TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  Newsweek ran this lengthy cover story while Bush was running for reelection. It did his campaign no good. Following the article’s publication, Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, held public hearings on the Vincennes incident in July 1992 and grilled a defiant Crowe. “The accusations of a cover-up are preposterous and unfounded,” Crowe told the House committee.7 After the hearing, Aspin vowed that there would be further hearings on the subject. There were not. On September 19, 1992, two months after testifying before Aspin, the politically savvy Crowe made an unlikely pilgrimage to Little Rock, Arkansas.

  This was a crucial visit. The great majority of military officers, active and retired, loathed the draft-dodging Clinton. With the candidate beaming by his side, Crowe dismissed Clinton’s draft record as “a divisive and peripheral issue” and threw his considerable weight behind Clinton’s bid for the presidency.8 A month later, Crowe wrote a New York Times op-ed defending his position. He conceded that Ronald Reagan, who first appointed Crowe chairman, did an excellent job handling the Soviet Union. He admitted too that George H. W. Bush, who extended Crowe’s chairmanship, did great work in defeating Saddam Hussein. That said, Crowe argued unconvincingly, “America needs new leadership, which will imaginatively and boldly address the problems facing our citizens and threatening our prosperity.”9 Upon being elected, Clinton appointed Aspin secretary of defense, and the probe into the Vincennes quietly died. Helping it stay dead was the newly appointed chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, none other than Crowe. When TWA 800 blew up, the retired admiral was serving as the ambassador to the United Kingdom.

  Barring a deathbed confession, the exact details of what the U.S. Navy did on the night of July 17, 1996, may never be known. What the media learned from the Vincennes incident, however, was that the mismanagement of the U.S. Navy’s prized Aegis system could and did result in the accidental destruction of a commercial airliner. They learned too that the Navy was capable of deceiving the citizenry about a misfire of this magnitude. What they chose not to learn, however, was that Bill Clinton was capable of exploiting vulnerable naval officers to improve his political chances.

  In the election year of 1996, the media chose to forget the little they did learn from the Vincennes incident. Most conspicuously, the New York Times failed to voice the least suspicion about the role of the U.S. Navy in TWA 800’s demise. On September 17, two months to the day after the crash, Andrew Revkin wrote an article on Internet-based conspiracy theories, one of which suggested that a Navy Aegis guided missile cruiser “let loose a practice shot that went awry.”10 The Pentagon denied any involvement, and Kallstrom assured the Times’ readers that the probability of a Navy misfire was “as close to zero as you can get.” This was the most probing penetration of the naval involvement the Times would deliver. It was as if the Vincennes incident and its subsequent cover-up had never taken place. Had the Times reporters persisted, they would likely have encountered what Newsweek did in pursuing the Vincennes story—“months of stonewalling by senior naval officers”—but there was no indication they bothered.

  Although Revkin did not name a source for the Internet-based theory, he was likely referring to the Holtsclaw-Russell communication. Russell recalls sending his provocative e-mail about a month after the crash. Interestingly, Pierre Salinger cited August 22 as the specific date of the e-mail.11 This was the same day Kallstrom was summoned to Washington for that game-changing session with the DOJ. According to the Russell e-mail, on the night of July 17 a Navy P-3 participated in a missile firing practice in W-105, a warning area off the southeast coast of Long Island. For the record, the P-3 is a long-range, antisubmarine warfare patrol aircraft with advanced submarine detection and avionics equipment. It can help provide a fleet commander oversight of an engagement at sea and relay information among the various ships in a battle group. As it happens, the presence of an Iranian P-3 near IR 655 heightened the suspicions of Rogers and his crew on the Vincennes.

  The AP’s Pat Milton provided the only serious window into Kallstrom’s knowledge base at this time, especially in regards to the U.S. Navy. Writing two years after the incident, Milton explored the P-3 issue in some detail. In her retelling, FBI agents interviewed the crewmembers the day after the crash and satisfied themselves with the crew’s explanation that the P-3’s proximity to the exploding TWA 800—less than a mile away—was a “harmless coincidence.”12 Wanting more assurance, Kallstrom sent agents back to interview the crew again on the following day. This time Captain Ray Ott resisted the interrogation. “Are you saying I’m lying?” he told the agents. “Are you questioning my patriotism here?” Ott refused to share details of his flight and told the agents the mission was classified.

  An irritated Kallstrom contacted the chief of the Atlantic fleet, Admiral Bud Flanagan, and asked him to intervene. “They’ve given you all the information relevant to your search, sir,” Flanagan reportedly told Kallstrom. “Anything else is outside what you need to know.” According to Milton, Kallstrom then leaned on his old Marine Corps colleague, General Charles Krulak, to get at the truth, and Krulak shared Kallstrom’s concern with his fellow Joint Chiefs. The verdict: “Friendly fire did not play a role in the downing.”13 Still, Kallstrom persisted, and the Navy obliged by allowing his agents to interview the P-3 crew a third time. To this point in the investigation, there is no reason to doubt Kallstrom’s sincerity.

  Some time before the third interview, the FBI learned that the P-3’s transponder, the homing device that enables air traffic control to track the plane, was off during the flight. Holtsclaw knew this before Kallstrom did. He told Russell the P-3 was “a non-beacon target (transponder OFF) flying southwest in the controlled airspace almost over TWA 800.” In his third interview with the FBI, Ott explained that the plane’s transponder was “faulty” and only worked “intermittently.” In their interview with the NTSB in March 1997, P-3 crew members insisted the transponder “failed after takeoff” and was soon replaced through the normal Navy supply channels.14

  According to Milton, after the explosion the P-3 circled back to the crash site with the crew offering to help. The plane then returned to its original practice mission, dropping sonobuoys to track the USS Trepang, a submarine.15 At a November 1996 press conference, Rear Admiral Edward K. Kristensen, who managed the Navy’s end of the investigation, claimed the P-3 was conducting the training exercise with the Trepang eighty miles south of the crash site,16 a figure Milton would repeat. In March 1997, however, the P-3 crew told the NTSB much the same story about the training exercise but added that the sonobuoys were all dropped “a minimum of 200 miles south” of the crash site.17

  The authorities staged the aforementioned November 1996 press conference to refute Pierre Salinger’s claim of an accidental shoot-down. In no previous article had the Times so much as mentioned the P-3. Its readers still did not know what Russell’s colleagues knew, namely, that the P-3 was flying almost immediately above TWA 800 with its transponder off. This, as shall be seen, was a critical detail. Kristensen chose not to mention it at the press conference. A savvy reporter might have asked one devastating question: if Washington were on veritable war footing immediately after TWA 800’s destruction, and a terrorist missile attack was suspected, why did the P-3 continue on a routine sub-hunting exercise 80 miles (or 200 miles) to the south? After all, no naval asset was more capable of finding the culprit. Two answers suggest themselves. One is that the P-3 crew, knowing the Navy’s culpability, heeded orders to vacate the area. The second, and much less likely, is that the crew remained ignorant of a potential terrorist threat.

  Reporters had good cause not to ask tough questions. Kristina Borjesson, then a CBS producer, attended this press conference. She watched in shock as Kallstrom exploded at a fellow who asked how the U.S. Navy could be involved in the investigation when it was a possible suspect. “Remove him,” Kallstrom shouted. Two men promptly grabbed the reporter by the arms and dragged him
out of the room. Wrote Borjesson, “Right then and there, the rest of us had been put on notice to be on our best behavior.”18

  A veteran freelance cameraman who worked the TWA 800 case every day for months confirmed Borjesson’s account. “I watched some astounding things I never saw before, nor saw since,” said the fellow who asked that I not reveal his name. “It all unfolded before me—firsthand: official stories changing, Pat Milton cozying up with the FBI, tapes confiscated, threats to boycott TV networks if those shows persisted with the missile theory, press thrown out of press conferences for simply asking a question.”19

  When Russell’s e-mail surfaced, the authorities sensed they had a problem on their hands. Russell knew about the naval training exercise. He knew about the P-3. He knew that the P-3’s transponder was off. And he knew about the radar data. The readers of the New York Times knew none of this. That the e-mail apparently surfaced on August 22 might have been a coincidence, but the investigation overflowed with coincidences, like the one that put the P-3 with its allegedly broken transponder right above TWA 800 as it exploded. Another coincidence, of course, was that the radar data just happened to mimic a missile arcing over and intersecting TWA 800 in the second before its identifier vanished from the screen.

  Kallstrom was in way over his head. He and his agents knew nothing about radar data or P-3s or submarines or guided missile cruisers. Although the FBI’s November 1997 summary listed all the Navy assets its agents reportedly checked out, those agents depended fully on the Navy for that information. If the crew of the P-3 felt free to blow them off, the skippers of the cruisers and subs surely felt the same. Navy higher-ups had to know the president had their back, and Kallstrom had to have figured that out. In November 1996, with all options still in play, he insisted there was no Navy involvement in TWA 800’s destruction. “We have looked at this thoroughly,” he blustered, “and we have absolutely not one shred of evidence that it happened or it could have happened.”20 In truth, he did not have a clue.

  In addition to the P-3, three submarines and at least one cruiser were in the mix that night. Kallstrom claimed early on that no naval asset was “in a position to be involved,” but the FBI was never sure where those assets were. The information Milton got from the FBI put one of those subs, the USS Trepang, 80 miles south of Long Island. (The P-3 crew, as mentioned, said the Trepang was 200 miles away.) Milton put a second sub, the USS Wyoming, 150 miles south. A tugboat captain spotted a third sub about fifty miles away off the Long Island coast about midnight on July 17. Milton identified that sub as the Albuquerque.21

  As to the cruiser, Rear Admiral Edward K. Kristensen claimed at the November 1996 conference held to discredit Salinger that the USS Normandy was the “nearest ship” to the crash site about 185 miles southwest.22 By this time, however, Kallstrom had to know Kristensen was being deceptive. According to Milton, shortly after the crash Kallstrom learned of a “gray warship” that two flight attendants spotted off the Long Island coast an hour before the crash steaming south. FBI witness Lisa Perry and her friend Alice Rowe likely saw the same ship about two hours before the crash near the coast of Fire Island and heading east. “The ship was so big and close,” said the women, “that you couldn’t capture the entire profile in one glance.” They described it as battleship gray with a large globe and impressive gunnery. “It was quite obviously a military fighting ship.”23 Other witnesses had seen this ship as well. Kallstrom was not at all pleased to learn how badly he had been played. He reportedly called Admiral Flanagan’s office in a huff. Only then was he told there had, in fact, been a Navy ship in the area—a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, the USS Normandy.

  If Kallstrom ever did learn the location of the Normandy at the moment of TWA 800’s destruction, he did not share that information with Pat Milton. According to Milton, the FBI verified “the precise location” of the ship as “181 miles southwest of the crash site, at latitude 37 degrees, 32.8 minutes north, longitude 74 degrees, 0.92 minutes west, off the Manasquan inlet in New Jersey.” Milton passed these numbers along without doing her homework. The coordinates do place the USS Normandy at a site roughly 181 miles from TWA 800’s debris field but nowhere near the Manasquan inlet. If the coordinates were accurate, the Normandy was off the coast of Delaware-Maryland-Virginia, at least 150 miles south of Manasquan. The ship that witnesses had seen just hours before the crash might have made it to Manasquan by 8:31 p.m., but given the timeline, the ship could not have made it to Virginia. Whatever ship the witnesses did see the FBI apparently failed to inspect. No surface vessel other than the Normandy was listed in the FBI’s final summary.24

  Chances are the Normandy was where Kristensen said—180 or so miles southwest of the crash site. The coordinates given to Milton put the ship off the coast of Wallops Island, home of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility and site of a rocket testing range. That is where the ship was positioned when retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and then active TWA 747 captain Allen Strasser had the opportunity to witness a missile test in March 1995, sixteen months before the fatal shoot down. As Strasser told me, he was a guest aboard the ship.

  About five to ten miles away from the Normandy that day was a second ship. On the night in question, slightly after midnight, a target missile was launched from Wallops Island. The second ship then launched an intercept missile. Strasser stood on the starboard wing bridge of the Normandy and watched the missile ascend. After the launch, Strasser returned to the ship’s combat information center where fewer than ten people monitored its computer systems, reprogrammed to put all of their computing power into the intercept shot. The purpose of the test, said Strasser, was to help upgrade the U.S. Navy standard arm missile from a ship-to-air, antiaircraft missile to a ship-to-air, anti-missile missile. The test that night proved fruitful, the first success after two previous failures. Prophetically perhaps, the successful intercept took place high over the ocean just south of Long Island.

  According to Strasser, on the night TWA 800 went down, an American Airline captain reported seeing a missile ascend from Wallops Island. Strasser argues that if a Navy ship fired the fatal shot, the crew may not have known the missile had a booster rocket capable of propelling it farther and higher than a typical standard arm missile. The missile would have been loaded in a vertical launch system, which was not visible to the crew. This may help answer the question of why no sailor has come forward, publicly at least, to report the incident.25

  Channeling the FBI, Milton wrote of the Normandy, “The agents told [Kallstrom] that the ship had been 181 miles south of the crash site when Flight 800 exploded, and not in the position to hit the plane with any of its armaments.”26 This information is misleading. In the test that Strasser observed, the Normandy programmed and monitored the missile. It did not fire any missiles itself. “I believe the loss of TWA 800 was by a missile,” Strasser told me, “and there is a 75–85 percent chance it was our own missile.” Strasser and I had this communication in 2008. Over the years I have heard from any number of people in and around the incident. Most do not want their names repeated. Strasser was an exception. “Feel free to use the information as is,” he said. “It is all true. The initial three people who let this out of the bag were arrested by the FBI to scare them into submission.” A one-time top gun, Strasser was not easily intimidated.

  In its final press release, the FBI boasted that its agents had done an “accounting of all armaments capable of reaching Flight 800.” Despite their efforts, they had little idea of what those armaments were. Few people did. One of my correspondents suggested why. He cautioned that his information was limited, but his insights have merit nonetheless. “Mack” (not his real name) was a crewmember on the USS Albuquerque. Several days before TWA 800 was destroyed, Mack was involved in loading what he was told were “experimental missiles” aboard the sub.27 “This was not your normal load out,” he said. The sub was heading for the testing area off the coast of New Jersey and south of Long Island. Mack did not go on that cruis
e. When the TWA 800 news first broke and talk of missiles was still in the air, his wife asked, “Do you think it was a terrorist?” Said Mack, “God, I hope so. My boat was out there.” If a terrorist did not down the plane, he feared the Navy might have.

  This fear was widespread. It accounted, at least in part, for media reluctance to pursue this angle and the insider reluctance to share information. Still, some facts were too obvious to ignore. In its final report28 the NTSB conceded that FAA radar picked up four unidentified vessels within six miles of the TWA 800 explosion. Three of the six were leaving the scene at between twelve and twenty knots “consistent with the speed of a boat.” A submarine goes under the rubric “boat.” The fact that all three of these radar tracks disappeared right after TWA 800 crashed raised the question of whether these boats were submarines.

  Kallstrom never said otherwise. The final FBI summary located the three subs in question—the USS Wyoming, the USS Albuquerque, and the USS Trepang—in the “immediate vicinity of the crash site.” In a recorded September 1998 phone interview AIM’s Reed Irvine asked Kallstrom about the unidentified vessels within six miles of that site. Said Kallstrom, “I spoke about those publicly. They were Navy vessels that were on classified maneuvers.”29 No, Kallstrom had never spoken publicly about classified maneuvers. He was having a hard time keeping his story straight.