TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  On August 14, four weeks to the day after the crash, the Times offered the first detailed account of the plane’s break-up sequence. The most salient revelation was that the center fuel tank caught fire as many as twenty-four seconds after the initial blast. This meant that the “only good explanations remaining” were either a bomb or missile.24 Reporter Don Van Natta described the destruction of the plane in much the same way the best eyewitnesses had weeks earlier. “The blast’s force decapitated the plane, severing the cockpit and first-class cabin, which then fell into the Atlantic Ocean,” he wrote. Witness 73, for instance, “observed the front of the aircraft separate from the back.” Witness 150, Lisa Perry, told of how the plane broke apart like a toy: “The front was carried forward and arced down with its momentum.” In no subsequent report by the FBI, NTSB, or CIA did any witness get credit for such an observation. To admit the witnesses reported the break-up sequence accurately would be to concede they knew what caused the plane to break up.

  In their later embrace of the CIA zoom climb scenario, Times editors ignored Van Natta’s accurate description of a plane going nowhere but down. “The rest of the plane flew on, descending rapidly,” he wrote, “and as it did thousands of gallons of jet fuel spilled out of the wings and the center fuel tank between them. At 8,000 feet, about 24 seconds after the initial blast, the fuel caught fire, engulfing the remainder of the jetliner into a giant fireball.”

  On August 17, in an article prophetically titled “To T.W.A. Crash Investigators, Not All Witnesses Are Equal,” Andrew Revkin introduced Times readers to Witness 136, Michael Russell. On July 19, Russell told the FBI he was working on a survey vessel a mile off shore when “a white flash in the sky caught his eye.”25 Within seconds of that flash, Russell “observed a burst of fire forming a huge fireball.” According to Revkin, who identified Russell by name, “His sober, understated story was one of only a few that investigators have judged credible.” As reported, there were “fewer than a dozen” accounts believable enough to aid the investigation. Of course, the FBI knew there were many, many more.

  The FBI judged Russell’s story credible because it fit with the Bureau’s already skewed plot line. This was not Russell’s fault. His observations were honest and accurate. He caught the “white flash” out of the corner of his eye. He did not happen to see the ascending object that caused it. That said, the white flash suggested a high explosive, meaning one that detonates at a high rate of speed, as in a bomb or a missile. The subsequent fireball, more yellow in color, he correctly identified as “a substance of extreme flammability being suddenly ignited.” An engineer, Russell knew the difference. Russell’s account, Revkin reported, “bolstered the idea that a bomb, and not an exploding fuel tank, triggered the disintegration of the airplane.” More to the point, his account “substantially weakened support for the idea that a missile downed the plane.” That was the article’s money quote, and the reason readers were allowed to hear from Michael Russell.

  The investigators who introduced Russell to the Times imagined a level of happy collaboration among the agencies that had defied reality. As they assured the Times, “teams of Federal agents and safety board officials” were carefully interviewing witnesses, reading their body language, and culling out “the pleasers.” This was nonsense. In reality, the FBI agents were imprecise and inconsistent. They had shut out safety board officials altogether and prevented witnesses from reading and correcting the 302s.

  Amateurism was only part of the problem. The Clinton White House was improvising a strategy to make missile talk go away and exploiting FBI weaknesses to make it happen. In this highly compartmentalized investigation, the great majority of those working it had no suspicion there was a strategy in place other than seeking the truth. Kallstrom knew, but he could not have known what conclusion he would be allowed to reach. As late as six weeks after the crash, I seriously doubt if Clinton knew what would be the final explanation for the crash. What the insiders did know, however, was that there could be no missile strike—a bomb maybe, but no missile—at least until November.

  On Thursday, August 22, the investigation took an unexpected turn. Reporter Dan Barry noted that Kallstrom was “conspicuously absent” from the podium he shared with the NTSB’s Robert Francis during the routine press briefings.26 Francis told reporters not to read too much into Kallstrom’s absence as Kallstrom had other responsibilities to attend to. Taking Francis’s cue, Barry failed to follow up. He should have. For the first time, Kallstrom had been called to meet with government officials in Washington.

  From a political perspective, the meeting came a day or two too late. “Three senior officials” had already provided the Times enough information to generate an above the fold, front-page headline on Friday, August 23, reading, “Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800.”27 If Van Natta, the author of the article, called one of the president’s people for confirmation, that call may have triggered the August 22 meeting. According to Pierre Salinger, August 22 was also the specific date Dick Russell composed his nervy e-mail, and that may have factored in as well.28 Kallstrom blamed the DOJ attorneys for informing the Times about the residue finds, but this accusation was not credible on any level.29 DOJ officials did not have the knowledge to generate a story of this magnitude. More to the point, just days before the Democratic National Convention, the attorneys at the deeply politicized DOJ did not have the motive.

  The Van Natta article could scarcely have been more definitive. Investigators had found “scientific evidence” of an explosive device, specifically traces of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a component found in bombs and missiles. As Van Natta reported, the FBI had announced as early as July 29 that “one positive result” was enough to declare the plane’s destruction a criminal act, a condition repeated often over the next few weeks. This was not the first article in which the Times reported evidence of explosives. On August 9, Van Natta noted that ATF agents had detected traces of explosives on some pieces of wreckage, but “later tests at the F.B.I. turned out negative.”30 On August 14, Van Natta reported that in ten field tests on the scene in Long Island, chemists had detected “residue consistent with an explosive,” but in each case further tests at the FBI lab in Washington were “not conclusive.” On August 24, Dan Barry reported that five days after the crash, investigators on Long Island had found a trace of PETN on a piece of the right wing, but “more sophisticated” tests at the FBI lab failed to replicate the result.31

  At first glance, this may seem as if the FBI was just being thorough, but in fact the EGIS Explosives Detection System at the Calverton investigation site was as at least as sophisticated as any device the FBI had in its lab. In his book on criminal forensics, Dr. Harold Trimm called EGIS “the ultimate in speed, accuracy, and sensitivity—without compromise.”32 EGIS developer David Fine described the technology as “extremely sensitive” and noted that false positives were “very rare if ever.”33

  A further complication was that the FBI lab was then subject to what the Times described as a “long-running internal inquiry” by the Inspector General of the DOJ. This inquiry cautioned FBI brass “to wait for incontrovertible evidence before saying publicly what most of them acknowledge privately: that Flight 800 was deliberately downed by an explosive device.”34 When Kallstrom finally did go public with his evidence—he sat on it for two weeks—he likely felt safe because the explosive residue had been found in the plane’s interior. This revelation kept the investigation on the “bomb” track. Still, the White House could not have been pleased with the timing.

  Despite Clinton’s lead over Republican Bob Dole in the polls, presidential advisor Dick Morris reminded the president that he had “a soft underbelly.” Too many voters did not trust this former draft-dodger in his role as commander in chief.35 As Morris well knew, a missile attack against America, by friend or foe, would have exposed that vulnerability. A bomb scenario was more manageable but still problematic.

  For what
ever reason, the Times reporters and editors failed to comment on the political backdrop against which this drama was playing out. The other above-the-fold headline on August 23 read as follows, “Clinton Signs Bill Cutting Welfare; States in New Roll.”36 The president was dramatically tacking to the center, as he had been doing on the terrorism issue. The signing of this bill three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was hardly a coincidence. There, Clinton hoped to sell the party’s peace and prosperity message. Front page headlines about explosive devices destroying an American airliner, by a bomb or especially by a missile, would remind America of what Clinton was not—namely, a trustworthy wartime leader.

  Back from Washington on the day the article appeared, Friday, August 23, an apparently chastened Kallstrom reversed direction. According to Times reporter Jim Barry, Kallstrom staged a “hastily announced” news conference. Investigators, said Kallstrom, lacked “the critical mass of information” necessary to declare the crash a criminal act.37 “The three theories are on the board,” he added. “When we confirm one of them, we’ll take the other two off.” When asked the provenance of the PETN if not a bomb or a missile, Kallstrom alluded vaguely to “some other means.” Barry followed this comment with an unusually critical observation, “But on Thursday night, a senior law enforcement official laughed out loud at the suggestion of this possibility.”

  Although there is no published record of any Washington meeting, Kallstrom returned to Calverton a changed man. Based on his subsequent performance, he seemed to have no more urgent task than to negate the Times reporting on explosive residues. Front-page headlines like “Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800” were not easily explained away, and it fell to Kallstrom to do the explaining.

  Without noting the significance of the date, Christine Negroni traced the effort to find an alternate explanation to the very day the “Prime Evidence” headline appeared, August 23.38 For the FAA, this meant a worldwide search to determine whether local police had ever used explosives in dog-training exercises on the plane that would come to be designated TWA 800.39 This would be no simple task. The FAA had never systematized these records. For its part, the FBI ceased to look for eyewitnesses. Agents would do no more interviews for the next two months, and only a handful after that, almost inevitably for the wrong reasons. The investigators working through the NTSB continued to do their work in good faith, but in a highly compartmentalized investigation most knew little more about the mischief afoot than did the public. That too would soon change, and people who noted the mischief would suffer for it.

  Chapter: ELEVEN

  BLACK HOLE

  On August 22, 1996, the day Jim Kallstrom was called back to Washington, the White House blunted the forward momentum of the investigation (just as surely as missiles had TWA 800’s five weeks earlier). Those five weeks had to have been a tumultuous stretch in the life of President Clinton. A U.S. airliner had been blown out of the sky two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, and the White House was making plans to retaliate. Richard Clarke called this crisis “the almost war,” and he was not exaggerating. As late as two weeks after the incident, Clinton was telling historian Taylor Branch that we were on the verge of attacking Iran.

  Given the gravity of the situation, one would have expected Clinton and his advisors to feature this saga in their respective memoirs, especially since all this chaos and uncertainty unfolded in the heat of a presidential campaign. Yet save for Clarke, they did not, not at all. So suffocating was the shroud of silence that cloaked the TWA 800 investigation that the individuals most deeply involved all but refused to talk about it. As a case in point, in his 957-page 2004 memoir, My Life, Bill Clinton spent one paragraph on TWA 800 and that a thoroughly dishonest one. “At the time everyone assumed—wrongly as it turned out—that this was a terrorist act,” Clinton wrote. “There was even speculation that the plane had been downed by a rocket fired from a boat in Long Island Sound.”1

  No, the fifty-six certified NTSB witnesses who claimed to see an object ascend from the horizon all traced its provenance to the Atlantic Ocean, south of Long Island. The Sound is north of Long Island. “While I cautioned against jumping to conclusions,” continued the former president, “it was clear that we had to do more to strengthen aviation safety.” He then added a second paragraph bragging about the intrusive and irrelevant measures he and Vice President Al Gore took—or promised to take—to avoid future bombings. That was it.

  A week after the crash, Bill and Hillary spent three heart-wrenching hours meeting with the victims’ families. Clarke described the president “praying with them, hugging them, taking pictures with them.” He spoke of how “Mrs. Clinton” retreated alone to a makeshift chapel, there to pray “on her knees.”2 For someone who liked to boast of her empathy with ordinary people, Hillary could have made literary hay with a scene this poignant. She did not. In her 528-page memoir, Living History, Hillary spent just one-third of a sentence on TWA 800, which, for her, was merely one out of several “tragic events” that summer.3

  In his memoir, My FBI: Bringing Down The Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror, former FBI director Louis Freeh mentioned the crash in passing as a footnote to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudia Arabia: “Three weeks later, on July 17, TWA flight 800 exploded off Long Island minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. No one knew what brought it down: mechanical failure, a bomb, a ground-to-air missile all seemed possible in the early stages.”4 No investigation during Freeh’s tenure generated more news coverage or demanded as much FBI attention, and yet Freeh begrudged it only two sentences, neither of which answered the question as to what did bring the plane down.

  In his memoir Off With Their Heads, presidential advisor Dick Morris teased his audience but did not deliver. He cited TWA 800 as one of “three attacks” in the “terror summer of 1996.” Wrote Morris, “Americans demanded action. But all they got from Clinton were speeches.”5 He did not shy from speaking in detail of the other two “attacks”—Khobar Towers and the Olympic Park bombing—but about TWA 800 he had nothing to say beyond its listing with the other two. On July 15, 2003, I got the Morris treatment firsthand when he and I were phone-in guests on Paul Schiffer’s Cleveland radio show. Three times I asked Morris to elaborate on his TWA 800 remarks. Three times he responded as though he had not even heard my question.

  Although he was inadvertently open about TWA 800 with ABC’s Peter Jennings on 9/11, George Stephanopolous did not spare the incident a single word in his 1999 memoir All Too Human. In June 2013, Stephanopolous sat mutely during a three-minute discussion of TWA 800 by two of his ABC colleagues on his own show, Good Morning America. Again, he said not a word.6

  In the aftermath of the plane’s destruction, George Tenet served as acting director of Central Intelligence. The new CIA documents show him to have been involved in the investigation from very nearly the beginning. Indeed, he signed off on the CIA’s ultimate explanation months before the FBI shared that explanation with the public. Yet he too failed to even mention the disaster in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm. Clinton’s chief-of-staff Leon Panetta called the president with the news of the plane’s downing. “The concern at that moment was that this might very well be a terrorist act,” Panetta would tell CNN.7 The concern was apparently not memorable enough to earn even the slightest mention in Panetta’s 2014 memoir, Worthy Fights.

  TWA 800 and the ensuing investigation would seem perfect fodder for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee’s “Special Report” for that period of time explored the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks before the TWA 800 disaster and a variety of other intelligence-related stories in the news. The report, however, was fully silent on the subject of TWA 800.8 This was all the more troubling given the CIA’s own acknowledgement that “the DI [Directorate of Intelligence] became involved in the ‘missile theory’ the d
ay after the crash occurred.”9 Equally curious is that on the same day the report was issued—February 28, 1997—CIA analysts presented a comprehensive PowerPoint titled, “A Witness by Witness Account: A Review of the TWA 800 Witness Reports,” to an unspecified internal audience.10

  Tim Weiner covered TWA 800 for the New York Times. In his 2008 bestseller, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, he had the opportunity to make amends for the paper’s failure to smoke out CIA mischief during the course of the investigation. To no one’s great surprise, he chose not to even mention TWA 800. Sicilian mobsters could learn a thing or two about omerta from the Times newsroom.

  As the lone White House chronicler of the TWA 800 aftermath, Richard Clarke buttressed the administration case just when the 9/11 Commission might have been tempted to scrutinize it. Unfortunately, little of what he wrote was true. “The FAA,” he reported, “was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft.”11 In fact, if the FAA had no explanation, its people would have likely contacted the NTSB. Clarke was summoned precisely because the FAA did have an explanation: the radar data showing an unknown object approaching TWA 800 just before it blew up. It was the radar data, not the eyewitness reports, that prompted Clarke’s meeting. As to the “17,000 feet” reference, Clarke incorporated the CIA’s zoom climb altitude into this 1996 story long before the CIA imagined it and repeated the altitude in his 2004 book long after the NTSB disowned it.

  Roughly four weeks after the crash, the late FBI terrorist expert John O’Neill reportedly told Clarke that the witness interviews “were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger.”12 Since O’Neill died at the World Trade Center on September 11, Clarke could put whatever words in O’Neill’s mouth he chose to. For the record, no witness ever mentioned a “Stinger.” As early as July 22, CIA analysts and FBI agents had concluded that a missile “would have to come from a boat under the flight path” and would most likely have been “an IR SAM,” meaning an Iranian surface-to-air missile.13 O’Neill was correct, however, in telling Clarke the FBI was convinced a missile had taken down the plane. This bears repeating. Within two weeks of the disaster, FBI agents had interviewed 144 “excellent” eyewitnesses and found the evidence for a missile strike “overwhelming.” Clarke used his book to help scrub this information from the record. In the days following the crash, he wrote, “No intelligence surfaced that helped advance the investigation.”14