Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction
(vi) British intelligence spurns Israel’s tip about a threat to bomb an airliner
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- (vii) Supposition that Israeli intelligence was tailing Abu Elias on the Continent
- (viii) Probability that Mossad would have followed Bushnaq if he had travelled to the UK
- (ix) Abu Elias/Marwad Bushnaq could not have been followed to Heathrow by Israeli intelligence agents
- (x) Conjecturing a deliberate break in the shadow
- Substantial likelihood that the bomb suitcase was brought in to Heathrow aboard an IranAir flight
- Repeated error concerning IranAir’s Heathrow facilities
- IranAir Nemesis At VI, 3 , (k)
- Were inquiries into IranAir complicity made in 1988/1989
- VIII. The Compelling Factual Conclusion
- IX. The Motive Behind al-Megrahi’s Release
(vi) British intelligence spurns Israel’s tip about a threat to bomb an airliner The period of soured relations with Britain could not be allowed by Israel to be long-lasting. As Katz described it, in late November (1988) Mossad alerted MI6 that a Middle Eastern terrorist gang, probably one of the Syrian-sponsored anti-Arafat groups, would try to sabotage an airliner departing from Europe in the run-up to the Christmas holidays (Jibril, p.205, referencing an article by Yisrael Rosenblat in Ma’ariv Sofshavu’a, the Israeli newspaper’s weekend magazine, for November 22, 1991). However, the British, according to Katz, dismissed the warning as no “hot tip” but a self-serving sham intended by Israel’s intelligence services to ingratiate and insinuate themselves back into MI6’s good books. Katz did not elaborate on the warning and it is not known if he was privy to the details. (vii) Supposition that Israeli intelligence was tailing Abu Elias on the Continent According to Khreesat and Mobdi Goben Abu Elias was in W. Germany during the crucial few days in late October 1988. If he was indeed Ahmed Jibril’s nephew, Marwad Bushnaq, he would have been very well known to Israeli intelligence. If (a) Abu Elias was indeed in Germany and if (b) he was Marwad Bushnaq it would be highly probable that he would have been kept under observation there by Mossad agents. He was not mentioned in the BKA log as a target but the Israelis may well have preferred to keep exclusive tabs on him. (viii) Probability that Mossad would have followed Bushnaq if he had travelled to the UK If the Lockerbie bomb was smuggled from landside to airside at Heathrow it would probably have been conveyed there by a route involving the least risk, that is to say by ferry to the United Kingdom and would have been taken to the UK and into Heathrow by the PFLP-GC’s security expert. (ix) Abu Elias/Marwad Bushnaq could not have been followed to Heathrow by Israeli intelligence agents If Abu Elias/Bushnaq had been tailed by the Israelis he could not have been followed all the way to Heathrow, otherwise he would have been prevented from planting the bomb. There would have to be an interruption in the shadow. Bearing in mind the competence and efficiency of Israeli intelligence it is unlikely this could have been accidental. Could there have been a deliberate interruption and if so why? (x) Conjecturing a deliberate break in the shadow If Bushnaq had been tailed by the Israelis and they had deliberately given up, the most likely point would have been when he reached one of the continental ferry ports of embarkation to England (for example, Caen, Calais, Dieppe, Ostend, the Hook of Holland or Gothenburg). They would have had one or other of two reasons. They might have been nervous about entering the UK during a period when Mossad was unwelcome in the British realm. More likely, however, they would have appreciated that delivering a genuine terrorist into the hands of the British presented a heaven-sent opportunity to restore their credit in the eyes of British intelligence. Had they been tailing Bushnaq to a ferry port it is likely that they would have alerted MI5 as to his impending arrival at Porstmouth, Newhaven, Folkstone, Dover, Tilbury, Harwich or the like. What might then have followed? The sensible thing for the British to have done would have been to take up the shadow and see where it led. What might the alternatives have been? They might simply have ignored the Israeli alert as a transparent attempt to get back into Britain’s good books. They might have acted on the information but then lost track of their quarry. A third possibility is that they stopped the man and questioned him and then either turned him back as undesirable or decided that he offered no credible threat and allowed him to enter without the need to keep him under surveillance. However hostile the British might have been towards their Israeli counterparts at the time it is impossible to believe that they would have been so pig-headed as to ignore the tip-off and refuse to follow the man. Equally it is difficult to believe that shadowing him they would have lost him. Of course, had the British ignored the tip-off or had followed Bushnaq but had then been given the slip, with the destruction of Pan Am 103 they would certainly have had a motive to suppress all evidence of the episode. Following suit, the Israelis – harbouring no infantile wish to crow over their intelligence triumph and their superiority over the inept or petulant British – would have preferred not to jeopardise the chance of a rapprochement by rubbing the noses of their erstwhile collaborators in their own folly. For their part the British would have been content to “pass the parcel” – contriving to see Frankfurt blamed for having allowed the bomb through on to the feeder flight. Later, when it seemed that the Americans were anxious to divert attention away from Syria in the run-up to the first Gulf War and simultaneously obtain the release of the hostages in the Lebanon an Israeli policy of “leave well alone” would have been likely to have been confirmed. (xi) Bomb probably did reach Heathrow by air From the foregoing we can conclude that if Marwad Bushnaq, the PFLP-GC airline security expert, had been in Western Europe from October to December 1988 the Israelis would have been keeping tabs on him. If anyone was going to be tasked by Jibril with the job of getting the bomb to Heathrow and on board Pan Am 103 there it would have been Bushnaq. It is unlikely Jibril would have entrusted the job to anyone else. Had Bushnaq been in Germany and had he entered the UK by ferry we can feel reasonably sure that he would have been kept under observation by Israeli agents and then followed to Heathrow by British agents, who would have thwarted the planting of the bomb. Since that did not happen and it is unlikely that anyone else entered the UK with the bomb via ferry we can conclude that it must have reached Heathrow by some other safe route. The likelihood is that bomb was not smuggled landside to airside at Heathrow but, we conclude later, came in by air, albeit of course not on Pan Am 103A. How then did it reach Heathrow and enter the bowels of Pan Am 103? (b) Logistical aid by the Iranian government? The hazards of entering Britain by sea and landside to airside smuggling of the suitcase into Heathrow For the terrorists it would obviously have been less hazardous bringing a disguised bomb into the UK by sea ferry than by air from the continent but it would nonetheless have involved a certain risk of interdiction if the terrorist was being tailed. If in the aftermath of Autumn Leaves he was being shadowed to the English Channel and was suspected of being in possession of a Toshiba bomb HM customs might be tipped off to search his luggage and the game would be up. Then again, the terrorist might simply be refused entry by immigration officials. If he managed to get through immigration and customs he still had to smuggle the suitcase landside to airside at Heathrow, an exercise which would undoubtedly involve a good deal of uncertainty and risk even for a terrorist as experienced as Abu Elias, with the most up-to-date information about security arrangements there. These were all factors which rendered a land and sea journey to Britain much less attractive than might at first blush have seemed to be the case. Substantial likelihood that the bomb suitcase was brought in to Heathrow aboard an IranAir flight The answer to the question as to how the bomb reached Heathrow and came to be planted on Pan Am 103 is tantalisingly simple. By contrast with a sea-crossing and smuggling the suitcase into Heathrow from landside to airside virtually no risk would have been incurred if, with the connivance of Iranian government agents, the suitcase carrying the bomb were simply flown into Heathrow aboard a scheduled IranAir flight and conveyed over to the interline shed. Since it is highly probable that the Iranian government commissioned the atrocity it is hardly unlikely that they would have baulked at providing such discreet logistical assistance in its perpetration. The total lack of risk Heathrow security staff would have taken no notice of the every day occurrence of a lone baggage handler in ground staff fatigues wearily pushing a “sack truck” (ie a typical porter’s two-wheeled trolley) loaded with a suitcase across the tarmac to the interline shed. Pretending it was for transfer to the Pan Am flight and “finding” John Bedford absent, he would himself have offered it for x-ray examination and would then have placed it in exactly the right position in container AVE4041 to do its lethal work. The proposition offers as economic an explanation of what must have happened as any that it is possible to conjecture. Incidentally, it may be imagined that to divert attention away from Iranian complicity someone could have cut the padlock on the doors leading into the baggage build-up area hundreds of yards from the sector being used that day by IranAir, although that would clearly not have been essential for the success of the enterprise. Repeated error concerning IranAir’s Heathrow facilities The present author had recently been contemplating the assumption, often repeated (including by himself), that IranAir maintained a docking and loading facility at Heathrow neighbouring Pan Am’s facility. This led him to inquire of John Ashton if he could clear up the issue. Ashton wrote back (email, 5 November, 2013) that by an odd coincidence he had just been looking into the self-same issue as a result of an inquiry from a German broadcaster with whom he had been co-operating on a 
Fig. 11 A typical porter’s “sack truck” documentary. The assumption had proved to be quite incorrect. There was no such IranAir facility at Heathrow. The source of the error, he wrote, appeared to have been the 
Fig 12 Heathrow Terminal 3 and the interline shed fatal accident inquiry in which one of the loaders, Gill, stated that Pan Am’s baggage build-up area was shared with other airlines including IranAir. In fact Pan Am’s loading services facility was underneath pier 7 at Terminal 3, Pan Am 103 having left from gate 14 on pier 7. Pier 7 was located to the south west of Terminal 3, aligned parallel to Pier 5 shown in Figure 12. The two piers were connected by a walkway. An intriguing visit The question is, then, were there any IranAir flights into Heathrow on the 21 December and, if so, where did they dock? Ashton informed the author that in pursuance of the inquiry from his German broadcasting collaborator he had unearthed departure and landing records for 21 December, 1988, and discovered that IranAir cargo flight number IRA4703 from Teheran had arrived at Heathrow at 12.51 and departed for Teheran as IRA4702 at 16.59, the airline’s only flights in and out of Heathrow that day. Although there is no record as to which gate the aircraft docked Ashton possesses a statement from IranAir’s Heathrow air cargo supervisor Peter Holliday in which he reports that he was working on pier 5 that day, strongly suggesting that the aircraft docked at one of the gates on that pier. Figure 9 shows part of the Heathrow Central area plan in 1988, depicting Pier 5 and the interline shed, the building slightly to the right of centre at the top. Applying the scale from the full area plan but not shown on Figure 9, the distance from pier 5 across the tarmac to the interline shed is no more than about 200 yards. IranAir Nemesis At VI, 3, (k) above we canvassed the most likely way in which the terrorist entered the interline shed and came to place the primary suitcase in container AVE4041. It may be useful to consider the most likely way in which it was brought to the shed, comparing the times of John Bedford’s tea break, 4.00 to 4.40 pm, with the departure of IranAir 4702 cargo flight at 4.59 pm. It may be conjectured whether someone attached to the IranAir flight crew might have brought the suitcase containing a Khreesat bomb from Teheran, carried it across that short distance from Pier 5 to the interline shed, handed it over for x-raying and fitted it into container AVE4041. If he brought it to the shed as late as 4.30, say, he would still have had time to make it back on board the departing cargo aircraft. If he had taken advantage of Bedford’s absence as early as 4.00 pm there would have been ample time. How would such an individual have (a) recognised Bedford as in charge of loading AVE4041, (b) known that Bedford had gone off for his break and (c) would not come back for at least the necessary interval sufficient to allow the bag to be presented for x-ray and then placed in the tin? Presumably Halliday was not the only IranAir employee based at Heathrow. Could there have been other staff, one of whom might have pointed out Bedford to the visiting suitcase planter during the afternoon? That staff member’s assistance might have been quite innocent. The terrorist tells him that he has an item for Pan Am and asks to whom he should speak. Perhaps the terrorists had already made discreet enquiries about the procedure and the people at the interline shed and so were ready when the IranAir plane arrived with its deadly cargo. If it be true that there was a deal between the PFLP-GC and the Iranian Interior Minister Mohteshemi the Iranian government would hardly have been averse to lending a hand in planting a bomb, the manufacture of which had been contracted out to the experts. It almost renders Autumn Leaves a red herring. Perhaps the Israelis were right (according to Samuel Katz in Israel versus Jibril, above) that the West German cell were intended by Jibril to serve as an expendable diversion. Perhaps the accomplice who was flown in was none other than Abu Elias (or Marwad Bushnaq, to give his real name) who it may be assumed would have known how to prime the bomb and the precise the position in which to place the suitcase in AVE4041. Were inquiries into IranAir complicity made in 1988/1989 Bearing in mind that the existence of the deal between Iran and the PFLP-GC was known by American intelligence before Lockerbie and was presumably passed on to the British it would be interesting to discover if the UK authorities inquired into the possible involvement of the IranAir cargo flight IRA4073 as soon as it became clear that the destruction of Pan Am 103 was the result of a terrorist bomb. Was Peter Holliday’s statement in John Ashton’s possession one originally taken by the police at the time? What, if any, of the inquiries which were quite obviously crying out to be made in early 1989 actually pursued? For example, while taking statements from John Bedford, Kamboj and others did the Metropolitan Police also investigate whether there was any recorded CCTV footage depicting the tarmac area between Pier 5 and the interline shed? Might there be any reference to this is any of the disclosed materials? The answers to those questions will clearly require further research. VIII. The Compelling Factual Conclusion John Bedford’s recollection may require some imaginative interpretation and the Heathrow modus operandi may involve a degree of conjecture. But the overall proposition offers an altogether more plausible scenario than the notion of a Malta origin, with Libyan culpability, or Frankfurt origin, with Ahmed Jibril arranging for a loader there to get a bomb bag into the system instead of a drugs bag. The involvement of a CIA protected drug route (if ever there was one) may have been a thrilling diversion but it was and remains a complete and utter red herring. Khreesat’s assertions did not directly assist the two Zeist defendants (who had called Marshman as a witness) but their self- and CIA-serving nature was obvious. What was important was that, if Khreesat was to be believed, a Toshiba-concealed bomb had been given to Abu Elias and was unaccounted for. But if the CIA was embarrassed by the likelihood that it was a man working for their client agency who had built the Lockerbie bomb while under their direction why was it necessary to contrive the curious (not to say facile claim) that he never used stereo Toshibas? Why could they not simply have ensured that the story of its being spirited away from under Khreesat’s nose while he was “in the shower,” or that he had merely handed it to Abu Elias, was buried rather than passed on to the FBI? The answer is that Khreesat had already reported the incident to his controller the next day and too many intelligence officials, German, Jordanian, Israeli and American, probably already knew about it prior to Lockerbie for the incident to be capable of suppression. Indeed, as argued earlier, his report of the loss may well have been the chief reason why the BKA pounced. Moreover, it must have been widely disseminated that the Toshiba taken by Dalkamoni and presumed to have been handed on to Abu Elias was not the only improvised bomb in the gang’s possession which was never seized. There were at least two others: the one Dalkamoni had told the BKA about, the Toshiba radio-cassette player bomb which Khreesat had brought from Amman and the Toshiba radio-cassette player which Ranzi Diab (one of the men rounded up on 26 October) had handed him on 18 October 1988. Neither was ever found (Ashton and Ferguson, pp.51, 52 and 55). Three deadly devices was an awful lot of which to lose track. Mohammed Abu Talb, the original suspect, was called by the Crown as their witness, having been brought from prison in Sweden where he was serving a life sentence for terrorist acts. Although he purported to testify that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie it emerged from his evidence that a terrorist gang financed by Iran and harboured by Syria were at large in Germany in December 1988, making bombs disguised in Toshiba radio cassette recorders to blow up airliners in flight. When police raided Abu Talb’s home in Sweden and arrested him they found clothes traced back to the Maltese manufacturers who had supplied Anthony Gauci’s shop and a barometer minus the barometric mechanism. He had been in Malta between 19 and 26 October, 1988 and could well have been there on 23 November, 1988, the date much more likely than 7 July to have been the date of purchase. Yet the judges inexplicably found that while there was a “great deal of suspicion” against “Abu Talb and his circle” there was “no evidence to indicate that they had either the means or the intention to destroy a civil aircraft in December 1988.” In the wry words of the late journalist and trial observer Paul Foot: “No means, that is, beyond working with a bomb-maker who specialised in disguising explosive devices in cassette recorders so that they could be smuggled on to aircraft. No intention except visits to airports and the studying of aircraft schedules, including some from Pan Am” (op cit, p.24). In “Exploding Lockerbie” (Criminal Law and Justice Weekly, (2011) vol. 175 JPN pp. 429-432, 445-449, at p.449) the author imagined the sinking feeling Khreesat’s CIA controllers must have experienced at the news about Pan Am 103: the dreadful realisation that a bomb which was probably improvised by their own proxy for the purpose of maintaining his cover on their behalf might actually have ended up being used to bring down the Pan Am Jumbo Jet. With the loss of so many American lives the mea culpa of an admission to human error would have been guaranteed to cut very little ice among the public they served. What action might they have contemplated? Within hours of the atrocity numerous personnel in US Government service were engaged across the crash site in various unexplained activities not necessarily connected with assisting the regular police or AAIB officials. In whose receptive ear might Khreesat’s controllers have whispered? In one of the last acts of his presidency Ronald Reagan, a dyed-in-the-wool enemy of Colonel Gaddafi, extended sanctions against Libya and threatened renewed bombing raids. The date was 28 December, 1988, a mere seven days after Lockerbie, when there was as yet no evidence ostensibly pointing to Libyan culpability. Diversion of the finger of accusation away from Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC certainly suited those in the US Government who were seeking the release of American hostages held captive in the Lebanon and was also beneficial in gaining Iranian and Syrian support for the coalition action against Iraq in the liberation of Kuwait. But that is another story (see eg Davina Miller “Who Knows about this? Western Policy towards Iran: the Lockerbie Case,” University of Bradford Dept of Peace Studies, 2011). It will have become apparent from the analysis of the evidence before the court offered here that wherever the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was built the Samsonite hardshell bag in which it was packed could not have come from Luqa as an anonymous item of baggage on KM180, or from Frankfurt on PA103A. It should have been “as plain as a pikestaff” that it was brought to Heathrow by means devoid of risk to the perpetrators and guaranteed to succeed. It was almost certainly built by the PFLP-GC and planted by that faction with Iranian government help. Quite why the judges lost sight of the wood for the trees is not a matter which warrants conjecture. That they did so is beyond doubt. When asked by Lord Maclean to confirm that al-Megrahi’s Abdusamad passport was never used again after 21 December 1988 William Taylor QC said “we don’t know that,” to which Lord Maclean riposted “Yes I do” and gave the reference. The judge got the acerbic reply he truly deserved: “Thank you. I am corrected. So Your Lordship has asked me a question to which Your Lordship already had the answer.” The application of a sight more judicial cleverness and rather less too cleverness by half might have delivered a true verdict.
There is little doubt that both the Scottish and UK governments are aware of the farce which represents the case against al-Megrahi. Yet both HMG and the Scottish government are in a deep quandary. Although the Libyans had handed over al-Megrahi in 1999 they had been under considerable pressure to do so; al-Megrahi and Fihma had obviously been treated by them as expendable. Now, with al-Megrahi terminally ill and Gaddafi having re-established his international credentials, the Libyans had regained sufficient confidence to demand that al-Megrahi be allowed to come home to die. Realpolitik decreed that the two British governments could ill afford to ignore those enormous financial pressures implicit in the Libyan position. They knew the case against al-Megrahi personally was built on sand. The problem was that the appeal was taking its time and even if al-Megrahi survived until the end of the proceedings there was by no means any guarantee that the appeal judges would depart from the position of the 2001 trial judges or those who had heard the original appeal. As the two governments no doubt wryly viewed the scenario, it was by no means inconceivable that the judges would once again stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that two previous tribunals had been so obviously wrong. However, there was an undoubted problem if the Scottish government simply cut the Gordian knot and ordered the Crown Office to drop its resistance to the appeal, rather than clinging on to the forlorn hope that the judges might do the job for them. If after so many years maintaining that al-Megrahi was guilty the Scottish government (with Whitehall behind them) at the eleventh hour now suddenly did an about face and pre-empted the court’s decision both governments would inevitably be condemned as in thrall to Libyan oil money. The Americans in particular would have been outraged, seeing such a decision as usurping the proper function of the judges, circumventing the justice system and clearly smacking of giving in to Libyan economic pressure. From the point of view of squaring conscience (freeing a man against whom there was little evidence of guilt) and of realpolitik (satisfying Libyan demands and thereby facilitating trade opportunities to the obvious advantage of the British public) the perfect solution was the compromise one of granting compassionate release: the demands of Justice could therefore be camouflaged, or masked, with “Mercy.” It will doubtless be suggested that the conjectures advanced here derive purely from behind the fevered brow of the present writer, with no inspiration from any external source. So be it.
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