The Helsinki warning

What follows is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103 (footnotes omitted):]

On 5 December 1988 (16 days prior to the attack), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin saying that, on that day, a man with an Arabic accent had telephoned the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and told them that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within the next two weeks by someone associated with the Abu Nidal Organization; he said a Finnish woman would carry the bomb on board as an unwitting courier.

The anonymous warning was taken seriously by the U.S. government, and the State Department cabled the bulletin to dozens of embassies. The FAA sent it to all US carriers, including Pan Am, which had charged each of the passengers a $5 security surcharge, promising a "program that will screen passengers, employees, airport facilities, baggage and aircraft with unrelenting thoroughness"; the security team in Frankfurt found the warning under a pile of papers on a desk the day after the bombing. One of the Frankfurt security screeners, whose job was to spot explosive devices under X-ray, told ABC News that she had first learned what Semtex (a plastic explosive) was during her ABC interview 11 months after the bombing.

On 13 December, the warning was posted on bulletin boards in the US Embassy in Moscow and eventually distributed to the entire American community there, including journalists and businessmen.

The Swedish-language national newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet reported on the front page of its 23 December 1988 issue — two days after the bombing — that a State Department spokesperson in Washington, Phyllis Oakley, confirmed the details of the bomb threat to the Helsinki Embassy. The newspaper writes that, "according the spokesperson, the anonymous telephone voice also stated that the bomb would be transported from Helsinki to Frankfurt and onwards to New York on Pan-Am's flight to the USA. The person transporting the bomb would not themselves be aware of it, with the explosives hidden in that person's luggage." The same news article reports that the US Embassy in Moscow also received the same threat on 5 December, adding that Finland's foreign ministry has found no evidence in its investigations of any link to the Lockerbie crash. "The foreign ministry assumes that an Arab living in Finland is behind the phone threat to the US Embassy in Helsinki. According to the foreign ministry's sources, the Arab has phoned throughout the year with threatening calls to the Israeli and US embassies [in Helsinki]," wrote the paper. "The man who rang the embassies claimed to belong to Abu Nidal's radical Palestinian faction that has been responsible for many terrorist actions. The man said that a bomb would be placed on board a Pan-Am plane by a woman." The article continues, "This has led to speculation that a Finnish woman placed the bomb aboard the downed aircraft. One of Abu Nidal's highest operative leaders, Samir Muhammed Khadir, who died last summer in a terrorist attack against the ship City of Poros, had lived outside Stockholm. He was married to a Finnish-born woman."

[RB: Perhaps the most detailed analysis of the Helsinki warning is to be found here (Part 1), here (Part 2), here (Part 3), here (Part 4) and here (part 5) on Caustic Logic’s website The Lockerbie Divide.]

The Helsinki warning

[An article headed Administrative notice was published yesterday by Lisa Parrish on the blog The Great Whatsit.  It deals with the infamous Helsinki warning and includes a copy of the notice to personnel posted in the Moscow embassy of the USA on 13 December 1988. The article reads in part:]

Here is the full text:

To:  All Embassy Employees

Subject:  Threat to Civil Aviation

Post has been notified by the Federal Aviation Administration that on December 5, 1988, an unidentified individual telephoned a U.S. diplomatic facility in Europe and stated that sometime within the next two weeks there would be a bombing attempt against a Pan American aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the United States.

The FAA reports that the reliability of the information cannot be assessed a this point, but the appropriate police authorities have been notified and are pursuing the matter. Pan Am has also been notified.

In view of the lack of confirmation of this information, post leaves to the discretion of individual travelers any decisions on altering personal travel plans or changing to another American carrier. This does not absolve the traveler from flying an American carrier.

Eight days later, on December 21, 1988, a Pan Am flight that originated in Frankfurt, then passed through Heathrow en route to New York’s JFK airport, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew. The flight was bombed by Libyan nationals.

What’s remarkable about this in retrospect is that the US State Department chose to alert its employees in Moscow and Helsinki, but the FAA issued no broader alert to the public about this very specific threat. The existence of this memo is not a secret – it’s covered here, with some disconcerting additional details – so I’m not adding some new conspiracy-theory wrinkle to the story by posting it here.

I clearly must have held on to the memo because of the Lockerbie crash, but I don’t recall feeling outraged at the time that there had been no broader alert. And even today, I honestly wonder how much the government would, or should, reveal about such warnings. Alerting people to avoid a particular carrier’s flights could result in severe economic consequences for that airline – but should that matter if lives are at stake? Is the only humane response to send out widespread alerts, even if they create consternation and fear? Or would that be succumbing to the very “terror” that terrorists intend to foment?

[The best treatment of the Helsinki warning that I am aware of is to be found here and here on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide.]

"Low profile" warning to Americans dates back to Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined The US embassy in the UK is telling Americans to “keep a low profile” during Trump’s visit published yesterday on the Vox website:]

The US Embassy in London is warning Americans to “keep a low profile” when President Donald Trump visits the UK from July 12 to 14.

Here’s why: Protesters who disagree with the US president’s policies are planning to stage multiple demonstrations during Trump’s trip. Most are set to take place on July 13, when Trump meets UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Queen Elizabeth.

And while this might sound extreme, it’s actually not. There are two reasons why.

“There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the alert. We send these out all the time,” Courtney Austrian, a spokesperson for the US mission in London, told me.

That practice dates back to 1998 [RB: this should, of course, be 1988], when a terrorist blew up Pan Am Flight 103 in an incident now known as the Lockerbie bombing. (The plane exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.) There were allegations afterward that the US government told employees it had intelligence of a terrorist attempt, which prompted officials to change their flight plans. It’s unclear if those claims were true or not. [RB: From The Helsinki warning: "On 5 December 1988 (16 days prior to the attack), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin saying that, on that day, a man with an Arabic accent had telephoned the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and told them that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within the next two weeks ... The anonymous warning was taken seriously by the US government, and the State Department cabled the bulletin to dozens of embassies. The FAA sent it to all US carriers, including Pan Am, which had charged each of the passengers a $5 security surcharge..."]

But since those allegations, US embassies around the world now give the same warnings to citizens as they do to employees, says Austrian. She added that embassy staff gets warnings like this all the time for mass demonstrations, which is why there is a warning now for all Americans.

Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons

[On this date in 2000, Rodney Wallis’s book Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons was published. What follows is taken from the Amazon website:]

The explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, should never have happened. Wallis, who has extensive, direct, personal knowledge of aviation security matters gained from his position at the crossroads of security information and the industry's endeavors to combat aviation terrorism, had warned the industry one year before the bombing that the interline element of baggage represented the prime opportunity for terrorist activity and had urged the adoption of passenger and baggage matching, a system that he had helped to develop. Mandated by the FAA for use at high risk airports, it was the feature missing from Pan Am's activity at Frankfort, an omission so cruelly exploited by the bombers. Wallis argues that the priority given by governments to technological solutions to the continuing terrorist threat puts the flying public at unnecessary risk every day.

This volume brings together all of the facts surrounding the sabotage of Flight 103, including the investigation and the civil litigation in which so much of the story unfolded for the first time. It uncovers the fundamental weaknesses in Pan Am's communication and management policies. Wallis supports the policy that politics are politics and explores the possibility that U.S. and U.K. policy towards a neutral trial for the two Libyans indicted for the bombing, which may have been affected by the wider scenario of Middle East politics rather than simple justice for the victims of Lockerbie. Although the tragedy has led to improvements in defense technology for use against acts of aviation sabotage, these methods have yet to be applied universally.

About the Author

RODNEY WALLIS led the airline industry's efforts to combat terrorism aimed against civil aviation for 11 years, from 1980 to 1991. As Director of Security for the International Air Transport Association, he served on ICAO's Panel of Aviation Security Experts. He drafted the Guidelines used by the world's customs authorities and established the basis for the industry's work in combating international drug trafficking. He is currently an independent civil aviation consultant.

[A customer review on the Amazon website reads as follows:]

Rodney Wallis has written a detailed account of the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 disaster from a unique perspective. Wallis was Security Director for the IATA and ICAO in 1988 when the Lockerbie bombing occured. As he makes clear in establishing his credentials he and his associates had access to more and higher level security information in the months prior to the bombing than anybody outside government.

This book provides a solid background on the aircraft bombings prior to Lockerbie, and several chapters of very detailed account of the civil suit against Pan Am and its insurers. This is an excellent summary of those disparate sources. One striking problem with this book is the total absence of references.

Wallis scrupulously sidesteps any of the questions that point to the government, the intelligence services, or what more loosely would be called the "political" aspects. Nevertheless he says clearly several things of the utmost importance that points to some of those questions.

He says emphatically - as he did under oath in the Pan Am suit - that he does not believe that the Helsinki warning which the US State Department selective disseminated to its employees was a "hoax" - the line of US and UK government.

Wallis says that in the months before the Lockerbie bombing Iran had a debt to settle, that it called for "an eye for an eye" justice (p.20), that the pictures of the bombs designed for use on airlines that were captured by German police in October 1988 had been given to many officials. It was clear that in the months before Lockerbie to all of the relevant civil and government security experts that an attack was imminent. Wallis believes that the Helsinki warning was no hoax and was related to Lockerbie (p.24). Wallis confirms that nothing was done to act on those warning (p.25 "the intelligence ...failed to elicit an effective response"). He states that the US and UK governments have been disingenuous ever since then in regard to what they did know in regard to the warnings and the bombing (p.34). His interpretation of the evidence is ultimately pointing to Iran - "Iranians were in no doubt that they had a real motive for revenge" - p.32, "The decision to bomb a Pan Am aircraft was and still is seen by most observers to have originated with the shooting down of the Iran Air airbus" p.52.

Wallis does not speculate what produced the inactivity on the part of government officials. It should be noted that he is a career professional with the civil administration charged with aviation security. His concerns are with technology and procedures and he is unwilling to recognize that an attack on the US by foreign government is beyond the capacity his organizations. Perhaps defending American citizens against an attack by foreign government is the responsibility of our own defense and intelligence agencies. Given the reams of evidence of foreknowlege that Wallis describes the decision to leave these matters in the hands of Pan Am's private security seems like somebody’s tacit acquiescence.

Wallis ends on a rather lame note debunking two pathetic theories relating Lockerbie to a drug running operation or an attempt to assassinate of a group US intelligence agents. There is nothing to support the "drug running" canard and it seems likely the CIA agents were just unlucky leaving Cyprus they did not benifit from warnings that the rest of the US government employees received. .

Wallis dismisses these ridiculously implausible "conspiracies" because they require a callousness by intelligence agents that "stretches the imagination to a point beyond belief". This is unsatisfactory. But as Wallis has made abundantly clear a very large number of people knew with frightening specificity that the Pan Am bombing would take place, where it would take place and when - and that nothing was done. The alternative to an utterly implausable concatenation of unlikely events is that just the kind of decision that Wallis seems to find unbelievable were made - but certainly at a much higher level and for something much more important than a "drug sting". Wallis gives the reader many facts to ask the right question - but he keeps his opinions about what the answers might be, to himself.

In fact given the history of attempts to write on the Lockerbie disaster Wallis's discretion is essential. Books that did not toe the government line on Lockerbie have been suppressed by legal actions in the UK and the US. Others are tied up in legal vetting. Writers on the topic who have raised just some of these questions have been subject to legal actions by government officials or former officials involved in one way or the other with Lockerbie. The courts have been a very effective tool to dissuade any investigative journalist from looking into Lockerbie. In contrast to Wallis's comment that "whenever the names of these two [Iran and the United States] were linked, the name of Lockerbie was never far away"; in fact the Iranian role in Lockerbie, as it is recognized by Wallis, has been utterly expunged from the US press since the Bush administration announced its position in 1991. Senior writers and editors at major US papers have produced a long stream of articles that whitewash Iran and amount to a pro-Iran lobby. To have gotten this book into print at all is an accomplishment. Despite some important lacunae and the lamentable absence of notes and sources this remains far and away the best work yet published on the Lockerbie and the first book that even approaches being a serious treatment. To understand Lockerbie start here.

Thatcher banned Lockerbie inquiry

[This is the heading over an item posted yesterday on Lockerbietruth.com, the website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph. It reads as follows:]

Today's release of Thatcher cabinet papers from 1988/89 contains a sinister footnote to the Lockerbie story.

Pan Am 103 was blown from the skies over the Scottish town of Lockerbie just after 7 pm on the evening of the 21st December 1988. Within hours US FBI teams arrived in Lockerbie to "assist" the Dumfries and Galloway police force.

Phone lines between the White House, the US embassy in London, and the offices of MI6 were running hot. The US ambassador to the UK had been kept informed. The secret US Navy base at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre had been alerted and at dawn a surveillance helicopter would be scrambled.

At 9.30 on the morning of the 22nd December Thatcher and her cabinet met to decide what to do.  Information about the tragedy had flooded into Downing Street from 8 pm the previous evening. Thatcher and entourage would fly to Scotland later that morning to survey the devastation.

At the cabinet table was head of MI6 Sir Christopher Curwen. He reported that US intelligence had instructed that on no account was there to be any form of public inquiry. His advice was supported by British Secretary of State for Transport Paul Channon.

The tragedy would prove to be the biggest attack on the British mainland since the Second World War, yet no public inquiry must be allowed. If such an inquiry were to happen, the following matters would be open to public scrutiny and questioning:

1. On board Pan Am 103 was a six-man CIA team returning from Beirut. In the suitcase of the team leader Charles McKee were sensitive state papers. The team had been on a praiseworthy mission to attempt to negotiate the release of US hostages at that time held in the Middle East.

2. One of the Pan Am passengers was Khaled Jafaar, a drug courier for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). His job was to take consignments of heroin originating from the Bekaa Valley to the US, to assist with the capture of drug traffickers in Mexico and the USA. UK security authorities cooperated with the drug shipments, known as "controlled deliveries" and sometimes "high risk flights". Passengers and public were unaware of the process.

3. Transport Minister Paul Channon was aware of a telephoned warning - made just days before the bombing - about possible bombs on US aircraft flying to the US. Known as the "Helsinki" warning it was, in the view of Heathrow security chiefs, a hoax. And yet the Department of Transport telexed the warning to Interpol and all airlines. Why would they do that, if the warning was a hoax?

4. Channon was aware also of a second warning from the German authorities in the form of a multi page coloured brochure. This included a photo of a mock-up of a bomb discovered in late October made by a terrorist group funded by Iran and Syria. It was certain that five bombs had been made by the group. Four were retrieved. A fifth bomb was never found.

5. In both warnings the Department of Transport had instructed airline check-in and security staff that if a tape recorder or radio in a passenger's luggage seemed suspicious, it should be "consigned to the hold of the plane". That is, exactly where the terrorist would want it to be.

6. Paul Channon was aware that Heathrow security was known to be in chaos. On the day of the Lockerbie attack 70,000 airside passes were in circulation at Heathrow, distributed to many nationalities and construction workers. The head of Heathrow security believed any country could have planted a bomb. There was no screening of staff, no restrictions on people walking through with bags. A rogue bag could be easily inserted into the baggage chain. [This information would be revealed to journalists in March 2012 by the Head of Heathrow Security following his retirement].

But...  

Important as they were, none of the above were recorded in Cabinet minutes or released under the thirty year rule.

 

Instead, all that is recorded and available to the public is that Thatcher and her ministers agreed that it was "not clear whether any further public inquiry would serve a useful purpose". An independent investigation would "serve no useful purpose". In general "it was important to avoid a plethora of inquiries that caused distress to individuals while unearthing no new facts."

On the contrary, Jim Swire and many bereaved relatives will be happy to undergo further distress caused by an independent inquiry. But will the Americans ever allow it?

Margaret Thatcher sleeps soundly in her grave knowing that her 1993 memoirs The Downing Street Years have consigned 270 murdered Lockerbie souls to the dustbin of history.  In 914 pages of closely remembered events and text she does not mention the word "Lockerbie".

The renowned journalist John Pilger has an appropriate saying for Thatcher's chicanery. When an event is inconvenient a government - aided by its intelligence services - will ensure that it "never happened".

Jim Swire is a force of nature

[What follows is excerpted from a report published yesterday evening on the website of The Sun:]

Retired GP Jim Swire is a force of nature – a man with balls of steel.

His search for justice after his daughter was murdered in the Lockerbie bombing has been so intense that at times he has put his own life in danger.

The 87-year-old campaigner faced down the late “mad dog” Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s guards armed with AK-47s, sneaked a fake bomb on a plane to expose security flaws and fears he could be a target for Iranian assassins.

But 35 years after 270 people were murdered in the attack over Scotland, on the Pan Am passenger jet flying from London to New York, thoughts of his 23-year-old daughter Flora break his indomitable spirit.

When Jim tries to remember the last words he said to medical student Flora before she left to catch the plane, tears flood his eyes and we pause the interview.

We are speaking in the conservatory of his Cotswolds home because he hopes an upcoming TV drama about the terror bombing will create the same public outcry seen when ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones highlighted the organisation’s IT scandal.

Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth will play Jim in the Sky series, Lockerbie, which is being filmed now. (...)

Apart from his grief — and bravery — there is also anger at the bungling officials who failed to stop the fateful bomb getting on to the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988, at Heathrow Airport before it exploded shortly after 7pm. (...)

He tells The Sun: “I am satisfied Colin will do his utmost to portray someone who has been searching diligently for the truth in the name of the murder of his daughter and all those other people.” getting on to the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988, at Heathrow Airport before it exploded shortly after 7pm. (...)

Jim, a BBC soundman turned GP, believes documents are still being withheld from relatives which could reveal either a cock-up in the investigation or a cover-up.

The worst terror atrocity ever to be visited upon the UK is still shrouded in mystery and controversy.

Only one person has been convicted of carrying out the attack — Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. His country-man Abu Agila Mohammad Masud is awaiting trial.

A call had been made to the US embassy in Finnish capital Helsinki warning that a bomb would be loaded on a Pan Am flight in Frankfurt, Germany, bound for Heathrow then New York.

That information was not passed on to regular travellers.

The threat should have been taken seriously because in October that year terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command were found with bombs in Neuss, Germany, designed to trigger once a plane reached a certain height. (...)

Understandably, Jim cannot hide his rage over this fatal delay. He says of the bomb: “It was in the baggage compartment, almost beneath the feet of my daughter and all of those innocent passengers. It exploded almost 48 hours from the warning having been passed on by the Department of Transport. Have we had an apology? No, we have not.

“Whatever you believe about Libya or all the rest of it, that’s where the explosion occurred, that was the warning they had and that was the way they handled it.

“If that doesn’t make a relative of anyone murdered in that atrocity angry, it bloody well should.” (...)

The late Paul Channon, Transport Secretary at the time, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, denied there had been a security failure but lost his job.

In the wake of Lockerbie, airlines claimed far more stringent inspections of luggage were put in place.

Keen to put that promise to the test, Jim, who had explosives training during a stint of military service, built a replica of the Lockerbie bomb with the Semtex explosive replaced by marzipan.

He managed to get it past Heathrow’s security even though a member of security found the Toshiba tape recorder containing the fake device.

Jim recalls: “The lady who opened up the suitcase said, ‘Sir, have you taken out the batteries?’ and I said, ‘Yes’, and she put it back.

“That poor lady had not been trained in what might and might not be dangerous.”

The Lockerbie crime scene was the largest ever in UK history. (...)

Initially, the finger of suspicion pointed toward Iran, because it had close links to the PFLP-GC and its leaders had sworn revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet in July 1988 by a US warship.

Then the FBI investigation, carried out in unison with Dumfries and Galloway Police, pivoted instead toward Libya.

Detectives concluded that Libyan Arab Airlines security chief Al-Megrahi and his colleague Lamin Khalifah Fhimah were responsible for the atrocity. (...)

[F]ollowing pressure from sanctions, the two Libyan suspects were tried in Holland in 2000. As the trial went on Jim started to doubt they had been responsible for Flora’s murder. When Al-Megrahi was found guilty — although Fhimah was cleared and let go — he collapsed from shock.

Jim says: “My son sitting next to me in the courtroom thought that I had died.”

He now believes the late PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril was the true mastermind of the horror that claimed his daughter’s life.

Jibril died of heart failure in July 2021 in Syrian capital Damascus, and Jim says: “I can’t conceal from you I am delighted he is dead.”

He suspects that Jibril’s ultimate paymasters were Iran’s security services.

Pointing the finger at Tehran’s murderous ayatollahs shows how fearless Jim is. He says: “It has often occurred to me that I might get bombed. The more the truth comes out the more possible it is that I might get killed by Iran for wanting revenge.

“It seems to me the direct line came from Iran.”

But Scottish judges have twice upheld the murder convictions of Al-Megrahi, who died from cancer in 2012.

Next year US prosecutors will bring Masud to trial, accusing him of making the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103.

Whatever any court decides, nothing will take away the pain from Jim and his wife Jane.

As Jim puts it: “When someone close to you in your family gets murdered, you get handed a life sentence.

“Jane and I will go to our graves still mourning the loss of Flora.”

The Conspiracy Files documentary

I had rashly assumed that The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie programme would be available today for viewing on the BBC website. This appears, however, not to be the case. Consequently, since I do not myself have a television set (believing, as all right-thinking persons must, that TV rots the brain) I am unable to provide an eye-witness account of the programme. However, informants (including the programme’s producer) tell me that, apart from the issues already mentioned in posts on this blog over the past few days, the programme investigated the Helsinki warning and concluded that it had nothing to do with Pan Am 103. It looked at Juval Aviv’s Interfor Report and concluded that there was no evidence to support it. Also featured were Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP-GC; Oliver North; the Frankfurt baggage handling computer operator in whose locker was found the computer print-out that supposedly showed that an unaccompanied bag had been transferred from Air Malta flight KM 180 to the Pan Am 103 feeder flight; former State Department lawyer Michael Scharf (on the CIA and Giaka and on Tony Gauci); Edwin Bollier; and retired FBI special agent Richard Marquise, all saying what would be expected.

The Independent's television review comments: 'Truth and lies were hopelessly tangled up in The Conspiracy Files, too, a strand that has done some useful work in the past in wiping up the mess left behind by credulous paranoiacs. In the case of this film about the bombing of Pan Am 103, which came down on the town of Lockerbie, matters were less straightforward. The programme briskly sorted out the facts behind some conspiracy theories – such as the nature of an early warning phoned in to the US embassy in Helsinki – while making it clear that there are still unsettling holes in the prosecution case. At least two of the interviewees struck me as bare-faced liars, while as many again had powerful motives for not telling the truth about an event inextricably entangled with the brutal realpolitik of the time. And the film ended with an astonishing interview in which the son of Colonel Gaddafi attacked the relatives of the dead as "greedy" and effectively repudiated Libya's formal acceptance of responsibility for the bombing. "I admit that we play with words," he said insouciantly. "We had to... there was no other solution."'

Here is what The Times's television reviewer has to say: 'Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi is still in jail for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, although he has an appeal pending. The next time television makes a documentary about Lockerbie, it had better come up with a confession, which, as one of the victims' fathers said, was about the only way this matter will be concluded. Getting Colonel Gaddafi's son to chuckle that the Libyans were innocent did not cut it as a pay off. The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie, though flashy, kept hurtling down blind alleys - much like the official investigation itself - and was unsatisfying.'

[For the avoidance of doubt, the view expressed above about the propensity of television to rot the brain is not meant to be taken – entirely – seriously.]

Fresh twists in the Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over a long article by John Ashton on the Consortium News website. It reads in part:]

On Oct 15, Scotland’s prosecuting authority, the Crown Office, announced that two Libyan men are being treated as suspects in the 28-year-old Pan Am 103 bombing case. They were widely reported to be Abu Agila Masud, an alleged bomb-maker, and Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Gaddafi’s former security chief. Both were associates of the only person convicted of the bombing, Abelbaset al-Megrahi, who died in 2012.

The development came almost 15 years after Megrahi’s trial, but only two days after the broadcast by PBS Frontline of a three-part documentary My Brother’s Bomber. Trailed by a long article in the New Yorker, the film was made by Ken Dornstein, a former Frontline staffer whose older brother David was one of 270 who died when Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988.

The documentary reveals that Masud was named by a German judge as the technical expert responsible for the 1986 bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin. That attack, which killed three, including two US servicemen, and injured many more, led to the US air strikes on Libya, for which Libya allegedly took revenge with the bombing of Pan Am 103.

Megrahi flew with Masud from Malta to Libya on the morning of the Lockerbie bombing having, according to the prosecution, placed a suitcase containing a bomb on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. The unaccompanied suitcase was allegedly transferred to a feeder flight to London Heathrow and again at Heathrow on to Pan Am 103.

Megrahi denied knowing Masud, yet the two men were on other flights in the run-up to Lockerbie and, according to the film, Masud was in the car that met him on his return to Libya in 2009, following his release from prison in Scotland. (...)

There is no doubt that Libya supported terrorist groups and that at least one Libyan, Musbah Eter, who was an official at the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin, was involved in the La Belle bombing. Eter was convicted for his role following a confession in which he implicated his co-accused, Palestinian Yassar Chraidi, Lebanese-born German Ali Chanaa (both of whom worked at the People’s Bureau) and Chaana’s wife Verana.

He implicated a number of others, including Masud, whom he described as a bomb technician. Masud was never apprehended for the bombing and when German prosecutor Dethlev Mehlis went to Libya to interview witnesses all denied his existence — as did the Libyan witnesses in the Lockerbie case.

Less Straightforward

There is also no doubt that the La Belle case is far less straightforward than portrayed in the film. At the time of the bombing, the Reagan administration was involved in a large, secret and dirty war against Libya. From the time Reagan took office in 1981 his government exaggerated the country’s role in terrorism, which it claimed — falsely — was central to a Soviet-directed global conspiracy against the West.

At the same time, the Reagan administration downplayed the role of equally active terrorist states Syria and Iran. There were two reasons for this: firstly, those countries held far greater strategic power in the Middle East than Libya; and secondly, their militant proxies held US hostages in Lebanon. The hostages’ safe return was an obsession that led the administration into the Iran-Contra scandal.

Under the direction of CIA’s rabidly neocon director, William Casey, the Agency launched a massive covert campaign against Libya, aimed at toppling Gaddafi. It was run from the National Security Council by the same people who ran the Iran-Contra operation, including Oliver North.

Disinformation was central to the campaign. In 1981, the CIA put out a false story that Gaddafi has sent a hit squad to the US to assassinate Reagan. The White House played along using an unmarked car to drive Reagan while decoy limousines were used to dupe the non-existent gunmen.

By the mid-1980s, the White House hardliners were hungry for an excuse to attack Libya and NSC staff drew up plans to provoke Libya in to a response that would provide the excuse they needed. Naval exercises were conducted off the Libyan coast in which Libyan vessels were hit and territorial water repeatedly violated.

Gaddafi appeared not to take the bait. Then, on April 5, 1986, came the La Belle bombing. The White House soon announced that it had irrefutable evidence of Libya’s involvement. Nine days later came the air strikes against Libya, which came within a whisker of killing Gaddafi.

The “irrefutable evidence” was intercepts of incriminatory messages sent between the Libyan government and the East Berlin People’s Bureau. Libyan intelligence traffic was normally processed and evaluated by a group known as G-6 at the National Security Agency, before being forwarded elsewhere.

An investigation by Seymour Hersh for The New York Times established that the La Belle intercepts were never sent to G-6. An NSA official told him “The G-6 section branch and division chiefs didn’t know why it was taken from them. They were bureaucratically cut out and so they screamed and yelled.”

Another explained, “There is no doubt that if you send raw data to the White House, that constitutes misuse because there’s nobody there who’s capable of interpreting it. . . . You screw it up every time when you do it –– and especially when the raw traffic is translated into English from a language such as Arabic, that’s not commonly known.”

The eventual prosecution of Eter and his three co-accused was reliant upon Eter’s confession and corroborating material from the files of the former East German security service, the Stasi. (Chaana also confessed but his evidence was not considered as important and Eter’s.) The Stasi had a number of informants within Berlin’s Arab communities, including Chaana, and kept a close watch on the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau.

Double-Dealing

During the 1980s, Berlin was a pit of Cold War double-dealing. The Stasi files indicate that among the Arab communities survival and personal advancement often trumped loyalty to any particular cause. The information relayed to the Stasi by its Arab informants might be cast iron, but against this background it’s also possible that they were recycling each other’s inventions.

The East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau, in particular, hosted numerous personal rivalries and little mutual trust. Eter was one of the more interesting vipers in the nest. According to the Stasi and a 1998 investigation by the German TV channel ZDF, he was a CIA asset. ZDF discovered that, at the time he made his confession in 1996, he was running a CIA front company in Malta.

The year before La Belle he was named as a suspect in the assassination in West Germany of a Libyan dissident called Jibril el-Dinali. (Der Spiegel reported at the time that dissidents believed that the German federal police, the BKA, had supplied their secret addresses to Libyan officials in return for intelligence about the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction, which had received Libyan support.)

Eter is Ken Dornstein’s key witness and will be central to any prosecution of Masud and Senussi. According to the film, since Dornstein made contact, he has told the FBI that Masud and Megrahi were pivotal to the Lockerbie plot. He claims that Masud told him personally that he was responsible for both the Lockerbie and La Belle bombings.

Unfortunately for anyone tasked with prosecuting at a trial of the new suspects, the CIA connection and his murderous past leave Eter with a credibility problem. So too does the fact that he waited 19 years after confessing to talk about Lockerbie.

Other Stasi informants involved in the case had a relationship with the CIA, as did some of those originally implicated in the bombing. One was a close associate of Chraidi’s, Mahmoud Abu Jaber, who with his brother Mohamed ran a freelance Palestinian terrorist cell that was mistrusted by other Palestinians.

The Stasi learned that the CIA knew that Mahmoud Abu Jaber and another cell member, Khaled Shatta, were involved in the bombing. They mixed regularly with the Chraidi and the other defendants and hours before the attack they travelled to West Berlin. They were watched by the Stasi and KGB, both of which concluded that they were working for Western intelligence.

One declassified KGB document suggested that Mahmoud Abu Jaber was a CIA agent provocateur, who was used to create a case against Libya. Group member Mahmoud Amayiri, who was both Shatta’s brother and Mahmoud Abu Jaber’s right-hand man, confirmed to ZDF through his Norwegian lawyer that he had been working for Mossad. He had fled Germany for Norway in 1990, following the issuing of an arrest warrant, which was later dropped.

The idea that some of the La Belle plotters were western agents provocateur is not far-fetched. A 1997 investigation by British Channel 4 TV’s Dispatches series revealed that the CIA-funded anti-Gaddafi terrorist group Al-Burkan was involved in the 1984 murder of police officer Yvonne Fletcher, who was killed when staff at the London Libya People’s Bureau opened fire on a crowd of anti-Gaddafi demonstrators.

A member of a Berlin criminal gang connected to Al-Burkan described transporting the murder weapon to London and handing it over to an Al-Burkan member. The program uncovered evidence that the fatal shot was fired from a building adjacent to the People’s Bureau used by the UK intelligence services. It also claimed that Al Burkan had moles within the People’s Bureau.

Reluctant Cooperation

The US government was reluctant to share its intelligence about La Belle with the Germans and it was not until 1996 that it did. It appeared to be convincing and included transcripts of intercepted messages, allegedly between Tripoli and the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau. Among other things, these suggested that senior Libyan intelligence official Said Rashid, a friend and relative of Megrahi’s, coordinated the attack.

The US government may well have believed the intercepts to be genuine, but, according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, they were an elaborate hoax. In his 1994 memoir, The Other Side of Deception, he claimed that the messages were in fact part of a Mossad disinformation operation codenamed Trojan.

Ostrovsky said that a few weeks before the bombing Israeli commandos secretly installed special communications equipment in an apartment near Colonel Gaddafi’s headquarters, which was subsequently used to broadcast phony terrorist orders. Neither German prosecutor Mehlis, nor the FBI, contacted Ostrovsky about his claims.

While none of this rules out Libyan sponsorship of La Belle, it does flash a warning that we should treat the official account with caution.

An even thicker fog surrounds Lockerbie. The CIA’s campaign against Libya did not end with the 1986 raids, indeed a few months after them President Reagan signed a secret National Security Decision Directive, which, according to a leak to Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, ordered “covert, diplomatic and economic steps designed to . . . bring about a change of leadership in Libya.”

In view of what we now know about Lockerbie, it’s not outlandish to suggest that those covert steps may have included manipulating the investigation behind the backs of the police and prosecutors.

Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that the bombing was not Gaddafi’s revenge for the 1986 raids, but was rather Iran’s for the US Navy’s accidental shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 over the Arabian Gulf, which killed 290 people six months before Lockerbie.

According to the documents, the Iranians contracted out the job to the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command, which had a track record of blowing up aircraft. One document, from 1991, stated, without naming the PFLP-GC, that the Iranian interior minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi paid the bombers $10 million.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer has provided some of the details of the Iranian/PFLP-GC plot and another, Richard Fuisz, revealed in a court deposition that he was told by numerous senior Syrian officials closely connected to the PFLP-GC that the group carried out the attack.

Two months before Lockerbie members of the group were arrested in Germany, including bomb-maker Marwan Kreesat, who had made the bombs used in previous attacks. He admitted building bombs into Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players — the same brand that housed the Lockerbie bomb —and said the group was planning to strike a western airliner. Other members of the group and at least one of his bombs evaded detection.

A Strange Warning

Less than three weeks before the bombing, the State Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security (ODS) warned that unnamed radical Palestinians in Europe were planning to target Pan Am. The warning came three days before the better known and entirely separate warning received by the U.S. embassy in Helsinki that an attack on Pan Am was imminent.

Whereas the Helsinki warning was written off as a hoax, the ODS warning, which was not revealed until seven years after the bombing, has never been adequately explained.

The key evidence that led the investigators away from Iran and PFLP-GC towards Libya was a small piece of circuit board known as PT/35(b), found within a blast-damaged piece of a Maltese-made shirt. The prosecution case at Megrahi’s trial was that it matched boards made to order for Swiss company Mebo by its supplier Thüring.

Crucially Mebo used the boards in timers called MST-13s, which it had designed and built 20 for the Libyan intelligence service. Megrahi was a partner in a Libyan company that rented part of Mebo’s Zurich offices.

Well before Lockerbie, the CIA had an MST-13 timer that had been seized in Togo in 1986 and photos of the one seized in Senegal in 1988. Prosecution statements by a CIA technical expert, disclosed six years after Megrahi’s conviction, revealed that the Agency was also aware before Lockerbie that the timers had been made by Mebo and supplied to Libya.

The Agency had a backchannel to Mebo boss Edwin Bollier via the Swiss police, so it’s likely that it knew of Megrahi’s connection to Mebo via his company ABH. (The Stasi, who had a relationship with Bollier from at least the early 1970s, were convinced by the late 1980s that he was a direct CIA asset.)

The story of the PT/35(b) fragment is ridden with evidential anomalies. Megrahi’s trial team highlighted a number of discrepancies concerning the fragment, including the fact that the handwritten description on the police label attached to the piece of shirt had been surreptitiously changed from “Cloth” to “Debris.”

There were numerous other discrepancies not raised at trial. These included German documents that reported that the Scottish police had told the German federal police that PT/35(b) had been found in January 1990, seven months after it was officially found.

In his memoir Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation, the head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation, Richard Marquise, revealed that he and his Scottish counterpart, Stuart Henderson, speculated that the fragment was a CIA plant. They dismissed the suggestion on the grounds that “Neither of us believed the CIA or any government official would do such a thing.”

However, Marquise also revealed that their Swiss police counterpart suspected it was a plant. This is especially interesting in view of a claim made in an affidavit by Mebo technician Ulrich Lumpert, who designed the boards and produced prototypes, that a year before the Lockerbie investigators had linked PT/35(b) to Mebo the Swiss police visited him and took with them a prototype board.

Shortly before Megrahi’s trial, the Scottish prosecutors received information from witnesses in the US suggesting that an electronics company in Florida had made replica MST-13s for the CIA, but the lead was not properly investigated.

A Miscarriage of Justice

Documents unearthed by Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) — the statutory body that investigates alleged miscarriages of justice in Scotland — highlighted more anomalies. They included a police memo stating that PT/35(b) had been tested for explosive residues and found to be negative, which contradicted the court testimony of the Crown’s forensic experts, who said that no such tests had been done.

As Frontline’s documentary, My Brother’s Bomber, points out, the SCCRC investigated Bollier’s claim that the fragment was fabricated and found it to be baseless. However, the film fails to mention that both the SCCRC and Bollier missed the most important discrepancy concerning PT/35(b), which only emerged during preparations for Megrahi’s second appeal in 2009.

Metallurgical analysis showed that the fragment’s copper circuitry was plated with pure tin, whereas the boards made by Thüring, which were used in the timers supplied to Libya, were plated with a tin-lead alloy. Crown scientists had speculated that the explosion had changed the plating, but tests commissioned for the appeal disproved the theory. The work demonstrated beyond doubt that the Lockerbie fragment was not, as the court had accepted, a match for the Libyan MST-13s.

Other important forensic items had a dubious provenance. Among them was a collection of small charred circuit board fragments that apparently originated from a Toshiba BomBeat RT-SF16 radio cassette player.

A large proportion of the global production total of the model had been bought by the Libyan General Electrical Company, which was run by Said Rashid. The fragments appeared to be compelling evidence of Libyan involvement in the bombing, but, like PT/35(b), their origin is questionable. They were discovered by an air accident investigator within a folded piece of aluminum from the luggage container that housed the bomb suitcase.

Giving evidence at Megrahi’s trial, the investigator could not suggest how the blast could have caused the fragments to become trapped within the aluminum. He was sure that the fold had not occurred at the time of the explosion, which suggested that someone had placed the fragments within the aluminum after the blast.

Also of great importance to the prosecution case was a fragment of brown checked trousers containing a sewn-in label of a Maltese manufacturer called Yorkie. The item led the police to a shop in Malta called Mary’s House, where the proprietor, Tony Gauci, recalled selling a bundle of clothes — including brown checked trousers and other items found among the Lockerbie debris — to an oddly behaved Libyan a few weeks before the bombing.

Two years later, Gauci picked out Megrahi from a photo line-up, although he was considerably younger, smaller and lighter skinned than the man described by Gauci.

When the trouser fragment was first examined, the Yorkie label was seen by neither the forensic examiner nor the police officer present despite being easily visible. When questioned about it by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, both said they could not have missed it, which suggested that the label appeared after the examination.

The CIA not only knew before Lockerbie that Mebo had supplied MST-13 timers to Libya, they also knew that Megrahi regularly travelled to Malta, that he was related to Said Rashid and others high up within Libyan intelligence and security, and that Rashid was the head of the Libyan General Electrical Company. Much of this knowledge it attempted to conceal.

No Dissident

According to the former deputy chief of the US State Department’s counterterrorism division, the Diplomatic Security Service, Fred Burton, a CIA official told him before New Year in 1988 that the bomb was in a Maltese-originating brown Samsonite.

Burton is no Lockerbie dissident — he believes Megrahi and Libya were guilty — but, if true, his indiscretions throw a big wrench into the prosecution narrative, which held that the evidence to support the claim was uncovered by the police well in to 1989.

A number of rescue volunteers have described to me arriving in Lockerbie within two hours of the bombing to find a group of American agents already present. According to the official narrative, this never happened and the first US government staff only arrived three hours later.

Police officers reported concerns that Americans had unsupervised access to the crash site and a British helicopter crew member told me that the day after the bombing his crew ferried CIA agents around the site.

Some potentially significant forensic items found at the crash site disappeared, among them an AA battery with a piece of wire soldered to one of its terminals. German police photographs of the PFLP-GC’s Toshiba bomb showed that it incorporated AA batteries with wires soldered to their terminals.

Anyone raising these evidential anomalies gets branded a conspiracy theorist by the supporters of the official narrative, yet that narrative and the one newly minted by My Brother’s Bomber are themselves elaborate conspiracy theories.

When the theories and counter-theories are cast aside in favor of hard facts, the official narrative is no longer tenable. Not only did PT/35(b) not originate from one of the timers supplied to Libya, but Megrahi was clearly not the man who bought the clothes for the bomb suitcase and that purchase took place when he was not in Malta. New analysis of the baggage evidence demonstrates that the bomb suitcase originated from London Heathrow, rather than Malta.

Perhaps the hardest fact of all for the defenders of Megrahi’s conviction — which has barely been reported in all the coverage generated by My Brother’s Bomber — is that in 2007 the conviction was referred back to the appeal court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on no fewer than six grounds.

One of these was that the trial court judgment, delivered by three of Scotland’s most senior judges, was unreasonable. Four of the other grounds concerned non-disclosure by the prosecution of important evidence.

The terminally ill Megrahi abandoned the appeal in the belief that it would aid his application for compassionate release from prison. Sadly, the commission this month rejected an application by family members and relatives of some of the British victims of Pan Am 103 for a further review of the conviction.

It may be that the only way to re-test the evidence against Megrahi will be a trial of the two newly announced suspects. If that happens, don’t hold your breath for a guilty verdict.