Games of Intelligence
After collapse of the Soviet Union, the elites of the City of London and Washington D.C. shifted their focus to “regime-change” operations in the Middle East to secure control over the oilrich countries and ensure the continuity of the petrodollar system which gave the United States financial supremacy. In the last decades, under the pretext of the Cold War with Russia, the American CIA, British MI6 and Israeli Mossad as well as other allied intelligence services like German BND had been recruiting and financing various terrorist groups, which were often used as tools in their economic and political agenda. In the 1980s and 1990s, these groups, financed by western intelligence services, had participated in various 'false flag' operations that usually aimed to justify a military intervention. The key countries on their target list were Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Libya was one of the first African countries to stand up so decisively to the Anglo-American domination. The revolutionary leader of Libya, Colonel Moammar El-Gadhafi had humble beginnings but he grew to become a visionary man.443 Born in a tent, in a rural area outside the town of Sirte, between Tripoli and Benghazi, in the deserts of Tripolitania, he was the only son of an impoverished nomadic Bedouin.444 His father paid for his education in a nearby Sirte, where he slept in a mosque and at weekends walked 20 miles to visit his parents.445 In 1963, he enrolled at the University of Libya in Benghazi to study history but dropped out to join military. His brief stay in Britain convinced him that although technologically advanced, Britain is devoid of spiritual culture. Inspired by nationalist policies of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who wrestled the Suez Canal from the British and the French, Gadhafi decided to set up a revolutionary cell in the army. In 1969, he overthrew British-imposed and pro-Israeli king Idris. Subsequently, he nationalized the oil industry, much to the dismay of British Petroleum, inspiring other oil producing countries grouped in OPEC to use it as instrument of political influence. He invested the oil money in free education, medical care and housing and launched the world's greatest irrigation project – the Great Man-Made river – to supply water to the Libyan population. Gadhafi went even further. In his “Green Book”, which he published in 1975, he rejected capitalism and representative democracy and proposed a type of direct democracy, which allowed direct political participation for all adult Libyans at the local level.446
Gadhafi's independent politics naturally worried the Anglo-American elites. Their response were economic sanctions and provocative U.S. military maneuvers. Gadhafi retaliated by purchasing military equipment from Soviet Russia and by supporting various opposition groups that opposed Anglo-American elites such as Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), Irish Republican Army (IRA) and National African Congress (NAC). Thus, by mid-1980s, Gadhafi found himself on the list of leaders that the elites of the City of London and Washington D.C. wanted to eliminate. On April 5, 1986, a bomb exploded in La Belle discothèque in West Berlin which was frequent by the American soldiers killing three people and injuring 229.447 The American government immediately accused agents of the Libyan embassy of being complicit in the bombing and ordered punitive attacks on Tripoli and Libya's second largest city, Benghazi. Shortly before 2 a.m. on April 15, 1986, 66 American jets, some of them flying from British bases, dropped 60 tons of munitions on Libyan military barracks and bases, and Gadhafi's residential compound, killing at least 30 civilians and Gadhafi adopted daughter Hanah.448 Despite their best efforts, Gadhafi himself, the main target of the air strike, escaped unhurt. Then, on December 21, 1988, on winter solstice, the longest night of the year, shortly before Christmas, the Pan American jumbo jet - Pan Am Flight 103 - crashed onto the residential areas of a peaceful Scottish town LOCKERBIE, killing 259 people on board, mostly Americans, and 11 people on the ground. The wreckage of the plane was scattered for miles. Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkin said at the time that "The aircraft clearly experienced some form of explosion, which has resulted in many parts of the aircraft falling in many different locations -- that we know."449 FBI agents and British dignitaries came immediately to the scene to oversee the investigation. The Pan Am 103 flight bound for New York had originated at Frankfurt Airport, West Germany, and had a scheduled change of aircraft at London Heathrow Airport. Initially, the investigators suspected the Palestinians planted a bomb, until they allegedly discovered a fragment of circuit board which was an element of a timer made by a Swiss firm called Mebo, the majority of which was supplied to Libya.450 451 The clothes that were found in a suitcase believed to have contained a bomb with Mebo timer, were traced to a Maltese merchant, Tony Gauci, who became a key prosecution witness. He gave contradictory evidence about who had bought the clothes, that person's age and appearance, and the date of purchase but later identified Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, head of security of Libyan Arab Airlines. Investigators claimed that a bag had been routed onto Pan Am 103 flight via the interline baggage system at Frankfurt, from the station and approximate time at which bags were unloaded from flight KM180 from Malta. Al-Megrahi was at Luqa airport in Malta at that time catching the 10.20 flight to Tripoli which was open for check-in at the same time as flight KM180, and he was traveling on a passport with a false name. Although documentation for flight KM180 indicated that all bags on that flight were accounted for, the court inferred that the bag came from that flight and that it contained the bomb.452 The prosecutors followed the Libyan trail and disregarded other vital evidence, such as the fact that security guard Ray Manley had reported that Heathrow's Pan Am baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before flight 103 took off.453 454 After a three-year investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, which cooperated with the authorities in Germany and the USA, indictments for murder were issued on November 13, 1991 against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, and LAA station manager in Luqa airport in Malta. Two Libyans were indicted but Gadhafi refused to hand them over and U.S. government retaliated by making U.N. impose sanctions on Libya.455
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443 443Because of the difficulties with transliteration from Arabic into Latin alphabet, there are over 100 spellings of Gadhafi's name. The authors chose the name he reportedly used in 1986 when corresponding with some secondgraders in Minnesota: “Moammar El-Gadhafi”, quoting after Joseph Alexiou, “Explained! Why No One Knows How The Hell Spell Quadaffi/Gadhafi/Gaddafi/Qadhafi”, Business Insider, 23 February 2011 http://www.businessinsider.com/qaddafi-gaddafi-kadafi-qadaffi-libya-spelling-2011-2?IR=T »
444 Simmons, Libya: The Struggle for Survival (Springer, 1996), p. 170 »
445 David Blundy and Andrew Lycett, Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown & Co, 1987), p. 39 »
446 George Tremlett, Gadafii: The Desert Mystic (1993) »
447 According to the German TV programme Frontal, broadcast on 25 August 1998, those involved in masterminding the bombing in Berlin in 1986 were Musbah Eter, who worked at the Libyan embassy in East Berlin and who had frequent contacts with the U.S. embassy, and Mohammed Amairi, an agent of Mossad. In 2001, after a four year trial, four people were convicted: A German, Verena Chanaa, who allegedly carried the bomb into the disco in a travel bag and left; A Palestinian, Yasir Shraydi, and Libyan diplomat Musbah Eter, who worked in the Libyan Embassy; and a Lebanese-born German, Ali Chanaa, former husband of Ms Chanaa. The court complained about the “limited willingness” of the German and American government to share intelligence. The court also declared that the personal responsibility of the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, had not been proven. Source: Steven Erlanger, “4 Guilty in Fatal 1986 Berlin Disco Bombing Linked to Libya”, The New York Times, 14 November 2011 https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/world/4-guilty-in-fatal-1986-berlin-disco-bombing-linked-to-libya.html »
448 “1986: US launches air strikes on Libya “, BBC, 15 April 1986 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/15/newsid_3975000/3975455.stm »
449 Edward Cody, “Pan Am Jet crushes into Scotland”, Washington Post Foreign Service, 22 December 1988 »
450 Many years later, in 2007, Mebo's electronic engineer, and one of chief witnesses, swore an affidavit admitting he had given false evidence at the trial and that he had stolen a prototype MST13 timer PC board from MEBO and gave it to “an official person investigating case” source: Allistair Fitzgerald, Air Crash Investigations: Lockerbie, the Bombing of Panam Flight 103 (Mabuhay Publishing), p. 231 »
451 Alex Duval Smith, “Vital Lockerbie Evidence Was Tampered With”, The Guardian, 2 September 2007 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/sep/02/theairlineindustry.libya »
452 Air Malta issued a statement in 1989, denying that an unaccompanied suitcase could have been carried on Flight KM 180: “39 passengers checked in 55 pieces of baggage were loaded onto Flight KM180; and 39 passengers travelled on the flight. Air Marta has been informed that all 55 pieces of baggage have been accounted for and that everyone of the 39 passengers had been identified”, Air Malta declared. See Allistair Fitzgerald, Air Crash Investigations: Lockerbie, the Bombing of Panam Flight 103 (Mabuhay Publishing), p. 232 »
453 This was one of many grounds of appeal prepared by Megrahi's defense team:”There exists significant evidence which was not heard at the trial. It demonstrates that at some time in the two hours before 12:35 am on December 21, 1988, a padlock had been forced on a secure door giving access to airside in Terminal 3 of Heathrow Airport, near to the area referred to in the trial as “the baggage built up area”. See Allistair Fitzgerald, Air Crash Investigations: Lockerbie, the Bombing of Panam Flight 103 (Mabuhay Publishing), p. 247 »
454 For detailed analysis of the Lockerbie investigation, the loopholes and inconsistencies see: Morag G. Kerr, Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies (UK: Matador, 2014) »
455 On December 22, 1994, a day after the fourth anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Libya witnessed the worst aviation disaster in its history. Flight 1103 from Benghazi to Tripoli, after circulating around the Tripoli airport waiting for permission to land due to military traffic, was hit in the rear by the Libyan military jet MiG-23 and plummeted 1,000 metres in just 13 seconds, killing all 157 people aboard. MiG-23's crew ejected and survived but was subsequently imprisoned. The families' of those who died found it strange that both Lockerbie and Tripoli disaster happened almost exactly on the same day and bore eerily similar flight numbers. »