TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010289/01028900.057

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.6 KB | 233 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 74

Terror In the Night


The prospect of sabotage hangs like a pall over the crash of Pan
Am Flight 103


    To: ALL EMBASSY EMPLOYEES

    Subject: THREAT TO CIVIL AVIATION

    POST HAS BEEN NOTIFIED BY THE FEDERAL AVIATION
ADMINISTRATION THAT ON DECEMBER 5, 1988, AN UNIDENTIFIED
INDIVIDUAL TELEPHONED A U.S. DIPLOMATIC FACILITY IN EUROPE AND
STATED THAT SOMETIME WITHIN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS THERE WOULD BE A
BOMBING ATTEMPT AGAINST A PAN AMERICAN AIRCRAFT FLYING FROM
FRANKFURT TO THE UNITED STATES.

    From a memo posted two weeks ago at the U.S. embassy in
Moscow, based on an advisory sent to American diplomatic
missions in Europe and the Middle East.

    Not one of the 3,000 residents of Lockerbie is likely ever
to forget the horrors that befell the Scottish village during
Christmas week of 1988. At dinnertime last Wednesday, on the
first night of winter, a rain of fire and metal suddenly fell on
Lockerbie, destroying houses and automobiles and scattering
debris as far as 80 miles away. Some called it a "great ball of
flame" and likened it to a fire storm or a mighty clap of
thunder, while others wondered if it was the result of an
accident at a nearby nuclear plant.

    As the people of Lockerbie and the rest of the world quickly
learned, the grisly shower consisted of the remains of a 747
jetliner, Pan American Flight 103 from London to New York, and
its 258 passengers and crew members. Long before dawn, emergency
rescue teams realized that everybody on the plane had perished,
along with at least 22 people on the ground. In the grim history
of aviation disasters, Flight 103 made the record books on two
counts: as Britain's deadliest air crash and as Pan Am's worst
accident involving only one plane.

    At 6:25 p.m., Flight 103 had pulled away from Terminal 3 at
London's Heathrow Airport. Takeoff was 25 minutes late, but that
was hardly unusual in the midst of the Christmas travel crush
at one of the world's busiest airports. Among the 258 passengers
were some 49, many of them U.S. servicemen, who had arrived from
Frankfurt on a connecting flight, and 35 undergraduates who had
been on an overseas study program sponsored by Syracuse
University, as well as four U.S. State Department employees.

    The plane, christened Clipper Maid of the Seas, climbed
smoothly to its cruising altitude of 31,000 ft. as it headed
northward on a normal course toward Scotland and the North
Atlantic Circle route, which would take it to New York in about 7
1/2 hours and then on to Detroit. Both takeoff and early flight
were normal, and within 35 minutes the aircraft was routinely
transferred from London air-traffic control at West Drayton to
Scotland's air-traffic control at Prestwick, southwest of
Glasgow. Inside the plane, passengers were busily settling in
for the long flight -- chatting with friends, fiddling with
pillows, reading magazines -- while the attendants began
preparations to serve dinner.

    At 7:17 p.m., Flight 103 disappeared from Prestwick's radar
screens.

    Less than two minutes later, the fire storm began over
Lockerbie. Said George Gilston, who was walking his dog when the
jet fell out of the sky: "I heard a noise like thunder, and then
I saw the outline of a plane dropping, nose down, straight into
the ground." Peter O'Brien was driving by on the A74 highway.
"The whole sky lit up as though it was daylight," he said later.
"The car behind me was engulfed in flames, and houses were
suddenly on fire, as if petrol had been sprayed over them. It
was an incredible inferno." Recalled truck driver John
McGuinness: "I'm sure the plane was on fire before it crashed.
It looked like a red sunset."

    Sputtering burning fuel, a large chunk of the fuselage
struck a hill outside Lockerbie, then careened into a gas
station and two rows of houses, gouging a 20-ft.-wide crater in a
roadway. In the center of town, an aircraft engine lay embedded
in the street. Sixty bodies were later recovered from a nearby
golf course and taken to the town hall, which had been turned
into a makeshift mortuary. One body was found on a back porch,
another entangled in the branches of a tree. Three miles away,
the plane's blue-and-white cockpit, containing the bodies of the
flight crew, was perched, almost intact, on a hillside, severed
from the rest of the fuselage as if by a giant karate chop.

    On the other side of the Atlantic, some of the relatives and
friends of Flight 103's victims arrived at John F. Kennedy
International Airport unaware of the tragedy. Gazing up at the
electronic arrivals board, they read an ominous message next to
the flight number: SEE AGT. When they found a Pan Am agent,
they were led into a lounge and told the news. One
grief-stricken woman, shouting "My baby! My baby!," threw
herself on the ground.

    At first, investigators believed the disaster might have
been caused by massive structural failure. Though Boeing 747s
are among the sturdiest passenger planes in the world, a Japan
Air Lines 747 crashed on a domestic flight in 1985 after a rear
bulkhead ruptured as the result of a faulty repair job, killing
520 of the 524 aboard. But one important difference between the
Japan Air Lines crash and the Pan Am tragedy was that the pilot
of the Japanese plane was able to talk to ground control for
half an hour as he tried unsuccessfully to land his mortally
wounded craft. In last week's disaster, there was only silence. A
preliminary inquiry showed that the plane's various electronic
systems had gone dead simultaneously.

    Pan Am's Clipper Maid of the Seas, the 15th 747 to come off
the Boeing production line, had been in service since February
1970 and had made some 16,500 takeoffs and landings. Despite
the plane's age and length of service, however, most aviation
experts would not rate the aircraft as particularly worn or
fatigued. Moreover, the airline pointed out that the plane had
been fully refitted 15 months ago and was checked and serviced
in San Francisco only a week before the crash.

    Inevitably, that left the horrific prospect that Flight 103
had been deliberately blown out of the skies. David Kyd, public
relations director of the Geneva-based International Air
Transport Association, noted the similarities between the Pan Am
crash and that of an Air India 747 that disappeared into the
Atlantic off the coast of Ireland in June 1985, killing all 329
people aboard. The subsequent investigation, aided by the
underwater recovery of the plane's flight recorder, or "black
box," determined that a bomb in the forward cargo hold had
blown off the front section of the aircraft. Sikh extremists
were suspected of the crime, but no one was ever charged. In the
case of the Pan Am crash, Kyd said, "sabotage cannot be ruled
out."

    Adding credence to that possibility was the news that
American embassies in Europe and the Middle East had received
advisories from Washington more than a week earlier that a bomb
threat had explicitly been made against Pan Am flights from
Frankfurt to the U.S. The threat had come from an anonymous
telephone caller to the American embassy in Helsinki. The
tipster said a man in Frankfurt, identified only as Abdullah,
planned to give a bomb to an accomplice named Yassan Garadad,
who in turn would persuade an unwitting woman passenger to take
the deadly package on board with her. The caller, who spoke
with a Middle Eastern accent, claimed that Abdullah and Garadad
were linked to Abu Nidal, the renegade Palestinian terrorist
whose group has claimed responsibility for more than 100
vicious attacks.

    Though the Finnish government subsequently said it knew the
identity of the telephone tipster and did not take the warning
seriously, the FAA was sufficiently concerned to advise all
major U.S. carriers, including Pan Am, of the threat, though
the news was not passed on to the general public. After the
crash, some bereaved relatives of the victims expressed anger
that neither the Government nor the airline had seen fit to
caution the public. In response, Government agencies pointed out
that they frequently receive warnings of terrorist activity,
most of which are meaningless; in fact, more than 100 advisories
of this kind have been sent to U.S. embassies since Sept. 1. To
make a public announcement of such threats, the agencies
contended, would serve no useful purpose.

    British diplomats confirmed last week that the U.S. and
Britain had received warnings from the Palestine Liberation
Organization that Arab rejectionists, aroused by P.L.O.
chairman Yasser Arafat's decision to acknowledge Israel's right
to exist, were likely to punctuate their anger with an act of
savagery. On Friday, after visiting Pope John Paul II in Rome,
Arafat said that if sabotage had been behind the crash, "it is
a criminal action we condemn."

    Still another possibility was that Islamic extremists linked
to Iran were involved. In London an anonymous caller to the
Associated Press claimed that the Pan Am plane had been attacked
in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus last
July by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, which mistook the
passenger plane for an F-14 fighter. All 290 aboard perished.

    If Pan Am Flight 103 was sabotaged, how was the crime
carried out? Among the possibilities:

    In Frankfurt a bomb was slipped into luggage checked through
to New York, but its owner never boarded the connecting flight
in London.

    In London a member of a ground crew put explosives aboard.

    On Flight 103, a passenger knowingly or unknowingly carried
the explosives and perished.

    Most experts give high marks to overall airport procedures
at Heathrow, where officials have for years contended with the
possibility of Irish Republican Army terrorism, and at
Frankfurt. Others point out that no airport is completely safe.
"Baggage control is pretty good at both Frankfurt and London,
but tarmac security remains a weak spot everywhere," says an
industry official. "A bomb with a timing device could have been
put into the forward baggage hold." According to Pan Am
officials, security was tightened after the airline received
the FAA advisory, but they refused to say what was done.

    Terrorist technology is outpacing the ability of authorities
to guarantee security. The powerful plastic explosive Semtex,
a gummy substance that is generally rolled into thin sheets, is
difficult for both dogs and machines to detect. So are the
relatively new "woven plastic" explosives, which resemble
swatches of fabric and could conceivably be carried in a
shopping bag.

    While the acrid smoke still hung over Lockerbie, British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited the scene, as did
Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. The sight was extraordinary in
the daylight: the cockpit resting near a church cemetery,
Christmas presents never to be delivered scattered on the
ground, sheep grazing in one field and policemen looking for
bodies in the next. "One has never seen or thought to see
anything like this," said Thatcher, visibly moved by the horror.

    Investigators assumed that some clues to the fate of Flight
103 would be contained within the plane's two flight recorders,
both of which were recovered from the wreckage. But on Friday
they could find nothing abnormal on the voice tape save for a
"faint unquantified noise" an instant before Flight 103 lost
contact. They were hoping, however, that within a few days they
would have further clues as to whether the Christmas tragedy at
Lockerbie carried with it a murderous message of political
symbolism.