http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/pan.html
Pan Am Flight 103
Four days before Christmas 1988, a Pan Am 747 was ripped from
the sky by a powerful wad of plastic explosives. Perhaps it
was happenstance that five CIA agents were among the 259 human
beings who died in the crash. Perhaps it meant nothing that
another squad of CIA agents showed up in Lockerbie, Scotland,
a few hours after the aircraft splattered the country village
with gruesome debris.
That the CIA agents on the crash scene, some posing as Pan
Am employees, walked away with a mysterious briefcase seems
somewhat more significant. It belonged to one of their downed
men. By confiscating the case, they interrupted the sacrosanct
"chain of evidence," imperiling prospective prosecutions. The
half-million dollars found by two Scottish farmboys seems
noteworthy as well. Detectives surmised that the cash also
belonged to the deceased CIA team.
The ill-fated spies had traveled from Beirut. Their mission,
investigators believe, was to locate American hostages held
there by Islamic fundamentalist kidnappers. Pan Am flight 103,
had it followed the bombers' schedule, would have exploded over
the Atlantic Ocean, but the bomb went off too soon. Wreckage,
bodies, and passengers' personal effects all landed on
the ground and meticulous Scottish investigators recovered
everything except the briefcase. Among the fallout were two
cryptic documents, both property of the CIA.
One was an intricate drawing of the interior of a Beirut
building. Two crosses marked the map. The CIA agents had
located two hostages. They may have intended to negotiate
for the hostages' release, using the $500,000 to purchase
information. Or, it is possible, the team headed by Charles
McKee, and army major, was doing advance work for a rescue raid.
The other document was a Christmas card with a message either in
intelligence can't or some kind of code. Investigators deduced
the meaning of the message. It was addressed to one of the CIA
agents and said that whatever they were planning would happen
on March 11, 1989.
The bomb cost not only 270 lives (including the eleven
Lockerbie dwellers who perished on the ground), but may have
cost at least some of the hostages their immediate freedom. It
undoubtedly impeded U.S. intelligence efforts in the Middle
East. Recall that earlier, Beirut CIA station chief William
Buckley had been grabbed, sent to Iran, and tortured to death in
interrogation. Iran was the first suspect in the bombing of 103.
The CIA presence was publicly reported, though not widely
known. A March 1990 New York Times Magazine excerpt from the
book The Fall of Pan Am 103 failed to mention the CIA officers,
though the book itself goes into detail about who they were and
why they were there. The Times version blamed the disaster on
"bungling" German police.
Most media reports on the Pan Am 103 bombing endorsed the
stereotype of irrational terrorists motivated by revenge. That
there may have been a strategic and, by the warped logic of
clandestine warfare, "rational" reason to bomb the pane -
beyond retaliation for the shootdown of an Iranian airbus or
the bombing of Tripoli (depending on who's getting blamed
that day, the Iranians or the Libyans) - is not generally
discussed. Admitting a motive (other than inscrutable
fanaticism) for such a monstrous crime implies that the target
of the crime, the United States, was involved in skullduggery
of its own.
Far more incendiary were the conclusions of a private
investigator, self-described former Israeli intelligence
agent Juval Aviv. His New York firm, Interfor, conducted an
investigation for Pan Am's insurance company. The Interfor
report contains the grimmest conspiracy allegations in the
Lockerbie case.
For two years the Interfor report circulated hand to hand in
fax/Xerox form on the conspiracy circuit. The report went
largely ignored by major news organizations. Then Time magazine
suddenly discovered it and set off a bitter and highly personal
internecine journalistic confrontation - all ignited by the
following tale of intrigue, as told by Interfor:
A separate CIA team, stationed in Frankfurt and referred to as
CIA-1 by Interfor, was also trying to free the hostages, Aviv
reported. Because CIA-1 was an unauthorized "off the shelf"
covert operation controlled from Washington, not from CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia, it was at cross-purposed with
the McKee team. The unnamed operative hooked up with Monzar
Al-Kassar, a Syrian arms and drug merchant, brother-in-law
to Syria's intelligence chief (Syrian intelligence is a major
terrorism sponsor) and paramour of Syrian fascist despot Hafez
Al-Assad's niece. Not Surprisingly, Al-Kassar was also deeply
into terrorism, the politically correct thing to do for Syrian
arms runners.
Al-Kassar, according to Interfor, assisted the French government
in freeing French hostages. If he'd do the same for them,
CIA-1 offered Al-Kassar, they'd protect his drug-smuggling
route, which they had had under surveillance for some time.
"Al-Kassar agreed to the deal," says Aviv's report, "but
continued his terrorism activities and told his cohorts that
their smuggling through Pan Am/Frankfurt at least was not
protected and safe to the U.S."
At the same time, Al-Kassar, who'd once been hired by
Iran-Contra conspirators Richard Secord and Albert Hakim to ship
weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras, helped the Frankfurt-based
CIA group by shipping weapons to Iran. The Americans hoped,
once again tragicomically, to trade arms for hostages. According
to Interfor, the drug-and-gun runner kept arms flowing to the
Contras as well. In an effort to keep his American patrons
happy, he even financed some of the Contra shipments with
his own drug profits. "CIA-1 gave Al-Kassar a free hand,"
wrote Aviv.
Because CIA-1 was an unofficial operation run out of Washington,
dealing arms for hostages and striking bargains with drug
smugglers, comparisons to the Iran-Contra "enterprise" managed
by Oliver North are inevitable. CIA-1 operated in 1988, when
North was long since fired and CIA Director William Casey, the
father of Iran-Contra, was dead from a brain tumor. Neither,
then, could have been CIA-1's "control."
So who was? Much of Iran-Contra was coordinated, it now appears,
from Vice President George Bush's office. Could former CIA chief
Bush of his underlings be the "control" for CIA-1? Interfor
doesn't touch that subject.
While CIA-1 was messing around with terrorists and heroin
merchants, the official CIA and the State Department, blissfully
unaware of its off-the-shelf counterpart's activities, sent the
McKee team to Beirut. According to Aviv, their mission was,
in fact, reconnaissance for a rescue mission. They found and
photographed building where the hostages were incarcerated.
"After some time, the special team (McKee) learned of Al-Kassar
and started investigating him," Aviv reported. "They also
realized some CIA unit was protecting his drug smuggling into
the U.S. via Frankfurt airport. They had reported back to
Langley the facts and names, and reported their film of the
hostage locations. CIA did nothing. No reply."
While under surveillance, Al-Kassar and his associates in Syrian
intelligence were surveilling the McKee team right back. When
McKee and his cohorts became "frustrated and angry and made
plans to return to the U.S.," Al-Kassar was watching. He knew
that the agents booked themselves a connecting flight in London:
Pan Am flight 103, originating in Frankfurt. A week before
that plane went down, Al-Kassar told CIA-1 of his problem,
ratting out the McKee team, travel schedule and all.
All during this period, for political reasons of their own,
Al-Kassar's terrorist overlords were plotting to bomb an
American plane. They'd originally selected American Airlines
as the victim. The target soon changed.
Warnings flowed in from every direction. German intelligence,
the Mossad, and CIA-1 got word of a bomb attack in the
making. No one did anything about it. The McKee team was in the
dark and way out in the cold. Al-Kassar's associates slipped
a compact "Semtex" device onto Pan Am 103, under cover of
Al-Kassar's CIA-secured drug route. A German agent assigned
to watch the route noticed that the drug suitcase was of a
different make than usual. This agent heard the warnings. He
knew right away that he wasn't eyeing dope, but a bomb.
The agent alerted CIA-1 to the bomb. CIA-1 called its Washington
control. Control's reply: "Don't worry about it, don't stop it,
let it go."
After its stopover in London, where it picked up a group of
Syracuse University students returning home from a semester
abroad, various American tourists, and the five CIA agents who
knew where the hostages were held, the 747, nicknamed Maid of
the Seas, exploded in mid-air.
The Interfor report first surfaced courtesy of James Traficant,
an eccentric Ohio congressman with a populist's nose for
conspiracies. He reportedly got it from Victor Marchetti, former
aide to longtime CIA director Richard Helms. Marchetti, though
his whisteblowing book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
is now a classic, works for the ultra-right-wing Liberty Lobby
these days and therefore has credibility problems.
Maybe, then, the Interfor report received scant publicity
due to the questionable leaning of its leakers. More likely,
the scandalous nature of its allegations are to blame. Much
of the report gibes with public reality: the ignored warning,
for instance, and the botched raid by German police on a
bomb-making enclave in October 1988. If properly carried out,
that raid might have preempted the bombing.
The CIA-complicity charges erupted in April 1992. Time ran a
rather lurid cover story, "Why Did They Die?" which conflated
the Interfor allegations with additional details apparently
from a dubious source named Lester Coleman. The story had a
number of faults. The most flaring was its misidentification
of a Christian Broadcasting Network cameraman (white photo!) as
the traitorous CIA agent who sold out the McKee team.
Predictably, the story drew a torrent of attacks, particularly
from Christopher Byron who wrote two major debunking pieces for
New York magazine and from CNN correspondent Steven Emerson
(in the Washington Journalism Review), co-author of his own
book on Pan Am 103.
In his book, The Fall of Pan Am 103, Emerson dismisses
the Interfor report as a "spitball," a hodgepodge of fact
and unfounded speculation worthless as intelligence. The
report had been echoed briefly on network news long before
the Time story. On the day before Halloween 1990, NBC News
reported that terrorists had infiltrated a Drug Enforcement
Administration undercover operation to plant the Pan Am
103 bomb. Substitute CIA for DEA and the story mirrored the
Interfor account. (Interfor did not that CIA-1 was working
with the DEA.) the story was picked up by major dailies,
including the New York Times, then quickly "investigated"
and denied by the DEA.
In his attack on the Time piece - which followed Byron's closely
- Emerson charged that Time "ignored evidence that contradicted
its story." Both Emerson and Byron found some sizable holes
in the Time story - though both spent an inordinate amount
of ink on ad hominem attacks against Aviv and Coleman. They
also made much of the fact that Time's story appeared one week
before a lawsuit against Pan Am was scheduled to go to trial.
Part of the problem was that Time's story - perhaps thanks
the overzealous "hoaxster" Coleman - fleshed out the Interfor
report with some questionable assertions that its critics were
quick to seize upon.
Conspicuous by its absence from both Byron's and Emerson's
articles was any mention of Monzar Al-Kassar. The omission
was especially glaring because a key point of both attacks
was the supposed mystery of how the bombers knew which flight
the McKee team would take. According to the Interfor report,
the information came from Al-Kassar.
Right about the time when Bush was recruiting Syria into the
"allied coalition" against Iraq, the CIA shifted blame for the
bombing form Syria to Libya, obviating more than two years
of work by a multitude of investigators, from the Scottish
police to ABC news, all of whom pointed to Ahmed Jibril
and his patrons, Syria nd Iran. Absolving Syria, of course,
negates the Interfore scenario.
Late in 1991, the U.S. government indicted two Libyan
intelligence agents for the bombing, and briefly, newspapers
brimmed with bluster about the dire consequences to Libya if
the pair weren't handed over. The legal tussle had not been
resolved as of early 1994.
On the fifth anniversary of the bombing, in December 1993,
the BBC aired a documentary, Silence over Lockerbie. The BBC
debunked the CIA's Libya-damning evidence and, white not ruling
out Libyan involvement, the documentary shifted blame back to
the original suspects, Syria and Iran.
There are other conspiratorial tales to explain the mass murder
aboard Pan Am flight 103. One, which briefly surfaced in the
Italian press, puts the infamous, neofascist, quasi-Masonic P2
Lodge at the center of the conspiracy. But none are as detailed
and internally consistent as the Interfor report. That doesn't
mean Aviv got it right. It means only that the real story lies
buried somewhere in the graveyard of geopolitics.
Copyright © 2000 CarpeNoctem. All rights reserved.
Revised: April 2003.