Recruitment of the FBI's Lockerbie "golden informant"

[What follows is taken from an article headed Richard Marquise and his "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka - An Extract from "Enemies - A History of the FBI" by Tim Weiner posted yesterday on baz’s blog The Masonic Verses:]

Tim Weiner's recent book Enemies - A History of the FBI is a fascinating story of the creation of the FBI within the US Justice Department following American entry into the Great War, not for the purpose of criminal investigation but to counter the threat of radicals, anarchists and communists by means of dubious constitutionality. (...)

The author devotes six pages to an uncritical account of the Bureau's involvement in the Lockerbie case focusing on the role of the leader of the FBI taskforce (of 7 persons) Richard Marquise. (Tom Thurman is not mentioned.)

Marquise was recently quoted in the Dutch media in a story titled "The Lessons of Lockerbie" in relation to the shooting down of flight MH17 over the Ukraine. Marquise advocated the recruitment of a "Golden Informant" to solve the case just as he had done in the Lockerbie case (and by ignoring the actual evidence). Weiner's book gives a very interesting summary of how this "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka was recruited (page 372).

"Marquise needed to turn intelligence into evidence.  He needed a witness who would link Megrahi to the Samsonite suitcase with the Semtex.  He needed to find someone who knew that the suitcase carried the bomb from Air Malta to Pan Am 103.  He went back to the CIA. The Agency told him, belatedly, that it had once had a Libyan informant named Abdul Majid Giaka. He had gone on the CIA's payroll four months before Lockerbie. He was on it the night Pan Am 103 was bombed. But the Agency had dropped him a few months later, deeming him a fabricator milking his interrogators for money.

Marquise was dying to talk to Majid, no matter how dubious he seemed to the CIA.  In June 1991 the Agency flew him from a navy ship off the coast of Malta to give the FBI the chance to interview him in Virginia.  Justly wary of its informant, the CIA imposed one condition: don't tell anybody."  (Marquise immediately phoned Stuart Henderson.)  

"Majid was debriefed for at least two weeks during September 1991. He insisted that he knew three facts. He identified Megrahi as an intelligence officer serving as Libya's airline security chief. He said that Megrahi's subordinate in Malta had a cache of Semtex. And he said he had seen Megrahi with a large brown suitcase at the airport in Malta during the weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. Majid was without doubt an unreliable witness. But the FBI had faith that he was telling the truth on those three points. Marquise thought he had the foundation of a case that would stand up in court."

Giaka's account did stand up unchallenged before a patriotic US Grand Jury leading to the November 1991 indictment. However, it crumbled before even the Mickey Mouse Camp Zeist tribunal when in the defence team's finest hour they had admitted in evidence a large number of CIA cables regarding Giaka. What is astonishing is that Megrahi was actually convicted despite Giaka being discredited, a fact not mentioned in Mr Weiner's book.

Perhaps some of the parties to the MH17 atrocity will, (or have already) recruited their own "Golden Informant".

Marquise's wrote his own account of the Lockerbie investigation in his book Scotbom.  (Which I have never read.) Giaka of course never wrote his memoirs and has never been heard of since the close of the Camp Zeist trial.

I am afraid the only "Lesson of Lockerbie" for the families of those murdered on flight MH17 is how Governments fabricate evidence to suit their own political objectives regardless of the facts.

Majid Giaka's CIA handler speaks out "after a lifetime of silence"

[What follows is excerpted from a report by Paul Martin headlined Former CIA agent reveals he was excluded from Lockerbie bombing inquiry published today on The Telegraph website:]

A former CIA agent has claimed he was excluded from the original Lockerbie bombing trial and that investigators should turn their attention to the "true culprit" – Iran.

John Holt, 68, says he was the author of secret cables showing that the Libyan double agent put forward by Scottish prosecutors as the star witness in the Lockerbie bombing trial had a history of "making up stories".

Mr Holt was never sent to the trial by his bosses, even though he had been the CIA handler for Libyan double agent and principal witness Abdul-Majid Giaka.

"I have reason to believe there was a concerted effort, for unexplained reasons, to switch the original investigations away from Iran and its bomb-making Palestinian extremist ally the PFLP General Command. Now we should focus a new investigation on the Iranians and their links with the bomber," he told The Telegraph in an exclusive interview.

"I would start by asking the current Attorney General, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also Attorney General, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans."

Mr Holt spoke out for the first time as Scottish Supreme Court judges consider whether to quash the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who died of cancer in 2012. (...)

Giaka became a US asset after claiming he had information about Libyan involvement with terrorism while working as an assistant to the station manager of Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA) in Malta.

Explaining the key importance of his cables, Mr Holt said: "I handled Abdul-Majid Giaka in 1989 for a whole year during which he never mentioned Libyan involvement in the bombing.

"My cables showed he was a car mechanic who was placed by Libyan Intelligence as Malta Airport office manager with Libyan Arab Airlines and had very little information about anything to do with bombs – or Lockerbie.

"He felt humiliated by Megrahi, who was an official with the Libyan Intelligence Service. 'I was treated,' he said, 'like a dog when Megrahi came to the office.'  

"That's all reported in my cables, so the CIA knew Giaka had a grudge against Megrahi.

"Every time I met Giaka, which was each month or two, I would also ask him if he had any information at all about the Pan-Am bombing. All of us CIA and FBI field officers were asked by the CIA to keep pressing our assets for any answers or clues.  His answer was always: No.

“I expressed my opinion to the FBI that Giaka was nothing more than a wannabe who was not a real Intel Officer for the Libyans. He had no information re Lockerbie, and I told the CIA all this in comments I made in my cables. He went back to Libya at the end of 1989 and I moved on to another assignment.  

"In 1991 Giaka told the CIA that he had been exposed and the Libyans would kill him. When he was told he was useless to our intelligence services [the CIA and FBI], he began making up stories.

"It was only when he needed desperately to get some financial and logistical support from the US to flee Libya in 1991 that he started telling the CIA things relevant to the PanAm-103 bombings – like hearing Megrahi and another man talking about a plan to bomb an American airliner." (...)

Mr Holt alleges he first realised there was an effort to distort the realities when called into the office of the CIA director George Tenet.  

There, his description of Giaka was not included in the initial presentation of evidence to the trial. Later, summoned a second time to the director's office, his cables were thrust in front of him by FBI agents and he claims he was told to sign that they were written by him. He says no explanation was given. These were eventually released to the trial by the CIA, with some 'redaction', in 2000.

"Operational cables that I wrote did not get sent to the original trial," he revealed. "They were withheld by the CIA and the FBI, who – even when my cables did emerge – declined to let me give evidence to the Scottish court hearing, held in Camp Zeist near Utrecht.  

"We now all need to admit we got the wrong man, and focus on the real culprits."

After 24 years of distinguished service with the CIA, Mr Holt has had deep concerns about speaking out. He has chosen his words with great caution, anxious to avoid accusations that he has leaked any secrets that could compromise his former agency.

"I'm speaking out now, after a lifetime of silence. But I feel deeply frustrated and I want justice to be done," he said.

Mr Holt believes intelligence services worldwide already have enough evidence to pinpoint the Lockerbie perpetrators.

"Whatever the Scottish Supreme Court decides, Britain should reopen the whole Lockerbie saga, have a heart-to-heart with the Americans, and go after Iran," he told The Telegraph.

"I have reason to believe that the three security agencies of the US Government were working on evidence pointing directly to Iran, before the Libyan connection was brought into play.  I believe the US Government tried to hide evidence for political reasons, and Britain also was willing to go along with this.

"I have reason to believe that a crucial decision was made in 1991 by the US Justice Department and its enforcement arm the FBI: to drop all evidence pointing toward Iran and instead manipulate the evidence to place blame on Gaddafi's Libya. Gaddafi was a long-time nemesis to numerous US presidents."

Mr Holt feels that Americans were particularly keen to pin the blame for Lockerbie on Libya because of an ongoing feud. After the coup that brought Gaddafi to power, the Libyans had expelled American oil companies from oil drilling fields, and US forces from a massive American-built airbase constructed during the Cold War.

And in the 1980s the Gaddafi regime was suspected of being a massive danger to the West by developing a secret WMD programme.

He said the first thing British and US intelligence officers should do is demand access to the former chief of Libyan intelligence, Abdallah Senoussi, son-in-law of Colonel Gaddafi, who is still languishing in a Libyan jail under sentence of death. 

Gaddafi and his henchmen were overthrown, with British military intervention, in 2011 and Senoussi, now aged 60, was convicted in 2015 for crimes against humanity that had no connection with Lockerbie.

"An interpretation is that the British and the US are not demanding to see him – because they already know Libya did not do it," says Mr Holt.

Giaka's second day in witness box

[On this date in 2000, Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka spent his second day in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial. What follows is the contemporaneous report published on TheLockerbieTrial.com:]

The Crown's star witness returned to the witness box today for a continuation of the defence counsel's attacks started yesterday by William Taylor QC for Megrahi. Today he was branded a "liar" and as a desperate man who made "incredible" claims to his CIA paymasters.

Giaka was accused by both Richard Keen QC for Fhimah and Taylor of fabricating crucial evidence to stay on with the CIA when it became clear that they were about to ditch him.

William Taylor said that two years after the Lockerbie bombing, CIA telegrams revealed Giaka was a "shattered" man who desperately needed to come up with new information for his CIA handlers.

He suggested Giaka offered new information within hours of a make-or-break meeting with the CIA and US Department of Justice officials.

The Americans, he suggested were saying "come up with something and the future is rosy, come up with nothing and you're cut off without a penny."

The court heard, that only then did Giaka say he saw one of the defendants with a suitcase like the one which contained the bomb, a "fact" that he had failed to mention in his previous two years as a CIA informer.

The defence team also highlighted the bizarre claims Giaka made to the CIA about Libyan leader Colonel Qadafi being a freemason. In one episode, more reminiscent of a farce than a Scottish murder trial, Richard Keen QC asked Giaka about some of the "incredible" claims he had made to the CIA.

Keen said Giaka had told his CIA handlers and the US Grand Jury that he was a relative of King Idris of Libya and that Colonel Qadafi was involved in an international Masonic conspiracy.

The question: "How did you discover that Colonel Gadaffi is a mason?" was put to Giaka six times.

Giaka repeatedly asked Keen for the source of his question before Lord Sutherland intervened and ordered Giaka to answer the question.

"The person is in Libya and for security considerations I can't mention the name of that person" replied Giaka.

Mr Keen asked how Giaka knew the president of Malta and the Libyan foreign minister were also masons, and Giaka said he did not remember.

"Do you remember suggesting that they were somehow conspiring together as masons over a political matter," said Mr Keen.

"I don't recall," replied Giaka.

"It's such a strange accusation to make that it would surely stick in your memory," responded Keen.

Later in his testimony responding to more awkward cross-examination, Giaka said, "I was not given any offer to act as a witness or any other offer. They did not try to buy me off."

"You also told the Americans that you were a relative of King Idris, the last king of Libya."

Giaka said he had never made this claim, suggesting the comment might have arisen from a translation error during an interview with CIA agents.

Keen pressed on, "Mr Giaka, you are a liar, aren't you? You tell big lies and you tell small lies, but you lie, do you not?"

Giaka said, "I do not lie about anything."

Secret cables revealed the CIA were disappointed with the information Giaka had given them into the Libyan intelligence service, said Taylor.

American agents reported Giaka was pressing them to boost his $1,000 per month CIA pay by $500 and was becoming "desperate" as he struggled to find himself a new role in life after leaving the Libyan secret service.

He even asked the CIA to give him $2,000 so he could import bananas from Malta to Libya and make a large profit, said one CIA telegram.

William Taylor said none of the scores of CIA documents about Giaka in the two years after the bombing mentioned his account of seeing defendant Fhimah collect a brown Samsonite suitcase from the luggage carousel at Malta airport and walking out without it being checked by Customs.

Taylor went on: "There's no mention of any incident like the one you described involving a brown Samsonite suitcase in the CIA cables at all. There is a deafening silence on this."

Taylor said Giaka requested an emergency meeting with the Americans on July 13, 1991, and met them on a US warship off Malta, when the CIA was going to decide whether to retain his services.

"Lo and behold, the deafening silence ends the very next day when you come up with a brown Samsonite suitcase and this rubbish about Customs," said Taylor.

"The very next day is the first mention by you, Giaka, of these matters."

Giaka replied that the American officials were very good investigators who could distinguish between truth and lies.

Comment

After day two of the testimony of the Libyan informer, Abdul Giaka, the Crown must be breathing a sigh of relief that tomorrow will be his last day in the witness box.

The court was once again treated to the "evidence" of the crown star witness and it plumbed new depths in terms of Giaka's bizarre statements of high level Masonic conspiracy.

The very mention of Freemasonry in court today must have set several hearts fluttering as it is a well known fact that Freemasonry can count many lawyers amongst its brethren.

It was clear from Giaka's demeanour that he was ill prepared for the cross-examination he is undergoing. Although it is common practice to coach witnesses with mock cross-examination, a number of questions put to Giaka seemed to throw him. This suggests either that his coaching by the Department of Justice was not as thorough it might have been or that they were completely outmanoeuvred by Taylor and Keen.

It now appears that the US Department of Justice is downplaying the importance of Giaka as a witness, as they told one American relative today that the Crown had "done enough to secure convictions, without Giaka." This of course is a complete reversal of the mantra coming from Washington and Edinburgh for years.

Many relatives have been putting very awkward questions to the DOJ today regarding what they see as evidence from Giaka which has been very unhelpful to the Crown's case.

[A verbatim transcript of Giaka’s evidence can be found here.]

Lockerbie questions that US Attorney General William Barr needs to answer

[What follows is excerpted from an article by John Schindler published today on the Top Secret Umbra website:]

With just six weeks left for the Trump administration, speculation is swirling that Attorney General William Barr may step down before the official presidential transition on January 20. Barr has fallen out of favor with the White House since his admission last week that the Department of Justice’s investigation of our November 3 election has uncovered no significant voting fraud, contrary to the loud claims of President Donald Trump and his enraged surrogates. A longtime liberal bugbear, Barr suddenly became the Oval Office’s new whipping boy instead, and the attorney general is reportedly tired of the public presidential abuse. 

That would be the second time that Barr steps down as the attorney general (...)

Before we get to his decisions as Trump’s attorney general, we should first ask Bill Barr about what happened the last time he headed the Justice Department.

Above all, why did Attorney General Barr back in mid-November 1991 decide to indict two Libyan spies for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, a terrible crime that killed 270 innocent people. Barr’s announcement stunned our Intelligence Community, which had investigated that terrorist atrocity for nearly three years in voluminous detail, yet never suspected that Libya stood behind the attack.

Three decades ago, the Lockerbie tragedy loomed large in American news. A bomb inside a suitcase stowed in the Boeing 747’s forward left luggage container tore the airliner apart as it cruised at 31,000 feet, headed for New York. All 243 passengers and 16 crew on the Pan Am jumbo jet died, as did 11 people in the town of Lockerbie, which was showered by the flaming wreckage of the shattered 747. One hundred and ninety of the dead were Americans, including 35 Syracuse University students headed home for Christmas after a European semester abroad.

It didn’t take long for diligent British investigators to find the remnants of the Samsonite suitcase which contained less than a pound of Semtex plastic explosive manufactured in Czechoslovakia and hidden in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder. That trail quickly led to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, a radical Arab terrorist group that was headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army officer. In the eyes of Western intelligence, the PFLP-GC was little more than an extension of Syria’s security services.

Intriguingly, less than two months before the Lockerbie attack, West German police rolled up a PFLP-GC bomb-making cell around Frankfurt, seizing four bombs made of Semtex hidden in Toshiba radios. Since Pan Am 103 originated in Frankfurt and that was the exact same kind of bomb which took down the doomed airliner, none of this seemed coincidental. Western intelligence circles heard chatter in the autumn of 1988 that the PFLP-GC, whose fifth Frankfurt bomb was never found by police, was planning to blow up U.S. airliners. Plus, one of the men taken into custody was Marwan Khreesat, a veteran bomb-maker who was believed to be behind the downing of a Swissair jetliner back in 1970, a terrorist attack which killed 47 people.

Before long, American intelligence believed that Iran was really behind the downing of Flight 103, given known close connections between Syrian intelligence and Iranian spy agencies. Neither was Tehran’s motive difficult to ascertain. A few months before, on July 3, 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes, on station in the Persian Gulf, mistakenly shot down an Iran Air Airbus, a terrible accident which killed all 290 people aboard, including 66 children. Iran’s revolutionary regime promised revenge, and the Intelligence Community assessed that they got it over Scotland. As I explained on the thirtieth anniversary of the Lockerbie horror, that Iran stood behind the attack:

Was the conclusion of US intelligence, particularly when the National Security Agency provided top-secret electronic intercepts which demonstrated that Tehran had commissioned the PFLP-GC to down Pan Am 103 (...) One veteran NSA analyst told me years later that his counterterrorism team “had no doubt” of Iranian culpability. Bob Baer, the veteran CIA officer, has stated that his agency believed just as unanimously that Tehran was behind the bombing. Within a year of the attack, our Intelligence Community assessed confidently that Lockerbie was an Iranian operation executed by Syrian cut-outs, and that take was shared by several allies with solid Middle Eastern insights, including Israeli intelligence.

The IC was therefore taken aback on November 14, 1991, when Attorney General Barr announced the indictment of two Libyan spies, Abdelbaset el-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, for the downing of Pan Am 103. Libya denied the accusations, as did the two Libyan intelligence officers, and it took Britain almost a decade to bring the men to trial. In a unique arrangement, the trial was held in the Netherlands under Scottish law. In the end, the court did not convict Fhimah but did find Megrahi guilty of 270 counts of murder in early 2001. Megrahi maintained he was framed and, suffering from cancer, he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009. He returned to Libya and succumbed to cancer there in May 2012, protesting his innocence to the end.

Quite a few people who looked at the evidence believed that Megrahi really may have been innocent, including some relatives of Pan Am 103 victims. Many in intelligence circles had doubts too, particularly because the prosecution’s star witness, Abdul Majid Giaka, was another Libyan intelligence officer who became a CIA asset. Giaka claimed to have witnessed Megrahi and Fhimah’s preparations in Malta to take down Pan Am 103 with a bomb made by Libyan intelligence. The Scottish court found Giaka less than credible, yet his claims against Megrahi stood up adequately to produce a conviction.

CIA made Giaka available to the court as the star witness, while obscuring some of their clandestine relationship with the Libyan spy. Langley offered several of its own officers to the court as well, something CIA recounted with pride in its official telling of their support to the Lockerbie trial, but the agency was careful to only produce officials who endorsed the Libya-did-it hypothesis.

There was the rub. Some CIA officers who were close to Giaka did not find his claims about Pan Am 103 and his own intelligence service’s involvement to be credible; in fact, they considered their “star” to be an unreliable fabricator. However, this secret – which raises fundamental questions about the US government’s official position on Lockerbie since late 1991 – was kept confined to spy circles for decades. Until now.

John Holt, a retired CIA officer who served as Giaka’s handler three decades ago, has broken his silence, granting a detailed interview to British media about his role in this sensational case. The 68-year-old Holt spoke out for the first time about what really happened behind the scenes with Giaka, whom he dismissed as an asset who was prone to “making up stories.” Giaka was far from a reliable source and the former American spy opined that CIA kept Holt away from the trial, since agency leaders knew that his account contradicted the official US position on Lockerbie. As he explained:

I handled Abdul-Majid Giaka in 1989 for a whole year during which he never mentioned Libyan involvement in the bombing. My cables [back to CIA headquarters] showed he was a car mechanic who was placed by Libyan Intelligence as Malta Airport office manager with Libyan Arab Airlines and had very little information about anything to do with bombs – or Lockerbie. He felt humiliated by Megrahi, who was an official with the Libyan Intelligence Service. “I was treated,” he said, “like a dog when Megrahi came to the office.” That's all reported in my cables, so CIA knew Giaka had a grudge against Megrahi.

This was a personal vendetta, in other words, one that was driven by Giaka’s needs and his changing memory, as Holt elaborated:

Every time I met Giaka, which was each month or two, I would also ask him if he had any information at all about the Pan-Am bombing. All of us CIA and FBI field officers were asked by the CIA to keep pressing our assets for any answers or clues.  His answer was always: No.

I expressed my opinion to the FBI that Giaka was nothing more than a wannabe who was not a real Intel Officer for the Libyans. He had no information [about] Lockerbie, and I told the CIA all this in comments I made in my cables. He went back to Libya at the end of 1989 and I moved on to another assignment.  

In 1991, Giaka told the CIA that he had been exposed and the Libyans would kill him. When he was told he was useless to our intelligence services, he began making up stories. It was only when he needed desperately to get some financial and logistical support from the US to flee Libya in 1991 that he started telling the CIA things relevant to the Pan Am 103 bombing.

This fix was in, however, and Holt found his first-hand view of the case sidelined by his own agency. His cables which illuminated Giaka’s unreliability as a source were not shared by CIA with the Scottish court, while Langley declined to let Holt provide evidence at the trial. “We now all need to admit we got the wrong man, and focus on the real culprits,” Holt explained, pointing a finger at Bill Barr:

I have reason to believe there was a concerted effort, for unexplained reasons, to switch the original investigations away from Iran and its bomb-making Palestinian extremist ally the PFLP—General Command. Now we should focus a new investigation on the Iranians and their links with the bomber…I would start by asking the current attorney general, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also attorney general, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans.

In May of this year, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ordered a fresh look into Abdelbaset el-Megrahi’s conviction. So far, this review has revealed claims that the prosecution presented a distorted version of the late Megrahi’s alleged role based on “cherrypicked” evidence in order to obtain a conviction. Bill Barr won’t be attorney general for much longer and he ought to avail himself of the opportunity to explain why credible information from veteran intelligence officers like John Holt was ignored to make a case against Megrahi, who may not be guilty of his supposed role in the murder of 270 innocent people.

Nearly a year ago, Attorney General Barr delivered remarks about the Pan Am 103 tragedy at a memorial service held at Arlington National Cemetery. He commemorated the dead of Lockerbie: “The Americans who died that day were attacked because they were Americans. They died for their country. They deserve to be honored by our nation.” Barr added that the case remains far from over for him: “In 1991, I made a pledge to you on behalf of the American law-enforcement community: ‘We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice.’ That is still our pledge. For me personally, this is still very much unfinished business.” The thirty-second anniversary of the Lockerbie attack is two weeks from today. If Barr meant what he said about resolving that tragedy’s unfinished business, John Holt’s testimony is an excellent place to commence the search for the full truth about what happened to Pan Am 103.

Giaka's evidence ends

[On this date in 2000 the evidence of Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka mercifully came to a conclusion. What follows is taken from TheLockerbieTrial.com’s contemporary report:]

Today saw the Libyan informer Abdul Giaka, endure his third day of questioning at the trial.

Much of the questioning today centred on money, starting with the $30,000 Giaka claimed he had saved. Richard Keen suggested that this money was made in illegal black market currency deals.

When questioned about how he supported himself when his salary from the JSO (Libyan Intelligence service) was stopped, Giaka answered that it was cheap to live in Libya. He denied the suggestion put again by Keen that the Black market money deals were the source of his income.

When Keen asked him if he had been promised a $4 million dollar reward, Giaka denied this although he admitted that he was aware of it.

Keen moved on to ask Giaka if he read much American literature and specifically had he read The secret life of Walter Mitty. The witness said he could not recall.

The Crown's attempt to rehabilitate Giaka and salvage even a modicum of his credibility failed miserably and Giaka finally left the witness box.

Later the court heard from witness number 689, Harold Hendershot a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Hendershot agreed that he had interviewed Giaka on board a US warship on July 14 1991 and on a number of other dates in Tyson's Corner, near Washington DC and on other dates in July and August.

Hendershot confirmed that on board the warship on July 14 Giaka had given him information regarding a suitcase.

Much of the detail of this information relating to the suitcase was vague and Giaka had not been able to specify the month he had seen the suitcase. Over the next few months further details emerged, he said.

During cross-examination by William Taylor, Hendershot was asked about Mohammed Abu Talb.

Taylor asked if the witness had attempted to interview Abu Talb in connection with Pan Am 103. Hendershot said the interview had been conducted in a prison as Talb was incarcerated. He could not recall Talb refusing to be seen by any American and only agreeing to speak to Swedish Police. Taylor asked where his notes were and the witness said that his notes were in Washington. Taylor said that his evidence was valueless without the notes and confirmed to the Judge that he may require to recall the witness after taking instructions.

Richard Keen referred to a number of trips made by Hendershot to Sweden in 1989 in connection with the Lockerbie bombing. These investigations involved obtaining search warrants from the Swedish police and Talb was named on the warrant. The Swedish Police executed the search warrants with Hendershot in attendance and he was asked if he remembered the recovery of a quantity of clothing manufactured in Malta from the home of Abu Talb. Hendershot did not recall this and said he did not believe he had made notes in respect of the search. Keen suggested it was unusual to have attended such a search without taking notes. The FBI special agent said that in foreign countries there were procedures that could uncover this information. Hendershot was asked if he recalled the recovery of watches and other electrical items, which were in stages of being, dismantled but he could not recall.

Hendershot could not recall whether Talb was in police custody or had already been convicted when he met with him. He said he did know he was at some point convicted of bombing incidents but said he did not know these had occurred outside Sweden. He was asked if he recalled the seizure of a calendar from Talb's house, which was relevant to Pan Am 103. This calendar, Keen said, had December 21 ringed or marked. The witness said that he did not remember but would presumably have noted this if it had been brought to his attention.

Keen suggested another reason Hendershot was in Sweden was because he had been informed of links between Talb and PFLP in Germany and the witness said he recalled travel between Sweden and Germany, which was believed to have something to do with the movement of explosives and the PFLP. Hendershot said he would be able to answer more fully if he had his notes with him.

Taylor asked him if he recalled that a reward was available in connection with the bombing of Pan Am 103. He said yes but could not confirm the exact amount but knew it was more than $1 million. Bill Taylor then confirmed that he would not require to recall the witness.

The next witness from the FBI spoke to money recorded spent on Giaka. In total payments of $110,800 had been made up to the present. (...)

Comment

Now you see him now you don’t. By the time the trial resumes Friday, Giaka is likely to be well on his way back to his US hideaway.

We may never know his thoughts on his camp Zeist experience, but his name will live on in the annals of Pan Am 103 as the most expensive witness ever to testify at any trial. This might have been acceptable if the evidence he gave was even remotely persuasive, but only the most blinkered of observers could say anything positive about Giaka's testimony.

The Department of Justice, who have touted Giaka as the greatest thing since sliced bread, will undoubtedly have some explaining to do when the dust settles.

Whatever the outcome of the trial, Giaka's contribution has been described as "totally useless" by one family member and a "complete waste of time" by another.

But should we be blaming Giaka or those who promoted him. It was clear from the moment that the CIA wrote the cables suggesting that he was providing no useful information that the FBI should have taken that assessment into consideration before making a lifetime commitment to protecting Giaka and his family.

So desperate was the FBI for anything that resembled evidence in the Pan Am investigation they jumped at the chance of getting Giaka, warts and all. They denounced any journalist or commentator who dared suggest that Giaka would prove to be a witness whose testimony was shot full of holes. They sang his praises and talked in glowing terms of having "dinner with Majid."

Today they dismiss his testimony to family members as "never having been really important in the scale of things."

We understand that the recriminations are already underway and if "buck passing" was an Olympic event there are certain DOJ personnel at Zeist who would be stepping up to collect gold.

"Poorest excuse of the day" prize has to go to FBI Special Agent Harold Hendershot, a senior agent who came all the way to the trial of the century and was overcome with a case of "I cannot recall". (He was unsure of many issues relating to Talb, which is surprising, considering Talb was at one time, THE number-one suspect for this bombing.) On top of this our intrepid FBI agent claimed that he had left his notes in Washington. Obviously Special Agent Hendershot missed the class at Quantico which dealt with "preparation for a trial."

[A verbatim transcript of Giaka’s evidence can be found here.]

It remains a mystery how Megrahi came to be convicted

[On this date in 2000, the Crown at Camp Zeist closed its case against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhima. In an article that I wrote at the time for The Lockerbie Trial website, I attempted to assess what the evidence led by the Crown might be held to establish:]

What could the Crown be held to have proved?

On the assumption that the witnesses who have so far given evidence which is favourable to the Crown case are accepted by the judges as being credible (ie honest and truthful) and reliable (ie accurate in their observation and recollection of events) and having regard to the matters that have been agreed between prosecution and defence in Joint Minutes, it is possible that the following might be held to have been provisionally established, always subject to any later contrary evidence which may be led by the defence.

1. That the seat of the explosion was in a particular Samsonite suitcase (which contained clothing manufactured in Malta and sold both there and elsewhere) at or near the bottom of a particular aluminium luggage container (AVE 4041).

2. That the bomb had been contained in a black Toshiba RTSF-16 cassette recorder.

3. That a fragment of circuit board from an MST-13 timer manufactured by MeBo AG formed part of the timing mechanism which detonated the bomb.

4. That MeBo AG supplied MST-13 timers to the Libyan army, and may have done so also to other customers such as the East German Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit (Stasi).

5. That the first-named accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was a member of the Libyan intelligence services; was known to the owners of MeBo AG; was involved, in an official capacity, in obtaining for Libya electronic equipment (including timers) from MeBo; and that a company of which a Libyan intelligence operative was a principal for a time had office accommodation in the premises occupied by MeBo in Zurich.

6. That Megrahi possessed and used Libyan passports in false names.

7. That Megrahi, on occasion under the false name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad, visited Malta on a number of occasions in 1988, including the night of 20/21 December.

8. That Megrahi arrived in Malta by air from Tripoli with a hard shelled brown suitcase at some point in the two or three weeks following 7 December 1988. [RB: This evidence came from Abdul Majid Giaka whose testimony on this and all other issues, except the structure and membership of the Libyan intelligence services, was ultimately held by the judges to be wholly lacking in credibility and rejected.]

9. That some weeks before 21 December 1988 a person who “resembled a lot” Megrahi, but who also “resembled a lot” Mohamed Abu Talb (a Crown witness named in the special defence of incrimination lodged by the defence) bought in Malta items of clothing that the Crown claims were in the suitcase that contained the bomb.

10. That in 1986 a conversation took place between Megrahi and Abdul Majid Giaka regarding the possibility of a piece of unaccompanied baggage being inserted onto a British aircraft at Malta. In the course of that conversation Megrahi used the words “Don't rush things.” [RB: This evidence, along with most of Giaka’s testimony, was ultimately rejected by the judges as wholly lacking in credibility.]

11. That the second-named accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhima, travelled by air to Malta on 20 December 1988 and departed by air the following day.

12. That Fhima was then in possession of a permit (obtained when he was station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines) which allowed him access to airside at Luqa Airport.

13. That Fhima when he was station manager for LAA (which he ceased to be some time before the Lockerbie bombing) kept blocks of plastic explosive in his desk drawer at Luqa Airport. [RB: This evidence emanated from Giaka and was ultimately rejected by the judges as lacking in credibility.]

14. That a diary kept by Fhima contained entries for a date six days before the Lockerbie bombing referring (a) to the arrival of Megrahi in Malta from Zurich and (b) to getting tags from Air Malta.

15. That a piece of interline baggage arrived at the luggage station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage destined for flight Pan Am 103A (the feeder flight to Heathrow) on 21 December 1988 at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from flight KM 180 from Malta.

16. That it would have been theoretically possible for a suitcase to be introduced into the interline baggage system at Luqa, although there is no documentary record of any such piece of baggage on Air Malta flight KM 180 to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988.

Apart from the consistency in timing referred to in paragraph 15 and the theoretical possibility mentioned in paragraph 16, no evidence has been led which could be held to establish that the Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb was launched on its fatal progress from Malta (as distinct from being directly loaded onto Pan Am 103 at Heathrow, or starting its journey at Frankfurt).

[RB: Having regard to the above and to the rejection by the court of the testimony of the mercenary fantasist Giaka, it remains a mystery to me how, at the end of the trial, Megrahi came to be convicted, particularly after the defence’s meteorological evidence established to the very highest degree of probability that the purchase of the clothing on Malta took place on a date on which Megrahi was not on the island.]

A date which will live in infamy

[What follows is excerpted from items contributed by me in 2000 to TheLockerbieTrial.com (and now accessible here and here):]

When the trial resumed on Tuesday 22 August [2000], the defence teams complained to the Court that they had just learned the previous day that certain CIA cables relating to the Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka, which they had thought had been made available to both the prosecution and the defence only in a censored or redacted form, had in fact been seen by members of the prosecution team on 1 June 2000 in uncensored or unredacted form.  The defence contended that the principle of equality of arms enshrined in article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights required that the defence should have similar access to this material.  The Crown opposed the defence's application.  They conceded that it is the duty of a Scottish prosecutor to supply to the defence any material available to the prosecution which advances the defence case or is relevant to a defence attack on the credibility of a prosecution witness. However, in the course of the Crown's lengthy submissions, it was stated by the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, that the deletions from the versions of the cables supplied to the defence related only to matters which were (a) irrelevant both to the facts in issue in the Lockerbie trial and to the credibility of the witness Majid Giaka or (b) related to sensitive matters of United States national security.  Indeed, it was for the purpose of ensuring that the Crown were in a position to fulfil their disclosure obligations that members of the Crown team inspected the unredacted cables on 1 June.  To quote the Lord Advocate:

"First of all, they considered whether or not there was any information behind the redactions which would undermine the Crown case in any way.  Secondly, they considered whether there was anything which would appear to reflect on the credibility of Mr Majid.  They also considered whether was anything which might bear upon the special defences which had been lodged and intimated in this case.

"On all of these matters, the learned at Advocate Depute reached the conclusion that there was nothing within the cables which bore on the Defence case, either by undermining the Crown case or by advancing a positive case which was being made or may be made, having regard to the special defence...

"There is nothing within these documents which relate to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid on these matters."

The Court was unimpressed by the arguments of the Lord Advocate and instructed him to use his best endeavours to secure the release by the CIA to the defence of the unredacted or uncensored cables.

These cables were in due course made available to the defence, and on Tuesday 29 August various excerpts from them were read out in open court by defence counsel in an attempt to convince the judges that further CIA cables relating to Giaka should be made available to the defence, if necessary by means of a request by the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist to the appropriate Federal Court in the United States of America for an order compelling the CIA to disgorge the relevant material. (...)

The previously blacked-out passages read out to the Court from the cables now in the hands of the defence indicated that, as at 1 September 1989 (more than eight months after the destruction of Pan Am 103), Giaka's CIA handlers were highly critical of him and of the lack of important information supplied by him.  He is described in the now-revealed portions of the cables as a man in the business of selling information for his own benefit; as someone who will never have the penetration of Libyan intelligence services that had been anticipated; as someone who had never been a true member of Libyan intelligence; and as someone whose CIA salary of $1000 per month should be cut off if he supplied no significant information.  It seems to be the natural inference from this that, by 1 September 1989, Giaka had still not informed his CIA masters that his Libyan colleagues in Malta had been responsible for the Lockerbie bombing: if he had done so, it is difficult to see how these criticisms of his value and of the worth of the information supplied by him could conceivably been made.

But apart altogether from that, if the excerpts read out in court on Tuesday 29 August and summarised in the preceding paragraph accurately reflect passages from the cables which had been blacked out from the versions originally supplied to the defence, it is somewhat difficult to appreciate how it could possibly have been accurate or justifiable for the Crown to state to the Court on Tuesday 22 August that the redacted or censored portions within the documents contained nothing "which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid."

...

In the light of the use actually, and entirely properly, made by the defence of material from those CIA cables in attacking, in the course of cross-examination [on 26, 27 and 28 September 2000], the credibility and reliability of Giaka’s evidence on matters relevant to the responsibility of the two accused men for the bombing of Pan Am 103, it may be that the Lord Advocate will (or at least should) feel that he owes an explanation of the statements made by him on 22 August 2000 which are quoted above.