The Helsinki warning

What follows is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103 (footnotes omitted):]

On 5 December 1988 (16 days prior to the attack), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin saying that, on that day, a man with an Arabic accent had telephoned the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and told them that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within the next two weeks by someone associated with the Abu Nidal Organization; he said a Finnish woman would carry the bomb on board as an unwitting courier.

The anonymous warning was taken seriously by the U.S. government, and the State Department cabled the bulletin to dozens of embassies. The FAA sent it to all US carriers, including Pan Am, which had charged each of the passengers a $5 security surcharge, promising a "program that will screen passengers, employees, airport facilities, baggage and aircraft with unrelenting thoroughness"; the security team in Frankfurt found the warning under a pile of papers on a desk the day after the bombing. One of the Frankfurt security screeners, whose job was to spot explosive devices under X-ray, told ABC News that she had first learned what Semtex (a plastic explosive) was during her ABC interview 11 months after the bombing.

On 13 December, the warning was posted on bulletin boards in the US Embassy in Moscow and eventually distributed to the entire American community there, including journalists and businessmen.

The Swedish-language national newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet reported on the front page of its 23 December 1988 issue — two days after the bombing — that a State Department spokesperson in Washington, Phyllis Oakley, confirmed the details of the bomb threat to the Helsinki Embassy. The newspaper writes that, "according the spokesperson, the anonymous telephone voice also stated that the bomb would be transported from Helsinki to Frankfurt and onwards to New York on Pan-Am's flight to the USA. The person transporting the bomb would not themselves be aware of it, with the explosives hidden in that person's luggage." The same news article reports that the US Embassy in Moscow also received the same threat on 5 December, adding that Finland's foreign ministry has found no evidence in its investigations of any link to the Lockerbie crash. "The foreign ministry assumes that an Arab living in Finland is behind the phone threat to the US Embassy in Helsinki. According to the foreign ministry's sources, the Arab has phoned throughout the year with threatening calls to the Israeli and US embassies [in Helsinki]," wrote the paper. "The man who rang the embassies claimed to belong to Abu Nidal's radical Palestinian faction that has been responsible for many terrorist actions. The man said that a bomb would be placed on board a Pan-Am plane by a woman." The article continues, "This has led to speculation that a Finnish woman placed the bomb aboard the downed aircraft. One of Abu Nidal's highest operative leaders, Samir Muhammed Khadir, who died last summer in a terrorist attack against the ship City of Poros, had lived outside Stockholm. He was married to a Finnish-born woman."

[RB: Perhaps the most detailed analysis of the Helsinki warning is to be found here (Part 1), here (Part 2), here (Part 3), here (Part 4) and here (part 5) on Caustic Logic’s website The Lockerbie Divide.]

Germans link Heathrow with Lockerbie bomb

[This is the headline over an article by David Pallister that was published in The Guardian on this date in 1989. It is no longer to be found on the newspaper’s website, but is reproduced on Caustic Logic’s website The Lockerbie Divide:]

West German forensic experts have discovered evidence which suggests that the bomb which brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie last December could have been loaded at Heathrow.

The evidence comes from an examination of three other bombs made by the Palestinian group believed to be responsible for the attack. It casts serious doubt on the theory that the bomb was placed on an earlier connecting flight.

All three devices were identically constructed, with electronic timers set to detonate the Semtex explosive within 43 to 46 minutes of being activated by a barometric pressure trigger at about 3,000 feet. [RB: These timings are not wholly accurate.] The West German police believe they were destined for El Al planes or flights to Tel Aviv.

If the Lockerbie bomb was the same, it would have had to have been placed on board the jumbo at Heathrow, rather than at Frankfurt, Malta or Cyprus - the three possibilities so far publicly canvassed.

The bombs have been connected with the terrorist cell run in West Germany by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The first was found in October 1988 in a radio cassette player in a car driven by Hafez Dalkamoni, who has been identified as a senior member of the PFLP-GC. He is awaiting trial in Frankfurt for a bomb attack on a railway in Lower Saxony in August 1987.

The discovery of the cassette bomb led to warnings from the West Germans to airlines and other western governments in November.

In April this year West German police found three more devices in the basement of a house owned by one of Dalkamoni's relatives in the town of Neuss. One exploded at the Wiesbaden headquarters of the BKA, the federal criminal investigation agency, killing a bomb disposal expert.

The three unexploded devices were all made by the same man. The BKA thinks he was the man arrested with Dalkamoni, Marwan Khreesat, who was mysteriously released without charge two weeks later, along with 12 other Palestinians arrested in October. Khreesat, it has been alleged, was probably an agent working for either Jordanian or West German intelligence, or both.

The forensic experts, working for the BKA, believe the devices were designed to withstand examination by El Al's pressure chambers which are used to screen baggage.

Dr Jim Swire, the spokesman for the UK Families-Flight 103 group, believes the findings could point to the Lockerbie bomb, which was also in a cassette player, being loaded at Heathrow.

The plane took off at 6.25pm and disappeared off the radar screens between 53 and 54 minutes later [RB: Actually 38 minutes later, at 7:03]. It takes between seven and 10 minutes to climb to 3,000 feet, which fits in precisely with the timing system on the other bombs.

All Lockerbie theories, in context

[This is the heading over an item published on this date in 2010 in Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide. It reads as follows:]

Broadly speaking, there are five classes of explanation for the fall of Pan Am 103.

1) Libya did it

 a) via Megrahi, as determined at Camp Zeist

 b) by some other agent

2) Iran did it

 a) via the PFLP-GC using a Khreesat bomb

 b) via some more direct method

3) Someone else did it (CIA, Israel, South Africa)

4) No one did it - the whole thing was an accident

5) It's not clear who or what caused the bombing, but it wasn't Megrahi

The first class is worth discussing, at least in that subset a) is the legally established, officially accepted, and culturally real version (within the US anyway) and b) follows from a) mixed with the doubts of the intelligent over the case against Megrahi. It's what we're debunking here, so of course it gets mentioned a lot and in detail. Tellingly, most proponents of the official 1a) conspiracy theory are less enthuusiastic about discussing the details in depth. They'd rather just point to some judges twice acting as if they believed it all. We know this, and just aren't impressed with their reasoning.

The second category is the most widely accepted alternate to Libya. The circumstantial evidence is strong, and anchored by Iran's epic grievance over Iran Air-655. This all but necessitated they do something like PA103 around the time it was done, and there's reasons to believe the German PFLP-GC cell making altimeter bombs was on this job. I'm all about informing or reminding people about this. To be sure there are many versions that aren't quite correct, like the drug swap theory. But the clues for a London infiltration of the bomb fit superbly with the Iran's desire to actually succeed, and with the known PFLP-GC technology.

Subset b) of "Iran did it" is occupied, to my knowledge, by Charles Norrie only. He also falls into group three, suggesting a joint Iranian-CIA operation. His theory is discussed in this post. Continuing with the scant category three, Patrick Haseldine has proposed - widely, loudly - the notion that apartheid South Africa carried out the bombing. At the Divide, that's discussed here and nowhere else. Andrew Killgore of WRMEA has hinted that - perhaps - Israel was to blame. That's covered here and nowhere else (no need).  

It's the last two categories that I have yet to address. On #4, the sparse allegations that a tragic accident was to blame for those 270 deaths, are - so far as I've seen - too irrational to bother discussing. To the extent I may be wrong, I've just created a post and invite full commentary on such issue there - and nowhere else on my blog, if you please.  For some reason, I've also lumped in different explosion theories in the same post - allegations the blast was too powerful, too far this way or that, a second bomb elsewhere, etc. In short, if your problem is what caused the plane to break up (and there is some room for legit questions), that is where I'd like to have it discussed.

Of these four, only "Iran did it" account for the obvious grievance Iran held in latter 1988. The others, proposing that Libya, or the South Africans, or happenstance, happened to blow up a mostly American plane within six months of its mirror image, while the Iranians apparently decided to let it slide at about the same time raises the question why?What amazing evidence compels you to propose such an amazing coincidence?

On option 5, proclaiming no good guess just always seems to me like a cop-out. Really, after all this time to consider the facts, you still don't have a best guess who or what caused such a historic event? Alright, well I suggest you read up a little more and try to at least narrow it down.

Other than links and some elaborations I may add, that pretty well sums up the allegedly confused field of "whodunnit" conspiracy theories. Five groups, four of which have something concrete to say. One dominates with the collusion of political power, one solidly challenges with the legitimacy of dethroned reality, and two are appear to be just wacky ideas supported by a small handful of persistent wingnuts.

Please do not allow yourselves to be too confused by all this.

[The comments that follow the article are also well worth reading.]

Majid Giaka offers his services to CIA

It was on this date in 1988 that Abdul Majid Giaka, a low level employee of Libyan intelligence (JSO), walked into the United States embassy in Valletta, Malta, and asked to speak to a CIA officer. From that date onwards he was a CIA asset and had many meetings with his American controllers. Although Pan Am 103 was destroyed on 21 December 1988, it was more than two years after that, when Giaka’s monthly US stipend was about to be cancelled, that he came up with information about Lockerbie. Without his “evidence”, it is in the highest degree unlikely that indictments would or could have been brought in either the USA or Scotland against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah.

The story of Giaka’s baleful rôle in the Lockerbie case is detailed in chapter 7, The Fantasist, in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury. Other useful accounts can be found here on Caustic Logic’s website The Lockerbie Divide, and on this blog here.

1988: Iran Air 655 - Casus Belli Behind Lockerbie Bombing?

This is the headline over an article by Caustic Logic which was originally published in March 2010 but which was re-published yesterday to mark the twenty-seventh anniversary of the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes. It is the clearest treatment of which I am aware of the evidence (and there’s quite a lot of it) supporting the thesis that the bombing of Pan Am 103 was an Iranian-financed operation motivated by desire for revenge for the destruction of Iran Air 655, an operation in which Libya had no, or at most peripheral, involvement.   

Tom Thurman "identifies" the dodgy timer fragment

[It was on this date twenty-five years ago that the FBI’s James ‘Tom’ Thurman, so he says, identified the fragment of circuit board PT/35b as coming from a MST-13 timer manufactured by the Swiss company MEBO. The circumstances are narrated in chapter 4 of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, especially at pages 62 to 66. The account that follows is taken from a long article entitled Thurman’s Photo Quest on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide:]

What we have in Thurman's case, with or without the actual piece of evidence, was the crucial identification. And one point that's consistent throughout is that he held a photo only when he found the match. The question at hand is how long it took him to find it and to determine its meaning vis-a-vis who carried out the bombing.

Tom Gets a Green Light

On the 10th of January 1990 new Senior Investigating Officer Stuart Henderson (who replaced John Orr) presented at a meeting of investigators in the UK. He did not openly mention the circuit board fragment PT/35(b), an amazing find UK investigators had been puzzling over for four months. But off to the side, he told FBI chief investigator Richard Marquise about it, Marquise says in his 2006 book SCOTBOM.  [p58] He expressed interest in helping find a match, but Henderson insisted on going it alone. “This decision cost us six months,” writes Marquise.

It was at a later conference in Virginia, on 11 June, when Marquise relates how the Scots finally made their puzzlement known to all, having blindly checked 55 companies to no avail. Given the opening, special Agent Thurman “approached Henderson and asked if he could take photographs of PT-35 and attempt to identify it. Henderson, who believed the Scots had done all they could do, agreed.” [p60] This passage is (...) rather ambiguous. It seems to read that Thurman, in Arlington, was allowed to snap a pic of evidence SIO Henderson had there with him. Then perhaps it means he took some of the prints they had brought.

Either way, he walked away with a picture or pictures of this crucial and curious evidence, a half-inch square, perfectly readable, mammoth of implausibility. The "forensic explosives expert" didn't balk at it, just ran with it. Or crawled, as he suggests.

"Months, Literally" or 2-4 Days?

A 1991 Miami Herald article, based on interview with Thurman, reported that he had “meticulously compared the picture of the fragment to hundreds of other devices,” a lengthy-sounding process. Affirming this, Thurman himself told the adoring program Air Crash Investigation in 2008:

“I spent, uh, months, literally, looking through all about the files of the FBI on other examinations that we had, uh, conducted over many many many years. […] After a period I just ran out of leads. And at that point I said, okay now we need to go outside the physical FBI laboratory.”

And it was there, in a CIA facility, that he found the long-sought answer.

But Marquise said “what Thurman did yielded fruit within two days.[…] Henderson and his colleagues were on an airplane headed back to Scotland” when Thurman set to work. They had barely settled back in at home before his efforts “would turn Henderson around quicker than he ever imagined,” putting him back stateside, along with electronics fiend Alan Feraday, within 24 hours of the discovery. [p60]

Further evidence against Thurman’s "months" claim is his own well-memorized “day that I made the identification,” recalling it as one would a wedding anniversary: June 15 1990. He had four days tops to get this grueling season of cross-checking out of the way after the 11 June conference (perhaps a multi-day event) where Marquise has him first learning of the thing.

Who He Ran To

What Thurman did, Marquise sums up, is know where to look. He took the photo to a CIA explosives and timers expert code-named John Scott Orkin (real name unknown - he testified under this name at Camp Zeist). [p60] Thurman mentions him only as an unnamed "contact" in the 2008 ACI interview.  From the vast photo files on hand, "Orkin" helped locate an obvious fit with the blow-up of PT/35(b). If you were Tom Thurman and knew about John Orkin, would you waste even one afternoon scrounging in the FBI's files, or go right to him?

Nothing I've seen specifies this match-up was achieved in only one visit on a single day, but that makes the most sense, as does starting right there. That would give us no more than "hours, literally" to describe the search duration. And either way we're at the point of days at most.

The matching circuit board was found in a timer confiscated in the African nation Togo in 1986. This device, assembled in a small plastic case, was physically available for Thurman to look at. He was given permission to take it apart and examine the main board inside. Upon confirming again the obvious similarities, “within a few minutes, literally, I started getting cold chills,” he told Air Crash Investigation.  He's also described as declaring "I have you now!" [p60] and other variations. In a 2010 interview, he said "I could not believe it under any circumstances, and it was there."

That he got these chills only after getting access to the CIA’s special stores is noteworthy, and the Agency is right to claim much of the credit, as they have in places. An AFIO newsletter from just after the Zeist verdict purred that “the CIA’s most important contribution in helping secure the conviction” was “when a CIA engineer was able to identify the timer […] shifting the focus of the probe from a Palestinian terrorist group to Libya.”  (This report's oblique reference to the CIA's less brilliant offering, Giaka, is also worth a read.)

As the overall story tells it, this was clearly a collaborative CIA-FBI effort, via Thurman and "Orkin", that neither side can claim sole credit for. And without this coming together, we're to infer, the naming of this planted piece of Libyan black magic would be delayed or impossible for both Scottish and American investigators. The power of cooperation, between intelligence and law enforcement, and across the Atlantic - a running theme of the 103 investigation - is nicely illustrated here.

[Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer is currently engaged on his PT35B blog in a meticulous exploration of all the evidence about the identification of this fragment.]

The dodgy timer fragment sees the light of day

It was (apparently) on this date in 1989 that Dr Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) discovered amongst Lockerbie debris a fragment of circuit board embedded in a shirt collar. This became PT35(b) -- the notorious dodgy timer fragment. The story of the discovery and how it was recorded is narrated an article headed Page 51 and its Environs on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide. The dialogue between Caustic Logic and Rolfe in the comments following the blogpost is also a mine of information.

Mrs Horton's mysterious manual

[What follows is an excerpt from a report on proceedings at the Lockerbie trial published on this date in 2000 on the BBC News website:]

Gwendoline Horton, a witness, described how she helped gather debris in the fields near her home in Northumberland.

Among her finds was what looked to be "a document relating to a radio cassette player", she told the court.

Ex-police constable Brian Walton, to whom Ms Horton handed in the item, identified it as "pieces of an instruction handbook".

Asked what had struck him about the object, Mr Walton said: "It had tiny bits of singe on some of the edges of the pieces."

[RB: Mrs Horton’s find was both significant and mysterious. Read all about it on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide here and here.]

"Accepting responsibility" contrasted with admitting guilt

[What follows is an article published on this date in 2009 on Adam Larson (Caustic Logic)’s blog The 12/7-9/11 Treadmill and Beyond (and referred to on this blog here):] 

I recently started an interesting discussion thread at the JREF forum, fishing for thoughts on why people believe the official line on the Lockerbie bombing so fervently. I hadn't yet encountered any serious questions in the course of previous brilliant and provocative discussions - just a few drive-by statements supporting Megrahi's and Col Gaddafy's absolute guilt, but never accompanied by evidence of any real knowledge. Among the questions and counter-points I suggested people could offer, if they knew anything, was "Libya admitted responsibility and paid out billions of dollars!" And if they had asked, I would answer like this: 

There is no doubt that the Libyan government did issue a statement admitting responsibility, and agreed to pay compensation, among other measures, in 2003. It was an explicit pre-condition, inssted by Washington, to having broad UN sanctions lifted. Tripoli has always defended its innocence of Lockerbie, but to function in the global economy, they had to do something. Here they managed to not explicitly break the rule, and using careful (cynical?) wordplay, managed to accept responsibility without admitting guilt. Sanctions were lifted. 

There’s been much oxymoronic harping on this in the West as both an admission of guilt and an arrogant refusal to admit their guilt. The BBC’s 2008 Conspiracy Files episode on Lockerbie is a brilliant example. “For those that believe al Megrahi was framed,” snarls the narrator, Carolyn Katz, “one fact remains hard to explain away. Libya agreed to award substantial compensation for Lockerbie. Sanctions were then lifted.” Well, ignoring that they just answered their own stumper of a question, it’s a good question, and they continue: “Tripoli accepted responsibility for what it called ‘the Lockerbie incident.’ But does it admit guilt?” Of course not, and by pretending there’s some disconnect, they’ve primed the audience to see the darkest of cynicism at work. Oops, how did that happen?

Under Prolonged Duress

Following he indictment of Libyan agents al Megrahi and Fhimah in late 1991, a process itself twisted with political machinations and riddled with a million broken questions marks, the Security Council moved to enforce the official truth with sanctions. Resolution 748 of 31 March 1992 imposed an arms and air embargo, diplomatic restrictions, and establishment of a sanctions committee. The committee’s work led to Resolution 883 of 11 November 1993, toughening sanctions. This measure “approved the freezing of Libyan funds and financial resources in other countries,” reports globalpolicy.org, “and banned the provision to Libya of equipment for oil refining and transportation.” 

By late August 1998 the framework of a trial was established, and used as the measure of Resolution 1192, agreeing to suspend sanctions once the suspects were handed over to the special Scottish court in the Nehterlands at Camp Zeist. Tripoli made it happen, with help from luminaries like Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia and Nelson Mandela of Africa. Megrahi and Fhimah were flown on a special flight to the Netherlands in early April, and on the 5th were official arrested at Camp Zeist and set to await their trial. Sanctions were immediately suspended, under threat of re-enforcement (that never did materialize). 

Many suspect this was never “supposed” to happen, as the evidence behind the indictment was too weak to stand up at Trial. The Crown's prosecutors managed to swing it somehow, but it took nearly two years from the handover, and a display of mental gymnastics worthy of the Realpolitik Olympics in the scale and skill of it. On January 31 2001, the three-judge panel made it official – Megrahi was legally guilty for the plot, and Fhimah was not guilty. 

From there, many insisted sanctions should be lifted to reflect Libya’s good faith through this process. But Bush and Blair balked, demanding an admission of responsibility and compensation to victims’ families before they went past suspension. It was a letter, dated 15 August 2003, from Libya’s Permanent Representative to the President of the Council Ahmed A Own, that paved the way. Own's letter explains “the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” as Libya calls itself, “has sought to cooperate in good faith throughout the past years” on solving the problems made theirs “resulting from the Lockerbie incident.” It was in this spirit that they “facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials.”

The letter also pledged Libya to cooperate with any further investigations, and to settle all compensation claims with haste, and to join the international “War on Terrorism.” It was widely (and reservedly) hailed as a bold… statement. But still evasive. It doesn’t clearly state anywhere the suspects or any Libyans were in any way actually guilty of the “incident.” Nonetheless, after a month of discussion in the Security Council, sanctions were lifted on Sept 12 2003. France and the US insisted on abstaining, but it was otherwise a unanimous vote of 13. (source) The United States’ own sanctions would remain in full force due to the general evilness of Col Gaddafy, US officials made clear. (Additional normalizations did happen in 2007). 

The Blood Libel Edits
Despite his portrayals as a crazed prophet of death, Moammar Gadaffi proved a shrewd and patient pragmatist in all this. He can't have ever believed his nation actually did the crime, but against "guilty" as a legal truth, he accepted they had no choice but to do “the time.” It’s a type of bind known to breed passive-aggressive tendencies. The Colonel’s son and likely successor Saif al Islam al Gaddafi seemed to understand it, when he was interviewed at home for the Conspiracy Files programme.

Q - Does Libya accept responsibility for the attack on Lockerbie?

A - Yes. We wrote a letter to the Security Council, saying that we are responsible for the acts of our employees, or people. But it doesn’t mean that we did it, in fact.

Q - So to be very clear on this, what you’re saying is that you accept responsibility, but you’re not admitting that you did it.

A - Of course.

(edit)

Q - That’s… to many people will sound like a very cynical way to conduct your relationship with the outside world.

A - What can you do? Without writing that letter, you will not be able to get out of the sanction.

Q - So this statement was just word play. It wasn’t an admission of guilt.

A - No. I admit that we play with the words. And we had to. We had to. There was no other… solution.

The BBC are masters, among others, of careful editing, and it helped bolster their whole “you don’t admit you’re guilty” thing where people have to explain there’s nothing to “admit” (or fail to explain that, as happened here). Thus he could, with a little imagination, appear to be saying “we don’t admit it, buuuuut of course we did it, you already know that.” Note the cut that removed some of his words from the middle of the exchange, unlikely to have been irrelevant. Thus is clearly established a cynical payout ($2.7 billion) and bit of semantics to buy up and slough off their non-admitted guilt so they could resume trade. They got away with Lockerbie using money and words and are laughing at us and making more money! 

Immediately after “there was no other solution,” the video cuts right to the interviewer asking “so it was like blood money if you like,” which seems to be referring to what was just shown. But really it refers to the American victims' families, whose “money, money, money, money” attitude (well-known and spearheaded by Victims of PA103 Inc) was “materialistic,” “greedy,” and amounted to “trading with the blood of their sons and daughters.” But with the magic of editing, it can seem to mean so much more!