It was only afterwards – after the dust had settled and all the reporters and supporters had gone home – that Bert Ammermann finally calmed down enough to realise what he had done.
Here he was – the same Bert Ammerman who had spent his life coaching football and teaching history at the High School, who once daydreamed he might run for the town council, who lived quietly with his wife and two daughters and a dog that scratched hell out of the furniture – here he was walking into the White House, sitting down opposite the President of the United States of America and personally giving him a piece of his mind. It was hard to believe.
Ammerman’s whole life has been that way ever since that Wednesday afternoon last December when a waitress came wandering through the restaurant where he was holding a Christmas party with some other teachers from the High School, asking: “Is there a Bert here? There’s a phone call for someone called Bert.”
A moment later, he was on the phone, hearing that his younger brother, Tom, had been in a plane crash. The rest of that afternoon was a struggle between a faint hope that Tom had kept his original booking on a flight which had landed safely and the growing certainty that he had changed at the last minute to Pan Am flight 103 which had been mysteriously destroyed 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Even then, as the scale of the disaster which had killed his brother became clear, there was never a hint of how events were about to seize Bert Ammerman and hurl him into a world of power and politics and conspiracy in high places.
Ammerman is the model of a middle-class American: a God-fearing, patriotic Republican who has lived almost all his 42 years in the same comfortable little town of Howarth, half an hour’s drive from New York in the green fields of New Jersey. He has a jovial, bear-hugging, table-thumping kind of aggression about him, and he is in the habit of getting his way.
Like the time he applied for the job of football coach at the school. High School officials told him he lacked experience. “Well, how am I ever gonna get any experience if you don’t give me a break?” he demanded. They gave him the job, and in his second season, the team won the biggest thing they could win -the state championship – for the first time in their history. Ammerman was immediately rewarded with a new job as assistant principal – and he learned a lesson about officials which he never forgot.
The day of the Lockerbie disaster, Pan Am were urging American relatives not to travel to the UK. Ammerman insisted. “There was no way I was going to have strangers dictating to me about my brother.” He was one of only 27 relatives who took the first flight to England.
In London, American and British officials told them not to go on to Lockerbie. Ammerman insisted and he was one of only seven relatives who arrived in the stricken town within 48 hours of the disaster. In Lockerbie, town officials explained that it was not possible to visit the site of the crash. “Let’s make a deal,” said Ammerman. “You provide the Scottish hospitality. I’ll provide the American sneakiness.” An hour later, after a cross-country hike and a scramble through barbed wire, he was at the site, awe-struck by the devastation.
The relatives who stayed behind found even more obstructions being placed in their way.
The State Department – the American equivalent of the Foreign Office – seemed to know nothing. Desperate for information and, later, for the return of their loved ones and their property, relatives kept calling the department’s HQ in Washington only to find themselves being put on hold and left there, or being told that their calls would be returned and then never hearing another word, or, in one case, being told “Listen, lady, your husband is dead. Wake up.” In their anger, some of them wrote to the White House to complain to the President, but none of them ever received a reply.
It was the same story at Pan Am. One family was informed that their relative was dead in an abrupt message left on their answer machine. Another discovered that the body of their dead father had arrived back in the United States when they were notified that “your shipment has arrived”. The Pan Am “hot line” which was supposed to give them information about the disaster connected them to a ticket desk which played muzak while they waited endlessly on hold. None of the families received any apology from the air line.
The relatives began to feel unwanted. There was no national mourning as there had been with other terrorist incidents, no sign of the President meeting with the bereaved or even sending his condolences, no hint of retaliation or any political initiative, no sign of Government aid for the families now struggling to survive.
At first, Ammerman shrugged it all off. All he had ever wanted to do was to get his brother’s body back to New Jersey and try to help the widow and two small children who had been left behind. It was several weeks later, in early February, before he began to wonder whether this wall of indifference might have been built out of something more than bureaucratic incompetence. It was more like the relatives were being deliberately blocked, as if there was some kind of cover-up going on.
Some worrying clues were beginning to surface: the intelligence agencies who had been saying for weeks that a Pan Am jet was about to be blown out of the sky; the warnings that had never been published; the warnings that had gone astray in the post; and, most worrying of all, the empty seats.
Numerous travellers reported that in early December they had been unable to buy seats on Pan Am 103 because it was fully booked. Yet by the time it took off, there were rows and rows of empty seats – nearly 200 of them. An ugly conspiracy theory began to take shape.
In the months before the disaster, Washington had been trying to open up a peace initiative in the Middle East – some strategy which might free their hostages from Beirut and secure their oil routes through the Gulf. However, the Iranians were unco-operative, still enraged over the incident, only six months earlier, when 290 of their civilians had been blown out of the sky over the Gulf by an American warship. And so – according to the conspiracy theory – Washington had agreed to sacrifice a civilian plane of their own, had ensured that select groups of people steered clear of the flight and had then abandoned the others to their fate.
Ammerman could not bring himself to believe the theory. “If I start to believe it, then there’s nothing left. I would become a radical. I would become a saboteur. It would be one hell of a corrupt system. But there are relatives who do believe it.”
On Sunday February 19, Ammerman and some of the other relatives met in a restaurant in New Jersey and determined to get to the truth, however ugly it might be. Carried forward by his natural aggression, Ammerman took a seat on the steering committee and was put in charge of political activity, campaigning for a public inquiry and new measures against terrorism. His new life was beginning.
He was used to dealing with the local newspaper after football matches; suddenly he was fielding calls from newspapers across the globe and talking to ranks of reporters at press conferences. In the past, he had made speeches at athletics dinners. Now, he was taking the podium at one public gathering after another, discovering a passion for oratory which brought crowds to their feet in standing ovations. As a member of the teachers’ union, he had negotiated pay rises with local schools. Now, he was in Washington DC, trading threats and promises with Congressmen.
He walked into a Senate Committee to hear the State Department describe its many achievements in helping the families of Pan Am 103. Ammerman took the stand and roundly accused the State Department of dishonesty, arrogance and incompetence and then talked non-stop for an hour and a quarter, unloading the bitterness of the families and finally extracting an apology from bruised State Department officials.
As he delved deeped into the truth, anger swamped his sorrow. “The more I got into it, the more I realised that it could have been prevented, the more I realised that the American Government and the British Government had fouled up. I was hoping they could show us that they had taken all the prudent security steps and that I could go to my family and Tommy’s family and say ‘OK Tommy was just unlucky’. But I couldn’t do that because it wasn’t true and the more I got into this, the more I saw that, in a sense, the Governments were accomplices.
“Those terrorists didn’t have to do anything clever to kill Tommy and all those other people. It was easy. There was no security to stop them putting a bomb on that plane. None. The Government knew the risk and they did nothing. Air lines knew the risk and they did nothing. This is all about greed and power and the almighty dollar. If you subcontract your security to the lowest bidder, you pay the minimum price – and you get the minimum result.”
Ammerman never pretended he knew anything about politics. “I had no experience at this. I had no experience being a football coach. So what? Life is politics. Every day at school I have to get people to do things they don’t want to do, to accept decisions, even if I can’t get them to like them. It’s just dealing with people.”
Spurred on by their growing anger, the relatives invested all their energy in the campaign. Pan Am and the State Department continued to offer them a cold shoulder, refusing to give them the full list of families who had lost people in the disaster on the grounds that the information was private. That was when Ammerman took his first step towards the White House.
At a meeting at his house in mid March, the relatives decided to hold a vigil outside the White House on April 3, a symbolic 103 days after the disaster. On the same day, they would try and meet with every Senator on Capitol Hill – and with the President himself.
Ammerman was now working at a furious pace, spending the days at school interviewing new teachers and sorting out squabbles with parents, then working into the small hours every evening and 12 hours a day on weekends, calling supporters, writing to Congressmen, endlessly picking up the phone and barking “Burdammerman”.
Other relatives were working just as hard. Wendy Giebler, who earned a living in a video store, became a speech writer of extraordinary eloquence. Paul Hudson, an attorney from New York State, became an expert on aviation law. Bonny O’Connor, a housewife, became a PR hustler, wedging the campaign into chat shows, network news broadcasts and any other outlet that would give them a platform. Others made video films expressing their concerns, organised public meetings on air safety, became students of counter-terrorism and Middle East politics and international law.
Their frenzied activity came to a head in Washington on April 3 when, after two days of press conferences and speeches and meetings with Senators, Bert Ammerman and four other relatives found themselves walking through the wrought iron gates outside the White House and being ushered down the long carpetted corridors and into the Oval Office to meet the most powerful politician in the world.
Ammerman felt no stage fright. “I could have spoken to God that day. I was so focussed on making him understand. You know when you’re switched on and, that day, I was ready for him.”
President Bush’s aides had told them that they could have just 20 minutes and warned them that that probably meant only 18. President Mubarak of Egypt was waiting outside. But, in the event, as Ammerman and his friends started to pour out their anger and grief, Bush let them talk for 70 minutes.
Bert Ammerman – the teacher from Howarth, New Jersey – bluntly advised the President that his State Department were liars. Bush looked shocked. He catalogued the indifference which had been suffered by relatives. Bush shook his head sadly. He listed a series of measures which could be taken to make life more difficult for terrorists – one intelligence agency to collate all information, a new role for the counter-terrorism chief, a complete overhaul of inadequate airport security.
Bush nodded sympathetically – as Ammerman and the others knew he would, since the measures they were proposing were all taken from a report on terrorism which had been produced two years earlier and which had remained largely unimplemented. The author of the report was George Bush.
Then they gave the President a copy of the video they had made -ten minutes of angry grief-stricken relatives indicting the US Government. Ammerman told him: “I know you get given a whole bunch of stuff which you never see again, but I’m asking you now, man to man, to watch this.”
Ammerman was impressed by Bush, but he is still not happy with the facts or policies provided by the Governments of America or the United Kingdom. “I think the leaders of both countries are shortchanging the intelligence of their citizens. If Mr Bush -whom I respect – wants to be a one-term President, he and his administration should carry on the way they’ve been acting. And I find it incomprehensible that the British transport secretary Channon is still in his job. I can’t believe that British citizens won’t ask for a change if Mrs Thatcher leaves him there.”
The Pan Am campaign now has more than 400 members. Ammerman is a familiar face on American television and a ferocious public speaker. A public inquiry in the US Congress is now within sight. The campaign has already won radical changes to the laws on compensation for the victims of air crashes. But Ammerman still fights on, still looking for the whole truth.
“I am addicted to this,” he said. “I really am. There are some of the relatives who can’t handle this kind of thing. But there are others who are using it to deal with the grief. And I put myself into that category. As long as I’m doing this, my brother is alive.
“I haven’t changed one bit. But all of a suden, what I think matters. All of a sudden, I have become a credible source. I guess it’s a compliment to the way I’ve handled myself, but I still find it absolutely amazing. I go to all these places and speak and I get a standing ovation and 100% support and I’m feeling great and then I remember what this is really all about and I’m back in the gutter again.”
