The Taking of MH370

by Jeff Wise

  In discussing the case, the ATSB has always treated the existence of MH370’s Inmarsat data as unremarkable. After all, this kind of data is generated by every plane with a functioning satcom system. But the circumstances here are not normal. There’s no reason why an airline captain would have either the means or the motive to turn off this obscure piece of equipment—and there's even less reason why he would then turn it back on again.

  There’s also no reason why it should have come on at exactly the most fortuitous moment.

  Once the reboot happened, the plane found itself in a virtually unprecedented electrical configuration. There is simply no reason why anyone, especially a bandit hightailing it out of Dodge, would want to fly with all the communications gear turned off but the satcom on. Satellite communications expert Gerry Soejatman told me that it is “very uncommon” for aircraft to fly this way. Indeed, out of the ten thousand planes airborne over the surface of the earth at any given moment, not a single one of them is likely to be in this configuration.

  Yet because the SDU came back on, and only because it came back on, investigators were gifted with six hours of data telling them that the plane was still in the air. And they treated it as unimpeachable.

  2) IT TRANSMITTED AN UNEXPECTED CLUE. Once the authorities had this data set in hand, it just so happened that it contained a stunning clue as to where the plane had gone. While not quite as implausible as the reboot itself, this too defied the odds.

  The Inmarsat data set consists of logged metadata for a satellite communications signal. The system has been carefully designed so that the signal doesn't include information about where and how the plane is traveling—that’s what the Doppler precompensation is all about. Yet when Inmarsat’s in-house team of scientists examined the data set, they realized that because the system wasn’t quite working properly, a residue of navigational information had leaked into the communications signal. It was this residue that allowed them to deduce where the plane had gone.

  What’s important to understand here is that the vast majority of planes that are flying around at any given moment are not going to be leaking navigation information in this way. For that to happen, a bunch of things have to line up. For one thing, the plane has to be equipped with an SDU manufactured by Thales, rather than the other leading manufacturer, Rockwell Collins. The plane has to be flying under the footprint of a satellite that is past its design lifespan and has run low on the fuel it needs to stay stationary relative to the earth. And the path of the plane has to lie along a north-south axis.

  Most planes, as they’re flying around, don't meet these criteria and aren’t leaking this kind of subtle clue. The fact that MH370 did and was can only be viewed as awfully convenient.

  3) IT COULDN’T BE CROSS-CHECKED WITH ANY OTHER EVIDENCE. To me, even more suspicious than what the evidence revealed was what it didn’t. Due to the particularities of the situation in which the plane found itself, there was no other evidence available to confirm the subtle clue encoded in the Inmarsat data.

  Because the plane had just flown beyond the edge of the Malaysian air-defense system, and because the flight took place late enough at night that Indonesia had turned off its own military radar system, MH370’s presumed turn south could not be confirmed by radar.

  Because Malaysia Airlines subscribed to the cheapest Inmarsat service available, Classic Aero, the transmissions between the plane and the satellite did not automatically include the plane’s position information.

  Because the entirety of the flight track lay under the footprint of a single satellite, its direction of flight could not be confirmed by a log-on with a different satellite. (For instance, if MH370 had flown east at IGARI instead of west, it would have subsequently disconnected from Inmarsat-3 F1 and reconnected with Inmarsat-3 F3 stationed over the Pacific.)

  And because the entirety of its flight track to the south was over open ocean, there was no chance for it to be accidentally observed in transit.

  4) WHEN EVIDENCE LATER EMERGED THAT COULD HAVE CONFIRMED THE TURN SOUTH, IT DIDN’T. The biggest piece of confirmatory evidence should have been the discovery of the wreckage on the seabed. If the data had been valid, the plane should have been found within the search area. The fact that it wasn't should have raised alarms about the data’s integrity.

  There were other, subtler ways that the Inmarsat data should have been confirmed but wasn’t. For one thing, if the reboot had been brought about in the normal way then it should have produced a typical set of signals. Instead, the 18:25 reboot generated an initial BFO value radically different from any of the previous 100 logons, as shown in the diagram below. Investigators are at a loss to explain why this might be the case.

  Another problem has to do with the way the debris presumably drifted across the ocean. If the Inmarsat data was correct, then debris should have been collected at times and locations that were consistent with a single drift model. They weren’t. And they should have been covered with communities of organisms whose age and makeup reflected their long voyage across the sea. They weren’t.

  Finally, if the data were legitimate, then the only plausible explanation would be a suicide plot by Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Investigators should have turned up evidence of Shah’s suicidality. But they didn’t. So we're left with the implausible implication that a man with no manifestations of stress or mental illness spontaneously decided to commit mass murder/suicide. (On top of that, he decided to do it in a way that no other suicidal pilot ever has.)

  ✽✽✽

  One of the most common things I hear people say about MH370 is, “I just can’t believe that in this day and age a modern airliner could just vanish.” Of course, they’re absolutely right. As a rule, things don’t just vanish, unless people make them. Magicians make rabbits disappear out of hats, and coins disappear behind kids’ ears, and themselves disappear behind clouds of smoke.

  If you don’t like the idea that something inexplicably miraculous is the handiwork of a magician, then your other option is to imagine that a series of unlikely coincidences occurred. Indeed, every “innocent” explanation that anyone has proposed to explain the vanishing of MH370—like pilot suicide, a lithium battery fire, or accidental depressurization—assumes that the reason the plane was never found is that it experienced an incredible chain of coincidences.

  And sure, bad luck happens in life, but once the odds get truly astronomical it’s time to start rethinking your assumptions.

  Here’s a historical analogy. In May of 1942, the Japanese fleet supporting the invasion of New Guinea was attacked by US aircraft carriers in the Coral Sea and suffered heavy damage. How, just half a year after Pearl Harbor, had America’s thinly stretched naval forces managed to intercept the Japanese task force amid the vastness of the Pacific?

  There were two possibilities. Either the Americans had gotten extremely lucky or they had managed to break Japan’s top-secret naval cipher. The former was a stretch, but the admiralty was certain that the Americans couldn’t have broken their code. A mentality later labeled as “Victory Disease” convinced them that they were vastly superior to their enemy. They themselves couldn’t have figured out how to break their own most sophisticated code, so they figured that there was no way the Americans could have done it. The Japanese Navy had nothing to fear.

  Then bad luck hit again. As the Japanese carriers were moving against Midway Island, lo and behold, the beleaguered American fleet got a jump on them again, sinking all their aircraft carriers. How lucky could those Yanks get? Apparently really lucky, because the Japanese leadership didn’t figure out that their codes had been broken until after they’d signed their surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.

  The search officials tasked with finding MH370 were in the same camp as Japanese wartime leaders. As far as they were concerned, it was inconceivable that they were dealing with an adversary capable of outwitting them. When I asked Mark Dickinson, vice president of satellite operations, how Inmarsat could be certain t
hat the MH370 data hadn’t been tampered with to mislead investigators, he dismissed the idea, saying: “Whoever did that would have to have six month’s worth of knowledge of what would happen, in essence have to know how the data would be used.”

  To be fair, some among the Japanese leadership were suspicious of the Americans’ good luck all along. And in the case of MH370, some of us have long smelled a rat. In 2018 David Gallo, the Woods Hole oceanographer who led the effort that found Air France AF447 deep in the Atlantic, wrote on Twitter: “I never accepted the satellite data from day one,” adding: “I never thought I’d say this….I think there is a good chance that MH370 never came south at all. Let’s put it this way, I don’t accept the evidence that the plane came south.”

  When I reached him on the phone, Gallo told me he was flummoxed by the authorities’ insistence that the Inmarsat data and its interpretation had to be correct. “This is where I got so frustrated,” he said. “The plane’s not there, so what the hell? What’s going on?”

  It now appears that French investigators share Gallo’s suspicion. According to Ghyslain Wattrelos, a family member of three MH370 passengers, French investigators are looking into the integrity of the Inmarsat data. “The essential trail is the Inmarsat data,” Wattrelos has reported. “Either they are wrong [in their analysis] or they have been hacked.”

  Chapter 28

  2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade

  In contrast to investigators’ failure to figure out what happened to MH370, attempts to resolve the mystery of the other Malaysia Airlines 777—MH17— progressed steadily. What researchers found in that case provided an eerie counterpoint to my evolving suspicions about MH370.

  After MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014, it had quickly become clear that the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. A 150-pound shrapnel-laced warhead tore open the aluminum airframe, scattering passengers and crew into the 500 mph slipstream.

  In most airplane crashes, the question is: what happened? This time, it was: who did it, and why?

  The first clue emerged almost immediately, courtesy of Igor Girkin, the GRU colonel whose Reuters profile had taught me the concept of “active reserve.” An hour after the shootdown, Girkin had gloated over social media that the rebels had destroyed a Ukrainian military transport. Once it became clear that the plane was in fact a passenger jet, Girkin took down his post.

  A consensus instantly gelled among Western experts. Girkin’s post meant that the rebels had shot down the plane by accident. Presumably they’d somehow gotten their hands on a captured missile launcher that they didn’t properly know how to use and thought they were firing it at an enemy military plane. Virtually every Western journalist, analyst, and government official agreed.

  But not everyone. An Internet collective known as Bellingcat started digging deeper. Bellingcat specializes in what its volunteer members call “open source intelligence,” gathering information from social media to shed light on geopolitical issues. The loosely affiliated members have none of the academic or government credentials that generally underpin public credibility; the collective’s reputation rests on the transparency of their methodology.

  Scouring Russian social media, the team gathered photos of the missile launcher that downed the plane as it drove to and from the shoot-down site. In the months that followed, they were able not only to precisely pin down its movements, but also identify where it came from and some of the officers involved in the mission.

  They learned that on June 23, 2014, the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade left its base outside Kursk, Russia, and drove south to the village of Millerovo, near the Ukraine border. Commanded by Lieutenant Dmitry Yuryevich Trunin, the battalion was equipped with a Buk medium-range surface-to-air missile system, including six missile launchers, three missile loaders, a command vehicle, and a Buk Snow Drift radar vehicle. Reaching Millerovo on June 25, the battalion encamped within five miles of an area of Ukraine controlled by separatists, and settled in.

  Three weeks later, on the night of July 16, one of the missile launchers, number 332, was hauled across the border and taken down the M4 highway to the rebel-held city of Donetsk. The next morning, it was brought to the village of Snizhne under the direction of GRU officer Sergey Dubinsky, then unloaded in an open field almost directly underneath a busy commercial aviation airway, L980. Over the next three hours, numerous commercial airliners flew overhead. Then MH17 approached. After Buk missile launcher 332 fired a missile and destroyed the plane, the launcher was filmed rolling back toward the Russian border with one missile missing.

  The narrative pieced together by Bellingcat indicated that responsibility lay not with hapless militiamen but with Russia’s military chain of command, and ultimately the Kremlin itself. This interpretation was later bolstered by Girkin himself, who in August 2017 gave an interview to the Russian news website The Insider in which he was asked who was responsible for the shootdown of the Boeing. Girkin insisted that the militia had not shot down the plane, but also refused to say that Ukraine was responsible. That left only one possibility. “He's implying that Russian soldiers were in the Buk crew, not separatists,” says Bellingcat member Aric Toler.

  Given the timing of events, Girkin’s initial claim of responsibility on social media—which reflected badly on Russia’s proxies, and deflected criminal responsibility away from the Kremlin—must have been a deliberate piece of disinformation planned along with the shootdown itself. And Russia didn’t just plant that one narrative. It launched a so-called “cluster narrative attack,” simultaneously unleashing a deluge of fictitious claims: that a Ukrainian warplane shot down MH17; that the missile had been from a Buk launcher, but a Ukrainian one; that MH17 was actually MH370, repurposed and stuffed with corpses; and so on. To support these claims, Russia generated doctored photographs, released spurious missile-test results, and flooded the internet with chatbots and trolls.

  The result was a haze of confusing and contradictory stories. While none of them seemed particularly credible to an informed observer, they crowded the mediascape and created a disorienting sense that all narratives were tainted and suspect—that there was no such thing as truth.

  Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter played an obvious role in amplifying such stories, but the mainstream press played along as well. “Western liberal media training proved initially to be no match for the unity of message emanating from Russia. In fact, the opposite was true,” writes Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre. “The emphasis on balance in many Western media ensured that Russian narratives, no matter how patently fraudulent, were repeated to European and American audiences by their own media, and thus validated and reinforced.”

  These efforts were directed at the world beyond Russia’s borders. Domestically, the Kremlin enjoyed uncontested control of the media and so was able to create its own reality.

  “The Russian media,” writes media critic Vasily Gatov, “have abandoned, sometimes through coercion, but mostly voluntarily and even eagerly, their mission of informing the public and have turned into creators of the Matrix-like artificial reality where imaginary heroes and villains battle tooth and nail in Russia’s Armageddon.”

  In this parallel dimension it was not Russia, but the United States and Ukraine’s pro-Western government who were responsible for the shootdown. To the Russian public, the U.S. sanctions that followed were yet another unjustified act of aggression. Their outrage had a twofold benefit for the Kremlin: as with the Chechen war, it united the nation against a common foe (Putin’s poll ratings soared), and it provided a palatable explanation for the slumping economy. It’s not corruption that’s bleeding us dry, it’s those nasty foreigners.

  Ultimately, the official Western response to the destruction of MH17 was shaped not by the Kremlin’s counternarratives but by the assessment of well-informed experts. This was the audience at whom Strelkov’s real-time social media revelation was aimed. To t
hese sophisticated onlookers, the apparent gaffe was the found key that fit the lock (remember Teller’s dictum). Few of them seemed able to imagine that Russia could be so clever as to plant a narrative that, on the face of it, looked damaging to themselves. It was easier to accept a version in which the underlying cause was bumbling incompetence than one in which the entire West had been taken in by aggressive mendacity.

  If the latter were the case, then one would have to entertain the possibility that a nuclear-armed nation with a seat on the UN Security Council deliberately and with premeditation slaughtered nearly 300 foreigners in another nation’s airspace for no apparent reason. If one puts events in their proper context, however, the seemingly arbitrary murder of civilians appears neither unprecedented nor inexplicable.

  Chapter 29

  Maskirovka

  We can get that context by unpacking recent Russian history.

  Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

  Under communism, all wealth belonged to the state, including Russia’s vast oil, timber, and mineral reserves. In the brave new world of capitalism, all that was up for grabs. Tremendous fortunes were amassed overnight by people connected and ruthless enough to scoop up what they could. Entrepreneurs with shady connections grew obscenely wealthy while the majority slid into poverty. Birth rates plunged and the life expectancy of the average Russian male fell from 64 in 1990 to 58 in 1994. The nation was literally dying.