The case for the defence
By William Paul
THE original plan was for the most spectacular gesture of random terror the world had ever seen. Five Israeli and American passenger planes would be blown out of the air simultaneously to demonstrate the vulnerability of the Great Satan, the United States, and the unshakeable determination of the Arab cause in its crusade to destroy the state of Israel.
It was the wildest blood-soaked dream of Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP) desperate to restore his languishing reputation as a terrorist warlord.
Ultimately, the dream had to be pared down to a single bomb hastily shoved on board a feeder flight at Frankfurt-am-Main airport which linked with Pan Am 103 from Heathrow to New York on the night of December 21, 1988.
A PFLP terrorist, by either bribing an airport employee or simply taking advantage of lax security, gained access to the internal luggage loading system. Once there, he saw two suitcases marked as the property of Pan Am pilot John Hubbard, who was flying to Pakistan and was sending them from Frankfurt for transit to New York and eventually his home in Seattle. His duty rota had him following an alternative route back to America for Christmas.
One of Hubbard’s bags was taken from the conveyor belt and its tag removed before being dispatched in a different direction. It would end up in Hamburg. The tag was then attached to the substitute, a bronze-coloured Samsonite suitcase containing a Semtex bomb inside a Toshiba cassette recorder. That suitcase was one of the last pieces of luggage to be loaded for the flight to London where it was transferred to Pan Am 103, packed close to the fuselage in the hold under the nose of the Boeing 747.
The bomb’s timer began running down on departure from Frankfurt. It was rigged to pause during the stop-over at Heathrow, starting again as the plane climbed into the air. The explosion happened at 19.03, 31,000ft above Lockerbie. Flight 103 disintegrated and fell out of the sky.
It was only one plane, a mere fraction of the carnage Jibril had hoped to wreak, but 270 bodies lay on the ground among the flaming wreckage. Jibril had delivered on his promise. Islam had gained its revenge on the Great Satan in a most spectacular gestures.
The trail that led to the Lockerbie bombing zig-zags across Europe. In Germany it involved the one-legged leader of the PFLP’s "foreign division", Hafez Dalkamouni, and another middle-aged veteran of the wars with Israel, Abdel Ghadanfar. There was Marwen Kreeshat, a reluctant bombmaker who ran a television repair in Jordan, and Mukhadeen Goben, an Arab-born mechanical engineer with Yugoslav nationality.
In Uppsala in Sweden a PFLP splinter group, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front had its power-base. There was the body-builder Marten Imandi, and the former bodyguard, Mohamed Abu Talb, another man who walked with a limp because of his war wounds and preferred to be known by his nom de guerre, Abu Intiqam (Father of Revenge).
These were just a few of the main players among a network of sympathisers and ‘sleeper’ agents made up from the widespread Palestinian diaspora which Jibril, a patient man, intended to employ in the cause of terror when the time was right.
On July 3, 1988, it was not infidel bodies that rained from the skies but Muslim pilgrims travelling to Mecca across the Persian Gulf on board a National Iranian Airlines airbus. The USS destroyer Vincennes mistook it for a hostile aircraft and fired a missile. There were no survivors among the 290 on board.
In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, the black-robed fundamentalist cleric who had ousted the Shah, watched the video images of bodies floating in the sea among the scattered wreckage. He spurned America’s diplomatic apologies and vowed revenge for this deliberate violation of Islam. It was not an idle threat. Another implacable member of the Iranian ruling elite, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Mohteshami, offered to translate Khomeini’s rage into practical retaliation.
Iran was already bankrolling Jibril’s PFLP from its bases in Damscus in Syria and outside Beirut in Lebanon. The PFLP was the hard-line offshoot of Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the way the IRA is related to Sinn Fein.
Mohteshami summoned Jibril to Tehran and was impressed by his ambitious plan to bomb five aircraft. He asked for it to happen before the year was out. The extra bounty was $10m.
In West Germany in January 1988 Dalkamouni had registered with the police, as all foreigner residents are required to do. He was living with his sister, Somaia, and her husband, Hasham Abassi, in their home at 16 Isarstrasse in the small town of Neuss, an industrial suburb of Dusseldorf. He used a false name and claimed to be a second hand car dealer but the security police, the Bundeskriminallamt (BKA), were not fooled. They knew he was a convicted terrorist who had served 10 years in an Israeli prison after blowing off his own leg in an attack that went wrong.
The BKA was content to keep Dalkamouni under intermittent surveillance. Some of his trips from Neuss to East Germany , Spain and Yugoslavia were tracked but intelligence sources believed he was buying arms to ship back to Lebanon and Syria. Also at the beginning of 1989, Ghadanfar, another of Jibril’s experienced and trusted men, had rented a property at 28 Sandweg in Frankfurt. He was the organisation’s main money man, known by a long list of aliases, but he only came to the BKA’s attention when he turned up at clandestine meetings with Dalkamouni.
In August, six weeks after the Iranian airbus was shot down, Dalkamouni telephoned a television repair shop in the Jordanian capital, Amman. "We are starting a big operation," BKA officers heard him say. "We need you."
The call had been made to Kreeshat, who two decades earlier had been an idealistic protégé of Jibril. His particular skill was bomb-making.
In 1970 it was one of Kreeshat’s bombs that brought down a Swissair plane and killed 47 people. Two years later another bomb was found on a Swissair plane flying from Amsterdam to Lod international airport at Tel Aviv. It failed to go off. Later the same year an Austrian Air flight from Rome to Tel Aviv had a large hole ripped out of its side in a mid-air explosion. The pilot managed to land safely with no casualties.
But the biggest outrage of 1972 was the Munich Olympic massacre, perpetrated by Black September guerrillas who were rivals to the PFLP. Kreeshat effectively retired and went home to Jordan, the most pro-western of the Arab nations, to settle down to raise a family and earn a living from his workshop.
A decade and a half later he was in Damascus visiting relatives when a chance meeting brought him back into contact with Jibril who had just conceived his big idea. It was suggested to Kreeshat that he might like to renew his role as a freelance operative for the PFLP, to be called on as required. It was an offer he could not refuse.
Back in Amman, worried that a revived terrorist lifestyle would see him end up in prison or worse, Kreeshat contacted Jordanian intelligence to explain his situation. He became a double agent.
Another year was to pass before he was called back to Damascus to resume his bomb-making trade. He was asked to defeat new airline security systems which tested baggage in a pressurised room to check for explosive devices triggered by altitude. The trick was to have two fuses, a barometric timer to set off a straightforward electronic timer at a given height, but which would then pause the countdown if the pressure was relieved. A plane would have to fly at altitude for a specified period before any "two stop bomb" went off.
Kreeshat made two bombs by adapting the innards of Toshiba cassette recorders and installing timers and 200g rolls of Semtex explosive.
When Dalkamouni phoned Kreeshat in August 1988, Jordanian intelligence immediately got to know. The BKA was told Kreeshat had promised to ensure than any bombs he handled would be defective. But Kreeshat was lying because he knew his bombs would be checked by Goben and deliberate mistakes would be punishable by death.
Goben had been in Yugoslavia for more than 20 years and was married to a Serbian woman. He lived in Belgrade and the PFLP paid him $400 a month to maintain a flat in the southern town of Krusevac that could be used as a staging post for Front Members travelling through Europe.
By this time Marten Imandi was spotted in Germany driving a white Volvo with Swedish plates. Talb, a sometime author and artist, was also in Germany before moving on to Cyprus where he made contact with Amar Dajani, owner of the King’s Takeaway pizza restaurant in Nicosia. After a couple of weeks he went to Malta where his host was Abu Nada, a Palestinian who regarded himself as the "father figure" of the exiled community on the Mediterranean island and ran the Miska bakery in the village of Qormi. In 1987 equipment for that bakery had been sent out from Damascus under the auspices of the PFSP, whose non-violent function was as a finance house for exiles setting up in business.
TALB’S sister had been killed in the war against Israel and his first wife had been in the same Lebanese refugee camp as Nada’s wife Madieha. It was, therefore, a matter of honour for Nada to offer him hospitality although he actually stayed at the Balluta Hotel in nearby Sliema.
While Talb was moving around the Mediterranean Kreeshat flew into Frankfurt to be greeted by Dalkamouni. Over the next 10 days the two men were under constant surveillance as they bought a variety of objects including two radio tuners and a television monitor, and transported them to the flat in Neuss.
Later the phone tap revealed calls to Dajani in Cyprus and listeners were convinced the system patched him through to speak to Jibril in Damascus. The language of "toys" and "strong medicine" being ready suggested things were coming to a head. Dalkamouni and Kreeshat visited a travel agency and showed interest in scheduled Iberia Airways flight 888 from Madrid to Tel Aviv via Barcelona on October 30.
On October 24, Dalkamouni was observed putting a large package in the boot of his car and driving away. The increasingly nervous BKA watchers, spread thinly over 12 separate locations in Germany watching 34 individuals, did not try to follow him because they expected him to return. He did, but not until the next day. The surveillance log now noted that the situation was becoming "unclear and uncontrollable".
The US presidential election was a week away and a high-level decision was taken to move in to pre-empt whatever was about to happen. The operation was codenamed Herbstlaub, Autumn Leaves.
Early in the morning of October 26, 1988, armed squads moved in to arrest 16 suspects. Dalkamouni and Kreeshat had left Isarstrasse and driven into the centre of Neuss. They offered no resistance when they were stopped. In Frankfurt, at Ghadanfar’s address, a huge terrorist arms cache - rifles, grenades, a bazooka - was found. The dramatic discovery switched the whole emphasis of the raids and it was to be three days before it was noticed that the cassette recorder on the back seat of Dalkamouni’s car was set up as a bomb with a barometric trigger. By then, however, 13 of the suspects had been released for "lack of evidence".
It was a matter of days before Kreeshat was released too. He had told the police the intended target for the bomb was a Frankfurt nightclub frequented by US servicemen. He was thanked for his help in preventing a massacre and put on a plane back to Jordan.
Dalkamouni and Ghadanfar were later jailed for conspiracy. It would be April 1989, four months after the Lockerbie bombing, before German police searched the basement of the Isarstrasse flat and found the television monitor and two radio tuners, all primed as bombs by Kreeshat. When a forensic scientist tried to defuse one it detonated, killing him.
Jibril had been deprived of his ability to create a terrorist outrage, but he still had one bomb available, stored in Belgrade. The Iranian mullah Mohteshami made it clear he expected the PFLP to keep its word and deliver the terror, even if it was scaled down.
Jibril resorted to a contingency plan. Talb (he and Imandi would later be jailed for life for terrorist bombings in Copenhagen in 1985) again travelled south, leaving a date circled on his calendar, December 21. From Cyprus he went to Malta. There in Mary’s House, a boutique in Sliema, he bought a quantity of clothing including a two pairs of trousers, a blue Babygro, and a tweed jacket. Talb returned to Germany.
At the end of November three PFLP men flew from Beirut to Belgrade and were transported to the Iranian Embassy. They travelled under false names - Moroveh, Akhavi and Zohari - and at a hotel in the city received "a black bag" before being taken to Osijek in the north and sent onwards by bus to Frankfurt. The "black bag" was the missing Toshiba bomb.
The initial assumption by European intelligence agencies that the Autumn Leaves operation had thwarted Jibril’s spectacular gesture was now being questioned. In particular Israel’s Mossad was hearing a steady stream of oblique warnings from its informants. On December 5 an anonymous call to the US embassy in Helsinki claimed there was to be bomb attack on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt. A warning about Toshiba cassette recorders was circulated to all airport security units.
On December 8 Israeli commandos, hoping to pre-empt an atrocity, launched a seaborne assault on the main PFLP milnear Beirut, but were unable to penetrate its underground tunnels and caves. On December 13 the US Embassy in Moscow told its staff of the Helsinki warning about Pan Am flights but left Christmas travelling arrangements up to "the discretion of the individual". Jibril was running out of time. The end of the year was fast approaching. He ordered the bomb to be deployed as soon as possible. The fate of Pan Am 103 was sealed.