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

Chapter 5:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the magazine Private Eye observed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was right on both counts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could he be trusted to keep his mouth shut?

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

A coincidence? Or had Coleman gone off the reservation?

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

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