Keeping Lockerbie Alive

By Melissa Ludtke

When Wendy Giebler finishes her job as a video production manager in Haverstraw, N.Y., each day, she starts a second shift of a more passionate nature. At home she spends five hours writing letters, preparing testimony, drafting speeches and devouring all the information she can find on how and why Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, last December, killing 270 people. One of the victims was William Giebler, 29, a bond broker who had married Wendy less than a year earlier. "I have nothing else left to live for," says Giebler, who transformed her grief into action. "This is what I consider my career."

Giebler has joined hundreds of relatives of Flight 103 victims in an organized attempt to change Government and airline policies and win compensation for their loss. Embittered after countless run-ins with unresponsive and evasive officials, their early efforts to lobby for improved airline safety quickly hardened into demands for the British, German and U.S. governments to disclose what they know about the bombing. Bert Ammerman, a high school assistant principal who lost his brother Tom and now heads a group called Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, calls Washington a "cesspool of unaccountability." After months of lobbying Congress and a meeting with President Bush, the families finally persuaded the Administration to establish a Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which began hearings last week.

Earlier this month, Ammerman accompanied a six-member delegation of American and British families to West Germany to quiz investigators and government officials on terrorist links to Flight 103. The group emerged from three days of talks with little new information. But they left the Germans with the clear impression that their persistence will not fade.

Nor has the European press lost its appetite for unraveling the Pan Am mystery. Since last summer, newspapers and magazines in Britain and Germany have bannered a disturbing mix of unsubstantiated charges and possibly valuable clues about the bombing.

The accusations and finger pointing give many Flight 103 families the sense of being trapped in an impenetrable web of international politics and terrorism. Says Eleanor Bright, whose husband Nick died over Lockerbie: "I feel as if I've been dropped in the middle of a bad spy novel." Among the disclosures:

-- West German police apprehended 16 suspected terrorists but then released all but two of them in October 1988, after discovering a cache of explosives and a bomb similar to the one used to destroy Flight 103 eight weeks later. Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian who some authorities believe assembled the Pan Am bomb, was among those set free. Published stories contend that Khreesat was also a German intelligence agent; German authorities deny it.

-- Pressured by a $300 million lawsuit for compensatory damages filed by more than 100 families, Pan Am has subpoenaed records of six U.S. Government agencies including the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department. The subpoena suggests that Israel or West Germany relayed serious warnings of a bombing to the U.S. -- and that the warnings were not passed on to Pan Am. The Flight 103 families say Pan Am may merely be trying to shift the blame so it can wriggle out of paying huge claims.

-- In the wildest allegation so far, an internal report by an investigator for Pan Am's insurance carrier suggests that the CIA unwittingly allowed the bomb aboard Flight 103 to protect a hostage-for-drugs operation. The report states that Monzer al Kassar, a Syrian arms dealer, was permitted to ship drugs through a "protected" route at Frankfurt in exchange for promises to help free American hostages in Lebanon. The subpoenas filed by Pan Am suggest that the CIA may even have a videotape of the bomb-laden suitcase being loaded in Frankfurt. The CIA and British authorities categorically deny these allegations.

After months of being kept in the dark, however, the families no longer discount any theory. "I believe ((the CIA scenario)) is more than possible," says Giebler. She is not alone in her suspicion, nor in her anger about the offer by the Bush Administration to compensate the families of victims killed in the downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the U.S.S. Vincennes in July 1988. Some security analysts conclude that Iran ordered the bombing of Flight 103 to avenge the Iranian Airbus disaster. The families do not disagree. Jeannine Boulanger, whose 21-year-old daughter Nicole was killed over Lockerbie, remembers vividly the day the Iranian plane went down. "Little did I realize that my daughter would pay the price for that," she says. "Iran paid for this bombing, yet Americans must sue to get compensation."

The families' estrangement from the Government and anger at Pan Am began almost as soon as Flight 103 fell from the sky. As television displayed the plane's splintered wreckage, relatives were told to wait patiently for the State Department to return their calls. Some sat seething by their telephones for as long as three days while calls bounced between agencies. When relatives of John Ahern, 26, went to New York City's Kennedy Airport, they were directed to a livestock warehouse where his body was forklifted off a plane in a cardboard box. No Pan Am or Government representative was present to help them. "They stripped him of his dignity," says Ahern's sister Bonnie O'Connor. "He should have come home with an American flag on his coffin."

The families say their quest for answers will persist until they learn who killed their relatives and how it was allowed to happen. Nor will they back down until air travel is made safer. "We are answering to our loved ones," says Ammerman. "We have all made a commitment not to stop until we satisfy that need." No one who has come up against them doubts the sincerity of that promise.

With reporting by Tom Curry/New York and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn