The Price of Terror: How the Families of the Victims of Pan Am 103 Brought Libya to Justice

by Allan Gerson, Allan Gerson

President Bill Clinton called it "an attack against America," but after Libyan agents planted a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground, America did not strike back. Instead, the grieving relatives of the victims did the unthinkable—as mere civilians-and tried to force Libya to pay for its crime. Lawyers told the families that they could never sue Libya in American courts, and they were right. This would require changing a bedrock principle of international law—a change that every government in the world feared and fought, including the United States itself. Working virtually alone at first, Allan Gerson, a former diplomat and prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, took on the case and spent the next eight years on the families’ quest for justice. In this high-stakes game of international power politics and legal maneuvering, there were friendships, jobs, and reputations lost, but a precious principle—that of accountability under the law—was strengthened and preserved. Now Gerson and his co-author, Newsweek writer Jerry Adler, follow the threads of this extraordinary tale back to that deadly night over Lockerbie, Scotland—and forward into a new era of international justice, when terrorists will learn to fear the righteous retribution of their own victims.

Genres: Nonfiction, Terrorism, True Crime

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2001

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

An uncle and two cousins were killed in 2004, when their small plane crashed into the spear-like pines of a South Carolina forest, an event meriting a 30 second report on CNN. I like to date my fascination with plane crashes from that moment, but in reality, I've been drawn since I was a child watching poorly-cobbled-together made-for-TV movies about Florida Flight 90 (Disaster on the Potomac)and United 232 (A Thousand Heroes). Since then, I've graduated to an obsession with CVR recorders (the greatest examples of professionalism under stress you will ever find) and occasionally reading NTSB reports that are available online. The latter are marvels of the lawyerly art of anesthetizing the ugliest events.

My attraction to the subject comes from dread fear. I can't think of a worse way to die than in a plane. It rolls every fear you have about death into one aluminum-and-steel tube: fear of heights (check); fear of enclosed spaces (check); lack of knowledge (check); lack of control (check); fire and/or water (check); dying with strangers (check); unexpectedness (check); not being able to say goodbye (check).

Of all the famous crashes - Swiss Air 111's fire that melted its cockpit, setting the pilots ablaze; FL 90 plunging into the Potomac, its survivors dying of hypothermia on live television; Value Jet 592 set afire by used oxygen generators meant to provide passengers life support; Egypt Air 990's suicidal co-pilot; and of course, the conspiracy-ridden TWA 800 - I think the most haunting is Pan Am 103.

Maybe it's that it went down on the darkest night of the year in 1988. Maybe it's because the crash happened to Pan Am, the airline that made flying sexy and glamorous (I still can't watch Catch Me With You Can without thinking about the Libyan bomb in that company's future). Maybe it's because the explosion took place four days before Christmas. Maybe it's the 45 college students who lost their lives, along with 225 others.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Price of Terror is the story of the families, and their lawyers, who went after the terrorists while a quisling US State Department and recalcitrant Federal Judiciary tried to stop them.

The book starts with a brief, horrifying description of the bombing. Half an hour after taking off, 12 ounces of Semtex molded into a Toshiba cassette player exploded as PA103 cruised at 31,000 feet. The explosion broke the plane apart: the cockpit and first class separated, heading down immediately; the coach-section of the fuselage continued flying momentarily before plunging ground-ward.

"There are questions here perhaps better left unspoken. But the people who loved those passengers want to know how it felt at that very moment...What exactly where they feeling? Cold, certainly; fifty-degree-below-zero cold, and darkness, and the 500-mile-an-hour wind of their momentum, strong enough to strip the shirts off their backs...And then that would have started to fall. It would have taken a surprisingly long time. A human body tossed into the air at 31,000 feet quickly reaches a velocity of around 250 feet per second, or 160 miles an hour, but as the density of the air increases at lower altitudes it actually slows, and hits the ground at around 120 miles an hour. Those who were tossed out of the plane right after the explosion probably took about three minutes to fall. 'They most likely would have a tendency to start to tumble or rotate a little bit,' an accident expert testified some years later, 'but the natural inclination for the arms and legs to spread would cause them to terminate rotation and somewhat flatten out.'"

From the explosion the book moves to Pan Am's response, which was callous to say the least. Then there is the investigation - because the plane blew up over land, it was recovered, and the cause of the blast located. Finally, the book moves on to the trials. From there, things get very complicated. There is the suit against Pan Am, the criminal trial against the two Libyans, al Megrahi and Khalifah, and the civil trial against Libya (opposed by the US government at the highest level). The civil suits were immensely complicated to begin with - just assessing damages for each individual victim (what is a 45 year-old businessman's life worth, when compared to a 20 year-old female attending Brown) makes the head spin, not to mention trying to prove liability - but throw in the arcane (and let's be honest, often ephemeral)subject of international law, and it gets thorny.

(It also makes you think about that Warsaw Convention warning printed on the back of your plane ticket. I looked at it while flying to Dubai a few months ago and thought: Wow, isn't this great? My government has already bargained away the value of my life.)

Thankfully, though one of the attorney's involved in the book is a co-author, the writing seems to have been done by Newsweek editor Jerry Adler. Rest assured, even if you haven't taken International Law and International Criminal Law in law school, you will still be able to make sense of the proceedings. Authors Gerson and Adler go to great lengths to clarify and explain without simplifying. (They start by defining "tort" and move from there).

The book also never loses touch of the human element, and makes several of the families - especially sculpture artist Suse Lowenstein - into indelible and indomitable characters. The book often steps away from the legal morass to pay attention to the finer details of the tragedy, such as how the different families chose whether or not to view the bodies:

"No one ever regretted having viewed the body of a child or spouse, but many who didn't have been sorry ever since. When our loved ones die horribly and violently, it is a measure of our love that we can look without flinching at their corpses, at their crushed and gutted bodies, and say, we love you still. In 1990 [George:] Williams went to Scotland for the Fatal Accident Inquiry and asked to see the photograph's of his son's body...The officials relented and sent the photographs to Williams's lawyer, who looked inside the envelope and told Williams: George, I can't let you see them. He sent them to Williams's doctor, but the doctor, too, refused to give them to Williams. Williams insisted...[He:] went to the hospital with a priest. He opened the envelope and saw that Geordie's face was gone. Williams recognized him 'from the shape of his head, and his hair, and his legs...He ran track and had fantastic thighs...'"

This book is filled with compassion and empathy, and also cold white fury. In the end, it shows the power of a committed group of people who will not be stopped. It's interesting to read this book in light of the September 11th attacks, because the Pan Am families are the template for the 9/11 Widows of this century: a wealthy, well-educated collective skillfully manipulating (and I don't mean that as a pejorative) the media and their congressmen in their pursuit of justice.

I found this to be a morally nuanced, complex story. As Gerson notes, there are many competing interests. When he describes how an unconscious person flung from the plane might be brought to consciousness as the air gets thicker and warmer, it's not just a ghoulish factoid, it's evidence in a court of law. This was a tort case, and the pain-and-suffering of a 3 minute, conscious free-fall is going to be a lot different than the pain-and-suffering of a sudden cabin de-pressurization, where you simply go to sleep forever. And since this is a story about lawyers, there are the attorney fees, which always cause laypeople so much grief (never mind that some of these firms worked contingency for fifteen years).

The story is even now ongoing. Al Megrahi, the one man convicted criminally of planting the bomb, has just been granted an appeal by the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal (he's also dying of prostrate cancer, because you can bomb all the planes you want, but can't avoid what's coming). Wikipedia has a page devoted to PA103 conspiracy theories (it was the CIA's secret drug smuggling route!).

When it comes down to it, all the lawyers, and attorney fees, and court cases can't bring anyone back. But nothing on earth will. So why blame the lawyers and investigators? Short of venting nuclear rage on Libya, a group of families and their committed lawyers sought justice in the only feasible manner. In the great film A Civil Action, John Travolta says that a corporation apologizes with money. It's true. Our Puritan forefathers knew this. Our litigation-crazy nation started in colonial New England. Why? Because filing a lawsuit is a a better option than pulling out the old blunderbuss and shooting each other every time Mr. Putnam's pig gets loose and eats the vegetables in Goody Proctor's garden.

Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's leader, eventually settled with the victims for what amounts to $10 million for each family. It's taken time, and there's been wrangling (the US had to lessen certain sanctions), but that money has, for the most part, been paid.

If money, then, is an apology, and an apology is a means for taking responsibility, and if justice is the proper assignment of blame, where it belongs and in the proper proportion, then these families got justice.

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pan Am Flight 103 departed Frankfurt, Germany on a regularly scheduled flight to Detroit, Michigan on December 21, 1988. The flight had a brief layover in London before resuming it's flight. When the plane reached the altitude of 31,000 feet over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, the plane jolted and broke apart. 243 passengers and `16 crew members were on board the plane at the time of the incident, and all perished. Subsequent investigation discovered the cause of the crash was a bomb. The book went into detail about the bomb, which was concealed in luggage, and how it affected the plane upon detonation. Several notable people were on this flight, including government officials from a couple of different countries, an Olympic sailor, and a rock musician. Eleven residents of the town of Lockerbie were killed by debris from the plane, increasing the death toll for this event. After investigation, two people were charged in this incident.

After reading what happened to the passengers in their final moments, I am more sure than ever that I am too anxious to get on a plane. I cannot imagine what must have been going through their minds in their last three minuets. The attitude of the airline was infuriating to me, the Reagan administration's response was infuriating to me, and the fact that the families of these victims were dismissed in the way that they were was exceptionally infuriating to me. I think the families of the victims were strong people to continue the demand for justice and their fight for compensation (which was absolutely deserved after having to wait for the release of death certificates and such to file claims). Libya did not claim responsibility for this incident until 2003. (I would like to say that is disgraceful, because it is, but I imagine the United States has done similar nonsense to other people, so I cannot be too judgmental.) Pan Am and their lax security was also extremely infuriating, and then for them to say they had made these huge changes and everything was so safe, only to have 9/11 show how lax airport security still was just a few short years later.... ridiculous.

This book is fairly old, but contained a lot of really good information about this incident and the outcome. I just happened to come across it while I was browsing at my local library, and decided to pick it up since I like disaster books. I was very pleased with my selection, and, despite the morbidity of the content, enjoyed reading this book and learning about this terrorist attack. One of the victims was the son of an artist, Suse Lowenstein, who created a memorial sculpture that featured a personal item inside each one. There is a monument at Arlington National Cemetery, as well as one at Syracuse University (some of the victims were students). The University of Rochester also has a memorial plaque for the victims belonging to that school. There is a monument in the United Kingdom at Dryfesdale Cemetery, close to Lockerbie. If you are near any of these locations, you can check out these memorials. If you are interested in disasters, this is a good book to look into.

[Kallia Vavoulioti · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ideal book concerning Lockerbie Case. Thank God, Jerry Adler and Allan Gerson wrote this book. They saved me.