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The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terrorby David Hoffman Copyright © 1998 David Hoffman Published online with the irrevocable permission of the author to republish with attribution on a non-profit basis. (See: http://www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt.htm ) " The covert operators that I ran with would blow up a 747 with 300 people to kill one person. They are total sociopaths with no conscience whatsoever." - Former Pentagon CID Investigator Gene Wheaton On 21 December 1988, Pan Am flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland. 270 people died. Minutes before flight 103 took off from London's Heathrow airport, FBI Assistant Director Oliver 'Buck' Revell took his son and daughter-in-law off the plane. (1) Revell was an associate of Lt. Colonel Oliver North who was linked to Iran-Contra. (2) North ‘was a business associate of Syrian arms and drug runner Monzer al-Kassar.’ (3) Al-Kassar was closely linked with Rifat Assad, brother of Syrian ruler Hafez Assad. Rifat ‘was married to the sister of Ali Issa Dubah, chief of Syrian intelligence, who, along with the Syrian army, controlled most of the opium production in Lebanon's Bekka Valley.’ (4) Reportedly, al-Kassar was involved in shipping heroin from Lebanon into the USA.Reportedly, al-Kassar's drug route to the United States was protected by the CIA. (5) The American Drug Enforcement Agency "was already using Pan Am flights out of Frankfort, Germany, for ‘controlled delivery’ shipments of heroin." (5) A team led by Major Charles McKee of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Matthew Gannon, the CIA's Deputy Station Chief in Beirut, traveled to Lebanon to try to get some hostages released. (6) According to Juval Aviv, the Lockerbie investigator for Pan Am, McKee's team discovered the illegal CIA drug operation and refused to participate. According to Aviv, McKee contacted the CIA headquarters but got no reply. McKee and Gannon, ‘against orders... decided to fly home to blow the whistle.’ According to Aviv: 'They had communicated back to Langley the facts and names, and reported their film of the hostage locations. CIA did nothing. No reply. The team was outraged, believing that its rescue and their lives would be endangered by the double dealing. 'By mid-December the team became frustrated and angry and made plans to return to the U.S. with their photos and evidence to inform the government, and to publicize their findings if the government covered up.' Reportedly Ahmed Jibril (founder and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command ) had a base near Frankfort. Reportedly, Jibril had links to al-Kassar. Reportedly bomb maker Marwan Abdel Razzack Khreeshat was part of Jibril’s cell. On 26 October Khreesat was arrested and one of his bombs seized. Then Khreesat was mysteriously released. (7) Former CIA agent Oswald Le Winter stated, "…pressure had come from Bonn… from the U.S. Embassy in Bonn… to release Khreesat." (8) Reportedly, Khreesat worked for U.S. intelligence. (9) Allegedly, one of Khreesat's bombs was used to bring down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie. McKee, Gannon and five other members of their team were killed when Pan Am flight 103 came down over Lockerbie. ? (10, 11) After the crashA member of a mountain rescue team said: "We arrived within two hours . We found Americans already there." (12)
According to George Stobbs, a Lockerbie police inspector, "I started to set up a control room, and eleven o'clock and midnight, there was a member of the FBI in the office who came in, introduced herself to me, and sat down — and just sat there the rest of the night. That was it." (13)
Tom Dalyell, a member of British Parliament, stated: "…Absolutely swarms of Americans (were) fiddling with the bodies, and shall we say tampering with those things the police were carefully checking themselves. They weren't pretending, saying they were from the FBI or CIA, they were just 'Americans' who seemed to arrive very quickly on the scene."
Dalyell recalled: "It was… odd and strange that so many people should be involved in moving bodies, looking at luggage, who were not members of the investigating force. What were they looking for so carefully? You know, this was not just searching carefully for loved ones. It was far more than that. It was careful examination of luggage and indeed bodies." (14)
Dr. David Fieldhouse, the local police surgeon, identified Major McKee's body. "I knew that (the identification of) McKee was absolutely correct because of the clothing which correlated closely with the other reports and statements, and the computers that were linked up to Washington." (14)
Jim Wilson, local farmer, told relatives of Pan Am victims that he was present "when the drugs were found." Wilson discovered a suitcase packed with heroin in one of his fields.
One Scottish police officer said that his department had been told to keep an eye out for the drugs early on. He also overheard American personnel say that there was a drug courier on the plane — Khalid Jaffar — one of the Lebanese informants used by the DEA. (15)
Sources and notes:
1. Paul Hudson, head of U.S. Pan Am survivors group, interview with author.
2. North contacted Meese through Admiral Poindexter. Meese informed Revell, who called Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Mark Richard, and told him: "Please get on top of this; Jensen is giving a heads up to the NSC. Deposition of Mark M. Richard before the Joint Congressional Committees, 8/19/87, quoted in Christic, Op Cit.; Jensen is Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen; Kellner is Attorney General Leon Kellner. The rest of the conversation went as follows: "Call Kellner, find out what is up, and advise him that decision should be run by you"; Cockburn, Op Cit., p. 136.
3. As investigative journalist Joel Bainerman writes: Officials said that Al-Kassar maintained offices in Warsaw and was a major broker of the Polish-owned weapons company, Cenzin. The first arms purchase by North from al-Kassar totaling $1 million was sent by boat to an unidentified Caribbean port in the Fall of l985 and was later distributed to the Contra fighters. In April of that year, a second shipment of Polish arms was sold to the CIA as part of this transaction. (Los Angeles Times, 7/17/87, quoted in Joel Bainerman, "Bush Administration's Involvement in Bombing Pan Am 103," Portland Free Press, May/June, 1997. See Bainerman's book, The Crimes of a President, SPI Books, 1992, regarding the illegal deals of George Bush). In another part of the deal, more than $42 million was laundered through BCCI accounts in the Cayman Islands. Al-Kassar earned more than $1 million. Private Eye, 10/25/9l, quoted in Ibid.)
4. Administration officials who discussed these deals said Al-Kassar had clear business links with Abu Nidal's organization, Los Angeles Times, 7/17/87.
5. Jim Berwick, a Pan Am security consultant in London, told Francovich, "An HM Customs officer involved in the investigation of narcotics, left a message for me. I subsequently contacted him and met with him and he advised me that he had been in Frankfort and had been at a meeting of drug enforcement agents in Germany, America and Britain, and that it was well known and discussed at that meeting that Pan Am was the airline that was being used as a drug conduit."
6. According to a special report in Time (April 27, 1992), COREA used the following front companies for its overseas operations: Sevens Mantra Corp., AMA Industries, Wilderwood Video and Condor Television Ltd. The report revealed that Condor did its banking through the First American Bank, a subsidiary of BCCI. (Bainerman, Op Cit. )
7. One interesting piece of evidence was a call to Damascus, Syria, intercepted by authorities, in which Khreesat stated: "I have made some changes to the medicine. It is better and stronger."
8. Pritchard, Op Cit.
9. This also raises the issue of whether Abraham Ahmed, who was released from custody after his mysteriously-timed departure from the U.S. after the Oklahoma City bombing, was an operative of the U.S. Government.
10. Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman, On the Trail of the Octopus (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, LTD., 1993), pp. 143, 201.
11. PBS Frontline investigators believe that the intelligence officers were "a strong secondary target."
12. As British journalist David Ben-Aryeah reported: "Very strange people were at work very early on. Within a matter of three hours there were American accents heard in the town. Over that night there were large numbers, by which I mean twenty, twenty-five, thirty people arrived.…" (Franckovich, Op Cit.)
13. As investigator and former law-enforcement officer Craig Roberts points out in The Medussa File: "The unusual activity of this alleged "FBI" agent is striking, but not quite as odd as the fact that Lockerbie is over 350 miles from London, which is the nearest point an American FBI agent might be. To reach Lockerbie that night from London, even if traveling by air, would have taken far more than one hour considering the sequence of events that would have had to occur. Assuming a timely notification, an American agent in London would have had to have been tracked down considering the late hour, notified to pack up for an investigation, rush to Heathrow, board a waiting airplane, fly immediately to the nearest airport that could land a jet transport, obtain ground transportation from there to Lockerbie, then locate the command center. An effort that would require four to six hours at the minimum."
14. J.D. Reed, "Wednesday, April 19, 1995: A Black Day for All of Us," Workin' Interest, Vol. 96, Issue No. 3.
15. The Jaffar clan had been at the center of the opium production in the Bekka Valley for years.
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2007/06/lockerbie-drugs-and-cia.html
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