Spycraft - Melton [196]
CIA officials quickly concluded that this was a terrorist attack, even if the identity of the perpetrators and their motives were unknown. Reports from around the world identified groups eager to claim credit for the cruel spectacle. Critical details began emerging over the following weeks, as investigators assembled information from agent reports, signals intelligence, and fragments of the plane. The bomb had been concealed in a commercial Toshiba radio cassette player, the Bombeat (Model RT-SF 16), available in consumer electronics stores. Fragments of the radio, as well as the owner’s manual, were recovered in the wreckage of the cargo container where the blast originated.
Traces of the plastic explosive Semtex were found on the radio’s circuit board and experts calculated that no more than 400 grams (about 14 ounces) positioned close enough to an outer bulkhead was enough to blast an eighteen-inch a hole through the fuselage. Within seconds after the detonation, the plane decompressed, suffered structural failure, and tore itself apart in the sky. But more puzzling than the presence of Semtex or the cassette player was what remained of a brown Samsonite suitcase. Tests revealed traces of Semtex on the suitcase fragments, indicating that it more than likely held the bomb. Yet, no such suitcase was checked in as baggage at Malta, the departure point for the baggage container where the blast occurred and investigators were unable to match the brown, hard-shell piece of luggage to any passenger aboard the plane.
From the start, the investigators focused on the use of Semtex. The explosive of choice among many terrorists, it is difficult to detect, but relatively easy to obtain. Counterterrorism experts suspected Palestinian groups based in Syria, which had used the explosive in past attacks and had a history of relying on consumer electronics as carriers. Iranian terrorists also favored the explosive, a fact that focused attention on an Iranian national aboard the flight’s Frankfurt to London leg, who disembarked before the plane’s departure for New York.
Although investigators understood what had happened, their study of the debris field and wreckage yielded little about who did it and how the bomb had been placed on the airliner. The break did not come for eighteen months. Then, nearly eighty miles from the center of the debris field, a local man stumbled onto the remnant of a T-shirt bearing the label of Mary’s House, a store in Malta’s port town of Sliema. Embedded in the material of the garment was a thumbnail-sized fragment of circuit board, about 0.4 inches square. That tiny speck of forensic evidence would eventually lead to the unraveling of a terrorist plot and test the international justice system.
However, the trail to the Lockerbie bombers began not in a European capital or the Middle East, but in sub-Saharan Africa. The Republic of Chad, a former French colony, is known primarily for the exotic name of its capital city, N’Djamena. Despite decades of ethnic warfare and limited strategic significance in the Cold War, the United States maintained relationships with Chad’s government. In the early 1980s, the local security service uncovered what they assumed to be a case of espionage and quickly moved in for an arrest. When the suspected spy was taken into custody, his suitcase surprisingly contained not a collection of standard spy gear, but a quantity of Semtex attached to a portable radio.
Without the capability to conduct an in-depth technical analysis, Chad’s intelligence service passed the device on to the CIA. The device, Orkin noted, was unexpectedly complex. The sophisticated circuitry was controlled by a standard pager traced to a