TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  Hall then asked other pertinent questions: “If you could show that the airplane did not climb after the nose departed, will that change your analysis?” Mayer replied, “Our analysis is not actually dependent on that.” Lest he pull the curtain all the way back on the CIA’s puppet show, Mayer claimed to “believe” the plane did ascend. Believe? That was not the only blow the NTSB quietly dealt to the CIA’s theorizing. Mayer made no mention of the “sound propagation analysis” that inspired the CIA recreation. Hall addressed this as well. “Is sound a factor in this analysis you showed us?” he asked. “Again, we certainly gave sound a great deal of consideration,” Mayer answered, “but our analysis is not based on sound so, no, sir, it’s not.”

  Without calling attention to the fact, Mayer and Hall had fully subverted the FBI/CIA analysis. Sound was irrelevant. The zoom climb was a fantasy. The witness statements were impressively consistent and might have driven the investigation if the DOJ and FBI had not illegally prevented the NTSB witness group from seeing them. The observers in the missile test all saw pretty much what the witnesses had. “Is your analysis of the witness accounts dependent on the CIA work?” Hall asked lamely. It was not, said Mayer: “We were aware of their work but our work is not a derivative of theirs.” Of course Mayer was aware. He had been working with the CIA. This I learned only recently, and it helps explain Mayer’s performance. The access to power can turn a career bureaucrat’s head all too easily.

  Even if the other board members were serious about their responsibility, they would have been hard pressed to do the right thing. The NTSB witness group had been handed a rough hewn but well accepted fraud. Once appointed to head that group, Mayer smoothed out its rough spots, surely on orders from above, but let the fraud stand. To expose it might well have caused a constitutional crisis. The nation had just survived the impeachment of its president. Who, at this stage of the TWA 800 saga, would have investigated whom? Better to congratulate Mayer for what board member George Black called his “excellent literature review and report” and move on.

  Before letting Mayer go, Hall had one more public relations problem to solve. Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media helped organize the “TWA 800 Eyewitness Alliance.” A week before the hearings, its members took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times boldly headlined, “We Saw TWA Flight 800 Shot Down by Missiles And We Won’t Be Silenced Any Longer.”18 The ad featured the testimony of seven witnesses including Mike Wire, Dwight Brumley, Paul Angelides, Major Fritz Meyer, and Joseph Delgado. It was not easy to ignore.

  “What do you think about those accounts?” Hall asked Mayer. At this juncture, Tom Stalcup could control himself no longer. The young physicist startled the audience in the Baltimore hearing room by yelling out, “Ask the eyewitnesses!” As Stalcup explained to us when interviewed for Silenced, there was no precedent for shutting the witnesses down like this. In place of their testimony, the NTSB satisfied itself with letting one its own officials sum up FBI reports he had already discounted as “incomplete” or “vaguely worded.” Mayer himself had spoken to none of the witnesses. An outraged Stalcup would go on to fight this battle for the next fifteen years, but he would not prevail that afternoon. Hall very civilly threatened to have Stalcup removed if he said anything else.

  Mayer had a copy of the Washington Times ad with him and breezed through the first five witness accounts with brief, specious counter claims not worth repeating. The sixth witness, William Gallagher, had earlier talked to the media about his frustration with the investigation. “I saw something hit the right side of the plane,” the plainspoken New Jersey fisherman told the Riverside Press-Enterprise in October 1997. “My honest opinion, my gut feeling, is that we have the most brilliant people in the world and the best technology, [and] if they’ve been on scene for a year and they’ve not come up with something, as a critical thinker I have to ask, could they be covering up something?”19 This was a question Mayer chose not to answer. He skipped Gallagher altogether.

  Joseph Delgado, the seventh of the witnesses, gave Mayer the most trouble. As Mayer acknowledged, “Witness 649 described events that certainly do sound like a missile attacking the airplane.” He noted too that Delgado was one of the eleven witnesses who were part of the Suffolk County Marine Bureau’s line-of-sight study, chosen in no small part “because he provided some fixed reference points.” The reader may recall that both in his phone interview and in his on-site interview at the running track, Delgado specified a “telephone pole next to the yellow fire hydrant.”

  To discredit Delgado, Mayer reached deep into his bag of propaganda tricks and pulled out a convincingly specific detail. “The yellow line that’s been drawn shows his line of sight between those two flagpoles,” said Mayer of Delgado while showing a supporting graphic. He argued that Delgado was looking in the wrong direction to see Flight 800 “when it would have been struck by a hypothetical missile.” In making Silenced, we went to a location Mayer never visited, Delgado’s school track. We showed why Delgado never mentioned a flagpole, let alone two. There was none. What Delgado showed the investigators were a fire hydrant and a telephone pole. Those were his reference points. Never did he imply that all the action was contained within them.

  Given the work Mayer put into this presentation, it is hard to believe this reference was a mistake. If it were, he made exactly the same mistake that the CIA analysts did in discussing the apocryphal second FBI interview with Mike Wire. According to Analyst 1, Wire recanted his earlier statement that he first saw the object as it ascended from below the rooftop. In this second interview, Wire now claimed he first saw the object “high in the sky.” How high? Analyst 1 had the answer: “[Wire] 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.”20 The flag pole gambit apparently worked. Both times. Who, after all, would disbelieve a detail that specific?

  The media should have helped the citizenry see through the smoke. They didn’t. As I heard from several reporters who covered this story, the New York Times owned this story. The FBI channeled virtually all new information through the Times, and the Times reported that information very close to uncritically. After the final FBI press conference in November 1997, for instance, the paper’s opinion page editors congratulated the FBI for its “admirable thoroughness and openness” in an op-ed insultingly titled “Conspiracy Inoculation.”21 They were able to reach this hapless conclusion for one reason above all others: after the first day or two of the investigation, the Times did not interview a single one of the 258 “streak of light” witnesses.

  If the media had paid attention to the investigation, they would have known by the time of the final NTSB hearing that they had been played. During the previous four years, government agencies had proposed at least four distinct scenarios to explain witness testimony. None of them made sense, but all went unchallenged.

  The first was the bomb scenario sold successfully to the Times through August 1996. In fact, as early as July 19, the Times was reporting, “Some investigators think the most likely explanation was a terrorist or criminal bombing, a scenario apt to strike deep fear in the public.”22

  As to scenario two, the zoom climb, the CIA fixed upon this curiosity almost magically on December 30, 1996. Based on their fabled “sound propagation analysis,” agency analysts concluded that after a spontaneous fuel tank explosion blew off the cockpit, the flaming, noseless fuselage streaked straight up more than three thousand feet. To reach this conclusion, of course, the CIA had to ignore the fact that no witness reported seeing the plane ascend, not a single one. Said Eastwind pilot David McClaine, TWA 800 “seemed to fall straight down.”

  An alternate possibility implicit in the CIA analysis was the cascading flame scenario. At the time of the November 1997 video premiere and FBI press conference, CNN paraphrased unnamed FBI officials to the effect that “what some witnesses thought was a missile hitting the plane was actually burning, leaking fuel from the jet after
its front part had already broken off.”23 By 2008, the CIA had adopted this theory as well. “What [the witnesses] were seeing,” analyst Tauss insisted, “was a trail of burning fuel coming from the aircraft.”24

  The fourth possibility is the one that Mayer proposed at the NTSB hearing. In this scenario, the center fuel tank exploded spontaneously but unseen. When the flames spread to the wings, the flaming fuselage, ascending gradually about 1500 feet, looked like “a small light or streak.”

  Then there is the fifth possibility, the one that Joseph Delgado, Mike Wire, William Gallagher, and scores of other savvy and responsible witnesses described in remarkably consistent detail. I refer here to the “events” that, in Mayer’s words, “certainly do sound like a missile attacking the airplane.” These events include the ascending flare-like objects, the smoke trail, the zigzag, the arc, the momentary disappearance, and multiple subsequent “bright white” explosions, followed by a fuel-fed fireball. Every one of the best witnesses saw a glowing object ascend and then saw the flaming plane descend. Their descriptions of the falling plane are as vivid and accurate as their descriptions of the ascending object. They did not confuse the two.

  “It was important for us to determine if the witness accounts were generally consistent with the physical evidence,” said Mayer at the final NTSB hearing. As should be clear, these accounts were not consistent at all with the physical evidence the NTSB presented. By the time we had completed Silenced in early summer 2001, I had every reason to trust the witnesses and none to trust the government. Officials who were willing to change witness testimony—or in some cases invent it—would have few qualms about editing tape, misreading data, misplacing parts, rearranging the debris field, or, if push came to shove, pulling out a hammer and bending the metal.

  Chapter: EIGHT

  RESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM

  On June 6, 2001, we staged a pre-screening of Silenced for a tough audience, the Kansas City “hangar” of a semi-secret organization known as the “Quiet Birdmen.” At the time the QBs were meeting at the Kansas City Club, a posh gentleman’s retreat in downtown Kansas City. There were close to a hundred people in attendance, the great majority of them retired airline, military, and freight pilots with a heavy TWA representation. I was a little apprehensive. Every one in the audience knew more about aviation than I did. They sat in silence through the hour-long presentation. The video concluded with our own animation, as seen from the perspective of the man on the bridge, of a two-missile strike on the doomed aircraft. We did not speculate as to the type of missile fired or the perpetrator of the attack. We focused instead on the witnesses and the corruption of their testimony.

  I did not know quite what to expect in the way of response, but when the lights came up, one gentleman rose angrily from his seat and shouted, “Follow the money!” He was a retired TWA pilot. Like many of his colleagues, he had been heavily invested in the company. He believed, as many of them did, that TWA management swallowed the government line to curry favor. At the time of this screening, the airline was in bankruptcy. It would cease to exist altogether within six months. If anyone in the room doubted that missiles had destroyed TWA 800, he kept his opinions to himself. Offered instead were corroborating details, particularly from angry TWA pilots, about the money trail and the inexplicable Pentagon visits of then TWA CEO Jeff Erickson. Said one TWA pilot: “90 percent of us believe there was a government cover-up.” Many traced the airline’s demise to that fateful night in July 1996.

  Once we started distributing the video, the response we got from people within Boeing was equally encouraging. One engineer who had spent countless hours analyzing the aircraft’s destruction on the company’s Cray Supercomputers e-mailed me the following: “I brought [Silenced] to work today and showed it during lunch to eight of my fellow Boeing workers. The room was deathly quiet the entire time. . . . My impression then was a missile strike, and it is even more so today.”1

  Encouraged by the reception, I sent a copy to Claudia Anderson, the managing editor of the Weekly Standard, a publication I considered then and now to be the nation’s smartest conservative journal. For the past few years I had been writing the occasional piece for the publication and had met Anderson during a recent visit. Not hearing back from her, I called to see if she had had a chance to watch Silenced. She claimed she tried but fell asleep while watching it. Taken aback, I suggested she watch it all the way through, this being the greatest untold story of our time, one with major political implications. She doubted she would.

  I sensed correctly that my relationship with the Weekly Standard was over. Those who believe that the conservative media would jump at a story potentially damaging to the Clintons have no experience with conservative media. In Washington, at least, I had crossed the line from responsible journalist to conspiracy theorist. Peter Goelz certainly thought so. I knew Goelz from Kansas City, though not well. In a county without much in the way of Republican opposition, I did some political media for local Democrats, including future senator Claire McCaskill in her successful run for Jackson County prosecutor. Goelz worked as a Democratic consultant and lobbyist, and so our paths crossed once or twice.

  Locally, Goelz was best known for his lobbying work with the “gaming” interests that were buying their way into Missouri. They nosed their way into the state with the pitch that the gambling would be limited to actual, floating, old-timey riverboats. In practice, the “boats” proved no more capable of floating than the Pentagon, but this was apparently “transportation” expertise enough to snag Goelz the spokesman’s job on Jim Hall’s staff at the NTSB. Being a political supporter of the ambitious Hall probably did not hurt either.

  Spokesman for Jim Hall was not the job for which loyalist Goelz had been pining. His connections were strong enough that Clinton had tagged him in 1994 to head the National Indian Gaming Commission, a job rich with perks and possibilities. According to the Washington Post, however, nearly all the participating tribes were “furious” that the White House was ramming Goelz down their throats. So too was Democratic senator Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, who had been promised an open application process. Their collective disgust forced the White House to rethink its plans, and so Goelz ended up on Hall’s NTSB staff.2

  In May 2001, I wrote an article in support of Silenced for Ingram’s, the business magazine that I served as executive editor. Goelz did not like it. In a dismissive letter to the editor in the next month’s edition, he wrote, “In the end there were no missiles, no bombs, no mystery fleet, no fleeing ships, no terrorists, no U.S. Navy involvement. It was just a tired old 747 with an empty, explosive center wing tank.”

  In October 1998, Goelz singled out ABC News correspondent Lisa Stark and producer Tina Babarovic as being “very responsible about reporting the complexities” of the TWA 800 crash investigation. He likely made this point not so much to praise ABC News as to intimidate ABC Entertainment. The network had recently commissioned filmmaker Oliver Stone to produce a one-hour prime-time special that would explore alternative TWA 800 scenarios. It never came to pass. According to the New York Times, the network dropped plans after “several ABC journalists” complained that viewers might confuse the Stone project with the news, and the news people knew for a fact that the missile theories were “groundless.” In reporting on this conflict for the Times, Lawrie Mifflin elaborated that various theories about bombs and missiles had been “widely discredited.”3 Goelz emphatically agreed, calling all such theories “[a]bsolutely, completely groundless.” At this time, the NTSB witness group had yet to read the eyewitness summaries, let alone come to any conclusions.

  If nothing else, Goelz was skilled in turning one branch of the media against another. In August 1999, Kelly O’Meara, a reporter with Insight magazine, asked Goelz for an interview. She had quietly received some new radar data from an NTSB source and wanted Goelz’s take on it. Fortunately, she recorded the interview. Within an hour of its conclu
sion, Goelz called the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz to make a preemptive strike on O’Meara. Less than two days later, in an article thick with sarcasm, Kurtz quoted Goelz as saying, “She really believes that the United States Navy shot this thing down and there was a fleet of warships.”4 As her audiotape proved, O’Meara said or implied no such thing, but that is the way Goelz rolled, and the media rolled with him. Said former NTSB board member Vernon Grose of Goelz, “No other NTSB Managing Director has ever given interviews or delivered opinions about accidents.”5

  My turn was coming up. On July 16, 2001, I got a call from a producer at CNN asking if I would be willing to talk about TWA Flight 800 on air the following day, July 17, the fifth anniversary of the crash. Of course, I would. I would be beamed in remotely to the The Point, a show hosted then by Greta Van Susteren. There was nothing tentative about the arrangement. The producer might or might not select someone to go on with me as counterpoint, she told me, but barring a confession from wayward congressman Gary Condit, then too much in the news, the show would go on. That night I organized my thoughts as though I were to be the only guest.

  The next morning the producer called back. Jim Hall had agreed to go on with me. Our dual appearance was billed on the CNN website and was promoted on conservative websites as well. The producer also directed me to the studio in Kansas City where the interview would be shot. It was KCPT, the local PBS station. I was pleased. The station had aired a half dozen of my documentaries.