Keeping Lockerbie Alive

When Wendy Giebler finishes her job as a video production manager in Haverstraw, N.Y., each day, she starts a second shift of a more passionate nature. At home she spends five hours writing letters, preparing testimony, drafting speeches and devouring all the information she can find on how and why Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, last December, killing 270 people. One of the victims was William Giebler, 29, a bond broker who had married Wendy less than a year earlier. "I have nothing else left to live for," says Giebler, who transformed her grief into action. "This is what I consider my career."

Giebler has joined hundreds of relatives of Flight 103 victims in an organized attempt to change Government and airline policies and win compensation for their loss. Embittered after countless run-ins with unresponsive and evasive officials, their early efforts to lobby for improved airline safety quickly hardened into demands for the British, German and U.S. governments to disclose what they know about the bombing. Bert Ammerman, a high school assistant principal who lost his brother Tom and now heads a group called Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, calls Washington a "cesspool of unaccountability." After months of lobbying Congress and a meeting with President Bush, the families finally persuaded the Administration to establish a Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which began hearings last week.

Earlier this month, Ammerman accompanied a six-member delegation of American and British families to West Germany to quiz investigators and government officials on terrorist links to Flight 103. The group emerged from three days of talks with little new information. But they left the Germans with the clear impression that their persistence will not fade.

Nor has the European press lost its appetite for unraveling the Pan Am mystery. Since last summer, newspapers and magazines in Britain and Germany have bannered a disturbing mix of unsubstantiated charges and possibly valuable clues about the bombing.

The accusations and finger pointing give many Flight 103 families the sense of being trapped in an impenetrable web of international politics and terrorism. Says Eleanor Bright, whose husband Nick died over Lockerbie: "I feel as if I've been dropped in the middle of a bad spy novel." Among the disclosures:

-- West German police apprehended 16 suspected terrorists but then released all but two of them in October 1988, after discovering a cache of explosives and a bomb similar to the one used to destroy Flight 103 eight weeks later. Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian who some authorities believe assembled the Pan Am bomb, was among those set free. Published stories contend that Khreesat was also a German intelligence agent; German authorities deny it.

-- Pressured by a $300 million lawsuit for compensatory damages filed by more than 100 families, Pan Am has subpoenaed records of six U.S. Government agencies including the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department. The subpoena suggests that Israel or West Germany relayed serious warnings of a bombing to the U.S. -- and that the warnings were not passed on to Pan Am. The Flight 103 families say Pan Am may merely be trying to shift the blame so it can wriggle out of paying huge claims.