the target airport for several reasons. It was an important hub for American carriers, connecting with feeder airlines from all over Europe and the Middle East; the PFLP-GC's recently reinforced European section was already based in Germany, under cover of that country's sizable Middle Eastern community, and Jibril knew he could count on the cooperation of local Islamic fundamentalists in Frankfurt, not least among the Turkish baggage handlers employed at the airport. Their skill in evading its security system had already proved very useful in promoting Syria's heroin exports.
After several more meetings with Iranian officials in Beirut and Teheran, Jibril sent a senior lieutenant, Hafez Kassem Dallkamoni, to Germany to team up with Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar, who, since the beginning of the year, had been stockpiling arms and explosives in a Frankfurt apartment. Dalkamoni himself moved in with his wife's sister and brother-in-law, who lived in the nearby city of Neuss, where they ran a green grocery business.
On 13 October 1988, he was joined there by Marwan Abdel Khreesat and his wife from Jordan. A television repairman by trade, Khreesat was the PFLP-GC's leading explosive's expert and bomb-maker.
As Khreesat also appears to have been an undercover informant for the German or Jordanian authorities, or both, it is not known if he told the BKA about Dalkamoni, but the Massod, Israel's security agency, and the CIA certainly did so. Documents seized by Israeli forces in a raid on a PFLP-GC camp in south Lebanon pointed clearly to a new terrorist offensive in Europe, led by Dalkamoni, and a general warning to that effect had been circulated to all European security forces by the end of September.
Acting on this intelligence, a BKA surveillance team was watching when Dalkamoni greeted Khreesat on his arrival from the airport and helped carry his bags into the Neuss apartment.
The German police were also watching when the two men went shopping for electronic components on 22 October; when Dalkamoni arrived at the apartment on 24 October with a number of foil- wrapped packages delivered from Frankfurt by Ghadanfar; while Khreesat remained indoors on 24 and 25 October assembling four (possibly five) bombs in two Toshiba radio-cassette players, two hi-fi radio tuners and a video screen, and on 26 October, when Dalkamoni and Khreesat left the apartment, as though for good, carrying their luggage.
At this, the BKA moved in, arresting both men on the street, and over the next 24 hours raided apartments and houses in five other German cities, rounding up a total of 16 terrorist suspects. Two others, one of them Mobdi Goben -- another PFLP-GC bomb-builder more commonly known as 'the Professor', and the probable source of the Semtex explosive delivered to Dalkamoni by Ghadanfar -- were unfortunately out of the country.
Even more unfortunate, when the Neuss apartment was searched, three (possibly four) of Khreesat's bombs were no longer there. Nor was the brown Samsonite suitcase he had brought with him from Jordan. The BKA had to be content with the bomb it found in Dalkamoni's Ford Taunus -- 312 grams of Semtex-H molded into the case of a black Toshiba Bombeat 453 radio-cassette recorder fitted with a barometric switch and time delay.
It had been assembled for just one purpose, to destroy an aircraft in flight. An urgent warning was accordingly issued to airline security chiefs throughout the world to be on the lookout for Khreesat's three (or four) missing bombs and possibly other explosive devices hidden in Toshiba radios. (Months later, in April 1989, two of Khreesat's missing bombs were found in the basement of the green grocery business run by Dalkamoni's brother in-law in Neuss. As if this were not embarrassment enough for the BKA, one of the bombs exploded while it was being disarmed, killing a technician. The other was then deliberately destroyed 'for safety reasons', thus denying the Lockerbie investigators possibly vital forensic evidence.)
The BKA had better luck at Ghadanfar's apartment in Frankfurt. Among lesser weapons, its search party found an anti-tank grenade launcher, mortars, hand grenades, sub machine guns, rifles and another five kilos of Semtex. On the strength of this and the bomb found in the Ford Taunus, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar were held on terrorist charges. Khreesat and the others, however, were released 'for lack of evidence' and promptly disappeared.
Still committed to Frankfurt as the best airport from which to attack an American passenger aircraft, Ahmed Jibril turned for logistical support to Libya, the PFLP-GC's principal supplier of Semtex. Dalkamoni and Mohammed Abu Talb, another key member of the European group, had already conferred at least twice with Gaddafi's agents in Malta, but they had yet to target a particular American airline.
The mechanics of getting a bomb aboard a trans-Atlantic flight were straightforward enough, given Jibril's connections in Frankfurt, but he faced a serious conflict of interest with the Syrian heroin cartel based in Lebanon. The PFLP-GC had no wish to offend Rifat Assad, brother of Syria's dictator, President Hafez Assad, and his associate, Monzer al-Kassar, who between them controlled the flow of drugs along the 'pipeline' from the Bekaa Valley to the United States via Frankfurt and London.[much more here on Kassar...https://www.deepcapture.com/2013/05/the-global-bust-out-series-chapter-5-monzer-al-kassar-model-citizen/ DC ]
Al-Kassar was an arms dealer, armourer-in-chief to Palestinian extremist groups in the Middle East, including the PFLP-GC, and also, through Lt-Colonel Oliver North and former Air Force General Richard Secord, to the Contras in Nicaragua. In this latter capacity, he enjoyed the protected status of a CIA 'asset', and had intrigued his American sponsors hugely by acting as a middle man in the ransom paid by the French government in 1986 to secure the release of two French hostages held in Beirut.
Under intense pressure from the Reagan White House to do something similar to free the American hostages, the CIA, like the French, sought to persuade him to use his influence with Syria and the Syrian-backed terrorist factions in Lebanon, but al-Kassar was a businessman. In the business of selling heroin as well as arms. He would do what he could, but ...
The CIA understood him perfectly.
So did Ahmed Jibril, who derived a large part of the PFLP-GC's funding from the profits of Syrian drug trafficking.
He knew that neither Rifat Assad, a CIA 'asset' himself, nor al-Kassar, would wish to see their drug pipeline through Frankfurt compromised by a terrorist attack that would inevitably draw attention to the gaps they had so profitably exploited in airport security. On the other hand, he also knew that they could not refuse to cooperate without seeming to lack zeal in the cause of Islam. That would seriously displease not only Iran, but the powerful, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon, who were hell-bent on revenge for the downing of the Iranian Airbus.
Towards the end of October 1988, around the time of the BKA's raids on the PFLP-GC in Germany, Mossad agents observed Jibril and al-Kassar dining alone at a Lebanese restaurant in Paris in an attempt to resolve the dilemma.
Neither could afford to be entirely frank with the other. Jibril was unaware of just how much protection al-Kassar enjoyed from the Americans and the BKA, and al-Kassar could only guess at the strength of what was left of Jibril's underground network in Europe. Unwilling to help but unable to refuse it, al-Kassar eventually promised to use his connections to get a bomb aboard an as yet unspecified American passenger flight from Frankfurt.
But the position was more complicated even than that. Besides the revolving-door loyalties of Assad and al-Kassar, another variable in this delicate equation of interests was the octopus factor. With the CIA's permission, playing one target group off against another in the hope of crippling both was standard practice for the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Cyprus, which otherwise had no scope to manoeuvre in the charnel-house of Lebanese politics.
Although the Syrian Army's occupation of eastern Lebanon had brought the region's drug trafficking under the supervision of Rifat Assad, the Syrian presence was deeply resented by the well-armed and ferocious Lebanese clans of the Bekaa Valley who had previously run their family enclaves like independent principalities. The Jafaar clan, for one, had been shipping hash and heroin to the United States for almost half a century, since the days when Lucky Luciano held a near-monopoly on supplies from the Middle East.
With family members settled in and around Detroit as American citizens, and traveling regularly back and forth between Lebanon and the United States, the Jafaars saw no reason why they should have to pay Syrian interlopers for 'protection', even if Assad and his partner, Monzer al-Kassar, had proved adept at negotiating with the Colombian cartels to expand the Bekaa's interests into cocaine and other drugs.
Unable to risk its agents in a war zone split between hostile Syrians, xenophobic Islamic fundamentalists and disgruntled Lebanese drug barons, the DEA could only exploit the friction between them as a means of slowing down the export of illegal narcotics that, in value, had come to represent about 50 per cent of Lebanon's economic activity. But even here the DEA was handicapped, for the drug-smuggling route that ran from the Bekaa to Nicosia, the administrative center for the traffic, then on to the United States via Frankfurt and London, had a political significance of often higher priority than narcotics law enforcement.
To the CIA, the Assad/al-Kassar pipeline was both a bargaining chip in seeking the release of American hostages and an important link in its Middle East intelligence-gathering network. And to the US State Department, the narcotics industry was virtually the sole means of economic support for the pro-Western Christian factions in Lebanon, without whom the whole country would collapse into the hands of Islamic extremists.
Caught between the demands of police work and these other, political considerations, and often required to share his informants and facilities with the CIA, Michael T. Hurley, the DEA attache in Nicosia, was obliged to confer almost daily with 'the spooks' upstairs in the embassy to see what he was free to do before sorting out the practical details with local officials of the BKA and H.M. Customs and Excise, who naturally needed to know what the Americans were up to if Frankfurt and London were involved.
Narcotics law enforcement in Cyprus tended to proceed, therefore, on the basis of ad hoc agreements between an assortment of government agents with different agendas, reflecting local priorities, and, for political reasons, was aimed more at breaking up drug distribution rings in the United States than at knocking out their suppliers in Lebanon.
Virtually all Hurley was free to do, apart from compiling narcotics intelligence reports, was to organize 'controlled deliveries' of heroin to Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles with a view to having his DEA colleagues in those cities arrest the traffickers who claimed them. And the most reliable couriers he could find for that dangerous job were Lebanese or Lebanese-American informants who either faced 30 years in jail for dope offences if they refused to cooperate or who, like the Jafaars, hated the Bekaa Valley's Syrian overlords so much that they would do anything to get them off their backs.
These, then, were the arrangements -- validated as necessary by the DEA, the CIA, the Cypriot National Police, the German BKA and H.M. Customs -- that al-Kassar reluctantly made available to Ahmed Jibril.
On 5 December 1988, the US Embassy in Helsinki received a telephone warning that 'within the next two weeks' an attempt would be made to place a bomb aboard a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York.
On the night of 8 December 1988, Israeli forces raided a PFLP-GC camp near Damour, Lebanon, and captured documents relating to a planned attack on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt later that month. This information was passed to the governments of the United States and Germany.
At around the same time and continuing until a final call on 20 December, American intelligence agents monitoring the telephones of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut heard an informant named David Lovejoy brief the Iranian charge d'affaires about the movements of a five-man CIA/DIA team which had arrived in Lebanon to work on the release of American hostages and which planned to fly home from Frankfurt on Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December.
On 18 December, the BKA was tipped off about a bomb plot against Pan Am 103 in the next two or three days. This information was passed to the American Embassy in Bonn, which advised the State Department, which in turn advised its other embassies of the warning. (The tip possibly originated with confederates of al-Kassar in a last-ditch attempt to divert Jibril away from Frankfurt, or at least away from Pan Am, by promoting tighter security checks and a higher police profile at the airport.)
On 20 December, the Mossad passed on a similar warning, this time relating specifically to Flight 103 next day.
At 15.12 on 21 December, airport staff began loading passenger baggage aboard the Boeing 727 that was to fly the first leg of Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Heathrow. About an hour before its departure at 16.53, a BKA agent was said to have reported 'suspicious behavior' in the baggage-handling area, but no action was taken.
With 128 passengers and an estimated 135 pieces of luggage, the 727 arrived at Heathrow on time. Forty-nine passengers, most of them American, then boarded the Maid of the Seas for the trans-Atlantic leg of the flight, their bags being stowed on the port side of the forward cargo hold. A further 210 passengers with baggage, beginning their journey in London, now joined the flight, but after the State Department's warnings to embassy staffs, the aircraft was hardly more than two-thirds full when it took off at 18.25, 25 minutes late.
At 19.03, when the bomb exploded in the forward cargo hold on the port side, the 747 broke up into five main pieces that plunged down on Lockerbie, scattering bodies, baggage and wreckage over an area of 845 square miles.
It was four days before Christmas - and perhaps only a coincidence that the Iranian Airbus had been blown out of the sky by the USS Vincennes four days before the feast day of Id al-Adha, the high point of the Muslim year. Had flight 103 left Heathrow on time, it would simply have vanished far out over the Atlantic, leaving little more than that coincidence to color speculation about who and what might have been responsible.
The day after the disaster, Lester Coleman was interviewed by Tom Brokaw on the NBC network's 'Nightly News' as an expert on Middle East terrorism. Although it had yet to be shown that Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb, the media had assumed from the start that a Palestinian terrorist group was responsible, and Coleman shared that opinion.
The Libyans probably had a role in it, he told Brokaw, because they had a large cache of Semtex explosives and about 20,000 pounds of C4, its American equivalent, supplied by CIA renegade Edmund Wilson. They also had access to electronic timers and other components, and the necessary expertise to construct a sophisticated explosive device. For some years, he said, the Libyans had acted as quartermasters for terrorist groups around the world.
Coleman went on to suggest that the Iranians had probably inspired the attack and commissioned Syrian-backed terrorists to carry it out, but that part of the interview was not aired.
If Brokaw had asked him how they had managed to get a bomb aboard Flight 103, Coleman would have had to pass, because he didn't know he knew.
TO BE CONTINUED....NEXT...
Five months later, he still did not know, and probably wouldn't have cared if he had.
The Iranians were incensed. Paying the US Navy the compliment of believing that it knew what it was doing, they chose to construe America's evasive response to their complaint before the UN Security Council as a cover up for a deliberate act of aggression rather than as an attempt to hide its embarrassment. (They were already smarting from what they perceived to be America's failure to honor its secret arms-for-hostages deal.)
To reaffirm the power of Islam, and in retribution for the injury, the Ayatollah Khomeini himself is said to have ordered the destruction of not one, but four American-flag airliners. But discreetly. Not even the most implacable defender of an unforgiving faith could afford to provoke an open war with 'the Great Satan', particularly at a time when he was obliged to look to the West for technology and trade to rebuild an Iranian economy all but shattered by the long war with Iraq.
His minister of the interior, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was placed in charge of planning Iran's revenge. At a meeting in Tehran on 9 July 1988, he awarded the contract to Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army officer and head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), based in Damascus. Although Jibril later denied his complicity in the bombing, he was reported to have bragged privately that the fee for the job was $10 million. Unnamed US government sources let it be known that the CIA had traced wire transfers of the money to Jibril's secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Spain.)
Certainly, his terrorist credentials were not in dispute.
In 1970, the PFLP-GC had blown up a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, killing 47 passengers and crew, and had only narrowly failed to destroy an Austrian Airlines flight on the same day. The bomb malfunctioned.
Two years later, in August 1972, the pilot of an EI Al flght from Rome to Tel Aviv managed to make an emergency landing after a PFLP-GC bomb exploded in the cabin at 14,000 feet, injuring several passengers. And later on, Jibril's terrorist cell in West Germany succeeded in exploding bombs aboard two American military trains.
The group was known for the sophistication of its explosive devices. Bombs designed to destroy an aircraft in flight often featured a barometric switch that could be used, with or without a timer, to detonate a charge at a predetermined altitude -- and two such devices were seized by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German Federal police, on 26 October 1988, eight weeks before the fatal flight of Pan Am 103 left Frankfurt, en route to London, New York and Detroit.
Jibril had chosen Frankfurt as the target airport for several reasons. It was an important hub for American carriers, connecting with feeder airlines from all over Europe and the Middle East; the PFLP-GC's recently reinforced European section was already based in Germany, under cover of that country's sizable Middle Eastern community, and Jibril knew he could count on the cooperation of local Islamic fundamentalists in Frankfurt, not least among the Turkish baggage handlers employed at the airport. Their skill in evading its security system had already proved very useful in promoting Syria's heroin exports.
After several more meetings with Iranian officials in Beirut and Teheran, Jibril sent a senior lieutenant, Hafez Kassem Dallkamoni, to Germany to team up with Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar, who, since the beginning of the year, had been stockpiling arms and explosives in a Frankfurt apartment. Dalkamoni himself moved in with his wife's sister and brother-in-law, who lived in the nearby city of Neuss, where they ran a green grocery business.
On 13 October 1988, he was joined there by Marwan Abdel Khreesat and his wife from Jordan. A television repairman by trade, Khreesat was the PFLP-GC's leading explosive's expert and bomb-maker.
As Khreesat also appears to have been an undercover informant for the German or Jordanian authorities, or both, it is not known if he told the BKA about Dalkamoni, but the Massod, Israel's security agency, and the CIA certainly did so. Documents seized by Israeli forces in a raid on a PFLP-GC camp in south Lebanon pointed clearly to a new terrorist offensive in Europe, led by Dalkamoni, and a general warning to that effect had been circulated to all European security forces by the end of September.
Acting on this intelligence, a BKA surveillance team was watching when Dalkamoni greeted Khreesat on his arrival from the airport and helped carry his bags into the Neuss apartment.
The German police were also watching when the two men went shopping for electronic components on 22 October; when Dalkamoni arrived at the apartment on 24 October with a number of foil- wrapped packages delivered from Frankfurt by Ghadanfar; while Khreesat remained indoors on 24 and 25 October assembling four (possibly five) bombs in two Toshiba radio-cassette players, two hi-fi radio tuners and a video screen, and on 26 October, when Dalkamoni and Khreesat left the apartment, as though for good, carrying their luggage.
At this, the BKA moved in, arresting both men on the street, and over the next 24 hours raided apartments and houses in five other German cities, rounding up a total of 16 terrorist suspects. Two others, one of them Mobdi Goben -- another PFLP-GC bomb-builder more commonly known as 'the Professor', and the probable source of the Semtex explosive delivered to Dalkamoni by Ghadanfar -- were unfortunately out of the country.
Even more unfortunate, when the Neuss apartment was searched, three (possibly four) of Khreesat's bombs were no longer there. Nor was the brown Samsonite suitcase he had brought with him from Jordan. The BKA had to be content with the bomb it found in Dalkamoni's Ford Taunus -- 312 grams of Semtex-H molded into the case of a black Toshiba Bombeat 453 radio-cassette recorder fitted with a barometric switch and time delay.
It had been assembled for just one purpose, to destroy an aircraft in flight. An urgent warning was accordingly issued to airline security chiefs throughout the world to be on the lookout for Khreesat's three (or four) missing bombs and possibly other explosive devices hidden in Toshiba radios. (Months later, in April 1989, two of Khreesat's missing bombs were found in the basement of the green grocery business run by Dalkamoni's brother in-law in Neuss. As if this were not embarrassment enough for the BKA, one of the bombs exploded while it was being disarmed, killing a technician. The other was then deliberately destroyed 'for safety reasons', thus denying the Lockerbie investigators possibly vital forensic evidence.)
The BKA had better luck at Ghadanfar's apartment in Frankfurt. Among lesser weapons, its search party found an anti-tank grenade launcher, mortars, hand grenades, sub machine guns, rifles and another five kilos of Semtex. On the strength of this and the bomb found in the Ford Taunus, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar were held on terrorist charges. Khreesat and the others, however, were released 'for lack of evidence' and promptly disappeared.
Still committed to Frankfurt as the best airport from which to attack an American passenger aircraft, Ahmed Jibril turned for logistical support to Libya, the PFLP-GC's principal supplier of Semtex. Dalkamoni and Mohammed Abu Talb, another key member of the European group, had already conferred at least twice with Gaddafi's agents in Malta, but they had yet to target a particular American airline.
The mechanics of getting a bomb aboard a trans-Atlantic flight were straightforward enough, given Jibril's connections in Frankfurt, but he faced a serious conflict of interest with the Syrian heroin cartel based in Lebanon. The PFLP-GC had no wish to offend Rifat Assad, brother of Syria's dictator, President Hafez Assad, and his associate, Monzer al-Kassar, who between them controlled the flow of drugs along the 'pipeline' from the Bekaa Valley to the United States via Frankfurt and London.[much more here on Kassar...https://www.deepcapture.com/2013/05/the-global-bust-out-series-chapter-5-monzer-al-kassar-model-citizen/ DC ]
Al-Kassar was an arms dealer, armourer-in-chief to Palestinian extremist groups in the Middle East, including the PFLP-GC, and also, through Lt-Colonel Oliver North and former Air Force General Richard Secord, to the Contras in Nicaragua. In this latter capacity, he enjoyed the protected status of a CIA 'asset', and had intrigued his American sponsors hugely by acting as a middle man in the ransom paid by the French government in 1986 to secure the release of two French hostages held in Beirut.
Under intense pressure from the Reagan White House to do something similar to free the American hostages, the CIA, like the French, sought to persuade him to use his influence with Syria and the Syrian-backed terrorist factions in Lebanon, but al-Kassar was a businessman. In the business of selling heroin as well as arms. He would do what he could, but ...
The CIA understood him perfectly.
So did Ahmed Jibril, who derived a large part of the PFLP-GC's funding from the profits of Syrian drug trafficking.
He knew that neither Rifat Assad, a CIA 'asset' himself, nor al-Kassar, would wish to see their drug pipeline through Frankfurt compromised by a terrorist attack that would inevitably draw attention to the gaps they had so profitably exploited in airport security. On the other hand, he also knew that they could not refuse to cooperate without seeming to lack zeal in the cause of Islam. That would seriously displease not only Iran, but the powerful, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon, who were hell-bent on revenge for the downing of the Iranian Airbus.
Towards the end of October 1988, around the time of the BKA's raids on the PFLP-GC in Germany, Mossad agents observed Jibril and al-Kassar dining alone at a Lebanese restaurant in Paris in an attempt to resolve the dilemma.
Neither could afford to be entirely frank with the other. Jibril was unaware of just how much protection al-Kassar enjoyed from the Americans and the BKA, and al-Kassar could only guess at the strength of what was left of Jibril's underground network in Europe. Unwilling to help but unable to refuse it, al-Kassar eventually promised to use his connections to get a bomb aboard an as yet unspecified American passenger flight from Frankfurt.
But the position was more complicated even than that. Besides the revolving-door loyalties of Assad and al-Kassar, another variable in this delicate equation of interests was the octopus factor. With the CIA's permission, playing one target group off against another in the hope of crippling both was standard practice for the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Cyprus, which otherwise had no scope to manoeuvre in the charnel-house of Lebanese politics.
Although the Syrian Army's occupation of eastern Lebanon had brought the region's drug trafficking under the supervision of Rifat Assad, the Syrian presence was deeply resented by the well-armed and ferocious Lebanese clans of the Bekaa Valley who had previously run their family enclaves like independent principalities. The Jafaar clan, for one, had been shipping hash and heroin to the United States for almost half a century, since the days when Lucky Luciano held a near-monopoly on supplies from the Middle East.
With family members settled in and around Detroit as American citizens, and traveling regularly back and forth between Lebanon and the United States, the Jafaars saw no reason why they should have to pay Syrian interlopers for 'protection', even if Assad and his partner, Monzer al-Kassar, had proved adept at negotiating with the Colombian cartels to expand the Bekaa's interests into cocaine and other drugs.
Unable to risk its agents in a war zone split between hostile Syrians, xenophobic Islamic fundamentalists and disgruntled Lebanese drug barons, the DEA could only exploit the friction between them as a means of slowing down the export of illegal narcotics that, in value, had come to represent about 50 per cent of Lebanon's economic activity. But even here the DEA was handicapped, for the drug-smuggling route that ran from the Bekaa to Nicosia, the administrative center for the traffic, then on to the United States via Frankfurt and London, had a political significance of often higher priority than narcotics law enforcement.
To the CIA, the Assad/al-Kassar pipeline was both a bargaining chip in seeking the release of American hostages and an important link in its Middle East intelligence-gathering network. And to the US State Department, the narcotics industry was virtually the sole means of economic support for the pro-Western Christian factions in Lebanon, without whom the whole country would collapse into the hands of Islamic extremists.
Caught between the demands of police work and these other, political considerations, and often required to share his informants and facilities with the CIA, Michael T. Hurley, the DEA attache in Nicosia, was obliged to confer almost daily with 'the spooks' upstairs in the embassy to see what he was free to do before sorting out the practical details with local officials of the BKA and H.M. Customs and Excise, who naturally needed to know what the Americans were up to if Frankfurt and London were involved.
Narcotics law enforcement in Cyprus tended to proceed, therefore, on the basis of ad hoc agreements between an assortment of government agents with different agendas, reflecting local priorities, and, for political reasons, was aimed more at breaking up drug distribution rings in the United States than at knocking out their suppliers in Lebanon.
Virtually all Hurley was free to do, apart from compiling narcotics intelligence reports, was to organize 'controlled deliveries' of heroin to Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles with a view to having his DEA colleagues in those cities arrest the traffickers who claimed them. And the most reliable couriers he could find for that dangerous job were Lebanese or Lebanese-American informants who either faced 30 years in jail for dope offences if they refused to cooperate or who, like the Jafaars, hated the Bekaa Valley's Syrian overlords so much that they would do anything to get them off their backs.
These, then, were the arrangements -- validated as necessary by the DEA, the CIA, the Cypriot National Police, the German BKA and H.M. Customs -- that al-Kassar reluctantly made available to Ahmed Jibril.
On 5 December 1988, the US Embassy in Helsinki received a telephone warning that 'within the next two weeks' an attempt would be made to place a bomb aboard a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York.
On the night of 8 December 1988, Israeli forces raided a PFLP-GC camp near Damour, Lebanon, and captured documents relating to a planned attack on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt later that month. This information was passed to the governments of the United States and Germany.
At around the same time and continuing until a final call on 20 December, American intelligence agents monitoring the telephones of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut heard an informant named David Lovejoy brief the Iranian charge d'affaires about the movements of a five-man CIA/DIA team which had arrived in Lebanon to work on the release of American hostages and which planned to fly home from Frankfurt on Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December.
On 18 December, the BKA was tipped off about a bomb plot against Pan Am 103 in the next two or three days. This information was passed to the American Embassy in Bonn, which advised the State Department, which in turn advised its other embassies of the warning. (The tip possibly originated with confederates of al-Kassar in a last-ditch attempt to divert Jibril away from Frankfurt, or at least away from Pan Am, by promoting tighter security checks and a higher police profile at the airport.)
On 20 December, the Mossad passed on a similar warning, this time relating specifically to Flight 103 next day.
At 15.12 on 21 December, airport staff began loading passenger baggage aboard the Boeing 727 that was to fly the first leg of Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Heathrow. About an hour before its departure at 16.53, a BKA agent was said to have reported 'suspicious behavior' in the baggage-handling area, but no action was taken.
With 128 passengers and an estimated 135 pieces of luggage, the 727 arrived at Heathrow on time. Forty-nine passengers, most of them American, then boarded the Maid of the Seas for the trans-Atlantic leg of the flight, their bags being stowed on the port side of the forward cargo hold. A further 210 passengers with baggage, beginning their journey in London, now joined the flight, but after the State Department's warnings to embassy staffs, the aircraft was hardly more than two-thirds full when it took off at 18.25, 25 minutes late.
At 19.03, when the bomb exploded in the forward cargo hold on the port side, the 747 broke up into five main pieces that plunged down on Lockerbie, scattering bodies, baggage and wreckage over an area of 845 square miles.
It was four days before Christmas - and perhaps only a coincidence that the Iranian Airbus had been blown out of the sky by the USS Vincennes four days before the feast day of Id al-Adha, the high point of the Muslim year. Had flight 103 left Heathrow on time, it would simply have vanished far out over the Atlantic, leaving little more than that coincidence to color speculation about who and what might have been responsible.
The day after the disaster, Lester Coleman was interviewed by Tom Brokaw on the NBC network's 'Nightly News' as an expert on Middle East terrorism. Although it had yet to be shown that Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb, the media had assumed from the start that a Palestinian terrorist group was responsible, and Coleman shared that opinion.
The Libyans probably had a role in it, he told Brokaw, because they had a large cache of Semtex explosives and about 20,000 pounds of C4, its American equivalent, supplied by CIA renegade Edmund Wilson. They also had access to electronic timers and other components, and the necessary expertise to construct a sophisticated explosive device. For some years, he said, the Libyans had acted as quartermasters for terrorist groups around the world.
Coleman went on to suggest that the Iranians had probably inspired the attack and commissioned Syrian-backed terrorists to carry it out, but that part of the interview was not aired.
If Brokaw had asked him how they had managed to get a bomb aboard Flight 103, Coleman would have had to pass, because he didn't know he knew.
TO BE CONTINUED....NEXT...
Five months later, he still did not know, and probably wouldn't have cared if he had.
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