Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons

LOCKERBIE

LOCKERBIE The Story and the Lessons Rodney Wallis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wallis, Rodney, 1933– Lockerbie : the story and the lessons / Rodney Wallis. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–275–96493–0 (alk. paper) 1. Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Incident, 1988. 2. Bombing investigation—Scotland—Lockerbie. 3. Terrorism—United States— Case studies. 4. Terrorism—Europe—Case studies. 5. Victims of terrorism—Scotland—Lockerbie—Case studies. I. Title. HV6431.W35 2001 363.12'465'0941483—dc21 98–53392 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright
2001 by Rodney Wallis All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98–53392 ISBN: 0–275–96493–0 First published in 2001 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the memory of all victims of airborne terrorism.

CONTENTS Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi xiii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Sabotage

Chapter 2

Growing Threat of Terrorism

17

Chapter 3

Bombing of Pan Am 103

27

Chapter 4

Search and Recovery

37

Chapter 5

Governmental Inquiries

45

Chapter 6

Indictments

59

Chapter 7

Families’ Search for the Truth

67

Chapter 8

Trial: Fact Witnesses

81

Chapter 9

Trial: Deposition Witnesses

103

Chapter 10

Trial: Expert Testimony

123

Chapter 11

The Appeals

135

Chapter 12

Conspiracy Theories

143

Chapter 13

Post-Lockerbie

149

Epilogue

167

Index

171

PREFACE Many times during the ten years following the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the Maid of the Seas, I was asked questions about its loss. How could terrorists have breached civil aviation’s defenses so carefully put together following an earlier assault on a passenger jetliner? Who was at fault? Why hadn’t those guilty of this crime been brought to trial? Could this kind of tragedy happen again? Those seeking answers have had divergent reasons for doing so. They have included television journalists, newspaper reporters, friends, and acquaintances who know of my role in helping to combat aviation terrorism over a time period spanning three decades. Most importantly, the questions had been asked by the families of those who died over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. Millions of words had been written and spoken on the subject of Pan Am 103, yet still the questions were asked. One aim of this book is to bring together in a single volume the facts, as I know them, surrounding the destruction of the Maid of the Seas. The text draws on various governmental and other inquiries into the bombing and on the testimony considered by the jury at the consolidated liability trial held in New York. This must be so since I have sought to present an objective text. A second aim is to provide a case study from which lessons for the future may be learned from mistakes of the past. Following the loss of an Air India Boeing 747, the Kanishka, over the Atlantic Ocean in 1985, the Honorable Mr. Justice B. N. Kirpal, on behalf of the Indian government, headed a judicial inquiry into the tragedy and prepared a detailed report of his findings. He put forward a series of recommendations with the intent that governments and commercial entities with responsibility for civil aviation operations would study them and through their use, find a

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way to effectively combat aviation terrorism. It may be argued that his efforts failed, because Lockerbie was a carbon copy of the Kanishka bombing. In many ways, preparing this volume has been an extension of Justice Kirpal’s work. Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons seeks to expand readers’ understanding of aviation security through consideration of a single tragic incident. It could also be regarded as a continuation of the task given to me two decades ago by Knut Hammarskjold, then director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). He asked me to lead the international air transport industry’s fight against airborne terrorism. Air travel can be made infinitely more secure than it was in 1988, or is today. This book is offered in the hope that the story it tells will assist those now responsible for commercial aviation operations. The destruction of the Maid of the Seas will be recalled whenever atrocities are perpetrated against U.S. citizens. The media coverage of the appalling events in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, when the U.S. embassies in these cities were bombed, was the latest evidence of this. Parallels were drawn with the tragedy of Pan Am Flight 103, and the familiar images appeared once more on the front pages of newspapers. Lockerbie is unlikely to be consigned to the files of history while international terrorism flourishes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgment is due to the tireless and largely anonymous efforts of those rapporteurs whose meticulous reporting of proceedings during the consolidated liability trial before Chief Judge Platt so facilitated research for this book. As a witness, I added somewhat to their onerous task. Similar thanks are due to those government and administrative officials who produced the reports covering the various aspects of the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103. The results of their work, like the trial transcripts, are now part of the public record and all are worthy of study by any student of aviation management and international relations. Finally, thanks are due to my editors, Heather Ruland Staines and Lynn Zelem of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., whose efforts were most appreciated.

INTRODUCTION ‘‘The tragedy which overtook Pan Am 103 was a disaster simply waiting to happen.’’ A New York jury heard these words spoken three and a half years after Pan Am Flight 103, the Maid of the Seas, had been blown up by a terrorist bomb 30,000 feet above the Scottish border town of Lockerbie; 259 passengers and crew died on board the sabotaged aircraft; 11 townsfolk lost their lives when debris from the wreck fell on their homes. After a trial lasting six weeks, the jury found Pan American World Airlines guilty of wilful misconduct over the bombing of their aircraft. The destruction of Pan Am 103 has been the subject of a U.S. presidential commission. It became the focus of the biggest murder hunt in history. The disaster has undergone examination in Scotland by a Fatal Accident Inquiry (a form of inquest) chaired by a sheriff principal (a judge). It has been the subject of extensive civil litigation in the United States which, through the strenuous and committed efforts of the lawyers representing the victims’ families, delved deeply into the causes of the incident. My own part in this litigation culminated in four days spent on the witness stand, first as a fact witness, then in an expert capacity. The following chapters seek to provide an objective text covering all the foregoing together with other events arising before, during, and after the bombing. The reader will learn that intelligence material available to the carrier and the U.S. and British governments before the bombing warned of an impending attack. The text discusses the human and corporate weaknesses and other failings that created the window of opportunity so wickedly exploited by the bombers. Various conspiracy theories have arisen surrounding the bombing of Pan Am 103. They are discussed in the later pages of the text, beginning with a Time magazine

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article published immediately before the trial opened in New York. This book will suggest that if any conspiracy exists, it may well be one initiated after the event by the principal governments concerned who, for a long time and for what may be justifiable reasons, never gave the appearance of earnestly seeking a way to bring the men indicted for the bombing before a court of justice. It will be shown that successive UK ministers have misled both Parliament and the people with their statements on the tragedy. Lessons provided by the disaster should have ensured the future safety of air travelers against a similar act of terrorism. However, in 1997, an influential voice suggested that ‘‘history has proven the aviation industry’s lack of sincerity and willingness to address safety and security on behalf of their customers.’’ Commissioner Victoria Cummock’s opinion was given in a letter of dissent to the report of the 1996/7 White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. This body had been established by President Bill Clinton following the loss in unexplained circumstances of another aging U.S. Boeing 747. In its closing chapter, this book will show that in some countries and within some airlines, sincerity and willingness do exist and that much has been done to improve aviation security. This commentary will help soften the opinion offered by Commissioner Cummock, but relative to many national scenarios, it will not contradict her. Indeed, support for the commissioner’s position may be inferred from a letter sent by Costas Pereira, secretary general of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), to the world’s civil aviation authorities. In April 1998, almost ten years after the Lockerbie tragedy, he warned that uniform and consistent implementation of the ICAO’s security standards and recommended practices was less than satisfactory. The ICAO has tried, along with the airlines’ trade association, IATA, to ensure that the threat from acts of terrorism is understood. Costas Pereira has warned that the threat to civil aviation should not be underestimated. Incidents during the second half of the decade should have made such a warning redundant. In 1995, a plot to bomb multiple U.S. aircraft operating in the Far East was only narrowly averted. In 1996, an attempt to place an explosive device on board an All Nippon Airways aircraft was foiled when the bomber failed to board. His unaccompanied bag was identified and off-loaded. It contained an explosive device. Tragically, also in 1996, 123 people died when a hijacked Ethiopian Airways aircraft crashed into the Indian Ocean. It had run out of fuel during the seizure. In 1997, fifteen acts of unlawful interference were committed against civil aviation targets, a pattern repeated in 1998. Acts of terrorism are facts of everyday life. They occur on every continent and in the skies above them. Terrorism directed against civil aviation targets will not go away, yet the lessons that should have been learned from the tragedy of Lockerbie are still frequently going unheeded. By the end of this volume, readers will be able to judge for themselves the size of the shortfall and be able to compare where the air transport industry stood with respect to security in December 1988 and where it stands today.

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The Lockerbie story can be concluded only when all those responsible for the loss of the Maid of the Seas have been brought to justice. The victims’ families will be able to rest only when civil aviation at large conscientiously adopts procedures aimed at preventing similar criminal attacks on innocent air travelers. In neither case are we there yet!

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SABOTAGE As the air traffic control clock at London’s Heathrow airport showed twenty-five minutes past six on the evening of 21 December 1988, a Boeing 747 of the Pan American World Airways fleet slowly began its takeoff run along runway 27R. The plane, Maid of the Seas, was cleared to climb to its initial flight level as it headed for Scotland before turning west toward its destination, New York. At three minutes past seven, the Shanwick Oceanic Control despatched a clearance message telling the pilot-in-command that he could begin his trans-Atlantic crossing. During the radio transmission, a secondary radar reading from the aircraft disappeared from the air traffic controller’s screen. The message was not acknowledged. As controllers monitored their visual display units, multiple readings began to appear and spread downwind. The Maid of the Seas was an aging aircraft, one of the early marques of the Boeing 747, which had become the long-haul workhorse of most international airlines. Piloted by an able and experienced captain with a seasoned crew, the aircraft had 259 people on board, a number of whom had joined the flight at Heathrow, having flown into London’s principal airport from Frankfurt. As the passengers settled down for their ocean crossing and the aircraft was passing 31,000 feet above the small Scottish border town of Lockerbie, it exploded. The aircraft’s shattered remains became the multiple readings monitored in horror by the air traffic controllers. Pan Am 103 bound from London to New York had become the victim of a terrorist bomb. All 259 people on board the aircraft died together with 11 townsfolk of Lockerbie, killed as the debris fell on their homes. It was a tragedy that should never have happened. Investigations were to show that the methodology used by the terrorists was a known one. It had been used to

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bring down an Air India jumbojet, the Kanishka, three years earlier, and countermeasures to prevent such bombings existed. Furthermore, prior warning of an attack on Pan Am had been received directly by U.S. authorities. The warning detailed the route of the aircraft and the intended timescale of the attack. Pan Am 103 was destroyed, and 270 people died as a result of avoidable human failures and irresponsible corporate decision making. A court in New York was to hear later that the airline had abandoned the passengers and crew on board the Maid of the Seas to the worst ravages of international terrorism. To fully understand the depth of the Lockerbie tragedy, it is necessary to review the environment in which civil aviation, especially U.S. civil aviation, was operating at the time of the bombing. Even a brief study will show that the terrorists had posted sufficient signs to warn the air transport industry that their operations were at risk. 1982: PAN AM UNDER-SEAT BOMBS The year 1982 was a watershed year for terrorism directed against U.S. civil air services. At that time, much of the world, certainly the countries in the Western Hemisphere, equated airborne terrorism with Palestinian groups supported by Syria, Iran, and Libya. There were other recognized hot spots such as the Indian subcontinent, and the cold war still caused certain Western politicians to criticize the Soviet Union as supporters of acts of terror. Few facts ever emerged to support the latter position, but it was a flavor of the month. Other ethnic and political troubles in a number of countries around the world had the potential to spill over to affect commercial aviation, but the majority of airline security managers focused their attention on the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The incidents involving the two principal U.S. carriers, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and Trans World Airlines (TWA), certainly had their origins with groups affiliated to the Palestinian cause. Thus the Middle East lay center stage in most debates on terrorism. Israel had long been the object of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) hatred, but hostility toward Israel was not the unilateral prerogative of the PLO. Others saw the Israeli retention of Arab lands gained through wars and the suppression of the Palestinian people as a wrong that had to be righted. Overt military action had been tried by Arab states to remedy the situation, but this had failed, leading to the creation of fertile fields in which the seeds of terrorism were sown and harvested. Guerrilla-style warfare became the modus operandi of the groups springing up in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, but Israeli targets proved difficult to hit, and the repercussions such attacks provoked were harsh, invariably exceeding the damage of the original strike. The terrorist groups looked for surrogate targets and turned their attention to the United States. The United States was perceived as providing unquestioned support to Israel throughout the decades following the establishment of the Jewish state. By extension, Americans were seen as supporting Israeli ‘‘aggression.’’ U.S. targets were considered

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viable and acceptable alternatives to Israeli ones. They were soft options, the most vulnerable and certainly the most newsworthy of which was the U.S. international commercial airline network. To most of the world, and certainly to the terrorist groups, this meant Pan Am and TWA. These were the airlines at most risk. In 1982, Pan Am was twice attacked with hand-carried bombs planted in the cabins of their aircraft. Immediate reaction was to place the blame at the door of Middle East terrorists. Two main points of discussion were initiated within aviation and security circles: firstly the methodology, the use of hand-carried bombs intended to blow up aircraft in midflight, and secondly, the locations. They were turning points in airborne terrorism, suggesting to the air transport industry the unpalatable fact that people and groups existed who were prepared to and capable of committing acts of mass murder far away from their primary operating bases. The first attack was on 11 August. The aircraft, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, was flying from Tokyo to Honolulu. A pressure-initiated time bomb had been secreted underneath a passenger seat, where it was detonated by an unfortunate sixteen-yearold Japanese boy who unknowingly activated the bomb’s timing mechanism when he sat down. By chance, the explosive charge had been positioned so that the shock waves, when the device was detonated, traveled longitudinally toward the front and the rear of the aircraft. This placement undoubtedly saved the lives of everyone on board, other than the young boy occupying the fatal seat. His leg was severed and he died instantly. However, had the bomb been positioned so that the shock waves went latitudinally, they may well have caused the skin of the aircraft to rupture. Had this happened, the list of fatalities could well have included everyone on board. Two weeks later, a second potentially fatal attack was prevented by an alert member of Pan Am’s maintenance staff in Rio de Janeiro. A cleaner found a bomb on an aircraft during a routine operation prior to takeoff. The recovery of the second bomb gave experts from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) an unprecedented opportunity to examine the latest piece of terrorist technology. The improvised explosive device (IED) measured some twelve inches by four inches by half an inch with sophisticated timing devices built in, capable of being set many hours ahead of the desired detonation time. The nature of the construction showed that the device was intended to explode after takeoff, hence the easily drawn conclusion that mass murder had become a tool of international air terrorism. The explosive charge was sheet plastic explosive of a type manufactured in Czechoslovakia and known commercially as Semtex. The power source comprised pencil-type batteries with a detonator, an essential element of any improvised explosive device. The timing mechanism was intended to be activated by the pressure of a passenger’s body weight when he or she sat down. The device was replicated by the FAA and FBI at the former’s technical center in Atlantic City, and controlled tests were initiated. IEDs, similar to the one found at Rio, were detonated inside the fuselage of a DC 10 aircraft to simulate the effects of the blast. What was learned led to new security regulations being introduced. The man who undertook a lead role in the investigation of the under-seat bombs

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was Walter Korsgaard. He was to play a similar role on behalf of the FAA in all the major bombing incidents involving U.S. airlines throughout the 1980s. Following the Lockerbie tragedy, he became a leading figure in the investigation and eventually, a fact witness during the civil litigation brought in New York by the families of the Maid of the Seas victims. Shortly after the two 1982 incidents, devices similar to the Pan Am bombs were delivered to the police in Switzerland. They were linked to the 15th May terrorist organization based in Baghdad, Iraq. Intelligence services believed the technology had been passed to other terrorists, notably Ahmed Jibril, whose name was to be directly associated with the Lockerbie bombing six years later. Jibril’s known links to Libya were also significant with respect to the loss of Pan Am 103. At the time of the Pan Am under-seat bomb attacks, the newly appointed director of the Office of Aviation Security at the FAA was Billie H. Vincent. Vincent was a long-serving official within the Federal Aviation Administration, having joined the Civil Aeronautics Administration (the predecessor of the FAA) in 1957. His particular area of expertise was air traffic control, but specialist training at the Air Force War College and within the FAA executive management, together with participation in legislative fellowship programs, pushed him into increasingly senior posts within the administration. In May 1982, he was appointed acting director of the Office of Civil Aviation Security and confirmed in that position two months later. He remained in this post until July 1986. These were formative years in the development of the FAA’s security policy in place at the time of Lockerbie. Following discussions with the airlines, Vincent published recommendations to deal with the threat posed by under-seat bombs. They required U.S. air carriers operating on international routes to search the cabins of aircraft and in particular, to lift the seat cushions and look under them before passengers boarded. Despite the consultation and the fact that a second disaster had been averted by just such a procedure, there was an outcry from the airlines because of the cost penalties they perceived arising from such a process. The airline lobby was to prove effective, and the recommendation was rescinded in October, two months after its introduction, although it remained an option the carriers could follow. A New York court was to ponder these decisions some time later when lawyers representing those killed in an attack on TWA in 1986 brought an action against the airline. TWA had failed to find an under-seat bomb during a stopover in Rome. The rest of the world’s airlines were eager to learn as much as they could from the Pan Am attacks. They sought to do this through the trade association of the world’s commercial airlines, the International Air Transport Association (IATA). As early as 1967, Knut Hammarskjold, then director general of the IATA, had established a special security body, the Security Advisory Committee (SAC), within his organization and for the next twenty years, the SAC developed collective airline policies for combating aviation terrorism. The SAC was given the terms of reference and the powers of a special committee of the international organization, making it a powerful and preeminent body with direct access to the men who ran the world’s airlines. The SAC’s recommendations gained mandatory status through resolutions

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adopted by the full membership of the association at its annual general meetings. Multinational in its compilation, the SAC’s makeup was representative of the geographic and ethnic groups whose airlines constituted the IATA membership. By the time of the Pan Am attacks, your author had been the director of security at the IATA for two years. The SAC came under his charge. The committee met in Athens shortly after the Pan Am bomb incidents. Athens had been chosen as the venue for the meeting to enable the assembled airline specialists to meet with the Greek civil aviation authorities. The IATA wanted to press on the local authorities the need for tighter security at the city’s Hellinikon airport, which had been linked to many terrorist incidents throughout the preceding years. It was to continue to feature as such until the middle of the decade, when IATA recommendations were finally adopted and Hellinikon became one of Europe’s safest airports. The majority view among the IATA’s members was that U.S. airlines were under a greater threat from acts of terrorism than most of their competitors. By ‘‘U.S. airlines,’’ the international carriers meant Pan Am and TWA. They were among the great names of international civil aviation and had played a principal role in developing international air transport into the major industry it had become. Their preeminence among the U.S. international air carriers and the nature of their routes made them obvious targets for Middle East–based terrorists. Other airlines reasoned that if cabin bombs could be used to attack U.S. carriers, they could be used against the rest of the industry. This position was as prophetic as it was obvious. The attack in 1986 on TWA mentioned previously was followed by another in 1987, when a hand-carried device was detonated with calamitous effect on board a Korean Air 707 over the Andaman Sea. All 115 people on board died. THE TWA BOMB The under-seat bomb used to attack Trans World Airways blew a hole in the side of TWA Flight 840. The aircraft, a Boeing 727, was operating an Eastern Mediterranean shuttle service. It had begun its day in Cairo before flying to Rome via Athens. It was on its way back from Rome to Athens and descending toward the Greek airport when the explosion occurred at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The IED did not incorporate a pressure mechanism as the earlier Pan Am devices had done. Instead it was a simple time bomb. It had been positioned so that the blast hit the fabric of the aircraft, but although it resulted in a hole, four feet in diameter, being blown in the side of the aircraft, the low altitude and the resulting reduced pressure differentiation between the air in the cabin and that outside the aircraft prevented greater damage. Even so, the male passenger sitting in seat 10F where the bomb had been placed was killed instantly, and three others occupying the row behind, a young mother and her small baby and the baby’s grandmother, were killed as the rapid decompression dragged them from inside the aircraft. They fell to their deaths. An investigation pointed to a Lebanese woman as the culprit. She had boarded the aircraft in Cairo and had flown on the aircraft to Athens, where she disembarked

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to connect with a flight to Beirut. Investigators believed the woman carried the components through the security screening points at Cairo, putting them together to form the bomb after she had boarded the aircraft. Evidence suggested the IED was based in a Sony Walkman radio, which the woman was known to have had in her possession, and to have incorporated Semtex as the explosive charge. It is thought the woman wore the thin strip of Semtex in the manner of a sanitary napkin, thus evading the security screening procedures at the airport. A simple timing device ensured the bomb exploded while the aircraft was in flight during a subsequent leg of its journey. THE KOREAN VARIATION The cabin-loaded bomb that detonated on board the Korean Air Boeing 707 claimed the lives of 115 people. They died over the Andaman Sea while flying from Baghdad to Seoul in South Korea. The terrorists responsible for the destruction of the aircraft with its massive loss of life were very quickly identified by investigators. Within hours of the disaster, they were arrested at Bahrain International Airport, where they had flown from Abu Dhabi, a stopover on the Korean aircraft’s route to Seoul. One of the two, a male, identified as Kim Sung-il and traveling under the alias of Shinichi Hachiya, committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill. He was, the South Korean authorities alleged, an agent of the North Korean Workers Party. His compatriot, whose suicide attempt failed, was named as Kim Hyon-hui, traveling as Mayumi Hachiya. The pair were posing as father and daughter. The latter described how they had taken liquid explosives on board the aircraft disguised as alcohol. A radio had been used to hide the detonating device. The couple had placed the combined package in an overhead rack and simply left it there when they disembarked. Both the Korean Air and TWA bombs were hand-carried devices, positioned on the aircraft and left on board after the bombers left the vehicle. They represented one known terrorist methodology. Before these incidents occurred and just one year after the Pan Am under-seat bombs that had identified the vulnerability of airlines to aerial bombers, an event took place in Istanbul that was to have even greater relevance to the Lockerbie disaster. THE YESILKOY INCIDENT In 1983, a security procedure at Istanbul’s Yesilkoy airport required that all baggage being carried on board international services had to be matched against the passengers traveling on the same aircraft. If bags were found to be present but without a related passenger, they were put to one side. They could not travel. On 29 December 1983, an Alitalia flight was due to depart for Rome. The baggage check revealed that one bag could not be linked to a passenger on the aircraft. It was isolated, and subsequent physical examination uncovered a bomb secreted inside. The bag had been labeled to travel to Rome, where it was scheduled to connect with

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a Pan Am flight heading for the United States. Had the bomb not been discovered by the procedures in place at Istanbul, an earlier ‘‘Lockerbie’’ would have overtaken the airline. Despite the Yesilkoy incident, an FAA-mandated requirement for all U.S. airlines to match passengers and their baggage at designated extraordinary-risk airports had been abandoned by Pan Am in 1988. The air carrier dropped the procedure at Frankfurt and London just months before the Maid of the Seas was bombed. Both airports had been listed as airports of extraordinary risk by the FAA. The Yesilkoy security success was repeated a few years later in Southern India. A former director of security for Air Canada, Ed Johnson, a long-serving member of the IATA SAC but acting on this occasion as an adviser to the Sri Lankan authorities, caused the Air Lanka management to implement a baggage identification procedure for their services. It was a system identical to that employed at Yesilkoy. This, too, caused an unaccompanied bag to be identified. It should have been taken to an isolated position, but the handling agency staff at Madras airport, where the aircraft was preparing to depart, wrongly and tragically returned the bag to the terminal building, where it exploded. An aircraft was saved, but considerable damage was caused to the terminal building and more importantly, forty lives were lost. The year 1983 did see the loss of an aircraft to a baggage bomber. A Gulf Air aircraft was destroyed by an in-flight explosion in the baggage hold. Thus several years before the tragedy of Lockerbie, the aviation world knew of the ruthlessness of certain Middle East–based terrorist groups and their capability of using modern explosive technology to attack aircraft in flight. THE AIR INDIA BOMBINGS In 1985 and with knowledge of the incidents in the first half of the decade and of the Turkish procedures, the management of Air India sought to tighten control of baggage security with respect to its services. This followed threats made against the airline. Air India met with the security specialists of Transport Canada in Ottawa, following which, passenger and baggage reconciliation for departures from Canada became part of the carrier’s operating program. Unfortunately, a loophole was left in the procedure. The matching process was applied only to people and baggage joining Air India flights directly, that is, passengers checking in at the airport from which the aircraft was due to depart. The procedure was not put in place for interline passengers, people who had flown on another aircraft to the Air India departure point. Nor did it apply to interline baggage. On 23 June 1985, just such a bag began its journey in Vancouver and was subsequently transferred to the Kanishka, which was waiting to depart from Toronto via Montreal to London and on to Bombay. A judicial inquiry established by the Indian government later ruled that the bag had contained a bomb, which detonated in flight, killing 320 passengers and crew. An investigation identified a passenger who had checked in for the domestic flight from Vancouver to Toronto claiming he wanted to travel on to India from Ontario’s capital city. However, he did not have a confirmed reservation out of Toronto, and

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normal airline policy would have been to check the bag only as far as that city. Once there, it should have been reclaimed by its owner and rechecked for the Air India service if a seat had become available. The check-in agent who accepted the bag at Vancouver was to testify that when she had pointed out the procedure to the passenger, he had become angry—one of the reasons that helped her to recall the incident. She gave in and labeled the bag through to its final destination, Bombay. The passenger did not join the flight to Toronto, but his bag did and was subsequently transferred onto the ill-fated Air India jumbo. Amazingly, the significance of what happened at Toronto escaped and continues to escape the attention of many civil aviation authorities throughout the world. As a later chapter will show, Time magazine overlooked this modus-operandi when publishing theories that sought to link the Lockerbie bombing to a government conspiracy. At Vancouver, the passenger who checked the bomb-carrying bag into the Canadian Pacific (CP) domestic system became a ‘‘no-show’’ passenger when he failed to join the originating flight. His bag was not off-loaded from the CP aircraft but was flown to Toronto, where it was transferred to the Kanishka. At Toronto, because the person who had checked the bag on to the CP flight did not have a confirmed reservation on the Air India service, his failure to join the onward flight was not noted—he was not a no-show passenger. However his suitcase, having been labeled with an interline (transfer) baggage tag showing a journey from Vancouver via Toronto to Bombay, was transferred. There was no reconciliation of the bag with any passenger. As the bomb bag that was destined to destroy the Kanishka was being flown to rendezvous with the ill-fated aircraft, a second device, also hidden in an unaccompanied suitcase, was winging its way to Tokyo. Like the Kanishka bag, this one had been checked in at Vancouver, but once again, the passenger failed to join the flight. The bomb detonated at the Narita airport in Tokyo, Japan, when the suitcase was being transferred from the CP aircraft, which had carried it across the Pacific, to the connecting Air India service. It killed the two airport workers who were handling the bag. Superficial damage was caused to the area where the device had exploded, and this was still visible when your author visited the scene some time after the incident. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigations were to find direct links between the two incidents. At Narita, Japanese police forensic specialists identified from remains of the device the methodology used by the terrorists. The IED had been concealed in a portable radio. They found enough of the casing to enable the RCMP to trace the article back to its point of sale. Eventually the RCMP were able to bring charges with respect to the Narita bomb against two individuals whom they had identified as the culprits. One, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was arrested in England, having left Canada after the bombings. He was found guilty of complicity in the Narita bombing and was sentenced to ten years in prison. The second wanted man, Talwinder Singh Parmar, escaped. No charges were ever levied in Canada with respect to the Kanishka tragedy.

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INDIAN COURT OF INQUIRY Following the loss of the Air India Boeing 747, the Indian government established a court of inquiry to investigate the causes of the disaster. The court was given ‘‘all the powers of a civil court under the Code of Civil Procedure’’ and was authorized to enforce the attendance of witnesses and compel the production of documents and material objects; and every person required by the Court to furnish any information shall be deemed to be legally bound to do so within the meaning of section 176 of the Indian Penal Code. The role of the court, presided over by the Honorable Mr. Justice B. N. Kirpal, was principally that of an investigatory body. Witnesses were called from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom as well as from India itself. Justice Kirpal’s report noted that as it became apparent during the course of investigation that security would be an important aspect which would require the attention of the Court, Mr. Rodney Wallis, Director, Facilitation and Security, International Air Transport Association was good enough to appear in Court on 24 January, 1986. His testimony on certain aspects of security was recorded in camera by the Court on that date. The expert evidence has been taken into consideration while formulating some of the recommendations. In the report published on 26 February 1986, Justice Kirpal addressed his recommendations directly to the ICAO and its contracting states and to the IATA. Several recommendations were very relevant to the subsequent attack on Pan Am’s Maid of the Seas, but two, in particular, were key. The court urged. the baggage of interlined passengers to be matched with the passengers by the onward carriers before loading the baggage on the aircraft and that all checked baggage, whether it has been screened by X-ray machine or not, should be personally matched and identified with the passengers boarding an aircraft. Any baggage which is not so identified should be off-loaded. This is advisable as examination of the baggage with the help of an X-ray machine has its own limitations and is not foolproof. Some explosives hidden in Radios, Cameras etc. may not be readily detected by such a machine. In fact an explosive not placed in a metallic container will not be detectable by X-ray machine. Similarly, a plastic explosive can be given an innocuous shape or

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form so as to avoid detection by an X-ray. Reliance on an X-ray machine alone may in fact provide a false sense of security. The court recognized that airlines did, knowingly, carry unaccompanied bags for operational reasons. In such instances, the court urged that all unaccompanied baggage should be placed on the aircraft after their contents have been physically checked. RESPONSE TO THE AIR INDIA BOMBINGS The Air India incidents occurred just a few days before a TWA Boeing 727 was hijacked in the Mediterranean. As a result of the seizure, one passenger, an American navy diver, was killed and a number of male passengers subsequently held hostage in Lebanon. The airline security chiefs were called by the IATA to an extraordinary meeting of the SAC in Montreal. Chaired by Lufthansa’s chief of security, Jurgen Loos, it was held amid tight security. Police guards were put at the entrances to the building where the meeting was being held, and sniffer dogs were used to test the premises for possible improvised explosive devices. By this time, suspicions that a Canadian-based Sikh terrorist cell had caused the disaster were already circulating. The publicity given to the airline meeting meant that a further attack, this time against the people forming the SAC, was not beyond the realm of possibility. The meeting, held on 28 June 1985, was attended by Canadian and U.S. government security officials in addition to airline representatives from around the world, but notable absentees were the heads of security of the U.S. airlines, many of whom were based just a short flight away from the Canadian city. Indeed, only one U.S. carrier sent a representative, TWA. The Air India bombings were ‘‘foreign’’ and deemed by the U.S. air operators to be of little relevance to their operations. The key event for most North American carriers was the TWA seizure and the ongoing saga of the hostages held in Lebanon. This was a ‘‘domestic’’ issue to be discussed in Washington. The importance given by the U.S. carriers to the TWA seizure was understandable. It was a major national and media event with daily pictures of the aircraft on the ground at Beirut being shown on all the front pages and on the television news bulletins. One picture destined to become one of the most utilized graphic examples of a hijacking showed the aircraft commander, Captain John Testrake, being held at gunpoint in the cockpit of the seized jet. With a number of American men taken and held hostage in Beirut, the level of emotion created in the United States was certain to give precedence of thought in that country to this criminal act rather than to the Air India incident. Yet it was a gargantuan mistake for the Air India disaster to be afforded only second-level importance by the U.S. airlines. From the loss of the Kanishka came the most significant change in international aviation security standards in the 1980s—the mandatory requirement for passenger and baggage rec-

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onciliation. Failure by Pan Am to implement this procedure was to claim 270 more lives just three years later. THE ICAO STANDARD Both Air India bombings were major debating points at the ICAO when a specially convened Ad Hoc Committee of Experts met in the Montreal headquarters of this specialized agency of the United Nations. They recommended fundamental changes to airline procedures for the security handling of baggage. Bags belonging to ‘‘noshow’’ passengers on international flights (the ICAO does not legislate for domestic services) had to be identified. They were not to be loaded nor transported on aircraft. The new security standard developed by the ICAO for Annex 17, (International Standards and Recommended Practices—Security), to the Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation was published in March 1986. The intent of the new standard was to prevent a repeat of the Air India incident. However, as already discussed in this chapter, at Toronto where the bomb bag that destroyed the Kanishka had been transferred, there had been no booked passenger and thus there could be no ‘‘noshow.’’ The danger from an extraneous bag being infiltrated onto an aircraft had not been covered in the new rule. How could this have happened? Development of standards within the ICAO involves a number of debating levels. For security matters, in 1985, the first level comprised experts nominated to the ad hoc committee (later renamed the Panel of Aviation Security Experts) by their governments or organizations. The second stage was consideration by the organization’s Unlawful Interference Committee, which comprised half the membership of the ICAO Council itself. Its members were not security experts but were the nominated representatives on the ICAO’s ruling body. The third internal tier of debate was the council, which comprised thirty-three representatives drawn from among the full membership of the ICAO. Subsequent to their debate, the process required consultation with all the contracting states of the ICAO before final decision making by the council. It follows that any language contained in the ICAO’s rules is invariably a compromise text, representing the lowest common denominator. The ICAO standards can only ever represent the minimum requirement, and key recommendations are sometimes watered down to a point where they are less than effective. The ICAO’s first attempt at rule making to prevent a repetiton of the Kanishka bombing was just such an example. The intention of the ICAO ad hoc group had been to ensure that no bag traveled on an aircraft when its owner deliberately separated himself or herself from the bag. An exception was to be allowed if the bag was specifically cleared for carriage following the application of additional security controls. The experts wanted to ensure that extraneous bags were not introduced into the airline system. The matching process was to be the primary action; any additional security controls were intended to be applied once a bag had been identified as unaccompanied. However, the text published in the annex as Standard 5.1.4, read:

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Each Contracting State shall establish measures to ensure that operators providing services to or from that State do not place or keep the baggage of passengers who have registered, but have not reported for embarkation, on board the aircraft, without subjecting it to security control. The rule carried a footnote showing that the applicable date was 19 December 1987, but the ICAO recommended that states should implement the substance of the rule as soon as it was feasible and practicable. The published ICAO standard had fallen far short of the intention of the original proponent of the change, the government of Canada. Canada had wanted a total prohibition on the carriage of checked baggage unless it could be proved that the owner was on board. The IATA, on behalf of its members, countered that whenever airlines were responsible for separating passengers and their baggage, they should have discretion in its onward shipment (a factor recognized by the Indian court of inquiry). By definition, such baggage was not considered dangerous. The ICAO accepted the airlines’ argument. Some authorities, following lobbying campaigns by their national airlines, decided that if security controls had been applied to baggage prior to the discovery of a ‘‘noshow’’ passenger, the bags could travel even if a passenger failed to board. Such protagonists included the use of X-ray machinery and vapor detectors as security control mechanisms. This interpretation suited those airports and airlines that had invested in such equipment, but it ignored the contention of the ICAO experts that X-rays and other detection devices were insufficiently developed for them to be used as a sole defense system. In the 1980s, the X-ray process was largely a cosmetic approach to baggage security, frequently used to sidestep the ICAO policy. It lulled the public and some airline managements into a false sense of security. FAA ACTIVITY The Federal Aviation Administration did take on board the lessons of the Air India tragedies and the earlier incidents. They were leading players in establishing the new rules developed by the ICAO, and in November 1985, well ahead of the ICAO’s publication of its standard, they introduced the requirement for U.S. airlines flying into or out of certain designated extraordinary-risk airports to ‘‘conduct a positive passenger/checked baggage match resulting in physical inspection or non carriage of all unaccompanied bags.’’ It was and is an excellent rule. Regrettably, in 1988 its implementation was not effectively policed. The FAA was unaware that Pan Am had dropped the procedure at Frankfurt and London. It was the commercial decision to discard the passenger and baggage matching requirement that, in 1991, helped the federal jury in New York to find Pan Am guilty of wilful misconduct in the bombing of the Maid of the Seas. On behalf of the FAA, Billy Vincent detailed the new rule at the April 1986 Paris meeting of the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC). The ECAC membership comprises the civil aviation authorities of the countries of Europe. The meeting

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took place following the machine gun and grenade attacks by the Abu Nidal terrorist organization on Rome and Vienna airports and a declaration from Ahmed Jibril that he would ‘‘no longer be responsible for civilians flying on Israeli and U.S. airlines.’’ It was a clear threat to the U.S. international air carriers. Vincent gave his European counterparts further details of an expanded Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP) to be applied by all U.S. airlines. Among the changes were additions to the register of designated ‘‘extraordinary-risk’’ airports. The list now incorporated all airports in Europe to which U.S. carriers operated scheduled flights. Vincent pointed out that the airlines would require some additional resources (a responsibility of the carriers) and additional time to process aircraft (which might affect scheduling and use of departure gates). The new positive passenger/baggage matching regulation found little favor with the U.S. airlines. However, the international carriers attending the IATA Security Advisory Committee in Montreal following the loss of the Air India aircraft less than a year previously had proposed the philosophy. They wanted a passenger and the passenger’s baggage to be treated as a single entity. From a customer service viewpoint, this should have been a requirement for all airlines from the day the first passenger flew on a commercial airliner. However, given the validity of the old vaudeville joke of ‘‘breakfast in London, dinner in New York, baggage in Tokyo,’’ the airlines’ ability to deliver their customers and their bags to the correct destination at the same time had long been questioned. In 1985, the ICAO estimated the cost to the airlines of mishandled (lost, stolen or strayed) baggage to be $400 million per annum. The security specialists who met at Montreal were not primarily concerned with the customer service–plus points of the new approach, although those who had had an airline operations rather than a police career before switching to the aviation security scene were clearly aware of the benefits. Those present did, however, recognize the danger that arises for airlines when passengers voluntarily separate themselves from their baggage. The SAC knew that identifying the gate no-show and the missing transit or transfer passenger was not the total answer. Bags illegally infiltrated into the airline system had also to be identified. Had the U.S. airlines fully participated in the debates held within the international airline community, their opposition to passenger and baggage reconciliation may have been different. It could have affected policies adopted later by Pan Am. The immense size of the domestic air transport market doubtless dominated the U.S. carriers’ thinking about passenger/baggage matching and was responsible for much of their isolationist approach. Certainly the potential for this requirement to spread to the domestic U.S. network was an anathema to them. In the 1980s, they could point to the nonexistent threat posed by terrorists to domestic flights as a factor mitigating against the imposition of the new security procedure for such services. This, of course, put to one side the customer benefits of passengers traveling to the same destination on the same flight as their bags. This opposition to matching bags with passengers on domestic services was to surface again in 1991, when the FAA decided to fund research into automating the process for the domestic market.

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The research and development program was abandoned following heavy airline lobbying activity in Washington. U.S. air carriers could point to the additional administrative and cost burdens that would be placed on airlines providing a passenger and baggage reconciliation service domestically, and doubtless this argument carried much weight. It will continue to do so, but debate should have been balanced by discussion on the cost and social benefits arising from efficient baggage handling. Now that urban terrorism of the type so frequently witnessed in Europe and the Middle East during the 1980s has been enacted on the American mainland (the attempted destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York in 1993 and the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995), attention may focus on domestic airline vulnerability to the saboteur. OTHER PRE-LOCKERBIE TERRORIST ACTIVITY The bomb attacks discussed in this chapter all had relevance to U.S. air carriers’ operations. Some had led to changes in the rules mandated by the ICAO before the tragedy overtook Pan Am Flight 103. However, terrorism aimed against U.S. civil aviation was not limited to bombings of aircraft. There were two significant attempts to hijack aircraft in the mid-1980s. The first air carrier to fall victim to such activity was TWA. The second was Pan Am. An attempt to seize one of the latter company’s aircraft in September 1986 while it was on the ground in Pakistan at Karachi’s international airport failed. Twenty-two people died and many more were injured during the incident. Terrorists had secured uniforms that resembled those worn by the airport guards. They obtained a vehicle similar to the ones operated by the airport authority and used it to secure free passage through the checkpoint guarding the entrance to the air side. No challenge was mounted to the vehicle or the men—the terrorists were waved through the airport perimeter checkpoint and drove directly to the Pan Am aircraft, which was in the process of boarding its passengers. This method of attack was used again in 1994, when terrorists opposed to the Algerian regime seized an Air France aircraft at Algiers airport. More innocent people were killed and injured in a different type of terrorist atrocity in December 1985. Simultaneously at the international airports at Rome and Vienna, machine gun and grenade attacks were made on the check-in areas. Nine people (4 of them terrorists) were killed, and more than 100 were wounded. Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president, asserted that he had ‘‘irrefutable evidence’’ of the Libyan leader’s (Colonel Muammar Gaddafi) involvement in the attacks. He claimed that the airport attacks were ‘‘only the latest in a series of brutal terrorist acts committed under Gaddafi’s backing.’’ The evidence referred to by the president has never been made public. Libya had long been the beˆte noire of the president, who believed the country was behind many of the terrorist attacks aimed against U.S. interests. In January 1986, President Ronald Reagan declared that Libya constituted ‘‘a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.’’ He also announced ‘‘plans

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to sever virtually all American economic ties to Libya.’’ Calling the colonel a ‘‘pariah’’ and citing the Libyan leader’s ‘‘longstanding involvement in terrorism,’’ Ronald Reagan threatened additional moves against Libya beyond economic action. Several Palestinian groups reacted angrily to the U.S. proclamation. Abu Nidal threatened reprisals for American intimidation of Libya. The threat was carried in a despatch by the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the name chosen by Abu Nidal for his faction when they broke with the mainstream Palestinian organization headed by Yassar Arafat several years earlier. Gaddafi’s reaction, given in a speech at the People’s Congress Building in Tripoli to an audience of 3,000 young people and reported in The New York Times of 16 January 1986, was to offer Libya as a base for the liberation of Palestine and to train Arab guerillas for ‘‘suicide and terrorist missions.’’ The United States reacted by building up its military presence in the Mediterranean. The Sixth Fleet advised air traffic control in Tripoli of their intent to conduct flight operations in the area. Navy vessels concentrated off the coast of Libya. In February, shortly after the naval buildup, Israel intercepted a Libyan aircraft and forced it to land. It was thought to be carrying the Palestinian leader George Habash. It was not. The seizure was condemned by Libya. Ahmed Jibril, leader of another Palestinian-based faction, issued threats against American civil aviation targets. The United States denied any complicity in what many observers saw as an act of air piracy conducted by the state of Israel. One month later, the United States increased its military activity in the Gulf of Sidra off the Libyan coast. A Libyan vessel was set on fire and another was severely damaged. A missile site in Libya was attacked by aircraft from the Sixth Fleet, and the FAA warned U.S. air carriers of possible reprisals as result of the activity in Libya. In April came the bomb attack on TWA 840. The Abu Ibrahim terrorist group was suspected of an involvement because of the nature of the bomb, but no direct link was established. U.S. aircraft again attacked military targets in Libya. The 1986 activity sharpened the divisions between the United States and Libya and laid a further foundation for links between the Middle East terrorist groups and the Gaddafi regime. Most specialists in international terrorism believe that just such a link was used two years later to bomb Pan Am 103 out of the skies.

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GROWING THREAT OF TERRORISM The year 1988 opened with a plethora of warnings concerning growing activity among the terrorist cadres. Many of these indicators centered on Germany, but information was circulating in other areas as well. Security warnings are frequently distributed within civil aviation circles, but often the information contained in them is highly questionable. Warnings that airlines should be on the alert because it is the fourth, fifth, or umpteenth anniversary of some long-forgotten deed or of someone’s birthday hardly constitutes ‘‘intelligence,’’ yet such has been the basis of many warnings from ‘‘authoritative’’ sources. Sometimes the information is a regurgitation of earlier warnings that have been picked up by one country’s authority, reissued and subsequently rebroadcast by yet another. Such circulation can cover a period of weeks or even months. Thus a great deal of information is of little value to threat analysts, but nevertheless, everything has to be scrutinized and evaluated—just in case. The failure of such security data to link to actual events has tended over the years to cause air carriers to be skeptical of ‘‘intelligence’’ information. A ‘‘little boy who cried wolf ’’ syndrome had developed. Occasionally the detail of a security warning has demanded deeper consideration. One example arose in March 1987. German intelligence sources uncovered what they believed to be a planned attack by the Abu Nidal Command on U.S. targets in the Federal Republic. The terrorists were expected to travel via Athens to Germany. The source of the intelligence appeared valid, and the data on the terrorist team selected to carry out the attacks was very detailed. Names and dates of birth of the terrorists were circulated, together with details of their travel documents. Information on some of the men even included the names of their fathers and mothers! With so much detail available, those carriers who considered they might

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be at risk and whose passenger check-in processes were computerized would have been able to feed the detail into their database. This in turn would have allowed staff at the check-in counters to be warned directly by the computer when passengers bearing the identified names reported for their flight. This assumes the terrorists chose not to travel under an alias—a big assumption. Perhaps the terrorists realized their plans had been blown, because no activity took place. Possibly the information had been fed by the terrorists to the security forces to test the latter’s reaction. Throughout the early months of 1988, there had been military activity in the Persian Gulf. Iran was seen as a pariah state by the West, and its fanaticism was considered a danger to other Moslem states in the Middle East and the gulf region. Iran’s hostile action had led to armed conflict. Naval vessels of the Western allies had been busy trying to control and protect the commercial shipping passing through the gulf, which the Iranians had turned into a war zone and where they had laid mines in an attempt to create havoc with international shipping movements. Mini-skirmishes between the Iranians and the Americans, as well as others, were frequent, and in one incident, several Iranian gunships were attacked and destroyed by the U.S. Navy. In April, it was the turn of a U.S. warship to be damaged when it struck an Iranian mine. The United States took punitive action against their enemy’s land-based oil installation, motivating the Iranians to mount revenge attacks. Given the imbalance between the military forces of the two countries, the likelihood of the Iranians resorting to terrorism was considered very real by U.S. intelligence agencies. The FAA took the precaution of advising air carriers coming under their registry to implement increased security measures. At this same time, a highly placed official in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Abu Jihad, was murdered at his home in Tunis. The culprits were not immediately identified, but reaction from the militants was anticipated. The potential for Israel’s intelligence services to be blamed was obvious. The tendency for hostility toward Israel to be transferred to the United States meant there was a strong possibility the latter would be singled out for a reprisal attack. Certainly, Teheran was likely to hold the United States responsible. When that was added to the action in the gulf, security analysts believed the murder provided Iran with a double motive for a strike at the United States. The FAA believed the Persian Gulf activity and the murder of Abu Jihad had significantly increased the threat against U.S. civil aviation. U.S. carriers operating from airports that also served Middle East–based airlines were warned to be careful. Those operating to Europe, the Middle East and southwest Asia were told to stringently review their security procedures and upgrade their programs, if the latter was considered necessary. The Iranian hostility continued throughout the middle months of 1988. So, too, did the covert terrorist buildup in the Federal Republic of Germany. By June, the authorities in Hessen had warned of increased subversive activity in the Frankfurt area. They believed that American facilities were the probable targets. German federal authorities assessed the threat against U.S. aircraft to be at the same level as that

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facing El Al, the Israeli state airline. This assessment meant that the Germans considered the U.S. air carriers to be at a high level of risk. FAA officials were well aware of the threat posed to U.S. airlines. Two years earlier they had designated Frankfurt and the other German airports served by U.S. airlines to be extraordinary-risk locations. They required enhanced security procedures to be carried out. A special section of the U.S. Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP) had been allocated to the procedures to be implemented at such locations. These were considered adequate to meet the growing threat. They included the reconciliation (matching) of passengers with their baggage, a process that sought to identify any bag not associated with a passenger. Such unaccompanied bags had to be physically searched or not carried at all on departing aircraft. The procedures also called for special profiling techniques to be applied to passengers to identify any potential terrorist or unwitting accomplices. The latter were passengers who may have been persuaded, unknowingly, to carry an explosive device onto an aircraft. On paper, the procedures mandated by the FAA were very good. The weakness lay in their implementation. In July 1988, the skirmishing between Iranian gunboats and U.S. warships took a disastrous turn. An otherwise insignificant engagement between a U.S. warship, the USS Vincennes, and some Iranian gunboats that had attacked the larger vessel, raised the adrenalin of the American gunners. Shortly after the firefight, radar operators spotted the movement of an aircraft on their screens. The young, inexperienced crewmen on board the Vincennes believed the aircraft was coming toward them from Iran. They classified it as an attack aircraft. The Vincennes tried unsuccessfully to make radio contact with the aircraft. Then, fearing a missile attack, the ship opened fire with surface-to-air missiles and destroyed the aircraft in mid-flight. The joy of the U.S. seamen was seen on millions of television sets around the world as the networks aired the moment of the gunners’ ‘‘success.’’ The joy was shortlived. The ‘‘attack’’ aircraft was no such thing. It was a commercial airliner operating to a published timetable, climbing, not descending, and flying in an internationally recognized air corridor. Two hundred ninety passengers and crew died. Television cameras were turned on the retrieval of the bodies from the sea, and the resultant pictures were beamed around the world. Iran now had a further motive for a revenge attack on the United States. The destruction of the Iranian airbus mirrored in some ways an earlier destruction of a Korean Boeing 707 by Soviet fighter aircraft in the Far East. On that occasion, the aircraft had strayed off course over sensitive Soviet locations. An air-to-air missile was fired, resulting in the destruction of the passenger jet. The Soviets claimed that they had been unable to identify the aircraft type. Few outside Iran considered the American action a deliberate act of unlawful interference with civil aviation. Rather, it was perceived to be the result of a naval commander and crew acting under stress. The Western world generally accepted the view that the tragedy was simply a disastrous accident. Soviet representatives at the ICAO made it clear that they accepted the shooting down as accidental—it would

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have been difficult for them to take a different position, given their defense of the Korean incident. However, it was realized that Iran would not let the matter rest there. Whatever the cause, a great many innocent people had lost their lives, and the incident became, in the widely held view of most people involved in intelligence matters at that time, the motivation for the December attack on the Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie. It is possible, though improbable, that had the U.S. government immediately accepted responsibility for the accident, the incident could have been removed as the focus of hatred that was orchestrated in Iran. Unfortunately, initial justification for the shooting down was offered by the United States. When it became clear that the Iranian aircraft was simply a commercial flight operating within the codes laid down by the ICAO and that other vessels operating in the gulf had identified it as such, the United States opened the subject of compensation. They put conditions on any settlement, which the Iranians would not accept. In 1996, eight years after the event, it was reported that the United States had renewed its offer of compensation. A sum of $300,000 per victim’s family was mentioned. In 1988, perhaps the Iranians would have refused any offer of compensation, restricted or otherwise, because the opportunity to make political capital from the Vincennes action may have seemed to those in power in Teheran too good to miss. Iran wanted revenge against the United States on the basis of ‘‘an eye for an eye.’’ Nothing less was acceptable, and an attack on a U.S.-registered aircraft became inevitable. In July, American air carriers were warned that three coinciding incidents had raised the overall threat posed to U.S. international airlines and that the dangerous environment was expected to remain for the foreseeable future. At the top of the list was the destruction of Iran Air flight 655. Then came the trial of Ali Hammedei, the man held responsible for the hijacking of TWA 847 out of Athens three years earlier. Hammedei had been arrested at the Frankfurt airport on 13 January 1987, and his trial had just begun. The third incident was the conviction and death sentence passed on five terrorists who had attacked Pan Am 73 at Karachi in September 1986. Any one of these events could be expected to initiate terrorist action but clearly, the Vincennes incident was the most obvious. The Iranians, Hizballah, and Abu Nidal were all named as the potential sources for an attack. By August 1988, knowledge that terrorists had improved technology for the construction of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) designed for use against aircraft was becoming available. Modifications in the manufacture of these bombs was coupled with changes in the method of their concealment. It had become obvious that detailed baggage search techniques would be necessary to detect the devices, since Xray examination was known to be inadequate for the purpose. Nor was the average screening operator considered up to the task of identifying the high-tech detonation mechanisms now available to the terrorists. The FAA requirement for all baggage to be matched with passengers took on even greater importance. So, too, did the procedures mandated for identifying selectees—passengers to whom special attention had to be paid. The possibility of an unsuspecting person being used to carry a bomb on board an aircraft in otherwise legitimate baggage was very real. It had been tried

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at London’s Heathrow airport when the pregnant Irish girlfriend of an Arab terrorist attempted to board an El Al service to Tel Aviv. She was flying to Israel to marry him, or so she thought. Her fiance´, Nezar Hindawi, had explained he would follow later. Israeli security guards found a bomb in the unfortunate woman’s hand baggage. It had taken detailed El Al security procedures to identify the device, which had already cleared routine airport screening. The FAA developed new guidelines for searching suspects and their baggage at extraordinary-risk locations. Such baggage was to be emptied and the bag itself examined to identify any false compartments. The contents of the baggage had to be scrutinized item by item and metal detectors used on articles as the occasion demanded. Objects made of, or using, metal components were also to be X-rayed, as were any other selected items. The whole process was extremely thorough. Battery-powered articles were of particular concern. Screening of such items was discussed at length within international security circles, especially at the ICAO and ECAC. The demand that no such items be allowed carriage on aircraft was considered highly impracticable. The normal trappings of the average person going on vacation or traveling on business comprised many such things. Cameras, travel clocks and hair dryers all fell into this category. So, too, did the lap-top computers and electronic diaries carried by a great many business men and women. Most watches were battery powered, and of course medical items, such as heart pacemakers, also used batteries as a power source. Children’s toys were frequently battery operated and could be adapted to power an improvised explosive device. The impracticability of banning such a wide range of goods was obvious, yet one European aviation authority did try. The result was the confiscation of several thousand items in a single working day with resulting chaos for the carriers operating at that particular airport. It was very quickly abandoned. Throughout 1988, the police in Hessen, Germany, continued to monitor the movements of individuals they had identified as members of a Palestinian-based terrorist group. They were known to be linked to a cell directed by Ahmed Jibril. On 26 October, German police raided premises in the cities of Neuss and Frankfurt. Sixteen people were arrested on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities. This action was code-named Autumn Leaves. The arrested men were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC). The PLFP-GC had been established by Jibril when he broke from the main body of the PFLP headed by George Habash. Of the sixteen people arrested, fourteen were Palestinians. The PFLP-GC had dominated the media headlines sometime earlier when commandos from the group attempted a hang-glider assault on Israeli positions in Israel. For reasons never explained, but generally believed to be linked to German covert intelligence activity that had been damaged by the police raid, fourteen of the arrested men were quickly released. It appeared to be a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing—a not-infrequent failing in the ‘‘intelligence’’ world. It had overtones of the noncooperation between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and the federal police (the RCMP) at the time of the bombing of Air

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India in 1985. The release of the men had taken place despite the discoveries made by the police at the time of the arrests. The finds had included counterfeit and other passports purporting to originate from a number of countries including France, the United Kingdom, Syria, and Morocco plus ammunition, weapons, and explosives. In the years subsequent to Lockerbie, the isolation of the two men who were held as a result of the police raids in Frankfurt and Neuss, together with their apparent protection by the German authorities from external police questioning, gave rise to speculation over the Federal Republic’s relationship with the men. Most significant among the discoveries made during the Autumn Leaves operation were a number of improvised explosive devices in various stages of manufacture. One item was a modified Toshiba ‘‘Bomb Beat 453’’ radio cassette player. It contained an electrical detonator and approximately 300 grams of Semtex explosive. The bomb was clearly intended to be used against an aircraft, because a barometric device had been incorporated into the instrument. Such controls allow saboteurs to ensure that their devices remain dormant and safe while they are at ground level. The bomb becomes armed once the aircraft in which it is being carried reaches a preprescribed altitude. Timing mechanisms then control the detonation so that the aircraft is not only at the height chosen by the terrorists but also at a fairly precise geographical position. There could have been no doubt that the modified Toshiba was intended to blow up an aircraft while it was in midflight. Details of the discoveries and information on the Toshiba bomb were passed to a number of governments in Europe and to U.S. and Canadian authorities. In the United States, the FAA circulated the details to airlines falling under its responsibility. The carriers were again told that those operating to locations designated extraordinary risk had to rigorously apply the appropriate sections of their security programs. In the United Kingdom, the Department of Transport advised British airlines and airports of the existence of the Toshiba IED. On 23 November, the Heathrow (London) airport management passed the information on to all airlines operating to and from Heathrow. Its circular gave a detailed description of the Toshiba IED including its size, power sources, the detonator used, and the activating devices—a barometric mechanism and a timer. Recipients of the circular were told that the radio would not work. In fact, the radio discovered by the German police would have operated if played. No photographs or diagrams were available to the Heathrow authorities at the time they distributed their warning circular. Photographs of the Toshiba improvised explosive device were seen at a meeting of senior airline security executives in Dallas, Texas, on 6 December 1988. The pictures, which had been distributed in Germany by the police, had been brought to Dallas by Jurgen Loos, Lufthansa’s chief of security. Others attending the meeting included your author and representatives of the U.S. air transport industry, Homer Boynton of American Airlines and Dick Lally, director of security for the American Air Transport Association. Another participant was Harry Pizer, who had recently retired from Pan Am. It was agreed that Autumn Leaves had justified the earlier warnings of the Hessen police authorities. There had indeed been a buildup of covert

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terrorist activity in the state, and the activity was now known to have included a bomb-making factory. The airline men noted that the evidence uncovered by the raids suggested at least two other IEDs had already been made but could not be found. When the German authorities circulated the details of the Toshiba radio cassette bomb, they included a very precise and urgent warning—the improvised explosive device would be very difficult to detect via normal X-ray inspection. The conclusion was that the IED was intended to pass undiscovered through areas subject to extensive security controls, such as airports. In fact, during the testing of the devices found in Neuss and Frankfurt, the Toshiba, still containing its explosive mechanism, had been put through an X-ray machine without its hidden contents being detected. The shortcomings of X-ray examination in determining the presence of explosive devices in checked baggage were already well known before the German police advice was circulated. Despite this knowledge, there was still a strong push by some to retain the procedure as the sole security control rather than use the baggage reconciliation procedures that had been counseled by the international organizations and by the FAA. Some months before the Autumn Leaves discoveries, Pan Am, which had been following the FAA mandate to match interline passengers with their baggage, dropped the reconciliation procedure at Frankfurt and London. They had replaced it with X-ray screening. By switching from reconciliation to X-ray, Pan Am had placed itself in breach of the federal regulations. The German police warning that the devices found by them would be very difficult to detect by X-ray should have prompted the carrier to revert to passenger/baggage matching. It did not. Further incidents in November gave additional warning to U.S. airlines that some sort of terrorist action might be in train. Attempts were made by an individual to test security defenses of a U.S. carrier at Frankfurt. The man’s actions were sufficiently suspect for a staff member of the airline to note his appearance and thus be in a position to provide a description of the individual who had presented himself as a sky marshal. The man, who made no attempt to provide any credentials supporting his claim, had wanted to carry weapons on board an aircraft on a trip to London. He had been refused. His subsequent actions suggested he already had some knowledge of the airline’s operation, because he telephoned the check-in counter, then the gate departure desk, to pose similar questions. Such internal telephone extension numbers would not normally be known outside the airline itself. They would not be difficult to obtain, but it would require some research, suggesting the individual or someone connected to him had already done a little homework. In another incident, a second U.S. carrier received an inquiry from an individual concerning the carriage of explosives and detonators from Frankfurt to the United States. He did not pursue the inquiry beyond the telephone call. U.S. airlines were informed of both incidents. November 1988 was a busy and noteworthy month for aviation security analysts. A meeting of the Palestinian National Council was scheduled to be held in Algeria. On the agenda was the recognition of Israel, a highly contentious topic that was

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bound to stir up considerable tension, with moderates being the target of hardliners’ anger. Internal bickering among various parties forming the Palestinian movement had already surfaced. Parliamentary elections were due in Israel itself with the outcome anticipated to have an effect on that country’s approach to the Middle East peace talks. Elsewhere, the reverberations were still continuing as a result of Autumn Leaves. The trial of the terrorist Hammedei was ongoing, and in Malta, Ali Rezak, arrested in connection with an Egyptair seizure in 1986, had recently been brought before the courts. This period also brought the conclusion of an ICAO investigation into the shooting down of the Iranian airbus. The Iranians had taken their grievances to the world aviation body hoping the ICAO would condemn the American action. The nonmilitary response of the Iranians to date was believed by many to be owing to their expectation that they might, through ICAO action, bring the world to their side in their fight against the United States. The outcome of the investigation when it was announced was not what the Iranians had wanted. The report did not condemn the United States. The failure of the world body to respond in the way the Teheran government had wished moved militants within Iran to demand direct action. The ICAO announcement was another piece of information available to threat analysts who were already convinced that an attack on an American target was imminent. The final key piece of data relevant to the attack on Pan Am 103 came on 5 December. The switchboard at the U.S. embassy in Helsinki received a call from a person who asked to be connected to the security officer. He did not identify himself but told the official that a man, Yassan Garadat, was going to put a bomb on board a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States. It was to happen within the next two weeks. The method Garadat was said to be planning to use involved an unwitting accomplice. A Finnish woman, who would not be aware of what she was carrying, would have the bomb included in her baggage. The caller alleged that a person based in Frankfurt and whose name he gave as ‘‘Abdullah’’ was planning to hand the bomb to Garadat in Helsinki. This information was circulated to all U.S. air carriers by the FAA. Garadat was reported to have recently arrived in Helsinki after a short stay in Libya. Both men, it was claimed, were members of the Abu Nidal organization. The Helsinki warning was detailed and precise. Coming as it did after the escalation of terrorist activity in Germany, the discoveries made by the police during the Autumn Leaves operation, and the clear calls for revenge by Iranians following the Vincennes destruction of the Iranian airbus, the security risk to U.S. carriers in general and to Pan Am in particular, had reached red alert status. There was an extremely high probability that something was about to happen. It did so on 21 December, just two days outside the two-week timescale given in the Helsinki warning. High above the Scottish border town of Lockerbie, an improvised explosive device contained in a Toshiba cassette radio player detonated with devastating effect.

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FOOTNOTE TO THE HELSINKI WARNING Despite the very precise nature of the Helsinki warning, the U.S. intelligence services had not given any classification to it before the Lockerbie attack. Classification came after the destruction of Pan Am 103 when the authorities decided the message was a hoax! That such a conclusion could be drawn when the intent given in the warning had already been carried out remains difficult to justify. It was suggested subsequently that the message was false because the method used by the terrorists had not included an unwitting accomplice. It was true that the modus operandi did not follow the detail of the warning, but terrorist prenotification of planned attacks often differ in some detail to the actual event, as the British knew only too well from their experience with Irish Republican Army terrorists in the United Kingdom. A second suggestion put forward to support the hoax classification was the fact that the terrorists who bombed Pan Am 103 were two days outside the schedule given by the Helsinki caller. Thus, it was contended, the message had no relevance to the incident. In contrast, the warning had named the air carrier. The route of the aircraft was identified. There were two days’ difference between the ‘‘two weeks’’ mentioned in the warning and the actual event, but two weeks is not a precise time period—the caller had not said fourteen days, nor named the hour. The authorities’ ‘‘hoax’’ arguments are still considered by many to have been put forward by embarrassed agencies seeking to recover from a failure to act in good time. The U.S. assessment of the Helsinki message found support in London. The British had received details of the Helsinki warning, and subsequent to the bombing, they echoed the American line. They had reasons of their own to support the U.S. position since bureaucratic procedures within the UK Department of Transport (DOT) had caused the circulation of the Helsinki warning to carriers operating from UK airports to be delayed until after Pan Am 103 had been destroyed. It is a point that has affected the British authorities’ aviation security policy ever since, even leading, in 1996, to the private secretary of Prime Minister John Major to deny it had any relevance to the bombing. Two hypotheses can be offered for the variation in the detail of the warning and the actual events. The telephone call made to the U.S. embassy in Helsinki could have been made by a disenfranchised member of the terrorist cell who had been involved in the early stages of the planning. Variations, developed as the strategy progressed, possibly subsequent to the Autumn Leaves raids, could have meant late changes to the plans of which the caller may not have been aware. Terrorist cells work on a need-toknow basis, thus keeping the full details confined to just a few key personnel. The second theory suggests that the terrorists themselves contacted the embassy in order to lay a false trail. They might have known that the intelligence services were aware of the growing threat and thus decided to divert the focus of attention from the real route intended for the bomb. In any event, the intelligence available to the U.S. and other authorities and to Pan Am failed to elicit an effective response. The Maid of the Seas and her passengers and crew were lost, together with the lives of a number of citizens of Lockerbie.

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BOMBING OF PAN AM 103 At 7:00, British time, on the evening of 21 December, Pan Am Flight 103, the Maid of the Seas, was climbing to its scheduled cruising height readying for its Atlantic crossing. The plane with 259 passengers and crew on board had left London’s Heathrow airport a short while earlier and had reached the skies above the Scottish border. At three minutes past the hour, air traffic controllers monitoring the aircraft’s progress on radar screens witnessed a breakup of their ‘‘target.’’ As discovered later, the loss of the single image was caused by the detonation of an improvised explosive device carried in the hold of the aircraft. The explosion had blown a hole in the side of the aircraft, and a combination of depressurization and wind action then ripped the Boeing apart. In the first hours following the initial news bulletins, media focus on the details of the unfolding story magnified. Speculation was rife, but Harvey Elliot, writing in London’s The Times newspaper on 22 December had limited the probable causes of the destruction to three possibilities: ‘‘The aircraft may have been in collision with another jet; It could have suffered a massive structural failure, or; It could have been brought down by a bomb.’’ Very little data was available when the Times article was being prepared, but as the air traffic control report had made no mention of a second aircraft, the possibility of a midair collision was very low in the order of probability. A catastrophic failure of the aircraft would have caused a panic in the aviation industry, because the majority of the world’s major airlines operated fleets of Boeing 747s. Japan Airlines, Air France, Northwest Airlines, British Airways, and Pan Am all had 747 fleets in excess of thirty such aircraft. The idea of the world’s fleets being grounded should metal fatigue or some other structural cause be shown to be behind the disaster

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hardly bore consideration. (This specter was to rear its head again in 1996, when TWA lost an aircraft of similar marque and vintage off Long Island.) The Boeing 747 was known to be one of the strongest, safest aircraft ever built, and although structural failure was a possibility, it was also considered extremely remote. Even so, it had to be discussed; after all, such an event did have a precedent. The de Haviland Comet, the first of the commercial jets to go into service, was grounded for several years while the nature of metal fatigue, which caused the early marques to crash, was studied. What the specialists had learned from the failures of the Comet had been put to good effect with the second generation of jet aircraft. Not covered in the Times article was the possibility of abnormal weather conditions having caused the aircraft to crash, but no adverse weather conditions had been reported in the news bulletin, and it would, in any event, have required something very unusual indeed to have brought down a jumbo from 31,000 feet. This left the probability that Pan Am 103 had been blown up. It pointed to the Helsinki warning having been genuine and suggested that the buildup of covert terrorist activity in Germany had culminated in a tremendous tragedy. Newspaper comment on the day following the crash dealt with human drama aspects of the disaster, and the journals themselves were full of eyewitness reports. The talk was of fireballs and huge bangs being heard, but there was little factual evidence available that the media could recount. By 23 December things were changing. The media had uncovered details of the telephone call to the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki that had warned of an attack against Pan Am. The warning had been posted on the notice board of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, but it was not passed on to the public at large nor did it appear on the bulletin board at any other U.S. embassy or consulate. News of the warning was featured in many newspaper headlines. In the United Kingdom, the media had begun to report a story that the British authorities had failed to respond to the warning of the threat against Pan Am flights. The UK cabinet minister responsible for transport, Paul Channon, had left the United Kingdom shortly after the bombing for a vacation in the West Indies (an unwise political decision that may have weighed heavily in his subsequent early departure from office). In his absence, Michael Portillo, the minister of state for aviation, responded to the media questions. He confirmed that many bomb threats and other pieces of intelligence were received by the UK Department of Transport (DOT) and that the quality of the information varied widely. Each item, he explained, had to be analyzed, and it would be wrong simply to pass such warnings on to the public. It was a view universally held within aviation administrations, airline managements, and the international organizations. Michael Portillo’s response to the criticism of the way the DOT handled bomb threats was explained further in a letter to John Prescott, the Labour (opposition) Party’s spokesman on transport matters. It was made available to the press. He wrote that having assessed warnings against other intelligence, the DOT ‘‘satisfy ourselves that the security measures applying to the flights under threat are appropriate.’’ In the instance of the Pan Am threat, the department had ‘‘concluded that the enhanced

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security measures already in force in respect of U.S. airlines out of the UK were appropriate.’’ There is no doubt at all that the enhanced security measures mandated by the FAA for implementation by U.S. airlines operating from designated extraordinaryrisk airports were appropriate. They had been developed to ensure maximum security was afforded to all international air services operated by U.S. registered airlines. One of the mandatory regulations had been specifically designed to identify unaccompanied bags. These bags were recognized as posing the greatest risk to airlines and, as such, had to be physically searched or not carried. Regrettably, although the measures were appropriate and had to be applied at Heathrow, no one from the DOT checked to see if they were being implemented. They may have reasoned that the FAA, which established the rules for U.S. air operators, would monitor the security performance of their registered carriers. However, responsibility for aviation security in the United Kingdom is rightly an obligation that falls on the UK government. It was the DOT’s duty to satisfy themselves that all was well. The director general of the International Air Transport Association, by this time Gunter Eser, a former executive of Lufthansa, decided that the association should maintain an official silence on the Pan Am tragedy. This held until two years after the bombing, when the association was invited to submit a statement on aviation security to the Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism established by President George Bush. The commission had come into being following heavy pressure from the families of the U.S. victims of Lockerbie. The IATA restricted itself in the first instance to a simple policy statement. However, as the commission became more involved in its task, it returned to the subject of the IATA’s position on aviation security matters. They sought a copy of your author’s paper on baggage security, which had been presented in Washington just two months before the Lockerbie tragedy. The occasion had been a conference hosted by the FAA and attended by aviation industry representatives from around the world. The baggage security paper had urged carriers to incorporate passenger and baggage reconciliation (matching) procedures into their security programs and had demonstrated how this could be done. Papers presented at major conferences are normally published in a compendium document for subsequent reference purposes. A copy of the IATA baggage security paper had been provided to the FAA for this purpose and should have been in the published record, but an interesting fact had emerged subsequent to the Lockerbie bombing—the paper was missing from the FAA documentation. The IATA was told that the noninclusion was an oversight. In their rush to sound informed and to meet the demand for copy, inaccuracies began to appear in the press reports. This frequently happens when major aviation disasters occur. Wrong descriptions of airline and airport security procedures were presented, and confusion between what was an airport’s responsibility and what was the duty of an airline were rife. The Times suggested the front (forward) hold of the aircraft could have housed the bomb (the bomb theory was still speculative at the

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time the particular edition was published). It went on to say that the ‘‘terrorist must have been incredibly lucky or a martyr to his cause.’’ The newspaper believed that to get a bomb on board the aircraft, the terrorist would have had to be on board. This was not correct. Nor do terrorists have to be martyrs. Indeed there had been no record of any suicide bombers attacking civil aviation operations. In the case of aircraft bombings, the perpetrators are simply mass murderers who operate from a safe distance. In March 1986, the ICAO had made it abundantly clear that they believed it was possible for bombs to be placed on aircraft in checked baggage belonging to ‘‘noshow’’ passengers (passengers who check in for travel on a flight but who do not actually board). States were mandated to ensure that airlines identify the baggage of such passengers and remove it from the aircraft. The Kanishka bombing in 1985 had shown most clearly that bags carrying explosive devices could be infiltrated into airline systems without an accompanying passenger and set to explode when the saboteurs were thousands of miles away. The Times article contained another misconception. It reported that had the passenger checked in at Frankfurt, the baggage would have been subjected to electronic scrutiny. This was not true. Only interline bags and bags of ‘‘selectees’’ (passengers who met a laid-down profile as possible dangers to the airline) were being subjected to X-ray examination by Pan Am at Frankfurt. This examination was carried out by the airline’s wholly owned security subsidiary, Alert. However, even had the newspaper been correct, the German police had already determined that such bombs ‘‘. . . would be very difficult to detect via normal x-ray inspection.’’ Although the newspaper had been wrong in the detail of baggage security procedures at Frankfurt, their surmise with respect to the positioning of the bomb bag was to prove correct. By 24 December, the print and visual media on both sides of the Atlantic were still reporting that no evidence of a bomb or sabotage had yet been traced. Nevertheless they had begun to describe similarities with the Air India tragedy of three years earlier. In the United States during the days following the Pan Am bombing, investigative journalists unearthed a report commissioned in 1986 by the airline from an Israeli security consultancy firm. The New York Post reported that the consultants had identified weaknesses in the airline’s security programs at European airports. The carrier’s security had been described as ‘‘dangerously lax.’’ Journalists noted the report was very critical of the Pan Am security operation, and its authors had suggested that under their current program, the airline was ‘‘highly vulnerable to most forms of terrorist attack’’ and ‘‘the fact that no major disaster has occurred to date is merely providential.’’ The Israeli consultants had found shortcomings in the airline’s security concept with an overreliance being placed on technical appliances, which they thought should serve only as aids to the security operation. The carrier’s management structure was attacked as was its staff selection and the lack of adequate training provided to security employees. The consultants noted the lack of monitoring programs and

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declared the whole operation non-cost-effective. Indeed to put matters right, in the opinion of the Israeli specialists, no more money was needed, merely ‘‘authority, management and resolve.’’ During the first weekend following the bombing, combined police, military, and civilian search units operating under John MacInnes Boyd, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway, hunted for the debris that had come from the aircraft. There was, however, little more for the media to get its teeth into during those last few days of December until, on the 27th, they were able to report that police efforts had focused on a single suitcase, which had been sent to the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) for forensic examination. It was to provide the vital breakthrough. On the following day, one week after the destruction of Pan Am’s Maid of the Seas, Scottish and American authorities simultaneously issued formal announcements that a terrorist bomb had caused the atrocity. In the United Kingdom, John Boyd and Michael Charles, the senior investigator for the United Kingdom’s Air Accident Investigation Branch of the DOT, spoke for their respective bodies. Preliminary forensic evidence had been sufficient to remove any lingering suggestions that the disaster was the result of an accident or the structural failure of the aircraft. The statement read: A number of items of wreckage, passenger baggage, and part of the framework of a metal luggage pallet are being examined by MoD (Ministry of Defence) scientists. More items have been collected by AAIB investigators from the accident area; each of these will be subjected to lengthy chemical and metallurgical forensic examinations. However, it has been established that two parts of the metal luggage pallet framework show conclusive evidence of a detonating high explosive. The explosive’s residues recovered from the debris have been positively identified, and are consistent with the use of a high performance plastic explosive. Other evidence collected by the AAIB, in particular that from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder and from the wreckage trail on the ground, has led to the preliminary conclusion that the explosion took place soon after the aircraft had crossed the Scottish border whilst it was in the cruise at 31,000ft and that this led directly to its destruction. Much investigative work remains to be done to establish the nature of the explosive device, what it was contained in, its location in the aircraft, and the sequence of events immediately following its detonation. The world’s most extensive murder investigation had begun. London’s The Times of 29 December carried a compilation report by four journalists led by Harvey Elliot, confirming that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan were told of the findings before they were made public. The reporters suggested that suspicion was already settling on

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Palestinian terrorist splinter groups. The motivation attributed to the groups by the journalists was their determination to prevent a political settlement of the ArabIsraeli conflict. Certainly much of the terrorism of the 1980s emanating from such groups was wholly politically inspired, but this time, there were very substantial reasons to look for other motives. The reason for the Lockerbie bombing, anticipated well ahead of the tragedy in many circles, was believed to be revenge. An attack on an Americanregistered aircraft had been expected for some months. It had been predicted as a straightforward act of retaliation for the destruction of the Iranian airbus over the Persian Gulf six months earlier. Those who had forecast a revenge attack believed that Iran was the source of the planning and financing. The same Times edition carried the following report: “Security depends on reacting to the perceived threat,’’ said Mr Rodney Wallis, the International Air Transport Association’s Director of Security. Despite what has happened, there is no discernable additional threat to aviation in general today than there was two weeks ago. What was needed urgently was a unified approach to the whole problem throughout the industry so that intelligence could be gathered and preventative measures taken in those areas under specific threat. If such measures are imposed across the board on all airlines and on every route, it could bring real problems to airports which are already seriously congested. Each of the three paragraphs can be considered in hindsight. ‘‘Security depends on reacting to the perceived threat.’’ There was most definitely a perceived threat with respect to Pan Am services from Europe. It was an ever-present factor, generated from the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. Although the peace process was under way, many factions on both sides were opposed to any settlement. This was to manifest itself in a most dramatic way many years later when, in 1995, a Jewish zealot assassinated the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had been working to secure a peace agreement. In late 1988, however, the threat was to U.S. commercial aviation operations. This threat had been increased by the shooting down of the Iranian airbus. The increased level of danger was generally accepted throughout the air transport industry yet, surprisingly, it appeared to have been taken more seriously outside the United States than within it. Many in the U.S. air transport industry held the opinion that because the destruction of the Iranian aircraft had been an accident, it could be discounted. This thoroughly dangerous viewpoint ignored the enmity felt by Iran toward the United States. Even in a less hostile environment than that created by the Vincennes action, there was no love lost between the two nations. Given that 290 of its citizens had been killed by the rocket attack, Iranians were in no doubt that they had a real motive for revenge. Pan Am could have been expected to ensure that its security program was appropriate to the threat. At the very least, the air carrier should have made certain that

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FAA regulations were being implemented at all airports deemed by the agency to be at extraordinary risk. For their part, the FAA should have satisfied themselves that their mandated procedures were being carried out. Greater attention should have been given to the intelligence available to the FAA, but they had failed to make a timely or correct analysis of the Helsinki warning or to link it to the other information circulating in Germany. The question also remains, did Pan Am even understand the position it was in? Subsequent investigation was to show that the FAA and Pan Am Corporate Security had different interpretations for key requirements of the air carrier standard security program. ‘‘. . . [T]here is no discernable additional threat to aviation in general today than there was two weeks ago.’’ This conclusion was based on intelligence available at the time. Most analysts saw the bombing as a ‘‘one-off,’’ an ‘‘eye for an eye’’ attack to settle accounts. It was believed that a single bombing would satisfy those elements in Iran that had called for revenge. Other aircraft of other nations were not believed to be under direct and immediate threat. ‘‘What was needed urgently was a unified approach to the whole problem throughout the industry so that intelligence could be gathered and preventative measures taken in those areas under specific threat.’’ It had long been an IATA policy to promote the need for urgent revisions to security programs when specific threats arose. They had succeeded in getting a flexible response philosophy accepted by the ICAO. They wanted to avoid ‘‘red alert’’ security conditions being imposed indiscriminately around the world without due cause. The airlines argued that to attempt blanket, high-level security was a dangerous process since, in areas where there clearly was no risk, such precautions would not be taken seriously. This would lead to complacency. Should a real threat emerge at a later date, the airline association reasoned, the probability would be that insufficient attention would be paid to the danger. Red alert security had to be meaningful; it had to be obvious; reaction had to be professional. There were commercial reasons, too, why the airlines were opposed to blanket rule making. Security is an essential but expensive addition to an airline’s operating program. The carriers collectively believed that red alert security, with its inevitable demands for additional manpower and equipment, together with its adverse effect on punctuality and, therefore, operating costs, needed to be invoked only when an identifiable operational requirement occurs. Then it should be applied vigorously. The IATA, led by the director general, sought to prevent a knee-jerk reaction to the Pan Am bombing that might lead to demands for widespread extraordinary conditions being imposed on airlines. The industry specialists knew that the best defense against potential terrorist attacks was to identify the threat and apply effective procedures to minimize the risk. Following the bombing, the same experts doubted that Pan Am’s reaction to the Helsinki warning fit into this scenario. Later they were to discover, along with everyone else, the inadequacies of Pan Am’s reaction to the telephoned warning and of the airline’s security procedures in general. At the time of Lockerbie, ‘‘intelligence’’ available to airlines and to government agencies was not being uniformly interpreted. Examples of this were the differences

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between the U.S. and European airlines’ views over the Vincennes tragedy and the opposing interpretation placed on the Helsinki warning by certain industry specialists and the two Western governments. Years after the bombing, U.S. and UK government spokesmen were still insisting no ‘‘intelligence’’ had existed to suggest an attack on Pan Am had been imminent! Indeed, in March 1995, the private secretary to the British prime minister wrote to a representative of the UK victims’ families, the Rev. J. F. Mosey, whose daughter Helga had died in the tragedy, claiming that ‘‘no specific warnings were received before the Lockerbie disaster, and neither the so-called ‘Toshiba’ or ‘Helsinki’ warnings, which are often cited, were found to be relevant to the disaster.’’ Both governments still maintain that the Helsinki warning, with its identification of the carrier, the route and the timing—all of which matched the conditions surrounding the ill-fated aircraft—was a hoax. THE UNFOLDING STORY In the United Kingdom, John Prescott of the Labour Party demanded an independent inquiry into the way the DOT had dealt with the disaster. He claimed that the bombing of the aircraft had exposed inadequacies of airport security and confusion within the DOT. Prescott was playing party politics, seeking to embarrass the government. Nine years later when he had ascended to the position of deputy prime minister (the Labour Party had won the 1997 general election), he turned down a request from the families to establish just such an inquiry. Prescott was confused on the subject of airport and airline security—many people are—but he was right about the DOT. Their information on the Toshiba bomb had not been wholly accurate, and their assessment of the Helsinki warning was, to say the least, questionable. The latter warning was circulated to the airlines and to airport managements following the Christmas holidays, many days after the tragedy had occurred! On 30 December 1988, the Times ran a headline ‘‘Bomb Checks Fooled By Two Trigger Device.’’ The subheading said, ‘‘Experts believe that the bomb in the Pan Am jumbo was set off by a sophisticated double-detonator device that fooled airport baggage checks.’’ In fact, most experts had assumed immediately after news of the disaster broke that a Toshiba device of the type found by the German police in their raids at Neuss and Frankfurt had been used. They knew from the information distributed by the German authorities that the Toshiba devices would have been extremely difficult to detect by X-ray examination. There were no valid detection programs available to identify such devices other than the physical searching of bags. The ‘‘bomb checks’’ were not ‘‘fooled’’—those in use were simply not designed to detect modern explosive devices, something the industry had known in advance. Had Pan Am followed the mandated requirements of the FAA to identify and physically examine unaccompanied checked baggage and had their staff been properly briefed, the Toshiba device would have been found. However the nonapplication of the FAA rules was not to become known until much later and after many months of investigation. Once the results of the forensic examination were available, it became clear there

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were differences between the bombs found during the Autumn Leaves raids and the one that destroyed Pan Am 103. The former had barometric controls in addition to timers—the sophisticated double-detonator device mentioned by the Times newspaper. The actual bomb used to bring down the Maid of the Seas had only a simple timer. The difference was highly significant. It suggested a different bomb maker had been at work.

4

SEARCH AND RECOVERY Emergency services were in action within minutes of the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103. The first fire appliance was mobile at 7:07 P.M.—four minutes after the aircraft had been blown apart! Thirty minutes later, the first of the injured town residents were being ferried by ambulance to the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary. In the United Kingdom, responsibility for coordinating rescue and investigative efforts following a major accident rests with the chief constable for the area. Thus when the Maid of the Seas was destroyed over Lockerbie, it was the chief constable of the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, John Boyd, who took charge. Boyd first became aware of the accident through a television report. Almost immediately, he was contacted by an officer from his control room, who confirmed the limited details available at that time. Boyd went to his office, where additional information was becoming available by the minute. At this stage, the incident was being treated as an air accident. Boyd established a casualty bureau which, because of the small size of the Dumfries and Galloway force, he sited in Glasgow, where he had access to greater manpower. It was obvious that the accident was going to become an international incident, and Glasgow, with a major airport at hand, offered communication benefits. The Glasgow police force also had a computerized casualty capability, something that Boyd realized would become very necessary as events unfolded. The chief constable also sought assistance from other, neighboring police forces under a collaborative program already in existence. These included the Strathclyde and the Lothian & Borders Constabularies, the two largest police forces in Scotland. Other support came from the Central Scotland and Grampian police and from

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England, the Northumbria, and Metropolitan (London) Police. The latter were asked to make the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES), a computer-based crisis management program, available. This meant that specialized officers, including criminal investigation department (CID) personnel, trained in the operation of the HOLMES system, were necessary. More assistance was to come from the military. In the United Kingdom, civilian authorities are able to seek assistance from the armed forces in times of crisis. On 21 December, before any such request was made, the Royal Air Force and the army had already acted on the news of the accident. They sent officers and men to support the police effort. This assistance was formalized subsequently. Because Pan Am 103 was registered in the United States, the FAA sent experts from Washington, D.C. to work with both the police and the Air Accident Investigation Branch of the DOT. Additional collaboration was provided by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the German police. John Boyd retained overall responsibility for all activity on the ground. From the outset, the chief constable had initiated a major response to the accident on the basis that it would be easier to scale down an operation than to build one up. He had been prepared for the worst possible scenario and was proved right. As details of the accident began to accumulate, it was confirmed that wreckage from the aircraft had been scattered over a wide area. It all had to be found, identified, and brought to a central point. This required a very large force of searchers. Material was retrieved from an area of 830 square miles. One of the officers involved in this collection was James Russell, a 21-year veteran from the Strathclyde Police, one of several forces contributing personnel to the work of discovery. Russell held the rank of detective sergeant. He stayed with the Lockerbie inquiry for eighteen months. His first briefing was on the morning of 22 December. Together with other officers, he was assigned to one of several teams, each of which was given responsibility for a specific search sector. Russell was made a supervisor in charge of an area encompassing Beech Wood and the local golf course. His team was required to recover the victims and clear the area of debris, aircraft wreckage, and all property that might be linked to the disaster. Recovered items had to be marked and given precise identification indicating where they had been found. This data was passed to a ‘‘property’’ team for recording purposes. Any item considered to be damaged in such a way that suggested it might have been part of a suitcase or packed in a suitcase or some other container that may have held the bomb was passed directly to a ‘‘production’’ team. The police already believed that the disaster was likely to become the subject of a major criminal investigation and that such evidence would be important. Relevant material was submitted to the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) for forensic examination. Subsequently, Russell became a member of the ‘‘production’’ team. The production team was charged with examining every recovered item to assess its value for evidential purposes. The strength of the team varied with, at times, as many as twenty officers involved. Their prime target was the baggage. Matching recovered bags and their contents to people known to have been on board the aircraft

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was fundamental to the investigation. Concurrent with this activity, Russell examined bags with the goal of linking the recovered lock of a particular suitcase to one of the many hundreds of keys recovered during the search process. The lock came from a copper-colored, hard-sided Samsonite suitcase, which had been identified by RARDE as the one that had held the Pan Am bomb. Russell was asked to find the key. Despite testing all the recovered keys, he reported that none was found that matched the number provided by the forensic scientists and none would have opened the lock. The police were aided in part of their identification work by the passenger nametags fixed on the outside of the checked luggage. International airlines encourage their passengers to attach external identification to baggage intended for carriage in the hold of aircraft. This procedure aids the identification of bags that become lost or misrouted by the airlines and facilitates the return of such bags to their owners. When misrouted bags do not have such labels, airlines open the luggage and look for evidence linking the bag with its owner. They examine the contents, seeking letters or other documents indicating the bags’ provenance. The police at Lockerbie followed similar procedures. The investigators obtained descriptions of bags and possible contents from relatives and friends of the passengers to help in the matching process. Although several Samsonite suitcases were known to have been on board the Maid of the Seas, Russell and his colleagues never received a description matching the suitcase that RARDE was to identify as the bomb bag. Russell was one of several policemen who were later to provide testimony for the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, about the investigative work of the combined police forces engaged at Lockerbie. His testimony was given in a deposition taken in Scotland. The deposition process enabled sworn statements to be obtained for use during subsequent litigation hearings without necessitating the attendance in court of the person providing the testimony. Lawyers of the interested parties question witnesses before a reporter appointed by the court. In the case of the British police, the depositions were their only input to civil litigation that was to take place three years after the tragedy. John Boyd gave evidence to the courts through just such a process. In his testimony, Boyd described the use made by the police of the HOLMES computer, explaining that it was managed by the Home Office, the government department responsible for policing matters in the United Kingdom. HOLMES had been designed to collect evidence in investigations that were anticipated to be lengthy and detailed. It proved ideal for amassing the enormous amounts of data collected in the Lockerbie investigation. The nature of the system allowed access from many points and was available to investigators in London, Frankfurt, and Washington, as well as those based in Lockerbie. Full particulars relating to recovered property were entered into the computer together with a detailed description of where the property was found. All available information relating to the victims of the tragedy was also fed into the computer. Such detail included fingerprint data and odontology evidence. With so many U.S. citizens on board the ill-fated aircraft, much of the latter was transmitted by the FBI

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from Washington. They used phototelesis communication—a sophisticated facsimile process capable of reproducing color images. The same system was used in reverse by the Scottish police seeking confirmation or identification of specific items. The data held in the HOLMES computer were capable of cross-matching to link the victims with the recovered property. No linkage was ever discovered between the bag recognized as having contained the explosive device and any passenger on the aircraft, nor were any of the other contents of the bag identified with anyone on board. However, a number of items sent to the RARDE by the police that had clearly been adjacent to the explosion were later identified with respect to their point of manufacture and sale. Debris that had formed part of the fabric of the Maid of the Seas enabled the Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) to reconstruct the aircraft. Materials and objects that had been contained in passengers’ baggage and in some instances, whole suitcases, were collected. The results of this combined effort were to become key to identifying the source of the improvised explosive device. This investigative work was the coordinated activity of RARDE and the investigating police force. The latter, and more importantly from the viewpoint of the victims’ families and friends, the American attorneys who represented them, were later able to build on the early investigative work to help identify how the terrorists had been able to defeat the security procedures operated by Pan Am. THE AAIB FINDINGS The AAIB investigation took one and a half years to complete. On 6 August 1990, D. A. Cooper, chief inspector of air accidents at the DOT, presented the formal findings of the AAIB to the Right Honourable Cecil Parkinson, who had succeeded Paul Channon as secretary of state for transport. They reconfirmed the initial conclusions of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch, namely that ‘‘the detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft with the loss of all 259 persons on board and 11 of the residents of the town of Lockerbie.’’ The date and time of the tragedy was confirmed as 21 December 1988 at 1902: 50 hours. The report contained much that was already known. Wreckage from the Boeing had been scattered over a huge area of the Scottish countryside and even into England and into the North Sea. The wind had caused much of the wreckage to fall in two distinct streams, which were referred to as the northern and southern trails. Computer compilations highlighted some 1,200 significant wreckage finds. Two major portions had fallen on Lockerbie itself, one causing a crater to be formed that measured 155 feet long with an estimated displacement of 560 cubic meters. Some 1,500 tons of material on the ground had been dislodged. The ill-fated Boeing had been positioned on stand K14 at Heathrow’s Terminal 3. Many of the passengers traveling on the flight to New York had flown into Heathrow from other European cities and elsewhere to connect with the transAtlantic aircraft. On this occasion, many of the transfer passengers had come from

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Frankfurt on a Boeing 727 that had parked on stand K16, alongside the jumbo. There was nothing to suggest to the writers of the AAIB report that anything was amiss with the departure. The Maid of the Seas was an early marque of jumbo jet. It had first flown in 1970. On 21 December, the aircraft was in standard configuration, with passengers and crew being carried on the upper decks and baggage and cargo stowed in the hold of the aircraft. Some airlines had made modifications to their 747s with additional cargo space being created on the main deck. The Maid of the Seas had been modified in this way, but the configuration was not in use on this occasion. AAIB inspectors examined the service records of the jumbo, including those pertaining to the cargo modification. They gave full details to the minister and reported that everything had been in order. The inspectors also considered the prevailing weather conditions at the time of the tragedy, but there had been no abnormalities. No conditions were identified that might have created any clear air turbulence, although it was agreed that some light turbulence may have existed. Winds at the level at which Flight 103 had been operating were estimated at some 100 or so knots. Visibility was given as fifteen kilometers. Inevitably when an aircraft crashes, the media start talking about ‘‘black boxes,’’ and they did so this time. By black boxes, the press are referring to the digital flight data and cockpit voice recorders carried on commercial airliners. They are valuable in helping investigators to unravel causes of accidents that happen from time to time with civil aircraft, but in instances of sabotage there is seldom any detail of value offered by these instruments. Even so, the crash investigators reviewed the data contained on the recorders, which had been recovered during the first hours following the tragedy. Nothing unusual was discovered. The recorders simply stopped at the time of the destruction. Key discoveries were to result from the painstaking work of the AAIB specialists and from the police, who had been aided by many hundreds of helpers drawn from other services and from the public. The reconstruction of the aircraft was achieved by piecing together the thousands of pieces of recovered debris from the Pan Am jumbo. The operation recovered some 90 percent of the hull wreckage, all of which was taken to the Army Central Ammunition Depot at Longtown. There it was rebuilt showing the center of damage to be on the lower fuselage to the left of the forward cargo bay area. Similar research activity took place with respect to the baggage containers. As a result, the investigators identified the presence of damage consistent with an explosion. Parts of baggage containers that had clearly been close to a detonating high explosive were identified. By reconstructing the containers, it was possible to show the one that had contained the bomb. The container carried the designation AVE 4041 PA and had been positioned at 14L in the hold of Pan Am 103, just forward of the wing. The improvised explosive device (IED) had been positioned at a point approximately twenty-five inches from the skin of the aircraft. From further examination of the container and of the one positioned alongside it in the hold, RARDE had been able to determine that the center of the explosion had been approximately

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fifty centimeters from the rear-facing, vertical open-sided front panel and twenty centimeters above its base. Examination of the blast effects caused by the detonation suggested that the Samsonite suitcase was either positioned in the angled overhang on the left-hand side of the container and held in an almost vertical position by other bags or it had lain horizontally in a second layer of baggage. Either way, the suitcase would not have been in the first layer of bags loaded into the container. This was later to link with testimony of the baggage loaders at Heathrow who had transferred suitcases from the incoming feeder service from Frankfurt onto the Maid of the Seas. They had placed the German originating bags into the container on top of interline bags received previously from other flights. The AAIB report offered a number of safety recommendations, but no proposals were put forward with respect to aviation security measures relating to commercial airline operations. These had, of course, been put under very close scrutiny in the aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy. This had showed that by 21 December 1988, rules and procedures had already been developed which, had they been implemented, would have prevented the destruction of the aircraft and saved the lives of the 270 people who died. Running concurrently with AAIB reconstruction work was the medical examination of the victims. The examinations showed that the injuries to the victims were consistent with an in-flight disintegration of the aircraft and its subsequent impact with the ground. There was no suggestion of an in-flight fire, and none of the victims bore any injuries from shrapnel from the explosion. The explosion had been away from the passenger cabin.

THE RARDE REPORT Forensic scientists from RARDE were charged with the task of assisting the police investigation by examining certain material debris for evidence that might support the case for a possible criminal misuse of explosives. In summary, they sought to identify: • Whether an explosion had occurred. • Whether any such explosion had been caused by an improvised explosive device. • Where precisely the IED had been placed on board. • How the device was constructed. • How the IED was concealed. • Whether the IED could be associated with any particular piece of luggage and whether the contents of that luggage could be identified. • All those items of luggage which showed characteristic explosion damage.

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The head of the Forensic Explosives Laboratory at RARDE, A. W. Feraday, reported in October 1990 that his scientists had been able to achieve all of the above. Explosive residues had been recovered from a severely damaged baggage container (AVE 4041 PA). The struts of the container as well as other parts gave clear indication that they had been damaged by an explosion. The scientists concluded that the evidence was ‘‘consistent with the detonation of a charge of a high performance condensed phase (solid) explosive,’’ and they determined that the residues showed traces of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) and cyclotrimethylenetrinitamine (RDX), two of the constituents of Semtex, the plastic explosive favored by terrorists. Semtex was preferred because it is extremely easy to handle. Any amount of rough treatment can be absorbed with immunity. It explodes only when a deliberate detonation occurs. Examination of the various fragments made possible by the painstaking gathering of debris by the Dumfries and Galloway police and their colleagues from other forces enabled RARDE to determine that a number of the fragments had come from a Toshiba twin-speaker radio cassette recorder. The remnants included parts of a printed circuit board, which had been trapped with other partly carbonized materials in the damaged container. Soot and striation marks showed clearly that they had been caused by a bomb. The investigators knew they were dealing with a very high explosive such as plastic, and thus there had to be an electric detonator or blasting cap. The forensic specialists examined various models of Toshiba cassette radios. They had to ensure that the recorders remained operable after the plastic explosive, timers, and detonators had been placed inside the cassette radio case. Their analysis showed that the quantity of explosive material that could be positioned inside the instrument was consistent with the damage caused on board the Maid of the Seas. Furthermore, RARDE’s findings were compatible with much of the detail released by the German police following the Autumn Leaves episode two months before the Lockerbie tragedy. However, the German models had been single-speaker instruments, each fitted with barometric as well as timing mechanisms. By the time the scientists had identified the method of concealment used by the bombers, analysis of other pieces of debris provided to RARDE had enabled conclusions to be drawn about the suitcase that had contained the device. Pieces of sootcovered, burned bronze plastic had been identified as having been adjacent to the initial explosion. These, together with recovered portions of lining material and locking mechanisms, showed that the suitcase containing the bomb had been a Samsonite bag. The next task of RARDE had been to identify the goods that had surrounded the bomb in the suitcase. Thirteen items had been in close proximity to the explosion. Feraday and his team found several bearing labels showing they had been manufactured on the Mediterranean island of Malta. They included a T-shirt with the brand name Aberanderado, a pair of men’s Yorkie brand tartan trousers, two brand name shirts, a second pair of men’s Yorkie trousers, a sports jacket, some Panwear pajamas, a child’s sleeper suit, some sports training shoes, and a sweatshirt. A folding umbrella, a Puccini-

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design cardigan and some woven material were also identified as having been in the fatal suitcase. The task of investigating the Malta connection fell to another experienced Scottish policeman, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell. He took the information provided by RARDE and traced the goods that had been linked to the bomb bag back to the manufacturer and to their point of sale. The white T-shirt was manufactured by Underwear Ltd. of Malta; the gentlemen’s tartan trousers were made by Yorkie Clothing; the blue and white Slalom brand shirt had come from Johnson’s Clothing; a second pair of Yorkie Clothing trousers was traced; the gentlemen’s sports jacket in brown herringbone had been tailored by C. H. Bernard & Sons; and the Puccini cardigan had been produced by Eagle Knitwear. All the manufacturers were Maltese companies. The police were able to obtain samples of some of the goods for comparison purposes. Apart from identifying the manufacturers, Bell was also able to pinpoint through the manufacturers’ distribution records, the retail outlet where the bombers had purchased many of the goods. It was Mary’s House. The store owner told the police he recalled selling the items. He was able to do so because of the eclectic nature of the sales and the number of items purchased at the same time. He suggested that ‘‘it was as if the buyer simply wanted to fill up a case.’’ Thus the police investigative work, which had begun with hundreds of people seeking and retrieving a multitude of items scattered over wide tracts of the Scottish border country and beyond, had found a focal point in Malta. Later, as lawyers from the firms engaged by the families of the victims of the bombing followed up with their own investigation, more pointers to a Maltese connection became evident. These revelations were to occur more than two years after the incident. Whether the German investigating authorities had uncovered this link much earlier without disclosing their discovery remains an intriguing substory of the Lockerbie affair. Ultimately, indictments named two Libyan citizens wanted in connection with the bombing and claimed that the bomb that had destroyed Pan Am 103 had originated in Malta. There are some who, for whatever reason, continue to argue against both the Maltese connection and the movement of an unaccompanied suitcase through the baggage handling system at Frankfurt. The legal authorities in the United States and Scotland are not among them.

5

GOVERNMENTAL INQUIRIES THE COMMISSION ON AVIATION SECURITY AND TERRORISM Before either the AAIB findings were published in August 1990 or the RARDE Report was made public two months later, George Bush, the United States president, created a Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism. Established under the authority of Executive Order 12686 dated 4 August 1989, the commission was chaired by former Labor Secretary, the Honorable Ann McLaughlin. Membership comprised two representatives from both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives together with three people having a background in air transport matters or counterterrorism drawn from the private sector. Sittings began in November 1989, and the final report was presented to the president just six months later on 15 May 1990. The conclusions were hard-hitting and critical of both the Federal Aviation Administration and Pan American World Airways. In respect to the former, the commission found the Federal Aviation Administration to be a reactive agency—preoccupied with responses to events to the exclusion of adequate contingency planning in anticipation of future threats. Such a claim could doubtless have been made against civil aviation administrations of many other countries as well. Regrettably, it still can. The commission also claimed that ‘‘the U.S. civil aviation security system is seriously flawed’’ and that

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Pan Am’s apparent security lapses and FAA’s failure to enforce its own regulations followed a pattern that had existed for months prior to Flight 103, during the day of the tragedy, and—notably—for nine months thereafter. Another conclusion was that the destruction of Flight 103 may well have been preventable. Stricter baggage reconciliation procedures could have stopped any unaccompanied checked bags from boarding the flight at Frankfurt. This opinion reached right to the heart of the Lockerbie tragedy—it should never have happened, but on 21 December 1988 ‘‘no-one knew whether the plane was carrying an ‘extra’ interline bag that had been checked through to Pan Am from another airline.’’ Passenger and baggage matching, deemed by the commission to be the ‘‘bedrock of any heightened civil air security system,’’ had been recommended by the IATA since summer 1985. The Indian court of inquiry investigating the bombing of Air India’s Kanishka had urged the procedure on the ICAO in 1986. The vulnerability of air transport to the baggage bomber had been highlighted two months before the Air India tragedy, when your author, speaking at a Federal Aviation Administration security conference in Philadelphia, warned delegates that use of sophisticated timing and other devices by terrorists and which are capable of evading discovery during screening processes will demand responsive action by security specialists. The attack on Air India graphically underlined the point. The commission noted the policies published by the international organizations and heard that an earlier disaster to Pan Am had been avoided by the discovery of an unaccompanied bag carrying a bomb during routine security checks in Istanbul. They were also briefed on the FAA’s 1986 classification of certain overseas airports as ‘‘extraordinary-risk’’ locations. With the classification had come changes to the Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP) incorporating tightened security controls, including the mandate for U.S. airlines to match bags with their owners. Any unmatched bags had to be physically searched or not carried on the aircraft. The new rule offered what should have been foolproof protection against the infiltrated, unaccompanied bag, but this was the rule Pan Am had dropped at Frankfurt and London in summer 1988. The commission concluded that although any extra bag carried on Flight 103 may have been X-rayed, the explosive Semtex could not have been reliably detected by such examination. The commission learned that despite several FAA audits of Pan Am’s security operation at Frankfurt, the carrier was never cited for breaches of the federal security program. In October 1988, Tommy Dome, the FAA inspector responsible for overseeing U.S. civil aviation security-related matters at Frankfurt, visited the airport.

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He recorded several failures on the part of the airline, including the absence of any identifiable tracking system for interline baggage. He made recommendations to cover the shortcomings but had not placed the airline in violation of the FAA’s baggage security requirements. Indeed, the commission heard that the inspector concluded in his report that the minimum (FAA) requirements were being met. At Frankfurt, Pan Am’s security operation in 1988 was being conducted by a wholly owned subsidiary of the airline, a company called Alert. Little was included in the commission’s report on this company’s operation, other than the testimony of Pan Am’s security officer for Germany, Martin Huebner. Huebner considered the Alert personnel ‘‘less well educated’’ (than the Pan Am staff) and ‘‘not qualified’’ for the task they had to perform. He also considered that Alert was undermanned for the tasks at hand. At the time McLaughlin presented her team’s report to President Bush, the criminal investigation begun in Scotland was still ongoing. Evidence had not come into the public arena to explain how the terrorists had beaten the security defenses of the airline. However enough was known to support the commission’s findings. It had already been established that an improvised explosive device, housed in a Toshiba brand cassette radio recorder and using Semtex as the explosive charge, had destroyed Pan Am 103. The authorities believed that it had entered the Pan Am system at Frankfurt in an unaccompanied suitcase. Frankfurt was known to have been the center for a terrorist bomb-making cell headed by Ahmed Jibril of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC). The improvised explosive devices the PLFP-GC had manufactured utilized barometric controls and had been clearly intended for use against air transport targets. A full description of these devices had been circulated to various governments, including those of the United States and the United Kingdom. In their circulation of the Toshiba advice, the FAA had warned airlines falling under the U.S. registry that the IEDs ‘‘would be very difficult to detect by normal x-ray.’’ THE HELSINKI WARNING By the time the commission met, knowledge of the Helsinki warning was widespread. Members knew that the U.S. embassy in Helsinki had received a telephone message on 5 December telling of a threat to bomb a Pan Am aircraft departing from Frankfurt to the United States. The message had been passed to other agencies and to Pan Am. A timescale had been included in the warning—within two weeks. The bombing took place sixteen days later. When the telephone call was made, Frankfurt was known to have been the center of a terrorist bomb-making cell whose activities had been disrupted by the Autumn Leaves operation of the German police. Other, undiscovered bombs were believed to have already been manufactured. Throughout their deliberations, Ann McLaughlin and her team had known that the Finnish police had decided the Helsinki warning was a hoax. The latter had based their conclusion on its similarity to other calls that had been received by various

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entities in Finland. Whether the Finns had weighed this particular call against the growing intelligence building up with respect to the terrorist cell known to exist in Frankfurt has never been made clear. Had they done so, they must surely have given greater consideration to the contents of the call with its obvious potential to dovetail into events in Germany. Obvious to the commission was the failure of U.S. intelligence services to reach a conclusion about the warning prior to the bombing of Pan Am 103. Aviation security experts have remained cynical at the hurried, post-incident embracing of the Finnish evaluation by the U.S. and UK authorities. Both administrations were severely criticized at the time for their performances, which many saw as contributory factors in the disaster. PUBLICATION OF BOMB THREATS The FAA issued their security bulletin covering the Helsinki warning on 7 December. The U.S. State Department reissued the advice two days later, and on 14 December the embassy in Moscow posted the warning on the general bulletin board advising the American community in the Russian capital of the situation. The commission found no record of any passenger changing their travel plans as a result of the Helsinki warning. Even so, families and friends of the Lockerbie victims saw the uneven distribution of the information and its nonpublication as a major failing by the airline. Many have insisted that had the warning become general knowledge, their relatives would not have flown on the Pan Am jumbo jet. It is a point that is difficult to substantiate after the event; nevertheless, to tell or not to tell became a significant debating point during the hearings held by the commission. In their report they suggested that ‘‘public notification of threats to civil aviation should be made under certain circumstances.’’ Further, they believed that ‘‘on balance—passengers are entitled to be notified of credible aviation threat information where the information is specific enough to assist the traveler in avoiding or minimizing exposure to the potential risk, and where there is no assurance that the threat can be nullified.’’ The conclusion suggests that the FAA and/or the airline should pass on to the traveling public the responsibility for assessing terrorist threats. The FAA and the airlines have personnel paid to undertake threat analysis. If such people are unable to give an assurance that the threat can be nullified, responsibility cannot be delegated to the public. The commission’s position could be construed to mean that a carrier may opt to fly even if it has not been able to nullify the threat, providing the intending travelers have been told of the situation. In 1988, the airline industry policy on the ‘‘to tell or not to tell’’ question was that warnings should not be advertised. In 1990, your author told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London that ‘‘to tell’’ would hand a new, powerful weapon to the terrorists. They would need only to phone in a threat to drive an airline’s customers away, assuming the intending passengers reacted in the manner

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suggested by the protagonists of the ‘‘tell’’ policy. Used as a weapon, this method could decimate a nation’s air services with no danger to the perpetrators. There was an important rider to this explanation. By withholding details of any threats made to it, an airline has to accept the responsibility for ensuring the warning is expertly analyzed and acted upon. Should analysis of the threat or application of any additional procedures satisfy the airline or any involved authority that the service is not at risk, the aircraft would be free to operate. At this point, the threat would no longer exist and the need to broadcast it would have passed. If, on the other hand, the analysis and any precautionary measures taken by the airline, or the appropriate authority if it had become involved, fail to satisfy the airline that the service is safe to operate, the flight would have to be canceled. The prime objective must be the safety of the passengers and the operating crew. It remains the duty of governments and their agencies to ensure that the correct procedures are in place and professionally implemented. In reaching their recommendations on the publication of threat advice to the traveling public, the commission was doubtless influenced by the deeply held opinions put to it by the families of those who died on board Pan Am 103. However, earlier study of bomb threats made to airlines in the United States had shown that whenever such calls were made, they were invariably false. Only when linked to extortion attempts had any validity been found in any of the warnings. The commission’s own report noted that of some 600–700 anonymous aircraft threats received annually during the previous decade, none had resulted in the discovery of a bomb. This knowledge may well have influenced the different interpretations of the Helsinki warning made by the various administrations. Even so, given the detail and the threat environment that existed in December 1988, the analysts should certainly have considered the warning as other than routine. THE LONDON EXAMPLE An example of the use to which terrorists can put a simple telephone call was demonstrated in the United Kingdom in 1994. In March of that year, a telephoned bomb threat was successfully used to close London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports, two of the busiest international airports in the world. A mortar bomb attack had been launched against London’s Heathrow airport from a parking lot adjacent to the northern runway. None of the missiles exploded, no one was injured nor was any damage caused to the facilities or to any aircraft. However, in the confusion that followed the attack (no one at the airport actually appeared to have known what was happening), aircraft continued to operate on the affected runway. This confusion and the embarrassment it caused was to affect the subsequent decision making of the involved managements. Twenty-four hours after the first attack, a further barrage of mortars was fired, this time directed at Heathrow’s Terminal 4. The southern runway close to the terminal was closed within minutes.

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Heathrow suffered another attack the following day, and responsibility for all three was claimed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Subsequent to the third onslaught, the IRA put away their mortars and resorted to the telephone. They called to warn of yet another attack, and the immediate response of the airport managements was to close down both Heathrow and Gatwick. The passenger terminals were evacuated and London was without air communication. A victory for terrorism simply by making a telephone call. No bombs were needed. The IRA doubtless considered the confusion at the airports and the closures to be a considerable achievement, and they would be right. They were after publicity and they obtained their goal. News of the attacks dominated the media headlines, serving to underline the emotional attractiveness of civil aviation to terrorists. One thing is certain, with airports and airlines being such easy and soft targets to attack, terrorism directed against commercial aviation is never going to go away. Recognizing the success of the IRA, other terrorist groups may choose to adopt similar techniques in other parts of the world. It is worth considering whether the evacuation of the terminal buildings at Heathrow and Gatwick on the Sunday following the initial attacks caused passengers who were excluded from the terminal facilities to be at greater risk than if they had stayed inside. If the telephone calls had been made by the Abu Nidal group who attacked Rome and Vienna airports in 1986, passengers standing around in the open would have presented an easy target for his group’s automatic weapons and grenades. Heathrow, Gatwick, Paris, Frankfurt, New York, or any other major airport are no less vulnerable to such an assault today than were Rome and Vienna in 1986. The evacuation of the Gatwick and Heathrow passengers and staff has some relevance to possible reaction to any publication of the Helsinki warning. At the British airports, passengers and staff were transferred from inside the terminal buildings to the sidewalks outside, albeit on direction rather than from personal choice. If the Helsinki warning had been made public, would passengers, on their own volition, have sought to change from Pan Am to other airlines? Despite the conclusions of the commission, some victims’ family members believe that certain in-the-know dignitaries did make such a transfer. However, if there had been a mass transfer of passengers, their baggage would have moved with them. Given the nonexistence of any matching procedure, this raises the possibility of the infiltrated, unaccompanied bag being swept along with the migration and subsequently being placed on another aircraft but this time on an aircraft of a different airline. The same devastating result would have occurred unless the new carrier operated the international reconciliation regime. There is little doubt that widespread advertising of bomb threats would encourage a multiplication of the many hundreds of hoax calls made to airlines every year. As fire and ambulance emergency services know only too well, there are many maladjusted people who get some sort of perverted thrill from such behavior. The airlines suffer from these same individuals. The ‘‘copycat’’ syndrome would come well to the fore if threats were to become published. Given that the commission recognized the difficulties likely to be associated with the publication of bomb threats and had

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identified the nonexistence of valid warnings in the domestic U.S. aviation scene during the previous ten years, a different conclusion on publication of threats might have been expected. Altogether the commission made more than sixty recommendations to improve aviation security but advised that before any new regulations were developed, existing ones had to be implemented. The commission was echoing the words of the IATA spokesmen who had repeatedly urged airlines, airports, and governments to implement established procedures as a first step to making the world’s airways more secure for the traveling public and crews. Among the recommendations made by McLaughlin and her team was one calling for the FAA to launch a top priority research and development program aimed at producing new techniques and equipment capable of detecting small amounts of plastic explosives. The mechanisms had to operate effectively in an airport environment. At the same time, it called for the cessation of one element in the existing FAA program that the administration had rushed forward following Lockerbie. This was Thermal Neutron Analysis (TNA). TNA had been the focus of the FAA’s research and development program throughout much of the 1980s. TNA requires baggage or packages to be bombarded with neutrons. These neutrons react with the contents of the bags, causing gamma rays to be generated in varying strengths when nitrogen, a component of almost all known explosives, is present. The gamma rays are measured by the TNA process indicating the possible presence of explosive material. However, early tests showed that a range of materials created a similar reaction to the nitrogen that would be present in an explosive device. Leather and wool, for example, had caused numerous false alarm readings. Technical experts at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in California, who were charged by the FAA with the research program, developed other measuring parameters such as mass and contiguity to distinguish between inoffensive and potentially dangerous contents of the baggage. Subsequent additions to the initial machines incorporated the use of X-rays, giving a combination of search possibilities. SAIC also added an automated detection warning to overcome the human element problems invariably associated with search techniques. TNA technology represented a major leap forward in explosive device detection, but at the time of Lockerbie, it was still effectively in the research and development stage. Six machines had been purchased for testing at New York’s Kennedy airport, Miami, Detroit, and Washington with the remaining two intended for London’s Gatwick airport and for Frankfurt. Without waiting for the test results, the FAA, stunned by the Lockerbie tragedy, mandated U.S. airlines operating from designated high-risk airports to incorporate approved explosives detection systems into their baggage screening processes. However, at this time, only TNA met the administration’s criteria and only the six prototypes were available. The commission criticized the FAA decision and urged that the TNA program be deferred until the system was more effective or other technology had been developed. Their recommendation was made with the shortcomings mentioned above

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in mind. The commission was also aware that in its published specification, TNA would not have detected the small quantity (300 grams) of Semtex contained in the Lockerbie bomb. To equip the forty airports that fell into the extraordinary-risk category in 1989 with the 150 or so machines that would have been required, would have cost in the region of $175,000,000. The commission’s logic won the day. POLITICAL WILL TO DEFEAT TERRORISM Notable among other conclusions drawn by the commission was their view that to solve airborne terrorism, the political will of nations was needed to combat those criminals who perpetrated such crimes. In expressing their opinion, they were echoing another element of your author’s 1985 Philadelphia speech. He had told delegates that ‘‘Ultimately, air piracy can only be defeated if States act responsibly within the parameters of international agreements. Only States can ensure there are no havens, no sanctuaries for air pirates. Condemnation and action should not be affected by political motivation but ‘politics’ are ‘politics.’ ’’ These words have particular relevance to Lockerbie. By November 1991, the United States and Great Britain had named persons whom their police authorities had linked to the bombing of Pan Am 103. Indictments were issued against two men. However, the alleged bombers stayed safely ensconsed in Libya until April 1999, the authorities there having previously refused to release them to the Western allies. Politics doubtless had a part to play in bringing about the change in Libyan and Western policy in 1999. The commission suggested that the U.S. government should vigorously plan and train for ‘‘preemptive or retaliatory military strikes against known terrorist enclaves in nations that harbor them.’’ Given the difficulty of isolating ‘‘known terrorist enclaves’’ and the high probability of innocent, civilian casualties resulting from such raids, this particular proposal was not universally supported outside North America. However, the recommendation did reflect action taken by the United States in 1986 when targets in Libya were bombed. The U.S. government may have recognized that the likely effect of retaliatory operations of the sort envisaged by the commission would elevate the risk of terrorist reaction by the state involved or elements within that state. The decision to bomb a Pan Am aircraft was and still is seen by most observers to have originated with the shooting down of the Iran Air airbus. The fact that the U.S. action was a mistake was irrelevant to those seeking revenge. Given that a bombing attack by military forces would be preplanned and intentional, retaliatory action would be certain. Under these circumstances, innocent airline passengers and crews would be placed in unnecessary danger. There has to be another way. BALANCE OF THE COMMISSION’S FINDINGS The commission recommended that the FAA security division should be elevated within the agency to a position that reports directly to the head of the administration.

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This is an important policy proposal that any entity involved with civil aviation should take on board. Within any civil aviation administration, the executive responsible for security should answer to the head of that organization. Within an airport management, the head of security should report to the managing director of the airport. Within an airline, the security director should have direct access to the chief executive officer. The intent must be to minimize the levels of command between the security executive and the person responsible for making any corporate decisions affecting the safety of the operation. At an airport or within an airline, the authority of the senior security executive may well be restricted to his or her own staff, but the policies developed by them will need to be implemented by line managers responsible for other airport and in-flight operations. Airports and airlines are commercial enterprises. They can exist in the long term only if they are economically viable; thus facilitation relating to the movement of passengers, their baggage, and any cargo is vitally important. The security director must take such matters into account when establishing company policy recommendations. Even so, his or her position could still be undermined by others with different objectives to achieve. The direct link to the chief executive will enhance the security director’s authority. Another of the commission’s recommendations addressed itself to the U.S. State Department. Often U.S. airlines operating overseas will come up against barriers when seeking to implement federally mandated security procedures. The commission saw responsibility for negotiating permission for U.S. carriers to carry out FAArequired screening and other security procedures as resting with the State Department. When facing local opposition to the implementation of FAA-mandated procedures, the commission believed that airlines should not be left on their own to conduct negotiations. This is a potentially difficult situation for carriers since the host state may not see the need for security procedures that may be additional to those required by the host country. The impetus given by State Department intervention (or its counterpart in countries other than the United States) would certainly ease the position of the airlines. One other important matter raised by the commission concerned compensation to the victims or the families of victims of terrorist aggression. McLaughlin’s team saw terrorism of the type perpetrated against Pan Am as an act of aggression against the United States. This was a view of terrorism reflected in a report to the Council of Europe that had been prepared in January 1989 by its Committee on Economic Affairs and Development. The supporting text to the report stated that ‘‘It must be underscored that the defence of civil aviation is the responsibility of the State. Airlines are not attacked because they are air carriers but because they are seen to represent the State of registry. The cost of the defence should be borne by the State.’’ Those who died when Pan Am 103 was destroyed were innocent, surrogate targets for the United States. The commission recommended that victims of such aggression should receive special compensation from the state. Although the commission could not have foreseen it at the time, the civil litigation resulting in financial compensation being awarded to the families was to take some three and a half years to reach the

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point of decision. The appeal process was to take another three years. The families of those who died when the Air India jumbo was bombed over the Atlantic in 1985 received their compensation in 1991. It, too, had taken more than six years! It is worth noting that in 1997, eight and a half years after the Lockerbie tragedy, the Commission for Aviation Safety and Security, sitting under the chairmanship of Vice President Al Gore, found it necessary to urge that the ‘‘administration and Congress . . . take additional steps necessary to ensure fairer and more equitable treatment of families of victims of international aviation disasters.’’ Passenger compensation with respect to aviation accidents had been governed by the terms of the Warsaw Convention, a convention prepared before the Second World War. At the time of the Lockerbie tragedy, the terms were woefully inadequate, the ceiling having been set at $75,000. ICAO contracting states had worked to improve the minimum levels of liability, but ironically, it was the U.S. Congress that had kept international agreement from being reached. The United States was arguing for unlimited liability, whereas the majority of the ICAO members supported some form of ceiling. By 1996, an agreement among U.S. airlines had waived the Warsaw liability limits to establish a new ceiling of $143,000, but by any standard, this, too, has to be seen as inadequate. To overthrow the Warsaw limit and even, in some cases, to get settlement at all, required lengthy litigation. This may well have been very beneficial to the legal profession and to the insurance companies, but the general public would have been better served if international legislators had found an acceptable alternative. Victims or their families should be compensated speedily and without causing them the grief and expense of years of legal argument. In 1999, the ICAO responded to these concerns. A replacement for the Warsaw Convention was agreed at an international diplomatic conference held in their headquarters in Montreal. The organization’s president, Dr. Assad Kotaite, announced that the ICAO had “succeeded in modernizing and consolidating a 70-year-old system of international instruments of private international law into one legal instrument that will provide, for years to come, an adequate level of compensation for those involved in international air accidents.” A major feature of the new treaty is the concept of unlimited liability where the fault of the carrier is presumed. A first tier of what is a two tier system provides for strict liability up to $135,000, irrespective of the carrier’s fault. This figure will be reviewed periodically. The second tier introduces the concept of unlimited liability where the fault of the carrier is presumed. Importantly, carriers are called upon to provide advance payments, without delay, to assist entitled persons in meeting immediate economic needs. The treaty also calls for facilitation in the recovery of damages without the need for lengthy litigation. The 1989 Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism dealt at length with other aspects of the treatment afforded to the families of those who died over Lockerbie. The U.S. State Department was seen as cold and not overly courteous toward the bereaved. In her report, Mclaughlin called for the State Department to ensure that, in the future, the families of those killed in overseas disasters receive prompt,

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humane, and courteous treatment. It would be reasonable for the general public to assume that sensitive handling of victims’ families and friends would automatically follow such traumatic circumstances as those surrounding the Lockerbie tragedy. The fact that the commission found it necessary to make their recommendation tells clearly that such was not the case. Certainly many of the American families were bitterly critical of the performance of the State Department, which they thought had fallen short in the most basic of their duties. They had failed ‘‘to notify the families in a timely and compassionate fashion.’’ Their provision of the consular services, necessary following the tragedy, had also been inadequate, according to the families who perceived the Scottish police authorities as much more considerate of their grief. The report and recommendations of the commission were among the points considered when the U.S. Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act of 1996 was developed and passed by Congress. It authorized the establishment of a task force to ‘‘study the need for modification to existing laws or regulations that would result in improvements to the treatment of family members of victims of aviation disasters.’’ In particular, the task force was required to consider the treatment of families by the media and legal community. THE SCOTTISH FATAL ACCIDENT INQUIRY Independently of the Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) into the bombing of Pan Am 103 was established in Scotland. It was created on the orders of the lord advocate, the country’s chief law officer. Inevitably, the FAI, headed by the sheriff principal of South Strathclyde, Dumfries, and Galloway, John S. Mowat, Q.C., covered similar ground to that traveled by the U.S. body. It sat from 1 October 1990 to 13 February 1991 and found that the cause of all the said deaths was the detonation of an improvised explosive device located in the luggage container AVE 4041 situated on the left side of the forward hold; the said device consisted of Semtex-type plastic explosive concealed in a Toshiba radio-cassette player contained in a Samsonite suitcase; the primary cause of the said deaths of the passengers on board Pan Am 103 and the residents of Lockerbie was a criminal act of murder. Evidence put to the inquiry included information on the movement of the illfated aircraft. Its arrival at Heathrow on 21 December 1988 had followed an overnight crossing from San Francisco. The FAI heard that the aircraft was under constant guard until it left Heathrow as Flight 103 that evening, operating the transAtlantic leg of a journey that airline timetables had shown originating in Frankfurt. In fact the Frankfurt/London sector had been flown by a Boeing 727, operating as Flight 103A. The sheriff principal was told the feeder service from Frankfurt had been parked alongside the jumbo and that bags transferred from the feeder service were taken directly from that aircraft to the Maid of the Seas. They were not counted or weighed to confirm that they corresponded with the interline baggage checked in

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at Frankfurt. Nor were they reconciled in any other way with the passengers, or Xrayed at Heathrow. The sheriff principal concluded that the suitcase containing the said explosive device was among the said pieces of baggage transferred from Pan American 103A and was unaccompanied both on the flight from Frankfurt to Heathrow and on the flight from Heathrow; the said suitcase probably arrived at Frankfurt on a flight or an airline other than Pan American and so was interlined to Pan American there. It was loaded on to and allowed to fly on Flight 103A without being identified as an unaccompanied bag; the bags interlined to Pan American at Heathrow were subjected to x-ray screening but there was no reconciliation procedure there to ensure that interline passengers and their baggage travelled on the same aircraft. The same procedure probably applied at Frankfurt. The FAI noted that in 1988 it had been accepted that there was a danger of an explosive device being concealed in a piece of baggage and loaded onto an aircraft; that such a piece of baggage was likely to be unaccompanied; that such a bag was likely to be introduced by being interlined at a particular airport from another airline, and that the person introducing it would not check in as a passenger at the transfer airport. Positive passenger/baggage reconciliation was recognized as an important element in any system designed to prevent the carriage of an unaccompanied bag on an aircraft. Underlining the importance of the passenger/baggage matching procedure, the sheriff principal concluded that as of December 1988, ‘‘the limitations of X-ray screening as a means of detecting plastic explosives contained in electronic equipment were generally recognized.’’ Regarding Pan Am’s dependence on X-ray examination of transfer baggage, the sheriff principal considered that their ‘‘reliance on X-ray screening alone in relation to interline baggage at Heathrow and Frankfurt was a defect in a system of working which contributed to the deaths.’’ Like the U.S. commission, the sheriff principal would have been aware that before the attack on the Maid of the Seas, Interpol had questioned the effectiveness of Xray units in detecting explosive or incendiary devices concealed in checked/hold baggage. He would also have known that in 1988, technical experts from the European Civil Aviation Conference had said, ‘‘There currently exists no equipment capable in itself of achieving such an objective (discovery of explosive devices) with 100 percent effectiveness.’’ John Mowat knew when taking evidence that the German Bundescriminale (Police), following the Autumn Leaves raids two months before the Lockerbie tragedy, had warned governments that the Toshiba improvised explosive devices found in Neuss ‘‘would be very difficult to identify by X-ray procedures.’’ Given the world opinion in 1988 on the fallibility of the X-ray as a explosive-detection device, the sheriff principal’s underlining of the key nature of passenger/baggage reconciliation can be readily understood. In another conclusion he noted that

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in all the circumstances, the procedure of transferring baggage from Flight 103A to 103 without any security check involved a substantial risk that an unaccompanied bag containing an explosive device would be so transferred and that it would have been a reasonable precaution to have instituted or reverted to a positive passenger/baggage reconciliation procedure in relation to interline baggage at Frankfurt designed to detect the presence of any unaccompanied bag. Such a precaution might have avoided the deaths. John Mowat had recognized that the failure of the Pan Am security procedures at Frankfurt could have been rectified at London had the airline implemented at Heathrow the security program mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. He believed that. in the absence of such a procedure (reconciliation) at Frankfurt, it would have been a reasonable precaution to have instituted a positive passenger/baggage reconciliation procedure in relation to bags transferred from Flight 103A to Flight 103, either by counting bags so transferred or by physical match. Such a precaution might have prevented the deaths. The United Kingdom’s Department of Transport did not escape criticism by the sheriff principal. He noted that the DOT’s own directions (mandatory requirements) and circulars (recommendations), as interpreted by the department, ‘‘afforded insufficient protection against the possibility that an undetected, unaccompanied bag would be transferred from Flight 103A to 103.’’ Media speculation on the identity of the culprits of the bombing had run rife following the destruction of the Maid of the Seas. One story had linked a Frankfurt originating passenger, Khaled Nazir Jaafar, with the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb. In his findings, John Mowat dismissed the suggestion. Speculation that the CIA had been using couriers to move illicit narcotics as part of an overall entrapment policy, and thus were connected to the tragedy, was not supported in any evidence provided at the FAI.

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INDICTMENTS THE SCOTTISH PETITION On 13 November 1991, almost two years after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, by a petition of the procurator fiscal of the Court of Public Interest, the Scottish authorities charged that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmad Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, ‘‘whose present whereabouts are unknown but who are believed to be within Libya,’’ did conspire together and with others to further the purposes of the Libyan Intelligence Services by criminal means, namely the commission of acts of terrorism directed against nationals and the interests of other countries and in particular the destruction of a civil passenger aircraft and the murder of its occupants. Abdelbaset was identified as the head of security of Libyan Arab Airlines and thereafter director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. Fhimah was the station manager of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta. Both were said to be members of the Libyan Intelligence Services. The petition detailed the premises where the conspiracy was alleged to have been developed. These included locations in Libya and Switzerland as well as Malta. Among the points itemized in the petition were: that between 1 September 1988 and 21 December 1988, both dates inclusive at the Eucharistic Congress Road, Malta, did establish and maintain a pretended business to be known as and under the name of Medtours or Med

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Tour Services Limited as a cover for the operations of said Libyan Intelligence Services. On 7 December 1988 in the shop premises known as Mary’s House at Tower Road, Sliema, Malta they did purchase a quantity of clothing and an umbrella. On 20 December 1988 at Luqa Airport, Malta said Abdelbaset Ali Mohmad Al Megrahi did enter Malta using a passport in the false name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad and they did cause a suitcase to be introduced to Malta. Specific to the bombing of Pan Am 103, the petition stated that on 21 December 1988 at Luqa Airport, aforesaid they did place or cause to be placed on board an aircraft of Air Malta flight KM180 to Frankfurt am Main Airport, Federal Republic of Germany, said suitcase or a similar suitcase containing such clothing and umbrella and an improvised explosive device containing high performance plastic explosive concealed within a radio cassette recorder and programmed to be detonated by one of said electronic timers, having tagged or caused such suitcase to be tagged so as to be carried by aircraft from Frankfurt am Main aforesaid via London, Heathrow Airport to New York, John F Kennedy Airport, United States of America; and such suitcase was thus carried to Frankfurt am Main aforesaid and there placed on board an aircraft of Pan American World Airways, flight PA103A and carried to London, Heathrow Airport aforesaid and there, in turn, placed on board an aircraft of Pan American World Airways flight PA103 to New York, John F Kennedy aforesaid; and said improvised explosive device detonated and exploded on board said aircraft flight 103 while in flight near to Lockerbie, Scotland whereby the aircraft was destroyed and the wreckage crashed to the ground and the 259 passengers and crew named in schedule 1 hereof and the 11 residents of Lockerbie aforesaid named in Schedule 2 hereof were killed and they did murder them. The petition was signed by the procurator fiscal, James T. MacDougall. THE U.S. INDICTMENT The day after the Scottish petition was published, the United States Department of Justice, through Acting Attorney General William P. Barr, told the world that a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia had indicted two officials of an intelligence agency of the government of Libya. They were charged with planting and detonating a bomb that had destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988 and killed 270 people. The grand jury named the men as Lamen Khalifa Fhimah (who also went by the alias of Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah) and Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi. The latter was

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also known by variations of his name including Abdelbaset Ali Mohmad Al Megrahi, used by the Scottish authorities, and Ahmed Khalifa Abusamad, noted by the procurator fiscal as the name used by Abdel Basset when entering Malta on 20 December 1988. Both men were alleged to be members of the Jamahirya Security Organization (JSO), the intelligence service of Libya. The indictment detailed the organization of the JSO, one department of which was Technical Administration, responsible for the development of technical equipment and provision of support to JSO operations in Libya and abroad. In 1984, according to the grand jury, the assistant manager was Said Rashid Kisha, who had negotiated with a Swiss manufacturer, Meister and Bollier, for the development of digital electronic timers for the JSO. Said Rashid Kisha had moved from Technical Administration in 1985 to the position of director of operations of the JSO. Among the branches making up his new department was the airline security section charged with ‘‘overseeing the covert placement and intelligence operations of JSO officers as employees of Libyan Arab Airlines in various countries, including the Republic of Malta.’’ During the period when Said Rashid Kisha was the director, Abdel Basset Ali AlMegrahi had been the chief of the Airline Security Section. Other Libyans named in the indictment included Izzel Din Al Hinshiri. The indictment claimed that he had held a number of posts within the Libyan government including minister of transportation, minister of justice, secretary general to the Peoples’ Committee for Justice in Libya, director, and assistant to the director of the Central Security Administration of the JSO. It was Hinshiri who, according to the grand jury, received the timers manufactured by Meister and Bollier. ABH, a Libyan front company, leased premises from Meister and Bollier at the latter’s Zurich office. A fourth Libyan, Badri Hasan, was alleged to have been associated with Abdel Basset in the activities of ABH in Switzerland. In 1988, the JSO was said to have issued Semtex explosives containing the substances RDX and PETN, electric blasting caps or detonators, and digital electric timers (MST-13) to their operatives engaged in covert terrorist campaigns outside of Libya. Libyan Arab Airlines, at that time, operated flights from Tripoli, Libya, to Malta, where Air Malta acted as their handling agents. Lamen Khalifa Fhimah was the Libyan Arab Airlines station manager at Malta’s Luqa airport. Abdel Basset, according to the indictment, flew from Luqa to Tripoli on 21 December 1988 on Libyan Arab Airlines’ Flight LN 147, which had boarded its passengers between 8:50 and 9:50 A.M. During this time period, passengers traveling on Air Malta’s Flight KM 180 to Frankfurt were being processed. The grand jury charged that an item of luggage had moved from KM 180 to PA 103A in Frankfurt and that at London, baggage from the Pan Am feeder service was transferred to the Maid of the Seas. The grand jury was satisfied that the bombing of the Maid of the Seas had been a conspiracy in which Abdel Basset and Lamen Fhimah, together with other unknown people, ‘‘unlawfully, willfully and knowingly’’ took part. The judgment of the Scottish procurator fiscal was repeated, namely that the conspirators ‘‘did place

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and cause to be placed a destructive device and substance in and upon Pan American Flight 103.’’ The full indictment ran to 193 charges, including one for each U.S. citizen killed by the terrorists. Details in the charges included various references to the purchasing of clothing in Malta, to the use of a cassette radio recorder to secret the improvised explosive device and to a brown-colored Samsonite Silhouette 4000 range suitcase in which the various items had been packed. The chronology given of the two principal conspirators’ activities shortly before the attack on Pan Am 103 showed Abdel Basset making a number of journeys from Libya to Malta, traveling under an alias, Abdel Baset A. Mohmed. It was claimed that he had used this same alias to check in to the Holiday Inn at Sliema at the beginning of December, when he listed his occupation as a flight dispatcher. It was on this trip that Abdel Basset was deemed to have purchased the various items of clothing from the Mary’s House store. He had traveled to Zurich in early December, returning to Malta on the 17th and then on to Tripoli, Libya, where Lamen Fhimah joined him. Abdel Basset and Lamen Fhimah returned to Malta on 20 December (the former using the alias Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad) bringing with them a ‘‘large brown hardsided Samsonite suitcase.’’ It was this suitcase, containing ‘‘an explosive device incorporating an MST-13 timer’’ that the men caused ‘‘to be introduced as part of the interline baggage in Air Malta flight KM180 to Frankfurt, Germany.’’ The grand jury concluded that the conspiracy required the bag to be transferred at Frankfurt to Pan Am 103A and thence to Pan Am 103 at Heathrow. The indictment closed with the statement that ‘‘Abdel Basset and Lamen Fhimah, and others unknown to the Grand Jury, did willfully, deliberately, maliciously and with premeditation and malice aforethought kill one hundred and eighty nine nationals of the United States who were the passengers and crew of the aircraft.’’ During the official U.S. inquiries into the bombing, diary notes alleged to have been made by Fhimah had been obtained by the investigators. Entries included references to a meeting with Abdel Basset on his return from Zurich and to obtaining Air Malta luggage tags for Abdel Basset. Significantly, Fhimah was said to have stored a quantity of plastic explosive in his office at Luqa airport in or about the summer of 1988. e tone of Barr’s statement announcing the grand jury’s decision was less formal than the precise language used by the Scottish law officer, but it did reflect the intense emotion felt within the United States over the bombing. He was at pains to point out that the investigation had not ended with the publication of the indictments but would continue unabated. The United States would not rest until all those responsible were brought to justice. The U.S. indictment was more detailed than the Scottish petition, but both made it very clear that the authorities believed they had identified two of the men responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. A year later, Clinton H. Coddington, the lawyer defending Pan Am in the consolidated liability trial in New York, told the jury that ‘‘an indictment is an accusation that has no evidentiary value.’’ Libya was to make a similar claim, suggesting that no evidence had been provided to them that implicated the men named for the bombing of the Pan Am aircraft. Abdel Basset and

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Fhimah had always claimed to be innocent of the charges levied against them by the United States and the United Kingdom. Certainly there appeared to have been a giant leap forward from the visit by the Scottish policeman Harry Bell to Malta and the naming of men believed to be responsible for the crime. Explanations why Fhimah and Abdel Basset were selected as the culprits were not enumerated, and evidentiary detail was missing from the indictments. Nor was justification for the claims that the bomb traveled on Air Malta to Frankfurt and on to Pan Am 103A provided in the U.S. indictment or in the Scottish petition. However, the specific nature of the accusations clearly indicated that the legal authorities were satisfied that other evidence held by the investigating authorities supported their charges. By the time the civil litigation began, lawyers acting on behalf of the victims’ families had identified evidence supporting the movement of the bomb bag detailed in the indictments. The source was Frankfurt. This data would have been available to the German police within twenty-four hours of the bombing of the Maid of the Seas. Information alleging the two men’s involvement and other specific details relating to the accused had come from a ‘‘third’’ man, a Libyan and at one time assistant to the Libyan Arab Airlines station manager at Luqa airport. It was believed that he had defected to the United States, where, in return for turning State’s Evidence, he was placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. His testimony, on which it seems much of the detail in the U.S. indictment was based, was not made public. It was not made available to the jury hearing the civil case against Pan Am in 1992 and, it must be assumed, was never provided to the Libyans to support the request for the men’s extradition. The U.S. authorities claimed that release of the information would impinge on any future criminal trial. Whether it was made available to the Libyans in 1999 prior to that country’s decision to hand over the accused men, only time will tell. In most terrorist incidents, motivation and means tend to be simple and obvious. Most observers believed that the basic motive of revenge had initiated the bombing of Pan Am 103, but the absence of published evidence supporting the indictments created a void in which various conspiracy theories flourished. The means to attack the Maid of the Seas were readily available, and the methodology was a tried and familiar one, proven effective by earlier terrorist groups. In so many ways the loss of the Maid of the Seas paralleled the destruction of Air India’s Kanishka in 1985. In both, an unaccompanied suitcase carrying an improvised explosive device concealed in a cassette radio had been infiltrated into the airline industry’s interline baggage system. An airport, off-line to the targeted carrier’s route network, had been selected for this purpose. The device was first flown on a feeder service from that airport to another, where it was transferred to the intended aircraft. The earlier attempt to put a bomb on board a Pan Am aircraft in Rome via a starting point in Turkey had used an identical methodology. The indictments reiterated the classic modus operandi of aviation bombers who make full use of their knowledge of interline baggage systems and their strengths and weaknesses. The selected plane is destroyed with no danger to the terrorist, who

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is many thousands of miles away from the actual incident. If things go wrong and the device is found at the transfer point, the perpetrators are still protected by distance from the scene of discovery. Should the discovery direct the investigators to the airport of origin, by that time, the terrorists’ tracks will have been well and truly covered. If found at the airport where the bag was checked in to the system, the terrorists would normally have had an hour or more to have moved away from the scene. Whether the mission succeeds or fails, the terrorist is safe. The one variation in the method alleged by the two Western governments to infiltrate an IED into the Pan Am system from that used in the Air India tragedy was the presence at Luqa airport of a person (Fhimah) with ready access to the airline systems. He would have known the security procedures used by the handling agent, Air Malta, and thus have been able to assess any risk from using the airport to infiltrate the bomb bag. POST-INDICTMENT ACTIVITY Assistant U.S. Attorney General Bob Mueller told a press conference in Washington that no state, other than Libya, had been identified as having played a role in the bombing. A similar statement was made in the British Parliament by the foreign secretary at the time, Douglas Hurd. Given the general belief in the aviation security world and elsewhere that the bombing had its origins in the destruction of an Iranian airbus by the U.S. Navy, the joint position was received with some skepticism. At the time, both the United States and the United Kingdom were engaged in negotiating the release of hostages held in Lebanon. Iran was considered to be a key player. Similarly, with Syria an essential participant in the Middle East peace talks, which had begun just prior to the indictments being published, linking the alleged offenders to that country would not have improved the prospects of a settlement of the Arab/Israeli problem. Cynics (realists?) will maintain that politics had a role in the position adopted in the official annoucements. It is, of course, not over yet. Both the U.S. indictment and the Scottish petition made reference to ‘‘others unknown,’’ leaving the door open for further charges. Foreign Secretary Hurd told the British Parliament that only by extraditing the two accused men to British or American jurisdiction would Libya meet the minimum required under international law. He seemingly had chosen to put to one side, or had not known, key provisions of the 1971 Montreal Convention, the international treaty governing the required behavior of signatory states when acts of unlawful interference (sabotage) occur. Article 6 of the convention requires that upon being satisfied that the circumstances so warrant, any Contracting State in the territory of which the offender or alleged offender is present, shall take him into custody or take any other measures to ensure his presence. The custody and other measures shall be as provided in the law of that State but may only be continued for such time as is necessary to enable any criminal or extradition proceedings to be instituted.

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Article 7 requires that the Contracting State in the territory of which the alleged offender is found shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged, without exception whatsoever and whether or not the offence was committed in its territory, to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution. Those authorities shall take their decision in the same manner as in the case of any ordinary offence of a serious nature under the laws of that State. Paragraph 2 of Article 8 reads: If the Contracting State which makes extradition conditional on the existence of a treaty receives a request for extradition from another Contracting State with which it has no extradition treaty, it may at its option consider this Convention as the legal basis for extradition in respect of the offences. Extradition shall be subject to the other conditions provided by the laws of the requested State. Thus the Montreal Convention allowed Libya to try the accused men before its own courts. That would seem to be the minimum allowable by international treaty— a treaty to which all three countries are signatories. Doubtless the allies would have had to present the ‘‘third man’’ evidence to a preliminary hearing in Libya to justify the men’s detention for trial and this they elected not to do. Failure by Libya to bring the men before its courts provided the United Kingdom and United States with legal grounds to seek extradition, but the same evidence would have had to be presented. Use of the Montreal Convention’s terms would have painted Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi into a corner from which he would have found it difficult to escape. By sidestepping the treaty and going instead to the United Nations to seek sanctions against Libya, the Western allies made it politically impossible for that country’s leader to accede to their demands for the men to be brought to trial in Scotland or the United States. In 1991 it would have been interpreted in Libya as a defeat by the enemy. Colonel Gaddafi’s position within Libya was not so strong that he could easily have lived with such an interpretation; thus the joint policy left him in a no-win situation. It also kept him available as a whipping boy whenever the West needed such a person.

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FAMILIES’ SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH Following the loss of the Maid of the Seas, the families and friends of the American victims of the Pan Am bombing came together in their grief. They met with U.S. President George Bush, and the commission discussed earlier in this book resulted. A similar family group was created in the United Kingdom. Its principal spokesman was a medical doctor, Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora had been a passenger on board the ill-fated aircraft. Swire, an old Etonian (he was a contemporary of Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd at England’s most prestigious boy’s school), had lifetime links to the upper echelons of British society and government, but his group was unable to achieve the same success as its American counterpart. This was in no way owing to lack of effort. The British families were simply up against a different political and administrative structure than the parallel organization in the United States. The open style of government practiced in Washington facilitated approaches to the top personages who were ‘‘of the people.’’ It was a style not reciprocated in the United Kingdom. In London, the civil service build zarebas around their ministers, protecting them (and in course of doing so, the civil servants) from outside pressures. This protection ensures that ministers are fed their information and receive their advice only from within the administration. The Department of Transport did not want a public inquiry in which they may have been exposed to heavy criticism for their handling of events prior to the bombing, but they could not prevent an inquest in the shape of a Fatal Accident Inquiry taking place. However, the families remain convinced that the civil service was able to influence the selection of witnesses who appeared before the sheriff principal in Scotland, and they continue to call for a public hearing. The UK families had all read newspaper articles reporting that the DOT had

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failed to notify the industry expeditiously of the Toshiba and Helsinki warnings. The media had also made the families aware that the intent of a key International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) security standard had not been implemented in the United Kingdom. Claims by the DOT that they had taken all appropriate steps to ensure the safety of civil aviation operations in the United Kingdom were not supported by the facts. In particular, their constant declaration that the United Kingdom was not required to have airlines match passengers with baggage was aggravating to the families. The relatives of the victims knew that effective matching of bags with passengers, the intent of the ICAO standard, would have saved their relatives and friends. Both the president’s commission and the judgment of the Fatal Accident Inquiry had made this clear. Stubbornly, the DOT held to their interpretation of the ICAO security requirement which, they maintained, only required bags of no-show passengers to be taken off departing aircraft. This irresponsible position flew in the face of the evidence uncovered after the bombing of Air India’s Kanishka, which had initiated the drive for an effective reconciliation procedure. Ministers were briefed on the basis of the DOT interpretation of the rules; thus they, in turn, misled Parliament and the public. This reached a point in late 1991 when Aviation Minister Lord Brabazon of Tara told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that ‘‘positive reconciliation of all transfer bags on all flights out of Heathrow using existing methods would virtually bring operations to a standstill.’’ Given that both the Air India and the Pan Am bombs were in transfer bags, this viewpoint was hardly designed to reassure the traveling public. Lord Brabazon had overlooked, or perhaps had never known, that the push for reconciliation had come from the airlines themselves through the IATA. The airlines’ association had not considered the procedure to be unfeasible nor one likely to stop all air traffic. Nor did they believe it would cause their members operational difficulties or pecuniary loss. The minister had also chosen to ignore Dr. Assad Kotaite (the ICAO president) who, in October 1988, told the FAA security conference in Washington that ‘‘if the airlines throughout the world take effective action to make sure that no piece of luggage is carried on board unless the passenger to whom it belongs has also boarded, the likelihood of sabotage acts would be greatly diminished.’’ Lord Brabazon had spoken at that same Washington meeting, by which time an off-the-shelf, automated reconciliation package developed by BRaLS, a small British company, had already been offered to the airlines. Also by then, Swissair had introduced a reconciliation system at the Zurich airport, thus leaving the minister open to criticism from John Prescott, the British parliamentary opposition party spokesman on aviation matters, who declared that ‘‘it is staggering to say that the technology is not ready.’’ Another member of Parliament, David Bevan, said, ‘‘If they’ve got it, we should have it.’’ The families of the U.S. victims did not content themselves with the creation of the Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism. They sought redress from Pan Am through the civil courts. This task was made difficult by the decision of the authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States not to release certain evidence on the grounds that its exposure might affect any future criminal trial. An

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example of this involved the vital evidence supporting the contention that an unaccompanied suitcase had been transferred at Frankfurt from an incoming Air Malta flight onto the Pan Am feeder service, Pan Am 103A. The attorneys engaged by the families uncovered this information when preparing their case for trial. The law firms of Kreindler & Kreindler; Speiser Krause & Madole and Beumeister & Samuels, all of New York and led by the doyen of the American litigation bar, Lee Kreindler, were among those representing the families. They were opposed by another eminent New York law firm, Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives. The latter’s lead counsel throughout the investigative stage was James M. Shaughnessy, although the defense at the eventual trial was led by Clinton H. Coddington, a trial lawyer from the West Coast firm of Coddington, Hicks & Danforth. The Kreindler team sought to identify all those people who, at any stage, may have had some involvement in the operation of the Pan Am services 103A and 103 on 21 December 1988. This meant interviewing numerous airline, airport, and agency staff in Frankfurt and London as they sought to understand the physical passenger and baggage handling operations at the two airports. THE PROVENANCE OF THE BOMB BAG Key to the families’ action was the provenance of the bomb bag, and Frankfurt was the pivotal point. The airport was built in the early 1970s and an advanced, computer-controlled system of baggage handling had been incorporated into the facility. It was very much state-of-the-art—so much so that it remains in operation today. Although not designed with security as the raison d’eˆtre, its construction, nevertheless, provides excellent protection for baggage entering and held within the system. However, the prime purpose of the design was to meet an important customer service/commercial objective. It was to protect the airport’s 45-minute minimum connecting time, which had made Frankfurt the interline (transfer) hub of Europe. A minimum connecting time is the shortest allowable time for the transfer of a passenger and his baggage between the scheduled arrival of one aircraft and the scheduled departure of a designated onward flight. The airport authority at Frankfurt guaranteed the transfer of any bags within this time frame. If any bag fails to connect with a flight, the records created by the computer-driven system can be used to identify the cause. The Frankfurt baggage handling system is a secure operation. All bags originating at or being transferred through the airport are placed into individual carrying trays, each of which bears a unique, machine-readable code. As the trays are conveyed over the network of tracks, the imprinted codes are read by laser beam readers and directed to the correct destination. This process also allows the movement of the bags to be monitored during their journey through the system. Bags originating at Frankfurt have their details entered into the computer by the airline agent at the check-in counter, and the necessary data are encrypted on to the trays. Interline (transfer) bags are taken from the arriving aircraft to a transfer baggage acceptance point, where the coding procedure is conducted. This operation is managed by teams of two

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people. One removes the bags from the delivery vehicle and places them into their individual trays, and the second makes the computer input. The workers maintain a written record of their activity on work sheets that detail the staff members’ names, the type of delivery vehicle (baggage dollies/wagons or containers), the time when work on a container or wagon load of baggage begins, and the time when it ends. The computer automatically records the precise time a bag enters the system; thus, by cross-referring the computer records to work sheets, it is possible to pinpoint the movement of individual bags. The railway track that carries the bags throughout the airport and the trays that transport them, is a triple-tier structure, and the multitude of trays together with their contents are constantly on the move. The trays are carried at three different speeds, the variation reflecting the section of the system in which they currently find themselves. The slowest portion of the track is the central storage loop where bags with a long wait between their arrival and planned departure are held. The design of the network and the nature of operation make it tamper-proof; the only point where bags can enter the baggage system is at a check-in desk or an interline coding station. The computer controlling the movement of baggage at Frankfurt allows those managing the system to know the position of all the bags in the network at any time. It provides management records that show the history of the movement of the trays carrying the individual items of baggage. This information is held for up to forty-eight hours after the day of operation. It was a printout from this commercial system, together with the work sheets of the baggage coders at one of Frankfurt’s transfer baggage acceptance points, that directed the investigators (first the German police, then the U.S. lawyers) to the movement of a bag from an incoming flight from Malta on 21 December 1988. The first public hint that evidence existed with respect to an unaccompanied interline bag came in October 1989, in a Sunday Times article by David Leppard. He suggested that details of transfer baggage were given to the Scottish detectives in August of that year. Subsequent investigation was to imply that the German police had the information much earlier, leaving an unexplained gap of some seven to eight months between their first being made aware of an unaccompanied bag passing through the Frankfurt baggage handling system on 21 December, and provision of this same information to the principal investigating force, the Dumfries and Galloway police. Corroboration that the German police—the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) did have early knowledge of a possible Maltese connection was to come during the consolidated liability trial in New York. Wilfred Borg, Air Malta’s ground operations general manager, was to testify that in response to a request from the German police, he had provided them with details of the flight records of KM 180, the service from Malta to Frankfurt, just two months or so after the bombing. Leppard’s article was revealing in other ways. He commented on the police investigation in Malta, where Inspector Harry Bell had found the source of the clothes carried in the bomb bag. He suggested that police were investigating the possibility of an airport worker having helped the saboteurs and closed with the comment that

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security sources believed that Iran had paid the PLFP-GC, Ahmed Jibril’s group, $10 million to carry out the bombing. The detail showing the movement of the unaccompanied transfer bag mentioned by Leppard was contained in a printout from the computer, which showed the movement of bags through the Frankfurt system on 21 December 1988. The Kreindler team of attorneys had come upon it through the persistence of their inquiries at the airport. They had been seeking to understand how baggage moved through the airport’s handling system, and as this was being explained, they identified a wide range of personnel who might have valuable contributions to make. One such person, a woman, worked in the control office where the computer-driven baggage handling system was monitored. At the New York trial in 1992, the judge accepted that her identity should be protected under the pseudonym Schmidt. Similar protection of her identity had been granted when her deposition testimony was taken. She was nervous at being identified by any of the criminals involved in the bombing. The pseudonym Schmidt is used in this book. Mrs. Schmidt was interviewed over a three-day period at Frankfurt in November 1991 before a German judge, Dr. Hichofer. Lawyers representing the families group and others from the law firm representing Pan Am and from the U.S. State Department were present. The interviews provided deposition testimony, elements of which were subsequently used in the New York trial. Schmidt, a university graduate, had been employed by the company working with the Frankfurt Airport Company (FAG) on the development and installation of the airport’s baggage handling management computer. When the FAG took over the operation of the system in 1975, Schmidt transferred to them. Thus by December 1988, she had worked for the airport company for thirteen years. Part of Schmidt’s job was to monitor the movement of bags through the airport’s baggage handling system. She was a member of a team of operators working with a series of computers and visual display units linked to the system. The computers allowed the operators to retrieve very detailed information on the movement of bags, both during a current operation and retrospectively up to a period of forty-eight hours. The computers also allowed Schmidt and her colleagues to trace where and when baggage was delivered and whether there was any change in original instructions given to the movement of specific trays carrying the bags. Schmidt was on duty when Pan Am 103A was loaded and departed from Frankfurt on 21 December 1988. She had just started on her way home from work when she heard on her car radio that Pan Am 103 had been lost. She realized at once that baggage for this flight had been processed through the Frankfurt airport system during her shift. The next day she discussed the disaster with her colleagues. Then, on the seven o’clock TV news, she saw the images from Lockerbie. For reasons she attributed to curiosity, she decided to look at the computer records showing the movement of bags through the Frankfurt system and delivered to the Pan Am feeder service. She used the data information computer to retrieve a paper printout of the detail relating to the flight. She satisfied herself that it had been a clean, trouble-free operation. After further discussion with her colleagues, Schmidt put the printout in

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her locker and a few days later went on vacation. No one, other than her immediate colleagues who shared the late shift with her, had spoken to her about the operation relating to Pan Am 103A. By the time Schmidt returned to work in mid-January 1989, stories about the aircraft being bombed had already been widely circulated. She asked her supervisor whether there had been any new findings on the disaster. During the course of their conversation, Schmidt astonished her boss by giving him the printout of the baggage movements relating to Pan Am 103A. He took the document away, but no one contacted Schmidt to discuss the subject until the teams of American lawyers arrived. She was never questioned by the BKA (the German police), nor by the Scottish police, nor by the FBI. The families’ lawyers recognized the potential significance of the story Schmidt had related, but she had not finished surprising them. She told them that the printout she had given to her supervisor was the original and the only printout she had made. Their disappointment at this news was short-lived. She advised them that before handing the printout over and ‘‘being aware of the importance of this document, I made a copy of it and put it in my locker.’’ She went on to stun the lawyers even further. She said that because she was expecting them to raise the subject, ‘‘I looked in my locker yesterday—and found it [the copy].’’ It had been at the bottom of her locker ever since she had placed it there in January 1989. It was now November 1991. Almost three years after the event, the document was to become a central piece in substantiating the provenance of the bomb bag. The data contained on the printout provided by Schmidt related to all the baggage delivered through the Frankfurt automated baggage handling system to Pan Am 103A, a total of 111 bags. The information was listed in a series of columns depicting the tray number, the flight code, the point and time the bag physically entered the system, the routing of the tray carrying the bag through the system, and the final destination and time of arrival at that point. One entry showed: B 8849 ⫺ F1042 ⫺ S0009⫹Z1309 ⫺ TO ⫺ HS33⫹Z1517 ⫺ B044⫹Z1523 Schmidt explained that B 8849 was the tray number. F1042 was the designated computer code for Pan Am 103A. S0009 was the code indicating work station 206 in Halle V3, a remote interline baggage acceptance area. The figures related to the time the bag was placed into the program. ‘‘TO HS33’’ gave the routing of the tray, and the figures showed the time the bag was rerouted from the in-house storage loop to B044, the baggage make-up area for Pan Am 103A. The final figure was the time the bag arrived at the make-up point. The printout did not detail the bag itself. To identify a specific transfer bag in relation to the printout, further documentation was required. This came in the form of the work sheet completed at the transfer baggage acceptance point, which was still held in the FAG records when the lawyers were making their inquiries. Work station 206 is situated away from the main terminal building at Frankfurt am Main. On 21 December 1988 at the time of the arrival of Flight KM 180, it

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was manned by two immigrant workers, Yasar Koca and Mehmet Candar. Their work sheet on that day showed that at 1:04 P.M., Koca began entering bags from an incoming Air Malta aircraft, Flight KM 180. The records indicated that the baggage had been delivered on a trolley rather than in a container. This conforms with the operating methodology of Air Malta, which did not use containers for baggage. The work sheet entry noted that the coding process had terminated at 1:10 P.M. The central computer printout indicated the delivery of a bag to Pan Am 103A that had entered the system at S0009 (work station 206) at 1:07 P.M. Cross-referring the printout to the work sheet showed that the bag would have been among those entered by Koca and delivered from KM 180. No bags, other than those from Air Malta, were shown on the work sheet as having been processed at this time. A combination of the printout produced by the central computer and the work sheets of the two FAG coders pointed at a bag having come from the Air Malta flight from Luqa and being delivered to Pan Am 103A. No amount of searching records was ever to show a passenger linked to this bag. The bag, if the Frankfurt records are accepted, was an unaccompanied item. Given that the Scottish police had already linked the contents of the bomb bag to Malta, not unnaturally, focus was once more turned on the Mediterranean island. The incoming Air Malta flight, KM 180, believed to have brought the bomb bag to Frankfurt, was positioned at a remote parking stand when it arrived at the German airport. Remote stands are used at all airports when there are insufficient pier locations available at the terminal building. At Frankfurt, allocation of baggage handlers needed to unload aircraft is normally made by a supervisor when the aircraft is still some distance from the airport. For aircraft parked on a remote stand, the supervisor despatches a loading team to the location by minibus. Once there, they separate the arriving bags into those to be transferred to another flight and those terminating at Frankfurt. The transfer bags are delivered to an interline coding station. Such a procedure was followed on 21 December 1988 with the arrival of Air Malta Flight KM 180. The men chosen to unload the aircraft would not have known who would be detailed to work the aircraft until a very late stage. If, as the computer printout indicated, the bomb bag traveled from Malta, no one at Frankfurt needed to be involved in the bombing. However, if the Malta connection is eliminated, focus must center on the airport’s baggage handling personnel, notably the two coders, or consideration given to the involvement of the supervisor and/or at least one of the unloading team in the plot. Their involvement would have been necessary in order to create an opportunity for the introduction of an extraneous bag into the system. The tractor driver collecting bags from the incoming aircraft and delivering them to the coding station could have stopped en route between the aircraft and the work station to collect an additional bag. This would require the supervisor’s involvement to ensure the right driver was allocated to the aircraft. It would presumably involve yet another person or persons to place the bag at a predesignated pickup point, one unlikely to be noticed by other, innocent parties. The bomb bag could have been placed on the delivery bus, but if so, this would involve all who traveled on the vehicle to be in on the conspiracy.

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Staff working on the air side of Frankfurt airport must pass through land side/air side security checkpoints before accessing the operational area of the airport. This is standard security procedure for all properly managed international airports. At Frankfurt, identity badges, coded to show to which areas the wearer is allowed access and bearing a photograph of the staff member, have to be worn and displayed. Access points used by loading staff are manned by security personnel, as are entry gates used by airport vehicles. Any vehicles required to operate on both the air side and the land side of the airport have also to display identification. For the bomb bag to have originated at Frankfurt, it would have required someone to carry it to an air side location and to bypass the land side/air side security-controlled access points unnoticed and unchallenged. The bag would have had to be held from the moment the bomber came on shift until the time it was placed into the system. Because of the eclectic nature of the workforce at Frankfurt, any conspiracy at the airport would require a veritable gaggle of persons of varying nationalities to be involved. Terrorists have never favored such complex, fragile maneuvers. The industry’s interline procedures offer a more simple opportunity for criminals, allowing the infiltration of a bomb bag at a ‘‘soft’’ location such as an off-line airport. It had worked for the bombers of Air India’s Kanishka in 1985. It had set a precedent for the bombers of the Maid of the Seas. Those who developed and favor the conspiracy theories that arose subsequent to the bombing or who work to eliminate any Maltese connection with the destruction of Pan Am 103, seek to argue away the Frankfurt evidence. They cast doubts on the effectiveness of Frankfurt’s security program and on the baggage system’s computer records and insist the coder’s work sheets were filled with errors. If the facts and the evidence are to be disregarded, the conspiracy theorists, if they are genuine in their beliefs, must contend that some who gave testimony in Frankfurt had an involvement in the plot to bomb the Maid of the Seas and that others became engaged in a complex cover-up after the event. If the latter, they would have to believe that, together with other members of the FAG management and perhaps the German police, Schmidt and the coders sought to divert attention away from a wholly Frankfurt scenario. The Scottish and U.S. indictments and the judgment of the third district court in New York showed that neither the procurator fiscal of the Court of Public Interest, nor the federal grand jury in the District of Columbia, nor a jury of twelve U.S. citizens accepted the conspiracy theorists’ premises. The Scottish and American authorities have shown through their indictments that they are satisfied that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 was placed into the airline system at Malta, something Air Malta has always strenuously denied. If the Western allies are correct, how could this have been achieved? MALTESE OPPORTUNITY Luqa airport in Malta is typical of many airports found in the Mediterranean region and around the world. In 1988, it was compact with a limited operation, up to twenty-four international movements a day. As a country, Malta was not threat-

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ened by any other state; however, its national carrier, Air Malta, a popular airline used by a great many of the tourists who make the island a center for their annual vacations, had previously been misused by Libyan-based terrorists. In 1982, Libyan agents used the airline to ferry explosives from Tripoli to Cairo. The carrier did not become aware of the illegal shipment until a suitcase exploded on arrival at the Egyptian capital. Two people were killed. Other, unidentified usage may have occurred, because at the time of the bombing incident, hostility between the two countries had caused a cessation of direct commercial air services between the two Arab states. Malta presented a convenient interline link for those traveling between Libya and Egypt. Following the bomb blast at Cairo, Air Malta acted to preempt any repetition. They tightened security on all flights to Cairo and Tripoli. Physical passenger and baggage reconciliation was introduced, with every passenger being required to identify his or her own bag before it could be loaded onto the aircraft. This was the method that had proved so beneficial at Istanbul’s Yesilkoy airport. In June 1991 at the civil litigation hearings in the New York district court, testimony from Air Malta’s terminal services manager, Emmanuel Agius, explained how the airline checked in passengers and accounted for baggage on all other services. The court learned that there were twelve check-in counters at Luqa airport positioned in a small passenger reception area. Each counter was allocated to a designated flight, and together, the twelve separated the public area from the baggage conveyor system. As passengers checked in, bags were weighed and counted and a charge levied for any baggage in excess of the permitted weight. The number of bags checked in by individual passengers or family or other groups was entered into the central computer via a terminal at the passenger agent’s position and the same number written onto one of the passenger tickets. The figures entered into the computer were used to generate a total baggage count once the aircraft was ready for departure. The manual recording of the numbers was a fall-back system in case the computer malfunctioned. At the aircraft side, the head loader was required to count bags as they were placed in the aircraft hold and check the individual destination labels on the bags. He was also responsible for supervising the loading of the cargo and mail and for managing his staff. Staff of all airlines frequently develop ‘‘quick-fit’’ variations and solutions to working practices and overloads, whether the latter are real or simply perceived. An example of a short-cut, effective working practice at Luqa was provided to the court when the Air Malta manager was cross-examined by the families’ lawyers. He had explained the methods used by his airline when loading baggage onto aircraft. His explanation was challenged because the description had differed from that provided in deposition testimony by the head loader who had been on duty on 21 December. Agius had said a mobile conveyor belt was used to place the baggage onto the aircraft bound for Frankfurt. The head loader testified that the baggage had been manually loaded directly from the trolley that had brought the bags to the aircraft side. No use had been made of a conveyor. The decision to manually load the bags had avoided the need to obtain and position an extra piece of equipment to the aircraft side.

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As part of an aircraft’s departure process at Luqa, the head loader’s count of bags placed in the aircraft hold had to be matched against the computer’s total. However, counting errors committed at the baggage acceptance stage would be carried over automatically to the total generated by the computer when the flight closed. In New York, the trial jury learned that when KM 180 was accepting passengers and baggage, one clerk did make a different entry into the computer from the one written onto the passenger’s ticket. Some group baggage was tapped into the computer terminal as sixteen pieces, whereas fourteen was written on one of the passenger flight coupons—a difference of two. If the lower figure was the correct one, an additional bag loaded on to KM 180 would have resulted in the head loader’s count of bags showing a shortfall of one. Emmanuel Agius testified that when such circumstances arose, the head loader had to advise the captain of the aircraft being loaded. The captain had discretion to depart without further checks being made. A missing bag was not perceived as a threat to the operation, a factor that would not have been lost on the loading staff. Certainly Michael Darmanin, the head loader on duty at Luqa on 21 December, would not have routinely perceived a shortfall in a baggage count, when such occurred, to be sufficient reason to off-load the baggage from an aircraft and delay its departure. It may be reasonably assumed, therefore, that an extraneous bag infiltrated onto KM 180, if fourteen was the correct number of the group bags, would have gone unremarked even if the head loader’s count had been accurate. If that extraneous bag had been the bomb bag destined and labeled for Pan Am Flight 103, counting alone would not have identified it. An influencing factor in any decision to depart with baggage missing would be the proximity of the takeoff time. As with all airlines, it was important for Air Malta to maintain punctuality in order to protect its allocated airborne slots. The importance of on-time departures to airlines was explained to the New York court by the Air Malta manager. He confirmed that his airline was very conscious of punctuality. European airspace is particularly congested. To ensure the skies are managed in a regular and safe manner, national air traffic control centers specify airborne slots (flight windows) for aircraft flying in their airspace. An aircraft crossing Europe would travel through several such control zones. If an aircraft’s departure is delayed for any reason, it may be necessary to renegotiate with several centers along its intended route. At peak times this may require the aircraft to be held on the ground for lengthy periods in order to slot into an acceptable flight pattern. Such delays cost money, which could amount to large sums if they resulted in an aircraft having to move outside its planned cycle, perhaps even losing an entire trip rotation. Additionally, transfer passengers on a late-arriving aircraft may miss connections, requiring them to be rebooked with, perhaps, overnight accommodation being required. Further costs may be incurred if an aircraft crew goes out of hours (can no longer operate) as a result of the delay. Thus for pressing economic as well as customer service reasons, all airlines try to operate on schedule. There is constant pressure on staff to maintain on-time performances, and many airlines set punctuality targets, which are carefully monitored. Delays are to be avoided wherever possible, and staff

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seek to find practical and expeditious ways to avoid incurring them, or at least to avoid having the cause allocated to them. The theory of matching counts of baggage at check-in with the numbers loaded onto an aircraft is flawed. As already explained, an overcount at check-in would mask an infiltrated bag loaded onto an aircraft. An exchanged bag, one bag substituted for another, would go unnoticed even if the counts were accurate. To suggest that a count of bags can be accurately made as they are being placed in an aircraft under the normal pressures of achieving an on-time departure would be considered optimistic by most airline operations managers. Jim Jack, the principal aviation security adviser to the UK DOT at the time of Lockerbie, believed that ‘‘counting of bags by itself takes you nowhere. It is part of the reconciliation procedure, it does not overcome the question of whether, even assuming the right number of bags are on the flight, they are in fact in all cases the bags of the passengers on the aircraft.’’ The United Kingdom was not without fault when it came to ensuring ICAO standards were implemented at British airports, but it did recognize the dangers of relying on baggage counts. At Luqa, when any baggage mishandlings or misconnects occurred (bags were not despatched on the same flights as their owners or failed to make interline connections), such bags were delivered to the Air Malta lost and found department. Such departments are established by airlines to seek, retrieve, and return to their rightful owners any mishandled baggage. Lost and found, as its name implies, deals with bags that are lost or being sought both at the airport where the department is situated and elsewhere. Baggage mishandlings occur at all airports and with all airlines for many reasons. In manual baggage handling environments, a loader can misread a label and cause a bag to be placed on the wrong aircraft. Even where automated systems exist, there is generally a human involvement that can cause similar mishandlings to occur, but generally such systems are less prone to this type of error. In a busy baggage makeup area where bags are prepared for loading, especially when such areas utilize a single carousel for more than one flight at the same time, a bag can be placed on the wrong trolley. Trolleys can be taken to the wrong aircraft. On a multi-sector flight, baggage containers holding up to fifty bags, a standard feature with widebody aircraft operations, can be left on board at the intermediate stop which had been their intended destination with the consequent nonarrival at that airport and the overdelivery at another. At the time the ICAO was developing its requirement for passenger and baggage reconciliation, 1985/6, the organization estimated the cost of mishandled baggage to airlines to be in the region of $400 million per annum. The existence of lost and found activity at Luqa suggests that Air Malta’s experience was no different from any other airline. It had its share of mishandlings. Although, in 1988, the wisdom of relying on counting may have been questioned, Air Malta did seek to identify any ‘‘no-show’’ passengers, passengers who had checked in for a flight but who had failed to board. This met the wording of the published ICAO standard intended to counter any repetition of the Air India bomb-

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ing. It was the same policy interpretation made by the United Kingdom. However, as already discussed, the ‘‘no-show’’ procedure fails to protect airlines against a bag being infiltrated after the check-in process. Equally and most importantly, any airline to whom bags are transferred for onward carriage becomes exposed unless they have in place an effective reconciliation program for interline baggage. All international carriers were expected by the ICAO and recommended by the IATA to match passengers and their baggage; thus, regardless of the procedures in place at an originating airport, any discrepancies at such locations should have been corrected at the transfer point. At Frankfurt, Pan Am was mandated by the FAA to have had just such a protective procedure in place, but they had dropped it earlier that year. The U.S. and Scottish indictments named Fhimah, Libyan Arab’s station manager at Luqa, as one of the two people responsible for infiltrating a bag into the Air Malta system. Certainly as station manager, Fhimah would have been aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the baggage control systems used by Air Malta. His official position with Libyan Arab would have given him access to the baggage acceptance point at Luqa and to the baggage make-up area where limitation of space, a multiplicity of bags, and his familiar presence would have made the infiltration or exchange of a bag a relatively simple matter. Since a Libyan Arab aircraft was being prepared for departure from Luqa airport at the same time that bags for Air Malta’s Flight KM 180 were being received, it can be envisaged that opportunities would have existed for him to act in the manner suggested by the United States and Scottish legal authorities. As already discussed in an earlier chapter, in 1988 the relationship between the United States and United Kingdom on the one hand and Libya on the other was at a dangerous level. The prospect of a terrorist strike against civil aviation targets of either nation by Libyan-based or -sponsored terrorists was manifest. Groups associated with Libya had threatened revenge against the United States following the various incidents in 1986, incidents that had culminated in the bombing of the Libyan leader’s headquarters. The threats were repeated following the destruction of the Iran Air airbus in the gulf, and the potential for a revenge bombing against a U.S. target was obvious. The FAA warned all U.S. carriers, calling for a stringent review of their security procedures and an upgrade of their programs, if necessary. Infiltration of an improvised explosive device into the international commercial aviation network for transfer to Pan Am or any other U.S. airline service was a very real possibility. It was tried and trusted terrorist methodology. Luqa airport would have been seen by any terrorist group operating from Libya as a very convenient intrusion point. The island’s location would allow the classic procedure of the aviation saboteur to be utilized—infiltration through an airport removed from the intended target. The evidence amassed by the investigating police forces, with the detailed scientific data educed by the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) and confirmed by Chief Inspector Bell, all point to the significance of Malta to the Lockerbie bomb bag. The computer printout initiated by Schmidt and the coder’s work sheets at the interline baggage acceptance points at Frankfurt am

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Main Airport, all accepted into evidence in New York’s eastern district court, add to the Maltese connection. Clearly, neither the U.S. nor the Scottish authorities doubted that the improvised explosive device, camouflaged by an eclectic assortment of Maltese-manufactured clothes, passed through Luqa airport on its way to destroying Pan Am Flight 103.

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TRIAL: FACT WITNESSES Wrongful death actions against Pan American World Airways and its wholly owned subsidiary, Alert Management Systems, Inc., were started in various federal courts in the United States. They were transferred to the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York before Chief Judge, the Honorable Thomas C. Platt. A consolidated liability trial began on 27 April 1992; it was to last thirteen weeks, during which time testimony was heard from fifty-eight witnesses. When the trial ended, the defendants had been found guilty of wilful misconduct in the bombing of their aircraft, the Maid of the Seas. Wilful misconduct was adjudged a proximate cause of the deaths of those killed. The trial brought together a number of law firms led by two contrasting counsel, Lee Kreindler for the families and Clinton H. ‘‘Bud’’ Coddington for the airline. Kreindler, a small, slightly harassed-looking individual, gave the appearance of being, and indeed was, a grandfather figure. Coddington, the epitome of a show trial lawyer, was a person given to theatrical gestures, none more so than his use of a silver chalice to contain his drinking water when all others in the courtroom used polystyrene cups. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was also represented by counsel, in their case by Carla Martin, whose role was to protect the security interests of the Federal Aviation Program. She ensured that vital elements of the program were not discussed in open court and thus made public against the interest of the United States. Five fact witnesses were called to the stand by Kreindler. Coddington was to clash with each of them, but before this happened, the court heard a number of stipulated facts which, as the judge explained to the jury, had been agreed upon by the opposing

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counsel and thus did not require any witnesses or produce of any proof. The jury could accept them as presented. STIPULATED FACTS The stipulated facts were presented to the jury by Lee Kreindler. He told them that Pan Am had produced and circulated a security manual that contained the company’s corporate policy regarding the safety and security of its passengers, customers, and employees. The manual incorporated the FAA’s mandated Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP). Approved in 1986, part of the ACCSP, Section 15.C, dealt with security procedures at airports designated by the FAA to be at ‘‘extraordinary risk.’’ It was the first of the exhibits that Martin required to be redacted. Elements of the section were withheld from public dissemination, although the principal sentence was allowed. This required airlines to ‘‘conduct a positive passenger/checked baggage match resulting in physical inspection or non-carriage of all unaccompanied bags.’’ Attention was to be focused on this clause throughout the trial. To meet this federal requirement, air carriers were allowed to use either a physical or an administrative match procedure. Physical match requires bags to be identified by the passengers to whom they belong. Administrative match allows the use of procedures to identify a bag’s ownership without the need for physical identification by its owner. The latter can be achieved by using uniquely numbered baggage tags cross-matched with similar data on a passenger’s boarding pass. In either case, the FAA required that the matching process be done in such a way that passengers were aware the procedure was in use. The airports at Frankfurt and London fell into the FAA’s designation of extraordinary risk, and matching of passengers with their checked baggage had to be undertaken at both locations. A second stipulated fact was the establishment of Alert Management Services, a wholly owned Pan Am subsidiary that provided security for the airline at a number of airports, including London and Frankfurt. Another was the destruction of an Iranian civil airliner over the Persian Gulf in July 1988, shot down by the USS Vincennes. Everyone on board was killed. In his presentation, Kreindler described the activity in Germany in late October 1988, when the German police (the BKA) arrested a number of people suspected of being high-ranking members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine– General Command (PFLP-GC). The PFLP-GC had been founded in 1968 by Ahmed Jibril. Sixteen people had been arrested during the German police action, including fourteen Palestinians. Among the items seized by the police were false passports and identity documents from Spain, France, Britain, Syria, and Morocco. The police also found a Toshiba radio cassette recorder into which the PLFP-GC’s bomb maker had incorporated an improvised explosive device (IED)—a bomb. Despite the material discovered by the police, twelve of those arrested were quickly freed by the German courts, an action never explained to anyone’s satisfaction. The discovery made by the BKA led to the issuance of several FAA security bulletins. One described the German finds in detail. One IED had consisted of

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a Toshiba ‘‘Bombeat 453” radio containing approximately 300 grm of plastic explosive wrapped in a metallic-coated, popular brand Handi-wrap. The IED contained an electrical detonator (NFI) with one red and one white wire embedded within the explosive substance. The circuit closed via four mignon cells (NFI) supplementing the electrical power supply of the radio. The IED contained a barometric device connected to a computer chip (NFI) which was believed functional and apparently part of the trigger or arming function. Most importantly, the FAA repeated the German BKA warning that it had been determined that the IED would be very difficult to detect via normal X-ray inspection, indicating that it might be intended to pass undiscovered through areas subject to extensive security controls such as airports. U.S. airlines were required to ensure that the requirements of the ACCSP Section 15 C-1 were rigorously applied. Another bulletin accepted as a stipulated fact was the Helsinki warning. U.S. air carriers had been advised that on December 5, 1988, an unidentified individual telephoned a United States diplomatic facility in Europe and stated that sometime within the next two weeks there would be a bombing attempt made against a Pan American aircraft flying from Frankfurt FRG to the United States. An individual identified as Yassan Garadet, who allegedly is in Finland and a second individual, identified only as Abdullah and is in Frankfurt are involved. According to the caller, Abdullah will provide the device to Garadet, who will in turn provide it to an unidentified Finnish woman in Helsinki, the woman who would unwittingly take the device to Frankfurt and eventually onto the US bound flight. The caller who spoke with a middle east accent claimed that the two individuals had ties to the Abu Nidal organisation. He would not comment on how he acquired the information. The FAA added a commentary to their bulletin: The reliability of the information cannot be assessed at this point. The appropriate police authorities have been advised and are pursuing the matter. Pan American is also aware of the threat information. Terrorist groups continue to target civil aviation, at times with the use of sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IED) that may be very difficult to detect during screening. Unwitting couriers have also been employed in the past. The bulletin, issued just two weeks before the Lockerbie tragedy, did not include a risk assessment. After the bombing, the ‘‘Helsinki warning’’ was declared to be a hoax!

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Another of the stipulated facts was the engagement by Pan Am of an Israeli security company, KPI, to review the security provided to Pan Am flights at certain airports both in the United States and at foreign locations. It was KPI’s report that the U.S. media had unearthed shortly after the bombing and that had been widely quoted in the British press. The Pan Am attorneys, although accepting the report as a stipulated fact, objected to its findings being taken into evidence. Given that the contents were, without doubt, damning to the Pan Am defense, the objection was hardly surprising, but neither was the judge’s decision to overrule it. Extracts were read to the jury with the explanation that it had been prepared against the background of a growing menace posed by international terrorism and the increasingly lethal threat to civil aviation, U.S. carriers’ flights in particular. The jury heard that the consultants had been critical of Pan Am’s security organization, which had suffered from, among other things, a general lack of authority and accountability. Later, this failing was to be underlined by various deposition witnesses who showed that at Frankfurt, neither the security manager nor the passenger services manager accepted responsibility for the security function at the airport. Just as newspaper readers had read shortly after the bombing, the jury was told that the Israeli consultants had concluded in 1986 that ‘‘under the present security system, Pan Am is highly vulnerable to most forms of terrorist attack.’’ The work undertaken by KPI had preceded the establishment of Alert Management Services as the Pan Am security agency at Frankfurt. The earlier organization looking after the airline’s security interests at the German airport had been Securitae, of whom the consultants had noted that although some of the staff had adequate backgrounds (they were formerly police officers), they lacked the required training and motivation. Others, however, had criminal records. Alert, who replaced Securitae, was to be headed by another person with a dubious history, Ulrich Weber. In 1979, following a plea bargaining process in New York, he had been given a year’s probation for writing bad checks. In order to join Alert Management Systems, he had to resign from Securitae. He had been persuaded to do so by Pan Am. Finally, the jury learned that KPI had warned Pan Am of the vulnerability and attractiveness of civil aviation to acts of terrorism and that the concentration of such activity was in Europe and the Middle East. They underlined Syria, Iran, and Libya as the source of the threat. Pan Am did not take any noticeable or effective action on the KPI findings. WALTER KORSGAARD The first of the fact witnesses to be called was Walter Korsgaard, who had spent twenty-three of his twenty-five years’ service in the U.S. military specializing in bomb disposal. He had served from 1945 until 1970 and had fought in Korea, where he earned a battlefield commission, ultimately attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. When his military career ended, he had worked with the International Association of Chiefs of Police and had assisted in establishing the FBI bomb data center. Subsequently joining the Federal Aviation Administration, he remained with them for twenty years as their aviation explosive security program manager, retiring in 1990.

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During his time with the FAA, Korsgaard had been designated a ‘‘national resource specialist.’’ This unique appointment underlined Korsgaard’s standing in his field of specialization. From 1971 until his retirement, he had participated in the investigation of every aviation accident in which bombs had been suspected. He had been the primary source of technical knowledge on the signature that a bomb leaves on an aircraft and its structure whenever dynamite or plastic explosives are detonated. Bomb signatures are created by the tremendous temperature and pressure generated by an explosion and are imprinted on the metal of the aircraft as well as on any baggage and its contents in the proximity of the blast. It was as the FAA’s No. 1 bomb man that he became involved with the investigation into the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103. On the evening of 21 December 1988, the FAA duty officer called Korsgaard and told him there had been a plane wreck in Scotland. The following afternoon he boarded an FAA Gulf Stream jet aircraft and flew to Scotland, accompanied by two colleagues from the FAA, plus representatives of the National Transportation Safety Board, the FBI, Boeing, and the engine makers, Pratt & Whitney. They arrived at three o’clock in the morning on 23 December, and Korsgaard quickly became involved in aerial and ground reconnaissance. He spent time in each of the established search locations trying to ascertain what type of components had fallen in a given area. Much later, various people sought to disqualify the work of the investigation teams. One filmmaker introduced a scenario that had unnamed Americans in unmarked helicopters scurrying about the crash site recovering and removing evidence. Korsgaard’s helicopter may well have been the vehicle on which the producer based his screenplay. In fact, Korsgaard was very much going about official, vital search and recover activities. He was seeking to ascertain from the pattern of the debris whether the destruction had resulted from an explosive device. Ultimately, he was shown a piece of fuselage skin from the left-hand side of the aircraft. It was curved by explosive forces in the direction of travel. On the inner side, it was pitted, cratered, and sooted. Korsgaard recognized the signature of a bomb blast. Korsgaard supported his testimony with photographic exhibits taken from the Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch report discussed earlier in this book. One showed the point where the aircraft was last identified in its entirety—a ‘‘single target’’ in air traffic control terms—and the location where the radar began seeing more than one target, indicating that the jet was beginning to come apart. Much of the aircraft, the engines, the main wing structure, and the center body section had fallen on Lockerbie, but some metal parts that were lighter were blown by the wind and fell as far away as twenty-six miles. Debris that was lighter still was carried out to sea. The aircraft had been fighting a crosswind of some 100 mph, which created the unusual debris path. The description of the search in which Korsgaard had played a role, echoed the evidence the Scottish policemen had given in depositions many months before the trial. The search teams had lined up in a field, shoulder to shoulder, and each member was told ‘‘anything which was not growing and which was not a rock’’ had to be picked up and placed in bags carried by the team. As the bags were filled, they were

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annotated with details of the search area where the contents had been found. The individual items were tagged with details of the coordinates of the find and all the information subsequently entered into the central police computer. The same recording approach was taken with respect to the bodies of the victims. The efficiency of the search and recovery process can be illustrated by an incident involving the witness. As a result of more than two decades of bomb disposal work, Korsgaard is deaf and wears a hearing aid in each of his ears. One day during the search at Lockerbie, he jumped down from the helicopter in which he had been traveling, forgetting to remove his radio headset, which was jerked off by the action. Unbeknownst to Korsgaard, one of his hearing aids was pulled out from his ear, but because he was walking into the wind, he did not immediately notice the effect of losing it. When he turned around and was sheltered from the wind, he realized what had happened and retraced his steps to look for the device, but to no avail. Three days later he passed the same spot and asked the police officer with whom he was working if they could stop and take another look. The officer replied that there would be no point since the area had been searched subsequent to the incident and all found items bagged. They decided to examine the bags, and in the second one searched, there was the hearing aid. Once Korsgaard’s testimony had been heard, Bud Coddington’s crossexamination sought to unbalance and discredit the bomb specialist. He asked, ‘‘How does it feel to be renowned?’’ This referred to the witness’s credentials as a worldrenowned figure in the field of aviation bomb detection. The cynicism intended by the question rebounded on the lawyer as he continued his attack. Korsgaard was wearing a lapel pin showing aircraft wings. ‘‘Does your expertise include the piloting of aircraft?’’ Korsgaard explained that wings with a bomb in the middle, ‘‘lightning strikes,’’ together with a star and a second star, showed that he was a ‘‘master of bomb disposal.’’ It was hardly the point the defense intended to make, and the matter was dropped. Walter Korsgaard, whose examination of the debris collected at Lockerbie had ruled out the existence of a barometric device incorporated into the bomb, had been the first of the fact witnesses to appear before the New York court. Others were to include Fred Ford, the first director of Pan American’s security subsidiary, Alert; Billie Vincent, former director, Office of Aviation Security at the FAA; Guente Kasterliner, a manager with the Frankfurt Airport Authority, and your author. Remaining testimony came from readings taken from the depositions that had been collected over a period of many, many months in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The first of these readings, given before the second of the fact witnesses was called, was the testimony of John Boyd, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway at the time of the bombing. His testimony has already been reflected in an earlier chapter.

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PAN AM PROMISE A telling exhibit shown to the jury before further live witnesses were called was an enlargement of a Pan Am advertisement, bearing facsimile signatures of C. Edward Acker, at the time chairman of the Pan Am board and the airline’s chief executive officer, and of Martin R. Shugrue, the carrier’s chief operating officer. It had been published in The New York Times on 20 May 1986.

Dear Air Traveler: On June 12, 1986, Pan Am will initiate one of the most far-reaching security programs in our industry. A program that will screen passengers, employees, airport facilities, baggage and aircraft with unrelenting thoroughness. This program will be called ALERT. And while we can’t reveal all that it entails, we can tell you this: • It will replace all present security systems for Pan Am. • It will be operated by our own Pan World Services Company, which is presently responsible for security at many sensitive military locations, including Patrick Air Force base, and the Trident Submarine base. • It will involve Pan Am’s own highly trained security experts, and many of the most sophisticated screening devices in the world, at Pan Am locations here and abroad. • Pan Am World Services will be working in close cooperation with security and military forces provided by the governments of the United States and other countries. • Between now and June 12, our existing security system will be operating at increased strength. • Effective immediately, all Pan Am passengers are advised to check-in at least two hours before international departures.

We at Pan Am feel that the ALERT program is more than worth the extra costs in both time and money. And we’re sure you agree. Europeans, by the way, feel exactly as we do. Security in every airport served by Pan Am has been strengthened enormously. The governments of France, Italy, Britain, Germany and every other country we fly into, have also taken extraordinary steps to ensure your safety. No one, of course, can ever minimize the seriousness of the incidents that have made ALERT necessary. But proportionately, these incidents are exceedingly rare.

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With our new ALERT program, and with your help, we at Pan Am are determined to provide a safe and secure environment for our passengers. Sincerely, C. Edward Acker Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer

Martin R. Shugrue, Jr. Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer

For the ‘‘extra’’ service, Pan Am’s passengers had to pay five dollars for each international journey. Tom Plaskett, who replaced Acker as the CEO of Pan American in January 1988, testified in his deposition that there was no relationship between the collection of the surcharge and the provision of security services. The money collected from the passengers had gone into a general fund. This was confirmed by Fred Ford, the first president of Alert. THE FORD TESTIMONY At the time of the trial, Fred Ford was the executive director of the Greater Rockford Airport Authority in Illinois. His career in aviation had begun in 1967 and included spells with the Massachusetts Port Authority. He had, at one time, been director of aviation at Springfield, Missouri, and general manager at Dallas– Fort Worth Airport. Recruited by Pan Am World Services in December 1984, he had held the position of vice president of the General Aviation Division. In May 1986, Chairman Acker and COO Martin Shugrue told him of their extreme concern over the airline’s declining load factors (the numbers of passengers carried compared with the seats available) and the impact the falling figures were having on the airline’s economics. They saw a need to restore customer confidence in flying following two bad years for the air transport industry. During this time, airlines had been subjected to sabotage attacks and hijackings. When Ford met with the two executives, Pan Am’s advanced bookings for the coming summer were very low. Normally, airlines in the Western Hemisphere make most of their money during the summer months, when passenger loads are expected to rise. The Pan Am executives believed that unless they could improve the forward prospects, the airline would not survive the summer. They sought, through their discussions with Ford, a methodology whereby customer confidence could be restored. Their answer was to establish a new network security program and break with tradition by widely advertising the enhanced safety the airline would promise the traveling public. Pan Am had initiated a new security program at Miami airport some time earlier. Ford was asked to take the embryo package and expand it worldwide. ‘‘Alert,’’ as the program was to be known, was born. Ford understood that the financing necessary for the enhanced security system was to come from a five-dollar passenger levy and that he would be required to obtain the best expertise to introduce the program. Acker set a deadline of 12 June 1986 for the introduction of Alert. This reflected

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the start of the summer travel season. He announced Alert’s formation to the company’s stockholders meeting in May. Fred Ford did not claim to be a security expert. He was a ‘‘manager, facilitator and organizer’’ who had completed a number of successful projects for the company, one of which had involved security. Pan Am did have a managing director of corporate security, Harry Pizer, but Ford was told that Pizer had not been asked to undertake the task because ‘‘we had a quick timetable and wanted the job done right.’’ Pizer had no corporate responsibility for Alert, but shortly after the first conference between Ford, Acker, and Shugrue, he did take part in a meeting between the three and Yossi Langotsky of KPI, the Israeli security company. Pizer was charged with examining the credentials of the Israeli consultants and deciding whether they should be retained to advise Pan Am. It was ultimately agreed that they would be hired, and Ford was told to agree to the scope of work and negotiate a contract price. The latter was settled at $450,000. KPI was commissioned on 2 June 1986 to evaluate eighteen of the most sensitive airports on the Pan Am network, airports where there was a likelihood of a terrorist attack. They were to examine the airline’s security operation as well as airport facilities, procedures and personnel—indeed, to undertake a thorough evaluation of the weak (and strong) points in the Pan Am security system. They were given ninety days to complete their task. Concurrent with the first phase of the KPI project, Ford had to have Pan Am’s new security program up and running at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport (JFK). The deadline for this part of the project was 12 June. He delegated the JFK task to his deputy, Thomas McCauley, while he took on the function of coordinating the KPI operation, which he believed to be the most important of the two roles. McCauley had been appointed vice president of operations at Alert on the instructions of Martin Shugrue. This had been against Ford’s personal judgment since he had misgivings about McCauley’s qualifications to do the job. Early in the establishment of Alert, Ford had a series of meetings with senior members of Pan Am’s management. Far from concentrating on security issues, two of the sessions were given over to agreeing on a logo for the new company. Two other meetings dealt with the color and material for the uniforms. The original uniforms developed for the Miami operation had been of a black paramilitary design. The colors selected for the new Alert company were two-tone green and tan. Another meeting covered the media campaign that was to go with the launch of Alert. The marketing objective behind the new program dominated the list of priorities. Traditionally, security is a subject airlines do not talk about publicly—it has a tendency to scare passengers. However, the corporate decision taken by Pan Am was to advertise widely on the television and in the print media. The purpose was to convince the traveling public that anyone who flew on Pan Am would be flying on the safest airline in the world. Television coverage featuring the Pan Am executives extended to programs such as ‘‘Good Morning, America’’ a widely viewed early morning magazine program. Images showed the uniformed security agents of Alert. The guards appeared to be

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armed, but in fact they carried fake guns since the port authority at JFK had refused permission for real weapons to be used. Bomb-sniffing dogs, high-tech detection equipment, and SWAT teams were also featured. All these items were to identify the benefits accruing from the five-dollar security surcharge. Two months after the broadcasts, Ford wrote to Chairman Acker alleging that the carrier was advertising and charging for a product it was not providing. He was concerned that Alert was parading untrained dogs in front of the public, dogs that were neither explosivedetection nor drug-sniffing canines. They were untrained German shepherds hired from a local kennel on Long Island. Indeed, no trained dog teams were used by Pan Am during Ford’s time at Alert. The German shepherds’ presence at the airport represented a fraud on the traveling public. Ford wrote his memo on 9 July 1986, wanting to ensure that the chairman knew the advertised product did not exist. He told Acker that the ‘‘public and the press fully supported our stated posture, but now expected to see and feel the fruits of our advertised efforts on their behalf.’’ He had asked himself and others, ‘‘Can you honestly state that you received—the passenger received more security on June 12th than on June 11th [the day before the launch]?’’ The answer was no! Ford estimated that on the basis of the number of 747 trans-Atlantic crossings each night, some $17 to $18 million would result from the five-dollar surcharge. With very minimal additional expenditure, this provided Pan Am with a very favorable cash input. Ford’s memo did not invoke a positive response. Early in August 1986, the president of Pan Am World Services, Russell Barnes, wrote to him advising that he would no longer be serving in the capacity of president of Alert—he was to be succeeded by Thomas McCauley. Ford was told that his role had been to get Alert started and that this had been achieved. He was to drop the subject and not object to the decision, which had come ‘‘right from the top.’’ Throughout his time with Alert, Ford had stayed on the payroll of Pan Am World Services, where he had continued to hold the position of vice president of the General Aviation Division. However, in February 1987, he was fired. Throughout the trial, counsel for the defense declined to call any Pan Am security executive to the stand. Coddington chose instead to attack the witnesses called by the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. Ford was questioned by the defense counsel, but his strongest efforts were reserved for Billie Vincent and your author, both of whom were to appear twice, firstly as fact and then as expert witnesses. Coddington’s collective term for Korsgaard, Vincent, and your author was ‘‘hired guns’’ who, he claimed, had been brought in to shoot down ‘‘our’’ airline. Pan Am had, in fact, ceased to exist by the time the trial began. They had filed for bankruptcy. Their defense was funded by their insurers, USAIG. Two of the defense counsel’s targets had been senior government officials with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and your author, who had, for eleven years, headed the airline industry security operation at the International Air Transport Association. All had worked to improve security procedures and legislation for the benefit of airlines and their customers. Vincent had redesigned much of the FAA’s security program, and your author had

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initiated major amendments to the world’s defenses against airborne terrorism within the United Nations’ aviation agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization. THE VINCENT TESTIMONY At the time of the trial, Billie Vincent was president of Aerospace Services International, a security engineering and consulting design company based in Washington. His special relevance to the court hearings resulted from his role at the FAA between 1982 and 1986, when he had been director of the Office of Aviation Security. During this time he had overseen the introduction of the upgraded security regulations required at airports designated as extraordinary-risk locations. These were still extant at the time of Lockerbie. Among the enhanced requirements was the rule calling for passengers and their baggage to be matched and for any unreconciled bag to be searched or not carried on the flight. At the FAA, Vincent had been responsible for identifying security requirements, setting standards, establishing procedures, and monitoring the overall security system designed to protect U.S. civil aviation operations. The FAA had been set these tasks in 1974 by an amendment to the Federal Aviation Act, which had led to the development of the Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP). The latter contains the security procedures that all U.S. airlines have to implement. Vincent explained the technical aspects of the Federal Aviation Act and the roles of the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration. He told the jury that the Secretary of Transportation was charged with promoting the safety of civil aircraft by prescribing such reasonable rules and regulations, or minimum standards governing other practices, methods, and procedures as the Secretary of Transportation may find necessary to provide adequately for national security and safety in air commerce. The Federal Aviation Act mandated that it shall be unlawful for any person to operate aircraft in air commerce in violation of any rule, regulation, or certificate of the Secretary of Transportation under this subchapter. Each holder of an FAA carrier operating certificate is required to ‘‘adopt and carry out a security program that meets the requirements of Section 108.7.’’ Section 108.7 of the Federal Air Regulations prescribes the security program, its form, content, and availability, and in 1988, it was required to: Provide for the safety of persons and property travelling in air transportation and intrastate air transportation against acts of criminal violence and air piracy.

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Be in writing and signed by the certificate holder or any person delegated authority in this matter. Include . . . the procedures and a description of the facilities and equipment used to perform the screening functions specified. Each certificate holder had to use the procedures included, and the facilities and equipment described, in its approved security program for detecting explosives, incendiaries and deadly or dangerous weapons. One regulation contained in the ACSSP called for the appointment of a member of staff as a ground security coordinator (GSC) for each international and domestic flight. An international flight is defined as a flight to, from, or outside the United States, including U.S. transborder flights. At the time of Lockerbie, the GSC had a range of responsibilities, which included ensuring that all requirements relating to the security of each flight were in place prior to departure. Access control to the aircraft had to be monitored, together with the ground support and aircraft servicing activity, the general security of the operation area, and the baggage and cargo acceptance and loading procedures. At airports such as Frankfurt and London, the GSC had to ensure that the extraordinary security procedures were being implemented. As a last duty before any aircraft departed, the GSC was required to notify the pilot-in-command that all the security procedures had been satisfactorily carried out. The pilot had to be told of any ‘‘pertinent security information.’’ The presence of an unaccompanied bag constituted ‘‘pertinent security information.’’ The range of responsibilities laid at the door of the GSC was considerable. To be able to meet their duties, staff appointed to this position had to attend a training course in which each aspect of their role was fully covered. The FAA required the appointment of an in-flight security coordinator (ISC) for each service. This person had to be the pilot-in-command, i.e., the captain. For the departure from Frankfurt on the feeder service, 103A, this was Captain Michael Anthony, and on the doomed 747 from London, it was Captain James MacQuarrie. Both, as a routine part of their duty, were required to review with the GSC all pertinent security information for the flight. The final decision maker with respect to the safety of the aircraft was the captain. Just as GSCs had to attend specified training courses and pass through a prescribed curriculum, so, too, did the in-flight security coordinator. Vincent explained that carriers were allowed to use security procedures other than those contained in the ACSSP, but before doing so, permission had to be requested in writing from the FAA. The administrator had to approve or disapprove written requests within fifteen days of receipt. Within thirty days of receiving a refusal, a carrier could petition for reconsideration. If the original request is granted, a similar thirty-day grace period had to pass before the authorized changes could be imple-

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mented. At the Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry and when giving testimony before the Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, Pan Am had strenuously claimed they had been given oral permission to abandon the passenger and baggage match. No evidence was ever provided to support the carrier’s claim, and the FAA’s director of the Office of Aviation Security at the time of Lockerbie, Raymond Salazar, flatly denied that any such request had ever been made. He had testified that it would have been rejected even if submitted. Even so, in a telex sent by the Pan Am security director, Dan Sonenson, to his London and Frankfurt staff in March 1988, he told them that the FAA had granted X-ray as an alternative to searching baggage and the operational change was implemented. The content of Sonenson’s cable contrasted with a message he had circulated in December 1987, repeating an IATA telex confirming the ICAO’s endorsement of passenger/baggage matching. On 14 December, your author had told the airlines: ICAO Council met Friday and reconfirmed the applicability date for passenger/baggage reconciliation in respect of all point-to-point and on-line baggage remains 19th December 1987. Council has urged all States to implement similar regulations for other categories of baggage as soon as possible but applicability date this element is postponed to 1 April 1989 to enable automated systems to be employed. I would add secretariat support of earliest possible implementation 5.1.4 to all repeat all baggage as the interline element represents prime opportunity for terrorist activity. Council also approved addition of note to 5.1.4 which clarifies the phrase qte operators providing service to/from that state unqte. This is to be interpreted to mean that prior to departure from, repeat from, one of its airports the state in question shall ensure the provisions of 5.1.4 are applied to all carriers’ commercial aircraft operations. FYI states may not have received formal notification of these amendments yet. The telexed circular had told the world’s air carriers that passenger/baggage reconciliation was now firmly on the ICAO agenda. Importantly, it urged airlines to put reconciliation procedures covering interline (transfer) baggage into effect at the earliest possible moment and gave clear warning that this type of baggage ‘‘represents prime opportunity for terrorist activity.’’ One year later, almost to the day, it was just such an interline bag that the investigating police forces decided had destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. The FAA had consulted with the U.S. air carriers over the passenger/baggage reconciliation regulations and in order to facilitate their operations, had agreed that the matching procedure could be either by physical means or by an administrative process. Early draft text had called for physical matching only. A physical match requires passengers to personally identify their bags, normally achieved by lining up all the bags on the tarmac and having each passenger pick out their items, which only then are loaded onto the aircraft. At busy airports and in inclement weather, this is a highly unpopular procedure and frequently, an extremely difficult one to

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accomplish. At most modern airports, passengers board through an air bridge linking the departure lounge with the aircraft. This activity is conducted many feet above the level of the tarmac. Passengers involved in physical identification would have to descend to the ground, then climb the stairs to get back into the aircraft. With infirm passengers, this is a particular hazard, and, at the same time, the procedure provides passengers access to the most vulnerable zone of the airport, the ramp. An administrative match allows the use of computer technology to link bags with passengers. In a less sophisticated environment, manual techniques can be used with bag tags being cross-matched with other passenger data. The intent of both methods is to isolate any unaccompanied bag. Bags that cannot be linked to a passenger during the matching process have to be moved to a secure area, which must be in an isolated and protected location. Once there, the bag must be examined to ascertain that it does not contain a sabotage or other dangerous device. At the airports pertinent to the departure of the Maid of the Seas, no alternatives to physical or administrative passenger and baggage matching were allowed to U.S. carriers. The regulations for extraordinary-risk airports first applied to Frankfurt and London in 1986. Details had been presented to a meeting of the European Civil Aviation Conference in April of that year by Vincent, who told delegates that the history of terrorist activity in Europe and the Middle East worried the U.S. administration. Intelligence reports provided by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies centered on these areas. Vincent confirmed that when he and his staff developed the new regulations covering the management of hijacking and sabotage incidents, they had consulted with the U.S. carriers. He had twice met with Pan Am representatives, then specifically with Martin Shugrue. Pan Am’s vice chairman had participated with other airline chief operating officers in an FAA-convened meeting in July 1985. Vincent considered the meeting to have been a very important one and in his opinion, the most unusual held during his four years in office. The FAA was represented by the administrator and his deputy, the deputy general counsel as well as Vincent and his staff. He told the jury that he had no doubt all the airlines were adequately consulted and briefed about the new security requirements. FAA rules relating to airline security staff apply equally to the staff of agencies working on behalf of the carriers, whether wholly owned or simply contracted. Actions of airline agents are the responsibility of the carrier. Thus at Frankfurt, Pan Am was mandated by the FAA to ensure the staff of Alert, their wholly owned security subsidiary, met the federal criteria. They had to be trained to the FAA specifications and be appropriate for the task at hand. All carriers had to hire, train, test and supervise all persons performing screening functions in such a manner as to ensure effective courteous passenger screening and shall ensure that all personnel performing screening functions are capable of performing such functions. Screening staff operating X-ray devices had to ‘‘possess sufficient eyesight proficiency to perform X-ray operator duties.’’

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Pan Am did not meet either rule at Frankfurt. Alert Management Systems staff at the airport delegated to identify people meeting the federal security risk profile and most importantly, the security officer appointed by the agency to X-ray the interline (transfer) baggage, were not trained at all. In the case of the latter, the operator also had defective eyesight. Deposition testimony was to underline the many defects associated with the hiring, promotion and supervision of the Alert workforce at Frankfurt. The cross-examination of Vincent typified the adversarial nature of the U.S. (and British) court system. Lawyers defending Pan Am sought to challenge, discredit if they could, the testimony offered by the plaintiffs’ witnesses. Coddington’s reference to ‘‘hired guns’’ had been just an opening salvo. Vincent was asked whether ‘‘the BKA determined it [the IED found during the raid] would be very, very difficult to detect via normal X-ray inspection?’’ If the intent was to nullify the failure of Alert’s X-ray operator to identify the device in the bomb bag which, it was claimed, had passed through the airline’s screening process, it was a strange approach. The question highlighted the very reason why the FAA had mandated the physical examination of all unaccompanied baggage. He was pressed on the general state of U.S. aviation security at the time of and since Lockerbie. Previously, Vincent had described the U.S. civil aviation security system to the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism as ‘‘seriously deficient,’’ continuing that it did not prevent the Pan Am 103 tragedy from happening and more important, what has been done since December 21st, 1988 will not prevent a similar tragedy. The US government and airlines were gambling that stop gap measures would interdict the sophisticated explosive devices possessed by terrorists. Terrorists have only to be lucky once and the rest of us have to be lucky all the time. The U.S. aviation security system was patently not foolproof at the time of Lockerbie. By questioning Vincent on this point, counsel may have sought to show that the whole system was faulty and that Pan Am, part of the system, was simply unlucky. Evidence was to show that those elements of the program that should have been applied at Frankfurt were in themselves sufficient to have prevented the tragedy had they been implemented. Luck had not come into the equation. Vincent explained to the court that all U.S. air carriers were required to submit a copy of their security program to the FAA. It had to meet the conditions of the ACSSP. Pan Am had incorporated the necessary elements into their security manual, which contained a special entry for expedite baggage. Expedite baggage is baggage which, for one reason or another, has become separated from its owner and is not carried on the same flight as the passenger. It may have been left on the ground through an oversight or some other reason or perhaps sent to the wrong destination through careless handling. When such on-hand (found) baggage is identified, it is rushed (expedited) back to its owner. Inevitably it is unaccompanied. It is, however, a bag whose history is known and whose owner’s whereabouts are on record. In

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theory, it should present little risk to an airline, but a terrorist, familiar in the way airlines operate, could attempt to use the system to infiltrate a bag onto an aircraft. The Pan Am security manual explained the nature of expedite baggage but did not require positive identification of its contents before onward despatch, which put the carrier’s procedures in direct contradiction with the federal regulations. The later required that ‘‘all’’ unaccompanied baggage ‘‘be physically searched.’’ Full and effective monitoring of the airlines’ security programs and manuals should have identified this particular discrepancy to the FAA. Elements of Vincent’s testimony (and your author’s) given before Chief Judge Platt were taken in closed session. The court was cleared on these occasions to allow sensitive security information to be discussed before the jury but with the public excluded. Subjects warranting this exclusion had relevance to specific aspects of the U.S. aviation security program and thus required consideration by the jury, but their omission from the public arena did not detract from nor affect the general understanding of events detailed before Chief Judge Platt. To reflect the court’s decision, all subject matter taken in camera during the trial has been excluded from these pages. THE WALLIS TESTIMONY Your author was sworn in on 4 May 1992. The court heard that he had worked for many years for British Airways and its predecessor, British European Airways (BEA). He had reviewed airline and airport operations around the world, and of specific relevance to the trial, he had visited Frankfurt during the construction of the airport and had followed the development of its automated baggage handling system. He had also visited Malta in the late 1960s to monitor passenger and baggage security operations when the emergence of aviation terrorism had caused Luqa and a number of other airports in the Mediterranean region to be considered securitysensitive airports on the BEA network. The witness’s links to the IATA had begun in the mid-1960s. He had been a member and chairman of several of its operational committees and working groups before formally joining the association in 1980 at the direct request of Knut Hammarskjold, then the IATA’s director general. He was appointed director of Facilitation and Security and had remained with the IATA until 1991, when he left to form an independent international security consultancy group. The year 1985 had seen the beginning of the witness’s six years of service with the ICAO Panel of Aviation Security Experts, during which time he had proposed on behalf of the airline industry and drafted, or assisted in drafting, many of the regulations contained in Annex 17 that were extant at the time of Lockerbie. Most still exist today. Other international links maintained by the witness were with the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), the Customs Cooperation Council, and civil aviation authorities such as the FAA. Having established the witness’s credentials, Lee Kreindler, leading for the plaintiffs, asked:

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As a result of your review of the records here, the record in this case of the depositions and exhibits, as well as your experience in airline security, have you come to any conclusions as to the nature and extent of prior indications or notice of the impending disaster we now know as Lockerbie? The response was: Yes. Bearing in mind I was sitting in the centre and receiving a great deal of this information and other information, it became obvious to me that by the latter part of 1988, we had an impending attack, which had to be a virtual certainty, on a United States target. The key points leading to this conclusion had included the shooting down of the Iran Air aircraft in the gulf, the known increase in terrorist activity in Frankfurt, the discovery of the Neuss and Frankfurt bomb factories, and finally, the Helsinki warning. A methodology and a timescale had existed and a target identified. In the opinion of the witness, the potential for an incident was greater than anything known previously. A series of exhibits reproduced from original security bulletins and other documents illustrated the witness’s thought processes. The sensitive nature of some of them was such that they were redacted (edited) at the request of Carla Martin on behalf of the FAA. The exhibits demonstrated the ruthlessness of the present-day, politically based terrorist groups and illustrated the major weakness in civil aviation security operations, including the potential for an unaccompanied bag to be infiltrated into the interline system. The jury heard that passenger/baggage match procedures, designed to prevent a repetition of the Air India bombing, had become from that moment in 1985, a prime requirement for the international airline community. The jury was told that two months before Lockerbie, developed IATA policies and procedures supporting passenger and baggage reconciliation were presented to an invited international and domestic audience at an FAA security conference held in Washington, the same meeting addressed by the ICAO’s Dr. Assad Kotaite and the United Kingdom’s Lord Brabazon. Pan Am had been represented in the audience. Several of the security bulletins reviewed by the plaintiffs’ attorneys during the discovery process had included the witness as an addressee. Among them was one from the FAA telling airlines that recently detected improvised explosive devices—bombs—employed by the terrorist organisations operating in Europe and the Middle East have used new methods of concealment. Detection will require more detailed search techniques than those necessary to detect the normal IED’s previously used by these groups. US air carrier flights boarding in Europe and the Middle East must follow the procedures referenced in section XV.C of their security program.

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Section XV.C included the requirement to conduct a positive passenger and baggage match. Two years earlier, Pan Am had alerted their various overseas security personnel to the growing threat to their operations from terrorist activity. Harry Pizer, then head of security at Pan Am, believed the carrier was more likely to suffer an attack in Europe than in the United States. He recognized the potential threat posed by noshow passengers and considered that the greatest danger to Pan Am’s operation was the detonation of an IED on board an aircraft. He warned the carrier’s personnel accordingly. By late summer 1988, the FAA bulletins were warning of ‘‘possible revenge attacks.’’ The agency believed that U.S. carriers worldwide were at increased risk as a result of events in the gulf and the increase in subversive activity in and around Frankfurt. Two additional events were of concern to the FAA—the beginning of the Ali Hammedei trial and the conviction and death sentence passed on five people found guilty of attempting to hijack Pan Am Flight 73 at Karachi in September 1986. Pan Am passed on the various messages received at the corporate level to their field staff and added their own thoughts. Staff were told that terrorists would hit anywhere security is soft; therefore, security had to be tight and appear tight as well. Further warnings from the FAA followed the Autumn Leaves activity in Germany. Your author had been a recipient of these messages. Specific attention was focused on the existence of improvised explosive devices fitted with barometric devices. They were clearly intended to cause a midair explosion, the very thing Pizer had warned about in 1986. On 21 November 1988, Pan Am’s corporate security director sent a message to staff at various locations, including London and Frankfurt, repeating the details of the Autumn Leaves finds. It included the warning that it would be very difficult to detect the Toshiba bombs by normal X-ray inspection, but there were no instructions to revert to passenger and baggage matching. In reviewing the depositions and exhibits, the witness had noted the wide circulation of the Toshiba warning. The airport authorities at Heathrow had received the information and had recirculated the details to carriers operating from London’s principal airport under the heading ‘‘Urgent Information.’’ Pan Am had received their copy of the Heathrow circular on 29 November 1988. At this time, terrorist activity was still being noted in Germany, and the FAA warned of tests being made by unknown people to check the security defenses of U.S. carriers. Finally, in early December 1988 had come the Helsinki warning. It was passed to carriers and others by the FAA under the heading ‘‘Alleged Bomb Threat.’’ Among material studied prior to your author taking the witness stand were several communications that had passed between various Pan Am executives. The first had been a message from the corporate director of security to Jim Berwick, Pan Am’s security manager in London, and Martin Huebner, his counterpart in Frankfurt. It was, in fact, a copy of your author’s own telex to the security chiefs of the IATA airlines following the decision of the ICAO to adopt the passenger and baggage reconciliation policy. Daniel Sonenson, the Pan Am corporate security director, had

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added a codicil to the IATA text. He appended the opinion that ‘‘this [the new ICAO rule] should not cause Pan American any consternation as we have the interline bag problem in hand through x-ray or physical search.’’ This belief was questioned by Jim Berwick. He told his boss that in London, the airline’s operations management were using X-ray screening and thus deemed there was no need to verify the bags of a no-show passenger. Berwick was reluctant to accept this philosophy, because he was very much aware of the limitations of X-ray equipment and more importantly, those who operate it. He telexed Sonenson accordingly. Sonenson’s reply told his London manager that the FAA’s director of security, Raymond Salazar, had granted the use of X-ray as an alternative to searching passenger baggage. This, in Sonenson’s opinion, had given Pan Am, which had purchased X-rays for those stations where interlining was going to be a problem, i.e., off-loading the bags of no-show passengers, ‘‘the jump on the issue.’’ Berwick was told, ‘‘In the event of a no-show interline passenger and his bag is loaded in the belly, we go!!!!!’’ Sonenson’s reply underlined his belief that Pan Am had been allowed to put to one side the federally mandated passenger/bag match rule. The signal also highlighted Pan Am’s reliance on technology to answer security challenges, a point that had been criticized in the KPI report. By maintaining its X-ray-only policy, Pan Am left itself vulnerable to unaccompanied interline bags, the very items the FAA had sought to guard against. The airline’s corporate security executives appeared not to understand the nature or the magnitude of the threat facing them nor the content or intent of the warnings from the FAA and the IATA. In questioning the fact witnesses, Bud Coddington had a difficult task. By the very nature of their role, the witnesses had dealt with factual matters, so the attorney chose to attack the witnesses themselves. He adopted an aggressive style of questioning but at the same time sought to present himself to the jury as an amusing, humorous fellow fighting to defend ‘‘our’’ airline. To the families of the victims, the humor was badly misplaced. They were still grieving the loss of their loved ones, and to them the trial was a very serious matter. At times, Coddington’s attempts at humor rebounded on himself, causing the judge to declare at one stage, ‘‘You asked for that.’’ The attorney sought an explanation for the government’s redaction of certain of the documents shown to the court. He wanted to know why the FAA had withheld parts of XV.C.1. ‘‘You claim to know about these things, logically, in your education, training and experience, can you give us a reason why?’’ Coddington was reminded by the court that a summary judgment had already been granted on the question of redaction. The subject could be explored only ‘‘in camera.’’ Reading from a previously published paper written by your author, Coddington sought agreement that the witness still held the opinion that airlines are attacked because they are seen to be extensions of the state—the air carrier is not the target; rather, it is the country whose flag the airline flies. Counsel was right. He was told that for this reason, flag carriers had to be very, very careful. In an eclectic approach in his cross-examination, the defense attorney changed

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tack, wanting to know if there was a difference between an unaccompanied bag and an unauthorized bag. He was told they could be one and the same bag but not necessarily. When a bag is mishandled, an attempt is made to identify the owner. When this is successful, an expedite tag, sometimes called a rush tag, is attached to the bag detailing its intended routing back to its owner. At such times, the bag would be authorized for carriage, but it would be traveling unaccompanied. It should have been subjected to stringent security controls, and indeed, the airline is likely to know more about such a bag than any other carried on an aircraft. The questioning then turned to the witness’s role in the Indian High Court’s inquiry into the bombing of Air India’s Kanishka. Coddington asked, ‘‘What sort of things did you talk about?’’ Your author’s role had been to advise on the various aspects of aviation security, enabling the court to develop its findings and recommendations. The Indian testimony had been given ‘‘in camera’’ because of the sensitive nature of its content. The attorney took another jump in his questioning and began to delve into the ability or otherwise of dogs, ‘‘and we’re talking dogs with serious noses, to sniff out Semtex and these plastic explosives.’’ He was interrupted by Carla Martin, who believed the attorney was going into areas of inquiry not suitable for public inquiry. The judge agreed, so the lawyer focused his attention on a briefcase the witness had carried into the courtroom. ‘‘Semtex explosives, which we heard about, is kind of like Silly Putty? If a mad terrorist or evil person wanted to, could he construct a brief bag or sample case just like yours and line it completely with Semtex or plastic?’’ The courtroom was cleared once more before he was allowed to continue. As explained earlier in this chapter, details of the attorney’s questions and witness responses provided ‘‘in camera’’ have not been included in this book. Questions from the Pan Am defense team on aspects of bomb-making and detection and certain specific security procedures were considered by the U.S. government suitable only for closed sessions of the trial. Omission of this material does not keep from readers any information essential to their understanding of the trial or the disaster that befell the Maid of the Seas. During redirect examination, Lee Kreindler for the plaintiffs sought to clarify those areas where he believed the defense had tried to muddy the waters. Jim Berwick’s approach, when he had questioned the decision to abandon passenger and baggage matching at London, had been described as sensible. ‘‘Was the response of Pan Am to the Helsinki warning sensible?’’ asked Kreindler. It was one of the most fundamental questions of the trial. The Pan Am response to the Helsinki warning should have been an immediate tightening of all security, concentrating on the mandated requirements of the FAA. The warning should have been the last piece in the intelligence puzzle, identifying the increased threat facing the carrier. Their reaction, in the opinion of the witness, had not been sensible. Kreindler asked another question. ‘‘Sitting for many years at the crossroads of security information, do you today think that the Helsinki warning was a hoax?’’ He was told ‘‘no.’’ In the message, the airline, the routing, the time period, even a methodology had been defined. Additionally, the warning had to be reviewed

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against the environment that existed at the time, and everything pointed to a terrorist attack on an American civil aviation target. It had to be assumed that the message was valid. Lee Kreindler concluded his redirect examination with a final question. ‘‘Would the performance of the required positive match procedure under Section XV.C.1a have provided a guarantee against an unaccompanied bag getting on Pan Am 103?’’ The reply was simple. ‘‘I believe so.’’ The last of the plaintiffs’ live witnesses to be called was Guente Kasterliner. He detailed for the court the baggage handling processes at Frankfurt in 1988. These are described in detail elsewhere in this book; thus, although they were very important for the jury’s understanding of the scenario at Frankfurt, they are not repeated in this chapter.

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TRIAL: DEPOSITION WITNESSES Deposition testimony presented during the consolidated liability trial was obtained from individual Pan Am and Alert staff members at Frankfurt and London. Some were interviewed over a period of many days, and a few were questioned more than once as the attorneys sought to understand the nature of the airline’s security operations at the two airports. The process began in summer 1989 and continued until shortly before the trial opened. During the trial, the jury saw video recordings of the deposition processes or heard members of the attorneys’ staff, using transcripts of the original sessions, enact the role of the witnesses who had provided the testimony. In Germany some of the deposition procedures were overseen by a federal judge. Because the legal teams were, for the most part, feeling their way through the maze of operational practice and government-mandated procedures, much of which was new to them, the process was long and repetitive. The depositions amounted to many thousands of pages, yet very few were needed at the trial. Only those necessary to identify the relevant policies, procedures, and actual practices for the jury were used. Defense counsel chose not to bring any of the witnesses before the court, where they would have been exposed to public cross-examination by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Jim Berwick, Pan Am’s security manager in London at the time of the Lockerbie bombing, was a very long-serving member of the airline’s London staff, having joined the company in 1956. In 1974, he had transferred from the operational side of the airline to security and at the time of Lockerbie had territorial oversight of Pan Am’s security operation in northern Europe and the United Kingdom. Martin Huebner,

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based in Frankfurt, reported to Berwick, who in turn answered to Daniel Sonenson in New York. Berwick learned of the Helsinki warning in a telephone call from Huebner on 8 December. He flew to Finland, where he met with a U.S. regional security officer. It was the latter who had received the telephone call at the embassy warning of the terrorist plan to attack Pan Am. Berwick was told by the security officer that the Finnish authorities had received similar threat calls in the past naming the same conspirators and that they had classified this latest call as a hoax. Even so, while in Helsinki, Berwick tightened the local security procedures for passengers intending to use Pan Am services for the trans-Atlantic crossing. All checked baggage of such passengers was to be X-rayed, and bags belonging to passengers classified as selectees were to be physically examined. Any Finnish-originating checked baggage threat to Pan Am’s departures from Germany would be through the interline system, and Berwick advised Huebner that special attention should be given to all transfer bags. His recommendation was intended to be additional to any instructions issued from New York. In fact, Sonenson and Huebner had decided to search the baggage of Finnish women passengers in view of the warning that an unwitting female was to be used to carry the bomb. They had also agreed that Frankfurt was a likely place for a bomb to be put on a Pan Am aircraft. Back in London, Berwick discussed the Helsinki warning with the local Alert manager and arranged with Pan Am’s Heathrow management that, for the balance of December, all female passengers traveling alone would be classified as selectees. He followed up these discussions by monitoring the changes he had recommended but made no alterations to the procedures for handling interline transfer baggage now being X-rayed in accordance with the corporate decision. Nor were any changes implemented for on-line transfer baggage, which continued to be transferred directly from incoming Pan Am aircraft to outgoing ones. The sheriff principal at the Fatal Accident Inquiry had noted that the Heathrow procedures meant mistakes and shortcomings at Frankfurt would not be rectified at London. In Frankfurt, Harald Hoffman, one of two Pan Am duty managers who doubled as ground security coordinators, also followed the corporate decision that interline bags needed only to be X-rayed. This meant that at Frankfurt, baggage belonging to missing passengers arriving on board another airline’s flight and scheduled to continue on a Pan Am service, the very bags that the the IATA had warned presented the prime opportunity for terrorist activity, were neither matched nor removed from the system. In contrast, unaccompanied baggage belonging to originating and online transfer passengers (passengers arriving in Frankfurt from another Pan Am service) had to be off-loaded from or not loaded in the first place onto departing aircraft. The illogic of this dual policy appeared to have escaped the carrier’s management. Moreover, other testimony was to show that in Frankfurt, Pan Am did not know if an interline passenger with baggage labeled through to its destination failed to check in. Berwick, who had questioned the corporate decision to abandon passenger and

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baggage matching, also disputed an instruction from the UK DOT. Pan Am, along with all other carriers and screening agencies, had been told to pay special attention to the growing numbers of personal computers that were being taken on board aircraft by business executives and others. There was a fear that PCs could be used to hide an improvised explosive device, since they had a ready-made power source, a battery, an essential element for IEDs. The DOT wanted screeners to be told: ‘‘If the PC cannot be operated for the screener and if the passenger refuses to submit the PC for X-ray inspection, it shall not be permitted beyond the screening point. It may then only be carried as checked baggage. PCS must either be operated for the screener, X-rayed or carried as checked baggage.’’ The DOT instruction was illogical and thoroughly dangerous. Clearly, the UK authority saw PCs as a potential threat only if used as the earlier Pan Am and TWA radio bombs had been. These had been placed on board and left to detonate after the saboteurs had left the aircraft. The DOT had overlooked the unwittingaccomplice scenario. Given that this was the method attempted earlier at Heathrow by the would-be bomber Nezar Hindawi, the DOT rule was unforgivable. They should have realized that if the person carrying a PC containing an improvised explosive device was another such unwitting accomplice, carrying the PC in the hold would still have doomed the aircraft. Berwick decided the rule was untenable and concluded that if Pan Am/Alert screeners were unable to satisfy themselves about a computer’s integrity, carriage was to be refused altogether. In Germany, Martin Huebner was questioned by the attorneys several times. His testimony was confused and often contradictory. At times his responses appeared naive and evasive. This may have resulted from a fear that the weaknesses the legal teams were uncovering within the Pan Am security performance at Frankfurt, for which he had corporate but no line management oversight, would focus unwelcome attention on himself. Huebner gave his deposition eight months after one of the worst tragedies to befall international civil aviation and certainly the most traumatic incident to have been suffered by Pan Am, yet he insisted that he could not remember the security procedures required by his company or by the FAA at the time of the bombing. He had been the carrier’s corporate security officer for Germany for thirteen years and had received FAA training, but he professed not to know if the procedures mandated by the agency for implementation at extraordinary-risk airports applied to Pan Am’s operations at Frankfurt. It was an amazing claim, since he agreed he did know that the airport came under this categorization. By the time Huebner first met with the lawyers, the U.S. and British authorities had determined that an unaccompanied interline bag had carried the improvised explosive device that had destroyed Pan Am 103. Both had concluded that the bag had entered the Pan Am system at Frankfurt. It is difficult to conceive that the security manager, knowing that Pan Am 103 had originated with the feeder flight from Frankfurt, with all the implications that implied for the security operation at that airport, would not have reviewed the station’s procedures on the fateful day and

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his part in them. Given his own involvement with Berwick when the latter had questioned the corporate decision to abandon reconciliation, it is equally difficult to believe that he could have forgotten the procedures so controversially put in place. Just as surprising was his assertion that he did not know the limitations of X-ray equipment in identifying improvised explosive devices. Although he had never received any training on X-ray machine technology and could claim only superficial knowledge of its function, the German police had made it quite clear in their bulletins on the Toshiba bombs that they would be extremely difficult to detect by X-ray examination. Huebner had received circulars to this effect, not just from the police but through internal telexes despatched by Pan Am in New York. With all his years of direct exposure to security matters, he should have known the airline industry’s misgivings on using X-rays to screen checked baggage. The ICAO recommended that no X-ray operator should spend more than twenty minutes in any hour monitoring visual display units. It was the industry norm, and Berwick had told the attorneys it was a well-known requirement. Alert’s training manual made reference to this time limit, yet Huebner claimed not to know such a recommendation existed. His confusion extended to the nature of the machines used at Frankfurt on 21 December 1988. He thought that before Lockerbie, Astrophysics brand X-ray machines had been modified to provide images in color rather than black and white. This had happened after the tragedy, and the change was so fundamental that again it is difficult to understand how he could have been so confused. Huebner had not been involved in, nor consulted over, the appointment of Alert as the security agents for Pan Am, and early in his sessions with the attorneys, he denied that any obligation for overseeing Alert’s performance fell on him or the ground security coordinators at Frankfurt. Later, he accepted that both were responsible for monitoring the Alert personnel. From time to time he had pointed out to Alert’s manager, Ulrich Weber, shortcomings identified in the latter’s staff. He had also told the Pan Am station manager when he believed security fell short of that required for the corporation’s operations. Yet when asked whether the shortcomings he had identified were corrected by the concerned managers, he could not remember, claiming he never followed up his recommendations to see if they had been implemented. He had passed security bulletins to Weber for the latter to instruct his staff as necessary, but the Alert manager insisted when he was questioned that any security message reaching him from the Pan Am man carried the codicil ‘‘You never got it from me.’’ Weber believed he was not allowed to pass the detail on to his staff. The New York jury sitting three years after Huebner was first interviewed was left to decide which man’s story was the most credible. They might have been influenced by Huebner’s inability to recall if he had sent a copy of the Helsinki warning to Weber or discussed it with him. Following one FAA inspection of the Pan Am security operation at Frankfurt, Huebner did recommend that the Pan Am station manager, Herbert Leuniger, increase the security staff numbers at the airport. His recommendation was not accepted, and he wrote to the carrier’s managing director of security, Ed Cunningham (Sonenson’s boss), telling him that at Frankfurt, for financial reasons, security staff

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had to be kept to a minimum. Huebner had been concerned that these financial concerns were jeopardizing the lives and safety of Pan Am passengers. Monika Diegmuller was a terminal services supervisor at Frankfurt. She had joined the airline in 1978 after working for some years with Air Canada. After a period in passenger services, she had moved into the Clipper Club (Pan Am’s club for VIP, first-class, and regular travelers) before being appointed a passenger service supervisor in summer 1988. Elementary security training had been provided on her new appointment, qualifying her, in the eyes of Pan Am’s local management, as an alternate ground security coordinator. The initial training period mandated by the FAA for a full GSC was forty hours. Diegmuller’s instruction lasted only ‘‘two to three hours’’ and had been concentrated largely on general matters that might be expected to arise during the course of her passenger service duties. She was not told how to evaluate Alert’s performance and believed her responsibility relative to the security company was limited to ensuring their personnel were present in the passenger area for an aircraft departure. In fact, the Pan Am security manual required her, among many things, to ensure that all security requirements were monitored prior to a departure. On 21 December, Diegmuller was on duty when Pan Am 103A departed. Her responsibilities that day had included overseeing the flights arriving from and departing to Berlin. She worked the early shift and should have been off duty by 3:00 P.M., but there was no middle-shift supervisor. She agreed to stay on until her lateshift counterpart arrived. Diegmuller reported to the captain of Pan Am 103A that there were no missing passengers for his flight but gave him no other security information. Nothing about the flight had been unusual, and all the passengers had boarded. She worked on the basis that if she didn’t have any security problems, she did not mention the subject. Had she had any quandaries, she would have gone to the duty manager. In fact, the Air Carrier Standard Security Program required GSCs to report the security status of the flight to the pilot-in-command regardless of whether or not there were any security-related problems. A record had to be kept of all such communications for a period of ninety days. Diegmuller believed that if there had been any pertinent security information relating to the departure, she would have been told by the security officer via the station management. This opinion suggested that her understanding of pertinent security problems did not encompass the parameters envisaged by the FAA. Although she knew about the Helsinki warning, she did not consider it her task to discuss the matter with flight crews. This, she believed, was the role of flight services management. Diegmuller had not been told by any of her staff, nor by Alert or Frankfurt Airport Company (FAG) personnel, of any trouble relating to the departure of Pan Am 103A. There had been earlier discussions on the Helsinki warning among the Pan Am supervisors, and they had known of the Neuss police activity both from the newspapers and from Pan Am documents. She had seen a notice concerning radio cassette bombs but could not remember when or where, although she could recall telling Alert staff and FAG security personnel to check thoroughly any cassette radio recorder carried by passengers. Although familiar with the Pan Am security manual,

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Diegmuller was not aware of all the detail it contained, yet as an alternate GSC, she was required to know the carrier’s security requirements and those mandated by the FAA. Regarding X-ray screening, she said, ‘‘All this is done downstairs at the ramp. I’m just working at the passenger area, so this is something I don’t have anything to do with.’’ Monica Diegmuller’s understanding of her security role was different from that of Harald Hoffman, the duty manager and the full GSC for Pan Am on 21 December. He claimed she was required to have full knowledge and understanding of all the security procedures she had to monitor and had to ensure all mandated security requirements were met. Given the disparity between the training received by Hoffman and that provided to Diegmuller, plus her primary role as the passenger services supervisor, this requirement could hardly be considered reasonable. Hoffman’s views were contradicted by Wulf-Rudiger Krommes, also a duty manager and a GSC at Frankfurt. He was the person who had given Diegmuller her security training, and he thought she had no ramp functions—‘‘She is not walking around the ramp.’’ Consequently, she had been given no security training regarding ramp activities. Hoffman considered himself an expert in evaluating threats received with respect to Pan Am operations, in formulating effective responses (although he explained this was the responsibility of the Pan Am station manager) and in implementing procedures to correct any security deficiencies. He believed Diegmuller had this same expertise. Additionally, he deemed her an expert in supervising Alert. If she had become aware of any deficiency in their operation, which included aircraft searching and guarding, baggage X-raying, and the selectee processes, she had to tell them and have the shortcoming rectified. She, on the other hand, supported by Krommes, did not regard herself as having any responsibility relative to Alert beyond ensuring their presence in the passenger area at the time of an aircraft departure. The contradiction was stark. Hoffman, Krommes, and Leuniger had all attended three-day GSC training courses in the United States in 1986, and each year following the initial session, had received a day’s annual refresher course. Monika Diegmuller’s local training had been only a summary of elements of the men’s training (Hoffman thought she had had five to six hours, Krommes suggested three to four hours and Diegmuller herself said two to three hours). Yet Hoffman, at least, considered this sufficient for her to act, unsupervised, in the GSC role since she had the ability to call on a duty manager should she need help. Given that Diegmuller was not aware that she had a role with respect to the ramp and operations activity, the potential for her seeking assistance away from the passenger service area was remote. For the departure of the feeder flight to London on 21 December, she believed there was another alternate GSC for the ramp. In fact, the ramp supervisor, Gunther Muller, who might have undertaken this task, had not received even the rudimentary training given to Diegmuller; thus he could not have acted in this capacity. Given that Alert was later discovered to have had no ramp guard looking after access control on that day, there was no formal security presence on the ramp for the departure of Pan Am 103A. On the day of the tragedy, Hoffman had formally ended his duty period at 3:00

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and like Diegmuller, he attended a retirement party being given for the station manager. He stayed there until 6:30. Thus at some stage in the departure process of Pan Am 103A, both the alternate and the full GSC had been at the festivities, although the former had attended only for a short while. Hoffman’s refreshment at the party had been ‘‘two to three glasses of champagne.’’ He considered his responsibilities for security matters ended when he went off duty, although he agreed with Krommes that duty managers and GSCs were on twenty-four hour call. Hoffman testified that once a day, he did monitor the security activity affecting Pan Am operations and made spot checks in the area where Alert X-rayed baggage. He spoke to the machine’s operator at such times but was not aware how improvised explosive devices could be identified by X-ray. Having no expertise in supervising the quality of an operator’s performance, he was unable to confirm that the process was being carried out properly. Nor did he consider this to be a subject area where Monika Diegmuller was expected to have any expertise. Thus on 21 December 1988, the duty manager’s testimony confirmed that the Alert X-ray screening operation was not being monitored by any Pan Am staff member competent to do so. The records from the FAG baggage computer, combined with the work sheets from the coders, had shown that it was to Pan Am’s unsupervised screening station in the baggage make-up area that an unaccompanied interline bag from Malta had been delivered. In October 1989, ten months after the loss of the Maid of the Seas, the Pan Am security administration at Frankfurt was changed. Hoffman, Krommes, and two others were made managing ground security coordinators. This had become their sole function. From the testimony of the station manager and others, the integrity of the carrier’s on-time performance and its fiscal management at Frankfurt airport had greater priority than the security operation. Leuniger had been instrumental in obtaining agreement to drop the reconciliation procedure, which he considered to be cumbersome, time-consuming and a very difficult venture. He saw the inauguration of X-ray screening for interline bags, a process he believed had been accepted by the FAA, as a means to eliminate the burden. As a trained GSC he should have known the reasons behind the federal mandate requiring bags to be matched, as well as the dangers in relying on X-ray examination of checked bags. He had received the German and U.S. Security bulletins describing the Toshiba improvised explosive devices and knew that discovery of such devices by normal X-ray examination would have been very difficult, yet he continued to rely on such screening even after receiving the Helsinki warning. Alert Management Systems was the company charged with providing physical security for Pan Am services at the time of the Lockerbie tragedy. It was headed by Ulrich Franz Xaver Weber and was part of what the world had been told in 1986 would be ‘‘one of the most far-reaching security programs in our industry.’’ The advertising campaign had announced that the program would ‘‘involve Pan Am’s own highly-trained security experts and many of the most sophisticated screening devices in the world, at Pan Am locations here and abroad.’’ Alert Management

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Systems was wholly owned by the airline. Thus their staff could be said to be ‘‘Pan Am’s own,’’ but as their deposition testimony was to show, they most certainly could not be said to be ‘‘highly trained.’’ Indeed, most had received no training at all. The Alert staff depositions were made in Germany in autumn 1989, and they showed an appalling state of affairs had existed in the management of Pan Am’s security at Frankfurt prior to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Staff were allocated tasks for which they neither understood the intent nor had mastered the required methodology. One screener, Sabine Fuchs, had joined Alert in October 1988, having had no previous experience in security matters. She was given no induction training by Alert on joining the company. Some three weeks after Lockerbie, she did attend a one-day course! On 21 December 1988, Fuchs was one of three staff in the main hall, where their job was to identify selectees and nominate them for further screening. ‘‘We were told to identify selectees and non-selectees, but I myself didn’t dare to do so because I didn’t know what a selectee was.’’ Fuchs also testified, ‘‘We weren’t given any concrete instructions on points as to persons. We just said, ‘Okay, let’s take a person out and give them a sticker.’ ’’ She didn’t know what action the sticker initiated. Just as other staff, Fuchs frequently worked double shifts because there was a shortage of personnel. This meant a fifteen-hour day. She worked a double shift on 21 December, when one of her two colleagues was Detlef-Bodo Gietz. Neither of them spoke English despite the fact that one of their principal tasks was to question passengers about their baggage as a prelude to deciding if they should be classified as selectees. Many of the passengers spoke only English. Supervision of the Alert staff and the security operations in general was lax. For the departure of the feeder service connecting with Pan Am 103 in London, no ramp security was provided to the aircraft, a fact that the Alert duty officer, Wolfgang Schwab, had not known. He had assigned a staff member to this task, Malik Muhammed Ramzan. Malik was one of two Alert personnel, the other being Uwe Schroeder, charged with conducting a cabin search of Pan Am 103A. He was then scheduled to go down to the ramp and undertake the necessary aircraft-access control function. However, he had become unwell and had gone into the terminal building to rest. Malik testified that Schroeder had been told to replace him on the ramps, where his job would have been to prevent any unauthorized person from having access to the aircraft. ‘‘Would have been,’’ because Uwe Schroeder claimed that his only function had been to check the cabin, a point confirmed by Schwab. He did not take up the security position on the ramp. Thus, after the interior of the aircraft had been checked, no one guarded it against unlawful intrusion, negating the earlier screening effort. The aircraft could have been accessed illegally and no one would have known. On 21 December, Schroeder, too, had worked for fifteen hours. One of the first Alert staff members to provide deposition testimony had been Stella Schneider. Her story was startling. Schneider had joined Alert on its formation in June 1988 and was put in charge of an electronic data-processing department, Accounting Control. Two months later she was appointed duty officer in administration, answering directly to Ulrich Weber.

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She had not seen the Helsinki warning prior to the destruction of Pan Am 103, but she did see it subsequently. Sometime in January 1989, Weber brought the bulletin containing the warning into her office and ‘‘took a stamp, put the date back, stamped a number of copies and I signed.’’ Schneider could not remember the exact date to which her boss had altered the machine but recalled it was either 8 or 9 December 1988. There were other people in the room, but she told the attorneys she did not believe they had seen Weber’s action. In fact, one had. Oliver Koch, the training officer, confirmed the backdating incident had taken place in Stella Schneider’s office, something Weber was to deny in his deposition. However, with the Schneider and Koch revelations, the investigating lawyers believed they had identified an attempt by the Alert boss to cover up the failure to act on the Helsinki warning. Although Schneider had not seen the Helsinki warning prior to the backdating incident, she did have prior knowledge of it. Early in December, she had attended a meeting in the Sheraton Hotel that forms part of the airport terminal complex. During the session she received a telephone call from Wolfgang Schwab, the supervisor in the duty office, and he told her about the call to the Helsinki embassy. Weber was at the meeting but Schneider was unable to recall whether he heard any of the conversation. In fact, he did learn of the Helsinki warning at that time, but from documents given to him by Martin Huebner, although the men did not discuss the subject with each other. Weber confirmed Schneider’s claim that the duty officer in attendance on the day of the supervisors’ meeting knew of the threat but told none of the other staff. ‘‘It was need-to-know information and we were not allowed to disseminate information like that.’’ Weber testified that he had not received any new instructions from Pan Am after the receipt of the warning nor did he issue any to his staff, other than to remind them about identifying people fitting the selectee category. Stella Schneider had one other exposure to the Helsinki warning prior to Weber’s backdating action. Oliver Koch arrived at the airport around 6:00 A.M. on 22 December, having been phoned by Weber the previous night and asked to arrive early the next day. While waiting for his boss, Koch worked on a standard operating procedure for the station, and to complete the work, he needed some notes prepared previously. He looked for them on Weber’s desk and found the security alert. He was upset that he had not been informed about it previously and complained to Schneider. He made the same complaint to other Alert staff, including Heinz Peter Christ. Koch had learned about the Toshiba bombs during a visit to Munich. He had gone to the Bavarian capital to talk about training and had been invited to attend a briefing session on the Autumn Leaves finds by a former colleague in the Civil Security Service known as the ‘‘Black Sheriffs.’’ They were so called because of the color of their uniforms. Koch had been employed by them for a year before joining Alert in June 1988. He brought a number of files back to Frankfurt with him and showed them to Weber. Again, the latter did not pass on the Toshiba information to his staff. ‘‘I wasn’t authorized to do so.’’ Explaining his position further, Weber said that if ‘‘I would alter the instructions originally received in the contract that

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would mean that Pan Am would have to react in one way or another.’’ He did not discuss the information with Leuniger. Koch was not allowed to train staff until he had attended a seminar on ‘‘training the trainer’’ to be given by Wilfred Wood, a senior manager with Alert. In fact, he never did receive this training. Just as Weber refuted Stella Schneider’s testimony on the Helsinki warning date-stamping incident, so, too, did he insist that Koch’s claim that he was the Alert training officer was false. Weber suggested that Koch simply had an administrative and clerical role in training, an assertion refuted by another staff member, Beate Franzki, when she gave evidence. ‘‘He was supposed to be the training officer. He was supposed to be in charge of the ongoing training of the whole staff, but they never really let him do it so he sat around all day not knowing what to do.’’ Koch’s testimony showed that his salary had increased on his appointment to, as he put it, duty officer of training. The increase had been from the 12 marks an hour paid to screeners to 3,500 marks a month. He had been given an office next to Beate Franzki, the senior duty officer. As a screener, Koch’s original appointment, he had been a uniformed member of staff. In his new role he had worn civilian clothes. Christ, to whom Koch had complained about not being shown the Helsinki warning, had joined Alert from Securitae, the previous provider of security services to Pan Am. As the supervisor, it would have been his responsibility to brief the Alert screeners on matters such as the Helsinki warning, but since he was unaware of its existence prior to 22 December, he had been unable to advise his subordinates. He was not told of the Sonenson/Huebner decision to add Finnish women to the list of selectees at Frankfurt. He had not known of the Toshiba warning arising from the Autumn Leaves activity. On finding the Helsinki message, Koch told Christ that it had been ‘‘next to Weber’s computer, underneath a pile of files and documents.’’ During the deposition process, Christ was shown a photographically enlarged copy of the warning and confirmed it was the same as the one he had seen on 22 December. It did not have a date stamp! After 22 December, he saw the bulletin a second time when it had been stamped showing a date at the beginning of December. He testified that he couldn’t be precise as to which date, but when shown a second copy of the warning, this one bearing a 9 December stamp, he confirmed that it was the second bulletin he had seen. The plaintiffs’ lawyers were satisfied they had identified an attempt by Weber to cover up his receipt of the Helsinki warning prior to 21 December and his failure to act upon it. There was no evidence to show that Pan Am’s corporate security executives had given Alert any new instructions following the Helsinki telephone call, either directly or through the operational management in Germany. The airline’s response to the very real threat directly aimed against them was left in the hands of an inexperienced, ill-trained staff managed by a person later shown to have been unsuited for the task. Another of the Alert screeners was Otto Prill, who, like his colleagues, had received no formal security training while with Alert and had had none prior to joining the company. He had been a warehouseman and a truck driver. His on-the-job training

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on the use of the X-ray had been limited to a demonstration of how the machine worked. He confirmed that only interline bags were X-rayed by Pan Am at Frankfurt. Wolfgang Schwab’s daughter, Andrea Caslis, also was an Alert staff member. She had provided the security boarding control for Pan Am 103A and like Prill and her father, could not recall having been told about the threat posed by the radio cassette bombs found in Neuss. She did know about the Helsinki warning, having been told by a Pan Am supervisor. She was able to confirm that Malik, who should have been guarding the feeder aircraft, had come back into the terminal building to rest after searching the cabin of the outbound 103A. He had told her he was unwell. She assumed that Schroeder had stayed on the ramp, using the rear exit of the aircraft to descend to the ground level, because he had not reentered the building at her position, which she would otherwise have expected him to have done. Ulrich Franz Xaver Weber, who was responsible for the Alert operation at Frankfurt, was born in Germany in 1959 and had emigrated to the United States in 1979, where he had worked with a number of U.S. security companies including Pinkertons, Rockford Alarm, and Burns before joining the U.S. military in 1983. He was posted back to West Germany in 1984. He left the army in 1987 under ‘‘other than honorable conditions’’ but this did not prevent him from joining a local security contracting company in Frankfurt, Securitae GMBH, one of whose customers was Pan Am. At Securitae, Weber became a section leader in charge of the airport department, which provided physical security for aircraft, screening for passengers and searching of baggage. In April 1988, when Alert decided to expand their operation into Germany, the company sent Wilfred Wood, their operations director, to talk to Weber. They discussed Alert’s plans for the Federal Republic. These included taking over Pan Am’s security operation from Securitae. Weber agreed to take on the role of project manager for Alert but did not tell Securitae of his future plans nor of the ambitions of Alert. One preformation role undertaken by Weber was the preparation of a bid for the Pan Am contract. ‘‘Our bid, of course, had to be below the contractor’s (Securitae) in order to receive the contract.’’ This meant he had to better three million deutsche marks, since the Pan Am station (airport) managers in Germany had all indicated the need to save money. In May 1988, one month before Alert was to take over the security operation, the Pan Am station manager at Frankfurt airport cut the Securitae staff allocation to achieve cost savings. The numbers of screeners in all areas, including the ramp and other physical security positions, were reduced, requiring Securitae to restructure their whole organization at the airport. The cut had amounted to some sixty man-hours per day. To meet the operational pattern of the airline, Securitae hired female screeners who were able to work within the required time frame, 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. From his appointment to Alert in May 1988, Weber coordinated the legal and all other requirements necessary to get the company established in Germany by the target date of June 1. The target was met and Securitae’s contract was terminated at 11:59 P.M. on 31 May. To enable Alert to take over at 12:01 A.M. on 1 June, they engaged staff directly from Securitae. Personnel simply changed uniform and pay-

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master. Weber was given overall command of Alert’s more than 100 staff and was made the managing director of the German end of Alert and appointed to the local board. Weber recalled the balance of the board included Tom Plaskett, Harry Pizer, Pan Am’s security chief in the early part of 1988 and Russell Barnes, the president of Pan Am World Services. From 1 June, Weber’s point of contact with Pan Am was the appropriate station manager. In Frankfurt that was Leuniger, the person in Germany with whom Weber claimed he had the most problems. Alert had ‘‘quite some difficulties’’ with different Pan Am departments, especially the flying staff, and ultimately he was instructed that his staff must not talk to the carrier’s flight crews. They were to receive instructions only from local staff. ‘‘Local staff’’ meant Pan Am management, including the GSC and supervisors. The instruction had resulted from an incident when an Alert employee had reported a security problem to a captain, who had in turn called for a recheck of the aircraft, resulting in an operational delay. Following the establishment of Alert, Pan Am continued to seek cuts in security costs at Frankfurt. Weber had to reduce the three million deutsche mark budget by half a million, which gave Alert ‘‘very big difficulties.’’ The original budget had been based on the last annual charge of Securitae, and problems arose because ‘‘nobody considered that Securitae and other contractors sometimes didn’t even fill 50 percent of the authorized and required man-hours. And so those costs were much below the actual costs if you fill all positions according to the position plan.’’ Shortfall in security standards at Frankfurt were inevitable and were made worse by the nonexistence of an effective line of communication between Pan Am, either at a local or corporate level, and Alert. Weber testified that FAA security bulletins were not routinely passed on to Alert, nor were any of the other security advisories received by the carrier. The security subsidiary was not on Pan Am’s ‘‘need to know’’ list for such information. What communication there was, was on a totally informal basis. Pan Am’s Huebner and Alfred Kunz did pass on information, but according to Weber it was always in a conversational mode ‘‘more or less expressing that something may be of interest to me. If I did receive a copy of a warning or document, it was classified and I was informed that wherever it came from, it didn’t come from them, should that question ever be raised. There was no procedure or way of communication or anything established until January 1989.’’ There had been no routine meetings on security between Pan Am station management and Alert, the two coming together in Frankfurt only on special occasions such as an extra aircraft service being added or the arrival or departure of a celebrity. Weber believed that Leuniger, who had questioned the competence of the FAA security inspectors who visited the airport, thought security was a waste of time. He continued to want substantial savings in his budget for security. Weber had to bring him the bad news, the invoices, ‘‘so I sure wasn’t one of the persons he liked to see in his office.’’ The unhappy working relationship between the two men, together with Leuniger’s alleged antipathy toward security and Weber’s laissez-faire approach to his own role, meant an environment existed at Frankfurt that mitigated against good security.

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Alert did not prescribe the security procedures for Pan Am’s operations. Indeed, they did not know what was required under the FAA’s Air Carrier Standard Security Program since, according to Weber’s testimony, they did not have a copy of Pan Am’s security manual or the ACSSP! Procedures applying to Pan Am’s operations and undertaken by Alert were decided by the airline, and Weber saw his task as fulfilling the requirements of the customer, Pan Am. With corporate security in New York playing virtually no role with respect to the Alert activity in Germany and the latter having no access to FAA regulations and requirements, it was beyond imagination that good security could ever have existed at Frankfurt. The Pan Am program inevitably was flawed and its passengers at risk. The FAA surveyed Pan Am’s security operation in Frankfurt. Inspectors visited the station on a number of occasions in 1988, and Weber always knew the inspections were going to take place prior to their happening. He was either told by Martin Huebner or he learned through the consulate general or directly from the FAA. The FAA’s routine was to make an appointment with the Pan Am station manager, advising him of the areas to be checked. Pan Am organized any necessary transport or other assistance and arranged the debriefing session to follow the inspection. Weber always attended the preinspection meetings and the debriefing sessions. During FAA visits, Weber ‘‘followed instructions,’’ ordering that no position requiring staffing was to be left unposted at such times. In addition, numerous additional positions were covered for the duration of the inspection. Alert set out to represent to the FAA a staffing position suggesting more personnel were on duty than was actually the case. During one FAA inspection, staff allocated to one position were moved during the inspection to a second or even a third post. A screener first appeared as a ramp guard protecting access to the aircraft, then went inside the aircraft to act as a searcher, having changed his outer clothing to give a different appearance. Finally, he went outside again, purporting to be a third person on duty when in fact there was only one. Pan Am at Frankfurt was aware of the subterfuge, since they authorized Weber to use one person to cover the three positions. The victim of this deception was Tommy Dome, the FAA’s security manager based in Brussels. Dome’s inspection of the Pan Am security operation in October 1988 had left him unhappy with several aspects of the carrier’s program. In particular, he was concerned about the administrative control of selectee and baggage tracking processes as well as the physical security of parked aircraft. He also questioned the interline baggage transfer system operated by Pan Am. His concern centered on the absence of a verifiable tracking system and documentary support for the system with respect to the reconciliation of baggage. Weber believed Dome ‘‘could not comprehend or understand theoretically how it actually works.’’ At the subsequent debriefing session, Bernd Meyer, Pan Am’s No. 2 man at Frankfurt, could not satisfy the inspector, who decided to make a report outlining his concerns to the carrier’s corporate headquarters in New York. Meyer was unsympathetic, telling Dome to ‘‘send your report to my headquarters . . . and then we see what we have to do.’’ At this point the FAA

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man was alleged to have stormed out of the room. The general opinion among the Pan Am management was that the procedures being suggested would hinder the day-to-day operation enormously, cause delays, inconvenience passengers, and create operational problems with baggage. Weber believed that Alert was not responsible for training and testing screening staff who operated the X-ray machines. ‘‘I don’t know whose responsibility it was. . . . I knew it wasn’t ours.’’ Alert did have a video training program that had been screened in June for staff who had not joined directly from Securitae. It was shown again in August 1988 for new staff, although not all the newcomers had attended the session; they and staff engaged after the second showing were scheduled to wait until January 1989. One problem with the video was the dialogue, which was in English. Few of the Alert staff spoke English. Whoever led the session in which the video was used had to translate as the tape progressed. Weber claimed that Alert had no practical material nor any manuals to support the video, nor were they supplied with any FAA training material at Frankfurt prior to December 1988. Weber had another difficulty. The Pan Am station managers in Germany did not want to pay for Alert staff to attend the training sessions, and some sent the invoices back. Weber had no budget for training and the staff did not want to attend without pay. Alert in New York gave no lead to Weber on this issue, and he testified that training ‘‘seemed to be like a hot iron which was pushed from Astrophysics to whoever wanted to take it because nobody wanted to assume the responsibility of training.’’ The X-ray operator on duty on 21 December 1988 was Kurt Maier, who, earlier in 1988, had worked as a cleaner for the airline. Maier had had no training on the X-ray machine, which at the time showed images in black and white only, nor had his ability to interpret what he saw on the screen been tested. In fact, Maier’s knowledge was limited to what he had learned sitting alongside a colleague. He had not been provided with operating manuals for the machine. He was nearsighted and needed to wear glasses, but he put them on only when he wanted to see some detail more clearly. In common with all other screening staff working for Alert, he knew nothing of the Toshiba warning and had received no special instruction on bomb identification. Suspicious items identified by the X-ray process had to be reported to the Pan Am ground security coordinator (GSC), who would be responsible for all subsequent action. Weber ‘‘hardly ever saw documentation that a bag was rejected.’’ Bags selected for screening by Pan Am were delivered to the X-ray point by the carrier, and it was Alert’s task to pass the bags through the machine and determine whether they were acceptable for carriage before the airline’s staff loaded them onto the aircraft. There were numerous occasions when the X-ray machines malfunctioned, and Weber reported these to Pan Am. On one occasion, he did make direct contact with Astrophysics, the manufacturers of the machines, but was stopped from doing so again by Leuniger who reminded the Alert manager that the machines belonged to Pan Am and were their responsibility. Weber guessed that ‘‘the station refused or there were difficulties in solving that bill.’’ All billings resulting from calls to the manufacturer went to the carrier.

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Weber had no doubt that it was Pan Am’s responsibility to formulate the security responses to threats. ‘‘My job was to perform those tasks I’m instructed to perform. We did not create policy or interpret policy.’’ Only the carrier had the authority to give instructions relating to their operations, and in Frankfurt, these came from the station manager, not from corporate security (Huebner). Weber could recall only one occasion when a Huebner report to New York had led to him being authorized to act. This had followed the Dome inspection in October 1988. There was insufficient manpower to guard aircraft, and the Pan Am station management would not authorize any increase. New York told Huebner to have Weber post more staff for this function. It was the only time the Alert man could recall corporate security headquarters authorizing Huebner to give instructions that would create a cost to the station. After the tragedy, a substantial increase in the man-hours Alert was to provide for the carrier’s security program was authorized. At Frankfurt, these rose to 700 daily, approximately 400 more than pre-Lockerbie. Additional upgraded Xray machines were obtained and more staff allocated to operate them. Weber testified that he first learned there had been an aircraft bombing during the evening of 21 December while he was dining with his family. He called Huebner, who told him it had been a Pan Am service, although at the time of his deposition, Weber could not recall whether he had been told it was a service from Frankfurt or London. He did not know it was Pan Am 103. Nevertheless, he went to the airport, assuming this was the ‘‘normal thing to do,’’ where he arrived around midnight to find that none of his staff was aware of any bombing. He talked again to Huebner, who told him to collect all the documentation and information from the previous day. This data was to include duty reports, schedules, flight reports, and any other relevant material. The two men met at Frankfurt airport at six o’clock in the morning on 22 December. Weber denied attempting to find copies of any warnings he had received during the previous month and testified that he did not see the Helsinki warning on either 21 or 22 December. He did not recall Oliver Koch expressing surprise that he had not previously seen the Helsinki warning (prior to 22 December), nor could he remember when the warning had been date stamped in his office nor if he had asked anyone in his office to date stamp it on 22 December. He believed the subject of the warning did not arise until ‘‘much, much later’’ when Koch had made his accusations in January or February. This reference to Koch by Weber related to the former’s discovery of the Helsinki warning on the morning of 22 December. The training officer had subsequently reported the incident to John Ridd, Alert’s regional coordinator in London. Weber was dismissed by Alert in June 1989, six months after Lockerbie. The reason given was mismanagement of the company’s finances. He had used the company credit card to make payments to a brothel in Munich, the Salambo, and to pay for personal items of clothing and jewelry for himself and his wife. The Frankfurt staff had known about many of the transactions. Weber’s secretary, Christa Hoerr, had known that Stella Schneider, the administrative officer, was angry at the use

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being made of the credit card by Weber. The irregularities were formally uncovered by John Ridd, together with yet another new president of the Alert company. Weber had refused to answer questions on the Salambo episode or the use of Alert’s credit card without having legal counsel representing him. He gave his deposition testimony in Chicago in summer 1990, in response to a subpoena served on him in Illinois, where he was living. Beate Franzki added a footnote to the Frankfurt scenario. She said that the Alert staff lacked motivation, were poorly paid, and she had the impression that quite a few of them just worked to have a job. There were some who were very conscientious but they must have been a minority. They existed to allow a semblance of security to be on show. This deception mirrored Pan Am’s introduction of the muchpublicized Alert program in 1986, when kennel dogs had been paraded as trained guard dogs at New York’s JFK airport, and uniformed staff had carried dummy weapons allowing them to masquerade as a well-armed force. The district court in New York was to learn from the deposition testimony that many of the failings of the Alert staff in Frankfurt were repeated in the personnel the company engaged in London, where the company also operated a low-wage strategy. Russell Davey, Alert’s administration manager responsible for hiring staff in London, would have liked better quality persons to undertake the selectee processes for Alert. He believed that if the screeners were given a better rate of pay, he would have interviewed a different type of person. However, he claimed that he had every reliance on the people that were reading the screens. This contrasted dramatically with the opinion of Jim Berwick, who had told the carrier’s corporate security director of his concerns over the caliber of the X-ray screeners employed by Alert when challenging the decision to abandon passenger and baggage reconciliation. Davey, in common with most of Alert’s Frankfurt staff, testified he knew nothing of the Helsinki warning or the warning that Toshiba improvised explosive devices had been found in Germany until after the bombing. He also denied knowing that radio bombs would be difficult to detect by X-ray examination or that it would be dangerous to assume that the use of X-ray alone would be an effective method of discovering improvised explosive devices. When questioned by the families’ attorneys, he could not recall whether this had been mentioned in any of the training videos prepared for newly engaged staff. Earlier, however, when appearing at the Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry, Davey had testified that in the video ‘‘there was a very clear warning given to trainees regarding the limitations of X-ray as a security technique.’’ He had also agreed at the FAI that it was ‘‘dangerous to assume that Xray on its own would be completely effective.’’ Until the arrival of color-enhanced screening devices, Davey had not realized that the machines showing only black and white images placed limitations on the ability of X-ray to find explosives. The wide publicity by the IATA and ICAO of the need for passenger and baggage reconciliation to overcome the shortcomings of the current X-ray processes and the mandated requirements of the FAA relative to U.S. carriers should have warned the Alert man of the system’s deficiencies. So, too, should the opinion of Pan Am’s security representative in London. It was just as surprising that

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Davey should testify that to the best of his knowledge, his staff, despite their responsibility for security, were unaware of the special dangers of unaccompanied bags. He claimed he had never been told to be especially careful of such items. Davey’s opinion on the need or lack of need to examine radios found in suitcases was also interesting. He believed that if the person reading the screen thought it was just a straightforward radio, there was no reason to open the case. Only if there had been extra wires or extra batteries would this have been necessary. All advice at the time of the Lockerbie tragedy had pointed to improvised explosive devices being totally self-contained within the apparatus selected to hold them. There would be no extraneous wiring to alert the screener—hence the German warning on identification difficulties. In any event, Davey could not recall advice being given to the screeners prior to Lockerbie to watch out for radio cassette players because they might contain a bomb. He did recall a message regarding electrical equipment. Alert required batteries to be removed from such items, and this was done with respect to originating passengers who had been designated ‘‘selectees.’’ Davey’s own security training had been limited to sitting in on a one-day session given by Wilfred Wood and monitoring the performance of a newly appointed trainer on two occasions. His request to attend an FAA training course had been turned down. Davey had had no sight of the Pan Am security manual, nor had he seen any part of the FAA’s Air Carrier Standard Security Program. He did not know that Heathrow airport in London had been classified as an extraordinary-risk location by the FAA nor that the federal regulations required a positive passenger and baggage match and the physical inspection or off-loading of any unaccompanied bag. PAN AM STAFF AT HEATHROW The Fatal Accident Inquiry had concluded that mistakes made at Frankfurt could have been remedied at Heathrow had Pan Am at the latter port effectively implemented the regulations mandated by the FAA. Tragically, many of the airline’s shortcomings at the German airport were mirrored in London. Jacqueline Dawson, a long-term Pan Am employee with twenty-two years’ service, described for the attorneys her role in supervising the departure of aircraft. One task was to liaise with the flight crew with respect to embarking passengers before finalizing the necessary paperwork for the crew. She had not been directly involved with the departure of Pan Am flight 103 but as a lead agent, she was able to explain the day-to-day operation relative to passenger handling at the departure gate. Her counterpart in Frankfurt, who did deal with the departure of the feeder service on 21 December, was Monika Diegmuller. At one time, Pan Am at Heathrow had reconciled interline passengers with their baggage. Staff at the transfer desk noted the tag numbers printed on the baggage receipt attached to the passengers’ tickets and passed them to the loaders in the baggage make-up area. There the numbers were checked against the labels on the bags being held for loading. Bags were supposed to be put on board only after the matching process had taken place, but according to Dawson, aircraft were routinely

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allowed to depart carrying bags belonging to passengers who had checked in for the flight but who were not on board. They had become ‘‘no-shows,’’ the very category of passenger identified in the International Civil Aviation Organization’s original reconciliation rule. She estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of all Pan Am flights would leave with the bags of missing interline passengers on board the aircraft. It was not customary to hold up flights for such ‘‘no-shows,’’ a view confirmed by Peter Jenkin, the ramp coordinator responsible for the departure of Pan Am 103 on 21 December. According to Dawson, it had been a longstanding practice, well preceding 21 December 1988, not to notify the crew of such matters. Notification ‘‘makes the crew jittery.’’ To avoid alerting the flying staff, gate personnel did not page missing passengers on board the aircraft, although they did try to locate them, sometimes going on board to see if they had bypassed the gate control. However, when aircraft were less than full, passengers often moved from the seats allocated to them, making the task almost impossible. Inside the terminal building, the loud speaker system was used when trying to trace missing passengers. No-show situations were referred to the duty manager, who decided whether or not to allow the aircraft to depart. Part of the decision-making process normally required the lead agent to pull the missing passenger’s reservation record from the computer. If there was anything suspicious about the booking, the passenger’s bag could be retrieved from the aircraft. When this happened, the pilot had to be informed. Nicola Milne was the lead agent for the departure of Pan Am 103 on 21 December. She testified that a passenger named Basuta had checked in two bags for the flight but had failed to board the aircraft. The ramp coordinator, Peter Jenkin, was informed and in turn, he alerted his boss, the superintendent of operations and ramp services, Christopher Price. Price was also the designated ground security coordinator for Pan Am 103 and as such had given evidence at the Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry. Subsequent to appearing at the FAI, Price discovered he was not properly qualified for the role of GSC since he had not completed all the elements of the FAA course. He had never been instructed on the Pan Am security manual and on 21 December, had not been aware of any heightened security applying to Pan Am. Price looked for Basuta, but when he could not be found, instructed Jenkin to close and despatch the flight. At this time it was not known if the missing man had been designated a selectee or whether his two, now unaccompanied, bags had been searched. Price did not have it in his mind that unaccompanied bags represented any special risk and had not considered it necessary to tell the captain about the situation. No one had drawn his attention to the FAA mandates contained in the ACSSP. The testimony of the London-based Pan Am despatch staff showed that the carrier was in constant breach of FAA security regulations at Heathrow airport. Pan Am used unqualified, untrained ground security coordinators and carried unaccompanied checked baggage without submitting it to physical search. On 21 December 1988, the GSC had failed to report ‘‘pertinent security information’’ to the pilot-incommand of Pan Am 103, and clearly a no-show passenger with two bags on board

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was pertinent. However, the Basuta bags played no part in the destruction of the Maid of the Seas. The fateful shortcoming was the failure to match the on-line transfer baggage that had come from Germany. As the FAI had concluded, this simple procedure would have identified the infiltrated bag containing the bomb and negated the failures of the Frankfurt operation. The depositions given by the London and Frankfurt staff of Pan Am and their wholly owned subsidiary, Alert, removed any possibility of the carrier mounting a credible defense against the charges brought by the families of the Lockerbie victims.

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TRIAL: EXPERT TESTIMONY Your author and Billie H. Vincent, who both had given testimony during the opening sessions of the litigation, were recalled to the witness stand some four weeks after their first appearances. This time they attended the court in an ‘‘expert’’ capacity allowing the attorneys to solicit their opinions on, and not just the facts of, the tragedy. Lee Kreindler, leading for the plaintiffs’ committee, asked your author, the former IATA director: Do you have an opinion with respect to Pan Am’s performance from a security standpoint with respect to the disaster of Pan Am flight 103? Before an answer could be given, defense counsel objected that opinion testimony would involve the evaluation of other witnesses’ credibility. He protested that the witness would have a dual role as a summarizer of testimony and as an expert, that he had had access to the court transcripts on a daily basis and had studied an enormous amount of material outside the evidence of the trial. The attorney was reminded of the Federal Rules of Evidence and was overruled. The response to the Kreindler question was given in a tense and hushed courtroom. By December, 1988, Pan American had knowingly abandoned any semblance of a valid security defense against the saboteur, the baggage bomber. By violating the mandated requirements of the FAA, Pan American had left its passengers and its crews vulnerable to attacks by terrorists. Given the environment, the dangerous environment which existed in December of 1988,

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the tragedy which overtook Pan Am 103 was a disaster simply waiting to happen. Kreindler asked a second question. Have you, as a result of your work, your reviewing the testimony, the exhibits and so forth, that were presented to the jury, reached an opinion with respect to how the bomb got on board Pan Am 103? The reply was affirmative. It was the witness’s opinion that the bomb was contained in a suitcase which was carried unaccompanied from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was placed on board Pan Am 103 which was ferrying passengers and bags from Frankfurt to London. In London it was transferred on to the 747 which subsequently was destroyed over Lockerbie. Before the reasoning behind these conclusions could be probed, a further defense objection was raised. A series of exhibits taken from earlier court transcripts were to be shown to the jury to illustrate how the witness’s opinions had been developed. The defense attorney found this unacceptable, again arguing that such a procedure would constitute both summarization and expert testimony. Judge Platt ruled that since the witness had personally chosen and selected the pages to be shown to the jury and intended to explain the reasons for the selection, the proposed procedure was in order. He cautioned the jury that the testimony would be the witness’s opinion and conclusions and that it was for them to decide whether the evidence and testimony they had previously seen or heard was credible and believable. Determination of the credibility of any particular person or the weight or effect of any particular exhibit was also their responsibility. To an extent, the witness would be invading the jury’s province, but he was entitled to do so to provide a basis for his ultimate conclusions. Important input to the witness’s thought processes had been provided by Fred Ford, the first person to head up the Alert Management Systems Company. His testimony had identified the mind-set of the Pan Am management vis-a-vis security and shown the advertising campaign announcing the formation of the carrier’s Alert program to be a sham. Typifying the Pan Am attitude had been the masquerade at New York where hired kennel dogs were paraded as trained guard canines and where the guards carried mock weapons. Martin Huebner’s deposition testimony had added to the witness’s understanding of the carrier’s attitude. The German security manager had complained to his director in New York, Daniel Sonenson, of inadequate staffing to guard and search aircraft and had warned that the selectee process at Frankfurt was flawed. He had discussed these matters with the station management at Frankfurt but had been told that financial reasons necessitated security staff being kept to a minimum.

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The fact that no one in the airline’s corporate security organization had any line management authority to implement security procedures or to affect staffing allocations had concerned the witness just as it had the consultancy firm hired by Pan Am in 1986. Everything was down to the station management, and they had other priorities. The corporate decision to substitute X-ray screening for the FAA passenger bag match requirements in March 1988 had met the Pan Am station manager’s object of replacing a ‘‘time consuming and cumbersome procedure.’’ It was a decision crucial to the Lockerbie story. Leuniger had opined that ‘‘staff and time cost money. That’s why x-ray was inaugurated.’’ If he had attempted to balance the security provisions he was mandated to have in place with his commercial responsibilities, clearly the latter had won. Other testimony reflecting on the Frankfurt scenario centered around a Pan Am pilot operating on the company’s internal German route network. He had sent two bags to Seattle ahead of his own journey, which was scheduled for later that day. With the help of a Pan Am passenger services staff member, he had labeled his own bags. Only one arrived safely in Seattle. The other was found among the myriad of bags scattered over the countryside around Lockerbie following the destruction of the Maid of the Seas. The bags had become separated at Frankfurt and had been despatched on different aircraft. It added to the expert’s perception of the lax nature of Pan Am’s baggage handling at the airport. The stories told by the various Alert and Pan Am staff members and discussed in the previous chapter had shown the travesty of the security program mounted by the carrier at Frankfurt and London. At Frankfurt, unqualified staff were hired on a low wage strategy; there was an absence of training; screeners responsible for classifying ‘‘selectees’’ did not speak English and in one instance, at least, did not know what a selectee was; and management failed to brief staff on vital security matters. Alert in Germany was headed by a man with a criminal record and who had been discharged in ‘‘other than honorable circumstances’’ from the U.S. forces. At Heathrow, there was also an absence of mandated training; basic security regulations were violated; and aircraft were allowed to depart with unmatched, unaccompanied bags on board. All combined to lead the witness to the first conclusion presented to the jury. Then came the provenance of the bomb bag. Walter Korsgaard and John Boyd had explained the search and recovery operations in and around the Scottish border town of Lockerbie. The evidence provided by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch and Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) had shown how the scientists had identified the bomb bag and the container in which it had been placed. The RARDE conclusions had matched the testimony provided by the Pan Am baggage loaders at Heathrow. The latter had explained how they had positioned the incoming bags transferred from the feeder service on top of a layer of bags already in the container. The list of thirteen items contained in the suitcase and later tracked to their point of sale led to a Maltese connection. So, too, did the Frankfurt computer printout and work sheets. The basis for the second conclusion presented to the court had been established.

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On the basis of the evidence studied, the terrorists’ methodology used to infiltrate the bomb bag into the Pan Am system had been almost a mirror image of the modus operandi used by the saboteurs of the Air India 747 three and a half years earlier. THE CROSS-EXAMINATION By the time the trial started in 1992, the Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism had already published their findings. The commission had commented on Pan Am’s ‘‘apparent security lapses that had existed for months prior to Flight 103’’ and noted the FAA instruction to U.S. carriers that passenger/baggage reconciliation procedures should be ‘‘rigorously applied.’’ The commission had accepted that stricter baggage reconciliation procedures could have stopped any unaccompanied checked bags from boarding the flight at Frankfurt but that ‘‘no-one knew whether the plane was carrying an ‘extra’ interline bag that had been checked through to Pan Am from another airline.’’ The Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry had reached similar conclusions to those developed in Washington. The sheriff principal had noted in his report that the bomb bag was ‘‘loaded on to and allowed to fly on Flight 103A [the feeder service] without being identified as an unaccompanied bag.’’ The findings of both the commission and the Fatal Accident Inquiry had been discussed during earlier sessions of the trial. Thus the defense attorneys had to work against this damaging evidence when cross-examining the expert witnesses. The indictments issued by the grand jury and procurator fiscal of the Court of Public Interest naming two Libyans as co-conspirators in the bombing, had also been circulated in the public arena by the time the trial began. The U.S. indictment had specified the route the grand jury believed the bomb bag had taken. The testimony presented by your author during both his sessions on the witness stand dovetailed with the official positions. To attack his opinion was to attack the findings of two official inquiries and the legal position taken by the judicial authorities of the United States and Scotland. Nevertheless, the attorneys tried. Coddington began by attacking the witness. I make it to be 76 minutes, Mr. Wallis! 54 minutes before lunch and 22 after on one question. I don’t know if that’s a world record on the longest answer to a question in law, but it’s a pretty long answer. Given the attention paid to the testimony by the judge and jury, the time taken appeared to have been justified, but clearly, any opinion testimony deemed damaging to the defense’s case had to be denigrated. Coddington had been brought onto the defense team just a few weeks before the trial opened and had had very little time to prepare for the lengthy proceedings that were to follow. James Shaugnessy, who had previously led the attorneys defending Pan Am, had been with the case from the start. The plaintiffs’ committee of lawyers had also been with the investigation from the beginning, and the witness had been

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part of the international aviation security circle prior to the tragedy. Coddington was alone as a newcomer. The time restraints placed on the lead defense counsel by his late appointment may have accounted for certain of his questions appearing, at least to the witness, to lack adequate research. One such question asked, ‘‘Do you know what a passenger transfer memo is?’’ The reply corrected Coddington’s descriptive error. It was not a ‘‘memo’’ but a ‘‘message.’’ At one time, the witness had been chairman of the IATA committee, which had developed the Passenger Transfer Message (PTM) procedure. PTMs are sent by an airline to an aircraft’s destination airport listing those passengers on board who are known to be transferring on arrival to another aircraft. The messages are intended to list the baggage belonging to such passengers. Air Malta had sent a PTM to Frankfurt following the departure of KM 180 from Luqa. It had not listed an unaccompanied bag. This was hardly surprising since if the carrier had been unaware of the bag’s existence at Luqa, the PTM could not have included any reference to it. PTMs sent by any airline are often subject to errors, not least because the persons sending them are normally remote from the physical handling operation and thus unlikely to know if bags have been shortshipped or shipped in addition to the load indicated by a computer-based departure control system. If the defense attorney’s ultimate point had been intended to suggest that the absence of any reference to an unaccompanied bag on the Air Malta PTM meant that the bag could not have originated at Luqa Malta, it was neither a valid nor a logical extrapolation. The attorney switched tack: ‘‘Have you ever been monitored by the CIA or the FBI?’’ The response, ‘‘How would I know that?,’’ brought a little light relief at the beginning of what was to be a day and a half of cross-examination. Coddington frequently based his questions on extracts taken from papers written by your author, but he had a tendency to misquote from the published texts, leading to one retort: ‘‘The last time I was here, you quoted me, alleged to quote me twice from papers you were holding. On both occasions they were inaccurate quotes.’’ The lawyer chose not to let it go. ‘‘Mr. Wallis, you were quoted a dozen or more times and shown papers that you authored—you were quoted accurately, is that correct?’’ The response went back, ‘‘That is not correct at all.’’ Throughout the cross-examination, Coddington jumped from one subject to another, interspersing his questions with thespian interludes. He turned to the subject of the indictments. In Scotland, the petition for the indictments had been signed by the procurator fiscal of the Court of Public Interest. In the United States it had been issued by a federal grand jury of the District of Columbia. The defense attorney asked whether the level at which the U.S. indictment was signed made it true. He was told, ‘‘It gives it a certain credibility, I would have thought.’’ Coddington naturally sought to use the cross-examination to make points for the defense. Could a terrorist ‘‘buy a bunch of clothes from Mary’s House in Malta, take it elsewhere to assemble it with his bomb bag?’’ Could a terrorist ‘‘get clothing from Malta, a radio from Japan, Semtex from Czechoslovakia, [a] suitcase from the U.S. a timer from Switzerland, to assemble it almost anywhere he wanted to make

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a bomb and throw people off?’’ ‘‘It would be a clever thing to have a Libyan individual buy the clothes and then ship them on.’’ ‘‘These people, in your experience, in fact are exceptionally clever, aren’t they?’’ The witness did not agree. ‘‘They make mistakes; they can’t be too clever.’’ The attorney moved to the intentions of the bombers, seeking confirmation that their likely intent was to destroy the aircraft over water. He wanted to know if a terrorist would be ‘‘best able to achieve that result if he puts the bomb on board at the last possible moment rather than at an earlier moment in order to avoid the vagaries of multiple take-offs and landings.’’ He was reminded that current devices made it possible to establish control so effectively that they do not have to be put on at the last point. In fact, attempting to infiltrate a bag at the last point of call could well bring failure. Most airlines, even Pan Am (although with them evidence showed that it did not work), had instituted no-show procedures for originating passengers who failed to board, whereas many had failed to apply protection against the unauthorized, unaccompanied transfer bag. Additionally, the terrorists who had attacked Pan Am had the history of the Air India bombing behind them and knew the interline system could be worked to their advantage. A modus operandi similar to that used to destroy the Kanishka has the additional benefit of leaving the saboteur thousands of miles away from the scene of the destruction or, if the bag was found at the transfer point, from the point of discovery. On the opinion testimony that Pan Am had ‘‘knowingly abandoned any semblance of a valid defense against the saboteur and baggage bomber,’’ Coddington asked, ‘‘Do you mean to tell me that somebody at Pan Am deliberately and maliciously said, oh what the heck, we don’t care if we are bombed?’’ He was told, ‘‘They took a deliberate decision to abandon a mandated requirement, a requirement which had been developed as the very bedrock of the defense against the saboteur. That decision was taken quite knowingly.’’ Using a dictionary to seek definitions of the words used by the witness, Coddington read that ‘‘knowingly’’ meant ‘‘should be viewed keenly, alert, deliberate, reflecting knowledge, intelligent, cognitive.’’ He was told, ‘‘Reflecting knowledge, precisely. They knew what they were doing.’’ Coddington tried again with ‘‘abandoned.’’ ‘‘We think of abandoning, like a mother abandoning a child or husband abandoning a wife.’’ The witness responded, ‘‘I used the right word.’’ In another eclectic switch in his questioning, defense counsel asked about the period when the witness was ‘‘the lead man in worldwide aviation security.’’ ‘‘You lobbied governments?’’ He was told, ‘‘I worked with governments.’’ On the Diegmuller testimony, the attorney asked, ‘‘You made suggestions to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that Monika Diegmuller wasn’t doing a proper job, but it wasn’t really her fault, right?’’ The witness replied, ‘‘I indicated clearly she was not trained to do the job and she was not told what the job was.’’ X-ray screening of checked baggage led to another exchange: ‘‘You told the ladies and gentlemen that anybody could pick up one of these Toshiba radios on an x-ray, even the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.’’ The attorney was told he was misquoting again. The witness had said, ‘‘I would expect somebody to be able to identify the

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outline of a cassette radio player on an X-ray screen if they were watching the screen, and assuming, of course, they had good eyesight.’’ Coddington continued, ‘‘You think the x-ray readers were not properly trained.’’ The reply was precise. ‘‘Thought doesn’t come into it. They were not properly trained.’’ Moving into his thespian mode, Coddington held up the pair of half-rimmed glasses he frequently wore. ‘‘Have you ever seen glasses like these? Do you know what we call these in the states?’’ He was told, ‘‘[W]e would probably call them schoolmarm glasses.’’ To the amusement of those in the courtroom, the judge comforted the attorney, ‘‘It’s all right, I have the same glasses on here.’’ The exchange had followed comments that Kurt Maier, the X-ray operator, needed to wear glasses to see fine detail but didn’t wear them when viewing the X-ray screen. The witness had expressed concern that Maier might not be able to identify that fine detail existed unless the screener had the glasses on. Next, the attorney approached the witness stand wearing a small rope around his neck. He asked, ‘‘If this was a primer cord, or C-4, and I had walked through a metal detector at an airport, or in His Honor’s courthouse, would the alarm have gone off?’’ He was told it would not. Warming to his theatrical role, Coddington approached the witness stand once more, this time making a great show of concealing a radio cassette player behind his back. He avowed he couldn’t let the jury see it because it hadn’t been entered into evidence. He was grandstanding—playacting to appeal to the jury. It was to bring an objection from the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Lee Kreindler referred to the ‘‘sideshow’’ antics and thought his opposing attorney was attempting to create a circus atmosphere disrespectful to the 270 people who had died at Lockerbie. Outside the courtroom, many of the victims’ family members who had been present during the defense attorney’s earlier thespian interludes had already expressed their distress at the games they perceived he enjoyed playing at the expense of serious inquiry. Coddington, who had amassed a number of Toshiba cassette radio models for use in the courtroom, none authenticated as being identical to the one used by the bombers, was told to replace them in their boxes and not to display them in any future ‘‘demonstrations’’ or ‘‘enterprises,’’ as the lawyer had described his activities, unless other testimony provided a basis for their use. Coddington turned to the deposition testimony of Alan Feraday, the forensic specialist of the RARDE who had identified the center of the bomb blast and the positioning of the bomb bag in the baggage container. The jury was told by the judge that the witness, in any responses he was able to make to the defense lawyer’s questions, would not be vouching for the Feraday testimony, but still Coddington held to his theme. He asked what Feraday had meant when he said the source and origin of the item of circuit board from which he had ultimately deduced the make of radio cassette player had been ‘‘isolated from an agglomeration of burnt materials.’’ To the witness, it had meant ‘‘identified’’ from a number of pieces.’’ Coddington then asked for the meaning of ‘‘agglomeration.’’ He was told it meant a ‘‘collection.’’ The lawyer’s questioning of the Feraday testimony may have reflected his frustration that the forensic scientist had not been put under direct cross-examination and probed on the techniques he had used to reach his conclusions. Coddington was

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clearly dissatisfied with the scientist’s responses and may have believed the deposition would have taken on a different hue had he, Coddington, been able to cross-examine him. To the lawyer, the fact that the evidence emanating from the RARDE specialist had been accepted by the British and U.S. governments was irrelevant. Particularly upsetting to him was the fact that several questions asking how the scientist had made his determinations had been answered with the phrase ‘‘by detailed forensic examination.’’ Typical of the many exchanges between the witness and the defense attorney was one concerning the use of the money collected by Pan Am through its security surcharge. Tom Plaskett, the airline’s new CEO, had said, in his deposition testimony, that the money had gone into a general account. Several witnesses had confirmed that nothing different happened after the charge had come into being. In Germany, Alert was being pressed to reduce costs and had not been provided with funds to train their staff. Coddington asked if the witness would withdraw his suggestion that Pan Am action in putting the security surcharge money into a general fund rather than a separate fund was bad. This brought a questioned retort: ‘‘I made that suggestion, Mr. Coddington? You made the inference but I did not make the suggestion. Provided the money is spent for the purpose for which it was gathered, that would be acceptable.’’ Coddington asked, ‘‘You don’t care where it’s spent, in a general fund or a special fund?’’ He was told, ‘‘I don’t care where it is put. I mind where it is spent.’’ Coddington switched again, this time presenting a litany of the faults identified with the Pan Am security program in Frankfurt.

Question: ‘‘Assuming it’s true, that Sabine Fuchs didn’t understand selectees [she had testified that she did not know what they were], that had no causal relationship to the Lockerbie crash, did it?’’ Response: ‘‘What it indicated to me was a general problem which seemed to exist at Frankfurt. Namely, people were not trained to do their jobs, didn’t know what their job was, therefore they couldn’t provide the level of security mandated by the FAA.’’ Question: ‘‘Did the training of Sabine Fuchs cause the Lockerbie disaster?’’ Response: ‘‘That is a strange question because she didn’t have any training but it wasn’t causal.’’ Question: ‘‘Did the x-ray training, which you claimed was deficient because of budgetary shortcomings, among other things, have any causal relation to this tragedy?’’ Response: ‘‘I didn’t say deficient. There wasn’t any.’’ Question: ‘‘It [the bombing] had nothing to do with this fellow Ulrich Weber’s

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promoting people on what some have said were inadequate or improper grounds, did it?’’ Response: ‘‘Not on this occasion but the litany . . .’’ At this point Coddington interrupted the response, which he considered nonresponsive, but was told by the judge that when asking for an opinion, he must let the witness answer. ‘‘You may not cut him off from answering that type of question.’’ ‘‘. . . the litany you’re going through simply reinforces all my thoughts about the appalling level of security and attention to security given by Pan American in Frankfurt at that time.’’ Questions then switched to a topic being discussed in the U.S. media at the time of the trial. Coddington suggested that three-quarters of U.S. congressmen were guilty of writing checks when they had insufficient funds to cover them. What did that say about them? Were they fit to govern? Ulrich Weber had pleaded guilty to check fraud and had been given a suspended sentence, and the attorney wanted to know if, because Weber had written bad checks in his youth, that made him unfit thereafter. The witness believed ‘‘it would cause me to ask some very serious questions about the right to appoint him as head of a security operation where he would be responsible for the lives and safety of passengers and crews traveling on an airplane.’’ Question: ‘‘Did the fact that certain secretaries, office workers and administrative staff had not heard of the Toshiba or Helsinki warnings have anything to do with it [the bombing]?’’ Response : ‘‘It could have.’’ Question: ‘‘Did Pan Am’s response to the Helsinki warning have anything to do with the tragedy?’’ Response: ‘‘The response could, indeed, have had an effect on the tragedy.’’ Reminding the jury of so many of the things that had been wrong with the Pan Am security operation had seemed to your author a strange course for the defense’s lead attorney to take. Coddington attempted to move into the area of U.S. governmental responsibility for passing security information to the Maltese authorities, but it was to get him into difficulty with the judge. Pan Am had initially brought a case against the U.S. government with respect to the Lockerbie bombing, but this had been dismissed by the court. The judge considered it improper to speculate now as to what fault lay with the government when there was nothing to support the contentions. Pan Am and Alert had received the warnings but had not disseminated them, and their

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defense counsel was not to be allowed to ‘‘stick the government with the responsibility to have alerted anyone down the line.’’ On the subject of the Vincennes incident, the witness was told, ‘‘You said it was clearly an accident. You’ve come to that view because of your belief about our government, our way of life, our country, not because you have any particular evidence known only to you.’’ Coddington asked, ‘‘Do you accept the proposition that the people of Pan Am who made the judgments about the use of X-ray might have been well motivated but just misguided?’’ The witness did not think they had been well motivated. As Coddington concluded his cross-examination, he asked, ‘‘One of the most specific, probably the most specific bulletin or warning or piece of security information that these ladies and gentlemen [the jury] have heard about in the whole trial is the Helsinki warning, true? It said the airline, it said the airport, it said who was carrying it and from whence it was coming, right?’’ Once again it seemed to the witness to be a strange tactic to remind the jury of these facts. The attorney did go on to emphasize that the Finnish government had concluded the warning was a hoax, but the damage would seem to have been done. It was almost the last tilt at your author who, after almost two days on the witness stand, was shortly afterward allowed to stand down. His place was taken by Billie Vincent. Vincent’s status as an expert witness was immediately challenged by the defense counsel on the grounds that he did not believe the former FAA director to be fitted by ‘‘education, training or experience’’ to draw the conclusions the lawyer anticipated he would be asked to deduce. The objection was overruled. Coddington was opposed to any repetition of the ‘‘sound and light show’’ presentation used by the previous witness but was told that ‘‘every expert who elicits his or her testimony on the basis of evidence introduced at trial is entitled to tell the jury the basis, which is opinion and conclusion.’’ The judge added that this had been true for at least forty years. If the jury accepted the basis used by the witness, they may accept his opinion, but they did not have to do so. Defense counsel anticipated that the disagreement between the testimony of Raymond Salazar, the FAA’s director of the Office of Aviation Security at the time, and that of Daniel Sonenson would arise during the examination of Vincent. The judge reaffirmed that ‘‘you may not, as an individual, authorize somebody to do something against the regulation.’’ He cited an earlier case, United States v. Schwartz, which had involved a transfer of arms sanctioned by the CIA and where the same ruling had applied, a ruling upheld by the second circuit court of appeals. Many of the subjects raised during Vincent’s second appearance at the trial paralleled those discussed in the previous paragraphs. Where the responses reflected the answers given in the earlier expert testimony, they are not reiterated here, but Vincent’s conclusion that Pan Am had violated the federal mandate to have positive passenger baggage check is worth repetition. He held that ‘‘the airline failed, from a statutory standpoint, to exercise the highest degree of care, particularly under a situation where there was an extremely high threat level in the Europe and Middle East environment.’’

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Vincent revisited the Martin Heubner testimony, recalling that the German’s testimony had shown that the system Pan Am had in force at Frankfurt on 21 December 1988 would have allowed an unaccompanied transfer bag from Malta to have been loaded onto the feeder service to London, even if the passenger had not checked in for the flight at Luqa airport. Many of the Herbert Leuniger responses had troubled Vincent. On being asked if the pilots of Pan Am flights in Frankfurt had been told about the Autumn Leaves arrests and the discovery of the Toshiba radio cassette bombs, the Pan Am manager had answered, ‘‘I don’t know whether I knew about it. How do I know whether we informed the pilots?’’ He had admitted that if, on the basis of security information received by a pilot, the latter wanted passengers evacuated, luggage taken off and each item of baggage individually searched, it would have been done. ‘‘What choice do we have?’’ This response added relevance to the instructions given to Weber not to talk to the flight crew and highlighted for Vincent the importance of the pilot being in the security information loop. The pilot of the feeder service delivering passengers and bags to Pan Am 103 in London was Captain Michael Anthony. He had testified that had he known an unaccompanied bag was on board, he would have requested that it be taken off the aircraft, if necessary unloading the entire aircraft to find it. This substantiated the FAA requirement for the pilot to be told of any pertinent security information pertaining to his flight. ‘‘The captain is not going to take off knowingly with an unsafe airplane.’’ Pan Am’s policy in Frankfurt and in London deliberately sought to preclude this essential pilot-in-command prerogative. Thirteen weeks after the court first began sitting, the jury brought in their verdict. The jurors had heard testimony from fifty-eight witnesses, much of which was introduced through the more than 180 depositions obtained during the massive discovery process. They rendered a special verdict, finding the defendants guilty of wilful misconduct that was the proximate cause of death of those who had been killed at Lockerbie. Damages trials were then held with respect to three of the victims: Robert Pagnucco, a vice president and associate general counsel of Pepsico, Inc., Harry Bainbridge, also a Pepsico executive, and Walter Porter, an electrician and successful calypso singer. Verdicts in their favor resulted in assessments totaling $9,250,000, $9,000,000, and $1,725,000 respectively. Of course, matters did not rest there. The defense attorneys were to appeal to the second circuit court of appeals and then to the Supreme Court before the case was finally over. This was to take an additional three years.

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THE APPEALS During the trial it became obvious that whatever the result, the jury’s verdict would be appealed. In the event it was the defense team who took the case to the Second Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. Two questions had to be answered: ‘‘Did the court commit any error in the admission or exclusion of evidence which so prejudiced the defendants as to require a new trial?’’ and ‘‘Are damages for loss of society and companionship and for loss of parental care of adult children recoverable in a Warsaw Convention cause of action?’’ The Warsaw Convention is the international statute that governs compensation in cases of aircraft accidents. The jury’s wilful misconduct verdict was not challenged. In their appeal, Pan Am’s attorneys continued to claim that X-ray inspection was a permissible means of meeting FAA requirements for baggage control at Frankfurt and London. They also maintained that the carrier’s X-ray machine at the German airport was capable of detecting a bomb in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder and that the passenger/baggage match rule was unclear and required interpretation. Surprisingly, they contended that Daniel Sonenson, the carrier’s corporate director of security, would have testified but was not called because of preclusionary rulings by the trial court. In their appeal, the defense team insisted they had been barred from providing evidence demonstrating that an oral waiver had been given to the airline allowing the federally mandated security matching provisions to be put to one side. By X-raying baggage transferred from other airlines, it was contended that Pan Am had complied with British regulations at London’s Heathrow airport but that supporting evidence had been excluded. The defense attorneys had wanted the court to hear from ‘‘experts’’ who believed the highest threat to air safety did not come from

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unaccompanied baggage. They postulated that each of these arguments might have negated plaintiffs’ showing of wilful misconduct. Each of the appellants’ points was countered by the attorneys representing the victims’ families. They reiterated arguments made in the original trial and covered earlier in this book. The Pan Am security program had been a ‘‘sham’’ and the carrier had set out on a ‘‘policy of deception and cost-cutting which corrupted security.’’ The airline had ‘‘abandoned the fundamental passenger baggage match requirement,’’ and it was this failure that had allowed the bomb bag to be loaded onto Pan Am 103. The countersubmission also reaffirmed that the carrier had set out to deceive the FAA and referred to the ‘‘frightening build-up of warnings’’ prior to the bombing, proving Pan Am had knowledge of ‘‘probable consequences of its actions and omissions.’’ The appeals court was reminded that ‘‘the tragedy which overtook Pan Am 103 was a disaster simply waiting to happen.’’ In the appeal, plaintiffs’ attorneys argued the reason no aviation security expert had been called by the defense to support their case in the lower court was simply that no one could defend Pan Am’s ‘‘shameful security system’’ and ‘‘because their earlier deposition testimony was contradictory.’’ It was not because of any ruling of the court. ‘‘Experts’’ the defense attorneys had wanted to introduce to provide background on terrorism would have offered history lessons describing how terrorism is ‘‘like other forms of warfare,’’ how it is ‘‘virtually unstoppable,’’ and how ‘‘governments did not aid and protect airlines sufficiently.’’ The families’ lawyers argued that one of the two ‘‘experts,’’ Dr. Ariel Merari, was not an aviation security specialist and had not known of the Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP) when he was deposed a month before the trial began. The defense had ‘‘offered their ‘experts’ not to help the jury understand and evaluate the evidence, but to persuade the jury to disregard the evidence and reject the law.’’ Regarding the compensation awards, the families’ attorneys contended that the Warsaw Convention allows full recovery of all compensatory damages, including both economic and noneconomic losses. The authors of Warsaw had intended dommage survenu to include lost society and companionship, because those damages had been routinely recovered in civil law death actions for nearly a century when the treaty was enacted. THE APPEALS COURT DECISION The court of appeals decision was handed down on 31 January 1994. With one judge dissenting, the second circuit affirmed the judgments of the district court and the jury verdicts both as to liability and damages. The judges gave their majority findings in a fifty-seven page document that summarized the events of the bombing and the various testimony and judgments. They categorized the appellants’ arguments into four broad bands. These were: the exclusion of evidence related to Pan Am and Alert’s alleged noncompliance with ACSSP regulations concerning unaccompanied baggage; the admission of evidence showing other alleged misconduct on the appellants’ part, coupled with the disallowance of

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defense testimony concerning alternative theories of causation; various other evidentiary rulings; and the legal bases for the damage awards. Each was examined in turn. Pan Am had been unable to substantiate its claim that an oral waiver had been granted with respect to matching bags with passengers. They had also been unable to specify the date of the purported waiver, but they claimed they had been in compliance with FAA regulations. The appellants’ brief submitted that Daniel Sonenson, had he been allowed, would have testified that he had approached the FAA in 1986 and received verbal authorization for the X-ray-only inspection of interline bags, although he could not recall who had given this authorization. He would also have testified, according to the defendants, that in October 1987, he had been told by the FAA’s director of security that X-ray examination would comply with FAA requirements. The defense team had been invited by the trial judge to offer proof, outside the presence of the jury, regarding the proposed testimony but had declined to do so, despite being warned, ‘‘To protect your record, maybe you’d better.’’ The appeals court commented that their ‘‘faith in the defendants’ versions of Sonenson’s testimony is not enhanced by the fact that Sonenson’s 1990 deposition testimony is substantially inconsistent with the representations made by the defendants before us.’’ The court’s findings continued, ‘‘Simply put, the defendants refused to put Sonenson on the stand for their own reasons and yet want us to accept at face value representations not made under oath, not subject to cross-examination, and in fact inconsistent with prior testimony made under oath.’’ The oral waiver defense had been ruled unavailable because anyone who may have given authorization would have had no authority to do so. Pan Am was responsible for knowing the regulations, which required written application and written authorization for any changes. The carrier’s chairman, Tom Plaskett, had confirmed they did know of this requirement yet no proof that such a written application had been made was offered at the trial. The appeals court thought the Pan Am approach was most appropriately treated as an attempt by the defendants to invoke a ‘‘mistake of law’’ defense. Pan Am thought what they were doing was in accordance with the law, and even if they were mistaken, they held that under such a circumstance they should not be held liable for wilful misconduct. Ignorance of the law being no excuse is a long-held maxim, but there are important exceptions, two of which the judges held applied to the case. First was the government authorization exception and the second, when the standard of liability involves specific knowledge of the law. With respect to the first of these exceptions, the trial judge ruling that it did not apply because the government official claimed by Pan Am to have given the oral waiver had no authority to do so, was upheld. With regard to the second, the appeals judges saw no reason that would prompt them to view heavily regulated air carriers, charged with knowing the relevant statutes and regulations under which they operate, as having the same difficulty as an ordinary citizen trying to unravel the complexities of the internal revenue code. The appeals court considered that there was cause to be wary of an ignorance-ofthe-law contention with respect to civil aviation ‘‘because of the ease with which air carriers could fabricate sham defenses and ignore safety requirements with impu-

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nity.’’ FAA regulations have legal status, and air carriers have a duty to know and adhere to them. Absence of wilful misconduct, when the defense is based on a mistaken understanding of the rules, ‘‘must be supported by objectively reasonable evidence as to the mistaken understanding.’’ Only an objectively reasonable belief by the defendant that they were authorized under the law would have been a valid defense allowing it to be put before the jury. Pan Am and Alert had fallen far short of doing this. The security regulations in the ACSSP were clear and unambiguous with respect to applying for waivers in writing; therefore the alleged belief that Pan Am was following FAA requirements was not reasonable. Evidence to the contrary had been properly excluded at the trial. The appeals court disagreed with the carrier’s opinion that the passenger baggage match rule was ambiguous and required interpretation. The carrier had to undertake a physical or administrative passenger/bag match in order to detect any unaccompanied baggage and then to physically inspect any such bags. X-ray inspection as a substitute for physical inspection was not permitted. Since the rule was not ambiguous, the judges believed that introducing testimony to the contrary would have invaded the court’s function of determining the law and instructing the jury as to that law. Without a reasonable basis for the carrier to argue that baggage screening by X-rays was permissible, the trial court had not abused its discretion in refusing to admit testimony regarding the alleged oral waiver. The theory under which the appellants sought to introduce the purported oral waiver had lacked a sufficiently sound foundation to be admissible at trial. The lower court’s decision to exclude documentary evidence from the United Kingdom was upheld, because much of the material did not have the force of law, and many of the documents had been out of date at the time of the disaster. The exclusion of several pages of deposition testimony provided by Jim Jack, the UK aviation security adviser, was deemed more problematic. However, the plaintiffs’ case had rested on violation of the U.S. ACSSP, not British regulations. The bulk of the evidence relating to the X-ray procedures had concerned breaches in the ACSSP, as had testimony linked to the importance of conducting a passenger/baggage match. The appellants’ purported knowing and reckless behavior in failing to follow FAA regulations had also been based on ACSSP violations. Thus it was not thought that the Jack testimony would have substantially influenced the verdict. Indeed, Pan Am’s closely related defense had failed to persuade the jury. During the trial, the defense attorneys had objected to the introduction of evidence relating to other misconduct on the part of the carrier, and the exclusion of testimony of several defense witnesses. Merari, one of those denied, would have said that bombs in unaccompanied baggage did not pose the ‘‘highest threat’’ to airline safety. Although the trial judge had declined to have Merari called, he did tell the jury that there was no evidence to show that bombs carried in this manner were the greatest threat. The jurors were told to disregard any such opinion. Because of this action by Chief Judge Platt, the appeal court ruled that no abuse of discretion had resulted from the exclusion of further testimony. The testimony regarding other misconduct against which the defense team had

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objected included details of the criminal background of Ulrich Weber; the failure to guard the ramp prior to the departure of Pan Am 103A from the German airport; the failure to train Alert staff; and the inability of Sabine Fuchs to explain what a selectee was even though it was her job to pick them out from the other passengers. It also included the fact that the alternate GSC at Frankfurt, Monika Diegmuller, did not know what the ACSSP required of her and thought someone else was monitoring the baggage. Finally, it had reflected on the lack of formal training and proficiency testing provided to the X-ray operator responsible for screening interline baggage carried on the feeder service from Frankfurt, who had never heard of the Toshiba warning. According to Pan Am’s lawyers, the defense witnesses excluded by the trial judge would have presented alternative causation theories. In considering the appellants’ arguments, the judges noted that when the Alert program was inaugurated in May 1986, it had been ‘‘a misleading public relations ploy designed to make would-be travelers feel more secure.’’ The annual income it had netted, $18 million, had not been used for security purposes but was commingled with Pan Am’s general funds. The court also recognized the deception played on the FAA at Frankfurt, suggesting the company had more staff on duty than were actually present, and a similar deception played on the public at New York where make-believe sniffer dogs had been employed. The recommendations of special consultants hired by the company to review their security had not been implemented. The judges held that ‘‘proof that Pan Am had acted with wilful misconduct through reckless disregarding passenger safety in general, with knowledge of the probable consequences of that disregard, was properly received.’’ Further, they approved consideration of the totality of the defendant’s wrongdoing in determining whether wilful misconduct existed. ‘‘We do not hold that as a matter of the law the evidence in this case required the jury to agree with the plausibility of a theory that Pan Am and Alert’s misconduct was so reckless it must have caused the bomb to go undetected. We say only that under the Warsaw Convention, wilful misconduct causing an accident may be established by inference from the totality of the circumstances.’’ The above ruling did not alleviate the responsibility on the plaintiffs of proving causation, and the trial court was right to charge the jury that ‘‘it must find not only wilful misconduct but also a causal connection between the misconduct and the passengers deaths.’’ The plaintiffs had submitted evidence related to such causation, thus the lower court had not been in error in receiving the evidence. Chief Judge Platt had declined to accept experts on terrorist bombings proffered by the defense and had limited cross-examination of the plaintiffs’ experts, Billie Vincent and Rodney Wallis, with respect to other methods of bombing. The defense team had offered nothing to show there was any other specific bombing theory. The appeals court considered that the conclusions likely to result from the defense experts would have been speculative and that without any foundation, the evidence would have been conjectural. Merari had admitted not knowing how the bombing had been accomplished. Discretion had rested with the trial judge, and such discretion was properly ‘‘exercised in limiting the appellants’ cross-examination of the plaintiffs’ experts to scenarios that had evidentiary support in the record.’’ Proffered testimony

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of bombing experts from Scotland Yard, whom the defense had sought to introduce, was ruled to have been cumulative since similar testimony had been forthcoming from other witnesses and in any event, the men’s expertise in X-ray technology was questionable. Their experience had been gained outside of civil aviation operations, and they had had neither background nor knowledge of the bombing of Pan Am 103. The defense strategy at the trial and in their summation had been to criticize the plaintiffs’ causation theory, vigorously attacking major and minor pieces of evidence alike. They had not offered any fact witness to testify as to any other method of bombing that might have caused the crash. They had utilized their many opportunities to undermine the plaintiffs’ causation theory, and thus the ruling limiting cross-examination and expert testimony was ‘‘unremarkable and without error.’’ Part of the appellants’ case had been their objection to the testimony of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses, Rodney Wallis and Billie Vincent. Both had given opinions based on evidence adduced at the trial. The former, they complained, had opined that Pan Am operated under a commercial rather than a security priority and that training requirements had been violated. Vincent had stated that Pan Am had committed acts that broke federal rules. Both men, the appellants claimed, had involved ‘‘improper summaries of evidence.’’ Case samples offered by the defense to support their opinion were considered by the appeals court to be ‘‘inapposite because they did not address experts’ summarizing record evidence.’’ The trial judge had relied on federal rules governing expert testimony when making his decision, and under these rules, ‘‘expert testimony may be based on other testimony or evidence obtained at trial.’’ No error had resulted from the format adopted by the two men; neither had their summaries of testimony improperly impinged on the jury’s function as asserted by the defense. Vincent’s had concluded that ‘‘Pan Am did indeed violate the ACSSP.’’ The appeals court considered this testimony dubious since experts ‘‘may not testify as to what the law is’’—this ‘‘would impinge on the trial court’s function’’ and thus should normally be excluded. However, the defendants had made no specific objection to the statement, and the trial judge had explained to the jury where the ultimate responsibility for judging credibility and liability lay. Thus in the opinion of the appeals court, the error was harmless. Another defense objection had been to the testimony of the Scottish detective assigned responsibility for matching certain bags from Pan Am 103. It was, they claimed, based on multiple layers of hearsay. The appeals court ruled that it had been properly received since the testimony was based on a report of a public agency containing ‘‘factual findings resulting from an investigation made pursuant to authority granted by law’’ and that ‘‘No bias may be presumed in the Scottish investigation.’’ The trial judge had refused to allow an X-ray machine to be demonstrated in court, considering such a demonstration irrelevant because the plaintiffs had stipulated that a radio cassette player would be visible on an X-ray screen. It would not have shaken or bolstered Kurt Maier’s testimony because he had said that he could not remember whether any radios or cassette players had appeared in any of the bags on Flight 103.

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The last of the Pan Am and Alert claims of error concerned the damage awards. The standard of liability under the Warsaw Convention requires that a carrier had to have engaged in wilful misconduct causing the claimed losses in order for the plaintiffs to hold the carrier liable for an amount exceeding the stipulated $75,000 limit. The trial judge had told the jury that wilful misconduct is the intentional performance of an act with knowledge that performance of that act will probably result in injury or damage, or it may be the intentional performance of an act in such a manner as to imply disregard of the probable consequences of the performance of the act. Likewise, the intentional omission of some act with knowledge that such omission will probably result in damages or injury, or the intentional omission of some act in a manner from which could be implied reckless disregard of the probable consequences of the omission, would also be wilful misconduct. The appeals court held that the Warsaw Convention permits damage awards for loss of society and companionship and that damages for loss of parental care for children over eighteen are also allowed. The defendants had received a fair trial and the jury verdicts, both as to liability and damages, and the judgments of the trial court were affirmed. THE SUPREME COURT The defendants chose not to end their fight with the appeals court ruling. They petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States, applying for a writ of certiorari. Had this been granted, the Supreme Court would have been required to review the full proceedings of the lower courts. Acting for the respondents (Judith A. Pagnucco, Dona Bardelli Bainbridge and Molena A. Porter, et al.), the plaintiffs’ committee of lawyers submitted a brief in opposition to the appellants’ case on 21 December 1994, the sixth anniversary of the tragedy. Two question were presented: In a Warsaw Convention case, where the jury was properly charged, without objection, on the issues of both wilful misconduct and causation, on which there is no conflict among the circuits, did the district court commit any error in the admission or exclusion of evidence which so prejudiced the defendants as to require a new trial? After a hard fought trial lasting three months and a verdict for the plaintiffs on wilful misconduct and causation, does a careful, multi-layered discussion of evidentiary questions by the court below, affirming the district court for several different reasons, with supporting evidence to show that even if there had been an error it was harmless, constitute the resolution of disputed fact in deprivation of the right to jury trial? In June 1995, three years after Chief Judge Platt had opened proceedings in New York and six years after plaintiffs’ lawyers had begun work on behalf of the families

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of the victims of Flight 103, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. The petition for a writ of certiorari was refused. The petitioners had failed to convince the ultimate judicial body of the United States of America to take their case. It was all over. Proceedings could now go ahead to compensate the families. These would take an additional year to conclude.

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CONSPIRACY THEORIES With the conclusion of the litigation process, some may have anticipated that the Lockerbie tragedy would quietly recede into history. The families may have been expected to retire from the scene to grieve away from the eyes of the world. But this has not, nor is it likely to happen. There are several reasons for this. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the families of the victims sought answers for their tragic loss and worked to have governments find and prosecute those responsible for the bombing. They also began their endeavors to have those same governments improve aviation security programs to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. To some, both have become an obsession that will diminish only when they have achieved a success that can be a living memorial to their loved ones. The successful police investigation did identify two men believed to be responsible for the bombing. However, they remained in Libya throughout the 1990s, until the Gaddafi regime had the men surrender to Scottish jurisdiction in April 1999. The sanctions procured by the United States from the United Nations as a punishment for Libya failing to hand them over ensured that the Lockerbie story resurfaced as a top news item every time the United States sought a renewal of the world body’s trade restrictions. Equally, the enmity that existed between Iran and the United States meant that whenever these two countries were linked, the name of Lockerbie was never far away. There is, of course, still the need to improve aviation security programs and to obtain worldwide implementation of the International Civil Aviation Organization’s security standards and recommended practices; thus the families’ work goes on. Another reason why the story of Lockerbie continues to invoke media interest is

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the myriad of conspiracy stories that have surfaced from to time. The sheriff principal of Strathclyde, Dumfries, and Galloway sought to put one such story to bed when he prepared the report of the Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry. He dismissed the allegations surrounding a Frankfurt originating passenger, Khaled Nazir Jaafar. Some had claimed Jaafar was linked to the suitcase containing the device. These same claimants speculated that the CIA had been using couriers to move illicit narcotics as part of an overall entrapment policy and that Jaafar was part of this activity. Nothing appeared in evidence to substantiate such a scenario, yet the adage ‘‘there’s no smoke without fire’’ has stuck in the minds of some. The timing of the various conspiracy theories has been interesting. One circulated immediately prior to the opening of the consolidated liability trial in New York. It appeared in the 29 April edition of Time magazine and could not have been timed better if the intent was to influence the jurors. There is no evidence that it did anything of the sort. Two theses were developed in the Time story. The first regurgitated the drug sting theory which, the article alleged, was being conducted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) with the Mediterranean island of Cyprus as the focal point. Four passengers did arrive at the Pan Am interline desk in London from Cyprus to connect with Flight 103. They were not shown on the reservation list, and the check-in agent recalled that the men seemed to ignore each other, although she believed they were acquaintances. They may well have been DEA or Secret Service operatives. That such people were among those traveling to the United States for Christmas would not have been surprising or particularly noteworthy, but Time believed they had motives other than a simple intent to spend the festive season at home. A second scenario involved Major Charles Dennis McKee, a military attache with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Beirut. He was described as a man generally noted to have been a ‘‘walking arsenal of guns and knives.’’ Time reported his real assignment was to be working with the CIA, reconnoitring locations where American hostages were being held in Lebanon. His ultimate goal was to lead a raid to rescue them. McKee and his team were travelling to their headquarters carrying $500,000 in cash, money intended for use in securing the release of hostages held in Lebanon. If so, the money appeared to have been traveling in the wrong direction. Time retold the Autumn Leaves story from Germany, noting the Ahmed Jibril connection. They suggested he targeted Pan Am 103 because McKee was planning to be on board. Given McKee’s normal location, Beirut, there must have been better opportunities to dispose of him had he really been the target. Any aircraft bombing would invoke a massive international investigation, something Jibril would not have wanted. Additionally, a change of schedule because of an off-time departure or arrival caused by adverse weather conditions, not an unknown in Europe in midwinter, could have resulted in the bombers missing their intended victim. Schedule changes would not have been a major consideration if an aircraft had been Jibril’s target. After all, the bag could be expected to end up on one at some time. However, it is unlikely that a terrorist of his experience would have left open such a possibility if an individual had been his goal. Strangely, while Time was promoting the McKee

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theory, the magazine also reported that Jibril had accepted an assignment, paid for by Iran, to avenge the downing of the Iran Air airbus earlier that summer. The two hypotheses do not sit well with each other unless it is argued he set out to kill two birds with one stone. A different causation theory was offered in the article, with Time declaring that an investigation by them had uncovered an FBI field report suggesting the bomb bag may have been infiltrated into the Pan Am system at Frankfurt by Jibril’s group with the assistance of Monzer al-Kassar, a new player on the scene. Al-Kassar was alleged to be a Syrian narcotics dealer cooperating with the DEA in drug sting operations and said to have been linked to Colonel Oliver North’s covert Iran-Contra operation. Still speculating that Frankfurt had been the point of origin of the Lockerbie bomb, Time raised questions surrounding two Pan Am employees, Kilin Tuzcu and Roland O’Neill. At Frankfurt, they had handled the interline baggage loaded onto Pan Am 103A. The men had been made to undergo polygraph examination by the company’s lawyers, which both, according to the article, failed. They had been flown to London under a subterfuge and once there, were expected to be arrested. This did not happen. In fact the men, having been suspended by the company at this time, were reemployed the next day, without explanation, in their old jobs. Presumably Pan Am considered them innocent of any involvement with the bombing and no threat to the carrier’s future operation. Time did not believe that terrorists would risk transferring an unaccompanied, bomb-laden suitcase to a connecting flight because, according to them, this ‘‘did not jibe with the precautions terrorists usually take.’’ This was totally wide of the mark. It was the exact modus operandi used by the bombers who destroyed Air India’s Kanishka over the Atlantic in 1985. The article poured scorn on the claims made in the indictments naming the two Libyans that the bomb bag had passed through Frankfurt’s baggage handling system, and talked of the ‘‘intricate network of computerized conveyers.’’ Time noted that ‘‘every piece of luggage is logged, minute by minute.’’ Interestingly, the text did not mention the key data the ‘‘intricate network’’ had produced for Mrs. Schmidt, depicting an unidentified, unaccompanied bag being transferred from an inbound Malta flight and delivered to Pan Am 103A. Instead, it asked how the bag could have eluded Frankfurt’s elaborate security system if it had traveled as the two governments had suggested. In fact, the bag did not have to pass through the airport’s transfer baggage security screening because no such system existed; nor was one required to be in place. Security control of interline baggage was the task of the receiving airline once the bags had been delivered by the airport system. Pan Am, as a U.S. carrier, had to reconcile such baggage with a passenger and apply the federally mandated controls pertaining to any that remained unmatched. Time’s research had let them down. If their facts were so wrong, what price their theories? A key witness used during the investigative work undertaken by Pan Am’s defense lawyers had been Lester Knox Coleman III. He was also to feature in a resurrection of the conspiracy theory close to the time of the appeal to the second circuit, this

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by way of a ghosted book. However, before it was written, Time had raised the Coleman ‘‘evidence’’ in their pages. Coleman was a former spy for the DIA and DEA, and he supported the drug theory, claiming to have recognized one of the bombers’ victims from a photograph. The man was said to have been one of Coleman’s own drug-running informants. This was in 1990, and at the time, Coleman had been looking for work. He had been deactivated by the DIA following his arrest by the FBI for using an official alias to apply for a passport. It had cost him three days in jail. Coleman, who claimed that he was following DIA instructions when he applied for the passport, offered his services to Pan Am. Coleman was reported to have been told by a contact that narcotics-laden suitcases were being placed on board aircraft bound for the United States by ‘‘agents or other sources working in the baggage area.’’ Apart from the DEA, he implicated UK Customs and Excise and the German BKA (Bundeskriminalamt) in the operation. The latter were said to have ‘‘had serious concerns that the drug sting operation originating in Cyprus had caused the bomb to be placed on the Pan Am plane.’’ The magazine brought the drug-running and McKee theories together. They reported that in December 1988, al-Kassar believed his operation was to be shut down. By this time, McKee’s team had uncovered al-Kassar’s CIA connection and thought the sting operation might damage the hostage rescue plans. Angry at their findings, they decided to fly back to the United States to pursue the matter at their headquarters, but their planned movements were known to Iran. Information supposedly had reached the Teheran regime through a double agent who, it was claimed, was working with both the United States and Iran. Time quoted from an Arabic newspaper Al-Dustur, which had suggested in its 22 May 1989 edition that terrorists set out to kill McKee because of his involvement in hostage-rescue attempts. U.S. intelligence services were alleged to have been aware of the Iranian activity and knew of the plot to bomb Pan Am 103 but did nothing to stop the attack. The purpose of such nonaction was to protect the drug sting activity. Presumably, the conspiracy theorists would have the world believe the involved agencies considered the price to be paid in human lives an acceptable one. No matter how dedicated to their work drug enforcement or other intelligence agents may be, it stretches the imagination to a point beyond belief to accept such an idea. Lester Coleman went into hiding in Sweden following his altercation with the U.S. authorities who had indicted him for perjury. His book, co-authored by Donald Goddard, was published in England, but similar publication was prevented in the United States. In June 1996, a leading British Sunday newspaper, the Mail on Sunday regurgitated the Coleman story in a four-page spread in their magazine section. Six months later, after living in exile for six years, Coleman, by now in poor health, returned with his family to the United States and was promptly arrested. Numerous bail applications were rejected, and as this text was being prepared, he had still to be brought to trial. The continued interest in the Coleman allegations illustrates the residual drawing power the media see in Lockerbie. The Mail on Sunday article, printed under the heading ‘‘How the CIA blew up Pan Am Flight 103,’’ was written by John Ashton,

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who had earlier researched material for yet another conspiracy production. This third resuscitation used a different media approach. It took the form of a film, produced by Allan Francovich. The script sought to direct attention away from Libya and Malta, focal points in the accepted causation thesis, toward alleged security weaknesses at Frankfurt. This suited the drug sting theory. The film was a celluloid repeat of much that had been circulated before. The motives of those who have pursued the conspiracy theories must be questioned. Their hypotheses seem always to seek to tarnish the U.S. authorities and at the same time to move the focus of guilt away from Libya. The stories have been researched but subjectively presented. In any event, no validity was given to such speculation by the American courts.

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POST-LOCKERBIE Is commercial air travel more secure today than it was at Christmas 1988? Have we learned the lessons of Lockerbie? In April 1998, almost ten years after the Lockerbie tragedy, the ICAO’s secretary general, Costas Pereira, told the heads of the world’s civil aviation authorities that in the previous five years, 144 acts of unlawful interference had been perpetrated against civil aviation targets. Published statistics for this same period show there were 195 fatalities. Although these figures do not equate to the numbers who died as a result of the Lockerbie bombing, they do suggest that cause for concern remains. However, eighteen months earlier, the IATA had sounded optimistic on the threat emanating from terrorism. In its 1996 annual report, the association noted a steady decrease in acts of unlawful interference committed against civil aviation. It was true that no aircraft had been bombed from the sky, but this had rested on a stroke of good fortune brought about by the incompetence of a would-be saboteur. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had planned to bomb twelve U.S. aircraft in the Asia/Pacific region but had been foiled. He was caught before he put his plan into operation and was deported to the United States, where he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy. He was also found guilty of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, thus forging an indelible link between urban and aviation terrorism. The same annual report insisted that airlines and airports had not been lulled into a state of complacency by the period of relatively low terrorist activity and that security remained a prime objective for the industry. Had the air transport industry been under any illusions that terrorist attacks were a matter of history, the bombing by Basque terrorists of Reus airport on Spain’s Costa Dorada at the height of the

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1996 holiday season would have brought it back to reality. Thirty-three people were injured. Within twenty-four hours of the Spanish blast, Pakistan’s Lahore airport suffered a similar attack. Nine people were killed and more than twenty injured. In November 1996, 125 lives were lost during a bungled hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft. It had been operating between Addis Ababa and Abidjan when it was seized. The pilot was directed by the hijackers to fly to Australia, but the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean off the Comoros Islands. Divers reported that many of the victims had drowned while still strapped into their seats. Another 1996 incident saw an attempt to bomb an All Nippon aircraft. Security procedures at the departure airport identified an unaccompanied bag that was later found to be carrying an explosive device. The IATA’s commentary was prepared before the foregoing airline incidents had taken place and doubtless, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, those who prepared it would have chosen a more cautious approach for their text. Any embarrassment to the association arising from the juxtaposition of its annual appraisal and the 1996 terrorist activity should temper future forecasts by others involved in aviation security management. They must recognize that the threat posed to civil aviation operations by terrorists is a constant factor and must never be underplayed. Regulations and procedures developed to counter acts of unlawful interference must be vigorously applied if a repetition of the Lockerbie tragedy is to be avoided. The loss in unexplained circumstances of an aging TWA Boeing 747 off the coast of Long Island in July 1996 may also have been the result of a terrorist attack. However, subsequent action by the FAA and the aircraft’s manufacturer suggest that a design fault, resulting in an explosion in the central fuel tank, may have been the cause. Given that the aircraft and a great many others of the same marque had been flying for more than a quarter of a century, the jury must remain out on this one. The ICAO clearly believes there can be no room for complacency with respect to the menace of terrorism. The U.N. agency continues to warn that the threat should not be underestimated. Readers will recall from the introduction to this book that in April 1998, the ICAO’s secretary general warned civil aviation authorities that implementation of internationally agreed-upon security standards and recommended practices was neither uniform nor consistent, a situation the agency considered less than satisfactory. The secretary general called on governments to implement the provisions contained in Annex 17 to the Chicago Convention. To date, the constant pressure from the ICAO since Lockerbie to have civil aviation authorities raise standards of aviation security has failed to have universal effect. The industry’s vulnerability to the bomber and the hijacker remains a factor affecting the safe operation of commercial air services. Study of international civil aviation activity during the decade following Lockerbie does show there has been heavy investment in security technology by certain airline and airport managements. However, the reader will have inferred from Commissioner Victoria Cummock’s dissenting opinion with respect to the report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security that U.S. aviation companies figure only rarely among them. U.S. aviation security standards are still less

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than optimum, and passengers remain vulnerable to the baggage bomber. Her view, included in the introductory remarks to this book, is worth recalling. ‘‘History has proven the aviation industry’s lack of sincerity and willingness to address safety and security on behalf of their customers.’’ Around the world, it is not just a ‘‘lack of sincerity and willingness’’ that lies at the root of the problem. Despite the ICAO’s best efforts and those of the IATA and the other international organizations, many authorities simply fail to understand what is required of them. Special survey teams visiting airports in the years after Lockerbie frequently found that the essential tools of the airport security manager, Annex 17 (the rule book) and the ICAO Security Manual (containing recommended operating procedures), were unknown entities. Where they were familiar to the managers, they were often not available to them. These remarks apply primarily to airports in the developing world, but it must be said that at one time, the UK’s Department of Transport refused to make the ICAO Security Manual available to the British Airports Authority’s security director on the grounds that it was a ‘‘classified’’ document. If ignorance can be added to lack of sincerity and willingness as a cause for civil aviation authorities failing to meet the ICAO regulations, another missing factor must be adequate financial resources. The report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security did lead to the allocation of funds in the 1997 federal budget totalling $144.2 million to cover the purchase and deployment of high-tech aviation security (screening) equipment throughout the United States. However, contrasting with this sum, the British Airports Authority’s capital investment for the provision and installation of similar equipment at London’s Heathrow airport alone was in excess of £100 million—a greater amount. Pro-rata sums have been spent at other UK airports, leading one member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Science, Technology and Transport, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, to demand of Frederico Pena, then transportation secretary, why ‘‘has the city of Manchester, England, purchased more state-of-the-art explosive device detectors than the entire United States?’’ The $144.2 million covered by the federal budget was government money. Airports and airlines in the United States, as elsewhere, are perfectly free to make their own capital investment in new technology as Frankfurt, Brussels, and the major British airports and airlines have done. In the United States, if aviation security is ever to match the level provided in the major European states or, for example, in Singapore or Malaysia, a shift in attitude is essential. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef has linked aviation and urban terrorism. By seeking to attack the United States in the Pacific and by bombing a major facility in the heart of New York, he must have shaken those who stubbornly and dangerously maintain support for isolationist philosophies with respect to U.S. domestic air operations. But such philosophies mitigate against the expenditure of large capital sums or activity on security programs. ‘‘Sincerity and willingness’’ are expensive and detract from bottom-line figures. However, more than changes of philosophies will be required to raise the standards of aviation security provided to the traveling public, whether in the United States

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or in many other parts of the world. Ways other than government financing will have to be found to fund the necessary improvements. Some authorities have moved to solve this particular problem by resorting to security levies. User fees have long been a contentious subject for airline managements. The latter see responsibility for security resting with the state. They have argued, indeed your author in his IATA role has asserted on their behalf, that such costs should be borne by governments. Aircraft are surrogate targets for the state whose flag they fly. They are not attacked because of any failing of the carrier. Governments have countered that only a small, privileged element, those who use civil air services, benefit from aviation security operations, and thus the air traveler should pay. Airlines are losing this battle and the imposition of user fees will grow and perhaps become the norm in the new millennium. Providing the money collected by way of security levies is accounted for and correctly used, the efficacy of user fees as a means of financing the defense of civil air operations against the acts of terrorism will not be challenged too strongly by the traveling public. Unfortunately, taxes collected to fund specific activities have a habit of finding their way into a central treasury, never to be used for the purpose for which they were levied. Airlines, airports, and the civil aviation administrations themselves must monitor the use to which any such funds are put. To date, civil aviation authorities, for the most part, have shown themselves to be impotent individually and collectively when it comes to monitoring security performances. Governments must not only legislate but also regulate air carriers and airports if internationally endorsed policies are to be implemented by the commercial entities. Testimony at the consolidated liability trial in New York showed that at the time of Lockerbie, there were some, in all areas of civil aviation operations, who paid only lip service to national and international security regulations. In too many places, little has changed. Where efforts have been made, performance is often less than satisfactory. Consider passenger and baggage reconciliation—the ‘‘bedrock of any heightened civil air security system.’’ It was the procedure at the very heart of the Lockerbie tragedy. PASSENGER/BAG MATCHING Matching passengers with their baggage seeks to prevent an unauthorized bag from being placed on board an aircraft. It is a mandated ICAO requirement, yet in 1994, airlines were mishandling eight thousand bags every day. There has been little change reported since those figures were made available. If the reconciliation procedures, so strongly promoted for more than a decade by the IATA and incorporated into the ICAO’s Annex 17, were being effectively implemented, this simply could not happen. Where does the fault lie? Some airlines seem loathe or unable to put their houses in order, but governments must shoulder a portion of the blame. The ICAO has told them they cannot divest themselves of their responsibilities for ensuring the provision of optimum levels of security. Yet some governments have still not incorporated passenger and baggage matching procedures into their own regu-

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lations. Those that have, frequently fail to understand that rules are only as good as the means that exist to enforce them. They must monitor airlines’ performances in this area if the potential for another Lockerbie is to be significantly reduced. Airline passengers can judge for themselves the effectiveness of an airline’s reconciliation performance. When the procedure is correctly implemented, unclaimed bags will no longer revolve forlornly around baggage reclaim carousels. Nor will there be lines of unfortunate people at airline ‘‘lost and found’’ offices bemoaning the nonarrival of their belongings. Study of baggage reclaim areas at airports would provide a simple and inexpensive way for governments to monitor carrier performance. Customer service benefits clearly arise from matching passengers with their baggage, but in many airlines, these have not been sufficient to motivate the financial, managers. However, they should be influenced by the cost savings to be made from the avoidance of mishandling baggage. By 1995 the cost of tracing and returning mishandled baggage to the rightful owner had reached $200 per bag. If eight thousand a day are mishandled worldwide, the potential daily saving is an astounding $1.6 million. This of course assumes that all mishandled bags are found. What of the compensation costs for totally lost bags? President George Bush’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism and the Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing both reached the conclusion that passenger and baggage reconciliation would have prevented the loss of Pan Am 103. Passenger compensation following the New York trial exceeded half a billion dollars. Few airlines could carry such a penalty and stay in business. Prevention of such a scenario should surely be motivation enough to implement the basic security tenet. Well before Lockerbie, the IATA had promoted the need to treat a passenger and his or her bag as a single entity. The association had developed a methodology to ensure that this could be done. As discussed earlier in this book, by summer 1988, David Williams, the managing director of BRaLS, had offered an automated reconciliation package to the airline industry. It was not taken up by the carriers, but times have changed. The management at Frankfurt International Airport, the FAG, identified the value of the reconciliation procedure and the potential financial benefits that would arise from a centrally funded, automated package offered to the airlines. By investing the airport’s money in the project, without the need for carriers to put up cash for the capital-intensive system, they found a way to focus the airlines’ attention. FAG anticipated recovering their investment on a ‘‘per bag’’ basis and correctly adduced this would be acceptable to their airline customers. They introduced an automated system into Germany’s principal airport with Lufthansa as the lead customer and by spring 1996, fifty airlines (two-thirds of those carriers operating to and from Frankfurt) had signed up to use it. It has significantly added to passenger security at a minimal cost and produced increased profits of the airport. The FAG introduction has been so successful, their package is being sought by other overseas airport and airline managements, and today it can be seen in operation for British Airways at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports and at key locations in the

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Asia/Pacific region. It can be anticipated that automated passenger and baggage reconciliation systems will be introduced in increasing numbers at the world’s major international airports. Airline passengers will travel more securely as a result. In 1997, the United States missed an opportunity to promote passenger and baggage matching within the domestic aviation scene. Following the loss of the TWA Boeing 747 off the Long Island coast and despite an intensive search and recover operation, no definitive cause was found for the disaster, but the possibility of a repeat Lockerbie scenario was debated. The White House commission decided to recommend the introduction of passenger and baggage matching on U.S. domestic services. U.S. carriers declared their support for the proposal, but behind the scenes a successful campaign was mounted to lessen the strength of the recommendation. By the time the final report was presented to the president, although recognizing that ‘‘full baggage match ensures that no unaccompanied bag remains on board a flight [and that] manual and automatic systems to achieve this have been employed in international aviation for several years,’’ it recommended only that ‘‘no unaccompanied bag should be transported on a passenger aircraft unless (1) it has been screened by a screening method that meets the FAA standard, or (2) it belongs to a passenger who at the time of check-in was neither randomly selected for security review nor selected by the profile for further review.’’ This phrasing defeated the purpose of passenger/bag matching, which seeks to prevent any unauthorized bag from being placed on board an aircraft. The Lockerbie bomb bag would have evaded the profile system since there never was an accompanying passenger to be trapped by this methodology and as has been shown, the X-ray screening process failed. Passenger and baggage matching remains the cornerstone of any aviation security program. By itself, it would have prevented the Lockerbie tragedy. However, rather than ensure this international requirement is fully met, many governments are giving priority to screening all bags checked in for carriage on a passenger aircraft. Used as an addition rather than an alternative to the matching process, this will add to passenger safety, providing it is effectively implemented using state-of-the-art technology and procedures. It should never be a substitute for passenger and baggage matching, just one of the important ingredients in the security mix. 100 PERCENT SCREENING OF CHECKED BAGGAGE Use of basic X-ray machines to meet a 100 percent baggage screening requirement offers little other than a cosmetic subterfuge. It is simply a deception, intended or otherwise, played on the traveling public. X-ray screening failed the passengers and crew on Pan Am’s Maid of the Seas. At some locations around the world, woefully outdated machines and systems are used to screen bags. Technology so old it would grace a science museum is inappropriate as a device to discover modern-day terrorists’ bombs. The European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) offered the opinion in 1991 that no equipment existed that would make 100 percent screening of checked baggage valid. They declined to make the procedure mandatory within their region and suggested that it would take

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ten years to reach such a point. They did, however, set 100 percent screening as a strategic objective and encouraged member states to work toward its implementation. Individual members have done just this. By summer 1998, all bags passing through London’s Heathrow airport were expected to be screened using a ‘‘smart’’ X-ray system. The Belgian government will have achieved this same target date at Brussels Airport. Meanwhile, the Belgians have sought to obtain harmonization of technical standards so that baggage screened in one location is accepted by the authorities in another. This would benefit a ‘‘one-stop’’ security concept currently being promoted by the airlines. One-stop security calls for bags and people screened at one airport to bypass all other security controls along the route of a passenger’s itinerary. The intent is to facilitate the movement of passengers and their baggage and reduce airline and airport costs. Given the wide disparity of standards around the world, ‘‘onestop’’ may have extremely limited application. Although at the forefront of the move toward 100 percent screening of checked baggage in 1991, both the British and the Belgian authorities recognized that the validity of screening by basic X-ray was still questionable. They accepted the ECAC position that no single device existed upon which airlines and airports could reasonably rely. They needed something better than basic X-ray. The explosives detection industry provided an answer. ‘‘Smart’’ dual-energy X-ray and computer tomography were developed and harnessed to a three-level approach to baggage screening. DUAL-ENERGY TECHNOLOGY Dual-energy technology as a basis for the X-ray examination of baggage has been around for some years. Using two different X-ray energies, it determines the densities and average atomic numbers of the target material, thus facilitating the identification of certain explosives. However, standard dual-energy X-rays do not detect the quantities and configurations of the full range of explosives called for in specifications set by the FAA, nor do they overcome the shortcomings that so concerned the ECAC. The airlines needed a system that would meet the FAA and ECAC standards and be capable of operating in an automated mode without disrupting the smooth flow of passengers and their bags through busy airports. Automation was required by the air transport industry to ensure minimum adverse effect on baggage handling and to reduce the reliance on human intervention in the screening process. Vivid Technologies of Burlington, Massachusetts, decided that to meet the air transport industry’s requirements, a ‘‘smart’’ version of the dual-energy X-ray explosive detection system was needed. They evolved a technology incorporating specially developed computing architecture running in parallel with dual-energy X-rays and by so doing, improving the system’s ability to analyze the contents of a bag. Use of color enhancement (the Pan Am X-ray at Frankfurt in December 1988 had provided only black and white images) enabled several categories of explosives to be highlighted. Continued research and development led to a further advance—‘‘scatter detection.’’ The addition of scatter detection is important, because whereas normal X-rays are most effectively absorbed by materials composed of atoms with high

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atomic numbers, plastic materials, including explosives such as Semtex, comprise atoms with low atomic numbers. Plastic explosives do not effectively absorb X-rays, but they can scatter the rays back toward their source. Scatter detection provides an additional image to highlight the presence of such organic material. Importantly, these systems are effective with thin configurations of explosive materials, which are sometimes used by terrorists to line bags and similar containers in an attempt to secrete the deadly contents from the screener. Vivid found a ready ally in the British Airports Authority (BAA), which provided an experimental base at Glasgow’s Abbotsinch airport. Together, these two entities have taken the industry to the point at which full inspection of checked baggage can be achieved without disruption to airport operations and airline on-time performance. The results of the cooperative effort have benefited civil aviation at large. Smaller airports have not had to fund the huge investment needed to mount trials similar to those undertaken at Glasgow. They have been able to use the experience gained by Britain’s major airport operator and by the manufacturer to short-cut their way to introducing the new systems at their own locations. Just as important as the advance in technology, the early trials at Glasgow established the standard international approach to maximize the benefits of hold baggage screening—examination at three levels, with the procedure incorporated into the baggage movement process. Use of state-of-the-art computer technology coupled with detection parameters built in to the screening system’s data bank now allows automated screening of bags accepted at check-in as they pass along the baggage belts. Bags cleared by the initial process are passed on to the baggage make-up area for loading on board aircraft. The human interface, deemed previously by airline specialists as a weak link, has been removed at this first stage. Any bags that fail to pass the automated examination travel on to level two. Here, specialists trained to a level superior to the one before, are employed to view the images collected during the initial screening process. Again, those bags that are cleared at this stage pass on for loading. Any that fail the second level of scrutiny are held for a final examination stage, level three. Third-level screening can be achieved in a number of ways, with vapor detection and analysis systems being the favored high-tech approach. EGIS trace-detection machines (sniffers) have been employed for this purpose. Manufactured by another U.S. company, Thermedics Detection, EGIS provides a high-speed chemical analysis process to determine whether the contents of a bag have been contaminated by explosives. However, screening at the third level can be by manual means, with physical examination of the suspect bag. The BAA/Vivid story demonstrates that baggage screening has taken a quantum leap forward. COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY An alternative technology to ‘‘smart’’ dual-energy X-ray is computed tomography—‘‘CAT-scan.’’ It is a process adapted from proven hospital scanning techniques

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and is being installed at a number of international airports, where it can be used in the three-level layout described previously. CAT-scan forms the basis of a machine, CTX 5000, manufactured by InVision of California. It uses computer software to control a process that manages everything from baggage motion and high-speed data collection to data communications, automatic diagnostics, and automated detection. CAT-scan images eliminate the clutter inherent in traditional X-ray pictures by providing an image depicting a crosssectional slice through a suitcase. The images are created by an X-ray source and detector array, which rotates 360 degrees around the target bag. By producing several CT slices, each object can be presented as a distinct picture, separate from any other object in the bag and shown in a three-dimensional mode. Each cross-sectional image allows the machine to determine the characteristics and density of the object being studied. Cross-matching this information against a built-in database comprising relevant parameters including characteristic chemical signatures (atomic numbers) of explosive compounds, provides automatic identification of any explosive material in the bag being examined. Although designed to provide automated detection of explosive material, the CTX 5000 can be and is used in operator mode. As with the ‘‘smart’’ dual-energy system developed by Vivid, different substances are color-coded to enable explosive materials to be distinguished from other items such as detonators, circuit boards, and batteries. All this has happened since Lockerbie. Thus research and development has not only taken place but has been translated into operational effect. Although the new systems may not yet be the answer to all civil aviation’s needs, they have advanced the air transport industry’s defenses against terrorism. Where passenger and baggage reconciliation and full screening of checked baggage using the new technologies and systems are in force, passengers traveling from such airports and on such airlines have had their security maximized. BOMB-PROOFING AIRCRAFT Lockerbie raised the question, can aircraft be made bombproof? For some years, research has been undertaken in this area. In 1994, Royal Ordnance, a British defense contractor, demonstrated a prototype baggage container designed to minimize the effects of detonating high explosives within the confines of an aircraft’s hold. The airline industry was tepid in its reception. Retrofitting whole fleets of aircraft with new, expensive containers, adding weight penalties to the operating costs, did not appeal. Airlines reasoned that even if all existing containers could be put to one side in favor of the bombproof models, much baggage and cargo is carried on pallets (trays) or loose-loaded into aircraft. Use of the new containers would still leave aircraft vulnerable. To be valid for commercial operations, bomb-proofing programs have to cover all the contents of the aircraft. Ideally, the whole physical structure of the aircraft should be protected. This requires changes in aircraft design and construction. Given the length of time new aircraft take to evolve from the germination of an idea into the finished product, we must look well into the new millennium

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before such features are incorporated into commercial vehicles. Until then, the security front line will remain reconciliation and screening. Of course, research and development of bomb-proofing technology continues. In May 1998, television newsreels and the print media carried pictures of a test-bed aircraft being destroyed with the simultaneous detonation of devices placed in a variety of positions and scenarios on board. The test program, conducted by the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency on behalf of the British Civil Aviation Authority and its U.S. counterparts, was seeking to test bomb-proof cargo holds. The resulting detonation made good viewing, but once an aircraft has been destroyed, it is finished as a laboratory tool. Work is now progressing to develop computer models that will allow economic evaluation of bomb-proofing techniques. Computer modeling will allow scientists and security specialists to experiment, ad infinitum, with wide variations of scenarios—bombs or other devices, including biological weapons, in checked baggage within containers or loose-loaded onto aircraft; in cargo, containerized or palletized; planted inside an aircraft, perhaps alongside the central fuel tank or in the nose wheel compartment. Even so, it may take an upsurge in terrorist activity to bring about changes in the airlines’ attitude to bomb-proofing developments, for history has shown that security improvements generally follow a tragedy rather than precede it. Until then, the need to balance the cost and operational penalties of hardened aircraft against security gains may be a deterrent to practical progress in this area of aviation security. Such a point in time may already have been reached with respect to securing the wheel bays of aircraft. These areas are particularly vulnerable. In February 1998, the frozen body of a stowaway was found in the wheel bay of a British Airways Boeing 767 that had arrived at Gatwick airport from Baku in Azerbaijan. In the previous March, ground staff at that same airport discovered the body of a young boy in the nose wheel bay of another British Airways aircraft, this time a Boeing 747 that had arrived from Nairobi, Kenya. Shortly before the latter incident, two brothers from India had secreted themselves in the nose wheel bay of another aircraft heading for the United Kingdom. One froze to death, and the older of the two, suffering from hypothermia but still alive, was discovered by ground-handling staff on the aircraft’s arrival. In all these incidents, the stowaways had evaded any security precautions put in place by the airline, or provided for them, at the airports of departure. The young men were intending to emigrate, illegally, to England. They had no desire to harm the aircraft and presented no threat to the passengers—they were simply hitching a ride. But since the youths were able to gain such easy access, so, too, could terrorists. Instead of stowaways in the wheel bays, explosive devices could have been planted. The above incidents show that even with sophisticated, well-regulated carriers who do commit large sums of money to their security programs, there is still much work to be done before security can be said to be satisfactory at many of the airports served by international airlines. The lesson for all air carriers must be that it is not sufficient to develop fortresslike security programs at home airports. They must also ensure that at all locations from which they operate, similar standards apply. Terrorists have shown through the tragedy of Lockerbie and through the earlier loss of

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the Air India Boeing, the Kanishka, that they can and will seek out insecure airports far away from the carriers’ home base in order to strike at their targets. Investigation of security breaches at foreign airports, for that is what the wheel bay incidents are, should be a governmental task. Airlines may make strenuous and honest inquiries following such incidents, but the necessary review cannot be left to the commercial companies. Their regulatory authorities must participate in this role. They cannot delegate their responsibility, for they have a duty to ensure that appropriate security standards are applied wherever aircraft registered by them operate. Certain European administrations (France, Germany, and Switzerland, for example) seek to satisfy themselves that security offered to their national carriers at foreign airports is adequate. Their inspectors monitor both airport and carrier performance. The United States follows similar procedures, although in 1988, their efforts were proven woefully inadequate. It must not be forgotten that airlines are commercial entities. They fly passengers not out of any altruistic motivation but for the sole purpose of making money. Where security costs can be cut, the natural instinct of some carriers will be to cut them. They may not set out to weaken the airline’s defenses against terrorism, but as seen with Pan Am at Frankfurt, this can happen, and with disastrous results. Security must not be regarded as an add-on, but as a necessary charge on the business. Governments must recognize that there may need to be some authoritative motivation if money is to be spent on projects deemed extraneous to the main thrust of a commercial operation. Mandating minimum security standards is only a start. Ensuring their effective implementation must be a natural follow up. To achieve this, governments must employ staff within their own aviation departments who have appropriate levels of experience and expertise to undertake the task. The intent of this closing chapter is to update the reader on the development of security safeguards since Lockerbie, but it is worth sounding a warning with respect to the potential use of biological weapons against civil aviation targets. In April 1995, a bomb containing the nerve gas Sarin was detonated in the Tokyo subway system. A number of people died and many were injured. Could this tactic be used against air transport? As far back as 1989, the Indian government’s representative on the ICAO panel of aviation security experts asked the members to consider the potential for the use of nerve gas against commercial airliners. The panel offered the view that a gas attack on an aircraft was too complex for terrorist use. Bombing is more simple and thus the more likely choice. Even so, aviation managements must anticipate possible future changes in the modus operandi of fanatical groups of terrorists. It is a short jump from ground transportation targets to civil aviation ones. Airport security plans must seek to contain such attacks should they be aimed against ground facilities. If nerve gas attacks can be mounted in underground railway stations, they can just as easily be mounted in an airport terminal, although the open spaces of the latter will not lend themselves to such use as easily as the confined tunnels of a subway system. Fanatical sects are not limited to Far Eastern territories. In April 1995, a car bomb was detonated in Oklahoma City, and 168 men, women, and children died. It was

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not the work of Middle East–originating terrorists, as the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York had been and as the American media immediately assumed. Instead it was the work of militants from within the United States itself— militants who were so opposed to the government of the United States that they were prepared to kill their fellow citizens to make a point. Quite what that point was we may never really know, but we do know one thing: it was not an isolated act. In October of that year, a group believed to be an offshoot of one of the many white extremist, paramilitary organizations in the United States, attacked a railway train in Arizona. It was derailed, with one fatality and more than eighty people injured. During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, a pipe bomb was detonated, creating television and print media pictures and headlines that circulated the world. Of course, Middle East–based terrorism remains center stage. The treacherous and cowardly bombing attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, causing more than 200 deaths, may have been the work of terrorists from this part of the world. If this is so, perhaps it should not be too surprising that they appear to have borrowed from the philosophy of those who bombed the Maid of the Seas. This time, land-based targets rather than aircraft were selected, but the targets would seem to have been carefully chosen from locations that might be deemed remote to the main sphere of U.S. influence and operations. Ruthless, wanton killing, especially when a large number of innocent victims are involved, as at Lockerbie, Oklahoma, and now East Africa, is newsworthy. The air transport industry must be prepared to meet the challenge. Existing security procedures developed by the international organizations can eliminate many of the threats if the recommendations are implemented. With these procedures, supported by the new technologies now being embraced by airport and airline administrations in Europe and elsewhere, the potential for air travel in a secure environment has never been better. But the four pitfalls, ‘‘ignorance, pecuniary shortcomings, insincerity, and lack of willingness to apply the regulations,’’ remain a real barrier to progress. PUBLIC SECURITY DISCUSSIONS SINCE LOCKERBIE The Bush Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism talked about the use of ‘‘intelligence’’ to combat the threat posed by terrorists. Testimony at the New York trial of Pan Am had shown that sufficient information was available before the Lockerbie bombing to have warned any reasonable observer of the imminent dangers to U.S. civil aviation in December 1988. Yet it is a fact that intelligence and other security agencies are reluctant, often to the point of refusal, to pass information from one agency to another within the same country, let alone export it abroad. In Canada prior to the 1985 bombing of the Kanishka, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had knowledge of the activities of the men who subsequently attacked the aircraft. They had even monitored bomb trials that had taken place in wooded country outside Vancouver, yet they had not passed this on to the federal police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In March 1996, Egypt was host to a summit of thirty-one heads of state consid-

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ering security and the exchange of intelligence information between countries. One does not have to be a cynic to see such gatherings as symbolic rather than practical, political rather than honest. Regular exchange of information is likely to remain a utopian dream. There is hope that within restricted circles such as the European Union, unless it grows too large, or perhaps within NATO, such exchanges will take place. Everything will depend on circumstances at the time, but it is unlikely ever to become a routine practice. Yet the use of intelligence remains a key element in the security mix. It can help preempt tragedies of the magnitude of Lockerbie. Governments should investigate the manner in which it is used, ensuring that information that may afford protection to the traveling public is transmitted to those who need to know. Among the many things Lockerbie should have taught the civil aviation industry, was that information about potential attacks and the methods likely to be employed must be passed on to the operatives in the front line for appropriate action. Experience has shown that in matters of aviation security, governments offer plenty of rhetoric but little practical endeavor. Furthermore, study of government statements on civil aviation security matters often shows a marked ignorance of the facts. In August 1996, a Sudanese airliner hijacked by Iraqi dissidents landed at London’s Stanstead airport. Subsequently, in a newspaper article ‘‘Why I let in the Iraqi hijackers,’’ the British home secretary at that time, Michael Howard, explained that, under international law, a state is required to offer any necessary assistance to a seized aircraft including permission to land. He was quite correct. However, he omitted to mention that under the same treaty, it was the duty of the government of Cyprus, on whose island the Sudanese aircraft had first landed, to hold it on the ground, resolve the crisis, and return the aircraft to its lawful commander. The Cypriots should then have facilitated the passengers’ onward travel to their intended destination. Such action is mandated under the 1970 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft—the Hague Convention. Given the experience suffered by Cyprus in April 1988, when a seized Kuwait Airways 747 landed at Larnaca and two passengers were killed while it was there (the aircraft eventually flew to Algiers, where the terrorists were allowed to go free), it was always likely that a ‘‘friendly’’ destination in some other country would be sought for the aircraft. It can reasonably be assumed that prior to its departure from Cyprus, the British authorities had agreed to receive the aircraft. If so, the home secretary’s actions were in fact outside the provisions of the treaty. This is not meant as a criticism. As has been proved, the United Kingdom is well equipped to deal with such situations. It does suggest, however, that the minister was motivated by factors other than the application of international law. Michael Howard used the balance of his article to talk of activities at the Group of Seven (the grouping of the world’s industrial nations—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan). Ministers representing the seven countries, plus a representative from Russia, had met in Paris a month earlier. President Bill Clinton had called for the meeting to discuss terrorism in the wake of domestic events in the United States. The British minister wrote in his

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article that the United Kingdom had taken the lead in advocating specific measures to improve the effectiveness of the international community’s response to acts of terrorism. In fact, certain of the measures proposed by the minister were ‘‘old hat,’’ having been put forward by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) following the Kuwaiti hijacking in 1986. The association published a five-point plan to manage incidents of unlawful interference with civil aviation operations. Entitled ‘‘Internationalizing the Response,’’ it received wide media coverage around the world, including in the United Kingdom, where BBC television aired a special ‘‘Newsnight’’ feature. The program was presented by veteran newscaster Peter Snow, who, with your author, discussed the IATA ideas at some length. The proposals were presented to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and to the member states of that organization, including the United Kingdom. They were also included in a report adopted by the Council of Europe. Eight years later, several elements of these same proposals, including one calling for the establishment of specialist groups to support states when incidents occurred, were now being offered as new ideas by the minister. The IATA proposals were initially intended to support the activities of small states that found themselves caught up in acts of unlawful interference. The first two points were intended to help such countries deal effectively with aircraft seizures. The plan sought to establish an international advisory group (perhaps operating under the auspices of the ICAO or its parent body, the United Nations) that would be immediately available to support governments trying to manage a hijacking incident. The proposals also sought the creation of an armed international force to work in conjunction with the advisory group and capable of providing a military response should such intervention become a necessity. The IATA wanted a third group, a team of experts qualified by practical experience, to investigate acts of unlawful interference after the event, firstly to identify how the incident occurred and secondly, to recommend methods to prevent any repetition, either at the airport where the security incident had arisen or at any other airport. It is possible that had such an organization existed after Lockerbie, conspiracy theories of the type discussed in the previous chapter would have been less likely to arise. The investigative body was not to have had a policing role. Their task was intended solely to identify weaknesses and errors in order to eliminate them. The fourth and fifth points of the IATA five-point plan have direct relevance to the aftermath of Lockerbie. The airline’s trade association called for an international court to be created to try those charged with perpetrating acts of unlawful interference. In the United States, a House Resolution was placed before Congress calling for just such a court. The IATA also wanted an international detention center where terrorists could be held while completing their sentences. Colonel Gaddafi had consistently claimed throughout the 1990s that he would release the men indicted in connection with the Lockerbie bombing to a neutral court. If the IATA proposal had been adopted by the international community, the Libyan leader’s bluff, if it was a bluff, would have been called. Opposition then may have come from the Western allies who had just as consistently refused to accept the notion of a neutral court to try the indicted men. All this was to change in November 1999.

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The Group of Seven (G7) ministers reportedly discussed drafting an international treaty requiring states to try suspected bombers/hijackers or extradite them. Yet such treatment for hijackers is already mandated in the 1970 Hague Convention. Similar handling of suspected bombers is directed in the 1971 Montreal Convention (Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation). Both the above conventions define the states with appropriate jurisdiction to receive any extradited persons. With respect to Lockerbie, such a state is any whose citizens died on board the aircraft; thus some twenty possibilities existed. Yet the United States and United Kingdom always insisted that extradition to the United Kingdom or United States was the only course of action acceptable to them, and so we had an impasse. As suggested in an earlier chapter, such a stalemate was not necessarily unacceptable to the Western powers. Both the Hague and Montreal conventions were written with major input from representatives of the G7, plus Russia (then the USSR), and each of the member countries are signatories to them. If the deliberate creation of an impasse is excluded, the question arises, ‘‘Did the ministers not know the terms of the conventions when meeting in 1996?’’ They had had a quarter of a century to do their homework. Rather than take recommendations to the United Nations, which, according to Michael Howard’s article, was their plan, the G7 countries would have been well advised to have looked at their existing commitments and to have sought ways of implementing the current treaties. The same meeting reported by Howard called for coordinated airline security measures to be established. The IATA publishes just such a set of coordinated measures and has done so for a great many years. They are reviewed and updated as the environment and technology changes. The ICAO, of which all G7 countries are leading members, publishes mandatory, as well as recommended, security measures, in Annex 17 to the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation. The Chicago Convention dates from 1946 and the annex is updated every three years with input from the major civil aviation powers and provided to the world’s governments. Procedures facilitating implementation of the Annex 17 provisions are published in the ICAO Security Manual. It, too, is regularly updated. The ministers also proposed a treaty to have explosives marked at their point of manufacture to facilitate identification by airport screening mechanisms. Five years previously, a diplomatic conference, in which the G7 countries had participated, developed The Convention on the Marking of Plastic Explosives for the Purpose of Detection (Montreal, 1 March 1991). If the world’s leading nations are not aware of the international treaties, what chance is there that the rest are? Assuming the British minister was reporting events at the Paris meeting correctly, why did he and his colleagues not know these facts? Could it have been that the civil service advisers in each of the countries were ignorant of their governments’ treaty commitments and thus had poorly briefed their masters? Or were the ministers deliberately left in the dark? Was it decided that the general public would be unaware of international practices and requirements and that by allowing government rhetoric, the politicians would be seen to be taking decisive action whereas none was intended? Monitoring activity since the Group of

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Seven gathering does not indicate any substantive action having been taken. Government rhetoric, it would seem, is just for media sound bites. Given the minimal level of major sabotage or other terrorist activity involving civil aviation since Lockerbie (at this stage, a question still surrounds TWA 800), is it really necessary to continue to work on aviation security? The answer has to be ‘‘yes,’’ for it is a fundamental truth that ‘‘terrorism directed against civil aviation will not go away! The emotional attractiveness of such a soft, newsworthy target appeals to those who commit acts of unlawful interference.’’ These words, part of your author’s 1989 Beaumont Memorial Lecture given before the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, remain valid. Improved technology applied to effective security procedures has undoubtedly made certain air carriers and certain airports safer for the traveling public. However, it can be assumed that commercial air operations have escaped major acts of unlawful interference during recent years primarily because terrorists have not sought to attack them. Just as political alliances form or change, environments in which civil aviation operates may alter, perhaps causing new terrorist organizations to evolve to chase new targets. During the Gulf War, the air transport industry was on its guard because of fears that Saddam Hussein would use terrorism as a means to hit back at the international alliance ranged against him. Iraq remains a pariah state and civil aviation could become a target for its leader’s machinations. The Indian subcontinent, an important destination for so many international airlines, has a predilection for violence and terrorism. It moved into the nuclear arena in 1998 with first India, then Pakistan, testing multiple devices. One protest movement responded by seizing an aircraft to identify its opposition to a deadly arms race. Once again, innocent airline passengers had been used to further a political act. Current security procedures developed by the international organizations, using the technology that is now available, can maximize the protection available to passengers and air crews, but for this to happen, they must be put in place. Whether implementing such procedures or monitoring their execution, those responsible for undertaking the tasks must recognize that ICAO regulations and recommendations are, through their normal circulation, provided to governments that may support terrorism. Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya are all deemed by the United States to patronize, or even to promote, terrorist factions. All four are contracting states of ICAO and receive that organization’s documentation. The state-owned airlines of these same countries are members of the IATA. They receive the normal distribution of the association’s resolutions and recommended practices. Terrorists may infiltrate, or even be members of, an airline’s or an airport’s management and thus have access to other companies’ security programs or even elements of national programs. It must never be assumed, therefore, that knowledge of security plans and procedures is limited to those with a right to know. Airline operators and airport managements, as well as government administrators, must work and monitor performance within these parameters. Providing programs are professionally developed and managed, terrorists, who are known to survey potential target airlines and airports seeking weak links in the security chain, will recognize the limitations this

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places on their actions. This may only divert their attention from their original choice of target, causing them to seek other, easier victims, but a company’s first aim is to protect its own operation. Effective implementation of internationally agreed-upon security standards by others is needed to ensure similar protection is available for the public wherever they travel. This underlines the vital importance of all states ensuring that ICAO security standards are put in place worldwide. Maximization of security for air travelers requires the ‘‘sincerity and willingness’’ that Commissioner Cummock told the U.S. president was missing. It might need a big stick to motivate some of the partners in the civil aviation industry. It certainly will require creative financing to fund improvements. Whatever happens, the lessons from the tragedy we know as Lockerbie must be acted upon by all involved in commercial aviation operations around the world if future passengers and the air crews who serve them are to be safeguarded. To benefit in the future, airlines, airports, and governments must take on board mistakes from the past.

EPILOGUE The earlier chapters of this book had been written when, on 24 August 1998, the U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, and Britain’s foreign secretary, Robin Cook, announced a reversal in their policy of refusing to countenance a trial of the men indicted for the bombing of the Maid of the Seas in a neutral country. Following negotiation with the Netherlands government, the United States and the United Kingdom had decided they would accept a trial in The Hague but before a Scottish court, with Scottish judges applying Scottish law. A similar proposition had been put forward by the families of many of the victims of the bombing following intervention by Robert Black, professor of Scots law at Edinburgh University. Professor Black had suggested that a trial before an international panel of judges but under Scottish law outside Scotland was both practical and feasible. However, Lord Hardie, the lord advocate, had held that a panel of international judges would not be qualified to make rulings on questions of Scottish law. The plan now being put forward was a compromise which, Robin Cook claimed, had already been approved in principle by the Libyan regime. He noted that Omar Muntasser, Libya’s foreign minister, had written to the president of the U.N. Security Council accepting ‘‘the proposal of the League of Arab States that the two suspects should be tried by a court in a neutral country and . . . that they should be tried at The Hague by Scottish Judges and in accordance with Scottish Law.’’ The role of the lord advocate was crucial to the decision to locate the proposed trial in a neutral country. In a statement coinciding with the ministers’ press releases, he claimed that the decision to take such a step was ultimately for him alone as Scotland’s chief law officer. He was responsible for ensuring that any trial of the men would be correct according to the laws of Scotland. Lord Hardie had seen his

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choice between a position that offered no prospect of a trial and an initiative that offered some hope of bringing the accused to justice. He had, of course, discussed the matter with the foreign secretary and other ministers. The decision, welcomed by a majority of the families, was reached seven years after the indictments were issued. Madeleine Albright reiterated the UK position. She confirmed that the two countries had been exploring the possibility of a Scottish court holding a trial presided over by Scottish judges outside Scotland. She believed the step was fully consistent with the U.N. Security Council resolutions and warned the Libyan regime that the U.S./UK plan was a ‘‘take-it-or-leave-it’’ proposition, one not subject to negotiation or change. In Montreal, where the world’s aviation powers sit under the aegis of the International Civil Aviation Organization, there was little anticipation that the move made by the United States and United Kingdom would lead to an immediate settlement of the stalemate. The proposal had moved the United States and the United Kingdom closer to the provisions of the Montreal Convention. However, it is interesting to note that the lord advocate, in a letter to the families of the British victims of Lockerbie despatched a year before the change in policy was made, wrote that ‘‘[t]he Montreal Convention was never intended to cover a situation where the regime of a member state itself is alleged to be involved in the crime committed.’’ There will be many who will question his interpretation, not least since the indictments did name two individuals. In any event, the offer by the two western governments placed the ball firmly in the hands of the Gaddafi regime from whom procrastination was to be expected. This began immediately. Reuters News Agency, reporting from Tunis, suggested the Libyans were raising a number of questions: If convicted, what will be the men’s fate? If sentenced to jail, where will the men be held? If they appeal, to whom do they appeal and before which court? No events had occurred during 1998 which offered themselves readily and openly as a basis for putting to one side the scenario suggested earlier in this book as possible reasons for establishing and maintaining an impasse with Libya over a trial for the indicted men. The political scenario in the Middle East remained unresolved and those governments, formerly on the wrong side of the fence but now considered important to the West, were unchanged. Lord Hardie must have anticipated some skeptical questioning of the new position. He commented in his statement that ‘‘[i]t has been suggested in some quarters that we have come up with this initiative—[a trial before three Scottish judges]—precisely because nothing short of an international panel of judges will be acceptable to the Libyans.’’ He denounced the idea as ‘‘nonsense,’’ pointing to the earlier public announcements by the Libyan regime accepting such a principle. Despite the lord advocate’s opinion, it had to be anticipated that Libya would seek benefits for themselves from a change in their intransigence. This required negotiations. Intervention came most notably from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and President Mandela of South Africa. Ultimately, the UK foreign secretary agreed that, if convicted and placed in a Scottish prison, the men would have access

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to U.N. officials at all times and vice versa. He had earlier announced that he would support the suspension of the international sanctions placed on Libya by the United Nations as soon as the men were handed over for trial. Colonel Gaddafi would have sought assurances in his various discussions that sanctions would not be reimposed at a later date, even if any testimony was offered during the trial suggesting a direct link between the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the Libyan regime. We may never know the details of the discussions between the Libyan leader and the various political leaders, nor the reaction to them of the U.S. and UK governments. However, in March 1999, seven months after the western allies’ change of policy, Colonel Gaddafi wrote to the U.N. secretary general. He advised Kofi Annan that the two men indicted for the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmad Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, would be surrendered to U.N. officials on or before 6 April 1999. This occurred on Monday, 5 April. A new chapter in the Lockerbie story was about to begin.

INDEX Abu Nidal terrorist organization, 13, 15, 17, 24 Acker, C. Edward, 87–88 Agius, Emmanuel, 75–76 Air Carrier Standard Security Program (ACSSP), 13, 82, 91–92, 107, 138 Air India bombings, 2, 7–8; Canadian and U.S. responses to, 10–11; Indian investigation of, 9–10 Air Malta: Flight KM 180, 73, 76, 78; security and baggage handling procedures, 74–78, 127 Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) report, 40–42, 85 Airports, extraordinary-risk: designation of, 13, 19; mandated security in, 5, 21, 29. See also Frankfurt Main Airport; Heathrow airport Albright, Madeleine, 167, 168 Alert Management Services, 47, 81; Frankfurt operations, 104, 109–19; oversight of, 106–7, 108; Pan Am’s introduction of, 87–89; and Pan Am’s passenger surcharge, 88, 90; personnel training shortcomings, 95, 107, 109, 110–13, 116–19;

X-ray screening operations, 109, 116–17, 118–19 Al Megrahi, Abdel Basset, 59–63; surrender to U.N. officials, 169 Annan, Kofi, 168, 169 Annex 17 rules, 11–12, 96, 150, 151 Anthony, Michael, 92, 133 Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorist threats and, 2, 32, 64 Ashton, John, 146–47 Athens’ Hellinikon airport, 5 Autumn Leaves operation, 21–23, 35, 111 Aviation Safety and Security, White House Commission on, 45–55, 150–51 Aviation security: British policy, 25; and bomb threat publication, 48–51; at extraordinary-risk airports, 5, 29; government regulation of, 4, 9, 21, 22, 29, 91– 92, 152; Group of Seven (G7) discussions on, 160–63; intelligence and, 17, 33–34, 160–61; and organizational command structure, 52–53; and political will, 52; and ‘‘red alert’’ conditions, 33; standard, failure to raise, 150–52; terrorist prenotification and, 25, 28–29; treaties and coordinated measures, 163–64;

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and wheel-bay stowaways, 158; White House Commission findings on, 45–55, 150–51 Aviation security procedures: and airline agents, 94–95; and blanket rule making, 33; bomb-proofing technology in, 157– 58; breaches of, regulatory agencies and, 158–59; financial considerations in, 106– 7, 109, 113–14, 151–52; high-tech detonation mechanisms and, 20–21; host country opposition to, 53; IATA SAC recommendations on, 4–5; new technology in, 155–57; and no-shows, 78; ‘‘onestop’’ concept, 155; Pan Am’s breaches of, 23, 92–93, 120–21, 132, 137–38; selectee identification, 104, 110, 112; U.S. airlines’ response to, 4, 154. See also Baggage handling; Passenger/baggage reconciliation; X-ray screening Aviation Security and Terrorism, White House Commission on, 29, 45–49, 52– 55, 126, 153; and bomb threat publication, 48–49; and Helsinki warning, 47– 48 Aviation terrorism: Air India bombings, 7– 10; classic modus operandi of, 63–64, 128; domestic airlines’ vulnerability to, 13–14; and domestic terrorism, 159–60; FAA assessment of, 33, 48; Korean Air Boeing 707 bombing, 6; Middle East as source of, 2–7, 13, 14–15, 160, 164; post-Lockerbie, 149–50; and retaliation, 52; TWA Flight 840, 5–6; Yesilkoy (Istanbul) incident, 6–7 Baggage handling: and baggage counts, 75– 77; and computed tomography technology (CAT-scan), 156–57; for expedite baggage, 95–96; at extraordinary risk locations, 5, 21, 29; at Frankfurt Main Airport, 69–74; ICAO security standard for, 11–12, 29, 30; and interline transfers, 7– 8, 93, 104, 115, 120–21; and mishandlings, 77, 152, 153; and physical searches, 9–10, 19, 29, 93–94; and thirdlevel screening, 156. See also Passenger/ baggage reconciliation; X-ray screening Bainbridge, Harry, 133

Barnes, Russell, 90 Barr, William P., 60 Bell, Harry, 44, 78 Berwick, Jim, 99, 103–5, 106, 118 Biological terrorism, 159 Black, Robert, 167 Boeing 747s, 1, 27–28, 41 Bomb(s): Autumn Leaves operation discoveries, 22–23; baggage, 6–10; Flight 103, description and transport of, 43, 105, 124, 125–26; high-tech, 20–21; improvised explosive devices (IEDs), 3, 6, 8, 9– 10, 20–23, 35, 105: Toshiba devices, 22– 23, 34, 109; under-seat, 3–6 Bomb bag, Flight 103: description of, 38– 39, 43–44; provenance of, 69–74 Bomb threats: and hoax calls, 50; public notification of, 48–51 Borg, Wilfred, 70 Boyd, John, 31, 37, 38, 86 Boynton, Homer, 22 Brabazon, Lord, 68 British Airports Authority (BAA), 151, 156 British aviation security policy, 25 Brussels Airport, baggage screening at, 155 Bush, George, 29, 45, 67 Canadian Pacific (CP), domestic system of, 8 Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 160 Caslis, Andrea, 113 Channon, Paul, 28 Chicago Convention, 96, 150, 151 Christ, Heinz Peter, 111, 112 Civil aviation administration: levels of command in, 53; failures of, 150–51 Civil aviation security. See Aviation security Clinton, Bill, 161 Coddington, Clinton H., 62, 69, 81, 86, 90, 99–100, 126–32 Coleman, Lester Knox, III, 145–46 Conspiracy theories, 63, 74; refuting of, 143–47; timing of, 144 Cook, Robin, 167, 169 Cooper, D. A., 40 Criminal trial negotiations, 167–69 CTX 5000, 157 Cunningham, Ed, 106

INDEX Darmanin, Michael, 76 Davey, Russell, 118–19 Dawson, Jacqueline, 119–20 de Haviland Comet, 28 Department of Transportation (DOT) of United Kingdom, 105; bomb threat handling procedures, 28–29; criticisms of, 67– 68; and Helsinki warning, 25, 34; mandatory requirements of, 57; and passenger/baggage reconciliation, 68 Detection devices, shortcomings of, 9–10, 12. See also X-ray screening Diegmuller, Monika, 107–8, 109, 119 Dome, Tommy, 46–47, 115 Domestic terrorism, 159–60 Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, 37 EGIS trace-detection machines, 156 Elliot, Harvey, 27, 31 Eser, Gunter, 29 European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC), 12–13, 154 Extradition, 63, 64–65; treaties, 163 Fatah Revolutionary Council, 15 Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI), 55–57, 126, 144, 153 Federal Aviation Act, 91–92 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 3– 4, 38; civil trial and, 81; Pan Am’s oral waiver defense and, 137–38; passenger/ baggage matching requirement, 7, 12; security division structure, 52–53; security policy, 4, 19, 21, 22, 29, 91–92; terrorist threats assessment, 33, 48; TNA (Thermal Neutron Analysis) program and, 51– 52 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 3, 38 Feraday, Alan, 43, 129–30 Fhimah, Al Amin Khalifa, 59–64, 78; surrender to U.N. officials, 169 15th May terrorist organization, 4, 15 Flight 103 disaster: and baggage handling, 55–57, 104–6; bomb, description and transport of, 43, 105, 124, 125–26; bomb bag, 38–39, 43–44, 69–74; criminal investigation of, 47; criminal trial negotiations, 167–69; forensic examination

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of, 42–44; governmental inquiries into, 45–57; possible motives for, 20, 32; press coverage of, 27–32, 34; prior warning, see Helsinki warning; reconstruction of, 41– 42; Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry findings on, 55–57; search and recovery operations, 31, 37–44, 85–86; suspects, 32, 57, 167–69; victims’ compensation, 53–54, 133. See also Indictments; Liability trial; Pan American World Airways Ford, Fred, 88–91, 124 Frankfurt Main Airport, 78–79; automated reconciliation system, 153; baggage handling procedures, 69–74, 109; as extraordinary-risk airport, 94; Pan Am’s (Alert) security operations at, 104–19 Franzki, Beate, 112 Fuchs, Sabine, 110 Gaddafi, Muammar, 14–15, 65, 162; and negotiations, 168–69 Garadat, Yassan, 24 Gatwick airport (London): automated reconciliation system at, 153; as extraordinary-risk airport, 94; threats to, 49–50 Germany: Autumn Leaves operation in, 21– 23, 35, 82, 111; covert terrorist buildup in, 17–19. See also Frankfurt Main Airport Giertz, Detlef-Bodo, 110 Glasgow’s Abbotsinch airport, 156 Gore, Al, 54 Ground security coordinator (GSC), 92, 107–8 Gulf Air disaster, 7 Hague Convention, 161, 163 Hammarskjold, Knut, 4 Hammedei, Ali, 20 Hardie, Lord, 167–68 Hasan, Badri, 61 Heathrow airport: automated reconciliation system, 153; as extraordinary-risk airport, 94; Pan Am’s security at, 104, 119–20; security expenditures, 151; threats to, 49– 50; X-ray screening, 155 Hellinikon airport (Athens), 5

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Helsinki warning, 83; government inquiries and, 47–48; hoax classification of, 25; Pan Am’s failure to heed, 2, 24–25, 28, 34, 104; UK Department of Transportation’s assessment of, 25, 34 Hijackings, 10, 163 Hindawi, Nezar, 21, 105 Hinshiri, Izzel Din Al, 61 Hoerr, Christa, 117 Hoffman, Harald, 104, 108–9 Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES), 38, 39–40 Howard, Michael, 161 Huebner, Martin, 47, 103–4, 105–7, 111, 114, 115, 117, 124 Hurd, Douglas, 64 Hussein, Saddam, 164 Ibrahim, Abu, 4, 15 Improvised explosive devices (IEDs): Autumn Leaves operation discoveries of, 21– 23; composition of, 3, 6, 8, 9–10, 20, 21– 23, 35; detection of, 9–10, 20–21; and personal computers, 105; Toshiba cassette players as, 22–23, 34, 109 Indictments: and absence of published supporting evidence, 62–63; and criminal trial negotiations, 167–69; and extradition, 64–65; Scottish petition, 59–60; U.S., 60–64 In-flight security coordinator (ISC), 92 Intelligence information: Autumn Leaves operation, 21–23; evaluation of, 17, 33– 34; sharing of, 160–61 International Air Transport Association (IATA), 9, 96, 149, 150; five-point plan, 162; and Pan Am 103 destruction, 29; and ‘‘red alert’’ security conditions, 33; Security Advisory Committee (SAC), 4– 5, 10 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 168, 169; Annex 17 regulations, 11–12, 68, 96, 150, 151; baggage handling standard, 11–12, 30, 68; and civil aviation authorities, 160; and flexible response philosophy, 33; and passenger/ baggage matching, 93; Security Manual, 151, 163; and Warsaw Convention, 54

InVision, 157 Iran: and Flight 103 bombing, 32; as threat to U.S. civil aviation, 18–20; and U.S. relations, 64 Iranian airbus destruction: ICAO investigation of, 24; as motivation for terrorism, 19–20, 32 Iraq, terrorist-based groups in, 164 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 50 Jack, Jim, 77, 138 Jamahirya Security Organization (JSO), 61 Jenkin, Peter, 120 Jibril, Ahmed, 4, 13, 15, 21, 47, 144–45 Jihad, Abu, 18 Johnson, Ed, 7 Kanishka bombing, 2, 7–10, 30 Kassar, Monzer al-, 145, 146 Kirpal, B. N., 9 Koca, Yasar, 72–73 Koch, Oliver, 111, 112, 117 Korean Air Boeing 707 crash, 6 Korsgaard, Walter, 4, 84–86, 125 Kotaite, Assad, 54, 68 KPI (Israeli security company), 84, 89 Kreindler, Lee, 69, 81, 82, 96–97, 100– 101, 123, 129 Krommes, Wulf-Rudiger, 108, 109 Kunz, Alfred, 114 Lally, Dick, 22 Langotsky, Yossi, 89 Leppard, David, 70–71 Leuniger, Herbert, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 116, 133 Liability limits, 54 Liability trial: appeal arguments, 135–42; appeals court decision, 136–41; attorneys, 69; damages awarded, 133; deposition witnesses, 103–21; expert testimony, 123–33, 139–40; fact witnesses, 84–101; Pan Am’s oral waiver defense, 137–38; stipulated facts in, 82–84; Supreme Court appeal, 141–42; verdict, 133 Libya: and Air Malta, 75; and Flight 103 bombing, 59–60, 64; and proposed trial,

INDEX 167–69; sanctions against, 169; terrorist groups linked to, 4, 14–15, 164; and U.S. relations, 14–15, 78, 143 Libyan Arab Airlines, 59, 61, 63, 78 Libyan Intelligence Services, 59–60 London Times, 27, 29–30, 31–32, 34 Loos, Jurgen, 10, 22 Lothian & Borders Constabularies, 37 MacDougall, James T., 60 MacQuarrie, James, 92 Maid of the Seas. See Flight 103 disaster Maier, Kurt, 116, 129 Major, John, 25 Malik Muhammed Ramzan, 110, 113 Malta connection, 43–44, 59–60, 61–62, 70; and bomb bag, 73, 74–79 Malta’s Luqa airport: passenger/baggage matching process at, 75, 78; as securitysensitive airport, 96 Mandela, Nelson, 168 Martin, Carla, 81, 82, 100 McCauley, Thomas, 89, 90 McKee, Charles Dennis, 144 McLaughlin, Ann, 45 Merari, Ariel, 136, 138 Meyer, Bernd, 115 Middle East terrorism, 2–7, 13, 160; and German-based covert activities, 17–19, 21–23; Libya’s involvement in, 4, 14–15; U.S. airlines as surrogate targets of, 2–3 Milne, Nicola, 120 Montreal Convention, 64–65, 163, 168 Mowat, John S., 55, 56, 57 Mueller, Bob, 64 Muller, Gunther, 108 Muntasser, Omar, 167 New York Post, 30 O’Neill, Roland, 145 Pagnucco, Robert, 133 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 2, 18 Palestinian National Council, 23–24 Pan American World Airways (Pan Am):

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bankruptcy of, 90; Flight 103A, 55–56, 107, 108–9, 110; 1982 bomb attacks on, 3–4; as surrogate target, 2–3; Yesilkoy (Istanbul) airport incident, 6–7. See also Flight 103 disaster; Liability trial Pan American World Airways security operations: deceptions in, 139; FAA inspections of, 114–16; federal regulations breach of, 23, 120, 132, 137–38; financial concerns in, 106–7, 109, 113–14, 124; at Frankfurt Main Airport, 104, 109–19; at Heathrow, 104, 119–20; Helsinki warning and, 2, 24–25, 28, 34, 104, 107, 117, 131; inadequacies of, 30– 31, 32–33, 107–21; Israeli consultation project, 84, 89–90; oversight, 103–4; passenger/baggage reconciliation, abandonment of, 7–8, 9, 23, 55–57, 104–6, 109, 118–19, 120, 137–38; postLockerbie changes, 109, 117; training, 108, 110, 111–13, 116–18 Parkinson, Cecil, 40 Parmar, Talwinder Singh, 8 Passenger compensation, Warsaw Convention liability limits on, 54 Passenger Transfer Message (PTM), 127 Passenger/baggage reconciliation: and ACSSP standards, 13, 82, 91–92, 107, 138; Air India tragedy and, 46; automated, 13–14, 153–54; customer service benefits of, 153; FAA actions on, 12–14; failures to enact/enforce, 152–54; ICAOmandated requirements, 11–12, 46, 68, 96, 150, 151; and interline passengers/ baggage, 7–8, 9, 55–56, 104, 110, 120– 21; at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports, 153–54; at Malta’s Luqa airport, 75, 78; Pan Am’s abandonment of, 7–8, 9, 23, 55–57, 104–6, 109, 118–19, 120, 137–38; UK Department of Transportation’s interpretation of, 68; U.S. airlines’ reaction to, 13–14; and U.S. domestic airlines, 154; Yesilkoy incident and, 6–7 Passengers’ families. See Victims’ families Pereira, Costas, 149 Personal computers, 105 Pizer, Harry, 22, 89, 114 Plaskett, Tom, 88, 114, 130, 137

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INDEX

Platt, Thomas C., 81, 124, 138, 139 Popular Front for the Liberation of PalestineGeneral Command (PFLP-GC), 21, 47, 82 Porter, Walter, 133 Portillo, Michael, 28 Prescott, John, 28, 34, 68 Price, Christopher, 120 Prill, Otto, 112–13 Reagan, Ronald, 14–15 Reyat, Inderjit Singh, 8 Rezak, Ali, 24 Ridd, John, 117 Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE), 31, 38– 40, 42–44, 78, 125 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 8 Royal Ordnance (Canadian company), 157 Russell, James, 38–39 Salazar, Raymond, 93, 132 Schneider, Stella, 110–11, 117 Schroeder, Uwe, 110, 113 Schwab, Wolfgang, 110, 111 Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI), 55– 57, 126, 144, 153 Securitae, 112, 113–14 Semtex plastic explosive, 3, 43 Shaughnessy, James M., 69, 126 Shugrue, Martin, 88, 94 Snow, Peter, 162 Sonenson, Daniel, 93, 99, 104, 132, 135, 137 Swire, Jim, 67 Syria, terrorist-based groups in, 164 Terrorism: biological, 159; domestic, 159– 60. See also Aviation terrorism Thermal Neutron Analysis (TNA) technology, 51–52 Thermedics Detection, 156 Time magazine, 144–46 Tokyo’s Narita airport, 8 Toshiba devices, 111; Autumn Leaves discovery of, 22–23; detection of, 34, 109 Trans World Airlines (TWA): Flight 800

(Long Island disaster), 28, 150, 164; Flight 840 bomb attack, 5–6, 15; Mediterranean hijacking, 10; as surrogate target, 2–3 Tuzcu, Kilin, 145 United Kingdom: British aviation security policy, 25; calls for Flight 103 public hearing, 67–68; and criminal trial proposition, 167–68; scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry, 55–57, 126, 144, 153; Scottish indictment petition, 59–60. See also Department of Transportation (DOT) U.S. Air Carrier Standard Security Program, 19 U.S. airlines: Air India bombings and, 10– 11; domestic, security proposals for, 13– 14; and host state opposition to security procedures, 53; and liability limits, 54; passenger/baggage matching requirement and, 13–14, 154; as surrogate targets, 2– 3. See also Pan American World Airways; Trans World Airlines U.S. Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act, 55 U.S. civil aviation security: federal allocations to, 151; standards and system deficiences, 95, 150–51; and State Department responsibility, 53–54. See also Aviation security USS Vincennes, 19–20, 32 Victims’ families: actions of, 67–69, 143; compensation for, 53–54, 133; Pan Am’s treatment of, 54–55 Vincent, Billie H., 4, 12–13, 90, 91–96, 123, 132–33, 139, 140 Vivid Technologies, 155–56 Wallis, Rodney, 9, 90–91, 96–101, 123– 32, 139, 140 Warsaw Convention, 54, 135, 136, 141 Weber, Ulrich, 84, 106, 109, 111–12, 113– 16, 131 Williams, David, 153 Wood, Wilfred, 112, 113 World Trade Center bombing, 149 Wyden, Ron, 151

INDEX X-ray baggage screening: by Alert Management Services, 109, 116–17, 118; monitoring, ICAO recommendations for, 106; 100 percent screening, 154–55; shortcomings of, 9–10, 23, 56; ‘‘smart’’ dualenergy technology in, 155–56; as

177 substitute for passenger/baggage matching, 12, 104–5, 118–19, 138; of Toshiba devices, 34

Yesilkoy airport (Istanbul), incident at, 6–7 Yousef, Ramzi Ahmed, 149

About the Author RODNEY WALLIS led the airline industry’s efforts to combat terrorism aimed against civil aviation for 11 years, from 1980 to 1991. As Director of Security for the International Air Transport Association, he served on ICAO’s Panel of Aviation Security Experts. He drafted the Guidelines used by the world’s customs authorities and established the basis for the industry’s work in combatting international drug trafficking. He is currently an independent civil aviation consultant.