All language subtitles for FBI True Season - 5 episode 5

- A gruesome Christmastime
disaster tonight.

A quiet Scottish
village an inferno

of flames after a Pan American
jumbo jet went off the radar

and went down in
the village center.

- It was the largest
crime scene in history.

- In a few short, violent
moments, 270 people died.

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- We suspected
that a bomb could

have brought the plane down.

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747s don't fall out of the sky.

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- The magnitude of
what had happened

was just something that
you couldn't fathom.

You have a 747 spread
over 845 square miles.

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You have 270 people
that were murdered.

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My baby!

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- Pan Am 103 was the greatest
loss of life for Americans

during the commission
of a terrorist attack.

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No FBI agent had ever
worked a murder case

with 190 victims.

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The target of that attack was
the United States of America.

As an American, I want
to find out who did this.

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- In the FBI, we make
a lot of headlines.

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Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people
want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze!
- FBI.

- FBI!
- Action!

- But they don't know
the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking
agent-to-agent.

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This is "FBI True."

- Hal, where were you
when you first heard

of the crash of Pan Am 103?

- Kristy Kottis is a
24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs,
crimes against children,

as well as human
and drug trafficking.

- I was actually flying
from Washington, D.C.,

to Louisville, Kentucky,
with who is now my wife.

And we were headed back for
Christmas when I landed,

and my dad asked
me why I was there.

He said, the field office has
been trying to get a hold of me

all day.

- Hal Hendershot is a
23-year veteran of the FBI.

He mostly worked
counterintelligence,

counterterrorism,
and cybercrimes.

- I was in the counterterrorism
section at FBI Headquarters.

- Dick Marquise followed
in his father's footsteps

by joining the FBI in 1971.

Dick retired as
the special agent

in charge of the Oklahoma City
field office 29 years later.

- I started to hear
rumors early afternoon

that a Pan Am flight
had crashed over Lockerbie.

- Rescue teams from
all over Britain

are heading for the scene of
what looks to be Britain's

worst air crash tonight.

- The plane crashed on the
outskirts of Lockerbie.

Witnesses have described
a huge fireball.

- It was evening in
Scotland, and it wasn't

until the next morning that
we started to understand

the enormity of the crash.

- A crater 20 feet
deep marks the spot

near the main Glasgow Road
where the jumbo jet came down.

- We had no idea what
happened to that airplane

Was it an explosion?

Did it malfunction?

747s don't fall out of the sky.

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We had obtained passenger
records from Pan AM

and discovered that there were

190 Americans
on that aircraft--

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- --including 35 students
from Syracuse.

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My baby!

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- The families came
here to Kennedy Airport

throughout the evening looking
for any word for confirmation

of what they already knew.

For the next of kin,
it is a torture.

- Oh, my baby.

- I'll take her.

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- So when I got
down to Lockerbie--

Lockerbie is a
very small town.

I see multiple debris fields.

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There were three residential
areas in the town that

had been hit by the plane.

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There were 11 residents
in Scotland that perished.

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We were still picking
up human remains out

of the massive debris field.

Ultimately, it was
about 841 square miles.

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- It was the largest
crime scene in history.

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And at that point, the
most significant thing

that we could do was to help
identify those 190 Americans

that were on that airplane.

- Wow.

So it was pretty
jarring to see all that.

- It's one of those things that
will live with you forever.

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I went out in the field
with the crime scene guys.

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If it wasn't a leaf
or a piece of grass,

you generally picked it up.

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- The Scottish cops,
this small police force

did a job of collecting
and preserving the evidence

as well as any
agency in the world.

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- When do we start
seeing more information

come that's letting
us put a picture

together of what happened?

- Tom Thurman, who was
in our explosives unit,

traveled to Scotland,
and he noticed

a piece of baggage container
that had explosive damage.

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There were some telltale
signs of a bomb.

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Several days after
Christmas, the Air Accidents

Investigation branch
in the U.K. announced

it was not a malfunction.

It was an explosive that
brought the plane down.

- It has been established that
two parts of the metal luggage

pallet framework show
conclusive evidence of

a detonating high explosive.

- The FBI had the
responsibility

to collect evidence
and prosecute people

who killed Americans overseas
in the commission

of a terrorist attack.

We sent agents to
London, to Lockerbie,

and to Frankfurt, Germany.

That's where the
plane originated.

The flight went from
Frankfurt to London,

where they changed aircraft.

It was going to
go on to New York

and continue on to Detroit.

You start to gather
all the pieces,

and you say,
who are our suspects?

And initially, we had several.

There was a history
of terrorists

blowing up airplanes.

The primary suspect was a group
called the PFLP-GC in Germany.

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The previous
October, 16 of them

had been arrested
by the German BKA.

They'd been arrested.

They'd been charged with
preparing bombs to be used

against aviation,
and in particular,

a Toshiba Bomb Beat radio

that had plastic explosive
in it

and a barometric timer
designed to not go off until
they

got up above about
20,000 feet.

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We're also looking
at the Libyans.

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The Libyans had
targeted Americans

in a terrorist
bombing in Germany.

- On April 5th in
West Berlin, a terrorist

bomb exploded in a
nightclub frequented

by American servicemen.

Sergeant Kenneth Ford
and a young Turkish woman

were killed, and 230
others were wounded.

- The Libyans were upset
with the United States

because Ronald
Reagan had retaliated

for the nightclub
bombing and bombed

what we call Gaddafi's
Tent in 1986.

- The United States
launched a series

of strikes against
the headquarters,

terrorist facilities,
and military assets

that support Muammar Gaddafi's
subversive activities.

- And inside that tent was
a young girl,

who Gaddafi
claimed as his daughter.

- We had the Iranians,
who were not happy

with the United States,

because of the shootdown
by the USS "Vincennes"

of an Iran Airbus
in July of 1988.

- Iranian-US relations
are at a flashpoint tonight.

The United States
accidentally shot down

an Iran Air jet,
a civilian airplane

with some 300 people
on board.

All are believed to have died.

- So those were three
of the main suspects

we were considering,

the PFLP-GC, Libya, and Iran.

- What other pieces of
evidence are we finding?

- Inside of the baggage
container that our bomb expert

determined had explosive
patterns on it,

we picked up a circuit board
fragment about the size

of the end of your finger.

- And that circuit board was

later traced to a Toshiba
radio, not the same model

as was seized in Germany,
but very similar.

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So this caused us to say,

this had to have been
the PFLP-GC.

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- To find something,
that tiny a piece of evidence.

- It's from the
tenacity of the people

involved in the investigation.

- And then we had
a monkey wrench

thrown into us in January.

Some unknown person
walked into the U.S. embassy

in Vienna, Austria,

and he left a letter
for the ambassador.

The letter seems to implicate
Gaddafi and the Libyans

in connection with the
bombing of Pan Am 103,

but it didn't provide
any actual evidence.

There were really no
leads coming from that.

We said, let's put this
away for another day.

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The Scots started finding
fragments of a suitcase

that was blown to smithereens.

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These were all parts
of the same suitcase that

were identified by Samsonite.

And they identified
it by the lock.

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We believe the suitcase
had the bomb in it.

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- They do a lot
of forensic work.

They find the cardboard
box, instruction manual

for the radio, and plastic

from the outer case
of the radio

all blasted into the
clothing in a sandwich,

and they slowly
peel that apart.

So that helped identify what
clothing was in the bomb bag.

- The clothing they were
finding, a lot of them had

"Made in Malta" tags on them.

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This is a new avenue.

How did Malta fit into this?

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And we were able to
get even more specific

than the country of Malta.

Some of the clothing
tags had a lot number

on them, which was
traced to a store

there called Mary's House.

The Scottish cops sent
a police officer to Malta,

and he had interviewed a man
who had sold

some of the clothing we had
recovered at Lockerbie.

And the most significant thing
he told us was this guy

had a Libyan accent.

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And he provided possible dates
when he bought the clothing.

And so, all of a sudden,
we've got a lead,

and we send an FBI
artist to Malta

to get a sketch of the person
that bought the clothing.

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Well, the exact same time, the
chief constables from Scotland

told us about a baggage record
from Frankfurt Airport

that shows that on
December 21, 1988,

a single bag had transited
from Malta to Frankfurt,

and was sent to the gate
where Pan Am 103

was loading baggage.

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- So at this point,
you're starting to think, oh,

the other leads
we thought it was,

turning out maybe not so much.

- We had investigated
the PFLP-GC.

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The German police had gone
back into one of the apartments

that they had searched before.

They found more devices.

One of the devices
blew up and killed

one of their technicians.

- Oh, wow.

- And as a result of that,
we had

renewed focus on the PFLP-GC.

Now, all of a sudden,
we're in Malta.

We have a quandary.

We don't know where to go.

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- In the Washington
field office,

there were two
photographs on the wall.

Number one was
the tail cone of Pan Am 103

with the American flag.

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Number two, it was a
picture of a baby shoe.

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We all had kids,
and we said, that is horrible.

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Those kids never got
a chance to live life.

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But we had to keep
everybody motivated.

Those pictures really did it.

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January 1990, Stuart Henderson,
the senior investigating

officer, showed me a photograph
of this small fragment--

smaller than the one Hal
described for the radio.

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The Scots spent six months,

they went to 55 companies,

17 countries to try to identify
the fragment.

But in June of 1990,
they allowed the FBI

and our forensics guy,
Tom Thurman,

to take it out to his sources.

And he went to the CIA.

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The CIA said,
"I've got something

that looks like that."

A green circuit board
with that little-- looks

like a one up in the corner.

It is not a barometric timer.

It's a straight timer.

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You set it for 10 hours,
it goes off in 10 hours.

- Wow.

- We had the Scots
come back over.

They brought the fragment.

They looked at it
in the FBI laboratory,

compared it to
the actual timer that we had,

and they agreed.

These are identical.

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- It was very exciting.

We at least now
had another avenue

to investigate
to hopefully take us

down to actually who did this.

- When Tom Thurman took
apart that actual timer

that he'd gotten
from the agency,

there were two circuit
boards on that timer.

When he took one
of them off,

there was something
scratched out.

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Turned out to be MEBO,
which were

the initials of
Meister and Bollier,

a company in Zurich,
Switzerland.

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- We ultimately invited Bollier
over to the United States

to meet with us
at Quantico, Virginia

at the Training Academy.

- When he comes
to the United States,

he's going to tell us a
couple of things that are

going to knock our socks off.

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First of all, he identifies
that small fragment

as being from one of the
timers they built for

and delivered to the Libyans.

Only 20 timers were ever
made, 20,

all of them given
to Libyan intelligence,

personally
delivered by Mr. Bollier.

He said, I cannot believe
you found my timer

in that big crime scene.

I thought you found me
because of that letter

I left at the embassy
in Vienna in 1989.

- Oh, wow

- And we all went, what?

- That was you?

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- We didn't track him down
because of the letter.

We tracked him down because
of this timer fragment.

So you got two connections.

- Oh, yeah.

- And then you got connections
to Libya, so we're thinking,

this is a big deal.

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One of the things that
Bollier told us was that a man

by the name of Megrahi,
he's got an office

in my office space in Zurich.

where I've been doing
business with him.

He's one of my
contacts in Libya.

While Bollier was in
Washington being interviewed,

the same week
the shopkeeper in Malta

that sold the
clothing to the Libyan

was shown a
photograph of Megrahi.

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The photograph was
a passport picture,

and it was a little bit old.

We had shown the shopkeeper
hundreds of pictures,

and he had never identified
anybody as being the guy

that bought the clothing.

He looked at that picture.

If this guy was
a little bit older,

that would be the guy
that bought the clothes.

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We check the database.

We have a passport record.

Megrahi had been
in Malta the day

we think the clothing
was purchased.

Looking at travel records,
we tied Megrahi to a guy

by the name of Fhimah, who
was a station manager for

Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

And all of a sudden, we have
a connection to the airport.

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We had developed a lot of
information that tied Fhimah

to the bombing as well,
because one of the things

that we found in his office

that he had left behind--
he had gone back to Libya--

was a notation
in his diary that said,

"Get tags from
the Malta airline,"

the week before the bombing.

Is it possible he could
help get a bag on the plane?

We didn't know,
but we suspected that.

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In July of 1991, I got a phone
call from Washington field

office, the agent in charge.

And he said, the CIA
just called and said

that they have a source,
Majid,

in a boat on his way
to a U.S. ship.

You need to immediately go to
the middle of the Mediterranean

and interview this guy.

- We flew to Italy
and flew out to the ship.

One of the things
Majid told us was

that he was a Libyan
intelligence officer signed

to Libyan Airlines in Malta.

- And he told us
Mr. Megrahi was

a member of the
Libyan Intelligence Service.

That was significant.

He tells us that Fhimah
kept explosives in his desk.

You remember the--
- At work?

- --photo spread we showed him?

What did he pick out?

- Semtex.

- Picked out Semtex.

And then he talks
about seeing Megrahi

and Fhimah at the
airport with this

brown, hard-sided suitcase.

And we showed him photo
spreads of the suitcase.

He picked out the Samsonite,
the same model of suitcase

that we believe the
bomb was transported in.

And the decision is made
by the Justice Department.

The source, Majid,
could be a witness.

We always felt that Megrahi
was the intelligence officer.

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He was the big guy that would
tie it directly to Gaddafi.

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This told us that
the Libyans did it.

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The indictments
of Megrahi and Fhimah

were returned
in November 1991,

both in Scotland
and in the United States.

- We charged that
two Libyan officials,

acting as operatives of the
Libyan Intelligence Service,

along with other
co-conspirators,

planted and detonated the bomb

that destroyed
Pan Am Flight 103.

- Shortly after the
indictments were announced,

Megrahi and Fhimah
were interviewed

by an American reporter,
and they denied

any involvement in the attack.

- I work for the airlines.

Those tags are readily
available on the counter.

Anybody can pick them up.

- In 1999, Gaddafi
turned Megrahi and Fhimah

over to the Scots to be tried
in a Scottish court sitting

in the Netherlands,
a neutral site.

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And they went to the
Scottish court for a trial

because they did
not face the death penalty,

something they would face
in the United States.

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- Trial starts in May of 2000.

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And the verdict
is announced right

at the end of January 2001.

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- After waiting 12 years,

it was some level of justice.

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Obviously, you can never
bring your kid back.

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- So the case is closed?

- Not exactly.

One of the people
that Majid, our witness,

was providing information
about was a guy by the name

of Abu Agila Mas'ud--

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- --tech expert.

And we sort of suspected,
he may have been

the guy that armed the bomb.

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Mas'ud was arrested
by the FBI in Libya

and brought to the
United States in late 2022,

and his trial is supposed
to start in June 2025.

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- When I look
back on this case,

I look back with a sense
of sorrow for the families,

a sense of pride that we
were able to come together

as a community across
intelligence and law

enforcement field
around the world,

and a sense of accomplishment.

We got a conviction.

- I never knew any
of the victims,

but I know many
of the families.

I've known these
people half my life.

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Every year,
I attend the memorial service

at the Cairn
at Arlington National Cemetery

to pay homage to them
that never got the chance

to live a full life.

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