The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  But he never called. Many months later, I got the chance to study my own file and I learned that he had ordered Internal Affairs to start a case against me right after that meeting. I regretted many of the names I had handed over. It seemed I had given them to the enemy as well as revealing just how much I knew.

  Shortly afterwards, I was fired from the FSB. Before I left, a former boss at the Anti-Terrorist Centre went to Putin to put in a word on my behalf. Returning from the meeting, he looked at me, shook his head and said: “I do not envy you, Alexander. There is common money involved.”

  I did not understand then what he meant by “common money”. Now I do. He was referring to Colonel Khokholkov and his dealings with the Uzbek drug barons. This understanding came to me many months later. I discovered that Putin’s connection with Colonel Khokholkov dated back to the time when Putin was a Deputy for Economic Affairs to the Mayor of St Petersburg.

  I had an informer in St Petersburg’s city hall. He kept an eye on the criminal connections of city officials. When the Mayor lost the elections, Putin lost his job. One day my informant had a beer with him. Putin was down and out and could not get hold of money he had stashed away. He was under surveillance by the new Mayor’s people. My informant took pity on Putin and gave him $2,000 as an “open-ended” loan. When Putin became President, he repaid him by appointing him an economic adviser.

  As for me, my years of service at the FSB were rewarded by being fired and thrown in jail. It was a year before I was released pending trial. My informant came to see me following my release: “Putin will squash you,” he said, “and no one can help you. He has no choice because he was working with the Uzbek group. There is lots of common money there.”

  I could not believe that he was using the same phrase: common money. He was telling me that Putin had been directly linked with the mob that my investigations into Colonel Khokholkov had led me to. How close had I come to his name?

  My informant smiled: “Remember the smuggling of rare metal in the early Nineties? Putin was in charge of export licensing. You worked on organized crime? Tell me, could anyone export a kilo of metal in those days without the mob? They would blow up the whole train. And he was right at the centre of it all. All his licensees were mob fronts.”

  The two of us were talking in a restaurant. “Vladimir fell for power very quickly,” confided my informant. “Look, when Yeltsin drove to the Kremlin, only one traffic lane was cleared. But for Vladimir they close down the whole highway. He is not fit for power. He has no political skills and a certain weird way of thinking. He is dangerous.”

  My friend got drunk and I took him out to the lobby. “Are you crazy?” I said. “All of this will be at the FSB tomorrow morning. Don’t you know that I am watched?”

  But it was too late. Three weeks after that conversation, he was killed by a hit-man from a passing bicycle. A direct hit at close range. I learned about it from TV. A presidential aide has been shot. One of many during the past decade.

  Concluding this story, I’m quite sure there will be an explosion of protests about my unsubstantiated allegations that President Putin is personally involved at least in a cover-up of organized criminal activities connected with drug traffic in Russia and Europe. People will demand hard proof. I am not going to try to prove anything. I am an operativnik, not a prosecutor. My job is to collect operational information and analyse it. This is my analysis:

  First: two independent sources report that a suspect – call him Mr P. – has “common money” with Colonel Khokholkov at the FSB. One of the sources gets killed as soon as his connection to me is compromised.

  Second: Colonel Khokholkov is tied to the Uzbek drug organization. He lives lavishly, well beyond his means.

  Next: Mr P. protects Colonel Khokholkov. He neutralizes his internal opponents.

  Further: Mr P. is fully aware that Colonel Khokholkov is involved with the Uzbeks.

  Finally: when the crimes were committed, Mr P. held a key position in a northern metropolis, Russia’s gateway to Europe. Much of the drug transit went through his city. This made him of tremendous value to the Uzbek friends of his friend Colonel Khokholkov.

  As an operativnik, I have every reason to suspect Mr P. at least in criminal complicity. There is nothing unusual in that – in my time I have seen hundreds of similar situations. Sure, Mr P. happens to be the President of Russia. But the crimes were committed when he was a humble Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg.

  Admittedly, the evidence against Mr P. is indirect and cannot be used in a court. And, of course, if Mr P. were not the President, I would not have publicized it, but would have opened a case and brought him in for questioning.

  But he is the President, and there is no possibility of questioning him. He is accountable by a different standard. So he must respond to my questions before the public.

  But first, I would like to see what will happen to the newspaper that prints this story.

  Daily Mail 2007

  LOCKERBIE BOMBING

  On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, bound from Heathrow for New York’s JFK International Airport, exploded at an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,450m). All 259 passengers aboard the Boeing 747–121 were killed, along with 11 residents of Lockerbie, southern Scotland, hit by plane wreckage falling from the sky.

  In the ensuing crash investigation, forensic experts determined that 12–16 ounces (340–450g) of plastic explosive had been detonated in the airplane’s forward cargo hold. Since this was a US plane with mostly US citizens aboard, the bombing was widely regarded as an attack on the US. After a three-year joint investigation by the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the FBI, indictments for murder in connection with the Lockerbie bombing were issued on 13 November 1991 against Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), and Khalifah Fhimahmen, the LAA manager at Malta’s Luqa Airport.

  Libya had a clear motive for the Lockerbie crime: revenge for the 1986 Air Force raid on the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi which killed, among others, the adopted daughter of the Libyan president, Muammar al-Gaddafi. Neither was Libya exactly a stranger to arranging terrorist attacks. Some forensic evidence also seemed to link the bombing to Libya. Lord Boyd, the Scottish advocate, noted:

  In June 1990, with the assistance ultimately of the CIA and FBI, Alan Feraday of the Explosives Laboratory was able to identify the fragment as identical to circuitry from an MST-13 timer. It was already known to the CIA from an example seized in Togo in 1986 and photographed by them in Senegal in 1988. That took investigators to the firm of MEBO in Zurich. It was discovered that these timers had been manufactured to the order of two Libyans – Ezzadin Hinshin, at the time director of the Central Security Organization of the Libyan External Security Organization, and Said Rashid, then head of the Operations Administration of the ESO.

  After ten years of United Nations sanctions Libya eventually handed over al-Megrahi and Fhimahmen in April 1999 to Scottish police at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, a neutral venue.

  On 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges acquitted Fhimahmen but convicted al-Megrahi of murder and sentenced him to 27 years in prison. Al-Megrahi professed his innocence. He wasn’t the only one. One observer of the trial, Dr Hans Koechler of the United Nations, called it a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”; as if to outdo Koechler, one professor of law at Edinburgh called al-Megrahi’s conviction the “worst miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years”. Faith in the Camp Zeist judgment was severely shaken again when Libya’s Prime Minister Shukri Ghanen told BBC Radio in 2004 that Libya had only paid US$2.7 billion compensation to the victims’ families to get the sanctions against his country dropped. The money, said Ghanen, was “the price for peace”.

  All of which raised the question: were al-Megrahi and Libya framed?

  In his book Lockerbie: The Tragedy of Flight 103, David Johnston asserts that, by the end of 1989, US and UK intelligence agents were near unit
ed in their agreement as to who was responsible for the 103 outrage – and it wasn’t Libya. Their suspicion was confirmed in 2000 when one Ahmad Behbahani stepped forward to claim that the Iranian government had carried out the Lockerbie operation.

  Behbahani was a former Iranian intelligence officer. His job: co-ordinating Iran’s terrorist attacks on the West. According to him, he contracted out the bombing to Ahmed JibriPs Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). There was a deal of supporting evidence for this claim. The PFLP-GC ran a cell in Germany – where Pan Am 103 began its flight to the US – which built explosive devices hidden in Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorders. The source for this information is the bomb-maker himself, Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian spy infiltrated into the PFLP-GC. According to most forensic evidence, the explosive device placed aboard Pan Am 103 was likewise hidden in a Toshiba Bombeat. So convinced were the Scottish police at one stage that Khreesat was the Lockerbie bomber that they drew up a warrant for his arrest. PFLP-GC watchers also remembered JibriPs 1985 warning: “There will be no safety for any traveller on an Israeli or US airliner.” Pan Am 103 was, by this theory, an eye for an eye: an American warship had mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airbus in 1988.

  Some journalists and observers account for the Lockerbie investigation switching track from Iran to Libya to a climate change in geopolitics. In the early 1990s the US and UK were enjoying a brief thaw with Syria and Iran, which had respectively supported and acquiesced in George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War. Libya, on the other hand, had sided with Iraq, the enemy. Reputedly, Bush asked the British PM Margaret Thatcher for the Syria/Iran/PFLP-GC line of inquiry to be “toned down”. (Thatcher’s memoirs, interestingly, fail to blame Libya for the Pan Am tragedy.) Being nasty to Libya but nice to the Syrians and Iranians, who effectively controlled the Lebanese capital Beirut, had the added advantage that Western hostages held in the city received their freedom.

  Oddly enough, the Beirut hostage crisis had another, more direct, connection to the Lockerbie bombing. On board the doomed flight were at least four US intelligence officers, one of whom was Matthew Gannon, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut. Sitting directly behind Gannon was Major Charles McKee of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, who is believed to have been in Beirut searching for American hostages held by Hizbollah. According to Pan Am’s own investigation, undertaken by former Mossad officer Juval Aviv, the CIA were couriering drugs in a protected suitcase aboard flight 103 on behalf of a Syrian arms dealer, who had the pull to get US hostages in Beirut released. It is widely reported that the crash area around Lockerbie was searched by scores of CIA officers, who removed cases of heroin and cannabis, together with $500,000. British soldiers found a map detailing the whereabouts of two US hostages.

  That the CIA used flight 103 for drug couriering has caused some Lockerbie observers to wonder whether George Bush himself ordered the blowing up of 103 in order to eradicate evidence that the CIA was once again involved in dodgy drug operations. The Iran-Contra Scandal had almost brought down Reagan, and Bush would have been frantic to avoid a repeat performance.

  The passenger list of flight 103 makes for fertile reading for conspiracy theory. Among the dead was Bernt Carlsson, the United Nations Commissioner for South West Africa (Namibia). Carlsson was due to fly to New York from Brussels to oversee the agreement by which the apartheid regime of South Africa relinquished control of Namibia as instructed by the UN Security Council; according to a report on 12 March 1990 in the Swedish daily iDAG, Carlsson was pressurized to abandon his plan to fly direct to NY and instead to stop over in London for a meeting with representatives of the De Beers mining group. Consequently, Carlsson ended up on fatal flight 103. The plot thickens: Pan Am witnesses at the Lockerbie Fatal Accident Inquiry confirmed that South African Airways was engaged in illegal baggage switching on 21 December. Was Carlsson’s bag substituted while he was at the De Beers meeting? The plot congeals: booked on flight 103 was a South African delegation, headed by foreign minister Pik Botha, also flying to NY for the Namibia treaty signing. At the last moment the South African delegation cancelled their seats on flight 103 and made other arrangements for travel.

  Carlsson’s death came immediately before the planned Namibia independence signing, and it was impossible for the UN to find a replacement in time, with the result that the territory’s South African administrator-general Louis Pienaar continued to administer South-West Africa in the run-up to the first election in November 1989. Free of Carlsson, the apartheid regime in South Africa foisted the constitution it wanted on Namibia.

  It has also been suggested that the Lockerbie bomb was radio detonated, the explosive device being set off by simply coming into range of a certain aircraft navigational beacon (in the case of Flight 103, the Dean Cross beacon, south west of Carlisle, on 123.95MHZ). Only two years before the downing of flight 103, Soviet accident investigators had accused South Africa of using a false navigational radio beacon to lure the Tupolev Tu-134 of Mozambique president Samora Machel to its doom.

  With so many allegations still swirling in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing, Dr Jim Swire of the bereaved families campaign group UK Families-Flight 103 (UKF103) has called for “a full review of the entire Lockerbie scenario through an appropriately empowered and independent inquiry”. Before it came to power in the UK in 1997, the Labour Party supported an independent Lockerbie inquiry. When it reached Downing Street the Labour Party decided there was no need to “initiate any further form of review on Lockerbie”.

  Strange, that.

  Libya was framed for the Lockerbie bombing: ALERT LEVEL 9

  Further Reading

  John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie, 2002

  David Johnston, Lockerbie: The Tragedy of Flight 103, 1989

  MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS

  During rush-hour on the morning of 11 March 2004, ten bombs exploded more or less simultaneously around the Atocha railway station in Madrid, killing 192 commuters and injuring 1,800 others. Within hours, the conservative government of Jose Marisa Aznar was blaming ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), the terrorist Basque separatist organization, for the attack.

  Three days after the train bombs, Spain went to the polls in the general election and voted Aznar’s Popular Party out of office and the Socialists in. Henceforth the investigation into what Spaniards would call “11–M” concentrated not on ETA but on Islamic radicals attached to al-Qaeda. At this, Aznar, together with influential right-wing media such as the El Mundo newspaper, cried foul and accused the Socialists of a conspiracy to hide the identity of the true perpetrators: ETA.

  It was widely known that ETA sought to attack targets in the capital and had previously tried to bomb trains, and only weeks before 11–M a vanload of ETA explosives had been seized approaching Madrid. Further, police in the northern region of Asturias had been tipped off that Basque separatists had sold dynamite for an imminent incident. The dynamite used in Madrid allegedly contained DNT, common in ETA blasts. Moreover, the Atocha attack was remarkably free of many of the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack, such as the suicide of the bomb carriers themselves.

  The Socialists had a reason to shine the spotlight on al-Qaeda, not ETA. Before polling on 14 March they claimed, without any certain evidence, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the train attacks. Fearful of more al-Qaeda assaults on Spanish citizens, Spain voted to oust the party which had sent Spanish troops to Iraq – Aznar’s Popular Party. In the three days between the bombings and the election, Aznar’s Popular Party went from 5 per cent ahead in opinion polls to 7 per cent behind the Socialists. Once elected, the Socialists had to shore up their unfounded claims concerning Atocha.

  On the other hand, Spain was indeed a prime target for al-Qaeda, as Aznar had been a high-profile supporter of the Bush-led ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Spanish police and judiciary continued on the al-Qaeda trail and within weeks surrounded Moroccan sus
pects in a hideout at Leganes. Rather than surrender, the suspects blew themselves up. Eventually, the Spanish police would arrest 29 more suspects in the Madrid train bombing investigation, and commit them to trial in 2007. The indictment ran to 96,000 pages, and failed to note any ETA connection with the Madrid bombings. It did find overwhelming evidence, however, of involvement in the crime by members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which is loosely associated with al-Qaeda.

  Despite the strength of the prosecution case, Aznar and the Popular Party refused to let go of their conspiracy theory, which fractured Spanish society almost exactly along right/ left lines running back to the 1930s Civil War. Even the 11–M victims’ groups were run on pro- and anti-conspiracy lines.

  In truth, any conspiracy theorizing after 11–M was as likely to be directed by Aznar and the Popular Party as against them. According to the ESISC (European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre), by late morning of the 11th the Spanish Intelligence Services had concluded the massacre was authored by an Islamist terrorist group, but were then ordered to deny the Islamic lead and insist that ETA was the sole suspect. The Popular Party government followed up by sending messages to Spanish embassies ordering them to uphold the pro-ETA line. Aznar is further reported to have phoned newspaper editors and personally asked them to support his version.

  Addendum: On 31 October 2007 the Spanish National Court found 20 Islamists and Moroccan petty criminals guilty of perpetrating the Madrid Train Bombings and/or belonging to a terrorist organization. A Spanish miner was convicted of supplying the explosives used in the bombing.

  It was ETA not al-Qaeda which committed the 11–M train bombings: ALERT LEVEL 4