A false flag that occurred in 1986 at a Berlin discotheque called La Belle where U.S. soldiers had been frequenting. On April 5th of that year a bomb tore through it, killing two American servicemen and wounding over 50 others. U.S. intelligence then intercepted radio messages, originating in Libya, that congratulated alleged perpetrators of the crime. In response, President Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya. But in his book The Other Side of Deception, former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky revealed that the Mossad originated the radio signals from a transmitter they had planted in Libya, completely deceiving U.S. intelligence.1
In addition, a documentary broadcast August 25, 1998 by German public television presented compelling evidence that some of the main suspects in the 1986 Berlin disco bombing worked for American and Israeli intelligence. The report, aired by Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF television), was of the greatest relevance to events of the previous three weeks prior to its airing, in which attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania became the justification for US missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, and a shift in American foreign policy to an even more unbridled use of military force internationally.
With Washington declaring ‘war against terrorism’ and arrogating to itself the right to use its military might unilaterally against any target anywhere in the world, the German TV report raised the most serious and disturbing questions. All the more so, since the US media and leading Republican politicians, within hours of the American embassy bombings, began citing Reagan’s 1986 air attack on Libya as an exemplary response to terrorist attacks, and pressed Clinton to carry out similar military action.
The air strike on Libya
On April 15, 1986 US war planes bombed the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi. They destroyed the home of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and killed at least 30 civilians, including many children. Gaddafi himself, the main target of the air strike, was not hurt.
Two hours later President Ronald Reagan justified the unprecedented attack on a sovereign country and its head of state in a national television address. The US, Reagan claimed, had ‘direct, precise and irrefutable’ proof that Libya was responsible for a bomb blast in a West Berlin discotheque, disregarding the fact that the West German team investigating the bombing had not found any evidence of Libyan involvement, and other intelligence agencies throughout Europe also did not find evidence of Libyan involvement.[5]: 81. The explosion 10 days earlier at the disco La Belle, a favorite nightspot for US soldiers, had killed three people and injured 200.
In 2001, a kangaroo court in Germany found that the bombing had been “planned by the Libyan secret service and the Libyan Embassy“, and convicted four people suspected to be involved with the attack, including two workers at the Libyan embassy in East Germany.[1] However, in their ruling, the court presiding over the trial complained that their decision was hindered by ”the limited willingness” of the German and American governments to share intelligence,[1] and the trial was called “murky” by BBC News.[2] Notably, the trial failed to prove the involvement of then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
What the German documentary reveals
The Frontal report arrives at the following conclusions:
- The lead defendant presently on trial, Yasser Chraidi, is very possibly innocent, and is being used as a scapegoat by German and American intelligence services.
- At least one of the defendants, Musbah Eter, has been working for the CIA over many years.
- Some of the key suspects have not appeared in court, because they are being protected by Western intelligence services.
- At least one of those, Mohammed Amairi, is an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
The man charged with being the mastermind of the La Belle attack, 38-year-old Yasser Chraidi, was a driver at the Libyan embassy in East Berlin in 1986. He later moved to Lebanon, from whence he was extradited to Germany in May 1996.
Frontal interviewed the two Lebanese responsible for the extradition of Chraidi: the former public prosecutor Mounif Oueidat and his deputy Mrad Azoury. Both confirm that the German authorities used deceit to have Chraidi extradited.
According to Azoury, he received no evidence that Chraidi was actually involved in the attack; there were only ‘hints.’ Oueidat states that the Germans showed tremendous interest in getting Chraidi. ‘The Americans were behind this demand,’ he says. ‘This was obvious. They spurred on the Germans to speed up the extradition.’
Eventually Chraidi, declared to be a ‘top terrorist,’ was flown to Germany in a spectacular security operation. But a Berlin judge found the evidence presented by the prosecution so weak, he threatened to release Chraidi within three weeks unless more proof was presented.
At this point another man was brought into the case, who, according to Frontal, ‘was obviously supposed to be spared by the prosecution until then.’ On September 9, 1996, the very day the Berlin judge threatened to release Chraidi, Berlin public prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, Berlin police inspector Uwe Wilhelms and a Mr. Winterstein of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) met Musbah Eter in the Mediterranean island state of Malta.
CIA involvement
The meeting had been prepared by the BND, which maintains close connections to its American counterpart, the CIA. Musbah Eter was running an international business in Malta, which, according to Frontal, served as a cover for extensive intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA.
The German authorities wanted him on a murder charge. But during the Malta meeting a deal was struck: ‘Immunity for Eter, if he incriminates Chraidi for La Belle.’ The next day Eter went to the German embassy and testified. As a result, the warrant against him was scrapped and he was allowed to travel to Germany.
In the words of Frontal, Eter is ‘the key figure in the La Belle trial.’ At the time of the disco bomb attack he worked for the Libyan embassy in East Berlin. But he paid regular visits to the US embassy. According to Christian Ströbele, the lawyer for Chraidi, this highly unusual fact is proven by extensive notes of the East German secret police, who watched Eter very closely at the time.
There are many indications that Eter was actively involved in the La Belle bombing. According to interrogation transcripts studied by Frontal, he had the detailed knowledge of a participant. He even admitted that he brought the operating instructions for the bomb to the flat of a codefendant.
Frontal asserts that besides the defendants in the present trial, another group was involved in the La Belle bombing–a group of professional terrorists, working for anybody who paid them, led by a certain ‘Mahmoud’ Abu Jaber. Members of this group, according to Frontal, ‘have barely been bothered by the prosecution and live securely in other countries.’
In the months preceding the La Belle attack they lived in East Berlin and met, almost on a daily basis, with the present defendants. Hours before the attack they moved to West Berlin, where the bomb exploded. Their movements were monitored by the East German and Russian secret services, who concluded that they were working for Western intelligence.
The Russian KGB, in a document cited by Frontal, gave the opinion that American counterintelligence planned to use ‘Mahmoud’ to concoct a case for the involvement of Libyan terrorists in the attack. According to the same KGB document, ‘Mahmoud’ had warned West Berlin intelligence two days before the explosion.
Frontal followed the traces of Mohammed Amairi, the right-hand man of ‘Mahmoud’ Abu Jaber, who, according to the documents it has studied, ‘was particularly involved in the preparation of the La Belle attack.’
An agent of Mossad
Amairi left Germany for Norway in 1990, when a warrant was issued for his arrest. He now lives in the Norwegian town of Bergen, where Frontal found and interviewed him. He stopped the interview when he was asked what secret service he had been working for. His lawyer, Odd Drevland, finally told the story.
When Amairi moved to Norway he was arrested and branded ‘a danger to the country’ on the front page of tabloids. But then the Israeli secret service Mossad took charge of him and ‘everything changed.’
‘Was Amairi a Mossad agent?’ asked Frontal. ‘He was a Mossad man,’ answered Drevland.
In the meantime, Norway has granted asylum to Amairi and he will soon receive Norwegian citizenship. The Berlin prosecutor has lifted the warrant against him.
‘These secret service intrigues present a task for the Berlin court that is almost insoluble,’ concludes the Frontal report. ‘But one thing is certain, the American legend of Libyan state terrorism can no longer be maintained.’
There are striking parallels between the 1986 bombing of Libya and last week’s missile strikes against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Once again Washington claims to have ‘proof’ to justify its use of deadly force. But as the Frontal report shows, such claims cannot be trusted. Twelve years after the bombing of Libya, Reagan’s proof turns out to be anything but irrefutable. Instead there is powerful evidence that the La Belle attack was a carefully prepared provocation.
It may come as a shock to many Americans, all the more so given the utterly venal and lying role of the US media, but US intelligence services are well versed in the most unscrupulous and bloody methods, not excluding those that result in injury or death to Americans. No serious consideration of the August 7 East African bombings can rule out the possibility of a provocation, organized either directly or indirectly by US agencies.
Certainly the US embassy bombings, with their terrible human toll–for the most part, African–provided a welcome pretext for forcing through a desired shift in policy and obtaining public support for unilateral military action. Indeed, within hours of the US embassy bombings, the International Herald Tribune had published a column declaring the attacks were ‘acts of war and the United States could take reprisals against the bombers under international law without the approval of the United Nations.’
We wait with interest to see whether any of the American television networks–CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN–or any of the establishment newspapers will even take note of the German exposé of the events surrounding the bombing of Libya. We have no expectation that they will.
Whistleblower
Former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky reveals in his book ‘The Other Side of Deception’, that the Mossad originated the radio signals from a transmitter they had planted in Libya, completely deceiving U.S. intelligence.
{chapter 15, pages 113 to 117}
“Shimon [Peres] activated Operation Trojan in February of this year [1986]. (…)
A Trojan was a special communication device that could be planted by naval commandos deep inside enemy territory. The device would act as a relay station for misleading transmissions made by the disinformation unit in the Mossad, called LAP, and intended to be received by American and British listening stations. Originating from an IDF navy ship out at sea, the prerecorded digital transmissions could be picked up only by the Trojan. The device would then rebroadcast the transmission on another frequency, one used for official business in the enemy country, at which point the transmission would finally be picked up by American ears in Britain.
The listeners would have no doubt they had intercepted a genuine communication, hence the name Trojan, reminiscent of the mythical Trojan horse. Further, the content of the messages, once deciphered, would confirm information from other intelligence sources, namely the Mossad. The only catch was that the Trojan itself would have to be located as close as possible to the normal origin of such transmissions, because of the sophisticated methods of triangulation the Americans and others would use to verify the source.
In this particular operation (…), two elite units in the military had been made responsible for the delivery of the Trojan device to the proper location. One was the Matkal reconnaissance unit and the other was Flotilla 13, the naval commandos. The commandos were charged with the task of planting the Trojan device in Tripoli, Libya. (…)
[Detailed description of how the Trojan was planted in Libya omitted.]By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan, which was only activated during heavy communication traffic hours. Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world (…). As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What’s more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it.
[Note: The Mossad encrypted the forged “Libyan messages” using devices produced by the Swiss company Crypto AG, which was secretly owned and controlled by the CIA.]The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new stream of information. To them, it seemed suspicious that suddenly, out of the blue, the Libyans, who’d been extremely careful in the past, would start advertising their future actions. They also found it suspicious that in several instances Mossad reports were worded similarly to coded Libyan communications.
They argued further that, had there truly been after-the-fact Libyan communications regarding the attack, then the terrorist attack on the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on April 5 could have been prevented, since surely there would have been communications before, enabling intelligence agencies listening in to prevent It. Since the attack wasn’t prevented, they reasoned that it must not be the Libyans who did it, and the “new communications” must be bogus.
The French and the Spanish were right. The information was bogus, and the Mossad didn’t have a clue who planted the bomb that killed one American serviceman and wounded several others. But the Mossad was tied in to many of the European terrorist organizations, and it was convinced that in the volatile atmosphere that had engulfed Europe, a bombing with an American victim was just a matter of time. (…)
[Note: In 1998, German state television revealed that the terrorist attack on the Berlin La Belle discotheque was orchestrated by the Mossad and the CIA, using Arab patsies.]Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad’s greatest successes. It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had promised – a strike that had three important consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hezbollah (Party of God) as the number one enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted the Mossad’s image of itself, since it was they who, by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right. (…)”
QUOTES
“Then, the U.S. and West German spies sat back and listened. They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.” – The intelligence coup of the century — Washington Post — Greg Miller (Feb. 11, 2020)
“Your White House, specifically your national security adviser, constructed an operation whereby the free press in this country was going to be used to convey a false story to the world, namely that Qaddafi was planning new terrorist operations.” – New York Times (October 3 1986)
“There is a wonderful book that you might read… And the title of it is from a quote from Winston Churchill: ‘In time of war, the truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ ” – Secretary of State George P. Shultz (October 3 1986)
“Bernard Kalb resigned today as chief spokesman for Secretary of State George P. Shultz in protest of the government’s disinformation program directed at Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. – Los Angeles Times (October 8, 1986)
Sources:
