by Jack Cashill
After making the arrangements, I headed out to a local public swimming pool where I idled away my lunch hour. It seemed like just another summer day until that light bulb went off over my head. “Good God!” I thought. In six hours, I would have the chance to blow open the most successful cover-up in American peacetime history on CNN, the most respected of all cable news channels. I expected the deck to be stacked at least a little. A few years earlier the Truman Library in nearby Independence had asked me to debate the then retired Illinois Senator Paul Simon on Harry Truman’s Fair Deal. The format went like this: Simon got twenty minutes. I got twenty minutes. Simon got twenty more minutes. Anticipating something similar, I concentrated on honing one killer question.
What I came up with was this: “By the NTSB’s own count, fifty-six eyewitnesses saw an object rise up off the horizon, ascend, zigzag, arc over, and explode at or near the aircraft.” I would continue, “The CIA—and what was the CIA doing on this case anyhow?—tried to tell us that the crippled plane rocketed upwards three thousand feet, confusing the witnesses. Aviators ridiculed this explanation. The NTSB disowned it. So my question to you, Mr. Hall, is what did the eyewitnesses see?” Hall, I imagined, would fumble out some kind of half-assed explanation. Then I would respond, “With all due respect, Mr. Hall, but the CIA had so little to go on that they manufactured—created out of whole cloth—an interview with their key witness, and I would be happy to show you the proof.” At this point, the ref slaps the mat. Takedown! “Mr. Hall,” I would say in conclusion, “I think you owe the American people an apology.”
Of course, we would never get to this point. As soon as I formulated these questions, I knew the interview would never take place. Hall was much too slow, much too vulnerable. Unlike the president who appointed him chairman, Hall was not “an unusually good liar.” Nor was he fast on his feet. Someone, I was certain, would get to him or to CNN and call this whole thing off. I just waited for the call to come. I did not have to wait long. Three hours before the show was to air, a chagrined young producer called to tell me my CNN debut was not to be. She did not hide her disgust. Jim Hall refused to appear on the show with me. And if I were to appear alone, as I had been scheduled to do just the previous day, then that would not be “responsible journalism.”
An hour later, I e-mailed Kristina Borjesson, a former CBS producer who was canned for trying to break out the TWA 800 story four years earlier. “The producer and Greta Van Susteren are furious. Not their fault. This came from the top,” I wrote. “The standards for responsible journalism seem to have changed overnight.” A serious reporter, Borjesson called CNN to confirm the facts in my e-mail. After much searching, she found a source willing to speak anonymously.
“We had no idea we were going to run into this problem,” the source told Borjesson. This CNN staffer went on to say that neither Hall nor Goelz would appear on this show with me so the decision was made to put Hall on alone. “If it is not responsible journalism for Cashill to go on alone, why is it responsible journalism for Hall to go on alone?” asked Borjesson. The answer was that Hall was a “legitimate news guest.” Then the source said about me, “Lots of people warned us about this guy.”6
That evening I watched The Point to see what responsible journalism looked like. Van Susteren began with a pointless canard. “At first,” she said, “people suspected a bomb went off on the plane.”7 No, at first people suspected a missile and with good reason. She then talked about the “painstaking search” that led authorities to conclude that an electrical spark “probably” ignited vapors in the jet’s empty fuel tank. Those vapors, she claimed, had been caused by the heat of the air conditioning units located under the tank. Much was made throughout the investigation about the plane sitting out on a hot tarmac, but these planes routinely sat out on tarmacs in places like Cairo and Phoenix. Plus, as one witness told the FBI, “It was a clear, chilly night.” Van Susteren concluded her introduction musing about the “conspiracy theorists” that insisted the plane was shot down.
In her defense, Van Susteren almost assuredly did not write this opening. It would not surprise me if NTSB staffers had a hand in its creation. The “painstaking” trope smells of David Mayer, as does the all-purpose “conspiracy theorist.” After the introduction, however, Van Susteren asked Hall a question that had the potential to derail him.
“Jim,” she asked, “can you say with 100 percent certainty that the people who think that this flight was shot down, that they were wrong?” Hall tried to kill the clock with innocuous blather. “Well, Greta,” he began, “I think the first thing that I need to say this evening is, we all need to remember first the 230 individuals who lost their lives in that tragedy.” Throughout the investigation, Hall, Kallstrom and others held the grief of family members in ready reserve to ward off tough questions.
Hall prattled on for a minute or two before Van Susteren stopped him. “Does that mean, Jim,” she asked, “that you are 100 percent certain that the conspiracists, who some say saw a white light traveling sky ward, zigzagging, disappearing, and then an orange ball of fire—can you say with 100 percent certainty that they’re wrong?” Other than the irksome use of “conspiracists,” this was a good question. An attorney, Hall knew enough to shade his answer. “Greta,” he said, “in my mind, with 100 percent certainty, our investigators, based on the facts that we developed, they are wrong. They are incorrect.” In his mind at least, Hall had dodged the bullet. It was not even hard.
CNN did not get off quite so easily. The Internet journal WorldNetDaily ran a five-part series to support the release of Silenced. Its editors also heavily promoted my appearance on CNN. As Accuracy in Media reported, “The cancellation angered a lot of people.”8 Many of them communicated their disgust to the network. As a salve, CNN brass rescheduled me for August 2 but cancelled that one too. “We just didn’t want to rush into something like we were rushing into it,” said CNN executive producer Bruce Perlmutter in Yogi Berra–speak.9 In my place, CNN lined up Jim McKenna, a government-friendly aviation reporter but eventually dumped him for a news-less Gary Condit update. As would soon enough become clear, my lessons in responsible journalism were just beginning.
Chapter: NINE
SEPTEMBER 11
“You’ve got to hear what I was just told,” said the caller. The time was late summer 2001. The fellow on the other end of the line was Steve Rosenbaum, the founder and then executive producer of an innovative, New York–based production company, Broadcast News Networks (BNN). Rosenbaum was working to help us find a cable network home for Silenced, but up to this point he was agnostic on its thesis.
“You got my attention,” I said.
As Rosenbaum explained, he was sitting on the rooftop deck of his New York City offices, interviewing a potential new hire for a job as BNN technical director, when a plane passed overhead. The plane got Rosenbaum talking about Silenced and TWA Flight 800.
“You know,” said the job candidate, “I saw the video.”
“You saw Silenced?” asked a surprised Rosenbaum.
“No,” said the candidate, “I saw the actual video, the video of the missile.” The fellow had been working late at MSNBC the evening of July 17, 1996. The network was airing an amateur video of the missile strike in regular rotation until “three men in suits” came to the fellow’s editing suite. They demanded every copy of the video that the network had and cautioned that there could be serious consequences for this fellow and his colleagues should they choose to talk about the video, let alone air it again.
Although I had not seen the video, I had heard a good deal about it, including a rumored bidding war for its purchase. Over time, at least a hundred people have sworn to me they saw it. No one was quite sure which station aired it, but MSNBC seemed a likely suspect. The network debuted on July 15, 1996, two days before the crash. That its execs would go all in to obtain the video made good marketing sense.
In early 2009, I received my most precise confirmation as to its contents,
this from a 747 pilot named Thomas Young. In early August 1996, Young explained, he was laid up in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital in Hong Kong for ten days with a back injury. His employer, Polar Air Cargo, flew his wife Barbara out to join him. They had little else to do but watch TV. Here, according to Young, is what they saw on the local news, both on an English language channel and a Chinese channel, over and over again:
The videotape began with people milling about on a deck facing a body of water. In the background, a streak of light can be seen leaving a point below the edge of the deck, accelerating as it climbed; it passed behind what appeared to me to be a thin cloud layer and continued upward out of the frame, from right to left. As the streak of light disappeared beyond the edge of the frame, after a slight pause, there is a generalized, dim flash on the upper left side of the screen, followed by a brighter and more pronounced flash.1
Young had a distinct perspective on what he was seeing. For six years in the 1980s he had worked at Boeing, much of that time in its Space and Strategic Missile Systems Division. There he had reviewed scores of videotapes of missile launches, covering a wide range of missile types. Given the TV reception in his Hong Kong hospital, Young could not identify the type of missile that took out TWA 800, but he was confident he was looking at a missile. “If this was a Navy missile,” Barbara recalled her husband saying at the time, “there goes Clinton’s re-election.” Apparently, the FBI had not yet made its way to Hong Kong. This description, of course, tracks precisely what the best eyewitnesses saw. When Young returned to the United States, he was “absolutely shocked not to see the video on the air.”2 He asked his fellow pilots if they had seen it and was shocked again that they had not. Young’s testimony has added value in that he had little to gain by telling me this, and even less in lending his name to the account.
In the summer of 2001, Rosenbaum had asked us to extend our sixty-minute documentary to ninety minutes to make it more marketable. We all agreed that an interview with Rosenbaum’s job candidate would be a useful and newsworthy addition. The fact that Rosenbaum decided to hire the fellow made him all the more accessible, but it did not make him any less fearful. He flat out refused to speak on the record or even off it, at least to me. I have only Rosenbaum’s word for what the fellow experienced, but Rosenbaum had no reason to exaggerate.
If nothing else, this refusal gave us more time to devote to the family members of those who died in the crash. For Silenced, we interviewed Marge Krukar, a former TWA flight attendant whose brother Andrew Krukar was among the victims. In Paris, Andrew had planned to meet up with his sweetheart who was to come on a later flight. There he would surprise her with an engagement ring—one shattered dream out of many. Marge’s testimony was as powerful as Andrew’s story. She had vowed to find out who was responsible for her brother’s death and, to this point, the authorities only stood in the way.
Don Nibert was no more satisfied with the investigation than Marge Krukar. Like too many other residents of Montoursville, a pleasant little town in central Pennsylvania, he lost a child on that flight. Alone among the townspeople, he would openly challenge the official explanation. I agreed to meet Nibert at 2 p.m. on August 30, 2001, at the Montoursville Cemetery where his daughter Cheryl, her fifteen fellow French Club members, and their five chaperones were buried. I contracted with a video crew out of Scranton to meet us there as well. I was staying in western New York at the time and drove down. The day was dreary, the sky close and ominous, the worst kind of light for shooting a video. As I found my way to Montoursville and approached the cemetery, however, the clouds parted just a little, and the sun struggled through. There was something mystical about the light—something mystical about the whole experience, for that matter.
Tall and taciturn, Nibert did not seem like a fellow given to fabulation. He had a story to tell, and was not afraid to tell it. After showing me the grave of Cheryl and her schoolmates, he told me the story of that tragic evening. In its early hours, he was picking berries in his small commercial orchard, completing a job Cheryl had been intent on finishing before he shooed her away. Just as the sun was setting, he heard a voice behind him in the Ohio valley accent he had grown up hearing and heeding. The voice was his mother’s. He did not doubt its source for a moment. “Don, Cheryl is okay,” said the voice. “She is with me. You even sent her with raspberry stains on her hands.” His mother had been dead for years.
A professor of agriculture at a nearby college, Nibert has the mind of a scientist. Still, he did not discount what he had heard. He and his wife Donna finished their work in the orchard and went back to the house. There the phone rang. It was the mother of one Cheryl’s classmates. She was frightened. A plane had crashed off Long Island. Did Don know the flight number of the kids’ plane? Nibert did not have to know the number. He knew the plane was theirs. At that awful moment, the long, nightmarish saga began—the desperate phone calls, the trip to JFK, the meeting with authorities, the identification of the body, the grief, the numbness, the despair, and, for Nibert, the mendacity. “I trusted the government before we went through this,” he said. “I do not trust them now.” The lies would make him an activist.
After the meeting at the cemetery, Nibert and I drove by the high school Cheryl attended. He had something he wanted to show me. In a small park next to the school stood a statue of a tall bronze angel, its head bowed, encircled by twenty-one young maple trees, one for each victim. Nibert explained that three days after the crash, during a memorial service, a cloud in the shape of an angel hovered over the town. Almost to a person, the parents took it as a sign their children were in good hands. Today, an angel in front of a public high school might be considered something of a provocation. I asked Nibert whether he was concerned that the ACLU might sue to have it removed. “Let ’em try,” he said drily. Clint Eastwood could not have said it more convincingly. When we returned to his home, Nibert showed me a photo of that cloud, and my own skepticism melted. The resemblance was uncanny.
Twelve days later, before we had a chance to edit the footage from Montoursville, the world turned upside down: it was September 11, 2001. Despite the horrifying events of the day, the Kansas City parish to which I belonged chose to go ahead with its annual dinner. Our young French priest reasoned that people would all the more feel the need to connect with those they knew and cared for, and no one disagreed. Not until I arrived, however, did I learn that the scheduled speaker’s plane had been forced down in Indianapolis. The priest asked me to speak in his stead. “You know something about airplanes,” he said. “Father,” I replied, “I’m not sure this should be about airplanes.” In fact, I was pretty sure it shouldn’t be, but until about five minutes before my time to speak, I wasn’t sure what to speak about. Then it hit me. I would talk about the Angel of Montoursville. It was a natural topic.
Given the national mood, we decided to shelve Silenced for a while. BNN agreed. We did, however, glean some useful insights on the day of September 11 itself. One came from George Stephanopolous, the Clinton advisor turned ABC News correspondent. On the afternoon of that endless day, Stephanopolous was speaking to ABC News anchor Peter Jennings about President George Bush’s relocation to the situation room at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Likely to show he deserved his generous salary, Stephanopolous served up some inside info about a second, more secure White House Situation Room about which few people knew. There, he told Jennings, the various military chiefs could teleconference with the president and other officials. “In my time at the White House,” confided Stephanopolous, “it was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon.”3 To the degree this remark garnered attention, it was for Stephanopolous’s use of the word “bombing.” If “bombing” was a slip of the tongue, his assertion about the Situation Room was surely not. This was newsworthy. The Pentagon does not involve itself in civilian plane crashes, certainly not in t
he United States. Nor, for that matter, does the White House. This had never happened before.
Jim Kallstrom had his own moment of revelation as well. While speaking with Dan Rather on CBS News about the events of the day, he blurted out in no particular context, “We need to stop the hypocrisy.” He then quickly added, “not that hypocrisy got us to this day.”4 Kallstrom knew more than he was prepared to say. Hypocrisy did help get America to that day. By convincing America that a mechanical failure destroyed TWA 800, Kallstrom and his superiors relegated talk about aviation terror to the overnight radio shows, if there. The failure to take the problem seriously left America more vulnerable than it needed to be. Kallstrom was the public face of this deception, and for just that one honest moment on September 11, he rebelled against the role he had felt compelled to play.
In the days following September 11, several commentators alluded to the destruction of TWA 800, but only one did so twice, and that was John Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts. Senator Kerry first mentioned TWA 800 on September 11 itself. “We have always known this could happen,” Kerry told Larry King. By “we” he meant the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. By “this” he meant the use of planes as flying bombs. “I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it, but not really doing hard work of responding.”5
I knew of at least one person who called Kerry’s office for clarification about his inclusion of TWA 800. A Kerry staffer told her she must have misunderstood. There was no misunderstanding Kerry’s second mention. I saw it as it happened. Kerry was a guest on Hardball with Chris Matthews, then on CNBC.6 “We’ve had the Achille Lauro, the Munich Olympics, the pipe bomb at the Olympics in Atlanta, the TWA 800, the bombing of embassies, and it’s not going to disappear overnight,” Kerry told Matthews, again adding “TWA 800” to a list of terrorist actions.