by Jack Cashill
Clarke cited the small, shoulder-fired Stinger missile as a way of discrediting all terrorist or missile-related theories. The CIA memos showed its analysts taking the same tack with the FBI. “[TWA 800] was at 15,000 feet,” Clarke reportedly told O’Neill. “No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high.” Confident no one in the media would challenge his numbers, Clarke did not bother to get the altitude of TWA 800 right or even consistently wrong. The actual altitude at the time of TWA’s destruction was 13,760 feet.
Although Clarke would pass himself off as a man above politics, the Clintons had seduced him if by no other means than granting him an access to power that George W. Bush never did. Clarke openly relished his role as a Clinton insider. A week after the crash, the president was telling Clarke and others that he was convinced terrorists had downed the plane and at that point, Clarke may not have known enough to disbelieve him. Soon, however, Clarke would become an active agent of disinformation. Based on his own timeline, he assumed this role a “few weeks later,” or roughly a month after the crash. As Clarke related in his book, he visited the investigation site at a “giant hangar in Beth Page, Long Island” where the plane was being “rebuilt.”15 Although he did not reveal why he was at the hangar or who sent him, Clarke did see fit to report on a remarkably convenient exchange he had with a random, unnamed technician:16
“So this is where the bomb exploded?” I asked. “Where on the plane was it?”
“The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn’t a bomb,” he added. “See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside.”
“What’s below row 23?” I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I thought it was.
“The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit . . .” He indicated an explosion with his hands.
The technician went on to tell Clarke that those “old 747s” had an “electrical pump inside the center line fuel tank,” and he cited the pump as the likely source of ignition. In truth, the whole story rings false. The giant hangar was in Calverton, forty-five miles east of Beth Page, and the decision to rebuild the plane was not made until the second week of November, at least two months after this serendipitous meeting.17 These “old” 747s could idle for hours on runways in Phoenix or Cairo without overheating, let alone on a cool summer evening in New York. The plane’s fuel pumps were suspect until finally recovered and found blameless. The NTSB admittedly never did find an ignition source.
Why Clarke chose to tell so strange a story is bewildering. Something of a glory hound, he may have wanted to claim credit for showing the White House the way out of this monstrous political mess. He elaborated, in fact, that he returned to Washington that same day and shared his fuel tank theory with Panetta and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, even to the point of diagramming the interior of the 747. Neither Panetta nor Lake has confirmed this account, but then again they, like everyone but Clarke, have kept their accounts to the bare minimum. “Does the NTSB agree with you?” Lake reportedly asked Clarke. “Not yet.” He added the telling comment, “We were all cautiously encouraged.”18 The word “encouraged” gives away more than Clarke intended. A fuel tank explosion brings no one back to life, but it would spare the president a Greg Norman moment.
“Unfortunately,” Clarke concluded, “the public debate over the incident was clouded by conspiracy theory.” Speaking of conspiracies, Clarke failed to sort through the conflicting details of the one the CIA had orchestrated. Although he accepted TWA’s 800 apocryphal ascent to 17,000 feet, he claimed that what the witnesses saw was not the zoom climb but “a column of jet fuel from the initial explosion and rupture, falling and then catching fire.”19 If he never quite got his story straight, it was because he did not have to. The media held the Clinton White House to a different standard than they did that of his successor, George W. Bush. When Clarke’s book came out in March 2004, he got a ton of exposure, including sixty minutes on 60 Minutes. No one asked him about his preposterous take on TWA 800. This was an election year after all. He was telling the media that Bush had done “a terrible job on the war against terrorism,”20 and that was all they needed to hear.
Chapter: TWELVE
DOG DAYS
As the Long Island summer slogged into its dog days, the news from the investigation slowed as well. The immediate problem for Jim Kallstrom was that he sold the bomb theory too well. The victims’ families believed it. So did the media. In the days after his return from Washington in late August, he seemed to be playing for time—to what end was not quite clear. Despite earlier promises, he refused to declare the crash a criminal act.
On August 31, the Times’ Don Van Natta complicated matters for the White House. He reported that investigators had found “additional traces of explosive residue” on the interior of the aircraft near where the right wing met the fuselage.1 Earlier, investigators had found explosive traces on the exterior where the right wing met the fuselage. “This is the spot believed to be the focal point of the explosion that destroyed the plane,” Van Natta reported. For the record, Witness 73 had also identified “the aircraft’s right wing” as the initial point of contact. So too had fisherman William Gallagher. This residue was RDX. RDX and PETN are the prime ingredients of Semtex, a plastic explosive that can be molded into any shape and slipped easily past an X-ray machine. For this reason, Semtex had become, wrote Van Natta, a “favorite of terrorist bombers.” Publicly at least, the FBI and the NTSB continued to insist that until they found telltale “physical evidence” they could not designate the explosion a criminal act. Still, noted Van Natta, they offered no alternative explanation as to how these chemicals got on the plane.
It was about this time that the dynamics of the investigation appeared to change. Few people noticed the difference, but one who did was senior NTSB accident investigator Hank Hughes. Hughes had been on the go-team that arrived immediately after the crash and worked on-site for months thereafter. At Calverton, Hughes led the team that reconstructed the interior of the aircraft. It was not until May 1999 that he and other NTSB and ATF officials were able to take their concerns public. The setting was a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing chaired by Republican Senator Charles Grassley.2 Those testifying complained that the FBI, although allegedly running a “parallel investigation,” bullied its working partners from day one. FBI agents let the others see only what they wanted them to see, and sometimes they restricted them from seeing anything at all. Kallstrom was nonplussed. In his typically brusque fashion, he dismissed the hearing as a “kangaroo court of malcontents.”3
As the hearing revealed, the NTSB was predisposed to deconstruct accidents. Its officials resented the FBI and failed to understand why its agents leaned towards a crime. “It was not whether someone was going to find evidence of a bomb,” said NTSB metallurgist Frank Zakar, “it’s a matter of when.” To Zakar and others, if a bomb at least seemed plausible, a missile did not. “Possibly the FBI had knowledge of something we were not aware of that could possibly have led them to believe it was a missile damage,” said Zakar naively. This was nearly three years after the incident. That Zakar still did not know about the radar data or the witness testimony is striking. This lack of knowledge, when coupled with a resentment of the FBI, led the NTSB rank-and-file to push for a mechanical explanation without much in the way of prompting.
Hughes, however, was seeing something more sinister. The FBI’s failure to respect the evidence and honor the chain of custody frustrated him, but it was the “disappearance of parts from the hangar” that truly alarmed him. Whole seats were missing, and other evidence was disturbed. At one point, he set up an overnight video surveillance that recorded two FBI agents in the hangar without authorization at 3 a.m. On another occasion, he saw an FBI agent trying to flatten out a piece of metal with a hammer. Indeed, if
one visual image captured the spirit of the investigation, this was it.
“You don’t alter evidence,” Hughes told Grassley. He had no idea what the agent’s intentions were, and he had no authority to stop him. When Hughes reported problems, he was ignored. As he would come to recognize, an FBI with this much control could literally hammer the metal to make an external explosion look like an internal one. Metaphorically, it could hammer the evidence to fit almost any outcome it desired.
Hughes started noticing this phenomenon about two months into the investigation. He was not alone. Jim Speer, representing ALPA, the Airline Pilot’s Association, watched the FBI skew the investigation and shared his misgivings in Silenced. With twenty-five years of experience as an Air Force fighter pilot and additional experience with TWA, Speer brought a rich experiential knowledge into his work. None of this impressed the FBI. Speer had to be inventive to learn much of anything. On one occasion, he identified a suspicious-looking part from the right wing and brought it to the FBI’s field lab at Calverton. He was convinced a high explosive had damaged it but dared not say as much. Instead, he told the FBI testers that he had done some chemical testing in college and was curious to see how the EGIS technology worked. When they agreed to show him, he grabbed the suspect part and passed it off as one of the million parts—literally—retrieved from the ocean floor.
“I asked them to swab it and test that in their demonstration, which they did, and the part tested positive for nitrates,” said Speer. This threw the testers into a panic. One of them picked up the phone, made a call, and in “nanoseconds” three agents in suits came running in. The agents huddled with the testers before informing Speer the machine had frequent false positives. They ran the tests several times without letting Speer watch. When finished, the lead agent turned to Speer and said, “All the rest of the tests were negative; we will declare the overall test negative and the first one you saw, we’ll call it a false positive.”4
TWA’s Bob Young, who worked with the NTSB on the investigation, witnessed this incident. As he noted, and Speer confirmed, the FBI sent this part to Washington for further testing. It never came back.5 This was a common phenomenon. In his otherwise innocuous testimony before Grassley’s subcommittee, Donald Kerr, the FBI Lab director, casually boasted that FBI Lab examiners sent “116 pieces of debris” to the FBI lab in Washington for further testing.6 This was 116 more pieces than Kallstrom would admit to sending.
FBI Director Louis Freeh had appointed Kerr, an outsider, to clean up the lab in the wake of a major scandal that rocked the FBI while the TWA 800 investigation was in full swing. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who blew the whistle on that scandal, failed to understand why any part from Calverton should have been sent to the D.C. lab. For one, he believed that the EGIS technology was “very specific and very sensitive.” For another, he argued that in delivery the part ran the risk of contamination.7 That these parts tested positive for explosive residue after weeks of immersion suggests that a high explosive blast outside the aircraft was more than the proverbial figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The boldest among the malcontents was Terry Stacey, the TWA senior manager who worked on the investigation through the NTSB. Stacey knew the aircraft well. He had flown the 747 in from Paris the day before its tragic end. Originally assigned to the NTSB witness group, he did not protest when the FBI neutered it. He was a team player by nature. Elizabeth Sanders described him as “a straight arrow, go-by-the-rules kind of guy.”8 A couple months into the investigation, he too noticed a subtle shift in FBI behavior. Always secretive, the agents now seemed intent on concealing potential evidence of a missile attack. In October 1996, James Sanders flew up from Virginia to meet with Stacey at Newark Airport. “What he told me over those first hours,” said Sanders, “was one thing—‘I know there’s a cover-up in progress.’”9
Sanders pored over the data Stacey provided in subsequent meetings. What the two concluded was that an initial blast outside the right wing appeared to leave a reddish-orange residue trail across two rows of nearby seats. In late August 1996, the FBI had the residue tested but refused to share the results with Stacey and others working with the NTSB. In September 1996, the residue trail was much discussed at Calverton. Stacey had planned on scraping off some of the residue, but when it refused to yield, he cut out a few square inches of material and FedExed it to Sanders. Sanders had the material tested at an independent lab on the West Coast, and its elements were found to be consistent with elements present in the exhaust residue of a solid-fuel missile.
After Sanders went public with his findings in March 1997, the FBI counter-claimed that the material was simply glue. If this were so, the FBI brass would not have needed to classify the results under national security, but they did. If this were so, they could have simply informed Stacey it was glue before he sacrificed his career to get at the truth, but they did not. If this were so, they would not have felt compelled to arrest Stacey and the Sanderses, but apparently they did.
One did not have to be a conspiracy theorist to distrust the FBI. Gene York, an experienced 747 pilot who worked the investigation through the NTSB on behalf of the ALPA, does not believe a missile brought down the plane. He concedes he is among the minority of pilots who feels that way, but having helped reconstruct the plane, he is firm in his beliefs. A former Marine like Kallstrom, York had little use for the FBI honcho’s bullyboy style. “He couldn’t put a sentence together without a four-letter word,” York told me. He described Kallstrom at work as “a bull in a china shop.”10 York had real problems with the way the FBI agents ran the show. “They would pick up things that looked like a crime and go hide it,” he said. When he protested, they retaliated by trying to get him thrown off the investigation. They even threatened to bring him up on charges of mishandling government equipment. He believes they tapped his phone as well. The whole experience left York disillusioned. “Don’t ever ask me to trust the government,” he said. “These guys do what they want to do and we are just hanging on for the ride.”
On September 19, 1996, the government went public with its change in direction. The news this time came out of NTSB headquarters in Washington, not out of Calverton. Putting it in play was Gore family retainer and NTSB chair, Jim Hall. “Convinced that none of the physical evidence recovered from T.W.A. Flight 800 proves that a bomb brought down the plane,” Matthew Wald led in his Times article, the NTSB was now planning tests “to show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical failure alone.”11
Wald cautioned that not everyone had signed on to this shift. Boeing did not think a fuel tank explosion capable of doing that kind of damage. Without passion, Kallstrom insisted the FBI would continue its parallel investigation. And Wald reminded his audience why many thought a mechanical failure unlikely, including the explosive residue, the lack of any emergency transmissions, and the dramatic fracturing of the plane. Unmentioned in the article was any reference whatsoever to eyewitnesses, at least a few of whom described the break-up sequence in detail before the NTSB confirmed the same. Forgotten too were the two military helicopter pilots who watched objects strike TWA 800 from opposite directions. As for the “mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane,” the authorities had been incrementally erasing that from the record for more than a month. In sum, Wald made eight references to a bomb in the article and only one to a missile and that briefly in the negative.
In her account from this same period, Pat Milton likewise deleted talk of missiles from the record. Given her access to Kallstrom, she was able to recreate a conversation between him and trusted deputy Tom Pickard. The two were apparently confused because a trace of RDX was found on a curtain in the rear of the plane as well as in the area near the right wing. “How about multiple bombs?” Kallstrom reportedly mused. “Multiple bombs?” said Pickard. “But how do you detonate multiple bombs on a single plane?”12 If Milton is to be believed, both seem to have forgotten that three of their more
capable agents had interviewed 144 “excellent” witnesses less than two months prior and found the evidence for a missile strike “overwhelming.”
The balance between bomb and mechanical failure lasted exactly one day before the weight swung fully the way of “mechanical.” On Friday, September 20, the FBI released a statement claiming the TWA 800 aircraft had “previously been used in a law enforcement training exercise for bomb-detection dogs.”13 On September 21, the Times’ Matthew Purdy filled in the details. Reportedly, on June 10, 1996, the St. Louis police used the TWA 800 plane to train a bomb-sniffing dog. The trainer placed explosives throughout the plane and encouraged the dog to find them. One law enforcement official told Purdy the explosives were kept in tightly wrapped packages but conceded that “testing can leave traces behind.”14
The following day, September 22, the Times published what would prove to be the investigation’s obituary. “Can you imagine what a defense lawyer would do to us?” one investigator told Van Natta. “This pretty much knocks out the traces, unless we get something much more concrete.”15 By “concrete” he meant physical evidence of a blast, like the explosive residue that had been blasted into the corner of a baggage container in the bombing of Pan-Am 103 in 1998. But that piece was only ten inches long.