TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA

Spies are not encouraged to keep diaries, send memos or make carbon copies of reports. If they attract suspicion, 'deniability' is their only hope.

But if a spy is cut off by his own country, deniability works like a hangman's noose. With no written record to call on and no access to official files, he must rely for the most part on memory to defend himself, so that, in the end, it usually comes down to his word against his government's.-

This can give rise to questions of credibility -- a troublesome factor in intelligence work at the best of times. At the worst of times, it can kill. With most people disposed to give those in authority the benefit of the doubt, why should anybody believe him? If spies are trained to lie, deceive and dissemble, they may argue, how can we accept what he says without proof?

No one in modern times has suffered more from this presumption of guilt than Lester Knox Coleman III, until recently a secret agent of the United States' Defense Intelligence Agency.

His crime was to find himself in possession of information of such acute embarrassment to the American government and, to a lesser extent, the governments of Britain and Germany, that officials in Washington were unwilling to rely solely on his discretion. Though he had given them no cause to question his loyalty, the stakes were so high they felt they needed insurance, and so sought to muzzle him by means of a trumped-up criminal charge, to be suspended in exchange for his silence. This procedure had always worked well in similar cases, particularly when combined with other forms of intimidation, like death threats against the agent and his family.

But when Coleman failed to cave in as expected and instead escaped to Sweden with his wife and children, he presented his government with an awkward problem. No longer in a position to enforce his silence, and unwilling to risk a public extradition hearing in a neutral court, Washington decided instead to try to defuse the explosive potential of what he knew by destroying his character and reputation. If it could not stop him talking, it could at least try to stop people believing what he said.

In this, it was more successful, although the irony is that, if the American government had trusted its own security vetting system in the first place, the problem would probably not have arisen. Coleman would have revealed nothing of what he knew; this book would not have been written, and America would have avoided the embarrassment that is now inescapable. By misjudging its own man, Washington brought about the very situation it was most anxious to avoid.

After more than two years on the run from America's state security apparatus, the 'octopus', Coleman believes that the lives and safety of his young family now depend on 'going public', on telling his story to the only jury left that can save him.

I hope he is right.

This is the first time that a fully-fledged Western intelligence agent has come in from the field and publicly debriefed himself, right down to the nuts and bolts of his various missions.  That would be interesting enough in itself, but in Coleman's case, his testimony is also sharply at variance with the official version of events leading up to the Lockerbie disaster, with official accounts of Anglo-American attempts to secure the release of Western hostages in Beirut, with the official line on Lt. Colonel Oliver North and Irangate, and, in general, with the official gloss on Western policy in the Middle East since 1985.

As this is a personal story, Coleman is naturally the primary source for it. Such documents as he does possess, and others that have come to light, not only support his version of events, but also reflect a paranoid determination on Washington's part to destroy him that may, in itself, be a measure of his truthfulness. Certainly no one, in or out of government, has cared to attack the substance of what he has had to say, other than with flat denials; nor have I, or has anyone else, so far identified in his story more than a few minor discrepancies of the kind that must inevitably occur in anybody's mostly unaided recollection of a complicated life, and whose absence would tend to undermine its credibility rather than reinforce it.

In any disputed account of events, the test is always, who benefits?

In this case, not Lester Coleman. Sticking to his story has him a penniless fugitive whose life probably depends on establishing the truth.

Corroboration there has been in plenty. Besides the sources identified in the text, I should also like to thank those many others, mostly in law enforcement and government service on both sides of the Atlantic, who would not thank me if I broke my promise of anonymity. These are difficult times for bureaucrats still attached to the idea of accountable government.

I am also obliged to Pan Am's attorneys for declining to help me with my researches, thereby -- I hope -- denying room to those government supporters who might otherwise wish to accuse me, as they did Time magazine, of conspiring with the airline to pervert the course of justice.

More positively, in the matter of research, I am indebted to Katarina Shelley for her diligence and enterprise; to Carol, for making the book possible anyway, and, for his unshakable faith in the enterprise, to Mark Lucas, of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, who had to work harder than either of us had bargained for to bring Lester Coleman in from the cold.

D.G.

August 1993

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