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Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 10:51 pm
by admin
Chapter 4

The first Lester Knox Coleman was a Navy man.

A native of Moffat, Texas, he had signed on in 1917 to escape his family's dirt-poor existence in the Texas dust bowl. Liking the look of it no better when he came back from the war, he re-enlisted in the peacetime Navy, and, in 1924, was assigned to the USS, Shenandoah, the Daughter of the Stars, one of two Navy airships developed from the German Zeppelins that, for many, seemed to point the way to the future of aviation.

He was on board when, in 1925, the Shenandoah cast off from her mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey, and headed out on a barnstorming tour of the Midwest to drum up public support for the Navy's lighter-than-air programme. Two days later, a violent storm broke her back over the cornfields of Ohio, littering the ground with the bodies of her crew.

Lester Knox Coleman survived, as no one who knew him would have doubted.

Lester Knox Coleman Jr., an engineer by profession, was another survivor. The day after Pearl Harbor, he quit his job with the Gulf Power Company in Pensacola, Florida, and, like his father before him in 1917, signed up for the Navy. His infant son was 18 months old before he even laid eyes on him.

Lester Knox Coleman III was born in the USNAS/Navy Point Hospital on 25 September 1943, while the other two were overseas, fighting their country's war against the Japanese, one in South America, the other in the South Pacific.

Like them, he was brought up to believe in America, to honor its principles, to be suspicious of foreigners and to distrust politicians, who, as far as the Colemans were concerned, had about as much common sense as a bucket of warm spit. There was nothing in his small-town Southern background, his traditional American middle-class home or his average educational achievement to raise as much as an eyebrow among the team of military investigators who later vetted him back to his diapers to determine his suitability for secret government service with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Coleman was five, the Gulf Power Company transferred his father from Pensacola to Panama City, a two-hour ride down the Florida panhandle on Highway 98. And for the next eight years nothing much else happened as far as Coleman can remember, except for the stroke that disabled his grandfather. He dawdled through Cove Elementary and Jinks Junior High to Eighth grade, showing no great aptitude for academic study, failed Ninth grade when his father moved the family north to New Jersey for a year, and did hardly better in Tenth grade at Pensacola High when the Colemans returned to Florida.

Indeed, the high point in his education until then was the discovery of progressive jazz. Under the tutelage of his friend Connor Shaw, ace drummer of the Pensacola High 'Tiger' Band, he was introduced to the music of Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson and Thelonius Monk, and to other, more tangible pleasures of the Beat Generation.

Older than Coleman, and with a driver's license, Shaw would pick up his protege in his '51 black Chevy coupe as soon as the Friday afternoon bell rang and together they would set off for a night out in the French Quarter of New Orleans, three hours away along the Gulf shore highway. Nearing sixteen, Coleman read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and took to wearing a hip pair of shades with his dirty sweatshirts and sneakers.

Then, one day, everything changed. His father came home and said, in his usual, unadorned fashion, 'We're moving to Iran.'

'Yeah? What part of Florida is that in, Dad?'

'I-R-A-N.'

'You mean, Iran like in Persia? Shit!'

The pain of withdrawal from his local bohemia was soon offset by Coleman's growing excitement at the prospect of traveling to faraway, romantic places of the sort his father and grandfather had so often talked about. But, as it turned out, the family was bound for the oil company settlement of Golestan, a suburb of Ahwaz, about two hours overland by land Rover from the city and oil terminal of Abadan. With its neat, yellow-brick homes set in plots of real grass, its own supermarket, school and country club, Golestan might as well have been in Arizona as in the ancient kingdom of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Continuing his teenage rebellion, Coleman decided to become an Arab.

He set himself to learn colloquial Arabic by hanging out with the company drivers and laborers who spent a good part of every work day sitting around charcoal stoves sipping glasses of hot tea through cubes of sugar. It was a conscious decision. Rather than learn Farsi, spoken only in Iran, he chose Arabic as it was the language of many nations, from the Shatt-al-Arab waterway clear across the northern reaches of Africa to the Atlantic Ocean.

As Coleman's proficiency improved, and the Arabs, treated like dogs by the Iranians, lost their suspicion of the 'young Satan', so they allowed him deeper into their society. His new friend Ahziz, who lived in Laskarabad, took him to visit his uncle's village to drink tea and eat sheep's eyes and rice with the old sheik as they lounged on Persian carpets and watched the belly dancers.

Coleman practiced his Arabic around camp fires at Refresabad, in the wilderness near Isfahan, and while riding third-class trains to Antimeshk. He grew accustomed to eating by the light of burning donkey dung with people who lived in huts or tents and bathed and urinated in open jubs as they had for a thousand years.

To placate his family and their Iranian friends, Coleman also learned a little Farsi, but as he approached his eighteenth birthday, both he and his father were only too conscious that his school credits were barely worthy of a high-school junior. If he was ever to amount to anything more than an Arabic-speaking bum, he needed to catch up with his formal education.

In the autumn of 1961, he was sent home to boarding school in Orlando, Florida -- and contrived to get himself expelled in three weeks. He then went to stay with his uncle in Birmingham, Alabama, while he attended Shades Valley High School.

'On Friday and Saturday nights,' Coleman remembers, 'my friend Walton Kimbrough and me went cruising in his '53 Mercury, parking at Pig Trail Inn, elbows out the window, listening to Dave Roddy on the radio, sipping cherry Cokes and eating Bar-B-Cues. We'd cruise up Red Mountain, beneath the bare bottom of Vulcan Statue, past WYDE radio and into five points south, giving the royal digit salute to every blue Ramsey High jacket we saw. Then shoot down main-drag 20th Street, all the way to 10th Avenue North, pull into Ed Salem's Drive Inn, elbows still out the window, watching lake-plugged hot-rods peel rubber, driven by boys from Ensley and Hueytown with names like Billy-Joe and Leroy and Bobby.'

It couldn't last. For one thing, he no longer had much in common with his contemporaries. When he told them he lived in Iran, they would mostly look him up and down, shake their heads, and with doubt shading through scorn to open hostility ask him 'Where's that?' And when he told them where it was, they would shake their heads again and dismiss what he said as 'a sack of porkey-pine shit'. He had never noticed before how parochial and ignorant of the world American kids were.

'It struck me about this time,' Coleman says, 'that they seemed to lie more than kids from other places. They didn't do it with purposed deceit -- it was just part of America's fast-hustle, three-card-monte morality. When a person tells the truth, other people, looking at themselves in the mirror and seeing a liar, assume that the truth-teller is a liar, too. You see America differently after you've been away for a while. All us expatriate kids had the same experience. When we got home and tried to communicate with our peers who had never left the United States, they'd look at us like we'd just landed from Mars.'

To the relief of his parents, and to re-establish his roots, Lester Knox Coleman III, with his friend Walton Kimbrough, applied for admittance to The Marion Military Institute (MMI), in Marion, Alabama. Founded in 1842, and alma mater to a distinguished roster of generals and heroes in every American war since then, the MMI was both a cradle and shrine to the United States Army, and a cadetship among the highest honors the military establishment could bestow on a young American of the right calibre.

Having somehow passed the written examination, Coleman reported for duty at the start of the winter term and managed to curb his rebellious streak sufficiently, not only to make his grades and the Dean's List, but to put up five stripes as a Sergeant First Class Platoon Sergeant in his senior year. Coleman Senior pretended to take this for granted when his son rejoined the family in Iran that summer, but, for the first time in his life, Coleman sensed his father was proud of him.

He also re-entered the Arab world as if coming home. By the time he graduated from MMI with the Class of '63, his father had moved on to a job in Libya with Esso. When Coleman arrived out there, the limitless horizons of the Sahara and the brutal austerity of life among the nomadic tribes of the desert caught his imagination so completely that it was 1966 before the claims of higher education in the United States again outweighed those of the liberal education he was acquiring in Arabic and Middle Eastern affairs. As his father pointed out with increasing acerbity, he had a living to earn, and -- not counting a brief spell at the American University in Beirut -- nothing worth a damn to interest a prospective employer.

An aimless year at Jacksonville State University, Alabama, failed to remedy the deficiency, but it did at least point the way. Through a friend, Jim Sands, he was introduced to the trials, tribulations and occasional rewards of scrub broadcasting.

A big, round, jolly fellow, Sands supported himself, more or less, by working at one of the scores of marginally profitable, day-time radio stations that had sprouted their directional antenna arrays all over the South. Under Sands's benevolent auspices, Coleman tried his hand as disc jockey-cum-announcer-cum-newsman and realized at once that he had found his vocation. Nothing would do now but a career in broadcast journalism. As foreign correspondent for CBS in the Middle East, maybe. Or even for NBC, at a pinch.

But he had to start somewhere. And as the FCC required each station to have a licensed engineer on duty at all times, and as you were obviously more employable if you were both announcer and engineer, he dropped out of Jacksonville and enrolled at Elkins Electronics Institute in New Orleans to study for the FCC exams, which he passed with flying colors in 1967.

It was the first flush of a passion for advanced electronics that, with his other qualifications, was later to prove of special interest to the United States government. At the time, however, it was of more interest to one-horse radio stations in Pasagoula, Mississippi, and Bay Minet, Alabama, where the transmitter sat in the middle of a cow pasture and Coleman had to dodge the resident bull to get to work every morning.

Stripped to his shorts in the heat and confined to a toolshed studio that turned blue with static electricity during a thunderstorm, he spun records, recorded supermarket commercials, and, for a change of pace, did occasional remote broadcasts from remote places like the local John Deere tractor outlet. A year of this brought him to the comparative luxury of a Country and Western 5000-watt station in downtown Mobile, but there his new career stalled.

For one thing, he could see that he needed better academic credentials if he was ever to get back to the Middle East as a network TV correspondent, and for another thing, his best friend, Jim Sands, was now also his brother-in-law.

Sands had invited him over to his mother-in-law's place one Sunday and introduced him to his wife's sister, Jocelyn. Hitting it off on sight, Lester and Jocelyn were married soon after, but even in 1967, it was tough for a married couple to live on $90 a week. When their daughter Karen was born in February 1968, it proved impossible. The following September, Coleman left his job at 'Woonie Radio' and took his new family to Jacksonville, where he went back to university, as a mature student of 25 and rewrote the definition of working one's way through college.

While coping with the not inconsiderable load of his degree course, Coleman held down jobs in a photo lab, on a radio show from 6 p.m. until midnight, six days a week, and as a paid football announcer on Saturdays. For her part, his wife worked as private secretary to the football coach, as well as looking after their infant daughter, and together the Colemans managed a 110-unit apartment complex which provided them with rent-free accommodation.

Thus stretched, they somehow survived the three years it took Coleman to equip himself for the big time with a bachelor's degree in political science and economics. But by then it was 1971, in the middle of a recession, and despite his now glittering qualifications, CBS wasn't interested. Nor was NBC or even ABC. After fruitlessly trawling the job market, Coleman took his wife and child back to Mobile and rejoined 'Woonie Radio' as News Director at $125 a week. It felt like he had put himself and his family through some pretty exhausting changes for an extra $35 a week.

Working out of a converted broom closet, his one-man news department was expected to write and deliver eight newscasts a day, although, as he recalls:

... the major activity at Woonie Radio was still station manager Rocky Reich's running poker game. It was too rich for my blood, but I did manage to pick up an extra twenty-five dollars a week producing the Dot Moore Radio Show. That meant I had to push a shopping cart carrying a heavy Ampex 601 tape recorder around Bellas Hess department store while Dot interviewed local shoppers. I'd then take the tape back to the studio, dub in the commercial breaks and add the music. But I couldn't see it as my life's work somehow.'

'Mobile was not exactly a hot news town anyway. My hourly five-minute newscasts were filled with the usual Fuz'n Wuz from the police blotter, the Wuz being the corpses from shootings, house fires and traffic pile-ups. Once in a while a bit of political juice from City Hall would spice up my news day, usually about Lambert 'Lamby Pie' Mims, Mobile's Bible-thumping Mayor, whose gospel of civic trust finally landed him in a Federal penitentiary. After five months in the 'Home of the Woonie Bird', I was open to the first reasonable offer.'


It came from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), which, as Coleman later discovered, served not only the nation's youth but also the military-industrial complex that had so exercised President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Seated one day in his broom closet, writing copy and eating Krispy Kremes, Coleman took a call from Mark Clayton of the BSA National Public Relations Office. An Eagle Scout from Mobile had been selected to meet President Richard Nixon on the White House lawn, said Clayton. Was Woonie Radio interested in covering this event?

'Sure,' said Coleman. 'I'll take a tape feed of our Eagle Scout meeting the President of the United States. Great stuff. I'd like to ask him how it feels to get chosen out of four million Boy Scouts to shake his President by the hand. We'll do an interview, okay?'

Tongue intermittently in cheek, Coleman taped a few questions and answers and then, jokingly, asked Clayton if the Boy Scouts of America were looking for someone with a bit of broadcasting experience.

'Well,' said Clayton, surprised. 'Now that you mention it, yes. You mean you'd be interested in taking a job with us?'

Coleman looked around his broom closet newsroom, with its mops and pails and industrial-sized bottles of Mr. Clean, and sighed for his lost illusions.

'Sounds like an exciting opportunity to me,' he said.

Brought over from Britain in 1910 by Chicago newspaper publisher William D. Boyce with the idea of building character in his street-corner newsboys, Scouting had grown by 1972 into a nationwide movement, chartered by Congress, with a full-time professional staff of 4000 directed from BSA headquarters in North Brunswick, New Jersey.

After a preliminary meeting with Clayton in Mobile, Coleman was flown in for two days of interviews and put up in the Scout guesthouse, next door to a museum full of Norman Rockwell paintings, in the middle of a 30-acre game preserve criss-crossed with neatly tagged nature trails.

The job opening he had stumbled upon was in the public relations department, which already had a staff of 20 writers and photographers -- many of them former military public information officers -- under the general direction of Ron Phillippo, a cigar-smoking outdoorsman in a three-piece suit, whose secretary, Marcia Schwartz, and right-hand man, Russ Butkins, USN (retd) between them ran the place. Being all 'print people', with no practical experience of radio or television, they needed somebody who could get the Scout story 'on the air' for $12,000 a year.

Satisfied he was made of the right stuff, BSA offered Coleman the job, and in March 1972, a big cross-country moving van delivered the family's worldly goods to their new home in Heightstown, near Princeton, New Jersey, about 20 minutes by Toyota south of New Brunswick on Route 130. If not quite as he had imagined. Coleman had made the big time as the BSA's National Event Public Relations Executive.

A former Cub Scout with a school troop at eight, he soon discovered there was more to modern Scouting than rubbing damp sticks together in the wilderness. It was a franchise operation. With a network of regional offices, heavily staffed with former military personnel, to oversee 'the product', the BSA sold franchises to Local Councils in cities and towns across the nation. These councils, in turn, employed full-time professional staff to recruit volunteers and sponsors to run and finance Scout troops at neighborhood levels.

In overall charge of the operation was a Chief Scout, a full-time salaried executive of BSA, Inc., and a volunteer counterpart with the title of National President. In 1972, they were, respectively, Alden Barber, a polished, smooth-talking businessman who could have stepped out of any corporate boardroom, and Robert W. Sarnoff, chief executive officer of the Radio Corporation of America.

Coleman's connection with the big time was through the National Public Relations Committee, a volunteer group he was encouraged to cultivate for help and support. One of its members was Walter Cronkite, of CBS News.

'Can you imagine?'

Twenty years on, Coleman still remembers the excitement of hopping on a train to New York, taking a cab uptown from Penn station to the corner of 57th Street and 10th Avenue and walking in to tell the guard he was there to see Walter Cronkite.

'And then actually getting in to see him. Escorted down one narrow hallway after another, past Xerox machines, past dark studios with the ghosts of John Cameron Swazy and Edward R. Murrow, then into the CBS newsroom, into Cronkite's glass fishbowl of an office, and there he is -- thinner and younger-looking in person, wearing a khaki suit, loafers kicked off, feet on the desk, talking to me about the next Explorer Scout Olympics in Fort Collins, Colorado.'

Most of the national events Coleman worked on were organized by the BSA's Explorer Division, the then-new co-ed Scout 'product' for young people between fourteen and twenty, offering hands-on experience in the career fields that interested them.

It was the Explorer programme that finally married the Boy Scouts of America to the military-industrial complex. The military saw Scouting as a training ground for leaders who were also good team-players, disciplined, respectful of authority and imbued with ideals of service to God and country, while the business community saw it as a politically neutral means of indoctrinating youth in the principles of free enterprise capitalism and the American way.

Nobody had a bad word for Scouting. It was the perfect public relations vehicle for acquiring civic virtue on the cheap while continuing the ruthless pursuit of corporate self-interest in government and the market place. In government, all the way up to Federal level, sponsorship of Career-Interest Explorer Posts proved so popular among image-sensitive agencies such as the police that a special unit was set up at BSA headquarters to administer 'Law-Enforcement Exploring' and to work alongside existing departments responsible for Congressional Relations, Military Relations, Mormon Relations (the Boy Scouts of America is the official youth movement of the Mormon Church), Corporate Relations and so on.

As Coleman would discover at first hand, it was not so much that Scouting was controlled by the octopus as simply incapable of denying it a favor. When a two-star general in Washington called a retired colonel in North Brunswick to ask if the BSA could find a job for one of 'our people' from overseas, the only possible answer was, 'Yes, sir.'

In his two years at headquarters, Coleman came across several 'spooks' cooling off in executive niches of the Boy Scout Movement, and later became one himself. He also came to appreciate the mutual benefit of having a Boy Scout troop on every significant US military base around the world. It not only helped with the BSA's numbers game but served as a benevolent advertisement for the American way of life, as well as a convenient cloak for low-level intelligence gathering.

As with any franchise operation, growth was the bottom line. In 1972, the BSA's national advertising slogan claimed that 'Scouting today is a lot more than you think', but in fact it was a lot less. Under pressure from head office to meet ever higher 'sales' targets, Local Council staffs had begun to create imaginary Scout troops, in much the same way as Teamster union officials had once created 'paper' Locals, and to pad the rolls of existing troops with phantom members.

By 1974, the BSA had 6.5 million Scouts on its books, of which two million existed only in the minds of hard-pressed District Executives. It was too many. When somebody at last blew the whistle, not even the National Public Relations Office could explain away so great a discrepancy. The Scouting hierarchy collapsed from top to bottom, sending Chief Scout Alden Barber into the decent obscurity of Santa Barbara, California.

In 1972, however, still untarnished by scandal, the BSA plugged Coleman into the military-industrial complex through Tom Geohagen, Department of Public Affairs, US Steel, Washington, D.C. A short, white-haired man with big ears and a booming radio announcer's voice -- he had worked for years at NBC News -- Geohagen was chairman of a high-powered committee of media experts put together to publicize the National Explorer Presidents' Congress, an annual meeting in Washington of Explorer Post leaders from all over America. The event was Coleman's first assignment, and Geohagen liked his style. Appointing himself Coleman's mentor, he was soon urging him to 'use this Scout business' as a stepping stone to higher things, perhaps in government service, where he could make the most of his command of Arabic and his background in the Middle East.

'Wherever we went in Washington, Tom introduced me to his contacts [Coleman recalls]. We would go for lunch down the street from his office to the Army-Navy Club, and he knew everybody. You'd get these grey men in grey suits, sitting around smoking cigars in red leather armchairs under portraits of Nimitz and Patton, and they'd all say hello and pass the time of day. One, I remember, was General Danny Graham, an old spook buddy of Tom's, who had been sent over from the Pentagon to clean house at the CIA.

'Now there's a guy you ought to talk to,' Tom said afterwards. 'You'll like him, and I know he'd be real interested in your background. Tell you what -- why don't I set up a meeting?'

'No, Tom,' I said. 'Thanks all the same. I still want to see how far I can go with journalism.'


But Geohagen kept on trying, determined his protege should make the most of himself. His next manoeuvre on Coleman's behalf was to secure a staff position for him with the US Olympic Team at the 20th Olympiad in Munich that September. This was exciting but also embarrassing, for Mark Clayton, who had got him his job in the first place, had to be bumped out of the slot to make way for him.

'It was Clayton's assignment, Tom, and he's my boss,' Coleman protested. Half-heartedly. 'And why me? I've only been here six months.'

'Well, let's just say you have special talents that your committee feels would be better suited to this assignment,' said Geohagen. 'Let's just say there are people who want to see how you make out, how you handle yourself under fire, so to speak. So let's show 'em, okay?'

Of course it was okay. It was damned okay. To be in Munich with the US team at the Olympic Games was about as far as you could get from a broom closet in Mobile.

Geohagen's wish to see how Coleman handled himself 'under fire' turned out to be curiously prophetic, for the 1972 Olympiad was to be remembered, not for Mark Spitz's seven gold medals or Cathy Rigby's bare-bottom picture in Sports Illustrated, but for the slaughter of Israeli athletes by hooded assassins from Black September.

It was Coleman's first direct experience of Arab terrorism. Although he saw no more of the siege and carnage than anyone else in the Olympic Village, he had earlier taken the fullest advantage of his staff pass to explore the compound and to fraternize with athletes and officials from other countries, particularly those from the Middle East for the chance it gave him to practice his Arabic.

Although there were armed guards everywhere, security was a joke. Photo-ID badges were rarely checked, and no attempt at all was made to confine badge-holders to the specific areas of the Village for which they had security clearance. In theory, only someone with a press pass could gain access to the Olympic Press Centre, for example, but Coleman came and went as he pleased, in and out three or four times a day, every day, without ever being challenged.

Before the attack, he enjoyed the same freedom of movement to meet and drink coffee with his new Arab friends in their Olympic quarters -- and also with Andrei, one of the Soviet team's 'trainers', who spent a lot of time in their company, drinking beer and picking away at salt fish wrapped in brown paper. After the attack, Coleman saw no cause to wonder how Black September had managed to smuggle explosives and automatic weapons into the compound, but he wondered long and hard about Andrei, who had mysteriously disappeared when the terrorists struck, and about the not-so-mysterious defection of the Arab teams, who now melted away for fear of Israeli reprisals.

Like everyone else, Coleman watched the drama build up to its bloody denouement on television, still misusing his pass to keep abreast of the latest developments via the Press Centre's battery of monitors.

Under the critical weight of world attention, Munich's beleaguered police chief, Manfred Schreiber, was now at pains to lock the barn door after the terrorist horse had bolted. His officers were ordered to question everybody they could trace who had set foot in the Arab camp in the course of the Games, including Lester Coleman, public relations assistant with the US Olympic Team, on loan from the Boy Scouts of America.

In what turned out to be a curious link with the future, Coleman struck up a friendship with Hartmut Mayer, a local police officer whom he would meet again 15 years later in Cyprus, when Mayer was resident agent on the island for the BKA, and like Coleman, concerned with a DEA operation where sloppy security opened the way to an even bloodier atrocity than at Munich -- the destruction of Flight 103.

For Coleman, there would be other curious links, too, between Munich and Lockerbie. In 1987, after renewing his acquaintance with Mayer, he was to work on the same poorly managed DEA operation with a Lebanese-American named Ibrahim El-Jorr, a key informant who claimed to have been one of the US Army support group sent into Munich after Black September took over the village.

In the troubled aftermath of Lockerbie, Coleman would also meet up with Juval Aviv, a private investigator hired by Pan Am, who was said to have been a member of the Mossad hit team turned loose after the Munich massacre by Israel's Golda Meir to track down and kill every member of the Black September squad responsible.

But the strongest link for Coleman was the continuing fascination of the American intelligence community with Arab terrorism.

On his first day back in the office after flying home with the Olympic team, he was called down to Washington by his sponsor.

'There's some people would like to hear about your experiences,' Geohagen said, on their way out to Georgetown to have lunch at the Sheraton Park Hotel. 'Some of Danny Graham's boys. I told 'em you wouldn't mind. You can probably give 'em some useful insights, just from being there in Munich.'

'Think so?' Coleman shrugged. 'I'll be glad to talk to them, Tom, but there were a lot of people a lot closer to what happened than me. Are you saying they didn't have any of their own people in the Village? They must have done. I heard the KGB was all over the place.'

'Well, I expect they did. But I guess they didn't have anybody out there who spoke Arabic. Or spent much time talking to the Arab teams.

It was only when somebody stopped by their table in the Sheraton's bar to say they were expected upstairs after lunch that Coleman began to wonder how Geohagen knew how he had spent his off-duty time in Munich, and it rather took the edge off his appetite.

After the meal, they adjourned for coffee to a suite on the third floor, where Geohagen introduced him to three men, who identified themselves as Bob, Nat and Herb, and then excused himself, saying he would see Coleman back in his office after they had finished. Nervous at first, but soon relaxing in their warmth and friendliness, Coleman told them about Andrei and tentatively identified him from a grainy ten by eight print that Herb produced from a file folder on his lap.

'You know who he is?' asked Coleman eagerly. 'Is he KGB?'

'It's not important,' Bob said. 'We keep tabs on all kinds of people. Can you tell us what you talked about?'

'Oh, Olympic-type things. You know, how it's good for East and West to get together, for people to exchange ideas, one to one, leaving politics out of it for a change. That sort of stuff.'

'You didn't talk politics? Not at all?'

'Well, depends what you mean by politics. Not cold war politics anyway. He asked me a lot of questions about what was going on here. Said he couldn't understand how people could be out of work or homeless or without proper medical attention and still be loyal Americans. He seemed to know a lot about black militant groups. Our 'dissidents' is what he called them.'

'Uh-huh. And how do you feel about 'em?'

'Me?'

Coleman spent 15 minutes defending his own political views before Bob finally turned to the subject of the Arabs he had talked to in Munich. And the same thing happened. After covering the ground, the three seemed to be at least as interested in examining Coleman's views on the Arab-Israeli question as the views expressed by the people he had met.

'Did you form any opinion about where the terrorists were from?' asked Nat, pouring him another cup of coffee.

'Well, I only know what I heard and saw on television,' Coleman said. 'But one of them sounded Libyan to me.'

'Libyan? Black September is a Palestinian group.'

'Yeah, I know. But King Idris took in hundreds of refugees from Palestine in the Fifties -- the guy could still have been a member of the PLO. Seemed to me I recognized the accent. I worked with two Palestinians in Libya when my father was out there.'

They appeared to know about that, too, and after a lengthy discussion of Middle East politics, went on to ask him about what he had told Hartmut Mayer, of the Munich police, and how he felt generally about the Germans, their security arrangements and their attitude towards the Israelis.

The questioning went on for more than two hours, and ended with another round of warm handshakes as they ushered him into a taxi for the ride back to Geohagen's office on K Street, North West.

'It had all been very friendly,' Coleman recalls, 'but I left feeling drained, as if I'd just sat through a really testing examination. But I also felt relieved from telling everything I knew to people I thought could do something about it, who could stop another Munich from happening. I guess I was still naive enough, going on twenty-nine, to believe in the fatherly image of the American government, as somehow all-protecting, all-knowing, and capable of fixing anything.'

By the time Coleman reached K Street, Geohagen had already heard from the octopus.

'They were very impressed,' he said. 'You know, Les, you really ought to consider working for those guys. You could have a big future there.'

'Well, thanks, Tom,' said Coleman. 'I'm flattered by their interest and I'm glad if I've been of help. But, like I say, I really am hooked on broadcasting. I want to see how far I can go.'

'Yeah, well, I told them that. But if you ever change your mind, Danny Graham says you're to go see him about it. Anytime.'

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 10:52 pm
by admin
Chapter 5

After his appearance with Tom Brokaw on NBC's 'Nightly News', Coleman went back to his cover job with the Boy Scouts of America, and in the following months the fate of Flight 103 slipped from his mind. Although he read about the case in the Chicago newspapers from time to time, he made no serious attempt to keep up with it, for he was still unaware of his connection with the disaster.

As is rarely true in murder inquiries, the identity of the killers, their motives, the method and approximate details of the weapon employed were known to agents of several governments from the start, but for various reasons, some political, some self-serving, this knowledge was not fully shared with the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. Even so, such intelligence information as was made available ensured that within 72 hours, the Scottish police officers investigating by far the biggest mass murder in British history knew more or less who had done it and roughly how. From the start, the entire thrust of their efforts was to prove what they knew.

But odd things were happening at Lockerbie. Although the collection of forensic evidence was of paramount importance, it was hampered for two days while CIA agents, some dressed in Pan Am overalls, combed the countryside for the luggage of the dead American intelligence agents and a suitcase full of heroin. After a 48-hour search, assisted by units of the British Army, whatever they had found was flown out by helicopter, and in due course, one suitcase, emptied of its contents, was returned so that it could be 'found' again officially.

It belonged to Major Charles 'Tiny' McKee, an agent of the US Defense Intelligence Agency. It was severely damaged, possibly by an explosive device of the type sometimes fitted in luggage used by intelligence agents to destroy the contents before they fall into the wrong hands. As the search continued, documents relating to the American hostages held in Beirut were recovered, along with over $500,000 in cash and traveller's cheques.

When the CIA's presence was reported on Radio Forth by David Johnston, who later published Lockerbie: The Real Story, he was interviewed at length next day by police officers who finally threatened him with legal sanctions unless he identified his sources. This Johnston refused to do and, oddly, that was the end of the matter. No further action was taken, and he heard no more about it, perhaps because to have carried out the threat would have drawn more attention to his story than was actually shown at the time, in the chaotic aftermath of the disaster.

Odder still, and more serious, it was later reported that 59 bodies which had been found, tagged and certified dead by a police surgeon on 22 December, were left lying where they had fallen in open country around Lockerbie until 24 December, when they were retagged, removed and recertified dead. But by then, according to the police count, there were only 58 bodies. Somebody had either miscounted or one had gone missing. Also puzzling, the name-tag observed by a local farmer on a suitcase full of heroin before that, too, went missing did not correspond with any of the names on the passenger list.

Another witness involved in the search within hours of the crash has spoken of finding handguns on six of the bodies, presumably those of the agents on board. He also saw Americans throwing tarpaulins over bodies and suitcases so that they could examine them in private, and warning searchers to keep clear of certain sectors, his own team included.

With the Americans scrambling to cover their tracks, the Germans also made sure they were not left holding the bag. Although the BKA, like H.M. Customs and Excise, had collaborated fully with their American colleagues in supervising the leaky DEA/CIA pipeline through Frankfurt and London to the United States, a spokesman for the German Ministry of the Interior calmly stated on 29 December that there were no indications that the bomb had been put aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt -- a position the BKA would maintain for almost a year, until finally persuaded it would not be saddled with the blame.

No one in the Anglo-American camp was ready to buy that. On the same day, 29 December, Michael F. Jones, of Pan Am Corporate Security in London, received a telephone call from Phillip Connelly, assistant chief investigation officer for H.M. Customs and Excise, who wanted to know if Jones had 'considered a bag switch at Frankfurt due to the large amount of Turkish workers'.

Asked to expand on this, Connelly said that before the disaster he had attended a meeting in Frankfurt with the other agencies concerned to discuss deliveries of heroin through Frankfurt airport involving the substitution of bags by Turkish baggage-handlers.

The next day, spokesmen for the British and American authorities followed up this thought by briefing the press in exactly opposite terms to those employed by the German authorities. On 31 December, The Times reported that the team investigating the Lockerbie air disaster had told the Scottish police that the bomb had definitely been placed on board in Frankfurt.

'The hunt for those responsible,' the story went on, 'is now centred in the West German city, where a Palestinian terrorist cell is known to have been operating for more than 18 months ... The Frankfurt terrorist cell is known to be part of Ahmed Jibril's hardline Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and to have carried out two bombing attacks on US military trains.'

The Times report added that Scottish police officers had flown to Frankfurt on 30 December in the hope of interviewing Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar, the two PFLP-GC members still in custody after the BKA raids on 26 October. They had been caught in possession of an explosive device 'similar to the one being blamed for the Lockerbie disaster'.

In the United States, a spokesman for the FBI went further and named Khalid Nazir Jafaar, a 21-year-old Lebanese-American citizen, as the possibly unwitting accomplice of the PFLP-GC.

His father, Nadir Jafaar, who owned a garage and other business interests in Detroit, said that his son had been visiting his grandfather in the Bekaa Valley and was on his way home for Christmas after spending a few days with Lebanese friends in Frankfurt. He feared that the terrorists might have used his son as a dupe and planted a bomb in his luggage. In any case, he intended to sue Pan Am for $50 million.

Commenting on the possibility that Jafaar's friends in Frankfurt might have tampered with or switched one of his bags, Neil Gallagher, of the FBI's counter-terrorist section, said: 'This is the type of relationship we are analysing as we look at the passenger manifest.'

If Lester Coleman in Chicago had heard or read about the FBl's suspicions then, ten days after Flight 103 had gone down, before the investigators stopped contradicting one another, and before politics intruded to distort or suppress their findings, the course of events might have taken a different turn.

Had he known that Khalid Jafaar, a DEA courier, had been aboard, and put two and two together, the Defense Intelligence Agency might well have reactivated him to take a hand in the game, as it had in the past when the DIA found itself embarrassed by the activities of TV evangelist Pat Robertson and Lt-Colonel Oliver North. In that event, Coleman might have had a role in cleaning up after the DEA rather than, in the end, being compelled to act as a witness against it. Even so, ten days after the disaster, the essential questions about the fate of Flight 103 had been answered; what remained was the burden of proof and the issue of contributory negligence.

The search for forensic evidence had gone well. On Christmas Eve, a foot-long piece of aluminum luggage pallet, scorch-marked by the explosion, was recovered, showing clear traces of the chemical constituents of Semtex-H plastic explosive. Further tests at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead in Kent also established, from fragments of polystyrene and tiny pieces of circuit board trapped in the wreckage of the luggage container, that the explosive device had been housed in a black Toshiba radio-cassette recorder, a two-speaker version of the Toshiba Bombeat bomb found by the German BKA in Dalkamoni's car. Tests at RARDE on pieces of blast-damaged luggage also proved that the device had been packed in a copper-coloured Samsonite suitcase.

This was a remarkable piece of scientific detection, considering there were an estimated four million pieces of wreckage from Flight 103 strewn clear across the Scottish Lowlands into northern England, but it was virtually the end of that line of inquiry. Bits of the bomb, bits of the clothing that had been packed around it, and bits of the suitcase the bombers had used were the only hard evidence the searchers would ever find at the scene of the crime. And it would probably have been enough, other things being equal, but German suspicions that the Americans, aided by the British, were still trying to duck the responsibility for the DEA/CIA operation that had gone so terribly wrong, filtered down to the Scottish police at ground level as plain bloody-minded obstructionism.

On 28 March 1989, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr took the Germans to task about it at a conference in the Lockerbie Incident Control Centre. The minutes of the meeting show that he reviewed the evidence pointing to Frankfurt as the airport where the bomb was placed aboard and went on to detail the 'evidential connections' between the disaster and the activities of the PFLP-GC in West Germany, demanding that the BKA release their full files on the October raids and arrests.

'There was, he suggested, a strong circumstantial link, and it was essential to find out all possible information. He stressed that he was not saying conclusively that these people did commit murder, but there is strong circumstantial evidence.'

Orr also reported progress in matching passengers with their baggage. 'However, if a "rogue" suitcase had been introduced into the system, and if the suitcase containing the bomb did not belong to a passenger, then further close examination of baggage-handlers and others would be carried out.'

Circumstantial or not, the evidence against Dalkamoni, Ghadanfar and other members of the PFLP-GC cell in Germany had been strong enough to lead Britain's transport minister, Paul Channon, to tell five prominent political journalists over lunch at the Garrick Club two weeks earlier that arrests were imminent. They were the result, he said, of 'the most brilliant piece of detective work in history'. As their conversation was off the record, the information was attributed in media reports next day to 'senior government sources' -- and was immediately attacked as prejudicial by all concerned.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who, as Lord Advocate of Scotland, was in charge of the investigation, observed in the House of Lords that it was not likely to be assisted by such 'wild, irresponsible speculation'.

More directly to the point, 'Getting the bastards that did this is more important than taking credit for finding out who they are,' said an anonymous American 'intelligence source' quoted in The Sunday Times. 'It wasn't the Brits that found that out anyway,' he added, hinting at the inter-agency tensions that had bedevilled the inquiry from the start.

It was left to Pierre Salinger, chief foreign correspondent for the American ABC Network, to identify Channon as the background briefer. Trapped by then in a web of denials, the transport minister resigned shortly afterwards, but not, as it turned out, solely on account of his lunchtime indiscretions. He was probably also a casualty of an 'understanding' reached around this time between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush, although both subsequently denied any such agreement.

According to Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta in the Washington Post, 11 January 1990, the two leaders decided on the telephone in mid-March, 1989, to soft-pedal the Lockerbie investigation for several reasons.

One was so as not to prejudice negotiations aimed at securing the release of Western hostages in Beirut by arousing further animosity among the Syrian-backed or Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups who were holding them captive.

Another was that the shifting sands of Middle East politics now required the West to find some counterbalance in the region to the monster it had created in Saddam Hussein of Iraq -- and the best available candidate for the job was Hussein's sworn enemy, President Hafez Assad of Syria.

While it was unfortunate that Assad permitted Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC to operate openly from Damascus and although it was clear that he controlled events in eastern Lebanon, where the hostages were held, in the joint State Department/Foreign Office view, the West now had little choice but to treat Syria as an object for diplomacy rather than of police work.

A third reason, no doubt, for not pressing the inquiry too rigorously was to shield Anglo-American intelligence operations in the Middle East from further embarrassment. The Scottish police were getting uncomfortably close to uncovering evidence of the DEA/CIA pipeline and the 'controlled' deliveries of Syrian heroin to Detroit -- Monzer al-Kassar's price for using his influence with the Syrian leadership to help with the hostage problem.

Around the time of the Bush Thatcher telephone call, Pan Am's investigators picked up the trail of the Lockerbie heroin and followed it to Cyprus. On making inquiries of the DEA in Nicosia, they were bluntly warned off on grounds of national security, a cry heard with increasing frequency as the airline tried to prepare its defence against the liability suits.

Sheila Hershow's interest in the same drugs lead may also have played a part in her unpublicized suspension a week later from the job of chief investigator to the House of Representatives Sub-Committee on Government Activities and Transportation. Two weeks after that, on 6 April 1989, she was fired for being 'uncontrollable' and 'dangerous'.

Further indications that the politicians had taken over were provided later in the year by Cecil Parkinson, Channon's successor as transport minister. In September, in response to misgivings expressed by the families of the Flight 103 victims about the apparent lack of progress in the investigation, he promised to arrange for an independent judicial inquiry at which sensitive intelligence information could be taken in camera, provided no word of his promise leaked out to the news media. Three months later, the minister (now Lord Parkinson) was obliged to tell them that he had been unable to convince his colleagues that such an inquiry was necessary and that the government had decided against it.

As the magazine Private Eye observed:

'If, after a major tragedy, a secretary of state recommends a judicial inquiry into something which is his departmental responsibility, he is almost certain to get it. The exception would be if the colleague who resisted it was the prime minister.'

But why would she block an inquiry? The only possible answer is that she was advised against it by MI5. Can it be that senior officers there, like their counterparts in the US and West Germany, are anxious to draw a veil over the Lockerbie incident? None of them wants anyone to know how a bomb, of a type which the security services already knew about, came to be placed in a suitcase which, if the current theory is to be believed, traveled from Malta to Frankfurt, where it changed planes, and then from Frankfurt to Heathrow, where it changed planes again, without being identified.


It was a fair point. Added to the Thatcher-Bush accord on a low-key pursuit of the bombers and the consequent need for all the agencies concerned to meet on common ground, it serves to explain why the Lockerbie investigation stalled in mid-1989 and never really got going again, leaving John Orr and the Scottish police to spin their wheels in frustration. After the Thatcher-Bush accord, the emphasis of government policy changed, none too subtly, from catching the bombers, whose identities and whereabouts were known, to pinning the blame for the bombing entirely on Pan Am and the undeniable inadequacy of its security arrangements at Frankfurt.

In this, the US government had powerful allies, commanding everybody's sympathy. Relatives of the victims of Flight 103 had legitimate claims for compensation against Pan Am and its insurers, but under the Warsaw Convention of 1929, the airline's liability was limited to a maximum of $75,000 for each passenger unless the claimants could prove wilful misconduct on the part of the airline.

The enthusiasm with which American law firms undertook to represent the families on a contingency basis in order to prove just that, coupled with the unstinting help they received from the US government in support of their claims, ensured that, from then on, Pan Am would be pilloried at the bar of public opinion to a degree just short of what might have been expected if it had wilfully blown up its own aircraft.

Any attempt on the part of the airline, its lawyers and insurers to shift any part of the blame back to where they thought it belonged, on the government agencies whose operational deficiencies had let the terrorists through, was promptly denounced in the news media as a sleazy attempt to duck responsibility for the disaster and thereby to avoid having to foot the bill for the generous financial settlements to which the grieving families were clearly entitled. (Pan Am later offered $100,000 in compensation to each of the families but this was rejected.)

Surprisingly, perhaps, the most temperate comment came from Bert Ammerman, president of American Victims of Flight 103, representing many of the families claiming compensation. 'If what Pan Am is saying cannot be substantiated, then Pan Am is through,' he said. 'But if what Pan Am is saying is true, then we have the most major scandal in the history of government in the twentieth century.'

He was right on both counts.

What Pan Am was saying was that, good, bad or indifferent (and they were certainly bad), its security arrangements at Frankfurt were probably irrelevant. Intelligence information strongly suggested that the bomb suitcase had been put on the conveyor after the baggage for Flight 103 had been cleared through the airline's security checks.

Within days of the disaster, lawyers acting for the families were seeking to get around the Warsaw Convention's $75,000 limit by alleging that Pan Am had wilfully disregarded prior warnings of a terrorist attack. (To hedge their bets, they also served notice that they would file claims against the US government as well for failing to pass on the warnings.)

On 2 November, the FAA alerted the airlines with a warning, similar to one already issued by the Germans, about the Toshiba radio-cassette bomb found in Dalkamoni's car. On 17 November, this was followed up with another bulletin describing the bomb in detail and urging all airlines to be extra vigilant. The British Department of Transport underlined this with a warning of its own on 22 November and had a further detailed description of the bomb in preparation when it was overtaken by events.

On 5 December the American Embassy in Helsinki received an anonymous call about a plot to blow up a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the United States 'within the next two weeks'. On 7 December, the FAA advised all US air carriers of the threat, and the State Department circulated an unclassified warning to all its embassies.

This was taken particularly seriously in Moscow, where the entire American community was advised of the threat. Like the earlier alerts, the Helsinki warning was still in force when Flight 103 took off from Frankfurt on 21 December, and although it was later dismissed as a coincidental hoax, this was no consolation to the families of those who, unaware of the State Department's warning to its staff, had bought standby tickets for seats on Flight 103 vacated by American diplomats.

With the US, British and German governments prepared to stand pat on what they had done to alert everybody (except the traveling public) to the danger, attention then shifted from the weaker ground of Pan Am's wilful disregard of these warnings to the more promising ground of its wilful failure to observe the FAA's baggage-security requirements.

The first suggestion that the airline might be vulnerable to this line of attack had appeared in the New York Post only two days after the disaster. A report from Tel Aviv declared that an Israeli security firm had told Pan Am two years earlier that its security arrangements in Frankfurt and London were 'dangerously lax'.

This story was quickly followed by reports that baggage recovered from the wreckage could not be matched with any of the passengers aboard Flight 103. According to the Sunday Telegraph, 'The implications of this are causing investigators grave concern because police believe that matching luggage to victims is an essential first step towards tracing the bombers.'

It was Pan Am's concern over problems of baggage security that had led the airline in 1986 to commission a survey of its procedures from KPI Inc., the New York arm of an Israeli firm of consultants headed by Yossi Langotsky and Isaac Yeffet, former chief of security for El Al. Their 200-page confidential report was scathing. As copies began to turn up in newspaper offices around the world, lawyers for the families seized on it avidly.

'Pan Am is highly vulnerable to most forms of terrorist attack. The fact that no major disaster has occurred to date [1986] is merely providential,' was one of the more damaging conclusions.

Another was that Pan Am's security was in the hands of 'an organizational set-up which suffers from a lack of authority, and an alarmingly low level of training and instruction'.

And again: 'The striking discordance between the actual security level and the security as advertised by the corporation may sooner or later become a cause of harmful publicity. In the event of casualties or damage resulting from terrorist action, the question of fraudulent advertisement would assume even greater significance.'

And worst of all: 'There are no adequate safeguards under the presently operating security system that would prevent a passenger from boarding a plane with explosives on his person or in his baggage, whether or not he is aware of the fact.'

No matter how Pan Am protested after the report became public that changes had been made which 'satisfied both the security needs of Pan Am and the Federal Aviation Administration'; no matter that the co-author of the KPI Report, Isaac Yeffet, said after the Lockerbie disaster that Pan Am had been unlucky, in the sense that its security was neither better nor worse than that of other airlines -- Pan Am appeared now to stand before the world virtually self-condemned of wilful misconduct.

Certainly, any deliberate evasion of security regulations exposing passengers to unnecessary risk would have merited that charge. And certainly, there were security lapses by Pan Am at Frankfurt on 21 December 1988 that were probably unpardonable after the airline had been warned of the dangers of terrorist attack. Nevertheless, Pan Am's procedures were essentially the same as those followed by every other airline (but one) at every other airport in the world.

As the DEA, the BKA, H.M. Customs and Excise and any international drug trafficker like Monzer al-Kassar will acknowledge, if it is possible for suitcases to be lost or stolen in transit, it must also be possible for suitcases to be switched or added in transit. With the security systems operated by every airline in the world (but one), there is no finally effective way of preventing corrupt airport workers from putting an unchecked bag in with legitimate luggage for a flight to America or of preventing corrupt airport workers in the US from intercepting that bag on arrival -- and a bag smuggled aboard in this manner could as easily contain explosives as a shipment of heroin.

The only way to exclude, with reasonable certainty, the possibility of a bomb being placed on a passenger flight is to have the aircraft guarded around the clock, to hand-search everything that goes aboard, accompanied or not, and then to keep everything and everybody under continuous observation until the aircraft doors are closed for departure -- and even then, the risk of human error or corruption would remain.

Among airlines, only El Al does that, and because of the time it takes to hand-search every piece of baggage, passengers are required to check in at least three hours before departure.

If all airlines were obliged to do the same, airport terminals around the world would come to a standstill. At Frankfurt alone, about 60,000 pieces of luggage are fed through the airport's baggage-handling system every day. If they all had to be hand-searched, existing flight schedules would have to be abandoned, and international air traffic on its present scale would soon become impossible -- a level of disruption that terrorists would no doubt be delighted to achieve without risk or effort on their part.

Today, the danger of terrorist attack, like the danger of design faults, equipment failure, pilot error, traffic congestion, bad weather, metal fatigue, bird-ingestion and all the other acts of God and man against which it is impossible to legislate, is a risk every passenger takes in using so convenient, and so vulnerable, a service as air travel -- which is not to suggest that governments and airlines are under anything but the most solemn obligation to minimize those risks in every possible way.

In the case of Pan Am Flight 103, both government and carrier failed in their duty, but in the 'national interest' and for reasons of 'national security', the airline was left to carry the full burden of blame.

At the very least, this was a gross dereliction of responsibility. The destruction of Flight 103 was not simply an attack on a commercial airliner but a deliberate act of war against the United States, whose government was, and is, accountable for the safety of its citizens at home and abroad.

To expect an unsubsidized commercial airline to assume a government's role in defending its citizens against state-sponsored terrorism, as well as the more specific function of airport security in a host country, is unreasonable. The airline's duty is to provide a third line of defence against the known danger, and, however defective this may have been in Pan Am's case, it can hardly be blamed for defects in the first and second lines of defence. For the US and German governments to disown any responsibility for letting the terrorists through, and then to blame everything on Pan Am after their own agents had connived at bypassing an already inadequate third line of defence was unconscionable.

But once the findings of the KPI Report became known, anything Pan Am chose to say or do was dismissed as a cheap attempt to pass the buck. All that the lawyers for the victims' families needed to do in order to get around the provisions of the Warsaw Convention was to show that Pan Am had been warned of the risk of terrorist attack and had not done enough about it. Now, with every reason to suppose they could make the charge stick, a legal action 'proving' wilful misconduct on the part of the airline would also have the effect of absolving all three governments of their misconduct.

By the end of 1989, with the investigation effectively stalled for political reasons, with public opinion conditioned to accept that the mass murder of 270 airline passengers was Pan Am's fault, and with the BKA at last prepared to acquiesce in a joint cover story, the American, German and British co-sponsors of the 'controlled delivery' run from Lebanon to the United States could relax a little.

No one was likely to talk. Everyone connected with the operation had some degree of culpability or negligence to conceal, and no one could be required to testify while they remained in government service. As they approached the first anniversary of the disaster, the only really worrying loose end was Lester Coleman, the one man outside the loop who knew about the heroin pipeline at first hand, who had fallen out with the DEA on Cyprus, who was no friend to the CIA, and who had just been reactivated by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Operation Shakespeare.

Could he be trusted to keep his mouth shut?

He had chosen to involve himself with the Lockerbie disaster by appearing on network television to answer questions about it. And barely three months later, Pan Am's lawyers and investigators had arrived on Cyprus asking about a dope pipeline to the United States.

A coincidence? Or had Coleman gone off the reservation?

With the 'national interest' at stake, who could afford to take chances? It was a job for the octopus.

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 10:55 pm
by admin
Chapter 6

Coleman's first assignment for the United States government was in 1982, when the CIA sent him to the Bahamas to interfere in the islands' elections.

By then, his love affair with broadcast journalism had reached the point of separation and divorce, but not without some purple patches along the way. Among the most memorable was his final year with the Boy Scouts of America, before he left it for the first time in 1974. Though increasingly disturbed by its paramilitary functions, he had no reservations about accompanying Norman Rockwell, Mr. America himself, on tour from sea to shining sea with his Boy Scout paintings, featuring Mom, Dad, apple pie and Old Glory.

Coleman's job was to act as a buffer between the grand old illustrator and his adoring female public and to arrange radio-TV coverage for the explosion of patriotic sentiment touched off by this travelling exhibition of Boy's Life magazine covers in cities across the nation. But he was still on the wrong side of the fence, and, as Walter Cronkite kept saying, 'If you want to be a network correspondent, you've got to get some experience first at a local TV station, pay your dues and move on up the ladder. You just can't start off at the top in New York.'

Taking the advice to heart, Coleman replied to all the likely want ads in Broadcasting magazine, tapped all the friends he had made in the media, and bombarded the industry with copies of his resume, finally reaping the reward for perseverance with the offer of a job as late night news anchor back home in Birmingham, Alabama, with WAPI-TV.

He lasted six months. It was not that he objected to being a one-man show, writing, editing and delivering the news, sport and weather; it was just that he grew tired of being stopped on the street and criticized for the necktie he had worn the night before. In radio, you didn't even have to wear a necktie. At the invitation of WSGN programme director Jan Jeffries, he moved on to become news director of Alabama's top radio station, with studios in the penthouse of the City Federal Savings & Loan Building, 'The Big Six Ten', where he lasted three years.

'There I was, free to cover stories I felt would have an impact [he says]. And a lot of them came through Aaron Kohn, director of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, who really got my juices going as an investigative reporter. Following through on leads I got from him, we aired reports linking the state attorney-general to New Orleans crime figures, and ran a whole series of in-depth probes into corruption and serious social issues. There were some unserious ones, too -- like the piece we ran on the wire-tap that Cornelia Wallace put on Governor George Wallace's bedroom phone. After I aired the story, he exiled her to Elba, Alabama, and called me up to say I was a nitwit shit, no bigger than a pinhead.'


Others held a higher opinion. Coleman was making a name for himself in investigative journalism. During his tenure, the station won the International Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors Association; the National Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, and the National Headliner Award. But they earned him no laurels from management, despite Jeffries's enthusiasm. WSGN was one of six stations owned by Southern Broadcasting, a deeply conservative company that seemed sometimes to regard the weather forecast as a threat to the status quo. An invitation to join the Special Investigations Unit of WBZ-TV, Boston, in December 1978, probably arrived in the nick of time.

The move from 65th-market radio to 4th-market television was not only a significant leap upwards in his career but Coleman had been head-hunted on the strength of his growing national reputation to do what he liked to do most: non-deadline exposes of graft and corruption. He rented an expensive apartment in Concord, Massachusetts, just down the road from Walden Pond, and moved a somewhat reluctant Jocelyn up from Alabama with their two children -- Karen, now ten, and Guy, aged three.

But there are exposes and exposes. WBZ TV was part of the Westinghouse Broadcasting Network, and run with the same corporate zeal as Westinghouse displayed, wearing its defence contractor hat, in charging the Pentagon $9096 for Allen wrenches that cost 12 cents each in Handy Dan's. Coleman embarked on a six-month investigation of design faults and cost overruns in the supply of Boston's new mass-transit trolley cars by Boeing Vertol, a defence contractor, like Westinghouse, and better known as builders of military helicopters.

Coleman recalls:

'Any city that agreed to buy Boeing's product got an automatic grant from Nixon's Urban Mass Transit Administration. Didn't matter that the trolleys didn't work. Didn't matter they were dangerous, that their plane plastic interiors gave off toxic smoke if they caught fire -- any city that bought them still got its grant. So after digging around for six months, we went on air with a 35-minute report, lead story on the six o'clock 'Eyewitness News', exposing the whole thing. Big sensation. Media spin-off all around the country. The city of Boston sued Boeing and the federal government, and Westinghouse folded its Special Investigations Unit. I'd breached the Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt not expose defence contractors.


Coleman won a New England Emmy for the programme, but it was time to move on -- to Washington now for a stripped-to-the-bone security vetting before joining the White House press corps as correspondent for the RKO Radio Network. On the face of it, Coleman was now within reach of everything he had ever dreamed of in broadcast journalism, but in fact running around after Jimmy Carter for two years turned out to be the most boring episode of his professional career.

'Reporters assigned to cover the President are not reporters at all [he insists]. They're hand-out takers -- told what to report, how to report it and when to report it. Break the rules and goodbye press pass. There's no room for enterprise at all. The whole White House press operation is geared to feeding the television networks, making sure that the evening newscasts have the proper 'spin'. The rest -- and there were 150 of us when I was there -- were more or less along for the ride.'

'Never mind what the Constitution says, the role of the American media is to inform the electorate of what the Administration wants it to hear in the way the White House wants it done. The press office manages the media the way you manage a spaniel, by leaking tid-bits to TV correspondents as a reward for stories that flatter the President and punishing them for stories that make the President look bad by shutting them out of the house. You get some rebels but they don't last. They can't, if they're shut out of background briefings. So most of the White House press corps just scamper around like puppies in pin-stripe suits, caught up in the ego trip of trotting along at the heels of the leader of the free world. Ask any honest reporter who's covered that beat -- it's a grueling, back-breaking bore.'


The nomadic life of a newsman had already cost Coleman his marriage. Jocelyn was tired of packing and unpacking and starting again somewhere else every two years. She wanted to settle down and raise her family, and he could not fault her for that.

'They say there are three things you can't keep if you want the job of White House correspondent -- and I wanted it: plants, pets and wives. Everybody I knew there was divorced. But it went deeper than that. Jocelyn and I had married too young and we'd grown apart, that was the truth of it. We woke up one morning and found we weren't the people we had been before. We both tried to keep things going, but it didn't work out. And that was mostly my fault. I still have deep scars and regrets about the way I conducted myself. It was the worst time of my life.'

Resigning after the 1980 election, Coleman went off to Connecticut to win another New England Emmy with WFSB TV, Hartford, and to write a book about the Mafia.

The Ethel Donaghue case made him an instant celebrity. Coleman's story of how a crooked probate judge had conspired with corporation counsel to bilk an old lady of $83 million by having her declared incompetent plucked at Connecticut's heartstrings, bringing him not only an Emmy but more criticism of his taste in neckties at supermarket check-outs and the friendship of FBI Agent Danny Mahan.

'Boy, have I got a subject for you,' Mahan said, when Coleman told him one night in their favourite bar that he wanted to write a book.

The subject's name was Richie Pedemonti, who had spent the last three of his 20 years in organized crime as an FBI informant. Refusing to go into the Federal witness protection programme after his cover was blown, Richie had fallen on hard times, made all the harder when his wife divorced him, unable to face life without a pink Cadillac and regular trips to Las Vegas. Although the FBI agents he had worked with had done their best to get him on his feet again, they were running out of ideas when Mahan took Pedemonti to meet Coleman at the Arch Street Tavern, behind the Bureau's Hartford office.

Fascinated by Richie's inside view of the mob scene, Coleman rented a small studio on Asylum Street and set to work on Squeal, a book anatomizing the mob's business interests in New England -- his collaborator, as often as not, sleeping on the studio floor. Even with a grant from the Fund for Investigative Reporting in Washington to match a small advance from the publishers, Spoonwood Press, their standard of living was austere, and Coleman was obliged to do some additional, part-time reporting for WCVB TV, Boston in order to keep the project afloat.

When his WFSB-TV source of income ran dry at the end of 1981 -- Coleman had gone after a businessman implicated in a Federal housing scam, not knowing that he was the station manager's neighbour, the collaboration seemed headed for the rocks, but then the CIA came to the rescue. In mid-December, Richie was summoned to a meeting on Long Island to discuss the Pizza Connection case, and, as he was unwilling to go alone, Coleman agreed to tag along.

Two weeks later, Coleman took a call at his studio from a government agent who declined to identify himself but proposed a chat and a drink at the airport Ramada Inn. Coleman recognized him at once by the drip-dry suit, white shirt and wing-tip shoes.

'Understand you guys could use a little cash,' the agent said affably, after they had settled in a quiet corner of the bar.

'Yeah, well, without it, I'd say posterity is going to be deprived of a literary masterpiece. What do I have to do?'

'How about a few days in the Bahamas?'

Coleman put down his drink. 'You're going to pay me to go down to the Bahamas? In January? Who do I have to kill?'

The agent chuckled politely. 'Guy we know down there just lost his wife from cancer. Nice lady. Name of Rose. Helped us for years. She was a real asset -- you know what I mean?'

'Okay.' That was when Coleman realized he was talking to the CIA. 'Sure. I know what you mean.'

'Fine. Well, she left a ton of papers and documents we need. And some people we know think you might be just the guy to help us out.'

'Yeah? How?'

'Soon as her husband gets the stuff together, we'd like for you to stop by their place and bring it out for us, that's all.'

'Well, I think I can handle that,' said Coleman cautiously. It seemed like a complicated way of dealing with a simple problem but he was broke and tired and not disposed to quarrel with the idea of a few days in the sun at the government's expense. 'Do I take Richie with me?'

'Hell, no. Not on your life. He's not to know anything about this.'

Rose's husband, now widower, turned out to be an American expatriate of about 30 years' standing, with business interests in the islands and a lovely old house across the street from the governor's mansion in Nassau. When Coleman stopped by, expecting to pick up a huge box of documents, he was handed a couple of rolls of film.

'Is that it?'

'That's it,' he said. 'That's what you came for. Have a nice trip.'

After ten days in Nassau, Coleman felt guilty about accepting the paper bag that the CIA agent offered him in exchange for the film when he arrived back in Hartford -- until he looked inside.

'What the hell's this?'

'That's two thousand dollars,' the agent said. 'In Italian lira.'

'What am I supposed to do with Italian lira?'

'You're supposed to take a run over to JFK and change 'em into dollars.'

'Oh. Okay. Tell me, you know a guy named Danny Graham? General Danny Graham?'

'Yeah,' the agent said cheerfully. 'I heard of General Graham.'

A few days later, he called to fix another date at the Ramada Inn.

'How'd you like to go down to Nassau again?' he said. 'There's something else we'd sure like you to do for us down there, if you got the time. And I guess you could still use the money.'

'That's a pretty good guess,' agreed Coleman, who somehow had to tide himself over for another month or two until he could finish the book. 'What do you want me to bring back this time? Robert Vesco's head?'

'Ha ha,' said the agent. 'No, this time, you'll take some stuff down for us. Including your typewriter. You can stay in the cottage behind Rose's house and work there.'

'Sounds good to me.' He was still broke, and more tired than ever 'What is it this stuff you want me to take?'

The agent smiled benevolently. 'You got a public relations background, right? Used to work for the Boy Scouts, I hear.'

'That's right. That was before I got to be a legitimate journalist.'

'Well, you're not a journalist now, are you?' He seemed worried suddenly. 'I mean, you're writing a book, but that's not the same, is it?'

'No, I guess not.' Coleman was unaware at the time that the American intelligence community was under orders not to use the media as a cover for its agents. 'It's kind of a longer range project.'

'Well, that's good. Because here's a situation where we think you can really help us, with your media experience. And I think you'll enjoy it.'

As he certainly enjoyed the Bahamas, and as his first mission had been harmless enough, Coleman agreed to go without even asking what was expected of him. The widower would fill him in when he got there, the agent said.

'And we're going to give you some alternative identification to use instead of your passport,' he added. 'You'll be in and out a couple of times, so we'll get you a birth certificate in another name. That's all you need for the Bahamas -- a birth certificate. So I want you to fill out one of these applications.'

He produced forms from three different states, and after some discussion they settled on one for Connecticut, as Coleman was more familiar with that state than with the other two.

'Should I use my own date of birth?' he asked.

'No, better not. This has got to be a whole new identity.'

'Well, I'm not too good with dates. If I can't remember my own birthday, that could be embarrassing.'

'Well, put down July the Fourth,' said the agent. 'You're not going to forget that one.'

He went away with the completed application form and came back in a couple of hours with a Connecticut birth certificate in the name of Thomas Leavy, born on the Fourth of July, 1948.

A few days later, Coleman set off on his first covert operation for the octopus, which was to discipline the prime minister and government of the Bahamas and remind them of their dependence on America's good will.

Lyndon O. Pindling had been framed in Washington's sights since offering sanctuary to the runaway financier Robert Vesco, and even before that had incurred American displeasure by consorting brazenly with money launderers and senior members of the Colombian cocaine cartels.

As the widower explained to Coleman on arrival, the CIA would feed them information on these associations and it was their job to use the dirt where it would do the most damage. He would see that it reached the ears of Pindling's political opponents, and in particular the Free National Movement, which could be counted on to make hay with it during the election campaign. Coleman's role was to use his public relations experience to get the maximum possible mileage from it in the Bahamian and mainland media.

Not having bargained on helping to run a dirty tricks campaign in somebody else's elections, and in any case feeling he had been suckered into it, Coleman hesitated for a day or two before finally persuading himself that Pindling was a rotten egg anyway and deserved all he had coming. Though scarcely aware of it at the time, he had crossed the line. It was easier, after Thomas Leavy's mission to Nassau, to accept that in the real world it was sometimes necessary to do good by stealth, and that it was all right for the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries because everybody knew it was constitutionally committed to the greater good of the greatest number.

Upon his return to Hartford, Coleman changed another bagful of Italian lira at JFK airport, finished Squeal, and in 1983, after the book appeared in the stores, took a job as field producer with 'The Jack Anderson Show'.

As a legitimate journalist again, this put him out of reach of his new friends at the CIA, who were now calling periodically to see if he was ready to change his mind and work for the Company full-time. And there were moments when he wavered. The trivialization of broadcast news by the networks had made him uneasy about the future; the world was too complicated to deal with in picture opportunities and soundbites. Reporting in depth was what he wanted to do, and what he felt he was good at. The rest was just showbiz. Already he was looking back on his time at WBZ TV, Boston, as the good old days.

For a while, 'The Jack Anderson Show' gave him the scope he needed. Indeed, one story he worked on, in which he managed to get cameras inside a camp run by the Ku Klux Klan for training kids to be Klansmen, came close to his ideal of what investigative journalism was all about, but a few months later the show folded, yet another casualty in the trend towards news as entertainment. Faced with a choice between unemployment, WMAR TV -- a Baltimore station owned by the same company -- and the CIA, Coleman chose Baltimore.

It was a mistake. Determined not to repeat its experience with 'The Jack Anderson Show', management had made up its collective mind to spare viewers the agony of thought by censoring any provocative, or even serious, material from local newscasts. The station wanted a 50-second expose every night, and Coleman was free to do anything he liked in that spot, provided it had to do with sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll.

With a family to support (he and Jocelyn were separated but not yet divorced), Coleman tried his best and even met management half-way with an off-beat story about a local attorney, James B. McCloskey, who ran a quickie divorce business from his home at 301 Timonium Road, Timonium, Maryland.

Working with a partner, Fernando Cornielle, in Santo Domingo, McCloskey claimed he could get a divorce for anybody, even for those who didn't want to tell their spouses. It was not necessary to leave the country, and no court appearances were required. All petitioners had to do was sign a few papers, pay McCloskey his fee and bingo! Within a week, the decree would arrive by airmail, and, under the laws of the Dominican Republic, they were free to do it again.

His own best advertisement for the service, McCloskey had been married five times and would probably have gone on but for the fact that he was well past sixty and his last wife, an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent, was busting his ass through the courts. Tough, gruff, feisty and profane, he was almost the last person anyone would have suspected of being a spy-catcher, recruiting officer and consultant to the US Defense Intelligence Agency. Coleman certainly didn't when he aired his story about McCloskey's mail-order divorces or for some time after they became friends. None of it showed behind McCloskey's amiable facade, and even if it had, Coleman, like most other Americans to this day, had never even heard of the DIA.

Often at a loose end at weekends, he took to stopping by McCloskey's place on Saturdays to pick him up for lunch at a local Mexican cafe. Over tacos and Dos Equis, Coleman would complain about the assholes who ran WMAR, McCloskey would listen sympathetically, although convinced Coleman was wasting his time anyway 'with all this bullshit news business', and divert him with stories about his ancestors.

One of these Coleman wrote up for the Baltimore magazine. According to McCloskey, his forebears had once owned the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia's Independence Hall and he was planning to sue the city to get his bell back. Before long, he had taken Coleman under his wing in much the same way as Tom Geohagen had appointed himself the younger man's mentor in the Boy Scouts.

'If you ever wanna do something meaningful with your life,' he said one day, after Coleman confided that his running battle with WMAR's management was likely to get him fired, 'all I gotta do is pick up that phone. I know a lotta people in D.C. who'd snap you up in a minute.

'Like who?'

'Never mind. When you're ready to give up this bullshit, just say the word.'

A week later, Coleman was declared surplus to WMAR's requirements, but he was still not ready to say the word. For one thing, to have abandoned journalism at that point would have left him feeling defenceless against the CIA, which for months had been pressing him to the point of harassment. He had even complained about it to Laurie Bernard, a TV producer in Washington whom he was dating at the time.

It was getting close to blackmail. 'Well, now, you know, you worked for us a couple of times, and you're a journalist and all -- I mean, how's that going to look if it gets out?' was the usual line. 'The media's not going to like that. On the other hand, you could have a secure future with us, with a pension at the end of it. And that's something you ought to consider very seriously. People in TV news don't get pensions. They get fired.'

In his late thirties, with a broken marriage and his career fizzling out, Coleman felt trapped in the wreckage. After several days of putting resumes together in McCloskey's office, of calling around the industry on McCloskey's telephone, and badgering his agent, David Crane, in San Francisco, for a network news opening overseas where he could do some serious work, Coleman touched bottom, one night in a waterfront bar and showed up next morning at McCloskey's place ready to throw in his hand.

Among his telephone messages was one from Crane, who had got him a freelance assignment with Cable News Network (CNN) in New York.

For six weeks, Coleman worked out of the new CNN bureau across from Penn station, running around town with a camera crew doing one or two pieces a day, covering the UN and interviewing notables, from Mayor Ed Koch to visiting Israeli Premier Shimon Peres -- and then lightning struck. Crane called to say that CBS had seen his work for CNN and had asked for a tape and his resume. Its foreign desk was thinking of adding another producer.

'This is it,' Coleman told McCloskey, exultant.

It wasn't.

He was kept dangling for several months while CBS News reorganized itself around Dan Rather and News Vice President Howard Stringer. Then at last, on 19 August 1984, Don DeCesare, the assistant foreign editor, called to ask Coleman if he was free to go to Saudi Arabia as an assistant producer with senior correspondent Tom Fenton to cover the Hadj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The contract would run for six weeks, and he would work on the story with Rome Bureau Chief Peter Schweitzer out of the Jeddah Hyatt hotel.

'Take it,' said David Crane. 'They want to see what you can do.'

Coleman needed little urging, although he already knew that one of the things he would have to do was to keep the Jewish chief of the Rome Bureau well away from Saudi officialdom. Then, as now, the country was a tightly run police state, a true kingdom, where the house of Saud literally owned the country and its citizens, and where arbitrary arrest was an automatic response to breaches of political or religious protocol.

'They gave me a CBS News ID [Coleman remembers] and the next evening I took an Air France flight to Paris, connecting four hours later with a flight to Jeddah. After nearly twenty years away from the Middle East, it felt like I was coming home at last. Then culture shock. On clearing customs and immigration, I stepped out of the terminal into the glaring heat to grab a cab, and there, strung over the four-lane highway, was a banner in Arabic which said, 'Please refrain from auto-racing'. Kids in Porsche 911s and Mercedes 350SLs, rich and bored, amused themselves by weaving in and out of the traffic at 100 miles an hour plus.'

'Otherwise, it could just as easily have been Tucson, Arizona. Riding over to the Hyatt, and talking to the driver to free off my rusty Arabic, we passed big American-style shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants -- even Taco Bell joints. The women, especially the young girls, were the only visible difference. With nothing to do but shop, they were in and out of the stores, cloaked from head to toe, soda straws sticking out from their veils as they sucked on their Slurpies, giggling, gossiping, buying designer jeans and Walkman stereos. I mean, what have we done to those people?'


Schweitzer was not particularly pleased to see him and let it be known up front that he was running the show. Although he had declared himself 'an agnostic' to the Saudi authorities, his evident unfamiliarity with the Arab world made Coleman even more nervous for he had realized within hours of his arrival that all foreigners were under close surveillance. With Islamic fervour at its height, he knew there would be hell to pay for the whole crew -- jail or worse -- if the Saudis were given even the slightest room to suppose that Schweitzer was an Israeli spy.

The security police were everywhere [says Coleman]. All interviews and shoots had to be cleared in advance -- there was no going out on our own, shooting pictures in the streets. Anybody caught doing that was put on the next plane out and had his cameras and gear confiscated.'

'My job was to go around to the Ministry of Communications every day with a box of tapes, sit down for hours on end and negotiate each shot. Every foot of video we wanted to up-link by satellite had to be previewed by Saudi censors. If they didn't like a shot of a Hadji shaving or pilgrims passing out in the heat, out it had to go. Anything sensitive, anything I knew we couldn't get by, we had to smuggle out in videotape machines, hoping Customs wouldn't look inside.


Due in large measure to his knowledge of Arab ways, the assignment passed off without incident and Coleman returned to New York confident that he had shown CBS what he could do and that a full-time contract offer would now be forthcoming. But, if anything, morale on West 57th Street was lower than when he had left. Don't hold your breath, was the best Don DeCesare could offer. 'Who knows?' he said. 'I may be selling aluminum siding in Bridgeport myself next month.'

Coleman went down to Baltimore to see McCloskey.

'Okay,' he said. 'Who are these people you're always talking about?'

Ironically, he heard some weeks later that he was under consideration for a producer's slot with the CBS correspondent in Amman, but by then Coleman had been visited by two young men wearing double-knit sports jackets and highly polished black shoes who asked a thousand questions and took notes and had him fill in the permission forms they produced from their identical grey briefcases so that the US Army could proceed with a full security vetting.

At thirty-nine, he had finally committed himself to joining the octopus as a secret agent of the armed forces of the United States -- and taken the first step on the road to exile.

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 10:58 pm
by admin
Chapter 7

When President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agreed on the telephone in March 1989, to keep the Flight 103 investigation within politically acceptable limits, the octopus was presented with a tricky problem of news management.

As the only official source of information about the disaster, as well as the only official source of information about government business in general, the American and British bureaucracies could count on the polite attention of every mainstream journalist, but the story had run for months and it was hardly possible to retract the tips, leaks, official statements and background briefings already given.

The consensus was that the Syrian-backed PFLP-GC had committed the atrocity for the Iranians; that the Libyans had probably had a hand in it by supplying the bomb components; that the individuals responsible had been identified, and that warrants could be expected at any time.

Undoing these now inconvenient views and expectations was not going to be easy, even without the continued meddling of congressional committees, boards of inquiry, lawyers for both sides in the compensation dispute and police officers still treating the case as a murder investigation. There was also the problem of what to do with the Germans, because there was no way of putting a suitable gloss on events without them.

At their baldest, the new policy requirements were that Syria and, to a lesser extent, Iran should be eased out of the picture, leaving Libya solely to blame, but without seeming to deny or tamper with evidence already made public and without appearing to allow expediency a higher priority than the ruthless pursuit of justice.

Given the usually uncritical reception of 'official news' by the media, and the patriotic reluctance of most people to believe the worst of their own governments, this should have been possible, but the solution to the problem rested in the hands of those who had created it in the first place, and in the end the task was to prove beyond them.

The first requirement was to get the Germans to cooperate, and the only way to do that was to show that the bomb had gone aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt due to circumstances beyond their control.

After Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr had taken them to task in March 1989, for dragging their feet, the BKA in April sent him the files on the PFLP-GC cell they had broken up some eight weeks before the disaster -- and by any reading, the circumstantial evidence against Dalkamoni, Ghadanfar and Khreesat was strong, not to say overwhelming. Although the first two remained in custody, charged with bombing American military trains in Germany, Khreesat and the other PFLP-GC suspects rounded up in the raids had, unaccountably, been released -- a decision which, on the face of it, might well have cost 270 lives.

A possible solution was to show that the bronze Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb had been fed into the system at some other airport, and that it was therefore a failure on Pan Am's part which had allowed it to go aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt without an accompanying passenger. If this could be 'proved', then the German authorities would be no more to blame than the British at Heathrow, who had also allowed the bag to be transferred from one aircraft to another for the trans-Atlantic leg of the flight.

To make this version of events plausible, a few awkward facts had first to be smoothed over. There could be no suggestion, for instance, that Frankfurt was the European hub of a 'controlled delivery' pipeline for drugs in transit from the Middle East. There could be no suggestion that 'clean' suitcases, properly checked through, were routinely switched in the baggage-handling area with 'dirty' suitcases containing heroin en route to the United States. There could be no reports of 'suspicious activity' in the baggage-handling area before Flight 103 left Frankfurt on 21 December. Nor could there be any videotapes available from the security cameras in the baggage-handling area.

A good deal of embarrassing speculation had already been made public. On 30 July 1989, for instance, the Observer, in London, had published an 'exclusive' under the headline: 'Lockerbie: Turks "planted bomb."

Reviewing the results of a 'three-month inquiry' into the disaster, the report said the paper had

obtained specific information from a range of Middle East sources who have told us that Turkish nationals were brought into the plot to bomb the Pan Am Boeing 747 at the end of September last year ... Contact is said to have been made, on the instructions of a German-based Iranian diplomat, by a member of the PFLP-GC ...
According to our sources, five Turks were entrusted with the task of planting the bomb on the Pan Am plane ... One has been described as a 'young Turkish engineer' and it is this man who is said to have physically planted a suitcase containing the bomb inside a cargo container on the London-bound Boeing 727 ...

German officials who questioned airport workers after the bombing have refused either to support or dismiss this account. American intelligence agencies want to reexamine and trace all likely suspects, but they appear to have received little cooperation from the Germans. The 'engineer' allegedly left Germany for Beirut via Cyprus shortly after the bombing.


What was needed to divert attention away from Frankfurt into politically safer channels was some 'new' evidence, preferably linked to the hard forensic evidence that had already been established and which, by association, would lend credibility to it. And as the police officers engaged in the field investigation could not be counted upon to cooperate in a political fix, that evidence had to be 'found' in a plausible way, even at the cost of further inter-agency bickering.

On 17 August 1989, eight months after the disaster, Chief Detective Superintendent John Orr received from the BKA what was said to be a computer print-out of the baggage-loading list for Pan Am Flight 103A from Frankfurt to London on the afternoon of 21 December 1988. Attached to this were two internal reports, dated 2 February 1989, describing the inquiries that BKA officers had made about the baggage-handling system at the airport. Also provided were two worksheets, one typewritten, the other handwritten, that were said to have been prepared on 21 December by airport workers at key points on the conveyor-belt network.

In the margin of the computer print-out, a penciled cross drew particular attention to bag number B8849 -- that is the 8849th bag to be logged into the computerized system at Terminal B that day. By reference to the worksheets, B8849 could be shown to have arrived in Frankfurt by a scheduled Air Malta flight from Luqa airport and to have been 'interlined' through to Flight 103. But neither the Air Malta nor the Pan Am passenger lists showed anybody who had booked a through flight from Luqa to New York that day. In other words, bag B8849 had arrived from Malta unaccompanied but tagged for New York and had been loaded aboard Flight 103 without being matched with a passenger. And as the job of matching bags with passengers is the responsibility of the airline, not of the airport authorities or of the host government, Pan Am had plainly been guilty of lax security amounting to 'wilful misconduct'.

This tied in nicely with the forensic evidence, which had already shown that the bomb had been hidden in a Samsonite suitcase filled with an assortment of clothing made in Malta, including a baby's blue romper suit.

Less than three months after the disaster, in March 1989, two Scottish police officers had flown out to the island to interview the manufacturer of the romper suit but had drawn blank. At least 500 of them had been sold to babywear outlets all over Europe. To trace the purchaser of the suit that had been all but destroyed in the explosion was clearly impossible. Now, with the baggage records pointing to a suitcase originating in Malta, the field of search was dramatically narrowed.

Two weeks after the BKA released the Frankfurt baggage print-out, two of Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr's men returned to Malta and, with the help of the manufacturers, traced the clothing to a shop in Sliema.

As 'luck' would have it, the proprietors not only remembered selling the exact items which the forensic team had shown were used as packing around the bomb but remembered the date on which they had sold them, 23 November 1988, a month before the bombing; remembered the purchaser -- a Libyan, they thought -- and, ten months after the event, remembered what he looked like clearly enough to brief an FBI video-fit artist to produce an acceptable likeness to Abu Talb of the PFLP-GC, who was known to have visited Malta not long before the bombing.

Leaving the shopkeepers guarded around the clock by security men, the police officers returned home with their questions answered so neatly that in other circumstances they might have been forgiven for suspecting the witnesses had been coached.

Never mind that Air Malta, the Maltese police and the Maltese government categorically denied that any baggage, unaccompanied or otherwise, had been put aboard Air Malta flight KM180 to connect with Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and never mind that the airline's record-keeping showed this to be so -- as David Leppard of The Sunday Times pointed out later, if the fatal bag 'had been smuggled on to the flight unaccompanied, it must have bypassed Luqa's baggage control system. No one could blame the airline company for the criminal activities of a terrorist gang.'

He was not prepared to exercise the same understanding for Pan Am in Frankfurt, however. 'Under international airline rules, bags unaccompanied by passengers should never be allowed on to aircraft,' he wrote (erroneously) in The Sunday Times of 29 October 1989. 'The new evidence casts serious doubt on the theory that the bomb was placed on board in Frankfurt and carried by an unwitting passenger who died in the crash.'

Leppard did not address the possibility that the bomb might have 'bypassed' Pan Am's baggage-control system at Frankfurt in the same way as he suggested it might have bypassed Air Malta's at Luqa; nor did the Independent, in London, two days later.

'Police investigating the Lockerbie bombing,' the paper reported, 'have confirmed they are investigating whether the bomb was first placed aboard an airliner in Malta, and then transferred to the Pan Am flight even though it had no accompanying passenger.' The story went on to quote a spokesman for the BKA as saying 'there are clues that a suitcase from Malta may have played a part. There are also clues that someone from Libya -- or at least, someone with a Libyan accent -- may have bought the items.'

John Orr declined to comment.

With this sensational breakthrough in the case, everybody but Pan Am and its insurers were off the hook. If the world could be persuaded to buy this scenario, then the responsibility would be shifted from the Iranians and Syrians to the Libyans, to the obvious benefit of Western foreign policy, not least in its attempts to secure the release of Western hostages in the Middle East; the security and police forces of the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom would be seen to be blameless, and the families of the victims would have a clear shot at a clear target in seeking proper compensation for their loss.

But there were problems.

The weight of circumstantial evidence against the PFLP-GC unit in Germany was still impressive and not to be wished away. If the bomb had been built there by Marwan Khreesat and hidden in the copper-coloured Samsonite suitcase that he had brought with him from Damascus, how did it get into the hands of the Libyans in Malta?

And why? It was winter time, when flight delays and missed connections were commonplace. Was it likely that any well-organized, well-funded, seriously determined terrorist group, capable of building a sophisticated explosive device to blow up an American aircraft over the Atlantic, would choose to put it aboard the target flight by sending it, unaccompanied, in a suitcase that had first to be smuggled on to an Air Malta flight (which might have been delayed or diverted) to Frankfurt (where it might have been mislaid or misrouted), in the hope that Pan Am would fail to search it or match it with a passenger and forward it, unaccompanied, on a feeder flight (which might also have been delayed or diverted) to Heathrow (where again it might have been misplaced or misdirected), still in the hope that no one would notice or examine the suitcase before it was finally loaded aboard the third, and target, aircraft for the New York leg of the flight?

As this is still the official view, such a plan must surely represent the most conspicuous victory of optimism over elementary common sense in the annals of terrorism. On the face of it, the PFLP-GC would have been better advised to post their bomb to the United States as a registered air parcel.

More particularly, there were problems with the computer records and worksheets from Frankfurt. For one thing, they did not tally with Pan Am's own baggage records, which although questionable as to their accuracy, were at least compiled in good faith. To this day no one knows exactly how many pieces of luggage there were aboard the doomed flight or consequently whether they have all been recovered or accounted for. Nobody even knows exactly how many suitcases were in the luggage pallet that contained the one with the bomb -- it was 45 or 46 -- or how many of these were brought in by the feeder flight from Frankfurt. (The number was also thought to include not one but four unaccompanied bags.)

The BKA estimate that 'about' 135 bags were sent through to the baggage room below the departure gate of Flight 103A, some belonging to the 79 passengers whose journey ended in London and the rest to the 49 who were going on to New York. There were no records of luggage sent directly to the departure gate, nor of interline luggage taken directly from one aircraft to another, nor of bags belonging to first-class passengers.

Of the 49 passengers bound for New York and beyond, 28 began their journey in Frankfurt, and 21 transferred from other connecting flights. As with the other interline passengers who joined the flight in London, their luggage was X-rayed before it went aboard but no attempt was made to match baggage with passengers, even though it had already been established that the Semtex explosive in the PFLP-GC Toshiba radio bombs was virtually undetectable by X-ray examination alone. (Later on, it would emerge that the X-ray machine operator had been instructed to pull out any bag that appeared to contain a radio. According to his testimony, he X-rayed 13 bags but none contained anything resembling a Toshiba radio.)

Of the 135 bags mentioned by the BKA, 111 had been logged on the Frankfurt computer and about 24 taken directly to the aircraft from three other connecting Pan Am flights. The list compiled by Pan Am at its check-in desks, however, showed not 111 but 117 items of luggage, and the discrepancy has not been convincingly cleared up to this day.

Although the 'discovery' of an unaccompanied bag from Malta was seized upon as a breakthrough in the investigation, there were in fact 13 items of unaccompanied luggage on the flight. According to the minutes of the fourth international conference of police agencies called on 14 September 1989, to consider the new Libyan link with the bombing, this cast 'doubt on the total reliability of hand-written entries of the baggage handlers on the computer print-out,' which had indicated only one such item. Details of the Malta connections were discussed, 'and it was explained that the bomb need not have been brought on in Malta, but must at least have come from Frankfurt'.

Well, they said it. Given that the flight wreckage was picked over initially by the CIA, that the total number of bags loaded aboard is not known, that the remains of others may yet be found in the wilder reaches of the Kielder Forest and the Scottish border country, and that there is still no reliable manifest for Flight 103 listing all the passengers by name with their seat numbers and baggage -- given all this uncertainty, to suggest that the theory of a suicide bomber or of an unwitting 'mule' had been eliminated or that the baggage could not have been tampered with at Frankfurt or Heathrow or that the investigation had accounted for every piece of luggage on board and, except for the bag from Malta, matched every piece to a passenger is, to say the least, unpersuasive.

Indeed, the claims are almost as unconvincing as the provenance of the crucial computer listing itself.

If the new Malta/Libyan theory was to replace the established Iran/PFLP-GC scenario, it was necessary, first of all, to believe that no one thought to ask for the baggage-loading lists for Flight 103A as soon as terrorist action was suspected -- which was almost at once.

It was necessary to believe that no one in any of the British, German and American police, intelligence and accident inquiry agencies who had a hand in investigating the disaster, or anyone who was in any way involved with airport management or security at Frankfurt or London, thought to secure the baggage lists as the one indispensable tool that would be needed to unravel the mystery of how the bomb got aboard.

It was necessary to believe that the only person who considered the lists to be at all important was a lowly computer operator at Frankfurt airport.

The Observer's chief reporter, John Merritt, described how this came about in a story published almost two years after the disaster.

He wrote, on 17 November 1991:

A major breakthrough in the hunt for the Lockerbie bombers came to light only because of the quick thinking of a conscientious computer operator at Frankfurt airport.

The vital computer evidence, proving conclusively that the bag from Malta, identified as Item B8849, was on board as the airliner was blasted apart on the last stage of its journey from Heathrow to New York would have been lost forever if the woman operator had not kept her own record.

Acting on her own initiative, the woman, an employee of the Frankfurt Airport Company, who for legal reasons cannot be named, was working at the computer system known as KIK on the day of the disaster. She knew records relating to baggage loaded on to flights were kept in the system for only a limited time [eight days] before being wiped. So when she returned to work the next day she made her own print-out of the information and placed it in her locker before going on holiday.

On her return, weeks later, she was surprised to learn that no one had shown any interest in the computer records. She passed the print-out to her baggage section leader who gave it to investigators from the West German Bundeskriminalamt. But it was not until mid-August, eight months after the bombing, that the German authorities turned over this information to Scottish police in charge of the investigation.

The woman employee's role became known only last week when lawyers for families of the American victims took evidence from her in Germany. She had kept her own copy of the print-out and still had it in her locker.


The Observer's readiness to print this story contrasted sharply with its scepticism when Pan Am subpoenaed the CIA and five other US government agencies in the US District Court for 'all documents concerning warnings, tips, alerts and other communications as to plans by any person to place a bomb, make an assault or commit another form of terrorist attack at Frankfurt airport during November or December 1988'.

The request seemed reasonable enough, given that the airline and its insurers were facing damage lawsuits totaling some $7 billion, and possibly as much again in punitive damages, but it was instantly dismissed as a fishing expedition when it became known, five weeks after the subpoenas were served, that Pan Am was seeking through the courts to compel the US government to produce the documents necessary for its defence.

This step had been prompted by the now notorious Interfor Report commissioned by the airline from Juval Aviv, whose inquiries into the disaster had produced intelligence information that was sometimes more reliable than the conclusions he drew from it. When copies of the report were leaked to the press and to Congressman James Traficant, a member of the House Aviation Committee who was then seeking re-election, its findings captured media attention across the world.

'Pan Am Seeks to Prove U.S. Was Warned of Lockerbie Attack' -- The Independent, London.
'Syrian Arms Dealer Linked to Pan Am Lockerbie Disaster' -- The Daily Telegraph, London.
'Lockerbie: How the Bomb Slipped Through' -- Daily Mail, London.
'CIA Drugs-for-Hostages Deal Allowed Bomb on Pan Am Jet' -- The Times, London.
'CIA Accused of Link to Drug Runner in Lockerbie Attack' -- The Guardian, London.


In vain, Pan Am protested that it was embarrassed by the leak of its confidential report (which was certainly doing the airline's position no good at all) and, in vain, did its spokesman insist that: 'We are not supporting the findings, neither are we suggesting that they are nonsense. What we are trying to do is establish what is fact and what is fiction. That is why we asked for the subpoenas.'

No sooner had the furor died down than the Observer weighed in on 26 November with the results of a 'Special Investigation':

'Pan Am Lockerbie Report a Sham'
'How Lockerbie Bomb Story was Planted'.


In marked contrast to the sympathetic hearing the paper was later to give the story of how the computer baggage-list came to light in Frankfurt, its reporting team fastened on the Interfor Report and its author like piranha fish.

An investigator's report which claims that the CIA allowed terrorists to place the bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103 is today exposed as a sham, following an investigation by the Observer [it announced]. Pan Am's insurers commissioned the report from an Israeli intelligence expert based in New York. As a result of his findings, the airline issued subpoenas demanding information from the CIA and five other US intelligence agencies ... As the agencies will strenuously contest any attempt to force information from them, Pan Am will be able to argue it was prevented from presenting a complete case.

And why not? Why would the agencies 'strenuously' contest the subpoenas if their hands were clean and they could prove the airline was wrong?

Described as 'incredible', 'unbelievable' and 'bizarre', the Interfor Report was summarized in the context of interviews with Juval Aviv -- 'a chubby Donald Pleasance, wearing a grey suit and a Gucci watch' -- and Congressman Traficant -- a 'former sheriff, who was once accused by Federal tax inspectors of accepting $108,000 in bribes from organized crime figures.'

When the Observer team met with Aviv, 'he failed to provide any evidence to substantiate a single claim in his report.' And when Traficant was told that there were 'serious doubts about the report', he suggested the Observer might be working for the CIA. When pressed, Mr. Traficant said: "'You've come here a day late, a dime short and you're a piece of shit." The Observer made its excuses and left.'

In the Observer's summary, the Interfor Report claimed

... that an autonomous CIA unit based in Frankfurt, West Germany, struck a deal with a Syrian drugs dealer with terrorist connections [Monzer al-Kassar]. He was supposedly allowed to smuggle heroin into the United States in return for helping to negotiate the release of American hostages in Beirut. Knowing of his 'protected' route, the bombers used his network to place the device on board the plane. It also alleges that warnings that Flight 103 was the target of a terrorist attack were suppressed because they would have exposed the 'drugs-for-hostages' deal ...

On first reading, the report is a detailed and strictly factual account of a complex plot to strike back at the U.S. for the downing of an Iranian airliner over the Gulf in July 1988. Many of its facts are true, but they have no link with Lockerbie. Other details do not stand up to close examination. The report is riddled with errors.


The Observer team then itemized the errors they had found and the details which did not stand up to close examination.

1. The report claimed that al Kassar had rented a car in Paris and driven to Frankfurt with components of the bomb. On examining the records of the rental firm for the day in question, 'No car hired on that date clocked up sufficient mileage to have made the trip.'

2. The report claimed that 'Corea' was the code name for the drugs-for-hostages deal. 'But Corea actually refers to communications between members of Trevi, the group of European intelligence, customs and police forces set up to monitor "terrorism, revolution and violence".'

3. The report claimed that documents proving Pan Am's case were held in the safe of Kurt Rebmann, 'a West German equivalent of an assistant attorney general, based in Berlin'. This was denied by Mr. Rebmann, 'who is, in fact, a Federal prosecutor based in Karlsruhe'.

And that was it, apart from other unspecified 'facts' that appeared 'to have been cobbled together from newspaper cuttings, many of which have turned out to be wrong'. On the strength of these revelations, which seem little enough to warrant such a conclusion, the Interfor Report was never again to be referred to in the public prints, either in Britain or the United States, without being described as 'discredited' or 'a sham'.

Aviv may have failed to provide the Observer with any additional evidence to support his findings, but equally the Observer failed to provide any solid evidence to refute them, despite the obvious pains it had taken. It was also a little ungrateful of the paper to attack him so vigorously, for in his preamble to the report, Aviv had spoken of crossing the trail of several other private investigations into the Flight 103 disaster, notably those of the Observer and The Sunday Times but 'only the Observer', he wrote, 'seems to continue trying to identify how the act was done and by whom.'

The Sunday Times was less dismissive of Aviv's work, although its reporter, David Leppard, agreed that 'the report at first appears so fantastic as to be ridiculous. Almost all the agencies involved have denied it. The CIA called it "nonsense"; one intelligence source said it was "fantasy". But the report, however bizarre, does contain remarkable detail, including names, dates, times of meetings, telephone and bank account numbers.'

The Interfor Report was commissioned by James M. Shaughnessy, of the New York law firm, Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives, who was acting for Pan Am as lead counsel in its defence of the liability suit. The report was an internal document, summarizing mostly unverifiable intelligence data collected in the field, designed to open up lines of inquiry that might lead to the discovery of evidence admissible in court, which the report self-evidently was not. Aviv began work in the spring of 1989 and when his findings were submitted to Shaughnessy on 15 September they provided the basis for the subpoenas served shortly afterwards on the CIA, the DEA and other government agencies.

The leakage of the report to Congressman Traficant and the press some six weeks later was a severe setback for Pan Am's legal team -- indeed, the embarrassment it caused was so acute that conspiracy buffs might well have suspected the U.S. Justice Department itself of leaking the report. A U.S. magistrate thought otherwise, however. Amid a blizzard of media speculation, an evidentiary hearing was ordered, at which John Merritt of the Observer was questioned, and, after hearing the testimony, the magistrate concluded that Aviv's denial of having leaked the report was 'not credible'.

After defining its terms of reference -- which had nothing to do with exculpating Pan Am, as was widely suggested even by those who had read them, but was 'to determine the facts and then to identify the sources, nature, extent, form and quality of available evidence' -- the report reviewed the results of the official investigation to date and the theories then current as to who was responsible ... Then followed a review and assessment of the anonymous intelligence sources who had contributed to Aviv's findings, rated on a scale of reliability from 'good' to 'excellent'. In some cases, their anonymity was barely skin-deep. 'Source 5', for example, rated 'excellent', was described as 'an experienced director of airport security for the most security-conscious airline'.

Next came a 'Background History' to the disaster, starting two years beforehand, in which the politics and principal players were put in context. Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, 'a major funder of terrorism', was said to have demanded better coordination among terrorist groups, and better 'deniability' for himself, with the result that the Abu Nidal group took over drugs and arms smuggling while Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC, backed by Syrian intelligence as its 'front team', concentrated on arms and terrorism.

Nidal's partner was Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian arms and drugs smuggler, married to Raghda Dubah, sister of Ali Issa Dubah, then chief of Syrian intelligence, and a close associate of Rifat Assad, Syrian overlord of the Lebanese heroin industry and brother of Syria's President Hafez Assad. Al-Kassar's mistresses in Paris included Raja al-Assad, Rifat Assad's daughter, and a former Miss Lebanon who had previously been married to two prominent terrorists -- most recently to a friend of Nidal's, Abu Abbas, who had planned the Achille Lauro hijacking.

Al-Kassar had many passports and identities, which Aviv listed in his report by serial number and date and place of issue, and operated through cover companies and offices, also listed by address and phone numbers, in Tripoli, Warsaw and Berlin. One of the principal drugs/arms smuggling routes ran through Frankfurt, with Pan Am being the favoured carrier. Tipped about what was going on, 'reportedly by a jealous Jibril', the BKA, in cooperation with the CIA and the DEA, began to monitor the operation and infiltrated 'at least two agents as well as informers, one of whom was Marwan Khreesat', the PFLP-GC's ace bomb-builder.

Aviv's Interfor Report went on:

The Pan Am Frankfurt smuggling operation worked as follows: an accomplice boarded flights with checked luggage containing innocent items. An accomplice Turkish baggage handler for Pan Am was tipped to identify the suitcase, then switched it with an identical piece holding contraband which he had brought into the airport or otherwise received there from another accomplice. The passenger accomplice then picked up the baggage on arrival. It is not known how this method passed through arrival customs, where such existed, but this route and method worked steadily and smoothly for a long time ...

Khalid Jafaar was a regular 'passenger' accomplice for the drug route.


The BKA/DEA/CIA surveillance continued to monitor the route without interfering with it, according to the report, and by visibly increasing the police presence in other locations, the team sought to focus drug smuggling through Pan Am's baggage area at Frankfurt. The reason for this was mainly convenience, as it was already under close watch by the CIA because of cargo shipments via Pan Am to and from the Eastern bloc through Frankfurt, Berlin and Moscow.

In Aviv's opinion, the CIA team concerned with this operation was not closely supervised. 'It appears that it eventually operated to some, or a large, extent as an internal covert operation without consistent oversight, a la Oliver North ... To distinguish what it knew as opposed to what CIA HQ definitely knew, we refer to that unit as CIA-1.'

In March 1988, the report went on, the CIA team was advised by the BKA of a secret meeting in Vienna between delegations from France and Iran that led to the delivery of weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of French hostages held in Lebanon. Having identified Monzer al-Kassar as a key player in the deal, BKA/CIA-1 approached him to see if he could also help arrange the release of American hostages in return for their protection of his drug routes.

According to Aviv, al-Kassar not only agreed to this but helped the CIA 'in sending weapons ostensibly to Iran ... supposedly to further the US hostage release', and also used his arms routes to supply weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua, sometimes financing the shipments out of his drug profits. For these and other services, he was designated a CIA 'capability', which meant that he and his business activities were then virtually immune from interference.

'It is believed that US Customs at JFK were ordered by CIA to allow certain baggage to pass uninspected due to national security interests. Thus the drug-smuggling operation was now secure.'

That was in the summer of 1988, at about the same time as a special team of counter-terrorist agents led by Matthew Kevin Gannon, the CIA's deputy station chief in Beirut, and Major Charles Dennis McKee, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, left for Beirut 'to reconnoitre and prepare for a possible hostage rescue'.

Against this background, Aviv now set out the sequence of events leading up to the bombing of Flight 103 as described by his sources.

On 13 December 1988, Jibril met with Khalid Jafaar and a Libyan bomb-maker known as 'the Professor' in Bonn -- 'sources speculate that Jafaar was offered money to make a private drug run to raise money "for the cause".' The 'passenger accomplice' was now lined up. But the BKA's raids on the PFLP-GC cell in late October had made it necessary for another bomb to be brought in, and Aviv asserts that al Kassar took care of this personally.

'His brother Ghassan's wife, Nabile Wehbe, traveling on a South Yemen diplomatic passport, flew from Damascus to Sofia on 13 November 1988, picked up the bomb components from [Ali] Racep and then flew to Paris. Al-Kassar picked up the bomb from her, and on 25 November 1988, rented a car from Chafic Rent-a-Car, 46 Rue Pierre Charron in Paris and drove to Frankfurt (carrying other contraband as well). He had previously been arrested twice by West German border guards but each time was suddenly released after a telephone call was made. Sources speculate that he apparently felt secure because he had "protection".' (The Observer, which later discovered that Chafic had no record of any such rental transaction, also managed to reach al-Kassar by telephone in Syria. Not unnaturally, he insisted he had been somewhere else at the time.)

Aviv's report went on to list the warnings that began to come in from the beginning of December 1988.

The first, from a Mossad agent about three weeks before the disaster, was to the effect that a major terrorist attack was planned at Frankfurt airport against an American-flag carrier. This warning was passed to CIA HQ and BKA HQ. The local CIA team is said to have suggested that the BKA visibly secure all the American carriers except Pan Am so that the threat, if it was genuine, would be focused on an airline and airport area already under close surveillance.

The second warning, on or just before 18 December, came from associates of Nidal and al-Kassar, who wanted to save their protected drug route without seeming to lack zeal in the cause of militant Islam.

Having figured out the most likely flights for Jibril's bomb ... they tipped BKA that a bomb would be placed on this regular Pan Am Frankfurt-London-New York flight in the next three days. They figured that BKA would increase visible security, thus dissuading Jibril in case that was in fact his target. So, two to three days before the disaster, and unwittingly, these terrorists tipped off the authorities to what proved to be the very act.'

The third warning, a follow-up of the second, was issued by CIA HQ, 'which sent warnings to various embassies, etc., but not apparently to Pan Am. CIA-1 thought that BKA surveillance would pick up the action and that BKA would stop the act in case the tip was correct.

Meanwhile, al-Kassar had learned that the Gannon-McKee official hostage team in Beirut had found out about his relationship with the CIA unit in Germany and his protected drugs/arms smuggling route through Frankfurt. According to Aviv, the official team had advised CIA HQ of what was going on and when no action was taken to put a stop to it, Gannon and McKee decided to return home, outraged that their lives and rescue mission should have been put at risk by CIA-1's deal with al-Kassar.

'Al Kassar contacted his CIA-1 handlers sometime in the third week of December,' the Interfor Report went on, 'communicated the latest news and travel information and asked for help. There were numerous communications between CIA-1 and its Control (in Washington).'

The fourth warning came two or three days before the disaster. A BKA undercover agent reported a plan to bomb a Pan Am flight 'in the next few days' and the tip was passed on to the local CIA team. Though anxious not 'to blow its surveillance operation and undercover penetration or to risk the al-Kassar hostage release operation', the warning was passed on and the State Department advised its embassies. As a result, BKA security was tightened even further around all the American carriers operating out of Frankfurt except Pan Am. Observing this, Jibril scratched American Airlines as his preferred target and finally selected Pan Am.

'We do not know exactly when this decision was made,' wrote Aviv, 'but the dates point to two or three days before the flight ... Jibril, through an intermediary, activated the Jafaar /Turkish baggage-handler connection via Pan Am. For the Turk and Jafaar, this was another normal drug run. Jafaar does not profile as a suicidal martyr type.'

The fifth warning, from an undercover Mossad agent 24 hours before take-off, was of a plan to put a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December. BKA passed this to CIA-1 who reported it to Control.

'The bomb was ready,' Aviv's report went on. 'Within 24-48 hours before the flight, a black Mercedes had parked in the airport lot and the Turkish baggage-handler picked up a suitcase from that auto and took it into the airport and placed it in the employee locker area. This was his usual practice with drugs.'

The sixth warning came from a BKA surveillance agent watching the Pan Am baggage loading about an hour before take-off on 21 December. According to Aviv's sources, he noticed that

... the 'drug' suitcase substituted was different in make, shape, material and color from that used for all previous drug shipments. This one was a brown Samsonite case. He, like the other BKA agents on the scene, had been extra alert due to all the bomb tips ... He phoned in a report as to what he had seen, saying something was very wrong.

BKA passed that information to CIA-1. It reported to its Control. Control replied: 'Don't worry about it. Don't stop it. Let it go.'
CIA-1 issued no instructions to BKA.

BKA did nothing.

The BKA was then covertly videotaping that area on that day. A videotape was made. It shows the perpetrator in the act. It was held by BKA. A copy was made and given to CIA-1. The BKA tape has been 'lost'. However, the copy exists at CIA-1 Control in the U.S.

Jafaar boarded the flight after checking one piece of luggage. The suitcase first emerged from hiding and was placed on the luggage cart in substitution for Jafaar's only after all the checked suitcases had already passed through security. The suitcase was so switched by the Turkish Pan Am baggage loader ...

The special, designated communications codename which BKA/CIA-1 had set up for their operations as described above is known at CIA HQ as 'COREA'. All communications concerning the surveillance operation and as described above as between or among BKNCIA-1 and CIA-1 Control were made via COREA. Thus all documents concerning all communications described above ought to be marked at the top COREA.

This completes the recitation of intelligence as to the act.


After listing other possibly useful details, such as the banks and account numbers used by al-Kassar, President Hafez Assad, Abu Abbas and Ali Issa Dubah to deposit their drug revenues in Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Beirut and Damascus, the Interfor Report declared

... it is our firm conclusion and opinion that our sources are correct as to why, how, where, when, by whom and what act was committed, and who had what prior warnings and when and what they did about it ...

From the perspective of intelligence analysis, our findings are conclusive. From the perspective of journalists, it is publishable speculation. From the perspective of trial lawyers, it probably remains inadmissible speculation or hearsay. Fortunately, the intelligence provides leads to admissible evidence. The videotape is the gem. But all the evidence is guarded by formidable constraints. Only carefully planned and tenaciously and narrowly pursued efforts will make acquisition possible.


The remaining six pages of the report consisted of Interfor's practical recommendations as to how Shaughnessy should proceed in seeking to obtain that evidence, including the issue of discovery subpoenas.

In the light of affidavits sworn to later by Lester Coleman and many other witnesses and investigators, the Interfor Report -- a confidential document never intended for public consumption -- can be challenged more for errors of interpretation than errors of fact (although there were probably more of the latter than the Observer was able to find).

Lester Coleman believes that, by grouping the CIA agents in Germany together under the designation of CIA-1, Aviv endowed them with a collective, conspiratorial purpose which almost certainly did not exist, and that he entirely omitted the contribution to the Flight 103 disaster of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and its country office in Cyprus.

With the sinister expansion of 'narco-terrorism' everywhere in the world during the 1970s and 1980s, the work of the two agencies overseas had become ever more closely entwined, with the CIA emerging as the senior partner in view of its superior resources, its loftier purpose and its greater freedom of covert action. As often as not, the requirements of narcotics law enforcement were subordinate to those of foreign policy and national security, as defined in Washington but reinterpreted by the octopus in the light of changing local circumstances.

In Coleman's view, the Lockerbie disaster was not the consequence of a malign conspiracy by a rogue CIA team in Germany -- as many assumed Aviv was saying from a careless reading of the Interfor Report -- but the result of misguided decisions and misplaced confidence in their own abilities on the part of a loose alliance of U.S. government agents in the field, often working with different agendas and priorities, and always without adequate supervision, on an ad hoc, day-to-day basis.

It was only after the event, in his opinion, that Washington engaged in a deliberate conspiracy, and that was to avoid the potentially disastrous political fall-out from Lockerbie by covering up the incompetence, complacency and bravado that had let the terrorists through.

Aviv was also perhaps confused by his sources' reference to COREA, a matter the Observer seized upon in its attack on the Interfor Report. COREA may well have referred to communications within the Trevi group, as the paper suggested, but as Coleman pointed out later, it could also have been a mishearing of khouriah, a Lebanese slang word for 'shit', which is, in turn, the international slang word for heroin.

With the media only too happy to savage Aviv's report as a device to allow Pan Am to escape its obligations, the government was under no necessity to descend into the arena and battle it out line by line.

'Garbage,' said the CIA.

'Rubbish,' said British intelligence.

'We never received any credible threat against Flight 103 on 21 December or any other date,' said the State Department, diplomatically hedging its bets with the weasel word 'credible'.

With the report made public, Juval Aviv's usefulness to Pan Am as an investigator was virtually at an end, a consequence he might have foreseen if he had, indeed, leaked it to the press. In an attempt to flesh out its findings with hard evidence, he met Shaughnessy with a polygrapher, James Keefe, in Frankfurt in January 1990, and interviewed the three Pan Am baggage-handlers who, on 21 December 1988, were thought to have been in a position to put the suitcase bomb aboard Flight 103.

They were Kilin Caslan Tuzcu, a German national of Turkish origin, who had been in charge of incoming baggage; Roland O'Neill, a German who had taken his American wife's maiden name, and was load master for the flight, and Gregory Grissom. All three voluntarily submitted to polygraph examinations.

Tuzcu was tested three times, O'Neill and Grissom twice. On reporting the results to the Scottish police, Shaughnessy was asked to sign a statement about the tests in the presence of an FBI agent, and readily agreed. The only visible result, however, was that, upon his return to the United States, James Keefe, the polygrapher, was served with a subpoena at Kennedy airport to appear before a Federal grand jury in Washington.

When he did so, he testified that Tuzcu 'was not truthful when he said he did not switch the suitcases'. And in Keefe's opinion, 'Roland O'Neill wasn't truthful when he stated he did not see the suitcase being switched, and when he stated that he did not know what was in the switched suitcase.' He thought the Grissom results were inconclusive.

A second polygrapher brought in by Shaughnessy to review Keefe's findings agreed with his interpretation of Tuzcu's and Grissom's tests but found those on O'Neill inconclusive. (Grissom was later eliminated from Pan Am's inquiries when it was shown he had been out on the tarmac at the time.)

The interest displayed by the FBI in the fact of Pan Am's polygraph tests rather than in the results was not shared by the British authorities, however. Convinced that the Scottish police would wish to interview Tuzcu and O'Neill on the strength of this lead, the airline found a pretext to send them to London so that they could be questioned and, if necessary, detained, but nobody seemed in the least bit interested. After hanging around all day, they returned to Frankfurt that night. (Intelligence sources suggested later that O'Neill was an undercover BKA agent, which, if true, might account for the lack of British and American interest. Otherwise, it must be assumed that the British investigators were as committed as the Americans to the politically more convenient theory that the bomb had arrived unaccompanied from Malta.)

Predictably, the results of the polygraph tests were leaked to the press, and just as predictably, on 28 January, the Observer heaped scorn on the airline's initiative: 'Both the timing of the pair's interrogation [by polygraph] and the circumstances surrounding it have refueled suspicions about Pan Am methods in defending the lawsuit brought by relatives of the 270 people who died when Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie.'

Unable to resist having another tilt at the Interfor Report, which was exposed as a sham by the Observer two months ago, the paper went on to say that the report 'weaves a fantastical tale around the assertion that the CIA, operating a drugs-for-hostages deal through Frankfurt airport, allowed the bomb to proceed, thus overriding or corrupting the airline's own security controls'.

Whether that was a fair statement of Juval Aviv's position or not -- he still believes that Tuzcu and O'Neill are prime suspects in the mass murder -- it was certainly typical of the prevailing view that Pan Am was indulging in spy-fiction fantasy to pervert the course of justice.

But in the scale of probabilities, was it any more likely that the management and staff of a major international airline, its insurance underwriters and the best legal brains that money could buy would seek to evade the legitimate claims of the victims' families and counter the determination of three governments to pin all the blame on Pan Am by inventing a fairy tale?

Is it any more fantastic than Aviv's report to think that they would hire, not just Aviv, but a small army of investigators to run around the world looking for some shred of happenstance to clothe that invention?

Or that they would persevere with it for years in the face of almost universal condemnation and ridicule and at a cost of millions of dollars in the hope that one day they would find someone like Lester Coleman, who might transmute some of that fantasy into fact?

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 11:01 pm
by admin
Chapter 8

The octopus had had him in its sights for so long that the security vetting should have been a formality, but a month went by without a word. And that was the first thing Coleman learned about the Defense Intelligence Agency: it never knowingly took chances. It would sooner not employ him than take an unnecessary risk, said McCloskey. He had known them junk a whole operation that had taken hundreds of people months to put together just because there was an outside chance that if anything went wrong the DIA might break cover.

McCloskey was unperturbed by the delay. This wasn't the CIA, he said. The CIA was a showboat civilian agency. These were the professionals, the military, the combined intelligence arms of the United States Army, the United States Navy and the United States Air Force. Together, they formed the largest and most discreet intelligence agency in the world; 57,000 people operating out of Arlington Hall, Virginia, and Bolling Airforce Base, Washington, D.C., on a budget five times bigger than the CIA's. No restrictions, no oversight -- and nobody even heard of it. Why? Because it didn't make mistakes. And because the director reported to the joint chiefs of staff, who didn't tell anybody anything they didn't have to know. And that included the Secretary of Defense.

But wasn't that dangerous? asked Coleman. To have a covert agency that big and powerful, and not directly accountable to anyone? Not even to the President of the United States? Their commander in chief?

The White House leaked like a colander, McCloskey said. It was full of politicians, and politicians came and went. Same thing with Congress. The military had never trusted politicians. It didn't trust civilians. Period. The military was America's backbone, its power and its honor. It didn't take sides. It didn't have to make promises it couldn't keep or gamble with the national interest to get elected. You could count on the military to see things straight, to see things through and to do things right. The DIA was only dangerous to the nation's enemies.

But where did the CIA fit in? And the National Security Agency? Didn't the DIA have to share these responsibilities?

The National Security Agency took care of the electronic and satellite stuff, McCloskey replied. And all that was filtered through the DIA before it went to Langley. The NSA did an important, technical job. As for the CIA, its main use as far as the military was concerned was as cover, as a front operation. While Congress, the media and the whole world watched the CIA, America's real spy shop could get on with its work the way it was supposed to -- in secret. Everybody knew about the CIA. It was good for a scandal a year at least because it leaked from top to bottom. It was a public agency, pinned down by White House directives and Congressional committees. Its director was a public figure. Everybody knew about William Colby, Richard Helms, George Bush, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates -- but who even knew the name of the DIA director?

'Not me,' said Coleman.

'Damn right,' said McCloskey. 'Not that I guess you'll ever get to meet him anyhow. Or even see the inside of Arlington Hall, come to that. The only DIA personnel you're ever likely to meet will be your handler and maybe a couple of agents you'll work with. (And he was right. It was only after the DIA froze him out that Coleman finally learned that the name of his boss, the agency's director of operations, was Lt. General James Kappler.)

A week before Thanksgiving 1984, a call came in on McCloskey's private line instructing Coleman to drive out to Washington's Dulles international airport and stand beside a potted palm near the United Airlines ticket counter, where he would be contacted at 11:15 a.m. precisely.

Coleman thought it was McCloskey playing a joke. He started to ask if he should wear a red carnation in his buttonhole or a false nose or something but the caller hung up.

At 11:15 a.m. precisely, he took up position by the potted palm and waited to see if he could spot his contact before his contact spotted him. It was a tie. He advanced to meet the first young man he saw with a grey briefcase, they shook hands cordially, and descended by escalator to street level, where his escort hailed a cab.

On arriving at the airport Ramada Inn, they took the lift to the fifth floor, walked back down the stairs to the third floor and along the hall to a room towards the end. After knocking on the door, his escort unlocked it himself and ushered Coleman inside.

"Sitting by the window (he remembers), was a thin fellow in his shirt-sleeves, about my age, a bit taller than me, same color hair as mine, a beard, too, who gets up and introduces himself.

'Hey, buddy,' he says. 'How are you? Glad you could make it. My name's Bill Donleavy.'

Before I could say anything he flips on the room TV, I guess to mask our conversation, and again I have to smile because this is straight out of John Le Carre. Anyway, Donleavy is to be my Control, my principal contact with the DIA for the next five years."


A quiet, careful, calculating man, Donleavy would quickly earn Coleman's trust and respect, in large measure because Coleman never caught him out in a lie but also because he always felt that Donleavy really cared, that he was genuinely concerned about Coleman's personal safety and the welfare of his family. But it was soon clear also that while Donleavy had to know everything about him, he was to know next to nothing about Donleavy.

Over the five years of their association, Donleavy revealed very little about himself, other than that he had served in Vietnam with the Special Operations Group, Military Assistance Command, and had worked in intelligence for most of his military career. Nor did he ever reveal very much about the agency that employed them both, other than that the range of its interests was wide enough to merit ex-CIA Director Richard Helms's rueful description of the DIA as 'the 900-pound intelligence gorilla'.

That was one of the ground rules Donleavy discussed at their first meeting. Everything would proceed on a strictly need-to-know basis. Coleman would have no contact with the DIA other than through him or those he would introduce from time to time. He would not meet or be aware of the identity of other agents unless they worked together, and possibly not even then. He could tell no one of his affiliation under any circumstances, not even the closest members of his family. If he were ever compromised or if it was ever suggested that he worked for military intelligence, the DIA would disown him; it would categorically deny that he had ever worked for the agency or had ever had any dealings with it in any capacity, whatsoever.

In return, the DIA would pay him $5000 a month, plus expenses (but in a way that could not be traced back to the agency); it would put him to work on matters of national importance (for which he would never receive any public recognition); it would train him in the most advanced security and intelligence techniques, and go to almost any lengths to keep him out of harm's way because the DIA was only as good as its agents and none of them were ever considered expendable. If Coleman was ready to accept the offer on those terms, all he had to do was sign an undertaking, binding for life, that he would never disclose the nature of his employment or assignments to anyone at any time and the agency would be happy to welcome him aboard.

As McCloskey had told him most of this already, Coleman signed.

'Okay, so what now?' he asked. 'Where am I going?'

Donleavy smiled. 'Later,' he said. 'When you get back from Europe.'

'Europe? Where in Europe?'

'Spain. For your training.'

'When?'

'First of the year. But there are things to do yet.'

They included a polygraph examination by an operator from Fort McClellen, Alabama -- six hours wired to the box in a hot, stuffy hotel room, while he answered the same sets of questions over and over again, with the sweat pouring off him.

Then another session at a different hotel with Donleavy, who told him he was now officially assigned to the Department of Defense Human Resource Intelligence (HUMINT) Program of the Armed Forces of the United States. His unit was MC/10, whose activities, he later learned, were part of Trine, a compartmented, special-access programme requiring clearance beyond Top Secret. MC/10 reported to the Special Technical Operations Center (STOC), The Pentagon. His code name was Benjamin B. He would use that to sign all receipts and agency documents from then on in.

'What about Thomas Leavy?' Coleman asked. 'I've still got that birth certificate. The one the CIA gave me to use in the Bahamas.'

Donleavy shrugged. 'Let me have it,' he said. 'It may come in useful some day. Who knows? I'll give it back to you later.'

Coleman was also given a contact number to call, but only in an emergency (703-455 8339), and a mail-drop address (P.O. Box 706, Oxenhill, Maryland 20745).

'Otherwise, don't call us, we'll call you,' Donleavy said. 'And if I can't get to you myself, if I have to send somebody, he'll say, "Hullo, I'm a friend of Bill Donleavy's." And you'll say, "I don't know any Bill Donleavy." Then he'll say, "His friends know him as Kevin." After that, you can talk. But if you've got any doubts, any question in your mind at all, just act like the name means nothing and pass it off. Never take a risk you don't have to. Not ever.'

Coleman practised this procedure several times before Christmas when meeting experts from Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) attached to Army Intelligence Center and School (JITC), Fort Huachuca, Arizona. They took him through such things as IUG (Intelligence User's Guide), MEBE (Middle East Basic Intelligence Encyclopedia), ACOUSTINT (Acoustical Intelligence), OPSEC (Operations Security), CIPINT (Encrypted Intelligence Communications) and HITS (Human Intelligence Tasking System).

He was also told to look out for a help-wanted ad in Broadcasting magazine placed by the Christian Broadcasting Network, a private venture owned and operated by Pat Robertson, the popular TV evangelist and moral conscience of the far right. CBN would be looking to hire a Middle East correspondent and when the ad appeared, Coleman should apply for the job.

'You're going to get born again,' said Donleavy. 'Kind of a nice touch that, seeing you're just starting out with us.' He seemed quite proud of it. 'When they get your resume, a guy with a British accent will give you a call and invite you down to Virginia Beach. Do like he says, and he'll help you see the light.'

The call came just before Christmas. Right after the holidays, Coleman flew down to be interviewed at CBN's Virginia Beach headquarters, a sprawling, neo-Colonial, campus-like complex with broadcasting facilities to rival anything he had seen in the major networks. The guy with the British accent, besides working for M16 under the code name of Romeo, was at the time general manager of CBN's Middle East Television (MET) based in Jerusalem, and had flown over to hire a correspondent for its bureau in Beirut.

'It's all set,' Romeo said, as they strolled in the grounds. 'All you've got to do is play the role. And not just with the Robertsons -- with everybody you meet down here. These are pray-TV people, every last one of 'em -- and they're all paranoid, so watch your step. They all think they've been called by Jesus to work for Pat Robertson.'

'Including you?'

'Doesn't it show? You'll find 'em friendly enough on the surface but don't let that fool you. They're fanatics, and very suspicious of strangers. They're going to work you over pretty thoroughly to make sure you're not the devil in disguise, so let's show 'em a little evangelical fervour, shall we?'

Romeo was not exaggerating. Coleman was asked to supply the names and addresses of past and current friends, a floor plan of his house, the names of his spouse, children and close family members, his medical records, dental charts and a typical daily schedule of family activities.

He then sat for a round of personality profile tests and apparently showed the requisite degree of apostolic zeal for, at the end of this two-day inquisition, a benevolent Romeo introduced him to Pat Robertson's son Tim and the three of them went off to meet the great man himself at a local restaurant, where they prayed over the salad bar.

During lunch, the Robertsons explained that MET operated from studios in Jerusalem, with a transmitter in Marjayoon in Israeli-occupied South Lebanon, an office in Nicosia, Cyprus, and a news bureau in the Christian enclave in Beirut, to which Coleman would be assigned. The station aired Christian and family programmes to the mostly Arab populations of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, thereby enraging Islamic fundamentalists to such an extent that they had several times bombed the transmitter even though it was located in the Israeli security zone.

'It was a funny coalition,' Coleman found. 'You had right-wing Christian Americans, the Israelis, and right-wing Christian Lebanese fascists, funded, trained and uniformed by the Israeli Army, all working together and in bed with outfits like CBN.'
Over dessert, Pat Robertson explained at some length that his interest in the region stemmed from his belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was imminent in the Holy Land, and he intended to cover it live.

As far as Coleman could make out, MET seemed to be a pirate station, operating, in violation of international law and numerous treaties, without a license from any government. There was no advertising, and the programme material, other than the Robertsons' religious and family output, consisted of wrestling on Saturday nights, NFL football and endless reruns of American soaps and situation comedies. As far as its audience was aware, the whole operation was funded entirely by the American faithful (of whom the most generous, as Coleman discovered later, was faithful Bill Casey, director of the CIA, and his friends at the Jewish Defense League).

Coleman's job was to file stories from MET's Lebanon bureau, not just for the pirate station, but for a new national network news programme the Robertsons were planning to set up in the United States.

They always had some major project going (he remembers). Pat would say he had been talking to Jesus, and Jesus had told him He wanted him to do this or do that, so CBN would then go out and hire the people they needed. These people would quit their jobs and sell their houses and move to Virginia Beach, where they'd buy new homes and settle down happily and go to work for Pat because Jesus had called them. He'd pay everybody lots of money and they'd all live very comfortably. Until one day he'd walk into the office and say, 'I just talked to Jesus. He doesn't want me to do this anymore. You're all fired.'


The Robertsons' mission in the Middle East was still clear and urgent, however, when they talked to Coleman over lunch.

'How soon can you join us?' Tim Robertson asked. 'We really need to get you out there, to get you started on God's work as soon as we can.'

'Praise the Lord,' said Coleman. 'I need thirty days to prepare myself.'

Donleavy had already told him to set January aside for his crash course in DIA HUMINT operations. CIA agents graduate in classes of 40 from spy school at Camp Perry, Virginia, not far from Williamsburg. As a DIA HUMINT agent, Coleman was trained alone, one on one, having little contact with anybody but his instructors and no contact at all with anyone outside his chain of command.

On 15 January 1985, he flew out to Malaga and made his way to Torremolinos, where he was picked up by an American contact, a friend of Bill Donleavy's, better known as Kevin, who drove like a madman down the winding coastal highway to Estepona, deposited him on the doorstep of a small hillside cottage overlooking the sea, and drove away immediately with a cheerful wave. With a rueful nod, Coleman went inside and slept the sleep of the jet-lagged.

The following morning, at 8 a.m., he dragged himself out of bed and went downstairs to see who was hammering so vigorously at the door.

'Sorry to disturb you," said another obvious Englishman, looking him up and down with professional detachment. This one had steel-grey, Fuller's brush hair, a bulging briefcase and a generally more purposeful air than Romeo. 'I'm a friend of Bill Donleavy's.'

Donleavy had already explained that the DIA enjoyed a special relationship with MI6, sharing the view that secrets were meant to be kept, not turned into headlines in the morning papers. The British had never quite grasped the logic of Congressional oversight of the CIA. The notion of their own intelligence chiefs being questioned at televised hearings before a Parliamentary committee was so comically at variance with British ideas of a secret service that they had turned gratefully to the DIA as a discreet, professional alternative to Bill Casey and his Langley cowboys, whom they distrusted almost as much as the Pentagon did.

But there were limits.

'I wish your people could have waited another fortnight,' grumbled Coleman's visitor. 'The border reopens next month, and I can drive here in under an hour from Gib. As it is, I had to fly from Gib to Tangier, and from Tangier to Malaga and drive over from there. And a bloody bore it was, too, I don't mind telling you.'

'Sorry,' said Coleman humbly. 'How about another cup of coffee?'

The man from MI6 had come the long way around in order to brief him on the finer points of the political situation in the Middle East, a British sphere of interest since the late 19th century. When they got down to considering which neighborhoods in Beirut were controlled by which of the warring Christian and Muslim factions, his visitor raked through his tattered briefcase and tossed a bundle of Bartholomew's folding maps on to the kitchen table.

'There you are,' he said, 'Compliments of HM government. Available at all good stationers. Easy to read and a bloody sight more accurate than the rubbish you'll get from the CIA.'

It was a useful lesson. If he was ever stopped and searched, no one would think twice about finding a Bartholomew's street plan in his pocket. But a map of Beirut by a military cartographer?

The lesson was underlined by a succession of visitors to the cottage over the next two weeks, most of them from Wiesbaden and Lisbon. As a correspondent for the CBN, Coleman was not about to engage in hand-to-hand combat with enemy agents or in high-speed car chases with armed Muslim militiamen, but for his own protection he was issued by one of his instructors with a small, five-shot, stainless steel, single-action, North American Arms .22 Magnum revolver, courtesy of 7th Brigade, Special Forces Detachment, from Bad Tolz, near Munich.

He was supposed to carry it in a canvas holster worn under the zip fly of his trousers, but Coleman never could get used to the idea of walking around with its barrel pointed at his private parts. On the rare occasions he went out with it, he wore the holster on his ankle instead.

In the event of an attempted kidnap or close combat he was supposed to aim at the eye or behind the ear of his assailant, but, having some notion of the hitting power of its Magnum round, rather doubted if he could do it. Although brought up with firearms, he had never really liked them, and managed to lose this one before he left for Beirut.

The main thrust of his training was in cryptography and communications. Although his assignment would entail the dispatch of lengthy reports to Control almost daily, the use of secret short-wave transmitters or fancy electronic gadgetry was ruled out. Unless the means of transmission were as secure as the codes he used, his cover would be constantly at risk, along with the integrity of his reports. If his true role as an American agent were ever suspected, not only would his life be in danger, but -- even more serious from the DIA's point of view -- he might also be used by the opposition as a channel for disinformation.

The same considerations also ruled out the use of the American Embassy's secure communications system from Beirut. Donleavy had already made it clear that Coleman was to keep well away from the embassy and its staff after he arrived in Lebanon as they were under continuous surveillance by Arab and Israeli intelligence agents. Anything but the most casual and routine contact with U.S. government officials in the field was, therefore, to be avoided, and under no circumstances was he to reveal his true affiliations to any of them, up to and including the ambassador.

Being entirely on his own, therefore, and unable to use any method of communication with Control that might draw attention to himself, Coleman needed a simple yet virtually unbustable code system that would enable him to send untraceable dispatches to Washington every day via the ordinary international telecommunications networks without alerting anybody listening in to the traffic and without having to use any item of equipment more incriminating than a Bartholomew's street map.

For an FCC licensed broadcast engineer working with the DIA's cryptographers, the solution was child's play. Between them they devised a simple grid code based on random number access via a telephone touch-tone keypad, the variable alpha-numeric sequence being determined for each transmission by the day of the month and the month of the year. All he needed was a Radio Shack pocket calculator with a touch-tone number pad, of the sort that any businessman might carry in his briefcase, and a two-speed microcassette recorder of the type that any self-respecting media correspondent would carry in his pocket.

After encoding his message, Coleman had simply to record the touch-tone bleeps, using slow speed, then direct dial Donleavy's answering machine in Maryland from a public telephone, place the recorder over the mouthpiece, play the tones on high speed as soon as the answering machine beeped, hang up and erase the tape. In this way he could transmit a lengthy, secure message in 30 seconds or less -- far too short a time for anyone to trace a call even if they had been waiting for it. (Later on, they supplemented this system with a software program in Coleman's laptop computer that randomly scrambled his plain language reports as they were sent via a modem direct to his contact number in Washington.)

But first he had to have something to communicate, and so was taught about 'dead drops' for the exchange of messages. A basic means of communication among members of the DIA cell in Beirut, these offered the advantage that the people using them did not have to meet, and messages could be left there at any convenient time. Popular locations included an international telephone booth in the central telephone exchange, where messages could be taped under the shelf, and the soap and detergent section of a supermarket in Jounieh. This became one of Coleman's main pick-up points for material coming from West Beirut, and was the unromantic setting for his first meeting with Mary-Claude, who worked there for a time.

He also learned about 'live drops', receiving or passing information face to face, and the 'brush pass' -- by far the riskiest means of exchange.

Then there was 'environmental situation awareness' -- or how to work covertly in a hostile environment. The key to this was an intimate knowledge of the terrain, with carefully selected drops, meeting and contact areas, and prearranged escape routes and safe houses, taking into account the opposition's strong points and weak points.

An intimate knowledge of the enemy was also crucial, for to overestimate him could be as dangerous as to underestimate him. This in turn meant understanding local culture and history and how differences in thought and outlook had to be taken into account in running an operation -- a factor nowhere more important than in the Middle East.

Still using off-the-shelf technology, he was taught how to photograph documents with an ordinary 35 mm. camera in available light. He was also shown the basic spy tricks of how to pass a message in a paperback book by pinpricking letters or words, the holes being visible only when the pages were held up to the light. (A variant of this was the overlay message, where the holes were pricked through a sheet of paper that the message receiver would then lay over the appropriate pages of his own copy of the book.)

A more sophisticated method was to use the book as a one-time code pad, reducing a letter or word to a number sequence by listing page number, line number and the letter or word number on that line. He liked this system, for he could keep up with the paperback bestseller list at the same time. He also enjoyed typing invisible messages on the back of innocuous letters by means of his IBM typewriter's lift-off correction tape.

The remainder of Coleman's crash induction course was taken up with briefing sessions on Operation Steeplechase, the mission for which he had been so hastily prepared.

The DIA had been monitoring activities at the Virginia Beach headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which suggested that Pat Robertson's organization was heavily engaged in raising money and providing support for the Nicaraguan Contras through Major-General John K. Singlaub, president of the Taiwan-directed World Anti-Communist League, and Lt-Colonel Oliver North, with the covert assistance of DCI William Casey and the CIA. James Whelen, a close friend of Casey's, had been installed at CBN to tap its database for fund-raising, and it was a measure of the importance attached to Robertson's contribution that, in 1985, the Contras named a brigade in his honour.

Coleman's job in Beirut was to track the Middle Eastern ramifications of the conspiracy, working through a network of informants who reported to Tony Werner Asmar, the DIA agent in place. A Lebanese of German extraction, Asmar owned AMA Industries, SAL, -- a hospital supply business which gave him access to every part of the country and every section of Beirut, regardless of which faction, Christian or Muslim, controlled it.

Until Coleman arrived, on 25 February 1985, the main duties of the Asmar cell had been to monitor the Muslim radical groups supported by Iran and Syria, to report on the movements of their leaders -- in particular, those of Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadellah -- and to keep track of the Western hostages then being taken in Beirut. After Coleman's arrival as Asmar's Control and his communications link with DIA headquarters, this work continued but with the added responsibility of trailing Oliver North and his boss Robert McFarlane, President Reagan's National Security Advisor, as and when the Iran-Contra conspiracy brought them to the region to buy illegal arms.

Coleman was also required to provide intelligence support for 7th Brigade Special Forces detachments in Lebanon, working through DOCKLAMP (Defense Attache System), American Embassy, Beirut. These Green Beret units were there ostensibly as advisers to the Lebanese Army but actually as a commando team to free the American hostages if the political situation in Lebanon ever changed sufficiently to warrant the use of force.

As CBN's Beirut correspondent, Coleman was well placed to observe and report on all these activities. Robertson's Middle East Television had close ties with Lebanon's right-wing Christian groups, which were largely funded by drugs trafficking, and in particular with the Christian Lebanese Forces, a militia largely funded by Israel.

CBN's 'office manager' in Beirut, Gushan Hashim, and his 'assistant,' Antoine, had both been recruited from the Christian Lebanese Forces, and, as Coleman observed when he took over, the bureau was better equipped with arms than with cameras. He also quickly discovered that the main function of CBN's telex links was to enable Antoine to contact 'Odette' in Tel Aviv via Zurich on behalf of the Mossad, ingeniously rendering his Arabic into its phonetic English equivalents in order to use the English-language keyboard.

DIA's concern about the Iran-Contra conspirators was focused in particular on Oliver North's Georgia 'mafia', whose representative, Michael Franks, also known as Michael Schafer, arrived in Beirut soon after Coleman. Described as a 'TV cameraman', Franks stepped off the boat from Cyprus wearing full army battle fatigues with a mercenary patch on his black military baseball cap.

He had been sent out by Overseas Press Services Inc. (OPS), a television consultancy company run by W. Dennis Suit, formerly a CIA operative in Central America. An associate of Oliver North, General Singlaub, Contra leaders Adolfo and Mario Calero, and William Casey, Suit specialized in organizing field trips for journalists to U.S.-supported military and paramilitary operations around the world, notably in Afghanistan, Angola, Central America and the Middle East.

As consultants to Pat Robertson's television operations, OPS clearly felt that Franks's inability to distinguish one end of a camera from another was offset by the expertise he had acquired in counter-terrorist techniques at SIONICS, a mysteriously funded training school near Atlanta run by another North associate, retired Lt. General Mitchell Werbell III.

It was all the same to Coleman. The Beirut bureau never filed a story in all the months he was there, and Franks was never around long enough to prove an embarrassment. Socially, they got on well enough, to the point where Franks felt free to talk openly about OPS and the Contras. His boss, W. Dennis Suit, while under cover for the CIA in Nicaragua as an ABC-TV cameraman, had apparently been caught handing out bugged Zippo lighters to the Sandinistas and ABC had fired him. When not regaling Coleman with gossip of this sort, Franks spent most of his time fighting along the so-called 'Green Line' with the Christian militias.

For his part, Coleman had his hands full coping with the flood of intelligence data from Tony Asmar, who quickly became a close friend. The Asmar cell was efficiently run, thoroughly professional and highly productive. Besides a network of informants inside every political and religious faction, the armed militias and the Lebanese Army, he also ran a string of Filipino domestic workers recruited from American Baptist missions in Manila. To have a Filipino housekeeper was a mark of prestige among Lebanon's leading political, military and business families, and as she invariably attracted the intimate attention of the head of the family, her reports, often of pillow talk, were invaluable.

"When I first got to Beirut, Tony stationed one of them with me for a while (Coleman recalls). Mainly for my protection. Before I even opened a suitcase, a package arrived at the chalet with a .380 calibre Beretta and another .22 Magnum pistol inside -- to add to the folding umbrella with the stiletto in the handle. I kept the Beretta in the bedroom and sometimes wore the twenty-two in an ankle holster, but Kathy was much better at that sort of stuff than I could ever hope to be.

She was a deadly little thing. Good with knives, guns or bare hands. Black belt karate. Close armed combat expert -- kill you in a minute. And yet the sweetest little thing you ever saw. I could step out of the shower in the morning and my slippers would be waiting at the bathroom door. She was always very attentive, and kept everything clean and spotless."


Mary-Claude soon put a stop to that.

As there was no way of avoiding face-to-face contact once in a while, Coleman and Asmar had decided that to fraternize openly as friends would probably attract less attention than if they were observed meeting in secret. At the first opportunity, therefore, Asmar invited Coleman to join him and his fiancee Giselle for Sunday dinner with Giselle's family. And to provide possible observers with a plausible reason for subsequent visits, Giselle made sure her sister Mary-Claude was there to make up a foursome who might also meet elsewhere on other occasions.

Virtually on sight, the two put flesh and blood on the stratagem by falling in love.

Neither could quite believe it. On the surface, Coleman, going on forty-two, divorced, a disillusioned, cynical and worldly American, a secret agent sailing under false colours, had nothing whatever in common with a petite, vivacious, voluptuously attractive, 22-year-old girl, strictly brought up by a typically close and protective Lebanese Catholic family in the claustrophobic confines of East Beirut during a civil war. His first reaction was to lie about his age. He told her he was thirty-seven.

But that was the least of their problems. He told Mary-Claude everything else about himself, except that he was an American spy, and left it to her to decide how much she would tell her family, who strongly disapproved of divorce, were concerned about the age difference between them, even though he had pruned it, and were naturally suspicious of his intentions. Even so, they were determined to marry from the start, and as quickly as possible as far as Coleman was concerned, for he had no way of knowing how long his assignment to Beirut would last.

"The family's reaction was reserved, polite and curious (he remembers), but Mary-Claude was always headstrong and usually got her way, no matter what her father said. As I spent more time with them and they saw it was a serious matter -- I told her father I respected the traditions of his society and I think that went in my favour -- so they came to accept me.

Even so, it was a style of courtship entirely alien to me. Though Christian and emancipated compared with the rest of the Arab world, the family was very strict by American standards. Mary-Claude and I were not allowed to meet without a chaperone -- one of her brothers or sisters always had to be there. Once or twice we met surreptitiously for lunch and went for a walk afterwards but that was the only time we were ever alone. Out of respect for her father, we complied with his wishes in order to show the seriousness of what we felt for each other. Once he was convinced of that, we had a traditional Lebanese engagement party, at which I gave her the traditional set of gold jewelry and stuff, and that made us official."


Mary-Claude was unhappy with the idea of keeping anything from her family, but knew that Coleman's divorce would be one problem too many for her father to handle. Asked, years later, what she had thought on meeting Coleman for the first time, she replied, 'I thought he was an old fart,' and they both laughed uproariously.

'He lied to me about his age. He was a foreigner -- with a previous marriage. There were many problems. But I always did like older men. I wanted a peaceful life with a wonderful husband who took care of me. I enjoy being spoiled. I like the attention. And I got it. I lived through hell.'

They both laughed again, but ruefully this time.

The DIA was delighted with the idea of having a married agent. Donleavy wanted to know all about Mary-Claude so that he could run a security check, but as her sister Giselle was already unknowingly in the loop, the vetting was a mere formality.

'Go ahead,' he said. 'Congratulations. That's great cover. With family there, you can go in and out of Beirut whenever you like and nobody's going to think anything about it.'

By then the question of cover was important. Although hired to do news stories for CBN, Coleman was using the camera equipment mainly to shoot background footage for intelligence reports and to keep up appearances. Even if he had filmed a story, he had no way of getting the tape to the studios in Jerusalem except via Cyprus. A running joke among correspondents in Beirut was, Middle East Television: Yesterday's News Tomorrow.

Until Operation Steeplechase got under way in April, the work Coleman was paid by CBN to do consisted mainly of training the Christian militia to run a TV station, called LBC, for the Christian enclave. This operation was backed by the Israelis, who were trying to set up a microwave link to feed video from Jerusalem to its agents inside Lebanon. But he was kept busy enough handling the huge volume of data from Asmar's cell, and servicing the drop for what was officially described as an in-country mobile training team (MTT) from 7th Brigade, Germany.

The drop was at Juicy-Burger, a hamburger stand run by an American couple known as Bonnie and Clyde at Dora, on the road between Jounieh and East Beirut.

"These Green Beret guys were supposedly advisers to the Lebanese Army [said Coleman], but they were really there to handle the wet jobs. If the politics had ever been right, they might have been used to rescue the hostages but the situation was always too sensitive, too precarious to risk using force. So they were simply there in case they were needed. They took care of loose ends. If there was anything for them, I'd take it over to Juicy-Burger and Sergeant-Major Duke, from 7th Brigade, would stop by for a hamburger and pick it up.

I remember one time I took in some special bullets that somebody needed. Six rounds in a coffee-can full of coffee with lead foil to beat the X-rays. Mercury-loaded or something, about .380 size shells hollowed out, with a wax tip. Couldn't help wondering what they were used for. But I'm happy I wasn't there when they were."


He was certainly there when the starting gate went up for Operation Steeplechase. On 22 April 1985, Coleman and office manager, Gushan Hashim, flew to Cannes to join Tim Robertson at a meeting in a private apartment with Pierre Dhyer, of the Christian Lebanese Forces militia; Mario Calero, representing the Contras, and a British agent from MI6 working undercover with the DIA.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a consignment of arms confiscated by the Israelis from the PLO and turned over to the pro-Israeli faction of the Lebanese Forces. The idea was to buy them secretly for the Contras and send them out to Honduras disguised as relief supplies on a ship chartered by CBN, but the problem was that the Hoobaka faction had declined a cash offer, preferring to exchange the weapons for an unspecified commodity to the value of $1.5 million, to be brokered by CIA asset Monzer al Kassar.

After an animated discussion, Hoobaka's terms were accepted in principle and the meeting adjourned, the CBN contingent to advise Oliver North with a view to setting the wheels in motion, and Coleman to advise DIA with a view to applying the brakes. Control responded by calling him to Frankfurt. On the strength of his report, the DIA had decided to scrap the whole vehicle.

'This CBN thing is getting to be a real pain in the ass.' Donleavy said.

He paused to light another in his endless chain of Merit cigarettes, brushing the stub ash off what could have been the same pair of double-knit trousers he had worn at their first meeting.

'So is Ollie North and that whole damn bunch of kooks and weirdoes. We got this lightbird colonel running around loose, telling two and three-star generals what to do, and they're getting pissed off about it. So don't be surprised if we pull his plug. Starting with this cockeyed deal with the Hoobaka bunch. We want you to close 'em out, old buddy. Nothing sudden, nothing dramatic -- we don't want to make waves. Just let it die from natural causes, okay? Let 'em get on with it, but from now on, things should start to go wrong.'

Early in June, al-Kassar flew out to Bogota, Colombia, on a Brazilian passport, No. CB5941792, in the name of Muce Sagy, one of several aliases. By prior arrangement, $1.5 million had been transferred from Oliver North's secret Contra fund at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in Panama to al Kassar's own BCCI account in Lima, Peru, which he held under the name of Pierre Abu Nader. From there, the money was credited to a BCCI account managed for one of the Colombian cocaine cartels by Frank Gerardo, a DEA informant, for the purchase of several hundred kilos of cocabase.

As Pierre Abu Nader, al-Kassar then returned to Europe on his Peruvian passport and subsequently reported on the success of his mission to North, who was then in Cyprus, staying in the ambassador's private apartment at the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia. Coleman observed him there on 15 June.

Two months later, on 17 August, the shipment of coca base arrived from Colombia aboard an East German freighter that put in to Tarbarja, Lebanon, an illegal narcotics port operated by the Hoobaka faction. The load was then taken by road to Zakorta, just east of Tripoli, processed into high-grade cocaine in the Hoobakas' own laboratories and passed through to its agents in Sofia, Bulgaria, en route to Monzer al-Kassar's distribution hub in Warsaw for bartering in the Eastern bloc.

On 23 August, Coleman reported to Control that the arms were to be loaded within ten days on the same freighter, which was now waiting to sail for Porto Lampura, Honduras, under the banner of the CBN's Central American relief programme, Operation Blessing.

The rest was up to Donleavy and the DIA, for by that time Coleman had so demoralized CBN headquarters with telex messages about Gushan Hashim and his colleagues stealing the store in Beirut that he knew it would take only one more serious shock, like preventing the arms from leaving Tarbarja, to bring the whole enterprise down. In accordance with instructions, he had ensured that the Lebanese would take the debacle philosophically, for they already had their cocabase and so would lose nothing by it, and that the Contra supporters would have to attribute the loss of the arms shipment, and of North's $1.5 million, to an act of God.

Meanwhile, Coleman had a pressing problem of his own. From the moment Donleavy gave North, Casey and CBN the thumbs down, Coleman had known that the days of his Beirut assignment were numbered. And now that he had found Mary-Claude, there was no way he was going to leave her in a war zone, not knowing when or if he could get back to her. The shelling had been bad that summer, and she had already had one narrow escape.

Coleman had been running around the city one day with Michael Franks when the bombardment became so heavy that he decided he should move the family down to the comparative safety of his beach chalet, which was sheltered to some extent from incoming fire by a number of tall apartment buildings. As the shells rained in from the Druze artillery, he drove through the winding streets of the quarter and found Mary-Claude hiding with her sisters in a neighbor's basement. Fifteen minutes after they left, the house took a direct hit and was virtually demolished.

But even the random brutality of the shelling provided the DIA with an opportunity for the kind of black humor enjoyed by the octopus. Coleman had been surprised to learn that Nabi Berri, boss of the Amal militia, held a resident alien's Green Card issued by the U.S. immigration authorities and owned five garages in the Detroit area.

"And yet here he was, in the middle of kidnapping U.S. citizens and up to his neck in the TWA 747 hijack and all that stuff. Berri really pissed us off. The problem was, what could we do to screw him without getting the U.S. involved in the civil war?

"Well, what we did was leak the trajectory coordinates of every house on Berri's street except his to militia factions Amal happened to be fighting at the time, including Hezbollah. And sure enough, every damn house in the neighborhood was hit except his. You can imagine what the neighbors thought. They went ape-shit. After that, nobody was going to mow his yard."

The incoming bombardment was less amusing, however, when Coleman himself seemed to be the target.

Mary-Claude was determined to have a proper wedding in a proper wedding dress at Christ the King, a beautiful, cathedral-sized church overlooking the sea. Equally determined to bring the marriage forward before his mine exploded under CBN, Coleman found himself faced with the usual string of time-consuming formalities, and prevailed upon her father Philippe to accompany him up to the monastery overlooking the city to seek a special dispensation from the bishop.

No sooner had they set out than shells started falling along the road, the barrage accompanying them half-way up the mountain. Taking their survival as a favorable omen, Coleman managed to convince the church hierarchy of his good intentions and they set off again down the mountain with the necessary dispensation, only to pick up the barrage where it had left off. Muttering prayers forgotten since childhood, he drove down the winding mountain road with Philippe, the shells still falling around them, and presented Mary-Claude with the necessary papers like a knight errant back from the Crusades with a trophy for his lady.

And only just in time. As Coleman had anticipated, CBN was finally panicked into acting on the reports he had been sending over about the reckless indiscretions of Hashim and his cronies in the Lebanese Forces. Fearing a major political scandal, the Robertsons ordered Coleman to close down the Beirut bureau at once and evacuate its equipment to Cyprus, abandoning the cache of arms on Tarbarja beach.

The shelling was then at its height, which at least spared him the complications of having to contend face to face with Hashim, who was hiding in his basement. But it did rather spoil the bride's toilette and the wedding party. Mary-Claude's hairdresser failed to get through, and except for Tony Asmar, only the immediate family were in the church when the bride and groom arrived in Range Rovers manned by Lebanese Forces militiamen armed with Kalashnikov rifles. The best man, hurriedly pressed into service at the last minute, was Michael Franks, alias Schafer, the OPS mercenary.

The Coleman's wedding night was spent in the chalet, with Tony Asmar's men tramping in and out delivering videotape machines, cameras and other equipment from the CBN office. At 5 a.m., trucks arrived to take all the boxes to the Jounieh docks, where they were loaded on the ferry to Larnaca, and as the sun came up, the happy couple watched the coast of Lebanon fade behind them in the morning haze. For Mary-Claude, it was the first time she had set foot outside Beirut's Christian enclave.

Following Donleavy's instructions, Coleman reported on arrival in Cyprus to Colonel John Sasser, the Department of Defense attache at the American Embassy in Nicosia. He was also debriefed by Micheal T. Hurley, the Drug Enforcement Administration attache, though without revealing his connection with the DIA. As far as Hurley knew, Coleman was an employee of CBN's who had been evacuated from Lebanon after the closure of its Beirut bureau.

At Donleavy's suggestion, Coleman then took Mary-Claude to Corfu for a two-week honeymoon before they went home to the United States to begin their married life in an apartment not far from James McCloskey's house in Timonium, Maryland.

Everything had gone according to plan. Fearful that his political ambitions, including a presidential candidacy, would be wrecked if CBN's connection with bartering drugs for guns on behalf of the Contras ever came to light, Pat Robertson lined up Gushan Hashim to take the rap, severed his connections with Colonel North, General Singlaub and their associates, and fired every non-believer who knew anything about it, including Coleman -- cushioning the blow with a $6000 severance check.

'Keep it,' said Donleavy, 'You did a great job, buddy. I want you to know that some very high-level people over here have asked me to thank you for a job well done. We rate the mission a major success. So take a couple of months off. Show Mary-Claude a good time. We're going to need you out there again after Christmas.'

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 11:03 pm
by admin
Chapter 9

Stalled by the higher priorities of Anglo-American diplomacy, the deliberate withholding of information by British and American intelligence agencies, and the seeming intransigence of the German BKA, the police investigation into the bombing of Flight 103 again ground to a halt in December 1989. In a newspaper interview marking the first anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Lord Fraser, conceded that 'we have not yet reached the stage where proceedings are imminently in prospect'. In other words, 'We know who did it but can't prove it in court.'

Touched by the general mood of frustration, he added that he had even thought of abandoning the hunt 'because we don't want to kid people that there is an active investigation if really policemen are just shuffling files around'. As a sop to 'serious public concern', he announced that a Fatal Accident Inquiry -- the Scottish equivalent of a coroner's inquest -- would be convened in the new year.

'Lord Fraser was initially opposed to such an inquiry,' wrote the Sunday Correspondent on 17 December, 'and his change of mind is indicative not only of intense pressure from victims' relatives but is also an admission that the inquiry, which has so far cost £7.75m, has reached a dead end. There is still no positive evidence to link the suspects firmly to the crime, although Lord Fraser did say in his interview that the investigation was in "a very active phase".'

George Esson, Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway, agreed. 'We are cautiously optimistic, based on the amount of evidence and information that we've already got, of identifying the culprits. Intelligence is one thing, but turning intelligence into hard evidence is quite another issue ... The gathering of the forensic evidence has been done, much of the analysis of that evidence has now been done. The obvious lines of inquiry are not exactly running out, but there's a limit to the time that can take and we are reaching that stage. You eventually exhaust the leads you have.'

Esson's caution and forbearance were remarkable, given that the investigation had become a political football. In the year since the disaster, his officers, led by Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr, had collected 12,402 names in the police computer at the Lockerbie Incident Centre, made 350 visits to 13 countries and launched inquiries in 39 others. (About the only people they had not talked to -- and never did -- were Juval Aviv and Lester Coleman.)

Otherwise, they had taken over 14,000 statements, logged about 16,000 items of personal property belonging to the victims, and taken some 35,000 photographs -- and the only solid lead they had left was a link between the bombing and four Palestinians who had just been convicted of terrorist crimes in Sweden.

One of them, Mahmoud Said al-Moghrabi, had confessed to the charges against him and, in so doing, had connected two of the others, Marten Imandi and Abu Talb, with the PFLP-GC cell in West Germany. Just before the BKA raids, Imandi's car, with Swedish licence plates, had been observed parked outside the bombers' apartment in Neuss, and in October 1988, Talb had visited Malta, bringing back samples of clothing that he told Ivloghrabi he intended to import from the island for Sweden's rag trade.

When the Swedish police raided Talb's apartment in May 1989, they found a calendar with a pencil ring around the fatal date, 21 December 1988, and when they returned later with the Scottish police on a second raid, they found some 200 pieces of clothing manufactured in Malta.

Reporting these developments in The Sunday Times, David Leppard, the most assiduous of the newsmen still working on the Lockerbie story, wrote:

Talb flew out of Malta on November 26 last year -- only three days after a man walked into a boutique in the tourist resort of Sliema and bought clothes which were later wrapped around the Pan Am suitcase bomb ... He also visited a flat in Frankfurt, West Germany, where the bomb was almost certainly built.

Talb is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the group Western intelligence believes was paid millions of dollars by the Iranians to carry out the Lockerbie bombing.


By now, Leppard was also convinced that the bomb had been put aboard Flight 103 in an unaccompanied suitcase sent via Air Malta to Frankfurt, an 'exclusive' printed two weeks earlier (after the extraordinary resurrection of the airport's computerized baggage lists), but the Observer was not so sure. 'The Maltese connection is the strongest lead so far in the search for the bombers,' the paper conceded, 'although there is nothing to support newspaper reports that the bomb itself originated on the island.'

It fell to David Leppard to close out the media's coverage of the disaster for 1989. On 17 December, under the headline 'Police close in on Lockerbie killers', he wrote:

Police now have the necessary evidence to charge suspects with the murder of 270 Lockerbie air disaster victims. After a series of exclusive disclosures over the past seven weeks, The Sunday Times understands that officers heading the investigation -- despite a cautious attitude in public -- have told their counterparts abroad that under Scottish law, charges are now possible against certain persons ...

The revelation ... was made at a secret summit in Meckenheim, West Germany, of the heads of security services involved in the inquiry from Britain, West Germany, America, Sweden and Malta.


A week later, on Christmas Eve 1989, he added: 'Police hunting the bombers of the Pan Am jet which blew up over Lockerbie last year have uncovered important new forensic evidence linking a group of suspected Palestinian terrorists in West Germany to the bombing.

'Ministry of Defence scientists now believe a white plastic residue recovered from the crash site is the same material as that in alarm clocks bought by the group at a shop in Neuss, near Dusseldorf, two months before the bombing,' Scottish detectives, Leppard went on, 'believe the white residue provides "a hard link" between the bombs found at Neuss and Frankfurt and the Lockerbie bomb'.

A year later, the same forensic evidence and a hitherto discounted CIA report of a secret meeting in Tripoli in 1988 would serve to pin the blame exclusively on the Libyans, as was then required by changes in Middle East policy, but on the first anniversary of the disaster, there was no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Lord Advocate when he insisted that 'Our commitment and determination to bring the evil perpetrators of this mass murder to justice continues undiminished.'

The same commitment had been expressed a few months earlier by President George Bush in setting up his Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, with instructions to report by 15 May 1990. This, too, was in response to public pressure for results in the Flight 103 investigation, and, like the promised Fatal Accident Inquiry in Scotland, was offered reluctantly, lest its findings should conflict with the politically acceptable solution required by London and Washington.

In Britain, the government managed to put off the Scottish hearings until October 1990, and even then, no evidence was to be offered that might prejudice possible extradition hearings, which covered pretty nearly everything. In Washington, where the appearance of openness in government is more highly prized, the necessary political constraints on the president's Commission were built in with the choice of its members. With Ann McLaughlin, Reagan's former secretary of labor, in the chair, it included four career politicians, among them a former secretary to the Navy, and a retired Air Force general.

Though empowered to call witnesses and to subpoena records, the Commission dutifully concentrated, not on the criminal investigation, but on Pan Am's security lapses in Frankfurt and London and on the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Administration. Even so, some revealing snippets emerged from the hearings. The panel learned, for example, from Raymond Smith, then deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the Soviet Union, that 80 per cent of the reservations made by Moscow embassy staff on Pan Am flights during the 1988 Christmas holidays were cancelled after the so-called Helsinki warning early in December.

'It named a carrier,' said Smith, 'It named a route. And it covered a time period when many Americans in Moscow would be going home for Christmas. Here, it seems to me, we have a moral obligation to let people know.'

On his responsibility, the warning was drawn to the attention, not only of diplomats, but of the entire American colony in Moscow. As Andrew Stephen wrote in the Observer, 'These revelations have helped to explain the mystery of why there were so many empty seats on Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York on 21 December 1988.'

Also significant were reports of a clash between testimony given under oath by Thomas Plaskett, Pan Am's chairman, and Raymond Salazar, security chief of the FAA. Some months before the disaster, the airline had decided to allow unaccompanied baggage aboard its international flights with an X-ray check instead of the physical search seemingly required under the rules. Plaskett testified that the FAA had agreed to this at a meeting with Pan Am's security chiefs, but Salazar denied that any such exemption had been given, dismissing Plaskett's testimony as 'not credible'.

Credible or not, when the FAA fined Pan Am $630,000 for violations of its rules in Frankfurt and London during a five-week period beginning on 21 December 1988, it did not cite the airline for failing to search unaccompanied baggage or for failing to reconcile interline baggage with interline passengers.

Stung by Salazar's denial, Pan Am promptly accused the FAA of engaging in a cover-up.

That was in April. On 16 May 1990 -- two weeks after Lester Coleman's arrest on a trumped-up charge -- the report of President Bush's commission was duly published, and duly spared Washington and London any further embarrassment in their diplomatic courtship of Syria. Stopping just short of pronouncing Pan Am guilty, the Commission found that the airline's security lapses, coupled with the FAA's failure to enforce its own regulations, were probably to blame for the disaster.

'The destruction of Flight 103 may well have been preventable,' its report concluded. 'Stricter baggage reconciliation procedures could have stopped any unaccompanied checked bags from boarding the flight [sic] at Frankfurt ...'' On the other hand, the commission could not 'say with certainty that more rigid application of any particular procedure actually would have stopped the sabotage'.

Its caution was justified, although clearly there had been plenty of room for improvement.

Until interline passengers checked in at Frankfurt (the report observed) Pan Am had no record of them, or their baggage, in its computer. Nevertheless, Pan Am personnel made no attempt to reconcile the number of interline bags being loaded into any plane with the number of bags checked by interline passengers who actually boarded the plane. Bags with distinctive interline tags were simply X-rayed on the baggage loading ramp, taken directly to the aircraft and loaded.

Pan Am employees did not determine whether any given interline bag loaded on to Flight 103 was accompanied by the passenger who presumably had checked it onto an earlier flight into Frankfurt or for that matter, whether that bag had ever been accompanied by any passenger.


In his book, On the Trail of Terror, published in 1991, David Leppard described that statement as 'a searing indictment' of the incompetence of Pan Am's security staff at Frankfurt in letting the bomb through, but the Commission itself was less damning. An FAA inspector checking on the airline's security arrangements in October 1988, had written in his report that 'the system, trying adequately to control approximately 4500 passengers and 28 flights per day, is being held together only by a very labour-intensive operation and the tenuous threads of luck'. Nevertheless, 'It appears the minimum (FAA) requirements can and are being met.'

Six months after the disaster, as the commission noted, FAA inspectors were generally less accommodating. In June 1989, one reported that while the security systems of four other U.S. carriers at Frankfurt were 'good', Pan Am's was 'totally unsatisfactory' -- so much so that 'all passengers flying out of Frankfurt on Pan Am are at great risk'.

This change of attitude by a Federal government agency before and after the disaster may or may not have been influenced by a change in the Federal government's political requirements before and after the disaster, but there were other inconsistencies also in the commission's report.

The bombing had occurred against a background of warnings that trouble was brewing in the European terrorist community and 'nine security bulletins that could have been relevant to the tragedy were issued between 1 June 1988 and 21 December 1988'. Elsewhere, however, the commission insisted that no warnings specific to Flight 103 and no information bearing on the security of civil aviation in general had been received by U.S. intelligence agencies from any source around that time.

The report also solemnly recorded the CIA's assurances that its agents had not gone to Lockerbie after the disaster, but stopped short of denying that at least two of them had been among the victims.

After reviewing the findings of its nine-month inquiry, the commission made over 60 recommendations for improving airline security in general, for revising the Warsaw Convention and overhauling the machinery of inter-agency cooperation. Most of these were sensible but some were mere sabre-rattling.

'National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means for defeating terrorism,' the report declared. It urged 'a more vigorous U.S. policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions ... These more vigorous policies should include planning and training for pre-emptive or retaliatory military strikes against known terrorist enclaves in nations that harbour them. Where such direct strikes are inappropriate, the commission recommends a lesser option, including covert operations to prevent, disrupt or respond to terrorist acts.

'Rhetoric is no substitute for strong, effective action,' it added, with a certain poignancy, for rhetoric was all the president's Commission had to offer in the changing circumstances of the Bush administration's Middle East policy. In deference to the government's requirements, there was no mention in its report of Syria or Iran or even Libya, or of any terrorist group known to be backed by any one of them. Nor was there any mention of drugs or drugs smuggling from Lebanon through Frankfurt to New York, Detroit and beyond. This was still the one component of the Lockerbie affair that had not been publicly addressed by the authorities but which, nevertheless, refused to go away.

After the flurry of excitement aroused by the discovery of a Swedish connection, the investigation had again stalled. Marten Imandi and Abu Talb, both sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorist activities in Scandinavia, steadfastly declined to assist the Scottish police in their inquiries, and although the circumstantial evidence against them remained strong, the lead petered out in yet another dead end.

Worse still, in June, the Swedish government moved to deport to Syria ten Palestinians it had picked up on suspicion of involvement with terrorism, including two who had been identified as associates of Dalkamoni and Khreesat. According to the BKA, these two had arrived in Germany from Syria and stayed at the PFLP-GC apartment in Neuss until a few days before it was raided in October 1988. Getting out just in time, Imandi had smuggled them into Sweden by car, where they had gone to ground near Uppsala. As one of the two had since been identified as a former Syrian intelligence officer, the Scottish police were naturally keen to interview them in the hope of establishing further connections between the bombers and PFLP-GC headquarters in Damascus.

Reporting this development in the Observer, on 17 June 1990, John Merritt wrote that

... anger at their imminent deportation will be increased by the revelation that their links with the West German terrorist cell found in possession of Lockerbie-type bombs, and their whereabouts, have been known to Western intelligence services for 18 months.

Sources close to the Swedish investigation said intelligence agents were tipped off about the men's movements since leaving Syria and the way in which they were smuggled into Sweden a few weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. And they cannot explain why they have been arrested only now -- just to be sent back to Syria ...

Swedish investigators are also convinced that there is intelligence information on 'several other suspects' with material important to the Lockerbie investigation currently living in Sweden. But there is 'a reluctance' on the part of intelligence sources to reveal details to the police inquiry.


Answering, in effect, the question of why the two were being sent back to safety in Syria to join Khreesat and the other West German cell members, and why Western intelligence sources were reluctant to cooperate with the police, Merritt concluded his report by observing that 'with the British government entering fresh negotiations with Syria, and Damascus signaling its interest in sending an ambassador to Washington, Swedish investigators were last week asking how much other information is being kept from the police inquiry for political reasons'.

The Scottish police had been asking the same question from day one of the investigation.

Two weeks after his Swedish report, Merritt drove yet another nail into the coffin prepared for Pan Am. On 1 July 1990, he wrote:

Fresh evidence from the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing indicates that the suitcase containing the bomb was allowed on the doomed Pan Am flight because of a failure to match baggage to passengers.

Within the last week, detectives have established that only one item of luggage, pieced together from the wreckage after one-and-a-half years of painstaking forensic work, cannot now be positively linked with a passenger from Flight 103. That item is the Samsonite suitcase which held the bomb.

The clear implication ... is that the beleaguered U..S airline broke American aviation security law ... Written procedures under the Federal Aviation Act expressly prohibited the U.S. carrier from transporting any baggage not matched with a passenger who boarded the flight.


This was not the first time the media had made that mistake -- the requirement at the time was that unaccompanied baggage should be searched before going aboard -- but, as Merritt accurately surmised, 'This development will greatly strengthen the case for families of the dead who are suing Pan Am.'

The following month, Saddam Hussein of Iraq occupied the neighbouring sheikdom of Kuwait, Syria declared itself on the side of the allied forces committed to rolling back the invasion, and from that moment on, nothing more was heard from official sources on either side of the Atlantic about Syrian complicity in the Flight 103 bombing.

'The Syrians took a bum rap on this,' declared President Bush, pointing the Anglo-American finger at Libya, which was now to be solely to blame for taking advantage of Pan Am's "wilful misconduct' at Frankfurt airport.

Everything seemed safely wrapped up, except for the almost universal scepticism which greeted the news that the Libyans were the culprits and the still persistent rumours of drug smuggling via Pan Am flights from Frankfurt.

With half-buried Syrian tanks guarding the poppy fields of the Bekaa Valley; with the Syrian President's brother, Rifat Assad, controlling the production and export of Lebanese heroin to the United States; with the Syrian arms and drugs dealer, Monzer al- Kassar, identified as Assad's marketing manager, and with al-Kassar inextricably linked with Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC and other Syrian and Iranian-backed terrorist groups, any serious suggestion that drug smuggling through Cyprus and Frankfurt to the United States had been in progress during December 1988, could only re-implicate Syria and thereby undo all the good work of disinformation and obfuscation carried out by the octopus.

In the national interest, anybody promoting any such idea had to be severely discouraged.

On 25 September 1990, Marshall Lee Miller introduced his client, Lester Coleman, to Pan Am's attorneys in Washington, and dropped out of sight.

Coleman neither saw nor heard from him again.

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 11:03 pm
by admin
Chapter 10

Having successfully worked himself out of the job of CBN's Beirut correspondent, Coleman went back to the Middle East in December 1985, as Condor Television Ltd., a one-man production company with an 'office' in the Kastantiana hotel, Larnaca, Cyprus.

Set up by his guru, James McCloskey, as an offshore Gibraltar corporation, with bank accounts (Nos. 00569798 and 02843900) at the First American Bank of Maryland (a BCCI subsidiary), Condor was to be Coleman's front for resuming control of Tony Asmar's network of agents in Lebanon.

As before, his duties were to direct and evaluate the flow of intelligence data, channel it back to the DIA in Washington, and act as paymaster for what was now by far the most valuable Western intelligence asset in the Middle East. To avoid any possibility of its being compromised by payments traceable to the DIA, Coleman used Visa traveller's cheques drawn on BCCI, Luxembourg. These were delivered to him by DHL, the international courier company, in shipments containing ten packets of ten unsigned $100 cheques. Every month, Asmar's secretary would take the Sunboat from Jounieh to Larnaca to collect the payroll from Coleman for distribution within the network, each cell member then signing his cheques and counter-signing them on presentation to a Lebanese bank for payment.

No sooner had he set up these new procedures than Coleman was summoned to the American Embassy in Nicosia by the Department of Defense attache, Col. John Sasser, to whom he had reported on leaving Beirut as a CBN 'refugee' a few months earlier. Although Donleavy had told him to stay clear of American officials overseas in case they were under surveillance by foreign intelligence agencies, Coleman assumed that Sasser had cleared the meeting with Control and drove up from Larnaca to keep the appointment, expecting to be briefed on some unexpected emergency, Instead, Sasser showed him a home videotape of a Hezbollah demonstration in Beirut and asked if he could identify anybody.

Annoyed that his cover might have been jeopardized for such a trivial reason, Coleman left Sasser's office with the intention of coding an immediate complaint to Donleavy -- only to run into Micheal T. Hurley on the stairway. This was even more embarrassing, for Donleavy's strictures about keeping away from the embassy had focused particularly on the risks of associating with the Drug Enforcement Administration's 'cowboys', the DIA's contempt for the CIA under William Casey being exceeded only by its detestation of the DEA.

Greeting Coleman like an old friend, although they had met only once before, Hurley said Sasser had told him about Condor Television and its plans for covering events in Lebanon, and how about joining him for lunch? As much to find out how much Sasser had told him as to learn what Hurley was up to, Coleman agreed, and over a sandwich from the embassy canteen in Hurley's basement office, discovered that the DEA attache was trying to put together a videotape documenting narcotics production in the Bekaa Valley.

'Think you can help us out with that?' Hurley asked, 'You got anybody over there can shoot some pictures for us?'

'Well, I don't know,' said Coleman cautiously. 'We're just setting up here -- we don't have much equipment or anything yet. Why don't I get back to you when I have this thing up and running?'

When he reported this encounter to Control, Donleavy hit the roof and summoned him to Frankfurt,

They had met there before for face-to-face debriefings during Operation Steeplechase, and the routine was always the same. Coleman would check into the Sheraton airport hotel and call a contact number, identifying himself as Benjamin B, and almost immediately, Donleavy would call back.

"Howyadoin', buddy?' (He always called Coleman 'buddy'.) 'Have a good trip? Here's what I want you to do. In exactly thirty-five minutes, I want you to leave and go to the airport terminal. Take the escalator down to the lower level. Get on the train and get off at the third [or fourth or fifth] stop. Cross over and go back two [or three or four] stops. Get off, cross over again and come on in to the Meinhof. Get off, go through the gate, and I'll meet you, okay?'

'Okay?' Coleman shakes his head at the memory of it.

Like hell I was okay. Two stops, did he say? Is this the right train? I could have wound up in Wiesbaden for all I knew. But I'd get off at the Meinhof, looking straight ahead and keep on walking and I'd feel this presence move up beside me. In a trenchcoat. 'Hey, buddy,' he'd say, and get real animated. 'How's everything? How's Mary-Claude?' And there we were, two friends coming off the train together.

After leaving the station, we'd just walk around for ten or fifteen minutes, doubling back on our tracks, heading in through the lobby of a big hotel and straight out again through the rear entrance, until finally we'd come to some itty-bitty hotel in a back street with a desk in the hallway, and we'd do the elevator routine. Up to the fifth floor, then walk down to the third, where he'd taken a couple of rooms. It was always the same with him. I used to call it the spook walk.

And once we got there, the routine was always the same. We'd have a drink. He'd chain-smoke a couple of Merits while we chatted about what had happened since our last meeting and then he'd hand me over to the guy in the room next door for a routine polygraph. Happened every three or four months. 'See you later,' he'd say, and often it was five or six hours later. There would be the guy with the black box in a suitcase and the chair facing the wall that I would sit in while he sat in a chair behind me. He'd fit the electrodes to my fingers, a band around my chest and a blood-pressure gauge to my left arm and then we'd go at it, heat full up, windows closed, sweating like pigs because that was supposed to make the polygraph more accurate.

Same questions over and over again. A lot of them related to the data I'd been passing but also he'd want to know who I'd been talking to. Had I been in contact with officials of other governments? Any close contacts with foreign nationals? If so, when, how and why? The whole thing was designed to smoke out double agents, to make sure you hadn't gone over and started to work for the other side. I didn't mind. Seemed like a sensible precaution to me. After that, I'd take a shower, we'd have a meal sent up, get a good night's sleep, and start fresh in the morning.


Donleavy had thought seriously about the chance encounter with Hurley, and, on balance, had decided that they might turn it to account, although ...

He was mad at Sasser for calling me in [Coleman remembers]. 'In future, if he wants to know anything,' Donleavy said, 'he can go through channels.' And as it looked like Sasser had told Hurley something about me, Control passed the word that I had handled some contract work for the Defense Department in the past, just minor stuff, but that it was all finished now.

'So if Hurley asks you again if you can do something for him,' he said, 'tell him, okay. Otherwise he's going to get suspicious. But you don't tell him Condor is a DIA operation or let him think you're with DIA HUMINT. And under no circumstances do you tell him about any assets we have in place in Lebanon. If he wants to know who your contacts are over there, make 'em up.' 'Fine,' I said. 'And I'm going to have to make up the cameras and equipment, too, because we don't have any.'

'That's all right, buddy,' he said. 'Just string him along until we get things squared away. There could be a positive spin to it because now you can keep an eye on Hurley for us. We've been picking up some bad vibes on that guy. But watch yourself. That whole bunch is into cowboys and Indians. Just don't get too close.'


Returning to Cyprus on 16 February, Coleman engineered another meeting with Hurley and told him Condor would be glad to do what it could to help.

'Hey, that's great,' Hurley said. 'We heard some good things about you -- and you'll find we pay better than the military. We got all kinds of people shooting stuff for us out there. Mostly media people, so you probably know 'em already. One way or another, we get to see most of their stuff before it gets Stateside. So pass the word to your guys. Tell 'em we'll buy anything they can get on narcotics. People. Places. Labs. Illegal ports. We want the whole picture. And here's a few bucks to grease a few palms.'

Signed up as a 'contract consultant', Coleman was paid $4000 in the next two months for supplying Hurley with absolutely nothing. His 'guys' in Lebanon, the Asmar network, were not to be risked on routine intelligence for the DEA, and Coleman had no other contacts there that he cared to expose to the Syrian-backed heroin cartel in the Bekaa Valley.

"Donleavy was right [Coleman says]. They were cowboys. Rock'n' roll cowboys, with beards, long hair, leather boots and jeans -- the embassy people couldn't stand them. Not their sort of bridge partners at all. And to see 'em hanging out upstairs with the spooks in their tennis shorts -- God, what a picture. America in action overseas.

But Hurley was no fool. At first sight, he was the kind of big, bull-headed Irish-American you'd expect to see in a blue uniform directing traffic, but he had Cyprus pretty much in his pocket and was planning to retire there after he'd put in his twenty years. He was shrewd, in a self-serving way, and friendly enough. But if anybody crossed him, or if he thought the embassy establishment was trying to put him down, he'd stand on his desk and raise hell.

He was always screaming about how they dumped on him. How he had the worst office space in the building, and the worst housing of all the embassy staff. When Hurley got off on one of his tirades, Danny Habib, his number two, would stand in the doorway and roll his eyes, and Connie, his secretary, a typical career civil service type, would cluck around like a mother hen. 'Now, Mike, don't do that. Get off the desk. You just cool down now, you hear me?'

But nobody could tell Hurley what to do. Not Connie, not me and certainly not anybody in Washington. They were all assholes at DEA headquarters, according to Hurley. They'd never understood him or what he was trying to do, he once told me. That was in the beginning, during our honeymoon period. But after two months and $4000 and still nothing to show for it, he was getting a little hacked off at Condor Television."


Control came to the rescue. On 4 April 1986, Coleman was summoned to Frankfurt for another 'spook walk' and polygraph.

'How long since you were in Libya?' Donleavy asked, once the formalities were over.

Coleman shook his head. 'You probably know better than me,' he said. 'Not for years. Not since the late sixties.'

'Well ... Hasn't changed much. Think you can find your way around Tripoli?'

'I guess so. I still know some people there anyway. Why? What's going on?'

Donleavy seemed not to hear. 'Do you have a way to get in?' he asked. 'Or do we need to set something up? There isn't much time.'

'Well, I wouldn't want to use Condor. I mean, I still don't have any cameras or gear, do I?' It was getting to be a sore point. 'How about as a newsman? I can probably get freelance credentials. There's a couple of radio people I can call.'

'Okay. Sounds good. But get right on it, buddy. Because when I say go, I want you gone.'

He closed his briefcase. The meeting was over.

Coleman laughed. 'You mean, I'm not supposed to know why I'm going?'

Donleavy sat down again and lit another Merit. He had the air of a man about to break a rule of a lifetime.

'You're going in there to observe the effect of Operation El Dorado Canyon,' he said.

Coleman waited, but that was all. 'Okay. So what the hell's El Dorado Canyon?'

'We're going to give Gaddafi a slap,' said Donleavy. 'Maybe take him out.'

'No shit.' Coleman whistled. 'What's he done now?'

Control shrugged. 'They reckon the disco bombing was enough.'

'In West Berlin? The Libyans didn't do that.'

'I know,' said Donleavy.

Coleman flew back to Cyprus on 6 April to rejoin Mary-Claude in Larnaca. She was particularly glad to see him as she had just been told she was pregnant.

The next day, finding it difficult to concentrate on anything as mundane as a punitive airstrike against Gaddafi, he called Evelyn Starnes, managing editor of Mutual Radio, in Arlington, Virginia. Ms. Starnes, who had once worked for him in the news department of WSGN Radio in Birmingham, Alabama, agreed at once that he should cover pending events in Libya for Mutual Radio and promised to get the necessary credentials to him within 48 hours. He then called his father, now living in retirement at Lake Martin, and got the name of a former Libyan engineering colleague, whom Coleman immediately telexed, saying he was coming out for a visit.

Control said all that was just fine, and to stand by for instructions.

On 16 April, Coleman met Donleavy in Zurich for a last-minute briefing. His mission was now critically important, he was told, because the CIA had pulled its operatives out of Tripoli in advance of the attack. Never mind that they might have tipped off Gaddafi by doing so, there was nobody now left on the ground to report back directly to the United States government on the effects of the bombing. It was all up to Coleman.

Well, thanks, he said. Libya was a big country. Expect him back in six months.

He could have three days, Donleavy said. They were not so much interested in damage assessment. They could do that by satellite. What the bird couldn't do was measure the impact of the raid on Libyan morale. How would the population react? Would its response be positive or negative? If Gaddafi survived, would it weaken or strengthen his position as leader? Would the bombing succeed as a deterrent, discouraging popular support for terrorism, or would it provoke a desire for revenge? Coleman's job was to get out on the streets and talk to people, to come back with a feel for what the bombing had achieved.

Donleavy posed these questions as if, like Coleman, he knew what the answers were already.

In the wake of the F-111s that had flown out from their British bases to bomb targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, Mutual Radio's correspondent arrived on the scene on 17 April with a laissez passer from the Libyan Consulate in Zurich. He had no difficulty getting in. Mourning the death of his adopted daughter in the raid, Gaddafi was inviting the world to come and see what the Americans had done to him.

After dutifully inspecting the destruction at the El Azziziya barracks, where the Libyan leader lived, at the port of Sidi Balal and at Tripoli airport, as well as the damage done to the French Embassy and to civilian homes adjoining the target areas, Coleman left the media pack clamouring for phone lines at the El Khebir hotel or doing 'stand-ups' on the roof and went off on his own. (To avoid getting bogged down with routine reporting at the expense of his DIA mission, he had telexed Ms. Starnes from Zurich to say he had been denied entry, a diplomatic untruth that still gives him a twinge when he thinks of it.)

Luckily, his father's former colleague at Esso Libya invited Coleman to stay with him, for there had seemed a pretty obvious danger in starting a cold canvas of opinion so soon after the raid. Feeling was running high in the city against the American 'butchers'. Whatever internal dissent there might have been had clearly been silenced by a unifying sense of outrage over the city's 37 dead. Coupled with a wave of popular sympathy for Gaddafi as a bereaved father, resentment at what was seen as Washington's bully-boy tactics appeared to have rallied the Libyans behind him with a solidarity he had rarely enjoyed before.

Networking out through the families and friends of Libyans he knew, talking to people in their homes, in coffee shops, in the markets and on the streets, Coleman met no one prepared to acknowledge even the smallest justification for the American action. From all that he heard, it was clear that Gaddafi's position had been secured for him in a way that his palace guard and secret police could never have managed on their own. Any question of a coup or a move towards popular democracy had been snuffed out.

With his knowledge of Arab ways, Coleman was not surprised. What did surprise him a little, and which argued a political maturity that even sensitive Western observers were sometimes inclined to overlook, was that, in three days of systematic canvassing of Libyan opinion, he encountered little or no personal hostility. The anger and resentment expressed at every level, from street vendor to middle-class intellectual, was almost entirely directed at Washington, not at him as an individual American. It was almost as if they considered him to be as much a victim of his government as they were of theirs, as if he could no more be held responsible for Reagan's actions than they could for Gaddafi's.

He told all this to Donleavy on his return to Zurich on 19 April. They talked for hours, and as he piled on the detail in his report, so Donleavy became ever more thoughtful and preoccupied.

'Okay, buddy,' he said eventually. 'Send Hurley a postcard. Tell him you're not coming back.'

'Say again?'

'Deactivate yourself. I need you back home for a spell.'

'Okay. But why don't I tell him myself? I can call from Larnaca.'

'No, no. I want you to head right on out of here to D.C. We got a lot of debriefing to do.'

'Now, wait a minute, Bill,' Coleman protested. 'What about Mary-Claude? I can't just leave her behind. She's pregnant.'

'Sure.' Donleavy nodded. 'So give her a break. This way, she can take her time packing your stuff and follow on when she's good and ready.' He checked his watch. 'Call her. You got an hour. If you get your ass in gear, you can make it out of here tonight.'

'Hold on, Bill. What about Tony Asmar? I can't just leave him high and dry either. We got a shit-load of stuff coming through about the hostages.'

'I know, buddy, but this is more important. Call Mary-Claude and write Hurley goodbye. You'll find your ticket downstairs by the time you check out.'

Coleman sighed.

'Come to think of it,' said Donleavy, 'maybe it's not too smart to get a U.S. entry stamp in your passport right after this. You better fly back via Canada and go in on your Leavy I.D.'

Donleavy tried to make up for it later by arranging a champagne thank-you weekend for the Colemans at the DIA's expense in an exclusive little Georgetown hotel, but by then they were almost too tired to enjoy it. Mary-Claude's pregnancy had been troublesome from the start, even without the stress of a month's separation and having to cope by herself with the move back from Cyprus, and Coleman was exhausted from a grueling month of detailed debriefings by a stream of DIA officers and analysts at an assortment of Ramada Inns in the Baltimore/Washington area.

He was also for the first time vaguely troubled about the DIA's priorities in the Middle East, particularly with respect to the Western hostages in Beirut. As far as Donleavy and his masters were concerned, clearly nothing was more important than preserving the integrity of Tony Asmar's network of agents in Lebanon. They were Washington's eyes and ears.

"We could have gotten the hostages out any damn time we wanted to [Coleman insists], but nobody was willing to rock the boat with a rescue operation. We knew where they were. We knew who their guards were. We knew what they had for lunch. We knew when and where they were going to be moved before their guards did. But the DIA wouldn't risk any action based on information that might have been traced back to one of Asmar's people. If we'd blown the network because of the hostages we would have left ourselves blind in the middle of a minefield. So there had to be another way. And it was in trying for another way that the CIA let in people like Monzer al-Kassar and, without meaning to, set up the whole Lockerbie scenario.

One of the factors that led me to sign up with the DIA was the idea that I might be able to do something for my friend Jerry Levin, who had been taken hostage in Beirut by Hezbollah, but as it happened he was released before I got out there. He and I had met in Birmingham, Alabama, while he was news director of WBRC TV and I was news director of WSGN radio. When he landed the job of Beirut bureau chief for Cable News Network, I remember I said to a colleague that if Jerry was ever taken hostage, his kidnappers would probably wind up paying CNN to take him back -- and I was only half wrong. He had a wicked tongue when roused and could talk a blue streak. The story going around at the time was that he had ticked off the Lebanese bureau staff to the point where they sold him to Hezbollah for a bit of peace and quiet!

Officially, he was supposed to have escaped by sliding down bedsheets from an upper window, but the truth is that CNN's vice president, Ed Turner -- no relation to Ted Turner -- had to pay a hefty ransom for him. The deal was set up by Ghazi Kenaan, Syria's head of security in Beirut, who naturally took his cut off the top.

Another wave of kidnappings began soon after I got out there in 1985. Terry Anderson was taken, then Brian Keenan and John McCarthy in Apri1 1986, followed by Terry Waite in January 1987.

Waite was a special case, of course. It's no secret now that he hooked up with Oliver North and Bill Casey of the CIA in an effort to trace the hostages -- all of them unaware that the DIA, through Tony Asmar's network, already knew where they were. North wanted to have Waite wired to keep track of his movements electronically, but Waite, very sensibly, refused. So naturally they went ahead and did it anyway, without Waite's knowledge. Before he left Larnaca airport on a U.S. Navy helicopter for the hop over to the American Embassy in East Beirut, his briefcase was rigged with a microchip Gigaherz transmitter no bigger than a butter biscuit.

That was stupid, and typical of North's cowboy mentality. As soon as Waite vanished, the trail went cold, because the first thing his kidnappers did was separate him from his briefcase.

It took Tony Asmar a month to find out where he was. Islamic Jihad had stashed Waite in the basement car park of a four-storey building in Baalbeck, in the Bekaa Valley. After that, they moved him to a building near Rue Michelle Boutros, and later on to the cellars of two different hospitals in West Beirut, both of them supplied by Tony's company, AMA Industries.

These hospitals were funded by Iran to treat battle casualties -- Hezbollah, Amal militiamen and Syrian troops, depending on who happened to be fighting whom at the time -- and they were ideal places for holding hostages. Not only Waite, but Anderson, McCarthy, Keenan, Mann and most of the others were also hidden there at various times, housed underground on two soundproofed levels. There were reliable supplies of electrical power, food and water, and if anybody got ill, help was available just upstairs.

The hostages were also pretty well protected from the fighting in the city. After all, who was going to bomb or attack a hospital? And when it came to moving them around, who was going to take any notice of vehicles coming and going from a hospital? The set-up was perfect.

It was even good enough to ease the conscience of the people on our side who decided to leave them where they were. If the hostages were reasonably safe and reasonably well cared for, why jeopardize our policy and priorities in the Middle East by trying to rescue them by force? An armed raid on a hospital was bound to cause an international outcry, particularly if we came out empty-handed.

Even so, Waite had everybody worried. I remember one time I reported that he had developed a cough and back came a directive that we should try to make an audio recording of it. Can't imagine why. Maybe somebody in the Pentagon figured they could find out how ill he was just by listening to it. Another time they asked if the hospital had taken delivery of a large bed. The Lebanese being quite short and Waite being quite tall, I guess they thought that this would show if Islamic Jihad was treating him right.

With his respiratory problem, he was lucky they didn't move him much. As I recall, they took him out in a refrigerator once, but the usual method with the hostages was to wrap them in blankets or carpet, strapped up with grey plumber's tape, cover them in sheets, then wheel them out in the middle of the night and stuff them in a van or the boot of a car for the journey. Before, during and after each move, the signals would really fly between us and Washington. We had to keep tabs on Waite at all times.

Not so with John McCarthy. The Brits' attitude was, well, he was a journalist. He had been warned the night before not to attempt to go to the airport but had done so anyway. The impression we got was that they thought it was pretty much his own fault. Like Anderson, Keenan and the others, he was a low priority. If it hadn't been for Jill Morrell and the people at WTN, London would have left him to rot.

All the noise being made about the hostages at that time was just political rhetoric. Nobody could move in those Beirut sectors without the consent of the Syrian occupying forces. If the Syrians had not permitted Hezbollah to have a presence in the southern suburbs of Beirut, there would have been no Iranian presence there. When the Syrians said, 'We don't know where the hostages are but we'll be glad to help locate them,' all they had to do was pick up the phone. Never mind what the U.S. government says or what the public thinks -- that's how it worked. The hostages could not have been held for ten minutes without Syrian permission.

General Ghazi Kenaan, commander of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, was on top of every move the whole time. How do I know that? Because we had somebody living in his house. Because he was screwing one of Tony Asmar's Filipino operatives.

The truth is the hostages were cynically exploited by both sides for political and tactical purposes. Okay, so we couldn't afford to compromise the Asmar network with a rescue operation, but there was another reason, too, why we had to leave them where they were. We needed to keep Hafez Assad, the Syrian president, in place. He's probably the most astute politician in the Middle East, and we knew we could do business with him.

If we'd upset his applecart in busting out the hostages, then the radical fundamentalists might easily have taken over in Syria and given us a much worse problem. So, well before the Gulf War, when he turned out to be a useful counterpoise to Saddam Hussein, Assad was serving our purpose by keeping Ayatollah Khomeini quiet. Much easier for us to deal with a conniving, self-serving bastard like Assad than try to cope with a religious fanatic. Those were the priorities. The hostages had to stay where they were, and we had to play the game. But I can't say I enjoyed it."


After their weekend in Georgetown, the Colemans moved in to his family's lakeside cottage at Lake Martin, near Auburn, Alabama, to await his next assignment. Donleavy kept in touch by telephone, sometimes talking to Coleman's father by mistake as they both sounded very much alike.

'My Dad would say to Donleavy, "I think you want to talk to the other Les." Then he would hold the phone out to me and say, loud enough for Donleavy to hear, "Hey, it's the spook."

Although the DIA clearly had plans for him, it was evidently in no hurry to send him back to the Middle East. That summer, Donleavy arranged for Coleman to enroll for graduate study, with a teaching assistantship, at Auburn University, one of the many land-grant universities involved in secret government research. No one at the university was to know of his DIA connection, and to avoid any written record that might compromise his cover, Donleavy arranged for him to be paid during this period with American Express money orders drawn at 7-11 stores around Falls Church, Virginia.

On 31 August 1986, just three weeks before the Fall Term was due to begin, Donleavy called from Washington and told him he had to make an urgent trip to Lebanon.

'No way,' said Coleman. 'Mary-Claude is due in four weeks. I can't take her with me and I can't leave her here, so forget about it, Bill. I'm just not available until the baby's born.'

'I know how you feel, buddy. And I wouldn't ask you if we didn't have a real serious problem here. If there was anybody else we could send, I would, you know that. But it'll only take a couple of days.'

'Bill --

'Listen, I don't want to talk about it on the phone. Come on up here, and we'll work something out.'

On 3 September they met for dinner at the Day's Inn on Jeff Davis Highway in Crystal City, Virginia.

'Sorry to do this to you, buddy,' Donleavy said. 'But we got a national emergency on our hands with your name on it.'

'Bill, I'd like to help you out but --

'Well, we just don't have a lot of choice here. You'll be back in a week, I guarantee you. And Mary-Claude'll be just fine. Maybe you can get somebody to move in with her for a couple of days. Family, maybe.'

'Now wait a minute, Bill --

'We got you on a flight out of Dulles via Heathrow the day after tomorrow. That'll get you back here by the fourteenth.'

'That's not a week. That's ten days.'

'At the latest. Cut a few corners, and you can maybe pick up a day or two along the way.'

'Well, that depends on what you want me to do, doesn't it?'

Donleavy chuckled. 'You're going to like this one. But eat your steak. I'll tell you about it in the morning.'

This was the military. Orders were orders. Coleman ate his steak.

Next morning, Donleavy came up to his room to lay out the assignment.

'Two things,' he said. 'First, you're going to get the video equipment you want for Condor and take it out there. Tony Asmar's lined up a couple of people in Beirut to shoot some pictures for us near the airport. When they're through doing that, bring the equipment out again and come on home with the videotape.'

'Okay. Good.' Coleman looked at him curiously. A national emergency? 'So where is it? This equipment.'

'Here's what you do.' Donleavy opened his briefcase and placed an envelope on the bed. 'There's twenty-two hundred dollars. That'll buy you a Sony video system from Errol's Video Supply Store in Falls Church. Take a cab, have it wait for you, and you'll be back here in an hour.'

Coleman shook his head. But for his trust in Donleavy, he would have dropped out at this point, military or no military.

'You said two things. What's the other?'

'I'll tell you when you get back.'

An hour later, Coleman returned to the hotel with the Sony system from Errol's. He produced the receipt, Donleavy carefully itemized the equipment on a small yellow legal pad and Coleman signed for it with his code name, Benjamin B.

'Okay,' said Donleavy, putting the pad away in his briefcase. 'You're all set. Now here's the national emergency.'

He produced a Mattel Speak 'n' Spell toy computer, and Coleman sat down slowly.

'What the fuck is this? Some kind of joke?'

'No joke, buddy.' Donleavy was deadly serious. 'I want you to take this out to Tony Asmar.'

'Come on, Bill. Are you kidding me? I'm risking my marriage for this?'

'Remember a year ago?' Donleavy said. 'When you pulled the plug on CBN and the Contra deal? Well, this is it. The bottom line. This is where you get to wrap the whole thing up.'

'With that?'

'Yep.' He patted the toy. 'You got a little something extra in there.'

'Great.' Coleman weighed it in his hand suspiciously. 'It's not going to blow up on me, is it?'

'Nothing like that. We put in an extra chip, that's all. When you sit down with Tony, punch in your code word, he'll punch in his, and you'll retrieve the data we loaded in. He'll know what to do with it.'

'Oh, God. Suppose I forget the code word. You know what I'm like with those things.'

'You won't forget this one. You're from the South. What's the Southern slang word for peanut?'

'You mean, goober?'

Donleavy beamed.

Next day, Coleman flew to Heathrow with the camera equipment and the Mattel Speak 'n' Spell, arriving on the morning of 6 September. From there, he took a direct flight to Larnaca, Cyprus, and after four hours' sleep, caught the midnight ferry to Jounieh. Asmar's fiancee, Giselle, Mary-Claude's sister, met him off the boat, and as it was now Sunday, they joined the family for lunch at their house in Sarba.

On Monday, 8 September, Coleman got to work with Asmar in his office at Karintina. After testing the video equipment, they sent Asmar's volunteer cameramen off to start shooting the locations Control had specified in the western sectors of Beirut, places where, Coleman assumed, the hostages were being held. They then put the Speak 'n' Spell on Asmar's desk, set it up in accordance with the maker's instructions, and punched in their code words.

Out poured a detailed account of visits made by Robert McFarlane and Lt-Col. Oliver North to Iran, traveling on Irish passports, to organize the sale of TOW missiles and launchers to the Iranian government in exchange for the release of American hostages; details of money transfers and bank accounts, with dates and places -- most of it based on incidents and conversations that could only have been known to the Iranian or American negotiators.

'My God,' said Coleman. He had known North was seriously out of favour at the Pentagon, but here was another glimpse into the pit. 'What are you supposed to do with this stuff?'

Asmar looked at him soberly, and Coleman did not press the point.

He left Beirut with the camera equipment and videotapes on 11 September, arriving back in Cyprus on the 12th. Next day, he flew to Heathrow, and after an overnight stop in London, traveled on to Montreal, and from there, as Thomas Leavy, to Baltimore Washington International airport, where he checked in, as instructed, at the Ramada Inn. Donleavy, accompanied this time by another agent, arrived there early next morning, the 15th, for a full day's debriefing, and that night Coleman headed south for Alabama to rejoin Mary-Claude at the Lake Martin cottage.

On the 23rd, he began his postgraduate studies as a teaching assistant at Auburn University, and on 2 October, also on schedule, Mary-Claude presented him with a daughter, Sarah.

Meanwhile, one of Asmar's operatives had delivered the Speak 'n' Spell material to a relative who worked for Al Shiraa, Beirut's pro-Syrian Arabic-language news magazine. When the story ran on 3 November, it was picked up at once by the Western media, touching off an international scandal of such embarrassing proportions that President Reagan was forced to act. On 25 November 1986, he fired North, accepted the resignation of Rear-Admiral John Poindexter, McFarlane's successor as National Security Adviser, and spent the rest of his administration trying to dodge the political fallout from Irangate.

'Most people assumed it was the Iranians who blew the whistle on North, McFarlane and Poindexter,' Coleman says. 'Some even said it was the Russians who leaked the story after the failure of the Reykjavik summit. But it wasn't. It was the Pentagon. It was the DIA. It was me, with my little Speak 'n' Spell.'

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 11:12 pm
by admin
Chapter 11

Pan Am was getting a bad press -- rightly so for its slovenly security at Frankfurt, but wrongly so for its attempts to establish the truth of how the bomb got aboard. While the general presumption was that its negligence had let the terrorists through, the intelligence indications were that its security arrangements -- good, bad or indifferent -- had been bypassed.

In its sympathy for the families of the victims, the public was inclined to forget that any passenger aircraft with the Stars and Stripes on its tail would have served as a target as well as another. To that extent, Pan Am, its insurance underwriters and the 16 members of the Pan Am crew were also victims of an act of war against the United States.

It would therefore have followed civilized custom if the government of the United States had sought both to relieve the burden of the disaster on all those affected by it and to pursue and punish those responsible. But for reasons of its own, Washington in the end did neither. It sought, first, to exonerate itself from any general or particular blame for the tragedy and, second, to temper the pursuit of justice, for victims and murderers alike, with considerations of political expediency.

This failure to respond appropriately not only called the government's good faith into question, opening the way to all kinds of lurid speculation about its actions and motives, but further victimized Pan Am. No matter what the deficiencies were in its security arrangements at Frankfurt, the airline and its insurers were at least entitled to prepare their best defence against a charge of wilful misconduct. But with all the relevant documents and witnesses controlled by a government determined to evade any suggestion of responsibility for what had happened, no adequate defence was possible. Pan Am was delivered to the courts hamstrung, bankrupt and ripe for dispatch as a scapegoat.

When James M. Shaughnessy came to the case, ten days after the disaster, certain agents of the government already knew how and where the bomb had been placed on Flight 103. But it was soon evident that the government was not about to share any of its information or, indeed, to cooperate with Pan Am in any meaningful way. From day one, at a political level, the purpose of the investigation was, not to uncover the facts, but to 'prove' that Pan Am was to blame for letting the terrorists through.

Left with no choice but to accept the responsibility or to pursue its own independent inquiries, the airline instructed Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives to prepare its defence and to investigate the suggestions of government complicity that were already coming to light. If Washington was determined to show that Pan Am's deficiencies were solely to blame for the bombing, Pan Am's only defence was to show that Washington was at least equally at fault.

The telephone call on 29 December 1988, between Michael F. Jones, of Pan Am Corporate Security in London, and Phillip Connelly, assistant chief investigation officer of H.M. Customs and Excise, was the first substantial lead that Shaughnessy had to work with. With the methodical professionalism of a former detective sergeant with 20 years' experience in London's Metropolitan Police, Jones had made a full note of a conversation in which Connelly asked, 'Have you considered a bag switch at Frankfurt?'

A subsequent call, also noted down in detail at the time, established that before the disaster Connelly had attended a meeting in Frankfurt between various agencies monitoring a drug-trafficking operation through the airport which involved the switching of baggage. Follow-up inquiries leading to Cyprus ran into a dead end, however, when DEA Nicosia refused to discuss the matter on grounds of national security. (Two years later, Connelly would dispute Jones's recollection of these conversations, but by then the octopus had more or less got its act together. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, there was no reason why Connelly should not have been helpful or why Jones should have falsified an entry in his notebook.)

In April 1989, Shaughnessy learned from a colleague that Juval Aviv, an Israeli-American investigator with a reputation for getting results, had told him that some of his contacts in the intelligence community had important information about the crash of Flight 103. After nine prominent law firms had each recommended Aviv highly, Shaughnessy hired him and his company, Interfor, Inc. to develop those leads, and Aviv took off for Europe. Although some of his referees had said he was 'extremely zealous' and needed to be kept within specific guidelines, at the time, that had struck Shaughnessy as a commendation rather than a reservation.

Two months later, Aviv submitted his now notorious report.

Not surprisingly, Shaughnessy found it 'extremely disturbing, because it suggested serious wrong-doing by the government and suggested that Pan Am employees placed the bomb on Flight 103'. Whereas the pending liability suit against the airline depended on the theory that the bomb had penetrated Pan Am's security, the Aviv report indicated that it had circumvented Pan Am's security. As this conclusion was supported to some extent by the earlier Jones-Connelly conversations and other intelligence data, Shaugnessy and his colleagues now felt obliged to put Aviv's findings to the test.

'In order to properly defend our clients,' Shaughnessy explained later, 'we decided that we should serve subpoenas on a number of Federal agencies in an effort to determine whether the government had any documentation which would either confirm or dispute what Mr. Aviv had reported.'

Because of its sensitive nature, access to the report was confined to the attorneys working on the case. At Pan Am, only the chairman and chief executive officer, Thomas G. Plaskett, the senior vice president, legal, John Lindsey, and Gregory W. Buhler, deputy general counsel, were allowed to read it, and only they were advised of Shaughnessy's decision to subpoena government records. (On first hearing of Aviv's findings, Plaskett reportedly exclaimed: 'You mean to tell me the CIA has been using Pan Am planes to run drugs? I thought I was running an airline.')

Significantly, Plaskett later told Shaughnessy 'that he had personally informed Secretary of State James Baker and Director of Central Intelligence William Webster of the contents of Mr. Aviv's report and of our intention to serve subpoenas on a number of Federal agencies'.

Whether or not this advance notice had any bearing on the government's response, when the subpoenas were served on 29 September, the FBI, the DEA, the State Department, the National Security Agency, the CIA and the National Security Council each made it clear that they had no intention of complying with them.

And whether or not this advance notice had any bearing on the leak of Aviv's confidential report to Congressman James Traficant and the media in November, the subsequent publication of its findings around the world undermined the credibility of Shaughnessy's attempt to test the report's conclusions to the point where no one seemed inclined to take it seriously.

Angry at being put at such a disadvantage, Shaughnessy twice confronted Aviv about the leak, and twice Aviv denied having had anything to do it.

In November, the government moved to quash Pan Am's subpoenas before Chief Judge Thomas C. Platt in United States District Court, Eastern District of New York. Two conferences were held in an attempt to resolve the dispute, with the court attempting to determine what privileges, if any, the government was claiming.

Based on papers submitted for review in camera, Judge Platt felt the government might have a valid claim that the subpoenaed documents were protected from discovery by the state secrets privilege, but counsel for the government seemed unwilling to accept the suggestion. Indeed, the government showed so little cause for its refusal to provide discovery that the court felt it might have to stay the civil litigation against Pan Am until the conclusion of the criminal investigation. Chief Judge Platt then directed the government to search for documents bearing on how and where the bomb was placed on Flight 103 and on warnings received by the government before the night of the disaster.

Instead of complying with this order, the government 'distilled the specific accusations' it had identified in Aviv's report and instructed each of the Federal agencies to respond to that 'distillation' with declarations that there was nothing to support it. As this severely restricted the scope of what the agencies had been directed to search for, Shaughnessy felt confirmed in his suspicions that the government had something to hide and sought to obtain depositions from the officials who had signed the declarations. At a further conference, however, on 5 April 1990, the court ruled against him because the original subpoenas, and the government's motion to quash, were still outstanding.

With both sides now hopelessly deadlocked, the court convened another conference on 27 July. After advising counsel for the government that Washington could not keep on withholding relevant evidence, Chief Judge Platt ordered the government to produce all documents relating to how and where the bomb was placed on Flight 103 for inspection in camera by 1 October 1990.

Convinced that he was getting somewhere at last in his search for admissible evidence, Shaughnessy now turned to several other lines of inquiry. After the strange indifference of the police investigators to the results of the polygraph examinations of Tuzcu and O'Neill in Frankfurt, and the even stranger attempt by the FBI to intimidate the ex-Army polygraph expert who had carried them out, Juval Aviv had played no further part in the preparation of Pan Am's defence. Already something of an embarrassment after the publicity surrounding the leak of his report, he became something of a liability when the results of the polygraph tests also leaked out to the press. Confronted yet again by Shaughnessy, Aviv yet again denied any hand in the disclosure and on 31 May 1990, resigned as Pan Am's investigator, mainly because Shaughnessy refused to take his advice.

'Here I am, leading the charge up the hill,' he was reported as saying, 'and I look back, and where are my troops? They are hiding behind bushes, waiting to see how Juval makes out.'

After the leak of the Interfor Report, counsel for the victims' families attempted to take a deposition from Aviv but Shaughnessy moved to quash the subpoena on the grounds that Aviv's work was protected from discovery by the so-called attorney work-product doctrine. In reply, the plaintiffs argued that either Pan Am or Aviv had waived that protection by knowingly leaking the report to the media, and Chief Judge Platt referred the issue to Magistrate Judge Allyne Ross for a ruling.

After hearing several witnesses, including Aviv and the Observer's reporter John Merritt, who had interviewed him in November 1989, Magistrate Judge Ross found that Aviv had divulged at least part of his report to Merritt and had thereby waived work-product protection. In her written opinion, dated 27 July 1990, Ross described Aviv's testimony as 'not credible', which most of the media took to mean that his leaked report was 'not credible'. In fact, she was referring only to his denials of having leaked the report. At no time had she addressed herself to the credibility or otherwise of anything in the report. (Curiously, although Magistrate Judge Ross ruled that plaintiffs did have the right to take a deposition from Aviv, their counsel never attempted to do so. The widespread belief that Ross had declared the Interfor Report 'not credible' was, perhaps, of greater value to their case than anything Aviv might have sworn to.)

But even before Aviv dropped out of the picture, Shaughnessy had substantially broadened the scope of his inquiries.

'As might be expected in an investigation involving international terrorism, the murder of 270 innocent people and a possible government cover-up,' he told the court, 'most of the individuals we contacted or who contacted us, demanded complete anonymity. For me to reveal the identities of those individuals would not only be a breach of confidence and trust in me but, in some cases, might jeopardize the careers of those involved or even jeopardize their safety.'

Though he offered to identify his sources to Chief Judge Platt in camera, Shaughnessy was only too well aware that the certainty he felt about Flight 103 had yet to be converted into a certainty he could prove in court. A former DIA agent, for instance, had confirmed the involvement of the U..S intelligence community in narcotics trafficking, but not for attribution. Similarly, a former CIA agent had given him a detailed, off-the-record account of the agency's involvement with arms and narcotics trafficking in the Middle East.

More dramatically, in the spring of 1990, a senior DEA intelligence analyst confirmed that most of what Aviv had said in his report about narcotics trafficking through Frankfurt airport was true.

At about the same time, Shaughnessy also commissioned a former German intelligence agent to carry out an investigation for him in Europe. When his report was submitted, it dwelt at length on the key figure of Monzer al-Kassar and his involvement with Palestinian terrorist groups, supporting Aviv's assertion of al-Kassar's connection with the bombing of Flight 103. Of even greater interest was the flat statement that the BKA, working with German intelligence, had established that the bomb had been carried to Frankfurt from Damascus via Cyprus.

Four other sources provided documents and information, mainly about warnings received before the bombing. One also supplied a report entitled 'Pan Am Flight 103', prepared in January 1989 by the intelligence unit of the Lebanese Forces, which had to do mainly with the substance of intercepted telephone calls to and from the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.

On page 10, the report stated: 'Two days after the downing of Pan Am 103, the Iranian embassy in Beirut receives a phone call from the Interior Ministry in Teheran, intercepted, during which the ambassador is told to hand over to the PFLP-GC the remaining funds, size and scope not specified, and is being congratulated for the "successful operation".'

All four informants confirmed that the United States had the Iranian Embassy in Beirut under electronic surveillance prior to the disaster. They also confirmed that an American named David Lovejoy had made a series of calls to Hussein Niknam, the Iranian charge d'affaires, about a team of American agents, led by Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Kevin Gannon, who had arrived in Beirut on a mission concerned with the hostages.

Lovejoy's last recorded call was on 20 December 1988, when he advised Niknam that the agents had changed their travel plans and would catch Pan Am Flight 103 from London next day, 21 December. Niknam at once put in a call to the Interior Ministry in Teheran and was monitored passing on Lovejoy's information.

One of Shaughnessy's sources, with close links to Israeli intelligence, actually claimed to have heard the tapes of these telephone intercepts, and another, well-connected with the U.S. intelligence community, confirmed not only that the Iranian Embassy's calls had been monitored at that time but also the substance of the Lovejoy-Niknam conversations.

Other documents to which Shaughnessy was given access included a series of DIA Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summaries (DITSUMs) issued in the second half of 1988 warning against renewed threats of attack on U.S. interests, particularly as a consequence of the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus in July. On 1 December, just three weeks before the disaster, a DIA DITSUM stated that 'reports of surveillance, targeting and planning of actions against U.S. persons and facilities are continuous'.

All four sources also independently confirmed that on 9 December 1988, Israeli Defence Forces had captured documents in a raid on a PFLP-CC base near Damour, Lebanon, which disclosed plans to bomb a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt by the end of that month. One of the four said that Flight 103 was specifically mentioned, and all agreed that the Israelis had immediately warned the governments of the United States and West Germany.

The consensus was overwhelming, but Shaughnessy could call none of his informants to the witness stand, even if they had been willing to testify, because almost everything they had told him -- no matter how detailed and how well corroborated by information from other independent sources -- would have been ruled out as inadmissible hearsay.

Although there was little room to doubt that the government of the United States, with the assistance of the British and German governments, was engaged in the biggest cover-up of modern times, there was no possible way Shaughnessy could prove it to a judge and jury unless the US government opened its files, and thereby virtually incriminated itself.

Everything seemed to hinge, therefore, on Chief Judge Platt's decision to order the government to produce all documents relating to the bombing of Flight 103 by 1 October 1990, for his review in camera. But in December, Shaughnessy was astonished to learn that the subpoenas he had served on seven Federal agencies (the DIA had been added to the others in March 1990) had been quashed without further hearing of argument.

The circumstances were odd, to say the least. The court's order, signed 12 December 1990, showed that, after the 27 July conference, the government had approached Chief Judge Platt privately to suggest that, rather than produce the documents he had specified, its agents should simply brief the court on certain matters connected with the bombing.

Without advising Shaughnessy of this proposal, much less inviting his opinion of it, the court had agreed to the government's suggestion and, as Shaughnessy put it later, 'was briefed on undisclosed matters on unspecified dates by unidentified agents of the government ... I still do not know [September 1992] who briefed this court, when the briefings took place or what was told to this court during those briefings.'

All he knew was that 'in the end, this court quashed the subpoenas based upon ex parte in camera briefings given to it by the government'.

Chief Judge Platt had already shown signs of distress over the government's intransigence. A year earlier, when the discovery dispute was at its height, he had been asked to comment on the documents he had seen so far.

"I am troubled about certain parts [he had said], and I don't think anything can be -- there could be a redaction, but I think what was left after the redaction would be virtually useless. And I don't know quite what to do because I think some of the material may be significant. Some of the material I haven't seen, of course, because the government hasn't even shown me all of the material. They have just given me the reasons why, which, as I see it, I am not at liberty to reveal at this stage.

But depending on what is behind that material, those reasons, if you will, there may be -- it might change this case completely (author's italics). There is a possibility. I don't say that it's a reality. There is a possibility, depending on what hypothesis you assume and I have no way of knowing which hypothesis is correct ... "


A year later, he resolved his uncertainty in favour of Washington. But Shaughnessy had lost a battle, not the war. As any claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act had to be filed within two years -- in other words, by 21 December 1990 -- he obtained leave from the court to commence a third-party action against the United States government. The thrust of this was that if the passenger liability suits went against Pan Am, the airline would seek to recover the cost of the compensation awards from the government on the grounds that the Flight 103 disaster had been due to the misconduct of government agencies.

The complaint, filed on 19 December, stated that the government had had a duty to inform Pan Am of information in its possession that a terrorist organization was planning to place a bomb on a Pan Am flight from either Frankfurt or London, specifically on Flight 103 on 21 December 1988, and had 'negligently failed to inform Pan Am'.

Secondly, the complaint charged that the government had been 'negligent in supervising and controlling an operation utilizing criminals, terrorists and terrorist sympathizers at various locations, including Frankfurt Rhein-Main airport, which circumvented all baggage security controls and which was utilized by a terrorist organization to place the bomb on Flight 103'.

Support for this theory, of an unexpected kind, had been provided a few weeks earlier by network television.

On 30 October, NBC News reported: 'Officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration told NBC News today they are conducting an inquiry of a top secret undercover heroin operation in the Middle East to find out whether the operation was used as cover by the terrorists who blew up Pan Am 103 almost two years ago.'

The report went on to say that

NBC News has learned 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 undercover operation, code-named Operation Courier, was set up three years ago by the DEA in Cyprus to infiltrate Lebanese heroin groups in the Middle East and their connections in Detroit. According to law-enforcement and intelligence sources, the Pan Am baggage area in Frankfurt was a key to the operation. Informants would put suitcases on the Pan Am flights, apparently without the usual security checks, according to one airline source, through an arrangement between the DEA and German authorities.

Law-enforcement officials say the fear now is that the terrorists that blew up Pan Am 103 somehow learned about what the DEA was doing, infiltrated the undercover operation and substituted the bomb for the heroin in one of the DEA shipments.


The following evening, 31 October, Pierre Salinger of ABC News, weighed in with a story of his own:

In 1987, the US Drug Enforcement Administration Set up a dummy company called Eurame here in Nicosia, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. According to law-enforcement sources, it was part of Operation Corea, an undercover operation designed to track the flow of heroin. The DEA recruited undercover couriers who would be monitored as they carried the drugs from Lebanon, through Cyprus and Europe and on to drug dealers in Detroit. ABC News has confirmed that one of those couriers was a young Lebanese-American named Khalid Jafaar.

He was one of those killed aboard Pan Am 103.


The report went on: 'Operation Corea worked like this. German police would be notified that an undercover courier was arriving at Frankfurt airport. German agents would escort his baggage through all security checks, and one of them would personally place the baggage on the plane.'

Before the broadcasts, both Brian Ross of NBC News and Pierre Salinger of ABC News had contacted Gregory W. Buhler, deputy general counsel of Pan Am, to inform him that they had obtained evidence from sources within the United States government that a DEA undercover operation was involved in the crash of Flight 103.

They also told him that they had talked to Lester Knox Coleman, a former agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Middle East, seeking confirmation of certain details of the story before airing their reports -- in Salinger's case, at a face-to-face meeting in London.

A couple of months earlier, Buhler had been introduced to Coleman by Marshall Lee Miller in Washington, and since then had been urging Shaughnessy to talk to Coleman because he had a great deal of interesting information concerning the crash of Flight 103.

As they were both due in London in connection with the case, and as Coleman was also there seeing Salinger, Buhler suggested that it might be a good opportunity for the three of them to get together.

Shaughnessy agreed, and on 1 November 1990, met his first -- and so far his only -- independent witness for dinner at the Hyde Park hotel.

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 11:13 pm
by admin
Chapter 12

'You know, buddy, you don't have to do this if you don't want to,' Donleavy said. 'Those guys are bad news. Anything goes wrong, they'll just leave you face down in the shit.'

'So what else is new?'

It was already too late. Mary-Claude was hopping with excitement at the idea of showing off their new daughter to her family.

'Hey!' Donleavy did his best to look hurt. 'We're the guys who hate to make mistakes, remember? The DEA, hell -- it's just one big mistake. Which is why we want you out there. To keep an eye on 'em.'

'Sure.'

Heads we win, tails you lose. But there had been little doubt he would go from the moment Micheal Hurley had called during the Thanksgiving holiday to say he had at last been funded for a major operation in the Middle East and would Coleman be interested in going back to Cyprus as a DEA contractor?

Maybe, Coleman had replied cautiously, but it was not up to him. He had been involved in other things.

Hurley already knew that, but he was sure the logistics could be worked out if Coleman agreed.

So was Donleavy when Coleman told him about Hurley's call. The DEA had already expressed an interest in getting him back there, he said. If Coleman was willing, he was ready to second him to Hurley to protect the security of DIA's mission in the Middle East. While working on the DEA/CIA operation Hurley had mentioned, Coleman could keep tabs on DEA's Cyprus station and provide 'back channel' reports on what it was up to.

The Colemans were willing. During the first week of December 1986, Donleavy came down to the Windfrey hotel at River Chase, Alabama, just south of Birmingham, for the first of several briefing sessions.

The DIA was worried about DEA personnel getting caught up in secret intelligence missions, he explained. None of them had been trained in covert operations other than when dealing with criminals. Its misgivings dated from the DEA's links with the CIA under the late DCI William Casey, whose Contra operations, as Coleman well knew, had been childish and reckless.

In contrast, the DIA's covert activities had never been compromised and it had never become embroiled in public controversy. In order to keep things that way, the agency was obliged to keep track of other U.S. intelligence operations that might prove embarrassing and to head them off as necessary.

If Coleman accepted the assignment, under no circumstances would he permit anybody to have any direct contact with or knowledge of DIA operatives in the region or allow anyone to suspect that he was reporting 'back channel' to Donleavy in Washington.

'You'll also need a better cover story,' he added, 'if you're going to be seen around with Hurley and his crowd. So I want you to enroll for the winter term at Auburn for one course. Thesis Research. It's for your master's degree. And your thesis topic is "The Role of Illegal Narcotics Trafficking in the Lebanese Political Crisis".'

Coleman smiled.

Donleavy seemed pleased with it, too. 'Just tell your faculty adviser you got a research grant from the DEA, and you'll be spending the term at the American Embassy in Nicosia.'

And so it was.

In January, Donleavy called from Washington to say he had met with Hurley and his people to discuss Coleman's assignment to NARCOG Nicosia, and if he still wanted the job, he should collect the family's travel expenses and airline tickets from the DEA's Birmingham field office. In Cyprus, he would live in government housing, use a green staff pass to enter the embassy, and receive mail via FrO New York 09530, a federal postal address for U.S. government employees overseas. Anything else he needed, he should work out for himself with Hurley.

'Okay,' said Coleman. 'How much does he have to know?'

"About you? No more than he knows already. Just your vital statistics and your alternative I.D. In case they want to use you undercover.'

'The Thomas Leavy I.D.?'

'Right. He probably knows about it anyway. They're in pretty tight with Langley. But that's it. Not a word about me or the agency or anything you've done for us or why you're there or anything.'

'Fine,' said Coleman. 'And the back channel reports?'

'I'll come down and talk to you about that,' Donleavy said.

He arrived with a Radio Shack hand-held computer phone dialer and a two-speed microcassette recorder for Coleman to use, with the code that had worked so successfully before, based on a standard telephone touch-tone pad.

On 21 February 1987, the Colemans were met off the plane at Larnaca airport by Special Agent Dany Habib, Hurley's number two at DEA Nicosia.

An Arabic-speaking Tunisian-American, Habib was the son of Phillip Habib, a former government agent who had played a big part in breaking up the French Connection in Marseilles during the 1960s. Shrewd, devious and Arab-looking, Dany Habib and Coleman took to each other on sight, despite their professional caution, sensing they could work together.

Hurley was waiting for them on the tarmac near the terminal in his big blue BMW 520i. When the Colemans' baggage arrived, without the formality of having to clear Customs, Coleman jokingly observed that the DEA attache must have the island in his pocket, a suggestion that Hurley took quite seriously.

'You bet your sweet ass,' he said. 'I got customs and immigration working for me and the Cypriot National Police. Once you got that, you got the whole damn country by the balls.'

'So hearts and minds must surely follow,' said Coleman politely. Hurley did not improve on further acquaintance.

'You better believe it. Anybody gets out of line, we just run his ass clear off the island. So any problems, you come to me. I'm your sphincter muscle, okay? Everything passes through me. I'm your total interface with this operation.'

It was hard to tell if he meant this as a warning, a threat or an offer of assistance. Habib remained impassive, and Mary-Claude, with Sarah in her lap, looked out the window. She had long since realized her husband worked for the government, but he had never discussed it with her, much less told her he was a spy. The space between them was filling up with unasked and unanswered questions.

The Colemans were driven to Filanta Court, on Archbishop Makarios Avenue, and handed the keys of No. 62B, a large three-bedroomed apartment with a balcony overlooking the port of Larnaca from which everybody getting on or off the ferry from Lebanon could be observed through binoculars.

On the way in from the airport, Hurley had warned him that the back bedroom was full of electronic gear that nobody knew how to use. Coleman's first job for NARCOG would be to get it operational as a listening post to monitor Lebanese radio traffic and to keep track of shipping movements in and out of Lebanese ports. Among the equipment was a maritime receiver that automatically picked up ship transmissions while continuously scanning a preset frequency range and recorded everything on tape, including the position of each vessel.

'Taxi George' was waiting inside the apartment and 'Syrian George' arrived a few minutes later. While Mary-Claude saw to the baby and busied herself around the apartment, Habib made the introductions.

Syrian George would man the listening post every day, play back the tapes and provide translations as required. A former officer in the so-called Pink Panther Brigade under Rifat Assad, he held a master's degree from the University of Kiev and, as Coleman quickly discovered, worked harder than anybody because he was desperate to get to America and Hurley kept promising to get a visa for him if he made himself useful.

Taxi George, a likeable Iraqi Chaldean Christian who worked as an interrogator for the Cypriot National Police Narcotics Squad, was another key informant. Fluent in Arabic, Greek and English, he visited the U.S. several times a year as a DEA courier, making controlled deliveries of Lebanese heroin to dealer networks in and around Detroit, but had proved even more useful to Hurley as a taxi driver.

Lebanese drug traffickers visiting the island to close a deal would check into a hotel like the Palm Beach or the Golden Bay on Dekalia Road, and, on going out to dinner, would find Taxi George at the curb. With no reason to suppose he was anybody but a Greek-Cypriot, they would go on talking business in Arabic, and Taxi George would time their cab ride according to the intelligence value of their conversation.

Hurley had promised him a visa, too.

Then there was Ibrahim El-Jorr, who had an American passport already. An erratic Lebanese with a wife and family in Beirut and a Dutch mistress in Nicosia, he wore jeans and cowboy boots and drove around at high speed in a Chevy 4 X 4 with expired Texas licence plates. He claimed to have been at the Munich Olympics in 1972 while serving with the U.S. Army, and seemed particularly proud of a photograph of himself in officer's uniform (without apparently realising that the insignia were incorrect).

El-Jorr was Hurley's principal link to a network of DEA informants/CIA 'assets' in Lebanon, many of them members of the warring clans of the pro-Syrian Kabbaras and the anti-Syrian Jafaars in the Bekaa Valley.

Two of them, Zouher Kabbara and his cousin Nadim Kabbara, had unfortunately been arrested in Rome about a month before Coleman arrived on Cyprus, but he did meet Sami Jafaar, a short, stocky, fast-talking Shiite drug runner with a hairy chest festooned with gold chains and medallions.

Technically, Sami was a confidential informant (CI) for Michael Pavlick, the DEA's country attache in Paris, but he was to play a vital part in Operation Goldenrod, a project preoccupying the NARCOG task force in Nicosia when Coleman arrived there, and which was to touch off the chain reaction of events that exploded over Lockerbie 21 months later.

In January 1986, President Reagan had signed a secret directive -- 'They can run, but they can't hide' -- instructing the octopus to identify terrorists responsible for crimes against American citizens abroad and to bring them to justice in U.S. courts. By October, when the administration's Operations Sub-Group on Terrorism met in the White House Situation Room, the target list had been whittled down to one, Fawaz Younis, whom the CIA described as 'a key player in the back-street world of terrorism ... who reported directly to the leadership of the Shiite Amal militia'.

In fact, he was a Beirut used-car dealer who had once been a member of the Syrian-backed Amal militia headed by Nabi Berri, a Shiite Muslim cabinet minister in the Lebanese government (and a less well-known businessman in Detroit, Michigan).

Though not a high-level suspect, Younis was wanted in connection with the hijacking of a Jordanian airliner with three Americans aboard in 1985. He had also been identified as one of those who had guarded the hostages after the TWA 747 hijack in June of that year, which made him an accomplice in the murder of U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stetham. More to the point, he was the only accessible target the CIA had been able to find, and the DEA had an informant -- Sami Jafaar -- who was both willing and able to nail him.

Sami's cousin and business associate, Jamal Hamadan, had known Younis for six years. They had once shared an apartment in Beirut, and when Hamadan later moved to Poland to run the Jafaars' heroin export business to the Eastern bloc through their offices in Warsaw, Younis had paid him an extended visit there. The Jafaars' main competitor in Eastern Europe was, as always, the Assad cartel, which worked out of a front company on Stawkis Street and another, ZIBADO, on Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin.

Sami Jafaar was confident he could persuade Hamadan to renew his friendship with Younis, and that, between them, they could cook up some pretext to lure Younis out of Lebanon into neutral territory for an FBI snatch. Hamadan became equally confident they could do so when the CIA offered them both 'asset' status, which meant virtual immunity from prosecution or the risk of ever having to surface in court and testify as witnesses.

The Hamadan clan, like the Jafaars, had been involved in a losing struggle against the Syrian cartel ever since Rifat Assad and Monzer al-Kassar had taken over the Bekaa Valley in 1975 with the help of the Syrian Army. One of the reasons why Sami and Jamal were so happy to cooperate with the Americans was that Younis belonged to the Syrian-backed Amal militia, which had burned Jafaar and Hamadan poppy fields and destroyed their processing labs, and here was a chance for revenge.

The fact that the DEA and the CIA were heavily involved with both camps would have meant nothing to Sami and Jamal. As far as they were concerned, and like most Arab players in the narcotics game, the DEA was welcome to play one side off against another, so long as they could watch safely from the sidelines. Business was business.

By the time Coleman picked up the threads of the plot in February 1987, there was still no clear plan of attack, although it was generally agreed among Hurley and his colleagues that luring Younis into a drug deal was probably the key, and that a lot of political hassle would be avoided if he could be taken, say, in international waters. Precisely how he was to be enticed aboard a suitable vessel remained in doubt, particularly as the DEA neither owned nor controlled a suitable vessel.

Finding one was Coleman's first assignment for Operation Goldenrod, inbetween setting up a NARCOG listening post in his back bedroom and instructing the Cypriot Police Force Narcotics Squad (CPFNS) in electronic surveillance. At CPFNS headquarters near the Nicosia Hilton, a cupboardful of expensive audio and video equipment paid for by the U.N. Fund for Drug Abuse Control was gathering dust and Hurley was anxious to get it out in the field, even though wiretaps were strictly illegal in Cyprus.

No, it was okay, he said. The government would turn a blind eye if the targets were foreign nationals, and particularly a despised Lebanese like Fawaz Younis.

In 1986, Coleman had struck up a friendship at the Larnaca marina with Fohad Beaini, a lively boat-builder better known around the docks as Abou Talar. A short, wiry Lebanese in his fifties, Talar lived aboard a partially finished 81-foot yacht, King Edmondo, with a tall, blonde Danish woman who towered over him and was known locally as 'Foofoo', as she was thought to be somewhat strange. He had pumped all his savings into building the boat, using bits and pieces scrounged from all over the Middle East, and was suspiciously eager to part with it. When Hurley approved of Coleman's find and hurriedly arranged for the CPFNS to buy King Edmondo for $80,000, Talar pocketed the money, kissed Foofoo goodbye and disappeared into Lebanon before anybody thought to take the boat out on trial.

Although the funds had come from Hurley's budget, the yacht was bought in the name of Andreous Kasikopu, a retired Cypriot marine police captain who looked remarkably like Claude Rains. This was in the interests of deniability. The DEA was free to use it for any covert operation it wished, but if anything went wrong, Hurley could always say, 'Oh, you mean that Cypriot boat.'

In fact, something went technically wrong almost at once. A week after taking delivery, Kasikopu telephoned the American Embassy to report that the transmissions of both engines had broken down, and although new, were beyond repair. When Coleman checked with the American manufacturers in Indiana, he discovered that they were really tank engines which Talar had somehow scrounged from the Israeli Army.

After spending more of the taxpayers' funds to make the King Edmondo seaworthy, and to rig her out with state-of-the-art marine communications equipment, Coleman handed the boat over in late March to Hurley, who renamed her Skunk Kilo. At about the same time, Jamal Hamadan put in the first of the 60 telephone calls he would make from Paris to Fawaz Younis in Beirut before the trap was sprung.

As the plan now called for Jafaar and Hamadan to meet Younis in Cyprus before consummating their phony drug deal aboard Skunk Kilo, and as close electronic monitoring of their conversations would be essential to avoid last-minute surprises, Hurley was determined not to risk a breakdown in surveillance, after what had happened with the boat. Some sort of dress rehearsal was clearly required for the Cypriot police officers who were only just coming to grips with wiretap technology, and, right on cue, one of Hurley's informants passed the word that Abou Daod, a Lebanese drugs trafficker, was coming to Cyprus to set up a deal.

With CPFNS Inspector Penikos Hadjiloizu, Hurley rented several rooms in the Filanta hotel, across the street from Filanta Court and the NARCOG listening post in 62B. Under Coleman's direction, a carrier-current monitor, with microphones hidden in the sitting- room and bedroom table lamps, was installed in a first-floor suite facing the street. When the lamps were plugged in, the hotel's own electrical circuits carried the microphones' output to a receiver and voice-activated recorder in another room down the hall. As the telephone was also wired to interface with the bugs, any sound in the suite was thereby automatically recorded, the only human intervention required being a periodic change of tape.

All was in readiness when Abou Daod stepped off the Suny boat from Jounieh. Picked up by Taxi George, he was steered successfully to the Filanta hotel, where the receptionist duly assigned him to the 'hot' suite. And in the room down the hall, Sergeant Mikalis, the Cypriot police officer appointed by Inspector Hadjiloizu to sit on the wire and bring the recorded tapes across the road for translation, watched the reels begin to turn as Daod placed calls to his associates in Athens, Paris and Sofia.

A big, blustering, opinionated cop, full of self-importance, Mikalis soon grew bored with wiretap duty. After two days, in which it had become clear that Daod was organizing a drug shipment from Lebanon via Cyprus to Bulgaria, a well-worn route through the Eastern bloc into Western Europe, he decided to go home and sleep with his wife instead of staying on the job, as instructed, in case of overnight calls. At 11 p.m., he made sure there was still plenty of tape left on the machine and departed, returning at 8 a.m. the following morning to take it across the street to Syrian George.

After listening to it on his headphones for a few minutes, Syrian George stopped the tape, looked Mikalis up and down and turned to Coleman.

'Daod called Sofia at 3.03 a.m.,' he said, in Arabic. 'He told his contact he was on Olympic Airways' seven o'clock flight to Athens. You want to tell this dumb-fuck donkey son of a Shiite whore that Daod just left the country right under his nose?'

'What did he say?' asked Mikalis excitedly. 'Is there news?'

'Yeah,' said Coleman. 'He said to tell you that Mr. Daod's plane is just landing in Athens.'

The sergeant looked baffled. 'What is this meaning?' As it began to sink in, his eyes opened wider. 'He's gone? He's left Cyprus?'

'Without even saying goodbye. You want me to tell Penikos or will you?'

'No, no, no,' Mikalis said wildly. 'Gimme the tape -- I must investigate this. Gimme the tape.'

They had better luck with Fawaz Younis. By the time Jamal Hamadan, accompanied by Sami Jafaar, arrived in Cyprus to meet his old friend at the Filanta hotel, Sergeant Mikalis had been banished to police school in Germany, and his successors in the room down the hall from the 'hot' suite had been drilled by Coleman to within an inch of their lives. Every incriminating word that Younis uttered within range of the room bugs was meticulously recorded, transcribed and translated as evidence to be used against him in an American court.

Encouraged by Hamadan, Younis made much of the minor role Nabi Berri had assigned to him in the Air Jordanian incident and admitted he had helped guard the hostages after the TWA 747 hijack. He also allowed that the used-car business had failed to keep him in the style to which he had grown accustomed and rose to the prospect of a lucrative drug deal like a shark to a bucket of entrails.

To cement their renewed friendship, Hamadan then took Younis on a five-day spree through the bars and cabarets of Larnaca, topping off this dizzy round of DEA-financed hospitality by pressing $5000 into his hand as a parting gift -- an act of impulsive generosity that sent Hurley thundering upstairs to confront his CIA colleagues.

'I'm not gonna get hung with this whole thing out of my budget,' Coleman heard him insist, as did half the staff of the embassy. 'I'm just along for the ride, that's all. This guy belongs to you.'

As Coleman subsequently reported to Control, this pretty well summed up the relationship between Hurley and the spooks in Nicosia. With the national and strategic interest of the United States as part of its more elevated terms of reference, the CIA would co-opt DEA informants at will or take over a DEA operation that suited its purpose or use the DEA as a cloak for its own interests or activities without much regard for the lesser claims of law enforcement. It was already clear to Coleman from his analysis of the drugs-related intelligence coming out of Lebanon that the traditional heroin route to the U.S. via Cyprus, Frankfurt and London was used regularly by both agencies, that the traffic was not always in narcotics and that it moved both ways.

After visiting Hamadan twice more on Cyprus (to complete the softening up and the wiretap evidence), Younis was targeted for an FBI snatch on 13 September. A team from the Bureau's anti-terrorist squad flew out from Quantico, Virginia, a week beforehand to take charge of the arrangements and Hamadan placed his final call to Younis in Beirut, telling him to drop everything and come at once. He was to meet 'Joseph', a big-time drugs trafficker, aboard his yacht to conclude a deal that would solve all his problems forever.

Younis arrived in Larnaca on the 10th and joined Hamadan in another two-day, nonstop pub crawl that turned the knife in Hurley's wound and brought them, on schedule, to the Sheraton resort hotel in Limassol on the night of the 12th. Next morning, decked out like a sacrificial goat in his gold chains and designer finery, Younis left the Sheraton marina by speedboat with Sami Jafaar and Hamadan to meet the octopus.

The logistics of his complicated destiny involved not only Skunk Kilo, anchored by its FBI crew in international waters, but the USS Butte, a Navy ammunitions ship that had been shadowing the yacht by radar, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, standing by with a Navy S-3 jet and an escort of two F-14 Phantoms to fly him to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., two KC-10 tanker aircraft to refuel the S-3 on the way, and 15 carloads of FBI agents to meet him on arrival.

Blissfully unaware that the full panoply of America's military might was about to deliver him up to the majesty of American justice, President Reagan's token terrorist was welcomed aboard Skunk Kilo by an undercover FBI team that was so wrought up by the occasion that in placing Younis under arrest they managed to break both his wrists, though he offered no resistance or showed any enthusiasm for the 12-mile swim back to Limassol. After that, it took the agents four days to extract a confession from their prisoner on the USS Butte before turning him over to the US Navy for the 13 hour 10 minute flight to Washington, a new solo record for a carrier-based aircraft carrying a second-hand car dealer.

After the arrest, Hamadan and Sami Jafaar returned to Limassol in the launch and were driven to the American Embassy in Nicosia.

Coleman recalls:

"It was mid-afternoon when they arrived at the compound's rear gate. Cypriot security guards checked the BMW's undercarriage with a large mirror, lowered the iron teeth into the pavement and waved them through. An Agent punched the buzzer next to the embassy's rear steel door. The men stepped inside, took the stairs to the right that led to the DEA office and rang the bell. Connie buzzed them in for a joyous greeting from Hurley, Colonel John Sasser, the Defense attache, and one of Buck Revell's FBI team, but there wasn't much time for celebration because Hamadan was wanted elsewhere for debriefing.

Hurley handed him a Turkish passport with a West German visa and he was escorted over the green line into Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. After spending the night at an embassy cottage in Kyrenia, he was put on a Turkish Air flight to Istanbul connecting with a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. He then spent three days at Fort King being questioned by people from the DIA, the FBI, the CIA and the DEA, and after that a bunch of U.S. Marshals took him away into the Federal Witness Protection Program. And as far as I know, Hamadan has never been heard of again from that day to this.

As for Sami Jafaar, the feeling was that he had not been compromised, although, with hindsight, it seems possible that Syrian intelligence had noticed his involvement. At any rate, he and his clan went to the top of the class as far as the DEA and CIA were concerned."


Back home, the massed ranks of the Federal government's press officers had been deployed to exploit the triumph of Goldenrod and the supposed deterrent value of President Reagan's 'They-can-run-but-they-can't-hide' anti-terrorist programme. To make sure that none of the macho details went to waste, the full, inside story of Washington's awesome display of military prowess was entrusted to Steven Emerson of U.S. News & World Report, who had shown in the past that he knew how to treat a government 'scoop' with respect, and who could be relied upon to resist the kind of sceptical impulse that sometimes afflicts reporters with a wider readership.

In the summer of 1987, while outwardly researching his master's thesis on Lebanese narcotics trafficking, Coleman met several newsmen of a less trusting nature, among them Brian Ross of NBC and his producer Ira Silverman. They already knew one another. Coleman had met Ross in 1981 while writing his book Squeal, in which he described how Las Vegas superstar Wayne Newton had sued Ross and Silverman over an NBC story connecting him with organized crime. The two had arrived in Cyprus, with the cooperation of the DEA, to prepare a documentary on 'The Lebanese Connection', and as Hurley did not want to be bothered, he deputed Coleman to look after them.

With his television news background and now intimate knowledge of Middle East drugs trafficking, Coleman helped Ross and Silverman prepare what was generally considered to be as balanced and authoritative a survey of narco-terrorism as the media had ever presented to the American public, a contribution which they both generously acknowledged on several occasions afterwards and which subsequently led to Coleman's appearance on NBC News after the Flight 103 disaster, although neither of them were aware then or before of his DIA/NARCOG affiliations.

For the most part, however, Coleman's experience with the media was disillusioning. While the intelligence community was specifically forbidden to compromise staff newsmen or to use media staff credentials as a cover for its agents, cutbacks and bureau closures had left most of the world's press, radio and television dependent on local freelance reporters and cameramen, to whom the restrictions did not apply.

Coleman himself had used freelance credentials supplied by Mutual Radio to get into Libya after Operation El Dorado Canyon a year earlier, and he would meet very few stringers during his various spells of duty in the Middle East who did not supplement their incomes from journalism by supplying material to government agencies like the DEA.

One morning, for instance, after monitoring radio traffic all night in the NARCOG listening post he had set up in his back bedroom, Coleman reluctantly opened his apartment door to a caller who introduced himself as David Mills, a British photographer for Newsweek.

It seemed they had a mutual acquaintance in 'freelance' W. Dennis Suit, president of Overseas Press Services, whom Coleman had met as a 'consultant' to Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and with whom he had kept in touch, on DIA instructions, because of Suit's involvement with Oliver North's ragtag army of conmen, yahoos and armchair mercenaries from Georgia.

Mills had apparently met a very loquacious Dennis Suit in a bar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and listened to him brag about the worldwide connections he had made in the course of his career as a self-proclaimed CIA agent. On hearing that Mills was headed for the Middle East, Suit had suggested he should look Coleman up in Cyprus because he was doing some research there and had a lot of good contacts.

'Oh,' said Coleman wearily. 'That's great. How are you? Come in. Would you like a cup of coffee?'

Doing his best to stay awake, he chatted to Mills until satisfied that the other was convinced of his academic credentials and then, to get rid of him before Syrian George arrived to transcribe the night's tapes and give the game away, sent him over to see Hurley, who wanted to know if Mills, in the course of his travels in and out of Lebanon for Newsweek, would like to shoot a few pictures for the DEA.

Seeing no conflict of interest in this, or any serious ethical problem in working covertly for the DEA, Mills joined the rest of the press corps on Hurley's freelance payroll and subsequently turned in some useful photo coverage of illegal port facilities in Lebanon.

Although Coleman still had qualms about the misuse of media credentials, foreseeing a time when immigration officials around the world would automatically assume that any visiting journalist was a spy, it would have been hypocritical to complain. But he did protest vigorously to Hurley when he discovered that a full-time British staff cameraman for a major news service was also secretly shooting stuff for the DEA, using his employer's equipment.

'There's a directive about that,' he said. 'I don't want to get involved. If Washington finds out, there'll be hell to pay.'

'He's a foreign national,' said Hurley impatiently. 'Fuck it.'

In the end, Coleman had to let it pass, although he contrived not to pay for the footage, and duly noted the DEA's systematic corruption of the media in one of his back-channel reports to Donleavy. It hardly mattered anyway, for in addition to his bootleg coverage, Hurley was also helping himself to anything he wanted in the legitimate footage brought out of Lebanon by television news teams.

As Coleman says:

"If CBS, NBC, ABC, the BBC -- anybody -- wanted to up-link video they'd shot in Beirut they could go either to Damascus or Nicosia. That was the choice. And a lot of times, particularly after shooting in the east, they were cut off from getting to Damascus so they had to put their tapes on the boat to Larnaca and up-link it from Cyprus.

Well, Hurley had this arrangement with Customs ... All those guys had DEA certificates of appreciation on their walls -- he'd greased the skids all the way. Anybody came in with videotape, Customs would grab it and say, 'Well, we have to look at this before you take it in.' 'But this is urgent news material,' the guy would say. Tough shit. He'd have to wait two or three hours while Customs ran it across the road to me so I could make a quick video dub for Hurley or his spook friends before they returned the original and let the guy on through to Nicosia.

Same thing with MEMO, Middle East Media Operations, just down the street from the embassy in Nicosia. It worked like a news bureau. You could rent office space and video equipment there. You could file your stories from there. They had secretaries, drivers, people to answer your phone -- it was a complete support operation on the ground, and most of the networks had a desk there. And everybody was working for Hurley, although most of them didn't know it. Anything going through MEMO ended up in the American Embassy. Assignment details. Progress reports. Private conversations. Notes. Videotape. Everything -- right down to scrap paper from the waste baskets. He had the whole thing fixed."


But NARCOG was not the only group using Cyprus as a base for its intelligence operations. When Beirut, the capital of Middle Eastern intrigue, was turned into a battleground in 1975 by the Lebanese civil war, the entire international espionage community moved out lock, stock and barrel to Nicosia. It used to amuse Coleman to saunter through the Churchill hotel around midday.

'It was like something out of an old Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet film,' he remembers. 'There were Libyans, Lebanese, PLO, KGB, Bulgarians, Romanians, British, Americans -- you could go by there and watch all the spooks watching each other have lunch.'

It was not so amusing, however, to have them on his doorstep.

One morning, it became clear that NARCOG was not the only group using Filanta Court as a base for its intelligence operations. Coleman had gone up on the roof the previous evening for one of his periodic checks of the antennae he had rigged for the listening post. All seemed to be in order, but next morning, after having trouble with one of the receivers, he went up again to make sure he had not inadvertently disturbed anything.

To his astonishment, a 30-foot latticework tower, neatly secured with guy wires, had sprouted there overnight, topped by a two-stack array of five-element, horizontally aligned, directional antennae, one pointed towards Nicosia, the other towards the Lebanese coast.

Was it possible that Hurley had forgotten to tell him they were putting in some decent professional equipment at last?

No, it wasn't possible.

Hoping no one was watching, Coleman climbed the tower's inspection ladder to look at the frequency allocation on the antennae. He then climbed down again, and followed the coaxial cables across the roof to the point where they went over the rear wall of the building and in through one of the bedroom windows of the apartment next to his.

Returning thoughtfully to his own back bedroom, he tuned one of his receivers to the frequency he had read off the antenna and hooked it up to a tape machine. Then he telephoned the embassy.

'Well, who the fuck did that?' Hurley demanded, when Coleman explained what had happened.

'Hell, I don't know. I got the frequency, so I'll ask Syrian George to listen in. See what he comes up with. And maybe you can get Penikos to find out who's renting the apartment.'

'Better than that, I'll have him kick their ass off the island.'

'Well, why don't we see what's going on first?' Coleman suggested. 'Whoever they are, these guys know their stuff. Could be interesting.

'Listen, you spotted them, maybe they spotted you. I don't want to take chances.'

'Don't worry about it.' Coleman was not used to such solicitude. 'Let's give it a few days. We'll be okay.'

'Hell, I'm not worried about that.' Hurley sounded astonished. 'I got a bunch of shitheads flying in from headquarters to take a look around. I told 'em about the listening post, so I don't want it compromised, okay?'

Over the next few days, Syrian George taped an assortment of Arab cab-drivers in Tel Aviv broadcasting on taxi frequencies with bits and pieces of low-level intelligence picked up from observations while driving around town and from eavesdropping on their fares' back-seat conversations. And twice a day, somebody would transmit a very brief, very high speed coded message from the apartment next door via the VHF array aimed at Nicosia.

Coleman recalls:

"I took the tapes up to the embassy for analysis, and sure enough, it turned out that Yasser Arafat's PLO had installed a listening post right next to ours. They had these cab-drivers in Israel using taxi frequencies to pass on intelligence to Cyprus, and as it came in, so they'd pass it up the line to the PLO office in Nicosia.

Hurley went dip-shit crazy. He had his top brass coming in from Washington to look at the operation and the first thing they'd see at Filanta Court was this 30-foot PLO radio mast. So he pulled all his strings, and although it was politically very sensitive, he got the Cypriots to close the Palestinians down and kick them off the island.

Well, he needn't have bothered. His guys showed up from Washington and they didn't want to see shit. It was a junket. When they came to the apartment, Mary-Claude was cooking up a storm in the kitchen, Sarah was squalling in her crib in the front bedroom and in the back it was wall-to-wall Star Wars, with all the electronic gear we had in there. So they walk in, wearing their Izod shirts and white walking shorts with clean sneakers, just like it was Miami Beach, and it was, 'Howiya? Howya doin'? Hey, what's going on here?' and all that bullshit, but what they really wanted to know was, where's the nearest topless beach?

I thought they'd probably want to see the video 1 was splicing together from the footage we were getting on opium growing in the Bekaa Valley, but these were cops on a government-paid vacation. They could watch that kind of stuff any time, back home at headquarters. They were there to get laid, that's all. It's an awesome sight, the U.S. government at work overseas.


The deputation from DEA headquarters had luckily chosen one of the cooler days of a very hot summer for their inspection visit. The NARCOG budget had apparently not stretched to air-conditioning, and there were times when life in Filanta Court was almost insupportable. At the height of the heatwave, with Hurley in Washington, Coleman finally had to notify the embassy that he was closing down the listening post and moving into the hotel across the street to save the equipment as well as the family from overheating.

But Donleavy, no less than Hurley, was anxious to get him back. From his response to the huge volume of encrypted data that Coleman was sending twice a week to his DIA number in Maryland, Donleavy was interested in his reports, not just for their own sake, but as a means of cross-checking the official inter-agency pooling of information by the DEA and CIA.

'Donleavy wanted to know everything. All he could get his hands on. Who the DEA were using and why. Names and descriptions of informants, their reasons for working with Hurley and the nature of their relationship. Details of DEA operations in Lebanon, cross-checked with whatever feedback I could get from my guys over there. Anything and everything to do with ongoing cases. Control wanted a complete run-down, and knowing the way Hurley operated, I think the DIA probably had a better handle on it from my back-channel stuff than DEA headquarters did through its own official channels.'

Although the principal objective of NARCOG remained the same, to piece together a detailed picture of Lebanese narcotics trafficking and its role in politics and terrorism, the emphasis in the DEA's contribution began to change after Dany Habib was reassigned to San Francisco in May. His replacement as Hurley's number two was Special Agent Fred Ganem, a tall, polite, soft-spoken Lebanese-American who had spent the previous five years in Detroit, on the receiving end of the Middle East narcotics pipeline.

While Hurley remained preoccupied with inter-agency projects like Operation Goldenrod, Ganem soon made it clear to Coleman that he had little patience with Hurley's intelligence operations. Ganem saw his role in Nicosia as an extension of his role in Detroit. He was interested primarily in law-enforcement, in using the pipeline through Cyprus to identify and arrest distributors of Lebanese narcotics in the United States. He was therefore interested in stepping up controlled deliveries, and for that he needed intelligent, well-motivated CIs who could pose as suppliers. Like the Hamadans and Jafaars.

Masked by the explosion in cocaine abuse, and by Washington's simple-minded preoccupation with the Colombian drug cartels, heroin addiction in the U.S. had risen steeply during the 1980s. Reflecting American demand, the acreage of the Bekaa Valley's opium poppy fields was doubling year by year. During the summer of 1987, Coleman helped identify 25 Lebanese laboratories with a combined annual output of six or seven metric tons of refined heroin, representing about half the country's gross national product.

Most of this was exported to the United States via the Cyprus-Frankfurt pipeline, nicknamed khouriah ('shit') by the couriers who used it, or via Turkey, the Balkans, central Europe and then on to New York and points west.

The profits were stupendous. Without needing to do more than put down sporadic resistance from the more independent clans, the 30,000 Syrian troops guarding the Bekaa for the heroin cartel were allowed to augment their pay by up to $1 billion a year in protection money. And this was chicken-feed next to the revenues earned by government- connected Syrians and Syrian-backed terrorist groups actually engaged in the traffic. Illegal narcotics contributed at least $5 billion a year to the Syrian economy, almost all of it in American dollars and other hard currencies. Without access to the American market for heroin and hashish, Syria and its Lebanese protectorate were as good as bankrupt.

But Washington's strategic interests in the Middle East ruled out the kind of interventionist policies pursued in Central and South America. With about 60 percent of its energy requirements supplied by a region racked with religious, ethnic and political conflict, the United States was as helpless in the face of state-sponsored narcotics trafficking as it was in dealing with state-sponsored terrorism. While Syria made the appropriate public disclaimers, insisting it was serious about eradicating drugs and denying sanctuary to terrorists headquartered in the Bekaa Valley, Washington could take no independent action without risking the charge of meddling in Syria's internal affairs and thereby still further inflaming Arab sensitivities throughout the Middle East.

In any case, with Muslim extremists threatening to dominate the region, the Western world needed Syria either in its camp or at least on the sidelines.

After watching DEA Nicosia at work, Coleman readily understood why the DIA felt it necessary to monitor Hurley's activities. Anything directed at rolling up narcotics distribution networks in the United States was politically neutral and therefore acceptable. The recruitment of 'mules' and CIs and their employment in a stepped-up programme of controlled deliveries down the pipeline offered little risk of embarrassment, provided the 'stings' were well organized and proper security precautions were observed. But the conversion of DEA informants into CIA assets, and their use in operations directed against Syrian nationals or Syrian-backed groups on the supply side of the narcotics traffic, was altogether more sensitive, and it was this area that, under Donleavy's direction, became Coleman's special study in the late summer of 1987.

Monzer al-Kassar and Rifat Assad were two of the names that cropped up most frequently in the cascade of raw intelligence from informants and intercepts that he was analysing for NARCOG and back-channelling to Donleavy. On principle, Hurley refused to share information with the Germans and British, except when he needed their cooperation for controlled deliveries through Frankfurt and London, but, braving his disapproval, Coleman made a point of renewing his friendship with Hartmut Mayer, the German police officer whom he had met in Munich during the 1972 Olympics and who was now the BKA's liaison officer on Cyprus.

Although the contact was more social than professional, the two inevitably talked shop when they met, and as Coleman zeroed in on al-Kassar as possibly the key player in the Middle East's narco-terrorist game, he decided to visit Mayer in his office at the German Embassy one day to see if his friend could be persuaded to take a more generous view of international cooperation than Hurley's.

Mayer obligingly pulled al-Kassar's file and, among other bits of useful information, told Coleman about two more of the Syrian's aliases, including the numbers of the passports held in those names, and details of al-Kassar's recent journeys to and from South America. These were of particular interest because they confirmed suspicions that Syrian traffickers were developing close commercial ties with the Colombian cartels, trading heroin base for cocaine base and bartering either or both as required for arms supplies to terrorist and revolutionary groups around the world.

Operating from one of several palatial villas in Marbella, Spain, al-Kassar was publicly one of the DEA's most wanted fugitives and privately one of the CIA's most useful 'capabilities', having supplied hundreds of tons of U.S. and Eastern bloc arms to Iran, as part of Oliver North's efforts to secure the release of American hostages, and to the Nicaraguan Contras as part of Oliver North's efforts to unseat the Sandinistas.

Though arrested in Denmark, Britain, France and Spain for narcotics and arms offences, al-Kassar had made himself too valuable an asset to European and American intelligence agencies for them to allow him to go to waste in prison, so that he went about his illegal business with a brazen assurance matched only among international criminals by his partner, Rifat Assad, younger brother of the Syrian president, who also owned a villa outside Marbella, and whose daughter, Raja, was al-Kassar's mistress.

After an unsuccessful attempt to depose his brother Hafez Assad from the presidency in 1984, Rifat had been banished to Paris, a punishment akin to being kicked out of purgatory and forced to live in paradise. Installed in a town house off the Rue St. Honore and accompanied everywhere in his armoured Mercedes by bodyguards armed with automatic weapons, he endeared himself to French society by throwing the kind of party that went out of style with Caligula while continuing to act as front man for the Syrian heroin cartel that underwrote his brother's fanatical Alawist regime in Damascus.

A volatile, erratic but undeniably charismatic figure, with a loyal following among the Syrian troops enriching themselves in the Bekaa Valley, among the Palestinian terrorists financed by Lebanese drug trafficking, and among Arabs living in Detroit and Los Angeles who distributed the product, Rifat Assad was also too valuable an asset to fear official displeasure from any quarter, Syrian, French or American.

Number three in Coleman's Syrian rogues' gallery was General Ali Issah Dubah, then chief of the Mogamarat, the Syrian secret service (and now President Assad's deputy chief of staff). One of Assad's closest confidantes (and Monzer al-Kassar's brother-in- law), Dubah was the cartel's principal enforcer, frequently co-opting Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC, the Abu Nidal faction and other Palestinian terrorist groups to do his dirty work as well as using them routinely as part-time agents in his 'legitimate' intelligence operations.

As the summer wore on and Dubah's name kept cropping up in raw intelligence data from DEA/NARCOG informants, Coleman eventually reported to Donleavy that, without ever leaving the country, the Syrian spymaster seemed to have his hand in the pockets of everybody engaged in the Bekaa's drug traffic, from Damascus to Dearborn.

General Ghazi Kenaan, head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, and a subject of Coleman's close attention from the day he arrived in Beirut as a DIA agent, was the fourth key figure in the heroin cartel. With Monzer al-Kassar and Rifat Assad fronting for the group in Europe, it fell to Kenaan, as the man on the spot, to supervise the supply end of the business, to keep the Bekaa peaceful and productive, to suppress dissent, discourage private enterprise and mediate disputes. With 30,000 troops at his disposal, and everybody dependent on drug revenues, including the Palestinian terrorist groups based in the valley, Kenaan was the most powerful man in Lebanon.

Having learned from his first assignment that the general effectively controlled the hostage situation in Beirut, Coleman now came to realize that, in a broader frame but in the same sense, Kenaan also controlled the nature and scope of narco-terrorism itself -- or, at any rate, could do so when it suited President Assad's purpose.

Next to Assad's Syria, Colonel Gaddafi's Libya had become little more than a refuge for Palestinian extremists, a useful quartermaster's supply depot for arms and explosives, and a convenient whipping boy for Western governments anxious to be seen taking a strong line on terrorism without risking their strategic interests in the Middle East.

It was also beginning to worry Coleman that while he and the whole NARCOG apparatus of government agents and informants were watching the Syrians, Syrian agents and probably many of the same informants were watching them. He had already advised Donleavy in his bi-weekly reports that Hurley's security arrangements were derisory, that all sorts of people with no clear allegiance were wandering in and out of NARCOG, ostensibly selling information but just as likely collecting it; that agents and bona fide informants were being put at risk because of this, and that future DEA or inter-agency operations might well be fatally compromised from the start.

But Hurley himself was apparently unmoved by any such fear. For one thing, he found it hard to accept that anyone who lacked the advantage of being American could pose much of a threat, and for another, he needed every scrap of material he could get from any quarter, even the newspapers, to sustain the nonstop barrage of reports he was firing into headquarters.

Coleman remembers:

"We burned up the Xerox machine. 'Gimme paper,' he'd say. 'The more paper we send 'em, the more money we're gonna get next year -- that's all those shitheads understand. So keep it coming, you hear? Never mind what you think about it, I want everything you can lay your hands on. Just make a copy and send it over.'

In the end, this passion of his for generating paper got to be so ridiculous that we had T-shirts made up, with the DEA logo and OPERATION MAKAKOPI in big letters across the chest. Couldn't find a size large enough for Hurley so we got him a nightshirt instead. Everybody in the embassy thought it was funny as hell, but he was pissed with it. Came out of his office, waving it in the air. 'Got nothing better to do, goddammit?'


Flushed with the success of Operation Goldenrod, in late summer, Hurley and his CIA colleagues lent Sami Jafaar and other members of his clan to the DEA office in Bern, Switzerland, for Operation Polar Cap, aimed at closing down an arms/drugs-dealing business run by Arman Jirayer Haser, a CIA asset and long-time associate of the Syrian cartel, who had been making millions out of secret American arms shipments to Iraq. A Turkish national living in Monaco on a Canadian passport, Haser had somehow attracted the attention of the Monte Carlo police and the CIA was nervous that if the arms operation had been blown, he might expose the agency's role in it.

The DEA's quid pro quo was to be a huge money-laundering operation run, under Haser's direction, by the Magharian brothers, Berkev and Jean, in Switzerland for Monzer al-Kassar. Besides handling a substantial slice of Syria's drug revenues, Haser and the Magharians also laundered drug profits for the Colombian cocaine cartels through a number of Swiss banks controlled by Arab interests. If Haser could be brought down by the Swiss for money-laundering, so the theory went, then he would have no reason to dig the hole he was in any deeper by embarrassing the CIA with gratuitous revelations about the agency's arms deals with Saddam Hussein.

Beginning in September 1987, the CIA's Department of Justice Liaison Officer, Richard Owens, began feeding evidence against Haser and the Magharians to the DEA so that its country attache in Bern, Gregory Passic, could pass it on to the Swiss authorities.

On 19 October, barely a month after the arrest of Fawaz Younis had made him a DEA star, Sami Jafaar was seen lunching in Marbella with Monzer al-Kassar and Stanley Lasser, a big-time money launderer with close ties to the Cali cocaine cartel in Colombia.

Jafaar was seeking a way in through al-Kassar to Haser and the Magharians, ostensibly to have them launder the clan's drug profits, and, through Lasser, to explore the unholy alliance that appeared to be in the works between the Syrian and Cali cartels whereby each would not only take the other's product but also share intelligence, smuggling routes and defensive tactics.

Jafaar scored with both barrels. With al-Kassar's blessing, he met the Magharians in Bern and Zurich to set up accounts for his family, each meeting taped and monitored by Coleman's assistant Syrian George, who had been flown in from Cyprus for this purpose. When the Swiss police agreed to tap Lasser's telephone in his Zurich apartment, Syrian George stayed on in Switzerland to sit on the wire while Sami Jafaar and other members of his clan kept watch to identify Lasser's Arab visitors.

On the strength of this, the Swiss issued arrest warrants for all the DEA/CIA targets, and before returning in triumph to Paris, Jafaar rounded off his winter's work by trapping Haser into a highly incriminating recorded conversation about heroin and morphine base shipments.

Over Christmas 1987, with his stock standing higher than ever, Sami introduced Michael Pavlick, the DEA country attache in Paris, to his cousin, another eager and potentially valuable recruit to the anti-Syrian cause. He was Kalid Nazir Jafaar, still in his teens, and the favourite grandson of the clan's patriarch, Moostafa Jafaar.

Though living with his father in Dearborn, near Detroit, Kalid visited his mother and grandfather in the Bekaa Valley several times a year, a family duty providing him with perfect cover for the job of courier in the DEA's stepped-up programme of controlled heroin deliveries. Too young to be hired as a full-blown Cl, he was signed up on the spot as a 'subsource', a convenient arrangement whereby he was paid by a DEA Cl, rather than by the agency itself, so that, in the interests of 'deniability', his name did not have to appear on any official payroll records.

Congratulating themselves, and the Jafaars, on a six-month run of unparalleled success, DEA Nicosia greeted 1988 in a mood of cavalier optimism. With the NARCOG anatomy of the Syrian cartel now virtually complete, with a major Lebanese clan working for them and a better organized monitoring and intelligence network feeding them more reliable information, Hurley and his CIA colleagues prepared for the new growing season in the Bekaa with a sense of having seized the initiative at last.

There was just one problem they knew nothing about.

The Swiss money-laundering network run for Monzer al-Kassar by Arman Haser and the Magharian brothers was altogether too valuable an asset for the Syrians to have left unprotected. As Coleman had feared, while the DEA and the Swiss police had been watching and collecting evidence, KGB-trained agents of the Mogamarat, commanded by al-Kassar's brother-in-law, General Ali Dubah, had been watching them. Although the Magharians were arrested, al-Kassar and Haser had been under protective surveillance the whole time and were both spirited away before the trap closed.

The Syrians had also observed the Jafaars. The link between Sami Jafaar and the DEA, suspected by the Mogamarat at the time of the Fawaz Younis affair, had been confirmed -- and the result, a year later, was catastrophic.

Re: Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut To Lockerbie

PostPosted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 11:16 pm
by admin
Chapter 13

Suddenly Libya was solely to blame.

Along with other newspapers, the New York Times had signaled the change of tack a year earlier, on 10 October 1990, shortly before President George Bush met President Hafez Assad to discuss Syria's contribution to the multinational task force confronting Saddam Hussein in the Gulf.

New evidence, it reported, indicated that Libyan intelligence agents may have assembled and planted the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103.

The 'new evidence' had been previously described by the French news magazine L'Express on 28 September. A fragment of plastic circuit board found at Lockerbie was said to be identical with the circuit boards used in timing devices seized with a quantity of explosives from two Libyans at Dakar airport in February 1988. Further inquiries, by the CIA, had established that these digital electric timers were prototypes, unique to Meister et Bollier of Zurich, who had made 20 of them for a Libyan intelligence organization in 1985.

'State Department officials were unavailable for comment,' the New York Times reported, thereby hinting at the source of the leak, but if the story had been aired as a trial balloon, it failed to lift off.

The Independent, in London, obliged with another blast of hot air. On 14 December, a week before the second anniversary of the disaster, it ran a six-column headline: 'Jet Bomb May Have Been Gadafi's Revenge.' Elsewhere in the paper, a seven-column headline, in even bigger type, stated, 'Libya Blamed for Lockerbie,' under the legend: 'Gulf crisis inhibits American action despite "conclusive proof" of bomb fragment's source.'

Under the first heading, the paper printed the text of a fax sent to Tripoli two months after the disaster by the head of the Libyan interests section at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London claiming the bombing as a victory for Libya.
'The dispatch of the fax appears to have been disregarded at the time by the team of detectives investigating the bombing,' declared the Independent, concluding, unwarily, that 'after two years of pursuing members of Jebril's West German cell, and their associates across Europe, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean, it appears that these men were not responsible for planting the bomb.'

Further proof of Gaddafi's guilt, in the paper's view, was the mysterious Libyan who had bought the clothes wrapped around the bomb from a boutique in Malta less than a month before the tragedy. Quoting from the L'Express story, the Independent described him as 'an associate of one of two Libyan secret agents picked up in Senegal in February 1988, in possession of a trigger device identical to the one recovered from the Lockerbie wreckage'.

Under the Independent's second major headline, this overstatement was partially corrected by reference to 'a detonator fragment' found at Lockerbie, but even so, this 'proof' that 'Libya was behind the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie' was described as 'conclusive' by the 'high-level sources' who had inspired the story.

To avoid 'alienating the Arab members of the Gulf alliance,' the paper went on, 'no indictments have yet been issued against the prime suspects, and the force of Scottish detectives in charge of the criminal investigation into the bombing has not formally been given the new evidence by other elements of the international inquiry team, which includes the FBI, CIA and German and British intelligence [authors italics].' (The 'new evidence' was greeted with derision in some quarters when it became known that the L 'Express story had originated over lunch with a senior official from the American Embassy in Paris. Suspicions of a CIA 'plant' deepened further when word leaked out that the matching of the Lockerbie circuit board fragment with the timers seized in Dakar was based on little more than a photographic comparison.)

A Libyan connection had, in any case, been assumed from the start, by Lester Coleman as well as most other experts aware of Libya's role as supplier of arms and explosives to terrorist factions around the world. In fact, the only genuinely new element in the Lockerbie investigation was Iraq's annexation of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, and the requirement this imposed upon the American intelligence community to put an acceptable face on Washington's alliance with Syria and its desired rapprochement with Iran.

With those two off the target list, the only available scapegoat was Muammar Gaddafi, always seen as a likely accessory before, during and after the fact of the Flight 103 atrocity, but never -- until December 1990 -- seriously proposed as the prime mover. From then onwards, all the 'evidence' offered as 'proof' that Libya was responsible for the mass murder at Lockerbie would come, not from the Scottish police or forensic scientists, but from the FBI and the CIA -- and they had to work hard.

Even after the Independent's uncritical puff for what it had learned from 'high-level sources', America's trial balloon was slow to take off. Two days later, Julie Flint in The Observer, shot it down.

'British and American experts believe that Libya's involvement in the Lockerbie disaster was only tangential,' she wrote. 'Despite last week's banner headlines claiming Libya "was to blame" for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 two years ago this week, it is still thought the outrage was almost certainly ordered from Iran and planned from Syria.'

Citing Paul Wilkinson, professor of international relations at St. Andrew's University and head of the Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism, as a leading proponent of this view, she reported that he had known about the timer match for almost a year. As for the fax claiming the bombing as a victory for Libya,

... Professor Wilkinson said it was not 'disregarded' -- as the Independent claimed on Friday -- but 'given a low rating because it was such a piece of opportunist propaganda '.

'There is something suspicious about wanting to shift the entire focus to Libya when we have so much circumstantial evidence for the involvement of Iran, Syria, and the GC group, Ahmad Jibril's Damascus-based Popular front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command [he said].

'A lot of fine forensic work will not be revealed until charges are brought to court, but the investigators have a pretty good idea about the sources of the case. There is also a pretty conclusive picture that here was a group -- the GC -- intent on bombing an American airliner.

'The truth is probably that there was an unholy alliance,' says Professor Wilkinson. 'Groups such as the GC have often been assisted by sympathetic groups, and it is not necessarily the case that the whole construction of the bomb was Libyan and that Libya was responsible for designing it.'


'Supporting this theory,' Julie Flint concluded, 'is the fact that the Libyans arrested at Dakar were not carrying a radio-cassette bomb, as the Independent claimed, but component parts -- ten detonators, 21 pounds of Semtex and several packets of TNT. Intelligence sources also say the CIA has evidence that Jibril designed much of the Lockerbie bomb.'

If so, the CIA was not about to admit it. With its trial balloon grounded again, the next attempt to patch it up came from Vincent Cannistraro, who claimed to have been in charge of the CIA's contribution to the Flight 103 investigation until his retirement in September 1990.

Having refurbished two bits of year-old evidence to support the new Libyan thesis, he now weighed in with a two-year-old intelligence report about a meeting in Tripoli before the bombing --in mid-November 1988 -- at which the Libyans were said to have taken over responsibility for the attack from the PFLP-GC after Jibril's West German cell was broken up.

According to Cannistraro, the report had been dismissed as unreliable at the time but now, in the light of the 'proven' Libyan connection, was the missing link that placed the blame squarely on Gaddafi.

He did not explain why the CIA had waited until December 1990, to draw this conclusion when the 'proof' had been available for at least a year, nor did he explain why no advance warning based on this report, reliable or not, had been passed down the line to those responsible for airline security. The so-called Helsinki warning, also dismissed as unreliable (and apparently for better reason), had at least saved the lives of those who would otherwise have occupied the vacant seats on Flight 103.

And possibly it was just a coincidence that Cannistraro's revelations, fully in keeping with the CIA's tradition of conducting America's secret business in public, were made at about the same time that his former colleagues in the Drug Enforcement Administration set out to discredit Lester Coleman as an obstacle to general acceptance of the Libyan/ Air Malta explanation of the Lockerbie disaster.

On 21 December 1990, Steven Emerson appeared on Cable News Network and in a broadcast received in 151 countries described Coleman as a disgruntled former DEA informant responsible for recent allegations in the media that the DEA was somehow involved in the bombing of Flight 103.

And possibly it was also significant that after the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) forensic team had identified the tiny fragment of micro-circuitry as part of the bomb's triggering mechanism, it was not the Scottish police who discovered the source of the murder weapon but the CIA's intelligence analysts. It was Cannistraro and his colleagues who pointed them towards Dakar and the timers seized from two Libyan intelligence agents.

It was Cannistraro and his colleagues who also identified the mysterious Libyan who bought the clothes in Malta to wrap around the bomb, based on a photofit picture produced by the FBI from the shopkeeper's phenomenally detailed description of his customer ten months after he saw him for the first and only time.

It was Cannistraro and his colleagues who also identified this man as an accomplice of the two Libyans arrested at Dakar (and subsequently released) who took over from Ahmed Jibril after he asked for Gaddafi's help.

And it was Cannistraro's CIA colleagues who, with the FBI, eventually identified two other Libyans who were later indicted for the bombing by an American grand jury.

But that was a year later. In December 1990, nobody was much impressed by America's trial balloon for there were serious problems of credibility with the Libyan theory.

All the forensic evidence showed in support of the theory was that the timer used in the Lockerbie bomb appeared to be identical with a batch sold to the Libyans three years before the bombing, and that the clothing wrapped around the bomb came from Malta, which had close links with Libya.

Forensic science had no answer to the question of what happened to the timer after it was supplied to the Libyans by the Swiss, any more than it could say with certainty what happened to the Semtex plastic explosive after that was supplied to the Libyans by the Czechs. Both could have passed through any number of hands before being finally installed in the Toshiba radio-cassette player used to house the Lockerbie bomb.

The same was true of the clothing around the bomb and the Samsonite suitcase that contained the device.

Given Libya's established role as quartermaster to the world's terrorists, the forensic evidence alone could -- and did -- point as readily to the PFLP-GC as to the Libyans themselves. It identified the components of the bomb -- not who made it or how it was put aboard Flight 103.

As accessories, the Libyans who supplied those components were as guilty as hell, as guilty morally and legally as anyone directly involved in commissioning or committing mass murder. But there was nothing in the available forensic evidence to prove that Libya was the sole author of the atrocity or even among the prime movers.

Beyond that, the official Libyan theory rested mainly on the proposition that the suitcase containing the bomb had been sent unaccompanied on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, where, undetected by Pan Am's inadequate security arrangements, it was loaded on to a feeder flight to London and then transferred to a third aircraft for the New York leg of the journey.

Apart from the inherent improbability that trained intelligence agents would simply add an armed suitcase bomb tagged for New York-JFK to a pile of international luggage waiting to be loaded in Luqa and then trust to luck that, unescorted, the bomb would get through the baggage-handling and security arrangements of two other major airports and be loaded aboard the target aircraft before the timer triggered an explosion, there remained the problem with the provenance and reliability of the Frankfurt baggage-list that was said to have identified the suitcase in the first place.

Apart from the inherent improbability that the Lockerbie investigators never thought to ask for it, that it was left to a clerk to print out a copy on her own initiative before the computer wiped the record, only to return weeks later from holiday to find that still no one had asked for it, and that the BKA, after being given the list, sat on it for months before passing it along to the Scottish police, there remained the problem of the FBI teletype which left open the possibility that no such bag from Malta was ever loaded on Flight 103.

According to this five-page document, sent from the US Embassy in Bonn to the FBI director on 23 October 1989, 'From the information available from the Frankfurt airport records, there is no concrete indication that any piece of baggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180, sent through the luggage routing system at Frankfurt airport and then loaded on board Pan Am 103.'

The baggage computer entry 'does not indicate the origin of the bag which was sent for loading on board Pan Am 103. Nor does it indicate that the bag was actually loaded on Pan Am 103. It indicates only that a bag of unknown origin was sent from Coding Station 206 at 1:07 p.m. to a position from which it was supposed to be loaded on Pan Am 103.'

The handwritten record kept at Coding Station 206 was no more explicit. According to the teletype, 'the handwritten duty sheet indicates only that the luggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180. There is no indication how much baggage was unloaded or where the luggage was sent.' On the agent's reading of the evidence, 'there remains the possibility that no luggage was transferred from Air Malta 180 to Pan Am 103 and that a piece of luggage was simply introduced at Coding Station 206 [author's italics].'

The teletype also disclosed that, on a guided tour of the baggage area in September 1989, Detective Inspector Watson McAteer and FBI Special Agent Lawrence G. Whitaker had actually seen this happen. They had 'observed an individual approach Coding Station 206 with a single piece of luggage, place the luggage in a luggage container, encode a destination into the computer and leave without making any notation on a duty sheet'. From this they concluded that a rogue suitcase could have been 'sent to Pan Am 103 either before or after the unloading of Air Malta 180'.

Although one government-inspired commentator tried later to dismiss the FBI teletype as 'an early memo ... that sketched one possible scenario, as of October 1989', and which subsequent events had rendered 'irrelevant' and 'pointless', it was less easy to reject the categorical denials by Air Malta, the airport staff at Luqa, the Maltese police and the Maltese government that any unaccompanied bag had been sent to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, or, indeed, that any Maltese connection with the Lockerbie bombing had been established at all, other than that the clothing in the suitcase bomb had apparently originated on the island.

There was a question also about the device itself. In the official view, the use of the Swiss timer pointed clearly to Libya, not only because it had been supplied to its security agency in the first place, but because the PFLP-GC favoured a barometric-pressure triggering system for its Toshiba bombs.

Thomas Hayes, however, the forensic expert responsible for identifying the tiny piece of Swiss circuit board, was not prepared to commit himself on this point. In his book, On the Trail of Terror, David Leppard wrote later that, privately, Hayes believed the Lockerbie bomb had been a dual device, triggered by a barometric switch and then running on a timer, but that not enough of it had been recovered to be sure.

The possibility that Khreesat or Abu Elias or some other PFLP-GC bombmaker had incorporated a Libyan timer as well as Libyan Semtex into the Lockerbie bomb remained open, therefore -- with the balance of probability tilted towards Jibril's group rather than the Libyans in view of its previous use of Toshiba radios as bomb housings.

But by now, the whole Lockerbie investigation was dogged by a sense of futility felt nowhere more keenly than at the Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry which, just before Christmas 1990, recessed for a month after hearing 150 witnesses in 46 days.

Ian Bell wrote in the Observer:

Before it adjourned, it heard former Pan Am employees accuse the airline of refusing to pay for adequate security measures. Disgraceful, if true, but almost irrelevant. Pan Am did not kill its own passengers. The inquiry is unlikely to tell us who did ...

Only a handful of reporters now cover the inquiry, and their stories slip day by day down the news schedules, overtaken by fresh nightmares and by disasters which are simpler, easier to comprehend. The iron laws of the press have prevailed. Predictably, the international media circus, with its Olympian disdain for the parochial, has long since moved on.

The words and images of 1988 are stored in the cuttings libraries and video vaults, sinking into history. The big world of geopolitics, where the truth about Lockerbie probably lies, demands the presence of the troupe elsewhere. For all we know, the political masters of those who destroyed Flight 103 are now our allies in the Gulf crisis. For all we know, they may have been our allies two years ago ... The only important fact to have emerged from the inquiry is that those who know the truth will never willingly give evidence ...

As the months have passed, it has become clear that something like a campaign of disinformation has been waged, for reasons which can still only be guessed at. With only the single, terrible fact of 21 December known for certain, journalists have scavenged and speculated. Some have been used. Hence the sense of futility haunting the Lockerbie inquiry.

Nothing said there, one feels, will approach the truth about Flight 103. The Scottish legal system, for all its solemnity, has neither the strength nor the resources to solve the puzzle.


Neither had the House Government Operations sub-committee in Washington which, a few days before Coleman was publicly denounced in a CNN broadcast, opened hearings into allegations that the DEA was involved in the fate of Flight 103.

On 18 December, Stephen H. Greene, assistant administrator of the operations division of the DEA, described at some length how a 'controlled delivery' worked and agreed that the DEA often used the technique. But he strenuously denied that anything of the sort had been going on anywhere in Europe around the time of the Lockerbie disaster.

Under pressure from Congress and the media, he said, the agency had reviewed its files and questioned its agents overseas to see if there was any basis in fact for the NBC and ABC newscasts and other media reports asserting that Khalid Nazir Jafaar had been involved in a DEA operation known as Corea or Courier.

The result, according to the DEA spokesman's sworn testimony, was a classified 350-page report, reviewed and confirmed by its sister agency, the FBI, showing that Jafaar had never been used as an informant or subsource and that no DEA agent or office had ever had any contact with him. Jafaar's two pieces of luggage had been identified by the Lockerbie investigators and neither showed any sign of explosives or drugs. Nor had there ever been a DEA operation or unit called Corea, or anything similar to that name. According to Greene, there had been three controlled deliveries through Frankfurt between 1983 and 1987, none involving Pan Am nights, and none after that.

This blanket denial might have been more persuasive if the report, or the files on which it was based, had been made available for inspection by some suitably qualified independent investigator, but the subcommittee fared no better in this respect than had counsel for Pan Am. Accused of hen-stealing, fox and vixen had once again insisted on going back to their lair alone to look for feathers.

If anything, suspicions of a cover-up were reinforced by the DEA's determination to act as counsel, judge and jury in its own cause, and nobody was much surprised when, three days before the deadline imposed by the Federal Tort Claims Act, Pan Am obtained leave from the United States District Court, Eastern Division of New York, to file a third-party liability claim against the US government in connection with the crash of Flight 103.

In an update of the story on the second anniversary of the disaster, Barron's, the American business magazine, quoted Vincent Cannistraro's dismissal of Juval Aviv's Interfor Report as 'absolute nonsense', and the more recent NBC and ABC newscasts that shared some of its conclusions as 'total rubbish and fabrication'.

Victor Marchetti, however, another CIA veteran, strongly disagreed. Formerly executive assistant to the deputy director under Richard Helms, Marchetti told Barron's he had always thought that 'the essence of the Interfor report was true ... I'm not concerned about a detail here or there that may be wrong'. With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the enlistment of Syria in the alliance opposing Saddam Hussein, 'the cover-up is now more true than ever. Which is why the lid is really on.'

A Middle Eastern intelligence analyst, who asked for his name to be withheld as he was employed by another agency, was even more emphatic.

'Juval Aviv is a very astute investigator who has come up with some very plausible explanations,' he said. 'I could find nothing that I knew to be untrue. And I found many details that I knew to be true. Do I think the CIA was involved? Of course they were involved. And they screwed up.'

Asked to comment on the Independent's report that Libyan terrorists had put the bomb aboard Flight 103 by means of an unaccompanied bag sent from Malta, Aviv himself thought it was yet another attempt to distract attention from the truth.

"The timing of this story [he told Barron's] at the same time as the Lockerbie inquiry, on the eve of the second anniversary of the crash, just as the threat of a Pan Am lawsuit emerges, is not a coincidence. They had to try to take attention away from the accepted theory that Jibril and the Syrians were responsible. That theory was never disputed until three months ago.

"It does not make sense to send a bomb unattended from Malta through Frankfurt to London -- two stops where it could be found [he went on]. This means they just sent it off, hoping it would pass all the checks and get on the right flight. How often does a bag get lost and fail to make a connecting flight? Professional terrorists don't take such chances. Also, according to the Libyan story in the Independent, the detonator was just a simple timer -- not a barometric pressure trigger. What would happen if there was a delay somewhere on that long trip from Malta through Frankfurt to London?"


Preserving a balance throughout that had not been conspicuous in other media surveys of the Lockerbie investigation, Barron's concluded its article with a statement from Paul Hudson, a lawyer from Albany, New York, whose sixteen-year-old daughter had died in the crash. Without hard evidence, he remained sceptical of the Interfor Report's findings, but nevertheless called for a genuine public Inquiry.

'We're counting on the Congress to shed more light on this,' he said. 'The subpoenas that would have shed light have been blocked. What we're looking for is a congressional review of the DEA and the FBI investigations, and then, if they decide there is any basis to the allegations, a special counsel. Right now, the House and Senate judiciary committees have jurisdiction over the FBI and the DEA. But the congressional intelligence committees are like a black box. Things go in without anything coming out. They never issue any reports. They never hold any open hearings. They don't seem to be a vehicle that's going to get the truth out. Whatever they do is totally within the intelligence cloak.'

No such hearings were held, of course -- on either side of the Atlantic. Instead, Washington relied on the public's dwindling interest in the two-year-old disaster, the shortness of its memory, and what Ian Bell had described as 'the iron laws of the press' to blur the improbabilities that riddled the authorized version of events. Though it never really flew, the Libyan trial balloon had served its purpose. Eleven months later, the indictment of two Libyans for the mass murder of 270 people at Lockerbie struck most Americans as little more than a formality, giving practical effect to what they -- and most of the media -- already thought they knew.

It was now openly an all-American show, although Robert Mueller, assistant attorney- general, paid tribute to the Scottish police, who deserved, he said, 'the most unbelievable praise of any law-enforcement agency in the world'.

Believable or not, the praise was echoed by his boss, acting Attorney-General William Barr, who, coupling their work with that of his own investigators, congratulated the team on a 'brilliant and unrelenting operation'. Other American officials hailed the indictments as 'one of law enforcement's finest hours', but those who still cared were not convinced. Neither was Israel. Nor the PLO. Nor even Germany.

The official sequence of events, as set out in the American indictment, began with the sale of 20 custom-built Swiss electronic timers to the Libyan Ministry of Justice in 1985. In 1988, they were issued to Libyan intelligence agents abroad, many of them working under cover as employees of Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), along with detonators and plastic explosives.

Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, one of the two men named in the indictment, was said to have stored the explosives at Malta's Luqa airport, where he was LAA station manager, and to have built the bomb with the second defendant, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, Libya's chief of airline security, hiding it in a Toshiba radio.

On 7 December 1988, al-Megrahi was alleged to have called at the Sliema boutique and bought the odd assortment of clothes that were used to wrap around the radio bomb. On 15 December, Fhimah made a note in his diary, reminding himself to take some Air Malta luggage tags from the airport. On 17 December, al-Megrahi flew to Tripoli for a meeting, followed by Fhimah next day, and both returned to Malta on 20 December with a suitcase for the bomb. On 21 December, the fatal day, they were said to have placed the suitcase with its Air Malta tags among the luggage being loaded on to international flights from Luqa airport.

Besides the Libyan connections established by the forensic evidence, the US Justice Department now had two witnesses.

The first was known to be Tony Gauci, son of the owner of Mary's House, the boutique in Sliema from which the clothing in the bomb suitcase had allegedly been purchased. Gauci had remembered the sale so vividly that, almost ten months later, he had given the Scottish police a probable date for it, 23 November 1988, and provided a FBI videofit artist with a detailed description of his customer -- he believed, a Libyan.

According to reports in the media at that time, the resulting likeness was thought to be that of Abu Talb, a PFLP-GC terrorist who had visited Malta twice before the bombing and was subsequently arrested in Sweden while in possession of large quantities of clothing purchased in Malta.

In the indictment, however, the sale was said to have been made on 7 December 1988, and the purchaser was identified as Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi.

The government's surprise second witness was Abdu Maged Jiacha, described as a Libyan intelligence officer who had worked undercover as assistant station manager for LAA at Luqa.

In the autumn of 1991, he had defected to the United States -- 'for financial reasons' -- and identified Fhimah and al-Megrahi as the bombers.

The investigators had also come into possession of what was said to be Fhimah's personal diary, improbable though it must have seemed to them that a trained intelligence agent would keep one or put anything in writing, let alone the incriminating English word 'taggs' (sic) in the middle of an entry in Arabic and then, according to media reports, leave the diary behind for the investigators to find. (Jiacha's 'financial reasons' were understood to be a reward of $4 million and resettlement in California under the Federal Witness Protection Program.)

The issue of warrants for Fhimah and al-Megrahi on 14 November 1991 was accompanied by a statement from President Bush's spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, insisting that Iran and Syria were not involved. The Pan Am bombing, he said, was part of a consistent pattern of Libyan-sponsored terrorism that could no longer be ignored. President Bush was discussing a coordinated international response with other Western leaders and all options were open, including the forcible seizure of the two men from Libya.

Amplifying this statement, Washington officials claimed that Libya had tried in various ways to implicate Syria and Iran -- by using a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder, for instance -- but there was no evidence of their involvement. Everything, including intelligence data, pointed to a solely Libyan operation in retaliation for President Reagan's bombing of Tripoli in 1986.

'The Syrians took a bum rap on this,' President Bush famously declared.

Any suggestion that such a conclusion might have been politically directed was simultaneously rejected on both sides of the Atlantic. Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland's Lord Advocate, said he would have resigned if exposed to political pressure, and Assistant Attorney-General Bob Mueller insisted that no one had even tried to influence the investigation.

The sceptics were not convinced.

'Does George Bush take us for fools?' asked Bonnie O'Connor, of Long Island, New York, when a Newsday reporter invited her opinion. Her brother had died in the wreck of Flight 103.

Dr. James Swire, who had lost a daughter at Lockerbie and was the leading spokesman for the British families, told The Times that he still believed the atrocity had been carried out by the PFLP-GC, acting as mercenaries for the Iranians, although he was anxious to see the two Libyans brought to trial by any means short of force. He thought Jibril had probably used them to confuse the chase.

Professor Paul Wilkinson agreed. 'There are no grounds for assuming that Libya was the only country involved,' he said, suggesting again that there had been 'an unholy alliance' between Iran, Syria and Libya.

The Israelis concurred. 'The revelation that Libya was involved does not necessarily mean that previous allegations against Syria and Iran are false,' said Anat Kurz, of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. 'It may be all three countries worked together.'

Yossi Olmert, head of the Israeli government press office, thought so, too. 'We are not surprised by the findings,' he said. 'It is what we call sub-contracting.'

Volker Rath, the German public prosecutor, tactfully said nothing at the time but later announced that Germany was suspending proceedings against the two Libyans for lack of evidence.

With the exception of a few journalists perhaps over-committed to the official Anglo- American view after following it so assiduously for three years, the press, too, was mostly unenthusiastic.

'The arrest warrants are unlikely to quell speculation that more than one country was involved,' wrote Alan Philps, diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Citing an additional reason for the change of tack, he went on to suggest that 'laying the blame at the door of Libya will lift a burden from the shoulders of diplomats working to reconvene the Middle East peace conference and to release the last remaining British hostage in Lebanon, Mr. Terry Waite.'

'Had either Syria or the Palestinians been shown to be involved,' he said, 'it would have added a complication to the peace conference, perhaps provoking an Israeli walk-out.'

The magazine Private Eye was more scathing, having already denounced the Thatcher and Bush governments for agreeing 'that they will not pursue any further the terrorists who bombed the plane over Lockerbie since they are known to be close to the Syrian government' (28 September 1991).

A week after the indictments were published, its 'Lockerbie Special Report' noted that

'... in recent weeks, Bush and Major have been under some pressure from the families of people who died at Lockerbie. One US group of families recently visited Britain and started to agitate for action. The statement about the two Libyans was the two governments' answer. The wretched Lord Fraser, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, was ordered to read out 'results' of his police inquiry which were completely different from those already read out to newspapers all over the world ...

In the House of Commons, Douglas Hurd went out of his way to exculpate the 'other governments' (Syria and Iran) which his colleague Paul Channon had denounced in March 1989.


(Sceptical from the start of official announcements about the disaster, Private Eye added this footnote to a later story [8 May 1992] about the suitcase of drugs found among the wreckage at Lockerbie: 'P.S.: Lord Fraser of Carmyllie has been promoted in John Major's new administration to be minister of state at the Scottish office.')

More temperately, Adrian Hamilton in the Observer reminded his readers 'that the US charges of Libyan complicity in the Rome bar bombing of 1986 -- used as a pretext for the US raid on Tripoli -- proved groundless. It was Lebanese terrorists, probably at the behest of Syria, who planted the device which killed an American serviceman ... The assault on Libya is all too conveniently timed to let Iran and Syria off the hook and speed the release of hostages.'

A.M. Rosenthal, in the New York Times, felt that too many people had taken part in the investigation for the truth to remain hidden for ever. 'Among those I have talked to over the past years,' he said, 'I have found none who believed that Libya alone paid for, planned and carried out the crime -- exactly none.'

Pierre Salinger of ABC News seemed equally unconvinced that it was Libya's sole responsibility after he went to Tripoli in December 1991 to interview the two accused and to discuss their indictment with Colonel Gaddafi. Though he had his doubts about al- Megrahi -- his 'answers to questions were not always convincing' -- he found Fhimah 'a simple man, and it was hard to believe that he had been involved in a terrorist case. Both Mr. Megrahi and Mr. Fhima told me they would be happy to meet Scottish or American investigators and talk to them about the case.'

Their willingness to do so was confirmed by Libya's foreign minister, lbrahim Bechari, who said that Western investigators were welcome in Libya and that the Libyan judge looking into the allegations, Ahmed al-Zawi, would like to have more US or Scottish evidence in the case so that he could conduct a solid interrogation of the two men.

Gaddafi himself, when questioned by Salinger, said: 'I am angry about the accusations against Libya, but I am satisfied that things are moving according to law. I am satisfied there is a legal way to deal with this.'

Donald Trelford, editor of the Observer, was told much the same thing by Gaddafi in a further interview a month or so later.

'He challenged the US and Britain to produce evidence against the Libyans,' Trelford wrote. "'The truth is, they don't have it," he added. Libya has arrested the two men named by the Scottish Lord Advocate last November ... and begun a judicial investigation of its own. Gadaffi invited British and US lawyers to attend the inquiry and interrogate the accused, and welcomed representatives of victims' families.'

Even the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), though working to a different agenda from that of other critics of the official line, felt that the Libyan contribution to the Lockerbie disaster had been of a low-level technical nature.

In an 80-page report leaked to the press on both sides of the Atlantic, the PLO described a number of meetings between Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian minister of the interior, Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP-GC and other officials in the late summer of 1988 to plan a revenge attack on an American airliner. According to the PLO's sources, the Toshiba radio-cassette bomb used to destroy Flight 103 had been built by Khaisar Haddad, also known as Abu Elias, a blond, blue-eyed Lebanese Christian member of the PFLP-GC, who passed the completed device on to an Iranian contact in Beirut.

This suggestion fitted neatly with the BKA's identification of Abu Elias as an associate of Hafez Dalkamoni, head of the PFLP-GC's West Germany cell until the arrests of October 1988, and with the Lockerbie investigators' belief that Abu Elias took charge of the attack after that.

Whatever its motives in preparing the report, no one could seriously challenge the quality of the PLO's sources in the Palestinian community. Even for those most deeply committed to the official view, these revelations could only reopen the vexed question of why the Scottish police and the FBI had changed their minds so comprehensively after claiming for at least 18 months that the bombing had been carried out by Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC at the instigation of Iran and Syria.

There were other questions, too.

If Libya was solely responsible for the bombing of Flight 103, why did the US government resolutely refuse on grounds of national security to open the relevant files for judicial or congressional examination, if necessary in camera, in order to dispose of alternative theories, rumours and speculation about the real cause of the Lockerbie tragedy?

If Libya was solely responsible, why had the government lied to Congress and the media about the activities of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Cyprus?

If Libya was solely responsible, why had the US government gone to such lengths to silence one of its own intelligence agents on the subject of the DEA's operations in Cyprus, and when that failed, to discredit what he had to say?

If the government's hands were clean, why did it insist on hiding them behind its back?