Interview with "Lockerbie: Unfinished Business" actor-writer David Benson

Fest, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe magazine, features a long interview with David Benson. The following are excerpts:]

Flora Swire boarded a Boeing 747-100 named Clipper Maid of the Seas at London Heathrow. On 21 December 1988—the day before her 24th birthday—she was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend Hart Lidov. Earlier that year she had graduated in medicine with a first-class degree and top of her class.

There was no touch-down at JFK. At 7.03pm, 30,000 feet above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, a bomb exploded on board ripping through the aircraft's fuselage. PanAm Flight 103 gradually disintegrated over two horrific minutes before impact on Sherwood Crescent creating a large crater and destroying homes. There were 270 fatalities.

Since the disaster, Flora's father Dr Jim Swire has fought to bring those responsible for the Lockerbie bombings to justice. Now he's now the focus of a play by writer and actor David Benson. (...)

“I was doing some research online on the subject of Lockerbie, idly browsing news stories, and I came across the website of Dr Jim Swire. I saw he had written a book—as yet unpublished—giving his account of what had happened, written with a co-researcher, Peter Biddulph.”

“They had a note saying to leave your email address if you'd like to know when the book is published. So I sent them an email and had a message back very quickly from Biddulph saying 'I see that you're an actor and you write one-man shows. Perhaps you'd be interested in having a look at this unpublished text and seeing if there's anything you can do with it'.”

Even though the topic was not on his agenda, Benson replied. “I would love to read it anyway so he sent me a copy of it and I was absolutely transfixed.” Fascinated by Dr Swire's traumatic journey, his campaign of enormous courage, and his anger and grief at the loss of his daughter, Benson spent months reading up on the subject and secured a rare 90-minute meeting with Swire. “He answered every question I had. Thoroughly as he always does. And I felt able to go away and write a script that would tell his story and tell things that maybe he can't tell.” (...)

When I ask Benson, now 48, if constructing his play has been emotional, he reveals it has generated anger above all else. He blames governments for “doing everything they could do block the Lockerbie relatives' path to justice. They had many reasons for not wanting the true story coming out and they very cynically produced a cover story that these Libyans were supposed to have done it. That is a horrendous, sickening insult to the grief of the people who are still seeking justice.”

Yet behind Benson's anger is deep sympathy for his subject, something he is not accustomed to finding in his work: “When I look at Dr Swire's story and realising how much he's lost, understanding the depth of his grief that I sometimes find it quite overwhelming in even speaking the lines I've written myself.

“He goes from being very formal and in control, giving out this information fact by fact about what happened, and then once in a while having to admit that his beautiful lovely daughter who he adored is dead, died in a horrible way and that he will never see her again. I think it's impossible not to be touched by that, and also to realise one has an awesome responsibility in telling that story to get it right. Because you're dealing with some of the deepest human emotions.”

[Lockerbie: Unfinished Business is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot until 30 August (not 18) 2:30pm – 3:40pm]

Lockerbie revisited

[This is the headline over an article published on this date in 2010 in the online Edinburgh Festival magazine Fest. It reads as follows:]

When David Benson set about translating the story of Dr Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, to the Edinburgh stage, he could not have predicted the whirlwind of renewed controversy. He talks to Joe Pike about an unexpectedly relevant piece of personal and political theatre

Flora Swire boarded a Boeing 747-100 named Clipper Maid of the Seas at London Heathrow. On 21 December 1988—the day before her 24th birthday—she was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend Hart Lidov. Earlier that year she had graduated in medicine with a first-class degree and top of her class.

There was no touch-down at JFK. At 7.03pm, 30,000 feet above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, a bomb exploded on board ripping through the aircraft's fuselage. PanAm Flight 103 gradually disintegrated over two horrific minutes before impact on Sherwood Crescent creating a large crater and destroying homes. There were 270 fatalities.

Since the disaster, Flora's father Dr Jim Swire has fought to bring those responsible for the Lockerbie bombings to justice. Now he's now the focus of a play by writer and actor David Benson. When we meet in an office on a hot day in London's West End, Benson is nervous: “I'm feeling of course all that sense of anticipation, and fear that one feels when you have a new show that you're launching in that intense market place...Edinburgh is, for four weeks on earth, the most judgmental place you could be”.

Recent events have not helped to reduce the pressure. David Cameron's recent visit to Washington, along with the investigations of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations into last year's release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombings, have put Lockerbie back at the top of the news agenda. This renewed relevance won't hurt ticket sales, but the show wasn't planned to capitalise upon it. Applications for Fringe shows are finalised in May, months before the recent developments. Since then, Benson has received calls from newspapers across the world, yet his main concern remains learning his lines.

Lockerbie seems at first a curious choice of topic for a writer and actor whose most successful performances have explored the camp, comic and completely un-political lives of entertainers Kenneth Williams, Noel Coward and Frankie Howerd. When I suggest that his current show marks a departure from more frivolous entertainment, Benson seems offended citing that the focus of much his work is complex personalities: “I like to do something that challenges me and the audience."

Ironically, when deciding the subject of Benson's next production, his producer James Seabright was convinced he should create a solo show based on the war-time sitcom Dad's Army. That never happened because at the end of the 2009 Fringe when Benson was finishing his run of a show on Dr Samuel Johnson, he started investigating Pan Am Flight 103.

“I was doing some research online on the subject of Lockerbie, idly browsing news stories, and I came across the website of Dr Jim Swire. I saw he had written a book—as yet unpublished—giving his account of what had happened, written with a co-researcher, Peter Biddulph.”

“They had a note saying to leave your email address if you'd like to know when the book is published. So I sent them an email and had a message back very quickly from Biddulph saying 'I see that you're an actor and you write one-man shows. Perhaps you'd be interested in having a look at this unpublished text and seeing if there's anything you can do with it'.”

Even though the topic was not on his agenda, Benson replied. “I would love to read it anyway so he sent me a copy of it and I was absolutely transfixed.” Fascinated by Dr Swire's traumatic journey, his campaign of enormous courage, and his anger and grief at the loss of his daughter, Benson spent months reading up on the subject and secured a rare 90-minute meeting with Swire. “He answered every question I had. Thoroughly as he always does. And I felt able to go away and write a script that would tell his story and tell things that maybe he can't tell.”

Swire is an enigmatic figure. When I tried to contact him to for an interview, the intermediary said: “I haven't heard back from him. He does rather go to ground from time to time.” His dogged efforts to bring the suspects to trial led to him visit the Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi three times. In an interview with The Herald in 2007 he said: "You might not think there was any common ground between a GP from the Midlands and an army colonel turned dictator based in an Arab country. But there was.” Swire continues: "He had lost his adopted daughter Hannah when she was just 15 months old, when the US bombed Tripoli in 1986. I took a book of pictures of Flora, making sure there was one of her at just that age."

When I ask Benson, now 48, if constructing his play has been emotional, he reveals it has generated anger above all else. He blames governments for “doing everything they could do block the Lockerbie relatives' path to justice. They had many reasons for not wanting the true story coming out and they very cynically produced a cover story that these Libyans were supposed to have done it. That is a horrendous, sickening insult to the grief of the people who are still seeking justice.”

Yet behind Benson's anger is deep sympathy for his subject, something he is not accustomed to finding in his work: “When I look at Dr Swire's story and realising how much he's lost, understanding the depth of his grief that I sometimes find it quite overwhelming in even speaking the lines I've written myself.

“He goes from being very formal and in control, giving out this information fact by fact about what happened, and then once in a while having to admit that his beautiful lovely daughter who he adored is dead, died in a horrible way and that he will never see her again. I think it's impossible not to be touched by that, and also to realise one has an awesome responsibility in telling that story to get it right. Because you're dealing with some of the deepest human emotions.”

[RB: David Benson is again performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year but in a very different play, Boris: World King, of which I have written “If there's a better Edinburgh Fringe performance than David Benson's in Boris: World King, I'll be amazed. This is a fantastic show -- screamingly funny, but also serious and sad. See it.” Details here.]

The dead still wait...

[This is the heading over an item posted yesterday on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads as follows:]

It is true that Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi was found guilty in a court of law and his conviction confirmed by five senior judges. [RB: For the restricted scope of this appeal and the issues which it did not address, see Lockerbie: A satisfactory process but a flawed result, section headed “The Appeal”.]

This - as Scottish government spokespersons continually remind us - remains the situation.

But those judges at trial and appeal are now proven to have been misled and mis-informed by senior British scientists and senior police officers who failed in their duty to the truth and the society they were entrusted to serve.  

This also – as Scottish government spokespersons continually ignore – remains the situation.

During the Lockerbie trial, RARDE scientist Alan Feraday in his evidence stated as follows:

"The conducting pad and tracks present on the fragment PT/35(b) are of copper covered by a layer of pure tin."  

(In other words, the tracking was 100% tin. And Feraday had written in long hand on his notebook just those numbers "100% tin".)  

And later in his evidence Feraday stated:

".. it has been conclusively established that the [PT/35(b)] fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects to the area around the connection pad for the output relay of the MST-13 timer."  

Unfortunately for Feraday is has now been conclusively established that the conducting pad and tracks present on all timer boards supplied to Libya by Swiss suppliers MEBO, and from which - according to the prosecution - came fragment PT/35(b), were of copper covered by a layer of 70/30% alloy of tin and lead.

Indeed, Feraday was aware of the difference and asked two scientists to look at the reason for the difference.  They did not do so.

In his evidence at trial, Feraday never mentioned the discrepancy.  The judges remained in ignorance of the discrepancy.  The defence team knew nothing of it.

So the fragment materials were and are not "similar in all respects" to those used on the MEBO MST-13 timer boards.

This phrase "similar in all respects" formed the kernel of the judgement against al-Megrahi.

No-one knows the origin of the Lockerbie fragment, and we will not speculate as to where it came from or who made it. It is, however, clear that PT/35(b) did not originate from any timer boards which the prosecution claimed were used by Al-Megrahi.

The prosecution did not, incidentally, produce any evidence as to where Al-Megrahi had used such timers, nor where or how he had constructed a bomb, nor where he had stored it or deployed it.  The judges, misled as they were by the remaining evidence, accepted such innuendo as fact.

The timer fragment PT/35(b) was not the only matter central to the verdict in which misinformation and concealment by the prosecution and their witnesses occurred. These are serious matters which cry out for independent investigation.  

Earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron, just two days after the revelation of the above information, claimed that such revelations were "an insult" to the Lockerbie dead.  

We must leave it to objective historians to form their own conclusions on such a statement.

An independent inquiry into the Lockerbie tragedy and its investigation and evidence submitted at trial is long overdue.

It is now almost a quarter of a century since the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The two hundred and seventy dead of Lockerbie still wait for truth and justice.

Thatcher banned Lockerbie inquiry

[This is the heading over an item posted yesterday on Lockerbietruth.com, the website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph. It reads as follows:]

Today's release of Thatcher cabinet papers from 1988/89 contains a sinister footnote to the Lockerbie story.

Pan Am 103 was blown from the skies over the Scottish town of Lockerbie just after 7 pm on the evening of the 21st December 1988. Within hours US FBI teams arrived in Lockerbie to "assist" the Dumfries and Galloway police force.

Phone lines between the White House, the US embassy in London, and the offices of MI6 were running hot. The US ambassador to the UK had been kept informed. The secret US Navy base at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre had been alerted and at dawn a surveillance helicopter would be scrambled.

At 9.30 on the morning of the 22nd December Thatcher and her cabinet met to decide what to do.  Information about the tragedy had flooded into Downing Street from 8 pm the previous evening. Thatcher and entourage would fly to Scotland later that morning to survey the devastation.

At the cabinet table was head of MI6 Sir Christopher Curwen. He reported that US intelligence had instructed that on no account was there to be any form of public inquiry. His advice was supported by British Secretary of State for Transport Paul Channon.

The tragedy would prove to be the biggest attack on the British mainland since the Second World War, yet no public inquiry must be allowed. If such an inquiry were to happen, the following matters would be open to public scrutiny and questioning:

1. On board Pan Am 103 was a six-man CIA team returning from Beirut. In the suitcase of the team leader Charles McKee were sensitive state papers. The team had been on a praiseworthy mission to attempt to negotiate the release of US hostages at that time held in the Middle East.

2. One of the Pan Am passengers was Khaled Jafaar, a drug courier for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). His job was to take consignments of heroin originating from the Bekaa Valley to the US, to assist with the capture of drug traffickers in Mexico and the USA. UK security authorities cooperated with the drug shipments, known as "controlled deliveries" and sometimes "high risk flights". Passengers and public were unaware of the process.

3. Transport Minister Paul Channon was aware of a telephoned warning - made just days before the bombing - about possible bombs on US aircraft flying to the US. Known as the "Helsinki" warning it was, in the view of Heathrow security chiefs, a hoax. And yet the Department of Transport telexed the warning to Interpol and all airlines. Why would they do that, if the warning was a hoax?

4. Channon was aware also of a second warning from the German authorities in the form of a multi page coloured brochure. This included a photo of a mock-up of a bomb discovered in late October made by a terrorist group funded by Iran and Syria. It was certain that five bombs had been made by the group. Four were retrieved. A fifth bomb was never found.

5. In both warnings the Department of Transport had instructed airline check-in and security staff that if a tape recorder or radio in a passenger's luggage seemed suspicious, it should be "consigned to the hold of the plane". That is, exactly where the terrorist would want it to be.

6. Paul Channon was aware that Heathrow security was known to be in chaos. On the day of the Lockerbie attack 70,000 airside passes were in circulation at Heathrow, distributed to many nationalities and construction workers. The head of Heathrow security believed any country could have planted a bomb. There was no screening of staff, no restrictions on people walking through with bags. A rogue bag could be easily inserted into the baggage chain. [This information would be revealed to journalists in March 2012 by the Head of Heathrow Security following his retirement].

But...  

Important as they were, none of the above were recorded in Cabinet minutes or released under the thirty year rule.

 

Instead, all that is recorded and available to the public is that Thatcher and her ministers agreed that it was "not clear whether any further public inquiry would serve a useful purpose". An independent investigation would "serve no useful purpose". In general "it was important to avoid a plethora of inquiries that caused distress to individuals while unearthing no new facts."

On the contrary, Jim Swire and many bereaved relatives will be happy to undergo further distress caused by an independent inquiry. But will the Americans ever allow it?

Margaret Thatcher sleeps soundly in her grave knowing that her 1993 memoirs The Downing Street Years have consigned 270 murdered Lockerbie souls to the dustbin of history.  In 914 pages of closely remembered events and text she does not mention the word "Lockerbie".

The renowned journalist John Pilger has an appropriate saying for Thatcher's chicanery. When an event is inconvenient a government - aided by its intelligence services - will ensure that it "never happened".

Fringe play tells Swire story

[This is the headline over an article in today's edition of The Herald. The following are excerpts:]

An Edinburgh Fringe play about the Lockerbie bombing has sparked poignant memories for Dr Jim Swire on whose original writings it is based.

Dr Swire and his wife Jane were haunted by the soundtrack of Lockerbie: Unfinished Business, in which their daughter Flora sings some of her favourite songs as a child.

She wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and study medicine at Cambridge University, but died along with 269 others in the Lockerbie disaster of December 21, 1988, the day before her 24th birthday.

Dr Swire, 74, said: “My daughter was a free spirit and her death was such a waste of all the energy and effort she put into life.

“It was so hard at first. We were numb with grief and misery. Often I wondered if we could survive the experience – but we have.

“At the time, it was impossible to relate words like terrorism and bombs to our beautiful daughter.

“Lockerbie never goes away. It is like a big heavy overcoat that you never seem quite able to take off.

“When you’ve got children and something bad happens to one of them, you torture yourself with thoughts about how much they might have suffered.

“Every parent wants to prevent their child from suffering and we couldn’t because we weren’t there. That is what really hurts.”

The new play by David Benson is based on an unpublished book, Moving the World, written by Dr Swire and Peter Biddulph.

It covers the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi and his co-accused Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah at at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands as well as Dr Swire’s belief that Megrahi was wrongly convicted and his continued efforts to find out the truth about the disaster.

Dr Swire described his campaign as “an outlet not just for my grief but my intense rage as well, at the way we relatives were treated”. (...)

Speaking about the play, Dr Swire said: “David Benson did very well. The play is very accurate and I think it will have a big impact on Edinburgh audiences.”

His wife, Jane, added: “It was very good; a thumbnail sketch of Jim’s campaign to get at the truth. It’s just that I have never before had to face somebody playing the part of my husband on a stage.

“It was a strange experience, but then nothing after Lockerbie has ever been normal.”

Lockerbie: Unfinished Business is at the Gilded Balloon until August 20.

[The Washington Post has published the Associated Press news agency report about the play that was mentioned on this blog a few days ago.]

...the media and the Scottish Parliament totally miss the point...

[What follows is from an item headed The Transatlantic relationship posted today on the website Lockerbietruth.com maintained by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph:]

 

With the launch of John Ashton's book Megrahi: You are my Jury, once again we see a furor about what Kenny McKaskill said  to whom about the compassionate release of Al-Megrahi.  And once again the media and the entire Scottish Parliament totally miss the point.

In a closely argued section, Ashton highlights a serious discrepancy in the evidence of British forensic scientist Alan Feraday.  Feraday's own hand-written notes prove that the electronic print on the alleged fragment of timer board found by Dr Thomas Hayes is not the same metal printed on the control MST-13 timer board supplied by Swiss manufacturers MEBO. 

Feraday wrote that the Hayes fragment printing was 100% pure tin, but that the MEBO control sample printing was an alloy composed of 70% tin and 30% lead.  He explained the difference by saying that the heat of the explosion had evaporated all - yes, 100% - of the lead content.  A highly doubtful theory indeed.  No tests were carried out at any stage to back up his theory.

In other words, Feraday's own notes provide strong evidence that the Hayes fragment might be a manufactured plant, designed to point the finger at Libya, and divert attention from Iran in America's strategic interests during the mid and late 1980's. 

This information was supplied to Al-Megrahi's defence team in 2009 only during the course of the second appeal, abandoned at an early stage to enable Al-Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds.  It should, under rules of natural Scottish justice, have been available prior to the trial which took place in 2000. But it was concealed by the police, forensic services and the Crown Office for more than ten years. 

If Iran - who paid $11m to the Jibril terrorist group only two days after the attack - was responsible, then the bomb which brought down Pan Am 103 was constructed by Marwan Khreesat, career master bomb maker for the PFLP-GC. Khreesat was a double agent working for Jordanian security, and rumoured to be a CIA asset. 

In a set of hearsay notes recorded by the FBI and repeated during the Lockerbie trial, Khreesat claimed "He did not think he made the Lockerbie bomb". As a career mass-murderer and double and possibly triple agent, can we trust his word?  We doubt it. 

But the Lockerbie trial judges did trust his word.  Then let us ask for a moment what would have happened if they had not. If they had expressed doubt concerning the timer fragment, their verdict would have suggested that the bomb which killed 270 people at Lockerbie was made by an asset working for America.  

Could the relationship between Britain and America have survived the shock?  And is this question not of far more import than a ministerial statement in a Scottish parliament?

The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice

[What follows is from 2021 Preview: History and Current Affairs on the website of Scottish publishers Birlinn:]

The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph (May)

The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 was the largest attack on Britain since World War Two. 259 passengers and 11 townsfolk of Lockerbie were murdered. Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the crime. He maintained his innocence until his death in 2012. Among the passengers was Flora, beloved daughter of Dr Jim Swire. Jim accepted American claims that Libya was responsible, but during the Lockerbie trial he began to distrust key witnesses and supposed firm evidence. Since then it has been revealed that the USA paid millions of dollars to two central identification witnesses, and the only forensic evidence central to the prosecution has been discredited. The book takes us along Dr Swire’s journey as his initial grief and loss becomes a campaign to uncover the truth behind not only a personal tragedy but one of the modern world’s most shocking events.

Jim Swire to speak at Major Incidents Conference

[What follows is an excerpt from an item posted today on Lockerbietruth.com, the website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph:]

Jim Swire is to speak at a national conference Major Incidents and Beyond at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham on Wednesday 20th May. He will open his address with a short extract from our book Lockerbie. This is the basis of a feature film directed by six-time Oscar nominated director Jim Sheridan.

The event will address topics surrounding acute trust involvement during a major incident such as recovery-phase post incident, personal accounts and psychological effects following an incident, security arrangements, and first-hand accounts of inquests and public inquiries.

This is a full day event for all those involved in emergency planning, working in emergency departments and those with a particular interest in major incidents.

From Birmingham to Lockerbie?

[This is the headline over an item posted today on Lockerbietruth.com, the website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph:]

Jim Swire and relatives of some of the Lockerbie victims are pursuing a posthumous third appeal on behalf of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. They believe that he suffered a miscarriage of justice.

In June 2014 - almost one year ago - they requested that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ask the Scottish appeal court to rule on whether it is authorised to continue an investigation into the trial findings. The SCCRC requires a ruling on whether the relatives have “a legitimate interest”.

While in prison Al-Megrahi was visited by many well-wishers. In John Ashton's 2012 book Megrahi: You are my Jury Al-Megrahi tells of visits by Paddy Joe Hill, one of the "Birmingham Six" wrongly convicted for the 1974 IRA Birmingham pub bombings. He says of Hill, "He was the visitor who best understood my plight".

Megrahi explains: "Hill knew better than anyone the innate reluctance of the criminal justice system to right its wrongs. Following their first unsuccessful appeal, the Six attempted to press charges against the West Midlands Police. The case eventually reached the High Court and was rejected by a panel of three judges led by England's most senior civil judge, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning.

"In one of the most notorious judgements of recent times he opined: 'Just consider the course of events if their [the Six's] action were to proceed to trial... If they failed it would mean that much time, money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose.'

"'If they won ... [it would mean] that the convictions were eroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would either have to recommend that they be pardoned or to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. That [would be] such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say "It cannot be right that these actions should go any further."'"

Baset Al-Megrahi continues: "By the time I was convicted 21 years later, no judge would dare so nakedly place the reputation of the justice system before the interests of justice. But the common ancestry of judicial myopia was all too obvious."

Let us hope that Mr Al-Megrahi is correct and that the sentiments expressed by Lord Denning will never be allowed to influence the current application for a third, posthumous appeal.

Hillsborough and Lockerbie

[What follows is the text of a letter dated 28 April 2016 sent to the editor of The Guardian by Peter Biddulph, but not (as yet) published:]

Twenty seven years is indeed a damning indictment. (Owen Jones: Think Hillsborough couldn't happen today? Think again). And not only in the case of Hillsborough.

It is now almost thirty years since the Lockerbie bombing of December 21st 1988, in which 270 people were murdered by a terrorist bomb. Two Libyans were accused and tried at a specially located court at Kamp Zeist in Holland. One - Baset al-Megrahi - was convicted, the other acquitted with no case to answer.

Only eight years after the trial and two appeals did it emerge that the top police investigator had concealed his diary of his investigations from the defence team and the trial court. When examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and members of the defence team, it was found to contain a chronological record of discussions with the US department of Justice and the sole identification witness concerning massive rewards, in the words of the US Department of Justice, of "unlimited monies" and "only if he gives evidence". The witness received $2m, and his brother $1m. This discovery was one of six areas of concern which led the SCCRC to conclude that "there may have been a miscarriage of justice".

Similarly, only after eight years was the forensic notebook of the prosecution's leading forensic scientist available for scrutiny by the defence team. This contained proof of either gross negligence or perjury when he told the trial judges that a fragment of timer circuit board found at the crash site was materially and structurally identical with timer boards delivered in 1985 to the Libyan government. In fact, his hand-written annotations revealed that the metallurgy of the fragment and the control samples were quite different. The fragment was protectively coated with 100% tin, whereas the sample was coated with an alloy of 70/30% tin/lead.

These issues, and several others with serious implications concerning both police and Crown officers, have been repeatedly brought to the attention of the Scottish government, the Scottish Crown Office, and the police. At all stages, those who have helped to expose them to public scrutiny have been pilloried as "conspiracy theorists".

Campaigners for justice in the Lockerbie case now await the results of Operation Sandwood, a police investigation into allegations of criminality by the Scottish Crown and certain Scottish police officers and government scientists. There is concern that campaigners for the truth have been forced to await an investigation of the police, by the police.  Whatever Sandwood contains, however, those areas of alleged criminality will still stand, and the fight for truth will continue.

Hillsborough has given truth and justice to the people of Liverpool. Let us hope that in time the same will be said for the bereaved of Lockerbie.

[RB: Further posts on this blog drawing analogies between Hillsborough and Lockerbie can be read here.]

The darkest of our days

[This is the headline over an item published today on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads in part:]

Today, the 21st of December, the darkest day of our year.  

Dark for those who, twenty four years ago, lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, babes in arms in the greatest terror attack against our nation since the Second World War.

Dark for those relatives who watched at Kamp Zeist a travesty of a trial when two Libyans were accused of the great crime we know as "Lockerbie".

And dark for those Scottish police, forensic scientists, lawyers, the American FBI and Britain's MI6, all of whom were responsible for a miscarriage of British justice perhaps greater than any that had occurred before. (...)

And so the history of Lockerbie has in general revealed a deceit greater even than that contrived by the police following the Hillsborough disaster. In that case it is now known that important evidence was concealed and scores of police statements altered so as to make it appear that the many fans who were crushed were responsible for their own deaths. Thankfully the original inquest verdict which formed that view has now been overturned by an act of the British parliament, and a new inquest ordered.

And so we are drawn inevitably to the following questions:

Will the Scottish government at least consider that a Lockerbie verdict based on evidence by bribed identification witnesses and a bomb timer fragment possessing all the hallmarks of a clandestine plant might be overturned by judicial inquiry?

Will action be taken against [the Scottish police officer] who concealed from the trial and appeal judges his personal record of offers of multi-million dollar rewards to the only two identification witnesses in the Lockerbie case?

Or might a more comprehensive inquiry ask why several warnings of intended bombings prior to the Lockerbie attack were consciously ignored?

Who might now ask why a break-in at the terminal adjoining the loading areas of Pan Am and Iran Air on the night preceding the attack was discounted, the security officer's report routinely filed, and evidence given thirteen years later by that same officer, by then close to death, mocked in a court of appeal?

As this darkest of days ticks away the minutes, where does the great deceit of the Lockerbie trial now stand? And why do the British and Scottish parliaments remain silent?

[Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm has just published an article headlined Swire: Pan Am 103 a greater deceit than Hillsborough.]

Crown misinformation

[What follows is a commentary by Peter Biddulph on the Crown's response to Dr John Wyatt's findings as disclosed in the recent Newsnight segment.]

The recent Crown statement regarding the John Wyatt tests needs to be exposed for what it is: - an attempt to confuse the uninformed with carefully placed words such as "fragments of circuit boards" and "fragment".

The statement includes:

1. "It was reported in the BBC Newsnight Programme [6th January 2010] that tests carried out by Dr Wyatt suggest that the fragment was unlikely to have survived the mid-air explosion and that the radio used in his tests 'totally disintegrated' and 'went into tiny, tiny bits'. In fact, extensive explosive tests were carried out in the United States in 1989, some time before the fragment PT35B was extracted by forensic experts, as part of the Lockerbie investigation. …."

COMMENT: The Indian Head tests took place in April 1989, three weeks before the bomb "fragment" was discovered for the first time by Dr Thomas Hayes on 12th May 1989.

At the time of the Indian Head tests, neither Thurman or Feraday were aware of the existence of the Hayes fragment, nor of its possible link to an MEBO MST-13 timer board.

They were not tests of the survivability of any kind of bomb trigger timer board, but to establish the location of the primary suitcase and the amount of explosive used.

No mention has ever been made by Thurman or Feraday to fragment survivability testing as part of the Indian Head tests.

2. The Crown statement continues: "After a number of test explosions, a detailed search was made and circuit board fragments … were all recovered in a condition which was consistent with the debris recovered in relation to the Lockerbie disaster."

COMMENT: An aircraft body contains many printed circuit boards. Test explosions of any part of an aircraft body will therefore produce many circuit board fragments.

Note the use of the terms "consistent with" and "fragments". An uninformed reader - including an uninformed journalist such as Dave Cowan of STV, or even an uninformed lawyer - will naturally conclude a link to the next Crown paragraph:-

3. "The forensic evidence placed before the court included evidence about the appearance of 'the fragment.' And the fact that when it was recovered, it was embedded within a fragment from a blast-damaged grey Slalom brand shirt, which had been found in Newcastleton, Roxburghshire on 13th January 1989 ..."

COMMENT: The fragment was not found on 13th January 1989. The shirt collar containing it was found on that day and entered on the evidence log by DC Gilchrist under the identification "CLOTH".

It would take another four months before the fragment was discovered, well after the completion of the Indian Head tests. It was found by Dr Thomas Hayes on 12th May 1989.

At the trial, under cross-examination, Hayes insisted in reply to two specific questions from Richard Keen QC that it was embedded deep within the shirt collar, and that the police could not have been aware of it prior to his finding.

CONCLUSION

The Indian Head tests, as far as the Hayes fragment is concerned, are an irrelevance.

Either the writers of the Crown statement haven't done their homework, or they've been seriously misled by FBI misinformation. Probably a combination of both.

Scientific shenanigans

[What follows is an extract from The people who moved the world, a forthcoming book by Jim Swire. It appears here by kind permission of Dr Swire and Peter Biddulph.]

Dr Thomas Hayes was formerly head of the forensics explosives laboratory at the British Royal Armaments Research and Defence Establishment (RARDE), and was a key witness in the prosecution case. I would find his evidence at times breathtaking and worrying.

He was aged fifty three, having retired from his RARDE post ten years earlier. As a bachelor of science honours in chemistry, a master of science in the faculty of forensic science, a doctor of philosophy in the faculty of forensic science, a chartered chemist, and a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, we might expect an outstanding memory. And yet he seemed reluctant to tell the court why or when he'd retired to start a new career as a chiropodist. When did he start work at Fort Halstead? In July 1974. And when did he leave? " The exact date of my leaving is a little circumspect, but I believe it was in 1990."

He actually retired in 1989, a year that for him may have been circumspect, but was, in relation to our trial, most significant. Hayes, I would discover from our own research, had an uncomfortable history in relation to one other major terrorist event, namely the IRA bombing said to involve seven members of the Maguire family - The Maguire Seven. In that trial Hayes and two close colleagues - including his immediate supervisor Dr Higgs - had performed a central and discredited role, and were found out by a Parliamentary investigation. To add to that Dr Higgs was also discovered to have conspired to mislead the court - with a further two RARDE colleagues of Hayes - in the case of Judith Ward, accused of a bombing in Guildford.

Was Hayes carefully avoiding using the numbers, "1989", so as to deter the court from forming its own conclusion? When asked by friendly advocate Campbell, Hayes could not recall when he became a chiropodist. Nor did his memory improve as he faced defence QC Richard Keen.

"KEEN. Dr Hayes, you told us in your earlier evidence that you were head of the Forensics explosives laboratory at RARDE until 1989? And your change of career from forensic scientist to chiropodist would appear to coincide in point of time with the decision of the Home Secretary to appoint Sir John May to inquire into the trial of those known as the Maguire Seven. Is that true?
HAYES. I believe so. I don't recall clearly."

I am convinced to this day that Hayes really did recall the date and reason. He simply did not dare say it in front of the judges. For in May 1989, even as he examined the fragment which appeared in the evidence bag with a label signed by Detective Constable Gilchrist and altered by unknown persons, a campaign was running in Parliament to have him and his colleagues investigated for their roles in both IRA trials. The Parliamentary findings were published in 1992 and 1996, long after the November 1991 indictments of the Libyan suspects Al-Megrahi and Fhimah.

In his study of the 1976 trial of the Maguire Seven, Sir John May found that the notebooks of three RARDE scientists, including Hayes, had been consciously withheld from the court. The first of the three was Douglas Higgs, Principal Scientific Officer and head of department; second was Walter Elliott, a Senior Scientific Officer; and the third was Hayes, at that time a Higher Scientific Officer.

During the trial, results of tests for traces of nitro-glycerine on skin and fingernails of the Maguire family were firmly maintained by the three scientists to be positive and decisive. Unknown to the court, however, the three had performed a second set of tests plus a series of experiments. Both tests and experiments indicated a negative result and an innocent means of contamination. They therefore knew of evidence pointing to the innocence of the accused yet failed to inform the court. Furthermore, during the inquiry their notebooks were disclosed to Sir John May only at the final "hearing" stage of that Inquiry. Thus he was forced to view the case files only on the last day of his public hearings.

Sir John recorded his unease at the delay, and concluded: "In all the elements of the prosecution case the Crown relied on the evidence of three RARDE scientists. Their accuracy, reliability, fairness and credibility were fundamental to the convictions. In my opinion the whole scientific basis upon which the prosecution was founded was so vitiated that on this basis alone the Court of Appeal should set aside the convictions."

Then the Judith Ward case: in February 1974 twelve people were killed in an IRA bombing attack on a military bus in Guildford. Ward was arrested, and in an almost exact parallel to the Maguire case, the evidence central to her conviction was an analysis of samples taken from the skin and fingernails. These, maintained three lying scientists, were evidence of her guilt. In November of 1974 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She would spend fifteen years in jail before her innocence could be established.

Hers was one of a spate of miscarriages of justice including the Maguire case and the Birmingham Six. In every appeal, the manipulation of evidence by RARDE forensic scientists was a major feature of the convictions, and its exposure the cause of successful appeals.

Of the dishonesty revealed in the Ward case Lord Justice Glidewell observed that the catalogue of the lamentable omissions included "failure to reveal actual test results, the failure to reveal discrepant Rf values, the suppression of the boot polishing experimental data, the misrepresentation the first firing cell test results, economical witness statements calculated to obstruct inquiry by the defence, and most important of all, oral evidence at the trial in the course of which three senior RARDE scientists knowingly placed a false and distorted picture before the jury. It is, in our judgement, also a necessary inference that the three senior RARDE forensic scientists acted in concert in withholding material evidence."

Of Higgs Lord Justice Glidewell commented "We reject Mr Higgs' account as a deliberate falsehood" Higgs was, in the words of the appeal panel "An experienced chemist… the head of a closely knit team." The words "deliberate falsehood" are clear. The man and two senior members of his organisation were nothing less than liars.

Dealing with another item of evidence, an apparently bomb damaged suitcase, prosecution advocate Campbell QC led Hayes through what seemed an endless list of items in his detailed schedule. The catalogue droned onward for seventy six pages of transcript. Suddenly Hayes reached a thirteen word sentence, almost hidden from, and mostly missed by, the court and the relatives. It was quietly read: "… The suitcase was fitted with a rigid plastics handle, bright metal trim and locks, which were devoid of any proprietary or owner's identification. A rectangular hole had been cut in the hard shell above the handle. The left-hand edge of the suitcase showed evidence of having been damaged by an explosion, with disruption and blackening of the outer skin and bright metal body frame, [etc]

The suitcase belonged to Major Charles McKee, leader of a four-man CIA team returning from Beirut. He, with colleagues Gannon, Lariviere, and O'Connor, were on a mission to explore ways of freeing a group of American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian-based terrorists. McKee's suitcase contained something that the US government were desperate to keep from the sight of the media or the public. That something remains so important to America's security that for twenty years the White House has never even hinted at what it might be.

McKee's case had been removed by unknown persons, a rectangular hole expertly sawn just below the handle, the contents taken away and new contents put in. Security suitcases of this type were fitted with an incendiary explosive device on the interior of the case, just by the handle. Should the suitcase be opened without the use of a security code, the suitcase would explode and incinerate the contents. Hence the hole sawn into the case to enable disablement of the explosive trigger. A clean set of clothes were inserted and the case was returned to the crime scene and placed on a Lockerbie hillside so that it could be "found". The removal of evidence from a crime scene is of itself a criminal offence. Yet nothing would be said of it in the trial by the prosecution or the judges.

It was and is - for me - a disturbing tale. How had Hayes, publicly demonstrated as untrustworthy, and working in a close-knit organisation discredited by two major criminal cases, become so central to the Lockerbie tragedy? His repeated plays on words, his professions of innocence, his claims of forgetfulness, all were greatly worrying. As a skilled forensic scientist he should have been immediately alerted by the tampering that took place between the finding of McKee's suitcase and its arrival in his laboratory. Label, name tag and contents had been removed, and a set of clothes put into the case. These were recorded as to '...show no evidence of explosive damage, as opposed to the suitcase which was damaged.' It was as if a new set of clothes had been put into the case. And when writing notes about the identification tags and name tag of the suitcase, instead of using the word 'removed', Hayes chose the words 'devoid of'; technically correct, but in the true sense meaning simply not there. What most worried me, and auguring badly for whatever verdict might follow, was the nature of Lord Sutherland's interjection. His Lordship saw intelligence service interference with the trial process and illegal tampering with evidence as no cause for concern. It seemed to me that he was not the first senior trial judge to be fooled by RARDE's economical witness statements calculated to obstruct inquiry by the defence.

"KEEN. A rectangular hole has been cut in the top of the case, and that cannot be attributed in any form to blast damage or impact damage in the disaster, can it?
HAYES. No, it cannot.
KEEN. You are presented with the alleged contents in a bag marked with the name of the owner of the case? That wasn't usual, so far as the presentation of evidence to you at RARDE was concerned, was it?
HAYES. I don't think I can helpfully answer your question. I don't know.
KEEN. You have no recollection of other cases being presented to you in this fashion, for the purposes of your forensic examination?
HAYES. A case outside this Lockerbie investigation?
KEEN. Outside this particular case on page 22.
HAYES. The suitcase?
KEEN. The suitcase.
HAYES. No particular recollection, no.
KEEN. What appears to have happened, Dr. Hayes, in respect of this case, is that it has been the subject of interference or intromission by some third party.
HAYES. The cut hole would seem to suggest that. The rest of the observations may have some quite innocent explanation.
KEEN. Well, was any innocent explanation proffered to you for the state of this evidence when it was given to you for forensic examination at RARDE?
HAYES. I never asked for an explanation.
KEEN. Was any explanation ever volunteered to you?
HAYES. I'm sorry, I don't recall."

Under further cross-examination Hayes was unable to explain his notes concerning a fragment of circuit board from the MEBO MST-13 timer which was said to be part of the bomb. He found and identified it on 12th May 1989, labelling it "PT35-B" on page fifty one of his one hundred and seventy two page loose-leaf notebook. He would maintain that he was the first person to observe this, finding it in the evidence bag signed and dated by DC Gilchrist, mentioned above.

Hayes said he always kept detailed notes, yet his sheets were strangely renumbered for all pages subsequent to that containing information on the circuit board fragment. Was that particular page later written up and inserted so as to create the illusion of a contemporaneous sequence of entries? Richard Keen tried to extract the truth:

"KEEN. Well, whether it be the date or the page number, Dr. Hayes, would you like to explain how the present page fifty one came to be in your examination notes?
HAYES. How it came to be there?
KEEN. Yes.
HAYES. I'm rather lost for words. It came to be there in exactly the same way as every other page came to be there.
KEEN. If that was the case, Dr. Hayes, the pagination of your notes would run quite simply from pages fifty to fifty six, without the need for the alterations that have been made in the pagination of the notes themselves, and the index; is that not the case?
HAYES. Well, I can understand you expressing some concern on page fifty two onwards. But to my mind, fifty two follows from page fifty one, page fifty one follows from page fifty in a perfectly normal way.
KEEN. But page fifty one can only be there because what preceded it as page fifty one has been changed to page fifty two; is that not equally obvious, Dr. Hayes?
HAYES. Well, otherwise there would be two pages fifty one, of course.
KEEN. And what would have appeared at the end of pages fifty two to fifty six now appears at the bottom half of page forty nine? That is the entry for PI/991.
HAYES. Well, the mystery -- apparent mystery of the entry on the bottom of page forty nine, PI/991, to my mind is no more complex than there was space available on the page. And rather than waste part of the page, I inserted an examination note and dated it. The pagination, to me, is of no great consequence. The date and day of the examination, to me, is of much greater consequence.
KEEN. Well, I understood you to tell us that these were contemporaneous notes that you prepared as you were carrying out your examinations; is that right?
HAYES. Yes. But presumably our definitions of "contemporaneous" are different. My -- I only mean that these notes were written on the date on the page, and that the notes were written at the time precisely of the examination, and not any time afterwards.
KEEN. Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no need for the insertion of what is now page fifty one, would there?
HAYES. Well, it is your suggestion that it was inserted. I have no recollection of an insertion of that form at all. If it was, then it was done for a particularly good and perfectly innocent reason.
KEEN. Which you can't now recollect?
HAYES. I wish I could help you. It would save a lot of awkwardness. But I cannot, no."

He was then re-examined by friendly prosecution advocate Campbell, who steered him methodically through his notes on those same pages. Suddenly, lo and behold, Hayes remembered it all.

"CAMPBELL. Does that explanation of the way in which the items detailed in examination notes are listed help to jog your memory?
HAYES. It has helped me, sir, in attempting to explain what appears to be an unfathomable mystery. And I think the solution is very straightforward. And it is this: That when I wrote these notes, I initially did not number the pages… And in numbering the pages, I mistakenly used the number 51 twice, realised my error, after numbering a few pages, and corrected it… So whereas the page numbers may be in sequential order, the dates would not be."

This sudden flash of recall under Campbell's friendly re-examination for me remains unconvincing, and differed totally from his previous explanation, namely that "… the mystery was no more complex than there was space available on the page. And rather than waste part of the page, I inserted an examination note and dated it." As I watched him playing games with the defence, I became more and more convinced that he was misleading the court so as to achieve a prosecution, and not for the first time. He may have made notes, but unlike all similar items which he found, the sole piece of material evidence, PT/35B, claimed to link Bollier and MEBO to the Libyans, was absent from his drawings. And he gave it a higher identification number in his index than a similar sized piece of material he was to examine four weeks later.

Then as Richard Keen probed further concerning the fragment of shirt collar found by Detective Constable Gilchrist, Hayes could not quite remember the moment of finding the fragment.

"KEEN. Do you actually recall finding this fragment?
HAYES. I think so. If I was -- it's tempting to be too helpful in answering your question and saying clearly a very important piece, you must have a memory of it. You have flashbacks of certain important items that you've looked at. I question whether those are flashbacks to the correct case examination or another case examination. So although in my mind there is no question whatever that I did find it within this neck-band, whether I have a clear recollection in my memory of teasing it out, I would prefer not to be too definite about it."

Finally Hayes' notes dated 12th May 1989 recorded the following: "Trapped in the grey material within the blackened area were A. several fragments of black plastics, B. a fragment of a green-coloured circuit board". Thus he exposed, in an unguarded moment, a serious discrepancy from the evidence previously given by DC Thomas Gilchrist.

"KEEN. Dr Hayes, you record in those notes on page fifty one that PT/35B was trapped in the collar of a shirt or in a piece of material. So that fragment could not, presumably, have come to light as far as the police were concerned, prior to it being extracted from the cloth by yourself?
HAYES. That's correct. Yes.
KEEN. It would follow that it could not have been seen by the police prior to the cloth being passed to you at RARDE and the article being extracted by you from the trapped area of material?
HAYES. I'm sure that is the case."

Thus he twice maintained that neither Gilchrist - nor anyone else - could have seen the fragment prior to his probing the collar on his workbench. So we may ask when was the label altered to "DEBRIS", and by whom? More importantly, for what purpose was the label altered, other than to draw attention to a piece of "debris" inserted into the bag by persons unknown? That discrepancy was never challenged either during the trial nor at the subsequent appeal.

In yet another puzzling exchange with Richard Keen, Hayes admitted that even though his initial conclusion was that the green fragment - PT35/B - was a fragment from a bomb timer, he failed to undertake a routine chemical trace analysis to determine whether it had been in contact with an explosion. This was quite contrary to standard forensic process, and can only be described as negligence. It contrasted with the chemical trace analyses he undertook of each of the twenty four pieces of luggage surrounding the immediate explosion of which the fragment was a component. In spite of prolonged cross-examination, Hayes could provide no logical explanation for it. Or, perhaps, did Hayes know what he would find, namely that the fragment possessed no trace of explosive? Only a controlled analysis by an independent forensic scientist might test the fragment's provenance. And that could not occur without a special form of appeal. Such would not prove possible until the year 2009, and I will return to this subject later in this book.

Meanwhile in Kamp Zeist the judges had only Hayes’ word. They knew of his record as a conspirator in with-holding evidence in a major IRA trial, and that of his immediate colleagues in a second IRA trial. They watched his contrasting explanations regarding the pagination of his notebook and the sudden return of his memory when gently steered under re-examination by the prosecution. They witnessed his word games regarding McKee's suitcase - illegal evidence tampering by the intelligence services of either the United Kingdom or America. They listened to him twice claim that he was the first to find debris - the fragment of the bomb - in the evidence bag, and that therefore neither Gilchrist nor anyone else could have seen it before he did. Yet instead of basing their judgement on what Hayes actually said, they would substitute their own explanations and believe the man implicitly.

Hundreds of fragments from the luggage container and its contents were discovered. From the remains of the Toshiba cassette recorder that contained the bomb; from twenty four items of luggage in the immediate vicinity of the explosion; from clothing and personal effects; even from a black umbrella. For me it was not unreasonable to expect many fragments from the bomb and timer, the wires, the circuits, the frame, the timer itself, to be embedded in surrounding clothing and luggage, the luggage container, the aircraft spars and structure. Yet apart from a charred shirt collar, none contained a single fragment of the bomb. The fragment too, when displayed before the court, and apart from fraying around the edges (said to have been done by laboratory processing), was almost pristine. Its bright green anti-solder covering was still bright green. Its printed circuits remained just as pristine. Both in spite of its position at the centre of a three thousand degree high explosive fireball.

In time I would watch witness Allan Feraday, who prepared the final forensic report for the trial, confirm under oath that only one fragment - the Hayes four millimetre square piece of "debris" - was ever found. That of itself seemed an unusual occurrence. I found myself asking how much other material might have been removed, or re-inserted, or even planted. One of Cannistraro's colleagues in the White House had discussed the use of manufactured evidence to destabilise a middle eastern government. If such was good for Yemen, then why not for Libya? Yet in spite of my suspicions - also shared by many of those following the progress of the trial - the miraculous fragment would pass without challenge.

CIA had duplicate timers.

"There has been some speculation about timers from that same series being provided to STASI [The East German Secret Police, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989], and it's true that they were. But they were on brown circuit boards. The circuit board that was used in the explosion at Lockerbie was a green production model of the timer, and that came from Libyan intelligence." So spoke Vincent Cannistraro into the camera in 1993. His words were of interest, not for what he said, but for what he did not say. During that time, unknown to the public and the media, within the storeroom of the CIA laboratories in Langley Virginia lay at least one exact duplicate of an MST-13 timer. It was set on a green lacquered baseboard identical to the type from which the Hayes fragment was said to have originated.

8th June 2000.

A column of vans with blacked-out windows glided to a halt at the entrance to the court building. Shielded from public and journalist gaze several men were ushered into the rear entrance.

One of the men was witness Richard Louis Sherrow, a retired US Army veteran of twenty years' service, and an expert in firearms and explosives, who'd worked for the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Service (ATF). Prosecution advocate Turnbull led Sherrow through his evidence-in-chief. In 1986 Sherrow had been instructed by the ATF to travel to Lome, Togo, with an Edward Owen of the ATF, and James Casey of the State Department. During the visit, Sherrow observed a number of items, including explosives and several timers. One timer was of special interest to him.

"TURNBULL: Had you ever seen electronic timers similar to the ones you saw in Lome?
SHERROW: Not exactly similar, no, sir. Subsequently, I was allowed to take one timer and a sample of, I believe, three different types of explosives. They were placed in the United States diplomatic pouch and returned. I examined [the timer] at the headquarters of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, performed bench tests, functioning tests.
TURNBULL: Did you photograph it at the headquarters?
SHERROW: Yes, I did.
TURNBULL: And having performed these tests and photographed it, what did you then do with it?
SHERROW: I was requested to take it to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and give a briefing on what I found.
TURNBULL: And did you take the timer back with you?
SHERROW: No, I didn't. That was released to their custody."