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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1999, pages 22-23 Special Report
The Israeli Deception That Led to the Bombing of Pan American Flight 103 Over Lockerbie, Scotland By Richard H. Curtiss With
the handover to the United Nations this spring for trial in The Hague
of two Libyan suspects in the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over
Lockerbie Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988, United Nations sanctions upon
Libya were “suspended,” but not lifted. This ended the principal
hardships imposed since 1992 upon the Libyan people, which were the ban
on international air travel to and from Libya, and the resulting high
prices and scarcity of foreign-made goods and equipment, which had to
be imported via Libya’s neighbors. U.S.
sanctions against Americans doing business with Libya or even travel by
Americans to Libya remain in place, but obviously will be re-examined
at some point. The original object of the U.S. sanctions was to force
Libya to turn over the suspects and, if they are found guilty, to force
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to accept responsibility for the crash of
the Boeing 747 in which all 259 passengers, of whom 189 were Americans,
and 11 people on the ground were killed. However, Qaddafi already has
distanced himself from the suspects by saying, in a BBC interview in
October 1998, that the bombing might have resulted from Libyans “taking
their own revenge” for the U.S. bombing of Tripoli two years earlier. The
principal effects of the U.S. sanctions have been to penalize U.S. oil
companies, which now operate in Libya with a U.S. government waiver but
without U.S. citizen employees there, and to discourage other U.S.
companies from doing any business at all with Libya. As for any effect
of the U.S. sanctions on Libya itself, no other countries have the
success rate of American exploration and drilling companies in finding
and extracting petroleum around the world, but there are few other
goods or services provided by U.S. firms in any field that cannot be
matched by European, Asian or other sources.
So the
principal result of the U.S. sanctions is to exacerbate the unfavorable
U.S. balance of payments, and to inflict some residual hardships on
Libyans with relatives in or educational or business ties with the
United States. Probably, therefore, as many Americans as Libyans are
hoping that the trial of the two suspects, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and
Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who have been on leave with pay from their jobs
with Libyan Arab Airlines for the past seven years, will somehow bring
closure to the long-running dispute. A “not proven” verdict is also available under Scottish law.
There
is little other than circumstantial evidence that Libyans had a hand in
the catastrophe. Perhaps the most compelling such item is that nine
months later, in December 1989, a French airliner also blew up in the
skies over Africa, with the loss of 170 people, after France had
intervened against Libya in its border war with Chad. The
conventional wisdom, therefore, is that if the defendants are
acquitted, the U.S.-compiled case against Libya collapses, opening the
way for a lifting of the U.N. sanctions. Or that a guilty verdict will
open the way to a Libyan government compensation offer to survivors of
the victims, which they can accept or reject in favor of civil damage
suits against the Libyan government. However,
a third verdict, “not proven,” is also available under Scottish law,
under which the two Libyans will be tried in the international court in
The Hague. In the likely event that the court, consisting of three
Scottish judges, reaches that conclusion, the defendants walk, the U.N.
will probably change the status of its sanctions from “suspended” to
abolished, and the U.S. will be left with no face-saving way to
re-establish a normal relationship with Libya comparable to Libyan
relations with virtually all other nations in the world. Such
a result will call for more creative U.S. diplomacy than a North
African version of the made-in-Israel policy of “dual containment”
which initially dominated Clinton administration Middle Eastern
diplomacy, and which has had no ameliorating effect on the conduct of
either Iraq or Iran, the two countries at which it was aimed. The
U.S., in fact, has been quietly backing away from dual containment for
the past two years, despite vigorous complaints from what Israeli
peaceniks have come to call “the Jewish thought police” in the United
States, meaning Israel’s vigorous Washington, DC lobby and some of its
unquestioning supporters within the U.S. Jewish community.
In
deciding what the U.S. should be doing about the impasse it has reached
with Libya, a country of only five million people, there are two
initial questions to consider. Is Colonel Qaddafi, Libya’s principal
leader ever since he led a successful military coup against the
pro-Western monarchy there in 1969, a seemingly incurable troublemaker
or have his actions and eccentricities been exaggerated deliberately by
the Western media? An Unrelenting Campaign Surprisingly,
the Israel lobby’s principal American think tank, the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, predicts “a fundamental reorientation
of Libya’s foreign policy” in a study it released Aug. 16. It
complains, however, that Qaddafi’s “antagonism toward Israel” has not
“ameliorated.” This means that Israel’s backers in the U.S. media will
continue an unrelenting campaign to keep alive the memory of his
transgressions, real or imagined. There
is a sinister aspect to this campaign of which Americans should be
aware in making judgments about where U.S.-Libyan relations should go
from here. That is the fact that the current U.S.-Libyan problems were
deliberately instigated by Israeli actions. Unfortunately, and this is
the sinister part of it, the U.S. media observe a nearly total taboo in
discussing this Israeli role, although the facts are indisputable. For
example who, besides the Libyans themselves, remembers that the first
victims in the brutal and seemingly endless tit-for-tat acts of
retaliation involving Libya and, later, the U.S. were the 111
passengers and crewmembers killed in the crash of a Libyan commercial
airliner downed on Feb. 23, 1973 by Israeli guns as it descended,
slightly off course during a dust storm, over Israeli-occupied Egyptian
Sinai for a routine landing at Cairo International Airport? The
Israelis called it a case of mistaken identity. It is not clear whether
U.S. journalists ever asked why the Israeli soldiers along the Suez
Canal were firing ground-to-air missiles at a civilian airliner at all,
regardless of its identity. Nor why the U.S. media obstinately refuse
to recognize the role of this early outrage, only four years after
Qaddafi came to power, and Western indifference toward it, in the
shaping of his mindset about the West in general, and the U.S. in
particular.
Whether
the Israeli killing of such a large number of Libyan and Egyptian
civilians was or was not accidental, the next documented Israeli
intervention was a deliberate and successful attempt to instigate
hostilities between Libya and the United States in February 1986. It
led directly to the April 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya’s two major
cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, in which there were some 40 Libyan
casualties, including the death of Qaddafi’s infant adopted daughter.
(She had been orphaned when her father, a former Syrian air attach in
Libya, was killed in aerial combat with Israel.) If, indeed, the two
accused Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, it clearly
was direct retaliation for the U.S. attack. The
manner in which Israel’s Mossad tricked the U.S. into attacking Libya
was described in detail by former Mossad case worker Victor Ostrovsky
in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two revealing
books he wrote after he left Israel’s foreign intelligence service. The
story began in February 1986, when Israel sent a team of navy commandos
in miniature submarines into Tripoli to land and install a “Trojan,” a
six-foot-long communications device, in the top floor of a five-story
apartment building. The device, only seven inches in diameter, was
capable of receiving messages broadcast by Mossad’s LAP (LohAma
Psicologit—psychological warfare or disinformation section) on one
frequency and automatically relaying the broadcasts on a different
frequency used by the Libyan government. The
commandos activated the Trojan and left it in the care of a lone Mossad
agent in Tripoli who had leased the apartment and who had met them at
the beach in a rented van.“By the end of March, the Americans were
already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan,” Ostrovsky
writes. “Using
the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of
terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies
around the world,” Ostrovsky continues. As the Mossad had hoped, the
transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample
proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What’s more,
the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it. “The
French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new stream of
information. To them it seemed suspicious that suddenly, out of the
blue, the Libyans, who had been extremely careful in the past, would
start advertising their future actions…The French and the Spanish were
right. The information was bogus.” Ostrovsky,
who is careful in what he writes, does not blame Mossad for the
bombing, only a couple of weeks after the Trojan was installed, of La
Belle Discothque in West Berlin, which cost the lives of two American
soldiers and a Turkish woman. But he convincingly documents the
elaborate Mossad operation built around the Trojan, which led the U.S.
to blame Libya for the bombing of the Berlin nightclub frequented by
U.S. soldiers. The plot was given added credibility since it took place
at a time when Qaddafi had “closed” the airspace over the Gulf of Sidra
to U.S. aircraft, and then suffered the loss of two Libyan aircraft
trying to enforce the ban, which were shot down by carrier-based U.S.
planes. A Prompt Reaction The
U.S. reacted promptly to the attack on the Berlin nightclub. On April
16, 1986 it sent U.S. aircraft from a base in England and from two U.S.
carriers in the Mediterranean to drop more than 60 tons of bombs on
Qaddafi’s office and residence in the Bab al Azizia barracks, less than
three blocks from the apartment containing the Trojan transmitter, and
on military targets in and around the two Libyan cities. Some of the
U.S. missiles and bombs went astray, inflicting damage on residential
buildings, including the French Embassy in Tripoli. The planes flying
from England were forced to skirt both French and Spanish airspace, and
one of them, a U.S. F-111, was shot down over Tripoli, killing the two
American crew members. “Operation
Trojan was one of the Mossad’s greatest successes,” Ostrovsky writes.
“It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had
promised—a strike that had three important consequences. First, it
derailed a deal for the release of the American hostages in Lebanon,
thus preserving the Hezbollah as the number one enemy in the eyes of
the West. Second, it sent a message to the entire Arab world, telling
them exactly where the United States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Third, it boosted the Mossad’s image of itself, since it was
they who, by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States
to do what was right… “After
the bombing, the Hezbollah broke off negotiations regarding the
hostages they held in Beirut and executed three of them, including one
American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they were rewarded for
their non-participation in the attack by the release at the end of June
of two French journalists held hostage in Beirut.” Ostrovsky doesn’t mention, however, the other apparent direct result of the Mossad “success”: the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Despite
the refusal by mainstream American media to revisit the well-documented
facts presented above, they contain some obvious political lessons for
the United States. For example, the U.S. government might decide to
continue its sanctions on Libya in retaliation for the deaths of the
270 victims of the Pan Am bombing, regardless of the verdict of the
Scottish judges. In that case, however, true justice would also require
imposition of similar U.S. sanctions against Israel for deliberately
instigating the U.S. bombing of Tripoli, in retaliation for the bombing
of La Belle Discothque, a crime which the Israelis knew from the
beginning that the Libyans had not committed. Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle
East Affairs. |
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