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THE MALTESE DOUBLE CROSS -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY |
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[Dr. Michael Scott] Well, I haven't seen the Lockerbie evidence so I can't comment on that directly. The involvement of Alan Faraday -- um -- that worries me. Particularly my experience in the Gibraltar case, what struck me as sad at the time, very strongly, the British government employees hundreds of people, extraordinarily well qualified in the areas of radio communication and electronics. Alan Faraday is not qualified, yet they use him. I mean, I have to ask the question, "Why?"
[Thomas Thurman, FBI Forensic expert] On June 15th of 1989, 1990, yeah, 1990, was the day that I made identification. And I knew at that point what it meant. And, because if you will, I'm an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. That at the point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer, I knew that we had it.
[Narrator] The forest find leads to Zurich where money grows in banks where the hand that steals is not cut off, just grows other hands. To this man, Edwin Bollier.
[Edwin Bollier] Scottish and American FBI officers came to Switzerland. They showed us a photograph of the fragment of a timer. They asked if it was a timer from the O-series, of the first series from an MST13 timer. They explained that in 1986 seven of these timers were confiscated in Dakar and later on in Senegal from two Libyans. I immediately recognized from the photo that the fragment of the timer found in Lockerbie was without a doubt from a timer that we ourselves had made.
[Vincent Cannistraro, CIA head of Lockerbie Investigation] Libyan Intelligence provided MEBO with an order, they provided the specification and an order for the production of a certain number of timers that are used in explosive devices of what are called IEDs, Improvised Explosive Devices.
[Edwin Bollier] They say that this bomb was in a Toshiba radio. In this casting, at least, there wouldn't have been any room in the radio. But if you took the radio out. I don't know. Maybe.
[Thomas Thurman, FBI Forensic expert] A magnification of that circuit board which is here, you can see it's a very large magnification, has a partially obliterated marking. And through investigation we determined that this actually is MEBO. Initially we thought that it might be another number, like M580 and a number of leads were sent out to electronic manufacturers to see if they had made this board. And they said no, that that was not their identification, so the last thing that we determined, which was the right thing, was that it was MEBO.
We had some inkling that that's what it was from the beginning, but we didn't want to say, okay that it's MEBO to the exclusion of anything else until we were absolutely certain.
[Edwin Bollier] Afterwards when we heard that a fragment had been found in the tragic Lockerbie accident, I wanted to save this piece. In 1990 or 1991, I spent a whole week with the FBI because I wanted to see the actual fragment. They then told me they didn't have it, that the Scottish police had it. So I spent a whole week with the Scottish police but they refused to show me the piece. They only showed me a photograph.
[Vincent Cannistraro, CIA head of Lockerbie Investigation] The forensics determined that the microchip found in the debris in Lockerbie came from one of those timers produced by MEBO. They were able to trace it to this certain lot that Libyan Intelligence had purchased from them.
[Edwin Bollier] The FBI officer said that this could be explained. Three of his people had sworn that they had found this piece in a piece of a coat and had signed a paper to this effect. I later heard it said that it was the Scottish police who had found the piece in a shirt that came from Malta. [Narrator] So the FBI were telling Mr. Bollier they had three men in Scotland in place constantly for two years when every piece was found because how could they have known beforehand what was important. Then the Scottish police tell him that none of that is true. They in fact found the smoking timer themselves in a shirt from Malta. Two years after his mountain rescue team had searched the Kielder Forest for two brief but terrible Christmas weeks -- that is how long the main search really went on -- Bobby was asked by the police to sign a statement saying he had found things, including things he could not even identify.
[Bobby Ingram, volunteer searcher] Approximately two years after the search had finished, I received a phone call from a policeman in Lockerbie itself asking if he could come down to the hall and bring with him certain bags containing some evidence that was of an important nature and would I sign to say that I picked those up or [inaudible] of my party had picked those up [inaudible]. He brought with him three small bags about the size of a [inaudible] piece of paper, one of which contained an item of cloth, one of which contained a brown piece which looked very much like a piece of cloth of suitcase, and the third item, I just don't know what it was. [Narrator] Then the trail blurs further. Other countries in fact have the same timers.
[Edwin Bollier] I didn't remember that we had supplied the GDR with two pieces. The timers hadn't actually been ordered by the GDR but I took the newly developed timers with me to a business meeting in the GDR. They kept two or three and said they would pay for them later.
[Vincent Cannistraro, CIA head of Lockerbie Investigation] There has been some speculation about timers from that same series being provided to Stasi. And it's true that they were. But they were on brown circuit boards. The circuit board that was used in the explosion of Lockerbie was a green production, a model of the timer, and that came from Libyan Intelligence.
[Narrator] In the Stasi files, the name of Edwin Bollier, code name Rubin, Stasi agent, his control Joachim Henschel, code named Wenzel, meetings in Berlin safe houses, German girls in Vienna hotels.
The Stasi had discovered Bollier was selling everything to everyone, the timers only the Libyans were supposed to have to the Stasi, and American C-4 explosives, and Italian remote radio-controlled detonators.
2 Million Deutsch Marks one Stasi payment for a year.
And selling directly to terrorists: The Red Army Faction, Palestinians, other Arabs, in quote "Germans."
The Stasi even conclude Bollier must have been working for the CIA because he seemed to be able to get very special American equipment so easily for the Stasi.
Double, triple, quadruple agent, a truly neutral Swiss businessman.
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