Conflicting accounts as to when the photograph was sent to Washington DC – and significance

As lead FBI Lockerbie investigator James Thurman played a pivotal role in presenting to the public the supposed story of how PT/35b was matched to the MST-13 timer. His public behaviour in doing so and the manifest factual misrepresentations which he deployed in distorting that account probably tells us as much as anything about the question whether the CIA’s desire to implicate Libya and its knowledge of Mebo’s supply of the timer exclusively to the Libyan military led ultimately to the “discovery” of the fragment. In other words, does Thurman’s behaviour support the possibility that someone introduced PT/35b into the body of evidence with the intention that it be conveniently found?

At a press conference that day the audience was shown a blown-up photograph of a piece of circuit board. Next day, the early evening ABC TV news programme anchored by Peter Jennings featured Thurman in its four and a half minute “Person of the Week” slot (aired originally from 5:53 to 5:57 pm; clip available on DVD loan from http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program. pl?ID=132218; see also A&F, 168 and 202).

The feature related how among the hundreds of thousands of scattered pieces of wreckage Scottish investigators “found something they didn’t know what to make of” and so the task of trying to identify it was passed on to Thurman in Washington DC. Over an enlarged still of the fragment which became Zeist exhibit PT35b Jennings intoned: “It was a piece of plastic found in a bit of shirt. It was no bigger than a finger nail. In terms of the investigation it was enormous.” The camera cut to Thurman exulting “When that identification was made of the timer I knew we had it.” The next shot was of a still displayed at the State Department press conference the previous day. It was the photograph of another piece of printed circuitry bearing the partially erased but otherwise unmistakeable legend “MEBO” and Jennings continued:

“This tiny piece of an electronic timing device with the Swiss manufacturer’s name MEBO partially rubbed off was what ultimately led investigators to the Libyans who bought it, the ones now accused of being responsible for blowing up Pan Am 103.”

Finally, the camera cut back to Thurman conveying his feelings on the making of the identification: “Absolute, positively euphoria [sic]. Just euphoria. I can’t describe it any more than that. I was on cloud nine.”

Although editorial responsibility for the feature and its content were clearly not Thurman’s he must necessarily have been involved very closely in its compilation. The feature was about him, the producers would have been largely dependent on his input and it is difficult to believe he would not have been significantly instrumental in procuring the way the material in particular on the Lockerbie investigation was presented as he wished it to be portrayed. The feature was, after all, occasioned by the indictments. He would have appreciated only too clearly the impact of the narrative in the context of running together the picture of the fragment from the wreckage and that of the item with the MEBO lettering: the clearest possible suggestion that he had traced the provenance of the fragment from lettering on it. By all appearances it seemed to have been a breakthrough of which Sherlock Homes himself would have been proud. It looked like the smoking gun for which the investigators had been searching.

But to paraphrase the commentators Ashton and Ferguson in a more general context, “the only smoke was the variety associated with smoke and mirrors” (p.268). For the PCB bearing the MEBO lettering photograph was not the fragment PT35b. The latter was a fragment from an MST-13 mother board and was alleged to be the only remains of such a timer recovered from the crash site. The photograph of the section of PCB with the MEBO lettering was a section of the daughter board from an MST-13. To be absolutely clear about this, no part of a daughter board from an MST-13 was alleged ever to have been recovered from the aircraft debris. From where exactly the piece of circuit board depicted in the second photograph on the programme had come remains uncertain: whether from a timer which had been seized in Senegal, from the Togo timer or from one supplied by, or otherwise taken from, the MEBO Company itself. Even if the wrong photograph had by some chance been inadvertently selected to be shown at the State Department press conference and on the TV programme there could be no mistake about the matter of lettering. The photographs of PT/35b which were exhibited at the Zeist trial had the fragment magnified fifty times and showed clearly that on neither side did it bear the slightest trace of any letters.

And yet to a prime-time audience of millions of American viewers Thurman had the breathtaking gall to promote the making of a representation that he had traced the origin of the fragment from the characters “MEBO” when he knew all along that these were not carried on the fragment PT/35b but on a different circuit board altogether, one which had nothing whatsoever to do with the destruction of Pan Am 103.

As matters turned out, then, this was no master sleuth in his prime, just Mr Arthur Daley of Minder fame. What on earth possessed Thurman to beget such a stunt? Was it just self-aggrandisement and chutzpah, or was there something more to it? To seek an answer it is important to appreciate that he must have known he could never mount a plausible claim to have traced the fragment’s origin merely from the figure “1” shaped finger pad and the parallel tracking lines. It would have been to find a needle in a haystack, even if the FBI happened to be in possession of a timer or two. Few would ever have believed a story of making the connection to Mebo (though the CIA were reputed to be experimenting with the notion of developing “remote vision”). Suspicions would inevitably be raised that the authorities had already latched on to the convenient idea of claiming that the bomb maker had used a Mebo MST-13 timer instead of – far more probably – a barometric pressure trigger. This would have led on inexorably to the suspicion that the finding of the fragment had been concocted – a plant, no less – because of the extreme coincidence that the authorities already knew about Libya and MST-13 timers and that they then just happened to discover a fragment from such a timer.

But what of the contrary idea that the very paucity of clues afforded by the fragment argues in favour of the authenticity of the evidence that it was found among the debris. If they were going to plant a fragment from a Mebo timer, it might be asked, why not simply produce one from the daughter board bearing the “MEBO” insignia? But a moment’s thought will raise a similar objection. Who would believe that either? The survival of a piece of fibre board in some sort of conflagration proof cocoon no more than two inches from a “thousands degree Semtex Supernova,” as it has been so graphically described (“The Lockerbie Divide” website) might have seemed difficult enough to accept. That the fragment should have survived with lettering might have been simply too much to swallow. It would simply have been too good to be true. (The same point holds good for the PCB fragment which was said to identify the device which concealed the bomb as a Toshiba SF16 radio-cassette player, most of the production run of which had gone to Libya.)

So the probable answer is that Thurman felt compelled to take the calculated risk of riding two horses. Well aware, as he must have been, that a pretence of having traced the provenance of PT/35b from non-existent lettering could hardly be run in court he was almost certainly not looking that far ahead. He probably calculated that Gaddafi would never countenance surrendering the two accused men and that the possibility of a trial was too remote to worry about, too remote to waste the opportunity for him to bathe in the limelight for a brief moment in time. In the short run the public would believe what he told them, that he was a brilliant sleuth (rather than a charlatan clairvoyant). Not only that, but he probably felt nervous about the possibility of any speculation in the media as to whether the “discovery” of the fragment might possibly have been led by a prior decision to prove the use of a Mebo timer. In other words, his immediate and primary concern was to avert any suspicion that the investigators had started with a decision to assert that the bomb employed a Mebo MST-13 timer and had worked backwards to concoct the finding of a fragment from such a device. In the short run, when the need to focus upon Libya was felt in some quarters to be paramount, his charade might serve to pre-empt any such suggestion. He would have been less concerned about the possibility of some commentators raising their eyebrows about the fragment surviving incineration, let alone with tell-tale lettering still visible. If by some remote chance in the fullness of time a trial did become a reality he probably calculated his public mendacity would have been long forgotten.

In any event he was plainly cunning enough to cover his back in case it were ever suggested that he had inspired a falsehood to be told on screen. Describing on “Person of the Week” his response when the fragment which became PT/35b was referred to him for investigation Thurman explained–

“A magnification of that circuit board, which is here – you can see it’s a very large magnification – has, er, a partially obliterated marking and through investigation we determined that this actually is M-E-B-O. Initially we thought that it might be another number like M-5-80 and that was . . . a number of leads were sent out to electronic manufacturers to see if they had made this board. And they said ‘no,’ that this was not their identification. So the last thing that we determined, which was the right thing actually and that it was Mebo. We had some inkling that that was what it was from the beginning but we didn’t want to say okay that it was Mebo to exclude anything else till we were absolutely certain.”

“For nine years the British and American governments had insisted that the Lockerbie investigators had fingered Libya as the result of straightforward detective work.”

But then it emerged only during the trial for the first time that no more than two weeks after the destruction of Pan Am 103 Edwin Bollier, the MEBO company’s director, had written to the CIA.