A rchive Date
[ 09-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[Conspiracy theories, and the usual suspects
By GEORGE JONAS
Toronto Sun
June 8, 2000
Even before CBS' 60 Minutes aired a sensational story last Sunday about an alleged high-ranking Iranian defector who claims that the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet was orchestrated by Iran, one thing was certain. The two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 48, and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, 44, who are being tried for the crime before a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands, are only small fry.
Whatever their role in that night of terror 12 years ago, it's plain that two low-level intelligence agents could not have invented, decreed, or financed the gruesome act of sabotage that killed Flight 103's 259 passengers and crew along with 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. If Al-Megrahi and Fhimah were involved, they were acting on someone's behalf.
Terrorist acts of such magnitude - acts that require not only sophisticated explosive devices but the ability to circumvent the formidable security arrangements of international carriers and airports - usually involve the apparatus of a terrorist state.
MASTERMIND
The man in Turkey who claims to be an Iranian defector - his name is variously given as Ahmad Behbahani, Seyyid Behbahani, or as Ahmad Beladi-Behbahan - is telling CBS he masterminded the downing of Flight 103 on behalf of Iran. His agents, says Behbahani, were assisted by Syrian-backed terrorist groups as well as Libya. The Pan Am jet was blown up in retaliation for the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iran Air flight. This tragic accident, which killed 290 people over the Persian Gulf, occurred about five months earlier, in July, 1988.
In one sense, Behbahani's revelation is old news.
As Ian Black points out in the London Guardian, the initial assumption was that the downing of Flight 103 was ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini. The Ayatollah, back then still the leader of Iran, had promised the skies would "rain blood" after the missile from the Vincennes blew up the Iran Air flight. Originally it was also suspected that Iran was assisted by Ahmad Jibril's Syrian-backed terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.
The focus shifted to Libya only later. The theory that Col. Moammar Khadafy wished to get back at the U.S. and Britain for the 1986 bombing of Libya seemed reasonable. Besides, both the Bush and the Clinton administrations may have had political reasons for preferring to blame Libya rather than Syria or Iran.
Behbahani's story confirms the original assumptions, right down to Iran being helped in the bombing by the Syrian-backed PFLP-GC. This could not only damage the prosecution's case against the two Libyans at Camp Zeist in Holland, but slow Washington's attempts at rapprochement with Iran and Syria.
But is the man claiming to be Behbahani the real article? Is he really, as described by one source, Iran's former deputy minister for counterterrorism?
This March U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a speech lifting certain economic sanctions and inviting Iran to open "a new relationship" with America. This may not have played well with Iran's hardliners. They may have planted a "defector" into Turkey to nip any "new relationship" in the bud.
Tehran TV calls Behbahani's allegations a plot whipped up by "the visible or invisible hands of international Zionism" which is "doomed to failure." Such denials mean zilch, but there are other problems with the story.
For instance, Behbahani's age is given as 32 in a June 5 Associated Press report under the byline of Selcan Hacaoglu. If this is so, the defector would have been 20 when he supposedly masterminded the Pan Am bombing.
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
Mind you, in the murky world of international intrigue anything is possible.
In the Guardian, Ian Black describes one theory of how Palestinian terrorists, backed by Syria and Iran, smuggled the explosives on board the doomed flight. They supposedly "infiltrated a U.S. intelligence operation which used Pan Am Flight 103 to smuggle heroin, in a complex dirty tricks, drugs-for-hostages deal."
Actually, this was more than just a theory. In the early 1990s it was Pan Am's attempted defence in a civil law suit. When sued by the victims' relatives, Pan Am tried to show that it wasn't lax in security, but was itself the victim of a clandestine CIA operation gone wrong.
At the time the courts - and the media, including 60 Minutes - dismissed the defence as mendacious. I wonder how they feel about it now.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com. Jonas, author and producer, appears Thursdays
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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