On the evening of December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 traveling from Frankfurt to New York crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, after a stopover at London’s Heathrow Airport, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew along with 11 civilians on a residential street.
Following a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals, Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah.
A Scottish court found Fhimah not guilty, though Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
In November 2022, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former senior Libyan intelligence official, was kidnapped from his home and charged with two criminal counts related to the bombing—it was alleged that he set the timer before the bomb went off.
U.S. officials say that Mas’ud admitted during an interview with Libyan law enforcement following the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 that the Lockerbie bombing was ordered by Libyan intelligence and that he and others who participated were personally thanked by Qaddafi for their roles.[1]
However, the former director of that prison, Khalid al-Sharif, denies that Mas’ud ever made such a confession while he was there. Sharif, now living in exile in Turkey, was one of the top leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an Afghan-based group that was listed in 2004 as a terrorist organization, though this designation was removed in 2015 after it participated in the 2011 U.S.-NATO-supported armed revolt that toppled Qaddafi’s secular national government.
After his release from a Scottish jail in 2009 because he was suffering from pancreatic cancer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was greeted by crowds back in Libya as a national hero, as people thought that he was innocent.
Megrahi’s conviction had hinged on the testimony of a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, who identified Megrahi as buying clothes, fragments of which were found among the plane wreckage.
However, the man who bought the clothes was older and taller than Megrahi and bought the clothes two weeks earlier. Furthermore, Gauci did not say he sold a slalom shirt that was found at the crash site with bomb fragments. Megrahi said that he never bought clothes at all from Gauci whom he said “dealt with me very wrongly. I have never seen him in my life before he came to court.”[2]
Australian Investigator Finds Hidden CIA Hand
Peter Osborne is a physics teacher and former science adviser to the Australian government who began investigating CIA corruption in 2002 after his encryption business venture established with the Australian government and United Nations was destroyed by CIA Operation StillPoint because it had an encryption key that the National Security Agency (NSA)—which operated at a U.S. spy base in Australia—could not infiltrate.
Osborne’s research has followed on the heels of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, who was murdered in August 1991 before he could write a tell-all book that would expose a web of corruption by a rogue group of CIA agents who appeared to be involved in the Lockerbie bombing.
Osborne has amassed a large amount of evidence indicating that the rogue group, led by the CIA’s former Saigon Station Chief Theodore Shackley, was indeed behind the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.
Known as “the godfather of secret warriors,” Shackley had worked as a translator for Nazi spy chief Reinhard Gehlen after his recruitment into the CIA and headed the CIA’s JM-Wave station in Miami, which directed terrorist operations against Cuba following the Cuban Revolution.
Shackley then teamed up with jungle warfare specialists such as Richard Secord, John Singlaub, Tom Clines and Oliver North in the secret war in Laos, where the CIA created a secret army of opium-growing Hmong tribesmen to fight against the communist Pathet Lao. Millions of dollars in opium profits were siphoned off and laundered through the Nugan Hand Bank of Australia during this operation.[3]
Shackley retired from the CIA in the late 1970s but continued to work with the Agency while heading private security companies that were involved in illicit arms deals with Iran to help fund the Nicaraguan Contras (counter-revolutionaries funded by the CIA to overthrow the left-wing Sandinistas).
The motive of Shackley and his secret team in bombing Pan Am Flight 103 was to cover up their involvement in illegal drug trafficking going back to the era of the Indochina War to fund black operations.
Among the Lockerbie victims were three U.S. intelligence specialists returning from an aborted hostage rescue mission in Lebanon: a) Matthew Gannon, the CIA Deputy Station Chief in Beirut; b) Ronald Lariviere, a special agent assigned to Beirut; and c) Major Charles McKee, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA operative from Arlington, Virginia.
A variety of sources have claimed that McKee got wind of illicit narcotics trafficking by Shackley and his secret team and was returning to Washington with Gannon and Lariviere to blow the whistle on them.
Pan Am Flight103 was brought down shortly after the election of ex-CIA chief George H.W. Bush, who enjoyed a close relationship with Shackley and his secret team.
A few months after Lockerbie, reports emerged from Lebanon that McKee and Gannon’s travel plans had been leaked to the bombers. The implication was that Flight 103 was targeted because they were on board.
McKee and company’s itinerary was allegedly telexed by then-DEA Agent Micheal Hurley to the CIA Director of Operations in Washington, MI6 and SPAG, a CIA Special Action Group in Germany. CIA operative George K. Pender had alerted members of the secret team that McKee and his team had unearthed evidence of their illegal drug and arms trafficking operations and was on his way to Washington to report on it. Prior to the flight, McKee had contacted his mother, Beulah, who said he appeared to be in distress.[4]
According to John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, authors of Cover-up of Convenience—The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie, Megrahi’s trial did not take into account the wads of U.S. dollars, or the heroin or the Hezbollah t-shirt found in the wreckage.
Furthermore, a suitcase belonging to McKee was mysteriously carried away from the piles of wreckage left by the crash and even had a large hole cut into it before it was returned to the investigation.
Called “tiny” by his Army intelligence friends when he was really a burly giant, McKee had graduated first in his class from the Army Special Forces School and served with the Green Berets in Beirut before working with the CIA there.
Ohio Congressman James Traficant said that a report that McKee and Gannon had seen concluded that the CIA was “covering up a drug run, protecting the terrorists’ Frankfurt to New York heroin route in exchange for contacts that might lead to the release of American hostages.”
These hostages had been taken by Hezbollah after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which the U.S. was blamed for supporting.
The CIA-protected drug route that McKee and Gannon were going to expose was supposedly called Operation Corea.
It allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar, an associate of Oliver North, to ship heroin produced by Christian Falangists backed by the CIA in Lebanon to the U.S. using Pan-Am flights in exchange for intelligence on Palestinian groups holding hostages in Syria.
The CIA protected the suitcases containing the drugs and made sure they were not searched. However, on the day of the bombing, terrorists exchanged suitcases, one with drugs, for one with a bomb.
Beulah McKee told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that, if her son had discovered that a faction of the CIA had become corrupt, he would have demanded answers and that her son was unwilling to be caught up in a drug-running ring.
Three years after the crash, she told Time that, “for three years, I’ve had a feeling that if Chuck hadn’t been on that plane, it wouldn’t have been bombed,” adding that she had “never been satisfied at all by what the people in Washington told me.”
Traficant said that the classified report McKee and Gannon had seen detailed a web of plots and connections involving hostages, spies, bombers and drug runners.
Allegedly, West German intelligence agents told CIA agents in Frankfurt about an hour before Pan Am Flight 103 departed that they suspected a bomb may have been enclosed in a specific suitcase, Traficant said.
Traficant corroborated that McKee and Gannon knew the CIA was protecting the heroin ring and planned to tell U.S. officials this was hindering efforts to win the hostages’ release.
A sign that there was a cover-up in place was that FBI Agent Oliver “Buck” Revell, who worked with the “secret team,” was able to warn his son in advance not to take Pan Am Flight 103 but to change to another flight.
U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon John McCarthy and Pik Botha, a South African politician and 22 other South African delegates were also booked on Pan Am Flight 103, but they either changed planes or declined to travel because of a warning.
According to Osborne, Shackley’s co-conspirators included Richard Secord, a veteran of the secret war in Laos involved in Iran-Contra, and Vincent Cannistraro, head of the CIA’s counterterrorism center who worked out of the U.S. embassy in Rome and with Oliver North. Conveniently, Cannistraro was appointed to head the CIA’s investigation into the Lockerbie crash.
Edwin Wilson claimed from his prison cell that he had been working for the CIA when his company, International Consultants, shipped 20 tons of plastic explosives from Houston, Texas, to Tripoli and trained people in Libya working for the Qaddafi regime to blow up things like airlines. (Wilson was convicted in 1983 of illegally selling weapons to Libya.)
