Original subtitles

Suse: Any time he was off from school,

This would be the place where you would find him.

Walking the beach fairly early,

I see this tiny little speck out in the water, waving.

And lo and behold,

There's alexander out there already.

There he is. There's my brother.

His pride and joy, his surfboard.

Lucas: There's my mom.

You know, always laughing. Always upbeat.

And uh... That all changed. That all changed.

Suse: Absolutely nothing prepares you for such an event.

It as horrific. Just-just awful.

Lucas: I remember being told,

"your brother, his plane crashed."

And the fact that it was a bomb,

To me, it was like the end of the world.

Lucas: I believe this would have been--

Suse: This came from the wreckage.

Lucas: The wreckage of the plane.

It's part of his diary.

Lucas: You see there's some burn holes.

Obviously water damage, or whatever.

To have one of your children killed,

Or, as we found out later, murdered,

In such a fashion,

Is... Is unthinkable.

It was very upsetting for us.

But trying to find out the why of it was paramount.

Became everything.

Reporter: Pan am flight 103 crashed

Into the scottish village of lockerbie.

Two hundred and seventy people, most of them americans, dead.

It was the worst terrorist attack on an airline ever.

Reagan: We have no knowledge of how this happened.

We're trying to find out.

Man 1: It was an attack on america.

Man 2: The largest crime scene in history.

Man 3: Two-hundred-thousand pieces of evidence.

Man 4: My daughter hadn't just died in an accident,

But been brutally murdered.

Man 5: They killed our children.

Man 6: To be lied to for 30 years.

Man 7: I think the us government had an agenda.

Reagan is the biggest terrorist in the world.

Woman 1: If it's up to our government,

We might not ever know the truth.

Man 8: Nothing is what it seems in the lockerbie story.

[big ben chimes]

Anthony: I was a foreign correspondent for cbs news

Based in the london bureau.

It was almost christmas eve,

And everybody else was home for christmas.

And all of a sudden, over the bbc squawk box...

We had an audio connection to the bbc newsroom.

..A voice said that an american plane had gone off the radar

In lockerbie, scotland.

I had no idea where lockerbie was,

I'd never even heard the word.

It's a small town close to the english border.

It was 3,000 people. That's all it was.

Colin: The 21st of December 1988

Will stay with me forever.

It was three months into my police career.

And I happened to be

The youngest recruit in scotland at the time too.

Hugh: It was a dark, windy night, yeah.

(plane engine revs overhead)

We heard, like, banging. Bang, bang, bang.

Margaret: We all jumped up, looked out the window.

Anthony: The early video that had come from british news teams

Showed there was fire everywhere.

So, we had to, all of a sudden, figure out what was going on,

And there wasn't a lot of information

In those first hours.

[indistinct radio chatter]

Colin: People were completely numb and confused.

It didn't initially make any sense.

Radio: Doctor and ambulance required.

My first reaction was,

"oh, it's probably a us fighter jet

On a training mission up there," 'cause I'd covered those.

Margaret: Here's stuff lying on the side of the road.

And we had took one look, and we thought,

"this has been no military plane."

We could tell, it must have been a passenger.

We have an unconfirmed report that a boeing 747 airliner,

Which left heathrow at six o'clock tonight, 1800 hours,

For jfk airport in new york,

Has crashed in the lockerbie area of dumfriesshire.

We don't know what airline,

But the report makes it plain that it is a civilian airliner.

Jim: On the television,

There was this message about a terrible disaster

Happening in the borders between scotland and England.

And my wife jane concluded immediately that...

..Our daughter flora was on that plane.

She was just on the eve of her 24th birthday that year, 1988.

She rang up to ask us

If we minded if she went over to america

To meet her boyfriend over christmas.

And, of course, not being total ogres,

We said, "yes, if that's what you want to do."

Everything was booked up,

Except there were plenty of seats available

On a certain flight known as pan am 103.

Which is why we're talking now.

Radio 1: 747 downed from london to new york.

Crashed ten minutes after takeoff.

Radio 2: There was some type of explosion in mid-air

And the plane broke into several parts.

Victoria: The radio reported that a pan american flight

Had disappeared from radar.

Radio 1: Wreckage is said to be scattered over a ten-mile area.

Victoria: Flight 103.

And I said to my mother,

"oh, that's the flight that normally john flies on.

"he's gonna come home on tomorrow."

John happened to be in london on business.

Every day we would always talk.

You know, check in with each other,

See how the three kids were getting on.

He had called me first thing on December 21st.

We had talked about preparation for christmas

And the kids, you know,] waiting for santa

And daddy to come home,

And celebrating our youngest daughter's third birthday.

He made no mention that he was going to be changing his plans

And trying to come home early and surprise us.

Dan rather: A gruesome christmastime disaster tonight.

A quiet scottish village an inferno of flames,

After a pan american jumbo jet,

Homeward bound across the atlantic,

Went off the radar and went down in the village center.

Now, in our cbs news london bureau at the moment

Is anthony mason.

Anthony.

The latest details we have, dan, are these.

The air traffic controllers at prestwick in scotland

Reportedly spoke to the plane minutes before the crash.

Anthony: We knew there would be hundreds of americans

On the flight.

Man, it was a pan am flight.

Any of us could have been on that flight home for christmas.

Reporter: Authorities immediately closed the main road

Between England and scotland.

And dozens of local ambulances were sent in.

They still have several helicopters

Flying around in the area, bringing in casualties,

But so far as I can make out, these casualties are...

..Are corpses.

Anthony: You know, you had americans

Who'd been working abroad, who'd been living abroad, who were...

You know, it was the holidays,

So, so many of them were going home

To see their relatives or families.

But the largest group of americans on the plane

Were a group of students from syracuse university,

Who were coming home from a term abroad.

There were 35 of them.

So, that made it even more heartbreaking.

Suse: Alexander was a senior at syracuse.

He was a kid you liked to have,

Because he was funny, he was very colorful in many ways,

Very talented in terms of surfing,

And what can I say, he was a great kid.

I was actually working in the studio,

And the phone rang, and it was a friend of his.

She was very hesitant in saying, "hi, how are you?"

"fine."

"is alexander home yet?"

And I said, "no, he's not."

And she said, "do you know when he's coming home?"

And I said, "yes, he's coming home later today."

And she sort of said, "what airline?"

And I said, "it's pan am."

And she said, "that number?"

And I said, "it's 103."

And she just screamed, "haven't you heard?

"it went down in a fireball."

And I screamed at her to just never say that again,

But I knew.

If you need information about someone

Who may have been on pan am flight 103,

There are a couple of numbers you can call.

The first is toll free, and it's 1-800...

Victoria: There was an 800 number that said, you know,

To call that number, and it was busy, busy.

And then finally, I um...

..Got through.

I said, "I've been told my husband was on this flight."

"what's his name? What's his nationality?"

And I-I-I'm desperate. You know?

I'm saying, "why are you asking me all these questions?

"I just need to know,

"was john cummock on the flight or wasn't he?

And um, they started taking all this different information

And they said, "well, we really... "

Um...

"we can't confirm anything right now."

I said, "so, you can't confirm if he was on the flight?

"you can't confirm that this plane has crashed?"

And they said, "no. We're just taking information right now."

And I said, "how cruel is this?"

I said, "you know, I have three little children."

Jim: Heathrow, I couldn't get through to at all.

And eventually, we ended up ringing

The pan am desk in new york.

They were able to tell us that flora was on that flight.

And at the same time, we could hear chaos in the background.

And you could hear women screaming.

[woman screams)}

[wailing] my baby!

Jim: A lot of american families had congregated at jfk airport

To get the latest news on this crash,

Because most of the victims were american.

I was at syracuse university,

And one of my roommates leaned in a little bit

And he said, you know, "lucas, you have to call your parents."

So, called my parents, and my dad answered the phone.

And uh...

I-I said, "w-w-what's going on? What-what is it?"

And he really just couldn't speak.

He didn't say anything.

And then my mom took the phone from him and she said,

"your brother.

"his plane crashed."

Very early on the morning, not long after dawn had broken,

We flew out to lockerbie.

David: There's an enormous hole in the ground

Where pan am flight 103 is thought to have made

Its first contact with the ground.

And on either side of the hole, houses are absolutely shattered.

You can see the trail of devastation

Wreaked by the 747

As it bounced and burnt its way across the town.

The fields here are littered

With what are as recognizable as parts of the fuselage and wing

Of the 747.

I've been told that the crew were found

Strapped in their seats in the cockpit.

[tape recorder clicks]

Gosh.

Interviewer: You were one of the first journalists on the ground?

Yeah. It was...

It was, you know, an image you just won't forget.

And we were low enough to, you know, quite clearly see features

And see that people were just sitting out in the grass.

But, of course, they were all dead.

The next morning, very early, we got on a charter plane up north

And then drove to lockerbie.

That image of the nose of the plane, the cockpit,

Sitting up on a hill in a field.

It's an incredibly distressing thing to see.

It doesn't go away.

It became the enduring symbol of lockerbie.

All you had to do was see that and understand...

We were looking at a tragedy.

Dick: Generally speaking, 747s don't fall out of the sky.

So, the first suspicion was,

Something bad happened to that plane.

The fbi, we had somebody in charge of the investigation.

That was me.

Certainly, this was something that we took seriously

And we devoted resources to finding out what happened.

We have a requirement to...

Obtain the very best evidence that we can,

To allow us to try and find a cause

Of the accident.

Uh, or if it is an accident.

The scottish police had resources.

They were a very civilized, well-trained,

Excellent police agency.

Reporter: Hundreds of police, from forces throughout scotland,

Are now involved in the search for debris.

So, we asked, "we would like to work with you,"

Recognizing they are in charge of the investigation.

And the fbi is not used to not being in charge.

Um, I have been appointed as the investigator in charge

For this particular accident.

There obviously are a number of potential causes

For an in-flight breakup.

We are looking for evidence to try and find the point

At which things first started to go wrong.

The big question was, was it structural failure

Or was it a bomb?

Neither one of those were great answers.

Reporter: Pan am flight 103 began in frankfurt,

Then passengers changed planes at heathrow

For the flight on to new york.

Over lockerbie, the crew went silent.

Before it crashed, pan am flight 103 was on course,

On schedule and gave no signal of distress.

Colin: The aircraft was flying

At a bearing of about 320 degrees,

Kind of northwest-ish, at 31,000 feet.

At 07:02 and a few seconds,

The nose cone rips off the front of the aircraft.

Investigators will want to see if there was any evidence

Of a sudden cabin depressurization

That could be caused by a massive technical failure,

Or by a bomb explosion.

Whatever happened to this plane may have started about in here,

An area of the plane where a cargo hold runs underneath.

Colin: At that point, it starts to plummet

And dive directly towards the town.

But because it was quite windy that night,

As the aircraft breaks up,

The lighter things blew much further east.

So, the debris field extended, in fact,

As far as the east coast of England.

Anthony: It was the largest debris field I'd ever seen.

The search parties became part of the landscape.

You couldn't look at a field and not see a line of people

Walking across it, looking for things.

Dick: It was humongous.

Eight hundred and forty-five square miles.

The largest crime scene in history.

You know, I think initially we just thought

This was a terrible, terrible accident,

With a huge loss of life,

When you're thinking about the families.

'cause I'd lived in scotland as well,

Not so far from lockerbie, less than 100 miles.

Somewhere I'd driven past a lot.

You're realizing that this has affected a place that you know.

Anthony: We were walking into the village,

And I remember these little houses along the road in.

You know, they were smoldering.

Some of them were still on fire.

There was debris on the street.

It looked like a bombed-out european village world war ii.

There was the enormous crater caused by the wing

That landed on a group of houses.

It was all incredibly disturbing.

Interviewer: You can really see the extent

Of the devastation there, can't you?

So, that's the front of your house there?

You're so close.

And just...

Anthony: There were 259 passengers on the plane.

Of those, 190 were american.

There were also 11 people on the ground

Who ended up being killed.

So, we were looking at a tragedy that affected 270 people.

It was an international tragedy,

But it was especially an american tragedy.

Reagan: I want to express our sorrow and our concern

For the families and friends of those who died in the crash

Of the pan american flight 103.

Christmas is a special time for the young,

For those who carry the twin promises of hopes and dreams.

And on this flight were the hopes and dreams

Of many young people,

Including the tragic loss of so many students

From syracuse university.

A tragedy that steals the hopes and dreams from our society,

Magnifies the loss.

May god be with them.

Nic: These were young people

Who were on their way home for christmas.

Their families were waiting.

And they got the worst possible news

They could have possibly had.

Officials at syracuse university have provided this list

Of some of the 38 students booked on flight 103.

That's when we first saw my brother's name

As confirmed to have been on the flight.

"alexander lowenstein".

A terrible way to find out that your child has died.

Reporter: Police and the rescue services

Have so far recovered about 150 bodies.

Sixty of them were found on a golf course.

About 40 others found in a housing estate.

Reporter 2: Dozens of victims strewn along the landscape

In a four-mile swath.

It'll be a sad christmas in this town.

Victoria: Of course, in the media,

Everything was about that image.

And in the foreground was all debris,

And there were, you know, bodies covered with orange tarps.

And in the right side of the foreground

Was a brown attache case.

I'd given john that attache case for our anniversary

On August 23rd of that year.

He really was onboard the plane.

That's how...

..Really, my...

Was the beginning of my nightmare.

Um...

Look at the crumpled mess it is.

Dear, dear, dear, dear.

These things were all in the front of the house, yeah.

Well, there's the house.

That's how near it was.

And that's the wing of the plane and the flaps.

Margaret: Yes, this is the red suitcase.

That was quite the thing to see.

Interviewer: Take me through that moment

When you came across the bodies.

Yeah. It was quite unreal for us, you know.

[sighs][ goodness me.

Hugh: He was lying on the ground with the seat of top of him.

We didn't know who he was.

But you got attached to him some way.

Aye.

Margaret: For nearly 24 hours,

We were keeping an eye on him up there, you know.

We developed quite a love for 'our boy', we called him.

Margaret: And that was the door.

Just a few hours before,

They'd all gone in that door, hadn't they?

Yeah.

And here it's lying amongst them.

Yeah.

Man: As at half-past three this afternoon,

The temporary mortuary at the town hall is now full.

We have opened a second mortuary

At the ice rink, at lockerbie ice rink,

Where in total we have now received,

Between the two mortuaries, 150 bodies.

We have, as yet, no positive, formal identifications.

The body of somebody who's been killed

By falling six miles to the ground

Is not a pretty sight.

She'd been so damaged.

She hadn't been damaged by the explosion on the plane,

But mainly by impact with the ground.

Which had so altered her face and her head that she...

Well, she was barely recognizable.

I asked him if, um...

If I could look at her left foot,

Because she had a little pigmented spot on her big toe.

So, the cloth was taken off her at her feet.

There was the spot.

On her undamaged foot.

Jane: I didn't want to see her when she had been killed.

I wanted to remember her as I had last seen her.

Full of life.

She was everything that a parent could wish for.

Beautiful, bright, lively, intelligent, yeah.

And we were very proud of her.

A very kind guy who was organizing all this for me said,

"'anything else I can do?"

So, I said, "yes. 'could I have a lock of her hair?"

He was kind enough to do that.

Human kindness can be very important

When these things happen.

I tried to imagine how I would feel

If it was one of my close family that had been on that flight.

Still too many question marks over it.

Still too many people left in complete doubt

As to what happened to their loved ones.

Suse: For a number of days,

We didn't know about alexander's body.

Will it be found?

Is it incinerated?

How did he fall?

You know, all these questions are going through your mind.

Unanswered, mind you, because there were so many days

Where you got no answers from anybody.

Victoria: The immediate need that I had,

And a lot of the other families,

Was to find out how to get our loved ones home.

Our government abdicated all their responsibility and role

Of, um, crisis management and assistant

To the victims' families to pan am.

And so here's pan am circling the wagons thinking,

"oh, well, we might be sued," or whatever.

And they weren't helping us at all.

Anthony: Pan am was an iconic american airline.

Those were not its best days.

But it was still, you know,

Prime american branding real estate.

Suse: Pan am was a catastrophe.

The state department was ridiculous, non-existent.

So, we were futzing around, not knowing what to do

Or where to get information from.

And every time we got information,

It got worse by the minute,.

David: No-one does come to lockerbie with clean hands.

There's so many twists and turns in this whole story,

From the very first day that it happens.

People trying to get off the hook, you know?

The insurers trying to pass the buck.

The airline trying to save itself.

There were people from the fbi, obviously.

There were also people from murkier ends

Of the us intelligence community.

Nothing is what it seems in the lockerbie story.

You know, nothing quite adds up.

Jim: The flight on which flora got her seat at the last minute

Was only two-thirds full.

How many flights, two or three days before christmas,

To the states, are only two-thirds full?

Answer - only those fights where people have been warned off.

She wasn't warned off.

Nobody told us.

Dan rather: In this season of peace on earth,

Growing suspicion of sabotage in the sky.

Reagan-bush administration officials acknowledged today

That an anonymous caller had threatened

To blow up a pan am plane some time this month.

But no-one warned the us army or the flying public.

In early December,

Someone called the us embassy in helsinki

And made a threat.

Within two weeks' time,

Someone will carry a bomb on board a pan am flight

From frankfurt to the united states.

David: People working for us agencies

Were made aware of that warning...

..And were given the chance to make alternative arrangements.

Whereas the normal traveling public

Weren't given that chance.

The american authorities

Put notices up on the noticeboards of their embassies,

Telling them that there'd been a terrorist threat

To these flights,

And they might want to avoid them

To get home for christmas, you see,

To their families in the united states.

Interpol warned airlines and police authorities

In 147 countries.

Reporter: The anonymous phone call to the us embassy

In helsinki, finland, was very specific

And perhaps very prophetic.

Victoria: Lo and behold,

There were over ten different bomb warnings on these flights.

And we wanted to know who got the warnings

And what did our government do about it?

Woman: We receive dozens of threats each day.

We notified the people who have responsibility for security.

Dick: If nothing else, it looked bad.

"we protect ourselves. We don't protect you."

Such a public statement,

With nothing more to go on than an anonymous telephone call,

You'd literally have closed down the air traffic in the world.

Reporter: Mr. Reagan, the suggestion, though, is that...

No.

Lucas: We were livid.

There was a lot of backpedaling from our government afterwards.

But even before the bombing,

This particular warning was circulated

Throughout us embassies in europe

And put on various bulletin boards,

And many people switched their flights.

Obviously, pan am wasn't mandated

To enhance security, search the plane,

Or warn the passengers.

But what really petrified all of us

Is that this was going to happen to somebody else.

And we didn't want any american -

Anybody - to go through what we had gone through.

Nic: If some diplomats had known this, then why not everyone?

Why weren't they alerted?

Why were they left in the dark?

And, therefore, why did their loved ones die?

Jim: All I was after was the truth.

About how my daughter had come to be killed.

And why she wasn't protected against being killed.

Those were the bases in which we very soon found

We were being ritually and profusely deceived

By the authorities.

Reporter: A thousand army and air force troops and policemen

Were deployed over the hills and fields around lockerbie.

They combed the ground near the main crash site.

An aircraft made up of several million parts

Now lies in several million bits.

Finding the ones that can tell something

May take a very long time.

All the evidence is converging

On this lockerbie school building,

Where, in an auditorium,

Police, military and airline investigation leaders

Are trying to piece together just what happened.

It has been established

That two parts of the metal luggage pallet's framework

Show conclusive evidence of a detonating high explosive.

Much investigative work remains to be done to...

Anthony: It took them a week of examining all of the debris

And the fragments of the plane.

Finally, a week later, they found explosive residue

Inside the baggage container.

And that's when they determined conclusively

That it was a bomb.

There is no doubt anymore -

The 259 passengers and crew of flight 103

Were killed by a bomb.

Reporter: The next question - who set it

And how did it get onboard?

Suse: It turned into a murder investigation.

And that somehow affected me deeply,

Because not only did I now have a dead son,

I had a murdered son.

Dick: Within a week, we knew

That it was a terrorist attack against the united states -

And against an american carrier - that killed 270 people.

It was the largest act of terrorism

On the united states, ever, before 9/11.

What we want to do is find out who did it

And bring them to justice, you bet.

Bruce: The mid-1980s were really a remarkable time,

In terms of international terrorism.

Virtually every day,

There was some news of some new terrorist attack.

Airplane hijackings, airplane bombings,

Attacks on embassies, assassinations of individuals.

You could look at the iranians. You could look at the iraqis.

You could look at the syrians.

You could look at the palestinians.

You could look at the libyans.

They'd all been involved in terrorism.

Bruce: There was ano - the abu nidal organization -

Pflp - popular front for the liberation of palestine, -

Pflpgc -

The popular front for liberation of palestine general command -

The provisional irish republican army - pira - hezbollah.

[man yells in foreign language]

And it sort of the fed the anonymity.

Like, who were these people? Who was behind them?

Why were they doing these things?

And it's often very hard to find clear answers.

Dick: And then in late January, early February,

We found a suitcase.

Many of the suitcases that fell 31,000 feet to the ground

Would have been a great commercial - they fell intact.

You could take the clothes out, put them on and go to a meeting.

But this suitcase was in about 54 pieces and fragments.

We pretty much thought

That suitcase contained the explosive.

The bomb that blew up the plane.

That suitcase was determined to be a samsonite silhouette 4000.

Antique copper in color.

They were able to determine that the bomb was in that suitcase

In the forward cargo hold,

Just under the back of first class.

Jim: It was in the hold of pan am 103,

Where the bomb exploded and murdered my daughter.

The british authorities had been warned well before lockerbie,

And had essentially done nothing.

Victoria: If it's up to our government,

We might not ever know why pan am 103

Was blown out of the sky.

Anthony: It was a whole world of intrigue,

And it was almost incomprehensible.

Basically, investigators had to go off into the shadows

To try to figure out how this came about.

And I remember thinking,

"you're never really gonna understand this."