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

Author’s Foreword

To the First U.S. Edition

Twelve and half years ago, on September 3^rd, 1996, I found myself in Federal custody in Atlanta, Georgia in dismal conditions.  My cell reeked with the stench of urine.  Lying on a filthy plastic cot, my body ached with the pain of a beating I’d received two weeks before.  Now and again a crack-inspired wail echoed off  the bare walls and racketed around the confines of my weary brain. As I retraced the events of the past twenty-four hours, my eyelids sagged with exhaustion.  My efforts at sleep were poisoned by memories of the eight-hour trans-Atlantic flight from Madrid with my wife and three children.

When we’d touched down in Atlanta, FBI agents had boarded the plane, stormed into Economy Class, and shoved me into a wheel-chair.  There was little time for family good-byes.  After exchanging anguished hugs and kisses, I watched helplessly as my wife, children in tow, disappeared down a corridor.  Their downtrodden looks haunted me. 

Assuring me that I’d only be in for a few days, the agents booked me into the old Atlanta City Jail, full of wacked-out hustlers and gang-bangers.  I hadn’t lived in the States for the last six years, and had a hard time understanding them at first.  By the time I appeared before a Federal Magistrate a few days later, their sing-song patois had begun to make some sense.  But little else would.

The Magistrate was there to arraign me on charges of making a false statement in a civil affidavit.  The felony indictment had become public knowledge three years earlier, a few days before the first edition of Trail of The Octopus was about to be released by Bloomsbury, a publishing house in the United Kingdom.  The indictment had been a cause for laughter among my European friends, but the smoldering grey men hunkered down in an obscure building in Langley, Virginia weren’t laughing when they targeted me for prosecution.  By the time I realized that they planned to bury me alive, it was too late – I had delivered myself into their hands, black with deceit.

My long-time friend Ernie Fitzgerald got the ACLU to represent me.  The acknowledged dean of government whistle-blowers, Ernie had shared my three-year ordeal from his Pentagon office, one of the few who understood what I was going through.  During the Nixon years he had exposed millions in cost overruns on the Lockheed C-5A cargo plane contract, and his book The High Priest of Waste, had introduced Washington Post readers to three-hundred dollar toilet seats and other examples of Pentagon-funded graft and waste.   Ernie and his growing list of supporters followed every step of our flight into exile, knowing first-hand what most Americans cannot accept – that all governments lie, and the United States government lies more than most.

The true story of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988 has been enshrouded in government-created lies.  The American government claimed that two Libyan agents, acting alone, placed the bomb aboard an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was transferred to a London-bound 727, and then transferred again to the 747 Jumbo Jet at Heathrow Airport, destined for New York, the ill-fated flight 103.  I knew better.  I had spent the past four years gathering strategic intelligence on narco-terrorist cells in Lebanon as an agent for two Federal agencies -- the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy unit, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.  Two days after the bombing, appearing on the NBC Nightly News, I told Tom Brokaw and his television audience, “We should take a close look at Libya -- renegade  CIA operative Edwin Wilson sold Leader Muhammar Gadaffi 20 tons of plastique explosives and has trained the Libyans to make bombs.”  I didn’t know then, but subsequently learned, that Wilson was no renegade.  He had recruited Gadaffi at the behest of his CIA bosses, who then turned on him, arresting Wilson in 1977 and prosecuting him for doing what he had been ordered to do.  While Wilson fought his battle against the CIA’s campaign of character assassination from a prison cell, Wilson’s partner Frank Terpil continued training Libyans in bomb-making and terror tactics.  When Pan Am 103 was destroyed in mid-air in 1988, Gadaffi had been perfectly positioned to serve as the CIA’s scapegoat.  Because Wilson knew the truth, the CIA’s campaign to discredit and silence him continued until 2003, when Judge Lynn Hughes ordered him released from Federal prison, declaring that the CIA’s story was “nothing but lies.”

I might have entirely escaped prosecution had I limited myself to a few indiscreet remarks on prime time television, but the truth haunted me, and when Pan Am sued the federal government, I signed an affidavit stating what I knew about the bombing.  It was that affidavit – true then and true now – that provided the pretext for my own prosecution and imprisonment at the hands of my own government.  Although I ultimately was awarded a substantial settlement in a tort claim action against the government for abuse and illegal incarceration for 154 days in federal custody, the bitterness remains.

When former New York Times Editor Donald Goddard and I wrote the book you hold in your hands, I thought if I could get it published, it would eliminate the motivation to silence me.  But due to legal pressure, Trail of the Octopus could not find a publisher in the United States, and shortly after it was published in the UK, Micheal T. Hurley, a disgruntled federal agent, filed a lawsuit that the British publisher settled by agreeing to withdraw all copies from the market.  Now, at last, I have found a publisher willing to print and distribute in the United States and worldwide.  Although Donald is no longer alive to share this happy event with me, the book is imbued with his dedicated and compassionate spirit.  The Trail of the Octopus has made a long and difficult journey to reach you, and as you read it I ask that you remember only one thing – every word reflects a sincere effort to reveal the truth.

Daniel Goddard's Foreword To the First U.K. Edition

Spies are not encouraged to keep diaries, send memos or make carbon copies of reports. If they attract suspicion, 'deniability' is their only hope.

But if a spy is cut off by his own country, deniability works like a hangman's noose. With no written record to call on and no access to official files, he must rely for the most part on memory to defend himself, so that, in the end, it usually comes down to his word against his government's.

This can give rise to questions of credibility -- a troublesome factor in intelligence work at the best of times. At the worst of times, it can kill. With most people disposed to give those in authority the benefit of the doubt, why should anybody believe him? If spies are trained to lie, deceive and dissemble, they may argue, how can we accept what he says without proof?

No one in modern times has suffered more from this presumption of guilt than Lester Knox Coleman III, until recently a secret agent of the United States' Defense Intelligence Agency.

His crime was to find himself in possession of information of such acute embarrassment to the American government and, to a lesser extent, the governments of Britain and Germany, that officials in Washington were unwilling to rely solely on his discretion. Though he had given them no cause to question his loyalty, the stakes were so high they felt they needed insurance, and so sought to muzzle him by means of a trumped-up criminal charge, to be suspended in exchange for his silence. This procedure had always worked well in similar cases, particularly when combined with other forms of intimidation, like death threats against the agent and his family.

But when Coleman failed to cave in as expected and instead escaped to Sweden with his wife and children, he presented his government with an awkward problem. No longer in a position to enforce his silence, and unwilling to risk a public extradition hearing in a neutral court, Washington decided instead to try to defuse the explosive potential of what he knew by destroying his character and reputation. If it could not stop him talking, it could at least try to stop people believing what he said.

In this, it was more successful, although the irony is that, if the American government had trusted its own security vetting system in the first place, the problem would probably not have arisen. Coleman would have revealed nothing of what he knew; this book would not have been written, and America would have avoided the embarrassment that is now inescapable. By misjudging its own man, Washington brought about the very situation it was most anxious to avoid.

After more than two years on the run from America's state security apparatus, the 'octopus', Coleman believes that the lives and safety of his young family now depend on 'going public', on telling his story to the only jury left that can save him.

I hope he is right.

This is the first time that a fully-fledged Western intelligence agent has come in from the field and publicly debriefed himself, right down to the nuts and bolts of his various missions. That would be interesting enough in itself, but in Coleman's case, his testimony is also sharply at variance with the official version of events leading up to the Lockerbie disaster, with official accounts of Anglo-American attempts to secure the release of Western hostages in Beirut, with the official line on Lt. Colonel Oliver North and Irangate, and, in general, with the official gloss on Western policy in the Middle East since 1985.

As this is a personal story, Coleman is naturally the primary source for it. Such documents as he does possess, and others that have come to light, not only support his version of events, but also reflect a paranoid determination on Washington's part to destroy him that may, in itself, be a measure of his truthfulness. Certainly no one, in or out of government, has cared to attack the substance of what he has had to say, other than with flat denials; nor have I, or has anyone else, so far identified in his story more than a few minor discrepancies of the kind that must inevitably occur in anybody's mostly unaided recollection of a complicated life, and whose absence would tend to undermine its credibility rather than reinforce it.

In any disputed account of events, the test is always, who benefits?

In this case, not Lester Coleman. Sticking to his story has him a penniless fugitive whose life probably depends on establishing the truth.

Corroboration there has been in plenty. Besides the sources identified in the text, I should also like to thank those many others, mostly in law enforcement and government service on both sides of the Atlantic, who would not thank me if I broke my promise of anonymity. These are difficult times for bureaucrats still attached to the idea of accountable government.

I am also obliged to Pan Am's attorneys for declining to help me with my researches, thereby -- I hope -- denying room to those government supporters who might otherwise wish to accuse me, as they did Time magazine, of conspiring with the airline to pervert the course of justice.

More positively, in the matter of research, I am indebted to Katarina Shelley for her diligence and enterprise; to Carol, for making the book possible anyway, and, for his unshakable faith in the enterprise; to Mark Lucas, of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, who had to work harder than either of us had bargained for to bring Lester Coleman in from the cold.

D.G.

August 1993

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