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Wreckage of Pan Am 103

Six months after the US Navy shot down Iran Air Flight 655, Iran’s leaders enjoyed their revenge.

Four days before Christmas 1988, a Pan Am plane took off from Frankfurt, Germany, connected in London, and began its journey from Heathrow to New York as Pan Am 103. Undetected by Pan Am or airport personnel, a pound and half of explosives was hidden in a Toshiba radio, packed in a Samsonite bag stowed in the forward cargo hold. At 7:03 pm, thirty-eight minutes into the flight to New York, as Pan Am 103 was flying at thirty-one thousand feet over the picturesque town of Lockerbie, Scotland, the bomb detonated. On the ground, residents heard a rumbling noise that seemed to get louder and louder. The blast blew a huge hole in the fuselage, and debris struck the tail assembly. A few seconds later the 747 suffered structural failure. The two-story forward fuselage and flight deck separated from the main cabin. On the ground, residents saw flaming sections of aircraft raining down. They watched in the darkness as the plane, on an uncontrolled descent, disintegrated.

Wreckage crashed into Rosebank Terrace and Sherwood Crescent near Lockerbie. At nearby Dumfries and Galloway, a fire began to spread. All 259 people who had been on board were dead, and by sunrise 11 local residents had been killed in the fire.

Christmas week had been turned into hell. Among the dead were CIA and military covert officers, college students, and citizens trying to get home for the holidays. The emotions of the season and the multinational character of the disaster created an outcry in Europe and the United States.

The once venerable Pan Am, already in financial trouble, would be sent into a death spiral as failures in its security and baggage-screening process emerged. The feckless Federal Aviation Administration, long under the thumb of a Congress dominated by airline lobbyists, promised reform. Much as his son would do after 9/11, President George H. W. Bush stubbornly refused to form a presidential panel to examine the security breakdown. Only after seven months of organizing by the families of the victims, and with heavy media and political pressure, did the new Bush administration relent and appoint a seven-member commission to look into the bombing.

The reason the Bush administration was reluctant to allow Pan Am 103 to be fully investigated is that the government did not want to provide secret intelligence records that would have revealed U.S. complicity with Iran since 1980. An investigation might expose the secret, strange, and often incomprehensible behavior between the United States and Iran that would embarrass the administration as well as expose secret US intelligence relationships. The Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie was but one manifestation of these covert operations.

CIA director William Casey’s efforts to reach out to Iran began when he was campaign director for the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign. For six years Casey and his colleagues hid these relationships by using Israel as an intermediary with the Iranians. At the same time, Vice President George H. W. Bush headed the effort to support Iran’s sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, in the bloody Iran–Iraq War. These were secret operations. During this entire time frame, the Reagan/Bush White House and the intelligence agencies made Libya the focus of public attention for almost all terrorist acts committed in the 1980s, much like the last Bush administration made Saddam Hussein the villain in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.

To avoid criticism that the United States was doing business with terrorists should the secret negotiations with Iran be exposed, the CIA participated in a bizarre campaign to divert blame for terrorist acts from Iran and Iran’s surrogate, Hezbollah, to Libya. If there was a comprehensive investigation into the Pan Am 103 tragedy, everything might be exposed — even the fact that the CIA had recruited a family of Beirut criminals to pretend to be a Libyan terrorist cell operating in Europe.

The major behind-the-scenes player in all this activity was the former number two man in covert operations at the CIA, Theodore G. Shackley. Before he was forced out of the CIA during the Carter administration, Shackley had planted the CIA’s top business asset, Edwin Wilson, in Libya to spy on the regime and had used him to great effect. In the early Reagan years, Shackley’s meetings with the Iranians began the process that became known as Iran-Contra. But the White House and CIA’s secret dealings in the Middle East were bound to fail. The CIA’s main conduit to Iran had close ties to Hezbollah, and he cooperated with this terrorist group in Lebanon, often with deadly results for Americans.

At the same time, the Reagan-Bush administration knew how to manipulate events because the FBI had recruited a key Libyan source. A top Libyan official shared information with the United States. The FBI successfully recruited the chief of the Libyan United Nations delegation, Dr. Ali A. Treiki, a Bedouin who missed the Sahara Desert so much that in 1983 he hired an Italian designer to re-create his homeland on the top floor of Libya House, a twenty-four-story building at 309 East 48th Street in New York. He used a huge aqua-and-peach tent to entertain.

Casey operated so informally that he used agents who had been discarded by the CIA years before. George Whitman, a man with a huge ego as well as CIA, Mossad, and publishing connections, was responsible for recruiting Treiki and convincing him to supply information to US intelligence and arrange access to Libya’s encrypted message traffic.  Helping William Casey with the Treki operation was William Zylka, who had been a business asset of the CIA for years.  The CIA had dropped Whitman in the 1960s after it learned that he had been recruited by Israeli intelligence. After a stint at AIG, the insurance giant, and with one foot in the New York literary world, Whitman was picked up by Casey in the early 1980s to conduct “back-pocket operations.” After Zylka was used to win Treki’s confidence, Whitman ran a darker side of the operation.

Whitman needed the New York FBI’s cooperation because it was responsible for all surveillance of United Nations missions. “Whitman,” according to an FBI official who worked with him, “looks like out of Central Casting.” Whitman made the FBI approach by volunteering to speak about intelligence at the FBI’s training center at Quantico and later convinced the FBI to finance and let him work the Treiki recruitment. Using information from another Casey business operative, Whitman became Treiki’s case officer.

Whitman and the FBI uncovered Treiki’s relationship with a blond prostitute, whom he used to meet at the Palace Hotel in New York. It turned out that her pimp had a history of filming his heroin-addicted call girl’s clients and blackmailing them. When the FBI interceded on Treiki’s behalf, he agreed to remain in place and not defect to the United States.

At the same time in the mid-1980s the FBI and the National Security Agency got routine access to the code room at Libya House and replaced circuit boards in secret communications computers. This allowed the United States to monitor everything sent back and forth to Tripoli.

When Libya agreed to cooperate and coordinate with Iran on terrorist operations, that put Libyan President Muammar Qadhafi right where Iran needed him for the revenge attack against the United States for the Iran 665 shoot-down.

For the victims and their families in Iran, Scotland, and the United States, the whole truth would be secondary to protecting state secrets — even if it was those very secrets that had caused their family members’ deaths.

When the Pan Am 103 commissioners finally brought in their report, in 1990, they were adamant in concluding that the bombing could have been prevented and that there “are gaping holes throughout the system.” They charged that the FAA had failed to keep pace with changing times. “At a time when bombings already had become the preferred method for terrorists, the security program was still aimed largely at preventing hijackings. There were shortcomings in virtually all areas . . .” The 182-page commission report called for a complete remodeling of US airline security. That did not happen.

To this day, the United States has not released files on secret military, DEA and other intelligence operations smuggling drugs and other contraband from the Middle East, through Europe and into the United States. Time magazine reported in 1992 that a team of agents operating in Lebanon to help secure release of American hostages were on board Pan Am 103 returning to the United States. Time wrote:

Almost immediately after the Pan Am bombing, which killed the 259 people aboard the plane and 11 more on the ground, the prime suspect was Ahmed Jibril, the roly-poly boss of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (P.F.L.P.-G.C.). Two months earlier, West German police had arrested 16 members of his terrorist organization. Seized during the raids was a plastic bomb concealed in a Toshiba cassette player, similar to the one that blew up Flight 103. There was other evidence pointing to Jibril. His patron was Syria. His banker for the attack on the Pan Am plane appeared to be Iran. U.S. intelligence agents even traced a wire transfer of several million dollars to a bank account in Vienna belonging to the P.F.L.P.-G.C. Iran's motive seemed obvious enough. The previous July, the U.S.S. Vincennes had mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf, killing all 298 aboard.

President Bush's remarks triggered an outcry from the victims' families, who claimed that pointing the finger at Libya was a political ploy. Photo: The Whitehouse

Suddenly, last November, the U.S. Justice Department blamed the bombing on two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah. The scenario prompted President Bush to remark, "The Syrians took a bum rap on this." It also triggered an outcry from the victims' families, who claimed that pointing the finger at Libya was a political ploy designed to reward Syria for siding with the U.S. in the gulf war and to help win the release of the hostages. Even Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's investigation of the bombing, told the New York Times it was "outrageous" to pin the whole thing on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

US intelligence fed the media stories like GOLDENROD and imprisoned airline hijacker Fawaz Younis to protect more important and profitable sources and operations. By 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, Libya agreed in principle to pay compensation to relatives of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing.  A minister in Colonel Gaddafi’s government – African affairs minister Ali al-Treiki – told the pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper in New York that “as a matter of principle” Libya accepted the idea of compensating victims’ families because it was a demand of the UN Security Council.

Libya said it admitted responsibility for Pan Am 103 and agreed to compensate American victims to get sanctions lifted. By 2004 the United States normalized relations with Libya after it renounced its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. On August 20, 2009, Scottish authorities released on humanitarian grounds Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The BBC reported that oil companies’ interests in Libya played a role in the deliberations.

Iran’s leadership was so distrustful of the US alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia that a decision was taken to spend its oil money on advanced weapons systems that could inflict real damage on the United States should the Americans decide to attack Iran.

Even though Iran was an embargoed state and was technically not able to buy weapons, the Iranian leadership had managed to buy hundreds of millions of dollars in spare parts for the Shah’s old weapons systems from Israel during the 1980s and the eight-year-long war with Iraq. Many of these weapons came through a notorious Syrian arms dealer. Through him, Iran made a connection to China and contracted with them to build a new series of sophisticated anti-ship cruise missiles that the Chinese assured Iran could present a real threat against the US Navy in the Gulf. Because it would be several years before the missiles were ready, as an interim solution, the Iranians bought from North Korea truck-launched Silkworm missiles to protect the entrance to the Persian Gulf at the Straits of Hormuz. The Iranians also cut a series of deals with North Korea and US ally Pakistan to purchase multi-stage rockets with the hope of improving their SCUD missile capabilities.

American intelligence understood Iran was expanding its military. Dr. A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, took money from Saudi Arabia and skimmed money from the covert US program to arm the mujahedin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union that was being run by Pakistan’s intelligence service and poured it all into his crash program to build the first “Islamic nuclear bomb.” Khan’s efforts were fully known to the Pakistani government. Both the Carter and Reagan administrations had ignored the issue of nuclear proliferation by Pakistan in exchange for cooperation in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Because US intelligence officials were told not to monitor these activities, Iran was permitted to pursue its own nuclear weapons program. US officers who tried to officially put an end to Pakistan’s activities were punished at the highest levels of our government.

By the time President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council team was in place it was fully aware of Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation activities. Both the CIA and MI6, British intelligence, claimed that it had penetrated and was carefully monitoring what had become a worldwide proliferation network. Yet both intelligence services refused to stop it.

Three machine gunners stand guard at an entry control point in Sarajevo during Operation Joint Endeavor. Photo by Staff Sergeant Andy Dunaway

By the mid-1990s, Iran, like the United States, was focused on Bosnia where Muslim minorities were under full assault in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Lebanese and other Middle Eastern terrorists were now moving to Central Europe to wage jihad. Technically, the U.S. and Iran were on the same side, trying to protect Muslims in the conflict, but to Iran or its surrogate, Hezbollah, it was a distinction without a difference.

In Bosnia, Issa Abdullah, the American who travels freely in and out of the country even though he has been sighted at various terrorist attacks, was lying in wait to organize an even bigger blow against the United States.

In Iran, the mullahs were positioning the country to take back control of the Persian Gulf, share weapons with its allies, and develop their own Shi’a nuclear capabilities.