Chapter 17
Lester Coleman's day in court had been scheduled for 17 June 1991, in Chicago, but having just found sanctuary for himself and his family in Sweden, he was not disposed to gamble with it.
Even if he had wished to run the risk of answering the government's trumped-up charge, he was neither fit enough nor solvent enough for any more travel. Acute lumbago, coupled with a kidney infection, had confined him to bed soon after his arrival, and he was down to less than $150. Except for their clothes, the family had nothing left to sell.
On 11 June, his Chicago public defender, Michael Deutsch, advised the court that Coleman was ill in Sweden, and Chief Judge James B. Moran rescheduled the trial for 22 July, ordering Coleman to produce proof of his illness and to appear at a pre-trial hearing set for 16 July.
It was impossible.
'We are disillusioned and exhausted, homeless and broke -- and there seems to be no end in sight,' Coleman wrote to Deutsch. 'I suggest you ask the court to fund a trip for you to consult with your client, whom you have never met, since I am unable to consult with you in Chicago for health and financial reasons.'
Not unexpectedly, the court rejected the suggestion. On 16 July, Deutsch reported that his client was still unable to travel and produced medical certificates to that effect from Coleman's Swedish doctors. Chief Judge Moran then postponed the trial indefinitely and asked the assistant US attorney in charge of the case to arrange for an independent physician to examine Coleman to determine the nature and extent of his illness.
The responsibility for this, and also for bringing Coleman back within the orbit of the Justice Department, was assigned to the FBI, which seems to have concluded, rightly, that he was unlikely to return of his own accord. A pretext was therefore required to have him declared a fugitive. The Bureau could then ask Interpol to have him picked up when Coleman next presented his passport for inspection.
On 24 September, having been advised that a Dr. Hakan Hallberg was prepared to examine Coleman in Sweden on the court's behalf, Chief Judge Moran ordered that unless Coleman submitted to an examination by Dr. Hallberg within ten days, a bench warrant would be issued for his arrest.
Still ready to comply with the court's order (if not to surrender himself to its jurisdiction), Coleman duly telephoned Dr. Hallberg for an appointment -- and was astonished to learn that Dr. Hallberg knew nothing whatever about the matter. He had never been approached by the American authorities, he said, and had certainly never agreed to carry out an independent examination for them.
At Coleman's request, Dr. Hallberg provided a written statement to that effect. In English. Dated 27 September, it read simply: 'Coleman, Lester, has contacted this office, and we have no knowledge of any request from American authority to examine Mr. Coleman.'
Guessing what lay behind the manoeuvre, Coleman immediately forwarded Dr. Hallberg's letter to Micheal Deutsch in Chicago, but it was either too late or ignored. On 7 October 1991, a bench warrant was issued 'for failure to appear', and Coleman was duly reclassified as an international fugitive.
That meant he was no longer free to travel, if he wished to, beyond the frontiers of Sweden, whose government had taken the Colemans in as refugees while their petition for asylum was considered. To get him back, the US Justice Department was now in a position to sue for Coleman's extradition, if it was ready to risk a public hearing in Sweden, or, if it wasn't, either to press through diplomatic channels for his deportation, or to sanction his kidnapping and forcible return to the United States.
A further bonus from Washington's point of view was that the fugitive warrant dealt another body blow to Coleman's credibility as a witness. The assault on his character begun by Steven Emerson in the CNN newscast had become a priority after James Shaughnessy filed Coleman's affidavit in Pan Am's third-party suit.
On 30 May, a few days before the Colemans crossed into Sweden, John J. Connors, the attorney heading the government team, joined Colonel Bathen of the DIA and Micheal Hurley of the DEA in filing declarations directed, not so much at what Coleman had to say, but at the man himself. Most of it had to do with the phony passport charge. As in Pan Am's case, the government was in sole possession of the evidence Coleman needed to prove that he had been acting under orders when he applied for a Thomas Leavy passport, and, again as in Pan Am's case, the government had refused to produce that evidence, claiming the state secrets privilege.
Still following the Pan Am tactics, the Justice Department chose instead to make an in camera, ex parte showing of classified documents to Chief Judge Moran, who, on the strength of what he was shown, ruled that those documents did not support Coleman's defence and denied his motion for discovery. Exactly what he did see, however, is known only to the court and the government prosecutors. As they had charged Coleman in a criminal matter, they were unlikely to have produced documents that undermined their own case, so the value of the exercise was questionable. But it at least enabled Connors to imply in his declaration that Coleman's story was unsupported by the evidence.
'In an apparent attempt to bolster the credibility of Coleman and otherwise support their allegations against the DEA,' Connors went on, 'third-party plaintiffs requested ... depositions of two German BKA agents, Bert Pinsdorf and Hartmut Mayer.'
Holding a watching brief for the government, Connors had attended those depositions in Germany and confirmed that both men had been instructed by their superiors not to discuss the Flight 103 investigation, although Pinsdorf did at one point deny that the BKA had received any advance warning of the bombing. Mayer, Connors went on, knew no more about it than he had read in the newspapers, but he confirmed that he had worked closely with DEA agents in Cyprus and that he knew Lester Coleman.
'The Coleman declaration specifically alleges that Mr. Mayer was somehow involved in or knowledgeable about the DEA 'controlled delivery' which Pan Am alleges was subverted by the terrorists in order to put the bomb on the aircraft in Frankfurt,' declared Connors. 'However, he [Mayer] specifically confirmed [that] controlled deliveries are escorted through and do not bypass security, and specifically denied Coleman's allegation that the BKA or DEA train anyone to circumvent security at any airport.'
Connors evidently misread Coleman's affidavit, for nowhere did he 'specifically' allege that Mayer was involved in the particular controlled delivery that was subverted by the terrorists. What he did say was that Mayer was the BKA's liaison officer for the controlled deliveries mounted by the DEA through Frankfurt -- a statement which Mayer confirmed, and that did little to support the DEA's contention that no controlled deliveries were being carried out in Europe at the time.
Nor did Coleman anywhere 'specifically' allege in his affidavit that the BKA or DEA trained anyone to circumvent airport security or, indeed, failed in this instance to 'escort' the controlled delivery through. What he did say was that 'baggage containing the narcotics used in the operation would be placed on flights to the United States through agents [author's italics], informants and/or sources ... so as to avoid the possible interdiction of the shipments by airport and/or airline security.' In the Frankfurt context, this meant following the established routine of supervising a suitcase switch in the airport's baggage-handling area.
Contrary to Connors's suggestion, there is no discernible conflict between Coleman's statement and Mayer's -- unless by 'escort' Mayer meant a group of DEA and BKA agents solemnly marching a courier through a crowded airport without allowing anyone to touch his bags. And when Mayer went on to say that Khalid Jafaar was not working for the DEA, as Connors reported in his declaration, what did he mean? On that particular occasion? That, as a subsource, he worked for a CI who was paid by the DEA? That he was working for some other agency? And in any case, how would Mayer know?
But for Coleman there were more important things to worry about. His first priority was to satisfy the Swedish authorities of the truth of his story and consequently of his need for their protection.
The family had entered the country legally, on valid American passports, making for Trollhattan, a small town of about 60,000 inhabitants, to which one of Mary-Claude's sisters and her husband had emigrated from Lebanon some five years earlier. Perhaps naively, Coleman had thought they might stay there on a temporary basis until the matter of the phony passport charge was cleared up, but he felt it wise to be frank with the Swedish authorities from the start, and a week after their arrival, he went with his brother-in-law to the local police station to explain his situation.
For one thing, they were broke and needed whatever help they could get.
"The police were very nice to us [he recalled]. Very understanding. They passed us on for a second interview to an officer in charge of refugees, and in July, she arranged for us to move out of my brother-in-law's apartment into a refugee compound on the edge of town. There we found ourselves living with Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis and, later on, Bulgarians, Albanians, Croatians, Serbians, gypsies -- all manner of people seeking sanctuary. And still I told myself it was just temporary, while I got things cleared up. But then came the business with the fugitive warrant and I knew finally I could never go back."
In support of his formal petition for political asylum, Coleman supplied references from a number of witnesses prepared to testify on his behalf, including the Most Reverend Mother Teresa, of the Sisters of Charity; Conrad Martin, executive director of The Fund for Constitutional Government, Washington, D.C.; A. Ernest Fitzgerald, United States Department of Defense, and Elliot L. Richardson, former United States Attorney-General, who met over lunch with the Swedish ambassador to the United States on Coleman's behalf.
His connection with Richardson stemmed from an affidavit Coleman had sworn to about the bootleg PROMIS software he had seen at Cypriot Police headquarters and in the offices of the DEA's Eurame Trading Company in Nicosia. As attorney for William and Nancy Hamilton, the owners of Inslaw, Inc., Richardson had successfully sued the Justice Department in Federal Bankruptcy Court for forcing the company out of business and stealing its software, securing over $7 million in compensation for the department's 'trickery, fraud and deceit'.
This judgment was subsequently affirmed in Federal District Court, which found it just 'under any standard of review', and although the US Court of Appeals later set the decision aside on jurisdictional grounds, it did not disturb the conclusion that 'the government acted wilfully and fraudulently to obtain property it was not entitled to ...'
On 3 August 1991, not long after the family had moved into the refugee compound on the outskirts of Trollhattan, Coleman took a telephone call from Danny Casolaro, an American freelance journalist in Washington, who had tracked him down after reading his affidavit in the Inslaw case.
He was working on a complex story about the octopus, Casolaro explained, linking the theft and unauthorized sale of PROMIS software to foreign governments with the BCCI scandal, the Iran/Contra affair and other questionable activities, including the so-called 'October Surprise'. Could Coleman perhaps help him with any of this? Did he know of anyone who might have further information?
Though disturbed that Casolaro should have traced him so easily, Coleman saw the chance of a trade-off. He had been trying to find James McCloskey, the quickie divorce lawyer who had recruited him into the DIA and who might again be prepared to speak up for him, but his amiable guru had apparently abandoned his practice and moved away from Timonium, Maryland, without leaving a forwarding address. When Coleman explained this to his caller, touching on McCloskey's links with the BCCI and the intelligence community, Casolaro thanked him for the tip and promised in return to let Coleman know as soon as he ran McCloskey to earth.
Nine days later, Ernest Fitzgerald, Coleman's friend at the Pentagon, called to say that Danny Casolaro had been found dead in a blood-boltered hotel bathroom in Martinsburg, West Virginia, both arms slashed open 12 times with a DIY knife blade. His briefcase was missing, and among other suspicious circumstances, the Martinsburg police, declaring Casolaro a suicide, had allowed the body to be embalmed before his family was even notified of his death. A firm of contract cleaners had also been called in to scour the room from top to bottom, so that any meaningful forensic investigation was impossible.
According to relatives and friends, Casolaro had gone to West Virginia, despite recent death threats, to see somebody he had met there who, he thought, could supply the missing links in the story he was working on. Everybody who knew Casolaro, including the Hamiltons and their counsel, Elliot Richardson, were convinced he had been murdered to shut him up.
Coleman was chilled by the news. If the person Casolaro had gone to see was McCloskey, then Coleman had sent Casolaro to his death. And if Casolaro had been killed because of what he knew, then Coleman's own chances of survival, if he fell into the same hands, looked slim. Thankful that he and Mary-Claude had decided to get out when they did, he prevailed on Fitzgerald to make further inquiries, although he found it hard to believe that the McCloskey he remembered could be involved in the murder.
The result was even more unsettling. The likelihood that Casolaro had gone to meet McCloskey increased when investigators established that, after leaving Timonium, McCloskey had bought a horse farm at Shepardstown, about fifteen minutes down the road from where Casolaro was murdered. As against that, McCloskey had not been seen in the area for two years, although there was a working telephone number listed in his name.
When Coleman dialed that number from Sweden, he got through to the Shenandoah Women's Center in Martinsburg, which claimed never to have heard of McCloskey. Efforts to trace him were then redoubled, but without result, and, as far as Coleman knows, McCloskey is still missing to this day.
On 16 October 1991, Coleman telephoned Elliot Richardson to pass on the results of these inquiries, but, as Richardson was out of the country, he spoke instead to William Hamilton, president of Inslaw, Inc., in Washington, D.C.
His revelations came as no great surprise. Hamilton himself had received 'threats of bodily harm from former US and Israeli covert intelligence operatives' embarrassed by his efforts to unmask the government's theft of Inslaw's software.
In a letter supporting Coleman's application for asylum in Sweden, Hamilton wrote:
"We believe that Mr. Casolaro was murdered to prevent the disclosure of evidence about this malfeasance. We also believe that some of the proceeds from the illegal sale of our PROMIS software to foreign governments have made their way into a political and intelligence slush fund in the United States and that this has seriously compromised the integrity of both our political system and our US Department of Justice ...
"I am inclined to credit as serious expressions of concern about personal safety by anyone such as Mr. Coleman who may have pieces to the puzzle of this widely ramified criminal conspiracy that permeates US intelligence and law enforcement agencies."
Ernest Fitzgerald, doyen of Washington's whistle-blowers, went a good deal further in urging the Swedish government to act on Coleman's petition. Drawing on 25 years' experience of official persecution and harassment, much of it described in his book The Pentagonists, he wrote:
"A live, talking and unfettered Lester Coleman represents an enormous potential embarrassment to powerful forces in our government and business establishment. Dead, silent or incarcerated, Les Coleman disappears as a problem. Other people in Mr. Coleman's situation have met untimely ends with distressing frequency.
"Without being able to predict Mr. Coleman's future in our country with certainty, I can tell you the views of other United States intelligence operatives I've dealt with in similar situations. Rightly or wrongly, these people believe that they cannot survive imprisonment in one of our penitentiaries. Conditions in these prisons are very harsh, and little inducement is required for long-term inmates to do deeds that would be unthinkable to the rest of us.
"This fear is so real and pervasive among our intelligence operatives that they are often silenced without imprisonment. A tactic I have noted is to induce a guilty plea through plea bargaining, then impose suspended sentences for a list of offences which the charged agent claimed were perpetrated as official acts. Agents thus pled and sentenced are silenced out of fear that if they talk or write about government-sponsored misdeeds, the suspension of their sentences will be set aside and they will be forced to serve their sentences in prison with consequent exposure to violence, and perhaps subjected to further prosecution.
"I should point out to you that it would not be necessary for Mr. Coleman to be convicted of anything in order to subject him to a US prison environment. At this stage of his dispute with the federal government, our courts would be unlikely to approve bail for him, so he would most likely be incarcerated pending trial."
After his arrest by the FBI on so transparent a trumped-up charge, such fears had never been far from Coleman's mind, and certainly nothing had happened since then to dispel them, neither his deliberate exposure by Steven Emerson on Cable News Network nor the government's latest cynical ploy in having him declared a fugitive. Any lingering hope that he might one day clear his name through the courts had been snuffed out, as he explained in a further submission to the Swedish authorities.
"Elements within the United States government, bizarre as this may seem, have both a motive and a capability to conduct covert 'sanctions', such as the death of Mr. Casalaro and the disappearance of Mr. McCloskey (he wrote). I had first-hand knowledge of these capabilities in Lebanon, where I gathered intelligence that was used to target individuals perceived to be enemies of US interests.
"I have no doubt that I am now a target, considering those former associates who are dead, and the death of Mr. Casolaro. If I return to the United States, I will be jailed and almost certainly killed. The DEA has publicly labelled me a narcotics informant, and there are close on a million and a half people behind bars in the United States serving time for drug offences. I am therefore in genuine fear for my life. In 1990, 243 prisoners were murdered in American prisons."
With plenty of time to worry about such things, Coleman could not decide if he and the family were safer trying to keep out of sight or trying to keep in the public eye. No longer a moving target or, as Casolaro had demonstrated, particularly hard to find, he was inclined to favour a higher profile, if only because an 'accident' or unexplained disappearance would then be more noticeable, but against that, the Swedish police and immigration authorities were clearly not keen on his drawing attention to his situation. In the end, he tried to compromise by making himself available to the media but without encouraging their interest.
Not that the media needed much encouragement, particularly after an interview he had given to Michael Evans of The Times resulted in a pithy restatement of what he knew in its issue of 22 July 1991. Several journalists flew to Sweden to follow up on that story, including Roy Rowan of Time magazine, accompanied by Juval Aviv.
It was Coleman's first meeting with Aviv, and the first time he had seen the Interfor Report. Confining himself for the most part to what he had said in his affidavit, Coleman enjoyed talking to Rowan, a widely respected figure in his former profession, and tried to be as helpful as his circumstances would allow -- without the faintest inkling of the furore that would follow Time's cover article about Flight 103 a few months later.
Some warning of the depths to which the octopus would sink, however, came Coleman's way in December 1991. In the October/November issue of Unclassified, the bimonthly newspaper of the Association of National Security Alumni, its editor, David Mac Michael, had run a piece about the spreading influence of the Defense Department over the US intelligence community, citing Coleman's experiences with the DIA.
This attracted the attention of Ron Martz, of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who, with Lloyd Burchette, had been placed in Coleman's charge by Micheal Hurley when they visited Cyprus in 1988 as guests of the DEA. Clearly not a subscriber to Unclassified's credo that 'covert actions are counterproductive and damaging to the national interest of the United States ... corruptive of civil liberties ... and a free press', Martz addressed MacMichael as follows:
"Dear David,
"This letter is not for publication but please use the information in it as you see fit."
How Martz would have reacted if Mac Michael had prefaced a letter to him in those terms is a matter for speculation, but he went on to claim that Coleman had contacted his (unnamed) 'primary assistant' in 1987 to offer his services 'for a relatively small amount of money' as a 'contact/fixer' on Cyprus during a visit they planned there to look into Lebanese drug trafficking.
As 'Les was living in Cyprus at the time' and 'passed himself off ... as a CI for DEA" Martz agreed to his proposition, but arriving in Cyprus found that 'Les Coleman was little more than a freelance journalist hustling money wherever and from whomever he could, including me. He had no connections with the Cypriot police or anti-drug squads, no connections with BKA and one minor connection with DEA as an 'unofficial consultant ... on non-secure communications.'
Several months later, Martz went on, he discovered Coleman had 'stolen some photographs I had taken of a terrorist car-bombing incident in Nicosia' and had sold them to Soldier of Fortune magazine under the name of Collin (sic) Knox. 'Then I learned the Cypriot police were looking for Les, who had departed Cyprus about the same time I did and left behind huge telephone bills and unpaid rent on his apartment in Nicosia.'
'Since then,' Martz continued, getting to the heart of the matter,
"Les has tried to put himself in the middle of several international events, most noticeably the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie. Les, who has had a long-running feud with DEA in Cyprus, managed to convince ABC News and Pierre Salinger that DEA in Cyprus was responsible for the Pan Am 103 bombing because it was working a sting operation and allowed certain luggage to go on the plane unchecked. ABC went with the story, apparently largely on Les's information, but that story has since been thoroughly discredited.
"I later checked out Les to see if he had any DIA connections as he claimed and found it had never heard of him or Collin Knox. This information comes from a high-ranking officer still on active duty who has served in a number of DIA positions in more than 25 years in the military, a man I trust implicitly and who gave me the information as an off-the-record favor ...
"The story he gave you concerning being in exile because of a DIA-DEA feud is a lot of crap. They may be feuding, but it's certainly not over Les Coleman. Les is in Sweden because the FBI was after him for filing a false passport application and impersonating a federal agent. If you're interested in more information about Les, I suggest you call Mike Hurley at DEA in Seattle (206-553-5443) ...
"From my experiences with him he very seldom, if ever, is what he claims to be.
"Sincerely,
"Ron Martz"
Taking Martz at his word, Mac Michael did not publish the letter, and all he saw fit to do with 'the information' it contained was pass it on to Coleman in Sweden.
Against his better judgment, although it turned out to be good practice for dealing with what was to come, Coleman took the time to prepare a point by point reply for Mac Michael to forward to Martz. Though it seemed unlikely that Martz had gone to the trouble of writing a two-page, single-spaced letter simply out of a public-spirited desire to protect a fellow journalist, he had clearly not been very well briefed.
Hurley's own declaration, for instance, had established Coleman's DEA connection, describing him (incorrectly) as a CI, and Martz's 'high-ranking' source who told him the DIA had never heard of Coleman should perhaps have checked first with Colonel Bathen.
But the pattern of attack was clear, and soon to be repeated. First, the systematic reduction of his character to that of minor con man on the fringe of events, and then the accusations of petty dishonesty.
Coleman told Mac Michael:
"I don't know where to start. I didn't contact them. They came to me, looking for help with their Cyprus trip. I'd never met Martz before he came to see me in my private office at the University of Alabama. The DIA had parked me there for the winter as Director of Visiting International Scholars. So I certainly wasn't living in Cyprus at the time -- I was living in Birmingham, Alabama.
"The suggestion that he paid me is also a bit comical. The only money that changed hands was payment for the phone calls he made from my government apartment while they were out there in the spring of '88, and I turned this over to the DIA in accordance with standing orders. He didn't know that, of course, and I suppose I should take it as a compliment that he swallowed my cover so completely that he saw me as a hustling freelance journalist, although how he squares that with what I was doing for the DEA and with the Fulbright Commission as UA's Director of Visiting International Scholars, I don't know.
"As for stealing his photographs, Lloyd Burchette gave me a set of five prints from a film he had developed in Larnaca while Martz was off on a cruise to Cairo with his wife. And Lloyd needn't have bothered because the lab he used handled all of DEA's film work on Cyprus and they always ran off an extra set of anything interesting for Mike Hurley anyway.
"Nor did I sell them to Soldier of Fortune. The article that appeared with the Colin Knox byline was written by Mike Theodolus, a close friend of Hurley's and a writer for Cyprus Life magazine, which also ran the piece. The only contribution I made to Soldier of Fortune was in 1987, and that was a rehash I did on Hurley's instructions of an article called 'The Lebanese Connection' that appeared in the Observer in December 1986. Almost word for word, I'm ashamed to say.
"And so it goes on. I left behind no unpaid telephone bills or unpaid rent. We were living in government accommodation, so the embassy picked up the tab. And if the Cypriot police were looking for me, I shouldn't have been hard to find because I was back in Nicosia, under my own name, in May 1991, en route to Sweden, and nobody bothered me. So I don't know where Martz got that from. And what's this about impersonating a Federal agent? That's a new one.
"Before writing this, Martz obviously didn't read any of the court documents in the Pan Am case or in the passport frame-up, otherwise he would have known that the DEA had admitted I was a contract consultant and that the DIA had acknowledged I was working for them at the same time. If he honestly thinks I put myself in the middle of the Flight 103 case in the hope of gaining something by it then one of us belongs in a padded room.
"No wonder his letter was not for publication. Like a few other reporters I know who make a business out of chasing dope stories around the world in their quiche-stained safari suits, Martz is no dope himself. If he wants a good scoop now and then, he knows he better play ball with the DEA."
It may just have been a coincidence that this attempt to discredit Coleman within the intelligence community came soon after Chief Judge Platt had declined to dismiss Pan Am's third-party suit in New York; soon after the government's deception of Chief Judge Moran in Chicago had resulted in the issue of a fugitive warrant, and soon after Danny Casolaro had been murdered while running down a Coleman lead, but there was no doubting the connection between Time magazine's cover article of 27 April 1992, and the vicious attack on Coleman launched as soon as the civil suit against Pan Am was over.
Christopher Byron teed off for the government in the 31 August issue of New York magazine.
A former employee of Forbes magazine, Byron found Roy Rowan's story about Flight 103 'a tangle of assertions and equivocations' based on Coleman's skill in 'conning the media'. Having bamboozled Brian Ross of NBC and Pierre Salinger of ABC, wrote Byron, 'Coleman finally found his loudest sounding board of all -- the cover of Time magazine.'
One might have expected that anyone with such a phenomenal gift for deception would be living in luxury in the south of France rather than subsisting on the goodwill of the Swedish government, but Byron was clearly made of sterner stuff than his media colleagues.
'Beguiled by his astounding claim that the DEA was implicated in the Pan Am 103 disaster,' he went on, 'Time made this the central thesis -- with Coleman as the corroborating source -- of its cover story entitled "The Untold Story of Pan Am 103".'
Byron did not feel it necessary to explain why he was not taken in as others were, nor did he suggest why, failing a financial motive, Coleman should have set out to deceive anybody, but it hardly mattered. Byron had already given most of the game away by describing him as a 'corroborating source', in effect accepting that the story had originated elsewhere as Ross, Salinger and Rowan had each insisted.
Byron next accused Coleman and Juval Aviv of collusion in selling Aviv's 'discredited' Interfor Report to Time, and, even more whimsically, of conspiring with Pan Am's lawyers to influence the civil liability trial. They 'all seem to have worked together -- or at least in parallel -- to get their story into Time,' is how he put it, falling just short of imputing libelous motives to an attorney of James Shaughnessy's calibre.
In fact, as Pan Am had dropped Aviv almost two years before the story appeared, and as Coleman had met Aviv for the first time some six months after he had sworn out his affidavit, their scope for collusion was limited. In any case, Coleman did not, and does not, accept Aviv's and Rowan's conclusion that a rogue CIA unit was instrumental in allowing a bomb aboard Flight 103.
'Just how badly did Time get snookered in all this?' asked Byron. 'For an answer, one need look no further than Michael Schafer, a young Christian Broadcasting Network cameraman who had worked for Coleman for six months in Beirut in 1985 and became the best man at his wedding.'
Schafer, known at the time as Michael Franks, had been sent to Beirut by Overseas Press Services Inc., a firm of 'consultants' with close ties to Oliver North, CIA director William Casey and the Nicaraguan Contras. The 'young cameraman' had spent most of his time in Beirut fighting with the right-wing Christian militias and, as best man, signed Coleman's marriage certificate as Michael Franks.
When Coleman later learned from Pan Am's lawyers that the mysterious David Lovejoy, who had told the Iranians about the American intelligence agents on Flight 103, was also known as Michael Franks, he gave Shaughnessy a photograph of his best man, and it was this picture that eventually appeared in Time magazine as a picture of David Lovejoy, 'a reported double agent for the US and Iran'.
(The same picture was also used on the forged CBN 'press credentials' that Schafer later produced in an attempt to cover up his lapse in signing Coleman's marriage certificate as Franks, the name he used in Lebanon in 1985 before it became generally known as a Lovejoy alias.)