Goddard, Donald with Coleman, Lester K. Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to
Lockerbie -- Inside the DIA. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1993. 326 pages.
Lester Coleman began as a reporter, became an agent for the Defense
Intelligence Agency in the Middle East (he's fluent in Arabic), and ended as
an exile in Sweden after trumped-up passport charges were filed against him
in Chicago. The problem was that Coleman, without fully realizing it, had
inside information about Drug Enforcement Administration operations in the
Middle East, and specifically about DEA arrangements for controlled-delivery
baggage handling out of the Frankfurt airport. In other words, what he knew
put an different spin on the Lockerbie tragedy, and suggested a degree of
U.S. intelligence complicity with the bombing of Pan Am 103.
There is also new information about DIA, DEA, and CIA turf wars in
the Middle East. DIA keeps their secrets better than the CIA (there's no
Congressional oversight), which allows them greater latitude for dirty
tricks, and for spying on the DEA and CIA. (For example, Coleman was tasked
by the DIA to expose Oliver North to an agent whose relative worked for Al
Shiraa, the Beirut news magazine that ran this information on 3 November
1986, and was thereby credited with opening the Iran-contra floodgates for
the Western media.) This book is well-written, perhaps because principal
author Donald Goddard spent eight years as an editor at the New York Times.
Despite this, don't look for it in U.S. bookstores -- you won't find it.
ISBN 0-7475-1562-X
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