by Jack Cashill
Wire was an “excellent eyewitness,” claimed the narrator of the CIA video. He watched a white light travel upwards. “It zigzagged” as it rose. And at the apex of its travel, it “arched over and disappeared.” In the video, while the narrator was saying these words, the viewer was watching a flaming TWA 800 zoom up and arch over. “So the white light the eyewitness described,” concluded the narrator, “probably was the aircraft briefly ascending and arching over after it exploded, rather than a missile attacking the aircraft.”
By the time we interviewed Wire in the spring of 2001, we had access to some eye-opening documents. One was Wire’s original FBI 302 from July 29, 1996. In it, FBI agent Lash reported faithfully, if a bit sloppily, what Wire told him.
Wire saw a white light that was traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40 degree angle. Wire described the white light as a light that sparkled and thought it was some type of fireworks. Wire stated that the white light “zigzagged” as it traveled upwards, and at the apex of its travel the white light “arched over” and disappeared from Wire’s view. . . . Wire stated the white light traveled outwards from the beach in a south-southeasterly direction.
Seconds after the light disappeared, Wire reported seeing “an orange light that appeared to be a fireball.” The fireball fell from the sky at approximately a thirty-degree angle and “left a fire trail burning behind it.” Only “after” the fireball descended behind the houses on the beach, did Wire hear the first of four explosions. The first was the loudest, and it shook the bridge sufficiently that the other workers came running out of the switchgear room to see what was going on.
One highly useful document clarifies how Wire found himself center stage in this drama.2 I refer here to the word-for-word transcript of a meeting between the NTSB’s witness group and the CIA analysts responsible for the video. To read the document is to understand the thoroughly corrupting role the CIA played in the investigation. The meeting took place in the fifth floor boardroom of the NTSB offices in Washington. Representing the CIA were the unnamed deputy director of the Office of Transnational Issues (OTI) and the two analysts who did the work on the video, also unnamed. “Analyst 1” was almost assuredly Randolph Tauss, a senior weapons analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence who would later take credit for his efforts on the case. At the table for the NTSB were managers Bernard Loeb and David Mayer as well as five industry members of the NTSB witness group.
The two members of that group who offered any real challenge to the CIA were J. Dennis Rodrigues, an air safety accident investigator for Boeing, and Bob Young, director of Flight Safety for TWA. One of the objections I have heard as to why there could not have been a cover-up goes something like this: “Are you telling me that the hundreds of people who worked on this investigation conspired to corrupt it?” No, that is not the way conspiracies unfold. After the crash, thousands of workers made a great, good faith effort to redeem the bodies, retrieve the wreckage, and search for answers. Few of those, however, were allowed to see beyond their immediate assignments. And fewer still had access to the big picture. On April 30, 1999, Rodrigues and Young got a glimpse of that picture. With no support from their superiors—Mayer, in fact, had been quietly working with the CIA—they pursued the truth in an environment rich with intimidation. To date their efforts have come to naught, but they did succeed in exposing a major plot twist in the CIA’s knowing rewrite of aviation history.
The NTSB made the report public in April 2000, a year after the meeting and four months before the final NTSB hearing in August. There was a Pulitzer waiting for the journalist who read it, dissected it, and pursued it. As far as I can tell, no one seems to have bothered. In my experience, and more on this later, journalists rarely explore material if they fear—or their superiors fear—the implications of their research. For ideological reasons, that fear factor seems to intensify in presidential election years. For all the power of the Internet, independent investigators cannot get agency honchos to answer their phone calls. To this day, only the major media have this power. Indeed, were it not for the Washington Post, the word “Watergate” would have little meaning beyond D.C.’s real estate community.
This gathering was held in April 1999. Incredibly, it had taken the NTSB a year and a half to set up a meeting with the CIA analysts who were doing a job that its own staffers should have been doing from day one of the investigation. It was decided early in the two-hour meeting to allow the NTSB reps to set the agenda. Analyst 1 answered almost all of their questions. As the analyst explained, the FBI originally provided the CIA with thirty or forty witness summaries, ostensibly to help determine whether there was any evidence of terrorism. Over the next ten months, the FBI provided the CIA with more than two hundred additional 302s.
To say the least, the 302s lacked precision. The FBI agents had little, if any, aviation experience. And unless accompanied by representatives from Suffolk County or the Defense Intelligence Agency, they had no instruments with which to gauge position. The CIA analysts had no relevant experience either. Nor did they interview any of the eyewitnesses. Working with about one-third of the 302s, the analysts somehow concluded that the witnesses had deceived themselves into thinking they saw something that they hadn’t. They came to this conclusion, said Analyst 1, “late on December 30, 1996.” As shall be seen, these analysts used gratuitously specific details for a reason.
The NTSB’s Young had questions. “CIA Analyst #1, we’ve had access to 755 witness statements versus your 244.” The analyst could only answer, “Right.” He offered no explanation. More troubling than this disparity was the fact the NTSB witness group did not get to see the eyewitness summaries until more than two years after the CIA had. “We only read these in the last few months,” said Rodrigues, “long after the video came out.”
Young and Rodrigues sensed that the die had been cast. Although legally charged with responsibility for domestic airline crashes, the NTSB had yielded its authority to the FBI, and the FBI passed it on to the CIA. Their superiors allowed this to happen. The meeting that they and their more responsible colleagues had been demanding for months, if not years, was something of a dumb show. Still, they persisted. “The video shows, or the video in effect says,” asked Rodrigues skeptically, “that what the eyewitnesses saw was the crippled airplane, after the nose comes off, climbing.” Said Analyst 1 in response, “That is something that a few eyewitnesses saw. The guy on the bridge saw that.” Rodrigues sighed in frustration, “If it’s only one or two of them, it’s not representative of all of them.” Seemingly cornered, Analyst 1 improvised a response, “Let me say something else about this eyewitness [Wire] because I think this is interesting”:
He was an important eyewitness to us. And we asked the FBI to talk to him again, and they did. In his original description, he thought he had seen a firework and that perhaps that firework had originated on the beach behind the house. We went to that location and realized that if he was only seeing the airplane, that he would not see a light appear from behind the rooftop of that house. The light would actually appear in the sky. It’s high enough in the sky that that would have to happen.
When he was reinterviewed, he said that is indeed what happened. The light did appear in the sky. Now, when the FBI told us that, we got even more comfortable with our theory. He also described, he was asked to describe how high in the sky above the house he thought that light appeared, and he said it was as if—if you imagine a flag pole on top of the house it would be as if it were on the top or the tip of the flag pole. [Emphasis added.]
If nothing else, one has to admire the CIA analysts’ nerve. They built their animation around Wire’s perspective in Westhampton, but in building it they took total liberty with his original testimony. In his July 1996 FBI 302, Wire reported a “40 degree” climb. In the CIA, animation, however, the noseless TWA 800 climbs at a seventy-degree angle or more. Wire spoke of an object zigzagging “outward from the beach.” The animation shows an object ascending b
riefly in a two-dimensional plane far from shore. Of most importance, Wire claimed that the object ascended “skyward from the ground.” The CIA analysts could not live with this. In their animation, the object first appears about twenty degrees above the horizon almost exactly where TWA 800 would have been when blown out of the sky. If nervy, the analysts were often careless. In the animation, the narrator echoes Wire’s claim that the object “zigzagged” as it rose even while the object on screen ascends without hint of a wiggle.
The astute reader may know where this is heading. As with Witness 73, there was no second interview. The FBI talked to Wire on July 29, 1996, and never talked to him again. Analyst 1, who artfully adlibbed his way through the two-hour meeting, may well have concocted this interview on the fly. With Witness 73 at least there was a second 302 in the NTSB docket. For Wire there was none. The NTSB sustained this charade in its final August 2000 report. The report specifically referenced the July 29, 1996, in-person interview, and then spoke of how Wire changed his story in “subsequent interviews,” plural, with no date or agency attached to any of them.3
In the years since, I have gotten to know Mike and his wife Joan well. He is a stalwart guy and a great patriot. He worked extensively in lower Manhattan on wreckage removal after the World Trade Center attack and suffered severe health problems as a result. He accepted that risk as part of his responsibility. But he couldn’t accept the passivity of the media in the face of so transparent a fraud.
The man-on-the-bridge ruse was not the only one Young and Rodrigues exposed during their much-delayed interview with the CIA analysts. They had issues with sound as well as sight, particularly Wire’s claim that a sound wave shook this seventy-ton bridge eleven miles from TWA 800. “The problem I’m having a little bit,” Rodrigues asked the analysts, “is that the center tank explosion is categorized as a low order explosion.” Unwilling to defend the notion that a low-order explosion at that distance—or any distance—could have shaken the bridge, Analyst 1 argued instead that an explosion of a missile warhead was “not nearly loud enough to do that sort of thing.”
Although Young and Rodrigues were willing to challenge the CIA analysts, they seemed unwilling to offer the obvious alternative thesis, namely that a missile or missiles had generated a sonic boom. In late January 2016, for instance, residents up and down the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey reported what they thought was an earthquake only to be told that “Naval aircraft testing over the Atlantic Ocean” had caused a series of sonic booms.4 If there were missiles involved in the 2016 test, authorities were mum. Young was not prepared to talk about missiles either. He offered defensively, “I don’t see how we can get a center tank to make that sound.” When no one picked up this train of thought, Young’s superiors, Loeb and Mayer, allowed the conversation to drift away.
A third issue involved Eastwind Airlines pilot, David McClaine. On the night in question, McClaine was flying from Boston to Trenton, New Jersey. He had just descended to 16,000 feet when he watched TWA 800 explode right in front of him. Later that night, when he returned home to the Charlotte area, he wrote a report of what he had seen and submitted it to Eastwind Airlines. The next day, July 18, a female FBI agent interviewed him at his home for about an hour. Another agent called him at home later that evening and confirmed the details of the interview. “I don’t think they had any aviation experience,” McClaine would later tell the NTSB.5 Much later.
NTSB witness group members did not interview McClaine until March 25, 1999, nearly three years after the disaster and a month before their interview with the CIA. This was shocking, appalling really. Until that time, NTSB group members had not seen the incident report McClaine submitted to his employer late on July 17, had not seen the FBI 302 on McClaine, and were unaware that he had already given several media interviews explaining what he had seen. In October 1997, David Hendrix, who helped break the Sanderses’ story for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, reported in some detail what McClaine had witnessed a month before the CIA premiered its notorious video.6 Had official Washington been aware of McClaine’s testimony before the premiere of the video, the FBI might have hesitated to show it.
In this instance, as in so many others, it is hard to tell where incompetence left off, and intrigue began. Again, only Young and Rodrigues tried to straighten out the record. McClaine obliged them. As always, he was open and forthcoming. While descending into Trenton, he had his eye on TWA 800 for some five minutes. “Boy, did he have a pair of landing lights,” he told his interrogators. It was their brightness that attracted his attention. He saw no missile approach the plane, but as he explained, “The fuselage and the wing could have blocked that out.” Besides, he occasionally looked at his instrument panel and away from TWA 800. When the Eastwind plane reached 16,000 feet, McClaine flipped on his landing lights to alert the TWA 800 captain to his proximity. Just at that moment, the 747 exploded right in his face. “It all ended right there,” said McClaine. “And everything went down.”
“Was there any flaming object that climbed to your altitude, 16 [thousand feet] or more?” asked Rodrigues. “Not that I could see,” answered McClaine. “You didn’t see any structure or anything else zoom up 1,000, 1,500, 3,000 feet?” asked Young. “No,” said McClaine unequivocally. When asked about the CIA video, McClaine volunteered, “I didn’t see [TWA 800] pitch up, no. Everything ended right there at the explosion, as far as I’m concerned.” With the wings and nose blown off, he could not imagine the aircraft “pushing against the wind” and zooming upwards. “I didn’t see that happen.” Young knew it could not have happened. Said he, “We’d be cutting new trails in aerodynamics if we could do that.” No one in the room dissented. Even before their interview a month later with the CIA analysts, the NTSB witness group members all knew their zoom climb scenario was a crock.
During that April 1999 CIA interview, Young recounted the interview with McClaine in some detail. “If [TWA 800] had ascended,” said Young, “certainly he would have been concerned because it would have ascended right through his altitude.” In his response, Analyst 1 unthinkingly referred to the CIA’s “analysis of the 302 information.” He and his partner had read McClaine’s 302 before they made the video. They knew what he had seen. Analyst 1 tried to squirm out of this logical black hole, but Young kept coming back to it.
“He never saw any ascension,” said Young. Analyst 1 stalled for time. “It was my understanding, based on the 302 information we had,” he bluffed, “that the pilot never reported seeing the plane. He only saw a light.” At this point, the newly appointed head of NTSB witness group, David Mayer, intervened to protect the CIA thesis. Unknown to the other members of the witness group, the crafty Mayer had been “working closely” with the lead CIA analyst for the previous sixteen months. CIA head George Tenet admitted as much to the NTSB’s Jim Hall in a March 1999 letter.
There was much going on that investigators working with the NTSB did not know about, and the CIA preferred to keep it that way. In that same letter to Hall, Tenet expressed his wish “that the briefing will be in a closed session, that no transcript will be made of CIA’s presentation and that appropriate safeguards will be made to protect any extraneous CIA and FBI interests.”7 Before the NTSB closed its case and even after, Mayer would go to great lengths to protect “CIA and FBI interests.” In this kind of environment, national interests did not stand a chance.
Inexplicably, in 2008, the CIA’s Randolph Tauss went public with an authorized explanation for the agency’s involvement.8 According to Tauss, the FBI immediately requested CIA assistance given “the possibility that international terrorists may have been involved.” Tauss claimed the agency responded to the FBI’s request for help less than twenty-four hours after the plane’s destruction and cited Executive Order 12333 as justification. A clause in that order authorizes the CIA to “conduct counterintelligence activities outside the United States and, without assuming or performing any internal security functions, conduct counterintelligence ac
tivities within the United States in coordination with the FBI.”9 When President Ronald Reagan signed this order in 1981, he likely did not think “counterintelligence” would include the making of cartoons to discredit citizen testimony.
There is something fishy about all of this. In the FBI’s case-closing press conference from November 1997, Kallstrom said the FBI “looked throughout the government” to find the experts best able to answer the question, “What did the eyewitnesses see?”10 Kallstrom appears to have echoed a talking point on this subject prepared for him by the CIA immediately before this press conference. The relevant CIA memo reads as follows, “The FBI requested CIA technical assistance in analyzing more than 200 eyewitness reports to determine what those eyewitnesses saw.”11
In fact, however, the people with the “best expertise” were on the ground in Long Island helping the FBI interview eyewitnesses in the first weeks of the investigation. These were the representatives from the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC) in Alabama, a subset of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Missiles were their business. Counterintelligence was the CIA’s. The shift in the CIA’s mission from hunting “international terrorists” to providing “technical assistance” on witness observations took place fully off camera. The fact that the FBI fed the CIA the witness statements so slowly and incompletely suggests the agency’s help was not welcome. Once empowered, however, the CIA analysts bullied the MSIC reps and the FBI into accepting the CIA’s counterfeit thesis. “We found the talent we were looking for in the CIA,” said Kallstrom in closing the criminal investigation. By that time, he was too compromised to say otherwise.