Terror In the Night

By William E. Smith

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.

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/London, with other bureaus