“Golfer was interviewed three times by the SCCRC officials but to date his identity has been one of the most closely guarded secrets concerning the whole Lockerbie affair. Let’s underline Golfer’s importance. If Lockerbie is Scotland’s Watergate then Golfer is our Deep Throat.”
Policing Lockerbie, A Bella Caledonia Special Investigation (Sept. 7 2011)
February 24 2021 — Over the last two decades, many people have tried to identify the GOLFER, but no one ever succeeded. Based on our research, Intel Today can reveal that retired Detective Sergeant Ian Hazelton was the GOLFER. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY
RELATED POST: Lockerbie — Lobster Magazine : The View From The Bridge by Robin Ramsay
RELATED POST: Lockerbie — Who Is The Mysterious GOLFER? [Part I : Trust No One]
RELATED POST: Lockerbie — Who Is The Mysterious GOLFER? — Part II : “Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” [UPDATE]
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Lockerbie — Three Decades of Lies: J’Accuse…!
To make it easier for the readers to retrieve various chapters of my book, I have created a special page “Lockerbie” where all the links to the chapters will be listed with a brief description.
You can access that page directly as it appears at the far right of the top bar of this blog.
Lockerbie — Three Decades of Lies: J’Accuse…!
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In May 2012, the Sunday Herald published the full Lockerbie Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) 800-page report. For those who like statistics, this report contains 285,300 words, and a total of 1,384,109 (no space) characters.
The chapter regarding GOLFER was redacted to hide his identity. But one letter of just one word had been only partially redacted. After a bit of thinking, I came to the conclusion that this letter was a (Times New Roman) capital G. And that was all that was needed to start cracking a two-decade-old secret.
Ian Hazelton (born August 13 1947) retired [as a Detective Sergeant] from the Strathclyde police in 1995 after 30 years of service. Ian Hazelton was the source of David Leppard’s article and he is the GOLFER.
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5.17 Prior to the start of the interview, the Golfer (
who introduced himself as“Ian”) informed the senior legal officer of some additional concerns he had regarding his involvement in the Commission’s enquiries.SCCRC [Redacted]
Who was the GOLFER?
Ian Hazelton (born August 13 1947) retired [as a Detective Sergeant] from the Strathclyde police in 1995 after 30 years of service.
Hazelton was on the witness list [n° 517] but he did not testify. His name does not appear once in the trial’s transcripts.
Ian Hazelton was already the source of Leppard’s articles in the late 80’s. [Hazelton and Leppard may be related. (uncle/nephew)]
“5.1 In the application to the Commission reference is made to a former police officer who, it is alleged, worked at a senior level in the original enquiry and could provide “sensitive” information about various aspects of the case. The true identity of this witness is not disclosed; instead a pseudonym, ‘the Golfer’, is used.”
SCCRC — CHAPTER 5 — “THE GOLFER”
What did the GOLFER claim?
According to the SCCRC Report [5.9], the Golfer claimed that he had “profiled” Pan Am 103 passenger Khaled Jaafar, and he was adamant that Jaafar had carried the bomb in a suitcase placed in the hold of the aircraft.
[This statement was redacted in the SCCRC report published by the Sunday Herald.]
RELATED POST: On This Day — USMC Col. William R. Higgins Is Abducted in Lebanon (February 17 1988) [2021 UPDATE — The Lockerbie X FILE]
The GOLFER also alleged that he had purchased alarm clocks from a supplier in Germany frequented by the Autumn Leaves suspects, which transpired to be a forensic match to recovered fragments of the improvised explosive device used to bomb PA103.
[This statement was also redacted in the SCCRC report published by the Sunday Herald.]
Both statements are untrue and the second one helped me in identifying the GOLFER because Ian Hazelton already made this anachronistic claim in the late 80’s when he was the source of David Leppard’s articles.
[And by the way, DS John McGowan — also from the Strathclyde police force — is the Police officer who profiled Khaled Jaafar.]
Actually, Khaled Jaafar was neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler as the GOLFER and others have alleged.
The Lockerbie investigators knew very early on that he was living a double life. His employer was the US ARMED FORCES.
Jaafar was working as an informant for CIA Matthew Kevin Gannon [Beirut COS] and Defense Intelligence Agency Major Charles – Chuck – Dennis McKee.
[Despite McKee being seated at the front and Jaafar at the very back of the plane, their bodies were found a few yards from each other. Considering that the plane broke in flight at section 41/42, it is rather obvious that the two were together at the moment of this tragedy.]
How did Intel Today manage to unmask the GOLFER?
In my previous posts, I have explained how I had managed to ‘read’ a redacted sentence which indicates that, during his first interview, GOLFER told the SCCRC investigators that he had worked in Germany.
Here is a quick summary. In June 2019, I managed to guess a key redacted part of the Lockerbie SCCRC report.
On June 17 2019, in the second part of this series — Lockerbie — Who Is The Mysterious GOLFER? [Part II : Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.] — I wrote:
“Let us magnify the first redacted part of paragraph 5-18. About 7 characters before the end, the top of a letter appears clearly. It is a capital — upper case — ‘G’. [The report probably uses the ‘Times New Roman’ font.] And the last character seems to be a ‘y’. Could the proper name be ‘Germany’?
And how does the SCCRC Report refer to ‘Germany’ anyway? The SCCRC Report uses the following expression: “the former West Germany”. And that is a perfect match!”
And here is the non-redacted paragraph 5.18 which I have obtained earlier this month.:
I then compared what I had learned about GOLFER from the SCCRC report to what was known about the Lockerbie investigators seconded to West Germany. And to my surprise, none of them could be the GOLFER.
The only explanation was that Golfer had lied to the SCCRC, and I could remember that DS Ian Hazelton had told the same lie to David Leppard two decades earlier.
There is some real irony in this story. GOLFER had hoped that he could hide behind a lie, and for many years he succeeded. But, in the end, it is this very lie that allowed me to identify him.
In fact, that false statement had been redacted in the SCCRC report published in May 2012.
5.9 The memorandum goes on to list a number of “revelations” made by the
Golfer during the meeting. These included: (…)—
that the Golfer purchased alarm clocks from a supplier in Germany frequented by the Autumn Leaves suspects, which transpired to be a forensic match to recovered fragments of the improvised explosive device used to bomb PA103.
In May 1991, Leppard published a book titled: “On the trail of terror”. Much of the book was based on the series published in the Sunday Times.
In his book [page 97], Leppard writes that:
“Detective Sergeant Ian Hazelton, from LICC, was sent to Germany to buy clocks similar to those found in the PFLP-GC flat in Neuss.”
This statement is a transparent lie. The source of this idiotic and anachronistic ‘information’ can only be Detective Sergeant Ian Hazelton himself.
Concerned by the leaks published by the Sunday Times, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr — the Senior Investigating Officer — dispatched two officers to interview Leppard in order to discover his source.
As a result, Detective Sergeant Ian Hazelton was removed from the Lockerbie investigation.
[This incident happened very early on, possibly in April/March 1989. Contrary to what he told the Commission, GOLFER did not work two years on he Lockerbie investigation.]
Why did experts fail to detect GOLFER’s lies?
Although it has been a serious challenge to identify the GOLFER, it should have been obvious to the Lockerbie experts that he was a liar and a fabricator.
And yet, some ‘Lockerbie experts’ continue to believe his lies to this day!
At some point, GOLFER suggested that DS Alexander Gay could confirm some of his allegations.
There is however no doubt whatsoever that the GOLFER deliberately misled the Commission by proffering him in support of his lies.
Mr Gay had in fact committed suicide a decade earlier — on February 16 1992 — a time when the GOLFER was also a serving officer with Strathclyde Police and his death was, as one might expect, well known among his fellow officers.
When the information about Mr Gay’s death was put to him at his final meeting with members of the SCCRC enquiry team on March 10 2005, the GOLFER denied any prior knowledge of it.
During one of the SCCRC interviews, the GOLFER revealed that he had “worked” at MacKechnie & Associates’ office.
In the Commission’s view, this involvement with the company “went beyond that normally expected of a witness.”
As researcher and author John Ashton wrote:
“There is little doubt that these episodes soured the Commission’s view of MacKechnie’s further submission and may have cost his team a good deal of credibility.”
The lies of the GOLFER were a terrible distraction for the SCCRC officers. As a result, they became convinced that there was no credibility to the allegation that evidence had been fabricated.
RELATED POST: Lockerbie — The Mysterious Case of David Harvie
And thus, they ignored the irrefutable scientific evidence that PT/35(b) — the key piece of evidence linking Libya to Lockerbie — is a forgery.
“Folks in Scotland like to say that, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ I want to know who paid for GOLFER’s lies. Everything else will follow…”
Intel Today (Aug. 18 2020)
REFERENCES
Policing Lockerbie, A Bella Caledonia Special Investigation (September 7 2011)
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Lockerbie — Unmasking the GOLFER. Who was Lockerbie Deep Throat?
Intel Today 