TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  In March 2006, Berger held a fundraiser for the designated hit man, Joe Sestak, a former vice admiral forced into retirement for what the U.S. Navy charitably called “poor command climate.” This would-be congressman had not lived in Weldon’s suburban Philadelphia district for thirty years before being tabbed to run against Weldon.35 Berger lent more than his money and support. He volunteered Stonebridge’s Director of Communications to serve as Sestak’s campaign spokesperson.36 Before the campaign was through, Berger and his allies would bring in the big guns, none bigger than Bill Clinton and none more lethal than the FBI.

  Unaware of the plot against Weldon, I stumbled into the middle of it. Mike Wire, the TWA 800 witness on the bridge, had wrangled an appointment with Weldon and asked if I wanted to come along. Wire lived in suburban Philadelphia, and I happened to be down the New Jersey shore that week. So he and I and his wife Joan drove down together. We did not expect much. If Weldon were like other authorities we had tried to contact, he would have listened politely for a few minutes and promised to have some staffer look into it.

  Given Weldon’s interests, I had expected to meet a much harder guy. The year before our visit Regnery Publishing had published Weldon’s Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America—and How the CIA Has Ignored It, a book whose very title made serious enemies in the intelligence establishment. Weldon had also shed light on Able Danger, the Army intelligence unit that had targeted 9/11 conspirators months before the attack only to be thwarted by various bureaucracies.

  The Weldon we met, however, was a congenial, grandfatherly fellow who took more pride in his service as a volunteer fireman than he did in fighting the CIA. He had served a couple of terms as a small town mayor and seemed no more regal than that. Nor did the session go as we had anticipated. Not at all. Weldon ushered us into his office at 11 a.m., and he and Russ Caso, his chief intelligence aide, kept us there for more than two hours. In fact, I was the one who broke up the meeting as I had to be back in New Jersey for an extended family gathering.

  Wire told a compelling story. His straightforward, no-nonsense account has made a believer out of many a skeptic. I supported his account by showing other witness testimony from Silenced and explaining the motivation and the logic of the conspirators. Weldon did not need much convincing. He had been investigating the dark side of the Clinton security apparatus for years, including Berger’s woefully under-punished destruction of government documents.

  Weldon was well aware of the forces massing against him. And he thought he knew why. He had made it his business to find out what Berger had been seeking in the National Archives and how he had gotten off so lightly. In fact, when we left Weldon, he was on his way to review the Berger evidence. He was the one man in Washington willing and able to put all the pieces together of a scandal that, if pursued, could shake the DC firmament. The very fact that Berger was overseeing a campaign against the man most likely to expose him had the potential to move the political Richter at least a few notches.

  The Clintons and their cronies invested a good deal of energy in neutralizing Weldon. During an unusually testy Chris Wallace interview with President Clinton on Fox News in late September 2006, the nation saw just how much energy. “A three-star admiral,” Clinton announced out of nowhere, “who was on my National Security Council staff, who also fought terror, by the way, is running for the seat of Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania.”37 He did not even mention Sestak. In fact, he mentioned only two Republicans in the interview: Curt Weldon and President George Bush. A week or so later, Clinton visited Weldon’s district to stir up the base.

  Popular ten-term congressmen don’t go down easily. With three weeks remaining before the election, despite the outsized efforts of the Sestak campaign, Weldon retained a seven-point lead in the polls. Weldon’s enemies, however, had a nasty little ace up their sleeves. Dealing it was Greg Gordon of the Democrat-friendly McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington Bureau. Two anonymous sources had allegedly told Gordon that Weldon had “traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter.”38 Two days later, on October 15, the New York Times, in a surprisingly lengthy article on the race, confirmed that law enforcement officials “were investigating [Weldon’s] role in securing lobbying contracts for his daughter’s international public relations firm.”39

  Alleging a need to act quickly because of the leak, the FBI raided the homes of Weldon’s daughter and a friend on Monday morning, October 16. Within hours, Democrat protesters were waving “Caught Red-Handed” signs outside Weldon’s district office in Upper Darby.40 The story received a great deal of unreflective attention from a media desperate for a Democrat win. My attempt to educate reporters at the McClatchy papers and the local Delco Times fell on willfully deaf ears. The narrative had already been established, and the media saw no need to rework it. On election night, Sestak and his pals had cause to celebrate. He won his district with 56 percent of the vote, and the Democrats retook Congress.

  It took a good long while for the local media to wise up. “It was assumed by some at the time that the Justice Department wouldn’t have taken the extraordinary steps to conduct such raids if it didn’t have substantial evidence of wrongdoing on the part of its targets,” editorialized the Daily Times, a suburban Philadelphia paper. “And yet, more than three-and-a-half years later, none of those people have been charged with anything.”41 One other casualty was Weldon’s aide Russ Caso. Howard Sklamberg, the lead U.S. Attorney in the Weldon case, charged Caso with failing to file the proper disclosure forms on a job held by his wife. Caso pled guilty and accepted two years of probation, which was two more years than Sklamberg, a Democrat, recommended for Sandy Berger when he prosecuted that case.42

  Weldon was not the first congressman to involve himself with TWA Flight 800. That honor belonged to James Traficant, a maverick Democrat from Ohio. A member of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, Traficant had been a “strong supporter” of Commander William Donaldson’s independent investigation into the TWA 800 disaster. Then, said Donaldson, Traficant had a “sudden and severe change of heart.”43 It coincided precisely with a federal plea deal by Traficant’s senior political advisor in 1998. “After Mr. O’Nesti’s guilty plea,” observed Donaldson in a press release, “Mr. Traficant avoided all contact with Commander Donaldson and proactively attacked the Donaldson investigation.”44 This is not to say that Traficant was innocent of the charges that would eventually land him in a prison for seven years, but he came to see, as did Weldon, that justice in Washington is a notoriously subjective affair.

  Chapter: SIXTEEN

  ENGINE TROUBLE

  As the years passed, two realities forced their way into the conversations among TWA 800 researchers. One was the futility of attempting to determine, without a high level insider as guide, exactly what happened on the night of July 17, 1996—who fired what from where and why. The second was the vanity of expecting that guide to come forward on his own. Few people knew the dynamics of the shoot-down, and with each passing year, the incentives for them to volunteer what they knew diminished.

  As I was coming to see, something as mundane as a pension could go a long way in assuring a lifetime of silence. Jim Kallstrom acknowledged as much himself. In criticizing the investigators who testified in the 2013 documentary TWA Flight 800, he groused, “They could have been real men and been whistleblowers back then.” He attributed their hesitance to “their government pensions.”1 Kallstrom overlooked a few other disincentives, such as Clinton’s Executive Order 13039, the removal of several investigators from the Calverton hangar for challenging the FBI, the public humiliation of Pierre Salinger, and the arrest of Terry Stacey and the Sanderses. More problematic still was the failure of the media to offer whistleblowers a safe harbor.

  Despite the many reasons not to speak out, from time to time I would hear from lower-level servicemen who claimed to know something. As I was writing this book, in fa
ct, one “Sailor” e-mailed me the following:

  We were using commercial aircrafts as simulation! We were doing this because there was to be absolutely no live missiles! But when Commander Cooka heard that there was a real missile launched, he got on WISKEY [sic] secured channel and started conversing about the live fire! Commander Cook was in charge of the exercise! USS CARR was the Warfare Commander for the exercise! You double-check that because after the deployment he was sent to Warfare College to teach. My leading petty officer, as he was sitting in the Captain’s chair in CIC [combat information center], made it so clear that I say nothing of what I saw or heard because the government could ruin me with my social security number and even kill me. And his words were, “so with that being said, pull the RD390 tapes, close all positional log books, including the bridges, tape them and leave them on the DRT table!” They took a few things to a place called the shred room where we destroy documents using salt water and a shredder! When we ran, we ran to Bermuda where we were not allowed to leave the ship, no phone calls, e-mails secured, and nothing was to be discussed! Everyone that was involved was told in CIC, “This didn’t happen!”

  Name changed.

  I did some checking. The USS Carr was, in fact, a guided missile frigate. The RD-390 is a multi-channel tape recorder. The named skipper took command five days before the TWA 800 incident. The previous year the ship underwent extensive combat system upgrades which led to “two highly successful dual missile firing exercises” in early 1996. The ship’s official history is oddly silent on where the ship operated between April 1996 and November 1996 when it headed for the Mediterranean.2 Then too, the USS Carr fit the description of the ship Lisa Perry and other witnesses had seen earlier on the evening of July 17: a large (453 feet) military fighting ship, battleship gray, a big globe, lots of equipment, ID number on the front. Of note, the skipper did go on to teach at the U.S. Army War College, not unlike the Vincennes captain, Will Rogers, who instructed his fellow officers in San Diego before retiring.

  In December 2015, at my prompting, “Sailor” contacted Commander Cook through Facebook.3 After an exchange of pleasantries, Sailor introduced the subject indirectly by sending Cook a link to an Internet article that blamed the destruction of TWA 800 on a military missile.4 “I am sorry Capt. [Cook] for the direct, but it troubles me! Please forgive me.” Replied Cook in the kind of semi-literate shorthand common on Facebook, “No problem. We were no where [sic] around Ny. And the missles [sic] we fire were in the Puerto Rico Opera area.” Sailor prodded gently about the possibility of another Navy vessel being involved, and Cook responded, “The Navy proved there no units around and no one fires a missles [sic] without strict area clearance. Rest assured can not be hidden or allowed.”

  Not wanting to accuse an individual based on an unverifiable source, no matter how well the source’s account held up, I have altered the commander’s name. Independent researchers have the freedom to pursue stories over time, but we do not have clout. Clout comes with having a major newsroom as back up—the greater the misdeed, the greater the need for it. In its absence, people like this commander feel no pressure to share much of anything.

  Short of a confession from one of the participants in the TWA 800 cover-up, my colleagues and I have had to rely on circumstantial evidence, the more visual the better. The holy grail of this pursuit has been the amateur video of the missile, the one around which Nelson DeMille constructed the plot of his bestseller, Nightfall. MSNBC probably aired it briefly that first night, and foreign stations showed it after that, but the FBI appears to have seized all available copies.

  Videos about the event have proved helpful if for no other reason than that they keep the story alive. Some of these add information. Others unintentionally show the bankruptcy of the government position. In 2005, Pierre-Emmanuel Luneau-Daurignac produced a helpful documentary on TWA Flight 800 for a major French network. In April of that year I went to Paris to meet with Luneau-Daurignac and several other journalists whose interest in the story remained keen. Retired United Airlines captain Ray Lahr was to join us.

  In the early morning hours of April 19, Lahr left his Malibu home for a trip to Los Angeles International Airport, and beyond that to Charles De Gaulle. He arrived sleepless on the morning of April 20. Michel Breistroff met him at the airport in his Jaguar. Some ten years prior, then still in his early fifties, Breistroff retired to better follow the career of his son, also named Michel, who starred on the Harvard hockey team and on the French national team. He loved the boy dearly and was devastated when young Michel died aboard TWA 800. Breistroff has been on a mission ever since.

  Michel and Ray met me at my hotel. On the surface, Breistroff has everything going for him—looks, wealth, style. That said, the loss of his beloved son has robbed much of the joy from his life. For his part, Ray Lahr, then a few months shy of his eightieth birthday, was a work of nature. With the death of Commander Donaldson nearly five years earlier, he had emerged as the leader of the ongoing dissident investigation into the demise of TWA Flight 800. His good-natured persistence helped pull the various factions together in their collective effort to keep the case alive. Tireless at eighty, Ray and I would walk for hours around Paris later that day.

  At lunchtime, we journeyed to the aptly named Cafe des Delices in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. There, we met with the French journalists and Luneau-Daurignac. Breistroff, in fact, had appeared in studio on camera after the showing of Luneau-Daurignac’s documentary. He seemed neither optimistic, nor pessimistic, merely determined. As helpful as the journalists were, it struck me that if anyone were able to force this case open it would be the family members like Breistroff. On the first anniversary of the crash, he confronted Kallstrom at a ceremony on Long Island. Breistroff impressed Pat Milton as well. She spent three pages of her book on the confrontation.5 “All that matters to me is knowing the truth,” Breistroff reportedly told Kallstrom. “My life is over. I sit in a chair at night and go to bed at two a.m. When I get up in the morning, it is not daylight for me, but only darkness again. I want to trust you, but there are people higher than you that may be pulling strings.”

  “Michel,” Kallstrom replied, “there is no way in hell that if a Navy missile or any other missile shot this plane down it could ever be hidden from me.” By this time, Kallstrom was deeply in denial. The Navy had deceived him left and right. He had sanctioned the fraudulent dog training exercise. With his blessing, the FBI and the CIA were far along in the creation of the zoom climb video and the manufacture of the witness interviews needed to pull it off. Kallstrom’s seeming sincerity may have swayed Milton, but it did not move Breistroff. To this day, he is confident he was right: people higher than Kallstrom were pulling strings.

  Breistroff is not the only family member who has refused to accept the government’s unholy spin. Another parent I have gotten to know along the way is Lisa Michelson, the mother of then nineteen-year-old Yon Rojany. On the afternoon of July 17, 1996, Yon arrived at JFK Airport with a ticket for Rome. Basketball coach Larry Brown had seen Yon play in California and encouraged him to try out for the Italian Basketball League. Yon took his advice. When TWA cancelled Flight 841 to Rome, its agents secured him a seat on Flight 800 before Yon had a chance to call his mom. It didn’t matter. As soon as Michelson heard of the Flight 800 crash and saw the images of its burning debris, she intuited that Yon had been on board. She called TWA desperately throughout the night and did not learn of Yon’s fate for sure until her niece was able to check the passenger manifest in Paris nearly two days after the plane went down. All that Michelson remembers upon hearing the news is falling to the ground and crying. In the months that followed she called the NTSB almost daily. “They did their best to assure me that it was mechanical failure,” Lisa told me in 2003. “I am not able to explain to you specifically why I didn’t believe them, but I didn’t. Too many things I was told just didn’t make sense.”6

  A month before the Paris meeting, Lisa, Ray, and I met in a San
ta Monica restaurant with a serious Hollywood player interested in producing a movie about TWA 800. Several other producers had approached Sanders and me over the years. In every case, as in this one, someone higher up in the money chain said no. Among those who contacted us were representatives of controversial director Oliver Stone whose would-be TWA 800 project for ABC in 1998 had come to naught. Our dealings with Stone went nowhere as well.

  Family members do not get discouraged that easily. Michelson credits her son Eric—and now her grandchildren—with keeping her going through the ordeal. It is not easy for her to talk about the disaster even today. When asked what it is that she hopes to get by keeping the investigation alive, Michelson answers concisely, “the truth.” She adds, “The truth is so easy, so simple. To lie is difficult.”7 This is the same answer that Breistroff gives. The same answer that Don Nibert, father of Cheryl from Montoursville, gives. The same answer that Marge Krukar, brother of Andrew, gives. Whenever I think of sloughing off this case, I think of them. I think of them too when I read anew Kallstrom’s gripe that people like Lahr, Sanders, and myself have “increased the pain already inflicted on the victims’ families.”

  Said Kallstrom to Breistroff about anyone who might have ordered a cover-up, “I would like nothing better than to expose them. No matter who the cowards were, I would stand up and tell the whole world about it.”8 Within months, Kallstrom would close the FBI case, sell the CIA’s duplicitous video to a credulous media, and block all eyewitness testimony at the NTSB hearing that followed. The man apparently has a sterner constitution than the rest of us. On the tenth anniversary of the crash in July 2006, Michelson got in Kallstrom’s face at the memorial service on Long Island. “I can’t believe you’re still sticking to this story,” she said to him. “How can you lie to people’s faces?” He dropped his head and said nothing.