TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010289/01028900.057

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 12KB | 217 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.