PART 2:TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA

TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS  

FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE  

INSIDE THE DIA

BY DONALD GODDARD

WITH LESTER K COLEMAN

.......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.....End part 1...

Chapter 3: 

Five months later, he still did not know, and probably wouldn't have cared if he had. 

After being photographed and fingerprinted in the Federal courthouse in Mobile, Coleman was handed over to the US Marshals and put in a holding cell pending his arraignment before a US Magistrate that afternoon. Apart from a telephone conversation with Joseph L. Boohaker, the Lebanese-American attorney he had befriended in Birmingham, Alabama, while setting up his latest mission to Beirut, he had not been allowed to make any calls. And although he couldn't mention it to anybody, as a matter of extreme urgency, he needed to confer with Control at Arlington Hall. 

Later that morning, he was visited in his cell by a pre-trial services officer for a routine interview to determine his history and circumstances. As the officer explained, his job was to verify Coleman's personal details and prepare a report that would help the court to decide on such matters as eligibility for bail.

Coleman brightened a little. If he were bailed out quickly and could recover his passport, he might yet be able to save the mission. Though under standing orders never to reveal his D.I.A affiliation to anyone, he could certainly tell enough of the truth about himself to satisfy the court as to his reliability and standing in the community. 

It certainly proved enough to satisfy the pre-trial services officer, whose report forms part of the court record in US vs. Lester Knox Coleman. 

The subject is a white male who stands 5' 8" tall and weighs 175 pounds [he wrote]. He has blue eyes and brown hair, mixed with gray. He is presently wearing a beard and mustache, both of which are also graying. 

Although Mr. Coleman's employment history sounds quite improbable [the report went on], information he gave to the Pretrial Services Officer has proven to be true. Coleman is a freelance journalist, specializing in the Middle East, who has also worked as an undercover investigator for the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States. NBC News Foreign Correspondent Brian Ross contacted this office on May 3, 1990, to verify Coleman's relationship with NBC News. He also indicated that Coleman has worked for other news agencies as well. Ross indicated Coleman has contributed stories regarding Middle East terrorism and drug trafficking to NBC News numerous times throughout the 1980's. They have interviewed him on air, on NBC Nightly News, as an expert in terrorism and drug production in the Middle East. Ross also verified that Coleman has testified before Senate committees on these same subjects. 

Ray Tripiccio, an agent with DEA in Washington, D.C., verifies that Coleman has formerly worked in a relationship with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The only information he could give on this secret activity is that Coleman was deactivated as a contract consultant as of 6-24-88. 

Coleman indicates that he is currently working on a book, and that he was attempting to make arrangements to return to the Middle East in order to do more research. (It is noted that Coleman has gone to Jefferson County Probate Court in Birmingham to have his name legally changed to Thomas Leavy. Joseph Boohaker, the subject's attorney, verifies that this was accomplished sometime in April. The present charge from Chicago apparently predates the legal name change.) Coleman states that he needed a passport in a different name because his name is known to drug traffickers in the Middle East. 

The name change had allowed Coleman to take out some life insurance as Thomas Leavy in case anything happened to him while he was traveling under that name. He had no wish to leave Mary-Claude and the children destitute while she tried to claim on his existing life insurance in the name of Coleman. 

'I have no indication that Mr. Coleman owns any property that would be available for posting bond,' the report concluded, 'and it appears that he is presently somewhat low on funds.' 

That was putting it mildly. Since being reactivated six months earlier for Operation Shakespeare, his monthly salary of $5000 had been paid into Barclays Bank, Gibraltar -- scheduled as his first stop on the way to Beirut. 

By the end of the interview, if it had been up to the pre-trial services officer, Coleman would probably have been released on the spot, but the Justice Department had other ideas. After his arraignment before US Magistrate William H. Steele, Coleman was consigned to the squalor of the city jail along with the pimps, pushers, muggers, drunks and assorted criminal riff-raff swept off the streets every night by the Mobile police.

For the next three days, he shared a cell with three drug traffickers awaiting trial on Federal charges, watching every word in case he fatally let slip his former connection with the DEA. 

As Special Agent Lesley Behrens explained when she called to see him with her clipboard and a new form to fill out, he was there because the county jail and the cells in the Federal building were all full. With that, she produced three sticks of fake dynamite, wired to an old-fashioned alarm clock, which the agents had found under the seat of his Mazda van. 

'Would you mind telling me what this is?' she asked. 

Coleman laughed. 'That's my Beirut alarm clock,' he said. 'Scared the shit out of you, right?' 

'Where did you get it?' 

'A buddy of mine gave it to me in Lebanon.' His smile faded. 'It's a joke, okay? A practical joke?'

'You mean you brought it back on an airplane?' 

'Oh, God,' he said. That was Tuesday. 

On Friday, they put him in leg-irons and handcuffs and delivered him back to the Federal courthouse for a bail hearing before Magistrate Steele, who had the pre-trial services officer's report in front of him. After conferring briefly with Boohaker, who had driven five-and-a-half hours from Birmingham to be present, Coleman went on the witness stand and testified that he had indeed worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

'And what did you do for them?' Boohaker asked. 

'I was a contract consultant involved in narcotics intelligence gathering and analysis in the Middle East,' he replied. 

The young Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) representing the government winced, and looked around at the FBI agents at the back of the courtroom. 

'And what were you doing at the time of your arrest?' Boohaker went on. 

'I was preparing to go back to the Middle East,' said Coleman. 

'For the US government?' 

He hesitated. If he couldn't break the rules, he felt entitled to bend them a little. 'I'm not at liberty to answer that,' he said. 

When Boohaker had finished, the AUSA was plainly in a quandary, but he still opposed bail, on the grounds that Coleman, with his overseas experience and connections, was an obvious flight risk. 

In reply, Boohaker argued that, besides being a citizen of repute with no criminal record, Coleman was a resident of Alabama, held an Alabama driver's license, and that his family lived there. In those circumstances, and as the charge could be tried as readily in Alabama as in Illinois, Boohaker could see no reasonable grounds why his client should be sent back to Chicago or why bail should be refused. 

Magistrate Steele could hardly disagree. But he set bail at $25,000, plus a $75,000 surety, and ordered that Coleman's passport be withheld. 

It was a relief to get the leg-irons off -- but a $100,000 bond for a passport violation? They were definitely out to get him. But why? 

Mary-Claude and the children were waiting outside the courthouse. Through Boohaker, Coleman had arranged for a Lebanese-American friend to collect his family from the beach-house and drive them to Mobile, where they stayed in a hotel the first night and then, when his bail hearing was postponed until Friday, at their friend's house for the second night. 

The separation had been an ordeal for them both. Knowing how terrified Mary-Claude had been by his arrest -- inevitably a prelude to something far worse in her own country -- and how vulnerable she must have felt with three babies to look after, Coleman had worried so much about her that he had scarcely had time to consider his own position. 

The same was true for Mary-Claude. After three days of sleepless anxiety about him, she had almost reconciled herself to the idea of never seeing him again -- although she had remembered to bring along a change of clothes. Untangling themselves from each other, they went off to an oyster bar for his first decent meal since the previous Monday night. 

He then tried his DIA contact number, and was not much surprised to get a disconnected signal. At heart, he had known all along that as soon as the agency found out what had happened -- assuming it had not had a hand in setting him up in the first place - he would cease to exist as far as the DIA was concerned.

He had no hard feelings about that. It had been understood from the day he signed on that if he were ever discovered, or if his activities as a spy ever threatened to embarrass the DIA, then Arlington Hall would disown him. Those were standard conditions of employment for any intelligence agent anywhere. It was just hard to accept that the rules applied at home as well as overseas, and to deliberate sabotage by an agency of his own government. 

Not sure what to do next, he drove the family up to Birmingham to stay with his mother. And in a final request for guidance, particularly as he still had the DIA's video camera and other equipment that he was supposed to have taken with him to Beirut, he encoded a written message to Control and sent it off to his DIA Post Office mail drop in Oxenhill, Maryland. 

Two months later, a letter was delivered to his mother's house, postmarked San Antonio, Texas, 16 July, and franked United States Air Force, Official Business. The address was in his own handwriting. Written as the return address on the envelope of his original coded message to Control, it had been cut out and pasted on the envelope. 

Inside was a slip of paper with two sets of handwritten numbers: 332- 22476 and 121-31323. Nothing else. And nothing else was necessary. Decoded, the message read: DEA-Cairo. 

Coleman's suspicions had been confirmed. On being seconded to the DEA in Cyprus, he had been told to give Michael Hurley copies of his alternative identity papers, including a copy of his CIA/Thomas Leavy birth certificate. If the DIA message meant anything, it meant that the DEA had used those papers, without consultation or authorization, as a cover identity for one of its people in Egypt. If a passport had already been issued in the name of Thomas Leavy, then his own application for a passport in the same name, with the same particulars, would presumably have triggered an investigation leading to his arrest. 

The only remaining question was whether this had been done deliberately or was just the consequence of another ill-considered act by Hurley's cowboy operation in Nicosia. 

Not that it made much difference. Either way, he was on his own. And after two months of brooding about it, making due allowance for the paranoia inseparable from intelligence work, he seriously doubted if there was anything unplanned in what had happened. Every time he visited his new pre-trial services officer in Birmingham and saw the puzzlement in his face; every time Boohaker expressed astonishment at the bail conditions and the government's conduct of the case; every time he woke up at night with the sure conviction that Hurley had him in his sights, the more he raked back over the past for some inkling of why they were out to get him. 

He had begun to understand what Kafka was all about. 

Schooled from childhood in the exotic intrigues of Beirut, Mary Claude knew already. 

'We were so sure there was more trouble coming,' she recalls, 'that we took turns sleeping, me and him and my mother-in-law. When we went to the market, we were sure someone was following us. At night, one of us would keep watch for any cars going around the house. Something was going to happen - to hurt us, to take my husband away, to ruin our lives. Every night, we would not sleep until four or five in the morning, and smoke two or three packs of cigarettes.' 

Rather than sit home, waiting for trouble to arrive, Coleman decided to meet it half way. He called his old friend in New York, Bernie Gavzer, formerly of NBC News and now a contributing editor of Parade magazine. 

'Hey, Les? Howaya? Howya doin'? You're supposed to be in Beirut. Why aren't you in Beirut?' 

'I got arrested, Bernie, that's why.' 

'Yeah? Well, it's about time. What they get you for? White slaving?' 

'No. The FBI busted me. For making a false statement on a passport application,' 

There was a brief silence at the other end. 

'No kidding,' said Gavzer. Coleman had never told him about his DIA connection but Gavzer was aware of his undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration, 'Anything I can do?'

'I don't know. Maybe. I need a lawyer.' 

'Hell, that's easy. I know a shitload of lawyers.' 

'Yeah, but how about one with Washington connections? Plugged into the Pentagon, maybe? Because that's what I need. Somebody who can get an inside track on all this.' 

'Okay, Sure. I'll ask around. See what I can do.' 

What Gavzer did was to line up a call from Marshall Lee Miller, former counsel to the Defense Intelligence Agency, or so Miller told Coleman during a high-powered telephone conversation in which he offered to get William Colby, former director of the CIA, to testify for him if necessary. 

'Only it won't come to that,' he said. 'Don't worry about it. We'll get to the bottom of this and clear the whole thing up so we don't have to go to trial. So it never even sees the light of day.' 

'Well, that'd be great. But how do you know you can do that?' 

'Because I'm connected in the right places, Les " -- that's how I know. I got all kinds of contacts here. So just sit tight. I'll get back to you.' 

Coleman had a good night's sleep for the first time in weeks. This was obviously the DIA 's way of baling him out without having to show its hand. In the best Hollywood tradition, the US Cavalry had ridden to the rescue in the nick of time. 

True to his word, Miller had William Colby talk to Coleman on the telephone to explain the strings he could pull. If it turned out that things had gone too far for them simply to wipe the slate clean, then they would have the case moved to Washington. 'They don't know how to deal with these things in Chicago,' he said. 

Cheered by their confidence, Coleman decided to test his theory that it was Hurley and the DEA who had wrecked his career. He presented himself at the DEA's field office in Birmingham and asked to see the agent from whom he had picked up his airline tickets and expense money before flying out to Cyprus to join Hurley's operation two years earlier. 

The agent recognized him at once and seemed astonished to hear what had happened. 

'Oh, this is crazy,' he said. 'Somebody's fucked up as usual. I'll send a wire to Washington. Find out what the hell's going on.' 

'Yeah, okay,' said Coleman. 'Only I think it's something to do with DEA Cyprus, and the guys out there probably don't even know what's happened -- about the FBI and the passport charge and everything. So if you tell Mike Hurley about it, maybe he can help straighten this thing out.' 

'Sure. I'll put it on the wire tonight. Just leave it with me, okay? I'll call you as soon as I hear something.' 

What the agent heard in response to his telex surprised him rather more than it surprised Coleman. 

'Hey, Les, I don't know what's going on here,' he said, when Coleman called next day. 'I got this message back that you're a real bad egg and we're not supposed to have anything to do with you.' He laughed uncomfortably. 'I don't know what you did, Les, but they say to tell you, don't try to get the DEA involved in your case.' 

'Listen, I'm trying to get the DEA off my case, all right? But thanks anyway.' Now he knew who, if not why. And it was some comfort to know that Arlington Hall had played no part in setting him up. Except in the first shock of his arrest, he had never seriously believed that anyway. 

With the profound contempt of the military for a civilian agency, the D.I.A would never have connived with the DEA to destroy one of its own agents. This had to be a combined DEA/FBI set-up, based on the DEA's unauthorized use of his alternative identity papers. 

But Coleman was still no closer to understanding why Hurley had chosen to move against him now, more than a year after the row between them. Marshall Lee Miller seemed unable to account for it either, although he continued to convey the impression that he knew more about the case than he cared to admit. Coleman was astounded, for instance, when the court in Chicago denied their motion for the case to be moved to Washington, but Miller, in spite of what he had said in the beginning, passed on the news as though he had known all along what the outcome would he.

The Colemans' cigarette consumption began to go up again. The same eerie feeling was coming back that they were caught in an unseen web, that their future was being decided for them, somewhere else, without their knowledge. Valiantly trying to retain some sense of control over his own life, Coleman started to call all his old friends in the media, particularly those with Washington connections, in the hope that he might just stumble on something that would help make sense of the nightmare, that would offer some clue as to what was happening, and why. 

Among those he called was Charlie Thompson, a friend at CBS who put him on to Sheila Hershow of ABC's 'Prime Time'. Coleman already knew her as they had worked together on the 'Jack Anderson Show' in 1983. 

In April 1989, Hershow had been chief investigator for the House of Representatives Sub-Committee on Government Activities and Transportation. Some two weeks before the sub-committee was due to start hearings into the Flight 103 disaster, Ms. Hershow had been unceremoniously fired, it was said because of a personality conflict with sub-committee chairman Cardis Collins, but some believed because of her tenacity in pressing, not only Pan Am, but the federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the airport authorities at Frankfurt and Heathrow with awkward questions about security

She refused to be drawn on the subject when Coleman spoke to her, but, more than a year later, she had certainly not lost her interest in the Lockerbie disaster. There was some connection she had not been able to track down, she said, between the bombing and the DEA in Cyprus. 

'You were out there around that time, weren't you?' she asked. 'I remember Brian Ross, over at NBC, saying he met you in Nicosia.' 

'Well, yes, that's right. They were doing a story on the Lebanese connection - about heroin from the Bekaa Valley, you know? And as I was out there doing some academic research on narcotics trafficking and Lebanese politics, we got together and compared a few notes. But that was a while before the bombing.' 

'Uh-huh. He said you did some work for the DEA as well.' 

'Well, yes,' he said cautiously. 'Intelligence analysis -- that kind of thing. Desk work. Nothing operational.' 

'No, but intelligence analysis -- that must have given you a pretty good insight into what they were doing out there, right?'

'Well, yeah. Pretty good.' It went against the professional grain to admit even that, but he owed the DEA nothing. And besides, he was curious. 'It's a small office. I was in and out all the time. Not a lot went on there I didn't know about.' 

'Okay,' she said. 'I'm going to send you a picture. And I want you to tell me if you know' who it is. If you ever saw him before. Will you do that for me?' 

'Sure. Why not? Is it somebody I knew out there?' 

'I don't know. You tell me.' 

The picture was faxed to him two days later. It was of a young man, an Arab, about 20 years old, and, after penciling in a moustache, Coleman recognized him at once. 

'That's Khalid Nazir Jafaar,' he told Hershow. 'Nice kid. We used to call him Nazzie.' 

'Well, well,' she said. 'That's interesting. You mind telling me how you know him?' 

'Nazzie was one of the boys, one of Hurley's people. The DEA had a front operation in Nicosia, down the street from the embassy. The Eurame Trading Company. That's where I worked. And that's where I met Nazzie. Saw him there several times.' 

'Well, well,' she said again. There was a funny note in her voice. 'The Jafaars -- they're into heroin, right?'

'Biggest in the Bekaa. Or they were until the Syrians moved in. The Jafaars were Lucky Luciano's heroin connection. They go back a long way in the dope business.' 

'This kid, Nazzie -- are you saying he worked for the DEA?' 

'Oh, sure. And probably for the CIA as well. Seemed like the whole damn family were CIA assets.' 

'But why? I mean, why would they want to work for the US government?' 

'Why? Hell, the Jafaars'll work for anybody against the Syrians -- they hate 'em so bad. They'd do anything to get Assad off their backs.' 

'Okay. So what did he do?' 

'Nazzie? Well, he was under age to be an informant, so he was probably on the DEA books as a subsource. I know for a fact he ran two or three controlled deliveries of heroin into Detroit.' 

'You mean he was a DEA courier?' 

'Among other things. But how come you're interested in Nazzie?' 

'You don't know?' 

'No, I kind of lost touch with those people when I got back here, you know how it is. I've no idea what he's doing now.' 

'He's dead,' she said. 

'Yeah? Oh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Like I say, he was a nice kid. But I'm not surprised. It's a tough business.' 

'Yeah. He was on Flight 103 when it went down.' 

Coleman chewed that over. 

'No shit,' he said. 

That probably explained everything. 

And when she went on to say that at least two intelligence agents had also died with Nazzie Jafaar, having switched to Flight 103 through RA Travel Masters of Nicosia, the DEA's travel agents on Cyprus, he knew without a doubt that his life was in danger. 

The octopus already had its coils around him.

Chapter 4: 

The first Lester Knox Coleman was a Navy man. 

A native of Moffat, Texas, he had signed on in 1917 to escape his family's dirt-poor existence in the Texas dust bowl. Liking the look of it no better when he came back from the war, he re-enlisted in the peacetime Navy, and, in 1924, was assigned to the USS, Shenandoah, the Daughter of the Stars, one of two Navy airships developed from the German Zeppelins that, for many, seemed to point the way to the future of aviation. 

He was on hoard when, in 1925, the Shenandoah cast off from her mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey, and headed out on a barnstorming tour of the Midwest to drum up public support for the Navy's lighter-than-air program. Two days later, a violent storm broke her back over the cornfields of Ohio, littering the ground with the bodies of her crew. 

Lester Knox Coleman survived, as no one who knew him would have doubted.

Lester Knox Coleman Jr., an engineer by profession, was another survivor. The day after Pearl Harbor, he quit his job with the Gulf Power Company in Pensacola, Florida, and, like his father before him in 1917, signed up for the Navy. His infant son was 18 months old before he even laid eyes on him. 

Lester Knox Coleman III was born in the USNAS/Navy Point Hospital on 25 September 1943, while the other two were overseas, fighting their country's war against the Japanese, one in South America, the other in the South Pacific. 

Like them, he was brought up to believe in America, to honor its principles, to be suspicious of foreigners and to distrust politicians, who, as far as the Coleman's were concerned, had about as much common sense as a bucket of warm spit. There was nothing in his small-town Southern background, his traditional American middle-class home or his average educational achievement to raise as much as an eyebrow among the team of military investigators who later vetted him back to his diapers to determine his suitability for secret government service with the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

When Coleman was five, the Gulf Power Company transferred his father from Pensacola to Panama City, a twohour ride down the Florida panhandle on Highway 98. And for the next eight years nothing much else happened as far as Coleman can remember, except for the stroke that disabled his grandfather. He dawdled through Cove Elementary and Jinks Junior High to Eighth grade, showing no great aptitude for academic study; failed Ninth grade when his father moved the family north to New Jersey for a year, and did hardly better in Tenth grade at Pensacola High when the Colemans returned to Florida. 

Indeed, the high point in his education until then was the discovery of progressive jazz. Under the tutelage of his friend Connor Shaw, ace drummer of the Pensacola High 'Tiger' Band, he was introduced to the music of Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson and Thelonius Monk, and to other, more tangible pleasures of the Beat Generation. 

Older than Coleman, and with a driver's license, Shaw would pick up his protege in his' 51 black Chevy coupe as soon as the Friday afternoon bell rang and together they would set off for a night out in the French Quarter of New Orleans, three hours away along the Gulf shore highway. Nearing sixteen, Coleman read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and took to wearing a hip pair of shades with his dirty sweatshirts and sneakers. 

Then, one day, everything changed. His father came home and said, in his usual, unadorned fashion, 'We're moving to Iran.' 

'Yeah? What part of Florida is that in, Dad?' 

'I-R-A-N.' 

'You mean, Iran like in Persia? Shit!' 

The pain of withdrawal from his local Bohemia was soon offset by Coleman's growing excitement at the prospect of traveling to faraway, romantic places of the sort his father and grandfather had so often talked about. But, as it turned out, the family was bound for the oil company settlement of Golestan, a suburb of Ahwaz, about two hours overland by land Rover from the city and oil terminal of Abadan. With its neat, yellow-brick homes set in plots of real grass, its own supermarket, school and country club, Golestan might as well have been in Arizona as in the ancient kingdom of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. 

Continuing his teenage rebellion, Coleman decided to become an Arab, 

He set himself to learn colloquial Arabic by hanging out with the company drivers and laborers who spent a good part of every work day sitting around charcoal stoves sipping glasses of hot tea through cubes of sugar. It was a conscious decision. Rather than learn Farsi, spoken only in Iran, he chose Arabic as it was the language of many nations, from the Shatt-al-Arab waterway clear across the northern reaches of Africa to the Atlantic Ocean. 

As Coleman's proficiency improved, and the Arabs, treated like dogs by the Iranians, lost their suspicion of the 'young Satan', so they allowed him deeper into their society. His new friend Ahziz, who lived in Laskarabad, took him to visit his uncle's village to drink tea and eat sheep's eyes and rice with the old sheik as they lounged on Persian carpets and watched the belly dancers. 

Coleman practiced his Arabic around camp fires at Refresabad, in the wilderness near Isfahan, and while riding third-class trains to Antimeshk. He grew accustomed to eating by the light of burning donkey dung with people who lived in huts or tents and bathed and urinated in open jubs as they had for a thousand years.

To placate his family and their Iranian friends, Coleman also learned a little Farsi, but as he approached his eighteenth birthday, both he and his father were only too conscious that his school credits were barely worthy of a high-school junior. If he was ever to amount to anything more than an Arabic-speaking bum, he needed to catch up with his formal education. 

In the autumn of 1961, he was sent home to boarding school in Orlando, Florida -- and contrived to get himself expelled in three weeks. He then went to stay with his uncle in Birmingham, Alabama, while he attended Shades Valley High School. 

'On Friday and Saturday nights,' Coleman remembers, 'my friend Walton Kimbrough and me went cruising in his '53 Mercury, parking at Pig Trail Inn, elbows out the window, listening to Dave Roddy on the radio, sipping cherry Cokes and eating Bar-B-Cues. We'd cruise up Red Mountain, beneath the bare bottom of Vulcan Statue, past WYDE radio and into five points south, giving the royal digit salute to every blue Ramsey High jacket we saw. Then shoot down main-drag 20th Street, all the way to 10th Avenue North, pull into Ed Salem's Drive Inn, elbows still out the window, watching lake-plugged hot-rods peel rubber, driven by boys from Ensley and Hueytown with names like Billy-Joe and Leroy and Bobby.' 

It couldn't last. For one thing, he no longer had much in common with his contemporaries. When he told them he lived in Iran, they would mostly look him up and down, shake their heads, and with doubt shading through scorn to open hostility ask him 'Where's that?' And when he told them where it was, they would shake their heads again and dismiss what he said as 'a sack of porkey-pine shit'. He had never noticed before how parochial and ignorant of the world American kids were. 

'It struck me about this time,' Coleman says, 'that they seemed to lie more than kids from other places. They didn't do it with purposed deceit -- it was just part of America's fast-hustle, three-card-monte morality. When a person tells the truth, other people, looking at themselves in the mirror and seeing a liar, assume that the truthteller is a liar, too. You see America differently after you've been away for a while. All us expatriate kids had the same experience. When we got home and tried to communicate with our peers who had never left the United States, they'd look at us like we'd just landed from Mars.' 

To the relief of his parents, and to re-establish his roots, Lester Knox Coleman III, with his friend Walton Kimbrough, applied for admittance to The Marion Military Institute (M.M.I), in Marion, Alabama. Founded in 1842, and alma mater to a distinguished roster of generals and heroes in every American war since then, the MMI was both a cradle and shrine to the United States Army, and a cadetship among the highest honors the military establishment could bestow on a young American of the right caliber.  

Having somehow passed the written examination, Coleman reported for duty at the start of the winter term and managed to curb his rebellious streak sufficiently, not only to make his grades and the Dean's List, but to put up five stripes as a Sergeant First Class Platoon Sergeant in his senior year. Coleman Senior pretended to take this for granted when his son rejoined the family in Iran that summer, but, for the first time in his life, Coleman sensed his father was proud of him. 

He also re-entered the Arab world as if coming home. By the time he graduated from MMI with the Class of '63, his father had moved on to a job in Libya with Esso. When Coleman arrived out there, the limitless horizons of the Sahara and the brutal austerity of life among the nomadic tribes of the desert caught his imagination so completely that it was 1966 before the claims of higher education in the United States again outweighed those of the liberal education he was acquiring in Arabic and Middle Eastern affairs. As his father pointed out with increasing acerbity, he had a living to earn, and -- not counting a brief spell at the American University in Beirut -- nothing worth a damn to interest a prospective employer. 

An aimless year at Jacksonville State University, Alabama, failed to remedy the deficiency, but it did at least point the way. Through a friend, Jim Sands, he was introduced to the trials, tribulations and occasional rewards of scrub broadcasting. 

A big, round, jolly fellow, Sands supported himself, more or less, by working at one of the scores of marginally profitable, day-time radio stations that had sprouted their directional antenna arrays all over the South. Under Sands's benevolent auspices, Coleman tried his hand as disc jockey-cum-announcer-cum-newsman and realized at once that he had found his vocation. Nothing would do now but a career in broadcast journalism. As foreign correspondent for CBS in the Middle East, maybe. Or even for NBC, at a pinch. 

But he had to start somewhere. And as the FCC required each station to have a licensed engineer on duty at all times, and as you were obviously more employable if you were both announcer and engineer, he dropped out of Jacksonville and enrolled at Elkins Electronics Institute in New Orleans to study for the FCC exams, which he passed with flying colors in 1967.

It was the first flush of a passion for advanced electronics that, with his other qualifications, was later to prove of special interest to the United States government. At the time, however, it was of more interest to one-horse radio stations in Pasagoula, Mississippi, and Bay Minet, Alabama, where the transmitter sat in the middle of a cow pasture and Coleman had to dodge the resident bull to get to work every morning. 

Stripped to his shorts in the heat and confined to a toolshed studio that turned blue with static electricity during a thunderstorm, he spun records, recorded supermarket commercials, and, for a change of pace, did occasional remote broadcasts from remote places like the local John Deere tractor outlet. A year of this brought him to the comparative luxury of a Country and Western 5000-watt station in downtown Mobile, but there his new career stalled. 

For one thing, he could see that he needed better academic credentials if he was ever to get back to the Middle East as a network TV correspondent, and for another thing, his best friend, Jim Sands, was now also his brother in-law. 

Sands had invited him over to his mother-in-laws place one Sunday and introduced him to his wife's sister, Jocelyn. Hitting it off on sight, Lester and Jocelyn were married soon after, but even in 1967, it was tough for a married couple to live on $90 a week. When their daughter Karen was born in February 1968, it proved impossible. The following September, Coleman left his job at 'Woonie Radio' and took his new family to Jacksonville, where he went back to university, as a mature student of 25 and rewrote the definition of working one's way through college. 

While coping with the not inconsiderable load of his degree course, Coleman held down jobs in a photo lab, on a radio show from 6 p.m. until midnight, six days a week, and as a paid football announcer on Saturdays/ For her part, his wife worked as private secretary to the football coach, as well as looking after their infant daughter, and together the Colemans managed a 110-unit apartment complex which provided them with rent-free accommodation. 

Thus stretched, they somehow survived the three years it took Coleman to equip himself for the big time with a bachelor's degree in political science and economics. But by then it was 1971, in the middle of a recession, and despite his now glittering qualifications, CBS wasn't interested. Nor was NBC or even ABC. After fruitlessly trawling the job market, Coleman took his wife and child back to Mobile and rejoined 'Woonie Radio' as News Director at $125 a week. It felt like he had put himself and his family through some pretty exhausting changes for an extra $35 a week. 

Working out of a converted broom closet, his one-man news department was expected to write and deliver eight newscasts a day, although, as he recalls: 

... the major activity at Woonie Radio was still station manager Rocky Reich's running poker game. It was too rich for my blood, but I did manage to pick up an extra twenty-five dollars a week producing the Dot Moore Radio Show. That meant I had to push a shopping cart carrying a heavy Ampex 601 tape recorder around Bellas Hess department store while Dot interviewed local shoppers. I'd then take the tape back to the studio, dub in the commercial breaks and add the music. But I couldn't see it as my life's work somehow.' 

Mobile was not exactly a hot news town anyway. My hourly five-minute newscasts were filled with the usual Fuz'n Wuz from the police blotter, the Wuz being the corpses from shootings, house fires and traffic pile-ups. Once in a while a bit of political juice from City Hall would spice up my news day, usually about Lambert 'Lamby Pie' Mims, Mobile's Bible-thumping Mayor, whose gospel of civic trust finally landed him in a Federal penitentiary. After five months in the 'Home of the Woonie Bird', I was open to the first reasonable offer. 

It came from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), which, as Coleman later discovered, served not only the nation's youth but also the military-industrial complex that had so exercised President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950's.

The Boy Scouts of America serving the military-industrial complex: See Temptations of Dr. Antonio, directed by Federico Fellini

Seated one day in his broom closet, writing copy and eating Krispy Kremes, Coleman took a call from Mark Clayton of the BSA National Public Relations Office. An Eagle Scout from Mobile had been selected to meet President Richard Nixon on the White House lawn, said Clayton. Was Woonie Radio interested in covering this event?

'Sure,' said Coleman. 'I'll take a tape feed of our Eagle Scout meeting the President of the United States. Great stuff. I'd like to ask him how it feels to get chosen out of four million Boy Scouts to shake his President by the hand. We'll do an interview, okay?' 

Tongue intermittently in cheek, Coleman taped a few questions and answers and then, jokingly, asked Clayton if the Boy Scouts of America were looking for someone with a bit of broadcasting experience. 

'Well,' said Clayton, surprised. 'Now that you mention it, yes. You mean you'd be interested in taking a job with us?' 

Coleman looked around his broom closet newsroom, with its mops and pails and industrial-sized bottles of Mr. Clean, and sighed for his lost illusions. 

'Sounds like an exciting opportunity to me,' he said. 

Brought over from Britain in 1910 by Chicago newspaper publisher William D. Boyce with the idea of building character in his street-corner newsboys, Scouting had grown by 1972 into a nationwide movement, chartered by Congress, with a full-time professional staff of 4000 directed from BSA headquarters in North Brunswick, New Jersey. 

After a preliminary meeting with Clayton in Mobile, Coleman was flown in for two days of interviews and put up in the Scout guest-house, next door to a museum full of Norman Rockwell paintings, in the middle of a 30- acre game preserve criss-crossed with neatly tagged nature trails. 

The job opening he had stumbled upon was in the public relations department, which already had a staff of 20 writers and photographers -- many of them former military public information officers -- under the general direction of Ron Phillippo, a cigar-smoking outdoors-man in a three-piece suit, whose secretary, Marcia Schwartz, and right-hand man, Russ Butkins, USN (retd) between them ran the place. Being all 'print people', with no practical experience of radio or television, they needed somebody who could get the Scout story 'on the air' for $12,000 a year. 

Satisfied he was made of the right stuff, BSA offered Coleman the job, and in March 1972, a big cross-country moving van delivered the family's worldly goods to their new home in Heightstown, near Princeton, New Jersey, about 20 minutes by Toyota south of New Brunswick on Route 130. If not quite as he had imagined, Coleman had made the big time as the BSA's National Event Public Relations Executive. 

A former Cub Scout with a school troop at eight, he soon discovered there was more to modern Scouting than rubbing damp sticks together in the wilderness. It was a franchise operation. With a network of regional offices, heavily staffed with former military personnel, to oversee 'the product', the BSA sold franchises to Local Councils in cities and towns across the nation. These councils, in turn, employed full-time professional staff to recruit volunteers and sponsors to run and finance Scout troops at neighborhood levels. 

In overall charge of the operation was a Chief Scout, a full-time salaried executive of BSA, Inc., and a volunteer counterpart with the title of National President. In 1972, they were, respectively, Alden Barber, a polished, smooth-talking businessman who could have stepped out of any corporate boardroom, and Robert W. Sarnoff, chief executive officer of the Radio Corporation of America. 

Coleman's connection with the big time was through the National Public Relations Committee, a volunteer group he was encouraged to cultivate for help and support. One of its members was Walter Cronkite, of CBS News. 

'Can you imagine?' 

Twenty years on, Coleman still remembers the excitement of hopping on a train to New York, taking a cab uptown from Penn station to the corner of 57th Street and 10th Avenue and walking in to tell the guard he was there to see Walter Cronkite. 

'And then actually getting in to see him. Escorted down one narrow hallway after another, past Xerox machines, past dark studios with the ghosts of John Cameron Swazy and Edward R. Murrow, then into the CBS newsroom, into Cronkite's glass fishbowl of an office, and there he is -- thinner and younger-looking in person, wearing a khaki suit, loafers kicked off, feet on the desk, talking to me about the next Explorer Scout Olympics in Fort Collins, Colorado.' 

Most of the national events Coleman worked on were organized by the BSA's Explorer Division, the then-new co-ed Scout 'product' for young people between fourteen and twenty, offering hands-on experience in the career fields that interested them. 

It was the Explorer program that finally married the Boy Scouts of America to the military-industrial complex. The military saw Scouting as a training ground for leaders who were also good team-players, disciplined, respectful of authority and imbued with ideals of service to God and country, while the business community saw it as a politically neutral means of indoctrinating youth in the principles of free enterprise capitalism and the American way. 

Nobody had a bad word for Scouting. It was the perfect public relations vehicle for acquiring civic virtue on the cheap while continuing the ruthless pursuit of corporate self-interest in government and the market place. In government, all the way up to Federal level, sponsorship of Career- Interest Explorer Posts proved so popular among image-sensitive agencies such as the police that a special unit was set up at BSA headquarters to administer 'Law-Enforcement Exploring' and to work alongside existing departments responsible for Congressional Relations, Military Relations, Mormon Relations (the Boy Scouts of America is the official youth movement of the Mormon Church), Corporate Relations and so on. 

As Coleman would discover at first hand, it was not so much that Scouting was controlled by the octopus as simply incapable of denying it a favor. When a two-star general in Washington called a retired colonel in North Brunswick to ask if the BSA could find a job for one of 'our people' from overseas, the only possible answer was, 'Yes, sir. 

In his two years at headquarters, Coleman came across several 'spooks' cooling off in executive niches of the Boy Scout Movement, and later became one himself. He also came to appreciate the mutual benefit of having a Boy Scout troop on every significant US military base around the world. It not only helped with the BSA's numbers game but served as a benevolent advertisement for the American way of life, as well as a convenient cloak for low-level intelligence gathering. 

As with any franchise operation, growth was the bottom line. In 1972, the BSA's national advertising slogan claimed that 'Scouting today is a lot more than you think', but in fact it was a lot less. Under pressure from head office to meet ever higher 'sales' targets, Local Council staffs had begun to create imaginary Scout troops, in much the same way as Teamster union officials had once created 'paper' Locals, and to pad the rolls of existing troops with phantom members. 

By 1974, the BSA had 6.5 million Scouts on its books, of which two million existed only in the minds of hard pressed District Executives. It was too many. When somebody at last blew the whistle, not even the National Public Relations Office could explain away so great a discrepancy. The Scouting hierarchy collapsed from top to bottom, sending Chief Scout Alden Barber into the decent obscurity of Santa Barbara, California.

In 1972, however, still untarnished by scandal, the BSA plugged Coleman into the military-industrial complex through Tom Geohagen, Department of Public Affairs, US Steel, Washington, D.C. A short, white-haired man with big ears and a booming radio announcer's voice -- he had worked for years at NBC News -- Geohagen was chairman of a high-powered committee of media experts put together to publicize the National Explorer Presidents' Congress, an annual meeting in Washington of Explorer Post leaders from all over America. The event was Coleman's first assignment, and Geohagen liked his style. Appointing himself Coleman's mentor, he was soon urging him to 'use this Scout business' as a stepping stone to higher things, perhaps in government service, where he could make the most of his command of Arabic and his background in the Middle East. 

Wherever we went in Washington, Tom introduced me to his contacts [Coleman recalls]. We would go for lunch down the street from his office to the Army-Navy Club, and he knew everybody. You'd get these grey men in grey suits, sitting around smoking cigars in red leather armchairs under portraits of Nimitz and Patton, and they'd all say hello and pass the time of day. One, I remember, was General Danny Graham, an old spook buddy of Tom's, who had been sent over from the Pentagon to clean house at the CIA. 

'Now there's a guy you ought to talk to,' Tom said afterwards. 'You'll like him, and I know he'd be real interested in your background. Tell you what -- why don't I set up a meeting?' 

'No, Tom,' I said. 'Thanks all the same. I still want to see how far I can go with journalism.' 

But Geohagen kept on trying, determined his protege should make the most of himself. His next maneuver on Coleman's behalf was to secure a staff position for him with the US Olympic Team at the 20th Olympiad in Munich that September. This was exciting but also embarrassing, for Mark Clayton, who had got him his job in the first place, had to be bumped out of the slot to make way for him. 

'It was Clayton's assignment, Tom, and he's my boss,' Coleman protested. Half-heartedly. 'And why me? I've only been here six months.' 

'Well, let's just say you have special talents that your committee feels would be better suited to this assignment,' said Geohagen. 'Let's just say there are people who want to see how you make out, how you handle yourself under fire, so to speak. So let's show 'em, okay?' 

Of course it was okay. It was damned okay. To be in Munich with the US team at the Olympic Games was about as far as you could get from a broom closet in Mobile. 

Geohagen's wish to see how Coleman handled himself 'under fire' turned out to be curiously prophetic, for the 1972 Olympiad was to be remembered, not for Mark Spitz's seven gold medals or Cathy Rigby's bare-bottom picture in Sports Illustrated, but for the slaughter of Israeli athletes by hooded assassins from Black September. 

It was Coleman's first direct experience of Arab terrorism. Although he saw no more of the siege and carnage than anyone else in the Olympic Village, he had earlier taken the fullest advantage of his staff pass to explore the compound and to fraternize with athletes and officials from other countries, particularly those from the Middle East for the chance it gave him to practice his Arabic. 

Although there were armed guards everywhere, security was a joke. Photo-ID badges were rarely checked, and no attempt at all was made to confine badge-holders to the specific areas of the Village for which they had security clearance. In theory, only someone with a press pass could gain access to the Olympic Press Center, for example, but Coleman came and went as he pleased, in and out three or four times a day, every day, without ever being challenged. 

Before the attack, he enjoyed the same freedom of movement to meet and drink coffee with his new Arab friends in their Olympic quarters -- and also with Andrei, one of the Soviet team's 'trainers', who spent a lot of time in their company, drinking beer and picking away at salt fish wrapped in brown paper. After the attack, Coleman saw no cause to wonder how Black September had managed to smuggle explosives and automatic weapons into the compound, but he wondered long and hard about Andrei, who had mysteriously disappeared when the terrorists struck, and about the not-so-mysterious defection of the Arab teams, who now melted away for fear of Israeli reprisals. 

Like everyone else, Coleman watched the drama build up to its bloody denouement on television, still misusing his pass to keep abreast of the latest developments via the Press Center's battery of monitors.

Under the critical weight of world attention, Munich's beleaguered police chief, Manfred Schreiber, was now at pains to lock the barn door after the terrorist horse had bolted. His officers were ordered to question everybody they could trace who had set foot in the Arab camp in the course of the Games, including Lester Coleman, public relations assistant with the US Olympic Team, on loan from the Boy Scouts of America. 

In what turned out to be a curious link with the future, Coleman struck up a friendship with Hartmut Mayer, a local police officer whom he would meet again 15 years later in Cyprus, when Mayer was resident agent on the island for the BKA, and like Coleman, concerned with a DEA operation where sloppy security opened the way to an even bloodier atrocity than at Munich -- the destruction of Flight 103. 

For Coleman, there would be other curious links, too, between Munich and Lockerbie. In 1987, after renewing his acquaintance with Mayer, he was to work on the same poorly managed DEA operation with a Lebanese/American named Ibrahim El-Jorr, a key informant who claimed to have been one of the US Army support group sent into Munich after Black September took over the village. 

In the troubled aftermath of Lockerbie, Coleman would also meet up with Juval Aviv, a private investigator hired by Pan Am, who was said to have been a member of the Mossad hit team turned loose after the Munich massacre by Israel's Golda Meir to track down and kill every member of the Black September squad responsible. 

But the strongest link for Coleman was the continuing fascination of the American intelligence community with Arab terrorism. 

On his first day back in the office after flying home with the Olympic team, he was called down to Washington by his sponsor. 

'There's some people would like to hear about your experiences,' Geohagen said, on their way out to Georgetown to have lunch at the Sheraton Park Hotel. 'Some of Danny Graham's boys. I told 'em you wouldn't mind. You can probably give 'em some useful insights, just from being there in Munich.' 

'Think so?' Coleman shrugged. 'I'll be glad to talk to them, Tom, but there were a lot of people a lot closer to what happened than me. Are you saying they didn't have any of their own people in the Village? They must have done. I heard the KGB was all over the place.' 

'Well, I expect they did. But I guess they didn't have anybody out there who spoke Arabic. Or spent much time talking to the Arab teams.' 

It was only when somebody stopped by their table in the Sheraton's bar to say they were expected upstairs after lunch that Coleman began to wonder how Geohagen knew how he had spent his off-duty time in Munich, and it rather took the edge off his appetite. 

After the meal, they adjourned for coffee to a suite on the third floor, where Geohagen introduced him to three men, who identified themselves as Bob, Nat and Herb, and then excused himself, saying he would see Coleman back in his office after they had finished. Nervous at first, but soon relaxing in their warmth and friendliness, Coleman told them about Andrei and tentatively identified him from a grainy ten by eight print that Herb produced from a file folder on his lap. 

'You know who he is?' asked Coleman eagerly. 'Is he KGB?' 

'It's not important,' Bob said. 'We keep tabs on all kinds of people. Can you tell us what you talked about?' 

'Oh, Olympic-type things. You know, how it's good for East and West to get together, for people to exchange ideas, one to one, leaving politics out of it for a change. That sort of stuff.' 

'You didn't talk politics? Not at all?' 

'Well, depends what you mean by politics. Not cold war politics anyway. He asked me a lot of questions about what was going on here. Said he couldn't understand how people could be out of work or homeless or without proper medical attention and still be loyal Americans. He seemed to know a lot about black militant groups. Our 'dissidents' is what he called them.' 

'Uh-huh. And how do you feel about 'em?'

'Me?' 

Coleman spent 15 minutes defending his own political views before Bob finally turned to the subject of the Arabs he had talked to in Munich. And the same thing happened. After covering the ground, the three seemed to be at least as interested in examining Coleman's views on the Arab-Israeli question as the views expressed by the people he had met. 

'Did you form any opinion about where the terrorists were from?' asked Nat, pouring him another cup of coffee. 

'Well, I only know what I heard and saw on television,' Coleman said. 'But one of them sounded Libyan to me.' 

'Libyan? Black September is a Palestinian group.' 

'Yeah, I know. But King Idris took in hundreds of refugees from Palestine in the Fifties -- the guy could still have been a member of the PLO. Seemed to me I recognized the accent. I worked with two Palestinians in Libya when my father was out there.' 

They appeared to know about that, too, and after a lengthy discussion of Middle East politics, went on to ask him about what he had told Hartmut Mayer, of the Munich police, and how he felt generally about the Germans, their security arrangements and their attitude towards the Israelis. 

The questioning went on for more than two hours, and ended with another round of warm handshakes as they ushered him into a taxi for the ride back to Geohagen's office on K Street, North West. 

'It had all been very friendly,' Coleman recalls, 'but I left feeling drained, as if I'd just sat through a really testing examination. But I also felt relieved from telling everything I knew to people I thought could do something about it, who could stop another Munich from happening. I guess I was still naive enough, going on twenty-nine to believe in the fatherly image of the American government, as somehow all-protecting, all-knowing, and capable of fixing anything.' 

By the time Coleman reached K Street, Geohagen had already heard from the octopus. 

'They were very impressed,' he said. 'You know, Les, you really ought to consider working for those guys. You could have a big future there.' 

'Well, thanks, Tom,' said Coleman. 'I'm flattered by their interest and I'm glad if I've been of help. But, like I say, I really am hooked on broadcasting. I want to see how far I can go.' 

'Yeah, well, I told them that. But if you ever change your mind, Danny Graham says you're to go see him about it. Anytime.' 

Chapter 5: 

After his appearance with Tom Brokaw on NBC's 'Nightly News', Coleman went back to his cover job with the Boy Scouts of America, and in the following months the fate of Flight 103 slipped from his mind. Although he read about the case in the Chicago newspapers from time to time, he made no serious attempt to keep up with it, for he was still unaware of his connection with the disaster. 

As is rarely true in murder inquiries, the identity of the killers, their motives, the method and approximate details of the weapon employed were known to agents of several governments from the start, but for various reasons, some political, some self-serving, this knowledge was not fully shared with the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. Even so, such intelligence information as was made available ensured that within 72 hours, the Scottish police officers investigating by far the biggest mass murder in British history knew more or less who had done it and roughly how. From the start, the entire thrust of their efforts was to prove what they knew. 

But odd things were happening at Lockerbie. Although the collection of forensic evidence was of paramount importance, it was hampered for two days while CIA agents, some dressed in Pan Am overalls, combed the countryside for the luggage of the dead American intelligence agents and a suitcase full of heroin. After a 48- hour search, assisted by units of the British Army, whatever they had found was flown out by helicopter, and in due course, one suitcase, emptied of its contents, was returned so that it could be 'found' again officially. 

It belonged to Major Charles 'Tiny' McKee, an agent of the US Defense Intelligence Agency. It was severely damaged, possibly by an explosive device of the type sometimes fitted in luggage used by intelligence agents to destroy the contents before they fall into the wrong hands. As the search continued, documents relating to the American hostages held in Beirut were recovered, along with over $500,000 in cash and traveler's cheques. 

When the CIA's presence was reported on Radio Forth by David Johnston, who later published Lockerbie: The Real Story, he was interviewed at length next day by police officers who finally threatened him with legal sanctions unless he identified his sources. This Johnston refused to do and, oddly, that was the end of the matter. No further action was taken, and he heard no more about it, perhaps because to have carried out the threat would have drawn more attention to his story than was actually shown at the time, in the chaotic aftermath of the disaster. 

Odder still, and more serious, it was later reported that 59 bodies which had been found, tagged and certified dead by a police surgeon on 22 December, were left lying where they had fallen in open country around Lockerbie until 24 December, when they were re-tagged, removed and re-certified dead. But by then, according to the police count, there were only 58 bodies. Somebody had either miscounted or one had gone missing. Also puzzling, the name-tag observed by a local farmer on a suitcase full of heroin before that, too, went missing did not correspond with any of the names on the passenger list.

Another witness involved in the search within hours of the crash has spoken of finding handguns on six of the bodies, presumably those of the agents on board. He also saw Americans throwing tarpaulins over bodies and suitcases so that they could examine them in private, and warning searchers to keep clear of certain sectors, his own team included. 

With the Americans scrambling to cover their tracks, the Germans also made sure they were not left holding the bag. Although the B.K.A, like H.M. Customs and Excise, had collaborated fully with their American colleagues in supervising the leaky DEA/CIA pipeline through Frankfurt and London to the United States, a spokesman for the German Ministry of the Interior calmly stated on 29 December that there were no indications that the bomb had been put aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt -- a position the B.K.A would maintain for almost a year, until finally persuaded it would not be saddled with the blame. 

No one in the Anglo-American camp was ready to buy that. On the same day, 29 December, Michael F. Jones, of Pan Am Corporate Security in London, received a telephone call from Phillip Connelly, assistant chief investigation officer for H.M. Customs and Excise, who wanted to know if Jones had 'considered a bag switch at Frankfurt due to the large amount of Turkish workers'. 

Asked to expand on this, Connelly said that before the disaster he had attended a meeting in Frankfurt with the other agencies concerned to discuss deliveries of heroin through Frankfurt airport involving the substitution of bags by Turkish baggage-handlers. 

The next day, spokesmen for the British and American authorities followed up this thought by briefing the press in exactly opposite terms to those employed by the German authorities. On 31 December, The Times reported that the team investigating the Lockerbie air disaster had told the Scottish police that the bomb had definitely been placed on board in Frankfurt. 

'The hunt for those responsible,' the story went on, 'is now centered in the West German city, where a Palestinian terrorist cell is known to have been operating for more than 18 months ... The Frankfurt terrorist cell is known to be part of Ahmed Jibril's hard line Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and to have carried out two bombing attacks on US military trains.' 

The Times report added that Scottish police officers had flown to Frankfurt on 30 December in the hope of interviewing Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar, the two P.F.L.P-G.C members still in custody after the B.K.A raids on 26 October. They had been caught in possession of an explosive device 'similar to the one being blamed for the Lockerbie disaster'. 

In the United States, a spokesman for the FBI went further and named Khalid Nazir Jafaar, a 21-year-old Lebanese-American citizen, as the possibly unwitting accomplice of the P.F.L.P-G.C. 

His father, Nadir Jafaar, who owned a garage and other business interests in Detroit, said that his son had been visiting his grandfather in the Bekaa Valley and was on his way home for Christmas after spending a few days with Lebanese friends in Frankfurt. He feared that the terrorists might have used his son as a dupe and planted a bomb in his luggage. In any case, he intended to sue Pan Am for $50 million. 

Commenting on the possibility that Jafaar's friends in Frankfurt might have tampered with or switched one of his bags, Neil Gallagher, of the FBI's counter-terrorist section, said: 'This is the type of relationship we are analyzing as we look at the passenger manifest.' 

If Lester Coleman in Chicago had heard or read about the F.B.l's suspicions then, ten days after Flight 103 had gone down, before the investigators stopped contradicting one another, and before politics intruded to distort or suppress their findings, the course of events might have taken a different turn. 

Had he known that Khalid Jafaar, a DEA courier, had been aboard, and put two and two together, the Defense Intelligence Agency might well have reactivated him to take a hand in the game, as it had in the past when the D.I.A found itself embarrassed by the activities of TV evangelist Pat Robertson and Lt-Colonel Oliver North. In that event, Coleman might have had a role in cleaning up after the DEA rather than, in the end, being compelled to act as a witness against it. Even so, ten days after the disaster, the essential questions about the fate of Flight 103 had been answered; what remained was the burden of proof and the issue of contributory negligence.

The search for forensic evidence had gone well. On Christmas Eve, a foot-long piece of aluminum luggage pallet, scorch-marked by the explosion, was recovered, showing clear traces of the chemical constituents of Semtex-H plastic explosive. Further tests at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (R.A.R.D.E) at Fort Halstead in Kent also established, from fragments of polystyrene and tiny pieces of circuit board trapped in the wreckage of the luggage container, that the explosive device had been housed in a black Toshiba radio-cassette recorder, a two-speaker version of the Toshiba Bombeat bomb found by the German B.K.A in Dalkamoni's car. Tests at R.A.R.D.E on pieces of blast-damaged luggage also proved that the device had been packed in a copper-colored Samsonite suitcase. 

This was a remarkable piece of scientific detection, considering there were an estimated four million pieces of wreckage from Flight 103 strewn clear across the Scottish Lowlands into northern England, but it was virtually the end of that line of inquiry. Bits of the bomb, bits of the clothing that had been packed around it, and bits of the suitcase the bombers had used were the only hard evidence the searchers would ever find at the scene of the crime. And it would probably have been enough, other things being equal, but German suspicions that the Americans, aided by the British, were still trying to duck the responsibility for the DEA/CIA operation that had gone so terribly wrong, filtered down to the Scottish police at ground level as plain bloody-minded obstructionism. 

On 28 March 1989, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr took the Germans to task about it at a conference in the Lockerbie Incident Control Center. The minutes of the meeting show that he reviewed the evidence pointing to Frankfurt as the airport where the bomb was placed aboard and went on to detail the 'evident connections' between the disaster and the activities of the P.F.L.P-G.C in West Germany, demanding that the B.K.A release their full files on the October raids and arrests. 

'There was, he suggested, a strong circumstantial link, and it was essential to find out all possible information. He stressed that he was not saying conclusively that these people did commit murder, but there is strong circumstantial evidence.' 

Orr also reported progress in matching passengers with their baggage. 'However, if a "rogue" suitcase had been introduced into the system, and if the suitcase containing the bomb did not belong to a passenger, then further close examination of baggage-handlers and others would be carried out.' 

Circumstantial or not, the evidence against Dalkamoni, Ghadanfar and other members of the P.F.L.P-G.C cell in Germany had been strong enough to lead Britain's transport minister, Paul Channon, to tell five prominent political journalists over lunch at the Garrick Club two weeks earlier that arrests were imminent. They were the result, he said, of 'the most brilliant piece of detective work in history'. As their conversation was off the record, the information was attributed in media reports next day to 'senior government sources' -- and was immediately attacked as prejudicial by all concerned. 

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who, as Lord Advocate of Scotland, was in charge of the investigation, observed in the House of Lords that it was not likely to be assisted by such 'wild, irresponsible speculation'. 

More directly to the point, 'Getting the bastards that did this is more important than taking credit for finding out who they are,' said an anonymous American 'intelligence source' quoted in The Sunday Times. 'It wasn't the Brits that found that out anyway,' he added, hinting at the inter-agency tensions that had bedeviled the inquiry from the start. 

It was left to Pierre Salinger, chief foreign correspondent for the American ABC Network, to identify Channon as the background briefer. Trapped by then in a web of denials, the transport minister resigned shortly afterwards, but not, as it turned out, solely on account of his lunchtime indiscretions. He was probably also a casualty of an 'understanding' reached around this time between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush, although both subsequently denied any such agreement. 

According to Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta in the Washington Post, 11 January 1990, the two leaders decided on the telephone in mid-March, 1989, to soft-pedal the Lockerbie investigation for several reasons. 

One was so as not to prejudice negotiations aimed at securing the release of Western hostages in Beirut by arousing further animosity among the Syrian-backed or Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups who were holding them captive. 

Another was that the shifting sands of Middle East politics now required the West to find some counterbalance in the region to the monster it had created in Saddam Hussein of Iraq -- and the best available candidate for the job was Hussein's sworn enemy, President Hafez Assad of Syria.

While it was unfortunate that Assad permitted Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC to operate openly from Damascus and although it was clear that he controlled events in eastern Lebanon, where the hostages were held, in the joint State Department/Foreign Office view, the West now had little choice but to treat Syria as an object for diplomacy rather than of police work. 

A third reason, no doubt, for not pressing the inquiry too rigorously was to shield Anglo-American intelligence operations in the Middle East from further embarrassment. The Scottish police were getting uncomfortably close to uncovering evidence of the DEA/CIA pipeline and the 'controlled' deliveries of Syrian heroin to Detroit -- Monzer al-Kassar's price for using his influence with the Syrian leadership to help with the hostage problem. 

Around the time of the Bush Thatcher telephone call, Pan Am's investigators picked up the trail of the Lockerbie heroin and followed it to Cyprus. On making inquiries of the DEA in Nicosia, they were bluntly warned off on grounds of national security, a cry heard with increasing frequency as the airline tried to prepare its defense against the liability suits. 

Sheila Hershow's interest in the same drugs lead may also have played a part in her unpublicized suspension a week later from the job of chief investigator to the House of Representatives Sub-Committee on Government Activities and Transportation. Two weeks after that, on 6 April 1989, she was fired for being 'uncontrollable' and 'dangerous'. 

Further indications that the politicians had taken over were provided later in the year by Cecil Parkinson, Channon's successor as transport minister. In September, in response to misgivings expressed by the families of the Flight 103 victims about the apparent lack of progress in the investigation, he promised to arrange for an independent judicial inquiry at which sensitive intelligence information could be taken in camera, provided no word of his promise leaked out to the news media. Three months later, the minister (now Lord Parkinson) was obliged to tell them that he had been unable to convince his colleagues that such an inquiry was necessary and that the government had decided against it. 

As the magazine Private Eye observed: 

If, after a major tragedy, a secretary of state recommends a judicial inquiry into something which is his departmental responsibility, he is almost certain to get it. The exception would be if the colleague who resisted it was the prime minister. 

But why would she block an inquiry? The only possible answer is that she was advised against it by MI5. Can it be that senior officers there, like their counterparts in the US and West Germany, are anxious to draw a veil over the Lockerbie incident? None of them wants anyone to know how a bomb, of a type which the security services already knew about, came to be placed in a suitcase which, if the current theory is to be believed, traveled from Malta to Frankfurt, where it changed planes, and then from Frankfurt to Heathrow, where it changed planes again, without being identified. 

It was a fair point. Added to the Thatcher-Bush accord on a low-key pursuit of the bombers and the consequent need for all the agencies concerned to meet on common ground, it serves to explain why the Lockerbie investigation stalled in mid-1989 and never really got going again, leaving John Orr and the Scottish police to spin their wheels in frustration. After the Thatcher-Bush accord, the emphasis of government policy changed, none too subtly, from catching the bombers, whose identities and whereabouts were known, to pinning the blame for the bombing entirely on Pan Am and the undeniable inadequacy of its security arrangements at Frankfurt. 

In this, the US government had powerful allies, commanding everybody's sympathy. Relatives of the victims of Flight 103 had legitimate claims for compensation against Pan Am and its insurers, but under the Warsaw Convention of 1929, the airline's liability was limited to a maximum of $75,000 for each passenger unless the claimants could prove willful misconduct on the part of the airline. 

The enthusiasm with which American law firms undertook to represent the families on a contingency basis in order to prove just that, coupled with the unstinting help they received from the US government in support of their claims, ensured that, from then on, Pan Am would be pilloried at the bar of public opinion to a degree just short of what might have been expected if it had willfully blown up its own aircraft. 

Any attempt on the part of the airline, its lawyers and insurers to shift any part of the blame back to where they thought it belonged, on the government agencies whose operational deficiencies had let the terrorists through, was promptly denounced in the news media as a sleazy attempt to duck responsibility for the disaster and thereby to avoid having to foot the bill for the generous financial settlements to which the grieving families were clearly entitled. (Pan Am later offered $100,000 in compensation to each of the families but this was rejected.)

Surprisingly, perhaps, the most temperate comment came from Bert Ammerman, president of American Victims of Flight 103, representing many of the families claiming compensation. 'If what Pan Am is saying cannot be substantiated, then Pan Am is through,' he said. 'But if what Pan Am is saying is true, then we have the most major scandal in the history of government in the twentieth century'

He was right on both counts. 

What Pan Am was saying was that, good, bad or indifferent (and they were certainly bad), its security arrangements at Frankfurt were probably irrelevant. Intelligence information strongly suggested that the bomb suitcase had been put on the conveyor after the baggage for Flight 103 had been cleared through the airline's security checks. 

Within days of the disaster, lawyers acting for the families were seeking to get around the Warsaw Convention's $75,000 limit by alleging that Pan Am had willfully disregarded prior warnings of a terrorist attack. (To hedge their bets, they also served notice that they would file claims against the US government as well for failing to pass on the warnings.) 

On 2 November, the FAA alerted the airlines with a warning, similar to one already issued by the Germans, about the Toshiba radio-cassette bomb found in Dalkamoni's car. On 17 November, this was followed up with another bulletin describing the bomb in detail and urging all airlines to be extra vigilant. The British Department of Transport underlined this with a warning of its own on 22 November and had a further detailed description of the bomb in preparation when it was overtaken by events. 

On 5 December the American Embassy in Helsinki received an anonymous call about a plot to blow up a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the United States 'within the next two weeks'. On 7 December, the FAA advised all US air carriers of the threat, and the State Department circulated an unclassified warning to all its embassies. 

This was taken particularly seriously in Moscow, where the entire American community was advised of the threat. Like the earlier alerts, the Helsinki warning was still in force when Flight 103 took off from Frankfurt on 21 December, and although it was later dismissed as a coincidental hoax, this was no consolation to the families of those who, unaware of the State Department's warning to its staff, had bought standby tickets for seats on Flight 103 vacated by American diplomats. 

With the US, British and German governments prepared to stand pat on what they had done to alert everybody (except the traveling public) to the danger, attention then shifted from the weaker ground of Pan Am's willful disregard of these warnings to the more promising ground of its willful failure to observe the FAA's baggage security requirements. 

The first suggestion that the airline might be vulnerable to this line of attack had appeared in the New York Post only two days after the disaster. A report from Tel Aviv declared that an Israeli security firm had told Pan Am two years earlier that its security arrangements in Frankfurt and London were 'dangerously lax'.

This story was quickly followed by reports that baggage recovered from the wreckage could not be matched with any of the passengers aboard Flight 103. According to the Sunday Telegraph, 'The implications of this are causing investigators grave concern because police believe that matching luggage to victims IS an essential first step towards tracing the bombers.' 

It was Pan Am's concern over problems of baggage security that had led the airline in 1986 to commission a survey of its procedures from K.P.I Inc., the New York arm of an Israeli firm of consultants headed by Yossi Langotsky and Isaac Yeffet, former chief of security for El Al. Their 200-page confidential report was scathing. As copies began to turn up in newspaper offices around the world, lawyers for the families seized on it avidly. 

'Pan Am is highly vulnerable to most forms of terrorist attack. The fact that no major disaster has occurred to date [1986] is merely providential,' was one of the more damaging conclusions. 

Another was that Pan Am's security was in the hands of 'an organizational set-up which suffers from a lack of authority, and an alarmingly low level of training and instruction'. 

And again: 'The striking discordance between the actual security level and the security as advertised by the corporation may sooner or later become a cause of harmful publicity. In the event of casualties or damage resulting from terrorist action, the question of fraudulent advertisement would assume even greater significance.'

And worst of all: 'There are no adequate safeguards under the presently operating security system that would prevent a passenger from boarding a plane with explosives on his person or in his baggage, whether or not he is aware of the fact.' 

No matter how Pan Am protested after the report became public that changes had been made which 'satisfied both the security needs of Pan Am and the Federal Aviation Administration'; no matter that the co-author of the KPI Report, Isaac Yeffet, said after the Lockerbie disaster that Pan Am had been unlucky, in the sense that its security was neither better nor worse than that of other airlines -- Pan Am appeared now to stand before the world virtually self-condemned of willful misconduct. 

Certainly, any deliberate evasion of security regulations exposing passengers to unnecessary risk would have merited that charge. And certainly, there were security lapses by Pan Am at Frankfurt on 21 December 1988 that were probably unpardonable after the airline had been warned of the dangers of terrorist attack. Nevertheless, Pan Am's procedures were essentially the same as those followed by every other airline (but one) at every other airport in the world. 

As the DEA, the B.K.A, H.M. Customs and Excise and any international drug trafficker like Monzer al-Kassar will acknowledge, if it is possible for suitcases to be lost or stolen in transit, it must also be possible for suitcases to be switched or added in transit. With the security systems operated by every airline in the world (but one), there is no finally effective way of preventing corrupt airport workers from putting an unchecked bag in with legitimate luggage for a flight to America or of preventing corrupt airport workers in the US from intercepting that bag on arrival -- and a bag smuggled aboard in this manner could as easily contain explosives as a shipment of heroin. 

The only way to exclude, with reasonable certainty, the possibility of a bomb being placed on a passenger flight is to have the aircraft guarded around the clock, to hand-search everything that goes aboard, accompanied or not, and then to keep everything and everybody under continuous observation until the aircraft doors are closed for departure -- and even then, the risk of human error or corruption would remain. 

Among airlines, only El Al does that, and because of the time it takes to hand-search every piece of baggage, passengers are required to check in at least three hours before departure. 

If all airlines were obliged to do the same, airport terminals around the world would come to a standstill. At Frankfurt alone, about 60,000 pieces of luggage are fed through the airport's baggage-handling system every day. If they all had to be hand-searched, existing flight schedules would have to be abandoned, and international air traffic on its present scale would soon become impossible -- a level of disruption that terrorists would no doubt be delighted to achieve without risk or effort on their part. 

Today, the danger of terrorist attack, like the danger of design faults, equipment failure, pilot error, traffic congestion, bad weather, metal fatigue, bird-ingestion and all the other acts of God and man against which it is impossible to legislate, is a risk every passenger takes in using so convenient, and so vulnerable, a service as air travel -- which is not to suggest that governments and airlines are under anything but the most solemn obligation to minimize those risks in every possible way. 

In the case of Pan Am Flight 103, both government and carrier failed in their duty, but in the 'national interest' and for reasons of 'national security', the airline was left to carry the full burden of blame. 

At the very least, this was a gross dereliction of responsibility. The destruction of Flight 103 was not simply an attack on a commercial airliner but a deliberate act of war against the United States, whose government was, and is, accountable for the safety of its citizens at home and abroad. 

To expect an non subsidized commercial airline to assume a government's role in defending its citizens against state-sponsored terrorism, as well as the more specific function of airport security in a host country, is unreasonable. The airline's duty is to provide a third line of defence against the known danger, and, however defective this may have been in Pan Am's case, it can hardly be blamed for defects in the first and second lines of defence. For the US and German governments to disown any responsibility for letting the terrorists through, and then to blame everything on Pan Am after their own agents had connived at bypassing an already inadequate third line of defense was unconscionable. 

But once the findings of the K.P.I Report became known, anything Pan Am chose to say or do was dismissed as a cheap attempt to pass the buck. All that the lawyers for the victims' families needed to do in order to get around the provisions of the Warsaw Convention was to show that Pan Am had been warned of the risk of terrorist attack and had not done enough about it. Now, with every reason to suppose they could make the charge stick, a legal action 'proving' willful misconduct on the part of the airline would also have the effect of absolving all three governments of their misconduct. 

By the end of 1989, with the investigation effectively stalled for political reasons, with public opinion conditioned to accept that the mass murder of 270 airline passengers was Pan Am's fault, and with the B.K.A at last prepared to acquiesce in a joint cover story, the American, German and British co-sponsors of the 'controlled delivery' run from Lebanon to the United States could relax a little. 

No one was likely to talk. Everyone connected with the operation had some degree of culpability or negligence to conceal, and no one could be required to testify while they remained in government service. As they approached the first anniversary of the disaster, the only really worrying loose end was Lester Coleman, the one man outside the loop who knew about the heroin pipeline at first hand, who had fallen out with the DEA on Cyprus, who was no friend to the CIA, and who had just been reactivated by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Operation Shakespeare. 

Could he be trusted to keep his mouth shut? 

He had chosen to involve himself with the Lockerbie disaster by appearing on network television to answer questions about it. And barely three months later, Pan Am's lawyers and investigators had arrived on Cyprus asking about a dope pipeline to the United States. 

A coincidence? Or had Coleman gone off the reservation? 

With the 'national interest' at stake, who could afford to take chances? It was a job for the octopus.

to be continued....

FAIR USE NOTICE

THIS SITE CONTAINS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL THE USE OF WHICH HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN SPECIFICALLY AUTHORIZED BY THE COPYRIGHT OWNER. AS A JOURNALIST, I AM MAKING SUCH MATERIAL AVAILABLE IN MY EFFORTS TO ADVANCE UNDERSTANDING OF ARTISTIC, CULTURAL, HISTORIC, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL ISSUES. I BELIEVE THIS CONSTITUTES A 'FAIR USE' OF ANY SUCH COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AS PROVIDED FOR IN SECTION 107 OF THE US COPYRIGHT LAW.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THE MATERIAL ON THIS SITE IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL CAN BE REMOVED ON THE REQUEST OF THE OWNER.