Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  Hindawi kissed her goodbye at the departure terminal; in only a few hours, he said, they would meet again in Tel Aviv. She mustn’t worry about anything.

  Murphy made her way to Gate 23 for the El Al flight. An airline security officer noticed the holdall and decided to subject it to a thorough search. Its contents were removed in her presence, including the pocket calculator. An El Al security woman did a calculation and it functioned normally. The bag was twice placed in a fluoroscope and X-rayed but gave no cause for concern.

  However, when one of the security staff picked up the holdall with the intention of repacking Murphy’s belongings, it occurred to him that for an empty piece of airline baggage it was unexpectedly heavy, so it was taken to a nearby office and stripped down. After removing its interior cardboard base, security staff discovered a flat blue plastic package measuring 16 inches by 9 inches by ⅜ inch, shaped to the contours of the bag. It was wrapped up with buff-coloured parcel tape and secured in place with double-sided adhesive tape.

  I arrived at the evacuated terminal at 10.10 a.m. and was briefed by an inspector from the Heathrow Airport police. Until the briefing, all I knew was that El Al had found what they thought might be a bomb in a passenger’s luggage. The Inspector explained that the passenger had been through British Airways security before being allowed to enter the transit lounge, but that El Al ran their own security and were not content to depend on anyone else. He escorted me to the office, pointed out the holdall and left me to it. The blue plastic package had been removed and a corner torn off to reveal a section of orange-coloured substance resembling Semtex. Clearly this was the main charge of a bomb.

  I X-rayed it in order to locate the initiator but found nothing; X-rayed it again: nothing. Gingerly I unwrapped the package, set it down on the table and tried again: still nothing. All I was looking at was 3 pounds 4 ounces of high explosive – a bare charge.

  Security staff said they’d already subjected the passenger’s belongings to a rigorous inspection and found nothing, so the initiator had to be somewhere inside the holdall. But where? Concealed in the holdall’s tubular frame? Hidden in the wheels?

  The X-ray machine went into action again, producing one image after another of – nothing. I scanned the holdall from every conceivable angle, examined every millimetre of its construction, turned it inside out and upside down and still … nothing. It did not make sense.

  Nobody would be stupid enough to attempt to transport bare explosive to Israel on board an El Al flight. Someone might attempt to get a bomb aboard, but not bare explosive; there were easier ways of getting HE across international borders than risking it on an airline with a reputation for the tightest security.

  I checked my watch: 11.13 a.m. I had spent an hour on the main charge and the holdall. There had to be a mechanism to initiate detonation. If it wasn’t in this room then it had to be amongst the passenger’s belongings which security staff had previously removed at the search table by Gate 23.

  I went and stared at the jumble of things spread out over the length of the search table. All this stuff had been checked by the ultra-zealous El Al security, so the initiator must have been very well hidden indeed. There was nothing else for it: I would have to work methodically from one end of the table to the other.

  Perfumes, pots of cream, sandals, shoes, hairdryer, clothes – it was like trying to analyse the individual items of a jumble sale. I X-rayed everything, opened the perfume bottles, stuck my fingers in the pots of cream, took images of the sandals because I knew there’d been an earlier case of an initiator being built into the heel of a shoe. I found nothing.

  Then I came across an old brass boot, an ornament 5 inches long by 2½ inches high. This could be it, I thought. The hollow boot could provide a good hiding place for a bomb and the metal casing would act as a barrier to X-ray inspection.

  My X-ray machine was on the verge of smoking. I aimed it at the boot and punched in the maximum number of pulses but the brass was too thick for the X-rays to penetrate. I moved the machine closer to the boot and tried again but I still got only an outline of the ornament. Once more, even closer. Finally I got through and found the old brass boot was … an old brass boot. (I later discovered it had been a wedding present to Ann Murphy and her prospective husband.)

  It was 11.35 a.m. and I had totally knackered the X-ray machine: you’re supposed to allow something like five minutes for the machine to cool after intensive activity but I didn’t know if I had five minutes – better to ruin an X-ray tube than sit around waiting and be blown to pieces by a bomb.

  I picked up the calculator. Security staff had already checked it. It functioned normally. It was what it appeared to be – except that when I turned it over and examined the retaining screws at the back, they seemed somehow … shiny, as if they were under a layer of clear glue. I paused and wondered about that, then carefully prised apart the front and back of the calculator and saw a piece of white tape inside. That was wrong too. Calculators do not normally contain white tape.

  I returned to the screws but was unable to remove them because they had been cemented into place with an epoxy resin. Instead, I used wire-cutters to split open the plastic casing around the screws and levered the thing wide open. And there it was: a bomb.

  The interior contained two small packages, one wrapped in white tape, the other in brown. I wasn’t an authority on calculators but I knew that these items shouldn’t be there. I took a photograph of the device and put the camera outside the room. If anything went wrong, at least the forensic experts would have something to go on. I slit open the brown package and discovered 1½ ounces of Semtex with a detonator embedded in it. I separated the two and then realized that if I disconnected the timer unit from the battery I would never know when this thing was set to go off – it was functioning on an integrated circuit (often known as a chip timer), not a mechanical timer. A scientist could say that this particular chip timer was designed to run for a certain number of hours, but he could not say when it had been set; which meant that if a number of people had been handling the bomb, there would be no evidence to suggest who had armed it.

  Accordingly I disconnected the detonator without disconnecting the battery from the timer circuit and then replaced the detonator with a tiny device called an Ignitor Safety Fuze Electric (a detonator without detonating composition). I placed it back on the table and informed security and officers from the Met’s Anti-Terrorist Branch of what I had done.

  At 1.04 p.m. the igniter went off with a crack and a puff of smoke. Had the El Al jet departed on schedule, it would have been 800 miles away, high above southern Europe. It was five hours since Hindawi had opened the calculator in the taxi to Heathrow – five hours since he had armed the bomb.

  After kissing Ann Murphy goodbye, Hindawi had returned to his own hotel, collected his luggage, then headed for the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington. He was due to fly to Syria at 2 p.m., travelling to Heathrow on a Syrian Arab Airlines crew bus. However, when the bus arrived he was handed a sealed letter by a member of the crew and instructed to go instead to 8 Belgrave Square: the Syrian Arab Embassy.

  At the embassy Hindawi presented his letter and was warmly welcomed by a Syrian diplomat who then introduced him to three others, including a Dr Haydar, described as ‘the Ambassador’. In Hindawi’s presence, the Ambassador made a call to Damascus, and then told Hindawi that certain persons in Damascus were ‘very pleased’ with him. According to Hindawi’s later statement, Dr Haydar said it had been decided to keep him in hiding for a few days; he would be taken to a safe place.

  Hindawi was driven to a house in Stonor Road, West Kensington, which had been let to one of the diplomats on 7 August 1985, although it was not listed as his official residence. There Hindawi’s hair was cut and dyed. At 5 a.m. the following day, Friday 18 April, Hindawi was woken by two of the diplomats and told he was being taken back to the Syrian Arab Embassy. Something about the situation made Hindawi suddenly apprehensive; on the pavement ou
tside the house he began arguing, was grabbed by one of the men, broke free and ran off down the road, shouting at the top of his voice. The two diplomats jumped into their car and sped off without pursuing him.

  Hindawi roamed the streets for some time and then checked into the London Visitor’s Hotel. But the Metropolitan Police had obtained vital evidence from Ann Murphy and circulated Hindawi’s picture the previous day. As Hindawi was registering at the hotel he was recognized and the police summoned.

  In the wake of Hindawi’s arrest, the Stonor Road address was searched by police and a quantity of cut hair found in a wastepaper bin. It matched Hindawi’s. Hindawi also provided police with an accurate sketch map of the interior of the Syrian Arab Embassy and descriptions of the Ambassador and his three colleagues.

  As police now had in custody a man who had planned to kill the woman who loved him, her unborn child, and 374 other men, women and children, the Syrian Ambassador and his staff were asked to cooperate with the criminal investigation enquiries in progress. The request was refused. Within hours Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Syria; the Ambassador and all his staff were summarily expelled.

  In October 1986 Nezar Nawaf Mansour Hindawi appeared at the Old Bailey.

  The evidence was damning: forensic scientists had indeed been able to work back from the time my little ISFE went off at 1.04 p.m. to show that the chip timer was designed to set off a detonator after a five-hour delay. Hindawi had been seen handling the calculator at 8.04 a.m. by both the taxi driver and Ann Murphy.

  In his summing up Mr Justice Mars-Jones said: ‘A more callous and cruel deception, and a more horrendous massacre, would be hard to imagine.’ I watched as Hindawi was sentenced. He smiled broadly, saluted the Court and was led from the dock.

  None of us could understand his reaction. But then, none of us knew that Hindawi hadn’t understood the Judge. It was only when Defence Counsel went down to see his client in the holding cell that Hindawi’s misapprehension was corrected. He thought he had been sentenced to ‘four to five years’, hence his jubilant face in Court. In fact he’d been given forty-five years – the longest prison sentence ever handed out by a UK Court. Upon learning the truth Hindawi promptly collapsed.

  Though diplomatic privilege precluded the arrest of Dr Haydar and the other three diplomats, Syrian complicity in a mass murder conspiracy was never in doubt.

  The Hindawi case also brought to our attention a new kind of aircraft bomb, one where the main charge was separate from the initiating system.

  Hindawi must have known that black-and-white X-rays have great difficulty in identifying hidden explosive – it looks like a grey mass, and when positioned at the bottom of a case tends to merge into its structure. All the things which security people would look out for – batteries, detonator outline, wiring – were not present but hidden inside a separate and mundane item of equipment which they assumed couldn’t possibly be a bomb since you can’t pack enough HE to blow up an aircraft into something as small as a pocket calculator.

  The calculator would have blown up first, triggering sympathetic detonation of the main charge a millisecond later. It made the ideal initiating system because you expect to find batteries and electric circuitry in such equipment.

  In the wake of the Heathrow incident I made a mock-up of Hindawi’s bomb. There had been two chips instead of one, the first as standard equipment to work the calculator, the second incorporated by the bomb-maker to operate the timer. He had also placed the small quantity of Semtex and a detonator on top of the circuit board. When I X-rayed my mock-up I couldn’t easily discern the detonator, even though I knew where it was. As for the presence of two chips, I very much doubt if anyone other than the designer could have said how many chips should have been in that calculator. Hindawi’s bomb had been specifically designed to defeat X-ray examination and, in that respect, was extremely successful.

  I was pleased with the outcome of the affair. Until then, no one had thought to disconnect a detonator and connect in its place something which would prove the time of the intended explosion. I was also relieved that I had not ignored a stubborn intuition which kept insisting that, despite the lack of evidence, despite the time expended on the main charge, the holdall, and all its contents, up to and including the old brass boot, there had to be an initiator somewhere; that this was not just a cache of bare explosive.

  The Hindawi affair took me back to my days at Hounslow and our DIY depressurization chamber. Prior to that time bombs on aircraft were very crude and rarely associated with terrorism; an explosion was more likely to be caused by someone sending his wife off with a suitcase full of dynamite in order to claim the insurance.

  But then Middle Eastern terrorists began to emerge, and they incorporated barometric switches into the bomb timing mechanism, knowing that it was futile to depend on timers alone: a plane could be delayed for hours on the ground with passengers still stuck in the departure lounge; you needed to ensure that the timer didn’t begin to function until the barometric switch had detected the change of pressure when the aircraft became airborne. To each counter-terrorism tactic, Arab terrorists responded with increasing sophistication; soon, explosive was being built into the linings of suitcases and metallic components hidden in the metal framework.

  Until after the Lockerbie disaster in December 1988 passengers were still allowed to transport battery-powered objects in luggage destined for an aircraft’s hold. You expected to find batteries in radios, calculators, or children’s toys. But those batteries could simultaneously be powering something else, as in Nezar Hindawi’s calculator.

  Not until 1989 was anything done to prevent all passengers on all airlines from carrying batteries in luggage sent to an aircraft’s hold. Some airlines banned them, others did not. Lockerbie, and the alleged radio bomb aboard the Pan Am jumbo, was to change all that, but the Hindawi incident had already been well-documented two and a half years earlier; the lack of reaction can only be attributed to complacency.

  Despite all today’s precautions – including the colour differential X-ray system – I still think Lockerbie could happen again. We have improved our defences against the terrorists but it is always a case of they lead, we follow; they act, we respond.

  For instance in 1987, the year after Hindawi’s bomb attempt was frustrated, an Arab was carrying two bottles of wine through Frankfurt Airport. An alert Customs officer stopped the man for questioning, was dissatisfied with the answers he received, detained the Arab, and sent the bottles away for forensic examination.

  It was a wise move. Instead of wine, the factory-sealed bottles were filled with methyl nitrate, an extremely dangerous liquid high explosive. Similar to nitroglycerine and normally colourless, methyl nitrate can be dyed to resemble anything you want – whisky, rum, sherry or wine. In a suitcase or a bag it is unlikely to provoke suspicion even when X-rayed; in weight and appearance it is just a bottle of Duty Free, not a container filled with liquid explosive.

  Methyl nitrate is exceptionally sensitive to a detonating shock-wave, even more so than liquid nitroglycerine, so the proximity of main charge to detonator is far less crucial than it was in the El Al bomb, when Hindawi had to delve deep into Ann Murphy’s holdall when positioning the calculator (if he’d left it at the top of the bag, the detonating charge would have been separated from the main charge by layers of clothing, and would have been unlikely to set off the main charge.) But if Hindawi had placed a bottle of methyl nitrate in the holdall, it would not have mattered where the calculator was placed: regardless of anything between them, the main charge would have gone off.

  It is not clear if methyl nitrate is being used by terrorists for bombs in aircraft; it may well be that the banning of batteries in passenger luggage and the use of colour differential X-ray is causing the bombers to rethink their tactics. However, those arrested for the bombing of a Korean jet shortly before the Seoul Olympics claimed to have used liquid explosive.

  Although an airline can be run
with virtually a hundred per cent security, it is unlikely that many passengers would wish to travel on it. No matter what people say, no matter how loud the clarion call for greater safety, an airline which banned all electrical goods, which insisted on a five-hour check-in, and which strip-searched every passenger, would rapidly go out of business. People do not wish to endure such massive inconvenience because, deep down, they do not think anything will happen to them. Death is something which only happens to others.

  The trouble with embassies, I thought, is that diplomatic immunity only goes so far. On 7 May 1980 Ken and I were standing in the wreckage of the Telex Room of the Iranian Embassy. I’d just managed to disentangle myself from a corpse and a Russian RGD 5 hand grenade.

  Until then I had given little thought to the kind of life enjoyed by foreign embassy staff. Stories of diplomats owing thousands of pounds in unpaid parking tickets or of diplomats’ wives escaping prosecution for shop-lifting had left jaundiced Londoners with the distinct feeling that there was one law for the diplomats and another for everyone else. There were circumstances, however, where diplomatic immunity didn’t apply: diplomats couldn’t say to a bomb, ‘Excuse me, I’m on embassy premises.’

  The Iranian Embassy siege began on 30 April when, in the name of a factional extremist cause, armed terrorists burst into the building and took many of the staff hostage. Negotiations proved fruitless; after the murder of two hostages the SAS stormed the embassy on 5 May and killed five of the six gunmen. The operation was watched by millions of TV viewers worldwide.

  Clear-up work began on 6 May; the Met’s Explosives Office was called in to declare the building safe from explosives. In the wake of the siege and its violent conclusion the place was littered with the remains of grenades and small arms ammunition. Fire damage was extensive; you only had to look at the once-proud façade of the Prince’s Gate building to know that it had been a war zone.

  Two Expos were tasked because of the magnitude of the job. We started on the ground floor and then carefully worked upwards, floor by floor, dealing with unsafe items as we found them, leaving others which we considered to be safe where they were, their existence signalled by little markers.