Pan Am Flight 103

Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, killing all on board and several on the ground.

Ahmed Jibril

According to Juval Aviv (13:45 - 14:05), Iran paid Ahmed Jibril $50 million to destroy an American passenger plan in revenge for the US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655.

We have the evidence and the CIA has the evidence that he received $50 million. We had the bank accounts, we had the money transfer, and we had the communication between him and Iran. When it all happened, he bragged about it.

DIA MC10 team

Among the victims were five members of the joint CIA-DIA-DEA team Middle East Collection Ten (MC10) whose were traveling to the United States on a secret mission to expose a drug trafficking arrangement between senior US intelligence officials and Monzer al-Kassar, brother-in-law of Syrian intelligence director Ali Issa Duba. This team was led by Beirut deputy station chief Matthew Kevin Gannon, son-in-law of CIA Deputy Director Thomas Twetten.

According to Juval Aviv (10:50 - 13:25):

We had British and American hostages in Lebanon... Our President decided we're going to find them in Beirut. They have been held in Beirut. We're going to send the Marines in to rescue them and it's going to be a big operation, but they have them find them. They need to know what's going on, so they send three agents, three Pentagon / CIA agents, the James Bonds of America, three guys who went to Beirut to find out what happened on the ground and then create the arrangement for the Marines to hit the beaches and come in.

When they arrived in Beirut and met the CIA agents on the ground who were stationed there, in a short time they realized those guys are doing drug deals ... and they decided we're going to abandon this mission because we don't trust the CIA people on the ground. Maybe they're going to sell us out. We don't want the Marines to come into an ambush. They made a mistake by telling those CIA agents on the ground, they are going back to America ... we are going to go to Congress and testify of what you guys are doing. We don't subscribe to it.

There was a call that was later on intercepted by those agents from Beirut calling Langley saying those three guys are on their way back to America. They're coming to talk about this operation.

The three agents realized they made a mistake by telling people that they are going back and what they are going to do when they are back. They decided on their own to take a boat from Lebanon, from Beirut to Cyprus and decided to go and buy some tickets at a travel agent's and go home just before Christmas. So they did the move. When they came to Cyprus they went to a travel agency next to the American embassy to buy three tickets back to New York. They didn't know that the travel agency is a CIA operation. The CIA opened this travel agency because they wanted to see where the drug dealers are traveling, who are the guys, are they coming to buy tickets? You know who they are.

So now it was confirmed that those three agents are going to be on Pan Am 103 from London to New York.

Leak to Iran

Al-Dustur reported that David Lovejoy, a CIA agent code-named Nutcracker, had given MC10's flight plans to the Iranian embassy in Beirut. Self-proclaimed DIA MC10 officer Lester Coleman identified Lovejoy as Michael Schafer, his former co-worker at the Christian Broadcasting Network in Lebanon. Schafer denies that he is Lovejoy, and Steven Emerson condemned Coleman as a fraud. David Hoffman identified Schafer as Lovejoy aka Michael Franks, and claimed that US signals intelligence intercepted a call from David Lovejoy to Iranian chargé d'affaires Hussein Niknam in which Lovejoy provided the information that the MC10 team would be on Flight 103. Hoffman's information may have originated with Coleman.

Further assassinations of MC10 agents

In April 1991, DIA operative Lester Knox Coleman alleged that four members of MC10 have been assassinated. These included German-Lebanese DIA agent Werner Tony Asmar and Lebanese army officer Charlie Frezeli, both killed in East Beirut.

Drug trade

According to Juval Aviv:

CIA agents were hauling drugs from the Middle East, selling it to kids on the streets of Chicago and New York, raising money for a slush fund.

DEA / TREVI

DEA officer Ronald Caffrey had allowed al-Kassar to deliver heroin from Lebanon through Frankfurt under the guise of a sting operation called Operation Khourah, or COREA, which operated through the European security agency TREVI. Juval Aviv, head of the private investigation company Interfor, identified the CIA's COREA unit in Wiesbaden, Germany as responsible for the bombing.

Identification of the bomb

German secret police had noticed that the suitcase carrying the bomb was a different color and size than the drug packages, but the CIA ordered the Germans to stand down and allow it through.

As Juval Aviv told the story, a German named O'Neil was an American agent placed in the baggage handling area to ensure that nobody would inspect the drug suitcases. O'Neil identified the suitcase with the bomb as suspicious and called the American embassy for instructions. O'Neil told the local head CIA agent, George, that the suitcase was much heavier than usual. The head CIA agent replied, "We know. Let it go." The telephone line was tapped by Pan Am corporate intelligence.

Bekaa valley drug trade

Juval Aviv described Ahmed Jibril as "the lord of the Bekaa valley" who supplied the CIA with the drugs it was shipping back to the United States.

Kabera arrest

Two of Michael T. Hurley's confidential informants, Zouhir and Nadim Kabbara, were arrested in Rome while importing heroin. They claimed to be on a mission from the DEA. Nadim Kabbara had a business card from Spiro T. Agnew. Their trading company Kinex had a telephone number assigned to the US Embassy. An Italian court ruled that "The true function of the Kabbaras was to assist U.S. intelligence in shipping military equipment to Iraq."

Cyprus team

see also: Wackenhut

A Mr. Pinsdorf in German intelligence "had serious concerns that the drug sting operation originating in Cyprus had caused the bomb to be placed on the Pan Am plane." DIA operative Lester Knox Coleman alleged that Cyprus-based DEA official Michael T. Hurley had been responsible for selling Inslaw PROMIS to Middle Eastern governments, and that Hurley had been redeployed to Washington state to prosecute a drug case against Michael Riconosciuto. Shortly before the bombing, Riconosciuto was monitoring the Lebanon hostage crisis out of an apartment owned by Robert Booth Nichols and Ellen Hopko Nichols in Nicosia, Cyprus. Riconosciuto claims that he and Robert Nichols were aware of both the MC10 unit's flight plans and the Iranian plans to bomb their plane, and that Nichols had promised to change the reservations for the MC10 team.

Congressional obstruction

According to Juval Aviv, members of Congress told Pan Am that the facts of the bombing were a national security state secret and could not be pursued.

CIA obstruction and retaliation

According to Juval Aviv, in a meeting with Pan Am attorneys, the head of the CIA admitted that Aviv's report was true and accused Aviv of breaking into CIA computers to obtain some of the information. The director of the CIA at that time would have been either William H. Webster (1987-1991) or Robert Gates (1991-1993).

Aviv states that upon receiving his report from Pan Am, the CIA shut down its investigation into the Lockerbie bombing and redirected its resources into investigating his report as if it were a security threat.

All of the effort was not anymore to find out what really happened. It is "who wrote the report and where did he get his information?"

OSI team

The victims of the Lockerbie bombing included a team from the US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations which tracked Nazi war criminals. This team included Assistant Deputy Director Michael S. Bernstein, Special Agent Ronald Lariviere, and Special Agent Daniel O'Connor.

Allegations against Buck Revell

David Hoffman's book Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror claims that FBI agent Buck Revell ran onto the tarmac at Heathrow Airport and removed his son and daughter-in-law from flight 103 before it took off, and that South African President Peter Botha and several high-ranking officials were scheduled to be on this same flight but changed their reservations at the last hour. Hoffman also accuses Revell of a cover-up in the 1985 crash of a DC-8 in Gander, Newfoundland that killed 248 members of the 101st Airborne. Revell sued Hoffman and his publisher for defamation.

Time Magazine investigation

Time Magazine pulled veteran reporter Roy Rowan out of retirement to recreate Juval Aviv's investigation. Rowan generally agreed with Aviv and raised the question of whether the crash of Arrow Air Flight 1285 at Gander in 1985 was also an attack targeting specific military personnel.

The Plane Truth

Carl A. Davies is the author of a book entitled The Plane Truth which attempts to connect Pan Am 103, TWA 800 and Air India 182. Davies believes a fault in the rivets in Boeing 747s caused all three events, rather than missiles, bombs etc.

What I found interesting about Davies story is the people he knew:

He mentions one of his companies lost a lot of money to Robert Colgin Wilson.

Another interesting name was Thomas A Dardas. Dardas once knew Adel Sennosi who worked for Mousa Hawamda. Hawamda was once accused of being the head of Libyan Intelligence inside the US, of plotting to assassinate Olive North and of stealing money through his travel agency. He also knew Ian Verner Macdonald.

Also Drazen Premate, a Yugoslav, described recently in the press as a "homeless space scientist" who set fire to a church. Apparently Premate knew many people at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.

Carl Davies was in Libya, ostensibly working for an oil company, when the Col. Gaddafi coup occurred.

Davies father worked for De Havilland Aircraft and had a role in overseeing development of the worlds first commercial airliner, The Comet.

Etc

Ramzi Yousef

Yousef was in the UK at the time of the bombing. He had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Wales. He took an break from studying in Swansea to travel to a camp in Afghanistan in 1988.

Author Richard Labeviere noted, “A classified FBI file indicates that Yousef was recruited by the local branch of the CIA” around this time.

Could Yousef have travelled to Namibia at this time also? We dont know, much of his life is a mystery.

Yousef was later involved in many terror attacks and has been accused of planning 9/11. Officially his uncle KSM took all the credit.

When Yousef was arrested in 1995 the CIA had pushed to stop the arrest, only the intervention of President Clinton trumped them.

Its believed Yousef's birth name was "Abdel Basit." Yousef had multiple aliases

KSM and his whole group of jihadis are known to have had a drinking party to celebrate the anniversary of the 1988 explosion of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Oswald LeWinter

"LeWinter is an example of a brilliant mind gone to the bad," former CIA counter-terrorist expert Vincent Cannistraro.

Spy buffs know Oswald LeWinter as a former CIA operative. A Vienna tabloid quoted Rodney Stich, author of "Disavow a CIA Saga of Betrayal," as saying that Mr LeWinter worked for more than 30 years for the CIA under the codename "Razine". He was the best-informed person I have ever met on intelligence matters. His views on everything from geopolitics to literature were sophisticated.

The document he plonked down on the airport bar looked like a field report from a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in Switzerland. It suggested that Mark Thatcher had been involved in an arms-for-drugs deal with a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar. Mr al-Kassar is known to spy buffs because he was arrested in Spain for supplying weapons to the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship who murdered the passenger Leon Klinghoffer. Later, however, he was acquitted of all charges in a trial in Madrid.

After showing the document about Mark Thatcher and his putative arms- for-drugs deal to the Drugs Enforcement Administration, the FBI via the former Washington DC intelligence chief, and the US District Attorney's office in New York, I concluded it was a fake. After that Mr LeWinter rang me once to complain that the DEA had visited him to ask about the Thatcher document.

Peter Koenig, Sunday, 03 May 1998, London Independent

Mark Thatcher

Sir Mark Thatcher is the son of Sir Denis Thatcher and Baroness Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister. Thatcher has attracted headlines for the role he played in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. Thatcher married a Texan, Diane Burgdorf, but the family moved to South Africa, possibly to avoid bad publicity because of allegations against Mark Thatcher of racketeering that resulted in a £4 million civil action in 1994.

In 1998 South African authorities investigated his firm for running loan shark operations. According to The Daily Telegraph of 26 August 2004, "In 1998, he was at the centre of a scandal after he lent huge sums of money at exorbitant interest rates to more than 900 local police officers and civil servants in Cape Town. He admitted lending the cash but insisted that he had done nothing wrong. He is also thought to have profited from contracts to supply aviation fuel in various African countries." The Sunday Times, quoting "city sources", said he had amassed a personal fortune of £60m, the majority of which is in offshore accounts, attributed to shrewd investments and a series of "astute deals in Africa".

On 25 August 2004, Thatcher was arrested at home in Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa. He was charged later that day with contravening two sections of South Africa's "Foreign Military Assistance Act", which bans South African residents from taking part in any foreign military activity. The charges related to "possible funding and logistical assistance in relation to an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea" organized by Thatcher's friend, Simon Mann.

Thatcher's father was a director of Burmah Oil, and a consultant to Amec plc who would later feature in 9/11 conspiracy theories. He knew many world leaders including Poppy Bush

Simon Mann

Simon Francis Mann is a British mercenary and former British Army officer. He had been serving a 34-year prison sentence in Equatorial Guinea for his role in a failed coup d'état in 2004, but was pardoned after only 5 years.

He became a member of the SAS and served in Cyprus, Germany, Norway and Northern Ireland and served in the Gulf. When he returned from his service in the Gulf and he entered the oil industry to work with Tony Buckingham. In 1993 UNITA rebels in Angola seized the port of Soyo, and closed its oil installations. The Angolan government under Jose Eduardo dos Santos sought mercenaries to seize back the port and asked for assistance from Buckingham who had by now formed his own company. Buckingham hired a South African organisation called Executive Outcomes, in which Mann and Buckingham were involved.

Mann went on to establish Sandline International with fellow ex-Scots Guards Colonel, Tim Spicer in 1996. The company operated mostly in Angola and Sierra Leone but in 1997 Sandline received a commission from the government of Papua New Guinea to suppress a rebellion on the island of Bougainville. Sandline International announced the closure of the company's operations on 16 April 2004.

On 7 March 2004 Simon Mann and 69 others were arrested in Zimbabwe when their Boeing 727 was seized by security forces during a stop-off at Harare airport where the aircraft was due to be loaded with £100,000 worth of weapons and equipment. Mann and the others claimed that they were not on their way to Equatorial Guinea but were in fact flying to the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to provide security for diamond mines owned by JFPI Corporation.

The 14 men in the mercenary advance guard that were caught in Equatorial Guinea were sentenced to jail for 34 years. Among the advance guard was Nick du Toit who claimed that he had been introduced to Thatcher by Mann. Investigations would later reveal in the financial records of Mann's holdings that large transfers of money were made to Nick du Toit, as well as approximately US$2 million coming in from an untraceable and unknown source. On 10 September Mann was sentenced to seven years in jail. His compatriots received one-year sentences for violating immigration laws and their two pilots got 16 months. The group's Boeing 727 was seized, as well as the US$180,000 that was found on board the plane.

On 23 February 2007, the charges were dropped against Mann and the other alleged conspirators in South Africa. Julian Lewis said in Parliament: “Quiet diplomacy has failed and we now have to save Mr. Mann, whatever he has or has not done, from torture and a horrible death in a terrible situation." On 8 March 2008, Channel 4 in the UK won a legal battle to broadcast an interview with Mann in which he named British political figures, including Ministers, alleged to have given tacit approval to the coup plot.

Executive Outcomes

Executive Outcomes was a private military company founded in South Africa by former Lieutenant-Colonel of the South African Defence Force Eeben Barlow in 1989. It later became part of the South African-based holding company Strategic Resource Corporation.

In 1989, following the conclusion of South African Border Wars in Angola and Namibia, the apartheid regime in South Africa was beginning to dissolve. The South African Defence Force was looking at broad cuts in its personnel. African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela demanded that then South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk dismantle some of the South African and South-West African Special Forces units such as 32 Battalion and Koevoet. One of these was the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a unit that carried out covert operations which included assassinations of government opponents, and worked to bypass the United Nations apartheid sanctions by setting up overseas front companies.

Only Koevoet — being part of the South West African Police (SWAPOL) — was disbanded as part of independence negotiations for South-West Africa (now Namibia). Many members of the other units, or simply former national servicemen, were recruited by Executive Outcomes (EO). Barlow registered Executive Outcomes Ltd in the UK on the insistence of the South African Reserve Bank.

Executive Outcomes had contracts with multinational corporations such as De Beers, Chevron, JFPI Corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc and Texaco.

Craig Williamson

Craig Michael Williamson (born 1949, Johannesburg), a former South African police major, was exposed as a spy in 1980, and was involved in a series of state-sponsored overseas bombings, burglaries, kidnappings, assassinations and propaganda.

In the late 1970s, Craig Williamson had inveigled Lars Eriksson, director of the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF) in Geneva, into employing him as deputy director and help in the award of IUEF scholarships to African students. He was thus able to infiltrate the banned African National Congress (ANC) and, at the same time, make high-level contacts in Sweden which provided most of the funding for the IUEF. Williamson's networking through prime minister Olof Palme's office in Stockholm put him in touch with a number of Palme's close associates including Pan Am Flight 103 victim, Bernt Carlsson.

Williamson applied for amnesty in 1995 from SA's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for bombing the London office of the ANC in March 1982. Following the TRC hearing, South African lawyer Anton Alberts commented to the "woza" news agency: "If you look at the Lockerbie disaster - this is very similar. I think Britain would like to see these guys prosecuted in England even though they get amnesty here."

Williamson ordered the assassination of Ruth First, who was an exiled campaigner for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, close friend of Sweden's prime minister, Olof Palme, and the ANC author of a pioneering study of Namibia. She was also the wife of the South African Communist Party's leader, Joe Slovo. She was killed by a letter-bomb in Maputo, Mozambique on August 18, 1982. Williamson addressed a letter-bomb to exiled anti-apartheid activist, Marius Schoon, in Angola but killed Schoon's wife Jeanette and daughter Katryn on June 28, 1984.

On February 4, 1988, the ANC representative in Brussels, Godfrey Motsepe, narrowly escaped an assassin's bullet. On March 29, 1988, the ANC representative in Paris, Dulcie September, was shot and killed. Williamson's protégé – former SADF Sgt Joseph Klue – and South African spy, Dirk Stoffberg, were suspected for both the Brussels and Paris shootings.

In the summer of 1988 the film Red Scorpion was made on location in South-West Africa (Namibia). South Africa helped finance the movie and the SADF provided trucks, equipment as well as extras. The film's producer, Jack Abramoff, was also head of the International Freedom Foundation (IFF). Established in Washington in 1986 as a conservative think-tank, the IFF was in fact part of an elaborate intelligence gathering operation and, according to Craig Williamson, was designed to be an instrument for political warfare against apartheid's foes. South Africa spent up to $1.5million a year to underwrite Operation Babushka, the code-name by which the IFF project was known. Funding ended in 1992

International Freedom Foundation

Jack Abramoff had visited South Africa in 1983 to meet with student leaders, presumably including Russel Crystal, who headed an energetic right-wing outfit on that nation’s campuses. Crystal was a sort of South African doppelgänger to Abramoff, echoing not only the American’s tactical thinking but his combative style as well.

One month after Jamba, Crystal’s student group hosted a second right-wing Woodstock, bringing together conservative college students from around the world. The event was called “Youth for Freedom,” it was 1985, the U.N.’s “International Youth Year,” and high-minded youth congresses were happening all over the world—most of them “under the leadership of communist front organisations to propagate their own marxist/leninist agenda.” The duty of the righteous was obvious: “to gather the true defenders of liberty and freedom”; to ponder “the security and prosperity of the free world”; and to draft a statement to which “conservative students worldwide” might rally. Although Abramoff is listed as the very last speaker on the official “Youth for Freedom” program, none of the attendees I talked to remember seeing him there. and a gaggle of College Republicans made up the American contingent. Color was added by a representative of the German extreme right. Delegates received an expensively printed booklet about the martial and philosophical achievements of Jonas Savimbi.

Out of the Youth For Freedom conference came an organization called Liberty and Democracy International. Out of that organization, in 1986, came the International Freedom Foundation

The International Freedom Foundation (IFF), was established in Washington, D.C. by former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It came into being after Democratic International in Jamba, Angola. The IFF campaigned against regimes and movements it described as Soviet allies. The IFF, with satellite offices in London and Johannesburg, sponsored symposia with high-profile speakers such as Henry Kissinger.

According to the official report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the duties of the IFF included supporting Jonas Savimbi and fighting trade sanctions against South Africa. The IFF’s head office was in Washington, where Abramoff served as executive director. But the shots were called by the organization’s South African branch, headed by Russel Crystal.

The group’s “advisory board” listed, Senator Jesse Helms and Representatives Phil Crane, “B-1 Bob” Dornan, James Inhofe and “Buz” Lukens. In 1987, the IFF’s Washington office requested $450,000 from South Africa in order to buy a jet plane for the presidential campaign of Jack Kemp, then the idol of the conservative movement.

The real, confessed éminence grise behind the IFF was South Africa’s infamous “superspy” Craig Williamson, a man whose bloody escapades deserve an entire volume in the annals of Cold War espionage. Williamson infiltrated South Africa’s main leftist student group in the Seventies and rose to its leadership; he used the connections thus made to assist in the imprisonment and murder of the movement’s other leaders. A respected South African historian, asked for his opinion of the man, said simply, “Craig Williamson was the scum of the twentieth century. He murdered friends of mine. I spit on the ground he walks on.”

According to a Newsday article entitled Front for Apartheid in July 16, 1995, the IFF was funded by apartheid South Africa in the amount of $1.5 million per year from 1986. In return for this funding, South Africa was said to have used the IFF as an instrument to portray the African National Congress (ANC) together with its leaders, Oliver Tambo and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, as terrorists and as sympathetic to Soviet communism. The IFF's first chairman was Duncan Sellars. Its Washington lobbyist was Jack Abramoff.

SA's Directorate of Military Intelligence, Major Craig Williamson, told Newsday that Operation Babushka was designed so that the people it recruited would be unaware of the foreign funding. Williamson indicated that Abramoff would undoubtedly have known about the source of the IFF's funding. Another former SA intelligence official, Colonel Vic McPherson, declared to Newsday how pleased he was with the performance of the IFF: "They were not just good in intelligence, but in political warfare."

The director of the IFF's London office, at 10 Storey's Gate, Westminster, was Marc Gordon. Gordon had a mixed relationship with Western Goals (UK) an affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League, sometimes praising, sometimes criticisng its activities. Gordon was publicly disowned by the UK Conservative Party after he claimed to have gone on a patrol with anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua and was photographed holding an assault rifle. Gordon later managed, in 1996, without revealing his political past, to get a post with Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, where he was helping to choose candidates. It emerged that Gordon had been Vice-Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students before it was controversially banned by the then Tory Chairman, Norman Tebbit, in 1987, for "its extremist views".

The IFF practised who and who isnt a terrorist before terrorism was in vogue. IFFs Australian executive director, Mr Brendan Davis, said ANC leader Mr Tambo was a violent terrorist with the blood of many women and children on his hands. Nelson Mandela was also defined a terrorist.

The Sydney Morning Herald said that more than 100 US business groups had donated over $1 million to the IFF since it began operations less than six months ago. The group funds "projects" around the world, including assistance to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The IFF has offices in Johannesburg, London, Tel Aviv and Washington.

UK Observer - "...grew out of a meeting in 1985 at Jamba, the headquarters of Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, attended by a who's who of the extreme Right: members of the Oliver North group, Laotian guerrillas, Nicaraguan Contras, Afghan mujahideen and South African security police. The official title of the summit was the Democratic International." "...the International Freedom Foundation was, in fact, a South African military intelligence front. In Washington it passed on information to a British-based company, Long Reach, also a military intelligence front, whose job was to gather data on the ANC for the apartheid government."

Democratic International

also known as the Jamboree in Jamba.

UK Observer: "out of a meeting in 1985 at Jamba, the headquarters of Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, attended by a who's who of the extreme right - members of the Oliver North group, Laotian anti-Communist guerrillas and Pa Kao Her, Nicaraguan Contras, Afghan mujahideen and South African security police - would grow the IFF."

According to an affectionate profile of Abramoff in The Weekly Standard: "In the summer of 1985 Abramoff helped plan and organize an event that, as Abramoff told me, inspired Red Scorpion. Abramoff joined forces with Jack Wheeler, another anti-Communist activist, to create the "Jamboree in Jamba." The pair also approached Lewis Lehrman, a conservative benefactor who made a fortune off his Rite-Aid drugstores. Dana Rohrabacher was brought in to help muster support from inside the White House. Only two governments were publicly supportive: South Africa and Israel. At the event Lehrman read a letter Rohrabacher had drafted on Reagan's behalf, expressing solidarity with those struggling against the Soviet empire. A reporter with Time/Life was also present.

Bernt Carlsson

Bernt Carlsson died aboard Pan Am 103.

He had been United Nations Commissioner for Namibia since July 1987

Edwin Wilson

Edwin Wilson set up front companies abroad for the CIA, made millions in the arms trade and entertained generals and congressmen at his sprawling Virginia farm. His high-powered, jet-setting life in the 1970s and early 1980s followed a career in the CIA. But it came crashing down when he was branded a traitor and convicted in 1983 for shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya.

After two decades in prison, Wilson finally got the conviction overturned, convincing a judge that he had continued to work informally for the agency.

Josef Šťáva

From 1975-1981, roughly 700 tons of Semtex plastic explosive were purchased and exported to Libya by Omnipol. As such, implications have been drawn that Semtex usage on the part of militant factions, such as the Irish Republican Army and the Palestine Liberation Organization, may have been originally sourced from Omnipol, given Libyan ties to such groups. Notably, it has been alleged that the Semtex utilized to carry out the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland was in fact indirectly sourced from Omnipol via Libya, which, though not entirely substantiated or corroborated, fits in with verifiable records of Omnipol's arms sale connections to Libya.

Josef Šťáva, the former owner of Diag Human who is claiming over Kč 8.9 billion from the Czech state in arbitration proceedings, proposed arms deals to Czechoslovakia's Communist leadership, secret police (StB) files reveal. Šťáva reportedly met regularly with representatives of the state arms trading enterprise Omnipol and proposed a number of arms and munitions deals and ventures.

At the age of nineteen, Josef Stava left communist Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. He studied chemistry in Switzerland, later receiving Swiss citizenship, and forged a stellar career as a global salesman for Johnson and Johnson. For several years he was awarded the best salesman of the year prize and for two decades he crisscrossed the world, becoming a wealthy and respected businessman with personal contacts to the CSU political party in Bavaria.

On the way he participated in organizing a Bavarian Red Cross initiative that helped to negotiate the release of 27 Czechoslovak hostages from UNITA in the civil war in Angola in 1984. He was tasked to organize Bavarian Red Cross aid to the former GDR.

Stava's main business became a lucrative blood plasma and plasma derivates trade. In the 1980s this global business was in the hands of a close knit group of private traders operating heavily from Zurich, Switzerland. Stava and Diag Human had, through their GDR operations, developed a unique model devised specifically for communist countries short of hard currency. It allowed them to barter expensive blood derivates produced only in the West for blood plasma produced in these countries on Western equipment brought in by Diag Human and by trained medical staff. The whole system was devised to conform to stringent US donor screening and quality norms – an important element at a time of widespread fears over HIV infection. In the late eighties the entire global blood plasma business went through dramatic consolidation. In ten years the number of plasma fractioning companies shrunk by ninety percent. With the 1989 collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe the competition for taking over of the market of more than 300 million population with donors' that was blood free of antibiotics and residual medication on one hand, and hungry for modern derivates on the other, was severe and far from fair.

Josef Stava came back home to Czechoslovakia and immediately took advantage of its non-existent market economy. He invested more than CZK 190 million and built the blood plasma production market from scratch. His company signed contracts with around thirty hospitals, financing their blood plasma collection centres' equipment purchases and training their staff in exchange for future blood plasma deliveries. Blood plasma would then be transported to Danish company Novo Nordisk fractionation plant and produced derivates brought back to Czechoslovakia. The same model was discussed in Poland, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Hungary and other former Communist countries. Stava forged an estimated eighteen month lead over his potential competitors and held the entire market in Czechoslovakia and the GDR markets.

CZECHOSLOVAK OCEAN SHIPPING Ltd. C.O.S BULK Captain Pavel Trnka

See also

• http://www.american-buddha.com/cia.lockerbie.htm