Customer Reviews

Lockerbie: The Story and the Lessons

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Rodney Wallis has written a detailed account of the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 disaster from a unique perspective. Wallis was Security Director for the IATA and ICAO in 1988 when the Lockerbie bombing occured. As he makes clear in establishing his credentials he and his associates had access to more and higher level security information in the months prior to the bombing than anybody outside government.

This book provides a solid background on the aircraft bombings prior to Lockerbie, and several chapters of very detailed account of the civil suit against Pan Am and its insurers. This is an excellent summary of those disparate sources. One striking problem with this book is the total absence of references.

Wallis scrupulously sidesteps any of the questions that point to the government, the intelligence services, or what more loosely would be called the "political" aspects. Nevertheless he says clearly several things of the utmost importance that points to some of those questions.

He says emphatically - as he did under oath in the Pan Am suit - that he does not believe that the Helsinki warning which the US State Department selective disseminated to its employees was a "hoax" - the line of US and UK government.

Wallis says that in the months before the Lockerbie bombing Iran had a debt to settle, that it called for "an eye for an eye" justice (p.20), that the pictures of the bombs designed for use on airlines that were captured by German police in October 1988 had been given to many officials. It was clear that in the months before Lockerbie to all of the relevant civil and government security experts that an attack was imminent. Wallis believes that the Helsinki warning was no hoax and was related to Lockerbie (p.24). Wallis confirms that nothing was done to act on those warning (p.25 "the intelligence ...failed to elicit an effective response"). He states that the US and UK governments have been disingenuous ever since then in regard to what they did know in regard to the warnings and the bombing (p.34). His interpretation of the evidence is ultimately pointing to Iran - "Iranians were in no doubt that they had a real motive for revenge" - p.32, "The decision to bomb a Pan Am aircraft was and still is seen by most observers to have originated with the shooting down of the Iran Air airbus" p.52.

Wallis does not speculate what produced the inactivity on the part of government officials. It should be noted that he is a career professional with the civil administration charged with aviation security. His concerns are with technology and procedures and he is unwilling to recognize that an attack on the US by foreign government is beyond the capacity his organizations. Perhaps defending American citizens against an attack by foreign government is the responsibility of our own defense and intelligence agencies. Given the reams of evidence of foreknowlege that Wallis describes the decision to leave these matters in the hands of Pan Am's private security seems like somebodies tacit acquiescence.

Wallis ends on a rather lame note debunking two pathetic theories relating Lockerbie to a drug running operation or an attempt to assassinate of a group US intelligence agents. There is nothing to support the "drug running" canard and it seems likely the CIA agents were just unlucky leaving Cyprus they did not benifit from warnings that the rest of the US government employees received. .

Wallis dismisses these ridiculously implausible "conspiracies" because they require a callousness by intelligence agents that "stretches the imagination to a point beyond belief". This is unsatisfactory. But as Wallis has made abundantly clear a very large number of people knew with frightening specificity that the Pan Am bombing would take place, where it would take place and when - and that nothing was done. The alternative to an utterly implausable concatenation of unlikely events is that just the kind of decision that Wallis seems to find unbelievable were made - but certainly at a much higher level and for something much more important than a "drug sting". Wallis gives the reader many facts to ask the right question - but he keeps his opinions about what the answers might be, to himself.

In fact given the history of attempts to write on the Lockerbie disaster Wallis's discretion is essential. Books that did not tow the government line on Lockerbie have been suppressed by legal actions in the UK and the US. Others are tied up in legal vetting. Writers on the topic who have raised just some of these questions have been subject to legal actions by government officials or former officials involved in one way or the other with Lockerbie. The courts have been a very effective tool to dissuade any investigative journalist from looking into Lockerbie. In contrast to Wallis's comment that "whenever the names of these two [Iran and the United States] were linked, the name of Lockerbie was never far away"; in fact the Iranian role in Lockerbie, as it is recognized by Wallis, has been utterly expunged from the US press since the Bush administration announced its position in 1991. Senior writers and editors at major US papers have produced a long stream of articles that white-wash Iran and amount to a pro-Iran lobby. To have gotten this book into print at all is an accomplishment. Despite some important lacunae and the lamentable absence of notes and sources this remains far and away the best work yet published on the Lockerbie and the first book that even approaches being a serious treatment. To understand Lockerbie start here.

This is an excellent work on the civil litigation trial brought by the surviving family members of the Pan Am 103 terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, where 259 souls on board, and 11 persons on the ground, perished. This was a civil trial brought by the family members against the now defunct air carrier, Pan American World Airways, for "willful misconduct" in the carrier's failure to carry out government mandated FAA security procedures. The trial took place in the courtroom of the Honorable Thomas C. Platt in the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York in 1992. It is a painstakingly accurate account of a trial where it was clear an enormous amount of work was done by the plaintiff attorneys, the defense attorneys, and also, the government attorneys to vigorously represent their respective parties' interests and the public interest, in determining not only the liability of the air carrier, but in furthering the investigation into the how and the why of this horrific terrorist act. The information that was entered into evidence that is described so accurately by Wallis was later used by both the Scottish prosecutors and defense attorneys in the criminal trial against the two defendants who were charged with the Lockerbie bombing, of which one of the two, Al-Megrahi, was found guilty by a Scottish court sitting in Zeist, the Netherlands in 2001.