Spycraft - Melton [195]
For instance, lot numbers denoting manufacturing runs used for inventory control, coupled with standardized fabricating processes, gave virtually every component a personal history. Working out the “technological DNA” of terrorist devices, the foreign-finds experts uncovered yet another disturbing trend: terror organizations were no longer working in isolation. They were now forging ties with rogue nations and each other.
In one instance, when analyzing a device uncovered in the Middle East, he noted features of an elaborate, high-powered radio receiver with British markings. “We kept finding components that were marked from a British company. And when we showed it to the British, they identified it as PIRA [Provisional IRA] technology,” recalled Orkin. “British analysis had concluded that PIRA traded technology for guns and explosives with the Libyans. Libya also trained some of the PIRA guys who handed them the technology. There was another incident in Peru. And when we looked at it, we said this looks like the other device from PIRA.”
What eventually emerged was a complex, interlocking network of terrorist organizations. For example, PIRA technology could support the ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna) in Spain and ETA could hand off some of the equipment to Shining Path in Peru, and so on and so on. While these groups did not always share political or social agendas, they did share a common desire for bomb-making technology. “It was getting harder and harder to differentiate between groups by their technology,” explained Orkin.
The ringing bells and songs of carolers on Christmas Day 1988 sounded with little joy or peace for families of the 259 passengers and crew of Pan Am Flight 103. Four days earlier, just after 7 PM on December 21, a bomb ripped a hole in the forward fuselage of the Boeing 747 as the plane reached its cruising altitude of 31,000 feet over Scotland. Stunned air traffic controllers at London’s Heathrow Airport watched the aircraft vanish from their radar screens, replaced by small blips as nearly 700,000 pounds of airborne debris, including flaming jet fuel, rained down on the small town of Lockerbie.
Two hundred seventy perished that day, all those aboard the plane and eleven residents of Lockerbie. Death and destruction in the air and on the ground turned the anticipation and joy of the Christmas holidays that traditionally unites friends and coworkers in a spirit of joyous goodwill into a season of mourning. The next day, CIA casualty officers suspended holiday plans after learning that among the dead was a CIA officer. Another star would be chiseled into the white marble of the Agency’s memorial wall of the Original Headquarters Building.
Even for those not directly touched by the tragedy, the grim images of the wreckage on covers of magazines carried a stark reminder that evil honored no holiday. The debris field, spread over more than 800 square miles, was a horrific scene of human remains, personal effects, and pieces of aircraft. The plane had not exploded, but broken apart as it plummeted to earth. Few news organizations captured or broadcast images of the most gruesome elements of the crash site; however, one photo that shocked and sickened the world eventually became a morbid visual shorthand for the tragedy. That was the image of the battered nose section of the 747 with the cheerful script MAID OF THE SEAS resting on its side in a muddy field. Nearly twenty years later, even those who can recall few of the details surrounding the tragedy of Flight 103 remember that image vividly.
Terrorism was not new to the Agency or unknown to viewers of the evening news. Nevertheless, Pan Am Flight 103 seemed different. The plane was not in a war-torn country. Those aboard were students, husbands, and mothers. Their faces, revealed to the world smiling