British and US officials say the Lockerbie investigation has been steered by just one thing: the evidence.

But some relatives of those killed on Pan Am 103 and expert observers have speculated that Middle East politics may have played a role, too. The early suspects, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), had close ties to Syrian intelligence agencies. "Having the PFLP-GC under the microscope also meant having the Syrian government under the microscope," says former CIA counter-terrorism chief Cannistraro.

But while investigating the PFLP-GC, the West was actively courting the man who gave that group haven, Syrian President Haffez Assad, for his help in the Middle East peace process. Then, in August, 1990, a new crisis erupted - the Gulf War - giving the administration yet another reason to do business with Damascus.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Bush Administration rallied an international coalition to confront Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Syria joined the alliance and sent troops for Operation Desert Storm - a step of crucial symbolic importance in building support for the alliance among Arab countries, analysts say. Secretary of State James Baker rewarded Assad by visiting him in Damascus in the fall of 1990. Critics suggested the visit sent the wrong message on terrorism. Baker bristled: "We are not embracing Syria and everything that Syria has done with which we disagree."

Nonetheless, when the Bush Administration cleared the Syria-based terrorists in the Lockerbie bombing a year later, some relatives of Pan Am 103 victims wondered out loud if a deal had been done. That suspicion was heightened by the release, four days after the indictments, of prominent Western hostages Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland, who'd been held in Beirut by Hizbollah terrorists under the control of the Syrian government.

Jim Swire, whose daughter died on Pan Am 103, says it was plainly in the interests of the British and American governments to absolve Syria and accuse Libya instead.

"That doesn't mean that Libya or Libyan citizens are guilty or not guilty," Swire says. "It merely undermines my faith as an individual in what governments are telling me because it is so extremely convenient for them."

"Certainly had the evidence led to Syria at that time, it would have been extremely inconvenient and very, very complicated in the US diplomacy," says Middle East expert Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. "So if evidence later came that implicated Libya, that certainly would lead to a sense of relief that it was not Syria."

Telhami says he assumes that the turn in the Lockerbie investigation was made in good faith. Another expert thinks otherwise.

Noel Koch, the former counter-terrorism chief at the Pentagon, says his opinion about Lockerbie is based on a reading of the evidence - he finds the case against the Libyans thoroughly unpersuasive - and on his inside observations of the Reagan/Bush Administration's approach to state-sponsored terrorism. In the 1980s, Koch sat on an anti-terrorism task force headed by then-Vice President Bush. He was constantly frustrated, he says, by what he describes as the administration's unwillingness to take firm action against all Middle East nations that sponsored terrorism.

"Whenever you got to the point where you needed to take some overt action to demonstrate you were actually doing something about terrorism, Libya was the preferred target," Koch says, "simply because Colonel Qadhafi himself was viewed in the Islamic world as an apostate, in the Arab world as a pariah. Nothing much was lost by going after him. A great deal could be lost by going after Syria or Iran or Iraq or other countries that had an involvement in terrorism and which were, in fact, known by the United States to be involved in terrorism."

Koch says he's convinced that, two years after he left the Pentagon, the administration of then-President Bush repeated the pattern of scapegoating Libya in the case of Pan Am 103.

Former President Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker both declined to be interviewed for this report.

Buck Revell, who oversaw the Lockerbie investigation for the FBI until six months before the Libyans were indicted, denies suggestions of political influence. "There was never any indication from President Reagan or thereafter President Bush - any interjection of any geopolitical concerns." Revell adds that if either president had tried to influence the investigation, "We would have had to end up with a special prosecutor."

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