Libya got the blame, but many in US and UK intelligence believe Iran gave the instructions

[What follows is excerpted from a long article by John Simpson in today's edition of The Mail on Sunday:]

Following the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani in the early hours of Friday morning – personally ordered by President Trump from his Florida holiday home, Mar-a-Lago – retribution is now a major priority for Iran’s leaders and their forces. And, as my Iranian friend implied, they have plenty of options. There are only two requirements: whatever action they take should satisfy Iran’s instinctive desire for vengeance, yet it should not be so blatant that it provokes the United States into an all-out war. (...)

There is a huge variety of alternative strategies. Iran has often staged cyber-attacks against Western targets, with some success; but although cutting American power supplies or the flow of information might be briefly satisfying to Iran’s leaders, it won’t have the element of personal revenge they want. As in the past, Iran can use proxy groups to attack international shipping in the Gulf. But Western intelligence and tactics have improved recently, and this may not be as effective as in the past. (...)

An eye for an eye has always been the approach of the clerics who control the government of the Islamic Republic. (...)

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a new guided missile cruiser, was on patrol in the Gulf at a time of greatly heightened tension between Iran and the US. It found itself involved in a shoot-out with a group of apparently hostile Iranian gunboats. While the firing was still going on, an Airbus A300 of Iran Air took off from Bandar Abbas, a civil as well as military airport on the Gulf coast of Iran, and flew south towards the Vincennes.

As a result of a catastrophic technical mistake, the defensive systems on the Vincennes identified the Airbus as a military jet coming in to attack. Vincennes fired two radar-guided missiles at it, bringing it down with the loss of all 290 people on board.

By chance, a television team was filming on the bridge of the Vincennes that morning. The cameraman captured the delight of the crew when they thought they had shot down a hostile fighter, and the change to horror when it became clear what had really happened.

William Rogers, the captain of USS Vincennes who gave the order to fire the missiles, was cleared by a board of inquiry, but Iran believes to this day that the destruction of the Airbus was deliberate, and its leaders announced that they would avenge it.

Almost six months later, on December 21, a small group of Libyan terrorists associated with Iran’s close ally Syria planted a bomb on an American PanAm airliner. It blew up over Lockerbie, killing 270 people altogether. 

Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya got the blame, but many people in the American and British intelligence community believe that Iran gave the original instructions for the attack, to avenge the shooting down of the Airbus. (...) 
[RB: While many believe that Iran commissioned the destruction of Pan Am 103, no-one that I'm aware of has ever suggested that Abdelbaset Megrahi or Lamin Fhimah were members of "a small group of Libyan terrorists associated with Iran's close ally Syria" nor is there any evidence that such a group existed. If Iran was the instigator, the evidence points to the actual perpetrators being Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC and there is no evidence of any Libyan link to that group.]

Iran’s religious leaders believe their authority and the reputation of Iran now depend on getting specific retribution for President Trump’s ordering of the assassination of General Soleimani and his companions.

The late Arnaud de Borchgrave and Lockerbie

[Arnaud de Borchgrave died on Sunday, 15 February 2015. Obituaries are to be found in The Washington Times, The New York Times and The Guardian. His contribution to the Lockerbie affair is recorded in the following two items on this blog:]

Friday, 1 January 2010

Gadhafi admitted it!

This is the subject-heading of an e-mail sent by Arnaud de Borchgrave to Frank Duggan and copied by the latter to me. It reads as follows:

"As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya."

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, Gaddafi made the admission, off the record, in the course of an interview in 1993. His published account [28 August 2009] reads:

"Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. After a long interview with Gaddafi in 1993, this editor at large of The Washington Times asked Libya's supreme leader to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, and for which Libya paid $2.7 billion in reparations. He dismissed all the aides in his tent (located that evening in the desert about 100 kilometers south of Tripoli) and began in halting English without benefit of an interpreter, as was the case in the on-the-record part of the interview.

"Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655, on a 28-minute daily hop from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz to the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of the Gulf, was shot down by a guided missile from the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes. The Vincennes radar mistook it for an F-14 Tomcat fighter (which Iran still flies); 290 were killed, including 66 children. A year before, in 1987, the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi Mirage, killing 37 sailors. The Vincennes skipper, Capt. William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit, and the entire crew was awarded combat-action ribbons. The United States paid compensation of $61.8 million to the families of those killed on IR 655.

"Gaddafi told me, 'The most powerful navy in the world does not make such mistakes. Nobody in our part of the world believed it was an error.' And retaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). 'Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?' said Gaddafi. 'We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was,' Gaddafi added.

"As he got up to take his leave, he said, 'Please tell the CIA that I wish to cooperate with America. I am just as much threatened by Islamist extremists as you are.'

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history."

On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.

Saturday, 2 January 2010

Reaction to "Gadhafi admitted it!"

[The following comment on the "Gadhafi admitted it!" thread comes from Peter Biddulph. It was too long to be posted directly as a comment on that thread.]

The timing of this information is most strange.

According to Wikipedia and other sources, Arnaud de Borchgrave appears to have an impeccable background. According to him, the CIA debriefing arranged by Woolsey took place in 1993.

But I am informed by an expert on these matters that Gaddafi never, repeat never, was without at least one armed personal bodyguard. To be alone with an American journalist with many contacts in Washington would be, for Gaddafi, impossible.

And if this information was known in 1993, why on earth did the CIA, the FBI and the Scottish Crown office not know of it in the next seven years leading up to the trial?

Why was de Borchgrave not invited to be deposed or give evidence to the Lockerbie trial, or even an affidavit?

It might be said to be hearsay, and therefore not admissible in court.

But several hearsay issues and affidavits were extensively investigated by the court, notably the Goben Memorandum, and the account of the interview of bomb maker Marwan Khreesat by FBI Agent Edward Marshman. Even a hearsay account that Gaddafi confessed to the crime would have cast serious doubt on al-Megrahi's defence.

The original 1991 indictment could have been varied to reflect the latest knowledge. Indeed, the final version of the indictment was agreed by the US Department of Justice and the Scottish Crown Office in 2000, only three weeks before the trial commenced.

If the FBI did know it, why did they not mention any of this in a May 1995 Channel 4 discussion following the screening of the documentary The Maltese Double Cross? Buck Revell of the FBI became quite intense in answering Jim Swire's questions and those of presenter Sheena McDonald. But he said not a word about the Gaddafi "confession". Why?

Also, how come Marquise - as he says himself "Chief FBI Investigator of the Lockerbie bombing" - was not aware of it in the seven years leading up to the 2000 trial or the nine years since? That is, sixteen years of ignorance?

And why did CIA Vincent Cannistraro himself not mention it when interviewed on camera on at least two occasions in 1994 by Alan Francovich for the documentary film The Maltese Double Cross?

As head of the CIA team investigating Libya, Cannistraro would be the first to be briefed by the Langley central office. He was happy to provide hearsay evidence to the media and film camera against Oliver North and any Libyan or Iranian that got in his way. He spoke at length about green and brown timer boards, and potential witnesses.

To relate on camera the Gaddafi "confession" would have been greatly to Cannistraro's advantage, a slam-dunk in the public mind. Indeed, even a hint in the media would have ham-strung al-Megrahi’s defence before proceedings commenced.

But between 1993 and 2009 from Cannistraro not a word. And when it comes to America's interests, the CIA never follow Queensberry rules.

CIA [officer] Robert Baer too, as a Middle Eastern specialist has given no hint of this. Such information would surely have come within the "need to know" category. Yet he has maintained on two occasions that Iran commissioned the job and paid the PFLP-GC handsomely two days after the attack. His conclusion suggests strongly that the so-called fragment of the bomb was planted.

The real reasons for this late announcement, we believe, are as follows:

1. It is well known among those who study these things in the field that there are two candidates shortly to succeed Gaddafi. His son Saif, and his son-in law Sennusi. Meanwhile Sennusi is not top of the pops with Arab leaders in the region. They would love it if he were out of the frame. The Borchgrave revelation discredits Sennusi perfectly.

2. The SCCRC is shortly to publish information which some believe will cause serious embarrassment to the FBI And CIA. The Borchgrave email is huge smoke and mirrors, a spoiler.

It all looks highly suspicious. Just another carefully crafted phase in a long, long history of disinformation.

Q: If Libya, then Megrahi? A: No

[What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2010:]

Gadhafi admitted it!

This is the subject-heading of an e-mail sent by Arnaud de Borchgrave to Frank Duggan and copied by the latter to me. It reads as follows:

"As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya."

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, Gaddafi made the admission, off the record, in the course of an interview in 1993. His published account reads:

"Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. After a long interview with Gaddafi in 1993, this editor at large of The Washington Times asked Libya's supreme leader to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988, and for which Libya paid $2.7 billion in reparations. He dismissed all the aides in his tent (located that evening in the desert about 100 kilometers south of Tripoli) and began in halting English without benefit of an interpreter, as was the case in the on-the-record part of the interview.

"Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655, on a 28-minute daily hop from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz to the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of the Gulf, was shot down by a guided missile from the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes. The Vincennes radar mistook it for an F-14 Tomcat fighter (which Iran still flies); 290 were killed, including 66 children. A year before, in 1987, the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi Mirage, killing 37 sailors. The Vincennes skipper, Capt William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit, and the entire crew was awarded combat-action ribbons. The United States paid compensation of $61.8 million to the families of those killed on IR 655.

"Gaddafi told me, 'The most powerful navy in the world does not make such mistakes. Nobody in our part of the world believed it was an error.' And retaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). 'Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?' said Gaddafi. 'We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was,' Gaddafi added.

"As he got up to take his leave, he said, 'Please tell the CIA that I wish to cooperate with America. I am just as much threatened by Islamist extremists as you are.'

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history."

On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.

Gadhafi admitted it!

This is the subject-heading of an e-mail sent by Arnaud de Borchgrave to Frank Duggan and copied by the latter to me. It reads as follows: "As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya." 

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, Gaddafi made the admission, off the record, in the course of an interview in 1993. His published account reads: 

"Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. After a long interview with Gaddafi in 1993, this editor at large of The Washington Times asked Libya's supreme leader to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988, and for which Libya paid $2.7 billion in reparations. He dismissed all the aides in his tent (located that evening in the desert about 100 kilometers south of Tripoli) and began in halting English without benefit of an interpreter, as was the case in the on-the-record part of the interview. 

"Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655, on a 28-minute daily hop from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz to the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of the Gulf, was shot down by a guided missile from the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes. The Vincennes radar mistook it for an F-14 Tomcat fighter (which Iran still flies); 290 were killed, including 66 children. A year before, in 1987, the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi Mirage, killing 37 sailors. The Vincennes skipper, Capt. William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit, and the entire crew was awarded combat-action ribbons. The United States paid compensation of $61.8 million to the families of those killed on IR 655. 

"Gaddafi told me, 'The most powerful navy in the world does not make such mistakes. Nobody in our part of the world believed it was an error.' And retaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). 'Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?' said Gaddafi. 'We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was,' Gaddafi added. "As he got up to take his leave, he said, 'Please tell the CIA that I wish to cooperate with America. I am just as much threatened by Islamist extremists as you are.' 

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history." 

On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.

"The White House took care of Lockerbie just as smoothly"

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Jack Cashill published on the WorldNetDaily website on this date in 2007 and referred to here on this blog:]

On the Sunday morning of July 3, 1988, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser, the USS Vincennes, fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR655.

The first missile struck the tail and right wing and broke the aircraft in half. All 290 people aboard were killed. Misunderstanding America, the Iranians claimed that our Navy had intentionally destroyed the plane.

The Navy did no such thing. It does not destroy innocent commercial airliners intentionally. As retired Navy Capt David Carlson has well-documented, however, the shoot down was recklessly executed, relentlessly misreported, and dumped into the dustbin of history prematurely and all too consequentially.

Carlson was in a position to know. He commanded the USS Sides, a guided-missile frigate, just 20 miles from the Vincennes at the time of the incident and under its tactical control.

To this day he faults himself for not intervening in the Vincennes’ hasty command decision to launch the fatal missiles and for not speaking out sooner against “the corruption of professional ethics” that defined the incident’s assessment. (...)

As Carlson has reported, it served the career interests of the Vincennes’ command and the short-term national security interests of the White House to present the incident as an unfortunate result of an Iranian provocation.

In the waning days of the Reagan administration, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm William Crowe and Vice President George H W Bush took the lead in defending the Vincennes crew both against domestic critics and before the United Nations.

At the time, before the incident reports were complete, the two may have protested America’s innocence sincerely. Once voiced, however, these protests would prove difficult to rescind.

The Iranians were not pleased by the obfuscation. According to David Evans, former military affairs correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Carlson’s writing partner, the Iranians responded by placing $12 million in a Swiss bank account to fund the revenge bombing of an American airliner.

Reportedly, the Palestinian terrorist group Ahmed Jibril took the Iranians up on the offer. This plot culminated less than six months after the IR655 incident in the destruction of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The on-board bomb killed 270 people, including 188 Americans and 11 sleeping Scotsmen below.

As might be expected, the media and Congress had no enduring interest in protecting a Republican administration. In July 1992, in the heat of the presidential election, Newsweek ran a bold cover story, “Sea of Lies,” which detailed the “cover-up” of this “tragic blunder.”

Following the article’s publication, Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, held public hearings on the Vincennes incident and grilled Adm Crowe in the course of them.

“While it is not our policy to respond to every allegation that appears in print or goes out over the airwaves,” Aspin pontificated, “these charges go to heart of a very major historical event.”

On Sept. 19, 1992, a month after testifying before Aspin, the politically savvy Crowe made an unlikely pilgrimage to Little Rock, Ark. There, according to Carlson and Evans, Crowe “declared his fervent support for presidential candidate Bill Clinton.”

Upon being elected, Clinton appointed Aspin secretary of defense, and the probe into the Vincennes quietly died. Helping it stay dead was the newly appointed chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, none other than Adm Crowe.

A lesson may have been learned here. To keep the TWA Flight 800 story dead and buried a decade later, the Clintons saw to it that the executioner of the TWA Flight 800 deception – then Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick – was appointed to the 9/11 Commission. (...)

The White House took care of Lockerbie just as smoothly. Wary of engaging either Iran or Iraq despite continued provocations from both, the Clinton White House put the squeeze on the defenseless Libya.

In 1999, Clinton convinced Libyan honcho Gadhafi to hand over a pair of his hapless subjects, one of whom was eventually acquitted and the other of whom continues to protest his innocence.

It seems likely that in turning the White House over to George W Bush in 2000, the Clintons had reason to believe that the state secrets they shared with the elder Bush would be protected by the son.

So far at least, they have been proved right.

The leading statement of the Iran responsibility thesis

[Five years ago today OhmyNews International published a long article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer headed Former Iranian President Blames Tehran for Lockerbie. The following is merely a short excerpt:]

In an interview conducted on May 16 [2008], Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, told me that Tehran, not Libya, had ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes a few months earlier.

On July 3, 1988, the navy cruiser USS Vincennes, also known as "Robocruiser," shot down Iran Air Flight 665 over the Persian Gulf. The civilian airliner was carrying mostly Muslims on their pilgrimage to Mecca -- 290 died, most Iranians.

According to Bani-Sadr, in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy, [Ali Akbar] Mohtashemi-Pur, the then minister of the interior, acknowledged in an interview that he had contracted Ahmad Jibril, the leader of a Palestinian organization, to bomb an American airliner. The interview was scheduled for publication the following day. Hours before distribution, the newspaper was shutdown.

In the aftermath of the USS Vincennes accident, top figures in the Iranian government held a series of meetings in Beirut with leaders of Ahmed Jibril's terror group, the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command).

"Everybody in US intelligence knew about Iran's intention to bomb an American airliner in response to the downing of one of its own only months earlier. We knew that," former CIA operative Robert Baer explains.

"There was a smoking gun in July '88 that Iran hired Jibril to knock down at least one American plane," Baer told me. And indeed, media have long reported that high-ranking Iranian officials held a meeting with [Hafez] Dalkamoni, a trusted lieutenant of Jibril and a man said to be only known by the CIA as Nabil. In late October '88, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar, alias Nabil Massoud, were arrested in Frankfurt where they were running an operation to destroy airliners.

"I was assigned to Paris in 1988 running down leads with French police on both Pan Am 103 and UTA [Union des Transports Aeriens] -- I do not know the ultimate judgment on the leads we produced. Or why precisely the case is being reviewed by Scotland. Keep in mind in your research that intelligence and evidence are two separate domains. Often it's the case [that] compartmented intelligence is not shared with the FBI. I do not know what the FBI was given or not given," Baer added.

"There's a world of intercepts and information from sources that is never shared with the FBI. This is because the controller of the information doesn't want to compromise the source. At the CIA, we look at the FBI as trying to get convictions, while intelligence is to get at a proximate truth."

Reacting to the downing of Airbus 665, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge. Mohtashemi had been the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1985. He is widely believed to have helped to found Hezbollah in Lebanon and had close connections with the terrorist groups of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.

The National Security Agency intercepted and decoded a communication of Mohtashemi linking Iran to the bombing of Pan Am 103. One intelligence summary, prepared by the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, was requested by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines through the Freedom of Information Act.

A classified document prepared for the Multi-National Force during the first Gulf War reads: "Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus."

Caveat: Former FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise led the Lockerbie investigation. Marquise has told me that the document came from a source of unknown reliability. However, careful reading shows that the source makes a clear difference between rumours and facts.

While parts of the document reads: "Mohtashemi is said to [have done this or that]," the paragraph regarding Pan Am 103 is factual. It reads: "He has recently paid…"

The difference of style cannot be ignored.

Lockerbie, Iran and USS Vincennes

[On this date in 2008, an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer headed Former Iranian President Blames Tehran for Lockerbie was published by OhmyNews International. The first few paragraphs read as follows:]

In an interview conducted on May 16, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, told me that Tehran, not Libya, had ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes a few months earlier.

On July 3, 1988, the navy cruiser USS Vincennes, also known as "Robocruiser," shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf. The civilian airliner was carrying mostly Muslims on their pilgrimage to Mecca -- 290 died, most Iranians.

According to Bani-Sadr, in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy, [Ali Akbar] Mohtashami-Pur, the then minister of the interior, acknowledged in an interview that he had contracted Ahmad Jibril, the leader of a Palestinian organization [PFLP-GC], to bomb an American airliner. The interview was scheduled for publication the following day. Hours before distribution, the newspaper was shutdown.

[The remainder of the long and detailed article consists of the fruits of Dr De Braeckeleer’s search for evidence supporting or rebutting Bani-Sadr’s contention. He found quite a lot of the former and not much of the latter. The article merits close attention.]

A classic mix of incompetence ... and deviousness

[What follows is the text of an article about Iran Air flight 655 that appeared on The Trusty Servant website on this date in 2014 (maps and graphics omitted):]

It was an Airbus A300 on a flight from Tehran to Dubai shot down by USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988 using guided missiles. All 290 people on board (16 crew, 274 passengers, including 66 children) were killed.

It was a classic mix of incompetence leading to the accident, and deviousness in trying, and eventually failing, to cover up what actually happened.

At first sight the shooting was hard to believe. The flight had a stop-over at Bandar Abbas. It took off normally from there at UTC 06:47, 27 minutes late. It flew normally down the commercial air corridor Amber 59, a 20-mile wide direct route to Dubai airport. It followed the normal flight plan of climbing steadily, aiming to reach 14,000 ft, then cruise briefly, then descend to Dubai. Its transponder was broadcasting the regular civilian code (“Mode III”, easily distinguishable from the military “Mode II”). When it reached 10 miles from the Vincennes still climbing, it was shot down on the basis that it must be an Iranian F-14 descending on its final attack run.

The Vincennes was at lat 26.513056N, long 56.015833W, 10.8 miles from the nearest point of the Iranian coast (the little island of Hengam, just south of Qeshm), inside Iranian territorial waters, and was in the process of attacking small Iranian gunboats which it had lured out with a decoy “Liberian ship” the Stoval. It was neither a ship, nor Liberian, but essentially just a transmitter to fool the Iranians into coming into range of the Vincennes’ helicopters and various other US ships that were in the area.

Indeed it turned out that the US had been engaged in a secret naval war in the Gulf for some while, a war for which it did not wish to seek authorisation under the War Powers Act.

The Vincennes had all the latest kit, known as Aegis.

This was a complex computer system linked into umpteen radars, intelligence feeds and other systems, designed to allow the ship to engage up to a hundred air or surface threats simultaneously.

It performed flawlessly.

The snag was apparently that the crew did not believe the information it was giving them. They expected the plane to be a hostile Iranian plane rushing to defend the gunboats, so that is what they managed to see.

There was also a classic time-zone mix-up. The ships clocks were on UTC + 4hrs, whereas Bandar Abbas was on UTC +3.5 hrs. So although the crew knew all about the IA655, they knew it could not be the plane on the radar, because the timing was wrong.

But part of the problem was that the Vincennes had too much information. All kinds of people were intercepting, real-time, the communications between IA655 and the Bandar Abbas control tower: GCHQ and NSA (with listening stations in Oman, including Goat Island), an AWACS plane (a Grumman E2-Hawkeye) above the Gulf.

All this information may not have been much help to the captain of the Vincennes faced with only a few minutes to make a decision as the plane closed on his position at about 6.5 miles/minute. Having said that, I am not inclined to be particularly sympathetic. There was precisely one scheduled flight out of Bandar Abbas that morning, IR 655, due to depart at 09:50 local time = 06:20 UTC. It was flying direct to Dubai, which would take it directly over the Vincennes. Clearly, avoiding downing that flight was a priority.

But the information was certainly a problem afterwards. Aegis provided a flawless audit trail. It showed that the crew had imagined things when they thought the flight was descending. It did nothing but ascend. There followed a lengthy period of giving out a mixture of flat untruths and heavily redacted truths, but the truth did emerge several years later.

Full details, and amusingly commented original documents etc, are available on Charles Harwood’s site.