Lockerbie: CIA Officer Among Victims

One of the 189 Americans killed when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, just before Christmas 1988 was a CIA officer, reports CBS News Correspondent Dan Raviv.

A new book, by former Time correspondent Ted Gup, says 34-year-old Matthew Gannon, an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, was returning from an undercover mission in Beirut "to gather intelligence on a number of terrorist cells."

The Book Of Honor also reveals that Gannon's father-in-law, Tom Twetten, was director of covert operations at the CIA at the time who helped plan the airstrikes on Tripoli. It's believed the Pan Am bombing was in retaliation for those raids.

CBS

CBS News Correspondent Dan Raviv

And, until now, neither did Americans.

"The agency maintains that identifying its casualties, even decades later, would endanger foreign nationals who may have provided the CIA with intelligence," writes Gup, a former Washington Post investigative reporter who now teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "But the oft-invoked argument wears thinner and thinner as the years wear on and bereaved families are asked to bear their losses in continued silence."

Gup reports agency officials often lie to family members about how their loved ones died to maintain "plausible deniability" and keep the CIA from being linked to controversial overseas missions.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah are charged with murder, conspiracy to murder and endangering aircraft safety in the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing, and are currently on trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law. The explosion occurred over the village of Lockerbie, Scotland, and plunged to the ground there, killing eleven residents on the ground, as well as all 259 aboard the 747 jet.

Prosecutors accuse the Libyans, said to be members of their country's intelligence agency, of concealing a bomb in a brown Samsonite case originating in Malta.

If found guilty al-Megrahi and Fhimah face life imprisonment in Scotland. They have pleaded innocent, blaming Palestinian factions based in Syria for the attack.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi agreed to hold the trial at a former U.S. air base in the Netherlands after nearly a decade of sanctions.

The trial is in recess until May 23.

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