TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/112789/11278900.044

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 6KB | 108 lines

NATION, Page 33

Keeping Lockerbie Alive

Questions still burn for relatives of the Pan Am 103 victims


    When Wendy Giebler finishes her job as a video production
manager in Haverstraw, N.Y., each day, she starts a second shift
of a more passionate nature. At home she spends five hours writing
letters, preparing testimony, drafting speeches and devouring all
the information she can find on how and why Pan Am Flight 103
exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, last December, killing 270
people. One of the victims was William Giebler, 29, a bond broker
who had married Wendy less than a year earlier. "I have nothing
else left to live for," says Giebler, who transformed her grief
into action. "This is what I consider my career."

    Giebler has joined hundreds of relatives of Flight 103 victims
in an organized attempt to change Government and airline policies
and win compensation for their loss. Embittered after countless
run-ins with unresponsive and evasive officials, their early
efforts to lobby for improved airline safety quickly hardened into
demands for the British, German and U.S. governments to disclose
what they know about the bombing. Bert Ammerman, a high school
assistant principal who lost his brother Tom and now heads a group
called Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, calls Washington a "cesspool
of unaccountability." After months of lobbying Congress and a
meeting with President Bush, the families finally persuaded the
Administration to establish a Commission on Aviation Security and
Terrorism, which began hearings last week.

    Earlier this month, Ammerman accompanied a six-member
delegation of American and British families to West Germany to quiz
investigators and government officials on terrorist links to Flight
103. The group emerged from three days of talks with little new
information. But they left the Germans with the clear impression
that their persistence will not fade.

    Nor has the European press lost its appetite for unraveling the
Pan Am mystery. Since last summer, newspapers and magazines in
Britain and Germany have bannered a disturbing mix of
unsubstantiated charges and possibly valuable clues about the
bombing.

    The accusations and finger pointing give many Flight 103
families the sense of being trapped in an impenetrable web of
international politics and terrorism. Says Eleanor Bright, whose
husband Nick died over Lockerbie: "I feel as if I've been dropped
in the middle of a bad spy novel." Among the disclosures:

    West German police apprehended 16 suspected terrorists but then
released all but two of them in October 1988, after discovering a
cache of explosives and a bomb similar to the one used to destroy
Flight 103 eight weeks later. Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian who some
authorities believe assembled the Pan Am bomb, was among those set
free. Published stories contend that Khreesat was also a German
intelligence agent; German authorities deny it.

    Pressured by a $300 million lawsuit for compensatory damages
filed by more than 100 families, Pan Am has subpoenaed records of
six U.S. Government agencies including the CIA, the Drug
Enforcement Administration and the State Department. The subpoena
suggests that Israel or West Germany relayed serious warnings of
a bombing to the U.S. -- and that the warnings were not passed on
to Pan Am. The Flight 103 families say Pan Am may merely be trying
to shift the blame so it can wriggle out of paying huge claims.

    In the wildest allegation so far, an internal report by an
investigator for Pan Am's insurance carrier suggests that the CIA
unwittingly allowed the bomb aboard Flight 103 to protect a
hostage-for-drugs operation. The report states that Monzer al
Kassar, a Syrian arms dealer, was permitted to ship drugs through
a "protected" route at Frankfurt in exchange for promises to help
free American hostages in Lebanon. The subpoenas filed by Pan Am
suggest that the CIA may even have a videotape of the bomb-laden
suitcase being loaded in Frankfurt. The CIA and British authorities
categorically deny these allegations.

    After months of being kept in the dark, however, the families
no longer discount any theory. "I believe (the CIA scenario) is
more than possible," says Giebler. She is not alone in her
suspicion, nor in her anger about the offer by the Bush
Administration to compensate the families of victims killed in the
downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the U.S.S. Vincennes in July
1988. Some security analysts conclude that Iran ordered the bombing
of Flight 103 to avenge the Iranian Airbus disaster. The families
do not disagree. Jeannine Boulanger, whose 21-year-old daughter
Nicole was killed over Lockerbie, remembers vividly the day the
Iranian plane went down. "Little did I realize that my daughter
would pay the price for that," she says. "Iran paid for this
bombing, yet Americans must sue to get compensation."

    The families' estrangement from the Government and anger at Pan
Am began almost as soon as Flight 103 fell from the sky. As
television displayed the plane's splintered wreckage, relatives
were told to wait patiently for the State Department to return
their calls. Some sat seething by their telephones for as long as
three days while calls bounced between agencies. When relatives of
John Ahern, 26, went to New York City's Kennedy Airport, they were
directed to a livestock warehouse where his body was forklifted off
a plane in a cardboard box. No Pan Am or Government representative
was present to help them. "They stripped him of his dignity," says
Ahern's sister Bonnie O'Connor. "He should have come home with an
American flag on his coffin."

    The families say their quest for answers will persist until
they learn who killed their relatives and how it was allowed to
happen. Nor will they back down until air travel is made safer. "We
are answering to our loved ones," says Ammerman. "We have all made
a commitment not to stop until we satisfy that need." No one who
has come up against them doubts the sincerity of that promise.