TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  Radar picked up a fourth vessel radar within six miles of the crash site, and this one the authorities never managed to explain away. The ship was spotted twenty minutes before the explosion heading southwest. At the time TWA blew up, it was less than three miles away. Instead of heading back to the site to look for survivors, its captain committed a nautical sin of the highest order. He fled the scene at a speed the FBI estimated at between twenty-five and thirty-five knots. That captain has never been held to account. “Despite extensive efforts,” the FBI’s Lewis Schiliro told a House subcommittee, “the FBI has been unable to identify this vessel.” Schiliro added the meaningless disclaimer, “Based on our investigative efforts, we are confident it was not a military vessel.”30 The FBI identified the other vessels in the area and conducted interviews as appropriate, claimed Schiliro, but he declined to name the other vessels for fear of compromising the investigation.

  According to Schiliro, the fleeing ship was “believed to be at least 25–30 feet in length.” This was pure guesswork, if not outright disinformation. A Navy cruiser measures in the hundreds of feet. A routine radar scan cannot gauge length, but it is much more likely to pick up a Navy cruiser than an ordinary pleasure boat. Whatever the nature of the ship, whether Navy or pleasure or terrorist, the people on board would have had a better perspective on the incident than just about any witness. Admittedly, FBI agents never talked to them. Nor did the FBI explain how it was able to identify every other vessel in the area except the most conspicuous one.

  On subjects nautical, the FBI had little choice but to take the Navy’s word. From day one, however, naval officers were sparing with the truth. The directive to be evasive had to come from on high. How high one can only conjecture, but the White House would be a reasonable guess. Were the shoot-down the result of a secret test gone awry, a president could easily have invoked “national security” as the rationale for concealing the truth from the American people. Only a few high ranking officers would have needed to know the details, but it is hard to believe they would or could have misdirected the investigation of their own accord.

  For the first week after the crash the documentation of its cause lay buried, presumably on the ocean bottom. Investigators believed, with good cause, that when they retrieved the so-called “black boxes” they would discover the truth. These durable fluorescent orange containers protected the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) respectively. Between them, the CVR and FDR had the potential to spell out precisely what had gone wrong.

  Investigators knew how skilled the U.S. Navy was in retrieving these boxes and expected quick results. In February 1996, the Navy used a remote-control submersible vehicle to recover the CVR and FDR from Birgenair Flight 301, a Turkish charter plane that crashed off the coast of the Dominican Republic. The devices had sunk with the wreckage to a depth of 7200 feet. The FDR revealed in explicit detail the mechanical flaws that caused Birgenair 301 to crash, and the CVR recorded the pilots’ desperate attempt to cope with the impending disaster. As in most crashes caused by mechanical failure, the cockpit drama lasted for several excruciating minutes. In this case, it began with one pilot saying, “There is something wrong, there are some problems,” and it ended three minutes later with the other pilot crying out, “Oh, what’s happening?”31 The FDR data proved just as revealing. Between them, the two devices told in inarguable detail the story of Birgenair 301’s undoing.

  On the night of the TWA 800 crash, would-be rescue boats had picked up the distinctive “ping” from the black boxes’ underwater locator beacon. The next morning, July 18, two NTSB investigators set out to find the boxes. This should not have been hard. The sea was smooth. The sky was crystal clear. The searchers used the latest in sounding devices. And the aircraft wreckage lay only 120 feet beneath the surface. Birgenair 301 had settled sixty times deeper. Wrote CNN’s Negroni, “The men left the inlet that afternoon optimistic they’d soon have what they were after.”32 They found nothing, heard nothing.

  The New York Times expressed little curiosity about the delay, but the Long Island–based Newsday sensed something amiss. On July 22, the paper ran an article titled, “Divers Wait as Devices Scan Ocean.” According to Newsday, Navy divers still had not gone into the water. They had been relying instead on various remote devices that had yet to find the elusive boxes. “They should be down there diving,” a captain of a nearby diving boat operation told Newsday. “[Federal officials] said it was too rough out there, but my boat had 27 divers in the water on Saturday [July 20].”33

  Navy Captain Chip McCord told Newsday that those remote devices were a “quicker and better” way to locate the boxes, but in the first four days the Navy found nothing. Newsday paraphrased McCord as explaining, “Signals from the black boxes have not been heard because the devices are broken, destroyed or covered with sand or other material.” Whether intentionally or not, McCord was misleading the reporters. On July 24, two Navy divers finally went in. I have seen the underwater video of the Eureka moment, a moment Negroni described accurately enough. No sooner was the first diver lowered to the ocean floor, she wrote, than he saw “an orange box with FLIGHT RECORDER stenciled on its side.” Seconds later, the other diver “came into view. In his arms he carried another orange box.” Said diver Kevin Gelhafen, “Recovering the boxes was merely picking them up, setting them in the basket, and tying them down.”34 Like Milton, Negroni expressed no wonder at the ease with which the divers found the boxes.

  With the boxes successfully recovered, President Clinton’s “on again/off again”35 trip to New York was on again. Arriving at JFK the morning after their retrieval, Clinton spun their recovery to his best political advantage. “Just last night the divers who were braving the waters of the Atlantic to search for answers recovered both flight data recorders,” boasted the president at a press conference afterwards. “Our experts are analyzing their contents at this very moment. This is major step toward unraveling the mystery of Flight 800.”36 As to what that mystery might be, Clinton laid out two possibilities, “mechanical failure or sabotage.” The word “sabotage” implied a bomb, not a missile.

  A major part of that “mystery” was the length of time it took to find the boxes. No sand or other material covered the CVR and FDR—not that any such covering would have muffled their distinctive ping. Nor were the beacons broken. In its first formal report from November 1997, the NTSB addressed the condition of the two boxes. Although banged up and even ripped open, the boxes protected the recording devices, both of which were in good working order. The NTSB also examined the underwater locator beacon on the CVR, the “pinger,” and it “operated normally when tested.”37 This report failed to mention the condition of the FDR beacon, but there is every reason to believe that it worked as well.

  Stranger still, when the NTSB agents examined the recordings, they found no useful information at all. The last words out of the cockpit were “power set,” a casual acknowledgement of an air traffic control order to continue ascending. This was said nearly a minute before the tape ended.38 The FDR ended at the exact same time as the CVR, also revealing nothing of consequence. According to former NTSB Board member Vernon Grose, this complete lack of information was unusual to the point of extraordinary. As Sanders and I discussed in some detail in First Strike, there is every reason to believe the boxes were recovered immediately after the crash, edited, and put back in place. I will not go into detail here because the evidence remains inconclusive.

  Some facts, however, speak for themselves. Most notable is the inexplicable failure of the CVR and FDR to reveal any crash-related information whatsoever. Another is a CIA intra-agency memo from early in the investigation in which an analyst expressed surprise that the recorders would go silent. “To get the electrical power to shut down,” wrote the anonymous analyst, “[a missile] would need to ‘miss’ the engines, and instead hit the electrical compartment by mistake.”39 There was no evidence this happened. Finally, there is Executive Order
13039. Although the president preferred to work through his fixers, on March 11, 1997, Clinton quietly signed this order effectively removing all federal whistle-blower protection from anyone, civilian or military, associated with U.S. Navy “special warfare” operations.40 This would include any Navy divers charged with moving the black boxes.

  The date of the executive order is worth considering. On the following day, March 12, the New York Times reported that government officials had “unleashed a pre-emptive strike” to neutralize an upcoming 57-page article in the Paris Match. That article explored in depth the Navy’s role in the destruction of TWA 800.41 The Times also noted that on the day before, March 11, the same day as Clinton’s executive order, the Riverside Press-Enterprise broke the story of James Sanders’s residue test. Having cause to fear the collapse of the cover-up, Clinton for the first time left his fingerprints on the investigation. The media failed to notice.

  Much more alert than the media, Montoursville’s Don Nibert had deep suspicions about the black boxes. The technically inclined Nibert used his status as a bereaved family member to get information. As he would tell CNN, he asked for a copy of the flight data recorder tape to have it analyzed independently, and the NTSB obliged him. Nibert delivered the tape to audio expert Glenn Schulze. For the thirty years prior Schulze had worked as an independent consultant with high profile clients like the U.S. Navy and the Applied Research labs at the University of Texas. Schulze concluded there were at least two seconds purposely deleted from that tape. Nibert believed they were removed to conceal “an outside explosion next to the airplane.” When CNN asked NTSB Board member John Goglia for clarification, he responded unhelpfully, “We talked about there being an event of something that the data was missing and it’s unexplainable, it’s just missing.”42

  Nibert’s proposed scenario, if accurate, would not have shocked Jim Speer. Representing the representing the Airline Pilot’s Association, Speer recalled watching a video of the ocean floor early in the investigation and noticing that the tape had been jacked with. “Look at the gaps in the time clock here,” Speer told his FBI chaperone. “There is no reason for gaps to occur unless the tape has been edited. I want to see the unedited version.”43 Said the agent, “No.” End of conversation.

  With the black boxes saying nothing, and the media saying not much more, the Navy was off the hook. More importantly, so was the president. Missiles, friend or foe, had been edited out of the equation as surely as the troubling shots of the ocean floor in Speer’s video and the revealing last few seconds of data from the black boxes. For the White House, things were looking up.

  Chapter: FOURTEEN

  MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

  In late November 2002, I was strolling the concrete banks of Brush Creek, a channelized waterway that runs through the heart of Kansas City. As usual, I walked Huck Finn–style along the edge. With First Strike about to be released, scads of people had told me to “watch my back.” What they should have told me was to “watch my step.” Lost in thought, I stepped off into space and immediately knew I was going in the water. As in the cartoons, it took about a half hour to get there. On the way, I had time to contemplate the absurdity of what could happen were I to drown in the smelly, semi-toxic Brush Creek. Who would ever believe I just fell in? A whole conspiracy industry could grow up around my literal liquidation. I hit the water almost laughing.

  The laughing stopped, however, when I realized I could not get out. I was wearing sweats, now about as heavy as I was, and boots. The walkway was about a foot and a half above the water. I could not quite pull myself out or throw my foot up over the edge. The harder I tried, the wearier I got. Few people in our overly antiseptic metropolis walk the creek even in the best of weather. In late November, no one does. But then—mirabile dictu!—a hefty, heaven-sent fellow came ambling down the walkway. “Hey, Mac,” I said to my new guardian angel, “could you lend me a hand?” Again as in the cartoons, he did a comic double take. My guess is that he had not seen too many swimmers in this waterway, especially in November. He cheerfully obliged and spared the conspiracy mills a story even the New York Times might have felt compelled to investigate.

  Upon the book’s publication three months later, our young publicist Bob Keyser and I descended on the nation’s capital. Our goal was to find someone higher up the media chain to take an interest in the information Sanders and I had gathered. Thanks to the Internet, we had much more information at our disposal than the Times newsroom had a year after the crash, but we lacked the institutional clout to prod authorities to return our phone calls. That is not to say we didn’t try. We simply did not succeed. I had no illusion that we could break open this story ourselves.

  As I had yet to acquire a reputation as a “loose cannon”—that would come in time—a few media people of note proved willing to talk with us. We began with AIM’s Reed Irvine, who had been helpful throughout. He knew what doors to knock on and what numbers to call and graciously shared those numbers with us. One door led to Don Phillips, an aviation reporter who covered the TWA 800 affair for the Washington Post. We met with him in the Post’s lobby. Although he told us little that was new or useful, Phillips did not disguise his contempt for a process that relegated him and every other reporter not with the New York Times to a lower media caste. By funneling its inside information to the Times, the FBI made the Grey Lady a co-dependent, and she obliged, wittingly or not, by enabling the White House’s disinformation campaign.

  I never did meet the one person I thought could move the TWA 800 saga into the mainstream, but in deference to Irvine, that fellow did take my calls. In addition to being the most effective reporter of his generation, Bob Woodward was a U.S. Navy vet. He served for five years as a lieutenant after graduating from Yale in 1965. During those years, by his own account, he sometimes acted as a courier between the White House and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, then the chief of naval operations.1 Moorer, long since retired, publicly supported the work Irvine was doing to reopen the TWA 800 investigation. In January 1998, at an AIM-sponsored press conference, he and Commander Donaldson made the case that a surface-to-air missile brought down the aircraft.2 Despite Moorer’s credentials and Donaldson’s expertise, the media blew them off. During Clinton’s second term, reporters showed little interest in knowing any more than they had to about the workings of the administration.

  Woodward was not nearly as dismissive. He let me make my case almost without comment. Not above a little flattery, I assured him he was the only reporter capable of breaking this open, which was very close to the truth. I added, a bit presumptuously, that TWA 800 would make a nicely symmetrical capstone thirty years after Watergate. Woodward reminded me that the war in Iraq was just about ready to kick off. He suspected it would grab the media’s attention in a way a seven-year-old story could not. That I could not deny. In any case, Woodward remained polite throughout our two or three phone conversations and asked me to send a book to his home address, which he provided. I have not heard from him since. If he left anything unspoken, it was a general sense of apprehension, the kind that, if voiced, might have translated, “Don’t you know what you are getting yourself into?”

  I did get to meet one mainstream reporter in Washington with a reputation for uncovering things presidential: Michael Isikoff, then with Newsweek. Isikoff became very nearly a household word early in 1998 when Matt Drudge broke an Isikoff story that Newsweek had spiked, namely that President Clinton had been dallying with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. Sex was the one scandalous slice of Clinton’s life that defied the media’s best efforts to suppress it.

  With Isikoff in Newsweek’s cramped Washington office was a colleague who covered the TWA 800 story for the magazine, Mark Hosenball. In fact, no reporter endorsed the CIA zoom climb hoax more enthusiastically than did Hosenball. His article on the subject began with a pro forma dig at “conspiracy theories” and went nowhere positive from there.3 Indeed, without intending to, Hosenball revealed how painfull
y little America’s major newsrooms knew about TWA 800 even in November 1997, sixteen months after the crash. Worse, what he did know he got from the CIA. Its analysts had convinced him that “infrared images captured by spy satellites” showed what really happened during the plane’s last forty-nine seconds.

  This revelation may have come as news to Kallstrom. The FBI’s comprehensive summary issued just a week before Hosenball’s article did not once mention the word “satellite.” The NTSB’s final report made only vague mention of “infrared sensor information from a U.S. satellite” and that in reference to the CIA video. In his 2008 report, the CIA’s Randolph Tauss claimed a satellite detected a “heat plume associated with the crash” but said it was not “crucial” to the analysis. In her book, CNN’s Christine Negroni made no mention of satellites, and AP’s Pat Milton made only fleeting references. The New York Times avoided the subject altogether. Yet here was Hosenball saying that the CIA had “spy satellites designed to monitor unfriendly foreign countries pointed at the Eastern Seaboard.” This at least sounded plausible. Two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, and three weeks after the terror bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the military was on an extremely high state of alert.

  Family member Don Nibert heard about the satellites as well and wanted to know more. “I learned that they had three satellites that would have coverage of the site near the 8:30 time period,” Nibert observed wryly. “All failed.”4 Nibert asked John Clark, an aviation safety deputy with the NTSB, what were the odds all three would cease working at the same time. Clark responded that this information was considered classified.