TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  The evening of the tenth anniversary, CNN aired its own documentary on the crash called No Survivors: Why TWA 800 Could Happen Again.9 One detail stood out in this otherwise orthodox rehashing of the government position: the treatment of the notorious zoom climb. In CNN’s recreation, a noseless aircraft flew not straight up but straight ahead, trending downward. “Only twelve minutes after take off,” the CNN narrator claimed, “the center fuel tank blast rips away the bottom of the plane. The cockpit and nose section plunge into the sea. For another half minute or so, the decapitated plane flies on. Then, it loses momentum and begins its deadly drop toward the ocean below.”

  Incredibly, the zoom climb had fully disappeared. Lahr had spent the previous three years battling the CIA and the NTSB to secure the calculations used to determine the crippled plane’s vertical climb, and now CNN, with the NTSB’s blessing, was telling Lahr there was no zoom climb in the first place. Without it, CNN had to imagine some other optical illusion powerful enough to confuse the witnesses into thinking down was up. “Investigators believe the red lights seen by eyewitnesses could have been an intense fire immediately after the fuel tank erupted,” the narrator continued, now beginning to embarrass the network with sheer disinformation.

  Among the many nuggets buried in the CIA document cache was one that astonished even the cynics among us: the CIA analysts knew there was no zoom climb and had known this as early as March 1999. In a memo from March 24 of that year an unnamed analyst more or less owned up to the con. The “maximum CIA calculated altitude in the final study was about 14,500 feet,” he conceded. He added that the noseless plane’s maximum angle of attack was “about 35 degrees,” not the seventy or so degrees shown in the video. “This high angle suggests the likelihood that engine compressor stall would occur.” From the beginning this is what aviation professionals said would happen when the nose was severed; the remainder of the plane would pitch up, stall, and fall. This was what the best witnesses reported seeing. The CIA acknowledged this more than a year before the NTSB’s final hearing but apparently did not share the news with the NTSB and certainly did not inform the media.10

  Two months after the debut of CNN’s No Survivors, Lahr and his Washington-based attorney John Clarke received some judicial good news. In fact, the National Law Journal deemed the news unusual enough to capsulize the story on its front page as, “A rare win in fight for TWA crash records.”11 The story related how federal judge Howard Matz found Lahr’s evidence “sufficient to permit Plaintiff to proceed based on his claim that the government acted improperly in its investigation of Flight 800 or at least performed in a grossly negligent fashion.” Arguing that the “public interest” was at stake in Lahr’s pursuit of the truth, Matz allowed him access to seven of the twelve CIA documents he had requested.

  In August 2007, a Lahr FOIA suit resulted in an unexpected harvest. A document the FBI sent to him and Clarke detailed a communication that took place six days after the crash. It read as follows: “On Tuesday, July 23, 1996, a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) advised [the FBI] that after a visual analysis of both the videotape as well as a number of still photographs taken from various portions of the tape, the phenomenon captured by [name redacted] appeared to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a MANPAD [Man-portable air-defense] missile.”12

  The video discussed in the FBI document was shot on July 12, 1996, five days before the crash. This was not news. Lahr had received a heavily redacted document earlier that told the story of how a fellow and his friend on Long Island were attempting to videotape the sunrise when they saw and recorded “a grey trail of smoke ascending from the horizon at an angle of approximately 75 [degrees].” So compelling was the sight that the fellow made a comment to his friend, heard on the tape, “They must be testing a rocket.” Pat Milton discussed the video in her book.

  What Milton did not discuss and what the redacted memo did not show was the DIA’s involvement. This unredacted version revealed that the FBI took the video seriously enough to bring in the DIA for further analysis, and the DIA found the video image to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a missile. For the record, the DIA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and a serious player in the United States intelligence community. An important component of the DIA is the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC), an Alabama-based operation charged with gathering intelligence on enemy surface-to-air missiles and short-range ballistic missiles. During a Senate inquiry in May 1999, the FBI’s number two man on the investigation, Lewis Schiliro, conceded that MSIC analysts had arrived on the scene in Long Island just two days after the July 17, 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 and interviewed eyewitnesses along with the FBI.13

  In September 2007, a month after Lahr received his unexpected surprise in the mail, I got a surprise of my own. A producer at Fox News had a video he thought I should see. I stopped by when I was in New York and picked it up. Wary of being involved at all, the producer would not tell me how he obtained it. Ideally, Fox News would have covered the story that this video generated, but there were forces at work at Fox, just as there were at ABC, that kept the network from exploring the TWA 800 story in any meaningful way.

  I did not know exactly what those forces were, but I saw them at work just two months prior. Another Fox staffer enlisted me to be a guest on a segment she was producing for Hannity’s America. At her request I sent a copy of Silenced. As I was doing research in California at time on another book project, she arranged to do a remote interview with me in a San Francisco studio. The interview lasted twenty minutes, and she gave the impression she actually watched Silenced and took it seriously. Her questions were intelligent. Unfortunately, the produced segment was not. The give-away came quickly. My on-screen identifier was “conspiracy theorist,” never a good sign.

  Standing in for the FBI was Pat Milton. In a fair fight, I would have KO’ed Milton in the first round, but I never got a shot. The producer crunched my twenty minutes of interview time down to twenty seconds of TV time. In those twenty seconds, I tried to summarize the eyewitnesses accounts, but it was not time enough to dissuade Sean Hannity from presenting the rehashed misinformation the producer put on the teleprompter. A year after CNN fully flattened out the CIA zoom climb, Fox News resurrected it in all its Orwellian subtlety. Ill-served by his producer, Hannity stated matter-of-factly that what the eyewitnesses actually saw was “really just the aftermath of the explosion,” and that was that.14

  If my producer friend gave me this new infrared video to atone for his network’s timidity, he succeeded. The video had been shot immediately after the crash from the U.S. Navy P-3 Orion. There was no mistaking the perspective as the camera occasionally tilted down past the plane’s propellers to the smoldering wreckage below. Apparently, a copy had surfaced years earlier as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. At the time, it did not cause much of a stir. The video simply showed the main debris field, and there was nothing controversial about it. The video more or less confirmed the wreckage pattern as later diagramed. The NTSB witness group, which the FBI thwarted at every opportunity, may well have seen the same edited version. In its 1997 Factual Report, the witness group acknowledged receipt of the video but claimed it “provided no additional information pertinent to the investigation.”15 No future NTSB or FBI report mentioned the video.

  The unedited video I received showed something the earlier video obviously had not. Although the videographer focused on the main debris field, he did not stay with it. Five different times he panned the camera off to the northwest, perhaps a mile or two, and there he fixed on a fully separate burning object, one capable of sending great plumes of smoke into the sky. In no subsequent government report was there any mention, let alone clarification, of what that object might have been. A single engine on a 747 of this vintage had a lot of fuel to burn. By weight, it was about twenty times larger than the engine of your average automobile.

  When I first told James Sanders of
the video, I said the smoking wreckage was northeast of the major debris field. “Hmmm,” Sanders responded, “I thought it would have been northwest.” He was right. I misspoke. I meant to say northwest, back towards JFK. Sanders was on to something. He was convinced a missile warhead explosion, likely external to the plane, blasted the No. 3 engine off the right wing. This was where the explosive traces were found both on the wing and in the adjoining section of fuselage. We now had a literal smoking gun. (For those who might wish to see the video, it is available online at WND.com embedded in the article, “Stunning New Video of 800 Crash Site” from October 15, 2007.)

  If this were an engine, as it certainly appeared to be, the NTSB had refused to acknowledge the same. The NTSB had divided the wreckage into three zones depending on where the various pieces fell. In the red zone, the one closest to JFK, were the seats and overhead bins from rows seventeen through nineteen where the plane first ruptured. These were the same rows on which the mysterious reddish-orange residue was found. In that same zone too were the bodies of the people who had been in those seats, many of them mutilated by the force of the explosion but not burned. In the yellow zone was the forward section of the plane, including the cockpit, first class, and business sections. This part was severed by the blast and plunged relatively intact into the sea.

  The final NTSB report from August 2000 put all four engines in the so-called green zone, the swath of the debris field farthest from JFK.16 This was the zone that included the headless two-thirds of the fuselage that sputtered on for some distance before erupting in the fireball that almost all the witnesses observed. According to the NTSB, the green zone wreckage included both wings, the main landing gear, the tail section, the bulk of the center fuel tank, and “all four engines.”

  The P-3 video, however, showed what appeared to be a smoking engine a mile or more northwest of this zone. Sanders had good reason to suspect it was the No. 3 engine. Early in his investigation, he had secured a copy of a local CBS news broadcast in which the announcer said, “On Monday, the fourth and final engine was located along with small pieces of wreckage found nearest Kennedy Airport, pieces that fell from the plane first.”17 TWA’s Terry Stacey had shared with Sanders an early map of the debris field, and that placed only three engines in the green zone—1, 2, and 4. The calculated movement of items between zones alarmed Stacey early on, but retagging engines went well beyond tidying up the data. Then too there was the testimony of Witness 648, a fisherman, who was closer to the crash site than any other. He watched as “the right wing separated from the fuselage.” As his FBI 302 documents, “He did not see any engine pods on it.”18

  This wayward engine proved problematic for the NTSB from the beginning. The Times matter-of-factly reported fact that the fourth engine was not recovered until August 15, four weeks after the crash and nine days after local CBS news reported it found. Less important than the timing of the find was the location. The local report placed it “nearest Kennedy Airport” as the P-3 video suggested. The Times failed to acknowledge anything unusual about the engine’s location or its condition. “Some turbine blades were missing,” rationalized the Times, “but the damage may have been caused by the impact.”19

  The following day the NTSB’s Robert Francis assured the public there was “nothing really extraordinary” about any of the engines, the last of which had been taken apart in “an unusually quick” process. The fact that some unnamed “officials” had claimed that the “No. 3 engine” showed “foreign object damage” was not to be taken seriously. That alleged foreign object, Francis insisted, was “part of the engine itself.”20 The Times reporting, however, left unclear whether the last engine found was, in fact, the No. 3 engine. Sanders believes it was. He is convinced that the location of the engine was so damaging to the developing government case for a spontaneous fuel tank explosion that the FBI and/or NTSB had to corrupt the debris field charts by eventually placing the recovered engine in the same zone as the others. He submitted a FOIA request to review the salvage documents from this period, a request the FBI has not yet fulfilled.

  In addition to Stacey, several other investigators at Calverton complained about the retagging of parts. The most outspoken was the NTSB’s Hank Hughes. Chief among the accused was the NTSB’s ubiquitous David Mayer. “During the investigation, I personally witnessed Dr. Mayer changing wreckage recovery tags on interior wreckage components without proper authority,” said Hughes in a sworn affidavit. “Mayer’s changes falsified the factual record of the actual physical locations from which those components were recovered.” When Hughes asked Mayer why he was retagging items, he reportedly answered, “I didn’t want to confuse the Chairman,” meaning NTSB chairman Jim Hall.21

  Mayer was not the only one monkeying with the evidence. In one of the several meetings held to undo Mayer’s mess, investigators working through the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) learned that Paul Harkins, the Navy’s supervisor of salvage, tagged more than one hundred pieces of wreckage without authorization or documentation.22 The actions of Mayer and Harkins, together with “the FBI’s altering, tainting and removing evidence,” said Hughes, “acted to undermine the investigation.”23

  Worse, the NTSB brass kept the other parties to the investigation in the dark about the way Mayer had rigged the tag database. In fact, they were reluctant to discuss anything controversial. When he started voicing his dissent prior to the NTSB hearing in August 2000, the IAMAW’s Rocky Miller learned that silence was the approved policy. “If you believe in corporate memory,” the NTSB’s investigator in charge, Al Dickinson, told him, “you won’t ask any questions or speak at the public hearing.”24

  The video of smoking wreckage observed from the P-3 should have been enough to reopen the investigation. If nothing else, the NTSB needed to explain why its officials had failed to even mention the source of that smoke plume in any of their public hearings. To prod them into action, I met with one of the New York Times reporters who covered the crash and gave him a copy of the video. That he was willing to meet with me testified to his open-mindedness, but nothing came of the meeting. If Fox News was not willing to touch this story, I had no reason to believe the Times would, and my suspicions were, as usual, confirmed.

  The mid-air break-up of Iranian Airbus 655 had the potential to explain the location of the stray TWA 800 engine. As it happened, some crewmen on the bridge of the USS Montgomery near the Vincennes watched as a Navy standard missile destroyed this aircraft. There was nothing theoretical about their observations. They saw the first missile explode at or near the left wing of the plane and watched in awe as a section of the wing “with an engine pod still attached” fell to the sea.25 Although the Navy did not have the opportunity to assess IR 655’s debris field in any detail, this engine would have fallen into the zone closest to the airliner’s point of departure, much the way the smoking TWA 800 engine appeared to. Not surprisingly, the NTSB and FBI made no reference in any of their reports to the Vincennes incident. By journeying to Little Rock in 1992, Admiral Crowe helped assure that the saga of the IR 655 would never be fully told. Jamie Gorelick and Sandy Berger had a harder task. They had to assure that the true story of TWA 800 would never be told at all.

  Chapter: SEVENTEEN

  BENGHAZI MOMENT

  In early December 1997, two weeks after closing its investigation, the FBI sent a letter to NTSB chairman James Hall telling him its conditions for the upcoming public hearing on TWA Flight 800, the first to be held by the NTSB. Incredibly, these included: “no public discussion or publication of the interviews conducted with witnesses to the crash, no presentation of the video simulation of the crash created for the F.B.I. by the Central Intelligence Agency, and no reference to the search for residue of explosives on the wreckage.”1 Although these exclusions essentially negated any real value the hearings might have had, the New York Times reported them deep in an article on a potential Boeing redesign as matter-of-factly as they reported
the hearing’s date and location.

  If the media took no notice of the FBI’s power play, Tom Stalcup did. Then working on his Ph.D. in physics at Florida State, Stalcup intuited what was going on. The CIA video troubled him when he watched it two weeks prior, but now the authorities were removing from the discussion any evidence that might challenge that video and the thesis it represented. Working through their fixers, the Clintons reminded the media that only the paranoid would question official orthodoxy. Officials working the TWA 800 case would call Stalcup a conspiracy theorist and worse, but from that first NTSB hearing on, they faced no more relentless a critic than this young physicist.

  I first met Stalcup in the spring of 2001. On his own dime, he came to Kansas City to lend his testimony to our documentary Silenced. Tall and reserved with a shock of dark hair, Stalcup observed the TWA 800 misdirection through a scientist’s eyes. Given the data and his own knowledge base, the CIA video struck him as an affront to the laws of physics, and he was fully capable of explaining why. Although he would go on to launch his own IT company, Stalcup never gave up on TWA 800. More than fifteen years after the crash, he collaborated with former CBS producer Kristina Borjesson on a documentary so compelling even the New York Times had to concede it was not “crackpot conspiracy theory stuff.”2

  Called simply TWA Flight 800 and ably directed by Borjesson, the documentary circulated around Washington before its Epix network premiere on July 17, 2013, the seventeenth anniversary of the crash. Most impressively, Stalcup and Borjesson persuaded a half-dozen highly credible whistleblowers from within the investigation to tell their stories on camera. These included (all affiliations circa 1996) the NTSB’s Hank Hughes, Bob Young from TWA, ALPA investigator Jim Speer, Suffolk County chief medical examiner Charles Wetli, U.S. Army forensic pathologist Colonel Dennis Shanahan, and Rocky Miller, investigation coordinator for the IAMAW. The producers supplemented the whistle-blower testimony with that of numerous family members, witnesses, and experts like Ray Lahr, former NTSB Board member Vernon Grose, EGIS developer David Fine, FBI bomb analyst Bob Heckman, and FBI lab whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst. Many of these people came together to form a group Stalcup called the “TWA 800 project.”