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THE MALTESE DOUBLE CROSS -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY |
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[Howard Teicher, U.S. National Security Council, Senior Director 1985-1987] Vince was quite aware of what was going on in Syria. He was quite aware of the Iranian dimension and the Iraqi dimension and their role in state-sponsored terrorism. What emerged in U.S. policy was the tendency to be able to most directly deal with Libya because of Libya's geographic proximity to Europe and the United States as opposed to Iraq, Iran or Syria, was much more difficult to deal with the other countries.
[Oswald Le Winter, CIA 1968-85] Cannistraro is not interested in investigating Lockerbie. I believe Cannistraro was put in charge to make sure that the Lockerbie case goes in a specific direction because he wasn't put in charge immediately. As long as at the beginning they were willing to blame Syria and Iran, Cannistraro had nothing to do with Lockerbie. As soon as it shifted to Libya, then they brought in of course the Libyan dirty tricks expert to oversee the investigation.
[Howard Teicher, U.S. National Security Council, Senior Director 1985-1987] The Syrian support for terrorism was much more circumspect. The Syrians were much more capable of concealing their direct role. The Iraqis had been taken off the list of countries that supported terrorism at the direction of CIA director Casey in early 1982 in order to facilitate the U.S. tilt towards Iraq. But the Iranians, because of their geographic proximity, while clearly an acknowledged sponsor of terrorism, were very active, particularly in Lebanon, but elsewhere around the world were also hard for the United States to reach.
[Vincent Cannistraro, CIA head of Lockerbie Investigation] I think the Scottish police did an outstanding job. Some of it has been documented. I think the FBI in particular, their explosives experts and their forensic experts, also did an outstanding job. I think on both sides of the Atlantic, it was probably the largest criminal investigation in the history of both countries.
[Oliver "Buck Revell," FBI Head of Lockerbie Investigation] The crime scene work that was done not only in the small town of Lockerbie but throughout almost all of Southern Scotland and much of Northern England, the very minute detail of collecting all the bits and pieces of evidence, the bringing together of military and civilian and law enforcement and foreign agencies as well, I think was a remarkable accomplishment on the part of the Scottish police and the English authorities that were backing them up, Scotland Yard and their military and others.
[Chief Supt. John Orr, Scottish police, head of Investigation] Approximately 10,000 items of baggage and other artifacts have been recovered in the widespread [inaudible] extending from Lockerbie to the Kielder Forest and Cumbria. These articles are thoroughly being evaluated for evidentiary purposes. [Inaudible] officers forming part of this investigation are involved in joint inquiries with their respective colleagues in West Germany and the United States of America.
[Vincent Cannistraro, CIA head of Lockerbie Investigation] All of the major developments in the case were provided by the criminal investigators. The principal evidence that led to identification of a foreign role in an act of terrorism was forensic evidence recovered by the Scot's police at Lockerbie themselves. Investigators and townspeople on their hands and knees crawling along the countryside picking up minute bits of debris. And one of those bits of debris turned out to be a microchip which was analyzed forensically, then led to the Libyan connection.
[Narrator] God sometimes speaks to detectives in mysterious ways. After two years, sometime in those two years, after two Scottish winters, surviving wind, mist and snow in the 850 square miles moor and forest land where 150 mile headwinds had scattered wreckage, a miracle, a clue, found -- they say -- near the Kielder pine forest where it is as dark as it must have been before time began with the first big bang.
[David Clark, volunteer searcher] There were some areas which were very densely forest which we couldn't penetrate and that area was ignored.
You then got into the areas of woodland that had been thinned where debris had been in trees and dropped to the forest floor.
And that was cleared wherever we could by getting access. There was nothing cleared out of the high trees.
[Bobby Ingram, volunteer searcher] The criteria for finding things with burn marks and scratch marks on was to keep those items separate and hand them in as a separate item at the end of the day so they could be specifically identified and checked out in priority to all the debris that would be sorted out at a later date. And we did in fact find one item, about the size of a postcard, that was a piece of material with the evidence of burn marks ate a whole right through it.
[David Clark, volunteer searcher] We were really taught to bring whatever we could back which we could get out easily. Then anything in the high canopy was left, and the remainder it was cleared. [Narrator] On the Scottish moors the mist comes in near the ground, but in the pine woods where the tiny bit of microchip rested until found, even the mist is invisible.
[Dennis Kline, FBI Investigator] Tom and I were associates in the explosive unit. We worked together in that unit. He was assigned the case as the case agent for the FBI, the forensic examiner, if you will. And it was Tom's responsibility to organize and collect all this evidence, analyze it as well as other people from RARDE [Royal Armament Research & Development Establishment], the British side of the forensic investigation, and to coordinate the results of their analysis and examination to identify these components, reconstruct the bomb, and provide these leads which were so essential.
[Narrator] Intrepid Tom Thurman of the FBI had, in 1989, interviewed Neuss bombmaker Khreesat. Never sharing what he was told with the Scottish police.
This time, before he could act, he had to be helped by two English counterparts, forensic experts from RARDE. The first to see the importance of the extraordinarily eventful forensic find, one, the curious doctor, Alan Faraday, who has had one terrorist case he investigated thrown out on appeal, with others under legal scrutiny.
[Dr. Michael Scott] [Inaudible] finding things about Alan Faraday as an expert witness is that he has no formal academic qualifications whatsoever. The only qualification he has is that, a technician's qualification, I suppose you would call it, a higher national certificate, in [inaudible] and electronics for thirty years that he did. So no, he's not a doctor and I would even go so far as to say he's not a scientist in the accepted sense. The first time I encountered him giving evidence was in the trial of Daniel McNamee, an Irish person who was in the [inaudible]. He was up on a bomb making charge. I was, because of some previous court experience, I was asked to come along and to watch the proceedings. I was on the public gallery. And I watched Faraday. And I gradually became aware that he was giving the evidence a certain emphasis that really wasn't justified, the technique couldn't be justified. [Narrator] Thomas Hayes, the second English forensic expert, an actual real chemist, has his own terrorist associations, the Maguire Seven, associated with Gerry Conlon, convicted of kneading TNT in their bathroom in part because of Hayes' scientific evidence. The Maguires spent 63 years in prison.
[Alastair Logan] The evidence was entirely forensic in nature. There was no other evidence at all. They made no confessions. In fact, they consistently denied any involvement in any terrorist activity or handling any such material. Dr. Hayes had carried out a test on gloves belonging to Mrs. Maguire on a second occasion, and had detected the presence of nitroglycerin on that test. So he was not actually a primary witness. He was a secondary witness [inaudible]. But his role during the course of the trial as a chemist, and a qualified chemist whereas the others who were giving evidence had no formal qualifications but had worked in the fields of explosives detection for many years. His role was to reinforce what was being said and to provide the explanations that the court needed in order to be able to comprehend the nature of the prosecution case against these people.
[Dr. Michael Scott] Alan Faraday maintained wrongly in my view that the electronics was intrinsically sinister. For example, the tiny little board with [inaudible] fired chip on it, an utterly innocuous item, he would maintain had been specifically designed as instructed for bombmaking purposes, the implication being that anyone who handled or had any involvement whatsoever to do with this tiny little circuit board would have knowingly been involved, had to be knowingly involved in bomb construction.
[Alastair Logan] They were all saying the same thing. They were all saying that the test was specific. They were all saying that there wasn't enough sample to run a second test. They were all saying that there was no other substance known to them that could be confused with nitroglycerin. And I frankly do not believe that all of them could have been saying that if they hadn't put their heads together to say it. Because all of them were saying something that they knew and must have known was a lie. The only logical explanation for the pattern of conduct in not revealing all of these things that should have been revealed including the tests that they had secretly carried out in their laboratory in order to determine their theories which had in fact been supportive of the defense case and not their own, is that they were engaged in a giant conspiracy which resulted in these people being convicted.
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