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The Ghosts of Lockerbie

(NOW-Lebanon) Tony Badran - Al Jazeera's documentary on the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988 established the context for the years preceding the bombing. Iran's immediate motive for the operation was revenge for an Iranian commercial flight that was accidentally shot down by the cruiser USS Vincennes in the Gulf in July 1988. Khomeini vowed retaliation and American intelligence at the time established that days after the Iranian flight was downed, the Iranians went to Ahmad Jibril's PFLP-GC in Beirut and contracted them for the job. The man who quarterbacked the operation was Iran's former ambassador to Damascus, then Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashami, who according to a 1989 Defense Intelligence Agency memo "conceived, authorized and financed" the operation. Mohtashami is best known as the godfather of Hizbullah, and during his tenure as ambassador to Syria, Mohtashami helped organize and supervise the group. From his perch in Damascus, he coordinated the 1982 entry of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards contingent to the Beqaa, which, under the command of current Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, trained Hizbullah and guided its attacks on U.S. and Western targets in Lebanon. The writer is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2014-03-21 00:00:00
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