MY BROTHER'S BOMBER DOCUMENTARY
PRODUCED & DIRECTED BY:
Ken Dornstein
When FRONTLINE filmmaker Ken Dornstein was 19 years old, his older brother David was one of 189 Americans killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Some 25 years later, only one suspect, a Libyan man, was ever convicted of the terror plot, which killed 270 people in total. He was sentenced to life in prison but later released. Who else was involved remains an open case. Who was really responsible for one of the worst terrorist attacks on Americans before 9/11? In My Brother’s Bomber, an emotional and suspenseful three-part series, Dornstein embarks on a quest for answers.
“My Brother’s Bomber” is the winner of two News and Documentary Emmy Awards, including “Outstanding Investigative Journalism–Long Form.”
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
PBS began airing this series in September, 2015. The first public mention of this new suspect, Abu Agela Masud, by the Scottish and American prosecutors came a few weeks later. The early news reports linked the announcement of new suspects to “My Brother’s Bomber” even though current reports now leave out where this all started.
“My Brother’s Bomber” is a work of journalism, based on extensive documentation, reporting and rigorous fact-checking–not just by PBS FRONTLINE, but also by The New Yorker and the New York Times, and elsewhere, which published detailed accounts of this project. “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is a drama written by a playwright about a man, Jim Swire, who has “campaigned” for truth for decades, but didn’t actually do much original research, basing his talking points instead on material largely generated by the Libyan legal defense team.
In an increasingly post-fact world, maybe not. But for those who still care, there’s a difference between dramatic truth and journalistic truth–something that the playwright behind the Swire series seemed to acknowledge when he suggested that “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” may actually be enhanced by the idea that Swire turns out to be wrong: “There are other people in the world who believe the opposite of what [Swire] believes,” the playwright said in an interview. “So I couldn’t make a drama without asking, ‘What if all this is actually driven by grief.’”
Maybe. But, back in 2014, the year before “My Brother’s Bomber” aired, Ken spent a day with Jim at his house and talked about their parallel journeys over the years. Ken walked Jim through the step-by-step way in which the documents gathered by three very different intelligence agencies–the CIA, the East German Stasi, and the Libyan external intelligence service–all led to the identification of the bomb expert traveling on the day of the bombing with the man who Jim continues to feel is innocent.
You can see Jim’s initial reaction to this evidence in an outtake from “My Brother’s Bomber” here.Years earlier, when Ken was writing a book about his older brother David, who was a passenger on Pan Am 103, he read through the transcripts of the trial and kept seeing excerpts from documents that mentioned a name–Abu Agela Mas'ud– that was always connected to the main suspect, but was never directly discussed at the trial. At the time Ken first went to Libya, it wasn’t clear whether this was a real person or just a nom de guerre. There were no mentions of the bomb expert on the internet. There was no picture of him–not even in the files of the original investigators. The few people who had ever been asked about his name denied his very existence.
The original Lockerbie investigators made notes to look into another act of Libyan terror against the United States–the bombing of the La Belle Discotheque in Berlin in 1986. But the FBI repeatedly failed to follow up on this and missed the chance to obtain the document that linked the bomb expert in the disco bombing to the mystery man in the Lockerbie case: A 1996 confession made by a Libyan intelligence operative who turned out to be the only person in the world who ever publicly admitted to knowing abu Agela Mas'ud. His confession was backed by documents from the East German intelligence service which listed Mas’ud’s passport number in the Disco case, which turned out to be the same passport number listed in documents gathered by the FBI in Malta back in 1991, but never pursued.
The idea behind “My Brother’s Bomber” was to try to establish something true about the plot to bring down Flight 103 Even if parts of the story involving other countries and other groups, remain as mysterious today as Abu Agela was when Ken started this project, it’s something of a relief to know that the story can continue to be fleshed out in whatever ways it still can without Ken himself spending more of his life working on a project that will never bring his brother back.
Hmmmm, Ken put a version of this very question to some of David’s closest friends during the filming of the PBS series and cut together a little video that did not make the final cut, which explained the way that David–who liked to argue passionately with friends and foe alike–may have responded himself to the news that his plane had been bombed.
FOLLOW-UP NEWS ON THE "BOMBMAKER'S" ARREST
KEY SCENES AND PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN FOOTAGE
“Defendant #28”--The Moment the Bomb Expert was First Identified:
After years of looking for a mysterious figure who the FBI failed to identify for decades, and the Libyans denied existed, watch Ken finally connect the dots in a moment from the 2015 documentary that’s at the heart of the current resurgence of interest in the Lockerbie investigation and story.
An Encounter With Dr. Jim Swire
In this scene, filmed in May, 2014 at Jim’s home in The Cotswolds UK, Ken and Jim talk about their decades-long searches for the truth, and Ken presents Jim with new evidence that strongly suggests that Jim may be mistaken in his campaign to clear the name of the one man convicted for the bombing.
A Haunting Look at the Remains of Pan Am 747
Go inside the airplane hangar in the UK which, for years, housed the remains of the plane that had been painstakingly reconstructed from fragments found in around Lockerbie and the Scottish countryside. This video also contains clips of a bomb test carried out by investigators to test their theory of where the Pan Am 103 bomb was placed in the luggage hold.
“Who Was the Passenger in Seat 40K?”
Meet a young, aspiring writer–and unforgettably complicated character–David Dornstein, who was heading back to the United States after six months abroad. It’s a portrait told by some of his closest friends–Tim Blake Nelson, Melissa Brown, Norman Atkins, and Susan Jane Gilman.
