Lockerbie II

Having said that I am not a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist I do suggest to you the following hypotheses. On 3rd July 1988 the American warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian airbus flight IR655 carrying 290 people. Because this atrocity was committed by the Americans, and different rules apply to Americans than for the other humans on the planet, no action was taken, no court martial held, no reparation made. Indeed on its return to San Diego the ship was given a rapturous welcome.


There was a crime and so, some people, as yet unidentified, decided that there should be a punishment, and, being of the eye-for-an-eye persuasion the punishment needed to take the form of a downed passenger airliner.

The world’s intelligence services knew this, and they are just the sort of people who run scenarios using game theory and what follows is a perfect piece of game theory.

Your job is to stop people blowing up aeroplanes. You know there are people out there who are determined to blow up an aeroplane. You know the logic of the situation and you know they do too, because it was neatly summed up by the Provisional IRA after their attempt on the life of Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984. “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all the time.”

If someone tries to do something determinedly there is a high probability that the will eventually succeed. A plane will blow up. However, there is also a high probability that having achieved their objective they will stop. That will make your life much easier. Better for both parties therefore if a plane goes down.

If you receive intelligence that a bomb is on a plane, therefore, do you take the bomb off the plane or do you take key people off the plane, knowing that you might not have that opportunity another time, but that there might not be another time if you leave the bomb alone.

I strongly suspect that Pan AM flight 103 was meant to go down. It was just meant to go down over the North Atlantic where there would be nothing to pick up and hand over to forensic scientists. It wasn’t meant to go down over the quiet border town of Lockerbie.