Original subtitles

- 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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