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TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA

Chapter 17:

Lester Coleman's day in court had been scheduled for 17 June 1991, in Chicago, but having just found sanctuary for himself and his family in Sweden, he was not disposed to gamble with it.

Even if he had wished to run the risk of answering the government's trumped-up charge, he was neither fit enough nor solvent enough for any more travel. Acute lumbago, coupled with a kidney infection, had confined him to bed soon after his arrival, and he was down to less than $150. Except for their clothes, the family had nothing left to sell.

On 11 June, his Chicago public defender, Michael Deutsch, advised the court that Coleman was ill in Sweden, and Chief Judge James B. Moran rescheduled the trial for 22 July, ordering Coleman to produce proof of his illness and to appear at a pre-trial hearing set for 16 July.

It was impossible.

'We are disillusioned and exhausted, homeless and broke -- and there seems to be no end in sight,' Coleman wrote to Deutsch. 'I suggest you ask the court to fund a trip for you to consult with your client, whom you have never met, since I am unable to consult with you in Chicago for health and financial reasons.'

Not unexpectedly, the court rejected the suggestion. On 16 July, Deutsch reported that his client was still unable to travel and produced medical certificates to that effect from Coleman's Swedish doctors. Chief Judge Moran then postponed the trial indefinitely and asked the assistant US attorney in charge of the case to arrange for an independent physician to examine Coleman to determine the nature and extent of his illness.

The responsibility for this, and also for bringing Coleman back within the orbit of the Justice Department, was assigned to the FBI, which seems to have concluded, rightly, that he was unlikely to return of his own accord. A pretext was therefore required to have him declared a fugitive. The Bureau could then ask Interpol to have him picked up when Coleman next presented his passport for inspection.

On 24 September, having been advised that a Dr. Hakan Hallberg was prepared to examine Coleman in Sweden on the court's behalf, Chief Judge Moran ordered that unless Coleman submitted to an examination by Dr. Hallberg within ten days, a bench warrant would be issued for his arrest.

Still ready to comply with the court's order (if not to surrender himself to its jurisdiction), Coleman duly telephoned Dr. Hallberg for an appointment -- and was astonished to learn that Dr. Hallberg knew nothing whatever about the matter. He had never been approached by the American authorities, he said, and had certainly never agreed to carry out an independent examination for them.

At Coleman's request, Dr. Hallberg provided a written statement to that effect. In English. Dated 27 September, it read simply: 'Coleman, Lester, has contacted this office, and we have no knowledge of any request from American authority to examine Mr. Coleman.'

Guessing what lay behind the manoeuvre, Coleman immediately forwarded Dr. Hallberg's letter to Micheal Deutsch in Chicago, but it was either too late or ignored. On 7 October 1991, a bench warrant was issued 'for failure to appear', and Coleman was duly reclassified as an international fugitive.

That meant he was no longer free to travel, if he wished to, beyond the frontiers of Sweden, whose government had taken the Colemans in as refugees while their petition for asylum was considered. To get him back, the US Justice Department was now in a position to sue for Coleman's extradition, if it was ready to risk a public hearing in Sweden, or, if it wasn't, either to press through diplomatic channels for his deportation, or to sanction his kidnapping and forcible return to the United States.

A further bonus from Washington's point of view was that the fugitive warrant dealt another body blow to Coleman's credibility as a witness. The assault on his character begun by Steven Emerson in the CNN newscast had become a priority after James Shaughnessy filed Coleman's affidavit in Pan Am's third-party suit.

On 30 May, a few days before the Colemans crossed into Sweden, John J. Connors, the attorney heading the government team, joined Colonel Bathen of the DIA and Micheal Hurley of the DEA in filing declarations directed, not so much at what Coleman had to say, but at the man himself. Most of it had to do with the phony passport charge. As in Pan Am's case, the government was in sole possession of the evidence Coleman needed to prove that he had been acting under orders when he applied for a Thomas Leavy passport, and, again as in Pan Am's case, the government had refused to produce that evidence, claiming the state secrets privilege.

Still following the Pan Am tactics, the Justice Department chose instead to make an in camera, ex parte showing of classified documents to Chief Judge Moran, who, on the strength of what he was shown, ruled that those documents did not support Coleman's defence and denied his motion for discovery. Exactly what he did see, however, is known only to the court and the government prosecutors. As they had charged Coleman in a criminal matter, they were unlikely to have produced documents that undermined their own case, so the value of the exercise was questionable. But it at least enabled Connors to imply in his declaration that Coleman's story was unsupported by the evidence.

'In an apparent attempt to bolster the credibility of Coleman and otherwise support their allegations against the DEA,' Connors went on, 'third-party plaintiffs requested ... depositions of two German BKA agents, Bert Pinsdorf and Hartmut Mayer.'

Holding a watching brief for the government, Connors had attended those depositions in Germany and confirmed that both men had been instructed by their superiors not to discuss the Flight 103 investigation, although Pinsdorf did at one point deny that the BKA had received any advance warning of the bombing. Mayer, Connors went on, knew no more about it than he had read in the newspapers, but he confirmed that he had worked closely with DEA agents in Cyprus and that he knew Lester Coleman.

'The Coleman declaration specifically alleges that Mr. Mayer was somehow involved in or knowledgeable about the DEA 'controlled delivery' which Pan Am alleges was subverted by the terrorists in order to put the bomb on the aircraft in Frankfurt,' declared Connors. 'However, he [Mayer] specifically confirmed [that] controlled deliveries are escorted through and do not bypass security, and specifically denied Coleman's allegation that the BKA or DEA train anyone to circumvent security at any airport.'

Connors evidently misread Coleman's affidavit, for nowhere did he 'specifically' allege that Mayer was involved in the particular controlled delivery that was subverted by the terrorists. What he did say was that Mayer was the BKA's liaison officer for the controlled deliveries mounted by the DEA through Frankfurt -- a statement which Mayer confirmed, and that did little to support the DEA's contention that no controlled deliveries were being carried out in Europe at the time.

Nor did Coleman anywhere 'specifically' allege in his affidavit that the BKA or DEA trained anyone to circumvent airport security or, indeed, failed in this instance to 'escort' the controlled delivery through. What he did say was that 'baggage containing the narcotics used in the operation would be placed on flights to the United States through agents [author's italics], informants and/or sources ... so as to avoid the possible interdiction of the shipments by airport and/or airline security.' In the Frankfurt context, this meant following the established routine of supervising a suitcase switch in the airport's baggage-handling area.

Contrary to Connors's suggestion, there is no discernible conflict between Coleman's statement and Mayer's -- unless by 'escort' Mayer meant a group of DEA and BKA agents solemnly marching a courier through a crowded airport without allowing anyone to touch his bags. And when Mayer went on to say that Khalid Jafaar was not working for the DEA, as Connors reported in his declaration, what did he mean? On that particular occasion? That, as a subsource, he worked for a CI who was paid by the DEA? That he was working for some other agency? And in any case, how would Mayer know?

But for Coleman there were more important things to worry about. His first priority was to satisfy the Swedish authorities of the truth of his story and consequently of his need for their protection.

The family had entered the country legally, on valid American passports, making for Trollhattan, a small town of about 60,000 inhabitants, to which one of Mary-Claude's sisters and her husband had emigrated from Lebanon some five years earlier. Perhaps naively, Coleman had thought they might stay there on a temporary basis until the matter of the phony passport charge was cleared up, but he felt it wise to be frank with the Swedish authorities from the start, and a week after their arrival, he went with his brother-in-law to the local police station to explain his situation.

For one thing, they were broke and needed whatever help they could get.

"The police were very nice to us [he recalled]. Very understanding. They passed us on for a second interview to an officer in charge of refugees, and in July, she arranged for us to move out of my brother-in-law's apartment into a refugee compound on the edge of town. There we found ourselves living with Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis and, later on, Bulgarians, Albanians, Croatians, Serbians, gypsies -- all manner of people seeking sanctuary. And still I told myself it was just temporary, while I got things cleared up. But then came the business with the fugitive warrant and I knew finally I could never go back."

In support of his formal petition for political asylum, Coleman supplied references from a number of witnesses prepared to testify on his behalf, including the Most Reverend Mother Teresa, of the Sisters of Charity; Conrad Martin, executive director of The Fund for Constitutional Government, Washington, D.C.; A. Ernest Fitzgerald, United States Department of Defense, and Elliot L. Richardson, former United States Attorney-General, who met over lunch with the Swedish ambassador to the United States on Coleman's behalf.

His connection with Richardson stemmed from an affidavit Coleman had sworn to about the bootleg PROMIS software he had seen at Cypriot Police headquarters and in the offices of the DEA's Eurame Trading Company in Nicosia. As attorney for William and Nancy Hamilton, the owners of Inslaw, Inc., Richardson had successfully sued the Justice Department in Federal Bankruptcy Court for forcing the company out of business and stealing its software, securing over $7 million in compensation for the department's 'trickery, fraud and deceit'.

This judgment was subsequently affirmed in Federal District Court, which found it just 'under any standard of review', and although the US Court of Appeals later set the decision aside on jurisdictional grounds, it did not disturb the conclusion that 'the government acted wilfully and fraudulently to obtain property it was not entitled to ...'

On 3 August 1991, not long after the family had moved into the refugee compound on the outskirts of Trollhattan, Coleman took a telephone call from Danny Casolaro, an American freelance journalist in Washington, who had tracked him down after reading his affidavit in the Inslaw case.

He was working on a complex story about the octopus, Casolaro explained, linking the theft and unauthorized sale of PROMIS software to foreign governments with the BCCI scandal, the Iran/Contra affair and other questionable activities, including the so-called 'October Surprise'. Could Coleman perhaps help him with any of this? Did he know of anyone who might have further information?

Though disturbed that Casolaro should have traced him so easily, Coleman saw the chance of a trade-off. He had been trying to find James McCloskey, the quickie divorce lawyer who had recruited him into the DIA and who might again be prepared to speak up for him, but his amiable guru had apparently abandoned his practice and moved away from Timonium, Maryland, without leaving a forwarding address. When Coleman explained this to his caller, touching on McCloskey's links with the BCCI and the intelligence community, Casolaro thanked him for the tip and promised in return to let Coleman know as soon as he ran McCloskey to earth.

Nine days later, Ernest Fitzgerald, Coleman's friend at the Pentagon, called to say that Danny Casolaro had been found dead in a blood-boltered hotel bathroom in Martinsburg, West Virginia, both arms slashed open 12 times with a DIY knife blade. His briefcase was missing, and among other suspicious circumstances, the Martinsburg police, declaring Casolaro a suicide, had allowed the body to be embalmed before his family was even notified of his death. A firm of contract cleaners had also been called in to scour the room from top to bottom, so that any meaningful forensic investigation was impossible.

According to relatives and friends, Casolaro had gone to West Virginia, despite recent death threats, to see somebody he had met there who, he thought, could supply the missing links in the story he was working on. Everybody who knew Casolaro, including the Hamiltons and their counsel, Elliot Richardson, were convinced he had been murdered to shut him up.

Coleman was chilled by the news. If the person Casolaro had gone to see was McCloskey, then Coleman had sent Casolaro to his death. And if Casolaro had been killed because of what he knew, then Coleman's own chances of survival, if he fell into the same hands, looked slim. Thankful that he and Mary-Claude had decided to get out when they did, he prevailed on Fitzgerald to make further inquiries, although he found it hard to believe that the McCloskey he remembered could be involved in the murder.

The result was even more unsettling. The likelihood that Casolaro had gone to meet McCloskey increased when investigators established that, after leaving Timonium, McCloskey had bought a horse farm at Shepardstown, about fifteen minutes down the road from where Casolaro was murdered. As against that, McCloskey had not been seen in the area for two years, although there was a working telephone number listed in his name.

When Coleman dialed that number from Sweden, he got through to the Shenandoah Women's Center in Martinsburg, which claimed never to have heard of McCloskey. Efforts to trace him were then redoubled, but without result, and, as far as Coleman knows, McCloskey is still missing to this day.

On 16 October 1991, Coleman telephoned Elliot Richardson to pass on the results of these inquiries, but, as Richardson was out of the country, he spoke instead to William Hamilton, president of Inslaw, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

His revelations came as no great surprise. Hamilton himself had received 'threats of bodily harm from former US and Israeli covert intelligence operatives' embarrassed by his efforts to unmask the government's theft of Inslaw's software.

In a letter supporting Coleman's application for asylum in Sweden, Hamilton wrote:

"We believe that Mr. Casolaro was murdered to prevent the disclosure of evidence about this malfeasance. We also believe that some of the proceeds from the illegal sale of our PROMIS software to foreign governments have made their way into a political and intelligence slush fund in the United States and that this has seriously compromised the integrity of both our political system and our US Department of Justice ...

"I am inclined to credit as serious expressions of concern about personal safety by anyone such as Mr. Coleman who may have pieces to the puzzle of this widely ramified criminal conspiracy that permeates US intelligence and law enforcement agencies."

Ernest Fitzgerald, doyen of Washington's whistle-blowers, went a good deal further in urging the Swedish government to act on Coleman's petition. Drawing on 25 years' experience of official persecution and harassment, much of it described in his book The Pentagonists, he wrote:

"A live, talking and unfettered Lester Coleman represents an enormous potential embarrassment to powerful forces in our government and business establishment. Dead, silent or incarcerated, Les Coleman disappears as a problem. Other people in Mr. Coleman's situation have met untimely ends with distressing frequency.

"Without being able to predict Mr. Coleman's future in our country with certainty, I can tell you the views of other United States intelligence operatives I've dealt with in similar situations. Rightly or wrongly, these people believe that they cannot survive imprisonment in one of our penitentiaries. Conditions in these prisons are very harsh, and little inducement is required for long-term inmates to do deeds that would be unthinkable to the rest of us.

"This fear is so real and pervasive among our intelligence operatives that they are often silenced without imprisonment. A tactic I have noted is to induce a guilty plea through plea bargaining, then impose suspended sentences for a list of offences which the charged agent claimed were perpetrated as official acts. Agents thus pled and sentenced are silenced out of fear that if they talk or write about government-sponsored misdeeds, the suspension of their sentences will be set aside and they will be forced to serve their sentences in prison with consequent exposure to violence, and perhaps subjected to further prosecution.

"I should point out to you that it would not be necessary for Mr. Coleman to be convicted of anything in order to subject him to a US prison environment. At this stage of his dispute with the federal government, our courts would be unlikely to approve bail for him, so he would most likely be incarcerated pending trial."

After his arrest by the FBI on so transparent a trumped-up charge, such fears had never been far from Coleman's mind, and certainly nothing had happened since then to dispel them, neither his deliberate exposure by Steven Emerson on Cable News Network nor the government's latest cynical ploy in having him declared a fugitive. Any lingering hope that he might one day clear his name through the courts had been snuffed out, as he explained in a further submission to the Swedish authorities.

"Elements within the United States government, bizarre as this may seem, have both a motive and a capability to conduct covert 'sanctions', such as the death of Mr. Casalaro and the disappearance of Mr. McCloskey (he wrote). I had first-hand knowledge of these capabilities in Lebanon, where I gathered intelligence that was used to target individuals perceived to be enemies of US interests.

"I have no doubt that I am now a target, considering those former associates who are dead, and the death of Mr. Casolaro. If I return to the United States, I will be jailed and almost certainly killed. The DEA has publicly labelled me a narcotics informant, and there are close on a million and a half people behind bars in the United States serving time for drug offences. I am therefore in genuine fear for my life. In 1990, 243 prisoners were murdered in American prisons."

With plenty of time to worry about such things, Coleman could not decide if he and the family were safer trying to keep out of sight or trying to keep in the public eye. No longer a moving target or, as Casolaro had demonstrated, particularly hard to find, he was inclined to favour a higher profile, if only because an 'accident' or unexplained disappearance would then be more noticeable, but against that, the Swedish police and immigration authorities were clearly not keen on his drawing attention to his situation. In the end, he tried to compromise by making himself available to the media but without encouraging their interest.

Not that the media needed much encouragement, particularly after an interview he had given to Michael Evans of The Times resulted in a pithy restatement of what he knew in its issue of 22 July 1991. Several journalists flew to Sweden to follow up on that story, including Roy Rowan of Time magazine, accompanied by Juval Aviv.

It was Coleman's first meeting with Aviv, and the first time he had seen the Interfor Report. Confining himself for the most part to what he had said in his affidavit, Coleman enjoyed talking to Rowan, a widely respected figure in his former profession, and tried to be as helpful as his circumstances would allow -- without the faintest inkling of the furore that would follow Time's cover article about Flight 103 a few months later.

Some warning of the depths to which the octopus would sink, however, came Coleman's way in December 1991. In the October/November issue of Unclassified, the bimonthly newspaper of the Association of National Security Alumni, its editor, David Mac Michael, had run a piece about the spreading influence of the Defense Department over the US intelligence community, citing Coleman's experiences with the DIA.

This attracted the attention of Ron Martz, of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who, with Lloyd Burchette, had been placed in Coleman's charge by Micheal Hurley when they visited Cyprus in 1988 as guests of the DEA. Clearly not a subscriber to Unclassified's credo that 'covert actions are counterproductive and damaging to the national interest of the United States ... corruptive of civil liberties ... and a free press', Martz addressed MacMichael as follows:

"Dear David,

"This letter is not for publication but please use the information in it as you see fit."

How Martz would have reacted if Mac Michael had prefaced a letter to him in those terms is a matter for speculation, but he went on to claim that Coleman had contacted his (unnamed) 'primary assistant' in 1987 to offer his services 'for a relatively small amount of money' as a 'contact/fixer' on Cyprus during a visit they planned there to look into Lebanese drug trafficking.

As 'Les was living in Cyprus at the time' and 'passed himself off ... as a CI for DEA" Martz agreed to his proposition, but arriving in Cyprus found that 'Les Coleman was little more than a freelance journalist hustling money wherever and from whomever he could, including me. He had no connections with the Cypriot police or anti-drug squads, no connections with BKA and one minor connection with DEA as an 'unofficial consultant ... on non-secure communications.'

Several months later, Martz went on, he discovered Coleman had 'stolen some photographs I had taken of a terrorist car-bombing incident in Nicosia' and had sold them to Soldier of Fortune magazine under the name of Collin (sic) Knox. 'Then I learned the Cypriot police were looking for Les, who had departed Cyprus about the same time I did and left behind huge telephone bills and unpaid rent on his apartment in Nicosia.'

'Since then,' Martz continued, getting to the heart of the matter,

"Les has tried to put himself in the middle of several international events, most noticeably the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie. Les, who has had a long-running feud with DEA in Cyprus, managed to convince ABC News and Pierre Salinger that DEA in Cyprus was responsible for the Pan Am 103 bombing because it was working a sting operation and allowed certain luggage to go on the plane unchecked. ABC went with the story, apparently largely on Les's information, but that story has since been thoroughly discredited.

"I later checked out Les to see if he had any DIA connections as he claimed and found it had never heard of him or Collin Knox. This information comes from a high-ranking officer still on active duty who has served in a number of DIA positions in more than 25 years in the military, a man I trust implicitly and who gave me the information as an off-the-record favor ...

"The story he gave you concerning being in exile because of a DIA-DEA feud is a lot of crap. They may be feuding, but it's certainly not over Les Coleman. Les is in Sweden because the FBI was after him for filing a false passport application and impersonating a federal agent. If you're interested in more information about Les, I suggest you call Mike Hurley at DEA in Seattle (206-553-5443) ...

"From my experiences with him he very seldom, if ever, is what he claims to be.

"Sincerely,

"Ron Martz"

Taking Martz at his word, Mac Michael did not publish the letter, and all he saw fit to do with 'the information' it contained was pass it on to Coleman in Sweden.

Against his better judgment, although it turned out to be good practice for dealing with what was to come, Coleman took the time to prepare a point by point reply for Mac Michael to forward to Martz. Though it seemed unlikely that Martz had gone to the trouble of writing a two-page, single-spaced letter simply out of a public-spirited desire to protect a fellow journalist, he had clearly not been very well briefed.

Hurley's own declaration, for instance, had established Coleman's DEA connection, describing him (incorrectly) as a CI, and Martz's 'high-ranking' source who told him the DIA had never heard of Coleman should perhaps have checked first with Colonel Bathen.

But the pattern of attack was clear, and soon to be repeated. First, the systematic reduction of his character to that of minor con man on the fringe of events, and then the accusations of petty dishonesty.

Coleman told Mac Michael:

"I don't know where to start. I didn't contact them. They came to me, looking for help with their Cyprus trip. I'd never met Martz before he came to see me in my private office at the University of Alabama. The DIA had parked me there for the winter as Director of Visiting International Scholars. So I certainly wasn't living in Cyprus at the time -- I was living in Birmingham, Alabama.

"The suggestion that he paid me is also a bit comical. The only money that changed hands was payment for the phone calls he made from my government apartment while they were out there in the spring of '88, and I turned this over to the DIA in accordance with standing orders. He didn't know that, of course, and I suppose I should take it as a compliment that he swallowed my cover so completely that he saw me as a hustling freelance journalist, although how he squares that with what I was doing for the DEA and with the Fulbright Commission as UA's Director of Visiting International Scholars, I don't know.

"As for stealing his photographs, Lloyd Burchette gave me a set of five prints from a film he had developed in Larnaca while Martz was off on a cruise to Cairo with his wife. And Lloyd needn't have bothered because the lab he used handled all of DEA's film work on Cyprus and they always ran off an extra set of anything interesting for Mike Hurley anyway.

"Nor did I sell them to Soldier of Fortune. The article that appeared with the Colin Knox byline was written by Mike Theodolus, a close friend of Hurley's and a writer for Cyprus Life magazine, which also ran the piece. The only contribution I made to Soldier of Fortune was in 1987, and that was a rehash I did on Hurley's instructions of an article called 'The Lebanese Connection' that appeared in the Observer in December 1986. Almost word for word, I'm ashamed to say.

"And so it goes on. I left behind no unpaid telephone bills or unpaid rent. We were living in government accommodation, so the embassy picked up the tab. And if the Cypriot police were looking for me, I shouldn't have been hard to find because I was back in Nicosia, under my own name, in May 1991, en route to Sweden, and nobody bothered me. So I don't know where Martz got that from. And what's this about impersonating a Federal agent? That's a new one.

"Before writing this, Martz obviously didn't read any of the court documents in the Pan Am case or in the passport frame-up, otherwise he would have known that the DEA had admitted I was a contract consultant and that the DIA had acknowledged I was working for them at the same time. If he honestly thinks I put myself in the middle of the Flight 103 case in the hope of gaining something by it then one of us belongs in a padded room.

"No wonder his letter was not for publication. Like a few other reporters I know who make a business out of chasing dope stories around the world in their quiche-stained safari suits, Martz is no dope himself. If he wants a good scoop now and then, he knows he better play ball with the DEA."

It may just have been a coincidence that this attempt to discredit Coleman within the intelligence community came soon after Chief Judge Platt had declined to dismiss Pan Am's third-party suit in New York; soon after the government's deception of Chief Judge Moran in Chicago had resulted in the issue of a fugitive warrant, and soon after Danny Casolaro had been murdered while running down a Coleman lead, but there was no doubting the connection between Time magazine's cover article of 27 April 1992, and the vicious attack on Coleman launched as soon as the civil suit against Pan Am was over.

Christopher Byron teed off for the government in the 31 August issue of New York magazine.

A former employee of Forbes magazine, Byron found Roy Rowan's story about Flight 103 'a tangle of assertions and equivocations' based on Coleman's skill in 'conning the media'. Having bamboozled Brian Ross of NBC and Pierre Salinger of ABC, wrote Byron, 'Coleman finally found his loudest sounding board of all -- the cover of Time magazine.'

One might have expected that anyone with such a phenomenal gift for deception would be living in luxury in the south of France rather than subsisting on the goodwill of the Swedish government, but Byron was clearly made of sterner stuff than his media colleagues.

'Beguiled by his astounding claim that the DEA was implicated in the Pan Am 103 disaster,' he went on, 'Time made this the central thesis -- with Coleman as the corroborating source -- of its cover story entitled "The Untold Story of Pan Am 103".'

Byron did not feel it necessary to explain why he was not taken in as others were, nor did he suggest why, failing a financial motive, Coleman should have set out to deceive anybody, but it hardly mattered. Byron had already given most of the game away by describing him as a 'corroborating source', in effect accepting that the story had originated elsewhere as Ross, Salinger and Rowan had each insisted.

Byron next accused Coleman and Juval Aviv of collusion in selling Aviv's 'discredited' Interfor Report to Time, and, even more whimsically, of conspiring with Pan Am's lawyers to influence the civil liability trial. They 'all seem to have worked together -- or at least in parallel -- to get their story into Time,' is how he put it, falling just short of imputing libelous motives to an attorney of James Shaughnessy's calibre.

In fact, as Pan Am had dropped Aviv almost two years before the story appeared, and as Coleman had met Aviv for the first time some six months after he had sworn out his affidavit, their scope for collusion was limited. In any case, Coleman did not, and does not, accept Aviv's and Rowan's conclusion that a rogue CIA unit was instrumental in allowing a bomb aboard Flight 103.

'Just how badly did Time get snookered in all this?' asked Byron. 'For an answer, one need look no further than Michael Schafer, a young Christian Broadcasting Network cameraman who had worked for Coleman for six months in Beirut in 1985 and became the best man at his wedding.'

Schafer, known at the time as Michael Franks, had been sent to Beirut by Overseas Press Services Inc., a firm of 'consultants' with close ties to Oliver North, CIA director William Casey and the Nicaraguan Contras. The 'young cameraman' had spent most of his time in Beirut fighting with the right-wing Christian militias and, as best man, signed Coleman's marriage certificate as Michael Franks.

When Coleman later learned from Pan Am's lawyers that the mysterious David Lovejoy, who had told the Iranians about the American intelligence agents on Flight 103, was also known as Michael Franks, he gave Shaughnessy a photograph of his best man, and it was this picture that eventually appeared in Time magazine as a picture of David Lovejoy, 'a reported double agent for the US and Iran'.

(The same picture was also used on the forged CBN 'press credentials' that Schafer later produced in an attempt to cover up his lapse in signing Coleman's marriage certificate as Franks, the name he used in Lebanon in 1985 before it became generally known as a Lovejoy alias.)

'This whole thing is a disgrace,' Byron went on, quoting CNN investigative reporter Steven Emerson.

'I have reviewed the DEA file on Coleman,' Emerson had told him (perhaps unaware that this was not only prima facie evidence of a Federal crime but something which Coleman and the Pan Am legal team had conspicuously failed to accomplish by subpoena). 'The overwhelming evidence is that this man has invented his involvement in and knowledge of covert operations that never occurred.'

As the only 'evidence' this provided was of Emerson's inability to express himself clearly, Byron proceeded to enlarge on his remarks with a sceptical account of Coleman's career as an intelligence agent, ostensibly based on Coleman's own claims and assertions, but in reality cobbled together to fit the Byron/Emerson/DEA thesis that the Time/Aviv/Coleman story was a put-up job to get Pam Am off the hook.

'That's what Coleman says,' concluded Byron. 'Here's what others say about him.'

Eight loaded quotations followed from a list of 'character witnesses' headed by Lloyd Burchette Jr., a friend of Michael Franks/Schafer and 'primary assistant' to Ron Martz, who was apparently still too shy to come forward in person.

Billed now as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Burchette declared: 'Les Coleman is the greatest bullshit artist I've ever met in my life. He ripped us off for $2000 and absolutely nothing he promised to do for us ever panned out. He also stole some photographs from me and my partner and sold them to Soldier of Fortune magazine. The man's a phony, and I wouldn't believe a word he says about anything.'

Burchette evidently has a forgiving nature, however. Later in his article, Byron says 'he [Burchette] stayed in touch with him [Coleman] thereafter' -- and clearly on friendly terms, because in June 1990, according to Byron, Coleman called Burchette 'in hysterics' to say he had just been busted for a passport violation and that he was sure Hurley 'was behind the whole thing'. (Hardly the reaction of a guilty man, in any case.)

Next up in the firing line was Tom Slizewski, managing editor of Soldier of Fortune who said Coleman had written two stories for him under the pen name of Colin Knox and owed the magazine $1000 for a third, which he had failed to deliver.

Coleman had already answered this charge, and Burchette's, when it was first made by Martz, but his response had evidently failed to register. Coleman prepared the first article to appear, bylined Colin Knox, in 1987 and then surrendered the pen-name to a journalist friend of Hurley's.

Number three was Hurley himself, who departed from the text of his sworn declaration to describe Coleman as 'a part-time confidential informant' who 'stole $5500 from one of his own subinformants. Then he got in trouble with the Cypriot police for stealing from his landlord. He stole DEA files and sold them to Soldier of Fortune. Then Coleman talked about DEA informants in Time magazine, and he's blown their covers.'

These charges were particularly contemptible.

First, the $5500 was demanded by a cameraman in the full-time employ of a London television news company who shot some film for the DEA with his employers' equipment in the course of his official duties and thus wished to be paid twice. Coleman refused to give him the money.

Second, by 'stealing from his landlord', Hurley presumably meant the telephone bills which he had neglected to pay after Coleman left his government apartment and returned home.

Third, this was the first reference anywhere to the theft of DEA files, a more serious offence than a passport violation, particularly if they were then sold to Soldier of Fortune, a Federal crime on the part of both seller and buyer.

Fourth, as for blowing the covers of DEA informants in Time magazine, the only one mentioned by his real name was Ibrahim El Jorr, an 'offence' of which Byron was also guilty, and who had long since dropped out of sight, no doubt because he knew too much about DEA-controlled deliveries from Cyprus.

Then came Peter Schweitzer of CBS News, who suggested that Coleman had conned the network's foreign desk in New York into having him tag along with Schweitzer and his team when they went out to Saudi Arabia 'to cover the hajj in September of 1985 ... He was nice enough, it is true, but he was of no help and had no special expertise. He didn't speak Arabic or anything.'

Schweitzer's memory was evidently playing tricks. He had covered the hajj in 1984, not 1985, from his hotel room, keeping out of trouble while Coleman did battle -- in Arabic -- with Saudi Ministry of Information officials to save the unit's video footage from censorship.

'My wife, her family, my many friends and my present employer who hired me as a part-time Arabic translator will be interested to know that I don't speak Arabic,' he wrote in a long letter of rebuttal to New York magazine (which neither acknowledged nor published it).

A spokesman for the University of Alabama came next. He claimed that Coleman had been hired as 'assistant director of international student affairs' but after a couple of months 'he just left, so we dismissed him.' They then discovered that some student visa forms had gone with him, and they 'wound up having to void every student visa he'd issued'.

Except one. Coleman's appointment had been a DIA set-up from the start, with the dual object of putting him on hold for the winter and importing Syrian George on a student visa. The DIA may not have confided this to the university's anonymous spokesman.

He was followed by an equally anonymous spokesman for Auburn University, Montgomery, Alabama, who declared, 'We've never had a Lester Coleman on the payroll.'

In Montgomery, no. But on the main campus at Auburn, Alabama, the DIA had arranged for him to take up a full teaching assistantship in the Department of Political Science. (The local newspaper ran a story about a lecture he gave there on Middle East politics, complete with Coleman's picture.) He was admitted to graduate school on 23 December 1986, and the records show -- if they have not since been shredded -- that when he arrived in Cyprus in February 1987, seconded to the DEA, he was enrolled for a course entitled Thesis Research. (The spokesman's confusion may have arisen because Coleman was paid by the DIA while on campus and not by the university.)

A similar problem afflicted the next anonymous spokesman, this one for the National Intelligence Academy, Fort Lauderdale. 'He [Coleman] worked here for eleven days in October of 1988. He was a videotape editor. That's all I know.'

In fact, it was 1987. Coleman was assigned to the Academy for six weeks, and he kept a souvenir -- his official staff pass. It reads: 'Director, Video Operations'. Also, he does not know how to edit videotape.

Last but not least, Byron quoted yet another anonymous spokesman, this time for the Boy Scouts of America. 'He worked here in PR,' he said. 'Let's just say he's gone; things didn't work out.'

Just before his recall by the DIA for Operation Shakespeare, Coleman received his annual review as director of Marketing and Communications for the BSA, Chicago. In three areas of responsibility, his performance was rated: in one, 'Exceeded requirements'; in another, 'Far exceeded requirements', and in the last, 'Met requirements'.

If Byron's New York article had aspired to greater balance, he might have offset some of this with one or two more positive opinions.

If he had approached Msgr. John A. Esseff, for example, who went out to the Middle East in 1984 to direct a Catholic church relief mission and later gave evidence to a Congressional committee inquiring into Lebanese drug trafficking, he would have heard that 'Les Coleman was the most respected, most knowledgeable source on the Middle East and the kinds of terrorist activities that had been engaged in by Syria, Iran and Libya that I had met ...

'I find him trustworthy and courageous. He is not someone who has made these revelations to cater to sensationalism and journalistic playing to the crowd for material gain ... Les may not see himself as a modern prophet, but I see him as a biblical prophet who is driven by a sense of justice, truth and honesty to reveal the truth.'

This and other testimonials from public figures in support of Coleman's plea for asylum in Sweden did not, however, fit well with Byron's New York thesis that 'Coleman's career underscores an important message about contemporary American life: how eager the media have become to charge the very worst about government, even when the evidence in a story points to the opposite conclusion.'

Though confusingly expressed, his meaning was clear. But equally it could be said that mistrust of government is enshrined in the American political process, and that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the media have a constitutional duty to assume the worst. In his eagerness to exonerate the government by blackguarding Coleman, Byron tortured the evidence in his story to the point of travesty.

In defence of Rowan's article, Time said it had obtained documents proving that Coleman had been, as he claimed, employed by both the DIA and the DEA.

'What Time didn't point out,' wrote Byron, 'was that two of these documents were affidavits of DIA and DEA officials that contradicted many of Coleman's claims.'

True. But they did not contradict the essential one, which was that Coleman had been employed by them. And that was the point Time had sought to verify.

Similarly with Coleman's pre-trial services report, from which Time had quoted this passage: 'Although Mr. Coleman's employment history sounds quite improbable, information he gave has proven to be true.'

Uncomfortable with this official endorsement of Coleman's credibility, Byron wrote: 'What Time didn't tell its readers was that the information in the report came mainly from a court officer's interviews with Coleman himself, as well as from Brian Ross of NBC News: the very first sentence in the report says so.'

Really? The very first sentence of the report reads as follows: 'The information below was gathered through interview of the defendant and through contact with DEA headquarters [author's italics], NBC News and the subject's attorney.'

The reason for Byron's omission of DEA headquarters as a source for the report becomes clear in the text. This says plainly that Coleman 'worked as an undercover investigator for the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States'. And it goes on: '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.'

Not as a 'low level' informant, part-time or otherwise, but 'as a contract consultant'. Not 'fired' or 'terminated', but 'deactivated'.

Coleman's pre-trial services report gives the lie to all subsequent DEA statements about his status, starting with Steven Emerson's CNN newscast in December 1990, continuing with Micheal Hurley's sworn declaration 'under penalty of perjury', with Martz's 'not-for-publication' letter, Byron's systematic misrepresentation of his career, and Emerson's review of 'the DEA file on Coleman'.

Having failed to silence him, the DEA's motive in seeking to destroy Coleman's credibility was clear: he knew too much about the sequence of events that led up to the Flight 103 disaster, and it was imperative that no one should believe him.

Byron's motive in withholding information in order to assist the DEA in those efforts is a matter for speculation.

Still trying to attack his former colleagues at Time and denounce Coleman in the same breath, Byron accused Rowan of quoting selectively from the pre-trial services report in order to present Coleman as a credible source, 'ignoring those parts of it that clashed with that view [in the circumstances, a remarkable piece of hypocrisy].

'Thus, the story unquestioningly parroted Coleman's claim that he had been tricked into applying for a passport under a false name ... Yet the pretrial services report states the truth of what actually happened: 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 ... Coleman states that he needed a passport in a different name because his name is known to drug traffickers in the Middle East.'

This was indeed true, if not the whole truth -- although how Byron could have known was not explained. At the time of his arrest, Coleman was certainly working on a book. His name was certainly known to drug traffickers in the Middle East. And he certainly needed a passport in a different name. What he did not reveal to the pre-trial services officer was his identity as a DIA agent who had been instructed to apply for another passport to use on a mission to Lebanon to investigate its military government's links with Iraq. Byron was either unaware of this or again chose to withhold the information.

The rest of his New York magazine article was a more or less standard rehash of the lies, half-truths and innuendo that had dogged Coleman from the day his cover was blown. But there were one or two ingenious twists. In order to get around the awkward problem of why other journalists of greater reputation should have asked Coleman to corroborate a story obtained from other, unconnected sources, Byron attempted to show that Coleman was also behind the other sources.

While it was clearly not safe to accuse Pierre Salinger of lying when the ABC newscast attributed its story about the DEA's involvement in the Flight 103 disaster to 'law enforcement officials', Byron could suggest, in language appropriate to someone tiptoeing around the edge of libel, that 'there is good reason to wonder whether Salinger properly understood the full picture of what they were telling him.'

Byron's theory was that when Coleman's attorney in Chicago subpoenaed the DEA and other agencies on 31 August 1990, he triggered an internal Justice Department inquiry into Coleman's story that lasted 'for many months' and resulted in the DEA giving itself a clean bill of health. While that was going on, 'the DEA began getting press inquiries from ABC itself regarding COREA -- inquiries that it now seems evident were prompted by Coleman.' Evident to whom? Not, clearly, to Salinger, who had already said that he met Coleman in London shortly before the broadcast to corroborate material he had previously obtained from 'law enforcement officials'.

'Thus, without knowing each little fact of the matter,' Byron went on, 'we can begin to sketch the general outlines of what happened: ABC News, egged on by Coleman, called its law-enforcement sources on the COREA business, only to hear that the government was indeed looking into the question. In short, if ABC News thought it had "other sources" for its Pan Am story, it is equally possible that it had simply caught the scent of Lester Coleman disappearing around a corner.'

Unfortunately for Byron, 'each little fact of the matter' carries too much weight to be borne by so flimsy a piece of special pleading, despite his attempt to include readers in the conspiratorial 'we' and his disingenuous 'equally possible'.

It is not at all possible that Salinger, 'a journalist with a long and strong track record' who had told Byron there was 'no possible way' that his sources 'could have been in contact with Coleman or even have known him' was referring to sources within the government who had merely confirmed that the Justice Department was looking into 'the COREA business'. Who could reasonably assume from this that allegations of DEA involvement in the Lockerbie disaster were true? In any case, these government sources would certainly have known about Coleman even if they had not been in contact with him.

It is equally implausible to suggest that two months after inquiring if DEA agents in Nicosia had been running a controlled delivery operation at the time of the Flight 103 disaster their superiors in Washington still did not know the answer. And surely, if there had been an internal inquiry, it would have taken place a year earlier, in September 1989, when Pan Am attempted to subpoena the same documents?

In fact, the only 'good reason to wonder' Byron provides is whether he properly understands the nature of responsible journalism.

After a slanted synopsis of Bathen's DIA declaration and an embellished version of Hurley's, Byron turned again to Burchette for 'evidence' that Coleman was lying when he said he recognised a photograph of Khalid Jafaar.

'During the month he was on Cyprus, Lloyd Burchette says he met every informant working with or for Coleman and he maintains he never met anyone who even looked like Jafaar.' Burchette further claimed that Coleman called him after the ABC newscast, which had included a photograph of Jafaar, and denied that he recognized him.

This was conclusive enough for Byron.

'The fact that Time magazine was willing to put a charge of government complicity in the Pan Am bombing on its cover on the doubtful assertions of a private eye [Juval Aviv] and an international fugitive in a passport case, and against the strong protestations [later denied] of its own Washington-bureau experts,' he wrote, 'reveals more than sloppy journalism -- it reveals something about the impulse to self-destruction that seems to be chipping away at America's faith in itself and its institutions.'

As an authority on American values, Byron's credentials are perhaps less impressive than they are in the matter of sloppy journalism -- as witness the concluding paragraph of his article.

"And what of Lester Coleman? As things turned out, he was never called as a witness in the Pan Am trial, and no affidavit, declaration or deposition from him was submitted at the trial, either. Apparently realizing they'd been snookered, Pan Am's lawyers seem to have concluded that if they put Coleman on the stand, the plaintiffs' lawyers would rip him apart. As a result, the only people who now need to be told the truth about the Pan Am bombing are the millions of TV viewers and magazine readers who weren't in the courtroom. Thanks in no small part to Lester Coleman and the American media, they no doubt continue to wonder whether the US government was, in fact, involved in the mass murder of American citizens."

Not knowing each little fact of the matter, Byron got most of this wrong as well. At no time had Coleman ever been considered as a possible witness in Pan Am's defence of the civil liability suit. His affidavit had been obtained in the course of Pan Am's third-party suit against the US government, and the only circumstances in which he might have been called as a witness in that action would have been if the government had produced the discovery material that Pan Am's counsel had asked for. As it did not, the third-party suit was dismissed on the eve of the liability trial.

The only issue that then remained was whether Pan Am's security lapses at Frankfurt amounted to wilful misconduct, and Coleman had never had anything to say about that. Even if Pan Am had wished to put him on the stand for some reason it could not have done so, not only in view of his circumstances but because the judge had already made it clear in advance that he would rule out any testimony suggesting government complicity in the bombing. The jury was there to try a claim against Pan Am, not the US government.

In fact, the only parties keen to 'rip him apart' were the Drug Enforcement Administration and, on this evidence, Christopher Byron (although he would shortly be joined by his colleague Steven Emerson). With that in mind, the last sentence of Byron's article takes on an unintended irony. Nor are the editors of New York magazine beyond reproach. When Coleman sent them a point-by-point rebuttal of the smear, they not only failed to publish it, thus denying the accused a chance to defend himself, but failed even to acknowledge his letter. (Or, if they did, he failed to received it.)

Hard on the heels of Byron's article, the September 1992 issue of the Washington Journalism Review fielded Steven Emerson on the same subject, using much the same material to arrive at much the same conclusion.

Leading off with the Franks/Schafer/Lovejoy business to demonstrate that 'Time obviously screwed up,' Emerson was prepared to forgive the magazine for that but not for relying on Juval Aviv and Lester Coleman, whom he described as Pan Am's 'paid consultants'.

Aviv had been, of course, some two years earlier, but to describe Coleman in this way was about as accurate as Emerson's previous description of him on CNN as a disgruntled former DEA informant (and was no doubt attributable to the same source).

Coleman received nothing from Pan Am except travel passes and expenses incurred on Pan Am-related business. To assert, as Emerson did later in his article, that 'the two men have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Pan Am's attorneys, according to officials close to the case', was presumably intended to suggest that Coleman had been a beneficiary of legitimate payments made to Aviv before he resigned as Pan Am's investigator, long before Coleman had even met him.

In its own interests, Pan Am had always been scrupulously careful to avoid compromising Coleman as a possible witness, preferring to leave the buying of testimony, as in the case of the Libyan defector, to the government.

After a brief synopsis of Time's cover article, Emerson went on to note that the 'independent' President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism had, in 1990, seen 'no foundation for speculation in press accounts that US government officials had participated tacitly or otherwise in any supposed operation at Frankfurt Airport having anything to do with the sabotage of Flight 103.'

What he, in common with most government spokesmen, failed to mention, however, was that the commission had been specifically excluded from any role in the investigation of the bombing and had thus never addressed the issue of government complicity.

Emerson did, however, concede that the indictment of two Libyans for the crime in November 1991 had 'generated some controversy, leading several critics to charge that the US government might be engaged in a cover-up.' Time, he felt, had 'exploited this controversy' by running a story derived from Aviv's original Interfor Report of 1989.

Without referring again to a possible cover-up, Emerson went over the government's now familiar dismissal of Aviv and his report, echoing the Observer's 1989 charge that he 'had pieced together known events and facts in a wild conspiracy'. Things then died down, he wrote, until the NBC and ABC news reports in October 1990 revived the story of the DEA's involvement in the bombing.

Differing slightly from Byron's account of what happened then, Emerson claimed that 'within a week, the agency reviewed every file from the previous five years and sent inquiries to its agents overseas. The evidence collected by the DEA -- and independently confirmed by the FBl -- showed that the allegations reported by NBC and ABC were baseless ...

'Still, some journalists were not convinced,' he wrote. 'In its 17 December 1990 issue, Barron's published a lengthy article reporting virtually everything in the Aviv report. The conspiracy theory would not die.

The main reason for this, Byron suggested, was Lester Coleman, who had alleged that Khalid Jafaar was one of his informants and who had teamed up with Aviv in 1990.

Both statements were incorrect. Coleman had never claimed Jafaar as an informant and he met Aviv for the first time in late 1991.

Nevertheless, according to Emerson, the DEA had shown him 'an internal November 1990 DEA memo' which said Aviv had told a DEA agent that Coleman had contacted him several months earlier and that he (Coleman) was trying to sell information about the bombing. 'By the time NBC and ABC interviewed Coleman,' wrote Emerson, 'he had worked out his story with Aviv.'

Why Aviv should have reported Coleman to the DEA and then collaborated with him in concocting a story for NBC and ABC was not explained. Nor has Coleman been able to verify the existence or contents of the DEA internal memo for, unlike Emerson, he has never been able to obtain access to his DEA file, not even under Title 5, 552 (b) (6) of the Privacy Act.

Emerson's special relationship with the DEA was further demonstrated when he quoted from another internal DEA memo describing Coleman's association with DEA Cyprus. This, not unnaturally, echoed Hurley's sworn declaration on that subject, and led to 'corroborative' testimony from Ron Martz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on the record this time, and Lloyd Burchette Jr., now described as 'a screenwriter'.

After that, Emerson drew his readers' attention to what he described as 'half-truths, misstatements and omissions' in the Time magazine story, displaying a measure of the same disregard for his own shortcomings in this respect as Byron had shown in his article, and, again like Byron, getting Coleman's status as a Pan Am witness completely wrong.

'According to sources familiar with the defence strategy,' wrote Emerson, 'Pan Am's attorneys began having doubts about Aviv and Coleman two years ago. Even so, they went along with the conspiracy story because it was their only hope of winning the case. But when the defence attorneys apparently realized that their prize witnesses and their story would be torn to shreds under cross-examination, they dropped the witnesses.'

It was clear from this that neither Byron nor Emerson had understood that there had been two lawsuits to be tried: the civil action against Pan Am brought by the families of the Flight 103 victims, and the action brought by Pan Am against the US government for third-party liability .

Coleman and Aviv might have been called as witnesses in the third-party suit if it had not been dismissed three days before the main trial began, but at no time -- before, during or after -- did Coleman have a role to play in the suit against Pan Am. On the issue of the airline's alleged 'wilful misconduct' in flouting FAA security regulations at Frankfurt, he had nothing whatever to contribute.

Although clear enough from the court records, the legal position was apparently too difficult for Byron and Emerson to grasp. In which case, their 'sources familiar with the defence strategy' might at least have spared them the humiliation of looking foolish in print.

On the other hand, perhaps they did not mind. For a parting shot at Coleman, Emerson turned again to reporter/screenwriter Lloyd Burchette Jr. and the Franks/Schafer affair.

'Burchette recalls that one day in May 1988, in Cyprus, Coleman showed him a letter of identification stating that Michael Schafer "is a representative of CBN News assigned to the Beirut bureau",' he wrote. 'It included a photo of Schafer -- the same photo Time said was David Lovejoy -- and was signed by Coleman, who was then a CBN senior correspondent. A copy of this letter of identification shows that the photo of Schafer and that of Lovejoy are exactly the same. There is no evidence that Lovejoy exists.'

In fact, there is some evidence that Lovejoy exists, but aside from that, a less committed writer might just have paused here and asked Burchette these questions (or if he did ask them, to have favoured his readers with the answers):

Why would Franks/Schafer sign Coleman's marriage certificate as Franks if he was holding a letter of identification from Coleman in the name of Schafer?

If Coleman had given this letter of identification to Franks/Schafer in Beirut in 1985, what was Coleman doing with it in Cyprus in 1988?

How did he get it back from Franks/Schafer?

And how did Franks/Schafer then get it back from him?

For Coleman, safe for the moment in Sweden, these smears mattered only because they showed how far the US government was ready to go in suppressing the truth. And that was important because, having given up hope of a fair hearing in court or in the news media, he had sought to have the whole story of his career as an intelligence agent told in a book.

After the Byron and Emerson articles appeared, negotiations with a prospective publisher stalled, and when New York magazine and the Washington Journalism Review both failed to publish his rebuttal, they collapsed.

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