TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.041

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 9KB | 154 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."