were headed to Washington to raise their concerns about its impact on their hostage rescue plans. Juval Aviv introduced a variation of this story in October 1989. Aviv was the owner of Interfor Inc, a private investigation company based on Madison Avenue, New York. Aviv claimed to be a former Mossad officer who led the Operation Wrath of God team that assassinated members of Black September who were believed to have been responsible for the Munich Massacre in 1972. According to his theory, the CIA knew in advance that the baggage exchange would take place, but let it happen anyway, because the protected drugs route was a rogue operation, and Gannon and McKee were on their way to Washington to tell their superiors about it. After PA 103, Aviv was employed by Pan Am as their lead investigator for the bombing. He submitted a report (the Interfor Report) in October 1989, blaming the bombing on a CIA-protected drug route (Barrons December 17, 1989). This scenario provided Pan Am with a credible defense against claims for compensation by relatives of victims, since, if the U.S. government had helped the bomb bypass Pan Am's security, the airline could hardly have been held liable. The Interfor report alleged inter alia that Khalid Jafaar, a Lebanese-American passenger with links to Hezbollah, had unwittingly brought the bomb on board thinking he was carrying drugs on behalf of Syrian drug dealers he supposedly worked for. However, the New York court, which heard the civil case lodged by the U.S. relatives, rejected the Interfor allegations for lack of evidence. Aviv was never interviewed by either the Scottish police or the FBI in connection with PA 103. The theory of the CIA-protected suitcase was detailed as well in Patrick Pesnot's Rendez-vous avec X radio program in June 1998. In 1990 the protected-suitcase theory was given a new lease on life by Lester Coleman in his book Trail of the Octopus. Coleman was a former journalist turned intelligence agent working with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) while employed by DIA in Cyprus. Coleman claimed to have seen Khalid Jafaar in the DEA office in Nicosia, Cyprus, once again implying that Jafaar was a drug mule, but this time for the DEA instead of Syrian drug dealers. In 1997, Coleman pleaded guilty to five counts of perjury in a federal court after admitting that he submitted false testimony in civil