The Truth about Lockerbie - MartinFrost.ws

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A tale of three atrocities concealed in a bag but, oddly, he didn't make this explicit. 22 To me, this was a very carefully drafted statement by someone who knows how to use words because there are ways of hiding a device “among baggage” that don't require a suitcase. A bomb attached to a baggage container is one of these. **** Box out: The Iranian – a hypothesis I have speculated a great deal about the identity of the Iranian who broke into Heathrow and planted the Lockerbie bomb. At the time of writing, I have no firm answers, but would like to share an interesting hypothesis. I think the Iranian who planted the bomb may have been a Ahmad Beladi Behbehani, a relative of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's president at the time of the Lockerbie disaster. On 24 th May 2000, when the Lockerbie trial was in its early stages, I found a strange little story about a man called *Sattar who went into exile and ended up in a Turkish internment camp 23 . His case was taken up by a CBS reporter called Leslie Stahl and a Jewish-Iranian-American journalist called Roya Hakakian. They visited him accompanied by a former CIA officer, Robert Baer. Hakakian managed to surreptitiously interview Ahmad Beladi Behbehani after the Turks refused to let the party speak to him. When I came upon this CBS story, I realised Ahmad Beladi Behbehani was one of the first people to link Lockerbie to Iran with any certainty. According to Robert Baer - "He's the only person that has tied Libya and Iran into Pan Am 103, into the Lockerbie bombing. This is the first authoritative source that I've ever heard that connected the two countries together. 24 So serious was the CBS' report that the Iranian Government denied ever employing Behbehani. Later, Iran suggested he had fabricated his allegations to gain asylum. 25 "Those Iranians, who wish to be granted asylum in Western countries, are usually trying to achieve their aims through libellous statements against the Islamic Republic of Iran," Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi said. 26 The next reference I found to a man called Behbehani was in a book by leading FBI agent Richard Marquise 27 . In it, he says on the day the CBS report was aired in June 2000, he was dispatched to interview a man called Behbehani in a prison in Turkey. He was briefed by Richard Clarke at the National Security Council – the US president's foreign security agency. According to Marquise: “This 22 New York Times (1988) British conclude cassette player held Pan Am bomb http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/17/world/british-conclude-cassette-player-held-pan-am-bomb.html? pagewanted=all 23 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/06/05/60minutes/main202714.shtml 24http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/06/05/60minutes/main202714.shtml 25 http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Behbahani_Ahmad_579605951.aspx 26 http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:V2HEqvth_tIJ:plane-truth.com/emails%25202008/Confession %2520of%2520Iranian%2520Terror%2520Czar%2520posted %2520Jan17%25202008.doc+Ali+Yunesi+libellous&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk 27 Marquise, R. A. (2006) Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie investigation. Algora Publishing, New York 16
A tale of three atrocities was the only time I knew of anyone from the NSC or the White House taking an active interest and an operational role in the case.” The US Government must have been very alarmed by the CBS story and the effect it could have on the Lockerbie trial for the President to take a personal interest. After interviewing a man who called himself Behbehani, Marquise concluded that the man was “a fabricator” who claimed he was born in 1968 and was therefore “far too young to have been the person responsible for ordering the Pan Am bombing. If he had any information, he was unable to provide it. He said there was a CD which documented his claims, but said he had no way of getting it, further hurting his credibility.” Yet I found something very odd about Marquise's interview. He was thwarted at every turn by the Turkish authorities, which made it hard to fulfil his brief to “not leave out any detail.” He was allowed just one interview with Behbehani. The morning after the CBS report was aired, he learned that the “Turkish authorities would allow the FBI access... but no later than Thursday of that week”. Unfortunately for Marquise, he had "taken the day off but was thousands of miles away, with only a couple of days to get there and no visa.” Upon arriving in Turkey, he was told by the Legat 28 (the FBI legal official) there that “the Turks had told him that, if this story appeared in the news media once more, the interview would never take place.” The Turkish authorities also denied the Scots permission to participate in the interview. Marquise and the CIA didn't have the best relationship. According to Marquise, during the Lockerbie investigation, they were concerned about "CIA attempts to slow down the investigation” and "the CIA's incursion into avenues better explored by law enforcement”. So it's my view that Marquise and Hakakian didn't see the same Behbehani – Marquise was set up by the CIA and swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. I have managed to find a picture of the Behbehani that Hakakian interviewed, and he was a fairly well-built man who looked almost a decade older than Marquise's man claimed to be. So the younger man seems like a put up job by the CIA, possibly with the assistance of the Iranians. As I looked into it further, I found there was a Behbehani with family connections to Rafsanjani who seemed the right age to be the man in Hakakian's pictures. So it's unsurprising that the Turks 29 were so reticent about letting the FBI see their man more than once. The real Behbehani's links to Lockerbie are perhaps greater than the claims he made while in Turkey. Shortly after Lockerbie, he was promoted to Head of the Intelligence Section of the Revolutionary Guard in the President's Office. This timing seems more than a coincidence – perhaps it was a reward for "services rendered". Certainly, the man was a favourite of the Rafsanjani regime - he rose to the senior rank of brigadier-general before he fled into exile. Marquise said a man called Behbehani could have been involved in Iranian terror. In his book, he says that, although he believed the man he met was a fake: “It was possible a man by the same name was formerly in charge of terrorist operations.” I therefore think, although this is no more than a hypothesis at the moment, that Behbehani was the Iranian at Heathrow. As a man with family links to the Iranian regime, he was perfectly placed to avenge a Qesas crime. No one knows what happened to Hakakian's Behbehani after those fateful interviews. 28 http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0418/exec.htm This contains a useful description of the work of the Legat and their worldwide distribution 29 http://www.silkroadstudies.org/new/inside/turkey/2009/090605B.html 17
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The Truth about Lockerbie - MartinFrost.ws

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