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.

Lockerbie: time for us to reveal the true culprits

[This is the headline over an article by David Wolchover published today on the website of The Jewish Chronicle.  It reads as follows:]

The Arab Spring may have heightened tensions between Egypt and Israel but, on the upside, it also achieved Colonel Gaddafi's overthrow. Strangely, this could actually benefit the Jewish state - but only if Libya takes the initiative.

With Gaddafi gone, the world could recognise, finally, that the perpetrators of the Lockerbie bomb were not from the Libyan secret service, did not include the man who was ultimately convicted, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and indeed had nothing to do with Libya. The world could learn that the culprits were the original suspects, a gang of Palestinian terrorists. 

As it takes its first steps, the new Libyan leadership will likely want to remove the stigma of Libya's association with the atrocity of December 1988 and seek international acceptance of al-Megrahi's innocence. A democratic Libya could wield a good deal of clout if it applied the sort of economic and diplomatic pressures Gaddafi used to secure al-Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds to urging the Scottish and British governments to declare him innocent. And they may be pushing at an open door. 

It is no conspiracy theory to claim that the case against al-Megrahi and Libya was manifestly absurd, or that the government knows that. Any study of the details of his trial, a decade ago at Camp van Zeist in Holland, will reveal that, unbelievable as it seems, the Scottish judges who convicted him and rejected his appeal made an utter hash of the evidence. Moreover, they actually missed a key piece of evidence which, alone, would have been enough to sink the prosecution.

The Scottish government say they "do not doubt the safety" of al-Megrahi's conviction, a statement which implies a rational consideration of the evidence. Yet they have stonewalled on revealing whether the cabinet ever actually deliberated on the issue. 

They know they are on weak ground. A little prodding from a powerful, influential, oil-rich country looking to restock its armoury and they will admit the obvious.

How do we know the true culprits were Palestinian terrorists? In July 1988, the battle cruiser USS Vincennes shot down IranAir flight 655 over the Straits of Hormuz. The Americans were steeled for a terrorist response and the Western intelligence community was tipped off, probably by Mossad, that a deal to carry out such an attack had been struck between Iran and Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, "General Command". This was a Syrian-based ultra-extremist splinter group of the PFLP, with an active cell in West Germany. The deal was that Iran would pay them a bounty to destroy an American civil airliner departing from a European airport. 

As a result, the West German police set up the "Autumn Leaves" surveillance operation, whereby a CIA proxy double-agent named Marwen Khreesat, an expert bomb-maker from Jordan, was infiltrated into the cell. He built a number of similar improvised explosive devices (IEDs) one of which was virtually identical to that which brought down Pan Am flight 103 a mere two months later. 

The device was removed from under his nose and delivered to the cell's airport security expert, Abu Elias. Khreesat tipped off his control in Jordan and the police immediately swooped, rounding up members of the cell and seizing a second device, also virtually identical to the Lockerbie bomb.

"Abu Elias was never seized and the missing IED was never recovered, two facts enough in themselves to prompt the strongest suspicion. Combined with other compelling circumstantial evidence they plainly connected the cell with the bombing."

This is not conspiracy theory. It is non-contentious stuff, most of it given in evidence at Camp Zeist. Yet the judges turned a blind eye to the obvious and based their decision on a series of weak findings. What the Scottish judges did not appreciate was the utter horror Khreesat's CIA controllers must have felt in the aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy: that a bomb made by their proxy in pursuance of his cover on their behalf was almost certainly used to bring down the Pan Am jet. 

Therein lies the clue to why attention was drawn away from Iran and the PFLP-GC and why Libya became the scapegoat. But Israel has no need to defer to the embarrassed sensibilities of a handful of long-retired CIA staffers. Nor need it wait for pressure to build up from the new Libyan leadership.

Benjamin Netanyahu's government might not want to be seen too openly pressing for al-Megrahi's vindication and the corresponding condemnation of Palestinian extremists. Yet behind the scenes they ought to be attempting to secure that outcome. It can do Israel no harm for the world to learn that her enemies were paid $4.5 million to murder 11 residents of Lockerbie, and 259 innocent passengers, of all religions.

Lockerbie was an impossible verdict

[This is the headline over an article by Richard Norton-Taylor published in The Guardian on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

On January 31, after an eight-month trial, three Scottish judges, sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, found a Libyan intelligence officer, Ali Al-Megrahi, guilty of the Lockerbie bombing - Britain's biggest mass murder - acquitting his colleague, Khalifa Fhimah.

Two days earlier, senior Foreign Office officials briefed a group of journalists in London. They painted a picture of a bright new chapter in Britain's relations with Colonel Gadafy's regime. They made it quite clear they assumed both the Libyans in the dock would be acquitted.

The FO officials were not alone. Most independent observers believed it was impossible for the court to find the prosecution had proved its case against Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt.

It was not only the lack of hard evidence - something the judges admitted in their lengthy judgment. The case was entwined, if the judges were right, in a sequence of remarkable coincidences.

Doubts about the prosecution's case and the judges' verdict are spelled out in Cover-Up of Convenience, published this week. Two journalists, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, examine in detail what Paul Foot has already succinctly written in Private Eye's special report, Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice.

For more than a year, western intelligence agencies pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril. It is not hard to see why. Two months before the Lockerbie disaster, German police arrested members of the PFLP-GC near Frankfurt where, according to the prosecution, the bag containing the bomb was placed on the Pan Am airliner.

Among those arrested was Marwan Khreesat, who was found with explosives and a Toshiba cassette player similar to the one said to have contained the bomb. Khreesat was released. It was later revealed he was a Jordanian double agent.

The Jordanians did not allow him to appear as a witness at the trial. Instead, he was interviewed by an FBI agent, Edward Marshman. Marshman described how Khreesat told him how he infiltrated the PFLP-GC, how a second Toshiba bomb had gone missing, and about his contacts with another member of Jibril's group, Abu Elias, said to be an expert in airline security.

Elias is mentioned in a report written by Mobdi Goben, another member of the PFLP-GC, shortly before he died. The Goben memorandum claims Elias planted the bomb in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese American passenger allegedly involved in a CIA-approved heroin-smuggling operation. The luggage used for these operations, it is claimed, bypassed normal security screening.

The prosecution asked a "foreign government", believed to be Syria, to hand over information about Goben's allegations. Syria refused. Syria was central to the original explanation. This was that 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.

There is a widespread view that the US and Britain changed their tack when they badly needed Syria's support, and Iran's quiescence, for the Gulf war after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They thus fingered the two Libyans, insisting they placed the bomb in an unaccompanied bag at Malta's Luqa airport, where it was transferred to the Pan Am plane at Frankfurt. An earlier Palestinian suspect, Abu Talb, had also visited Malta. He was later held in Sweden on terrorist charges and identified by the British as a prime suspect.

You don't have to look for conspiracies - maybe Jaafar's presence on the plane has an entirely innocent explanation - to question the prosecution's version of events. US authorities issued a series of specific warnings about a bomb threat before Lockerbie. These, and intelligence reports implicating Iran, were dismissed as speculative or hoaxes.

The evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner was extremely shaky. He was uncertain about dates and the weather that day. He told the police the purchaser was "six foot or more" and over 50. Megrahi was five foot eight inches and 37 at the time.

According to Ashton and Ferguson, replica MST-13 timers - implicating Megrahi but only presented as evidence after a long delay - were manufactured by the CIA but that information was not passed to the defence. The evidence of Abdul Giaka, a Libyan who defected to the CIA and star prosecution witness, was described by the judges as "at best exaggerated, at worst simply untrue".

The judgment is littered with assumptions and criticisms of prosecution witnesses. They refer to a "mass of conflicting evidence". Megrahi has lodged an appeal. The Scottish appeal judges surely owe it to the victims' families to explain the string of unanswered questions.

Lockerbie: the CIA drug-running scenario

[On this date in 2011, Susan Lindauer’s article Lockerbie Diary: Gadhaffi, Fall Guy for CIA Drug Running was published on the Scoop website. The following are excerpts:]

From May 1995 until March 2003, I performed as a back channel to Tripoli and Baghdad, supervised by my CIA handler, Dr Richard Fuisz, who claimed from day one to know the origins of the Lockerbie conspiracy and the identity of the terrorists. http://issuepedia.org/1998-12-04_Susan_Lindauer_Deposition He swore that no Libyan participated in the attack.

Armed with that assurance, our team started talks with Libya's diplomats for the Lockerbie Trial, and I attended over 150 meetings at the Libyan Embassy in New York. After the hand over of Libya's two accused men, our team engaged in a concerted fight to gain permission for Dr. Fuisz to give a deposition about his primary knowledge of the conspiracy, during the Lockerbie Trial In a surprise twist, the US Federal Judge in Alexandria, Virginia imposed a double seal on a crucial portion of Dr Fuisz's deposition. The double seal can only be opened by a Scottish judge. In my opinion, that should be a priority, as testimony hidden by the double seal maps out the whole Lockerbie conspiracy. Most significantly, it identifies 11 terrorists involved in the attack. Dr Fuisz's testimony could put the whole matter to rest forever.

There's good reason for my confidence. Much to my surprise, during the Lockerbie talks, Dr Fuisz's allegations of CIA opium running in Lebanon received unusual corroboration. One day, as I left the office of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun on my lunch break, an older spook caught up with me in front of the US Supreme Court. From out of nowhere, he stepped in my path and invited me to lunch. With extraordinary candor, he debriefed me as to what motivated the CIA's actions. I remember it as one battle-hardened old spook sharing the perils of fieldwork with a gung ho young Asset, anxious to get started on great adventures.

It was a morality tale for sure. According to him, the CIA infiltrated opium and heroin trafficking in Lebanon as part of a crisis operation to rescue AP reporter Terry Anderson and 11 other American and British hostages in Beirut, including CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin and Anglican envoy Terry Waite. The hostage crisis was a legitimate CIA concern. The CIA Station Chief of Beirut, William Buckley, was also kidnapped by Islamic Jihad and brutally tortured to death, his body dumped in the street in front of CIA headquarters. The rescue was protracted and complicated by Lebanon's Civil War—ultimately, Terry Anderson's captivity lasted seven years. Many of the hostages suffered beatings, solitary confinement chained to the floor, and mock executions.

The older spook who refused to identify himself swore that the CIA considered it urgently necessary to try every possibility for recovering the hostages. The concept of infiltration into criminal networks cuts to the murky nature of intelligence itself. Drug enforcement frequently rely on the same strategies. Where the CIA went far wrong was in pocketing some of those heroin profits for itself along the way. The dirty little secret is that the CIA continued to take a percentage cut of opium and heroin production out of Lebanon well into the 1990s.

As for the hostage rescue itself, considering the operation took years to accomplish, it's always been whispered that a corrupted CIA officer enjoying those opium profits might have swallowed reports on the hostages' locations, or otherwise diverted his team in order to protect his narcotics income.

That appears to have become a serious fear at the time, among other US officers jointly involved in the rescue.

In December 1988, infuriated Defense Intelligence agents issued a formal protest, exposing CIA complicity in Middle East heroin trafficking. When teams from both agencies got summoned back to Washington to attend an internal hearing, they boarded Pan Am 103. A wing of militant Hezbollah led by Ahmed Jibril, his nephew Abu Elias, Abu Talb and Abu Nidal took out both teams in order to protect their lucrative cartel.

Classified Defense Intelligence records show that Jibril and Talb had been toying with a conspiracy to bomb a US airplane during the 1988 Christmas holidays anyway. They planned to bomb a US airliner in revenge for the USS Vincennes, which shot down an Iranian commercial airliner loaded with Hajiis returning from Mecca in July, 1988. However the Defense Intelligence threat to expose their heroin network put the bombing plan into action. Islamic Jihad's ability to discover actionable intelligence on the flight schedules would definitely confirm that somebody at CIA was operating as a double agent, keeping Islamic Jihad a step ahead of the rescue efforts.

That's the dirty truth about Lockerbie. It ain't nothing like you've been told. (...)

But the bottom line is that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing of Pan Am 103, which exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. We should care about Lockerbie because of the serious problem that it exposed. Opium trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley provides a major source for global heroin production. In turn, the global pipeline of narco-dollars keep militant operations alive world-wide from the Middle East to Indonesia, Colombia, Burma and the Far East.

"The coverage of the film is more notable for what it omits than what it reveals"

[What follows is the text of an article by John Ashton headlined The Lockerbie Case published in today’s edition of the Scottish Review:]

Lockerbie is back in the news. On 15 October the Crown Office announced that the lord advocate and the US attorney general have agreed that two Libyan men should be treated as suspects. They have been named as Abu Agila Masud, an alleged bomb-maker whose identity was until now a mystery, and Abdullah Senussi, Colonel Gaddafi’s former security chief. Both men are currently in prison in Libya.

The announcement was prompted by the recent broadcast by the American PBS channel’s 'Frontline' series of a three-part documentary, My Brother’s Bomber, made by Ken Dornstein, who lost his brother David in the attack. Trailed by a long feature in The New Yorker, it suggests that the Libyan man convicted of the bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was guilty and that he acted with Masud.

The film has provided the much-derided Crown case against Megrahi with the only significant boost it has had since he was convicted almost 15 years ago. That case, accepted by the three Scottish law lords who tried him, went as follows. Two weeks before the bombing, on 7 December 1988, he bought a selection of clothes from a shop in Malta called Mary’s House. On 21 December 1988, while travelling on a false passport he placed an unaccompanied brown Samsonite suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt.

The suitcase contained the clothes and a bomb, and was labelled for New York on PA103. At Frankfurt it transferred to Pan Am feeder flight PA103A to London Heathrow, and at Heathrow to PA103. The bomb was allegedly built in to a Toshiba BomBeat brand RT-SF16 radio cassette player. A large percentage of the global total of this model had been imported by the Libyan General Electrical Company, which was run by Megrahi’s friend and relative Said Rashid, who was a senior figure in Libyan intelligence service, the JSO. More importantly, it was said to have been detonated by a timing device known as an MST-13, which had been designed and built to order for the JSO by a small Swiss company called Mebo, whose Zurich offices were shared by a Libyan company called ABH, in which Megrahi was a partner.

Before I go further, I should declare an interest. I worked for three years as a researcher for Megrahi, helping his lawyers prepare for his appeal against conviction, and following his return to Libya, at his request, I wrote his biography Megrahi: You are my Jury. I was also a paid consultant during the early stages of the film’s production in which capacity I was interviewed on camera (although the interview doesn’t appear in the film) and provided Ken with numerous documents. Although he and I hold very different views about the case, I like and respect him.

He has a profound need for clear answers about who killed his brother. He always believed that Megrahi was guilty and that he had acted on behalf of the Libyan state. He used the opportunity opened by the Libyan revolution to pursue the other alleged state players.

He accepts that the evidence suggesting Megrahi was the clothes purchaser was flawed. Not only was he very much younger, smaller and lighter-skinned than the man described by the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, but the evidence also suggested that the purchase date was not, as the crown alleged, 7 December 1988, but two weeks earlier, when Megrahi was not in Malta. Ken considers that these weaknesses in the Crown case are relatively insignificant when set again the other evidence that he has unearthed, the most important of which concerns Abu Agila Masud.

We have always known that on the morning of the bombing Masud was on the same flight as Megrahi from Malta to Tripoli and that they had been on other flights together in the previous weeks. Megrahi denied knowing him, as did the Libyans interviewed by Lockerbie investigators prior to Megrahi’s trial. The film reveals that, according to a German court judgment, Masud was the technical mastermind behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle nightclub in Berlin. That attack prompted US air strikes on Libya, which in turn, according to the official Lockerbie narrative, prompted Libya to bomb Pan Am 103. Furthermore, the film suggests, Masud was in the car that greeted Megrahi at the airport on his return to Libya in 2009. Then, earlier this year, a Libyan court convicted him of making booby-trapped car bombs during the 2011 revolution.

The film also focuses on another alleged plotter, Said Rashid, who greeted Megrahi on the steps of the aircraft on his arrival home. Ken got access to Rashid’s abandoned house, where he found diaries in which he had described Malta as a launch pad for terrorism against the west. Malta, of course, was where the Libyans allegedly launched the Lockerbie bomb.

Megrahi was always open about his close relationship with Rashid and other notorious senior security figures, including the newly named suspect Abdallah Senussi, who, like Rashid, was a relation. Megrahi: You are my Jury made clear that both Rashid and Senussi were allegedly involved in terrorism – in Rashid’s case the La Belle bombing.

The evidence that Ken has assembled is substantial and I do not dismiss it out of hand, but, for reasons set out below, I believe the conclusions he has built upon it are unsustainable.

His film has prompted an avalanche of media coverage, almost all of it uncritical. The Crown Office’s chief media cheerleader, Times columnist Magnus Linklater, has even declared that '[it] is time to extinguish the last embers of controversy that have heated the Lockerbie case for so long'. 

Anything that places Lockerbie back in the spotlight is to be welcomed. Unfortunately, however, the coverage of the film is more notable for what it omits than what it reveals.

The first significant omission is a consideration of the evidence from Libya and of Megrahi’s behaviour. At the start of the Libyan revolution four years ago, the former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil claimed to have proof that Colonel Gaddafi ordered the bombing. Since then nothing has emerged publicly from the country’s security archives to implicate the Gaddafi regime and Megrahi in the bombing. Jalil later claimed he had been misquoted and the best he could offer by the way of evidence was the fact that the regime had paid Megrahi’s legal bills. Said Rashid’s papers implicated Rashid in terrorism, but there was nothing new and substantial to demonstrate that he had a role in Lockerbie.

The only genuine document to emerge from the ruins of the old regime that speaks directly to the suspects’ private views on the case is a letter by Megrahi to Senussi, reported on by The Wall Street Journal, in which he protested his innocence. (The WSJ speculated that he might have expected the prison staff to check his mail, but that didn’t happen, as he was free to hand over correspondence to the Libyan consulate staff who frequently visited him.)

Megrahi continued to plead his innocence following his return to Libya in 2009. By then there was nothing for him to lose in admitting his guilt, yet he wouldn’t and he spent much of his remaining time cooperating with me in writing his biography – hardly the actions of a guilty man. The Gaddafi regime also had nothing to lose. In 2004 it made a formal admission of responsibility and paid compensation for the bombing, but only because it was obliged to do so in order to free itself of crippling UN sanctions, which had been imposed under US and UK sponsored Security Council resolutions passed in the early 90s. It never made an unambiguous admission of guilt.

Megrahi didn't act like a terrorist when he was in Malta. Although he travelled on a coded passport under a false name, he went to visit his co-accused Lamin Fhimah’s Maltese business partner, whom he had never met before, and introduced himself under his real name. He then stayed the night at the Holiday Inn, rather than at one of the island’s Libyan-owned hotels, despite having stayed there for two nights only a fortnight earlier under his own name. He kept the passport for 11 years until he went to The Netherlands to stand trial and handed it over to the prosecution; again, not what one would expect of a terrorist.

Megrahi told a number of lies, not least, it seems, about his relationship with Masud, but lies do not prove guilt. Truth telling is a luxury of liberal democracies. In countries like Gaddafi’s Libya it can be fatal.

A second omission is the strong evidence that points away from Megrahi and Libya. Unlike the Libyans, the original suspects in the bombing, the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), had a track record of bombing aircraft. Moreover, they made bombs into Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players, the same brand – although a different model – that was used to destroy Pan Am 103. According to their bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat, who was arrested in Germany with other members of the group two months before Lockerbie in an operation code-named Autumn Leaves, his fellow arrestee Hafez Dalkamoni had come to Germany to coordinate an attack on a western airline and had shown a particular interest in Pan Am. 

The German cell also had a link to Malta through the Swedish-based terrorist Mohamed Abu Talb, some of whose associates had visited Dalkamoni and Khreesat’s German apartment two weeks before the Autumn Leaves raids, and who himself visited Malta around the same time. 

There have been suggestions that the PFLP-GC and the Libyans somehow joined forces and that the Libyans were responsible for the plot’s final execution. This would make sense if the Autumn Leaves arrests had halted the PFLP-GC’s operation. However, other evidence suggests that it continued. Khreesat told the German police that other members of the group had evaded arrest, including one called Abu Elias, who, Khreesat gleaned, was to have an important role in the planned attack. Another PFLP-GC member called Mobdi Goben, who led the group's Yugoslavian cell and was visited by members of the German cell shortly before their arrest, later claimed that the bombing had been coordinated by Abu Elias. 

Further evidence that the PFLP-GC’s plot remained active after the Autumn Leaves raids came in a warning circulated by the US State Department's bureau of diplomatic security three weeks before Lockerbie (and a few days before the better known and allegedly hoax Helsinki warning). It stated that a group of radical Palestinians in Europe was planning to target Pan Am, adding 'Timeframe is present'. 

A number of declassified US intelligence documents have stated as fact that the bombing was commissioned from the PFLP-GC by Iran in revenge for the accidental shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 by US battlecruiser the USS Vincennes six months earlier. Former CIA agent Robert Baer revealed specific details of the Iranian/PFLP-GC attack, which he said came from a number of reliable sources. Another, Richard Fuisz, revealed in a court deposition that he was told by numerous senior Syrian officials who were close to PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril that the group was behind the bombing. 

None of this rules out Libyan involvement in the attack: Libya backed the PFLP-GC and may well have provided logistical and material support to the bombers. This scenario was one that neither the Lockerbie prosecutors nor the Libyans themselves would wish explored. 

A third omission is the evidence suggesting that the La Belle bombing was not a straightforward act of Libyan terrorism. Three of the four people convicted of the bombing worked at the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin: Palestinian Yassar Chraidi, Lebanese-born German Ali Chanaa and Libyan Musbah Eter. Eter confessed to his role in the bombing in 1996 and became the key prosecution witness (Chanaa also confessed but his evidence was not relied upon by the prosecution). Also central to the case were files from the former East Germany security service, the Stasi, which documented information provided by its network of informers within Berlin’s Arab community.

The files appeared to corroborate Eter’s claim that Masud was a bomb technician and indicated that he was in Berlin around the time of the bombing. The Libyan witnesses in the Lockerbie case all denied knowledge of Masud. Also important to the case were intercepts of incriminatory messages supposedly sent between the Libyan government and the East Berlin People’s Bureau. Said Rashid was identified as the main voice behind the instructions from Tripoli. Ostensibly, all this was convincing evidence of Masud’s and Libya’s guilt. But other evidence suggests the bombing had some very murky undercurrents.

The Stasi files suggested that the staff of the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau were far from being a close band of Gaddafi loyalists. Most startlingly, they showed that Musbah Eter had a long-standing relationship with the CIA. A 1998 investigation by the German TV channel ZDF alleged that, at the time of his confession in 1996, he was running a CIA front company in Malta.

Some of the Stasi’s Arab informants also had a relationship with the CIA. So too did a number of non-Libyans, whom the Stasi files implicated in the wider La Belle plot, but who escaped justice. One key informant, Mahmoud Abu Jaber, and his brother Mohamed, both of whom were both close to Chraidi, ran a freelance Palestinian terrorist cell that was mistrusted by other Palestinians. The Stasi learned that the CIA knew that Mahmoud and another cell member, Khaled Shatta, were involved in the bombing. In the months prior to the attack the cell lived in East Berlin and met the defendants almost daily. Hours before the attack they travelled to West Berlin. Their movements were monitored by both the Stasi and the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, who concluded that they were working for Western intelligence. A declassified KGB document indicated that Jaber was suspected of being an agent provocateur, who was being used by the CIA to concoct a case against Libya. The KGB reported that, two days before the bombing, he told his CIA contacts that it would cost $30,000, rather than the previously quoted amount, $80,000. Another member of the group admitted to ZDF that he was a Mossad asset.

All this is important in the light of the widely reported and well documented fact that throughout the Reagan presidency the CIA ran a massive covert campaign against Libya. In the run up to the La Belle attack, the US navy conducted aggressive exercises off the coast of Libya, which were clearly designed to provoke a Libyan military response, although none came. The bombing gave the White House hawks the excuse they craved to strike. 

When the US released the incriminatory intercepts to the German authorities a decade after the attack they appeared to be genuine. However, according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky the Americans were duped by a Mossad, who broadcast phony messages from Tripoli. Neither the La Belle prosecutor Detlev Mehlis nor the FBI bothered to interview Ostrovsky about his claims. 

To be clear, I do not claim that Libya, Said Rashid and Abouagela Masud were not involved in La Belle – I would not be surprised if they were – I merely caution against taking a black and white view of the case.

The fourth major omission in the recent media coverage is the evidence that demonstrates that the Lockerbie bomb did not originate in Malta. To remind you, Megrahi's conviction rested on the belief that he had managed to smuggle a bomb contained in an unaccompanied suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt and that this case had been transferred to Pan Am feeder flight PA103A to Heathrow, where it was transferred to PA103. The claim relied upon two documents from Frankfurt airport, which, according to the Crown, demonstrated that an unaccounted-for suitcase had been transferred from KM180 to PA103A.

However, that claim in turn relied upon a number of shaky inferences about the documents and the surrounding events at Frankfurt (which are documented in Megrahi: You are my Jury and, more exhaustively, in Dr Morag Kerr's book, Adequately Explained by Stupidity?).

Megrahi's conviction depended upon two still more unlikely assumptions. The first was that he had struck very lucky. Forensic evidence suggested that the bomb's position within luggage container AVE4041 was such that it was as close as it could be to the skin of the aircraft and that had it been any further away it would not have penetrated the skin and caused the plane to disintegrate. 

The second was that he had managed to circumvent Air Malta's baggage loading procedures. Unlike Pan Am's these were unusually strict; they required the head loader to physically count all the bags to make sure the total tallied with the number checked in. To ensure that he had done so, he was not told this number, but instead had to report the total to the flight's ramp dispatcher, who would check it against the checked-in total. KM180's records showed that the numbers had matched. The police investigation established that all these bags had made it onto the flight and been collected by their owners, which ruled out the possibility that Megrahi or an accomplice had managed to swap the bomb suitcase for a check-in bag prior to the head loader's count.

The only witness from any of the three airports investigated by the police who could recall seeing a brown Samsonite case of the type that contained the bomb was a Pan Am loader at Heathrow called John Bedford. On the day of the bombing he was based in the so-called interline shed, which processed bags transferred from other flights, but not those from PA103A from Frankfurt, which allegedly carried the suitcase from Malta.

When interviewed by the police he remembered clearly that it was lying flat in the luggage container AVE4041 in the approximate position that the explosion later took place. He said he noticed it when he returned from his tea break at around 16.45 and that a colleague, Sulkash Kamboj, had told him that he had placed it there. (Kamboj subsequently had no recollection of doing so and there is no suggestion that he was part of the bomb plot.) 

Crucially, Bedford went off duty before PA103A arrived from Frankfurt, so the suitcase he saw could not have originated from that flight and could therefore not have been a rogue suitcase from the Air Malta flight KM180. Equally crucially, he and the two other loaders who saw AVE4041 were sure that, by the time it was taken to PA103A to be topped up with baggage from Frankfurt, the base of the container was covered by a single layer of baggage, which consisted of at least five cases standing vertically along the back and two lying flat at the front.

These details were important because two police memos uncovered during preparations for Megrahi's second appeal showed that only six legitimate interline bags would have been loaded into AVE4041, none of which matched that described by Bedford. Clearly then, the Bedford suitcase was rogue and, to the best of his recollection, it matched the one that contained the bomb.

Further evidence that the bomb was planted at Heathrow has been unearthed and compiled in an exhaustive investigation by researcher Dr Morag Kerr in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?. Taken together, the Heathrow evidence is far more convincing evidence of the bomb's origin than the fact that Megrahi and Abouagela Masud left Malta together on the morning of the bombing.

The final important omission is the evidence that destroys the Crown’s central claim that the Lockerbie bomb contained an MST-13 timer from a batch supplied by the Swiss company Mebo to Libya. The claim relied upon a fragment of circuit board known as PT/35(b), which was found within the Lockerbie debris.

According to the Crown, it matched the boards used in the Libyan batch, which had been made for Mebo by another Swiss company, Thüring. However, there was a crucial difference, which was not revealed to the trial court: PT/35(b)’s copper circuitry was plated with pure tin, whereas the boards in the timers supplied to Libya were plated with a tin-lead alloy. In 2008 Thüring’s production director confirmed to Megrahi’s lawyers that the company had only every used tin-lead alloy plating. It meant that the fragment could not have been from one of the MST-13s supplied to Libya. 

As well as omitting such vital evidence, the media coverage surrounding 'My Brother’s Bomber' has swerved an urgent question: given that Abu Agila Masud apparently linked the La Belle attack and Lockerbie, why did the Lockerbie investigators never make anything of the fact? It's clear from the statements of Scottish police officers that Masud was a prime suspect from 1991 onwards. In 1997 he was named in the indictment against the La Belle accused. Had the Lockerbie prosecutors known of the link, they should have used it to bolster the weak circumstantial case that they had assembled against Megrahi and his co-accused, Lamin Fhimah. The fact that they did not looks like a major cock up, which the announcement of the pursuit of the two new suspects has effectively concealed. The Crown Office claims that there is now a 'proper basis' in Scots law to treat the two men as suspects, implying that there wasn’t previously. In fact, such a basis has existed since 1991.

The initiative has already descended into farce. The Crown Office has discussed getting access to the suspects with the internationally recognised government in Tobruk, which is powerless to help, because they are being held by the rival government in Tripoli. That government is willing to allow the Crown Office to interview the suspects, but has heard nothing from them. As leading Libya observer Jason Pack has observed, given the very delicate political situation in the country, which the UN is attempting to resolve by brokering the formation of a national unity government, the Crown Office’s announcement seems 'particularly ill-timed and naïve'.

I can believe that the police and FBI failed to be sufficiently curious about La Belle, but find it hard to believe that the CIA missed the Masud link with Lockerbie. In the official narrative, the two bombings were umbilically linked. The CIA of all people should therefore have been alert to the possibility that there were common players between the two attacks. They could not have been unaware that Masud had been implicated in La Belle if the man who implicated him, Musbah Eter, was one of their own.

Why, then, was it not until 19 years after Eter named Masud, and 18 years after he was named in the La Belle indictment, that the Lockerbie connection was made? And why did it fall to one of the Lockerbie victims' relatives to make the connection? Clearly the Libyans kept silent about Masud because they knew that the La Belle connection, whether genuine or not, would damage Megrahi and Fhimah's prospects at trial, but why the apparent silence from the CIA?

We are unlikely to get answers to these and the many other questions that cloud Lockerbie. We should applaud Ken Dornstein for adding some pieces to the jigsaw. He has seen a picture that he finds convincing, but when I look at the other pieces, I am equally sure he is wrong and that, if we ever get to see the complete picture, the part he has illuminated may prove to be peripheral.

We must nevertheless hope that Masud and Senussi are handed over to the Scottish authorities, unlikely as that prospect may currently seem. The case urgently needs reopening and a trial of the two men may be the best way of achieving it. Should there be one, the prosecution would have to re-run most of the discredited case that convicted Megrahi, and the defence would be armed with vital exculpatory evidence that the Crown previously withheld. The result, I predict, would be a deepening rather than an answering of Lockerbie’s mysteries.