by Jack Cashill
In between Kerry’s first mention of TWA 800 and the second, one major newspaper broke the story of how former vice president Al Gore undermined an air safety commission he himself chaired. According to Kerry’s hometown newspaper Boston Globe, Gore sold out the commission, formed after the TWA 800 disaster, for campaign cash. Reporters Walter Robinson and Glen Johnson knew an Achilles heel when they saw one. The collapse of Gore’s commission struck them as “the clearest recent public example of the success that airlines have long had in defeating calls for more oversight.”7 I speculated at the time that Kerry’s follow-up on Chris Matthews’s show was fortuitous. He was playing hardball. Gore stood in the way of his run for the White House, and he wanted him out. I may have been right. After Gore’s surprise announcement he would not be a candidate in 2004, he endorsed Howard Dean over Kerry.
I was not the only one who caught the many references to TWA Flight 800 by the various commentators. So too did retired TWA Captain Albert Mundo. Mundo knew something about TWA 800. He served as flight engineer on the plane’s trip in from Athens earlier on the day of its demise and inspected it before its final flight. On September 25, 2001, he sent a letter to Greta Van Susteren.8 He pointed out the various terrorist references by Kerry and others and lamented the cancellation of my scheduled appearance on CNN two months prior. “Had the real cause of the destruction of TWA 800 been made public,” he wrote, “then there surely would have been a heightened awareness of the terrorist threat to this nation.”
Bestselling novelist Nelson DeMille noticed as well. He was on Long Island the night of July 17, 1996. News reports of the plane’s destruction spooked him. He had put his college-age daughter on that same plane three nights earlier. Two years later, his research on a new novel dealing with Mideast terrorism, The Lion’s Game, put him in touch with several FBI agents and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). During one interview he casually mentioned TWA 800, and the agent answered brusquely, “What does that have to do with Mideast terrorism?” When DeMille mentioned the possibility of a missile strike, the agent shot back that it was a center fuel tank explosion and concluded, “That’s all I’m going to say about that.”
The agent’s tone intrigued DeMille. He kept asking the question of other involved parties and kept getting the same cryptic answers. One New York cop he interviewed worked the case through the JTTF. Not being a federal agent, he felt freer to talk. He had interviewed two dozen witnesses and convinced DeMille those witnesses had seen something. After September 11, at the suggestion of the NYPD/JTTF officer, DeMille got hold of the FBI witness summaries, the 302s, and he came to much the same conclusion that I did upon reading them at the Sanderses’ home in Florida.
Before beginning a novel on TWA 800, DeMille conferred with retired TWA international captain, Jack Clary. “I don’t know what it was,” said Clary as to the cause of the crash, “but I know what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a short-circuit spark in the center fuel tank.” As Clary asked rhetorically, and this more than five years after the crash, “Do you see the FAA requiring any remedial action on the center fuel tank of the 747s?” The answer was no, not even on Air Force One. There had never been a comparable explosion before and has not been one since. Thomas Young, in fact, had told me that his Boeing colleagues thought the spark in the fuel tank theory “laughable.”9
Soon after, DeMille ran into a neighbor at a Long Island restaurant. In passing, the man asked what he was working on.10 DeMille said he was thinking about writing a novel based on TWA 800. “We saw that,” said the fellow. “We were on our boat that night.” DeMille arranged to interview the couple and their children. On the night in question, this family and another were out boating. “Look, a skyrocket,” said one of the kids. And then everyone on the boat, four adults and five children, “watched as a streak of light rose off the water and headed into the sky.” DeMille knew these people and trusted them. They had nothing to gain by embellishing. They convinced him there was a story to be told. The subsequent novel, Night Fall, opens on July 17, 1996, and culminates on September 11, 2001. Not to give too much away, but the story begins with a steamy encounter on the beach that the couple decides to videotape. DeMille knew a real video was out there, and the plot of his novel revolves around it. Although the real video was confiscated, the hunt for it would continue. More on this later.
Chapter: TEN
FIT TO PRINT
“Cashill, you are either stupid, delusional or complicit,” wrote one correspondent. “Hey bozo,” wrote another, “what are you going to do with that little bit of money you are being paid to spew that elementary, zombie riddled, falsity?” No, the NTSB’s Peter Goelz was not calling me out for being a conspiracy theorist. Just the opposite. The readers of a piece I had written about September 11 were calling me out for not being enough of a conspiracy theorist. One summed up my failings nicely. “You are no better than the rest of the hacks out there with something to sell,” he wrote. “Only you are willing to excuse the murder of thousands of citizens by our own government to do it.”
In the offending piece, I suggested a media version of Gresham’s law: bad conspiracies drive out the good. In the wake of September 11, a variety of wildly speculative inside job theories threatened to trivialize the most consequential real conspiracy of our time. This was the environment in which James Sanders and I were writing in 2002, having signed a book contract early that year. A former accident investigator, Sanders was the nuts and bolts guy. I was more interested in the logic, the why. None of the 9/11 conspiracy theories passed the “why” test. For a theory to make sense, all the pieces must fall in place, not just some, and there has to be a compelling logic as to why they would. The challenge in discerning the logic of the TWA 800 misdirection was that the logic kept shifting. A walk through the first two months of the New York Times’ reporting on the investigation sheds useful, if imperfect, light on that shift.
After the downing of TWA 800, the Times reporters swarmed Long Island, producing as many as a half dozen articles a day. Little of that reporting went beyond what they were told by the FBI. If nothing else, the Times’ dependence on the FBI provided clearer focus on the pressures Kallstrom and his colleagues faced and some insight into why they responded the way they did. The pressure was coming from several different sources: the White House, largely through the Justice Department; Clinton’s go-to guy at the NTSB, Robert Francis; and, most curiously, the CIA.
The Times’ first full article on July 18 leads with the fact that the FBI had taken over jurisdiction of the investigation. The reason for the takeover was that “witnesses reported an explosion, raising the possibility that a bomb went off on the jetliner.”1 On day one, “federal law enforcement authorities” were leading the Times away from a missile. In fact, the word “missile” does not appear in the article, and each of the eyewitnesses interviewed saw the plane only after it exploded. That the Times failed to mention the widely bruited speculation about a missile suggests that its reporters were asked not to. The article concluded, however, with a federal official saying, “It doesn’t look good,” meaning, the reporter conceded, “a terrorist act.” A day later, July 19, the Times published the president’s remarks on the crash. “We do not know what caused this tragedy,” said Clinton. “I want to say that again: We do not know as of this moment what caused this tragedy.”2 To drive home a lie, Clinton had the habit of repeating an assertion as if repetition signaled sincerity. He did this most memorably in January 1998. “I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again,” the president told the nation. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”3 We know he was lying in January 1998. The evidence strongly suggests he was lying in July 1996 as well.
In a separate article on July 19, the Times’ David Johnston introduced the possibility of a missile strike. “In public,” Johnston wrote, investigators were talking about an “accident,” but “in private” they hinted at a “terrorist’s missile.” The Times’ account wa
s straightforward. Eyewitnesses “had described a bright light, like a flash, moving toward the plane just before the initial explosion, and that the flash had been followed by a huge blast—a chain of events consistent with a missile impact and the blast produced by an aircraft heavily laden with fuel.”4 There it was. This was the most honest description of the plane’s demise that the Times would publish. Of note, this same article reported that air traffic controllers “had picked up a mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane just before the explosion.”
Based on his language, Johnston’s sources seemed to be local. Later that same day, a separate article by Matthew Purdy showed “federal” law enforcement officials struggling to regain control of the narrative.5 They claimed to have looked at radar records and were “giving less credence” to the missile theory in no small part because TWA 800 was flying too high for most shoulder-fired missiles to reach. This was true, but there was no mention of the kind of missiles that did have range enough to destroy a 747 at more than 13,000 feet. Curiously, the Times quoted both Major Fritz Meyer and Paul Angelides, the last two witnesses to a likely missile strike the Times would cite. Both would press their case in the years to come, but the Times had no interest in hearing what they or other eyewitnesses had to say. On July 20, the Times ran a notice asking people who saw “events in the sky” to call an FBI hotline. The FBI, however, would not share the results of these calls with the NTSB for nearly three years and never with the New York Times.
Recently published CIA documents show that the White House had recruited the agency within a day of the crash, not to hunt for international terrorists but to suppress missile speculation. In a July 20 internal memo obtained by a Ray Lahr FOIA request, a CIA analyst reported “no evidence of a missile” in the radar data.6 That same memo argued that the aircraft was beyond the range of virtually all shoulder-fired missiles. In no memo was there any mention of a possible naval misfire even though one memo acknowledged the Navy was “reportedly conducting an exercise in the area.” The analyst mentioned the exercise only because he was interested in seeing if any of the ships had raw radar video recordings to share.
Sure enough, by July 21, “experts” were telling the Times that the radar blip was actually “an electronic phantom image.” They insisted too that TWA 800 was flying beyond the range of even the “most sophisticated shoulder-launched missiles.”7 It was not hard for the authorities to make the radar mean whatever they wanted. A CIA analyst would admit in an internal memo that the FAA did not “store or record” the original radar video data. The only imagery available was “post-detection,” meaning copies or representations.8 Jim Holtsclaw had the advantage of talking to controllers who witnessed the event in real time. These experts also told David Johnston that no one either saw or heard a missile launch, a claim they could not begin to substantiate.
On July 24, the Times’ Matthew Purdy reported that investigators had yet to find proof of an explosion.9 Speaking to reporters, President Clinton claimed to have learned nothing new about “the cause of the accident” (italics added). On July 26, the paper of record published the president’s remarks on his and Hillary’s meeting with the families of the victims. “We do not yet know what caused Flight 800 to crash, whether it was mechanical failure or sabotage,” he insisted. “But we will find out.”10
By July 26, investigators had established the false dialectic that would hold for the next two months. The cockpit voice recorder captured only a brief sound before it stopped recording. This, reported Matthew Wald, “added strong support to the theory that a bomb destroyed the plane.”11 That much conceded, “aviation experts,” surely the NTSB, could “not exclude mechanical failure.” There was no mention of a missile. This same dialectic played out a day later. The NTSB’s Francis insisted that mechanical malfunction still could not be ruled out but his comments shriveled under a headline that read, “Backing a Bomb Theory: Devices Stopped in Unison.”12
The bomb scenario enabled Clinton to appear presidential. On July 26, Times editors praised his decision to install bomb detection systems in advance of any NTSB findings.13 On July 28, Times readers learned that “within days” the weight of the evidence would “prompt the Government to announce that the cause was sabotage, and that the case is being taken over by the F.B.I.”14 The word “sabotage” implied “bomb,” but investigators had every reason to believe the culprit was a missile. In a July 30 internal memo, headlined “Hold the Press,” a CIA analyst warned of an impending FBI report on a likely missile strike. After interviewing 144 witnesses, the FBI was convinced there was a “high probability that the incident was caused by a MANPAD,” meaning a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. According to the reporting agents, all three of whom had aviation experience, the evidence was “overwhelming.” The witnesses were “excellent” and their testimony “too consistent” for the cause to be anything other than a missile.
The unnamed CIA analyst boasted of how he discouraged the FBI from pursuing this angle. “I reported to [the FBI agent] the majority if not all our concerns, issues and problems with the determination that the incident was most-likely caused by a MANPAD.” Said the analyst of his FBI counterpart, “He had little to refute our concerns.” At this point, even internally, all missile talk revolved around terrorism. The FBI agents appeared to be sincere in their beliefs; the CIA analysts not so much. In any case, the FBI never did go public with this report even though it had “only minor corrections left to make,” and the future performance of the CIA suggests it played a role in assuring the same.15
On August 2, 1996, two weeks after the crash, President Clinton shared his thoughts on TWA 800 with Taylor Branch. About once a month over the course of his presidency, Clinton allowed the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian to interview him. The understanding between the two was that these conversations could not be published before 2010, time enough, one presumes, to give Hillary her shot at the presidency. When published, The Clinton Tapes offered little in the way of the new or useful. Even in private, Clinton could not stop spinning, but on August 2, 1996, Taylor caught up with Clinton before the spin had become dogma. At the time, it appears that the Clinton White House was still finessing the TWA 800 narrative. “Unless some telltale chemical survived the brine,” Clinton told Branch, “[the investigators] must try to reassemble the plane to determine the cause.”16 Clinton also told Branch that the FBI was “rechecking” its interviews with “some fifteen ground witnesses who saw a bright streak in the sky near the plane.” If corroborated, Branch added, this “could suggest a missile rather than a bomb.” By August 2, of course, the FBI had interviewed more than 500 witnesses, at least 144 of whom were considered “excellent.” Clinton had to know this. He knew enough certainly to tell Branch that a Stinger fired from land was out of the question, but not a surface-to-air missile fired from the sea.17
Perhaps as a form of dress rehearsal, Clinton floated the Eisenhower option by Tower. “They want war,” Branch quoted Clinton as saying of Iran. Never one to take his eye off the prize, Clinton was convinced that, given his investment in the Mideast peace process, fundamentalists in Iran and elsewhere wanted war to “undermine [his] chances for reelection.”18 After the Khobar Towers bombing in June 1996, the president’s first instinct was to have advisor Dick Morris run a quick poll. Morris found that Americans approved of his handling of the terrorist attack 73 to 20 percent. “SAUDI BOMBING—recovered from Friday and looking great,” Morris wrote in his notes. Only 18 percent held Clinton responsible.19 If Morris polled about Clinton’s handling of TWA 800, he has never discussed it publicly.
Given how little information was available to the public or even to Clinton’s cabinet, the Iran angle seemed to make sense. In their 1998 book TWA 800: Accident or Incident, Kevin Ready and Cap Parlier made a plausible, if speculative, case that a surface-to-air missile fired from an Iranian ship destroyed the airliner.20 They traced the Iranian motivation to the U.S. Navy’s accidental shoot dow
n of Iranian Airbus 655 in July 1988. Both Ready and Parlier have serious credentials, Ready having served as a military intelligence officer and Arabic linguist and Parlier as a U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. No Survivors, a 2013 CNN special report, made the case that the White House did indeed think terrorists attacked TWA 800, with Iran the leading suspect. “I think our first thought,” said national security advisor Anthony Lake, “was that, when we got this news, that if it was terrorism, we wanted to especially look for an Iranian connection.”21
Subsequent events suggest, however, that Clinton was hedging his bets with history. He knew more than he was telling Branch or even his aides, but on August 2, 1996, he had yet to fix on an end game. If the FBI found Clinton’s “telltale” chemicals, its agents could argue for a bomb and declare the crash a crime. In the interim, the FBI and CIA would continue to marginalize the witnesses. Both agencies had been doing that from day one. With the witness testimony suppressed, the investigators could “reassemble the plane” as Clinton suggested to Branch,22 and the tedious reconstruction of the massive 747 would take the investigation past the November election. The missile talk would remain strictly private. Greg Norman. Greg Norman.
The White House could live with a bomb scenario. For the first two weeks of August, the bomb theory dominated the Times reporting. Relentlessly political, Clinton attempted to exploit public anxiety about terrorism. In an article with the none too subtle headline, “Seizing the Crime Issue, Clinton Blurs Party Lines,” the Times told its readers that the tough talking president “scrapped his party’s traditional approach to crime and criminal justice.” In its stead, he recommended a series of punitive measures that “threatened the Republicans’ lock on law and order.”23