All governments lie, some more than others. To protect themselves or 'the national interest', American governments lie more than most.
The story of Washington's blackest lie in modern times began, typically, with a bureaucratic blunder. In the spring of 1988, Special Agent Micheal T. Hurley, the Drug Enforcement Administration's attache to the American Embassy in Cyprus, was given a clear warning by an American intelligence agent that security had been breached in a 'sting' operation the DEA had mounted against Lebanese drug traffickers running heroin into the United States via Nicosia, Frankfurt and London.
Seven months later, on 21 December 1988, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York, killing all 259 passengers and crew. Eleven more people died on the ground as the wreckage of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, Maid of the Seas, rained down on the Scottish border town of Lockerbie.
Among the victims were at least two, possibly five or more, American intelligence agents, who had disregarded standing orders by choosing to fly home from Beirut on an American-flag airline, and a DEA Lebanese-American courier who had previously carried out at least three controlled deliveries of heroin to Detroit as part of the 'sting'.
Those involved in this operation, along with those who had authorized, condoned or used it for other purposes, recognized at once that their neglect of the warning in May had cost 270 lives, that terrorists had slipped through the reported breach in security and converted a controlled delivery of heroin into the controlled delivery of a bomb -- probably in revenge for the 290 lives lost in July when the US cruiser Vincennes had shot down an Iranian Airbus 'by mistake'.
