Terrorism Late Alarums, Failed Alerts

By Jill Smolowe

Just what do governments owe the traveling public by way of warnings against possible terrorist attacks? A lot, say families of the victims killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Scotland by a bomb on the night of Dec. 21. In the wake of new disclosures last week suggesting that authorities on both sides of the Atlantic had received several detailed and credible | alerts of a terrorist threat, many relatives want to know exactly what American and British transport officials knew -- and when they knew it. And then they want to know why nothing was done about it.

Controversy over the ill-fated flight revived when London's Daily Mail obtained a memo from the British Ministry of Transport dated Dec. 19. The alert warned British airlines and airports and some foreign carriers of a new type of terrorist bomb, packed with the Czechoslovak-made explosive Semtex, that could be hidden in a radio-cassette player. The memo contained an elaborate list of clues for detecting such devices, including the failure of the cassette player to function normally and more wiring than usual for a portable player. "Its sophistication, and the effort taken to conceal it," said the warning, "suggest it could have been intended for use against an aviation target in support of a 'high risk' operation."

The bomb that was detonated two days later aboard Flight 103 is thought to be similar to the one detailed in the memo. The British bulletin was also distributed to U.S. airlines, but because the packet of information included a color photograph, it had to be sent by mail. A Pan Am spokeswoman said last week that that warning did not reach the company's London office until Jan. 17.

The British disclosure of the hitherto unpublicized memo prompted a belated admission by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that almost identical alerts had been circulated to American airlines for more than a month before the December warning. On Nov. 18 an "aviation security bulletin" urged airlines to be on the lookout for explosive-packed cassette recorders, painstakingly describing the "Toshiba bomb." On Nov. 22 the British issued a similar alert, but only to British airlines and airports.

As relatives of the Flight 103 victims know only too well, even those warnings were not the first. In October, West German police arrested a member of a Syrian-backed guerrilla group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and discovered a Toshiba Boombeat Model 453 radio- cassette player fitted with explosives and a barometric device designed to explode at high altitudes. In the first week of November, the West Germans held a conference in Wiesbaden to distribute information about the construction of the bomb. Security specialists from Britain and the rest of Europe attended.

On Dec. 9 there was another warning, this one from the FAA. The reason: four days earlier, the U.S. embassy in Helsinki had received an anonymous phone call from a person with a Middle Eastern accent. The tipster stated that a man named Abdullah planned to pass a device to a female Finnish passenger, who would unwittingly transport it to Frankfurt, then onto a U.S.-bound craft. U.S. and Finnish authorities dismissed the message because the caller was a known hoaxer.

The Daily Mail's disclosure caused something of a feeding frenzy among some other newspapers. At week's end there were rampant reports that British authorities had identified those responsible for causing the explosion aboard Flight 103 and were on the verge of making an arrest. Those reports were dismissed by a government official as "total nonsense."

Looking back, British opposition politicians were critical of the authorities' apparent lack of response to the warning. They indignantly demanded an investigation. Among the questions they wanted answered: Was a cover-up under way to protect the Thatcher government? Huffed Frank Dobson, shadow leader of the House of Commons: "When is the Secretary of State ((for transport)) going to come to the House and tell us the truth and the whole truth for the first time?"

Despite the accusations of irresponsibility involved in this particular case, the larger question remains unanswered. As the FAA noted in December, it and the airlines constantly receive terrorist threats. To publish them all would effectively halt air travel and give the terrorists an unprecedented victory.

With reporting by Anne Constable/London and Jay Peterzell/Washington