Dirty Tricks
Not everyone in the media has been as naive about Israeli machinations though. Writing in the Guardian just before the trial of the two Libyans,veteran American journalist Russell Warren Howe, in an excellent article titled "What if they are innocent? analyzes whether the Iranian government, Palestinian terrorists or Israeli intelligence were more likely perpetrators. Howe concludes, "Even if Megrahi and F'hima are found guilty of the most serious charges, there would still be a need for a new investigation: to decide what was Israel's possibly major role in mass murder and deception of its main benefactor, the US. Howe is suggesting that even if the Libyans, or other Arabs, had actually planted the bomb, they may still have been duped into doing so by Israeli agents.
Intriguingly, Howe cites a reference in Gordon Thomas' book on Mossad, "Gideon's Spies," to a Mossad officer stationed in London who showed up in Lockerbie the morning after the crash to arrange for the removal of a suitcase from the crime scene. The suitcase, said to belong to Captain Charles McKee, a DIA officer who was killed on the flight, was later returned "empty and undamaged.
Moreover, the idea of Libyan responsibility, Howe notes, seems to have originated in Israel. Again, he quotes Thomas, who says that a source at LAP, Mossad's psychological warfare unit, informed him that "within hours of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts urging them to publicise that here was ˜incontrovertible proof' that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable.
It may also have been Mossad disinformation, Howe suspects, that induced the U.S. government to believe the Libyans were guilty. The day after the Lockerbie bombing, U.S. intelligence intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan government office in Berlin that effectively said, "mission accomplished.
Two years earlier, a similar message intercept had induced Ronald Reagan to order air strikes against Libya, killing over a hundred people, including Qaddafi's two-year-old adopted daughter. But the message had been faked by Israel, according to Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case officer, who described the operation in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two exposàs he wrote about the Mossad after leaving the service.
Operation Trojan began in February 1986 when the Mossad secretly installed a communications device known as a "Trojan in an apartment in Tripoli. The Trojan received messages broadcast by Mossad's LAP on one frequency and automatically transmitted them on a different frequency used by the Libyan government. "Using the Trojan, Ostrovsky writes, "the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world. U.S. intelligence, as anticipated by the Israelis, intercepted the bogus messages, and believed them to be authentic -- especially after receiving confirmation from the Mossad.
Within weeks of the Trojan being installed, two American soldiers were killed in an explosion at La Belle Discothà que, a nightclub in West Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. Assuming that Libya was responsible, nine days later the U.S. dropped 60 tons of bombs on Tripoli and Benghazi. Few suspected that the Americans had been tricked into the "retaliation by Israel, whose subterfuge had punished Qaddafi for his support of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and further alienated the U.S from the Arab world.
Not all Americans are oblivious to Israeli wiles, however. Commenting on the Israeli intelligence service's penchant for deception, Andrew Killgore, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, wrote in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, "Mossad's specialty was dirty tricks...Its modus operandi had always been the same: pull off a dirty trick but make it appear somebody else had done it.
As part of any new investigation to establish whether or not the Lockerbie bombing was another one of the Mossad's "dirty tricks, detectives might want to interview Issac Yeffet, the former chief of security for the Israeli airline, El Al, who in 1986 was commissioned by Pan Am to survey its security at a number of airports worldwide. As Killgore, in a separate article for the Washington Report, suggestively noted: "Yeffet may have been successful in maintaining perfect security for El Al at Ben-Gurion Airport. But his efforts at Heathrow Airport in London, one of the airports he surveyed for Pan Am, and to which he and his employees had full rein, failed to save Pan Am Flight 103.
Still protesting his innocence, the dying Megrahi told reporters on his release, "The truth never dies. That may be so. But as long as the Western media continue to believe that only Israel's enemies would blow up a civilian airliner, the truth about Lockerbie is unlikely to ever reach a very wide audience.
Maidhc Ã" Cathail is a freelance writer with a particular interest in the Middle East.
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