All aspects of the Lockerbie deserved attention, but there are some aspects which deserve the particular attention of Americans. These will not be addressed by people and press elsewher. It is these uniquely American topics, the ones that are close to home - literally in our backyard - that have been most abysmally ignored or covered up by the US media. For those for whom justice in the Pan Am 103/Lockerbie case is anything more than a matter of money, a clear exposition of the roles of the likes of George Bush, Oliver Revell, and the way their ends were served by turning a blind eye to the Lockerbie attack may be the only justice that is possible. To anyone who has followed US-Iran relations over the last several years it is obvious that the the people who literally “ordered” the Pan Am 103 bombing are beyond the reach of the US - indeed it is unrealistic to suppose that they will ever be held accountable. Khomeni, Mohtashemi, Assad, and Khaddaffi did not take an oath of office to protect us - officials of the US government did. (That US officials are indemnified against civil damages resulting from their failure to carry out that duty is of overwhelming importance to plaintiff’s lawyers - but not to anyone else.)

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT BETWEEN JULY AND DECEMBER 1988? 

It would be an invaluable luxury to be able to begin any consideration of Lockerbie by knowing who carried out the bombing, how it was done and ultimately at whose request. This is the way that many journalists would like to tackle any story. Unfortunately there is only a reasonably strong suggestion of the answer to the last question, and no credible evidence for the first two questions. The two chapters in Sam Katz’s book on Ahmed Jibril are as good a summary of what is know as any, but as Katz points out paramilitary terrorists generally take their secrets and deeds to their graves. In the case of Lockerbie there are innumerable theories, no indisputable proof that any one is correct, and no reason to assume that situation will change at any specific time in the future. Thus any discussion that is predicated on knowing who precisely carried out the bombing is essentially a dead end. The answer may be known by the intelligence services of any of several countries, but it may not be. If it is there is no reason to expect that it will be divulged except as it suits other political purposes in what may be a very long fullness of time.

In the absence of this information are there questions that the press could have addressed - yes, lots of them. Who had an interest in seeing the Pan Am 103 bombing succeed? What do the few facts have become public since Dec. 21 1988 add up to? Did the US security services take appropriate actions in light of what was known? What can be inferred was known based on actions - as opposed to public statements about “what was known”? None of these questions have been addressed by American journalists, or if they have it is in the manner of Michael Wines of the NY Times who like a weathercock points in which ever direction the State Department is blowing, or Steve Emerson, whose continued relationship with Oliver Revell (at least as late as Emerson's WSJ article “Stop Aid and Comfort for Patrons of Terror” 8/5/96) make his reporting of a story in which Revell may in fact be a central culprit, unreliable. No independent American investigative journalists has gotten into print looking at the domestic or US government aspects of the disaster. 
 

Why revisit this question now? The basic facts were mostly obvious in 1989 after reading the list of passengers and John Newhouse’s The New Yorker (7/ 10/ 89) article which described the meticulous care which US agents had previously combed the passengers and baggage of a flight subject to a serious bomb threat. Back in 1989 maybe security precluded Newhouse revealing that similar, unsuccessful efforts were made to protect Pan Am 103 but 10 years later there is still not the shred of a suggestion that anything was done, and “security considerations” simply don’t wash as an explaination. One must give serious consideration to the possibility that nothing was done. I wrote a tiny letter to the NY Times (4/15/90) suggesting “We ought to better understand our own Government's role in the Lockerbie disaster” - when all the attention was on “who did it” and “airline security”. Over the next 8 years another scattered additional facts have come out that point which make this question even more reasonable than in 1989 - although they have not been reported in the US press since 1992 - and it is only with the availability of the WWW that anybody but a dedicated journalist, which I am not, could find the additional pieces. 

I will make the scenerio that I believe makes the best possible account of the facts that are know clear from the outset:

1. The US ,that is the Reagan/Bush administration had opened covert relations with Iran possibly prior to the 1980 election in the affair subsequently known as the “October Surprise”, and certainly had covert dealings with Iran from 1981 to 1986 in the events that were subsequently known as “Iran-Contra”.(From what has become known about Reagan’s medical condition I believe that it is a reasonable presumption that George Bush was effectively functioning as President in any way that is relevant to the present discussion from 1980 - 1992; an attempt to distinguish a Reagan policy from a Bush policy is unnecessary. Specifically Bush chaired Reagan’s Terrorism Task Force which included Oliver North and Oliver Revell, and hatched many intrigues of the Iran-Contra affair.) Essentially the relationship with Iran has continued to develop - no longer covert- right up to the present. US-Iran relations since the ouster of the Shah have never been better than they are today. Anyone who doubts the current status need only look at the articles in the 6/21/98 NY Times on US vs Iran soccer and the falling apart of the U.S.-Saudi Inquiry Into '96 Bombing Al-Khobar tower bombing because “evidence suggesting that Iran sponsored the attack has further complicated the investigation, since the United States and Saudi Arabia have recently sought to improve relations with a new, relatively moderate government in Tehran”. I have no problem with this; anything else is probably unrealistic.

2. This relationship was done considerable harm in July 1988 with the ghastly shootdown of an Iranian civilian Airbus by the USS Vincennes. Iran expert Gary Sick told the Wall Street Journal in regard to the nascent dialogue between the US and Iran following the Airbus incident"Whatever prospects there were have gone glimmering." July 6 [1988], Washington, Reuter. (Sick - who is a career Iran-specialist - has never been willing to comment on any connection between Iran and Lockerbie. Presumably he thinks there is no connection or that it will “go away” if he does not talk about it.)

3. Islamic “tribal law” requires taliation - “eye for an eye” justice. Frank Vogel - the Harvard expert on Islamic law said, in reply to a query on this topic, that such “blood revenge” is part of tribal custom, not proper Islamic law. However he indicated that “such tribal revenge has its basis in tribal customs, not Islam. It can be very real and obligatory, nonetheless.Tribal law is a competitor of Islamic law (in countries applying the traditional law) and of positive law for countries that have western-inspired penal codes, as most do. Tribal law may work in lawless conditions or by compromise or settlements winked at by the State.” I would suggest that after the Airbus shootdown the willingness of the fundamentalist Islamic Iranian state to willing to “wink” is not farfetched. David Halevy - an Israeli journalist who is the author of a well regarded study of the PLO and Middle East terrorism, told me in conversation, some 8 years ago, that an Islamic country would feel obligated to obtain “blood revenge” for the Airbus killings - that this went without saying, and that he found it unimaginable that the US State Department Middle East experts were not well aware of this. Were the truth lies is not proven, but reports that Iran paid $10 million to arrange the bombing, and that Reagan/Bush now had a covert diplomatic partner bent on or obligated to deliver revenge seem plausible. 
 

4. In July 1988 Khomeni was in fact only the moderate faction - the one with whom the Reagan/Bush team had been able to work some deals. There is no reason to suppose that if relations were mended Reagan/Bush were not hoping for more and better things to come. Joel Bainerman has suggested that Bush hoped for Iranian help in freeing the hostages held by Iranian backed groups in Lebanon in 1988. So there were profitable deals to be done in the immediate future, and of course there is the long-standing interest the oil community, precisely George Bush’s background, has always had in Iranian and Caspian oil. Unfortunately extreme though Khomeni was, then Iranian Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi represented a more hard-line anti-US faction. Guys with whom Bush might not be able to swing deals - the same faction that is now making more moderate President Mohammad Khatami’s life difficult. So the question is whether if Khomeni failed to deliver the “blood revenge” required by custom he might not have been replaced by the more hard-line faction. (It would be interesting to know what someone knowledgeable about US/Iran relations would say about this - but frank apologists like Gary Sick or Robin Wright have no commitment to truth, just realpolitik. Without exception they avoid comments which might imply a connection between Lockerbie and Iran - the sort of politically motivated rewriting of history that Western journalists and academics used to criticize in the Soviets.)

5. Suppose then that Iran was going to obtain “blood revenge” - Iran did not have a USS Vincennes with which to shoot down an American plane, but they had more than adequate capability to get a bomb on an American airplane - even if it took many attempts. If so, Reagan/Bush, presuming they wished to maximize their ability to continue making deals with Iran, could play either of two options - let the score get settled whenever and wherever the Iranians chose - ie succeeded in getting a bomb on a plane - or striking a deal to be warned, and to turn a blind eye. The information would only be used to make sure that the sacrificed plane carried “expendable” people - not State Department employees, government officials of any country with an intelligence service that might expose the “deal”, or dependents of government officials, and not a fully loaded 747 (which would have carried 300-500 people) but just the minimum number needed to satisfy Iran. That is a precise description of Pan Am 103 - despite being the US flag carrier, normally used by the State Department, returning to the US at peak travel time 3 days before Christmas - as some have said “a remarkable coincidence”. 
 

What do I mean by “non-expendable people”? In a general way all of the State Department people who would ordinarily have been booked on a flight from Europe to the US three days before Christmas. Those people where "non-expendable" not because they were particularly important but because they presumably had friends and even spouses who worked in the State Department, and while State Department people can in general be counted on to be team players and not to leak information about the warnings the State Department had (which came out later) or what I believe was quite treacherous behavior - they could not be counted on not to be uncooperative if their immediate friends or family were sacrificed. And those are the people who would have access and ability to leak awkward material - as the Germans did later in 1989. A particular example of the kind of thing that the State Department wanted to avoid can be seen in John F. Root - whose wife was killed - and he was quite unwilling to be quiet, in fact downright disruptive, persisted in asking James A.Baker III all sorts of awkward questions in unpolitic circumstances. Root was a lawyer, but he was no more unbalanced than many of the people in the State Department would have been if “the firm” had patched up a little glitch by sacrificing their spouse or child. Root was only the son of a former State Department employee and did not actually have access to any information. He is a good example of what could have happened if State Department employees had been treated as "expendable". Pan Am 103 was loaded with 259 people who did not present that kind of risk.
 

6. What would this deal have looked like to the inner Reagan/Bush circle in October 1998 ? Pretty good, so long as it was kept secret and deniable. The only precedent in 1988 as to how the job would look if done by a reasonably competent professional - presumably what could be hired for $10 million - was the Air-India Flight 192 lost over the Irish Sea in 1985. (And as a worst case nightmare if the Iranians simply struck were they could it might be as costly as the the August 1985 Japan Air Lines 747 accident, which killed 520 people). Almost no forensic evidence was recovered from the Air India crash at sea - and though it is generally accepted that it was a bombing - the perpetrators have never been apprehended and it can be argued that even the fact that it was a bombing remains a circumstantial conclusion some 13 years later (see Allan Edwards, Flights to Oblivion, p 162, where he comments that as of 1993 there Air India bombing was still listed as a “structural failure” by civil aviation authorities. Strangely, this was precisely the term used by Oliver Revell - 5 days after the Pan Am bombing. I think that the identical terminology is significant.) This I submit was what Pan Am 103 was supposed to look like. 
Both Pan Am and Oliver Revell were primed for the story that it was “either structural failure or a bomb”. In fact there was the completely unpredictable turn that take off from Heathrow was delayed by an hour, the plane took a longer than usual course over dry land, reaching the preset altitude over Lockerbie, and resulting in all of that awkward evidence for examination - the one thing that Revell and company did not expect, a large amount of forensically examinable material. Five days after the bombing “Eric Newton, a leading British air-disaster expert, said yesterday that he was surprised that no physical evidence has been found. In a phone interview, he said that if an explosive device was involved in the Pan Am disaster, investigators would have been expected to have uncovered some indication by now”(Newsday December 26, 1988) - the last thing in the world that the Air India would have suggested would be available. My belief is that Revell’s statement in the Newsday article, 5 days after the crash, that there was no evidence of a bomb and that it appeared to be “structural failure” was a last attempt to stick to the comment that would have been irrefutable if the plane had only exploded, like the Air India flight, over the sea. Much of what has transpired subsequently has had to do with finding a culprit on whom to lay the blame - the only country that could not be blamed was Iran - since I am suggesting that the highest priority for Reagan,Bush, and their obliging servant Revell was to smooth out relations with Iran. The Libyans had it laid at their doorstep. Will Iran, the US or the UK let Al Megrahi and Khalifa appear alive in court? The US and UK intransigence on venue would suggest not. On one hand I do not think anyone has produced any evidence that this was primarily the Libyan’s doing - but I don’t think that if at the last moment for example a PFLP-GC/Ahmed Jibril operation ran into trouble it is impossible that Libyan intelligence agents might have given them a hand. In the real world Western intelligence services would probably cooperated with each other, against say the Russians or East Germans, and it is unlikely that Thatcher, Bush, or to continue the analogue Khaddaffi would have been consulted.

7. If this scenario is what happened it explains a lot - the US secrecy and failure to have any inquiry into how the US intelligence services failed to protect against what is the largest killing of American civilians by what even the US acknowledges was a foreign government. It is a stark contrast - Clinton’s sex life, the failure of the CIA to predict the Indian nuclear tests, and the Khobar towers terrorist attack - which killed all of 19 soldiers (although the NY Times 6/21/98 seems to suggest that out of deference to Iran this investigation is being stopped by the US State Department) - all have received much closer scrutiny both officially and by the press than Lockerbie. No US journalist has written anything on this obvious aspect of the case. All of the important pieces of information have been leaked in Germany, repeated in the UK press, and early on, finally reluctantly reported in the US press. In the last several years (since about 1995) relevant items don’t even get into the US press - the Channel 4 revelation about Revell’s son, the information about Thurman, and recently the questions raised by Edwin Bollier. It seems a strange cascade of information about something that even US journalists seem reluctantly to admit was an attack on the US. Well maybe it was not an attack in the usual sense, but very astute, politically useful if treacherous betrayal - that went slightly wrong.

This, not the carrying on about Palestinian, Syrian or Libyan “foot-soldiers” is the real issue. What US journalists like Robin
Wright and Shaul Bakhash (Foreign Policy, Fall,1997) along with editorials in the WSJ, and the writings of Gary Sick make clear why Iran has too big a market and has too many petrodollars to isolate or ignore and that was true in 1988. Even then Iran was too important to hold accountable and Texan oilman George Bush switched blame to Syria as part of his inauguration and later, in the interests of the Gulf War, to that most convenient scapegoat Libya, were it rests today. In fact it was a clever strategy - Libya will never turn over the agents - the Iranians, British and Americans would be lining up to make sure that they never appeared in court - which would risk upsetting the mutually beneficial and improving relations between Iran and the US, and so long as there is a pending criminal case, the US can deny anyone access to any information, indefinitely.

IS OLIVER REVELL THE “HANDS ON” AMERICAN CULPRIT ? 

Oliver Revell was executive assistant director of the FBI and the man responsible for counter-terrorism in 1988. Something that seems to have escaped - can that be ? all journalists who have ever written on Pan Am 103 is that Revell was already involved in defending the Reagan/Bush camp in connection with the Iran-Contra affair in 1986(Nation, 7/18/87). Revell was certainly one of the people in the best position to know the aims of Iranian backed terrorists, and if our government had an interest in stopping them, Revell would have been a key player. When in October 1988 the German police apprehended terrorist who may have actually planned the Lockerbie bombing Revell must have been aware and he subsequently referred to it as the “bumbling of the German police”. In October 1988 the FAA inspected the security facilities of Pan Am in Frankfurt(NYT 9/17/89). Our government had the best available account of what security there could or could not be expected to deal with - in the same month that Revell was looking at photographs of the barometrically triggered bomb taken from PFLP-GC terrorists in Frankfurt. In that light it is interesting that much of what has ever been reported in the US media about US Government activities in relation to Pan Am 103 and Lockerbie came from Revell. In 1995 Revell appears to have acknowledged in print that his own son was scheduled to travel home on leave for Christmas on Pan Am 103 and unexpectedly had his trip moved back by two weeks, saving him from the ill-fated flight (Living Marxism issue 81, July/August 1995 - that is how far out the press has to be to do anything but tote the State Department line on Pan Am 103!). The US government had received the famous Helsinki warning on December 5, two days before young Revell's leave was moved up. This is the same warning which was disseminated to US embassies across Europe and then declared a hoax after FBI agents, Revell's subordinates, paid a visit to Helsinki (Washington Post, 1/6/89). In nine years no journalist in the US has gotten into print examining the Pan Am 103 investigation without using Revell as a source, and not surprisingly these connections have never been noted. 

A review of Revell’s statements to the press - with the hindsight of what we know now was the real state of knowledge at the time he made statements to the press, as well as Revell's own actions are revealing.

1) Los Angeles Times 1/ 14/ 1987, 
“SAID IT COULD BLOW LID OFF ARMS DEAL; 
NORTH WARNING TO FBI ON PROBE OF AIRLINE ALLEGED” 
By Ronald J. Ostrow, Times Staff Writer 

“Lt. Col. Oliver L. North warned the FBI in early October that its investigation of Southern Air Transport, a former CIA company then linked to arms deliveries to the Nicaraguan contras, could blow the lid off secret U.S. arms shipments to Iran, government officials said Tuesday. 

On Oct. 8, shortly after the crash in Nicaragua of an American plane carrying supplies to the contras, North telephoned OLIVER B. (BUCK) REVELL,executive assistant director of the FBI in charge of investigations, to caution him about the FBI's investigation of Southern Air Transport. 

North reminded Revell that an anti-terrorism task force on which they both served had been told the previous summer of the Iran arms sales, sources said.”

> this is one of many published items indicating Revell involvement with the Iran-Contra group - available to any interested journalists who subsequently used Revell as a source on Pan Am 103 (that includes Robin Wright and Ostrow himself, LA Times 5/12/89).

2) Newsday December 26, 1988, 
Bomb Theory Questioned; No evidence at site of plane crash 
BY:Peter Marks. Newsday Staff Correspondent 
DATELINE: Lockerbie, Scotland 

A top FBI official said yesterday that authorities have not found any physical evidence that sabotage led to Wednesday's crash of a Pan Am Boeing 747 jet, killing all 258 passengers and crew and at least 11 villagers. 

The remarks on U.S. Television by OLIVER REVELL, executive assistant director of the FBI, supported recent statements by local officials who say they have yet to find any evidence of a bomb among the wreckage, strewn over more than 100 square miles of southern Scotland. 

Eric Newton, a leading British air-disaster expert, said yesterday that he was surprised that no physical evidence has been found. In a phone interview, he said that if an explosive device was involved in the Pan Am disaster, investigators would have been expected to have uncovered some
indication by now. 

"If there was a large bomb - to bring this aircraft down, you must have a large bomb - I would think they would have found some physical evidence by now," said Newton, who led great Britain's investigation of the 1985 crash of an Air-India boeing 747 into the Irish sea. Three hundred twenty-nine persons were killed. 

REVELL was asked on CBS-TV's "Face The Nation" yesterday about the recent assertions by Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens that there had been solid intelligence gathered about a planned terrorist attack on a Pan Am jet. Arens made the comment after it was reported that the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki received a telephone warning DEC. 5 about a possible attack on a Pan Am airliner. The call later was identified to be a hoax. 

"To my knowledge, we know everything they know," Revell said, referring to Israeli officials. "We have nothing that would indicate that." 

He also disputed published reports that the CIA's Beirut station chief was aboard the jet. On Saturday, two unnamed U.S. officials had told The Associated Press that the unidentified station chief was aboard the plane. One of those two officials told the AP again yesterday that despite Revell's denial, the station chief was on the Pan Am flight. 

The State Department has confirmed that three of its employees, including a security officer and a political officer in Beirut, were killed in the crash. The CIA often gives its operatives State Department jobs as a cover. 

> We now know that US agents and helicopters were all over the Lockerbie crash site within 2 hours of the bombing( Mr. Tam Dalyell, UK Parliament Commons,7/23/97) . Revell’s statement that after 5 days of examining the wreckage there was no “evidence that sabotage” would seem, in the absence of a credible explaination of why his information seemed to lag days behind UK air-disaster experts, to be an outright lie - and one may speculate that he was still considering whether a suggestion of “structural failure” might still be plausible. I would suggest that had Pan Am 103 gone down over the sea - as it would have if it had taken off on time, and perhaps as Revell anticipated, it would remain like Air India 192 - twelve years later not unequivocally proven to be a bombing. I can say from personal experience that on the night of Dec. 21, 1988 Pan Am personnel were ascribing the crash to “a bomb or structural failure”. It would be another 9 years before TWA 800 - the first midair explosion of a Boeing 747 for reasons of “structural failure”, of a rather different sort. Even after Pan Am 103 the idea of a midair disintegration of a 747 was a difficult story to sell - in 1988 it was without precident, but it was a feeble attempt to preserve the Bush byword - deniability. In addition to surveying the wreckage it is believed that the US agents who arrived within hours at Lockerbie were looking for the possessions of the Gannon, McKee and other CIA agents on board. On this point too one must wonder if, 5 days later, Revell was again lying. Both David Halevy and Sam Katz suggest that the Israeli’s may indeed have prior information relating to the Iranian plan - and they both blame Ahmed Jibril, Syria and Iran; there is no suggestion that this was not available to US intelligence agencies. Finally we know that Revell own son had rebooked off Pan Am 103 two days after the “hoax” Helsinki warning.
 

3) The Washington Post 1/ 6,/ 1989,
Finns Convinced Call About Pan Am Bombing Was Grisly Hoax 
BY: Edward Cody, Washington Post Foreign Service 
“Washington immediately after the Dec. 21 crash DISPATCHED FBI AGENTS TO HELSINKI to
monitor yet another Finnish investigation into the telephone warnings -- the fifth since January 1988. By this time, a senior Finnish security official said, police here knew the target of the denunciations well and were fairly certain they also knew the identity of the caller. . . . 

The fact that the Dec. 5 denunciation to the U.S. Embassy was tantalizingly close to what actually occurred over Scotland two weeks later, the Finnish official declared, seems to have been only "an unhappy coincidence" in which a hoax ran parallel to an actual event. . . . The FBI has announced that it accepts the Finnish conclusions.” 

> so these are Revell’s subordinates who after the event, and after the dissemination of the warnings to US embassies in Europe, and perhaps even Revell’s use of the information to save his son - visit Helsinki and announce that the warnings are a “hoax”. Steve Emerson strongly supports the contention in his book and derides the unwillingness of family members to accept it as a coincidence. Interestingly convicted PFLP-GC bombmaker, Abu Talb subsequently turned up in Scandinavia - specifically Sweden. It is only worth noting that that a lot rested for the US government and for Revell personally - that the warning disseminated to European embassies and received two days before the fortuitous change in Revell’s son’s flight plans be a “hoax”. His minions returned with the “right” answer.
 

“Oliver 'Buck' Revell, leader of the FBI investigation, was asked how it was that Revell's own son had so luckily escaped flying on Flight 103, when he had been booked on it. The film claims that key personnel knew there was a bomb on the flight and canceled their bookings. . . . .His alibi for his son's escape was that he had been given leave two weeks earlier than planned, and so missed the fateful flight. Everybody agreed it was a fortunate coincidence. “
Reproduced from Channel 4 /Hemar Enterprises, London/ Living Marxism issue 81, July/August 1995

>interestingly this story never appeared in the US or even interested US journalists - yet if it were untrue the UK is a notoriously easy country to sue for libel - but inquires to both
LM and Channel 4 have not revealed that the item was ever disputed. A participant indicated that in addition to the story as written young Revell was on leave from US military. An assistant director of the FBI would not have to do much to get leave shifted.

Revell deserves close scrutiny because he was the right man in the right place at the right time. He was the top FBI anti-terrorism officer between July 1988 and December. All of those photographs from the BKA and the Helsinki warnings (and who knows what else) would have gone through him. And he was the Iran-Contra crowds top man in the FBI. So if they saw their interests best served by “turning a blind eye” - Oliver “Buck” Revell was the man to take care of the details. It is only the final twist that he appears to have used the information to get his own son off Pan Am 103. And it seems blackly ironic that Revell was then the man to - as he says himself - conduct the investigation into the Pan Am 103 bombing, and dole out information to the press. His life was only made difficult by the unexpected bombing over dry land, and then the occasional leak of information such as “Autumn Leaves” by the West Germans when they were cross for other reasons.
 

It is not clear that Revell was the only US security agent who may have been involved (although so far he is the only one who may have used the Helsinki warning to get his own relative off the doomed plane). John Deutch, recent head of the CIA (Foreign Policy, Fall,1997) touted the interagency Counter Terrorist Center, established in 1986, as "a model of interagency cooperation" and the best type of organization to deal with international government backed “terrorism”. What did they do with the German warnings,the Helsinki warnings, the radio intercepts from Beirut(NYT 5/23/89), and the knowledge that Iran had a grievous score to settle after the U.S.S.Vincennes incident - apparently nothing. When ask, Deutch - an MIT professor and university provost, author of several hundred scholarly papers - could manage “interesting”. 
 

In nine years nothing has come to light to suggest that the US government had any interest in stopping the attack on the Pan Am airliner or doing anything but re-establishing relations with Iran, at the lowest possible cost to State Department employees. However the deed was done, a detail which is really irrelevant (and if Bush and Revell were acting like good covert operators - the last thing they would ever have wanted to know), in the absence of any evidence to the contrary the most parsimonious explaination is that the US intelligence services elected to “turn a blind eye”. And for those who wonder - well what could have been done - they should read John Newhouse’s article on Lockerbie (New Yorker 7/10/89) - informed of course by Revell - and see what the US security agencies could do with a lot less warning - if they wanted to! Ten years later I don’t think that the absolute absence of any evidence of any effort to do anything but get those
“non-expendable” people off the flight washes as a “national security” issue. The Newhouse article was full of details - and surely ten years later revelation of any of those extra precautions that which if they existed in the Pan Am 103 situation were so unsuccessful, cannot still be a matter requiring total secrecy. No - the facts speak for themselves - nothing was done, because stopping the bombing was not in the real interests of Reagan, Bush, or Oliver Revell - only manipulating who got sacrificed was. (Or to turn the question around - having permitted the largest killing of American civilians by a foreign government since the WWII to occur “on their watch” - can anyone cite any damage done to Reagan, Bush, Oliver Revell, or anyone in the State Department; no, maybe just a little scrambling for “damage control”, but nothing more.)

Nor is Revell the only US government spokesman who appears to have misleaded the press.

Consider (Washington Post 4/26/1992)
"At the time of the indictment[of Libya], Assistant Attorney General Robert S. Mueller III said that "we have no evidence linking Syria to this bombing. We have no evidence linking Iran to this bombing."

but at the same time

http://www.halcyon.com/blackbox/hw/panam103.txt
Lockerbie bomb link to Iranian reported
U.S. spy agency document revealed
Seattle Times, 24 January 1995, LONDON - A U.S. National Security Agency report says the deadly 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was financed by a former Iranian interior minister...Ayatollah Ali Akbar Mohtashemi paid $10 million in cash and gold to have the bombing carried out.. . . . the agency's report was written during the 1991 Gulf War.

> There is certainly a conflict buried here. In the absence of some convincing evidence that Robert S. Mueller
III, was issuing an indictment without knowing about the 1991 NSA report of a year earlier, not a very likely suggestion for a DoJ Assistant Attorney involved in preparing this indictment, one must wonder if this was simple bald faced lying.

However since all that has appeared in the US press was in the Seattle Times article in 1995, “The Guardian said the agency's report was written during the 1991 Gulf War and was declassified after a Freedom of Information Act request by lawyers representing insurers of the defunct Pan American airline”. - it is unclear what precisely happened. The lawyers declassified version of the NSA document was leaked and reported on in half a dozen English papers in 1995 but Pan Am’s lawyers presumably had the declassified version in 1992 or earlier - a year after it was prepared - since the case was lost in July 1992. Perhaps Mr.Mueller was busy indicting Libya without even enough security clearance to see the 1991 NSA report that directly contradicted him - in which case the government set him up to look like a liar, possibly better than the alternative, being one. And of course the American public did not get to hear about this for three more year - and then because it was leaked to the UK press. A perfect epitome of the US press has covered this Pan Am 103. And the document itself, even in its declassified form remains unavailable.

I think that close reading of the statements of Richard Boucher (State Department) and Samuel Skinner (Bush’s Sec’t of Transportation) when compared with the chronology of what the FBI and CIA knew about the bombings and warnings also turn out to be “damage control” - and similar incongruities and not the unvarnished truth. But this is tough work - and not something that any US journalist has undertaken.

Contrary to the plucky statement by a relative of one of the 19 service men killed at Al-Khobar "Ignoring us doesn't make us go away" - for Pan Am 103, with 5 times longer, and 25 times more people killed, all civilians, the opposite is proving true. Oliver Revell lives happily with an unblemished reputation running his security consulting firm and getting the occasional TV interview, George Bush frequently graces the pages of the NY Times, and his son is a front runner for the next Republican Presidential nomination. Basically Reagan, Bush, and Revell got away with it.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE PRESS ?

The American press - particularly the major papers have made every effort to expunge Pan Am 103, not to mention the connection with
Iran, altogether. It is politically expedient self-censorship. A high-level Iranian defector in Germany in 1997 implicated the Iranian government in initiating the Pan Am bombing and it was reported in the German press and secondarily in the English Guardian (7/14/97), but has never been mentioned at all in American papers. No one has followed up interviews with State Department personal from 1988 - how did they get home for Christmas ...were all the planes half empty and selling half price tickets - or just Pan Am 103? None of the information in the Frontline Scotland "Silence Over Lockerbie" (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5260/silence.html) or Paul Foot & John Ashton’s Guardian (7/29/1995)”Inside Story: Body Of Evidence” has ever appeared in the US press. 
Among all of the American investigative journalists who get into mainstream press in this country, not one has not one wondered in print about a connection between Bush, Iran, Oliver Revell, and an unpaid debt after the Vincennes incident? 

What happened to the Prime Time interview(11/30/89)of US Moscow Embassy Consular Assistant Karen Decker - never followed up.
ABC won’t even acknowledge requests for transcripts of that interview. Pierre Salinger describes, in his memoir “P.S.” how the UK authorities (he believes at the request of the US) got ABC to agree turn over all of his interview material in relation to Lockerbie.

And what does a professional media critic say (Steve Brill, A.J. Liebling & AJR have not touched this one - and nor has CJR except to throw one “dart” at Steve Emerson!)

The best there is the self-important mealy mouthed nonsense of Joan Deppa’s book “The Media and Disasters:Pan Am 103”- by an academic journalist no less! There are only two types of story about Pan Am 103 in the US. Deppa herself recognizes, in the introduction, that “this particular disaster was international in the ultimate sense of the word: it seemed from the outset to be aimed at an American airliner, probably in retribution for some action by the US government” but the book that follows ignores the whole question of the US government response, was it adequate, was the investigation by the US press adequate, how and why in this essentially American disaster the US press mustered nothing more than “sob stories” and mouthing the information handed to them by Reagan/Bush spokesmen like Oliver Revell. How is it that any attempts to produce stories other than the “State Department version”, especially in the US, have been stifled or quietly withdrawn. The watchdog - which is the most important role of the media functioning at its best - was muzzled from the start; how did it happen? That is the real media issue - the one that is particular to Pan Am 103. Deppa systematically devotes separate sections to every conceivable reaction, families, police, journalists, but the government, which she acknowledges is at the heart of the issue, gets a few dishwater pages late in the book that say nothing incisive or new. This is passed off as analysis.

The Pan Am bombing was not an accident - so it rarely appears as a "airline accident", and when it terrorist attacks on the US are tabulated it is generally avoided as “foreign”. It was not as Joan Deppa treats it, natural occurrence - like the Grand Forks flood, the Northridge earthquake, or even some airline disasters, but she evades issues by using the Pan Am bombing as thought it were. One a just another natural disaster is pretty much like another. She and journalists like her are an insult the very people who are fodder for their interviews and those who died at Lockerbie. Pan Am 103 was an American disaster - an American plane and largely American dead. The circumstances and number of American civilians killed is without recent precedent. To see the critical issues evaded and turned into the mush of politic rhetoric is a disgrace. Andrew Revkin (NYT 12/14/97) could not even get the year right - the type of error for which the NYT used to issue corrections (NY Times, 11/15/95) - but Lockerbie is so forgotten and unimportant that they didn't bother anymore - IT IS GOING AWAY. 
 

There are hints as to why the press has failed. One part of the explanation of why there has never been an exploration of the US intelligence agencies in relation to Lockerbie may be, by implication, a lecture by William M. Baker, the CIA's chief spokesman during the investigation of the Lockerbie bombing (NYT 2/25/89) given at Harvard University, July 27, 1989, on "Restraining the Media at the CIA" with specific examples of stories killed at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post. Joel Bainerman, who regularly gets access to mainstream press, wrote a book with a single chapter on Lockerbie and suggested that covert Bush deal gone bad might have contributed to Lockerbie; he had to settle for a house with standards barely above that of a comic book publisher because "I took it to many, all turned it down, most saying they were worried about getting sued". Its a far from flawless book, but is densely referenced, and actually says very little that had not been published elsewhere. Its value is really as a compendium of scattered items in the press, but whether it says anything so scabrous that it would have produced a lawsuit is arguable. 

And there is the response of a former US Attorney General - outside the time frame of Lockerbie - who expressed the pious hope that even FBI and CIA agents were "cold blooded but not that cold blooded",that he doubted my suggestion but felt it could not be proved or disproved, and most important - that “even if it were true, it is highly unlikely that this could ever be established by the evidence: in that event, the interests of the U.S. government in suppressing the facts would be enormous” - and he cited a case in which involved only a single death but in which he felt this had happened. And this appears to be precisely what has happened in relation to Lockerbie. Certainly, as many people have noted the the UK and the US have for 10 years made sure that no evidence of what went on in any part of the either governments in connection with Lockerbie has ever surfaced. I believe the former AG knew what he was talk

posted 06-29-98 10:43 AM EDT (US) 

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former AG knew what he was talking about - but perhaps underrated just how cold blooded Reagan/Bush henchmen might be. 

But journalists are not lawyers and they are allowed to speculate - within the bounds of not saying what they know to be false or with “reckless disregard for the truth”. It is long overdue that a good hard look at the circumstantial evidence - an unsentimental, unbiased, and yes even unpatriotic look, be taken at the big picture and ask whose interests were served, who stood to profit and who to loose, and see where it points.
 

I contend that, contrary to a reasonable but unthinking first response, the ugly truth, the one that like the “emperors new cloths” no one has spoken, is that Bush, the Iran-Contra crowd, and Oliver Revell had something specific to gain from not preventing the Pan Am 103 bombing, and they made sure that they had nothing to loose. But after almost 10 years all that has appeared are the “interview the sobbing relatives” stories and the “whodunit story” overdone and repeated without end. By contrast there has not been a single article examining the role of the US government in relation to Lockerbie. Even the "whodunit" stories have almost without exception been the “US State Department version” (which has shifted with the political winds). The only reporting - good or bad, has appeared in fringe press in Europe and the unverifiable mire of the internet. Is Steve Emerson (3/18/90) and John Newhouse (New Yorker 7/10/89) taking dog biscuits from Oliver Revell really the best that American journalism can manage? Is there simply a hierarchy of government scandals - the “Monica” cases - which are utterly inconsequential, and can get covered to death, events like Watergate, which was in substance relatively minor and might have been avoided if Nixon had spent less time covering up and a bit more time polishing his relations with the press, and affairs like the "October Surprise" and "Iran-Contra", which appear to have involved real malfeasance - things which if true ought to have produced jail time, but in fact did not cost lives or do real damage (except to the naive persons mistaken faith in the government). And then there are scandals like the Inslaw affair, which may have cost Danny Casolaro his life, or the American contribution to the "dirty wars" in Central America, in which there are strong arguements have been made that inconvenient Americans seem have been killed by "assets" on the payroll of the CIA, - and the coverage for these becomes progressively smaller. Pan Am 103, which may have involved US officials winking at the killing of 270 civilians, looks like a plan that went unpredictably slightly wrong - or we would know even less about it - may be simply too ugly for any respectable journalist or editor.
 

The issue of “the Libyan’s” is a distraction. American press has refused to even carry the European news items which suggest that what little of the American evidence is known may be “doctored”("Silence Over Lockerbie"FRONTLINE SCOTLAND
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5260/silence.html). It is not necessary to agree - but that the US press would not even mention the items is simply pusillanimous. Whoever actually planted the Lockerbie bomb was a “foot-soldier”. According to the US State Department in it's current version it was two men who were members of the Libyan intelligence service. Carrying on about turning them over for trial is hypocritical nonsense or a foolish distraction. Would we turn over similar agents to a foreign government - we gave Capt Will Rogers III of the USS Vincennes, who shot down an Iranian Airbus and killed 290 civilians, a medal of merit (for the period of service, not for the incident, LA times;5/28/89). Was that sailor on the USS Vincennes who pushed a button and sent an Aegis miss

posted 06-29-98 10:46 AM EDT (US) 

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Aegis missile off to blow up an unarmed Airbus somehow braver than the terrorist who planted the bomb on Pan Am 103 - I think not - neither was particularly brave. Such talk is just a lot of nationalistic grandstanding. The US uses the high tech weapons at its disposal and lesser countries make do with what they have. “Fair play” is a term that belongs in the schoolyard and has nothing to do with actions like these. Meantime it is difficult to imagine that the US or Britain would like to have “the Libyans” in court, or that Iran would let them appear alive in such a forum considering the potential damage to the gradually thawing relations with that country. The interests of the US, the UK, Syria and Iran are all best served by the permanent legal stalemate that has been carefully preserved. (And it looks like the Al-Khobar investigation is going the same way, for somewhat the same reasons - NY Times 6/21/98).

Perhaps the most telling quote is from the Foot/Ashton Guardian (7/29/95) article - when a member of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism is quoted as telling one of the British relatives “Your government and our government knows what happened at Lockerbie. But they are not going to tell you”. That is the challenge the US press should have responded to in this unprecedented American disaster - and in 10 years, and perhaps to its eternal shame, it has failed utterly and miserably.

posted 01-27-99 03:00 PM EDT (US) 

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Well we now have Oliver Revell's dissimulation on the topic of Lockerbie ...his chapter on Lockerbie in his new book "A G-Man's Journal : A Legendary Career Inside the

Revell simply pretends that the multiple warnings in November and December 1988 just did not happen. There is every reason to suppose that not only did they go to the US
security agencies (that's what the media said) but that they went through Revell's office. The warnings were described with pictures in Newsweek 4/27/89 and in NY Times
4/18/90. Revell says that such warnings are too numerous to act on ... just to pass to the embassies etc. Nobody has suggested that there are more than 12 - 24 per year of
similar seriousness - not the "hundreds" that Revell throws around. Word and number magic are a Revell specialty ...Lockerbie is a "tragedy" ... nevermind that there are
anti-terrorism officials in the government who have never been heard from and who should have been called to account - years ago. 

He repeats for the umpteenth time the unsubstantiated story that the Dec 5th Helsinki warning was a hoax. The odds that of a random caller - a "hoax" - correctly identifying
one of the thousands of airline flights as a bombing target by chance alone are - ridiculously small, essentially nil. "One year after Flight 103 blast, trail of evidence leads to
Sweden" - Chicago Trib 12/25/89. Abu Talb - initially identified by the shopkeepers in Malta - now its the Libyans - was arrested in Sweden. Did a little coaching from the
investigators Revell is so proud of mould this into something useful in 1992 ?

But the hoax is an idea that makes Revell's story more attractive since it suggests that the warnings which were passed to the embassies (- and possibly to Revell's son Chris ?)
but not to those "unimportant people" was ok - it was a hoax after all. 

In a discussion in 1995 Revell said that his son escaped because he changed his PA 103 booking a couple of weeks before - that is 
precisely the time the Helsinki "hoax" warning - the one Revell says is unconnected - was received. In the present book Revell sanitizes this by changing to "he flew a week
earlier". More coincidence ? 

Pierre Salinger, who is savaged by Revell, was part of the ABC team that got out a little truth - Consular Assistant Karen Decker saying "There was a real push in the Embassy
community to make sure that everybody was aware that there had been a terrorist threat made, and that people flying Western carriers going through such points as Frankfurt
should change their tickets" - while "law enforcement and intelligence" let those seats get filled by students. Revell was the terrorism specialist at the FBI. Lockerbie happened on his watch. Forget about warning the public - 10 years later where are those agents who acted on the warnings and tried and failed ? 

Revell simply disregards the 1992 NSA report that Iran paid more than 10 million dollars for the Lockerbie bombing, the recent debriefing of a high-level Iranian intelligence agent, Abolhassem Mesbahi (this was only reported on German TV and two Canadian papers ...not important enough for American journalists) or Washington Post,
5/11/1989,"CIA has concluded that Iran hired Palestinian faction to blow up the Pan Am Flight 103". Reagan and Bush did deals with Iran, as Iran Contra showed, and
Revell, along with Oliver North, was on the Reagan Terrorism Task Force, chaired by Bush - so Revell does not want to involve Iran; not then or now. Revell has is own
unique way of telling this story too - he was "out of the loop" - just like Bush. 

The accusation that Revell whines about, that the law enforcement or intelligence officers, or Revell himself, may have "indirectly" facilitated the bombing has nothing to do
with the lame Coleman story. That's a nice straw man; Coleman is a guy who copped a plea - his story is irrelevant and more important unsubstantiated. The real issue is the
warnings that went through Revell's office, and who knows were else in our government, and in 10 years there has never been any evidence that they were acted on - even
ineffectually. That no one has ever turned up speaks volumes about what went on; and "official bureaucratic US" profited from it royally - see the incessant complaining by American big business that they are being kept out of the Iranian gold pots. Almost 20 years of thawing US-Iran relations were jeopardized by the Vincennes shoot down; did Revell and his anti-terrorism colleagues, and the State Department take care of their own and then turning a blind eye ? 
 

Revell repeats the MEBO story - but does not acknowledge that for the last several years Bollier has said the timer fragments are NOT from the Libyan timers. Revell says "no one has ever questioned Tom Thurman's ability" - it seems unlikely that Revell is not deeply familiar with the accusations of Fredrick Whitehurst - that cast doubt on the reliability of FBI forensic labs - something that got at the heart of just the investigations that Revell is so proud of. And it was Fredrick Whitehurst who questioned Thurman's ability, in a case
that the Government settled. (Washington Post, 1/29, 1997 "A senior FBI official who helped supervise the crime scenes after the bombings of the Oklahoma City federal
building and New York's World Trade Center was among those removed from their positions following an unusual Justice Department report that criticizes the work of the
bureau's laboratory. David Williams, Tom Thurman, unit chief of the explosives division...".) 

And just in case any journalist wonders how Revell deals with the press he brags that he threatened the BBC with a libel suit when he did not like the turn of their questions.