by Jack Cashill
This was bunk. If the satellites showed what Hosenball claimed, federal officials would not have needed the CIA’s trumped up zoom climb video. Surely too the FBI and NTSB would have used the data to buttress their shaky, inconclusive summaries. In a letter to then congressman John Kasich two months after the press conference, the CIA quietly buried the subject: “No satellite imagery of the disaster exists.”5 This translates, “No satellite imagery exists that would help us make our case.”
Hosenball fell hard for the CIA video. Under his byline, Newsweek ran a fully affirmative, nine-frame, full-color recreation captioned with the unlikely boast, “CIA Photos.” For Hosenball, the video provided a necessary rebuttal to “speculation about a mystery missile.” As he told the story, “some” of the “244” FBI witnesses claimed to have seen a streak of light arcing across the sky. In reality, that “some” was 258, and the “244” was 736. But who was counting? Not Hosenball. He had information enough to assure his readers that what the witnesses really saw was the fuselage of the burning, climbing plane rocketing upwards some three-thousand-plus feet.
Indeed, had Hosenball been on the CIA payroll he could not have done more to legitimize the agency’s crude rewrite of history. Among the major media only Robert Hager of NBC rivaled Hosenball in the uncritical affirmation of government talking points. In fact, the CIA cited Hager in an in-house newsletter as an example of how well the media received the zoom climb animation. “The work was riveting,” the newsletter quoted Hager as saying. Hager too marveled at the satellite data and congratulated the CIA on its “fascinating, highly informed” presentation.6 In the years to come, authorities could rely on Hager to pass off TWA 800 agitprop as news.
Our goal in meeting with Isikoff and Hosenball was not to make enemies but to make converts. Unfortunately, we had no success. Hosenball resisted fiercely. He countered my objections to the CIA animation with the claim that Boeing executives had assured him the 747 fuel tank was a veritable time bomb. I had a hard time believing any executive anywhere would say something that incriminating, but Boeing did have reason not to make enemies at the White House. When the crash occurred, Boeing was in the middle of negotiations to buy McDonnell Douglas, its only real competitor in the American commercial airliner market. The airlines closed the deal in December 1996 with a $13 billion price tag, pending government approval.7
Among others, consumer advocate Ralph Nader denounced the proposed merger, arguing that it would give Boeing a near monopoly on the industry as well as “dramatic political power.”8 Despite Nader’s impassioned plea, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the merger on July 1, 1997. This was a mighty subjective decision. Just the day before, the head of the FTC was reportedly “delighted” when a federal judge blocked a proposed merger between Office Depot and Staples. The New York Times dryly noted that the decision was “controversial” in antitrust circles given that the merged entity would “would control only 6 percent to 8 percent of the overall office products market.”9
In November 1997, with the merger concluded, Boeing execs seemed confident enough to distance the company from the CIA zoom climb animation. “Boeing was not involved in the production of the video shown today, nor have we had the opportunity to obtain a copy or fully understand the data used to create it,” said a company press release posted immediately after the video’s airing. “The video’s explanation of the eyewitness observations can be best assessed by the eyewitnesses themselves.”10 The release concluded with an odd disclaimer, “Since the beginning of the investigation, Boeing has never subscribed to any one theory.”
Isikoff did not patronize us the way Hosenball had. He just did not express much interest. He asked me which three pages of the book he should read. “Given that this is the great untold story of our time,” I responded, “how about a chapter?” I suggested chapter fourteen, our summary chapter. As I explained, there is a binary quality to any such investigation: gate open or shut, explosive device or mechanical failure, internal explosion or external explosion. To transform an external explosion into a mechanical failure someone had to alter or suppress every known variable.
As I explained to Isikoff, in chapter fourteen of our book we reviewed all the relevant variables—the physical evidence, the eyewitness testimony, the debris field, the medical forensics, the explosive residue, the residue trail, the Navy information, the radar data, the FDR, the CVR, the satellite data, and more—and showed how the authorities lost, stole, concealed, erased, deleted, denied, or simply ignored every variable that did not fit the preferred outcome. Where need be, I continued, they even manufactured new evidence—the zoom climb, the imaginary flagpoles, bogus interviews, counterfeit dog training. Losing patience, Isikoff looked at me skeptically and repeated, “Which three pages?”
Mr. Smith, welcome to Washington.
Chapter: FIFTEEN
THE FIXERS
“They were careless people,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Fitzgerald, of course, was writing here about his fictional characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. The Buchanans, however, had nothing on the Clintons. Throughout their political careers, Bill and Hillary made one unseemly mess after another and in every case let other people clean up.
The clean-up people rarely got the top jobs. Those required Senate confirmation. They got the number two spots or, in Webster Hubbell’s case at the Department of Justice, the number three spot. Unfortunately, Hubbell had messes of his own and no one to clean up after him. A year into his tenure as associate attorney general, the Clintons’ old Arkansas pal was forced out for sundry corruptions back at his and Hillary’s law firm in Little Rock. For the Clintons this was just as well. The ungainly Hubbell would not have been up to the TWA 800 mess—the Clinton’s most complex and consequential, Monica included. This clean up had to be managed through at least three agencies: the NTSB, the CIA, and the FBI, as well the Departments of Defense and Justice.
In that it controlled the FBI, the DOJ had the most demanding job. Making it tougher still was the disarray within the department. From the moment Hillary Clinton staked out Justice as her personal fiefdom, the department had been in chaos. Nanny issues sidelined the first two attorney general candidates as well as the first would-be deputy AG. Insisting that a woman—any woman—head the department, Hillary finally settled on the feckless Miami prosecutor Janet Reno. For the next eight years the Clintons would have to work around her. Needing someone to work through, they finally found a fixer worthy of the number two position, a little known DC litigator named Jamie Gorelick. With Gorelick’s appointment as deputy attorney general in February 1994, Hillary had three women occupying the most powerful posts in federal law enforcement, criminal division head Jo Ann Harris being the third.
Gorelick proved to be a much more capable and subtle problem solver than the blundering Hubbell. In June 1996, a little more than a month before the TWA 800 crash, Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball—yes, that Mark Hosenball—took note of Gorelick’s insider role. In a rare glimpse at the political workings of the feminized DOJ, Hosenball observed that Gorelick had set up “a campaign-like ‘war room’” to combat alleged smears from the Bob Dole campaign. Wrote Hosenball without a hint of disapproval, “In a campaign year, Justice can’t afford to be totally blind.”1
In that stormy campaign year, Justice was very nearly omniscient. A month after the Hosenball revelation, still in war room mode, Gorelick directed the FBI to take over the TWA 800 investigation. Heading up Justice’s operation on the ground in Long Island was United States Attorney Valerie Caproni. As attorneys and officers of the court, Gorelick and Caproni knew the FBI was the subordinate agency. They knew too the NTSB could not legally be restricted in its pursuit of information. They simply ignored the law. The FBI reported to Justice. The NTSB did not.
&nb
sp; While Reno contented herself with “policy issues,” Gorelick ran the department. The media acknowledged as much, but they missed Gorelick’s crucial role in the TWA 800 investigation. In her book Deadly Departure, CNN’s Christine Negroni never once mentioned her. The New York Times made only one reference to Gorelick in regards to TWA 800. That came on July 20, three days post-crash. Identified as a member of an “interagency task force,” Gorelick told the Times that investigators were still entertaining “multiple possibilities” as to the cause of the crash. That was it. Of note, at the time of the interview, she was traveling to the Atlanta Olympic games “with the presidential party.” In a lapse of taste given the mess in Long Island, the Times headlined this article, “Clinton Tells U.S. Athletes, ‘I Want You to Mop Up’.”2
Only with the release of Pat Milton’s book three years after the crash did Gorelick’s name surface in any meaningful way. Milton identified Gorelick as the most serious player at the August 22, 1996, meeting in the attorney general’s office, the meeting that reversed the momentum of the investigation.3 Presuming Kallstrom told Milton about Gorelick’s presence at that meeting, he did not share her apparent message, namely that investigators had to find some explanation other than a bomb, let alone a missile. Although undocumented, the rough outlines of the strategy shift would not be hard to interpret.
What followed in the next several weeks was the most ambitious and successful cover-up in American peacetime history. At its quiet center was Gorelick. With the help of a complicit media, she and her cronies transformed a transparent missile strike into a mechanical failure of unknown origin. Given her role, the months after the crash had to have been emotionally harrowing. She did not know whether she would wake up one morning to find Washington Post reporters at her door eager to make her their John Mitchell or H. R. Haldeman. Perhaps such anxiety may have inspired her to leave the DOJ in January 1997. If so, the media missed the story. In an article on her departure, the New York Times failed to explain why the “hard-driving, efficient” deputy was stepping down or what she intended to do next. Nor did the paper mention her role in the TWA 800 investigation.4
There was nothing routine about Gorelick’s next career move. In May 1997, the Clintons found a way to reward their trusted deputy for her steely performance. To the best of my knowledge, not one reporter even questioned why a middling bureaucrat with no financial or housing experience would be handed the vice-chairmanship of Fannie Mae, a sinecure the Washington Monthly aptly called “the equivalent of winning the lottery.” Had the reporters inquired, they might have learned that Clinton had appointed five reliable hacks total to the Fannie Mae Board, including the chief of staff and deputy campaign manager from his 1992 campaign, a former White House aide, a major DNC fundraiser and Lincoln bedroom guest, and a GOP real estate mogul who endorsed Clinton in 1992. The Washington Monthly summarized a board appointment as “a nice way for a president to say ‘thank you’ to a political ally.” One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that Clinton had something to do with Gorelick’s appointment. Gorelick would make $877,573 in that first half-year alone.5
Another understated player in the TWA 800 drama was George Tenet. A party loyalist, Tenet hopscotched from one congressional staff position to another before wending his way to the deputy directorship at Central Intelligence. On July 17, 1996, he was serving in that position under John Deutch. A respected intellectual, Deutch brought much to the office, but, unlike Tenet, he did not bring the one quality the Clintons most valued: blind fealty. In September 1996 Deutch confirmed White House suspicions by testifying to Congress that Saddam Hussein was stronger than he had been after the 1991 Gulf War. Reported the Times’ Tim Weiner, “The White House was furious at Deutch for speaking the truth in public.”6 Clinton dismissed him two months later.
The memos the CIA released in response to various FOIA requests reveal the CIA’s complete engagement in the investigation by the day after the crash. In that all names are redacted, I cannot tell whether Tenet sent or received any of these memos. He was sufficiently involved, however, to lend his imprimatur to agency disinformation by March 1997. That month Tenet sent FBI director Louis Freeh a letter assuring him that “what these eyewitnesses saw was the crippled aircraft after the first explosion had already taken place.”7 This was eight months before the FBI shared the counterfeit CIA thesis with the public. For all the FBI’s bluster and the NTSB’s statutory authority, the CIA gave the impression of being the agency in charge.
To secure a meeting with the analysts responsible for the zoom climb video, for instance, the NTSB’s Jim Hall had to send a humble pie letter to Tenet explaining how NTSB group members would “appreciate learning more about the CIA’s evaluation of witness statements.”8 Hall sent this letter two years after Tenet informed Freeh as to what the witnesses were alleged to have seen. In March 1997 the White House rewarded Tenet for his faithful service by naming him director of central intelligence. Opined the New York Times, more accurately than its editors knew, “The rise of Mr. Tenet is proof of the rewards of being a loyal and obedient servant to one’s boss, be he a senator, a spymaster or the President of the United States.”9
For all their power within the administration, neither Tenet nor Gorelick could have undone the TWA 800 investigation without Kallstrom’s support. In the way of compensation, Gorelick had one precious carrot to dangle: the freedom of Kallstrom’s good friend and FBI colleague, R. Lindley DeVecchio. For thirty years, until his arrest in 1992, a Brooklyn hit man named Greg Scarpa worked as a “top echelon confidential informant” for the FBI. DeVecchio managed that relationship for many of those years. In return for the intelligence Scarpa provided on New York’s La Cosa Nostra families, the FBI protected Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, and kept him out of prison.
During the years he was under FBI protection, however, Scarpa murdered as many as fifty people. Ultimately, three of DeVecchio’s fellow agents accused him of losing his moral balance and, at the very least, providing Scarpa with the kind of FBI intelligence that allowed him to target his enemies.10 This was a serious charge and not without parallels elsewhere. A similar relationship with mobster Whitey Bulger in Boston would earn FBI agent John Connolly a forty-year sentence for murder.
According to the New York Times, the Clinton Justice Department began its investigation of DeVecchio in 1994 based on the testimony of his FBI colleagues. In April of 1996, with DeVecchio still in FBI limbo, Kallstrom had his attorney send a memo to FBI director Louis Freeh warning that the DOJ investigation of DeVecchio threatened future prosecutions and “casts a cloud” over the New York Office.11 In July 1996, the DeVecchio case was still active when Freeh assigned Kallstrom to head up the TWA Flight 800 investigation.
On August 22 of that year Gorelick summoned Kallstrom to Washington. In early September 1996, the Justice Department abruptly closed its thirty-one month long investigation and informed DeVecchio that a prosecution was not warranted.12 By mid-September 1996, Kallstrom had ended all serious talk of a missile and pushed through the administration’s “mechanical failure” narrative. In October, DeVecchio resigned with full pension. Of course, the DOJ’s abrupt clearance of DeVecchio in 1996, like Gorelick’s Fannie Mae bonanza and Tenet’s directorship, may all have been happy coincidences, but the coincidences in the TWA 800 investigation make hash out of the laws of probability.
In any case, the State of New York was not as forgiving as the Department of Justice. In 2006, its prosecutors indicted DeVecchio for his alleged role in abetting the Scarpa murders. At the time of his indictment, Kallstrom came defiantly to his friend’s defense. “Lin DeVecchio is not guilty and did not partake in what he’s being charged with. It’s as simple as that,” said Kallstrom, still speaking in absolutes. Then serving as senior counterterrorism advisor to New York governor George Pataki, Kallstrom apparently saw no conflict in publicly raising money for a man whom New York State had indicted for murder.13 Although the case against DeVecchio eventually
fell apart, the evidence was strong enough for the State of New York to risk alienating the FBI by bringing it to trial.
Kallstrom left the FBI in December 1997 immediately after the close of the TWA 800 case. Like many of his peers, Louis Freeh included, he took an executive position with the MBNA Bank before assuming New York State’s top security post in response to 9/11. Today, he serves as a regular contributor to Fox News on the subject of terror. The NTSB’s Peter Goelz did pretty well too. He proved to be a good enough soldier during the early rough going of the TWA 800 investigation that Jim Hall named him managing director of the NTSB on December 4, 1997, a week before Kallstrom resigned.14 On the next day, December 5, the FBI arrested James and Elizabeth Sanders. The NTSB’s David Mayer would have to wait a little longer for his ship to sail in, but in July 2009, he was named managing director of the NTSB. The CIA’s Randolph Tauss meanwhile got his medal. Washington takes care of its own.
If Gorelick’s sweet Fannie Mae deal passed under the media radar, Webster Hubbell’s did not. In the same spring Gorelick was plotting her career options, Hubbell was fending off any number of government interrogators. They were hoping to learn why Hubbell’s “clients” paid him more than $400,000 in the months after he stepped down from Justice to face criminal charges. The most generous of those clients, the Riady family of Indonesia, had been bailing Clinton out since his Whitewater days in Arkansas. According to the Times, the Riadys had their hand in a $2 billion American-Chinese project whose White House endorsement international bagman Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had the dishonor of trumpeting. He did so, said the Times, while “on a groundbreaking trade mission to Beijing.”15
This groundbreaking mission to China took place two months after the Riadys put Mr. Hubbell on their payroll. Without saying so explicitly, the Times strongly implied that the disgraced White House fixer was paid to keep quiet during his eighteen months in prison. The headline said as much, “Payment to an Ex-Clinton Aide Is Linked to Big Chinese Project.”16 The Whitewater independent counsel, the Justice Department, and Congress were all investigating Clinton fundraising but were getting nothing out of Hubbell.