FLIGHT 800: TRAGEDY’S AFTERMATH : TWA Crash a Grim Reminder of Pan Am Disaster in Scotland

If the Trans World Airlines crash Wednesday stirs a familiar emotion, it may be the lingering memories of another air calamity that remains seared in the nation’s memory: Pan American Airways Flight 103, blown out of the night sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, more than seven years ago.

It was the tragic end of Pan Am 103 that revealed to the world just how sophisticated the technology of terrorism had become. It also brought home the message that no travelers were immune--even if they were Americans on a U.S. jetliner, homeward bound.

The disaster led to an extraordinary international detective saga, in which investigators scoured 845 square miles of woods and meadows in Scotland, sometimes on their hands and knees, scrambled after tips throughout Europe and the Middle East and squabbled on occasion with each other over the meaning of evidence.

Finally, after many months of frustrating dead-ends and wrong turns, the anti-terrorist sleuths cracked the case with clues found in a microchip fragment and shreds of clothing. And contrary to the working assumption that had guided their thinking for many months, it was Libyan intelligence rather than radical Palestinians who had carried out the bombing.

“No. 1, maybe the butler didn’t do it,” said Brian M. Jenkins, an expert on terrorism, alluding to lessons for today arising from the Lockerbie episode. “You’ve got to be careful about early conclusions. No. 2, the investigation can take years and rest upon tiny bits.”

Six days after that crash, law enforcement officials concluded that a bomb was responsible, and attention immediately focused on the Middle East. Nonetheless, it was too soon to dismiss other possibilities. Law enforcement officials tentatively considered Sikh dissidents from India, Red Army radicals from Japan, the Irish Republican Army, maybe even a person with a nonpolitical motive--someone with a personal grudge, such as a disgruntled employee.

But there seemed to be sound reasons to focus on the Middle East and the possibility that a government was involved, given the sophistication of the attack. “You don’t buy this kind of stuff off the streets,” a U.S. analyst told The Times just days after the Lockerbie bombing. “To do something like this also requires a certain amount of sophistication, to work with this kind of explosive and to get it on board.”

Just two months before the bombing, German authorities had uncovered a cell of 16 operatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Raids in Frankfurt and Neuss, near Dusseldorf, uncovered an arsenal of bombs and accessories.

Moreover, the leader of the radical group, Ahmed Jibril, traveled often to Iran. And Iran had a possible motive--revenge for the accidental downing of an Iran Air flight over the Persian Gulf by a U.S. warship earlier in the year.

Not every path led to Tehran, however. Jibril’s organization was based in Syria, where Jibril himself had once served as an officer in the army. And Syria had been linked to a bid to blow up one of Israeli airliner El Al’s jets in London two years earlier.

In a series of false starts, investigators put the spotlight on various passengers who may unintentionally have carried the lethal cargo on board.

Among them were two young women who had studied in Vienna, where they befriended a man from Jordan. Could he have sent them back to America with an unopened gift?

And then there were the two CIA agents who had hooked up with Pan Am 103 from a flight out of Cyprus. Could a terrorist have switched their bags?

What about the Lebanese native, now a U.S. citizen living in Dearborn, Mich., who made repeated trips to the Middle East?

There were theories that didn’t involve passengers at all: Did an Iran Air baggage handler sneak across the runway apron at Heathrow Airport and slip one extra suitcase onto the dolly loading Pan Am 103?

Sorting out these questions was a team of anti-terrorist investigators that included Scottish police, technical experts from Scotland Yard and the FBI, along with investigators from Germany, Sweden, Malta and elsewhere.

Oliver B. “Buck” Revell, a top FBI official overseeing the international investigation, had a personal as well as professional connection to the crime: His own son had held a reservation on the flight but changed his travel plans several days before it took off. “I just say, ‘There but for the grace of God. . . ,’ ” said Revell, now head of a private investigative firm in Dallas.

In an interview last week, Revell spoke favorably of the international investigation, the largest such effort “in the history of the bureau.”

It was not without tension, however. No country, it seemed, wanted to be known as the place where terrorists smuggled the bomb on board. Indeed, German officials were miffed when British forensic experts concluded that the blast occurred in a section of the plane--near the “P” in the Pan Am logo, on the left side--loaded with bags from Frankfurt.

“If the British officials are speculating about clues in the direction of Frankfurt, then they’re doing it apparently with the intention of diverting attention from their own negligence,” a German security official complained at the time.

By now, the sleuths had figured out that the bomb was concealed inside a Toshiba radio-cassette player with great ingenuity; a trained eye might not even catch it with an X-ray. “You had to be a Toshiba engineer to know it was not an integral component of the radio itself,” Revell said.

Still eluding the investigators, however, was the most important answer of all: who planted it.

Ultimately, two breakthroughs transformed the case, pinpointing the blame on Libyan intelligence agents.

In 1989, investigators determined that certain items of clothing, including a baby jumpsuit, had been stuffed into a brown, hard-shell Samsonite suitcase along with the bomb. Aided by the intact label “Babygro,” Scottish police and the FBI traced the clothing shreds to a factory on the island of Malta.

A local merchant provided police with a description of the man who bought the items; investigators also uncovered a diary that seemed to describe the terrorists’ plans to place Air Malta baggage tags on the suitcase containing the explosive.

An even greater break came soon after, when forensic experts, following the hunch of a CIA analyst, found that the device used to trigger the bomb over Lockerbie matched devices used by Libyan agents in the African nations of Senegal and Togo. The chip fragment recovered in Scotland was Swiss made and designed for use with a timer, like the other Libyan devices.

On Nov. 14, 1991, the United States indicted two Libyan intelligence agents in the bombing--Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, 39, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 35. The two men are believed to be in Libya. The United States, however, has not succeeded in efforts to have them turned over to U.S. authorities.