Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist From: Barry Chamish ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Lockerbie >From Yediot Ahronot: YEDIOT AHARONOT 8/20/99: "In the darkness of the night of 20 December 1988, a black Mercedes entered the Frankfurt Airport compound and stopped next to one of the automatic doors. A baggage handler of Turkish origin removed a hard suitcase from the trunk, carried it through the passenger lounges, and disappeared together with the case in the area where airport workers had their personal lockers. The worker knew that the suitcase he had removed from the Mercedes was full of drugs, but he didn't look in the least agitated. He knew that no one would stop him and that no one would ask unnecessary questions about the suitcase that he had taken into the area restricted to airport personnel. The Turkish baggage handler's extreme self-confidence was founded on 24 months of experience, during which this routine had been followed weekly without interruption. The suitcase with the drugs would arrive by car at the parking lot. The employee would take the bag into the workers area, and from there it would continue into the hold of an American aircraft which would carry it across the ocean. The Turk and the other members of the smuggling ring knew that everything they did was under the watchful eye of undercover agents of the CIA and the BKA [Office of Criminal Investigation] -- the West German security service. Both intelligence services permitted the "secure drug channel" to operate undisturbed because with the help of the head of the ring, Mundhir al-Qasr, they obtained a lot of intelligence about what was happening within the terrorist organizations in Lebanon. At the same time, al-Qasr promised to act for the release of the American hostages that were being held in various secret locations in Lebanon at the time. The BKA and CIA have denied outright the existence of the "secure drug channel" described above, which operated under their supervision, as it were. Recently, this highly expected denial has taken on far greater significance than anticipated. A few weeks ago, 'Abd-al-Basit 'Ali al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifah Fhimah -- the two Libyan intelligence officers suspected of blowing up the plane -- were extradited to the Netherlands to stand trial in the international court in The Hague. Against this background, the suspicion that it was the drugs route that permitted the explosive charge to be placed on the Pan Am plane, which took the lives of 270 civilians, might serve the case for the defense. The person providing substance to this worrying theory is former Israeli Yuval Aviv, author of "Gideon's Sword", who describes himself as a former Mosad agent. Aviv, who today runs a large and successful private international intelligence and investigations office, prepared for Pan Am--before the airline went bankrupt--a 27-page intelligence report detailing the "secure drug channel." The indictment submitted to the Hague court against the two Libyan officers is the result of an intensive American investigation. This investigation was conducted by the CIA, and for this reason the finger wasn't pointed in the direction that Aviv mentions. It accused the Libyans. The investigation found that the Libyan officers put the suitcase containing a sophisticated 'Semtex' bomb onto the plane. The suitcase exploded in the skies above Scotland after it had flown unaccompanied from Malta to Frankfurt, passed through security checks, was transferred to a Pan Am Boeing 727 flying from Frankfurt to Heathrow, was again transferred to a Pan Am jumbo jet, and only exploded after the plane had taken off on its way to New York's Kennedy Airport. It was not difficult for American investigators to find reasons for a Libyan bomb to be planted on an American plane. A number of incidents prior to the explosion could have served as a cause for the tragic attack. The first incident took place two years before the Lockerbie disaster. The Americans launched a lethal attack on a chemical weapons production plant in Libya. The second incident took place seven months before the disaster. All the passengers aboard an Iranian 'Airbus' were killed as a result of an unfortunate American mistake. The civilian plane was shot down by troops aboard the American warship "Vincennes" that was sailing in the Persian Gulf. In the wake of the incident, all intelligence services in Europe and North America went on high alert in anticipation of a revenge attack. But this is not the direction to which Aviv is pointing. In a special report that he prepared for Pan Am, Aviv claims that the suitcase bomb was placed aboard the plane on the "secure drug channel" that the CIA intentionally ignored. According to him, the route's code name was "Korea." According to this version, American intelligence elements decided to maintain a drug route under their supervision. There were two reasons for this decision. The first: There were those in the CIA who maintained that when in Rome, do as the Romans; that is to say, the best way to obtain information in Lebanon was by making contact with and getting close to the centers of power in the drug trade, and from there to vital intelligence sources. Another reason was the massive flood of drugs coming out of the Lebanese Al-Biqa' and flowing into the United States along hundreds of routes. The little that the CIA could do was to try and keep tabs on a chosen drug route and in this way catch the major drug dealers in the United States. The lucky person chosen by the CIA was a colorful character on the Middle East scene: Mundhir al-Qasr. Al-Qasr born in 1947 in Syria, is married to the sister of 'Ali 'Issa Duba, who was head of Syrian intelligence at the time. At the same time, he had an affair with Raja, daughter of Rif'at al-Asad, and with Georgina Rizzaq, a former Miss Lebanon, who was married to 'Ali Hasan Salamah, the terrorist liquidated by the Mosad in the seventies. Through his family and social ties, al-Qasr would travel freely in Lebanon. This route made him so wealthy that he ceased his terrorist activity and did everything to protect the goose that lay the golden eggs that had landed in his lap. So much so, according to Aviv, that he did everything to prevent a terrorist act being carried out via Frankfurt Airport. Aviv claims that for this reason, al-Qasr and his associates were the ones who issued the warning about the impending terrorist action at the airport two days before the Lockerbie explosion. But it was al-Qasr, the person who wanted to protect his source of income, who unwittingly enabled the suitcase bomb to be put on the plane. How did this happen? According to Aviv, al-Qasr had a courier by the name of Khalid Ja'far, the leader of a drug ring in Lebanon's Al-Biqa', who would regularly fly the Frankfurt-New York route with suitcases full of drugs. According to Aviv, Ja'far fell into a trap laid for him by Ahmad Jibril. Aviv claims that Jibril had an account to settle with the Americans over their intensive actions against the terrorist organizations in Lebanon, and he came to the conclusion that the drug route was his opportunity to plant a bomb on an American plane. Among other things, the report Aviv gave Pan Am says that on 13 December 1988, Ja'far was invited to a secret apartment in Bonn where he met Jibril. There was another man in the apartment with Jibril. According to the report, this man was called the "professor" -- a Libyan citizen who specialized in assembling sophisticated bombs. The report claims that Jibril proposed that Ja'far smuggle an additional consignment for him, all the income from which would "serve the sacred cause." Ja'far agreed without knowing that he had thus sealed his own fate and that of 269 other people. According to Aviv, Ja'far was given a suitcase similar to the drug suitcase that was regularly carried through the Pan Am cargo terminal. This suitcase also held a "Toshiba" radio-cassette containing 568 grams of "Semtex" explosives. Four similar explosive charges (including "Toshiba" radio-cassettes) were seized a few months earlier in a secret terrorist apartment in Germany. In order to prove this version of events, Aviv even points to the existence of a recording of a conversation between an employee at Frankfurt Airport who was involved in the drug route, and a security service official who was his supervisor: "On the day of the disaster, the employee noticed that the suitcase that arrived was slightly different in shape and color. He contacted the man from the security service, consulted with him about the suitcase, and was instructed 'to let the suitcase pass.' At the time, all Pan Am employees' conversations were recorded because of a wave of unauthorized private calls. As a result, that fateful conversation was recorded and will be played before the judges' bench." Aviv's involvement with the Lockerbie affair got him into hot water. Irrespective of whether this fact points to the truth of his conclusions or not, one cannot ignore the fact that in 1995, a short time after the contents of the report he submitted to Pan Am were leaked to the press, Aviv was arrested by FBI agents under suspicion of defrauding senior 'General Electric' officials and of receiving money for work he was supposed to have carried out. During the trial, it transpired that the alleged episode took place five years earlier. 'General Electric' hired Aviv's services to conduct security checks on the Caribbean islands prior to a vacation by the company management. The vacation went ahead as planned and passed without incident. 'General Electric' neither complained about Aviv nor did it seek any investigation against him. According to Aviv, he discovered that at least two of the FBI agents who conducted the investigation against him over the 'General Electric' affair were involved in the Pan Am investigation. His lawyer told the court: "In 20 years of practice, I have never seen such dedication by official investigative bodies looking into a civil matter that took place five years ago." At the end of 1996, Aviv was acquitted of all charges. A federal jury in the Manhattan court decided that Aviv had been set up "in the wake of his position in the Pan Am report." The judge said for the record: "The conduct of the FBI investigation, and the fact that it did not arise from any external complaint leads to the impression that the investigation arose for other reasons, and the only plausible reason is the investigation (by Aviv) into the Lockerbie affair." Aviv himself told the 7 Yamim supplement that while the trial against him was in progress, FBI agents came to many of his clients and tried to discourage them from continuing to use his services. "They made a big effort to hang me out to dry," he says. "All my contracts with government elements, including contracts with the FBI itself, were put on ice. The FBI tried to deny these in the court. Their problem was that I had documents attesting to the fact that they used my services from 1982 to 1989. The judge asked them sarcastically how they could claim that I was a fraud after they had worked with me for years." The British journalist John Ashton is working on a full-length feature on the Lockerbie episode for a BBC subsidiary. He pointed to Yuval Aviv as one of a chain of people who had investigated the affair and been harmed by it. Ashton: " In June 1996, I published a report in the newspaper Mail on Sunday about the attempts to harm various people because of their position on the Lockerbie affair. Apart from Aviv, I pointed to a long list of publishers, film directors, and movie-theater owners who received threats, had their businesses broken into, and in one case set on fire, after they had expressed a willingness to screen a film or publish a book that supports this theory. If everything they say is invented, it is hard to understand why someone is trying to discourage people from expressing their view on the matter." John Ashton says that the most detailed evidence about drug activity along this route was supplied by the journalist Lester Coleman. After writing the book "Trail of the Octopus", which deals with the blowing up of the plane above a Scottish town, his life became hell. In the mid-eighties, Coleman, 43, was an adviser to the Cyprus arm of the US Government's Drugs Enforcement Administration. In the course of his work in Cyprus, Coleman gained information that CIA personnel were involved in giving the green light to drug smuggling from Lebanon. Coleman was fired from the DEA, according to him, after he got into a conflict with his supervisors who ignored his warnings about the lack of professionalism of various agents who were active in Lebanon, and about the fact that Lebanese agents turned into double agents and betrayed their American dispatchers. Administration officials claimed that Coleman's statements were unfounded and that he was fired for inappropriate conduct. In an interview with the British journalist Ashton, Coleman said that despite his suspicions, he didn't dare think of a link between the American drug route in Cyprus and the Lockerbie disaster. According to him, certain things happened that aroused his suspicion: There were rumors among the volunteers searching for wreckage from the Pan Am plane about the discovery of large quantities of heroin. At the same time, Coleman learned that among the plane's victims was an American of Lebanese origin named Khalid Ja'far. Coleman claims that he knew Ja'far from his activities in the CIA station in Cyprus, and that he was a key figure in the drug route. Aviv's stories about the Lockerbie affair, as well as other evidence that supports his version, do not really impress the Israeli intelligence community. The main dispute centered around Aviv's security past. He describes himself as a former Mosad agent and refuses to elaborate. ("I wish to have the opportunity to continue coming to Israel without getting into trouble; therefore, I do not engage in discussions about my past"), but many former members of Israel's security apparatus describe him as a charlatan and claim that he has no idea about intelligence matters and flight security. According to them, Aviv never served in the Mosad and was simply an El Al selector who was fired after a few months' work. They claim that most of what he writes in the report was previously published in the world press. Two well-known Israeli intelligence officials with an impeccable reputation told 7 Yamim that they have serious reservations about Yuval Aviv and described him as a "professional Walter Mitty." Another person, who is still working for the Mosad, says that as far as he knows, Aviv did in fact carry out many operations for the Mosad, and he should be recognized for them. A clue to Aviv's possible connections with the security services can be found, of all places, in the FBI documents that were deposited with the federal court in Manhattan during the trial against him. Two facts can clearly be ascertained from the uncensored parts of these documents: one is that for a long time the American security services suspected that Aviv was a Mosad agent in the United States. The second is that for a number of years Aviv was a paid adviser to two American investigative and intelligence agencies. Whatever Aviv's security history, everyone is agreed that both the Mosad and El Al's security department believed that it was only a matter of time before a bomb would be placed on a plane departing from Frankfurt Airport. It transpires from a comprehensive research paper written by three of Israel's most senior former security services personnel (Yitzhaq Yafet, a former senior member of the General Security Service [GSS] and head of El Al's security department; Avino'am Avivi, who held a senior position in the GSS; and Colonel (Reserve) Yosi Langozky) that Pan Am's security set-up looked like an open invitation to terrorism. Yuval Aviv agrees with them: "It was clear to any amateur that this company's security arrangements existed only on paper." But the main point is that too many people learned about the "secure drug route" at the airport. During the two weeks prior to the bomb being placed on the American plane, at least two warnings were given by the Mosad. British Member of Parliament [MP] Tam Dalyell claims that one of the warnings that was received at the beginning of December 1988 was most detailed. In the wake of this warning, an official document of one intelligence organization said: "A terrorist act by Palestinians who are not members of the PLO can be expected against American targets in Europe, including Pan Am and US military installations." A senior Israeli intelligence official says: "I don't know if the 'Korea' operation is a product of Aviv's hallucinations, but the involvement of espionage organizations in the international drug trade is not his private invention nor a unique CIA innovation. Over the years there have been several suggestions that American espionage elements have closed their eyes, facilitating the drug trade at various times along the Turkey-Lebanon-Cyprus-United States route." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MyPoints-Free Rewards When You're Online. 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