Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

On a December evening in 1988, Pan American Airways Flight 103 from London to New York exploded in the air over Lockerbie in Scotland. Within hours, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts, urging them to publicize that here was “incontrovertible proof” that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable. (The author of this book received a call making such a claim from a LAP source hours after the disaster.) Sanctions were swiftly imposed by the West against the Gadhafi regime. The United States and Britain issued indictments against two Libyans, charging them with the destruction of the Pan Am flight. Gadhafi refused to hand over the men for trial.

LAP next accused Syria and Iran of being coplotters in the Lockerbie disaster. The case against the Damascus regime turned on no more than its well-known support for state-sponsored terrorism. With Iran, the accusation was more specific: Pan Am 103 had been destroyed as an act of revenge for the shooting down on July 3, 1988, by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian passenger plane in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people. It had been a tragic error for which the United States had apologized.

LAP then named the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as having conspired to destroy the airline. None of the journalists who widely published this story stopped to think why Libya, accused as the original perpetrator, would have needed to call for help from Syria or Iran, let along a Palestinian group.

According to one British intelligence source, “LAP was on a roll. Lockerbie was the perfect opportunity to remind the world that there existed the terror network that LAP always liked to promote. Lockerbie didn’t need that. In fact putting in too many names in the pot was actually counterproductive. We knew only the Libyans were responsible.” However, there were facts that did not make Pan Am 103 such an open-and-shut case.

The loss of the airliner had occurred at the time when George Bush was president-elect and his transition team in Washington was updating itself on the current Middle East situation so Bush could “hit the ground running” when he entered the Oval Office.

Bush had been CIA director in 1976-77, a period when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had largely dictated Washington’s pro-Israeli policy. While Bush publicly maintained Reagan’s glad-handing toward Israel, his years at the helm of the CIA had convinced him that Reagan had been “too dewy-eyed about Israel.” Waiting to become president, Bush needed no reminding how, in 1986, the United States had been forced to cancel a $1.9 billion arms deal with Jordan when the Jewish lobby in Congress had intervened. Bush had told his transition team that as president he would not tolerate interference in the right of “God-fearing Americans to do business with whom and where they wished.” This attitude would play its part in the destruction of Pan Am 103.

On board the aircraft as it left London on that December night in 1988 were eight members of the U.S. intelligence community returning from duty in the Middle East. Four of them were CIA field officers, led by Matthew Gannon. Also on board were U.S. Army major Charles McKee and his small team of experts in hostage rescue. They had been in the Middle East to explore the possibility of freeing the Western hostages still held in Beirut. Though the Lockerbie disaster investigation was under the jurisdiction of a Scottish team, CIA agents were on the scene when McKee’s still closed and miraculously intact suitcase was located. It was taken away from the scene for a short time by a man believed to be a CIA officer, though he would never be positively identified. Later the suitcase was returned to the Scottish investigation team, who logged its contents under “empty.”

No one queried what had happened to McKee’s belongings, let alone why he had been traveling with an empty suitcase. But at the time, no one suspected that the CIA officer might have removed from the suitcase data that explained why Pan Am 103 had been destroyed. Gannon’s luggage was never accounted for—giving rise to the belief that the actual bomb had been placed in his suitcase. No satisfactory explanation would ever emerge as to how or why a CIA officer was carrying a bomb in his suitcase.

The PBS investigative television program Frontline subsequently claimed to have solved the cause of the disaster. Pan Am 103 had begun its journey in Frankfurt, where U.S.-bound passengers from the Middle East transferred on to Flight 103. Among them were Gannon and his CIA team, who had traveled on an Air Malta flight to make the connection. Their baggage was similar to thousands of suitcases that passed through the hands of Frankfurt baggage handlers every day. One of them was in the pay of terrorists. Somewhere in the airport baggage bays the handler had concealed a suitcase already containing the bomb. His instruction was to spot a matching suitcase coming off a connecting flight, and substitute his suitcase, and then let it continue on into the hold of Pan Am 103. It was a plausible theory—but only one of many advanced to explain the bombing.

Understandably desperate to show the destruction of Pan Am 103 had been an act of terrorism for which it could not be culpable, the airline’s insurers hired a New York firm of private investigators called Interfor. The company had been founded in 1979 by an Israeli, Yuval Aviv, who had immigrated to the United States the previous year. Aviv claimed to be a former desk officer with Mossad—a claim the service would deny. Nevertheless, Aviv had satisfied the insurers he had the right connections to unearth the truth.

When they received his report, they could only have been stunned. Aviv had concluded that the attack had been planned and executed “by a rogue CIA group, based in Germany, who were providing protection to a drug operation which transported drugs from the Middle East to the U.S. via Frankfurt. The CIA did nothing to break up the operation because the traffickers were also helping them send weapons to Iran as part of the arms-for-hostages negotiations. The method of drug smuggling was quite simple. One person would check a piece of luggage on the flight, and an accomplice working in the baggage area would switch it with a piece of identical luggage containing the narcotics. On the fatal night, a Syrian terrorist, aware of how the drug operation worked, had switched a suitcase with one containing the bomb. His reason was to kill the U.S. intelligence operatives whom Syria had discovered would join the flight.”

Aviv’s report claimed McKee had learned about the “CIA rogue team,” which had worked under the code name of COREA, and that its members also had close ties to another of those mysterious figures who had found his niche on the fringes of the intelligence world. Monzer Al-Kassar had built a reputation as an arms dealer in Europe, including supplying Colonel Oliver North with weapons for him to pass on to the Nicaraguan Contras in 1985-86. Al-Kassar also had links to the Abu Nidal organization, and his family connections were equally dubious. Ali Issa Duba, head of Syrian intelligence, was his brother-in-law, and Al-Kassar’s wife was a relative of the Syrian president. Aviv’s report claimed Al-Kassar had found in COREA a ready partner for the drug-smuggling operation. This had been going on for several months before the destruction of Pam Am 103. The report farther claimed McKee had discovered the scam while pursuing his own contacts in the Middle East underworld in an attempt to find a way to rescue the Beirut hostages. Aviv stated in his report that “McKee planned to bring back to the U.S. proof of the rogue intelligence team’s connection to Al-Kassar.”

In 1994, Joel Bainerman, the publisher of an Israeli intelligence report and whose analyses have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Britain’s Financial Times, wrote: “Twenty-four hours before the flight, Mossad tipped off the German BKA that there could be a plan to plant a bomb on flight 103. The BKA passed on their tip to the COREA CIA team working out of Frankfurt who said they would take care of everything.”