| http://www.covertaction.org/full_text_66_pa103.htm
Key Question A key question in the PFLP-GC version has always been: How did the bomb get aboard the plane in Frankfurt, or at some other point? One widely disseminated explanation was in a report, completed during the summer of 1989 and leaked in the fall, which had been prepared by a New York investigating firm called Interfor. Headed by a former Israeli intelligence agent, Interfor–whose other clients included Fortune 500 companies, the FBI, the IRS, and the Secret Service25–was hired by the law firm representing Pan Am’s insurance carrier. The Interfor report said that in the mid-1980s, a drug and arms smuggling operation was set up in various European cities, with Frankfurt airport as the site of one of the drug routes. The Frankfurt operation was run by Manzer Al-Kassar, a Syrian, the same man from whom Col. Oliver North’s shadowy network purchased large quantities of arms for the contras. At the airport, according to the report, a courier would board a flight with checked luggage containing innocent items; after the luggage had passed all security checks, one or another accomplice Turkish baggage handler for Pan Am would substitute an identical suitcase containing contraband; the passenger then picked up this suitcase upon arrival at the destination. The only courier named by Interfor is Khalid Jaafar, although this may well have derived from the many news reports already citing Jaafar as a prime suspect. The report spins a web much too complex and lengthy to go into here. The short version is that the CIA in Germany discovered the drug operation at the airport and learned also that Al-Kassar had the contacts to gain the release of American hostages in Lebanon. He had already done the same for French hostages. Thus it was that the CIA and the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, Federal Criminal Office) allowed the drug operation to continue in hopes of effecting the release of American hostages. According to the report, this same smuggling ring and its method of switching suitcases at the Frankfurt airport were used to smuggle the fatal bomb aboard Flight 103, under the eyes of the CIA and BKA. Because of several warnings, these same officials had reason to suspect that a bomb might be aboard Flight 103, possibly in the drug suitcase. But the CIA, for various reasons, including not wanting to risk the hostage-release operation, told the BKA to do nothing. Interfor gave three of the baggage handlers polygraphs, and two of them were judged as being deceitful when denying any involvement in baggage switching. However, neither the U.S., U.K. or German investigators showed any interest in the results, or in questioning the baggage handlers. Instead, the polygrapher, James Keefe, was hauled before a Washington grand jury, and, as he puts it, “they were bent on destroying my credibility–not theirs [the baggage handlers].” To Interfor, this attempt at intimidation was the strongest evidence of a coverup.26 Critics claimed that the report had been inspired by Pan Am’s interest in proving that it was impossible for normal airline security to have prevented the loading of the bomb, thus removing the basis for accusing the airline of negligence. The Interfor report was likely the principal reason Pan Am’s attorneys subpoenaed the FBI, CIA, DEA, State Department, National Security Council, and NSA, as well as, reportedly, the Defense Intelligence Agency and FAA, to turn over all documents relating to the crash of 103 or to a drug operation preceding the crash. The government moved to quash the subpoenas on grounds of “national security,” and refused to turn over a single document in open court, although it gave some to a judge to view in private. The judge later commented that he was “troubled about certain parts” of what he had read, that he did not “know quite what to do because I think some of the material may be significant.”27 Drugs Revelation A year later, on October 30, 1990, NBC News reported that “Pan Am flights from Frankfurt, including 103, had been used a number of times by the DEA as part of its undercover operation to fly informants and suitcases of heroin into Detroit as part of a sting operation to catch dealers in Detroit.” The TV network reported that the DEA was looking into the possibility that a young man who lived in Michigan and regularly visited the Middle East may have unwittingly carried the bomb aboard Flight 103. His name was Khalid Jaafar. “Unidentified law enforcement sources” were cited as saying that Jaafar had been a DEA informant and was involved in a drug-sting operation based out of Cyprus. The DEA was investigating whether the PFLP-GC had tricked Jaafar into carrying a suitcase containing the bomb instead of (or in addition to?) the drugs he usually carried. The report added that “Informants would put [suit]cases of heroin on the Pan Am flights apparently without the usual security checks...through an arrangement between the DEA and German authorities.”28 These revelations were enough to inspire a congressional hearing, held in December 1990, entitled, “Drug Enforcement Administration’s Alleged Connection to the Pan Am Flight 103 Disaster.” The chairman of the House committee, Rep. Robert Wise (Dem.-W. Va.), began the hearing by lamenting the fact that the DEA and the Department of Justice had not made any of their field agents who were most knowledgeable about Flight 103 available to testify; that they had not provided requested written information, including the results of the DEA’s investigation into the air disaster; and that “the FBI to this date has been totally uncooperative.” The two DEA officials who did testify admitted that the agency had, in fact, run “controlled drug deliveries” through Frankfurt airport with the cooperation of German authorities, using U.S. airlines, but insisted that no such operation had been conducted in December 1988. The officials denied that the DEA had had any “association with Mr. Jaafar in any way, shape, or form.” However, to questions concerning Jaafar’s background, family, and his frequent trips to Lebanon, they asked to respond only in closed session. They made the same request in response to several other questions. (NBC News had reported on October 30 that the DEA had told law enforcement officers in Detroit not to talk to the media about Jaafar.) The hearing ended after only one day, even though Wise had promised a “full-scale” investigation and indicated during the hearing that there would be more to come. What was said in the closed sessions remains closed.29 One of the DEA officials who testified, Stephen Greene, had himself had a reservation on Flight 103, but he canceled because of the warnings. He has described standing on the Heathrow tarmac, watching the doomed plane take off.30 There have been many reports of heroin being found in the field around the crash, from “traces” to “a substantial quantity” found in a suitcase.31 Two days after the NBC report, however, the New York Times quoted a “federal official” saying that “no hard drugs were aboard the aircraft.” The DEA of course knew of its sting operation in Frankfurt two years earlier when the tragedy occurred, but they said nothing, not even to the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which held hearings in the first months of 1990 in response to the Flight 103 bombing. The Whistleblowers Lester Coleman, author and radio talk-show host, who spent several years with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the DEA, beginning in the mid-1980s, has revealed that when he was working with the DEA station in Cyprus, he met Khalid Jaafar several times, that Jaafar was working for the DEA, and that the young man had run two or three controlled deliveries of heroin into Detroit.32 Because Coleman did not keep what he knew to himself, but repeated his story in an affidavit for Pan Am’s action against the U.S. government, and then co-authored a highly revealing book, he was hounded for several years, across continents, and severely punished by various institutions of that same government, including being imprisoned on phony charges to damage his credibility. His tale reads like something out of Les Miserables with the U.S. government as Inspector Javert. At one point, a federal judge warned Coleman: “If you attack the government on the radio, I will take that very, very seriously.”33 Several other individuals who have raised questions about a U.S. government role in the Pan Am 103 disaster have also paid a heavy price, including Juval Aviv, the head of Interfor. His office suffered a series of break-ins; the FBI visited his clients; his polygrapher was harassed, as mentioned; and a contrived commercial fraud charge was brought against him. Even though Aviv eventually was cleared in court, it was a long, expensive, and painful ordeal.34 There was also Allan Francovich, who made a documentary film, The Maltese Double Cross, which presents Jaafar as an unwitting bomb carrier with ties to the DEA and the CIA. Showings of the film in Britain were canceled under threat of lawsuits, and venues burglarized or attacked with arson. When Channel 4 agreed to show the film, the Scottish Crown Office and the U.S. Embassy in London sent press packs to the media, labeling the film “blatant propaganda,” and attacking some of the film’s interviewees, including Coleman and Aviv.35 Additionally, Francovich said he had learned that five CIA operatives had been sent to London and Cyprus to discredit the film while it was being made, that his office phones were tapped, and staff cars sabotaged, and that one of his researchers narrowly escaped an attempt to force his vehicle into the path of an oncoming truck.36 Lockerbie investigators went so far as to ask the FBI to investigate the film. The Bureau later issued a highly derogatory opinion of it.37 The film’s detractors made much of the fact that the film was initially funded jointly by a U.K. company (two-thirds) and a Libyan government investment concern (one-third). Francovich said that he was fully aware of this and had taken pains to negotiate a guarantee of independence from any interference. On April 17, 1997, Allan Francovich suddenly died of a heart attack at age 56, upon arrival at Houston Airport.38 His film has had almost no showings in the United States.39 Abu Talb The DEA sting operation and Interfor’s baggage-handler hypothesis both predicate the bomb suitcase being placed aboard the plane without going through the normal security checks. In either case, it eliminates the need for the questionable triple-flight unaccompanied-baggage scenario. It does not eliminate the matter of the clothing purchased in Malta, but we do not need the Libyans for that. Mohammed Abu Talb fits that and perhaps other pieces of the puzzle. The Palestinian had close ties to PFLP-GC cells in Germany which were making Toshiba radio-cassette bombs, similar, if not identical, to what was used to bring down Flight 103. In October 1988, two months before Lockerbie, the German police staged several raids against these cells, uncovering all but one of their five known bombs. In May 1989, Talb was arrested in Sweden, where he lived, and was later convicted of taking part in several bombings of the offices of American airline companies in Scandinavia. In his Swedish apartment, police found large quantities of clothing made in Malta. Police investigation of Talb disclosed that during October 1988 he had been to Cyprus and Malta, at least once in the company of Hafez Dalkamoni, the leader of the German PFLP-GC, who was arrested in the raid. The men met with group members who lived in Malta. Talb was also in Malta on November 23, which was originally reported as the date of the clothing purchase before the indictment of the Libyans, as mentioned earlier. After his arrest, Talb told investigators that between October and December 1988 he had retrieved and passed to another person a bomb that had been hidden in a building used by the PFLP-GC in Germany. Officials declined to identify the person to whom Talb said he had passed the bomb. A month later, however, he recanted his confession. Additionally, Talb was reported to possess a brown Samsonite suitcase, and to have circled December 21 in a diary seized in his Swedish flat. After the raid upon his flat, his wife was allegedly heard to telephone Palestinian friends and say: “Get rid of the clothes.” In December 1989, Scottish police, in papers filed with Swedish legal officials, made Talb the only publicly identified suspect “in the murder or participation in the murder of 270 people.”40 Since that time, the world has scarcely heard of Abu Talb, who was sentenced to life in prison in Sweden, but never charged with anything to do with Lockerbie. In Allan Francovich’s film, members of Khalid Jaafar’s family–which long had ties to the drug trade in Lebanon’s notorious Bekaa Valley–are interviewed. In either halting English or translated Arabic, or paraphrased by the film’s narrator, they drop many bits of information, but they are difficult to put together into a coherent whole. Among the bits: Khalid had told his parents that he had met Talb in Sweden and had been given Maltese clothing; someone had given Khalid a tape recorder, or put one into his bag; he was told to go to Germany to friends of Ahmed Jabril who would help him earn some money; he arrived in Germany with two kilos of heroin; “He didn’t know it was a bomb. They gave him the drugs to take to Germany. He didn’t know. Who wants to die?” It cannot be stated with certainty what happened at Frankfurt airport on that fateful day, if, as seems most likely, that is the place where the bomb was placed into the system. Either Jaafar, the DEA courier, arrived with his suitcase of heroin and bomb and was escorted through security by the proper authorities, or this was a day he was a courier for Manzer al-Kassar, and the baggage handlers did their usual switch. International Law Contrary to what American officials and the media have stated on numerous occasions, the 1992 U.N. resolutions do not demand that Libya turn the two men over to the United States or Scotland. No specific venue is mentioned.41 In 1992, Qaddafi declared that if the U.S. could demand that al-Megrahi and Fhimah be turned over for trial, he could ask for the surrender of the American airmen who bombed two Libyan cities, killing 37 people, including his daughter. The United States refuses to accede to the request of Costa Rica for the extradition of John Hull, an American who was a major player in Iran-Contra, and who is wanted in Costa Rica for drug trafficking and other crimes. Similar requests from Cuba over the years for the terrorists harbored by the U.S. in Washington and Miami have also been ignored. It is surprising that Qaddafi has agreed to subject the two Libyans to a Scottish judge and Scottish law, without a jury. Even though it would take place in the Netherlands, there is no reason to assume that the Scottish judges would be any less biased than in Scotland. To return home after acquitting the men could not be a pleasant thing to face. At the same time, it is unlikely that any U.S. or British official really believes that Libya played a significant role, if any. And for that reason, they probably do not actually want to see the trial of the two men take place.42 Not only would the paucity of their evidence be exposed for all the world to see, but they might be obliged to reveal information they’d rather not see the light of day, perhaps touching upon the role played by one or more U.S. intelligence agencies. Footnotes |
