The Lockerbie bombing, which brought down Pan Am 103 and killed 270 people, is one of the most disturbing events in modern British history. In this episode we look at the bombing itself, the aftermath and criminal investigation, the bizarre pivot from suspecting Iranian-backed Palestinians to blaming Gaddafi’s Libyans, the absurd trial and some of the theories around what actually happened. We also look at a recent TV dramatisation of Jim Swire, the father of one of the victims who has spent decades seeking the truth about Lockerbie. And what the hell does all this have to do with Iran-Contra?

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On the night of December 21st 1988, a Pan Am Boeing 747 on its way from Heathrow to New York exploded in mid-air over the small town of Lockerbie, in Scotland. Shortly after 7pm parts of Pan Am 103 along with the bodies of 16 crew and 243 passengers began raining down on Lockerbie, in what has to be the most grisly, horrifying thing that ever happened there. The remainder of the plane came down in the town, smashing through houses and into a petrol station, which exploded. 11 people on the ground along with all 259 people on board were killed.

This disaster happened when I was a young child and I don’t remember much about it from the time, but it was the worst terrorist attack in British history. 270 deaths is more than any attack by ISIS or Al Qaeda sympathisers, suffragettes, Fenians, anarchists, Loyalists, Republicans and whoever Guy Fawkes really was.

As with the majority of major crimes in this country, especially terrorist attacks, the investigation was a failure, and resulted in a miscarriage of justice while the real perpetrators got away with it. A similar story as with the Maguire 7, the Birmingham 6, the Guildford 4, the 2005 London bombings, Judith Ward, Danny McNamee, Barry George, the Cardiff 5 and many other murderous crimes that resulted in wrongful convictions and the real killer or killers never being identified. The police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the courts themselves (including the judges and barristers) and of course the mainstream media all consistently fail when it comes to major crimes in the UK. With Lockerbie, because the plane was on its way to America and some passengers were Americans going home for Christmas, the FBI and CIA got involved, which only screwed everything up even more.

The initial suspicion was that this was an Iranian government revenge attack for the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the US Navy in July 1988, apparently due to misidentification. The theory in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had contracted the bombing to the PFLP-GC, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command – a terrorist group based in Syria.

Somehow this story disappeared and the official version became a tale of two Libyans – Abdulbaset Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, who supposedly planted the bomb on a plane in Malta. Again, the motive was revenge – Colonel Gaddafi striking back against the West in retribution for the killing of his adopted daughter in a US air strike on Libya in April 1986. This air strike was itself revenge, ordered by Ronald Reagan because he believed Gaddafi was behind the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin frequented by US soldiers. There were only 10 days between the disco bombing and the air strike, so it’s not as though Reagan even waited for a criminal investigation, he just ordered the air strike out of sheer belligerence and hostile assumption.

Megrahi and Fhimah went on trial in 2000, accused of conspiring together to carry out the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 bombing on behalf of the Libyan government. Fhimah was acquitted, but Megrahi was convicted, which made no sense to some of the journalists and bereaved family members who attended the trial, let alone the UN observer. How could the prosecution present a case where both men were guilty and had conspired together to carry out a mass murder, but the panel of judges only convicted one of them?

That was in January 2001, and Megrahi set about appealing the verdict. After 8 years in prison he was finally released and allowed to go back to Libya on compassionate grounds – he had terminal cancer, doctors felt he only had months to live. Megrahi then lived for about another three years, surviving the NATO-backed civil war of 2011 and outliving Gaddafi himself. While many refuse to believe there are any problems with his conviction, it’s abundantly clear that it was a show trial and he was fitted up by a combination of American intelligence and American and British forensic scientists.

As a result, the case remains unsolved and – like many others – probably won’t ever be solved. Just as Dr David Kelly did not kill himself and therefore must have been murdered, but his murderers remain free and possibly working as consultants for JP Morgan and/or Credit Suisse, the real murderers of the 270 Lockerbie victims have never been prosecuted. While a second Lockerbie trial is due to begin in May 2025 it is another Libyan, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, who is accused of making the bomb, and leads tending in other directions are still being ignored.

Despite this, the mountain of problems with the official story has led to mainstream journalists and many more independent journalists, historians and others seriously questioning what happened. Jim Swire, the father of one of the victims on the plane, has waged an over-30-year campaign to try to get to the truth, and co-wrote a book on his mission to get justice for the victims. This book was adapted into a TV mini-series Lockerbie: The Search for Truth, which recently broadcast on Peacock and Sky and inspired me to take another look at the case and write this episode. There is also a forthcoming BBC series telling the story of the investigation.

So, we’re going to explore this TV show, the real history of the Lockerbie bombing and some of the theories about who was actually behind the attack on Pan Am 103. I am not going to insist on any particular conclusion, except that there was a cover-up and a miscarriage of justice and that it was motivated by geopolitics. Exactly who did it, I do not claim to know.

The Lockerbie Bombing

At 9:52 on the morning of December 21st, Air Malta flight KM 180 left Malta on its way to Frankfurt, arriving at 12:41 pm. At 4:19 that afternoon, Pan Am 103 left Frankfurt, allegedly carrying a suitcase that had been put on KM 180 before it left the island. 103 stopped off at Heathrow, near London, arriving at 5:40 and leaving at 6:25 pm. 38 minutes later, while flying over Scotland the plane blew up. The explosion, disintegration of the plane in mid-air and the crash killed everyone on board, including Flora Swire, Jim Swire’s daughter, CIA officers including Matthew Gannon and DIA Major Charles McKee, who was working with the CIA in Beirut.

The wreckage covered a huge area, with the front portion of the plane along with luggage and nearly a hundred human bodies – some still in their airline seats – landing on farmland near Tundergarth, around 3 miles from the centre of Lockerbie. Within an hour or so, Americans identifying themselves as ‘crash investigators’ arrived at Tundergarth Mains and began cutting suitcases open and rifling through the belongings of dead people literally lying in the same field. Various witnesses have spoken about these mystery men, along with bizarre details, such as vertical stacks of loose coins being found on top of walls around some of the fields. The chances of coins dropping from 30,000 feet while travelling at hundreds of miles an hour and landing in neat, vertical piles on top of walls around farm fields are astonishingly low. Then there’s the story of farmer Jim Wilson, of Tundergarth Mains, who found a suitcase in his hedgerow the day after the crash. It was busted open so he looked inside and found a compartmentalised plastic pouch containing white powder, which he assumed were drugs. Jim called the police, who turned up within minutes with an American who was ‘extremely angry’, took the suitcase, handcuffed it to the wrist of one of the policeman, and left.

Leaving aside the mystery of the coins and the question of the drugs (for now), the quick arrival of the self-labelled ‘crash investigators’ that locals believed were FBI and/or CIA is very important. How could they get there so fast? Lockerbie is right in the south of Scotland, over an hour’s drive from Glasgow, the nearest obvious location for a possible CIA station or FBI office. Newcastle, in the North of England, is also too far away. Literally the only significant place I can think of that would enable you to drive to Lockerbie in less than an hour is Carlisle, North of the Lake District. But why the hell would the CIA or FBI have an office in Carlisle, of all places? The speed of these ‘investigators’ strongly suggests foreknowledge – someone knew that plane was coming down, and more or less where it would come down, and was ready.

Indeed, on December 5th the US Embassy in Helsinki sent out a warning that a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt would be bombed by the Abu Nidal organisation using a bomb in a suitcase smuggled on board by an unwitting passenger. The Abu Nidal gang was a militant, sometimes terrorist organisation who were at various times supported by the governments of Iraq, Syria, Libya and others. The Helsinki warning about a possible Abu Nidal airliner bombing was sent to US diplomatic staff all over Europe, which is suspected to be the reason why there were so many empty seats on Pan Am 103. The rumour is that embassy staffers from Germany and the UK booked flights on that plane, but never got on board, likely due to this warning. A former aide to Abu Nidal told Western media in 2002 that Nidal was behind the Lockerbie bombing, apparently attributing this to Nidal himself, who had told a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council that his gang was responsible.

A couple of weeks prior to the Helsinki warning the German authorities raided a cell of the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian terror group. They were planning bombings of large passenger planes using bombs hidden inside Toshiba ghetto blasters. Their bomb maker turned out to be a Jordanian spy, who told his handlers about the plot and they passed the information onto the US, who told the Germans, who put the Frankfurt cell under surveillance and then swooped in and busted them. While the spy – Marwan Khreesat – was told by his GID handlers to make the bombs incapable of exploding, one German technician died the following year while trying to dismantle one of Marwan’s devices.

The bombs were quite ingenious – not just because they were disguised, but because they used barometric switches, specifically designed to take down a passenger plane at cruising altitude. The problem with a conventional timer bomb is airport delays – the bomb might go off while the plane is still on the tarmac, which minimises damage and casualties and chaos. If you really want to cause trouble, blow up a plane at 30,000 feet – no one is going to survive, the plane will be completely wrecked, it will be horrifying for anyone on the ground too.

This was the idea within the PFLP-GC cell. The barometric switch reacts to air pressure – so when the plane rises after takeoff, gaining height and reaching cruising altitude, that activates the first switch. The first switch activates the 30 minute timer, and when that’s up the detonator goes off, setting off the main charge of plastic explosive and taking down the plane. It typically takes a big plane 7-10 minutes to reach cruising altitude after takeoff. Pan Am 103 blew up 38 minutes after it left Heathrow, and the bomb was hidden inside a Toshiba cassette player.

This is partly why the initial suspects were Ahmed Djibril’s PFLP-GC – because they were known to be targeting airliners, because the Toshiba bomb matched the ones found in the Frankfurt raid, because the timeline fit. A CIA summary of their involvement in the investigation, which is annoyingly redacted in key places, sums this up.

It wasn’t until nearly a year later that a Scotsman walking his dog in the area around Lockerbie found a charred, burnt piece of a shirt. This was after the formal recovery and evidence gathering had ended, so it’s entirely by chance that this happened. The man turned the piece of shirt over to the authorities, who found two things – a label connecting the shirt to Mary’s House, a clothing shop on Malta, and a fragment of a circuit board, fused to the partially melted polyester of the shirt.

This is the key forensic evidence that shifted the investigation from suspecting it was Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorists to believing it was the Libyans. The shirt was sent to the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment, who found the circuit board fragment. After months of trying to work out where this circuit board came from and whether it was part of the bomb the forensic scientists Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes couldn’t figure out what it was. So Feraday and Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson (no, I’m not kidding) contacted Thomas Thurman, a supposed explosives expert with the FBI.

Thurman has given contradictory stories about exactly how he identified this fragment, initially saying he spent ages looking through reference books and photographs on the FBI’s databases, trying to find a match. But other accounts suggest it was only a matter of days before Thurman had an answer for Williamson and Feraday.

Thurman had turned to an associate – John Scott Orkin (real name Jack Christie) of the CIA, who matched the fragment to circuit boards in timers seized in Togo in the 1980s. They were part of a batch of timers sold to the Libyan government by the Swiss firm MEBO, thus providing a direct, forensic link to Libya. However, while Orkin, Hayes and Feraday testified at Megrahi’s trial in 2000, Thurman did not. Why not? Because by that time he had been discredited and struck off as a scientific expert, having been nailed by fellow FBI crime lab examiner Fred Whitehurst.

Both Thurman and Hayes had testified at trials on behalf of the prosecution in cases that were later overturned. In the case of Hayes this included the Maguire 7 – wrongly accused of being involved in the Guildford pub bombings. A few months after discovering the circuit board fragment he left the forensic science world for a new career as a chiropodist, due to investigations into his role in the Maguire 7 case. Feraday, too, would soon be discredited for the same reasons – dubious or low-quality work, testimony tailored to suit the prosecution, in cases where the accused turned out to be innocent.

Meanwhile, the Scottish police were investigating the Malta connection. The shirt was, seemingly, bought from a clothing shop on the island run by a guy called Tony Gauci. He identified the person he’d sold the clothes to as Libyan, and would eventually testify at the trial. On the face of it, the Libyan connection was becoming more plausible, even though throughout late 1989 and early 1990 the DIA and State Department were still saying it was the Palestinians, backed by Iran.

However, in August 1990 – shortly after Thurman and Orkin apparently matched the circuit board fragment to the timers produced by Mebo – Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait. The US went to war, also invading Kuwait, and needed the backing of Syria and Iran to make sure the situation didn’t spiral into a region-wide war. It wasn’t a good time to be accusing Syria or Iran of sponsoring terrorists who blew up a plane over Scotland, killing Brits, Americans, Germans and others. Hence, that summer, the whole Iran-backed Palestinians story fell by the wayside and the new target was the Libyans.

By November 1991 the US Department of Justice issued an indictment against Megrahi and Fhimah, citing the testimony of Gauci, who supposedly sold Megrahi the clothes including the shirt, Feraday and Orkin regarding the fragment of circuit board, and Edwin Bollier, the CEO of Mebo, the Swiss firm. However, Gaddafi refused to extradite Megrahi and Fhimah, leading to a stand off.

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth

Most of this is portrayed in the Peacock/Sky series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. The reconstruction of the plane coming down is particularly disturbing, and while I don’t like content warnings I am not surprised the first episode of this mini-series cautions viewers that they may find it distressing. While some of the visual effects are a little janky, overall it works extremely well, capturing the shift from a quiet night a few days before Christmas in a small town in rural Scotland to a flaming, horrifying disaster zone.

We see much of the aftermath through the eyes of Jim Swire, who quickly found out about the Helsinki warning and the Frankfurt raid and other indications of foreknowledge via a journalist digging into the case. While that journalist is a fictional character it seems he is a composite of several real journalists, some of whom were friendly with Swire.

We see Jim confronting the Department of Transport, who are investigating the Lockerbie bombing alongside the FBI, the Scottish police and the rest. I especially liked the scenes between Jim – played by Colin Firth in a role he is very well suited to – and the Transport Secretary who keeps trying to fob him off. The answers he gets have the exact tone I’ve heard so many times – in statements to the press, from politicians and officials testifying at an inquiry or select committee, from the police every time they say or do anything. It’s almost robotic, how they reduce themselves to the words they’re saying, they cease to become human beings, they are mere process, protectors of institutions.

Jim, his wife and other family members set up a group to challenge the government and lobby for an independent inquiry into the warnings received prior to the bombing and what was done (or not done) about them. This is something that has happened repeatedly in this country – the 7/7 families and the family of Patrick Finucane spring to mind. The pressure for an inquiry into the death of David Kelly, into what happened in the Salisbury poisonings and the Amesbury death of Dawn Sturgess – this is a recurring theme of British politics. Most of the time the government refuses an inquiry, as with Lockerbie, but sometimes they are held and while they reveal a few things they ultimately avoid or cover-up more.

Indeed, Thatcher’s own memoir – as Swire notes in his book – never mentions Lockerbie. He writes:

You will find she claims on page 449 that following her support for the USAF bombing of Tripoli and Bengazi in April 1986, the aftermath was that ‘the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack could not and did not take place… There was a marked decline in Libyan sponsored terrorism in succeeding years.’

Are we to assume then that 1988 was not a ‘succeeding year’ to 1986? Or could it be that she knew all along that the tale of Libya being responsible for the Lockerbie bombing was false?

The insanity of the government’s refusal to hold an inquiry provoked Jim into action. He made a mock-up of a PFLP-style Toshiba ghetto blaster bomb, using marzipan in place of Semtex, and smuggled it through Heathrow security when he flew out to America to meet with a families organisation. On his arrival in the States he revealed the ruse, giving interviews to news media talking about his fake bomb. It seems his family back home never knew about this, never knew what he was up to, and while the stunt drew a lot of news coverage and a warning from the police, it did nothing to change the government’s position. They remained steadfast, even in the face of a bereaved doctor with military experience who smuggled a marzipan bomb through airport security on both sides of the Atlantic.

That was in May 1990, but something else was in the works as Jim pursued his somewhat eccentric approach to getting the truth about the Lockerbie bombing. A CIA informant inside Libyan intelligence, Majid Giaka, had been working for them since before the bomb, and never mentioned anything about Megrahi, Fhimah, Libya being behind the attack. It wasn’t until 1991, after the discovery of the circuit board, and the dubious ID linking it to Libya and the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, that Majid suddenly realised he knew critical information.

According to the CIA summary:

In the debriefings, he revealed for the first time that he had seen, the day before the bombing, a shiny brown Samsonite luggage taken off the carousel at Malta airport by Al-Megrahi, who was one of the suspects at that time, and therefore Majid became very important.

The CIA turned him over to the Feds, who started calling him the ‘puzzle piece’ because he helped connect various leads and details so that ‘This is when it become(sic) apparent that, yes, this was a Libyan operation.’ I want to consider something here that I haven’t seen picked up in any of the critiques of Majid, even the excellent page on Wikispooks.

The CIA constantly tells us that they aren’t a law enforcement agency, they don’t operate domestically, they are an intelligence gathering and analysis organisation. But here we see them handing over a covert intelligence asset to the FBI for use in building their case against the Libyans – just as Orkin helped Thurman identify the fragment of circuit board, which also pointed to Libya. Majid is the only meaningful source that says that Megrahi was working for the Libyan intelligence agency, the JSO, just as Majid was (albeit at a low level). He claims that Megrahi had bricks of high explosive hidden in a locked desk drawer at Luqa airport in Malta, that Megrahi picked up a Samsonite suitcase full of explosives at the airport before the bombing, that they knew the supposed bomb builder Mas’ud (the guy who goes on trial later this year), and that he had a conversation with the JSO operations chief about whether it was possible to get an unaccompanied bag on board a British flight.

On the face of it, everything he said pointed to this being an operation of Libyan intelligence. Not unlike the jihadi supergrass Mohammed Junaid Babar, who was evidently an intelligence asset before he became a key witness in terrorism trials, Majid Giaka was crucial to shifting the story from Iranian-supported Palestinians to Libyan-supported Libyans in Malta. All of this was happening in the midst of a wider geopolitical pivot, whereby the US were trying to re-align their relationships with Syria and Iran but maintaining their desire to oust or kill Gaddafi in Libya.

If this sounds suspiciously like Majid told the CIA what they wanted to hear – needed to hear, in fact – and the CIA then used him to tell the FBI what they wanted them to hear, having already told them the circuit board was Swiss made and sold to Libya, then that’s because it is exactly what happened. We know that the CIA were on the ground in the immediate wake of the bombing – supposedly looking for a briefcase belonging to Charles McKee, the leader of a CIA group flying back to the States from Beirut. His briefcase was found and taken by the CIA before eventually being handed over to investigators, showing how the Agency were interfering with the evidence trail from the very beginning.

Fake bomb. Fake spy. Fake story. Meanwhile, the two suspects are still in Libya because the Colonel is still refusing to send them to Scotland to stand trial. Jim Swire, who at this point believed what he was being told about the Libyans and the evidence, is approached by an Egyptian journalist who says he can get him into Libya to meet with Gaddafi. Having already got into a spot of trouble with the marzipan bomb Jim now decided to travel to meet the most hated dictator in the Middle East – at least from the perspectives of the British and American governments.

This part of the mini-series was, obviously, not shot in Libya but in Morocco, and so the rows of tanks and trucks you see lined up outside Gaddafi’s palace are Moroccan military vehicles. Ditto, the subsequent visit to Libya to persuade Gaddafi to allow the trial to take place by providing the defendants. You have to hand it to Jim Swire – he went to extraordinary lengths and took what some people would consider crazy-level risks.

The Lockerbie Bombing Trial

The third, and middle, episode of Lockerbie: A Search for Truth covers the trial, which took place on a former Air Force base in the Netherlands, and had a panel of judges rather than a jury rendering a verdict. The testimony opens with citizens of Lockerbie describing the hell on earth they experienced. This is one place that I felt that the series descending into mawkish sentimentality – we saw a lot of this in the first episode, which depicts what happened on the ground. And it’s more effective to show, rather than tell. In a documentary it’s different, but in a drama you don’t need to recycle the same emotions that we, the audience, have already felt.

However, it is important to recognise that this is one of the worst single events in modern British history and perhaps devoting a couple of minutes of screentime to these stories isn’t the worst screenwriting mistake. Maybe some people would find it necessary in order to really care about this trial episode, which alternates between legal procedural and Jim’s gradual realisation that there are problems with the prosecution’s story. Having taken for granted that the authorities got it right, he goes through another dramatic transformation (the first caused by the death of his daughter) and becomes an advocate for Megrahi’s innocence.

For someone who likes court procedurals, this is the best episode of the five, partly because the whole story turns a corner. The prosecution establishes the charred remains of the shirt supposedly bought on Malta, the fragment of circuit board supposedly from a timer produced by Mebo, and largely skips over the problems with all of the forensic scientists involved in this part of the case. It even has our protagonist say that the shirt was found by the investigators, when the CIA’s own document says it was found by a guy walking his dog. And fails to mention that the circuit board was never tested for explosive residue, which would be an obvious test to do if you believe it was the timer for the bomb.

When Bollier, the CEO of Mebo testifies he implicates Megrahi heavily, saying he was involved in Libya’s purchase of 20 timers from Mebo. But when he is shown pictures of the fragment, and then the fragment itself, he says it is different to the one he was shown by the police. This is brushed off as him trying to protect his company, worrying about being sued, but I feel it’s actually quite significant. Given the high likelihood of planted and/or fabricated evidence in this case, I have to wonder if Bollier was being serious.

Leaving these problems in the rearview mirror, it is when they get to Tony Gauci that things start to unfurl. He identifies Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes, including the shirt, from his shop, two weeks prior to the bombing. However, under cross examination his story becomes much weaker.

The defence established that he gave nearly 20 sworn statements and was interviewed by police well over a dozen times, and that his story changed. He identified multiple people as the man he sold the clothes to – one was a CIA officer, one was Abu Talb, a Palestinian terrorist. He described the man as six foot and about 50 years old, when Megrahi was 5’7” and was 36 at the time. Talb fits this description much more closely, though whether Gauci sold the clothes to anyone is pretty much guesswork at this point.

He said he made the sale on a day when it was raining, but on the day the prosecution says this took place there was no rain. Abu Talb had visited Malta earlier that year, in October and possibly November, which raises the possibility that Gauci sold him the clothes in question. However, in his earlier statements he lists the clothes and doesn’t mention a shirt, and it also turns out that these clothes are widely available in shops across Europe. If the charred shirt is authentic, it may never have been in Gauci’s shop or sold to anyone by him.

Another key witness was the CIA asset, Majid Giaka. He outlined his history working for the JSO, says he knew Megrahi when he was head of airline security for a Libyan airliner, and knew Fhimah from his time as manager of the airport on Malta. He talks of them having access to explosives, of running tests against the security in the airport using live explosives. However, he too ran afoul during cross examination, leading the court to discount most of what he said.

It turns out that Giaka was a poor quality asset that the CIA didn’t take seriously. Until they turned him into the ‘puzzle piece’ to solve all the FBI’s problems in the Lockerbie investigation and help tie everything together. Why would the CIA intervene in a criminal investigation in this way? We will come back to this.

The other important witness highlighted in this episode is a baggage handler from Heathrow who mentioned two suitcasess, both hard shelled, that were loaded into a baggage container that went on Pan Am 103. This is fairly devastating for the prosecution’s case, because their story has Megrahi and Fhimah loading the case onto a flight out of Malta that went to Frankfurt. The bomb suitcase then gets loaded into Pan Am 103 at Frankfurt before flying to London. But if the bomb was loaded onto the plane in London then Megrahi and Fhimah couldn’t have done it.

I want to add that it makes no sense anyway – if you’re going to bomb a plane for revenge purposes, why do it in such a complicated way? All sorts of things might go wrong, the bomb might get discovered at Frankfurt or London and get traced back to you. It makes much more sense for the bomb to be of the same type being made by Jordanian spy Marwan Khreesat while working with the Frankfurt cell of the PFLP-GC. The ones who were busted just weeks prior to the Lockerbie bombing. It also makes much more sense if the bomb was loaded at Heathrow – which at the time had notoriously lax security and where a baggage handler testified to two mysterious suitcases being loaded into the baggage cart destined for Pan Am 103 before the plane had even landed on its journey from Frankfurt.

Indeed, this is why Fhimah and Megrahi were never prosecuted by the German authorities – they couldn’t find evidence proving that the suitcase was loaded onto Pan Am 103 at Frankfurt airport. This key step in the official story remains unproven – possible, but never proven by any direct evidence of any kind.

As the trial in the Netherlands drew to a close, the British Foreign Office were quietly briefing journalists that Megrahi and Fhimah would likely be acquitted, and that this would herald a new era in positive relations with Libya and Gaddafi. This is about three years before the deal in the desert, where Gaddafi allowed British oil companies into Libya in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Presumably, had the verdict gone the way the Foreign Office were expecting, this deal would have happened earlier.

But it didn’t. For some reason the panel of judges decided to acquit Fhimah but convicted Megrahi. The conspiracy of two was now a conspiracy of one, even though all the evidence tying Megrahi to the bombing was dodgy if not outright nonsense. The whole theory of the crime is illogical and unproven and, like Jim Swire and others, I don’t believe he was guilty.

Alternative Theories about the Lockerbie Bombing

Some people think Megrahi was guilty and that the Libyans did it, but just as many think the truth lies elsewhere. One of the facts I keep coming back to when thinking about these events is that the CIA had someone involved in the investigation from the beginning – Vincent Cannastraro. But he wasn’t an analyst, let alone a criminal investigator, he was an operations guy who was intimately involved in Iran-Contra.

The same Iran-Contra that saw the CIA get involved in black market weapons and drugs trafficking as part of their regional covert operations, I hear you ask? And might that have something to do with the suitcase of Peruvian decongestant that farmer Jim Wilson found in his hedgerow the day after the crash? And what about the CIA group on the flight who were travelling back to Washington from Beirut, and the frantic search for McKee’s briefcase containing secret documents? Or at least, what most people presume contained secret documents.

Here’s where things get really tricky. Megrahi was released from prison in 2009 and died in 2012 – the latter episodes of the mini-series show Jim getting involved in his appeal and then trying to contact him after his return to Libya. But the Libyan angle to Lockerbie persists – following the war several former Gaddafi government officials have said he ordered the attack. Gaddafi himself paid billions in compensation to the victims’ families as part of the attempt to normalise relations with Britain, but always denied any personal involvement in the bombing. The guy who supposedly built the bomb, at least according to disgraced former CIA asset Majid Giaka, is going on trial. But that bomb would have to have been loaded in Malta and switched onto Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt. So who knows what will come out in that trial.

The bombing has been used by both the NATO mainstays the US and UK (especially the CIA) as a tool of leverage over Libya and Gaddafi, but in some ways has also been used by Gaddafi as a tool to help change his relationship with Britain. And then used by his former officials once he was dead and they were free to blame him for the bombing so they could get cushy asylum deals and whatnot. At that point they are like Soviet or North Korean defectors – about as reliable as a ten dollar pair of trainers.

But what of the Iranian-backed PFLP theory, or if not the PFLP then one of the similar organisations who have also taken credit for the bombing? In his book Jim Swire says he believes this is what really happened, and that geopolitics not only let the true culprits off the hook but also led to the framing of Megrahi and Fhimah.

I have to say, I find this theory quite plausible. Since the 1979 revolution that brought in the era of the Ayatollahs, the Iranian government has used terrorism both domestically and as a tool of foreign policy. They’ve also been subject to terrorism from Israel, the US and to some extent Pakistan. Terrorism truly is one of the most common tools of statecraft.

Let’s look at the context. In the 1980s the Iran-Iraq war saw long-standing grudges turn into a bloody, vicious battle. Saddam, who at that point was an ally of the US being used as a regional enforcer, not unlike Noriega in Panama, was tooled up with all kinds of weaponry and he was happily firing it at Iranians. An arms embargo prevented the US from supplying either side, but they covertly supplied weapons to Iran as part of the fundraising efforts to support the Contras. It seemed that, at least quietly, Iranian-US relations were improving. And then the US navy shoot down an Iranian airliner carrying hundreds of Muslims on their way to Mecca.

You can imagine the sense of betrayal those within the Iranian secret state must have felt, and their disbelief at the US military claiming this was an accident and a case of mistaken identity. They’d surely figured out by now that the US was secretly supply weapons to Iraq as well, and violating the arms embargo on both sides of the war. It isn’t at all implausible that they’d carry out a tit-for-tat retaliation strike using a terrorist group as a proxy.

The big conspiracy theory is that the Frankfurt cell were going to carry out the bombing, but they got busted by the German secret police and were out of the game, so Iran turned to Libya to get the job done. This makes little sense to me – why not just find another PFLP cell or get Abu Nidal to do it? While Iranian-Libyan relations during this period were largely positive – Libya was one of only two alllies of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, the other being Syria – this isn’t the sort of operation you share around unless you have to. Iran didn’t need Libya to bomb an airliner for them.

I know there’s a tendency among the anti-imperial Left to believe that the Iranian government is somehow the poor victim of Israel and America and mainstream propaganda, but the reality is that the Iranian government is batshit. Ditto, there’s a tendency to overlook the terrorism perpetrated by Palestinians and by Arab Muslims in general, because it doesn’t fit the narrative. But Middle Eastern governments do sponsor terrorists and sometimes Palestinians (or at least, Palestinian-originating gangs) carry out atrocities.

Of course, it couldn’t be that simple, could it? Maybe it is, but there is an additional dimension to this. Pan Am, or at least their insurance underwriters, commissioned their own investigation entirely separate from the FBI and Scottish police. They hired Interfor – a private intelligence and investigations company run by Juval Aviv, a former Mossad guy. You might think he’d support the Iranian-Palestinian theory with that sort of background, but Aviv had other ideas in mind.

The Interfor report into Pan Am 103 said that a drugs and weapons smuggling operation was set up in various European cities in the mid-80s, with the Frankfurt branch being run by a Syrian arms dealer, Monzer al Kassar. The same Monzer al Kassar who was selling weapons under the table to Oliver North’s network as part of Iran-Contra, I hear you ask? One of the smugglers was a Lebanese-American named Khalid Jaafar who also worked as a DEA informant, involved in sting operations. At one point the FBI even leaked to the media that he was the guy they suspected of planting the bomb, but that was before everything switched to focus on Libya.

Monzer also had ties to Lebanon, particularly Lebanese Hezbollah, who were holding American hostages in the country. Aviv’s report said that the CIA in Germany found out about this smuggling operation and decided to let it keep going so Monzer could help them get the hostages back from Lebanon.

According to William Blum’s commentary on all this, the smuggling ring used people inside the airports to switch suitcases – a case of heroin goes here, a case of something else goes there. It was this case-switching and smuggling operation that enabled the Lockerbie bomb to be loaded on board Pan Am 103, in what was partially an Iranian revenge attack and partly blowback from whatever the fuck the CIA were up to with Monzer al Kassar.

A competing theory is that the CIA actually took over this smuggling ring and that the team in Beirut including Charles McKee found out about this. After all, they were in Beirut trying to figure out a way to free the hostages, so if another group from within the CIA were running parallel ops it’s fairly likely they would hear about it. The theory is that McKee and the others were on their way back to Washington to report this, possibly blow the whistle on the CIA involvement in the drugs and weapons smuggling ring, so the Agency took out some of their own via the Pan Am 103 bomb.

I keep coming back to the mystery ‘crash investigators’ who were almost certainly CIA and/or FBI, searching the debris sites within an hour or so of the plane coming down. If this was an Iranian revenge attack using Palestinians, it seems the CIA knew about it ahead of time. If this was one branch of the CIA taking out some of their own to keep covert operations covert, then of course they’d know it was coming. The witnesses on the ground talk about agents cutting suitcases open and rummaging through people’s clothes, looking for something. Were they looking for drugs that might lead back to the smuggling ring? Were they looking for the secret documents in McKee’s briefcase? Both? Something else?

Ultimately, I don’t know which of these overlapping theories is the most likely. I naturally tend towards thinking some version of the CIA-Monzer al Kassar theory is more probable but I am somewhat biased, it’s entirely possible that their smuggling ring was used by the Iranians or a Palestinian gang to infiltrate a bomb onto the plane. The prompt arrival of the ‘investigators’ tells us that if the Iranians (etc.) did sneak something through that smuggling ring that the CIA knew about it, and for whatever reasons didn’t stop it.

Taking a sideways step, I want to remind you that in the 1990s there was a weapons smuggling route from Iran through Turkey and into the Balkans, to supply the Bosnian Muslims (and to some extent the Croats, since they took a portion of the weapons for allowing them into Bosnia via Croatia). The CIA knew about this, knew it violated the arms embargo, and let it continue before eventually getting involved in it themselves. Also, the Lockerbie bombing took place towards the end of the Iran-Contra decade, and seems to involve various characters who also turn up in that story.

However, both of these pieces of important context implicate Iranian intelligence just as much as they implicate the CIA, so we would need some more refined information to draw the key distinctions necessary to choose between these theories. The role of the CIA in framing the Libyans after the event tells us they were trying to shape perceptions and exploit the bombing for reasons of geopolitical strategy, but it doesn’t tell us exactly what they were covering up.

Hence, I find Lockerbie a tricky bastard of a mystery and remain relatively agnostic about the truth that Jim Swire and others have spent so long trying to find. None of these theories are implausible, but none of them are conclusive.