Chapter One

All governments lie, some more than others. To protect themselves or 'the national interest', American governments lie more than most.

The story of Washington's blackest lie in modern times began, typically, with a bureaucratic blunder. In the spring of 1988 Special Agent Michael T. Hurley, the Drug Enforcement Administration's attaché to the American Embassy in Cyprus, was given a clear warning by an American intelligence agent that security had been breached in a 'sting' operation the DEA had mounted against Lebanese drug traffickers running heroin into the United States via Nicosia, Frankfurt and London.

Seven months later, on 21 December 1988, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York, killing all 259 passengers and crew. Eleven more people died on the ground as the wreckage of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, Maid of the Seas, rained down on the Scottish border town of Lockerbie.

Among the victims were at least two (and possibly five or more) American intelligence agents, who had disregarded standing orders by choosing to fly home from Beirut on an Americanflag airline, and a DEA LebaneseAmerican courier who had previously carried out at least three controlled deliveries of heroin to Detroit as part of the sting.

Those involved in this operation, along with those who had authorized, condoned or used it for other purposes, recognized at once that their neglect of the warning in May had cost 270 lives, that terrorists had slipped through the reported breach in security and converted a controlled delivery of heroin into the controlled delivery of a bomb probably in revenge for the 290 lives lost in July when the US cruiser Vincennes had shot down an Iranian Airbus 'by mistake'.

The U S government would lie about that catastrophic blunder, too, but the more immediate problem was the Lockerbie disaster. Like a woodlouse sensing danger, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) rolled up in an armourplated ball to protect its bureaucratic arse.

This worked, more or less, for two years, but the problem refused to go away. When the DEA's obduracy began to attract as many embarrassing questions as it deflected, the agency started to lie, with the grudging connivance of the intelligence community and the ungrudging assistance of the Bush administration.

It lied to the media and the public, of course, but it also lied to Congress. And the more it lied, the harder it became to keep the story straight.

For one thing, there was the problem of the intelligence agent who had warned Hurley about the 'disaster waiting to happen' months before the downing of Flight 103 Like most of his colleagues in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lester Knox Coleman III had found little to admire in the work of the DEA overseas.

And for another thing, there was the problem of Pan Am and its insurers, who had commissioned their own investigation into the disaster. The more they picked up about the DEA connection, the less they felt inclined to pick up what was beginning to look like a $7 billion tab.

For those watching the situation from Washington, a recurring nightmare was that these two problems might come together like match and tinder: that Cole man would meet up with Pan Am's attorneys and tell them what he knew. Because if that happened, they might between them start a fire that would blacken the reputation, not just of the DEA, but of the United States itself. If the truth came out, it would not only undermine America's role as moral and political exemplar to the world, but also inflict intolerable damage on its policy objectives in the Middle East.

The risk was simply not acceptable. The 'national interest' now required the DEA sting never to have happened, and Lester Knox Coleman III not to exist, at least as a credible witness.

It was a job for what Coleman had come to think of as 'the octopus' America's state security apparatus.

(This is the end of the preview - Chapter One in the book continues for many more pages.)