DEA May Be Involved In Lockerbie Disaster

Lester Coleman, a former agent with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, claims that the U.S. and British governments have covered up the fact that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was unwittingly involved in 1988's bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed more than 200 people.

The official investigation said that Libyan terrorists blew up the plane. (Libya did, in fact, much later admit responsibility and compensate the families of victims.)

Coleman claims that the plane was bombed by Lebanese drug smugglers in a DEA sting gone wrong. In what Coleman claims is an attempt to destroy his credibility, the U.S. government issued a warrant for his arrest for perjury. Coleman escaped with his family to Sweden.

In a mailing list message, Malcolm Hutty discussed a BBC Radui 4 interview with Coleman:

The operation was to approve the smuggling of drugs on American planes into America. These drugs could then be traced, allowing the DEA to find and capture American importers, distributors and dealers. His office co-ordinated the smuggling through third-party countries that the plane would land in en route to the States, assuring the Drug Enforcement officials of those countries that the drugs were being transferred through and would not end up in their country.

18 months before the bombing, the ground operative of the DEA in Syria and a friend of his were shot. He suspected that the Lebanese terrorists and smugglers working in Syria found out that they were being used by the DEA. He reported back to his supervisors in the States, who told him to pack up and get out. He returned to America, where he was debriefed ...

Coleman says that security at Frankfurt and Heathrow airports, where the doomed airliner stopped, is normally very tight, and it would take an extremely effective unit to get a bomb through. It is most likely, in his judgement, that the package that was a bomb was waived through by the DEA operation that he used to belong to under the mistaken belief that it was a drug consignment. After all, that must have been the belief of the courier who took it onto the flight and got blown up with it ...

There was also a telephone interview with an academic, Dr. Squire. He said nothing except that it was extremely plausible, especially when you look at the passage in Mrs. Thatcher's recently published memoirs which say ... -- at which point the phone went dead. The interviewer said "Dr Squire? We appear to have lost Dr Squire. In today's European Union summit the GATT was the centre of attention...". He came back later to say that all people who had any information relating to the bombing should contact the Lockerbie police, and having said that the Thatcher memoirs were particularly interesting on this issue because ... I'm sorry Dr Squire, that is all we've got time for.