https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/magazine/lockerbie-bombing-justice-father.html
My Father Was a Nazi Hunter. Then He Died in the Lockerbie Bombing.
My Father Prosecuted History’s Crimes. Then He Died in One.
He was a Nazi hunter — and was killed in the Lockerbie bombing. What does it mean to seek justice for his death?
Michael Bernstein had worked for the Office of Special Investigations since 1985.Credit...
On an early summer day in 1986 in a federal building in Newark, my father, Michael Bernstein, sat across a conference table from an elderly man named Stefan Leili. Then a young prosecutor at the Department of Justice, my father spent the previous day and a half deposing Leili, who emigrated to the United States from Germany three decades earlier. While applying for an entry visa, the U.S. government claimed, Leili concealed his service in the Totenkopfverbände — the infamous Death’s Head units of the SS, which ran the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that such an omission was sufficient grounds for denaturalization and deportation. If my father could prove that Leili lied, the United States could strip him of his citizenship and kick him out of the country.
In an earlier interview, Leili repeatedly denied guarding prisoners at Mauthausen, one of a cluster of work camps in Austria, notorious for a stone quarry where slave laborers spent 11-hour days hauling slabs of granite up a steep rock staircase. But my father and a colleague sensed that this time around, the weight of hundreds of detailed queries might finally be causing Leili to buckle. Leili had begun to concede, bit by grudging bit, that he was more involved than he first said. My father had been waiting for such a moment, because he had a piece of evidence he was holding back. Now he decided that it was finally time to use it.
Leili sat next to his college-age granddaughter and a German interpreter. Earlier in the deposition, the young woman said her grandfather was a sweet man, who couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. Indeed, it would have been hard to look at this unremarkable 77-year-old — bald, with a sagging paunch — and perceive a villain.
Certainly, the story Leili first told my father was far from villainous. Born in a small town in 1909 in Austria-Hungary, present-day Romania, Leili was an ethnic German peasant, who like millions of others had been tossed from place to place by the forces convulsing Europe. In 1944, Leili said, the Red Army was advancing toward his village. He had to choose whether to join the Hungarian Army or, like many ethnic Germans from his region, the SS. The Schutzstaffel promised better pay and German citizenship, plus money for his family if he was killed. And besides, if he hadn’t gone along with what the SS wanted, Leili said, he would “have been put against the wall and shot.”
Leili told my father he spent much of his time in the SS pretending to be ill so he wouldn’t have to serve. Then he guarded some prisoners working in a Daimler munitions factory. These were soldiers, not civilians. They had friendly relations, he told my father. They worked short days. They were well fed, even “plump.”
Eventually Leili was sent to the front in Alsace-Lorraine, and in 1945 he was captured by U.S. troops. After his release from a P.O.W. camp, he worked for a decade as a farmhand before U.S. immigration services granted him a visa under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. He moved to New Jersey and found work as a machinist, making a quiet American life, like so many others sloughed off by Europe after the war. Leili was so sure he had done nothing wrong that he didn’t bring a lawyer to his first meeting with my father.
At the table, my father produced a Xerox of a handwritten ledger. He explained that he held in his hands a selection of the register of unnatural deaths — something that the Nazis, in their infernal record-keeping, kept at Mauthausen. The ledger had German headings: Name des Häftlings, Tag des Todes, Lager, Art des Todes, Name des Postens: name of prisoner, day of death, camp, manner of death, name of guard. My father pointed to Line 349. There, written in a neat hand, was the name Léon Axelroud, Dec. 9, 1943, Mauthausen, Erschiessen — shooting — Stefan Leili.
By this point Leili had admitted to my father that he joined the SS in 1943, not 1944, as he initially claimed. Now he asked Leili another question: Why was his name there?
Leili began to confess. In an exhausted voice, the old man said that he was on guard duty that day more than four decades earlier. He had been near the quarry. From a distance of 150 feet, he saw two SS men beating a younger man. Then he saw the man turn and run from the guards, toward a forest. He shot the man in the back and watched him fall to the ground.
“I may have hit him, but someone else finished him off,” Leili said. “I couldn’t let him escape. I had to shoot.” The victim was a Jew who arrived at the camp from Paris two months earlier: Léon Axelroud. He was 17.
After Leili spoke, the room was silent for a long time. Then his granddaughter started to cry.
A confession like this was unheard-of within the Office of Special Investigations, the Department of Justice unit my father had worked for since 1985. The O.S.I. was established in 1979, amid a growing awareness of how many ex-Nazis had entered the country after the war. Its mandate was to bring together historians and lawyers to identify and expel from the United States anyone who assisted the Third Reich in persecuting civilians. That made its employees, colloquially, “Nazi hunters.” It’s a title that calls to mind the larger-than-life figure of Simon Wiesenthal, working a shadowy global network of spies and informants to stalk his notorious prey: Adolf Eichmann, Hermine Braunsteiner, Franz Stangl.
The O.S.I.’s remit was less glamorous. With no jurisdiction over Nazi crimes committed abroad, Department of Justice lawyers pursued fairly technical immigration cases, like the one against Stefan Leili. Many of the men the O.S.I. prosecuted participated in atrocities for which they had never been punished, and then gained entry to the United States through refugee resettlement programs by lying. Immigration court became a venue for the American government to assert that some histories were incompatible with U.S. citizenship.
In most instances, it was sufficient to demonstrate to a judge that a defendant had concealed membership in a group that persecuted civilians, even if the defendant swore that he had little or no choice. Because of this, one important kind of evidence an O.S.I. lawyer could obtain was documentation of membership in such a group. Eyewitness testimony was difficult, across so many years, to connect to any one guard or officer. And earlier confessions given behind the Iron Curtain were useless because it was nearly impossible to persuade American judges they hadn’t been coerced.
By the time my father started at the O.S.I., four decades had passed since the Holocaust, and not everyone saw the point of dragging old men through the American legal system, even if they were former SS guards. Walter Rockler, the O.S.I.’s first director, initially turned his nose up at the job because he thought all the “big-timers” had been tried at Nuremberg, where he was a prosecutor. What would be the point of trying mere trigger-pullers, when the masterminds had already bit down on poison pills, swung from the noose or been locked away? Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative firebrand, lambasted the O.S.I. as a band of vengeance-obsessed sectarians (many of the office’s employees were Jewish) wasting federal dollars on the prosecutions of men in their dotage. “Hairy-chested Nazi hunters,” Buchanan called the O.S.I.’s lawyers, with a characteristic whiff of antisemitism.
The O.S.I. prosecuted some major figures, but a vast majority of its cases concerned unremarkable camp guards and police officers, replaceable men who made up a low caste in the Reich hierarchy. They had neither the connections nor the capital to follow the ratlines to South America, as thousands of Nazis did. They were not valuable to the U.S. government, as the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun — and others — were. Nor were they educated or important enough to be rehabilitated into the West German government — like the former Nazis who, by 1957, made up some 76 percent of the senior officials in the Justice Ministry of the Federal Republic. The typical O.S.I. target had no such luck. He was an ex-Nazi. But he was also a displaced person and a refugee.
Some O.S.I. prosecutors could be aggressive, trying to intimidate defendants through pressure tactics and displays of anger. But not my father, who was known for his perfect manners in the deposition room. A New York Review of Books-reading intellectual who deferred law school to pursue a Ph.D. in history, he came to the O.S.I. from a white-shoe firm in Washington. Colleagues found him urbane, ironic, cerebral, meticulous and a little hard to know. He had built a reputation as the office’s star prosecutor. Paul Le Caër, a Mauthausen survivor who met with my father during an investigation, wrote that he was able to understand “better than anyone else” what Le Caër called nos problèmes de conscience vis-à-vis de nos bourreaux — our problems of conscience toward our executioners.
My father had spoken with survivors about their murdered family and friends. He was proud of his work and good at it. But it wounded him. One night, he came home from a deposition, uncharacteristically emotional. He told my mother that relatives of a defendant had approached him, begging him not to deport their loved one. He was a young father, and he knew how terrible it was to break up a family. He understood that the relatives were victims too, after a fashion.
There was a tension inherent to my father’s work, and he must have felt it. He and his co-workers pursued a grand form of justice against the perpetrators of the worst crime of the 20th century. But the Nazi killing apparatus required such a vast pool of labor that the lives of most of the men my father prosecuted were not grand at all. They were machinists and janitors and factory workers, swept by history and federal policy into starring roles in an epic American story of good and evil. How could these meager figures hold so much meaning?
By 1988, my father had risen to assistant deputy director of the O.S.I., making him third in charge at only 35. But he had started to apply to other jobs. He told my mother that the legal work presented by O.S.I. prosecutions had grown repetitive. His mind was restless.
Then a unique and sensitive assignment fell to him. In 1987, the United States moved to denaturalize a man named Martin Bartesch, another Mauthausen guard, who left for Austria before he could be forced. The Austrian government responded with indignation, claiming that the Americans had given them no notice. When the Austrians tried to return Bartesch, a diplomatic contretemps ensued. Now the O.S.I. needed to send a representative to Austria as part of a delegation to smooth the way for future deportees. Making matters more complicated, the O.S.I.’s top two officials were each involved in the 1987 decision to ban President Kurt Waldheim of Austria from entering the United States, on account of evidence of his own participation in Nazi persecution during World War II. They were personae non grata in Vienna. But my father, tactful, capable and next in line, was not. In the middle of December, my mother dropped him off at Dulles airport — with me, just turned 4, in the back seat of the Toyota station wagon — and he flew to the Austrian capital.
The negotiations took several days. They were friendly. The Austrian government was keen to keep good relations with the United States, which in turn needed the Austrians to cooperate. One night, my father and a State Department attorney, Jeffrey Kovar, worked on the text at the U.S. ambassador’s residence with an Austrian counterpart. The men sat in the small office of the ambassador’s social secretary, hashing out the details, listening to the warm sounds of the embassy Christmas party outside. My father told Kovar that he was going to change his flight to come home early. He missed his family.
That afternoon, Dec. 21, 1988, my father went to the airport, where he caught a flight to Heathrow. From there he boarded a Pan Am 747 bound for J.F.K. and took his seat in the aisle of the middle row, 47D. The plane took off in the early-evening dark and headed toward Scotland. About 35 minutes into the flight, when my father was perhaps sleeping, a bomb exploded in the hold, puncturing the fuselage. Within seconds, the 230-foot, 356-ton plane broke apart in midair, the nose cone shearing off like the lid of a tin can. Huge sections of the 747 plummeted 31,000 feet, nearly six miles, slamming into the ground in a small town called Lockerbie and the surrounding countryside.
They found my father’s body the next afternoon in a place called Halldykes Farm. His was one of 270, each of whom received a number from the Scottish authorities. My father was No. 059. The medical examiner gave his cause of death as “multiple injuries,” a catchall applied to the recovered corpses. In his wallet, rescue workers found $19, as well as his lucky ticket stub from the 1969 Michigan-Ohio State football game, which he attended as a college freshman.
Days later, investigators turned up a fragment of a baggage container bearing traces of Semtex, a plastic explosive. The discovery set in motion an investigation and international legal process spanning all of my conscious life. Now, 36 years later, this fitful odyssey of justice approaches its latest and most significant destination. In 2022, American authorities arrested a 71-year-old Libyan man, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, who is charged with planting the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103, as part of a plot authorized by the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Mas’ud’s trial had been scheduled for May, but it has been delayed indefinitely because of the complexity of the case and the defendant’s health issues. And when he is finally brought before a judge, the Justice Department will prosecute an old man for his role nearly four decades ago in killing scores of innocent people, among them my father — a man whose mission, until his very last moments, was to prosecute killers from four decades earlier.
I have a single memory of my father, if you can call it that. It’s not like a scene from a movie. It’s the feeling of clinging to his laughing back, and the sensation of him lifting me up and over his head and dropping me into his lap. That’s all.
One morning when I was 4, I woke up and walked downstairs in our suburban Washington home, still in my pajamas. A semicircle of adults was sitting in high-backed dining chairs in the living room, waiting for me. They all looked very sad. My mother beckoned me into her lap and told me that Daddy had been killed in a plane crash. That’s my first real memory with a beginning, a middle and an end. According to my mother, I reacted to the news by asking if I could go play with my toys in the other room.
For years, I thought this meant I was too young to understand what had happened. Apparently, for several weeks after the bombing, I would run to the front door whenever the doorbell rang, expecting my father to walk into the house. But I have two little boys now, and I’m no longer sure that I was quite so clueless back then. Four-year-olds think magically, but not stupidly. They weave what adults tell them into the personal myths through which they make sense of the world. This made me perfectly receptive to the somewhat childish logic of the myths people used to make sense of my father’s murder.
Immediately after the bombing, the idea took root that my father’s unusual and violent death was rich with meaning directly related to his work. In a letter to my mother, the secretary of state, George Shultz, wrote, “That it happened as your husband was returning home after the successful conclusion of very important negotiations with Austria makes it even more painful.” Would it have been less painful if he sold vinyl siding? Would it have been less painful if he got hit by a car? The press detected a tragic resonance. “They talk of such a gentle man dying so violently, of how one who ferreted out murderers from one era would fall to those of another,” wrote a legal affairs columnist in The Times. “Terror comes full circle,” blared a headline about my father in The Evening Standard, which called him “one of America’s foremost Nazi hunters.” “Symbolic,” read a section heading. This was before there were even suspects in the bombing.
I grew up with a strange split feeling about my father’s killing. On the one hand, I understood that he died because of a set of freakishly contingent events. He wasn’t targeted because of who he was. But I also felt that he was a symbol, martyred as an avatar of justice, somehow, by people representing the total moral opposite. At the annual Christmas parties of a nonprofit organization called No Greater Love, held for the children of American service members killed in the line of duty, I lined up for autographs from the Washington Redskins with dead soldiers’ kids, feeling simultaneously fraudulent and superior. Years later, I watched an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which a rabbi tells Larry David that his brother-in-law was killed on 9/11, only for Larry to find out that the brother-in-law died that day in a traffic accident uptown. It’s probably the hardest I’ve laughed as an adult.
To preoccupy oneself with contingency as intensely as I have is to invent an endless story about a path not taken, populated with shadows. What if? You make one magic change, and everything else follows from there. These changes can be narrow, as in the alternate universe in which my father does not switch flights home. Or they can be sweeping historical counterfactuals. My grandmother, for example, blamed the Nazis for the death of her only child. After all, if it wasn’t for them, her son never would have worked at the O.S.I., which never would have existed. This is one way my father has haunted me.
Another way he still haunts me is that I cannot help reading the investigation into his murder and the prosecution of his killers as a commentary on his life’s work, even though his life’s work had nothing to do with his killing. For his death to have a meaning beyond brutal chance — wrong place, wrong time — requires this magical turn in thinking: that the bombing is the central event in a symbolic drama of good and evil in which he and his murderers are the players. And for this thinking to make sense on its own terms, justice has to be universal, operating outside the bounds of circumstance. It must be fated. It must not admit contingency.
So, one man sits in federal detention: Abu Agila Mas’ud. Very little is publicly known about him, and much of what we do know comes from a 2022 indictment that is short on detail. It says that Mas’ud worked for nearly 40 years in the intelligence services of Qaddafi, serving “as a technical expert in building explosive devices.” According to the indictment, Mas’ud and other operatives conspired “to commit terrorist acts against the United States of America and its citizens” by placing “a destructive device and explosive substance upon Pan American World Airways Flight 103.” It does not, however, claim that Mas’ud ordered, financed or even helped to plan the bombing.
In a confession Mas’ud made in Libya in 2012, which he has since recanted, he admitted to building the bomb on the orders of his superiors in the Libyan External Security Organization, or E.S.O. To the extent a picture emerges of Mas’ud in the indictment and supporting materials, it is quite unlike the post-9/11 terrorist in the American popular imagination, a murderous zealot charged with holy feeling. Instead, Mas’ud is a node within a bureaucracy of state violence. He is an important soldier, within a chain of command, doing his job.
Lockerbie was the largest terrorist attack on American civilians before 9/11, the biggest story in the world. It was a media event from the start, which produced its own iconic image of destruction: the nose cone of the plane lying sideways in an upland moor. From the first days, the bombing threw off theories and countertheories, stories about advance warnings and ignored intelligence and passengers with connections to drug rings and spy agencies. In short order a cottage industry of cranks and pseudo-experts arose, whose steady emission of contextless facts and unprovable assertions long ago seeped into the popular understanding of the bombing. This atmosphere of conspiracy, in concert with an investigation marked by chance, never-answered questions about the origins of the plot and the cynical calculations of geopolitics, have stranded families of the victims in a maddening zone of uncertainty.
When Pan Am 103 took off from Heathrow, high winds led air traffic control to route the plane north, rather than west over the Irish Sea, the path it usually took. Had it flown west, the 747 would most likely have exploded over the water and sunk to the ocean floor. Instead, the wind scattered metal, cloth, plastic and flesh over some 845 square miles of town, road, forest and field, creating a crime scene almost three times the size of New York City. The caprice of the wind was the only reason there was evidence to recover in the first place.
In December 1988, the most obvious sponsor of such an attack was the Islamic Republic of Iran, not Libya. Five months earlier, a U.S. Navy warship shot down a commercial Iran Air flight over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 civilians. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on his nation to “rush to the front for a fully fledged war against America and its surrogates.” The eye-for-an-eye symmetry of the bombing is one reason some family members and intelligence officers have never accepted the official story, instead believing it more likely that the plot was a revenge operation paid for by Iran and carried out by Palestinian militants.
But forensic evidence from Scotland never supported this. Instead, several weeks after the bombing, members of a line search found a scrap of a man’s shirt into which a fragment of a bomb timer had been embedded. About a year and a half later, an F.B.I. explosives expert identified it as similar to one seized from a Libyan operative in Senegal in 1988. This, and evidence from the rigged suitcase, eventually pointed investigators to two Libyan intelligence officers who worked cover jobs for the Libyan national airline.
Qaddafi also had a motive for the bombing: In 1986, the U.S. Air Force struck targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, reportedly killing 40. And his regime had its own history of sponsoring bombings against Americans. (Indeed, the airstrikes were retaliation for a bombing orchestrated by Libyan agents in West Berlin, at a nightclub popular with American servicemen.) In November 1991, the British and American governments jointly charged Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah with the Lockerbie bombing, claiming that they smuggled an unaccompanied bag containing the Semtex onto an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto the feeder flight Pan Am 103A, which went on to Heathrow.
The Libyan government refused to extradite Megrahi and Fhimah, and for nearly a decade the case stalled. But the story stayed in the news. As a child, I got used to the sight of television crews in our living room, there to interview my mother for any number of segments with chyrons like “Still Waiting for Justice.” She was a powerful advocate with an irresistible narrative: the articulate, photogenic widow of a Nazi hunter murdered by terrorists. Sometimes they shot B-roll of her walking in the backyard, looking off into the middle distance. (Rather than film my older sister and me, the media tended to favor framed photographs taken in the months before the bombing, oversaturated with dramatic irony.) If my mother was wearing dark clothing and thicker makeup than usual as she sipped her morning coffee, I knew she was heading to Capitol Hill. In 1996, Congress passed economic sanctions against Libya, in part because of lobbying by her and the family members of other victims.
In 2000, as I was entering high school, Qaddafi changed his mind and turned over Megrahi and Fhimah. After years of haggling over a suitable venue, the Libyan government agreed to a trial in a Scottish court, brought by its public prosecutor, the Crown Office, and convened in a disused U.S. Air Force base in the Netherlands called Camp Zeist. Qaddafi told the press that he would accept the results of the proceeding but that the investigation should stop there. “If you go further than that, we shall come to an endless chain,” he said. Qaddafi was acknowledging something obvious, that it was impossible to believe that the accused had acted alone or without orders. And beyond the plotters and the plot were the circumstances that led them there, and the circumstances that led to those circumstances, stretching back as far as you wanted to look.
Intentionally or not, Qaddafi was also saying something profound about the nature of criminal prosecutions. They proceed narrowly from a set of provable facts to build a case. The stuff of them, fragments of timers and pages of logbooks, aren’t intended to uncover new information or unravel conspiracies. They’re intended to tell a story that is limited by design. They are sealed containers, on either side of which lies an endless chain.
The trial lasted eight months. The defense poked holes in the Crown Office’s case, mostly having to do with the credibility of shadowy third parties with firsthand information about a state-sponsored plane bombing. In January 2001, when I was 16, I watched the verdict with other families on a closed-circuit TV on a cart wheeled into a room in a federal building in Washington. I remember finding this humorously low-tech, not much different from when they put on a videotape at school. After some preamble, one of the wigged jurists read off the verdict: Megrahi guilty, Fhimah not. In the room in Washington, people cried and hugged, but it was unclear if they were relieved or disappointed. Twelve years after the bombing, after what may have been the largest criminal investigation in history, a single spy had been found culpable for a crime no one in the world believed he had set in motion, committed with a weapon he wasn’t accused of having built.
In 2003, the Libyan government agreed to pay financial compensation to the Pan Am families in the amount of $2.7 billion. This staggering figure was dwarfed by the energy dollars it promised to unlock for Qaddafi when the United States lifted sanctions, as it did in 2004. In a formal letter, Libya accepted “responsibility for the actions of its officials” in the bombing. It was an equivocal and strange statement that both distanced Qaddafi’s state from the attack and admitted more than it needed to — why “officials,” when only one man was convicted? The F.B.I. and the Crown Office still considered Lockerbie an open case. But the trial, the compensation and the statement took on the appearance of a final settlement. I remember, around this time, my mother’s telling me that she hoped I wouldn’t be bitter, despite it all.
I was too young to understand quite what she meant. But as I headed off to college in Chicago, I was certainly the world’s least enthusiastic teenage millionaire. Of course, I knew the compensation was a form of blood money. Also, I knew that as an American, my father’s life was considered much more valuable than those of people from other parts of the world. By contrast, in 1996, the United States paid $61.8 million to the families of the victims of the Iran Air flight, which averages out to a little more than $200,000 per death. And we offered no full-throated apology or admission of fault. In fact, the captain of the ship that shot down the plane received the Legion of Merit in 1990.
To manage my guilt, I developed a heuristic: W.W.M.B.D., or, what would Michael Bernstein do? Surely, he would approve of using Qaddafi’s money to better myself through a private education. Surely he wouldn’t approve of using Qaddafi’s money to buy a sports car. Then there were borderline cases. My father loved Brioni suits, but he could afford them only at Syms. So when it came time to pick a graduation suit, I reasoned, I could buy something designer, as long as it was on sale. After college I moved to New York, ambivalently deploying Qaddafi’s money to supplement my income as an aspiring journalist. Michael Bernstein would approve of my going for my dreams, I figured. Sometimes, I took dates to nicer restaurants than a fact-checker should be able to afford. It had become a flexible standard.
When the Justice Department announced charges against Mas’ud in 2020, Attorney General William Barr spoke of the breakthrough as a product of an unbroken, three-decade quest for justice. “The United States government, on behalf of the American people,” he said, “have never relented and will never relent.”
It was a stirring sentiment. But when squared against the behavior of the American government, it was impossible to take seriously. For eight years after the financial settlement, the United States and other Western nations reintegrated Libya into the global economy and refashioned it as a geopolitical ally. The United States held Qaddafi’s Libya up as a success story in the global war on terror, a former rogue state that had made amends for its murderous past, relinquished its nuclear-weapons program and reoriented its oppressive state apparatus around American foreign-policy priorities. I was left with the absurd feeling that I existed in the eyes of my government as a neutralized obstacle to the global flow of fossil fuels.
The Lockerbie case may not have been closed, but the U.S. government had obviously relented. Far from a coordinated plan to get to the bottom of the bombing, the sequence of events that enabled Mas’ud’s prosecution was unforeseen and chaotic, balls colliding in the bingo cage of history. They were set in motion not by any American action but by the Arab Spring: anti-regime protests in January 2011 that intensified into an armed rebellion. From the start of the Libyan civil war, I hoped the conflict might somehow lead to a fuller understanding of the bombing. I largely kept this wish to myself, for fear of seeming insensitive or parochial. Libyans suffered for decades under Qaddafi, I knew, and the Western decision to back the Libyan rebels with air support had been criticized as overreach by people with whom I often agreed. But I burned for answers. Perhaps they were hidden away in some dusty state archive alongside evidence of all the other crimes of the regime.
Then, in October 2011, rebel militiamen executed Qaddafi. During a battle outside a coastal city, Sirte, they found him hiding in a drainpipe, wounded. Dozens of soldiers recorded the violence with their phones, so it was broadcast online nearly as soon as it happened. The footage is appalling. Qaddafi, surrounded by a clamoring mob, bleeds from his head and mouth as he pleads for his life. The men beat him, sodomize him with a blade and then shoot him.
Stunned, I watched the murder of my childhood boogeyman on an iPhone in my basement apartment in Brooklyn. Friends reached out to ask how I felt, but I didn’t know what to say. I think they were granting me permission to admit that I felt some vicarious release of bloodlust or at least a kind of grim satisfaction. Instead, the act of watching felt surreal and mediated, as so much of my experience of my father’s murder did. Of course, the extrajudicial killing did not signal good things about the competence of the forces that would try to rule Libya. Nor did it augur well for a truth-and-reconciliation process that might, inter alia, shed more light on Lockerbie. I found myself, of all things, regretting that Qaddafi would never stand trial, simply to produce a record of what he had or hadn’t done.
For four years, despite the fervent hopes of the Lockerbie families, nothing happened. Then, in 2015, a PBS “Frontline” producer, Ken Dornstein, whose brother David died aboard Pan Am 103, released a documentary series called “My Brother’s Bomber.” The film follows Dornstein’s attempts to track down and meet various Libyan ex-operatives who were named at the Camp Zeist trial. Dornstein focused especially on one man: Mas’ud, whom he eventually discovered was serving a 10-year prison sentence for setting car bombs during the civil war.
Two days after the final episode of “My Brother’s Bomber” aired, the Crown Office and the U.S. attorney general announced that they had identified two new suspects in the Lockerbie case. While they weren’t named, they were widely understood to be Mas’ud and Abdullah al-Senussi, Qaddafi’s feared former spy chief. Whether Dornstein’s film forced the government’s hand or whether it made the government aware that Mas’ud was in Libyan custody is almost irrelevant; the timing speaks for itself.
Five years later, the Department of Justice charged Mas’ud with destruction of an aircraft resulting in death, and destruction of a vehicle by means of an explosive resulting in death. In order to bring a criminal case against Mas’ud in a U.S. court, the government couldn’t charge him with a murder that happened in Scotland. Instead, it used a statute related to the “special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States” — American plane, American court.
Indicting Mas’ud was one thing; apprehending him was another matter. In the years since Qaddafi’s death, Libya had descended into political chaos. Rival governments in the west and east of the country jockeyed for control of territory and oil reserves through the use of unaccountable militias. Global and regional powers chose sides. This confusing web of forces made unified statecraft impossible, raising the question of who was actually empowered to extradite the suspected bomber.
Mas’ud was released from Libyan prison on medical grounds in 2021. According to Human Rights Watch, early in the morning of Nov. 17, 2022, armed men affiliated with a locally infamous warlord entered his home in a gritty section of Tripoli and dragged him into a car in front of his wife and children. A week later, Mas’ud called his family to tell them he was being held in the Libyan city Misrata by a militia loyal to the Government of National Unity, which the United States and the United Nations recognize as the country’s official government.
On Dec. 11, the Justice Department suddenly announced that Mas’ud was in F.B.I. custody. How he had been turned over was a mystery; officials did not comment on the details of Mas’ud’s deportation or handover. Later, Mas’ud would tell his family that he was blindfolded and driven to a meeting where he heard English spoken. Then he was taken on a short flight — to Malta, he suspected, but he couldn’t be sure — and finally on to the United States. Notably, it was the United States that managed to apprehend Mas’ud, not France, which may also be interested in him for his suspected role in another bombing, in 1989, of a French airliner over Niger. But national victimhood is ranked by the might of states, and the United States comes first.
On Dec. 12, Mas’ud appeared in federal court in Washington to face charges, walking with a limp and complaining of flu symptoms. In his mug shot, he looks every bit of his 71 years. Mas’ud is bald, with a wiry white beard, deep creases under his eyes and nose and a dark prayer callus in the center of his forehead. When I saw the image for the first time, I thought he looked like a grandfather, tired from a long flight.
And I wondered whether Mas’ud, as he crossed the ocean in custody, had reflected on the series of contingencies that brought him here, into the grip of the American legal system: the plane that exploded over Scotland rather than the Irish Sea, the historical wave of popular unrest, the American military intervention, the regime change, the contested confession, the PBS documentary, the flying jurisdiction, the fearsome reach of the American intelligence apparatus. This was a kind of justice that was available only under certain conditions, in certain places, on behalf of certain parties. It was not foreordained. It did not operate according to a cosmic principle or descend from a rational hierarchy of blame.
In March, I spoke with Mas’ud’s nephew, Abdulminaem Al-Marimi, through an interpreter. According to Al-Marimi, who lives in Libya, his uncle suffers from diabetes and back problems and has spent time in an American prison hospital. Al-Marimi, perhaps unsurprisingly, does not think that his uncle was responsible for the bombing. He does not even believe that he was a spy. In a phone call, he told me that Mas’ud’s job under the Qaddafi regime was to run security for the Libyan postal service and that he spent his spare time raising songbirds.
Still, since Mas’ud’s arrest, evidence against him continues to accumulate. In January, two French investigative journalists published a book, “L’assassin qu’il fallait sauver” — “The Murderer Who Had to Be Saved” — based on documents from the personal archives of Abdullah al-Senussi, Qaddafi’s spymaster. (Libyan authorities recently arrested and provisionally released the journalists’ Libyan source and co-author, a sign of the documents’ authenticity.) It quotes memos and reports about the transfer of explosives to Malta, where the bomb is thought to have started its fateful journey into the cargo hold of Pan Am 103, and an October 1988 test of the bomb’s triggering device in Libya with “a suitcase similar to the one used in this mission.” The memo mentions the presence of both Mas’ud and Senussi at the demonstration. The book also details Mas’ud’s possible involvement in a series of other bombings, among them the fateful 1986 discothèque attack in Berlin, which led to the airstrikes, which led to Lockerbie. (The Berlin plot was reportedly carried out in retribution for the American sinking of two Libyan patrol boats in the Gulf of Sidra.) Libya’s attacks targeted civilians, but they came in the broader context of states in a cycle of violent action.
In the confession, Mas’ud said the bomb he was suspected of building to destroy Pan Am 103 was “unfortunately” not detected by airport security, most likely because he had done a good job hiding the detonator and the timer. Unfortunately. There are several ways to think about this word in this context. If the bomb had been discovered, it stands to reason, Mas’ud would not be charged with a federal crime in the United States, which is unfortunate for him. Perhaps he meant that it was unfortunate for the people on the flight, whom he regards not as his victims but as poor souls caught up in a deadly tit for tat. Most likely, I think, is that the word reflects the attitude of a bureaucrat who believes his responsibility begins and ends with his assigned function, for whom questions of morality are irrelevant.
A case can be made that Senussi bears far more responsibility for the bombing than Mas’ud. But he remains in Libya. Senussi is from a powerful tribe — he is Qaddafi’s brother-in-law — and presumably has decades of knowledge about the murky world of espionage and state violence. He is a more precious bargaining chip. So, it is Mas’ud on trial.
And though Mas’ud is charged with crimes that do not have statutes of limitation, his suspected responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 is in fact limited: He is only one participant in a conspiracy that led to my father’s death. At times, I confess, I have felt exhausted at the prospect of adding another chapter to the flawed book of justice written in the name of my father and the other dead. I have witnessed incomplete justice, in the trial of Megrahi and Fhimah; primitive justice, when Qaddafi was butchered; and queasy justice, when my father’s life was assigned a dollar-denominated value during a negotiation among attorneys, which was wired to my family after clearing escrow.
Over time, the piecemeal and uncertain nature of the justice in the Lockerbie case has worn away at the cherished myths of my childhood. Mas’ud’s trial, which comes after a yearslong cascade of unlikely chances, feels to me like the endpoint of all that erosion. Whatever true thrust of justice I may once have imagined leading to the judgment of my father’s killers, this has not been it. It has come after too many twists, compromises and doubts. Whatever I may once have imagined an incarnation of pure evil to look like, Mas’ud does not resemble it. He is an ailing septuagenarian, whittled into shape, like all of us, by forces beyond his control: a human being.
Indeed, what these episodes have taught me is that justice is only ever dispensed by those with the ability to wield it in the context that they are able. My father was an American citizen, and so the latest justice to which he is entitled, given the context, is the prosecution of an old man, for a crime he is charged with committing 36 years ago, under orders.
Since the Nuremberg trials, it has been a principle of international law that crimes legitimized by a state bureaucracy are still crimes. At the same time, political philosophers since Hobbes have argued that justice requires a sovereign — only under a legitimate authority can there be any faith that justice will be enforced consistently. But there is no global sovereign, just a balance of national powers. The American government has a chance to hold someone accountable for those crimes after so many years, just as my father did. Even if this accountability is a product of a certain place and time, and even if others deserve it more, our prerogative as a superpower is to demand it.
What this means is that we have the power to invest certain crimes with special meaning, to insert their perpetrators into the drama of American self-understanding. Stefan Leili and Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi are just men. But when our government pursues them across decades and moves them across borders to make them pay for what they have done, we aren’t just applying the law to a set of contingent facts. We are choosing to add the punishment of these crimes to our national myth. One part of that myth says there can be no Nazis here. Another says that our government will stop at nothing to enact justice for its citizens. Like all myths, these ones can be revised, argued against, historicized, disbelieved. I am a reporter, a professional skeptic, and this habit of mind comes easily to me. But perhaps there is still a part of me, a frightened boy, who craves the comfort of a simpler story about justice.
I have found it hard to muster hatred for Mas’ud. Part of this may be my own vanity. Since I was a boy, I have taken pride in showing the world an uninjured face. And I was so young in 1988. For me there was no before to mourn, only a hypothetical future I never experienced. Instead, there has just been my life. In some sense, truly hating Mas’ud would require abnegating my own existence. In this way, we are connected. We are connected in other ways, too — ones that I can’t understand and can only feel.
A few months after Mas’ud arrived in the United States, I stopped sleeping. It began the night before a work trip, one of my first since the birth of my second child. I’ve never been afraid to fly, but on the plane, I started to choke. In my dingy airport hotel room, I drew the blinds and tried to rest, but I couldn’t lie still. I called my family and could hardly focus, I was so overwhelmed by the feeling that I would never return to them. The next day, I found a dark bar and drank myself into a stupor.
When I got home, I kept running my hands through my boys’ hair and kissing their heads. I felt that something catastrophic was going to happen to me. At night, I dragged a spare mattress into our makeshift home office so I wouldn’t bother my wife. In the dark, I kept imagining what it might feel like to be embraced by my father. Sometimes, toward daybreak, I would fade in and out of half-sleep, dreaming vivid scenes. In one of them, I sat in a small metal airframe gliding along a metal rail suspended high above the water. There was no floor beneath the metal trusses. I was clutching both of my sons, who were wriggling to escape, to grasp the bars, to play. They were laughing, and I was frantic.
It was as if three generations — me, my father, my sons — were compressed together in time, in midair. My father’s death was making me fear I would follow him, leaving my sons behind; through my boys, I was experiencing what I had lost, before I could even know what it meant. I began to dread that I was doomed to hold them back from the innocent joy that should be the birthright of every child.
The men who murdered my father destroyed the life I might have lived. But they also created a new one, the one I went on to lead. In this life, I met a girl through an unpaid internship in New York City that I was able to afford only because of the settlement money I received seven years earlier. Eventually, we fell in love. I have learned to remind myself that a life that includes her and my boys cannot possibly be the wrong one.
Of course, my children will learn about Pan Am 103. They have already started to ask why their daddy doesn’t have a daddy. Soon, they will want to know about the way he died. So perhaps they should learn about Lockerbie from the trial of Abu Agila Mas’ud.
Beyond that, what larger purpose will this proceeding serve? It is hard to imagine the trial as a deterrent; the bombing happened in an almost unrecognizable geopolitical landscape. It is unlikely, as far as I know, to introduce anything revelatory about the plot to destroy the airliner. The truth is, like my father’s work, the trial’s purpose is symbolic. It declares that these are a few pieces of a tragic history that cannot be ignored. Look at them — not the rest.
Symbols are at odds with contingencies, which defy them. But symbols let us tell stories, which can help us create meaning even as we are oppressed by the indifference of the universe. They help us proceed through a world whose complexity exceeds even our most desperate attempts at understanding.
This is why, when my children ask about my father, I think I will tell them that Michael Bernstein was a good man, who was killed by bad men — but you and I are safe, because we brought them to justice.
Read by Robert Petkoff
Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan and Emma Kehlbeck
Engineered by Quinton Kamara
Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section.
A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2025, Page 28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Crimes Of History. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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