TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.041

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.7 KB | 168 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 26

"Diabolically Well-Planned"


The hunt begins for the bombers who doomed Pan Am's Christmas
Flight 103


    For jittery air travelers, the news was decidedly mixed.
No, the jumbo jet had not suddenly disintegrated in midair from
metal fatigue. But, yes, there are people out there who are
capable of planting bombs aboard passenger planes to blast them
-- and hundreds of innocents -- out of the sky. When Britain's
Department of Transport announced last week that investigators
had found "conclusive evidence of a detonating high explosive"
that shattered Pan Am Flight 103 at 31,000 ft. above Scotland,
killing some 270 people, two questions took on a grim priority:
Who did it? And why?

    Working with unusual urgency, experts at a British army
ordnance laboratory in Kent took only days to determine the
cause of the crash. From wreckage recovered near the devastated
rural town of Lockerbie, they examined a ripped suitcase, fabric
from some passenger seats and fragments from a metal bin in
which checked luggage was packed and then rolled into the cargo
hold of the Pan Am 747 at London's Heathrow Airport. Two pieces
of the container's framework were pitted and showed other signs
that a "high-performance plastic explosive" had erupted near
them. Scotland Yard's antiterrorism branch and the FBI jointly
assumed the difficult task of finding out how the bomb got on
the plane.

    Engineers at Seattle's Boeing Co., makers of the 747, said
the explosive almost certainly had been placed in the
aircraft's forward baggage hold, just in front of the section
where the wings are attached to the fuselage. They estimated
that about 10 lbs. of a plastic explosive had in effect
decapitated the 747, instantly severing the cockpit and part of
the first-class cabin from the rest of the plane. Because the
forward luggage compartment is next to the main electronics bay,
the explosion instantaneously cut off all communications,
electricity and flight controls, explaining why all systems went
dead at the same moment. Declared a Boeing expert: "It was a
diabolically well-planned event, handled by experts in knowledge
of the aircraft, its structure, the flight plan -- the works."

    The bomber's only mistake apparently was in timing.
Terrorism experts assume that a timer had been set so that the
charge would explode after the flight cleared the British Isles
and was over water on its course to New York. If so, specific
evidence of the sabotage would have been almost impossible to
dredge up from the wintry Atlantic. But Flight 103 left Heathrow
25 minutes late. Anticipating such delays, terrorists have used
barometers to start a timer only when a set air pressure has
developed near the bomb. Since the cargo holds in a 747 are
pressurized after takeoff along with the cabin, the barometer
could detect this change and start the timer. If such a
technique was used on Flight 103, it failed to postpone the
blast until the aircraft was over water only because
high-altitude winds caused the crew to take a northerly course
over Scotland before heading west.

    Who has this kind of expertise on explosives? No one is
jumping to quick conclusions. But Palestinian sources, as well
as some in the U.S. Government and Israeli intelligence,
probably the world's best trackers of terrorist groups, point
to Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Damascus-based Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Fourteen members
of Jibril's group, which fiercely opposes P.L.O. chairman
Yasser Arafat's decision to recognize Israel's right to exist
and open talks with the U.S., were arrested by West German
authorities in October. Seized with them was a cache of arms
that included the ultimate boom box: a portable radio packed
with a plastic explosive so cleverly concealed that the radio
still worked. The wire detonator was fashioned to look under X
rays like the radio's antenna. Israelis say the group had
planned to blow up an Iberia Airlines flight carrying tourists
to Israel.

    The Jibril terrorists have a history of aerial bombings.
They claimed responsibility for the 1970 explosion that downed
a Swissair flight shortly after takeoff from Zurich on its way
to Tel Aviv, killing 47 people, and for a 1972 blast aboard an
El Al airliner that landed without casualties. West German
police are searching for any connection between this group and
the Pan Am tragedy. "The group is pro-Syrian, anti-Arafat and
anti-P.L.O.," contends a U.S. State Department fact sheet. "It
has strong ties to Syria, although Libya has also long supported
it."

    Another suspect is Abu Nidal, the fanatic P.L.O. terrorist
whose Fatah Revolutionary Council allegedly carried out the
1985 Christmas massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports. He
too would like to scuttle Arafat's Middle East peace moves.
"Such an act of terrorism by Abu Nidal would be a message to the
U.S. and a slap in the face for Yasser Arafat," said Ian
Geldard, director of research at London's Institute for the
Study of Terrorism. Allied with Libya, Abu Nidal would
presumably have access to Muammar Gaddafi's ample supply of
Semtex, a plastic explosive made in Czechoslovakia.

    One member of Abu Nidal's P.L.O. faction is, in fact,
already charged with a plane bombing. Greece is holding Mohammed
Rashid on false passport charges while deciding whether to
extradite him to the U.S., where he is wanted for the 1982
explosion aboard a Pan Am flight from Tokyo to Honolulu. The
pilot landed in Hawaii with 285 passengers, but a 16-year-old
Japanese boy, seated close to the exploding bomb, was killed.

    Still, Israeli intelligence places Abu Nidal well behind
Jibril as a Flight 103 suspect. "Abu Nidal certainly wants to
undermine Arafat and do a favor to his sponsors, the Libyans,
helping them take revenge on the Americans," says one Israeli
expert. "But he has no expertise in this type of action. His
specialty is assassinations." While a caller to the U.S. embassy
in Helsinki had warned that terrorists allied with Abu Nidal
planned to sabotage a Frankfurt-to-New York Pan Am flight,
Finnish authorities insist that the tipster was a habitual
alarmist whose call was a mere coincidence.  Said FBI director
William Sessions last week: "The bureau believes that it was a
hoax and not connected to Flight 103."

    Various Iranian fundamentalist factions have claimed that
they arranged the Pan Am bombing to retaliate for the U.S.
Navy's accidental downing of an Iranian airliner over the
Persian Gulf last July in which 290 people died. Intelligence
sources generally doubt these groups have the required technical
knowledge to carry off such an operation.

    Whoever executed the deadly deed was probably targeting the
jumbo jet's large contingent of American passengers  heading
home for the holidays rather than individual travelers. While
the CIA flatly denied reports that its Beirut station chief was
a passenger, two regional State Department security officers,
as well as a U.S. diplomat assigned to the Beirut embassy, were
on board. But investigators think it implausible that anyone
wanting to kill known CIA operatives would try to follow their
uncertain travel plans rather than plot an ambush where they
work.

    A bit belatedly, the Federal Aviation Administration
ordered U.S. airlines to take new security measures on flights
at 103 airports in Western Europe and the Middle East. They
include either X-ray or physical inspection of all checked
luggage, random opening of carry-on baggage, and a "positive
match" of passengers and bags to make sure that no suitcase is
loaded on a plane without its owner taking the same flight.

    The need for tougher measures was apparent long before the
metallic shower struck Lockerbie. A ten-man Israeli security
team studied 25 Pan Am airport facilities for the airline in
1986. It concluded that Pan Am was "almost totally vulnerable
to midair explosion through explosive charges concealed in the
cargo." The team claimed, for example, that baggage could be
loaded on Pan Am airliners in London and Hamburg without its
owner also boarding; that Pan Am planes too often carried both
passengers and general cargo; that in Europe the checked baggage
of some citizens of certain nations, including the U.S., was not
examined at all.

    The Israelis say Pan Am officials rejected many of the
suggested remedies as too expensive for such a large airline to
implement. "We told them many times it was a matter of life and
death," said one of the authors of the report last week. "But
they seemed to know better and told us they would go their own
way. What a pity."