Spycraft - Melton [197]
A few years later, in the autumn of 1986, local authorities uncovered a terrorist cache of weapons in Togo’s capital, Lome, and U.S. authorities were invited to examine these materials. Among the hodgepodge of aging weaponry and munitions, two state-of-the-art timers stood out, one of which Orkin acquired for analysis. Like the find in Chad, the device was also traced back to Switzerland and MEBO.
Then, in February of 1988, two known Libyan intelligence operatives were arrested in Dakar, Senegal, as they disembarked from their flight. Items found in one of the passengers’ briefcases included a silenced pistol, ammunition, four blocks of TNT, and two blocks of Semtex, along with a timer. Local authorities allowed CIA officers to photograph the timer. The photograph, like the timers from Chad and Togo, eventually landed at Orkin’s lab. Again, MEBO appeared linked to the device.
“In retrospect, the devices from Chad were first-generation,” Orkin explained. “Then, we observed that the device from Togo was a prototype. We said, ‘If you cut the corners out here and change this and change that, you can put it in a box and make it look nice.’ And that’s exactly what we got in the Senegal device, it was a packaged unit.” The terrorists had learned the engineering principles of form, fit, and function.
Orkin now had three increasingly sophisticated devices, all from Africa, all physically linked to the same manufacturer in Switzerland, and all with some Libyan connection. A report on each rested in the OTS archives as technological curiosities of no immediate intelligence value.
Then came Pan Am 103. By September of 1989, Scottish investigators converged on Mary’s House clothing store in Malta, led there by the scrap of T-shirt. The shop’s owner remembered the customer who bought the T-shirt, describing him as a Middle Eastern man who shopped indiscriminately, purchasing items without regard to size, as if he were simply trying to fill a suitcase, which, of course, is precisely what he was doing. The police produced a sketch of the buyer from the store owner’s recollections, though there was as yet no name to go with the face.
The Scots were still having a difficult time identifying the tiny piece of circuit board found embedded in the shirt. Unable to match it up to any piece of the plane or known electronic component, they sent a photograph of it to the FBI with the understanding that it would not be released outside the Bureau. Analysis of the photograph yielded little, if anything, new. After six months, the FBI received permission to show the photo to other U.S. government agencies. That same day, Orkin received an unexpected call.
“The guy calls me from the FBI’s explosives unit. He came out to my lab, pulled out the picture, plus a one-page report with a brief description of the fragment that says it’s epoxy fiberglass and seven-ply board,” said Orkin. “It also makes note of the fact there was green solder masking. Solder masking is used to prevent solder flowing to parts of the board where you don’t want it.”
Orkin had seen the same design before. The green solder masking, coupled with the curve of the board, matched previous reports done on the devices found in Togo and Senegal and associated with Libya. Then he discovered that the fabrication techniques, along with a modified connector, matched the device found in Chad. They all pointed to the Swiss firm MEBO. The connection, though still tenuous, represented a starting point. Beginning with this information about the components found on the African circuit boards, the FBI launched a global investigation.
The FBI traced the components, eventually tracking the timing crystal to a specific company. Asked about the component, the firm consulted its records, which showed that one hundred of them had been sold to MEBO,