See No Evil by Robert Baer

Author:Robert Baer [Baer, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4598-3
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2002-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

FEW THINGS HAVE LEFT ME feeling more frustrated than the Pan Am investigation. All the early signs suggested that the bombing was the work of a group based in Lebanon, acting on Iran’s behalf. If I had still been in Beirut, I would have had my agents all over the case, running down leads, checking facts, looking for new sources. But I was in an office overlooking the Place de la Concorde, and while Paris had a few Arab agents, they were on the periphery of terrorism at best.

The theory that Iran was behind Pan Am 103 was based on a piece of information that surfaced in early July 1988.A few days after the U.S.S. Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus in the Gulf, a Pasdaran intelligence officer flew to Lebanon to meet two officials of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command, Muhammad Hafiz Dalqamuni and someone we knew only as Nabil. The meeting took place at the Damur refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The Iranian’s instructions to Dalqamuni and Nabil were crystal clear: Blow up an American airplane—in the air, in order to kill as many people as possible. Iran had decided to take revenge for the Airbus.

The Iranian hypothesis fit in with what we knew about the regime in Tehran. The Iranian hardliners, who controlled the government, never accepted that the Airbus was shot down accidentally. Revenge, for them, was a simple act of justice: an eye for an eye. And Iran’s turning to the General Command for help made sense, too. Iran had developed a taste for letting surrogates do its dirty work, and the General Command was one of the best terrorist groups in the world when it came to blowing things up. Its expertise was in sophisticated mechanisms like barometric switches. The General Command made its air debut on February 21, 1970, when it blew up an Austrian Swissair flight. Two years later, on August 16, 1972, the Front exploded a bomb in an El Al plane, injuring four. In the years since, it had only gotten better.

Dalqamuni, too, was the ideal emissary for Iran’s interests. As late as the mid-1980s, he had been living in Europe, where he would sit for long stretches in the local McDonald’s, depressed that his fellow Palestinians were dying in the intifadah. Then one day he turned to Islam, joining a small group of Islamic fundamentalists in the General Command who looked to Iran for inspiration. Iran vetted Dalqamuni and determined he was a true believer who could be counted on to keep his mouth shut if caught. Still, he needed testing. At Iran’s direction, Dalqamuni organized two separate attacks on U.S. military trains inWest Germany, one on August 31, 1987, and the other on April 26, 1988. No one was killed, but Dalqamuni had shown he was prepared to take risks and follow orders.

Dalqumuni appeared to have an airtight alibi for Pan Am 103. He had been arrested along with most of his German

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