PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril reported assassinated

There are reports on Twitter that Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC, suspected by some of being the true perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing, has been assassinated in Syria by Jabhat al-Nusra, a branch of al-Qaeda. One such Twitter report can be seen here. An item on the Live Leak website contains the following: “Reports now that PFLP-GC chief Ahmed Jibril, the most prominent pro-Assad Palestinian figure in Syria, was assassinated by Jabhat al-Nusra (...) Oh the irony - the Lockerbie families get justice not from their Government but from Al Qaeda aka Jabhat Al Nusrah. It will be all over the news tomorrow. Al Nusrah just admitted it.”

I can find no corroboration of these reports on mainstream news websites. 

[A report just published on The Jewish Press website and headlined Ahmed Jibril dead at 76 reads as follows:]

Ahmed Jibril, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, has reportedly died in Damascus.

Conflicting reports surrounded the death. Initial reports indicated that Jibril suffered a stroke, while others said he was killed by a roadside bomb detonated by the al-Qaeda-linked Jabha a-Nusra terror group. Israel Radio reported that Jibril was known as a supporter of the Assad regime in Damascus.

Born in Yazur, Mandatory Palestine in 1938, Jibril was one of the Palestinins’ most notorious killers. He was responsible for a 1974 attack on the city of Kiryat Shemona, during which three members of PLFP-GC infiltrated Israel from Lebanon and murdered eleven civilians in their homes. The same year, a terror cell under Jibril’s command committed the Ma’alot massacre the same year, followed by the Savoy Hotel Attack and Kfar Yuval hostage crisis in 1975. In 1976, Jibril’s followers hijacked an Air France to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, sparking Israel’s legendary rescue operation on July 4 of that year, claiming the life of IDF soldier Yoni Netanyahu (brother of the current prime minister) and knocking the United States’ bicentennial celebration off newspaper front pages around the world.

Lockerbie incriminee Ahmed Jibril dies in Damascus

[Ahmed Jibril has died in Damascus at the age of 83. What follows is the report published today on the Middle East Monitor website:]

Ahmed Jibril, leader of Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command passed away in the Syrian capital Damascus yesterday at the age of 83.

Jibril and his family were forced out of Yazour neighbourhood in the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Yafa in 1948.

In 1965, he established the Palestinian Popular Front, which was later merged with other leftist Palestinian factions and became the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In 1969 he defected and formed the PFLP-General Command, which ten years later agreed to a prisoner swap with Israel

In 1979, the PFLP-General Command held a prisoner swap with Israel. Some 76 Palestinian detainees were released in exchange for one m Israeli soldier.

Jibril negotiated a prisoner swap between the PLO factions and Israel in 1985 when 1,150 Palestinian prisoners were released in return for three Israeli soldiers.

In 2002, Israel assassinated his eldest son Jihad in Lebanon.

Jibril was criticised for his support for the Assad regime in Syria, which didn't waiver in spite of the current war.

[None of the reports of Jibril's death that I have seen so far have mentioned his and the PFLP-GC's alleged responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. What follows is a report by Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black in The Guardian on 4 May 2000:]

The finger of suspicion after the Lockerbie bombing was first pointed at Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, the very group implicated yesterday, more than 11 years later, by the two Libyan defendants.

In another extraordinary twist, they also implicated Abu Talb, once regarded by the Scottish police as a prime suspect but now a prosecution witness.

For years, western intelligence agencies believed in a simple explanation. The bombing was funded by Iran in retaliation for the mistaken shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes, over the Persian Gulf in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing.

It was assumed that the Iranians paid Jibril's Syria-backed group to carry out a revenge attack. The assumption appeared to be backed up by the arrest a few months before the bombing of 17 people in Frankfurt, where the bag containing the bomb is alleged to have been placed on the Pan Am airliner. It was reported later that those arrested in the operation, called Autumn Leaves, included Hafez Dalkamoni, a prominent member of the PFLP-GC with links to Palestinians in Uppsala, Sweden.

They also included Marwan Kreeshat, a Jordanian, found with explosives and a Toshiba cassette player in his car similar to the one believed to have contained the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am airliner. British intelligence was later astonished to learn that he had been released for lack of evidence.

Iran appeared to be further implicated in the bombing when a US intelligence report referred to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister who supervised Iranian funding of Middle East terror groups, paying out "10 million in dollars in cash and gold ... to bomb Pan Am flight 103 ... in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus".

The existence of the report, which was given to lawyers representing Pan Am, became known in 1995. This was after the two Libyans were indicted and officials in Washington and London played down its significance, describing it as low-grade information found to be incorrect.

The trail to Talb began when he was linked to a car belonging to to one of those arrested in Frankfurt. Talb was found guilty at Uppsala in December 1989 of planting a bomb at a synagogue in Copenhagen four years earlier.

Swedish police were reported to have found at Talb's Uppsala apartment an air ticket from Malta to Stockholm indicating that he was on the island at the time children's clothes - part of the evidence against the two Libyans - were bought.

British Lockerbie investigators were also alleged to have found clothes bought in Malta during a later raid on Talb's flat. Also found there was a diary with December 21 1988 - the date of the bombing - circled. He was named in the Uppsala court as being suspected in Scotland of murder or as an accessory to murder.

Yesterday, Egyptian-born Talb was described in the Camp Zeist court as a member of the Palestine Popular Struggle Front and witness number 963 for the Scottish prosecution. The PPSF was founded in 1969 with backing from Syria, and split in 1981. One of its two founders, Samir Ghosheh, left in 1981 to join the mainstream PLO and is now a minister in Yasser Arafat's Palestine Authority in Gaza.

Experts said last night that the PPSF was defunct and that little had been heard of it for at least two years.

According to Israel's Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, the PFLP-GC, which rejects a political settlement with Israel, has maintained links with Syria, Libya and Iran, serving as a proxy for those states in attacks in the international arena. It was suspected of carrying out the bombing of a French airliner in 1989 over Niger.

Ahmed Jibril declined to comment last night.

Some commentators say that attention over Lockerbie turned to Libya when the west wanted to improve relations with Iran and Syria after the Gulf war against Iraq. Washington and London dismiss this as conspiracy theory.

Lockerbie suspect 'killed in al-Qaeda bomb blast'

[This is the headline over a report by Martin Williams in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads as follows:]

A terrorist suspected of being the real mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing has been killed in a bomb blast, according to unconfirmed reports.

Ahmed Jibril who has been on America's 'most wanted' list for decades was reported to have been assassinated by an al-Qaeda affiliated group.

Jordanian media reported that Jabhat al-Nusra, an off-shoot of al-Qaeda, used an improvised explosive device to kill the 76-year-old who is a strong supporter of Syria's President Assad.

The reports state that the attack on Jibril took place several days ago and although the Palestinian leader survived the initial attack he succumbed to his injuries in a Damascus hospital on Monday.

Yesterday the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), which Jibril founded and remains general secretary, denied that he was dead or even wounded.

Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scottish Law at the University of Edinburgh, often referred to as the architect of the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands did not believe that if Jibril died that it would make much difference to the search for the truth about the disaster.

He said: "He was never likely himself to admit responsibility.

"It is possible, though unlikely, that his absence from the scene might give others the courage to speak up about his involvement.

"But I think we will just be left with what evidence already exists, particularly the $10million payment from Iran into the PFLP-GC's coffers a few days after 21 December 1988.

"There are those in the West and in the Middle East who think that Jibril and the PFLP-GC were never really important figures in the Palestinian struggle: good at raking in funds but leaving the fighting to others.

"Certainly, Jibril and the PFLP-GC are thought by some to be seriously in the frame, as contractors for Iran which was seeking revenge for the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in July 1988, six months before Lockerbie.

He added: "And at the Camp Zeist trial the defence lodged a special defence of incrimination blaming Jibril and the PFLP-GC for the crime."

In March an Iranian defector, a former intelligence agent, claimed that the Lockerbie attack was ordered by Iran in revenge for the accidental downing of an Iranian commercial jet by the US Navy in 1988.

It was carried out by Palestinian terrorists based in Syria, he said, and not on the orders of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The atrocity killed 243 passengers, 16 crew and a further 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.

Ex-spy Abolghassem Mesbahi claimed in a documentary that former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to mirror the 1988 US strike on an Iranian Airbus and recruited a Syrian-based group to plan an attack.

Evidence unearthed by the documentary-makers included the names of four suspects belonging to the Syrian-based radical group, the PFLP-GC, with Ahmed Jibril identified as the plot's mastermind.

It was claimed he recruited one of his most trusted deputies Hafez Dalkamoni, a Palestinian PFLP-GC member, and Jordanian bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat

These recruits were arrested by German police, who discovered four bombs, months before Lockerbie. A US intelligence cable obtained by Megrahi's defence team is alleged to have said: "The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmed Jibril…money was given to Jibril upfront in Damascus for initial expenses - the mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight."

PFLP-GC's name was identified during the Lockerbie trial - in which Libyan agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1989. Megrahi, who was released from jail by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, died in 2012 protesting his innocence and his family said they planned to appeal against his conviction.

Marwan Khreesat's daughter says Iran not Libya was behind bomb

[What follows is excerpted from a report in today's edition of the Daily Mirror:]

Iran paid a Palestinian terror group to carry out the Lockerbie bombing, it is claimed.

Member Marwan Khreesat ­allegedly told relatives boss Ahmed Jibril led the 1988 plot. Daughter Saha said: “He has a deal with Iran.”

For 17 years Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has been blamed for the Lockerbie bombing, despite grave doubts over his involvement.

But the Mirror today reveals fresh claims by the daughter of a former terrorist which she says finally proves Iran was behind the outrage that killed 270 people 30 years ago today.

Jordanian Marwan Khreesat left his wife a dossier of evidence that allegedly shows his boss in a Palestinian terror group, Ahmed Jibril, was paid millions of pound by Tehran to mastermind the horrific attack over the Scottish town.

Khreesat’s 43-year-old daughter Saha claims her father even gave the name of the bombmaker to her mother.

It will add to long-held suspicions that Tehran ordered the atrocity in revenge for the US shooting-down of an Iranian passenger plane months earlier, killing 290 civilians.

Saha insisted Khreesat played no part in the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 and blamed Jibril, who was leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

Speaking to us in the middle class suburb of the Jordanian capital Amman, she said: “I think he is responsible, and he has a deal with the Iran government.

“I do have a proof that Ahmed Jibril is ­responsible for ­Lockerbie." (...)

Khreesat was identified as a possible Lockerbie suspect shortly after the 1988 attack. He had been arrested two months earlier in Frankfurt with another PFLP-GC member who had plastic explosives hidden in a Toshiba cassette player in his car. The device was very similar to the one used on Flight 103.

Asked if her father knew the name of the bombmaker, Saha replied: “For sure he knows but I don’t know. My dad left ­something written about this but it’s not in the house.

“If my dad made the bomb he would have taken lots of money but now we don’t have anything because my dad didn’t have anything to do with it.

“Ahmed Jibril took the first million and then he took the rest of the money and got very rich but my dad didn’t take anything." (...)

Asked why her dad did not reveal this information while he was alive, she made reference to the US-led 1986 bombing of Libyan capital Tripoli, in revenge for terror explosions at a West Berlin nightclub.

She said: “Maybe he just wanted to protect Jordan. Maybe he’ll put Jordan in danger if he talked.

“What happened to Libya will happen to Jordan. Lockerbie is an important topic since it is related to America and no one is supposed to mess with America.”

Saha claimed Jordan’s intelligence services were not interested in the truth about Lockerbie. (...)

Scottish MSP Christine Graham said: “These various discoveries that you have made builds further on the case that it was, as many of us believe, Iran that was responsible for the ­Lockerbie bombing and that al-Megrahi was the fall guy. Libya took the rap for various reasons.”

Dr Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the attack, added: “This confirms what we have known for a long time and have never been able to say in public.” Within months of Lockerbie, it was being blamed on the PFLP-GC and Iran by the US and UK. America named Jibril.

Former King Hussein of Jordan said the group was behind the attack in a 1996 letter to John Major. [RB: This is the document in respect of which the UK Government claimed Public Interest Immunity during the appeal by Megrahi that was abandoned when he sought repatriation. The details can be found here.] 

Khreesat died two years ago at 70. Jibril, 80, is believed to be in Syria fighting for Bashar al-Assad.

A special mass marking Lockerbie’s 30th anniversary will take place today at Holy Trinity RC Church. Parish priest at the time of the bombing, Canon Pat Keegans, will say he is “not convinced” justice has been done.

PFLP-GC press office denies reports of death of Ahmed Jibril

[Here is the latest from RIA Novosti about the reported death of Ahmed Jibril:]

The head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) press office has refuted the death of PFLP-GC Secretary-General Ahmed Jibril in Damascus.

Mohammed Aidi denied reports of Jibril’s death or wounding during an interview with RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

Earlier, unconfirmed reports from the Syrian capital claimed Jibril, the founder and leader of the PFLP-GC, who has been on the America’s “most wanted” list for decades, had been assassinated by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group.

Jordanian media reported that Jabhat al-Nusra, an off-shoot of al-Qaeda, used an improvised explosive device to kill the 76-year-old Jibril who is a strong supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The reports stated that the attack on Jibril took place several days ago, and that although the Palestinian leader survived the initial attack, he succumbed to his injuries in a Damascus hospital on Monday.

Jibril and the PFLP-GC have long been associated with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December of 1988 that killed 270 people, despite the West officially blaming Libya for the attack. 

[Earlier instalments of this saga can be seen here and here.]

The PFLP-GC chimera: Part Two

[What follows is Part Two of Kevin Bannon’s article on the chimerical PFLP-GC. Part One can be read here.] 

Steve Emerson et al

In their book The Fall of Pan Am 103 (1990) Steve Emerson and Brian Duffy alluded to a suspicion that the Germans had secretly agreed with Syria to leave Palestinian suspects alone so long as no terrorist actions would be planned in Germany: ‘We will leave you alone if you leave Germans and German targets alone’ [Emerson & Duffy  p124]. The notion of such a diabolical pact between Germany and a terrorist group is absurd and entirely incompatible with both West Germany’s Cold War position and its post-war attitude to terrorism. The Germans had in fact adopted a famously pro-Israeli position in the aftermath of The Holocaust. In this context, The murders of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Olympics in Munich by the ‘Black September’ group had been a catastrophe for the Germans just as it had been a disaster for Israel and for the Olympic movement. The suggestion that Germany would again entertain murderous terrorists in their midst on the condition that German citizens would not be amongst their victims is abject nonsense. Emerson & Duffy’s stated source for this theory is ‘Israeli and Western intelligence officials’ [pp124 & 139] which speaks volumes about the integrity and reliability of such sources. An article in The Guardian in April 2012 by veteran foreign journalist Luke Harding and Israel correspondent Harriet Sherwood, observed that ‘German politicians from both left and right have traditionally been supportive of Israel, for obvious historical reasons’ [p27, The Guardian 6 April 2012]. The revelations of Herbstlaub more strongly suggest that the West German government had tolerated the presence of an Israeli ‘sting’ operation in their jurisdiction, out of a sense of obligation. 

According to Emerson, the Camp Zeist proceedings were ‘secured’ by Gaddafi, enabling the accused Libyans to get more ‘preferential treatment’ than they would were they tried in the US. He believed that the trial did not do justice to all the evidence, particularly ‘intelligence that could not satisfy the burden imposed’ by the ‘rules’ of proof and corroboration applicable to a court of law. Clearly a fountain of misconceptions - one could use coarser terms. [Steve Emerson, Terrorism on Trial: the Lockerbie Terrorist Attack and Libya: A retrospective Analysis, Case West Reserve Journal of International Law, Vol.36 no.2-3. 2004, 487-490].

Robert Baer, a former CIA man has made a successful second career out of writing about espionage and international intrigue. His take on the Lockerbie bombing does not contribute to a plausible or logical construct compatible with known facts, which genuine historical material tends to do. It is noteworthy that as a former CIA man, Robert Baer, for ‘security’ (i.e. strategic) reasons, cannot reveal most of the important things he must have knowledge of – hardly a position of strength for a writer of publications purporting to help unravel such mysteries. 

In my own research, I did manage to find some novelties in Mark Perry’s The Last Days of the CIA (1992) – but referred to them only for their effect as ‘comic relief’.

The PFLP-GC and Ahmed Jibril

The moniker ‘PFLP-GC’ represents a cynical attempt to usurp the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – an official and rational political party with international recognition as such. 

The deadliest atrocity attributed to the PFLP-GC was said to be the in-flight bombing of Swissair Flight 330 en-route to Tel Aviv in February 1970, killing 47 passengers and crew. After the bombing, the PFLP-GC - or callers on its behalf - were reported as having claimed and (separately) denied responsibility for the atrocity, but it was suggested, implausibly, that the denial was only after the outrage the bombing had caused – an outcome which the actual bombers must surely have expected [New York Times, Feb 22, 1970]. The criminal investigation into the plane’s loss by the Swiss Federal Prosecutors Office ‘ceased definitively’ in November 2000 as no perpetrator had been identified. In response to a ‘demand’ for information about the investigations into the loss of Flight SR 330 filed in the Swiss Federal Council chamber in March 2009, the Federal Council’s response was: "There is little hope of bringing the bomber[s] to court because there are not enough clues for their identification and arrest. This was the case in 1970, and the passage of time has further blurred the evidence and reduced the chances of a successful prosecution" [Daniel Huber, “We are crashing - goodbye everybody” (E-paper) 20 Minuten 9 February 2010]. 

The PFLP-GC were retrospectively named or claimed as perpetrators of the Kiryat Shimona massacre of Israeli villagers in 1974, but those terrorists blew themselves up before they could be interrogated. Another attack in Israel using micro-light aircraft in the 1980’s also resulted in the deaths of the perpetrators. These terrorist acts were real enough, but the claim that the PFLP-GC were behind it, was no more than that.

As a matter of historical comparison, the Israelis famously sought out and liquidated most of the ‘Black September’ group responsible for the murders of members of the 1972 Munich Israeli Olympic team. It must be significant that Ahmed Jibril, the PFLP-GC leader, ostensibly responsible for murdering many more Jewish and Israeli non-belligerents, has not only remained at large but has been openly accessible, enjoying a high profile, and giving filmed interviews to news teams (See Francovitch The Maltese Double Cross 1994). In May 1985 the Israelis actively promoted Jibril as go-between in a spectacular deal involving the release of well over 1,150 Palestinian ‘and other’ prisoners in exchange for 3 Israeli soldiers said to have been held by the PFLP-GC – whoever they were. [Ze'ev Schiff, ‘The Prisoner Exchange’ Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 14, No. 4, (Summer, 1985) University of California Press, pp176-180]. The agreement greatly enhanced Jibril’s prestige and status, confirming him as the ‘Palestinian’ that the Israeli’s could do business with, but if Jibril had been what he claimed to be, the Israeli’s would surely have eliminated him. In that event, the Palestinians would have shed few tears as Ahmed Jibril has been persona non grata in Gaza and the West Bank for decades. Gaza-based Mohammed Suliman writing for the pan-Middle Eastern website Al-Monitor, quoted two Palestinian residents in Syria in December 2012, while the Syrian civil conflict was on-going. One PFLP official, Mariam Abu Dakka criticized Jibril’s faction as unrepresentative. “Everyone knows the true size of PFLP-GC. They are not representative of the Palestinians. Their acts only represent them[selves], and in fact their membership in the Palestine Liberation Organization has been frozen for some time now,” Similarly, Rabah Mhanna, a senior member of the political bureau of the PFLP, affirmed the same position. “Ahmed Jibril does not even belong to the Palestinian Left. He is closer to the extremist right-wing groups than to revolutionary leftist ones” [Mohammed Suliman, Al-Monitor: 27 December 2012]. This explains Israel’s promotion of Jibril, whose principal contribution has been to help associate the Palestinians primarily with indiscriminate mass killings, rather than their pursuit of statehood.

Defence counsel in the Lockerbie trial ventured to present the Frankfurt bomb factory, PFLP-GC and the Goben memorandum as crucial to their case. In fact these diversions played a significant role in making the entire defence case eventually look ridiculous.

Reports claim terrorist Ahmed Jibril linked to Lockerbie bombing assassinated in Syria

[This is the headline over a report just published on the website of the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.  It reads as follows:]

Unconfirmed reports from the Syrian capital have claimed Ahmed Jibril, the founder and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) who has been on the America’s “most wanted” list for decades, has been assassinated by an al-Qaeda affiliated group.

Jordanian media have reported that Jabhat al-Nusra, an off-shoot of al-Qaeda, used an improvised explosive device to kill the 76-year-old Jibril, a strong supporter of Syria’s President Assad. The reports state that the attack on Jibril took place several days ago and although the Palestinian leader survived the initial attack he succumbed to his injuries in a Damascus hospital on Monday.

“If it is true that Jibril is dead, I don't think that makes much difference to the search for the truth about Lockerbie,” Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scottish Law at the University of Edinburgh, told RIA Novosti.

“He was never likely himself to admit responsibility. It is possible, though unlikely, that his absence from the scene might give others the courage to speak up about his involvement,” Black added.

“But I think we will just be left with what evidence already exists, particularly the $10million payment from Iran into the PFLP-GC's coffers a few days after 21 December 1988,” Black said.

Jibril and the PFLP-GC has long been associated with the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 that killed 270 people, despite the West officially blaming Libya for the attack.

Black told RIA Novosti that many Western and Middle Eastern sources believe the PFLP-GC did not play a significant role in the struggle for Palestinian rights.

“There are those (in the West and in the Middle East) who think that Jibril and the PFLP-GC were never really important figures in the Palestinian struggle: good at raking in funds but leaving the fighting to others,” Black said.

Last year the Palestinian National Council announced it would expel Jibril over his role in the Syrian civil war with one PFLP officials quoted as saying, “Jibril does not even belong to the Palestinian Left. He is closer to the extremist right-wing groups than to revolutionary leftist ones.”

As yet there has been no official confirmation that Jibril has been killed, but Robert Black, who is a leading expert on the Lockerbie bombing, told RIA Novosti his death will not bring the public any closer to the truth about who was responsible for the worst terrorist attack in British history.

[I am informed by RIA Novosti foreign affairs correspondent Mark Hirst that the PFLP-GC press office has told the news agency’s Moscow desk that Jibril is still alive and not wounded. He remarks that the picture is confusing given the conflicting reports, although Jewish Press is reporting his death.]

More from Dr De Braeckeleer

In his most recent article in OhMyNews International (the latest in a multi-part series on the background to the Lockerbie disaster) Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer has this to say:

'Just days after the downing [of Pan Am 103], the Iranian charge d'affaires in Beirut, Hussain Niknam, invited [Ahmed] Jibril at the Iranian Embassy. A few days later, several meetings occurred in Tehran. Among the participants, one finds Mohtashemi-Pur, Jibril and several representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah.

'According to the minutes of one of these meetings obtained by a German magazine, [Quick] Iran ordered the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian civilian jet by the US Navy in the Persian Gulf. Tehran paid Ahmed Jibril about $1 million in advance to carry out the attack.

'"We had advanced notice. The smoking gun came in July," Former CIA case officer Bob Baer told me earlier this month.

'"We had info that Iranian representatives of the Islamic Revolution Guards have signed an agreement with a Palestinian group to bring down a plane. The investigation data was superb. It couldn't have been better," Baer has said previously.

'Patrick Lang, chief of the US Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section at the time, told me that he stands by his statement that "the bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorized and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, the former Iranian minister of interior."

'According to a DIA memo, "the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril for $1 million." The remainder was to be paid after successful completion of the mission. (Jibril's organization did receive $10 million on Dec. 23, two days after the bombing of Pan Am 103.)

'Various media have quoted Lang as saying: "I still agree with that. We felt quite sure that this was a PFLP thing." In a recent e-mail, Lang told me that he meant the PFLP-GC -- that is, the group led by Ahmed Jibril. The PFLP is another group.'

The complete article can be read here.

Operation Autumn Leaves

[On this date in 1988 the German police arrested seventeen men at Neuss in operation “Autumn Leaves” (Herbstlaub). What follows is excerpted (with citations removed) from the relevant article in Wikipedia:]

For many months after the bombing, the prime suspects were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC), a Damascus-based rejectionist group led by former Syrian army captain Ahmed Jibril, sponsored by Iran. In a February 1986 press conference, Jibril warned: "There will be no safety for any traveler on an Israeli or U.S. airliner" (Cox and Foster 1991, p28).

Secret intercepts were reported by author, David Yallop, to have recorded the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) in Baalbeck, Lebanon, making contact with the PFLP-GC immediately after the downing of the Iran Air Airbus. Israeli intelligence (Mossad) allegedly intercepted a telephone call made two days after PA 103 by Mohtashemi-Pur, Interior Minister in Tehran, to the chargé d'affaires at the Iranian embassy in Beirut, instructing the embassy to hand over the funds to Jibril and congratulating them on the success of "Operation Intekam" ('equal and just revenge'). (...)

Jibril's right-hand man, Hafez Dalkamoni, set up a PFLP-GC cell which was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany in October 1988, two months before PA 103. During what Germany's internal security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), called Operation Herbstlaub ('Operation Autumn Leaves'), the BfV kept cell members under strict surveillance. The plotters prepared a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) hidden inside household electronic equipment. They discussed a planned operation in coded calls to Cyprus and Damascus: oranges and apples stood for 'detonating devices'; medicine and pasta for 'Semtex explosive'; and auntie for 'the bomb carrier'. One operative had been recorded as saying: "auntie should get off, but should leave the suitcase on the bus" (Duffy and Emerson 1990). The PFLP-GC cell had an experienced bomb-maker, Jordanian Marwan Khreesat, to assist them. Khreesat made at least one IED inside a single-speaker Toshiba Bombeat 453 radio cassette recorder, similar to the twin-speaker model RT-SF 16 Bombeat that was used to blow up PA 103. However, unlike the Lockerbie bomb with its sophisticated timer, Khreesat's IEDs contained a barometric pressure device that triggers a simple timer with a range of up to 45 minutes before detonation.

Unbeknown to the PFLP-GC cell, its bomb-maker Khreesat was a Jordanian intelligence service (GID) agent and reported on the cell's activities to the GID, who relayed the information to Western intelligence and to the BfV. The Jordanians encouraged Khreesat to make the bombs but instructed him to ensure they were ineffective and would not explode. (A German police technician would however be killed, in April 1989, when trying to disarm one of Khreesat's IEDs). Through Khreesat and the GID, the Germans learned that the cell was surveying a number of targets, including Iberia Flight 888 from Madrid to Tel Aviv via Barcelona, chosen because the bomb-courier could disembark without baggage at Barcelona, leaving the barometric trigger to activate the IED on the next leg of the journey. The date chosen, Khreesat reportedly told his handlers, was October 30, 1988. He also told them that two members of the cell had been to Frankfurt airport to pick up Pan Am timetables.

Acting upon this intelligence, the German secret police moved in to arrest the PFLP-GC cell on October 26, raiding 14 apartments and arresting 17 men, fearing that to keep them under surveillance much longer was to risk losing control of the situation. Two cell members are known to have escaped arrest, including Abu Elias, a resident of Sweden who, according to Prime Time Live (ABC News November 1989), was an expert in bombs sent to Germany to check on Khreesat's devices because of suspicions raised by Ahmed Jibril. Four IEDs were recovered, but Khreesat stated later that a fifth device had been taken away by Dalkamoni before the raid, and was never recovered. The link to PA 103 was further strengthened when Khreesat told investigators that, before joining the cell in Germany, he had bought five Toshiba Bombeat cassette radios from a smugglers' village in Syria close to the border with Lebanon, and made practice IEDs out of them in Jibril's training camp 20 km (12 mi) away. The bombs were inspected by Abu Elias, who declared them to be good work. What became of these devices is not known.

Some journalists such as Private Eye's Paul Foot and a PA 103 relative, Dr Jim Swire, believed that it was too stark a coincidence for a Toshiba cassette radio IED to have downed PA 103 just eight weeks after the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt. Indeed, Scottish police actually wrote up an arrest warrant for Marwan Khreesat in the spring of 1989, but were persuaded by the FBI not to issue it because of his value as an intelligence source. In the following spring, King Hussein of Jordan arranged for Khreesat to be interviewed by FBI agent, Edward Marshman, and the former head of the FBI's forensic lab, Thomas Thurman, to whom he described in detail the bombs he had built. In the 1994 documentary film Maltese Double Cross, the author David Yallop speculated that Libyan agents and agents paid by Iran may have worked on the bombing together; or, that one group handed the job over to a second group upon the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell members. The former CIA head of counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, who previously worked on the PA 103 investigation, was interviewed in the film and said he believed the PFLP-GC planned the attack at the behest of the Iranian government, then sub-contracted it to Libyan intelligence after October 1988, because the arrests in Germany meant the PFLP-GC was unable to complete the operation. Other supporters of this theory believed that whoever paid for the bombing arranged two parallel operations intended to ensure that at least one would succeed; or, that Jibril's cell in Germany was a red herring designed to attract the attention of the intelligence services, while the real bombers worked quietly elsewhere.