Allan Francovich

Allan James Francovich (March 23, 1941 – April 24, 1997) was an American maker of investigative films, including documentaries on CIA covert operations and the Lockerbie disaster.

Francovich suffered a fatal heart attack in a Customs area at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas, on April 17, 1997 whilst entering the United States from England; he was 56.

His father, Aldo Francovich, worked as a mining engineer for Cerro de Pasco mining company in Peru; as a child he lived in high altitude mining towns and witnessed the extreme poverty of the miners. He attended an elite preparatory school in Lima then came to the U.S. to attend Notre Dame University, where he completed a B.A. He lived in Paris for several years, studying free-lance at the Sorbonne before coming to Berkeley. There he finished an M.A. in Dramatic Arts at UC, Berkeley; he also studied film briefly at Stanford and received a grant to study film from the American Film Institute in 1970. He and translator and writer Kathleen Weaver were married in 1970; the two separated amicably and were divorced in 1986. She collaborated on his films during the time of their marriage.

His films and papers are archived by the Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley, California.

Allan Francovich produced, wrote and directed The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie, a documentary which challenged the official view that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103. Instead, an unwitting drug mule, with links to Hezbollah and to both the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the CIA, was argued to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft.

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 (believed to have been the DEA's Michael Hurley). Screenings of the film at the 1994 London Film Festival, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and at several universities were prevented. But Labour MP Tam Dalyell ignored libel warnings and went ahead and showed the film at the House of Commons on November 16, 1994.

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