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

Chapter 9:

Stalled by the higher priorities of Anglo-American diplomacy, the deliberate withholding of information by British and American intelligence agencies, and the seeming intransigence of the German BKA, the police investigation into the bombing of Flight 103 again ground to a halt in December 1989. In a newspaper interview marking the first anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Lord Fraser, conceded that 'we have not yet reached the stage where proceedings are imminently in prospect'. In other words, 'We know who did it but can't prove it in court.'

Touched by the general mood of frustration, he added that he had even thought of abandoning the hunt 'because we don't want to kid people that there is an active investigation if really policemen are just shuffling files around'. As a sop to 'serious public concern', he announced that a Fatal Accident Inquiry -- the Scottish equivalent of a coroner's inquest -- would be convened in the new year.

'Lord Fraser was initially opposed to such an inquiry,' wrote the Sunday Correspondent on 17 December, 'and his change of mind is indicative not only of intense pressure from victims' relatives but is also an admission that the inquiry, which has so far cost £7.75m, has reached a dead end. There is still no positive evidence to link the suspects firmly to the crime, although Lord Fraser did say in his interview that the investigation was in "a very active phase".'

George Esson, Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway, agreed. 'We are cautiously optimistic, based on the amount of evidence and information that we've already got, of identifying the culprits. Intelligence is one thing, but turning intelligence into hard evidence is quite another issue ... The gathering of the forensic evidence has been done, much of the analysis of that evidence has now been done. The obvious lines of inquiry are not exactly running out, but there's a limit to the time that can take and we are reaching that stage. You eventually exhaust the leads you have.'

Esson's caution and forbearance were remarkable, given that the investigation had become a political football. In the year since the disaster, his officers, led by Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr, had collected 12,402 names in the police computer at the Lockerbie Incident Centre, made 350 visits to 13 countries and launched inquiries in 39 others. (About the only people they had not talked to -- and never did -- were Juval Aviv and Lester Coleman.)

Otherwise, they had taken over 14,000 statements, logged about 16,000 items of personal property belonging to the victims, and taken some 35,000 photographs -- and the only solid lead they had left was a link between the bombing and four Palestinians who had just been convicted of terrorist crimes in Sweden.

One of them, Mahmoud Said al-Moghrabi, had confessed to the charges against him and, in so doing, had connected two of the others, Marten Imandi and Abu Talb, with the PFLP-GC cell in West Germany. Just before the BKA raids, Imandi's car, with Swedish licence plates, had been observed parked outside the bombers' apartment in Neuss, and in October 1988, Talb had visited Malta, bringing back samples of clothing that he told Ivloghrabi he intended to import from the island for Sweden's rag trade.

When the Swedish police raided Talb's apartment in May 1989, they found a calendar with a pencil ring around the fatal date, 21 December 1988, and when they returned later with the Scottish police on a second raid, they found some 200 pieces of clothing manufactured in Malta.

Reporting these developments in The Sunday Times, David Leppard, the most assiduous of the newsmen still working on the Lockerbie story, wrote:

Talb flew out of Malta on November 26 last year -- only three days after a man walked into a boutique in the tourist resort of Sliema and bought clothes which were later wrapped around the Pan Am suitcase bomb ... He also visited a flat in Frankfurt, West Germany, where the bomb was almost certainly built.

Talb is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the group Western intelligence believes was paid millions of dollars by the Iranians to carry out the Lockerbie bombing.

By now, Leppard was also convinced that the bomb had been put aboard Flight 103 in an unaccompanied suitcase sent via Air Malta to Frankfurt, an 'exclusive' printed two weeks earlier (after the extraordinary resurrection of the airport's computerized baggage lists), but the Observer was not so sure. 'The Maltese connection is the strongest lead so far in the search for the bombers,' the paper conceded, 'although there is nothing to support newspaper reports that the bomb itself originated on the island.'

It fell to David Leppard to close out the media's coverage of the disaster for 1989. On 17 December, under the headline 'Police close in on Lockerbie killers', he wrote:

Police now have the necessary evidence to charge suspects with the murder of 270 Lockerbie air disaster victims. After a series of exclusive disclosures over the past seven weeks, The Sunday Times understands that officers heading the investigation -- despite a cautious attitude in public -- have told their counterparts abroad that under Scottish law, charges are now possible against certain persons ...

The revelation ... was made at a secret summit in Meckenheim, West Germany, of the heads of security services involved in the inquiry from Britain, West Germany, America, Sweden and Malta.

A week later, on Christmas Eve 1989, he added: 'Police hunting the bombers of the Pan Am jet which blew up over Lockerbie last year have uncovered important new forensic evidence linking a group of suspected Palestinian terrorists in West Germany to the bombing.

'Ministry of Defence scientists now believe a white plastic residue recovered from the crash site is the same material as that in alarm clocks bought by the group at a shop in Neuss, near Dusseldorf, two months before the bombing,' Scottish detectives, Leppard went on, 'believe the white residue provides "a hard link" between the bombs found at Neuss and Frankfurt and the Lockerbie bomb'.

A year later, the same forensic evidence and a hitherto discounted CIA report of a secret meeting in Tripoli in 1988 would serve to pin the blame exclusively on the Libyans, as was then required by changes in Middle East policy, but on the first anniversary of the disaster, there was no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Lord Advocate when he insisted that 'Our commitment and determination to bring the evil perpetrators of this mass murder to justice continues undiminished.'

The same commitment had been expressed a few months earlier by President George Bush in setting up his Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, with instructions to report by 15 May 1990. This, too, was in response to public pressure for results in the Flight 103 investigation, and, like the promised Fatal Accident Inquiry in Scotland, was offered reluctantly, lest its findings should conflict with the politically acceptable solution required by London and Washington.

In Britain, the government managed to put off the Scottish hearings until October 1990, and even then, no evidence was to be offered that might prejudice possible extradition hearings, which covered pretty nearly everything. In Washington, where the appearance of openness in government is more highly prized, the necessary political constraints on the president's Commission were built in with the choice of its members. With Ann McLaughlin, Reagan's former secretary of labor, in the chair, it included four career politicians, among them a former secretary to the Navy, and a retired Air Force general.

Though empowered to call witnesses and to subpoena records, the Commission dutifully concentrated, not on the criminal investigation, but on Pan Am's security lapses in Frankfurt and London and on the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Administration. Even so, some revealing snippets emerged from the hearings. The panel learned, for example, from Raymond Smith, then deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the Soviet Union, that 80 per cent of the reservations made by Moscow embassy staff on Pan Am flights during the 1988 Christmas holidays were cancelled after the so-called Helsinki warning early in December.

'It named a carrier,' said Smith, 'It named a route. And it covered a time period when many Americans in Moscow would be going home for Christmas. Here, it seems to me, we have a moral obligation to let people know.'

On his responsibility, the warning was drawn to the attention, not only of diplomats, but of the entire American colony in Moscow. As Andrew Stephen wrote in the Observer, 'These revelations have helped to explain the mystery of why there were so many empty seats on Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York on 21 December 1988.'

Also significant were reports of a clash between testimony given under oath by Thomas Plaskett, Pan Am's chairman, and Raymond Salazar, security chief of the FAA. Some months before the disaster, the airline had decided to allow unaccompanied baggage aboard its international flights with an X-ray check instead of the physical search seemingly required under the rules. Plaskett testified that the FAA had agreed to this at a meeting with Pan Am's security chiefs, but Salazar denied that any such exemption had been given, dismissing Plaskett's testimony as 'not credible'.

Credible or not, when the FAA fined Pan Am $630,000 for violations of its rules in Frankfurt and London during a five-week period beginning on 21 December 1988, it did not cite the airline for failing to search unaccompanied baggage or for failing to reconcile interline baggage with interline passengers.

Stung by Salazar's denial, Pan Am promptly accused the FAA of engaging in a cover-up.

That was in April. On 16 May 1990 -- two weeks after Lester Coleman's arrest on a trumped-up charge -- the report of President Bush's commission was duly published, and duly spared Washington and London any further embarrassment in their diplomatic courtship of Syria. Stopping just short of pronouncing Pan Am guilty, the Commission found that the airline's security lapses, coupled with the FAA's failure to enforce its own regulations, were probably to blame for the disaster.

'The destruction of Flight 103 may well have been preventable,' its report concluded. 'Stricter baggage reconciliation procedures could have stopped any unaccompanied checked bags from boarding the flight [sic] at Frankfurt ...'' On the other hand, the commission could not 'say with certainty that more rigid application of any particular procedure actually would have stopped the sabotage'.

Its caution was justified, although clearly there had been plenty of room for improvement.

Until interline passengers checked in at Frankfurt (the report observed) Pan Am had no record of them, or their baggage, in its computer. Nevertheless, Pan Am personnel made no attempt to reconcile the number of interline bags being loaded into any plane with the number of bags checked by interline passengers who actually boarded the plane. Bags with distinctive interline tags were simply X-rayed on the baggage loading ramp, taken directly to the aircraft and loaded.

Pan Am employees did not determine whether any given interline bag loaded on to Flight 103 was accompanied by the passenger who presumably had checked it onto an earlier flight into Frankfurt or for that matter, whether that bag had ever been accompanied by any passenger.

In his book, On the Trail of Terror, published in 1991, David Leppard described that statement as 'a searing indictment' of the incompetence of Pan Am's security staff at Frankfurt in letting the bomb through, but the Commission itself was less damning. An FAA inspector checking on the airline's security arrangements in October 1988, had written in his report that 'the system, trying adequately to control approximately 4500 passengers and 28 flights per day, is being held together only by a very labour-intensive operation and the tenuous threads of luck'. Nevertheless, 'It appears the minimum (FAA) requirements can and are being met.'

Six months after the disaster, as the commission noted, FAA inspectors were generally less accommodating. In June 1989, one reported that while the security systems of four other U.S. carriers at Frankfurt were 'good', Pan Am's was 'totally unsatisfactory' -- so much so that 'all passengers flying out of Frankfurt on Pan Am are at great risk'.

This change of attitude by a Federal government agency before and after the disaster may or may not have been influenced by a change in the Federal government's political requirements before and after the disaster, but there were other inconsistencies also in the commission's report.

The bombing had occurred against a background of warnings that trouble was brewing in the European terrorist community and 'nine security bulletins that could have been relevant to the tragedy were issued between 1 June 1988 and 21 December 1988'. Elsewhere, however, the commission insisted that no warnings specific to Flight 103 and no information bearing on the security of civil aviation in general had been received by U.S. intelligence agencies from any source around that time.

The report also solemnly recorded the CIA's assurances that its agents had not gone to Lockerbie after the disaster, but stopped short of denying that at least two of them had been among the victims.

After reviewing the findings of its nine-month inquiry, the commission made over 60 recommendations for improving airline security in general, for revising the Warsaw Convention and overhauling the machinery of inter-agency cooperation. Most of these were sensible but some were mere sabre-rattling.

'National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means for defeating terrorism,' the report declared. It urged 'a more vigorous U.S. policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions ... These more vigorous policies should include planning and training for pre-emptive or retaliatory military strikes against known terrorist enclaves in nations that harbour them. Where such direct strikes are inappropriate, the commission recommends a lesser option, including covert operations to prevent, disrupt or respond to terrorist acts.

'Rhetoric is no substitute for strong, effective action,' it added, with a certain poignancy, for rhetoric was all the president's Commission had to offer in the changing circumstances of the Bush administration's Middle East policy. In deference to the government's requirements, there was no mention in its report of Syria or Iran or even Libya, or of any terrorist group known to be backed by any one of them. Nor was there any mention of drugs or drugs smuggling from Lebanon through Frankfurt to New York, Detroit and beyond. This was still the one component of the Lockerbie affair that had not been publicly addressed by the authorities but which, nevertheless, refused to go away.

After the flurry of excitement aroused by the discovery of a Swedish connection, the investigation had again stalled. Marten Imandi and Abu Talb, both sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorist activities in Scandinavia, steadfastly declined to assist the Scottish police in their inquiries, and although the circumstantial evidence against them remained strong, the lead petered out in yet another dead end.

Worse still, in June, the Swedish government moved to deport to Syria ten Palestinians it had picked up on suspicion of involvement with terrorism, including two who had been identified as associates of Dalkamoni and Khreesat. According to the BKA, these two had arrived in Germany from Syria and stayed at the PFLP-GC apartment in Neuss until a few days before it was raided in October 1988. Getting out just in time, Imandi had smuggled them into Sweden by car, where they had gone to ground near Uppsala. As one of the two had since been identified as a former Syrian intelligence officer, the Scottish police were naturally keen to interview them in the hope of establishing further connections between the bombers and PFLP-GC headquarters in Damascus.

Reporting this development in the Observer, on 17 June 1990, John Merritt wrote that

... anger at their imminent deportation will be increased by the revelation that their links with the West German terrorist cell found in possession of Lockerbie-type bombs, and their whereabouts, have been known to Western intelligence services for 18 months.

Sources close to the Swedish investigation said intelligence agents were tipped off about the men's movements since leaving Syria and the way in which they were smuggled into Sweden a few weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. And they cannot explain why they have been arrested only now -- just to be sent back to Syria ...

Swedish investigators are also convinced that there is intelligence information on 'several other suspects' with material important to the Lockerbie investigation currently living in Sweden. But there is 'a reluctance' on the part of intelligence sources to reveal details to the police inquiry.

Answering, in effect, the question of why the two were being sent back to safety in Syria to join Khreesat and the other West German cell members, and why Western intelligence sources were reluctant to cooperate with the police, Merritt concluded his report by observing that 'with the British government entering fresh negotiations with Syria, and Damascus signaling its interest in sending an ambassador to Washington, Swedish investigators were last week asking how much other information is being kept from the police inquiry for political reasons'.

The Scottish police had been asking the same question from day one of the investigation.

Two weeks after his Swedish report, Merritt drove yet another nail into the coffin prepared for Pan Am. On 1 July 1990, he wrote:

Fresh evidence from the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing indicates that the suitcase containing the bomb was allowed on the doomed Pan Am flight because of a failure to match baggage to passengers.

Within the last week, detectives have established that only one item of luggage, pieced together from the wreckage after one-and-a-half years of painstaking forensic work, cannot now be positively linked with a passenger from Flight 103. That item is the Samsonite suitcase which held the bomb.

The clear implication ... is that the beleaguered U..S airline broke American aviation security law ... Written procedures under the Federal Aviation Act expressly prohibited the U.S. carrier from transporting any baggage not matched with a passenger who boarded the flight.

This was not the first time the media had made that mistake -- the requirement at the time was that unaccompanied baggage should be searched before going aboard -- but, as Merritt accurately surmised, 'This development will greatly strengthen the case for families of the dead who are suing Pan Am.'

The following month, Saddam Hussein of Iraq occupied the neighbouring sheikdom of Kuwait, Syria declared itself on the side of the allied forces committed to rolling back the invasion, and from that moment on, nothing more was heard from official sources on either side of the Atlantic about Syrian complicity in the Flight 103 bombing.

'The Syrians took a bum rap on this,' declared President Bush, pointing the Anglo-American finger at Libya, which was now to be solely to blame for taking advantage of Pan Am's "wilful misconduct' at Frankfurt airport.

Everything seemed safely wrapped up, except for the almost universal scepticism which greeted the news that the Libyans were the culprits and the still persistent rumours of drug smuggling via Pan Am flights from Frankfurt.

With half-buried Syrian tanks guarding the poppy fields of the Bekaa Valley; with the Syrian President's brother, Rifat Assad, controlling the production and export of Lebanese heroin to the United States; with the Syrian arms and drugs dealer, Monzer al- Kassar, identified as Assad's marketing manager, and with al-Kassar inextricably linked with Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC and other Syrian and Iranian-backed terrorist groups, any serious suggestion that drug smuggling through Cyprus and Frankfurt to the United States had been in progress during December 1988, could only re-implicate Syria and thereby undo all the good work of disinformation and obfuscation carried out by the octopus.

In the national interest, anybody promoting any such idea had to be severely discouraged.

On 25 September 1990, Marshall Lee Miller introduced his client, Lester Coleman, to Pan Am's attorneys in Washington, and dropped out of sight.

Coleman neither saw nor heard from him again.

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