The Bombing of Pan Am 103 will tell Lockerbie story "more accurately", says FBI investigator

The first FBI agent to arrive at the crime scene was Richard 'Dick' Marquise, who is now long retired, although the case remains to some extent open. “Lockerbie has literally been almost half my life,” says Marquise on the phone from his Florida home. “I was 41 when it happened and I’m about to be 78, but it’s still a big part of my life.”

As an adviser on a six-part BBC drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 – for which one of the sources is his 2006 book, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation – Marquise recently spent more than a year working with producers and actors, and visited the filming in Scotland. (In an increasingly common practice due to the huge cost of making a drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 will be shown in a UK “first window” on 18 May ahead of a later global release on Netflix, a co-producer.)

In the drama, there’s a striking scene in which, as Marquise (played by Suits actor Patrick J Adams) prepares to fly to the UK to start the investigation, his wife tells him to keep thinking that it could have been their own sons on that plane; the FBI officer replies that he has to be rational, not emotional.

Is that scene true to his working personality? Marquise laughs: “No! Viewers may think I’m an – pardon my French – asshole, but I understand why they’ve done it. There’s a scene where someone says: ‘I hope Dick has a heart under that suit of his.’ They’re portraying my character not so much as heartless but as devoted to the mission. Is that 100 per cent me? No. But I accept it for dramatic reasons.”

The Bombing of Pan Am 103 focuses on hostility between the lead investigator for the local Scottish police, DCS John Orr (played by Peter Mullan) and Marquise. Orr is seen growling, “Scottish soil, Scottish evidence, Scottish procedure,” and slamming down the phone on his American counterpart. Were things as prickly as they are depicted?

“We had our issues,” Marquise admits. “They’ve had to simplify things in the drama: you can’t have 35,000 characters. In reality, I didn’t have a lot of one-on-one dealings with John Orr. I got to know him later and we became good friends until he died.

“My main dealings were with Stuart Henderson [who joined as a senior investigating officer] and that was, for both of us, a work in progress. I hate to use the word 'distrust' but you have a crime scene in Scotland with 190 American victims and you have this very small [Dumfries and Galloway] police force that had never investigated anything like this before. And I’ll be honest, the FBI is not used to not being in charge. But I’ll tell you this, no one could have collected evidence as diligently and expertly as the Scottish cops.”

This, of course, is the second drama about the mass aviation homicide to be screened in the UK this year, following January’s Sky Atlantic five-parter, Lockerbie: a Search for Truth, with Colin Firth as Dr Jim Swire, the GP whose daughter, Flora, was killed on the flight and who has led bereaved families in a campaign for justice.

Fact-based dramas often mark round-number anniversaries, but it is 37 years since Lockerbie and the double interest at this uneven anniversary results from many remaining questions and continuing litigation: a Libyan national, Abu Agila Mohammed Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, is scheduled to go on trial in Washington this summer, accused of building the Lockerbie bomb. In 2001, another Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted by Scottish judges of plotting the massacre; a past government of Libya also admitted responsibility. “So the case is still going on after 37 years!” says Marquise.

In most instances, a recent-historical drama following just a few months after another would, however well done, seem repetitive and second-best. But The Bombing of Pan Am 103 tells a story almost completely different from the Colin Firth drama. The Sky series dramatised Jim Swire’s belief that the convicted and accused Libyans were framed to protect (for alleged international political convenience) a plot by Iran and pro-Palestinian groups based in Syria in which, Swire and his supporters suggest, the bomb was placed on the plane not at Frankfurt, but at London Heathrow. The BBC drama supports Libyan culpability, as advanced by Marquise and the FBI.

“I haven’t seen the Colin Firth programme but I have read Jim Swire’s book,” says Marquise. “And I’ve told Dr Swire I disagree with his conclusion that we’re hiding things and that there’s much more to the story. I try to be respectful and I would never criticise a Lockerbie family member, but I simply disagree with him. The BBC programme is fact-based and will tell the story much more accurately than anything that’s ever been portrayed in the media, and I’m thankful for that.”

The contention between Marquise and Swire largely rests on the forensic evidence, from which the FBI concluded where the bomb was made (Zurich), for whom (Libya) and how it entered the luggage hold (Frankfurt) of a plane with three airport stops and a feeder flight from Malta. “There’s a lot of disagreement,” the former FBI lead investigator says, “over a fragment called PT/35, a piece of a circuit board of the timer built by a Swiss company in Zurich for Libyan intelligence. It’s almost unbelievable a fragment that small could have been found in such a large crime-scene, but I know the great work the Scottish cops did in collecting evidence. I know what the fragment was, know how it was recovered, where it was, I’ve seen it.”

The other side has claimed that the discovery of PT/35 was not “almost unbelievable” but completely so, casting doubt on how it was found and by whom. That fragment matters because it’s the main basis for the FBI/official line that the attack was run from Libya. Marquise, meanwhile, rejects the rival Iranian/ Palestinian theory: “We didn’t discover any link to Iran or Palestinian terrorists. We let the evidence speak for itself and it led us to conclude that it was a Libyan operation. The one thing I can never rule out is that the Iranians had some role way far in the background, but there’s no evidence for that.”

Not even a six-hour BBC drama can give a sense of the patient and painstaking length of the investigation. Marquise recalls: “At the FBI, we hated to say that we were assessing stuff. The CIA analyses; we find evidence that we can take to court. But we didn’t get that evidence until three years afterwards. Until then it was a whodunnit in which we had to re-create that 845-square-mile crime scene and follow that evidence where it led.”

A subtle way we see time passing in the drama is that the standard photo of the president on FBI walls changes from Ronald Reagan to George HW Bush. These days, it’s Donald Trump smiling out for the second time. How much difference does it make to the FBI who is in the White House? “I started in 1971 and worked under seven presidents [Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr]. And it made no difference who it was. I never felt anyone in the White House or Department of Justice was telling us how to do our job. Let me be clear, I don’t know how often I’ve said this publicly, but on Lockerbie I never had a single enquiry from the White House. The current president – that’s a whole different can of worms and I’m glad I’m retired…”

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The Bombing of Pan Am 103 premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 18th May, with new episodes premiering at 9pm every Sunday and Monday for three weeks.

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