Death of film director Allan Francovich

[Allan Francovich died at Houston Airport, Texas, on this date in 1997. What follows is excerpted from his obituary in The Independent, written by Tam Dalyell:]

That Allan Francovich should die prematurely, succumbing to a heart attack in the Customs Area of Houston Airport, is hardly astonishing to those whose lives were touched by this remarkable, hyperactive film director. I picture him arriving to meet me in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons, bag and baggage full of contents, out of breath, and blurting out the latest discovery that he had made about the iniquity of the authorities.

He reeled off facts at a mind-boggling rate. Yet, unlike most conspiracy theorists - of which he was proud to be one - Francovich was scrupulous about fact, and particularly about unpalatable facts which did not suit his suspicions. I never caught him cutting any inconvenient corners to arrive at the conclusion he wanted. He was, above all, a seeker after truth, wheresoever that truth might lead. (...)

My first introduction to Francovich was from Dr Jim Swire of the British Lockerbie Victims, who said that he had persuaded the best investigative film director in America to turn his attention to the crash of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, on 21 December 1988 that had killed his daughter Flora along with 269 other victims.

Once persuaded that there was a cause for suspicion, Francovich was the most determined of ferrets. The end result was his film The Maltese Double Cross (1995), made in conjunction with his fervently loyal colleagues John Ashton and David Ben-Aryeah and their cameraman Jeremy Stavenhagen. The showing of the film on Channel 4, and in the House of Commons, did more than anything else to awaken the British from J S Mill's "deep slumber of a decided opinion" about responsibility for Lockerbie.

Quite simply, Francovich proved the so-called Malta connection, on which the case against Libya depends, was a fabrication. Francovich identified the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner carrying pilgrims to Mecca as the starting point for Lockerbie. The Iranian Minister of the Interior, Ali Akbar Mostashemi, swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge. He had been, crucially, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1985, and had close connections with the terrorist gangs of Beirut and the Bekaa valley. They had infiltrated an American drug sting operation, which allowed them to circumvent the security precautions at the Rhine Main airport in Frankfurt. It was typical of Frankovich that he could go to the Jafaar family of the naive courier who had perished in Pan Am 103, and capture them on film in a powerful sequence showing up the activities of the Neuss terrorist gang operating in Germany.

It was Francovich's multi-dimensional, multilingual talents which I am sure will eventually unlock the truth about Lockerbie. Rare indeed, outside fiction, are the crusaders of truth who, time and again, have put themselves in personal danger as Francovich did.

Allan Francovich, film director: born New York 1941; married 1970 Kathleen Weaver (marriage dissolved 1985); died Houston, Texas 17 April 1997.

Death of Allan Francovich in 1997

[What follows is the text of a report in The Herald on this date in 1997:]

US film-maker Allan Francovich, whose controversial documentary challenged the official British and American view that the Lockerbie bombing was solely the work of two Libyan agents, has died. A friend said Mr Francovich collapsed on April 17 at Houston airport, Texas.

He was pronounced dead at hospital where the cause was given as a heart attack. Mr David Ben-Aryeah, a friend, said Mr Francovich would be cremated in San Antonio, and that his ashes would later be brought to Skye for a ''service of celebration''.

Mr Francovich, who was in his early 50s [RB: He was 56], had written a script while on Skye and had also visited the island with bereaved Lockerbie parent, Dr Jim Swire, while making the Lockerbie documentary The Maltese Double Cross. Mr Ben-Aryeah said: ''While he was there he came to love the island, its tranquillity, its scenery and its people.''

The American made several other controversial documentaries, mostly concerning the work of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Maltese Double Cross, which was shown to MPs in the Commons before being screened publicly in 1995, challenged the official US and British version of how a bomb brought down the New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.

Last night Linlithgow Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who collaborated with Mr Francovich in making the documentary, said he was ''very upset'' by news of his death. The MP described him as ''one of the most persistent seekers-of-truth'' he had ever met, ''an exceedingly brave man''.

Dr Swire, whose daughter died in the disaster, said he would be ''very much missed'' by those who considered that the truth on the Lockerbie disaster had yet to be told.

The 90-minute documentary, directed by Mr Francovich, claimed a huge cover-up had taken place. The film maintained that Iran and Syria plotted to bring down the aircraft as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian Airbus months before the Lockerbie tragedy. It argued that the authorities knew the plane was going to be bombed, but did nothing to prevent it for fear of exposing a US-sponsored drug-smuggling operation.

Scotland's top law officer at the time, the Lord Advocate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, criticised the screening by Channel 4. He said he deprecated all attempts to give a version of the atrocity ''from whatever angle'' while criminal proceedings were pending.

However, relatives of the 270 people who died welcomed the showing of the documentary saying people should be allowed ''to make up their own minds''.

Mr Dalyell said: ''It was my privilege to be Allan Francovich's collaborator in making the film, The Maltese Double Cross, which I believe exposed the truth that the Libyans were not responsible for the Lockerbie crime. ''I could not criticise the American and British governments more strongly for their refusal to address properly the explanations of Lockerbie.''

Dr Swire said: ''Speaking personally we view the loss of Allan as the loss of a close friend whose humour and determination was much appreciated and will be greatly missed.

[RB: Tam Dalyell’s obituary of Allan Francovich in The Independent can be read here.]

US Lockerbie relative attacks Francovich film project

[What follows is the text of a report published in The Herald on this date in 1994:]

The father of an American victim of the Lockerbie bombing has launched a bitter attack on documentary film maker Allan Francovich, who claims that his soon-to-be completed work on the destruction of PanAm flight 103 will make startling new revelations about the identity and background of the bombers.

In a letter in today's Herald, Mr Daniel Cohen, whose daughter Theodora was among the 270 people who died when the jetliner was bombed in December 1988, accuses Mr Francovich of being a ''Libyan dupe'' who is ''at best a journeyman film maker''.

The Herald reported last week that Mr Francovich's film was nearing completion. He maintained then that his efforts were being thwarted by a campaign to diminish his efforts and to undermine his professional standing.

He said anyone who challenged the official version of events, which was that the jet was bombed by the two Libyans subsequently charged by the Scottish and American authorities, was subjected to a tirade of abuse and harassment in the US.

Mr Francovich felt that the campaign was linked to Western intelligence agencies and also to the civil litigation involving PanAm and many relatives in the US courts.

However, Mr Cohen's position is at variance with that adopted by another relative, English GP Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora also died on flight 103. Last week, Dr Swire wrote to The Herald commending any attempt to investigate the affair further.

Yesterday, he said: ''I am sorry that the Cohens have taken this attitude but they lost a daughter at Lockerbie, as I did, and because of that I can forgive them anything. However, Allan Francovich, in the absence of anything else, is at least making the effort to inquire further and to challenge the current situation. Nobody else is doing that. Why not let him get on with it and then judge him on whatever he comes up with?''

Dr Swire, who is a leading campaigner on behalf of British relatives, added that the reason the affair was still wide open to speculation was because there had not been a trial of the two Libyans.

''However, the thing that makes me most angry about this whole affair is that there is continuing evidence to suggest that Western intelligence agencies were warned about what was going to happen. Francovich says he has hard evidence to this effect,'' he said.

''If it is true, I want the Western intelligence agencies to know that they can't just play about with evidence like this as if it was of no importance because at the end of the day a lot of people died.''

In Paris yesterday where he was continuing to work on the film, provisionally entitled Maltese Double Cross, Mr Francovich said the charges which Mr Cohen had levelled against him were those he had often made since filming started last autumn.

''He mentions my reputation as a film maker. Well it is probably not for me to say but my work has been shown at film festivals all over the world. I have won prestigious awards and my films have been shown on BBC and Channel 4.

''He says that our negotiations with Channel 4 for broadcasting the Lockerbie film were thwarted because we had been 'bragging' about the film. Frankly, that is nonsense. The negotiations were discreet in the extreme and I still maintain that they became public by means of telephone surveillance and because of a campaign mounted by someone acting on behalf of certain relatives' interests in the US,'' said Mr Francovich.

''Mr Cohen says that the British Government has never said that they were going to ban the film.

''Well, it wasn't me who originally said that they had. These were stories printed in the Scottish press quoting unnamed Government sources.''

Mr Francovich has also been accused by Mr Cohen of being funded by the Libyans. This follows the revelation that the Lonrho subsidiary which Mr Francovich says commissioned the film was itself partly funded by the Libyan Arab Finance Company.

Mr Francovich said yesterday: ''I can only say this over and over again. This is not a pro-Gaddafi film and the public will be able to come to their own conclusions when it is shown. Frankly, this assertion is probably actionable and it may well be that our production company's lawyers will have to take legal action if the Cohens continue with this campaign against me.”

"Libya’s vulnerable..., small country, Gaddafi’s hated, let’s go for it"

[The following are excerpts from an article by Alexander Zaitchik headed Lockerbie: the truth and those who dared to reveal it published yesterday on the Muslim Village website:]

The final documentary produced by the American filmmaker Allan Francovich, The Maltese Double Cross: Lockerbie was buried by the American press upon its release in 1994. It was dismissed and attacked for including testimony from terrorists, convicted felons, turncoat spooks, and others of dubious character. But mostly it was ignored. Unlike Francovich’s previous films about the US intelligence world, no art house theater screened it; no public television station aired it.

With the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Francovich has been vindicated. The basic elements of his film’s alternative theory — that the bombing of Pan Am 103 was an Iranian hit in revenge of the US downing of Iran Air 655, contracted out to a Syrian-backed, Beirut-based splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — are sturdier than ever. The official story of a lone Libyan in Malta, meanwhile, has never looked so pathetic or full of holes, especially in Scotland, scene of the crime, where polls show a majority still wants an independent investigation. This past March, the publication of a three-year Al Jazeera investigation added more ballast corroborating the basics of Double Cross.

The Maltese Double Cross was never screened or aired in the United States. Because of legal threats and official pressure, it almost never aired or screened in the UK, where the bombing killed 270 people on Dec 21, 1988. The doc’s controversial Glasgow debut followed a series of sudden cancellations, including a high-profile, last-minute erasure from the schedule of the 1994 London Film Festival. Double Cross finally opened under the defiant banner of the Scotsman newspaper, whose editors, supported by victims’ families, risked consequences to bring the film to the public. One of those editors, Lesley Riddoch, remembers thinking as the curtains parted, “Would The Scotsman, as one prominent journalist had warned, find itself frozen out of Crown Office briefings for a decade? Would we be sued, contradicted, even disappeared?”

The film and its many advocates, it turned out, weren’t easily suppressed. In 1994, nearly six years after the bombing, the British public had not forgotten the government’s sudden messaging shifts about the likely culprit, which seemed to follow a US lead, or its refusal to allow an independent investigation. Double Cross, for all of its problems, presented plausible explanations for both, often from the mouths of high U.S. officials. Following the Glasgow open, Double Cross won Best Documentary at the Edinburgh Film Festival; that spring, a truncated version of the sprawling 155-minute film aired on the UK’s Channel 4 and on Australian television.

When I first watched Double Cross in the pre-streaming year of 1995, it felt a little like watching a banned movie. A college buddy had returned from a semester at St Andrews with a choppy VHS bootleg of the Channel 4 broadcast in his suitcase. Everyone we showed it to had the same question: How was it possible this film wasn’t being shown anywhere in the US? It’s easy to forget how big a deal Lockerbie was into the mid-‘90s.

The Christmas bombing of the Pan Am jumbo jet, last century’s symbol of U.S. civilian air power, killed 189 Americans, making it the country’s deadliest act of international terrorism prior to 9/11. But after a brief flurry of skeptical reporting following the bombing, questions about Lockerbie dropped off in the US, where legal threats against broadcasters and theaters kept Double Cross off screens. The full-length version of the film is now available on YouTube.

Even the abbreviated version of Double Cross required an open notebook and heavy use of the pause and rewind buttons. Francovich, who produced several documentaries about the CIA for PBS and the BBC, was not afraid to make audiences work. He believed in letting his subjects tell the story. They talk at length, sometimes at cross-purposes, often in a domino-row of interviews without connecting tissue or explanatory bone-tosses to the viewer. But for all of its editing failures, substantive errors and questionable sources, the film deserves praise and revisiting, both as investigatory feat and intelligence-world rabbit-hole for the ages.

Few have chased rabbits home with as much energy as Francovich. Critics sometimes dismissed him as a conspiracy theorist, but he didn’t care. He dug as hard as anyone in the business, and his films were in no way analog antecedents to the investigative amateur-hours that animate the 9/11 Truth movement. His BBC2 investigation into Operation Gladio — a network of clandestine paramilitary “stay-behind” cells scattered throughout NATO countries that trained for post-apocalypse guerilla war — explored one of the juiciest Cold War veins ever tapped. His PBS dive into the CIA, On Company Business, won best documentary at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.

For Double Cross, Francovich and his main researcher, the Scottish journalist John Ashton, interviewed hundreds of subjects up and down the chain before arriving at an elaborate theory, strong in some areas, weaker in others. Like Gary Webb’s investigation, it relied on much that was already public record. But he put it all together for the first time, and worked through every implication to advance the story.

Double Cross posits that after a US warship in the Strait of Hormuz mistakenly shot down an Iran Air flight in July 1988, the Iranian regime put up $10 million to finance a revenge attack. The exiled former Iranian president Abulhassan Bani Sadr tells Francovich, “All Iranians viewed the US act as a crime [requiring justice]… Iran ordered the attack and Ahmed Jabril carried it out.”

Jabril was the Beirut-based leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [-General Command], a group known for its sophisticated bomb expertise. Jabril sent some of his best bomb makers to Frankfurt, where they caught the attention of German intelligence. In October 1988, German police arrested 17 members of the group (some with ties to Syrian intelligence) and confiscated caches of weapons and bomb material, including a primed Toshiba cassette player of the exact type used to bring down Pan Am 103. But the sweep did not put the entire cell behind bars, or stop the bombing. In early 1989, months after the downing of 103, German police conducted another raid on a PFLP safehouse in Neuss, northeast of Frankfurt, where they discovered more electrical-device bombs. Some of these bombs had altitude triggers used to bring down planes. All of this pointed clearly in the direction of Iran and Syria.

Then, on a dime, during the runup to the Gulf War, the official story told by American and British officials shifted to Libya. Jack Anderson, the muckraking syndicated columnist, reported in a January 1990 column that intelligence sources had told him that George H W Bush and Margaret Thatcher agreed to downplay the evidence pointing to Jabril, Syria and Iran. (Anderson suggests the need to keep Syria on board for the Gulf War coalition as a factor.) Forty minutes into Double Cross, Howard Teicher, senior director of Reagan’s NSC from 1985 to 1988, says he finds it unlikely the leaders of the free world would choose to frame Libya because so much corroborated intelligence “clearly links the bombing to [Iran and Syria].”

And yet, in November 1991, U.S. and UK authorities indicted two Libyans who worked for Libyan Airlines at the Malta airport, Abdel al-Megrahi and Lamen Fhimah. The key witness against al-Megrahi, the only one ultimately convicted, was a Malta shopkeeper named Tony Gauci, a witness as unreliable as anyone Francovich interviewed for his movie. Gauci picked al-Megrahi out of a suspect book after coaching from the FBI, and said he recognized him from media reports. During the trial, he said he “resembled a lot” the man who bought the clothes found at the crash site in Lockerbie, but couldn’t place his age and height in the right ballpark. He was given a $2 million reward.

The new focus on Libya timed to the arrival of Vincent Cannistraro to run the CIA’s Lockerbie investigation. During the 1980s, Cannistraro (interviewed extensively in Double Cross) and Col Oliver North ran a covert effort to undermine and destroy the Qadafi regime. In his front-page story about the program, Bob Woodward wrote that “deception and disinformation” were at the program’s heart. (...)

Subsequent reporting has vindicated Francovich’s core thesis that the Libyans were framed, and that the bombing was a tit-for-tat case of blowback caused by a trigger-happy U.S. Naval commander. In 2012, Al Jazeera acquired classified Defense Intelligence cables stating, “The execution of the operation was contracted [by Iran] to Ahmad Jabril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) leader. Money was given to Jabril upfront in Damascus for initial expense. The mission was to blow up a Pan-Am flight.”

The network also attained a copy of the Scottish police report showing dismay over the holes in the case against al-Megrahi. Had the Libyan been allowed an appeal, the report claims, he would have easily won. But appeal was denied following his non-jury trial in Holland in 2001. (At the time, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hailed the use of a third-country court as “an historic innovation in international legal practice.” Robert Black, meanwhile, the Scottish legal scholar known as the “architect” of the trial, has emerged as a leading critic of the proceedings and the official story generally.)

At the end of all this, the big question, why? Why would the US and Britain let the real culprits off the hook? Among the people interviewed in the recent Al Jazeera report is former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked on the Lockerbie investigation. “As far as I can tell,” he says, “someone said, look, Libya’s vulnerable to prosecution, small country, Gaddafi’s hated, let’s go for it. It was an executive decision, and then once that happened everybody lined up.” This accords with much earlier reporting and many of the interviews in The Maltese Double Cross.

Although mostly Americans died on Pan Am 103, conversation about Lockerbie in this country today revolves around the subject of victim pain. In October, NPR broadcast a segment about a “poignant letter” that emerged from the tragedy. The Smithsonian Channel produced a maudlin hour-long documentary last year that exploits the harrowing screams of a mother getting the news at JFK, but never touches the questions around the official story. As for Allan Francovich, he died in 1997 at the age of 56, a few years after the Glasgow premier of Double Cross. He suffered a heart attack in in the customs section of Houston’s George H W Bush International, the only airport named after a CIA chief, shortly after being detained by officials on his arrival from London. 

[It would appear that this article was first published on 15 December 2014 on the AlterNet website.]

Real questions raised but no reliable answers

[What follows is the text of a review by Tom Sutcliffe on the website of The Independent on this date in 1995 of the version of Allan Francovich’s The Maltese Double Cross broadcast on Channel Four that day:]

All disasters provoke in us a hunger for explanation and these days you're never at a loss for someone prepared to feed you, to appease your pangs with conspiracy theories - that intellectual junk food. In more faithful times blame was less complex. Writing about the Titanic, Thomas Hardy mused on the separate creation of ship and iceberg: "No mortal eye could see/ The intimate welding of their later history,/ Or sign that they were bent/ By paths coincident/ On being anon twin halves of one august event./ Till the Spinner of the Years/ Said 'Now!' And each one hears,/ And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres."

Alan Francovich's film about the Lockerbie disaster, The Maltese Double Cross (Channel 4), opened with a similarly baleful sense of ineluctable collision - a suitcase and a plane full of people, fated to meet. But where Hardy lays the blame on the Spinner of the Years (current whereabouts unknown) Francovich has more earthly agencies in mind. That terrible explosion was entirely eluctable, he suggests, so much so that several potential victims changed their travel plans after specific warnings from intelligence sources. Worse, he alleges, the bomb was actually placed on the plane with the assistance of DEA officials, protecting a drugs-for-intelligence operation in the Lebanon. The Libyan connection is simply a front, a cynical attempt to turn a political profit from the disaster and to conceal the murky dealings of American intelligence.

This is airport novel stuff, a convoluted story traced through a swamp of mendacity and impure motive. It might even be true - after all, Iran- Contra sounded like a Hollywood fantasy. But it doesn't greatly help your confidence that Francovich's film almost immediately adopted the conspiracist's unshakeable conviction that nothing is quite what it seems. "Americans" were on the scene very quickly, noted various witnesses, hinting darkly at foreknowledge. The CIA was there and the FBI, interfering with the work of Scottish policemen, combing those low hills for evidence. This seems "odd" to Tam Dalyell - but it doesn't seem very odd to me. It's explicable in a number of ways - management panic, jurisdictional squabbles, even the sick crowd instinct generated by such an event. Intelligence officers aren't immune from the impulse that makes people pull over to stare at traffic accidents and they have much better excuse at hand.

It was clear too that Francovich wasn't exactly a dispassionate seeker after truth. At times the script buckled beneath the weight of sarcastic insinuation. What about this, read over footage of night-time Tripoli? "Oliver North. Lieutenant-Colonel US Marine Corps. His commander-in-chief the Honourable Ronald Reagan and still sleeping the sleep of the just, as he had in cabinet meetings, had his three presidential obsessions - hostages, Contra and Gaddafi." Come again? Scorning the official explanation that a fragment of microchip proved Libyan guilt, Francovich showed you the pine forest where it was notionally found and "where it is as dark as it must have been before time began, with the first big bang". I guess the searchers needed torches. Later we travelled to Zurich - "Where money grows in banks. Where the hand that steals is not cut off, just grows other hands."

This sort of portentous nonsense is all very well, but it is not a good idea to stoke up such a generalised sense of double-dealing if your own film has been partly financed by Libyan money and if one of your principal witnesses was also employed by Pan-Am lawyers, hoping to stave off huge payments in damages. Francovich's film raises some real questions about the official account, about its political convenience and expedient omissions. But it didn't replace it with any reliable truth of its own. You switched off, thinking you couldn't trust anything but the continuing grief of the bereaved.

Lockerbie relatives in dispute over film

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in The Independent on this date in 1994. It reads as follows:]

British and American families whose relatives died in the Lockerbie bombing are involved in an acrimonious dispute over a controversial new documentary about the atrocity.

Friends and relatives of American victims, who have waged a bitter campaign against the documentary and its producer, Allan Francovich, have severed ties with British relatives, who have expressed support for the project. Angered by the Americans' campaign, Mr Francovich is seeking damages from one New Jersey family after they described him as 'a journeyman film-maker ... for (the Libyan leader) Muammar Gadaffi'.

American relatives argue that the documentary project is 'hopelessly compromised' because part of its intitial pounds 650,000 funding came from Libya, through the Lafico investment company. Two alleged Libyan agents have been charged with the terrorist attack in December 1988 which killed 270 people.

But UK relatives, who have met Mr Francovich, insist he should be allowed to investigate doubts that Libya alone carried out the attack. Dr Jim Swire, spokesman for UK families, said: 'We are not apologists for Francovich but we believe he should be able to present his findings and be judged.'

Susan and Daniel Cohen, from New Jersey, whose 20-year-old daughter Theodora died in the bombing, have waged a determined campaign against Mr Francovich, writing to broadcasters who expressed interest in the project. In letters to senior editors at Channel 4, which began negotiating to screen the documentary, they condemned him as a 'Los Angeles wannabe' who used 'fugitives and felons' for research and relied upon 'dubious' intelligence sources.

After Channel 4 announced late last month that it had abandoned plans to screen the film, Mr Francovich wrote to Mr and Mrs Cohen demanding an apology and seeking damages for their 'deliberate attempts to damage my reputation and interfere with my legitimate business interests'.

He said yesterday he was disappointed Channel 4 had abandoned plans to screen the film, but the project was continuing.

Documents to accompany Dr Swire's EIBF contribution

The following documents accompany Dr Jim Swire’s contribution to today’s Edinburgh International Book Festival session Megrahi: A spectacular miscarriage of justice?

1.  Foreword by Tam Dalyell MP to Cover-up of Convenience by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson (2001)

Seldom can an act of terrorism have had so many layers of sinister intrigue as the Lockerbie bombing. It was ten days after the disaster, on the evening of 31 December 1988 – Hogmanay – that I first became aware something very odd was afoot. A constituent, who I knew was an off-duty Lothian and Borders Police officer, pulled me aside at a function. He told me in confidence about disturbing events he had witnessed in the preceding days, while assigned to the Lockerbie crash site helping the Dumfries and Galloway force search the site. He described how American agents were swarming around the area, openly removing items of debris. He was concerned, not only because they appeared to be riding roughshod over the rules of evidence gathering required of a criminal investigation, but also because the police were doing nothing to stop them. My initial reaction was, ‘Well, one can hardly deny the Americans, since they’ve lost 175 citizens.’ During the following weeks I talked to more officers, some of whom had been left seething by similar experiences with the mysterious Americans.

Five years later, because I had repeatedly raised Lockerbie issues in the Commons, I was introduced to Allan Francovich, a remarkable American film-maker who had just begun to make his landmark Lockerbie documentary The Maltese Double Cross. His dogged investigation suggested that the ‘official version’ of the bombing (which insisted it was, in the words of one US official, a ‘Libyan government operation from start to finish’) was a sham and that the real culprits lay outside of Libya. More worryingly, he presented compelling evidence that the CIA was complicit in the disaster and, in so doing, made sense of the troubling accounts of my police sources.  Although not the first investigator to advance this ‘alternative version’, he did so with a degree of detail that was too great to be ignored. The British and American governments’ extraordinary joint campaign to discredit the film was both an indicator of how close Francovich had got to the truth and a disturbing reminder of the lengths to which some of those in authority would go to keep the lid on the affair.

Francovich’s sudden death in 1997 came as a massive blow, but
thankfully his deputy John Ashton has kept alive his spirit of inquiry.

In 1999 I became aware of another earnest seeker after the truth, Ian Ferguson, who was at the time producing a documentary for US National Public Radio. He is one of those rare individuals who, like Francovich and Ashton, is prepared to ask the awkward questions and devote many long hours to the search for answers. His reporting of the events surrounding the trial, for Scotland’s Sunday Herald newspaper and on his website thelockerbietrial.com, has been unsurpassed and has frequently rattled the cages of authority. I was delighted to learn that he and Ashton had collaborated to produce this book.

As an MP, I have seen it as my role to complement the efforts of the various investigators and the equally remarkable work of the British Lockerbie victims’ relatives, by raising questions in Parliament, and to that end I have so far initiated 16 adjournment debates. The sixth of these, held on 1 February 1995, was answered by the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. I am told it was the only occasion since the war that a senior cabinet minister had replied to a backbencher’s adjournment debate. I am a creature of instinct and I sensed that he and the other ministers who have replied over the years were uncomfortable with having to peddle the official line. Later that day, Douglas spotted me talking to his then shadow and eventual successor Robin Cook MP. My diary entry for the day reads:

“Douglas [Hurd] swooped down on Robin and myself in the corridor by the window opposite the clerk’s assistant’s office. He said, ‘I really do ask you two to believe that as Foreign Secretary I cannot tell the [Scottish] Crown Office [which was in charge of the Lockerbie case] what to do, nor does the Foreign Office have detailed access to evidence which they say they have. You must understand that law officers really are a law unto themselves.’ Robin and I agreed that Douglas Hurd was not unfriendly towards us, and was probably correct in outlining the rules. Robin said that he guessed that Hurd was being honest with us and did not know the full story. I shrugged my shoulders, and told Robin he was probably right.”

One of the most remarkable, but least reported, revelations in the recent trial of the two Libyans was that even the Crown Office did not know the ‘full story’ when it indicted the pair in 1991. Indeed, it was not until the trial was underway that it learned that its star witness was highly unreliable. The CIA had known this for well over a decade, yet had not seen fit to make available the crucial paperwork documenting this man’s failings. Evidence heard at the trial also confirmed the long-held suspicion that CIA agents were involved in the highly irregular activities at the crash site witnessed by my police sources.

In my view, these facts alone warrant the public inquiry that has always been the demand of the British victims’ relatives. I have no doubt that there is much else in this book that will add weight to that demand. My government colleagues promised such an inquiry when in opposition and I trust that, as men of honour, they will make good that pledge.


2.  Letter  to Jim Swire from Chief Constable, Dumfries & Galloway Police

Dear Dr Swire,                                                   2 April 2012                           

I refer to your recent correspondence headed ‘Apparent Suppression of Evidence’. This letter seeks to fulfil the undertaking I gave you to provide you with an unambiguous response to concerns you raised regarding the handling of statements and evidence in connection with the insecurity detected at Heathrow.

I can confirm the following:

1.    In January 1989 BAA security notified the Metropolitan police that an insecurity had been detected within terminal 3 at Heathrow during the early hours of 21 December 1988.

2.    The Metropolitan police passed this evidence to the Police Incident Room at Lockerbie and Actions were raised to investigate this matter.

3.    During the course of this investigation Mr Manly, the BAA Security Team Leader who discovered the insecurity, was interviewed by an officer from the Metropolitan Police and a statement was obtained from him. The interview took place on 31 January 1989. A number of other witnesses were also traced and interviewed regarding the insecurity.

4.    Mr Manly’s statement was passed to the police incident room at Lockerbie and was registered on the HOLMES system on 2 February 1989. This statement and those from other witnesses identified At Heathrow were considered by enquiry officers at the time in the context of a range of emerging strands of evidence.

5.    In 1991 the police report outlining the evidence against Mr Megrahi and Mr Fhima was submitted to the Crown Office. This report did not contain a reference to the insecurity at Heathrow and made no mention of Mr Manly's statement.

6.    The surrender of Mr Megrahi and Mr Fhima for trial in the Netherlands prompted a massive preparation exercise during the course of which over 14,000 witness statements were provided to Crown Office in 1999. Mr Manly's statement was included in the material supplied to Crown though again the police made no reference to it.

7.    In 2001, as a result of Mr Manly contacting defence representatives, the insecurity at Heathrow was subject to a fresh investigation, the Crown disclosed the relevant statements to the defence and as you know the matter was considered during Mr Megrahi's first appeal. The appeal judges, in rejecting the appeal, made it clear that their assessment of the significance of this additional evidence must be conducted in the context of the whole circumstantial evidence laid before the trial court and concluded that "it cannot be said that the verdict falls to be regarded as a miscarriage of justice on account of having been reached in ignorance of the additional evidence" As the Lord Advocate explained at the meeting in London it is not for the appeal court to look at the case "afresh", it has to consider the new evidence in the context of the whole case that the trial court had before it.

In summary I can categorically state that no suppression of evidence took place and I hope this information alleviates your concerns in that regard.

(Signed) Patrick Shearer, Chief Constable.


3.  The place of Lockerbie in world events, a review by Neil Berry of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury

Published by the plucky Scottish press Birlinn, John Ashton’s new book Megrahi: You are my Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence casts grave doubt on the validity of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi’s conviction as the Libyan terrorist responsible for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 and murdering 259 mostly American people in December 1988. At the same time, it raises deeply disturbing questions about the United States and United Kingdom’s boasted commitment to truth and justice.

It is perhaps no surprise that the mainstream British media are fighting shy of according this bulky volume the attention it deserves. For to discuss its contents would mean re-visiting a vastly acrimonious episode that threatened to poison relations between Britain and the US: The early release in August 2009 from his Scottish prison — on grounds that he was dying of cancer — of a Muslim convict who was seen by many as the personification of evil.

A member of Megrahi’s legal team, John Ashton is liable to the charge that his familiarity with the Libyan has clouded his judgment, but his book — which intersperses an exhaustive examination of the evidence that led to his conviction with Megrahi’s own testimony — collates the work of several hands and is a model of forensic rigor. It is indeed hard to believe that any fair-minded person could read it without being persuaded that Megrahi was the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice. The powerful impression left by the book is that Megrahi, who had run security for Libyan Arab Airlines while engaging in clandestine trading, had the ill-luck to be in Malta, the putative point of origin of the Lockerbie bomb, at the wrong time, and that he was framed because the US found it convenient to point the finger of blame at Libya.

What has never been widely recognized is that the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town ofLockerbie took place six months after the shooting down of an Iranian airbus over the Persian Gulf in July 1988 by the American battle cruiser, the USS Vincennes, with the deaths of 290 Iranians. It was an outrage Iran immediately vowed to avenge, and all the indications were that it was Iran, acting through the shadowy terrorist splinter group, the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, that mandated the Lockerbie operation. If, in the aftermath of Lockerbie, the US shrank from confrontation with Tehran, it was because, on top of seeking to negotiate the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed terrorists, it was concerned to have a free hand in repelling Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait to Iraq.

Yet a scapegoat for Lockerbie was imperative and Libya, with an egregious leader, Col Qaddafi, whose image in the West was that of a deranged tribal savage, figured as the ideal candidate. John Ashton’s book underlines how readily the Western public accepted the case for imposing crippling sanctions on Libya as the culprit for Lockerbie. Few demurred when — even before he was sentenced by 3 Scottish judges at a special court in the Netherlands in 2001 — US President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeatedly described Megrahi not as a suspect but as a mass murderer.

All this would be chilling enough — even if the case against Megrahi were a more compelling one. In truth, his conviction relied on the testimony of a shopkeeper in Malta who had but the sketchiest memory of selling clothes to an Arab customer around the time when a suitcase containing the bomb was supposedly put on a feeder flight to London, there to be loaded onto Pan Am 103. It relied, too, on a circuit board, alleged to have been part of the bomb and to have derived from a batch of Swiss timing devices sold to Libya, though it was to transpire that this item of evidence — found far from the Lockerbie crash site — had nothing to do with the timers in question. What is particularly shocking is how much material evidence was withheld from Megrahi’s trial — including the striking circumstance that the night before Pan Am 103 flew from London Heathrow, the airport was broken into.

The assumption that the Lockerbie bomb originated in Malta may well have deflected attention from a far more productive line of inquiry.

Megrahi endured his 8-year Scottish incarceration in the bitter knowledge that he had been convicted on a basis that came nowhere near to satisfying the principle that guilt should be proved “beyond reasonable doubt.” Following 9/11, however, he felt that his chances of ever clearing his name had all but vanished. Certainly, the belief that he was the “Lockerbie bomber,” a malevolent Muslim who had carried out Britain’s worst ever terrorist atrocity, lodged deep in the public mind — so deep that when he was diagnosed as having only months to live and Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MackAskill, decreed he should be allowed to return to Libya to die, there was widespread outrage, not least in the United States.

In Britain and the US, many were of the opinion that Megrahi was the beneficiary of a squalid oil deal struck with Qaddafi by Britain’s sometime Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and that British and Scottish politicians were not only colluding with a vile regime but insulting the dead.

Outrage about the commutation of his sentence grew as Megrahi confounded Scottish medical expectations regarding his survival prospects, living on in Tripoli until May of this year. And though he remained desperately ill, there were to be vindictive demands, following the toppling of Col Qaddafi in 2011, that he be made to face justice in the United States.

Yet on the evidence of John Ashton’s book it is not his truncated sentence that ought to be on British and American consciences. It is the fact that Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was ever convicted at all.