State Dept. Alerted Its Envoys Dec. 9 to Pan Am Bomb Tip

Acting on a telephone tip, the State Department on Dec. 9 alerted all American diplomatic missions in Europe that associates of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal reportedly intended to smuggle a bomb onto a Pan American World Airways flight originating in Frankfurt before Christmas, U.S. and airlines officials disclosed Thursday.

According to a copy of the alert, Pan Am had already been made “aware of the threat information.” And the department instructed its missions that the warning “must be passed immediately” to all other U.S. airlines serving West Germany and other European countries.

News of the official notice fueled speculation here that sabotage caused Wednesday night’s crash of a Pan Am jumbo jet in the southwestern corner of Scotland, the worst aviation disaster in British history. All 258 passengers and crew, as well as up to 22 victims on the ground, were killed when the Boeing 747 plummeted to earth in the tiny Scottish village of Locker-bie, raining fire on dozens of homes and several vehicles.

Flight 103, bound for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport via London’s Heathrow Airport, had originated in Frankfurt.

In addition, an anonymous caller told American news agencies here Thursday that “the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution” were “very proud” to have downed the American airliner in retaliation for the destruction of an Iran Air jetliner by the U.S. cruiser Vincennes last July over the Persian Gulf. The Navy said at the time that the plane, carrying 290 passengers, was mistaken for an Iranian fighter.

Officials of both the International Air Transport Assn. and the British Airline Pilots Assn. said Thursday that they consider sabotage the most likely explanation for an airliner to fall out of the sky while cruising at 31,000 feet. They discounted a competing theory that the jumbo jet had suffered a catastrophic, midair structural failure.

Civil aviation officials here had earlier ruled out a midair collision as they sought an explanation for why the Pan Am airliner apparently broke up without a Mayday call from the cockpit crew.

Britain’s transport minister, Paul Channon, told the House of Commons on Thursday that air traffic controllers in Prescott, which was handling Flight 103 at the time, saw what had been a single blip on their screen suddenly “split into several returns (blips) around the last known position.”

The fact that the nose of the aircraft was discovered about 3 miles short of most of the remaining wreckage suggested that the cockpit may have been separated from the body of the jumbo jet by an explosion in the forward cargo hold, immediately behind the nose, according to a British Broadcasting Corp. aviation analyst speaking on the evening news.

U.S. Ambassador to London Charles H. Price II, who toured the crash site Thursday, said that immediate indications were of an explosion aboard the aircraft.

“It came down in at least three or four sections, which would indicate a midair explosion,” he told reporters.

Anti-Terrorism Squad

A spokesman at New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police and the nation’s largest force, said the head of its anti-terrorism squad, Commander George Churchill-Coleman, had taken charge of the London end of the crash inquiry.

However, a spokesman for the British Transport Ministry, which has primary responsibility for investigating the crash, refused to comment on the likelihood of sabotage. He cautioned that the investigation would probably not yield even a preliminary statement about the cause “before Christmas.”

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who visited the crash scene Thursday, added a word of caution. “We are keeping an absolutely open mind about the cause,” she said. “Speculation is not evidence.”

The doomed flight from Frankfurt had started out with Pan Am flying a smaller Boeing 727, then shifting during a London stopover to the Boeing 747 for the final leg to New York. Among the passengers, according to Ambassador Price, were 49 service personnel returning home for the holidays from their bases in West Germany.

Price also said that 70% of the passengers were Americans.

Among the crash’s victims were several U.S. officials from various government departments. Others who died included the plane’s flight engineer, Jerry Avritt, 46, of Westminster, Calif.; at least 36 students from Syracuse University in New York who had been exchange students in Europe; Bernt Carlsson, the U.N. Commissioner for Namibia, a Swede; Volkswagen of America’s second-ranking U.S. official, James Fuller, and Lou Marengo, the company’s director of U.S. marketing; and John Mulroy, 59, director of international communications for the Associated Press.

Police Supt. Angus Kennedy told a news conference in Lockerbie that the bodies of 150 passengers, including those of three children, had been recovered.

In addition, authorities in the village said 13 adults and four children who lived in a particularly hard-hit neighborhood of the village were still unaccounted for Thursday night and feared dead. All that was left where their houses once stood was a deep gouge in the earth.

Other sources put the death toll on the ground at 22.

‘Middle Eastern Accent’

According to the State Department “security bulletin,” an unidentified individual with a “Middle Eastern accent” telephoned an unspecified U.S. diplomatic facility in Europe last Dec. 5 and alerted officials there to the bomb plot.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley confirmed that the contact was with the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki. The Foreign Ministry in Finland said an Arab resident there had made several bomb threats during the year, most recently on Dec. 5, but that “in the investigation so far, no direct connection has been found between the Arab living in Finland and the air accident in question.”

The statement said authorities know the caller’s identity and that he had not left Finland since Dec. 5.

The caller said that an individual identified only as “Abdullah,” living in Frankfurt, would provide an explosive device to a collaborator identified as “Yassan Garadat,” in Finland. Garadat, in turn, would give the device “to an unidentified Finnish woman in Helsinki. The woman would unwittingly take the device to Frankfurt and eventually onto the U.S.-bound flight.”

Abu Nidal, whose real name is Sabri Banna, is a renegade Palestinian terrorist who broke away from the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization and who has attacked Israeli, American, and moderate Palestinian targets with seemingly equal fervor. He is believed to have been behind the simultaneous December, 1985, attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports that left 20 dead and 121 injured.

His followers are also said to have been behind the attempted 1982 assassination of Israel’s ambassador to London.

Officials from Iran and the PLO denied any involvement in the Lockerbie tragedy.

Mahmoud Abbas, a member of the 15-man PLO executive committee chaired by Yasser Arafat, said in Cairo that “any attempts to draw Arabs into this are nonsensical.”

Iranian Prime Minister Hussein Moussavi, quoted by the official IRNA news agency, called sabotage against a passenger plane “a big crime” and expressed his condolences to the families of the victims.

Ever since Arafat complied with U.S. demands that he recognize Israel and renounce terrorism, there has been concern that hard-line Palestinian groups might try to sabotage his diplomatic success with some terrorist attack.

In addition to all West European diplomatic posts, copies of the State Department notice were also sent to some missions in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. The department ordered that the alert also be passed to “all U.S. carriers with service to Europe” and said it should be shared as well with “other U.S. carriers with international routes.”

Controversial Addendum

In what is sure in the wake of the Lockerbie disaster to be a controversial addendum, the bulletin commented: “The carriers must be specifically told that the information in this bulletin is solely for the use of U.S. carriers and airport aviation security personnel in the performance of their official duties, and may not be further disseminated without the official approval of the director of civil aviation security.”

Criticism was already mounting here Thursday that Washington should have warned all American citizens of the threat, not just the airlines and some of its diplomatic personnel abroad.

But the alert may have been unevenly distributed to U.S. diplomatic personnel. Undersecretary of State Ronald I. Spiers, in an interview with the Cable News Network, confirmed that four officials traveling from the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, were among the victims on Flight 103. He said that the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon had intended to be on the flight but had been delayed in Nicosia.

Another victim was Michael S. Bernstein, assistant deputy director of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting office. Bernstein, 36, was returning from a trip to Austria for the Office of Special Investigations where he was representing the department in negotiations on a treaty for deporting Nazi war criminals from the United States to Austria.

Pan Am spokeswoman Pam Hanlon in New York confirmed that the airline had received a memo about the threat and put “supplementary security procedures in effect, not only at Frankfurt but airports around the world.”

In London, diplomatic and industry sources confirmed that the bulletin had been distributed to U.S. carriers here.

“It looks like you’ve got a pretty good source to me,” commented one airline official, who added that the Federal Aviation Administration sends similar notices “with a relative degree of frequency.” He refused to elaborate for fear, he said, of jeopardizing security procedures.

Transport Minister Channon said a team from his department’s air accident investigation branch had begun its probe of the crash shortly after midnight.

2 Recorders Found

Searchers found the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder from the aircraft Thursday afternoon. They were taken to the accidents investigation headquarters in Farnborough, about 35 miles southwest of London, where analysis of their data was beginning Thursday night.

However, a spokesman for the ministry said: “We would never release information from the flight recorder separate from what is found from other sources.” He added, “I would be surprised if we can say anything before Christmas.”

In San Francisco, FBI Director William Sessions, taking time out from a vacation, announced that FBI bomb experts and criminal investigators are en route to Scotland and New Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation. An FBI squad to help identify victims also was heading to Scotland.

Sessions said some of the phone calls claiming responsibility for the disaster came “from persons associated with terrorist groups.” The FBI will be looking into violations of two statutes making it a crime to kill U.S. nationals outside of the country and to destroy U.S. aircraft traveling internationally.

“The FBI’s involvement comes with the agreement of New Scotland Yard authorities in England,” Sessions said.

Representatives of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Boeing, Pan Am and engine maker Pratt & Whitney are expected to assist in the British investigation.

Fisher reported from London and Montalbano from Rome. Contributing to the story was Times staff writer Dan Morain in San Francisco.