TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  Witness 558 was on fire duty for the Air National Guard at Gabreski Airport. As he told the FBI five days after the crash, “He noticed a red flare or roman candle ascending [above] the tree line,” gaining altitude and bearing in a southeasterly direction.33 He watched the flare ascend for as long as thirty seconds, lost it for a split second, and then observed “a large fireball erupt in the sky” before becoming “a ball of fire which separated into two equally sized balls dropping from the sky with no audible sound.” The FBI interviewed him again a day later, and his story remained the same.

  Witness 560 was still another of those citizens who enjoyed a second visit from the FBI.34 In her first interview in July 1996, she told the two agents she was sitting in her car overlooking Northwest Bay in East Hampton when she noticed a fine white line extending upwards in the sky in a north-northwesterly direction. As the trail extended upwards and began to arc, the trail began to dissipate. The thin line then turned “bright white” and then became “a bright red/orange ball of fire” that cascaded down towards the sea. She heard no relevant sounds. In her second FBI interview in June 1997, the agents had her relating a more confusing tale. It concluded with the claim that “she did not see anything traveling in an upward direction.”

  The FBI interviewed Witness 570 a second time as well. In July 1996, he told the agent he had been swimming at water hole in Speonk when “he observed a reddish/orange flare ascending in the sky.”35 The apparent flare “was followed by a white vapor trail.” He then observed an explosion in the sky from which “two large balls of fire” fell to the earth. In June 1997, he repeated his story to the agents in more detail. Although largely consistent with his first interview, the agents made a point of the fact that the flare-like object “made a sharp turn downward as if it were dropping out of the sky.” The witness also noted “a deep sound like thunder” after the wreckage fell from the sky.

  Witness 640 was standing in the surf at Smith Point Park when “his eye caught a jet plane, off to his left, and moving eastward.”36 At the same time, the witness saw “off to his right, a ‘green flash’ rising up, and going toward the plane.” The flash was far out in the ocean and moving east as was the plane. A week after the crash, he took the FBI to the spot and showed them where he had seen what he had seen. He did not, however, track the object to the point of collision or hear anything.

  In the first few weeks of the investigation, the FBI still seemed intent on gathering information about what appeared to be a missile attack. Agents were instructed to ask witnesses questions about the “missile launch point,” “the color of the smoke trail,” and “the impact point”—at least these were some of the questions forwarded to the Florida agents interviewing Witness 32, Dwight Brumley.37 They never did ask Brumley these questions, but that had likely more to do with incompetence than ill intention.

  On July 21, 1996, two FBI agents along with representatives from the New York State Police, the Coast Guard, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Suffolk County Police escorted Witness 648 a mile or so out into the ocean south of the Moriches Inlet.38 Their goal was to get perspective on what the witness and his two fishing buddies had seen four days earlier. According to the FBI, the witness kept continuously in his sights “a faint yellow star-type object” that moved in an east to west direction—the opposite direction TWA 800 was flying—before “it banked and turned downward toward the water.” Its glow grew more intense, producing a mushroom of white smoke and “a rushing roar-type sound.” At that instant, the witness “observed a plane which separated into two flaming parts,” one the fuselage, the other a wing, and both crashed into the water. Sufficiently alarmed, he called a “May Day” into the Coast Guard.

  Of all the witnesses, none provided the FBI with a more precise illustration of what he had seen than Witness 649. In Silenced, we animated his illustration to show the sequence of events from his perspective. Although we did not know his name at the time, Joseph Delgado, a public school administrator in Suffolk County, has since gone public. The CIA’s Tauss described the “most useful reports” as those that “referenced identifiable landmarks.” Delgado did just that, starting with his initial phone interview a day after the disaster.

  “His point of reference on the Mill Road tree line was a telephone pole next to the yellow fire hydrant,” the FBI reported.39 The reader would do well to keep this reference in mind. It will come in to play soon enough. The following day, July 19, two FBI agents visited Delgado at his home with his wife present. As he told the agents, he had just finished exercising on the track at Westhampton High School and was walking to his vehicle when he observed “an object ascending from behind the trees.” He described the bright white light object as “elongated.” More specifically, it had a reddish pink aura around it and a grey tail. It ascended vertically, moving in a “squiggly” pattern, and arced off to the right in a southwesterly direction.

  Had he not been tracking “object number one,” Delgado would not likely have seen “object number two,” which “glittered” with the reflection of the sun. That first object, said Delgado, “appeared like it was going to slightly miss object number two unless it made a dramatic correction.” This, it apparently did. Although he failed to see the actual contact, he saw a “white puff,” out of which emerged two objects “that arched upward from the initial impact trailing smoke.” These then turned into large rectangular balls of fire that descended at an angle down past the tree line. Delgado heard nothing, but he was sufficiently concerned to drive to the beach where he thought the collision might have taken place. According to the FBI report, when Delgado heard later about the destruction of TWA 800, “He realized he had observed the entire occurrence.” Unlike most witnesses, Delgado brought the agents to the site, and they noted again that the “point of reference was a telephone pole next to a yellow fire hydrant located on Mill Road.”

  The authorities took Delgado’s account seriously. The next day, July 20, three FBI agents, three investigators from the Suffolk County Marine Bureau (SCMB), a Suffolk County police officer, and two MSIC analysts visited the site. There, the SCMB personnel, using a GPS 45 Personal Navigator and a hand-bearing magnetic compass, tracked the paths of objects one and two. Delgado’s was one of eleven witness reports that the SCMB plotted in the first two weeks after the incident. Although talk of missiles had been discouraged from day one, investigators, even those not fully in the loop, had to know that a missile or missiles had destroyed TWA 800. Indeed, they were tasked with asking questions such as, “What did it look [like] when it impacted the aircraft? Small, single burst of fire/sparks or multiple bursts?”

  The authorities were not through with Delgado. On May 8, 1997, two agents from the FBI and a representative from the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, interviewed Delgado at his Long island school. According to FBI notes, the China Lake rep was introduced to Delgado simply as “a member of the Department of Defense.” Delgado repeated his account without any seeming change other than the addition of a second “puff” after the collision and the use of the word “firebox” to describe what fell from the sky. He told his interrogators he was confident he had seen a missile strike but having heard nothing in the ten months since the incident to confirm his suspicions, he was beginning to doubt himself.

  The FBI agents ran a little game on Delgado. They showed him a drawing of the incident produced by Tauss’s office in the CIA and, lest he be intimidated, told him another witness had drawn it. Delgado knew what he saw, and this was not it. He told the agents the drawing was “missing the entire first part”—that is, the ascent of the missile—and he made appropriate modifications. This interview took place six weeks after the CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence had sent the following memorandum to the FBI’s Kallstrom:

  Our analysis demonstrates that the eyewitness sightings of greatest concern to us—the ones originally interpreted to be of a possible missile attack—took place after the first of several explosions aboar
d the aircraft . . . combined with the total absence of physical evidence of a missile attack, [this] leads CIA analysts to conclude that no such attack occurred.40

  In his 2008 report, Tauss described how the CIA came to this conclusion.41 He larded the report with enough techno-gobbledygook to mesmerize the media into inaction, but the “crucial” element at the heart of his analysis was “the fact that the explosion was extraordinarily loud.” Tauss’s report left the distinct impression that sound was more important than sight. One problem, he conceded, was that the sightings were “remarkably detailed” and “surprisingly consistent.” This much was true. Another problem, one that he evaded, was the wild inconsistency in the sounds witnesses reported hearing, if they heard any sounds at all.

  Still, as Tauss noted, “a few eyewitness reports proved particularly useful.” Among the “most valuable” was a fellow in a beachfront condominium. According to Tauss, even though he saw nothing before the plane exploded, “His report of loud sounds just after the fireballs hit the water made it possible to calculate the elapsed time from when the plane first exploded to when it hit the water.” He was referring here to Witness 83. According to his FBI 302, this witness told the agents that five to ten seconds after the plane’s wreckage met the horizon, he “heard an extremely loud explosion that shook his house.” Knowing where the plane was when it exploded and where Witness 83 was located, Tauss was able “to calculate how long it took sound to travel from the explosion to the observer (49 seconds).” Incredibly, Tauss used this forty-nine second differential as the basis of his “sound-propagation analysis” to establish that “eyewitnesses who appeared to have seen a missile ‘streak up’ and cause the plane to explode could not have seen such an occurrence.”

  I say “incredibly” because the “man in the condominium” was Paul Angelides, the forensic engineer who appeared in Silenced. As he tried to do with Delgado’s drawing, Tauss edited out of Angelides’s account what he witnessed before the explosion. According to his FBI 302, Angelides had seen a “red flare” followed by “a thin white smoke trail.”42 He tracked this object for three or four seconds before the plane exploded. According to Tauss, however, Angelides’s “observations began well after Flight 800 first exploded.” Truth, as they say, is the first casualty of war. Tauss had no such excuse. This was peacetime. The shameless CIA analyst followed his passage on Angelides with a sentence that begins, “Another excellent eyewitness on the land . . .” That witness was Mike Wire, the man on the bridge.

  Not even knowing the role he played in the creation of the CIA zoom climb video, Angelides was appalled when he first viewed it. “That bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I saw,” he told us. In fact, he was so disgusted he called the FBI and insisted they come back and talk to him. His request was ignored. Wire was none too pleased either. Said he of the zoom climb video, “When I saw the scenario I thought it was strange because it was nothing like what I observed.” The plainspoken Meyer may have summarized the CIA scenario best: “It was totally ludicrous.”

  Tauss singled out a third Silenced witness for analysis. This was Witness 32, Dwight Brumley, the senior Navy NCO, who was a passenger on board US Air Flight 217. After watching a small plane fly underneath 217, Brumley, according to the FBI, “observed a light which appeared to be a ‘flare’ and looked like the shooting of an unexploded firework into the air.” The object was moving from right to left. US Air 217 was heading northeast to Providence. “Right to left” from Brumley’s perspective meant roughly parallel to the path of 217 but on a slightly more northerly course. This was more or less perpendicular to the path of TWA 800. The flare-like object appeared to peak and head downward. Just then, Brumley saw a small explosion, followed by a large one, which turned into a “fireball” that fell from the sky. He estimated that this incident took place three thousand to four thousand feet below US Air 217.

  This version of events did not work for Tauss. In his report, he claimed that Brumley’s flare-like object first appeared just where TWA 800 was when it exploded. More troubling, he claimed the object was heading not north but east, the same direction in which TWA 800 was traveling. This lie enabled Tauss to claim that Brumley’s flare “almost certainly was Flight 800 just after it exploded, not a missile.” The CIA video showed this sequence as Tauss described it. Brumley was not amused. “The flight sequence shows TWA 800 in crippled flight crossing my field of view from left to right and ahead of US Air 217,” he swore in an affidavit. “This is not correct. At no time did I see a burning TWA 800 crossing my field of view. If anyone claims I did they are very much mistaken.”43

  What Brumley found surprising—disturbing really—was that no one from the CIA or the NTSB talked to him before contorting his testimony to fit the CIA scenario. A twenty-five-year Navy vet, Brumley had trained in electronic warfare and participated in various missile-firing exercises. Given his knowledge base and his perspective on the disaster, he thought he might warrant more than a forty-five-minute interview by two FBI agents who knew little about aviation. “One of the biggest questions I have,” said Brumley after the investigation closed, “is why I was never contacted ‘officially’ by somebody with aviation experience.”44 The only people who did talk to him after the initial interview were independent researchers like Commander Donaldson.

  Like so many other witnesses, Brumley heard no sound. Indeed, only those who had not read the witness summaries—or who were complicit in the CIA’s disinformation campaign—could have taken the notion of “sound propagation analysis” seriously. In seven of the forty witness accounts summarized previously, the interviewing agents did not even bother to ask about what the witnesses heard. In another nineteen, the witnesses heard nothing at all. In only fourteen of the forty summaries did a witness admit to hearing a sound, and in only three of those did the witness report hearing, more or less, what Angelides heard. A few reported hearing a sound as the objects collided. Witness 550 described a “crackling sound” when the two objects “crunched up.” He then heard a “poof” followed by a “whooshing sound.” Several heard what Mike Wire had heard, as Witness 536 described it: an earth shaking “deep, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom sound.” Almost assuredly, an object breaking the sound barrier caused a sonic boom, but Tauss never entertained the possibility.

  The CIA’s elevation of these random aural accounts over the highly consistent visual ones had nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. In fact, thirty-nine of these forty witnesses saw a red or orange or pink flare-like object ascending. Sixteen of the forty specified that the object was trailed by a white or grey smoke trail. Many described it as arcing or curving. Several observed the object heading westward, in the opposite direction TWA 800 was flying. A few saw the 747 before the object collided with it. Yes, virtually every one of these acknowledged seeing the “trailing cascade of flames” highlighted in the CIA video, but all of them, save perhaps one, saw it as a fully separate event, and all of those saw the crippled plane heading only downwards.

  Despite its consistency, this testimony moved Tauss not at all. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, he insisted, “The plane had exploded before [the witness] observations began.” This was nuts. Delgado, Wire and more than fifty others saw the object as soon as it emerged above the horizon or the tree line or house line in front of them and tracked it for any number of seconds before the initial explosion. In his 2008 report, Tauss did even not try to explain away the testimony of Witness 73, the travel agent who called me years later at my office. He couldn’t. She was looking at TWA 800 as the object approached it and “never took her eyes off the aircraft during this time.” Her initial FBI report continued: “At the instant the smoke trail ended at the aircraft’s right wing, she heard a loud sharp noise which sounded like a firecracker had just exploded at her feet. She then observed a fire at the aircraft followed by one or two secondary explosions which had a deeper sound. She then observed the front of the aircraft separate from the back. She then obse
rved burning pieces of debris falling from the aircraft.”

  Given the specificity of her testimony, it was no wonder Tauss and/or his accomplices in the FBI turned her into a drunk. What they lacked in integrity, they compensated for in audacity. They blew off Witness 73 and every other witness as well. “What [the witnesses] were seeing,” Tauss insisted, “was a trail of burning fuel coming from the aircraft.” This was not, however, what the eyewitnesses were alleged to have seen in the 1997 CIA zoom climb video. The reader may recall the narrator’s claim that “just after the aircraft exploded it pitched up abruptly and climbed several thousand feet from its last recorded altitude of about 13,800 feet to a maximum altitude of about 17,000 feet” and his subsequent assertion that “the eyewitnesses almost certainly saw only the burning aircraft without realizing it.” In the 2008 CIA report, there was no mention whatsoever of this hypothesis. It vanished without explanation or apology.

  By the time we were ready to launch Silenced in the summer of 2001, I knew most of this. I knew enough certainly to trust James Sanders more than the mainstream media. Although we chose not to discuss politics in Silenced or the source of the missiles fired, I had strong suspicions about both. I still had much to learn. That would come in time.

  Chapter: SEVEN

  THE GOOD BUREAUCRAT