Word: bern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seat of federal government is in Bern, a medieval city of arcades, spires and fountains, full of politicians, government officials and farmers, whose open market in front of the gray-green stone parliament building is a reminder of the country's revered peasant past. A world away is Geneva, severe and handsome, with a touch of francophone chic, an international city, where summits are held and diplomatic deals are made. Solid, comfortable Zurich is at once the banking center and, along with Basel, at the bend of the Rhine, the cultural heart for German speakers...
...forces a rather unusual army division: a flock of 34,500 carrier pigeons. The Swiss do have such a unit, but they heatedly deny it will be dispatched to the gulf. "Our birds could not operate in such an environment," says a spokesman. "They would all fly back to Bern, if they weren't roasted by the desert heat or hostile fire...
...well-dressed Palestinian from Iraq named Adnan Awad walked into the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland, and announced that he had just left a bomb in his Geneva hotel room. He said he had been ordered by the May 15 Organization, a Baghdad-based terrorist group known to intelligence agencies, to blow up the Geneva Noga Hilton. But when he arrived in Geneva, he found he could not go through with it. Now he was appealing to the U.S. for help...
That was just the beginning of Awad's coming in from the cold. As he related his story to the Americans and the Swiss, then to Israeli, German and other officials in Bern, it became clear that he held the key to a major terrorist mystery. Just three weeks earlier, a bomb had exploded on a Pan Am jet flying from Tokyo to Hawaii; it killed a Japanese teenager and injured 15 other passengers. That bomb too was made of plastic explosive. It had easily passed through security checks designed to detect metal weapons and stop hijackings rather than bombings...
While Awad was astonishing officials in Bern with his detailed reports, other evidence piled up. A May 15 member en route from Baghdad was arrested in Tunisia with a suitcase bomb like Awad's. Under interrogation, the man admitted that he and another May 15 member, called Abu Saif, had put a bomb on a Pan Am flight from London's Heathrow Airport to New York. The bomb had been found on Aug. 25, 14 days and 40,000 miles later, unexploded, when the aircraft landed in Rio de Janeiro. It had not blown up because the bombers inadvertently broke...