Sounding the Alarm

The gouged earth, the torn bits of Boeing 747, the bodies of 258 passengers and crew members of Pan American’s Flight 103 and of 22 citizens of Lockerbie, Scotland, who died in 103’s fiery crash testify to tragedy on an inhuman scale. Perhaps worse, the disaster is haunted by an account of events that say it need not have happened.

While investigators searched for clues to the cause, people around the civilized world pondered a flurry of reports on the theme that the American government and Pan American World Airways had been warned that terrorists would put a bomb onto just such a plane during the holiday season. Because some U.S. embassies knew of the anonymous warning, the reports had it that some Americans knew enough to move to other airlines and thus escape danger.

Even Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, got caught up in a wave of outrage at the very thought of favoring a few with life-and-death information and keeping millions of others in the dark. The reports seem to have been overdrawn, but that it was faintly possible that they were true is reason enough to reexamine federal policy for acting on anonymous warnings.

According to official accounts, someone telephoned the American Embassy in Finland on Dec. 5 to warn that a bomb would be put aboard a Pan American plane leaving Frankfurt, West Germany, for the United States at some time in the future. Intelligence officials concluded that the call was the work of a crank. But the U.S. State Department told its embassies in Europe to notify all airlines and chiefs of security in Europe of the threat. The alert bulletin, intended “solely” for the airlines and security chiefs, somehow got onto a bulletin board in the Moscow embassy, which probably accounts for the report of the favored few.

Security apparently was tightened, but U.S. officials would not discuss the details.

Outrage wells up easily at the thought of warning a few people of danger without alerting everyone at risk. The only moral policy would be tell-one-tell-all.

But the harder policy question is whether to warn anybody at all, except security personnel, and, if so, under what circumstances.

It is hard to argue with the U.S. government position that broadcasting every threat would create panic among air travelers and give terrorists the power virtually to shut down international aviation simply by getting onto the phone now and then to warn of bombs on airplanes.

As long as there are patterns of behavior by which intelligence officials can tell real threats from false alarms, the general policy of silence makes sense. That warnings against air travel abroad have in fact been issued in the past suggests that such patterns of behavior exist. It does not seem reasonable to ask government to do more than its present policy requires.