TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  The editor of Silenced, Kelly Creech, hoped the project would be a learning experience for me. We had worked together on any number of videos before and shared thoughts on any number of subjects. One was the Kennedy assassination. A serious student of the event, Creech bought more or less into the Oliver Stone version of a government sanctioned turkey shoot. I dissented strongly enough that Creech offered to fly me to Dallas and walk me through Dealey Plaza. I argued then, and would argue now, that conspiracies of execution are not in our national character. The widely accepted rule of law among us and the generally cautious nature of the American civil servant weigh against that possibility.

  Conspiracies of concealment are another matter altogether. It was not hard to imagine the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover or the CIA’s John McCone shuffling the paperwork to avoid blame for Lee Harvey Oswald’s unsupervised presence along JFK’s parade route. In a similar vein, one did not have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe Richard Nixon would conspire with his subordinates to conceal a screwy, ill-advised break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters, especially in an election year. In these cases, the ambition of government employees made them all the more susceptible to pressure from above. “I was affected by how easily I said yes, sir,” contrite Nixon aide Alex Butterfield told reporter Bob Woodward years later. “I had seen myself and heard myself get caught up in and be anxious and ready to facilitate an abusive government.”1 Access to power can be that seductive.

  The CIA’s role in the TWA 800 affair made sense to me. Its agents were in the business of deception. They got medals for it. I suspect that if they were asked to deceive the American people for reasons of the highest national security—to avoid war, say, or to protect a secret weapons system—they would have willingly obliged. Contrary to what its critics might think, the FBI is not in the business of lying. For those few in the know, the task could not have come easily. As shall be seen, at least one agent resisted.

  Jim Kallstrom’s assignment, I am convinced, scarred him for life, his bluster notwithstanding. Through some combination of carrots and sticks—and more on these later—the White House swayed him to its cause several weeks into the investigation. After all, the FBI did report to the Department of Justice, and, short of resigning, Kallstrom had little choice but to be a good soldier. As a young Marine platoon commander, he had served in Vietnam and fought in the grueling battle of Khe Sanh. He knew how to follow orders.

  Much harder to understand was the complicity of the career professionals at the NTSB. Although founded in 1967, the agency was made fully independent in 1974. Its role was to investigate all major civilian transportation accidents in the United States and to do so without political pressure. For the first twenty-five years of its existence it did just that. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 changed the equation. In his first appointment to the NTSB Board, the relentlessly political Clinton replaced a pilot/aeronautical engineer/aviation lawyer with a good-old-boy Al Gore crony from Tennessee, Jim Hall. Unkindly but accurately, a Washington Post columnist described Hall as “a politically connected white male Democrat whose only transportation experience apparently is a driver’s license.”2 Less than a year after his appointment, Clinton appointed the feckless Hall chairman. “I wouldn’t trust Jim Hall as far as I could throw him,” Reaganera NTSB board member Vernon Grose told me. “He was locked up with Al Gore. I have no use for his integrity.”3

  As he often did—at the Department of Justice most relevantly—Clinton put his go-to guy in the less scrutinized second spot. That would be Robert Francis, a tall, balding patrician from Massachusetts. “Bob Francis,” Pat Milton reported, “felt responsible only to the person who had appointed him: the president of the United States.”4 Francis had passed the previous nine years running the Paris office of the FAA. There, he had insinuated himself into the good graces of international courtesan and Democratic Party power broker, Pamela Churchill Harriman, Clinton’s ambassador to France. In 1995, Harriman helped secure the NTSB gig for Francis.5 Francis would prove to be the ideal commissaire politique. Clinton needed one. This was the most desperate stretch of his career. Virtually every move he and Hillary made in 1995 and 1996 was political, and few moves proved as salutary as the appointment of Francis. Although board members were expected to rotate through accident assignments, vice-chairman Francis somehow managed to catch two in a row: the May 1996 ValuJet crash in Florida, from which he had just returned, and now TWA Flight 800.

  When the Department of Justice attorneys moved to take over the investigation, Francis was on the scene to let them. This move flirted with illegality. By law, the FBI could only seize control if DOJ attorneys declared the crash a crime scene, but this they did not do and never would. According to Title 49, section 1131(a)(2) of the U.S. Code, an NTSB investigation “has priority over any investigation by another department, agency or instrumentality of the United States Government.” If the FBI were to run a parallel investigation, the NTSB was to authorize and oversee it. The opposite happened.

  “There was something rotten in Denmark, just on the timing,” said Grose. “The law is very clear,” he told me. “The invitation is exclusively limited to when criminal action is suspected. And NTSB decides that distinction—not the FBI.” In his experience, the NTSB enlisted the FBI’s help if they thought there was a crime involved. He cited the October 1999 case of EgyptAir Flight 990, which crashed sixty miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, killing all 217 people on board. In that instance, the NTSB called in the FBI nearly two weeks after the crash when the recovered CVR pointed to a crime. The NTSB did not follow this protocol in the TWA 800 case. “The night of the crash,” added Grose, who provided expert commentary for CNN into the early morning hours, “the FBI was already in charge.”6 From his perspective, to understand what happened to the investigation there is no more important problem to solve than who authorized the FBI takeover.

  Hall and Francis yielded readily to the FBI takeover of the investigation. This was understandable. They were political people. They had their marching orders. If President Clinton lost in November, they would be out of work. A brief pep talk about national security would likely salve whatever conscience they brought to the job. Harder to understand were the motives of NTSB witness group head, Dr. David Mayer and his boss, Dr. Bernard Loeb, the head of the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety. Nine years previously, Loeb had brought Mayer on board as a statistics and database specialist, and he had worked his way up to safety study manager by the time of the hearing.

  Unlike the industry members of the NTSB witness group, Mayer was a federal employee. That said, he was not a political appointee. He had nothing obvious to gain from subverting the truth. And yet he participated in the sham 2000 NTSB hearing with overt enthusiasm. Fussy and officious, he seemed to me the good bureaucrat, one whose motives would have been clear to all good bureaucrats throughout history, if no one else.

  Thanks to the video recording of the August 2000 hearings, we were able to give Mayer a featured on-camera role in Silenced. As the presenter for the witness section, Mayer came on in relief to save the game the CIA had run on the American people. If he succeeded, no witness account would ever be taken seriously. This was not an easy assignment, but Mayer was clearly the man for the job. He told the board that the FBI had begun interviewing witnesses on the evening of the accident and, within a week, had contacted more than five hundred of them.7 This was true enough. “During this time,” he continued, “safety board investigators reviewed the many witness accounts the FBI was documenting.” This half-truth cloaked an insulting reality.

  Two days after the crash, the NTSB’s Bruce Magladry formed a witness group that included accident investigators from TWA, ALPA, and the FAA. On that same day, the FBI informed Magladry that no outside investigator could have any access to witness information. Two days later, Assistant United States Attorney Valerie Caproni told Magladry he could review FBI witness statements only if “no notes [be] taken and no copies made.”
A day later, he was told he could not even take notes during an interview and could only interview a witness in the presence of an FBI agent. Two days later, he gave up and slumped back to Washington.8 It was hard to blame him. The restrictions rendered his task frivolous. That was not, however, how Kallstrom remembered it. “I cannot recall telling the NTSB not to interview anybody,” he told Megyn Kelly of Fox News in June 2013. “They could interview whoever the hell they wanted to.”9 After years of fending off accusations, Kallstrom lied even when he did not have to.

  Not until April 1998 did the NTSB receive the witness summaries from the FBI. The actual review began months later, now with Mayer as head of the witness group. Like the CIA’s Tauss, Mayer made the case that reviewing these summaries was a “painstaking” task that took many months. In reality, a literate adult could read them all in an afternoon. Most are no more than a paragraph or two long.

  Mayer endeavored to tell the board members what the witnesses, a quarter of whom were less than eleven miles away, actually observed. Some of what he said was true: only a few saw TWA 800 before it blew up; fewer still saw the nose section fall to the sea as it was not on fire; many saw what appeared to be a fireball breaking into pieces as it fell to the sea. Mayer claimed, however, that no one saw the initial explosion, which was not true. He insisted that the flaming fuselage, which looked like “a small light or streak,” confused witnesses into thinking they saw a missile. This was egregiously false.

  Mayer had some explaining to do, and he knew it. By the witness group’s own count, 258 witnesses reported seeing a streak of light. There was, he conceded, “a remarkable consistency” among them. Of those 258 witnesses, fifty-six, by Mayer’s count, put his casuistry to the test. These were the witnesses like Mike Wire and Joseph Delgado, who saw the object ascend straight up from the horizon. As to why these witness accounts “didn’t seem to fit,” Mayer offered two explanations, one more specious than the other. His best shot was to blame the FBI. Mayer admitted the agents did not record the interviews. They simply took notes, many of which were “incomplete” or “vaguely worded.” As a result, “The documents may not always say what the witness said.” This was true to a degree, especially in the second round of interviews in 1997. At that stage in the investigation, the agents were trying to dilute the strength of the testimony, even if it meant making a teetotaler a drinker.

  Mayer’s second rationale was more insulting than the first. This time the culprit was “memory error.” Mayer cited the work of a hitherto obscure psychologist, Ira Hyman of Western Washington University, to the effect that people “combine knowledge from various sources with their own personal experience to create memory.” Hyman’s expertise was in recovered childhood memories. These fifty-six adult witnesses were telling authorities what they had seen a day or two earlier. Most gave their testimony unaware that others were giving comparable testimony. When re-interviewed, they stuck to their original stories, even after the media had ridiculed the missile theory and individuals such as Pierre Salinger who proposed it.

  To make his point, Mayer walked the board through an utterly specious rendering of what Mike Wire saw from the bridge and Dwight Brumley saw from his US Air flight overhead. In each case, he either manufactured or contorted details to confirm his own “small light or streak” theory. Mayer then showed the results of a missile visibility test, one undertaken not to determine if a missile struck TWA 800—“We’ve known for a long time it wasn’t”—but to show what witnesses at those distances might have seen. Not since the prosecutors dared O. J. Simpson to try on the gloves has a bit of show and tell gone so badly. Although positioned as far as sixteen miles from the launch site, “all of the observers,” the NTSB acknowledged, “easily detected” the shoulder-fired missiles used in the test.10

  The video of this test was priceless. We included it in Silenced and compared the missile in the test to what Wire and Delgado had seen. It was a near perfect match. “The rocket motor of the missile would be visible and it would look like a light ascending rapidly for about eight seconds,” said Mayer. Wire used the word “zigzag” to describe the motion of the ascending object. Delgado used “squiggly.” The missile in the video confirmed their observations. It squiggled and zigzagged. Both witnesses and many others noted that the missile seemed to disappear at the peak of its ascent. Unwittingly, Mayer explained why: “Then the motor would burn out and the light would disappear for as much as seven seconds.” The missile used in the test was of the shoulder launch variety. A larger missile would have been more visible still.

  In one of his less comprehendible moments, Mayer testified that in a “hypothetical missile attack” a witness would first have seen one streak of light, the hypothetical missile. Then he would have seen a second streak of light, the “airplane in crippled flight.” This made no sense to anyone paying attention. Mayer was suggesting that a fuel tank explosion had already crippled the plane before the “hypothetical” missile struck. Mayer explained that since no witness saw both an ascending streak of light followed by Mayer’s imagined “crippled flight” streak of light, they must have seen only the flaming fuselage of a crippled flight, never mind that several of the best eyewitnesses saw the missile heading in the opposite direction as TWA 800, and many more saw it ascend from the horizon. The NTSB produced its own video to show what a swooping, flaming, gently climbing plane might have looked like.

  “They got smart when the CIA got laughed out of town by aviators,” observed Commander Donaldson. “The NTSB figured they’d get away with half of it. So they said it climbed 1,700 feet. It didn’t.”11 As with the CIA video, the NTSB plane streaked smoothly without the zigzags so many witnesses described. Mayer did not attempt to explain the discrepancy. There was a good deal more he chose not to explore, including the possibility that more than one missile hit the aircraft almost simultaneously and appeared, at least, to stop the 747 in its tracks.

  Several witnesses testified to this perception. One fellow, Witness 551, who was sitting behind Dwight Brumley on US Air 217, said that TWA 800 came to a virtual halt “like a bus running into a stone wall.”12 Witness 233 “observed a large object seemingly stopping its forward momentum while igniting into a fireball.”13 Witness 150, Lisa Perry, who appeared in Silenced, gave very specific testimony along these lines.14 As the FBI reported, Perry tracked a cylindrical object moving at a high speed when she then “noticed a large commercial airliner which appeared to be traveling at the same altitude. The object headed toward the side of the plane. She saw a puff of smoke, and then the plane simply seemed to ‘just stop.’” Fissures developed throughout the plane, and it broke like a toy. “It was a 747, she knew, because it had a bump on the top.” Her 302 continued, “The front was carried forward and arced down with its momentum. The right wing seemed to stay with the front of the plane. . . . A portion of the left wing began to fall separately down, yet forward with momentum. The tail section fell backward. There was ‘blackness’ in the rear. All of the pieces seemed to fall ‘gracefully’ down and widening, leaving a cloud in the sky.” It would take weeks of investigation before the NTSB realized how accurate was the description Perry gave within days of the crash.

  To be sure, Mayer made no reference to Perry’s testimony or that of Witness 73, who described the destruction of the aircraft in similar terms. He did, however, make a passing reference to Captain Christian Baur, the Air National Guard helicopter co-pilot flying with Major Fritz Meyer. In his FBI interview on July 20, 1996, Baur reported seeing a flare-like object moving from left to right, towards JFK. He saw enough of it to ask the flight engineer, “Is that a pyro?”15 Baur then saw a succession of explosions followed by a “huge fireball.” As he told the FBI, he first “thought two things had flown into each other.” Baur expanded on what he had seen during his interview with the NTSB in January 1997. “There was an object that came from the left,” said Baur. “And it appeared to be like—like, a white-hot. Like a pyrotechnic.”16 Once it collided, or appeared
to, with TWA Flight 800, said Baur, “It was almost as if the plane dropped in its tracks. It didn’t keep going.”

  For Mayer, there were two major problems with this testimony. One was Baur’s contention, shared by many of the better observers, that TWA 800 seemed to halt in the sky when struck. The second was that the object Baur saw was moving from east to west. TWA 800 was moving west to east. The streak Baur witnessed could not have been the flaming fuselage of Mayer’s imagination. Mayer solved this problem by discounting Baur’s testimony as something of a memory trick. Apparently, in his initial debriefing right after the incident, Baur did not talk of seeing a streak. Mayer seized on this. He spoke of Baur’s later testimony to the FBI and NTSB as “an example of details being added over time.” On night one, however, Baur had more pressing concerns, like dodging bodies as they fell from the sky and locating them for retrieval.

  Had Mayer paid serious attention to what Baur and Meyer said he might have solved the mystery of the plane’s demise. Interviewed by the NTSB witness group the same day as Baur, Meyer told his interrogators that he saw a streak moving in a gentle arc from right to left, the same direction as TWA 800.17 He then saw a series of hard explosions “as opposed to soft explosion like gasoline or something.” Only then did he see the fireball, which he described as “definitely petroleum.” The two pilots were not confused. They saw two different objects, one heading in a westerly direction, one east, each exploding at or near TWA 800 and blowing it climactically out of the sky—no zoom climb, no gentle looping climb, no survivors.

  When Mayer finished his presentation, the folksy board chairman Jim Hall asked Mayer a series of questions. Although Hall’s probe seemed genuine, Mayer’s answers were likely rehearsed in advance, and many of them were untrue. “Were your activities restricted in any way?” Hall asked. “No, sir,” said Mayer. “There were no restrictions placed on us.” This statement makes euphemism impossible: it was pure lie. No other word suffices. The DOJ shut the NTSB witness group out of the interview process on day two of the investigation. The FBI did not even allow its members to review the 302s until well after the CIA ruled out a missile strike. For Hall, these illegal actions were minor housekeeping details. “I want to acknowledge that normal board procedures were not followed in this investigation,” he said, “and we are addressing that because that, unfortunately, has added to a lot of the misconception that has been generated around this.”