Uncovering real cause of Lockerbie tragedy was politically inexpedient

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Trowbridge H Ford entitled MI6's Sir John Scarlett: A Career of Increasingly Dangerous Failure that was published on this date in 2008:]

By this time [December 1990], Scarlett was busily arranging the set up of Libya for more terrorism. On December 21,1988, Pan Am Flight 103 had blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including Charles McKee's CIA investigative team returning from Beirut where it had been uncovering the deepest secrets of the Iran-Contra scandal - apparently Syrian Monzar Al-Kassar's efforts to free hostages there, and in Africa for the French in return for continued protection of his drug-smuggling operations. While this was going on, Al-Kassar's people learned everything they needed to know about how to stop it from returning to the States. When CIA's handlers of Al-Kassar in Washington learned of this, they allowed a suspicious suitcase on the plane despite a NSA warning of an attack on an airliner, thinking, it seems, that it was just more of his drug operations when, in fact, his associates slipped a Semtex device on the flight originating from Frankfurt.

Uncovering the real cause of the Lockerbie tragedy was most politically inexpedient as London and Washington were increasingly focusing on a showdown with Iraq's Saddam Hussein. In any confrontation with the dictator, it was essential to have both Syria and Iran at least on the sidelines, something impossible if Al-Kassar, brother-in-law of Syria's intelligence chief, and lover of its despot Hafez Al-Assad's niece, were ever indicted for the crime. As in the Palme assassination, the failure to find some apparent culprit for the mass murder - what could increasingly not be simply blamed on unknown terrorists - was putting more and more pressure onWest Germany's counterterrorists for apparently allowing it to happen. The real story had to be buried, as Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen wrote in The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, "in the graveyard of geopolitics." (p 286)

Scarlett, it seems, was the grave digger. On September 19, 1989, a Union des Transport Aériens (UTA) flight exploded over the Sahara in Niger while on its way from Brazzaville to Paris, via N'Djamena in Chad, killing all 171 passengers, including American Ambassador to Chad Robert Pugh's wife Bonnie, leaving "...a scene all too reminiscent of Lockerbie, Scotland." (Ted Gup, The Book of Honor, p 310) The similarity was not missed by France's DST, and Scarlett, the SIS resident in Paris, either, and they soon started connecting together the two bombings at Libya's expense.

Robert Pugh was the deputy chief of mission in Beirut who had had to clean up the mess when the American Embassy was bombed in April 1983, and the resulting CIA Counterterrorist Center (CTC) to stop such atrocities required a no-holds-barred solution to the Lockerbie bombing. Inter-agency cooperation of the highest degree, both domestic and foreign, was required if any culprits were ever to be caught, given the new legal restraints on how intelligence operations were to be conducted.

The task was to link Libya as having "...been ultimately responsible for both Pan Am 103 and UTA 772." (Ibid) While authorities were searching the desert for the wreckage of the French airliner, they apparently found the circuit board which was responsible for the IED explosion - what reminded investigators of what had happened to the same UTA flight back on March 10, 1984 when it exploded without loss of life while parked on the tarmac in Brazzaville - and now Anglo-American authorities worked together to create the same scene in the Scotland wreckage. A CIA agent planted parts from the same kind of detonator in the wreckage area of the Lockerbie crash while looking for belongings of its deceased personnel which was found by Bureau agents in early 1990 while they were searching for evidence of what caused the crash.

As in the Palme fiasco, Scarlett worked with the former SIS agent in Oslo, Robert Andrew Fulton apparently aka Mack Falkirk, who became its chief agent in Washington. While Scarlett was persuading his superiors to allow the CIA and FBI complete access to the Lockerbie crash site, Fulton was priming their superiors back in Washington to make the most of the opportunity. Scarlett put the icing on the cake, it seems, by persuading Abd Al-majid Jaaka, a Libyan intelligence officer who had defected to the British embassy in Tunis, to tell his story to the Americans in Rome, and claim that two former colleagues had prepared the bomb which blew up the airliner in revenge for the UK/USA bombing of Tripoli after the Palme assassination. The ruse was so successful that by the time Libya finally handed over the two fallguys for trial in Holland, Anglo-American covert operators were completely in charge of the prosecution. [RB: I know of no evidence supporting the statement that Giaka defected to the British embassy in Tunis rather than from Malta via a US Navy ship.]

Scarlett's particular contribution to their conviction, as MI6's Director of Security and Public Affairs, was to persuade disgruntled MI5 whistleblower Daivd Shayler to join SIS, and to claim that Gaddafi's destruction of Pan Am flight 103 had so angered SIS that it had plotted to assassinate him, with Al-Qaeda's help, in 1995/6. As Shayler and his former mistress Annie Machon have written in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers: while there was no credible evidence that the Iranians were behind the Lockerbie bombing there was no question that Gaddafi was. With everyone fixed on the alleged SIS assassination of the Libyan leader, it helped make their claim about Lockerbie tragedy a foregone conclusion.

To add injury to injury, Machon and Shayler made it sound as if Scarlett was the victim of some kind of British Stalinism where intelligence service chiefs were obliged to go along with what their political bosses demanded. As Dame Stella Rimington had explained her appointment to head the Security Service in her autobiography, Open Secret, as learning to go along with her superiors, so Scarlett became SIS director general after his time as head of the Joint Intelligence Committee where he supinely agreed to the doctoring of the 'dodgy dossier' on Iraq's alleged WMD to suit the demands of Downing Street. They added:

"David has always said that the intelligence services are anything but meritocratic, with those not rocking the boat more likely to be promoted than those who stand up for what is right. Scarlett's appointment has provided more than ample proof of that." (p 357)

To show that this was anything but the truth, Scarlett then arranged for his buddy Andrew Fulton to officially resign from SIS, and take up a visiting professorship at Glasgow's School of Law, though he had had no legal training, much less any legal degrees. In 2000, he volunteered his services as legal advisor to the Lockerbie Commission on briefing the press about the trial [sic; a reference to Glasgow University's Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit], and his handiwork became so notorious that he was forced to resign, once his background became known. For a sample of it, see what Machon and Shayler did with the British media's attempts to exonerate Qaddafi for Lockerbie.

Deception over Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a long article by Maidhc Ó'Cathail published on this date in 2009 on the Canadian Global Research website. It reads in part:]

The scenes of flag-waving Libyans welcoming home Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber, further discredited Muslims in the minds of many. For those whose knowledge of the story is derived mainly from TV news, it appeared to be a callous celebration of mass murder, lending credence to the belief that “Islam” and “terrorism” are virtually synonymous. A closer look at the facts surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, however, reveals a pattern of deception by those who have most to gain from making Muslims look bad.

While the news reports dutifully recorded the protestations of outrage by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and others at what appeared to be an unseemly hero’s welcome for a convicted terrorist, they neglected to mention that Libyans were celebrating the release of a countryman whom they believe had been wrongfully imprisoned for eight years. Also omitted from the reports was any indication that informed observers of Megrahi’s case in Britain and elsewhere are likewise convinced of his innocence.

Robert Black, the University of Edinburgh law professor who was the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, says that “no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led,” and calls his 2001 conviction “an absolute and utter outrage.” Prof Black likens the Scottish trial judges to the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass who “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Hans Köchler, a UN-appointed observer at the trial, states that “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime,” and condemns the court’s verdict as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” And Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 killed on December 21, 1988, dismisses the prosecution’s case against Megrahi and fellow Libyan Lamin Khalifa F’hima as “a cock and bull story.”

According to that “cock and bull story,” Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), conspired with Lamin Khalifa F’hima, the station manager for LAA in Malta (who was acquitted), to put a suitcase bomb on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, the lethal suitcase had to be transferred to another flight bound for London Heathrow. Then in Heathrow Airport, it would have to be transferred for a second time onto the ill-fated Flight 103 destined for New York.

But for that rather implausible scenario to be true, the Libyans would have to have had an inordinate faith in the reliability of baggage handlers in two of Europe’s busiest airports at one of the busiest times of the year. Less optimistic would-be bombers would surely have slipped the bomb-laden suitcase on board in London. Fueling suspicions that this is indeed what happened, investigating police were told by a security guard at Heathrow that the Pan Am baggage storage area had been broken into on the night of the bombing.

The reported break-in at Heathrow was part of 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence that Megrahi’s defense could present at an appeal, which in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after a three-year investigation, recommended he be granted.

But before that appeal could be heard, the compassionate release of Megrahi, suffering from terminal prostate cancer, conveniently spared the potential embarrassment of all those involved in his dubious conviction. More significantly, it also averted awkward questions being raised, in the likely event of the Libyan being acquitted, about who actually planted the bomb, and why.

Many of those who doubt Libya’s  responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, perhaps not surprisingly in the current climate, tend to suspect other Muslim countries of involvement. The most popular theory is that Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Gibril to avenge the “accidental” shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 288 civilians on board.

Others believe that Abu Nidal, the founder of the infamous Black September terrorist group, may have been involved. If they’re right, it raises disturbing questions about who was ultimately responsible for the Lockerbie atrocity. In his fine biography of Nidal, A Gun for Hire, British journalist Patrick Seale confirms long-held suspicions that many in the Middle East have had about the “Palestinian terrorist” who did more than anyone to discredit the Palestinian cause. “Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent,” Seale asserts. “Practically every job he did benefited Israel.” (...)

Writing in the Guardian just before the trial of the two Libyans, veteran American journalist Russell Warren Howe, in an excellent article titled “What if they are innocent?” analyses whether the Iranian government, Palestinian terrorists or Israeli intelligence were more likely perpetrators. Howe concludes, “Even if Megrahi and F’hima are found guilty of the most serious charges, there would still be a need for a new investigation: to decide what was Israel’s possibly major role in mass murder and deception of its main benefactor, the US.” Howe is suggesting that even if the Libyans, or other Arabs, had actually planted the bomb, they may still have been duped into doing so by Israeli agents.

Intriguingly, Howe cites a reference in Gordon Thomas’s book on Mossad, Gideon’s Spies, to a Mossad officer stationed in London who showed up in Lockerbie the morning after the crash to arrange for the removal of a suitcase from the crime scene. The suitcase, said to belong to Captain Charles McKee, a DIA officer who was killed on the flight, was later returned “empty and undamaged.”

Moreover, the idea of Libyan responsibility, Howe notes, seems to have originated in Israel. Again, he quotes Thomas, who says that a source at LAP, Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, informed him that “within hours of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts urging them to publicise that here was ‘incontrovertible proof’ that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable.”

It may also have been Mossad disinformation, Howe suspects, that induced the US government to believe the Libyans were guilty. The day after the Lockerbie bombing, US intelligence intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan government office in Berlin that effectively said, “mission accomplished.”

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."

An A to Z of Lockerbie “conspiracies”

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Guardian on this date in 1999. Some of the "conspiracies" have since been comprehensively debunked. Others have not:]

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

Several pieces of evidence (see H and W) suggest that the authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story.

B

is for bomb-maker

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see J, O and P) led to the arrest of bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat weeks before the Lockerbie disaster. Khreesat was released after a few days because of a lack of evidence. In April 1989 further German police raids resulted in the discovery of two more bombs designed by Khreesat specifically to blow up aircraft. Did he make the bomb which was placed on feeder flight Pan Am 103A before it left Frankfurt for Heathrow?

C

is for coffin

Two coach-loads of officials arrived at the disaster scene in the day after the crash. Many were plain-clothed Americans with no obvious affiliation. Among their baggage was a single coffin for which no explanation has ever been given. Labour MP Tam Dalyell later produced evidence indicating that the Americans had "stolen" a body from the wreckage. A local doctor identified and labelled 59 bodies and was then puzzled to find that the Americans had relabelled and tagged only 58 in the area where he had been working.

D

is for drugs

Lockerbie farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase full of cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields. The suitcase was taken away, no explanation was given, and the authorities continued to insist that no drugs (apart from a small quantity of cannabis) had been found on the plane. But it was later discovered that the name Mr Wilson saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the Pan Am 103 passenger list.

E

is for the Express

Ten days after the Lockerbie disaster, the Daily Express devoted its front page to exposing a Lebanese American called Khaled Jafaar whom it named as the "bomb carrier". The Express's sources were "the FBI and Scotland Yard". The Interfor report (see I) also named Khaled Jafaar as the bomb carrier.

F

is for fiction

It has been argued that talk of the CIA, cover-ups, bombs, timers and Maltese trousers (see M) is just entertaining fiction. Some observers believe that there was no bomb on Pan Am 103 and that explosive decompression or an electrical fault caused the Lockerbie disaster, as they caused other Boeing 747 crashes.

G

is for Garrick

Paul Channon, British Secretary of State for Transport, lunched five journalists at the Garrick Club three months after Lockerbie and told them, off-the-record, that the Lockerbie killers had been identified and would soon be arrested. Yet the two Libyans who came to be the prime suspects were not charged until November 1991. It seems likely that at that time Mr Channon was confident that the Lockerbie bomb was the work of the Palestinians (see P).

H

is for Helsinki

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President's Commission report on aviation security said that "thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat". Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as "not real".

I

is for Interfor

A report by Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am, suggested that a Palestinian gang (see P) had got the bomb on to the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a US intelligence deal (see U). In a bid to free American hostages in Beirut, American intelligence agents had apparently struck a deal with Syrian drug smugglers: in exchange for hostage information, the agents smoothed the Lebanon-US drugs route by relaxing security restrictions and allowing drug luggage to sail through customs. The terrorist gang simply switched the drug luggage for a bomb.

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (see P). He enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government. Intelligence agents reported that Jibril had been assigned by a furious Iran to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus by a US warship in 1988 (which killed 290 people). The leader of Jibril's terrorist gang, Hafez Dalkamoni, was one of the Palestinians arrested in Operation Autumn Leaves (see O).

K

is for Kuwait

In 1990 Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein. Anglo-American attitudes to the Middle East were transformed. Paul Foot and John Ashton argue that theories about Lockerbie are inextricably linked to this changing political situation. In 1989 intelligence-based evidence fitted snugly with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria, and the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988 with America and Britain continuing to be hostile to Iran and supportive of Iraq. The US and British governments were content with the prime Lockerbie suspects: a Palestinian gang (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. But in 1990, the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq necessitated neutralising Iran and winning the support of Syria. Britain's diplomatic relations with Syria were duly restored in November 1990 and the Gulf war commenced in 1991. Sure enough, the credibility of intelligence theories about the Lockerbie bombing being masterminded by the Iran- and Syria-backed Palestinian gang was soon dismantled.

L

is for Libya

In November 1991, the American and British governments charged two Libyan airline officials, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with planting the Lockerbie bomb. To justify the radical change in the investigation's focus away from the Palestinians, the US State Department said: "Fresh evidence undermined the initial theory linking the PFLP-GC (see P) to the bomb". This included evidence that the Lockerbie bomb's "sophisticated electronic timer" had been delivered from Switzerland to Libya. And, in contrast, the bombs discovered in the hands of the Palestinians in Germany (see B) had "relatively crude timers".

M

is for the Maltese connection

A series of Sunday Times investigative pieces reported that the Lockerbie bomb had first been put on a plane in Malta. The bombing had been carried out by the Palestinian group (see P), after a gang member, Abu Talb, visited Malta. He was identified by a Maltese boutique owner as the man who bought clothes later found in the bomb suitcase. A bag which ended up on Pan Am 103 was identified by a baggage handler as coming from an Air Malta flight. When a Granada TV documentary repeated the allegations, Air Malta sued Granada for libel. A hitherto unpublished document from Air Malta's lawyers demonstrated that there were no bags on the flight which went on to Pan Am 103 or 103A. Granada settled out of court.

N

is for not proven

Legally defined as "a criminal verdict, somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the consequences of which are that the accused is treated as if found not guilty". Britain and the US fear that if attention is paid to the conflicting conspiracy theories, the case against the Libyans in The Hague could only be "not proven".

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

Five weeks before the Palestinian warning (see I) was received, a German anti-terrorism campaign, Operation Autumn Leaves, arrested a "team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO" in possession of a bomb in a cassette recorder (see T) strikingly similar to the Lockerbie bomb. These Palestinians, including Hafez Dalkamoni (see J) and Marwan Khreesat (see B) had been arrested outside a flat in Neuss - two hours' drive from Frankfurt, from whose airport Pan Am 103's feeder flight had originated. They were released after five days because there was not enough evidence against them.

P

is for Palestinians

Operation Autumn Leaves led to the arrest of a gang associated with a splinter group of the Palestinian movement the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Was Pan Am 103 blown up by a Palestinian gang, protected by Syria and paid for by Iran?

Q

is for Queen's English

The official air accident report concludes: "The detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft". If it was a bomb why wasn't it called a bomb in plain English?

R

is for red tarpaulin

On the night of the disaster teams of rescue volunteers scouring the area discovered a large object under a red tarpaulin. As they approached it, they were warned off by gunmen in the doorway of a hovering helicopter. A local farmer, Innes Graham, was also warned by US investigators to stay away from a small wooded area a few miles east of Lockerbie.

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

A central piece of evidence which pointed to the Libyans (see L) was a tiny fragment of a circuit board found among the Lockerbie debris. This was traced to a firm in Switzerland which exported timers to Libya. Apart from the confusion over when and where the circuit board was found (reports vary between June and November 1990), the Libyan connection to the timers is not as clear-cut as investigators have claimed. The US state department maintained that all timers from the Swiss firm had been delivered to Libya, but a BBC radio programme later proved that the firm had provided identical timers to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

T

is for Toshiba

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see O) discovered a Toshiba cassette recorder packed with semtex. Pieces of a similar model of recorder had been found in the wreckage at Lockerbie.

U

is for US intelligence

There have been several claims that the bomb was planted on Pan Am 103 by a crack team of US intelligence agents. A Radio Forth journalist reported the claim and, within an hour, was threatened with prosecution or, bizarrely, invited to disclose his source to the Prime Minister. The Interfor report (see I) also alleged that Major Charles McKee, the head of the US intelligence team, who was travelling on the plane, was shocked by his colleagues' deal with Syrian drug smugglers and was returning on Pan Am 103 to report them. The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee. But the Interfor report was greeted with widespread scepticism.

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

In the early 1990s the Lockerbie investigation shifted from the Scottish Borders to the CIA base in America. The man in charge there was Vincent Cannistraro. Mr Cannistraro had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council and, Paul Foot and John Ashton argue, he "specialised in the US vendetta against Libya". Mr Cannistraro was part of a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of Libya in 1986. He retired from the CIA in September 1990 but by then had helped lay the foundations for a completely new approach to the bombing investigation, in which the chief suspect was not Iran or Syria, but Libya.

W

is for warning

Three days before the Helsinki threat (see H), an intelligence source in the US state department's office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: "We cannot refute or confirm this".

X

is for xenophobia

In 1989 Anglo-American intelligence services and politicians widely blamed the Lockerbie bomb on a Palestinian terror group (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1990, (see K) Iraq became the Anglo-American Arab enemy number one in the run-up to the Gulf war; Iran became neutral and Syrian troops joined the Allied forces. Only Libya remained adamantly aligned with Iraq. Suddenly, coincidentally, the Lockerbie bomb was blamed on the Libyans.

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, causing diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to be severed. The file on Yvonne Fletcher is still open and Britain continues to demand Libyan co-operation on the matter. The fairness of the trial of the two Libyan suspects could yet affect this case.

Z

is for Zeist

Camp Zeist is the former US air base in The Hague where the two Libyans are being tried under Scottish law. But even the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah seems unlikely to still the disquiet and conspiracies that continue to surround flight Pan Am 103.