Allan Francovich

Allan Francovich - charlatan or filmmaker extraordinaire?

Allan Francovich (March 23, 1941 – April 24, 1997) was an American film producer/director who made a series of films focused primarily on the activities of the CIA, though touching on other aspects of deep politics unaddressed in the commercially-controlled media. Francovich died in mysterious circumstances while going through customs at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas, allegedly of a heart attack.

In July 2013, on Professor Black's blog, Lockerbie commentator Barry Walker accused Allan Francovich of peddling the "drug conspiracy theory" and called him a "charlatan".

Productions

"The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie"

"The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie"

Full article: The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie

Allan Francovich produced, wrote and directed the documentary film The Maltese Double Cross, which challenged the Lockerbie Official Narrative that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988. The film, researched by John Ashton, suggests that the bomb was carried on board the feeder flight Pan Am 103A at Frankfurt airport by an unwitting drug mule, Khalid Jafaar, who had links to Hezbollah, the Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the CIA.

When his British production company, Hemar Enterprises, released the film in November 1994, it was immediately threatened with legal action by lawyers acting for a US government official (possibly the DEA's Michael Hurley). Several screenings of the film were prevented, but Labour MP Tam Dalyell ignored libel warnings and showed the film at the British House of Commons on November 16, 1994. It was shown on UK national TV (Channel 4) on May 11, 1995., but possibly because of the likelihood of legal action, it has never been publicly screened in USA. It can however be viewed on the internet..

Letter to The Guardian

The day after the Channel 4 broadcast, The Guardian published a letter from Francovich headed "The Lockerbie smears":

"The attacks by the UK and US authorities on my film "The Maltese Double Cross" ("UK and US scorn Lockerbie film", May 11) are exactly what we predicted would happen. The aim is to smear people in the film in order to divert attention from the mass of evidence that supports our claims.

"The film shows how Lockerbie was masterminded by Iran and Syria, not Libya, and that the bomb got on the plane through a botched US intelligence operation based on Middle East drugs and hostages. Elements within western intelligence knew what was happening but failed to act. The authorities can never admit this, as to do so would make Watergate look like a vicar's tea party.

"The smears referred to have been circulating for years and have been used to attack anyone who has suggested that US government agencies have dirty hands in the affair. The latest round of attacks was begun in a letter to Tam Dalyell MP by a Todd Leventhal, of the US Information Agency, who has the Orwellian title "Program Officer for Countering Disinformation and Misinformation". It is disturbing that the supposedly independent Scottish Crown Office should choose to repeat Leventhal's allegations without question.

"The full Crown Office statement states that the Lord Advocate deprecates all attempts to give a version of the Lockerbie story while criminal proceedings are pending. It goes on: 'The proper place for such issues to be explored is in a criminal court.'

"This argument was substantially undermined on November 15, 1991, only a day after the indictments were issued against the two Libyan accused. On that day the US State Department issued 'fact sheets' which detailed the evidence against the two accused. The information they contained has been repeated in numerous media reports and at least two books published in the UK since that time. One of the media reports was an item about how the Scottish and US authorities 'solved' the Lockerbie case, contained in a BBC 'How Do They Do That?' programme broadcast on February 15, 1994. It featured the former Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway Police, John Boyd. So far as we are aware, neither the Crown Office nor the Lord Advocate ever issued similarly critical statements against the BBC, John Boyd, or any of the other broadcasters, newspapers or book publishers which have raked over the evidence.

"The British and US authorities insist that the Lockerbie case is still open. Yet during the months my team has been investigating the subject, not one approach has been made by these authorities to see any of the new evidence we have gathered. Is it any wonder that the Libyans are reluctant to stand trial in Scotland or the US?"

Francovich a "charlatan"

al-Megrahi convicted, Bernt Carlsson targeted on Pan Am Flight 103

In July 2013, on Professor Black's blog, Lockerbie commentator Barry Walker accused Allan Francovich of peddling the "drug conspiracy theory" and called him a "charlatan":

Dear Professor Black,

For the record I must protest about your censoring of my previous comment on the supposed grounds that it was defamatory. Indeed your use of the words "my target" may give anybody reading it the impression I had made some wild or intemperate claim. Perish the thought. However it is not actually clear to whom you were referring.

From material outwith this blog it became clear that Edwin Bollier, possibly through cultural or language difficulties, may have taken Patrick Haseldine's claim to be Emeritus Professor of Lockerbie Studies seriously and was actually seeking his advice.

I pointed out for Herr Bollier's benefit that Haseldine is not a Professor but the proprietor of a tea shop. As a gag I actually wrote that he had used the skills he had acquired in the Diplomatic Service to start his own business. This is not in the least defamatory and I certainly didn't call him a liar.

There is a whiff of hypocrisy here. You are quite happy to publish the most outrageous insinuations, contradicted by historical fact, by others. (i.e. Ronald Reagan and George Bush somehow colluded in the murder of Archbishop Romero.) Very often I point out where claims are demonstrably untrue. While I have denounced others as charlatans and fabricators or even in Robert Baer's case as an "aviation terrorist" this is not defamatory.

However your concern for Mr Haseldine's reputation and your fear of defamation proceedings might be slightly more credible if you had not posted the comment "Patrick Haseldine is a liar."

I take it the name Patrick Haseldine is not to be mentioned. While most followers purport to be interested in the truth I am as interested in claims that are untrue. However it is your blog but please don't insult my intelligence by pretending my comment was defamatory.

Professor Black responded to Barry Walker:

You are entirely mistaken about my concern being that the comment was defamatory of Patrick Haseldine. Your comments about him cause me not the slightest concern. What does cause me concern is your reference to people as charlatans, one recognised meaning of which is "a fraud". You are entitled to believe and to say that someone is wrong, wrongheaded, misconceived, wilfully blind. But you are not entitled to say, at least on a blog which I publish and for which I have legal responsibility, that someone [Allan Francovich] is a charlatan.

Gladio (1992)

Allan Francovich interviewed parties involved in Operation Gladio, especially in Italy, and produced perhaps the most complete account on film of the Gladio/Stay Behind network.

Short Circuit (1985)

A Documentary about the murder of nuns in El Salvador.

On Company Business (1980)

An award winning documentary about the CIA, which made extensive use of interviews with current and former CIA employees.

Others

• Secret History : Murder in Mississippi (12 Dec, 1991)
• Dark Passage (1990)
• The Houses Are Full of Smoke (1987)
• Inside the CIA (1987)
• San Francisco Good Times (1977)
• Chile in the Heart (1975)
• The Lobster Pot (1973)

Death

Allan Francovich's death occurred while going through US customs at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas on April 17, 1997, age 56. It was ruled as occurring due to "natural causes" (i.e. heart attack) though its remarkable timing raises the clear possibility that it was not so simple.

Obituary by Tam Dalyell

That Allan Francovich should die prematurely, succumbing to a heart attack in the Customs Area of Houston Airport, is hardly astonishing to those whose lives were touched by this remarkable, hyperactive film director. I picture him arriving to meet me in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons, bag and baggage full of contents, out of breath, and blurting out the latest discovery that he had made about the iniquity of the authorities. He reeled off facts at a mind-boggling rate. Yet, unlike most conspiracy theorists - of which he was proud to be one - Francovich was scrupulous about fact, and particularly about unpalatable facts which did not suit his suspicions. I never caught him cutting any inconvenient corners to arrive at the conclusion he wanted. He was, above all, a seeker after truth, wheresoever that truth might lead.

Francovich was born in 1941, into a Jewish engineer's family in New York, but brought up in the Mira Flores district of Lima, one of the most sophisticated societies in the Americas. At an early age his extraordinary facility for languages was developed. It was to prove a launching pad, not only for academic success, but also for making investigative films which required mastery of precision in language as the complicated projects he undertook crossed international borders. Nothing Francovich either said or did was other than complicated.

From the University of San Marcos in Lima, he went to Notre Dame in the United States, where did a Bachelor of Arts in English, Romance and Slavic Languages. From there he went to the Sorbonne to study Comparative Literature and to L'Ecole des Langues Orientales, where he studied Russian, Serbo-Croat and the Arabic that was to prove so useful two decades later in untangling the complexities of Lockerbie.

He completed his education at Berkeley, California, where he studied the Dramatic Arts and was prominent in the university when "Flower Power" was at its height.

In 1970, Francovich married Kathleen Weaver, a graduate of Edinburgh University, who collaborated with him in his first major investigative film, "Short Circuit" (1970), relating to the murder of nuns in El Salvador. His linguistic talent was put to effective use in another joint venture, "On Company Business" (1980). Their work run the prestigious International Critics Award for the best documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, exposing as it did many of the thuggish practices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was a matter of sadness to him that he drifted apart from his wife and was without her during the creation of the documentary "Gladio" (1992) which was partially instrumental in bringing down an Italian government by exposing its links with American intelligence and the Americans' gross misbehaviour in assaulting democracy in Italy.

My first introduction to Francovich was from Dr Jim Swire of the British Lockerbie Victims, who said that he had persuaded the best investigative film director in America to turn his attention to the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, on 21 December 1988 that had killed his daughter Flora along with 269 other victims.

Once persuaded that there was a cause for suspicion, Francovich was the most determined of ferrets. The end result was his film The Maltese Double Cross (1995), made in conjunction with his fervently loyal colleagues John Ashton and David Ben-Aryeah and their cameraman Jeremy Stavenhagen. The showing of the film on Channel 4, and in the House of Commons, did more than anything else to awaken the British from J.S. Mill's "deep slumber of a decided opinion" about responsibility for Lockerbie.

Quite simply, Francovich proved the so-called Malta connection, on which the case against Libya depends, was a fabrication. Francovich identified the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner carrying pilgrims to Mecca as the starting point for Lockerbie. The Iranian Minister of the Interior, Ali Akbar Mostashemi, swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge. He had been, crucially, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1985, and had close connections with the terrorist gangs of Beirut and the Bekaa valley. They had infiltrated an American drug sting operation, which allowed them to circumvent the security precautions at the Rhine Main airport in Frankfurt. It was typical of Frankovich that he could go to the Jafaar family of the naive courier who had perished in Pan Am 103, and capture them on film in a powerful sequence showing up the activities of the Neuss terrorist gang operating in Germany.

It was Francovich's multi-dimensional, multilingual talents which I am sure will eventually unlock the truth about Lockerbie. Rare indeed, outside fiction, are the crusaders of truth who, time and again, have put themselves in personal danger as Francovich did.

Tam Dalyell (Allan Francovich, film director: born New York 1941; married 1970 Kathleen Weaver (marriage dissolved 1985); died Houston, Texas 17 April 1997.)

See also

• Lockerbie Official Narrative
• Cameron's Report on Lockerbie Forensic Evidence
• The Framing of al-Megrahi
• The How, Why and Who of Pan Am Flight 103

External links

• IMDb filmography
• Gladio: Europe's best kept secret

Video

• Operation Gladio (1992) - Watch the complete documentary online
• Alternative Views #074: THE CIA: ON COMPANY BUSINESS (1980) - Allan Francovich talks with ex-CIA agent John Stockwell about On Company Business on Alternative Views
• Alternative Views #167: MAKING A MOVIE ABOUT THE CIA (1982) - Allan Francovich talks about On Company Business on Alternative Views