Primary Evidence: Frankfurt Airport Records

First Posted 20 January 2010
last edits June 25, 2011

The System
[Analysis by Caustic Logic, based on wide but uncited skimming - may not be 100% accurate, but intended only to help understand the records below]

Frankfurt Airport in 1988 was the busiest air hub in Europe, serving many thousands of flights a day between Europe, the near east, nort Africa, and North America. The baggage handling system in 1988 was both state of the art and sloppy. Its workings can be understood as broken down to two parts, loosely termed outer and inner.

The outer portion was where luggage arrived at and left from the airport - a zone of tarmac and taxiing aircraft, wagons and luggage containers. From the planes, luggage was carted to a coding station, where items were placed on bar-code numbered trays (containers), one item per tray, and fed into the inner portion. Hard paperwork was apparently normally kept for transactions between aircraft and coding stations, both inclusive.

The Zeist Court explained “baggage for most airlines was handled by the airport authority, but PanAm had their own security and baggage handling staff.” Thus the airport and the airline each would then have responsibility for keeping track of their own efforts, and both should be called on in the investigation. The Frankfurt Airport Group would be in charge of unloading KM180, and Pan Am's people would handle loading and screening of luggage coming onto the outbound feeder flight.

The inner portion then is what the Court described as “a computer controlled automated baggage handling system” running beneath the airport. This vast electro-mechanic system automatically routed coded items along roller conveyors and through switching stations, at key spots scanned and logged. This system connected coding stations to the various stores, where luggage circulated until needed, and apparently up to loading gates. After this, they re-emerged topside and then to the connecting aircraft’s hold, where again, a record would be kept of loading procedures.

Primary Evidence
The relevant central computer data was produced, if under questionable circumstances, showing one particular item was coded at 13:07 into container no. 8849. It was then routed down to store for two hours until moved at 15:17 to gate B044, from which 103A loaded before its 16:53 departure. No passenger transferred from the air Malta flight to the PanAm one, so the bag thus illustrated was of the dreaded “unaccompanied” variety.

Apparently, no direct record of PA103A's loading was available to corroborate this. The unloading records for the Air Malta flight (KM180) that bag apparently came from, likewise do not figure in the evidence. And the mammoth central computer file aside from the items sent to 103A is missing without explanation. But the arrival of each flight at the airport, and the coding of one's luggage, were presented, aside from the crucial and curious "Frankfurt printout." Below are all available documents relevant to the claim of an unaccompanied bag, from flight KM180, being sent on to Flight 103A at Frankfurt. These will be given by the "production number" assigned them as evidence during the trial, and briefly explained. All images were originally found at Mebo pages, but seem to be genuine and unaltered. (see "Sources" at end)

Production 1068: The Opinion of the Court's paragraph 29 denotes this for “the evidence of Joachim Koscha, who was one of the managers of the baggage system at Frankfurt in 1988” It was his evidence that established KM180’s arrival and unloading time, 12:48-13:00. They do also cite a “record,” but provided no direct citation.

Production Null: This is the designation – none – given to KM180 unloading papers in the trial. Denis Phipps, former head of security, British Airways, has closely inspected the primary records of different airlines and airports connected to the disaster. He said in The Maltese Double Cross [video, 1994] “the records from Frankfurt were by no means complete." Among his concerns:

“There was no record of who unloaded that flight KM180 when it arrived at Frankfurt. We don't know who the loaders were. There was no record of the number of bags that were actually unloaded from that flight. There were no records that I could find.” 

It isn’t entirely clear if paperwork normally was kept for this – it might have been a policy to determine the number of bags from the computer system, which could count the number of items coded at a certain station and time and take that as the number from the flight coded then. It would be a grossly imperfect system, considering the reliability of this method, as mentioned above. But it would line up with the known laxness of procedure there, and mean one less suspiciously missing record.

Production 1092: This is an “interline writer’s sheet” filled out by Andreas Schreiner, who was in charge of monitoring the arrival of baggage at V3 That bears to record one wagon of baggage from KM180 arriving at V3 at 13:01.Within V3 are seven coding stations, where luggage is placed into bar-code numbered trays to enter bottomside. They cite the sheet’s contents in table form and it seems like they had these records at hand. No number of bags in that wagon is given.
This brings us to the reliability of coding station logs in determining where a particular item really came from. The Zeist judges heard testimony that “luggage was always delivered from one flight only” at any given time." [Opinion of the Court, para 29] Taking this literally would mean a station's log saying flight X was handled from 1:00-1:05 means an item shown in the computer system as coded there at 1:01 is clearly from flight X. 

But this is not completely sound. Dennis Phipps noted the unreliability of these logs in the Maltese Double Cross, and it's been widely noted that lapses of stray bags being inserted during another flight's coding are not only possible but recorded, and common sense itself suggests such a presumption is, at the least, not guaranteed to be right. The degree of correlation between coding time and flight number is certainly higher than zero and less than 100%, and debatable from there. A separate post, Coding Station Reliability, will address this controversy, but generally below it should remain an open question.

Production 1061: This document (above) was identified by witnesses Mr Schreiner and Mr Koscha “as a work sheet completed by a coder to record baggage with which he dealt.” The name of the coder in question was Koca, who was not called as a witness.” Pity, since the document shows us little detail. The signatures alternate Koca and Candar, listing either container numbers or numbers of wagons of luggage, the flight number it’s from, time they started coding, and stop time. The relevant line is the last one – one wagon of luggage from KM180 started coding at 13:04, and ended at a time disputed as 13:10 or 13:16. (13:10 yields a time closer to those previously noted, and it's what the Court decided. The difference is six minutes of time, which could have increased the likelihood of a stray bag being introduced. Again, refer to the post on coding station reliability.

Production 1062: This is the court’s code for some unspecified “documentary evidence” that “the aircraft used for PA103A arrived from Vienna (as flight PA124) and was placed at position 44, from which it left for London at 1653.”

Production 1060 (at left - r-click/new window for readable view) This is the famous computer printout, the single document that allows “the inference," drawn by the Scottish Judges, "that an item which came in on KM180 was transferred to and left on PA103A.” It's a list of items routed to PA103A, taken by airport employee Bogomira Erac for personal reasons and handed over to investigators only a month after the disaster.

It was the first time they'd seen it. What's highly unusual about this evidence is that the German federal police (BKA) were unable to secure their own copy, right off the computer, in the days after the crash. In the end, we had to rely on a memento copy from someone’s locker, which existed only by sheer luck. It was that close to having a whole airport's luggage records go completely missing, right after such a massive event demanded that information. The troubling case of the missing records is worthy of a detailed stand-alone post. Another interesting question is why the BKA then made the official investigators in Scotland and Washington wait another six months before sharing it with them. It wasn't until mid-August 1989 that Scottish police were able to see this pivotal record that wound up turning the investigation around to Malta and thence Libya.

Whatever the book got wrong, Trail of the Octopus is helpful on this issue.

"On 17 August 1989, eight months after the disaster, Chief Detective Superintendent John Orr received from the BKA what was said to be a computer print-out of the baggage-loading list for Pan Am Flight 103A from Frankfurt to London on the afternoon of 21 December 1988. Attached to this were two internal reports, dated 2 February 1989, describing the inquiries that BKA officers had made about the baggage-handling system at the airport. Also provided were two worksheets, one typewritten, the other handwritten, that were said to have been prepared on 21 December by airport workers at key points on the conveyor-belt network." [Coleman/Goddard]

Mrs. Erac' testimony at Camp Zeist in 2000 clarified that the printout was not taken to the BKA until approximately the last week of January, so a 1 February foray is a perfect match for being spurred by the printout. Any records of any earlier efforts, fruitful or not, remain under wraps. Upon getting the papers in August, Orr and his men quickly investigated the airport themselves, and also got more serious about previous clues leading to Malta.

What the printout shows, briefly, is 111 items listed numerically by container number. The relevant portions are highlighted in the condensed version below. PA103A is referred to herein as F1042. The relevant item 8849 was coded at station S0009, which it’s been determined means station 206, at 1307. That is a fit with KM180’s load. It then goes to Gate B044 at 1523, the same few-minute span most of 103's luggage arrived. What happened from there is outside the computerized system and not recorded here. But according to this, two late-coded items were sent to a separate gate B041, and curiously, these two items bracket the apparent bomb bag, numerically speaking, and so are visible below. All 108 items not shown here were sent to gate 44.

So broadly there are three possibilities:
- If it could be certain that station 209 at 1307 means KM180 and nothing else, this would be solid evidence of a bag from that flight.
- It could have been an item of another origin passing through there at just the right time to appear as from KM180. This does require a certain acceptance of coincidence, but cannot be ignored.
- The data could clearly mean to say KM180, but itself be fraudulent. This would explain the printout's appearance and the primary data's disappearance. Perhaps the two were not really unrelated bad and good luck, but two halves of a bait-and-switch routine, perhaps carried out by the BKA for uncertain reasons.

Production Null: The normal, official, system-wide, right from the computer luggage records.
As has been mentioned, for some reason the primary data of luggage movements was lost, but avoided making a big noise once a copy was luckily found. So it was no loss, we might presume. But how would we know?

There may never be answers to the riddle of the lost computer data, but a dedicated post is warranted to explore what we do and don't know about it.

Production Null: PanAm’s loading records for flight 103A.



---
Sources:
Image: Prod 1092
Image: Prod 1060
(other images by Caustic Logic)
[Coleman/Goddard] TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA. Chapter 7. Online posting.
[Opinion of the Court] PDF download link

What Did The Germans Know?

The Scots-German War Over Airport Security, part 2 of 2
June 23 2010
last edits 21 November

The following is part-essay, part compilation of long quotes. Two early books are drawn from throughout:
[E+D] Emerson, Steven and Brian Duffy “The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation” New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons. April 1990. 283 pages.
[L] Leppard, David.On the Trail of Terror: The Inside Story of the Lockerbie Investigation. London, Jonathan Cape. May 1991. 221 pages.
The views expressed by those writers are not necessarily shared by this blogger – the exercise is to gather facts and attitudes, the zeitgeist, of this minor 1989 struggle of wills between two erstwhile allies in a major investigation.
---
Vehement Vengeance
Part one explained the unfounded British decisions to rule out London origin for the bomb while repeatedly insisting it must have come in from Frankfurt. “Smarting from the accusation that sloppy West German security had allowed this terrible act of terrorism,” Emerson and Duffy explain, “Germany would begin to strike at the British with a vengeance.” [E+D161] It was the first of January 1989, the day after the inflammatory Times story (Disaster Bomb placed on Jumbo in Frankfurt), that the first response was heard. As the book explains:

“West German Interior Ministry spokesman Michael Andreas Butz was convening a news conferencet to respond to the Times account of the day before. “There is no indication,” Butz declared stiffly, “that the explosives could have been put on board at Frankfurt airport.” In fact, he added ominously, “there is evidence which is contradictory.”

What did the Germans know that the Americans and the Scots didn’t?”

Butz went on to assert, with some vehemence, that German agents had determined that the “Disaster Bomb” had been smuggled aboard the 103 in London. The German agents had proof of it, Butz said." [E+D161]

Five days later, it seems the Germans were ready to show what they knew or didn't know. Reuters in London, citing “West German security sources,” reported on January 6 that “an airport worker at Heathrow had planted the bomb in the forward luggage hold of the 103.” A bizarre explanation followed:

"According to the sources quoted by Reuters, investigators had arrived at the Heathrow link because of the “fact” that the bomb that had blow up the 103 weighed “at least sixty-six pounds.” Luggage restrictions limited carry-on bags to seventy pounds, but the sources cited in the Reuters account said that the bomb was loaded aboard by an airport worker. What the sources evidently didn’t say is why the airport worker couldn’t have been in Frankfurt instead of London." [E+D165-66]

That explanation fails to make sense in numerous ways (the bomb likely weighed less that 66 ounces, for one), and doesn’t sound like what any thinking German would really say. But this wasn’t their only counter-charge passed on in The Fall of Pan Am 103:

“In a matter of days, news stories began to leak from Bonn and Frankfurt that security at Heathrow was far worse than at Frankfurt. British authorities were outraged. For days and weeks, as the families of those killed on the 103 watched this ugly game of diplomatic Ping-Pong, Britain and Germany fought a nasty proxy war through their TV networks and newspapers. Clearly, the feud was based on more than a technical dispute among forensic specialists. Some went so far as to assert that the bitterness of the dispute showed the extent to which the age-old cultural animosities between the two nations had still not abated after two world wars.” [E+D 161]

The authors Emerson, Duffy, and Leppard have the Germans trying to deny both a Khreesat bomb (their botched police work) and the German bomb infiltration (their airport security failure), often confusing and conflating the two drives. On the other side, it’s clear that the Scots and Americans tried at every juncture to put all failures in Germany. David Leppard writes “the bitter argument […] persisted throughout the long hot summer of 1989” [135] and “the German BKA were to spend more than a year publicly claiming that the bomb must have been put aboard at London.” [60]

So Just What Did They know?
Such persistent denial could be motivated, as the Brits and Americans charged, by German fear of accepting the horrible truth about their epic shortcomings. But to be fair, the Germans in fact knew some actual evidence supporting their claims, and should have been given more credit.

Emerson and Duffy’s telling shows hardly a hint of this, with its cited argument that a 66-pound bomb somehow implies Heathrow origin. But the West Germans had to have noticed the lucky bag placement within the container, that could only have been more than luck if it was placed in London. They probably did not know of John Bedford’s story of suitcases matching the IED style seen at about that spot of that container - well before the 727 arrived from Frankfurt. Had they known, they likely would have said so.

The break-in at Heathrow’s Terminal Three the morning before the bombing was surely concealed from German ears as it was from the whole world up to and including the Zeist trial in 2000. On top of the generally lax security at Heathrow, this additional bit of information could only have added to the German resistance against the first script changes.

It was enough at first to know that both alleged German failures - a Khreesat bomb and Frankfurt ingestion - could not be true at the same time as the Yanks and Brits insisted. At least, not without a fair amount of speculation.

The German BKA actually did some work along these lines to help their colleagues understand, as David Leppard shares in some detail. They knew the Khreesat altimeter bomb better than anyone, having overseen the raid that caught only one of five, having had another one later kill one of their bomb technicians, just before they destroyed yet another in revenge. Leppard rails along with the Scots at these scientific losses and such fatal sloppiness. But he also misrepresents the number of samples they once held (it was four, not three), and the readable remains they had at the end of the explosions (three partial and two complete samples, not one). These were, however, studied as far as possible.

“In May the Germans decided to prepare a detailed scientific rebuttal of RARDE’s theory that the bomb had been made by Khreesat […] and put aboard at Frankfurt. The BKA asked its forensic section, ST33, to prepare a report on the three Khreesat bombs so far recovered.” [L142]

They shortly issued a final report called "Comment on the ignition Devices,” which said their remit was “to test and report if [Khreesat bombs] were suitable for surviving the flight from Frankfurt to London […] and exploding 38 minutes after take-off in London.” [L142] The answer, delivered with “bland Teutonic logic,” was No. Rather, they realized and explained one of the best London-origin clues. 

“The rundown of the functioning on the ignition devices … can be brought into line very well with the circumstances during take-off and pahse 1 of flight PA103 London to New York.
[…]
Presupposing that an explosive device of the same construction was used in the attack, then it must have been taken board for the first time in London, or at least made acute [armed -ed] by insertion of the master switch.” [L145]

Leppard dismisses the report as "a compendium of fudge and obfuscation." They had “only one [sic] fully functioning example of Khreesat's bombs,” Leppard complained, “but this did not prevent them concluding all three bombs had a time delay of between 30 and 45 minutes." The reality is in fact a little more complex it seems than the BKA’s report lets on, but the noted similarity of the timing style is still completely valid. The 38-minute detonation after leaving there really does look a lot like a Khreesat device loaded there.

War’s End
Upon seeing that insolent ST33 report, SIO John Orr “was furious,” writes Leppard.

“As the Kamboj episode showed, there had always been the outside chance that a bag had been smuggled into the container at Heathrow. That possibility aside, Orr had effectively ruled out Heathrow within three weeks of the bombing. Much to the relief of British security chiefs, the Met’s Special Branch had long since stopped investigating the Heathrow theory. Now the Germans were suggesting they were all wrong.” [L145]

They launched back in June with a rebuttal. “Harry Bell was tasked with getting RARDE to research a reply” to this ST33 report, writes Leppard. “It took five weeks to come up with a convincing response.” Finished before June was out, it mostly poked holes the uncertainties of the report, like using “only one working device” to decide the time delay. It offered no solid alternative, quibbled over climb rates, postulated a simple electrical error, and closed condescendingly:

“In conclusion the ST33 report deals with presumptions and presuppositions and it is respectfully pointed out that only factual evidence will be acceptable in the furtherance of the inquiry to bring to justice the bombers of Flight PA103.” [L146-48]

The Scots and Americans, on the other hand, were never able to shake the fact that London was always the far better fit for just the bomb style that everyone first suspected. And they could show no support for what they insisted on: a Khreesat bomb loaded and triggered in Germany but with a speculated two-hour timer to carry it just past London.

In short the authorities and investigators of the West German Federal Republic knew some of the same clues their counterparts across the channel did. They could see the general logic of London introduction, the detonation timing, and the expected British ass-covering. After all, as Leppard put it:

“Certainly, if Heathrow had been to blame, the ramifications would have been severe […] Fortunately for the British, no such evidence was ever uncovered. All the political embarrassment would fall on the Germans.” [p 60]

The embarrassment would then somehow shift off of them onto Malta and thence Libya, in a fascinating leapfrog action. But early on, we can see the Germans had circumstantial clues - if only half as many as the Brits held - that the bomb actually started in London. They could be called jumpy or defensive to leap to the conclusions they did so fervently based on such limited information. But now, with more information, we can see that they were probably right all along.

Evidence Reconsidered: The Bag from Malta

The Basics and Prosecution’s Case
The prosecution (Crown) case regarding the bomb bag was fully accepted by the Judges ruling in the 2000 trial. Their summary, paragraph 17 of their final "opinion of the Court," reads:

"[T]he primary suitcase was carried on an Air Malta flight KM180 from Luqa Airport in Malta to Frankfurt, that at Frankfurt it was transferred to PanAm flight PA103A, a feeder flight for PA103, which carried it to London Heathrow Airport, and that there, in turn, it was transferred to PA103. This case is largely dependent on oral and documentary evidence relating to the three airports. From this evidence, it is alleged, an inference can be drawn that an unidentified and unaccompanied item of baggage was carried on KM180 and transferred to PA103A at Frankfurt and PA103 at Heathrow." [Opinion of the Court, para 17]

The judges do acknowledge that "The Malta documentation for KM180 does not record that any unaccompanied baggage was carried," [para 31] and that Luqa Airport's security measures "seem to make it extremely difficult for an unaccompanied and unidentified bag to be shipped on a flight out of Luqa." [para 38] They had also dismissed as fabrication witness Giaka's tale of seeing the accused with the exact model suitcase the day of the bombing. [OoC para 44]

"[T]he absence of an explanation as to how the suitcase was taken into the system at Luqa is a major difficulty for the Crown case but after taking full account of that difficulty, we remain of the view that the primary suitcase began its journey at Luqa. The clear inference which we draw from this evidence is that the conception, planning and execution of the plot which led to the planting of the explosive device was of Libyan origin." [para 82]

In the end, the Court was swayed by the compelling evidentiary narrative presented by the Crown. As we've seen, the story is a bit weak in the beginning, with the introduction to KM180 being unsubstantiated and in fact directly contradicted by the relevant evidence. The final alleged transfer, to Maid of the Seas at Heathrow, was not clearly documented; luggage from Frankfurt was considered good-to-go but late, and hastily loaded with no further securiy or scrutiny. The only brown Samsonite suitcase reported in the primary luggage container was seen by handler John Bedford, and it was loaded before the Frankfurt feeder had arrived.

Otherwise the case that such a suitcase made the journey does look reasonably good on paper, and it's at the middle link of Frankfurt where the item is glimpsed briefly. Off-loading records for KM180 were not available to give a number for comparison with Air Malta's records, and the loading papers for PA103A seem to have gone missing as well, along with the entire central luggage system's computer data. (Another page explains the missing computer data more fully) With the middle and outer parts of the middle link equally blank about this bag, it was only some alleged luck that an employee, Bogomira Erac, and no one else, had printed a copy of just the data investigators needed, luggage destined for 103A, as a personal souvenir. Apparently she realized police had never gotten a copy, and then surrendered hers at the end of January 1989. (Another post yet deals in more detail with the circumstances of this save) [Trial Transcripts, Day 47, 30 August 2000, pages 6659-6671 - see also Erac testimony]

What this unusual and unsubstantiated record showed was a luggage item "coded" into container no. 8849, at coding station 206, 13:07 local time. Station 206 was logged as processing KM180's luggage from 1304-1310 local, suggesting the bag was from that flight. Item 8849 was then logged through storage and up to the correct loading gate to go on PA103A. (For more detail on the actual records, and lack thereof, and what they say or don't, see the post Primary Evidence: Frankfurt Airport Records.)

Also, the public indoctrination about this item on the printout is quite interesting. Well before it was decided libyans were responsible, a year or so was spent telling the world via David Leppard, a Granada/HBO TV movie, and other sources, that the Palestinians working for Iran in Germany had taken their altimeter bomb to Malta and sent it through three ups and downs before it blew up over Lockerbie. Only later did they realize they had a piece of the timer ...

Problems with the Evidence
- Contradicted by Air Malta's records
Stand-alone Post: Primary Evidence: Air Malta's Records for KM180
In terms of air security, an unaccompanied bag being waved through the system was considered a major and embarrassing breach. When the notion of such a bomb was visualized in a Granada/HBO movie, released December 1990, Paul Foot explains:

"This was too much for Air Malta, who sued Granada for libel. Norton Rose, the London commercial solicitors, compiled a huge dossier detailing almost everything about the flight from Malta to Frankfurt on the day of the Lockerbie bombing and proving that all 55 bags checked in on the flight could be ascribed to passengers, none of whom travelled on to London. The evidence was so powerful that Granada settled the action before it got to court. They paid Air Malta £15,000 damages and all the costs of the case. The only time these matters had been tested in a legal action, the Maltese connection to the bomb suitcase was comprehensively demolished." [Foot p 7]

- Supported by nothing else
Stand-alone Post: Frankfurt Airport's Missing Computer Records


- Ambiguity of its Evidence
Stand-alone Post: Coding Station Reliability
Station 206 at 1307 does not actually mean that an item from KM180 really entered the system tagged for PA103A. While this blogger accepts that's the single most likely thing indicated, such a conclusion runs up against both the Air Malta records having no 56th bag to fill the slot. It's quite possible, as widely argued, that another item altogether, from somewhere else, could have been piggy-backed in on KM180's load.

- Questionable Authenticity


- Operational Security (circumstantial)
Three airports circumvented ...
Frankfurt Airport had been put on alert,and vigilant against radio units that might have bombs inside.

See also: Randi forum (JREF0 discussion thread, started by me but taken over to amazing effect by Rolfe. Unaccompanied bag from Malta - evidence?

Libya Blamed by "American" Six Weeks After Bombing

June 28 2010
updates/edits/links 6/30

Early 1989 was a time of intense recrimination between German authorities and their British and American counterparts over whose airport security failed on December 21 1988. One of the lesser charges hurled at the time also bears a then-oddball but now-familiar stamp of blame. On February 3 1989, based on what someone had told them, CBS News reported that Libyans may have been behind the whole thing. The Herald (Scotland) reported on this, and I thank to JREF forum member Spitfire IX for the tip.

Libyan link to Lockerbie blast
3 February 1989
“INVESTIGATORS believe that employees of Libyan Arab Airways in Frankfurt planted the bomb which destroyed a PanAm Jumbo jet four days before Christmas, killing 270 people in and around Lockerbie, according to the American television network CBS News.”

This is far too early for any of the bogus clues against Megrahi to have emerged. It’s also far too early to be motivated by Gulf War alliances mandating a blind eye to Syria, as some assess the motive. It doesn’t appear to be based on any evidence (see below), but it must have been based on something or it wouldn’t have been said.

“CBS said that at least 100 Libyan airline employees are intelligence operatives under the command of Abdullah Senoussi, who is related to the country's leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Senoussie reportedly has a printing plant which produces forged luggage tags, among other documents.”

That certainly would not explain accused Fhimah’s later plot to flat steal Air Malta tags for the bombing, a "clue" that wouldn’t emerge for over two years. In fact, these sounds like hollow points of speculation, maybe just a handy occasion to again draw attention to Frankfurt while floating a novel solution to the embarrassing truth. Of course, only a few people would know this soon just how embarrassing that would be.

“The bomb, said by CBS to contain 20lbs of plastic explosives, was in a suitcase falsely labelled to fly to New York, via London, on flight 103. It was not searched, x-rayed, or even weighed-in at Frankfurt airport, where it was smuggled in through a ''back door,'' the TV report said, citing an American source.

CBS said the device was believed to be identical to a suitcase bomb found by West German police, in the days before the Lockerbie disaster, when they arrested 14 members of Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.”

There is no likeness, "identical" or otherwise, implied in the given description. Mot obviously, the ones seized were designed to blow up within 30-45 minutes or an hour (it's complicated) of leaving the ground, which has never fitted with an origin at Frankfurt or further out. Not with the blast 38 minutes after leaving London. Further, the only one of the PFLP-GC devices known of at the time contained 312 grams of Semtex-H, or well under one pound. Three found later were comparable, and the bomb used on 103 was at least that weight, and perhaps as high as 680 grams, based on the container damage. Again nowhere near this alleged 20 pound Libyan monster.

In fact, such small amounts of explosive could only work as fatally as happened on Soltice ’88 with the choicest placement within the luggage container - against the sloping outboard floor panel just two feet from the plane's skin. This is entirely possible by random baggage loading, but far less than a 50/50 shot. There’s still no guarantee, but at least a good 50/50, if the luggage is actually arranged by a terrorists who knows of the sweet spot. Someone else could then move it, or not move it. And of course that could only happen at Heathrow where the container was loaded, hundreds of miles from those dastardly Libyans at Frankfurt and their "back door" antics that still have never been elaborated.

That unspecified “American source” would have presumably been someone involved in an investigation. And we know the CIA’s probe into 103 was headed by Vincent Cannistraro, head of Agency’s counter-terrorism center. Previously, Cannistraro was one of Reagan’s make-s***-up-about-Libya men (See Maltese Double Cross – 42:40 mark). Along with Ollie North and Howard Teicher at the NSC, he used input from CIA and Deprtment of Defense to seed disinformation in the media to justify a policy of covert U.S. harassment of Col. Gaddafi up to coup plans and attempted assassination by Cruise missile, in 1986.

I’d bet money that Vincent Cannistraro was the source for this allegation. He’s friendly with the press, and always eager to tell them whatever’s convenient at the moment with some flair and no compunctions. The story had Libyan intel agents working through LAA at an airport connected to the Lockerbie bombing. The CIA at that time had Abdul Majid Giaka’s stories on file, mentioning both Megrahi and Fhimah as just such agents, but attachedto LAA at Luqa airport on Malta.

Of course, no further moves were made for quite a while, as investigators spent all of 1989 and 1990 at least publicly pushing the PFLP-GC leads - and increasingly Malta leads. Even the suspicious, possibly backdated evidence pointing at Libya was dated around May ’89 and not generally understood for around a year. If this is indeed an early stirring of Vince’s Libya solution, it was too early after waking from the haze of no leads that can be pursued. Libyan guilt rather than PFLP-GC/Syria/Iran probably did look nice and comforting passing through the national news, but just six weeks after the bombing, it was clearly something to come back to after a cup of coffee and a fistful of planted clues.

What Did The British Know?

The Scots-German War Over Airport Security, part 1 of 2
June 20 2010
last update 21 November

The following is part essay, part compilation of long quotes. Two early books are drawn from throughout:
[E+D] Emerson, Steven and Brian Duffy “The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation” New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons. April 1990. 283 pages.
[L] Leppard, David.On the Trail of Terror: The Inside Story of the Lockerbie Investigation. London, Jonathan Cape. May 1991. 221 pages.
The views expressed by those writers are not necessarily shared by this blogger – the exercise is to gather facts and attitudes, the zeitgeist, of this minor 1989 struggle of wills between two erstwhile allies in a major investigation.
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The point of origin for the bomb – where it first left the ground - was of prime importance in the first weeks after the explosion of Pan Am 103 on 21 December 1988. Fresh in investigator’ memories, a cell of Iranian-commissioned "Palestinian" terrorists had been busted in West Germany with multiple altimeter bombs, just six weeks before the bombing. That one of these had struck was obviously a prominent suspicion.

The plane that was destroyed, a 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas, was loaded from empty at Heathrow, taking on luggage that originated from the surface there, as well as bags that had come in from several other airports. A bomb like those found in Germany could only have worked, the conventional wisdom ran, if it had been introduced at London. If any other flight had taken it up first, that flight would have been killed, rather than 103. Steve Emerson and Brian Duffy explained, in their early 1990 book:

“If a barometer had triggered the bomb, as some investigators suspected, Heathrow was the likely place to try to get it aboard. “If it were a barometric device,” one official said, “it would have to trigger only once.” Placing a bomb on the 103 anywhere else, if it was barometric triggered, meant it would have to trigger more than once. “Much too complicated,” said a U.S. official briefed on the AAIB findings.” [E+D 156]

And the fear of discovering London origin was real. As David Leppard wrote in 1991, “if Heathrow had been to blame, the ramifications would have been severe: it would have meant that the bomb had probably been constructed in England by a new terrorist cell whose activities were unknown to the British security authorities,” and would have slipped through their air security system. [L 60] It would be heartening then to see the headline on the December 31 edition of the Times of London:

DISASTER BOMB WAS 'PLACED ON BOARD JUMBO IN FRANKFURT' [E+D 160]

This was the opening shot of what could be called a war of words between British and German forces that would mar 1989. But their supporting evidence for such a bold claim was scant at first. Emerson and Duffy note that investigators first concluded the bomb “must have been placed on the right side of the plane," after finding luggage in the right inboard engine but none in the left two engines. It seems doubtful there enough of the engines left to tell this, but without further explanation, the book asserts that this finding "meant the bomb had almost certainly been sneaked aboard at Heathrow.” [E+D 156]

There is no "Heathrow luggage on the right side of the plane" rule, but it was this alone that the authors cite as leading to the initial “Frankfurt connection” British and American investigators decided by the end of December. The FBI had concluded, as a December 31 internal memo stated, that the bomb had “entered the Pan Am system at Frankfurt.” [E+D 160] They had hoped to keep it out of the news to prevent the terrorists knowing what they knew. “Like John Boyd, Judge Sessions and Buck Revell wanted to keep a close hold on the Frankfurt connection.” [E+D 160] It was therefore a minor disaster when the Times ran its New Year’s headline, we're told.

The reasoning did get slightly better than left-side-equals-not London, or at least it reads better in David Leppard’s book from 1991:

“Sir Peter Imberth, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, was naturally concerned about the possibility that the bomb had slipped through security at Heathrow […] It was therefore a great relief when it was proved within the first weeks that the bomb had been inside a pallet containing luggage which had passed through Heathrow from other airports.” [L 60]

For example, John Bedford's story, elicited in the first half of January 1989, has the matching suitcases of the presumed IED style appearing at the interline shed. While a Mr. Kamboj was in charge, he says, two hard-shell Samsonite-style cases, one or both of them brown, were laid on the container’s floor. Normally all bags coming in there are from another connecting flight, not from the surface. And it was accepted that the container was then filled with luggage from the 727 arriving from Frankfurt, leaving no room, officially, for first-time-up luggage.

But they had already said the bomb was in the Frankfurt luggage, which was all transferred to the container after its time at interline, about an hour after Bedford saw those bags - the only two reported that were so similar to the bomb-bag style. So these too had to be eliminated, and it was the damage assessment of the container – plus strained logic – that made the hit.

The British AAIB and Mr. Claiden had assessed the container’s remains early on and found the approximate blast center – lower outboard corner, not in direct contact with the floor but only one flat-laid case beneath it, and against the sloping floor panel. The closest spot to the airplane’s fuselage and thus the deadliest possible. The bags Kamboj vouched for were both flat on the floor, when Bedford saw them.

David Leppard cites joint British-American forensics tests carried out in April 1989 at Indian Head, MD as the main thing that helped the investigation “narrow down estimates by [the AAIB] about the exact centre of the explosion.” Overseen by RARDE’s Allen Feraday and FBI’s Tom Thurman, they confirmed the findings in general, but more importantly, “the tests also meant that the mysterious brown Samsonite reported by [Bedford] could be ruled out; it was not the bomb bag. Kamboj was in the clear.” [L 141]

But of course, well before these tests, the mood music was building up that Frankfurt would be it. The Germans sought to keep their own airport from being named, but got little support. British Transport Minister Paul Channon was one of the few willing to grant them any leeway. Regarding a conference in Montreal on 16 February 1989, Emerson and Duffy wrote:

“In the prepared text, Channon’s original statement read thus: “The reconstruction of the baggage container suggests that the explosive device may have been among the baggage from the Frankfurt flight.” In another, larger typeface, two lines had been inserted before that sentence: “it has not yet been firmly established where the bag which contained the device was originally loaded, but…” The night before Channon’s statement, Bonn’s minister of transport, Jurgen Warnke, had asked that there be no reference made to Frankfurt. The most he had been able to get from Channon was the hasty two-line insert.” [E+D 156-57]

Interestingly, Channon would be sacked shortly for failing to stick to the script regarding Lockerbie.

The same peculiar mix of repeated wishful thinking tinged with hints of the actual uncertainty are reflected in a talk by Senior Investigating Officer John Orr at the Lockerbie Incident Control Center (LICC) on March 28:

“To date 14 pieces of explosive-damaged baggage have been recovered and enquiries to date suggest that on the balance of probabilities the explosive device is likely to be amongst the Frankfurt baggage items. Of all the currently identified explosion-damaged luggage all but one item originated from Frankfurt.” [L 100, italics in LICC original]

As will become clear later in the essay, these are all flimsy supports that don’t add up to what was claimed – solid reason to be sure of Frankfurt origin. The evidence claimed now, the Frankfurt printout, didn’t fully surface until August 1989. The desperate flailing for proof before this might seem strange at first blush, but the reasons above were not likely the real ones for the decision made. A whole other set of knowledge seems to be at work in dismissing Heathrow, and it’s the very abundance of London origin clues.
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Next: Part 2: What did the Germans Know?

Frankfurt Airport's Missing Computer Records

Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
finished March 9 2010
last edit March 10 1am

An Urgent Inquiry?
Following the historic fall of Pan Am 103 onto Scotland, the world’s law enforcers and investigators sprang into action to sort out what had happened and how. A short six days after the bombing, on December 27 1988, a news article reported that:

“The New York-bound flight originated as a Boeing 727 from Frankfurt, West Germany, with a change of planes at London’s Heathrow airport. Federal police in West Germany and the commander of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad last week began investigations at those airports.” [1]

More properly, an official feeder flight called PA103A, a Boeing 727, brought 47 passengers and their luggage from Frankfurt to London, where 103 itself (a 747, Clipper Maid of the Seas, with 243 passengers) originated. So about 20% of the flight originated in Germany, and if Pan Am had let a bomb through, it was at one of these two airports. So no surprise agents were swarming on both before Christmas Eve.

One German whose opinion matters here was airport employee Bogomira Erac, whose diligence seems to have solved the troubles we’ll deal with below. At the Zeist rtrial in 2000 she related first learning of PA103’s explosion en route to NY after work that night. “On the news it said the plane came from Frankfurt,” she testified. “I thought it was a direct flight. I didn't know anything more than that.” [2] The better informed police knew the tragic flight had a partial start point at Frankfurt airport, and should have gone there looking for exactly one thing: data on the luggage sent onto the plane that blew up.

German federal authorities with the BKA (BundesKriminalAmt) had at their disposal Frankfurt Main’s world-class computerized luggage system. This routed many thousands of bags a day on mechanized conveyors, every movement controlled and recorded by a central computer. All bags routed to 103A could be identified and tracked with some precision, compared with other flights and with paper logs. All of this should have been just a print command away.

The Eight-Month Blank Spot
The BKA came away empty-handed, it seems. Even working closely with their German counterparts, for eight months neither the Scottish police nor the FBI had direct record of the day’s luggage routing, not even for the feeder flight they were increasingly suspecting. Investigators were already, on their own, fudging away John Bedford’s story with unfounded forensic decisions about luggage arrangement to disprove a London origin. They were already speculating about a Khreesat bomb with modifications to fit it a journey from Frankfurt or beyond, without the hard data that would later back it up.

It wasn’t until mid-August 1989 that the “Frankfurt printout” saved the day, and since then is touted as the revolutionary evidence proving the bomb came from Malta, through Germany, and only briefly passed through Heathrow. The blind interim of nearly eight months is often ignored, and when mentioned it’s usually pinned on mysterious German failings. David Leppard wrote that Senior Investigating Officer John Orr had been asking for the 103A records “since early January,” and noted “the delay was never satisfactorily explained by the BKA.” [3] Leppard also mentioned the BKA’s own, earlier “work on the baggage-loading list, and wrote, damningly “had the BKA drawn the proper conclusions from their work […] it is likely that the bombers of PA103 would today be behind bars.” [4]

As noted by Leppard, the BKA reports attached to the printout, the careful work showing a Malta origin bag with no passenger, were both dated February 2 1989. This does show a puzzling delay of six-and-a-half months before surrendering it to the Scots that has got to have an interesting explanation. However, another puzzle glossed over by Leppard and nearly everyone else on all sides of the Lockerbie issue, is why the BKA themselves didn’t get the printout until over a month after the crash.

It’s no secret that Mrs. Erac, who printed this evidence as a personal keepsake the day after the attack, was never asked for it or offered it up until late January 1989. [5] This means the BKA reports indeed were done upon belated receipt of the evidence.And the related and larger question is, since all agree that stray souvenir wound up being THE evidence for what went onto PA103A, why does no one seem to wonder or much care why that was the case? Why hadn’t police gotten the relevant data right off the central computer on, say, December 22, like Bogomira did?

Live Data
From various readings and reasoning on my own part, the luggage routing system ran thus: each item of luggage was placed in a tray (“coded”), each with a unique number (or code, running approximately 00000-12000). [6] The central computer would reconcile each tray number with a flight destination from the luggage tags. As the items kept in constant motion on mechanized conveyors, the central computer would read periodic scanner returns and direct the machinery to route each tray where it needed to go. Every signal sent to or from the computer could be stored in its active memory.

As the Zeist Court gave their understanding, in 2001: “it was possible, for a limited period, to identify all the items of baggage sent through the system to a particular flight. After some time, however, that information would be lost from the system.” [7] A November 1991 article from the UK Observer, revealing the role of Mrs. Erac’ for the first time, explained:

“The vital computer evidence […] would have been lost forever if the woman operator had not kept her own record. […] She knew records relating to baggage loaded on to flights were kept in the system for only a limited time [eight days] before being wiped.” [8]

To be quite clear, the computers were running and recording on December 21, and the information was able to be printed, says the printout of the key data from the next day. That was held in the computer for eight days or a week in normal circumstances. Investigators were there by three days after a major airliner bombing presumably looking for a copy of just this data.

Printouts and Data Tapes
Now if we accept that the BKA had forgotten to snag this data on their presumed visit, we have a separate poor decision by the airport authority. The FAG (Frankfurt Airport Group) also must have failed to make an official copy before the memory was cleared. Legendary Lockerbie researcher Ian Ferguson was able to speak with an anonymous man described as “The expert who helped design the baggage system in place at Frankfurt airport in 1988 and familiar with the operating software”

"He was puzzled when he saw how short the printout out was and explained that there was no need to print a very small extract from the baggage system traffic, as a full back-up tape was made. This would have shown all the baggage movements at Frankfurt airport that day." [9]

Ferguson explained to the expert “that the system was purged every few days and that no back-up tape existed,” he responded: "This is not true." He admitted "of course it is possible no back-up tape was made for that particular day,” but explained that the FAG would usually keep such records simply to meet insurance claims for lost baggage. [10] And they would surely learn within hours that a flight originating from there had exploded, and that a backup was still not ordered by them, on top of the failure of the feds to make a copy is… let’s just say troubling.

In contrast to the expert’s recollection, Mrs. Erac said in 2000 “it would be possible then to copy the data onto disks.” [11] Somehow tape sounds more plausible in a system first set up in the mid-1970s, but disc storage, and perhaps a dual system would make sense. That this central brain would wind up blank by accident just when it was needed most seems unlikely.

Erac also spoke to routine paper printouts that would be kept on file for some time. A few days after her return from holiday, she recalls, “Mr. Berg just asked me to take a look in the archive in order to see whether there were teletype printouts. These were the things which came automatically from the computer. But I couldn't find anything.” [12] Routine prints gone. Special official prints not done. Tape or disk backup, routine or investigative, failed to appear. Police copies, nil.

But a personal memento copy, out of the investigative loop for weeks, altered for all we know, and certainly with no other copies to check against, is later acknowledged and accepted despite its broken chain of custody.

Listless in Pursuit of the List?
The only mentions one will find of the lack of early knowledge is in connection with the problem being solved by Bogomira’s Printout. The Observer’s introductory article of 1991 said that after her return from holiday in mid-January, “she was surprised to learn that no one had shown any interest in the computer records.” [13] Each has their own way of couching this odd failure; the BBC’s 2008 Conspiracy Files episode said "after the crash, surprisingly, the German police hadn’t fully investigated all the luggage records at the airport." [14] Having looked at all available information, I can safely say it’s a guess that the police just didn’t fully look – they either didn’t look at all for the one part they needed, or it wasn’t there when they looked, or they found it and then covered it up. It’s never been clarified which of these happened.

Whatever the book got wrong, Coleman and Goddard’s Trail of the Octopus is useful in this area, summarizing the due incredulity over this development:

"If the new Malta/Libyan theory was to replace the established Iran/PFLP-GC scenario, it was necessary, first of all, to believe that no one thought to ask for the baggage-loading lists for Flight 103A as soon as terrorist action was suspected -- which was almost at once.

It was necessary to believe that no one in any of the British, German and American police, intelligence and accident inquiry agencies who had a hand in investigating the disaster, or anyone who was in any way involved with airport management or security at Frankfurt or London, thought to secure the baggage lists as the one indispensable tool that would be needed to unravel the mystery of how the bomb got aboard.

It was necessary to believe that the only person who considered the lists to be at all important was a lowly computer operator at Frankfurt airport." [15]

And finally, none too helpful is a discrepancy revealed in Leppard’s book regarding the February 1989 reports attached to the printout. For these, the BKA had interviewed Gunther Kasteleiner, in charge of baggage flow to 103A. His interviewer wrote into the report “by a coincidence, the record of baggage transported […] for flight PA103 on 21.12.88 is still stored in the computer.” [16] This report then is in stark contrast to the story we now have that it was all wiped well before then and the souvenir saved the day. Leppard does however say “the BKA had obtained a print-out of this record from Kurt Berg.” [17] This, we now know, was Bogomira’s supervisor, to whom she handed the printout and by whom it was taken to the BKA at the end of January. But investigators were saying that Berg had gotten this off the computer itself, a month after the police couldn’t find it there. That could be a simple erred presumption, or a sign that a shifting cover-story was attached to this, and it changed later.

Sources:
[1]“Crash Investigators Studying Suitcase; bodies identified.” The Arizona Republic December 27, 1988. Accessed March 5 2010 at:
http://plane-truth.com/Aoude/geocities/az3.html
[2] Camp Zeist trial transcription, Day 47, 30 August 2000. p 6662.
see also: full testimony, on-line posting.
[3] Leppard, David.On the Trail of Terror: The Inside Story of the Lockerbie Investigation. London, Jonathan Cape . 1991. 221 pages. p 151
[4] ibid. p 157.
[5] Erac testimony, p 6666
[6] Using the Erac printout as representative and randomly spread, its sequential tray numbers (with no connection to coding time) top off at 12224.
[7] In the High Court of Justiciary at Camp Zeist. Case no. 1475/99. Opinion of the Court. Delivered 31 January 2001. Paragraph 27. PDF link: http://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/library/lockerbie/docs/lockerbiejudgement.pdf
[8] Coleman, Lester and Donald Goddard. Trail of the Octopus - From Beiruit to Lockerbie, Inside the DIA. 1993. Online posting, chapter 7, unpaginated. http://11syyskuu.net/octopus/trail.ch.7.htm
[9], [10] Ferguson, Ian. The Judges Got it Wrong. Sunday Times (Malta) 10 May 2009. Re-post: http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/05/from-sunday-times-malta.html
[11], [12] Erac testimony p 6668, 6666-67
[13] See 8.
[14] "The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie." Prod/Dir Guy Smith, Ex Prod Sam Anstiss, Narr Caroline Catz. BBC Two. First Aired 31 August 2008. 25:12
[15] See 8.
[16], [17] Leppard, p 152