As if to prod me, Vincent Cannistraro popped up on Radio 2 this morning offering his take on the Russians arrested in the US yesterday, accused of spying. I'm hoping to have a further browse around some of those old articles again this afternoon - I'll see if I can narrow the search to The Herald Rolfe, and see what turns up - hopefully dropping a few more clues about a timeline of the investigation path taken.
Here's an article dealing with Radio Forth's David Johnson, who's interviewed in Maltese Double Cross, and his impromptu meeting with security officials.
So, contrary to most opinions, only 6 weeks after the event, the theory that would later become the Aviv 'bag-switch' theory was nascent 2 years before Aviv and 5 before Coleman's and Francovich's claims. Of course, 'quite sensitive documents' would eventually morph into a suitcase of contraband as part of a covert operation that had went horribly awry. But, it is interesting that so early into the investigation, this theory is raisng it's ugly head, and clearly it causes enough disquiet to merit Johnson's report to be enquired further by senior security members.
I think Aviv was sooner than two years after the event, wasn't he? And his theory was that Khalid Jafaar's suitcase of heroin had been switched for the bomb, nothing to do with US agents. Also, the agents seem to have interlined into Heathrow from Larnaca - they weren't on PA103A. Or the one's we've been talking about weren't. Someone did suggest a bag-switch at Frankfurt
very early on though - might have been Jones.
I think the sensitive documents might have been real though, given all the interest there seems to have been in McKee's luggage. I think Johnson might have hit on a couple of raw nerves so far as theoretical shenanigans are concerned, but subsequent events suggest he wasn't on the nail as regards the method of introduction.
The on-going 'it wusnae us' between the the UK at Heathrow and the Germans at Frankfurt is rumbling on...
Still no indication, or slightest hint, that the BKA now have the Erac printout and have been in contact with Malta. Not that they'd necessarily release any direct evidence to the public, but possibly anyone would expect a far more aimable and concerted effort to make it clear there was a lead being followed that suggested neither Frankfurt or Heathrow were the origination for the device entering the system.
I don't know that we can be so sure about that. If Frankfurt were absolutely determined to deny responsibility, they might well have wanted to conceal the implications of tray B8849, if they'd seen it and it's not a fabrication.
The luggage transfers between KM180 and PA103A, and between PA103A and PA103 were very different. The Heathrow transfer was a fast plane-switch of luggage already assumed to have been screened at Frankfurt, and with no opportunity for anything to be interfered with during the transfer. Nobody was expecting Heathrow to screen the PA103A luggage for bombs. So if it was in that batch, Heathrow wasn't going to get the blame. However the Frankfurt transfer was through the heart of the airport and the main baggage transfer system, and the luggage was most certainly supposed to be screened. That's what Maier was for. He x-rayed everything that went on to that flight. So if one of these bags was the bomb, Frankfurt might still be regarded as blameworthy.
Frankfurt did take the rap in the end of course. It was the shambolic security at Frankfurt that got Pan Am into the civil action they lost and which bankrupted the company. However, because the airline ran its own security at Frankfurt (Alert was a subsidiary of PA), the airport iself seems to have got off the hook.
It's possible, though, that Frankfurt was extremely keen not to get the blame even at one remove like that. So if the printout is on the level, and the Frankfurt BKA spotted it at the time, they may have decided to rely on the watertight Luqa evidence to "assume" (conveniently) that B8849 was irrelevant, so providing a reason for just not showing it to anyone....
I don't think that's an excuse, and I don't even think it's particularly plausible. I merely point it out as a possible motivation for keeping schtumm about the printout and continuing to insist that a 38-minute explosion must mean a Heathrow introduction.
And while we're at it, the Helsinki activation doesn't fly for a barometrc trigger, any more than Frankfurt or Malta. There's a lot of garbled reporting and false assumptions going on near the beginning, and I don't think we can take too much out of it. I'm mainly saying the silence from Frankfurt about the printout doesn't to me completely prove they didn't have it.
Rolfe.
