Ep. - 1676 - LOCKERBIE: THE REAL STORY BEHIND NETFLIX’S THE BOMBING OF PAN AM 103

The days are longer, the calendar is filling up, and I want to feel as good as this beautiful summer weather. That's why I've been loving groans. It's one daily pack of gummies that covers my greens, vitamins, and minerals, and even has six grams of prebiotic fiber. So I don't need to juggle a complicated wellness routine on top of everything else. They taste amazing. They're easy to toss in my bag on the go, plus their vegan gluten-free and HSA FSA eligible for reimbursement. Save up to 52% off with promo code podcast at groans.co. That's code podcast at gruns.co. Welcome back for another episode of reality life with KKC. Olive Gordon was 25, a hairdresser, and she could not stop telling people the same sentence. I'm going to New York tomorrow. It was her first trip to America. She said it to her client. She said it to her family. She said it like it was the best sentence she'd ever gotten to say out loud. Tim Berman was 24, and he was flying to New York too to spend Christmas with the woman that he loved. They were two of 259 people on that plane. College students flying home for a break, business travelers finishing one last trip before the holidays. Kids counting down the hours until they wake up in their own beds on Christmas morning. Every single one of them had somewhere to be and someone waiting for them. Neither Olive nor Tim made it. On December 21, 1988, four days before Christmas, Pan Am Flight 103 took off from London's Heathrow just after 6 in the evening. Families had hugged goodbye at the gate. College students were heading home for the holidays. 38 minutes into that flight at 31,000 feet over southern Scotland, a bomb hidden inside a suitcase went off. 259 people on that plane died instantly. 11 more died on the ground in the small town of Lockerby when the wreckage came down on their homes. A Libyan intelligence officer was convicted in 2001 for his role in the bombing. A second suspect and alleged bomb maker who was extradited to the US until 2022 still hasn't gone to trial. Jerry's selection is set for August, nearly 40 years after the bombing. Investigators have long tied the motive to retaliation. Muammar Kudafi was Libya's dictator at the time. A man who'd spent years locked in conflict with the West in sponsoring attacks abroad. Two years before Lockerby in 1986, the US bombed Tripoli and among the dead was Kudafi's own daughter. Lockerby investigators believe was Libya's answer. It remains one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in modern history. And on July 30, Netflix releases a six-part dramatization of it. The bombing of H&M 103 with Patrick J. Adams playing the FBI agent who led the American side of the investigation. A man named Richard Marquise. The real Richard Marquise is who you're about to hear from. I interviewed him in episode 1190 and I'm re-aering that out conversation now because I think the timing matters. There's a generation about to meet this story for the first time through a TV screen. And I wanted them and you to hear it first from someone who actually lived it. It would be easy to tell this story as a number. 270 dead, the largest most complicated international terrorism investigation ever conducted. One that reshaped how country share intelligence and rewrote the rules of aviation security. All of that is true. And none of it is why I keep thinking about this case long after I'd researched it. I kept thinking about that town. Before that December night, Lockerby was just a small Scottish town that nobody outside of Scotland had heard of. By the next morning, its fields were scattered with suitcases and Christmas presents, family photographs and passports. Pieces of 259 lives carried by the wind into places they were never supposed to be. And the people of Lockerby didn't respond with fear. They responded by opening their homes to grieving families and investigators. By walking freezing fields for days, looking for anything that might help. A tragedy that belonged to the entire world landed on them specifically. And they carried it with something close to grace. The tennis player, Annie Murray's mother Judy was teaching in that town the night it happened. It stayed part of the place ever since. And I kept thinking about Richard. When I first reached out to him, I genuinely did not know if he'd want to revisit a case that had come to define so much his career. He wrote me back almost immediately. Not only did he agree to talk, he kept answering my questions after we hung up. He sent me photographs from the investigation itself, evidence from the crash site. Images that made clear just how slow and painstaking that work actually was. And what struck me wasn't just how much he remembered. Nearly 40 years on, most people would have the facts filed away, retrievable, but distant. It was how much he still cared. He didn't talk about Lockerby like a career highlight. He talked about the victims, about the families, about the responsibility that he and his team felt to keep looking until they had real answers no matter how long it took. For Richard Marquise, this was not just a case. It was a promise to 270 people to a town that didn't ask for any of this. That someone would just keep searching for the truth as long as it took to find it out. Now, quick note before we start, this conversation was recorded before the current US trial began. So you're going to hear Richard talking about the case as it stood out at that point. The investigation in the history and not the latest developments from the courtroom. And one more thing before we go, a few small, strange footnotes to all of us. Actors Kim Ketrault was booked on PNM 103 and she changed her plans the last minute. And the story goes that she'd forgotten to buy her mother a gift from her parents and caught a different flight home instead. Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, known to most of us as Johnny Rotten, was booked in that same flight with his wife Nora and they missed it because she hadn't finished packing. He said publicly that the two of them just looked at each other when they heard the news and almost collapsed. The Motown group, the four tops and tennis champion, Mott's Willender were also reportedly booked on that flight and for whatever reason did not board. It's the kind of detail that sits somewhere between fun fact and gut punch. For a handful of people that delay in errand or an argument over packing, was the only difference between one more empty seat on that plane and a life that kept going. But what hasn't changed is why we're still telling the story almost 40 years later. It's not because of the explosion, it's because of who was on that plane and who was standing underneath it. Here's my interview with the former FBI special agent Richard Marquise. What a pleasure. I've tracked you down. It took a bit, but I found you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's so good to be here. So tell me the first call that you get in relation to Lockerby. Where are you and what is happening at the moment where you get a call that you have to come and help with the investigation? My recollection was, this happened at about two o'clock in the afternoon in Washington. So I was at work and I was working in the counterterrorism section in 1988. And we started to hear rumors. I mean, this was before everybody had a television and see and then on all the time. So we didn't have that instant news that you would get today, something like that happened. But we started to hear rumors around the section that an American airliner crashed and then a little bit later an American airliner crashed. Well, by the time it was time to go home at six o'clock, you know, it's 11 o'clock at night in Scotland. There was not a lot of information coming about what it was because the Scots didn't know what it was initially. They thought it was a military plane that had crashed. So nobody really understood the enormity of what happened that night. I remember being a discussion and I'm sure there were some people maybe at our operations center that were getting information, but there was no indication of terrorism. It was a plane crash. So I think that in terms of the counterterrorism section on the night of the 21st, probably was not a high priority. It's a horrible thing. We didn't have a lot of detail until early the next day when the Scots went out. They started to see the enormity of the crash. Found out it's a Pan American aircraft with a 259 passengers and grew and then we knew some people in Lockerby had been killed as well. And it seems to me that it was about lunchtime on the 22nd when I was out having a Christmas lunch with a friend and my Pedro went off. And I was asked to come back to the office because we needed to start talking about what was going to happen in the event. This turned out to be a crime and turned out specifically to be a terrorist crime. We didn't know, we started talking about, well, we're going to treat it as such. We're going to treat it as a crime. We're going to treat it as terrorism, even before we knew, because there were several claims by one by an Irish group, a couple others by some Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, claiming credit or causing this airplane to crash. So we're starting to suspect the very first day that it may have something to do with terrorism, but it would not be proven till about Christmas day. So at what point do you fly to Scotland? I didn't go to Scotland initially until March. In 1988, the FBI's jurisdiction in working counterterrorism cases abroad, up until 1984, there was not. There had been an airplane crash in 1984. The US government wouldn't go investigate. There was no violation of the law. It would all be happening in that country wherever it was. The Congress passed two bills, one in 1984, one in 1986 that made it a federal crime, a US federal crime, to first to kidnap, because of all the kidnapings that were going on in the Middle East, and then to kill or injure an American during the Commission of a Terrorist attack. So the Congress gave the jurisdiction to the FBI that if the Attorney General certifies that this was a terrorist attack, the US government has the right to collect evidence, and the right to get them arrested and brought back to go on trial in the United States. That does not mean we would go into a country and usurp their authority. It was intended mostly for places like Lebanon, Iran, places where no justice was going to be meaded out to anybody. So we reserved the right to collect the evidence. But in case like Scotland that has a Western police force, they have the right of first refusal. They said, "Oh, we can't do this. We don't want to do this for political reasons. We would ask permission because we don't have authority there to go, do we have to get permission of the host country?" So what happened, it was determined on, I think it was the Christmas day or the day after, that it was a bomb that brought the plane down. They found a fragment of a baggage container, and forensics people examined it and said that we believe that a high-powered explosive brought this plane down. And again, no real evidence of terrorism but suspicion. So the FBI requested through our legal adage in London permission to send liaison agent. We sent one to Germany to coordinate the investigation because the flight that had come into London had come from Frankfurt. We sent agents to London and we sent an addition to our forensics people. We sent one liaison agent to La Croixby. They would all be done differently. But that was sort of, this was a new type of investigation, if you will. I mean, we've worked cases overseas before, but this was like the first big one. And I don't know that, back I do know, the FBI made a lot of mistakes in the early days about the way we did this. But I've often said, if we had sent over a senior manager, which I recommended after this was over. If we sent over a senior manager in the first couple of days and he or she decided that they're going to say, I'm in charge when you're clearly not. You send the wrong person. It would take the right person. I said, I think we would add a lot of failure, particularly in early stages. The young guy that we sent over, you know, I've been in the Bureau a few years, he was a perfect person. He was not threatening. He didn't try to take charge. He was not a supervisor, but he was great about getting information. And he had the great ability to transfer it back and forth so that the information sharing flowed very well. It wasn't, I went over to the very first meeting in Lockerby in March of 1989. And we met with the Scottish police, with the German BKA and somebody from SO13 in Schallengard from London. And that was the very first meeting because the first few months were very frustrating because the evidence is scattered in 845 square miles. So when you think about, somebody goes into a house because there was an homicide, that's your crime scene. You can search it in a couple of days. You can get all your evidence. You can get it tested. You can get it done. But when you have evidence, because it might blew up at 31,000 feet. And you can imagine that debris, it's train, plane is traveling at 500 miles an hour. And the debris falls from 31,000 feet. It's scattered in the Schumunga's crime scene. And largest crime scene in history. So the collection of evidence, even the chief constable, what he could get it done in a week or two. They were still searching the fields two years later, looking for evidence. Now, a lot of the significant evidence was collected early on. But then the other problem you had, you had so much stuff. How do you decide what's important and what's not? I mean, this was all new to this new to everybody. A bomb on an airplane bringing the plane down over this huge area. The other bombings on aircraft, most of them fell into the ocean. Well, is that kind of the intended idea that if it does fall into the ocean, there will be no evidence. So is there something to that that it was maybe exploded preemptively? That was a thought. The normal rooting from Heathrow to New York is they turn west almost after leaving Heathrow. So out over the Irish Sea go across Ireland and they come to the United States. This night, the wind was blowing at about 100 miles an hour from the west to the east. So the pilots were told you need to take a more northerly rooting. So rather than go hard turn left out of London and go across the Irish Sea across Ireland, they said stay above England. So they flew north in England. And then when they got into Scotland, they were given the command to turn west just over southern Scotland and they were going to go west and literally that airplane would be right to like there, Iceland, Greenland and make this big blue because they said it would take less time when was not as strong going that way. And it was going to, I guess, consume less fuel. And I've been on some of those flights where we've actually had to stop in Gander and get fuel because of the wind being so strong. So I can see how they did that. We've always said that we got lucky because if that airplane had gone out over the ocean, we would never have found any evidence. And as it was, the airplane literally was coast to coast from the west coast to Scotland to the east coast where they found some of the lighter debris that had blown almost over to the east side of Scotland. Now is this because of the fireballs but also because of the wind? This was because of the wind. Just the 100 mile an hour wind in their faces from coming from the west. Now some have suggested that there were passengers that may have been alive and what have had there had been support at the scene of the crime right away that they would have lived. Is that even possible? I have read, I read two autopsy reports and they were so graphic and I couldn't read anymore. It was just awful. The two that I read said these people hit the ground as such a speed that if you were six feet two, that by the time your family got you back, you might have been five seven because you're everything compressed when they hit the ground depending on which way that you hit the ground. Now, when I asked the question, never of a medical doctor, but I asked some of the prosecutors who had read all of the autopsy reports, I said, is it possible for somebody to survive? And they said, they have said, literally it's not, but I have read that at least two people may have survived the initial impact, maybe because of the way where they landed, how they landed, the ground was very soft. I have a photograph of, I don't know if it's a wine bottle, but it's a bottle of French wine hits the ground from 31 now. Who knows what it was in, may have been in a suitcase and fallen out, but this bottle of wine hit the ground and the bottle didn't break. Interesting. What do you think? Wow. But then ground in Scotland. It's not like we think about in the United States, you know, you get in December, everything's frozen. You know, you weigh up North and Scotland, it's gotta be frozen. It wasn't the ground was very soft. It was very soft. In fact, there's a lot of pictures that were taken. You see water sitting in the streets right after December, in December. So you see, there's not like a snow and frozen. The ground couldn't be very soft. But I think a lot of the families, when they asked, I don't know whether they read autopsy reports. I think it's better to think that they would kill instantly, maybe by falling debris or have a heart attack as you wake up, is it possible that they were, they blacked out when they 31,000 feet the oxygen to the air is very light. And they may have come to falling to the earth. I think if I was falling 31,000 feet in the dark, I hope I'd have a stroke or a heart attack and go, as opposed to when do you hit the ground? But I think the real answer is, I don't know. But I think it's probably more comforting to the families to think that your victim, your family member was killed instantly because of a lack of oxygen and never came to and died when they hit the ground. I think that's always been sort of the official line about how that worked. But I have read that a couple of people, I mean, you think about it again, you've got, most of the bodies were close to locker-be. They were not that far, but you think about this small town, smallest police force in the United Kingdom, Doug Frisian Galloway. And I'm sure they had a couple of ambulances, but when you have no idea where to go at night, I doubt that the people had very long, they hit the ground, but maybe somebody found somebody and that person was alive. And all of a sudden that became a story. I found a living victim, she is too bad nobody could get here to take care of them. I'm not sure how all these people live, if in fact they survived. (upbeat music) - The days are longer, the calendar is filling up and I want to feel as good as this beautiful summer weather. It's one daily pack of gummies that covers my greens, vitamins and minerals and even has six grams of prebiotic fiber. They taste amazing. They're easy to toss in my bag on the go, plus their vegan gluten free and HSA, FSA eligible for reimbursement. (upbeat music) - What was some of the most compelling evidence that they were able to get from the crime scene? - Well, I mean clearly when you do an investigation, it's almost like you work from the outside ear. Okay, so when we think about, okay, what was the evidence we found? It's almost in the order. The very first thing was a fragment, metal fragment made out of aluminum with pitting and cratering, blackening indications of a high power explosive. And they would later prove that it had, and I didn't do well in chemistry. So it had RDX and BET and big long chemical names for components of check made plastic explosive syntax. So that was found very early on indicators from a baggage container. Now the baggage containers in 747 were either aluminum or fiberglass. So this one was an aluminum baggage container. Well, by taking that and looking at all the baggage containers that fell to earth, they figured out which baggage container it was, a V E 4041 PA was the name of the, they found it in fragments. It was formed, ripped. The fiberglass ones were broken. They were, they could hit the ground and you see where it broke off. But the aluminum ones were just bent from the most part 'cause there were some in the front of the plane, some of the back of the plane. When they identified this baggage container where that skin rail came from, the piece of aluminum, they were able to say with certainty that this went on the plane, this is luggage from two places. It was luggage that was interlined into Heathrow earlier that day. So that container was sitting in the baggage buildup area and it was designated. That container's gonna go on Pan M 103 from London to New York at six o'clock. So put bags that come in from Cyprus, from Turkey, wherever else the planes may be coming into London. And then they filled up the bottom layer and then the rest of the bags in there were the bags that came in from Frankfurt, from the Frankfurt flight. So the rest, so the majority of the bags that were bags that came in from Frankfurt. So based on some tests that were done in Maryland, in 1989, the forensic examiners came up with a couple of conclusions. They said, this is the baggage container. It was on the second layer of luggage and it contained a less than a pound of some decks. Well, while they're playing with this baggage container, they find a small fragment. And I'm assuming you've seen some of the pictures. And if you have not, okay, I'm happy to send them to you. But there's a picture of a finger, okay? That shows a circuit board on it. It's brown. And you look at that and you go, wow, I don't care how big your finger is, that's, you still see loops and worlds on a fingerprint. You've got this little fragment. Well, that fragment comes to a Toshiba radio, a two speaker Toshiba radio. And of course, that is gonna be a clue that the forensic people, 'cause we're gonna find other evidence later that is the instruction manual for that radio. Some of the black plastic from that radio, piece of the speaker wheel, and clothing that was blasted into all of this stuff. So this is gonna become significant, but it's gonna take time. They also found 54 pieces of a suitcase. So they're able to say, we think that the bomb was in this cargo container. It would, which came from, we believe based on the forensic exams, came from Frankfurt. We believe based on the analysis of the fragments of the suitcases, 'cause suitcases, most of them survive. They landed in the dirt. You can clean them up and send them back. Some of them got dented and beat up and broken, but they found 54 fragments of a suitcase, which led, only one suitcase. Led the investigators to believe, forensic investigators to believe, this suitcase contained the bomb. So we identified the suitcases in Samsonite, so we went 4,000, which was manufactured in Denver, mostly sold in the Middle East. So they find the baggage container, the suitcase, and then in the suitcase, there's a Toshiba radio, black plastic, two speaker radio, and in that, they think it's gonna be an explosive, and they find all this clothing that they could also say, look, we found bunch clothing laying at the crash site. Somebody could pick it up and look at it, no, not a policeman, but forensic people could look at it and go, there's no blast damage on that at all. It's not burned, it's not charred, it's not blasted, it's ripped, it's torn, and there's a difference between blast damage and mechanical damage. It's torn because it was ripped on something was it fell, but they could eliminate some of those things, but they also found a lot of clothing, and our first big lead about the clothing was a lot of the clothing they were finding. The toughest part of the shirt was the collar, and the labels, the collar survived, and they had a lot of labels that said made in baltah. So that's gonna take us to the island of baltah. And of course, one of the big issues we faced early on when we discovered this was the Toshiba Radio also linked to a terrorist cell in Germany, the PFLPGC, and that cell was building bombs to be used aboard aircraft in October of 1988, and they used Toshiba Radio with the barometric timer on it. And of course, we sat there and we had a lot of debates because the Germans said that cell was all wrapped up. We arrested them all in October, two months before the bombing. We arrested these people, so we asked, well, where are they? Well, we arrested 16 people, including a plus the bomb builder. Where's the bomb builder? Well, we sat him back to Jordan because he was a Jordanian agent working for this terrorist group. Okay, he's gone. Well, where are the two principles? First to unjail with the other 16. people all have been released. And we had some issues because that plane blew up 38 minutes after it took off. It's just about the time frame that that Palestinian, that PFLPGC bomb would detonate. It was a very metric timer. And the time frame was between 30 and 40 minutes for the plane to blow up. It was done to defeat the aviation security of 1988. They would do that. It would not blow up on the tarmac. But the switch wouldn't go off until they got above I think 20,000 feet and then 38 minutes later, it would explode. And of course, we're sitting here trying to do this in German and said, well, we think the bomb went on London because that cell was wrapped up in Germany. Plus, why didn't the bomb blow up between Germany and London? And we couldn't explain that. And then all of a sudden, we have this multi-connection we're starting to find out. We get a baggage record from a multi that shows it the lone bag with no passenger put on the plane in Malta to Frankfurt to, it's designated for PAM 103. And we go, wow. But we had another problem. If it's that Palestinian bomb with the barometric device, why didn't it blow up between Malta and Frankfurt? And then it didn't blow up between Frankfurt and London. Had we've gone on in London, right? If it's a barometric bomb. But we would later discover by looking at all this one fragment of cloth, another fragment that's smaller than the one I showed you on my finger. And it's a fragment to a timer called MST13. And the MST13 was a timer built in Switzerland by Swiss company. And it solved our problem of how many times the airplane went up and down, because it was not a barometric device. It was straight timer. You set it for a particular time. And it's going to blow up. But we, and that we were able to prove. And I know this is probably the most. It's an easy case, as I think about it. But it's very complex because of the number of characters, the people-- and I didn't even go into. The media in January, because it's like today, you look at what was going on in New Orleans. There's this senators, we want full transparency. We want to know what went on. We want to know what happened. We want to know this. We want to know that. They want to know everything immediately. A lot of people are no different. And everybody was screaming in a hollering. Who did this? Who did this? And the CIA did an assessment. They said, based on what we know, the PFLPGC in Germany did this. Not based on any evidence. They based it on there. And all the intelligence agents, she said, we assessed the PFLPGC in Germany somehow managed to do this. That was their intelligence assessment, based on what they knew. So it's in the media. And in January, this man walks into the United States embassy in Vienna. He says, I've been reading. He says, I want to meet with the ambassador. The ambassador is not available. So he writes a letter. And in the letter, he doesn't sign it. In the letter, he tells them he's a European businessman. And he was asked to come and tell the US government what he knows. But he said, I have read all this material, I'm paraphrasing. I have read. I have a letter if you want to see it, too. But anyway, I'm paraphrasing. But I've been reading all this information in the media about the PFLPGC, this Palestinian group that committed the locker-bid bombing. He says, I don't think they did it. He said, I think the Libyans did it. And he describes a meeting that he went to in December, where he describes all of these people. And it's like I went to a meeting. And in the meeting was let's see, George Bush, Donald Rumpspell, Dick Cheney, Condoleesa Rice. OK, for sure, they all had meetings when they worked in the White House. And so what? And he did the same thing with Kadafi and all these other people having this meeting. But he threw a few other names in there, too, that we didn't know anything about these people. Anyway, we get the phone call from the embassy in Vienna. And the guy doesn't sign his name. No contact information. We know nothing about the guy. But he's tried to blame the Libyans. So we stuck it in over here because there's no leads. There's nothing we can do. We have no access to Libya. We can't go see this. Let's go cover a lead and Libyan interview these guys. So-- and of course, they were not to cooperate. Amazing thing was, the Russians cooperated a lot. They did a lot for us. Why do you think that happened? So probably one place to blow up. This is sort of an aside story. But we had somebody-- I don't remember the origins of all of it-- but somebody told us about a flight attendant. And this flight attendant for Pan Am was a young girl, she was from Dallas, apparently a very attractive blonde woman. And she had a boyfriend whose father was the Syrian ambassador Moscow. And he liked to pack her luggage. Well, that wouldn't have been so odd, except we found a piece of her luggage on Pan Am 103. What? At Lockerby. So that came first and found the piece of luggage. So we started trying to find out about her. This is all-- this was in early January. We tried to find out about her. And turns out she's on extended sick leave. And she's staying with her boyfriend in Moscow. So our minds are thinking. Very in boyfriend likes to pack her luggage. Maybe that is when she leaves Moscow after her sick leave is over. So we went through-- we had no relationship with the Russians at all. We went to the state department. We got them to go. The next thing we know, they're conducting surveillance of this woman and her boyfriend. We were getting daily reports about what they were doing. They were out drinking and partying and dancing all hours at night. So I remember this. By the way, she's on her sick leave. When this is happening? Oh, yeah. So anyway, she-- whether her sick leave ends or a panampo, just she had to come back to work. Because we were working with panamp security, too. They said she's coming back tomorrow. So we made sure that panamp station knew about-- the security people knew about it. She had to come through Frankfurt. They knew about it. And we were going to have two agents meet her at the plane in New York. And I can just imagine that the agents call me after the interview. And they said that this girl showed up. And she said she is beautiful. She's about 5'10. She had on a pair of black leather pants, very attractive young woman. And apparently, she gets off the plane in New York. And FBI, we want to talk to you. She says, "It effing failures. They were checking everything on her before they even letter on a plane." But she said, "I got body cavity searched in Moscow. What in the hell are you going to do to me?" But we watched her out. I don't know where panamp did to her. But apparently, panamp flight attendants would often leave. It was like her makeup kit. It had her name in it. And we discovered she had been on that aircraft. That's the whole thing about nobody cleans those aircraft. It takes all the crap off. We didn't even fight. But apparently, her bag was up in one of the-- she put it up in the-- and maybe the panant head has had a place. I don't remember anymore. But it was put in one of the overhead pants. And it was like her makeup bag. There was something like that in her name in it. But it was the fact that the Russians-- and I always felt that the Russians were helping us. Because this was 88 for the Berlin Wall fell. Yep. If the Russians are helping us, we should expect no more from everybody else. So we got a lot of help. But I sort of digress from my good friend, Mr. Bollier, that we didn't know who he was when he walked into the embassy in Vienna in January. We had to put that on the shelf. It wasn't until a fragment of this timer is identified. It takes months before we could figure out what it was. Because the CIA actually had one of those timers and a photograph of a second one. They had them. They had seized them in Africa. And they had them in their laboratory. So we were able to compare that fragment found blasted in to where the radio manual was, pieces of the radio, and a piece of clothing from my brother was a shirt. that was blown into this, everything was blown into this shirt, made this company. And I'm fast-forwarding to late 1990, so two years after the bombing, we have a magistrate here in Zurich. And we interviewed this guy. Well, it's all conducted in German. So we had a German speaking agent there. And I don't know that either he could bait it, right? But we didn't quite understand, but the Swiss called us a couple weeks later and said, "We got some pretty interesting news you really need to hear." Apparently, Mr. Boliet, the guy that made the timer, during the magistrates hearing, he said, "I made 20 of those." Libbyans asked for them in 1986. I made 20, we tested some, some of them blew up, but he said, "I cannot believe you found me because of the fact you found this fragment in this big crime scene. I thought you found me because of the letter I wrote and left at the embassy in Vienna." And we all went, "It's you." You're the guy that walked in in 1989 and said, "I don't think the Libbyans did this." Many proceeds to tell us that the Libbyans contacted him in mid-December. We're looking for some more of those timers that you built for us two years ago. And he didn't have any. So he went out to the Walmart and bought some Olympus timers and puts his company's logo on them, flies them to Libya and tries to sell them to the Libbyans. And they turned him down. They said, "We've already got what we need. We don't need that anymore." And he comes back. He was supposed to be on the flight that brought the bomb bag out of, this is, I mean, this is kind of really unusual, but he left it day early. He had a reservation on the air-multiply that had the bomb suitcase in it the next day. And he flew back a day early because they, they disdied. But he, and then of course, when it came time for trial, the Libbyans paid him billions of dollars. So his story's changed. Oh, I sold some of those to the Stasi. They really weren't the right ones. And because we said there were 20 of them, only 20. You know, he gave, and he gave all of them to, he never sold them. He gave them to that. They were supposed to be prototypes. But what like, why did he put himself in this position? He was a businessman. Yeah. What he said was, I've been doing business with Libbyan military intelligence for years. Now, let's turn it around as an American. We have defense department that I'm sure does business with 10,000 companies in the United States. Right? Now, if you own the XYZ corporation that makes, that makes bolts. And that bolt is used specifically to make a, a warhead on a bunker bomb. Now do you think that the guy that you are going to sit there at night and go, you know, that bolt that I make, it's a small piece, but I sold it to the defense department. I don't know what they're going to do with it, but maybe they'll put it on a bunker bomb, but maybe it'll put, you know, the medical stuff together. So we'll be taking care of people. I think only a justified in his mind that I'm making things for the military and the intelligence people. They're not going to do something bad with it. They're going to do something bad with it. Right. Well, yeah, military people, they don't get paid to do nothing. You understand my point. So I think if everybody that did work with the defense department started saying, I don't want to hurt anybody or kill anybody. And maybe what I make is small component. Maybe I shouldn't make it. But I think, boy, he said, this is my business. I've been doing business with them. He did a lot of communication stuff, but he made these timers. Should they ask him to manufacture a timer? He made it. It was, it's fairly very sophisticated. And he built, and it's only about this big. It's a very small timer. Maybe two inches square if that. It was in a box. And it would very easily fit up in the radio if he takes some of the components out. But the radio still work. If you were to have plugged it in or that batteries, turn it on, it would work, even with the semtex and the timer in the radio. So there are conspiracy theories, namely Dr. Jim Swire even has one that is really the center point of the scripted series about Lockerby. For those of you who worked diligently on this case for many, many years, and even in looking in retrospect, do you feel frustrated about that? Well, I don't, because, sad, you'd like to think that, I think I don't. We did everything we could do during the course of the investigation. If we had a lead, just because something said, well, maybe you should go this other way, we didn't let the other lead go. We would try to finish it out to make sure that we did everything to prove that's not what happened. We didn't abandon. There were some people that said, as soon as we got on to the Libyans, aha, it's a new thing. We'll blame them because, and one of the issues had to do with the first ball for war. Because there was a belief that the United States government and the British government collaborated to get Assad, the father of the current deposed president of Syria, to get the Hafez Assad on the side of the West. So he would not deny our support when we go into Iraq. There was a big belief that we would change the, that we investigators who are professionals would do something political to say, oh, you don't want us to go there. You want us to find somebody else here, sure, we'll do that. It never happened. And there are, unfortunately, there are some people who believe that we would, and maybe we did. But I've often said that if Margaret Thatcher and George Bush came to an agreement that maybe we better not look at, at Hafez Assad's group anymore, they forgot to tell us about it. Because we followed the evidence. We followed it. The other issue had to do with Reverend Mosy, who was to think his daughter, and Dr. Schweier were at a meeting in London. And I believe he said it was a politician from the United States who said, my government and yours saying the United States and Britain know who did this, but they're never going to tell you. Well, nobody's ever been able to say that was so and so. I've never heard a name because I'd love to go back and ask this person, did you say that? Why did you say that? What information did you have that would lead you to believe that we would number one lie about what the evidence was? And that's why I firmly believe it. I'll go to my grave believing the evidence as it is. We followed the evidence. We didn't, most everything that, I'm sorry, but the conspiracy theories theorist bring up, it's intelligence. It's, you can assess that. You can say, I think just like I commented about the original assessments done by the intelligence agencies, the FFL PGC, and I can see how you, anybody reached that conclusion, but the evidence didn't support that. And that's why law enforcement, for the most part, we don't go make final judgments until it's time to make a final judgment. And our final judgment was the indictments in November of 1991 that said, the evidence led us to believe that these two libias supported by others that are either unnamed, but we know who they are and we're not going to say their names right now, supported this because there's not evidence to do that. But we have evidence against these two people and we hope we can collect more in the future against other people, probably from Libya. The days are longer, the calendar is filling up and I want to feel as good as this beautiful summer weather. They taste amazing. They're easy to toss in my bag on the go, plus their vegan gluten free and HSA FSA eligible for reimbursement. Now, Kadafi never admitted guilt but there were fines paid. And then there was a minister who said that shortly before Kadoffi died that he was at a meeting where Kadoffi was part of the plan that was hatched for the bomb. Do you believe that's true? Well, I don't know. I know that when that's, I can tell you why I think Kadoffi paid the money and when he paid it because I remember this day like, you remember a lot of different things, 9/11, I'm all enough to remember the Kennedy assassination, but not Lincoln. So that one I don't like. But at any rate, I was in Dubai in a hotel when Ambassador Bremmer stood up at a press conference and said, we got a Saddam Hussein. They found Saddam Hussein in a hole in Iraq and he was brought out and he went and he was hung. Well, I have no doubt that one Mark Kadoffi was watching something at some point and he knew the United States just got Saddam Hussein. Let's think about this. It never found weapons and mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein has never, my knowledge, conducted a terrorist attack against the United States or the West. There have been some individual things that he may have been blamed for, some of his, some people, but there's no evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind any terrorism against the West. But you look at Kadoffi. I mean, he was, his agents were convicted in the UTA bombing in 1989 over Chad Africa by the time that Saddam Hussein was arrested. Muglahu had already been convicted in court. So he's had agents in two separate bombing airplane bombings. We believe strongly that he had weapons of mass destruction and at least a week later, that's when he came and said, okay, that's it. I'm giving up my weapons of mass destruction. I'd denounce terrorism and I'm going to pay. And yes, he didn't fully admit responsibility. And I'm still ticked off about that to this day. I did write it up to the Washington Post and I said, I'm, I'm incensed that our government allowed him to get away with such a weasel-y worded statement where he said, I accept responsibility for the actions of my agents. And people said, that's not, that's not, it's not an apology. Okay. Kadoffi was on a, it'd be similar to a Zoom call at Georgetown about 15 years ago. And I attended. It was held in a, in an auditorium at Georgetown. And they were going to allow Kadoffi to be asked questions. And we were allowed to submit questions that were not asked by us, but they were asked by a student. And I asked the question of Kadoffi. I said, and I remember the question, it said, you had agents convicted for UTA bombing. You've had an agent convicted for the Pan Am bombing. One of you going to accept total responsibility and apologize to the victim families. And I can, I'll never forget that. I was watching him. As the interpreter is saying these to him and he kind of looks at me. I mean, my son, my son, it was a young man that asked the question, my son, my son, Locker B is a close case. We need to move on. And this young man allowed him to get away with his answer, but a professor died up and challenged him. And Kadoffi sort of beat around the thing. He was never going to answer the question. Okay, you did this. Apologize. You want to be accepted in the West. You should apologize and he refused to do it. And that was, it was very offensive, but it was, it was interesting, but people like Kadoffi never did things just because they felt it was the right thing to do. There was pressure, the pressure seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein. He didn't, he'll go, unfortunately, for him, his own people did it. But it didn't happen because the United States invaded Libya and did that to him. So all of these years that have passed and you're sometimes asked about this case, has your opinion about anything changed over the years? Like you had mentioned earlier that you feel like the FBI made some mistakes in the beginning. But now that you look back after a career for 30 years, is there anything that you would have done differently as an investigator? Well, you can always say, it's Monday morning, I'm going to look back. When this was, when this was over, in this case was initially indicted, my day-to-day responsibility and activities changed. I was no longer responsible for the case because we said that we're at a stock. All the rest of the investigation that needs to be conducted has to be done in Libya. We can't do it. We have no diplomatic relations. We're not going to go. And it was not until 1999 when the Scots, when Kadoffi turned over the two suspects, went to Libya and conducted investigation. But I did two things. I sat down and I drafted with the help of the rest of everybody on the task force. What do we need to do? So there was a template left behind for everybody, which I think is a good idea to do in any major case. These are the things we didn't get done. This is what needs to get done if somebody goes. And I believe that they turned that over to the Scots when they went or at least gave them the information from it. The other thing I did was I wrote an after-action report and I was critical of the FBI, I was critical of me. I was critical of how we managed the case. Not so much how it was in, I mean, I think investigators did a really good job what we did. But we made some missteps. And some of the missteps, one of the first ones that I've suggested was that when you have a major case just like this, you take a senior official and you send them to that scene. Because it's all, it's usually too big for a field office. Now this one was really unusual because there's no field office in Scotland. You had to have sent somebody over there to manage the case and do this from day one all the time. Somebody needed to be there. But it's got to be the right person. Would I have been the right person to go in December of 1988? I'm not sure. I think the FBI did that part right. They sent a guy that was no threat to them. So it took them a while to figure it out. But I think that when I did was given the responsibility to oversee the entire case. Because initially my responsibilities from headquarters were to manage the overall investigation, but not directed. That other sounds confusing. Field offices do our investigations. I managed the whole thing, but I did not direct the resources. Those were directed at Washington Field Office. But a year and a half or so, yeah, it was recognized that that didn't work. Because I had access to things that the field office didn't, I won't go into a lot of detail, but we made some internal missteps. And when I was sent over, I was told your chain of commands changed. You work for that state special agent in charge. And the person that is your reviewing official as the assistant director, but I spent all my time in Bob Mueller's office. Bob Mueller was the guy that I spent most of my time talking to. And he wasn't even an FBI person. He was the deputy attorney general in charge of criminal division. Bob Mueller, it's really funny. I remember meeting him when he took that job. Because he came over and we briefed him. And the day that I was okay, you are in charge of everything. You got, and there were a lot of issues, relationship issues, lack of communication issues. Anyway, you got to go fix all these things. And my assistant director is the one that said, assistant director of the criminal division, he said, I can't think of anybody else other than me to go do that. And they called me and they said, are you willing to do this? And I was getting ready for a promotion. And I said, I'll step back from the promotion and I'll do this because I feel connected to it. And I didn't know if I could solve it, but I said, I learned a lot by sitting back and watching other people make mistakes. And I can remember calling people. And I can suggest things to like watching field office. And they ignored me sometimes. I just had a quarter of a guy. And anyway, I spent a lot of time building relationships. And I had somebody mentioned to be one thing. Well, I can't believe that you because I was critical of the early stages when the communication wasn't great between Washington and Lockerby. And I had somebody tell me, but I called there every two weeks. And I said, I said two years later, I said, I'm talking to them twice a day. Yeah. I said, that was, and I said, the other thing, what I remember walking into the agent charge's office, and I said, I need to go to Lockerby. He said, what for? Do we have a meeting? I said, no, that's the problem. The only time that we ever meet is when there's the big meeting and we eat food and we drink and we pat each other on the back and we set up the next meeting. I said, anybody ever sat down on that or one-on-one strategy session? What are we gonna do? And I said, that's what I need to do. And I went over and I sat down with Stuart Henderson, who was my counterpart in Scotland and I was nervous. I mean, I'm in my early 40s. I'm a pretty senior guy. I've been in the FBI for almost 20 years or, yeah, pretty close to 20 years at that point. But I was still nervous. Stuart was senior to me age-wise. He was a detective chief superintendent, which is pretty eye-up in the police. And I went over there and I was nervous about meeting with him because I said, I don't know what he's gonna say. Well, as I told a lot of people, I said, Stuart and I jog in the heat of Washington and the frigid cold of Sweden in the rain of London and Lockerby. I've been to his house. He's been to my house, our wives know each other, our kids know each other. When Stuart died, I went to a Sputor and carried his casket. I told him, "Street, you were never this heavy when you were alive. I couldn't come. I catch the weight of tongue." But I would, I spoke in his funeral. Stuart was like a brother to me. But that was the relationship that I knew I had to build with him and that do we agree on everything? Nope. We had a lot of disagreements, including the night before the indictments were announced. But Stuart and I had never had a physical fight, but we had a real knockdown dragout argument when we were in Malta because he did something that didn't agree with. And I told him, I said, what you did? I said, there was wrong. I disagreed with what you did. But we also knew that the end of the day, we were gonna come together and we were gonna do the right thing. We talked about that because as much as we may have disagreed, we agreed on one thing, absolutely positively. That attack was an attack on the United States of America. It's not a attack on Scotland, even though that's where the evidence was. And I also agreed, Stuart, you're in charge of this investigation. I'm a support figure and I'm telling you, you can have all the resources of the United States government because I can get those for you. And there's some things I can't tell you that we did. But if someone were to, if I could write all those things that we did, people would go, wow, wow, moving fleets, satellites. I mean, we did a lot of stuff that, you know, unheard of, unheard of. I don't even know what it cost. I'd never wanted to know. But we did things to support what we were doing during the course of the investigation. And I feel really, really good about what we accomplished. I wish we had accomplished it sooner. - Yeah. - I wish that it didn't take three years. But the reality is, it was good that we did because we were able to flush out all of those other things that the people like Dr. Swyre, well, Iranians did this because they were upset because we shot down the Airbus and killed 290 people. Yeah, I understand that. I can see why they would believe that. But the evidence doesn't show that. Now, I'll never, I can't say that some place in the bowels of the Iranian government isn't document that says, we're still ticked off about this shooting down this airplane. But we don't want our fingerprints on this. So we're gonna go to some other terrorist group at work country and we're gonna have them do this. But I've often thought, and I didn't know much about Sunnis and Shiites and all those relationships in 1988 have learned a lot more about them. I have find it hard to believe that a Shiite government would go to a Sunni government and say, hey folks, how about helping us out? I know the enemy of my enemy, how's that work? The enemy of my enemy is my no. Yeah, the enemy of my enemy is my friend or something. You know the phrase that I may hate you, but I'm gonna use you because this guy's worse than you are. So we're gonna go after you. But I, Locker B, for whatever the reason, 36 years later is still of interest to the world. And I'm glad for a couple reasons because I've often said that the model that Locker B eventually used of taking people, taking assets from the intelligence side, taking assets from the law enforcement side, internationally putting them together. We work very closely with CIA, with MI5. Things that never really happened before. I remember Stuart, we had a meeting at the CIA and Stuart walks out, we're in Langley, and I was impressed with the Dennis Park, right like in the executive parking lot. Usually I show up there and say, you're parked there. - Going back there. - Yeah. - On the other side of Route 123, but they would let us park. And so we walk up and Stuart says, I cannot believe that Stuart Henderson, a humble Scottish cop is allowed to come into the hallowed halls of the CIA. - Wow. - I never forget that. And that was, I mean, I went to MI5. I don't think I ever went to MI6, but MI5 used to often host lunches for us when we were in London. But when you bring all those assets together, you collaborate, you share. And of course, I read all the things of CM1 TV today about New Orleans. And how come this guy wasn't on the radar? No, there are seven billion people in the world. It's tough for everybody to be on everybody's radar. So when you do have probably, of course, the big goal prevents these things from happening. And the big goal today, if you can't do that, you gotta come at it hard and arrest the people and of course, right there for doing what they did. - I'm grateful for your 30 years of service. - 31 and a half. - 31 and a half, yeah. And while raising a family too, I'm really grateful for your service. Thank you for all that you did in this investigation and continued to do afterwards. A really, like a pretty phenomenal career. - Well, my career, I think, just ended after like 60 plus years, only because I don't think I want to take on any more major tasks. Although if maybe somebody called me, I'd probably come running, but I don't think, I got to get my wife all the better. - I think your wife would be very annoyed at you if you did that. But maybe there's a book in you. Maybe there's another book. - Another book. I don't know. The first one was, it took me a year to write it, a year to find a, let me say, a year to write it, another year to get the FBI to approve it. And then another year to find a publisher and no comment after that about my publisher, but that's another whole, I learned a great deal about the publishing world that I probably would not do certain things the same way again. - Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. - A big, amazing cake, cake scene. - I want to thank my incredible cast. I am so grateful for this conversation and it will truly be one that I treasure forever. I want to remind you to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast. I would love it if you gave a five star review. Join the Facebook group Reality Life with Kate Casey to continue this conversation. Bonus episodes are available on Apple Podcast and on Patreon. My What to Watch weekly list can be found at kkc.substack.com and follow me on social media. My Instagram is @kkcca, TikTok, it's Kate Casey and Twitter Threads and Blue Sky at @kkcc. Check back tomorrow for an on new episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)