How can an intelligence officer’s claims, no matter how far-fetched they may seem, be rejected wholesale?
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
A former MI6 asset who was at the heart of the Lockerbie story in 1988 has a terrifying and unbelievable story to tell. But U.S. judges and prosecutors are not interested in even examining her claims. Why?
With the Lockerbie case now pencilled in for mid-January by a Washington D.C. judge, the case against Abu Agila Mohammed Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, referred to as ‘Masud’, is complete – or so we are led to believe. With what appears to be only the translated interviews with Libyan intelligence officers whereby Masud is alleged to have flown to Malta with the Lockerbie bomb and placed it on the connecting flight, one would have thought the case against him, in any modern Western democracy, would be thrown out on the first day – down to what appear to be confessions extracted through torture. And yet, as we have seen before with Guantanamo Bay inmates and their due process, the U.S. appears to have a dual-track legal system, with second-tier criminals not privy to the normal rules and rights bequeathed to the first. Masud may have been a bomber working for the Libyan regime under Gaddafi. He may well have even been someone who was tasked with taking a package and planting it on a plane. But to make him the Lockerbie Bomber is stretching the credibility of the U.S. justice system – unless it has a case against him which has more solid evidence. Where is the smoking gun? Where are the witnesses?
Are there any witnesses, in fact? At this point we simply don’t know what the prosecution counsel have prepared, but one has to suspect that, like in many developing democracies in so-called ‘developing countries’, this might be a case with no witnesses at all.
One witness who is certain not to be recalled, even by the defence counsel of Masud, is Susan McNarey, who – despite being the victim of a comprehensive smear campaign which even involved journalists in Scotland, her native land – has a fascinating account of what Lockerbie was and who was behind it. In the mid-eighties she was stationed in Beirut and working for the UK Foreign Office as a clandestine agent in Lebanon (which was still in the throes of a civil war), attached to the leading DEA agent in Beirut. At that time, to her horror, she was to discover that the DEA was actually running a drug operation which helped Hezbollah get its drugs out of Lebanon and into the American market through what were called “controlled flights”. Such flights were the ones which handled the shipments which were protected by DEA agents, all part of a plan by Ronald Reagan at the time to keep U.S. and British hostages alive in Beirut. Her expertise was with terrorism associated with aviation, and she was at the centre of DEA, CIA and MI6 operations and saw and heard much.
Her sensational claims are hard to believe, as they are so sensational that they would fit better in a Hollywood movie. But they are worth investigating, at least given her position, her experience and what she claims to have witnessed. The Lockerbie story is a very grim, depraved long read of Western decadence, and leaves a lot of blood on the hands of the British and Americans who were at the heart of it. It’s also quite complicated, as it is a story which has three or even four subplots whereby Western intelligence agencies are competing against one another and are ideologically at odds.
But Lockerbie has very little to do with Islamic terror groups, which is why Western media are so reluctant to even look at the story from any other perspective other than ‘the Libyans did it’ – which ticks all the boxes, the racist clichés about Islam, and conveniently shrouds all Western players in a white sheet.
The truth is almost unpalatable, as it is so complicated that it often requires diagrams just to comprehend the events of the night of December 21st 1988 which took the Pan Am 103 flight down. In reality, three different groups of CIA officers were at odds with one another. One group wanted the DEA program to continue in secret, without the knowledge of Congress; a second group discovered the DEA operation and wanted to expose it; and a third group had been planning to actually plant a bomb on a Pan Am flight for at least a year before, as part of a false flag attack whereby Colonel Gaddafi had been framed for the crime. Add to these three groups the DEA and their dirty work – which initially we thought was just about keeping hostages alive, but later we have discovered was about funding the CIA with its own cash to buy weapons for the Contras in Nicaragua – and you have a kaleidoscope which at one particular moment all parts became aligned, whereby two of those four groups had a very strong desire to blow the plane up (as three rogue CIA officers who were planning to blow the whistle when they returned to the U.S. were on the plane, along with the head of the DEA operation), while, remarkably, the actual bomb on the plane is planted by two CIA officers who were focused on the Gaddafi plot.
Complicated and hard to believe. But this is Lockerbie. It is a story which is anything but simple, and all U.S. agencies investigating it are doing their utmost to tell the story which bypasses the dirty work of these four groups and concludes with a fable which leaves the Americans smelling of roses.
McNarey’s story is also an epic long read, which unpeels like an onion and leaves you weeping. She was to marry the chief DEA agent on the Lockerbie plane; she had a decades-long love tryst with the very Scottish police officer who was the chief investigator of Lockerbie; and she has the scars of being a victim of smears from police officers and the press in Scotland – all typical for whistle-blowers who have a story which everyone wants buried. Finally, after three attempts on her life, she fled the country for Jordan – but the case against her for being a ‘fantasist’ is alive and well. When you listen to her story, you understand why.
McNarey claims that she was in a meeting in south London in 1987 where the plot to bring down Pan Am 103 was hatched and discussed in detail. She claims she can name the two CIA officers who were the architects of Lockerbie and is prepared to swear on oath in a U.S. court. She has reached out to both the prosecutors’ team and Masud’s defence, but her claims are not even being verified and she will not be called as a witness. She claims Masud was set up and his confession was brought about from torture in any case. She also claims that international paedophilia and blackmail were also part of the original plot by the two CIA officers she is prepared to name.
If you ever wanted proof that the whole Lockerbie case – now and even before in 2001 at Camp Zeist – was an egregious miscarriage of justice and phoney from the word go, just consider McNarey and why she is being blocked by both legal teams. How can an intelligence officer’s claims, no matter how far-fetched they may seem, be rejected wholesale?
