A former U.S. government informant pleaded guilty to perjury,
admitting that he concocted a story that a government drug agent
allowed a bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over
Scotland in 1988. The informant faces up to ffve years in prison and a
$1.25 million fine. (Reuters)

Taking the Blame
Paul Foot
London Review of Books January 6, 1994
A review of:

Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie Inside the DIA by
Donald Goddard with Lester Coleman. Bloomsbury, 325 pp., ú16.99,
27 September 1993, 0 7475 1562 X

The Media and Disasters: PanAm 103 by Joan Deppa with Maria
Russell, Dona Hayes and Elizabeth Lynne Flocke. Fulton, 346 pp.,
ú14.99, 28 October 1993, 1 85346 225 X

The American investigative columnist Jack Anderson has had some
scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation in
January 1990 that in midMarch 1989, three months after
Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to 'cool it'
on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day,
perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher's Secretary of State for
Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political
correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club. It was agreed that
anything said at the lunch was 'on strict lobby terms' that is, for the
journalists only, not their readers. Channon then announced that the
Dumfries and Galloway Police the smallest police force in Britain had
concluded a brilliant criminal investigation into the Lockerbie crash.
They had found who was responsible and arrests were expected before
long. The Minister could not conceal his delight at the speed and
efficiency of the PC McPlods from Dumfries, and was unstinting in his
praise of the European intelligence.
So sensational was the revelation that at least one of the five
journalists broke ranks; and the news that the Lockerbie villains would
soon be behind bars in Scotland was divulged to the public. Channon,
still playing the lobby game, promptly denied that he was the source of
the story. Denounced by the Daily Mirror's front page as a 'liar', he did
not sue or complain. A few months later he was quietly sacked.
Thatcher, of course, could not blame her loyal minister for his
indiscretion, which coincided so unluckily with her instructions from the
White House.
Channon had been right, however, about the confidence of the
Dumfries and Galloway Police. They did reckon they knew who had
done the bombing. Indeed, they had discovered almost at once that a
terrorist bombing of an American airliner, probably owned by PanAm,
had been widely signalled and even expected by the authorities in
different European countries. The point was, as German police and
intelligence rather shamefacedly admitted, that a gang of suspected
terrorists had been rumbled in Germany in the months before the
bombing. They were members of a faction of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, led by Ahmed Jibril. The aim of the gang was
to bomb an American airliner in revenge for the shooting down by an
American warship of an Iranian civil airliner in the Gulf earlier in the
year. On 26 October 1988, less than two months before the
bombing, two of the suspects Hafez Dalkomini and Marwan Abdel
Khreesat were arrested in their car outside a flat at Neuss near
Frankfurt. In the car was a bomb, moulded into the workings of a black
Toshiba cassette recorder. In the ensuing weeks other raids were carried
out on alleged terrorist hideaways in Germany, and 16 suspects
arrested. One of them was Mohammad Abu Talb, another member of
the PFLP, who was almost instantly released. Even more curious was
the equally prompt release of Khreesat, who was suspected of making
the bomb found in Dalkomini's car.
The finding of the bomb led to a flurry of intelligence activity. It was
discovered that the bomb had been specifically made to blow up an
aircraft; and that the gang had made at least five bombs, four of which
had not been found. At once, a warning went out on the European
intelligence network to watch out for bombs masked in radio cassette
recorders, especially at airports. There were more specific warnings. On
5 December 1988 the US Embassy in Helsinki got a telephone warning
that 'within the next few weeks' an attempt would be made to bomb a
PanAm flight from Frankfurt to New York. On 8 December, Israeli
forces attacked a PFLP base in the Lebanon and found papers about a
planned attack on a PanAm flight from Frankfurt. This information,
too, was passed on. On 18 December the German police got another
warning about a bomb plot against a PanAmerican flight. This message
was passed to American embassies, including the embassy in Moscow,
and as a result of it 80 per cent of the Americans in Moscow who had
booked to fly home for Christmas on PanAm flights cancelled their
reservations. This was probably why there were relatively few
passengers on PanAm 103 as it took off from Heathrow half an hour
late on the evening of 21 December. No one has explained why a
warning thought proper for US citizens in Moscow never reached the
259 people who boarded the plane without the slightest idea that there
was any danger.
Though the German police dragged their feet and were singularly
reluctant to disclose any documents, the facts about the Jibril gang
were known to the Scottish police by March 1989. All the ingredients
of a solution were in place. The motive was clear: revenge for a similar
atrocity. The Lockerbie bomb, forensic experts discovered, had been
concealed in a black Toshiba cassette recorder exactly like the one
found in Dalkomini's car two months earlier. The German connection
was impossible to ignore: the flight had started in Frankfurt. The
identity of the bombers seemed certain, and surely it was only a matter
of time before they could be charged. But, like Chan non, the police
were unaware of the telephone conversation between Bush and
Thatcher. When Thatcher sacked Channon a few decent months later,
she appointed Cecil Parkinson in his place. Shaken by the grief of the
Lockerbie victims' families, Parkinson promised them a full public
inquiry. Alas, when he put the idea to the Prime Minister she slapped
him down at once. There was no judicial or public inquiry with full
powers just a very limited fatal accident inquiry, which found that the
disaster could have been prevented by security precautions which are
still not in place.
All through the rest of 1989 the Scottish police beavered away. In
May they found more clues. A group of Palestinian terrorists were
arrested in Sweden, among them Abu Talb. Talb's German flat was
raided. It was full of clothing bought in Malta. The forensic evidence
showed that the Lockerbie cassettebomb had been wrapped, inside its
suitcase, in clothes with Maltese tags. Talb was known to have visited
Malta some weeks before the bombing. Off flew the Scottish police to:
Malta, where a boutiqueowner remembered selling a suspiciouslooking
man some clothes ; similar to those found in the fatal suitcase. Closely
questioned by FBI videofit (or identikit) experts, the boutiqueowner's
answers produced a picture which looked very like Abu Talb. When a
computer printout of baggage on the fatal airliner appeared to show an
unaccompanied suitcase transferred to PanAm 103 from a flight from
Malta, the jigsaw seemed complete. Jibril had agreed to bomb an
airliner, probably in exchange for a huge reward from the Iranian
Government. The task was taken on by a PFLP team in Germany, led
by Dalkomini. It was joined by Khreesat, who made several bombs,
only three of which were ever discovered. One of the other two found
its way, probably via Talb, to the hold of the airliner. The culprits were
obvious. But the authorities still dragged their feet. The initial
determination to identify the conspirators and bring them to justice
seemed to have waned. The Scottish police were exasperated. They
made more and more of the information available. Much of it appeared
in the Sunday Times in a series of articles leading up to the first
anniversary of the bombing. No one who read them could doubt that
the bombers were Syrians and Palestinians. The series, mainly written
by David Leppard, who worked closely with the Scottish police team,
ended with a scoop: white plastic residue found at Lockerbie was traced
back to alarm clocks bought by the Dalkomini gang. There seemed no
more room for argument. 'The Sunday Times understands,' Leppard
wrote, 'that officers heading the investigation despite a cautious
attitude in public have told their counterparts abroad that under
Scottish law "charges are now possible against certain persons."'
There were no charges, however not for a long time. The President
of the United States ordered a commission of inquiry, which reported
(without mentioning Jibril, Palestinians or Syrians) in May 1990. By
that time the politics of the Middle East were changing rapidly. In
August, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The supply of cheap oil to
the United States was suddenly threatened. War was necessary to clear
the invading dictator out of Kuwait and restore to his throne the
resident dictator, the Emir, who had always been much more
appreciative of the United States' dependence on cheap fuel. No war
could be fought against Saddam, however, which might antagonist
other Arab rulers. The main problem was Syria. How would the
dictator of Damascus, Hafez Assad, react to what he might see as an
imperialist war against his fellow Arab dictator in Baghdad?
Very well indeed, as it turned out. Assad became an enthusiastic ally
of the US in the Gulf War. He sent frontline troops to fight in the
phoney war, and seemed happy to support the most ludicrous claims
coming from the White House. In other words, as Donald Goddard
puts it, from the moment of Saddam's invasion 'nothing more was
heard from of ficial sources on either side of the Atlantic about Syrian
complicity in the Flight 103 bombing.' From now on the official view
of the disaster was that Syria had, in Bush's typically elegant phrase,
'taken a bum rap on this'; and that the people responsible for
Lockerbie came from the one Arab state which had denounced the US
role in the Gulf War: Libya. Others have noticed this astonishing
somersault, but nowhere else has it been more carefully documented.
Goddard shows how the whole finelywoven case against Jibril and the
Syrians was halftwisted, halfforgotten until it came to seem 'logical' to
accuse quite different suspects. For example, the identikit picture of
Abu Talb drawn up by the Maltese boutique owner now apparently
identifies a Libyan airline official. And it is this official, together with a
colleague, who is now 'wanted' for the bombing. Libya faces
international economic sanctions if the two are not delivered to the
authorities in Edinburgh. Goddard takes the view that the Jibril gang
probably was responsible for the bombing and that the bomb probably
was put on the plane at Frankfurt.
If this were the only purpose of Goddard's book, it would be a
fascinating expose of coverup and hypocrisy. But it still wouldn't
answer the outstanding questions: why did the coverup start so early?
Why, in March 1989, long before the invasion of Kuwait, when both
the British and the American Governments regarded Saddam as an ally,
and were arming the Iraqi dictator to the hilt, did Bush and Thatcher
decide to 'cool it' on Lockerbie? Why for that matter were the
warnings of a bomb on a PanAm plane not more widely broadcast?
Why was there so much American intelligence activity on the ground at
Lockerbie after the crash? Why was the courageous work of Dr David
Fieldhouse, who drove from Bradford to Lockerbie as soon as he heard
the news of the crash and spent the whole night inspecting and tagging
the remains of bodies, ignored by the authorities, and the tagging done
all over again? Why, for that matter, was Dr Fieldhouse so shamefully
accused of being a busybody at the Scottish fatal accident inquiry an
insult for which the police and the Government had eventually to
apologise? What happened to the suitcase, almost certainly full of 5
heroin, which was swiped from a farmer's field near Lockerbie and
never seen again?

One answer to all these questions is to be found in the story of
Lester Coleman, told in detail here for the first time. Coleman
claims that he was recruited in 1984 by the Defence Intelligence
Agency, the combined intelligence of the US Army, Navy and Air Force,
which employs 57,000 people on a budget five times that of the CIA.
One of his jobs was to spy on another US government agency, the Drugs
Enforcement Administration, which had an important office in Nicosia.
Coleman alleges that the DEA tolerated and supervised a regular drugs
run from Lebanon to the United States. The drugs money was crucial to
the Syriancontrolled part of Lebanon, and to the economy of Syria
itself, while supervision of the trade ensured that the American
intelligence agencies could keep tight hold of their agents in
Beirut. Coleman's story is that he was sent to Nicosia by the DIA,
and while pretending to be a journalist and TV producer, at the same
time worked for the DEA and 'kept an eye' on it for his real masters.
His work in Nicosia brought him into contact with the drugrunners
and smugglers who, he says, operated mainly through Frankfurt
airport. A group of baggagehandlers there, Turkishbom and
sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism, regularly switched luggage so
that the smugglers' baggage was put on flights between Frankfurt and
the US in place of bags which had already been checked in. A similar
racket was operated at the US airports. Coleman left the DEA in
Cyprus in 1988 and was not engaged by the DIA again until 1990. He
was not told what his new assignment was. He was ordered to apply for
a passport in a bogus name a name he had been given as a false
identity many years before when working in a minor capacity for the
CIA. In May 1990, as he prepared for his unknown job, he was arrested
and charged with applying for at false passport. At Srst he felt
there was some mistake which a phone call would clear up. No one
would come to his assistance, however. Jailed and baited, he trawled
through journalistic contacts to find out why he was being
victimised. One of these, Sheila Hershow, had just been fired as an
investigator from the subcommittee looking into the Lockerbie
disaster. Her sacking followed her demands for more US government
infommation about security at Frankfurt airport. Hershaw sent Coleman
a photo of a young man he immediately identified as one of the drug
couriers from Nicosia. She told him the young man had died at
Lockerbie. This information persuaded Coleman that he was being
victimised because he might know too much about the prelude to the
disaster. When his lawyers were told that documents from the CIA
about his false identity and his instructions to apply for a false
passport from the DIA were 'classified' and could not be obtained in
any court, he realised that he was on a hiding to nothing. He decided
to come out in the open, and approached PanAm, who were fighting a
losing battle against having to take full responsibility for the
Lockerbie crash. He gave them a long statement in which he alleged
that the drugs operation supervised by the DEA had been infiltrated
by the terrorist gang who were out to bomb an airliner, and that the
existing baggageswitch operation in Frankfurt could well have been
used to plant the fatal bomb on PanAm 103. After telling his story
Coleman went into hiding. A journalist, Danny Casorolo, tracked him
down and tried to follow up his story. He sought out the man who
recruited Coleman to the DIA. Nine days after his first phone call to
Coleman, Casorolo was knifed to death in a hotel room in West
Virginia. His body was embalmed before a postmortem could be carried
out. Reading this story I was reminded of Colin Wallace, a former
army information officer in Northern Ireland, who had the guts to
stand up to and break with the more ludicrous conspiracies of his
intelligence controllers. Wallace was sacked from the Army, and
convicted on the slenderest, most contradictory evidence of killing
his best friend. Wallace served six years for this crime which he
passionately denies. He was then given a lowpaid job in airport
management, which he carried out perfectly honourably until he was
contemptuously sacked by a new, governmentsupporting British
Airports Authority management. Through all his ordeal, Wallace has
had to contend with cynical and servile media which peddle the
Government's story about him. Lester Coleman, apparently, has the
same problem. His story is powerful enough to be taken extremely
seriously. It explains many of the hypocrisies and coverups which
have confused and infuriated the families of the victims of PanAm
103. The sensitive study of the media and the disaster by Joan Deppa
and her colleagues from Syracuse University, 35 of whose students
died at Lockerbie, shows how many of the families have changed 'from
victim to advocate' and have come to expect that journalists will
give them answers to the questions which are still ignored by
governments. Lester Coleman has something crucial to say to all these
families, and they have a right to expect his story to be
sympathetically checked and analysed. Yet most of the media continue
to dismiss him as a 'Walter Mitty' (a term used again and again about
Colin Wallace) and a conman. He has been trashed in particular by the
onceprestigious US current affairs TV show, Sixty Minutes, and by
New York Magazine, whose reporter Christopher Byron accuses those who
take Coleman seriously of 'chipping away at America's faith in her
institutions'. David Leppard, who has never explained the
contradictions between the articles he published in 1989 and his 1991
book on the subject, wrote recently in the Sunday Times attacking
Bloomsbury for daring to publish this book when Coleman faces perjury
charges for his sworn affadavit to PanAm. Any investigative
journalist should consider the perjury charges a reason to publish,
not to keep quiet. There is a lot wrong with Goddard's book. Again
and again he launches into assertions before he proves them. He
'reports' conversations verbatim, in direct speech, when neither he
nor Coleman nor anyone else can have any proof of what was actually
said. He makes far too much use of flashbacks. On balance, however,
he wins the argument. And if he and Coleman are telling even half the
truth, they have lifted the edge of the veil on one of the nastiest
and most deceitful political corruptions of modern times.

Lockerbie Matters

Reply by Donald Goddard It was a pity that Paul Foot fell at the
final fence in his otherwise impeccable canter over the course of the
Lockerbie scandal, as set out in Trail of the Octopus, the book I
wrote with Lester Coleman (LRB, 6 January). In the last paragraph of
his review, I am accused of making assertions before I prove them, of
inventing conversations to which neither Lester Coleman nor I could
have been privy (that's the serious one) and of making too much use
of flashbacks. In controversial matters, I usually follow standard
advocate's procedure by first stating my position and then supporting
it with the available evidence. In a case bedevilled by five years'
worth of political rnanipulation, lies, special pleading and confused
media coverage, I felt readers were entitled to know unequivocally
where I stood and then to judge for themselves to what extent that
position was justified by the facts. In all 320odd pages of Trail of
the Octopus, there is not one word of manufactured dialogue. The use
of direct speech in the way Foot wrongly ascribes to me is, to my
mind, as reprehensible a practice as reviewing a book without reading
it properly. I report only one verbatim conversation in which
Colernan did not actually take part, and that was a brief exchange
between his mother and an FBI agent, relayed by her to Coleman in
precisely the terms set down. I feel entitled to a retraction on that
one. The quite groundless suggestion that I touched up the facts
could well taint a reader's response to the rest of the evidence set
out in the book. As for the use of flashbacks, for better or worse,
to provide the book with a narrative frame, I chose to interleave
chapters of Coleman's story, told chronologically, until the one
merged with the other; But I have to say my disappointment was offset
to some degree by Foot's magisterial putdown of David Leppard who,
without declaring a personal interest, recently criticised Bloomsbury
in the Sunday Times for daring to publish Trail of the Octopus at
all. Donald Goddard London N1 .

Taking Libya to Trial Letter to the Editor, International Herald
Tribune, Jan 12, 1994 It has been more than five years since the
terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, an
act of premeditated murder that caused the deaths of 270 persons. But
despite exhaustive investigations we remain no closer to solving that
crime than we were in November 1991, when the United States and
Britain announced the indictment of two Libyan intelligence officers
as the alleged bombers. Libya continues to defy the United Nations
Security Council resolutions calling for it to hand over the agents.
And even if prosecution of the two Libyans in an American or British
court were possible, it would hardly provide an adequate finale to
this tragedy. Such a trial would not h likely to lead to indisputable
proof of Libyan complicity. Or the two could plead guilty and avert a
trial. With no proof and no full accounting, sanctions against Libya
would be lifted and other state sponsors of terrorism would see the
small price they would pay for their acts. Can anything be done to
force Libya's hand, to ensure accountability and the assumption of
responsibility? The U.S. government seems convinced that criminal
punishment is the sole means of obtaining justice. But there are
other paths to justice, including civil damages in a court of law.
Indeed, civil damages, pursuant to a civil trial on merits, appears
to be the best way, if not a perfect one, to achieve accountability.
A civil suit does not seek to replace the prospect of criminal
punishment but to recognize its limitations. Sovereign nations cannot
be punished as if they were individuals. They can, however, be
deterred from future acts of illegal conduct by being held
accountable. To ensure accountability through a civil suit two
hurdles must be overcome. Libya needs to be stripped of any vestige
of sovereign immunity that it has under U.S. Iaw. In a ceremony at
Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 21, President Bill Clinton stated
that the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 was a deliber ate attack on the
United States. As such, Libya deserves no protection from a civil
suit in a U.S. court. Yet,, in the past the U.S. government has
joined forces with offender states: to protect their right to
immunity from civil suit. The U.S. government would also need to stop
refusing to share evidence implicating Libya on the ground that it
would compromise the use of such evidence in a criminal prosecution.
Today, the prospect of criminal prosecution seems increasingly
remote. Although the evidence presented in the U.S. criminal
indictment is said to be conclusive, it fails to name the government
of Libya. Only its two alleged agents are named as defendants. A
civil trial would remedy that by focusing attention on the government
of Libya. And, unlike a criminal trial, it only requires proof of a
preponderance of evidence, not the more exacting test ù"beyond a
reasonable doubt"ùused in a criminal trial. ALLAN GERSON. MARK S.
ZAID. Washington. On Dec. 15, the writers filed suit

Libya Still Only Suspect in Bombing, IHT Jan 13, 1994 LONDON
(AP)ùThere is no evidence that any country other than Libya was
involved in the bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Scotland in 1988,
but the inquiry into the matter remains open, Prime Minister John
Major said Wednesday. Mr. Major was asked in the House of Commons
about reports suggesting that Syria and Iran might have been involved
in the bombing, which killed all 259 people on board the New
Yorkbound flight and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.
Britain and the United States have named two Libyans as suspects in
the bombing, and the United Nations has imposed sanctions against
Libya because it has refused to extradite the suspects.