by Jack Cashill
From the beginning Kallstrom argued that the critical piece of evidence was most likely “a small piece of metal.” With the weather worsening, and that evidence likely deep under water, the search had become what Van Natta called “a race against the calendar.” Van Natta was right, but not in the way he intended. For the White House, the search had always been a race against the calendar—a race, that is, to November. If the officials under its sway could keep the public pacified and the airways open until then, they would win the race. The investigation was proving less stressful than the Clintons might have imagined. If the media believed the outcome hinged on a small piece of metal, how hard could it be to lose that piece or never find it?
In looking back at the case, I am struck by the sincerity of so many hundreds of hard-working investigators, and I am forced to wonder whether I have read too much into the inconsistencies. Then I come face to face with some appalling act of deception, and I file my doubts away. The CIA zoom climb animation comes to mind. So too does David Mayer’s creepy, CIA-influenced performance at the 2000 NTSB hearing. And the fabrication of witness statements would unsettle the media in the better class of banana republics. The dog-training story, however, came first and hit the serious investigators, said one, like “a punch in the gut.”16 All the work he and others had done finding explosive residue was undone—in this case by a training exercise that never took place.
To sell the dog story took any number of lies. It also required victims. One for sure was the St. Louis police officer that did the training, Herman Burnett. A second may well have been Ohio Congressman James Traficant who exposed the training for the fraud it was. So willing were reporters to believe Kallstrom—or to protect the Clintons pre-election—that they failed to confirm a story that could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny. Taking its lead from the FAA, the FBI had agent Jim Van Rhein interview Burnett on September 21, 1996.17 The alert reader may recall that the FBI put out its press release on this exercise the day before that interview, September 20. The Times published a comprehensive dog-training article on September 21. Incredibly, the FBI and the Times broke this story nationwide before a reporter or even an agent spoke to Burnett.
Six years after the incident I asked a police officer friend to persuade Burnett to talk to me, and Burnett obliged. As Burnett told me, I was the first person in the media to call him. Burnett had a story to tell. In fact, the FBI had no proof he had ever done a training exercise on the plane that would become TWA 800. In a September 1997 letter to Rep. Traficant, Kallstrom asserted, “The [airport] manager on duty, whose name the patrolman could not recall, told him that a wide body was available at gate 50.” The FBI did observe that Burnett “made no notations regarding the tail number of the aircraft, as it was not his policy to do so.” Nor was it Burnett’s policy to note the gate number, but that detail was left out of the record.18 What Burnett did list on the form were specific start and stop times and the notation “wide body.” That was all the information anyone had to go on.
The lack of documentation should have nipped the story in the bud. To repeat, no known record put Burnett and his dog at gate 50 or on the Flight 800 plane. The FBI claim that Burnett remembered the gate number after three months was unbelievable on its face. Yes, a 747 bearing TWA #17119, the number for the Flight 800 plane, was parked at gate 50 that day. According to the FBI, the plane was there “from shortly before 700 hours [7 AM] until approximately 1230 hours [12:30 PM] on that date.” No one disputes this. The FBI also acknowledged that Burnett “began the placement of the explosives at 10:45 AM.” No one disputes this either, but these time details undercut the whole FBI construct.
On that June day, as usual, Burnett placed the training aids throughout the passenger cabin in a “zigzag” pattern. He let the explosives sit for a while, as FAA regulations dictate, and then returned to his car to retrieve Carlo, his dog. “At 11:45 AM,” again according to the FBI, “the patrolman began the exercise by bringing the dog into the aircraft. The exercise lasted 15 minutes, and the dog located all the explosives.” Carlo’s mission accomplished, Burnett led him out of the plane and back to the car. Burnett then returned to the plane to retrieve the scattered training aids. He placed each aid on the galley counter and carted them all back out. Burnett estimated this activity to have taken fifteen minutes. Based on the FBI’s own timetable, Burnett could not have left the plane earlier than 12:15 p.m. Yes, the Flight 800 plane was at gate 50 until 12:30 as the FBI indicated.19
There was a reason the plane left the gate. As clearly documented in several places including Captain Vance Weir’s “Pilot Activity Sheet,” Weir and his passengers took off for Honolulu in that very same 747 at 12:35 p.m.20 Burnett did not leave the plane until 12:15 p.m. at the earliest and saw no one. To clean the plane, stock it, check out the mechanics, and board several hundred passengers would have taken more than the fifteen-minute window of opportunity offered in the FBI’s own timetable. Much more.
Even if the FBI had been unaware of TWA regulations that mandated an hour on-board preparation time for the crew, its agents would have known just from experience that a Hawaii-bound 747 would have been busily stocking up and loading passengers long before the plane took off. Burnett, however, was alleged to be exercising his dog in a “sterile” environment and seeing no one. As it happened, another 747, a veritable clone, was parked at gate 51. This second plane—bound for JFK International as TWA Flight 844—would not leave the gate until 2:00 p.m.21 This later departure would have allowed Burnett and Carlo plenty of time to execute the training undisturbed. In its response to Traficant, the FBI failed to acknowledge this second plane. “You know for sure the dog was on the plane?” Rep. Traficant asked Kallstrom at a congressional hearing in July of 1997. “We have a report that documents the training,” dodged Kallstrom.22
How, one must ask, could so flagrant a deception unfold with so many people looking on? The answer seems fairly obvious. Immediately after Kallstrom was called to Washington on August 22, federal officials began searching the nation, and probably the world, to find an airport at which a dog exercise had taken place on a day when the Flight 800 plane was parked there. Almost all of those involved in this search performed it in good faith, but not everyone. At the end of the search, some few people—Kallstrom was surely one—made an executive decision not to scruple over the details. The pressure to justify the investigation’s shift in direction forced their hand. They may have been reluctant collaborators, but their collaboration killed the investigation.
As was obvious from the beginning, too, Burnett did not put his training aids anywhere near where the explosive residue had been found. He told the FBI he made five separate placements of explosive devices within the plane in a zigzag pattern. These included smokeless powder, water gel, detonator cord, and ammonia dynamite. All of these were placed outside the area of damage on the right side of the plane, rows 17–27, in which the explosive residue had been found. And none of these aids combined PETN and RDX, the elements of Semtex that the FBI had reported finding in late August.
Van Natta reported this discrepancy in his September 22 article on the subject. “Records show the packages were not placed in the same place where the traces were located,” Van Natta wrote, citing “several” unnamed investigators as his source. These investigators also pointed out that an explosive trace had been found on the right wing, a location clearly beyond Carlo’s skill set. CNN’s Negroni used named sources to make the same point. “Where the bureau got hits on the wreckage,” said FAA bomb technician, Calvin Walbert, “there was no explosive training aids anywhere near that.”23 Said Irish Flynn, FAA associate administrator, “It’s a question of where those traces came from. The dog doesn’t answer the questions.”24
To defend the FBI’s conclusions, Kallstrom would dishonor his good name and damage Burnett’s. At the July 1997 hearing, Rep. Traficant prodded Kallstrom, “Isn’t it a fact that where the dog was to have visited, that it is not the part of the plane wh
ere the precursors of Semtex were found?” Said Kallstrom, growing defensive and defiant, “That’s not true.” He added in agonizingly dishonest detail, “It is very important where the packages were put, Congressman. And the test packages that we looked at, that were in very bad condition, that were unfortunately dripping those chemicals, were placed exactly above the location of the airplane where we found chemicals on the floor.” In fact, Kallstrom elaborated, “An incredible amount of this chemical leaking out of these packages fell into that spot.”25 The “tightly wrapped packages” of September 1996 were dripping chemicals less than a year later exactly where Kallstrom needed them to be dripped. This was a multi-tiered lie. No euphemism can paper over what Kallstrom said and did.
In her 1999 book, Milton changed any number of details to make the story work. She had Burnett loading the plane with “enough plastic explosives to blow the airport sky-high.” She referred here specifically to “five pounds of SEMTEX, or C-4.”26 In his 1997 letter to Traficant, however, Kallstrom specified a “1.4 block of C-4.” With all due respect to Ms. Milton, SEMTEX and C-4 are not the same. Unlike SEMTEX, C-4 does not contain PETN, and it was the discovery of PETN traces that first prompted the “bomb” stories in the Times. Besides, Kallstrom admitted in 1997 that Burnett placed the C-4 in a seatback pouch outside the suspected area.
In cleaning up Kallstrom’s account after the fact, Milton put the finishing touches on Burnett’s reputation. “Yeah, I could have spilled more than a little,” Burnett reportedly told the FBI. “The packages were old and cracked and we hadn’t used them in a while, so more than usual might have come out.” Milton referred to the incident as the “dog fiasco” and concluded her account with Kallstrom and his colleagues laughing at “Carlo” jokes. Officer Burnett, an African American, did not find the incident funny. “I am pissed off to this day,” he told me. “I never lost any. I never spilled any. There was never any powder laying loose.” As to his alleged confession of the same, he said, “I just hate that they twisted my words. I know what I did, and how I did it.”27 As should be clear by now, his were not the only words that were twisted in this investigation.
Three weeks after the dog-training story broke, and four weeks before the election, President Clinton signed an aviation bill into law that included a range of cumbersome programs designed to prevent passengers from bringing bombs onto commercial airplanes. “It will improve the security of air travel,” said Clinton. “It will carry forward our fight against terrorism.”28 In attendance at the White House signing were several people who lost loved ones on TWA Flight 800, unwitting props in Clinton’s effort to “showcase himself as a can-do steward tackling the nation’s problems.” Nowhere in the Times article just cited was the word “missile” even mentioned. That possibility had largely been relegated to the realm of the grassy-knollers. With more than a little help from the media, Clinton managed to turn a national security disaster of major proportions into a pre-election photo-op. Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton would attempt to do much the same with Benghazi.
The Navy P-3 was hovering a mile or so above TWA 800 when the plane exploded. That was the command position the P-3 routinely assumed during a Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) missile test, illustrations of which were publicly available in 1996.
Chapter: THIRTEEN
LOST AT SEA
Although fully confident that TWA 800 was shot down—I would not have embarked on this adventure were I not—I was not certain about who pulled the trigger. In Silenced, Sanders and I remained agnostic on the subject. For First Strike, which was published in 2003, we knew we would have to offer specifics, even if speculatively. From the beginning, Sanders believed the U.S. Navy had tragically misfired and said so in his 1997 book, The Downing of TWA Flight 800. For my part—and here is where what scientists call “confirmation bias” sneaks into the process—I did not want to believe that was true.
In First Strike, as the name of the book suggests, we arrived at a plausible speculation, namely that the Navy took out TWA 800 in the process of destroying a small terrorist plane filled with explosives. This theory is not at all fanciful, and Sanders still believes it possible. Several eyewitnesses talked about a small plane. Witness 550, for instance, reported seeing “a plane coming from west to east and then what looked like a ‘smaller’ plane coming from the northeast on a dead course heading towards the nose of the larger plane.” He heard a “crackling sound” when the two planes “crunched up.” In addition to witness testimony, we heard from at least two military sources that the flying bomb scenario was indeed the case. Even the CIA speculated early on that a “small airplane” might have intercepted TWA 800.1
A few months after the book was published, I was a guest on Barbara Simpson’s San Francisco radio show. One call from a local banker intrigued me enough that I had the producer take the caller’s name and number off-air. I followed up later that day. A Navy veteran, the fellow struck me as entirely credible. As he told the story, one of his banking customers was a TWA executive. Having served as a radar man during several missile-firing exercises on the Pacific missile firing range, the banker was curious about TWA 800 and asked the exec what he knew. Citing the TWA CEO as his source, the exec told him the U.S. Navy shot down the 747 by accident. This the banker had heard before, and he remained unconvinced. One added detail, however, caused the banker to reevaluate the possibility of a shoot down, specifically the exec’s suggestion that the U.S. Navy was not running a test but was actually trying to take out a small terrorist plane when its missiles inadvertently destroyed TWA 800.
In his 2003 book, Dereliction of Duty, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson related an incident that makes this theory sound at least plausible. As mentioned previously, Patterson carried the “nuclear football” for the president. One morning in “late-summer” 1996, Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update to the National Security Council when he “keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons.”2 The plot went under the rubric “Operation Bojinka,” Bojinka being the Serbo-Croatian word for “loud bang.”
The mastermind of the plot was Islamic terrorist Ramzi Yousef. Yousef was on trial in New York for his role in Bojinka on the day TWA 800 went down. Although the plot’s best-known feature was a scheme to blow up eleven American airliners over the Pacific, a secondary feature had Yousef and/or his cohorts chartering a plane, loading it with explosives, and crashing it into an American target.3 In moving these documents between offices, Patterson saw the president’s hand-annotated response to Bojinka. “I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community,” Patterson wrote, “and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.”4 Knowledge about the use of planes as bombs would emerge as a contentious issue during the 9/11 Commission hearings in 2004. As early as the summer of 1996 Clinton and his staff were aware of the threat. It is altogether likely that Clinton’s review of these documents was related to TWA 800’s destruction, if only to establish an alibi.
All this being said, I do not believe that Yousef had anything concrete to do with the demise of TWA 800. Nor have I seen sufficient evidence in the thirteen years since First Strike was published to believe a terrorist plane threatened TWA 800. If Yousef played any role it was to heighten anxiety, already keen three weeks after the terror bombing of the USAF’s Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia. Two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, the Clinton administration reportedly had the U.S. Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban Missile crisis.5 In this hair-trigger environment, accidents could happen.
Accidents had happened before in such an environment. On Sunday morning, July 3, 1988, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser, the USS Vincennes, fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR 655. IR 655 had reached 13,500 feet, a final altitude almost identical to TWA 800’s, when Captain Will Rogers III gave the order to fire. Rogers and his crew had
mistaken the ascending passenger jet with 290 people on board for a descending Iranian F-14, a fighter plane.
Four years after the incident, in July 1992, Newsweek teamed up with ABC News’s Nightline to produce an exhaustive exposé on the incident and its subsequent cover-up.6 Newsweek’s John Barry and Roger Charles reported that the $400 million Aegis system was capable of tracking every aircraft within three hundred miles and shooting them down. The weakness of the system was its complexity, especially when managed by people with little experience in high-pressure situations. “Some experts,” observed the reporters, “question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under stress, the torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them.”
In retrospect, Rogers and his crew could have used more training. Working under a time crunch in the ship’s windowless combat information center (CIC), they made a series of oversights and misinterpretations that quickly turned tragic. With IR 655 just eleven miles away, Rogers switched the firing key to “free” the ship’s SM-2 antiaircraft missiles. Given the green light to fire, a nervous young lieutenant pressed the wrong keys on his console twenty-three times before a veteran petty officer leaned over and pressed the right ones. Thirty seconds later, the first missile blew a chunk of the left wing off the airliner with an engine pod still attached, and the rest of the plane quickly plunged into the sea. The job done, Rogers gave the order to steam south out of Iranian waters.
Within twelve hours, Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called a press conference at the Pentagon to announce that, yes, the Navy had accidentally shot down a commercial airliner. That was about all the truth Crowe was inclined to offer. Relying on the information Rogers provided, Crowe stuck to the story that the Iranian plane was descending, picking up speed, flying outside the commercial air corridor, and refusing to identify itself. As their colleagues would do after the TWA 800 disaster, the naval officers closed ranks and kept other investigating bodies at bay. By July 14, 1988, when Vice President George H. W. Bush reported on the incident to the United Nations, Crowe knew that Rogers’s initial report was false in almost every detail but chose not to share that information with Bush. “The U.S. Navy did what all navies do after terrible blunders at sea,” Newsweek reported. “It told lies and handed out medals.”