TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  Stalcup and Borjesson walked viewers through the complete spectrum of evidence. As they made clear, all evidence—witness accounts, explosive residue, splatter patterns, radar data, debris field maps—pointed to a missile attack on the aircraft. Ever the physicist, Stalcup described the radar data as the crash’s “smoking gun.” He referred here not to the air traffic controller data suggesting a missile strike but a ballistics analysis of the radar immediately post-crash. Stalcup argued that the radar evidence showed the debris exiting the side of a plane at a high velocity, Mach 4 or greater. The NTSB, however, contended that a low-velocity, forward-moving, fuel-air explosion in the fuel wing tank caused the plane to blow apart. If true, this would have been a first. Since the introduction of Jet-A fuel in 1965, no commercial aircraft had ever spontaneously exploded.

  The documentary made a more dramatic impact when it discussed the effects of a high-speed explosion on the passengers. Indeed, the producers could have made a second, more gruesome documentary using the evidence gathered by the two pathologists, Wetli and Shanahan. As they and Hughes testified, the force of the blast shattered bodies and sent bone shards flying through the cabin. At least one shard pierced the fuselage like an arrowhead. The image of this was chilling. A low-velocity, fuel-air explosion would have burned the passengers in their seats, but it would not have mutilated them. Said Hughes, “The damage to the seats and the injury to the passengers was random which in my mind indicate a high ordinance detonation not a low speed explosion like a center fuel tank blowing up.” When asked where the explosion originated, Hughes answered without hesitation, “external to the aircraft.”3 The strength of the documentary was the human element, especially the testimony of the whistleblowers. They were too numerous and too knowledgeable to ignore. The eyewitnesses added to the video’s emotional power.

  In addition to those featured in Silenced, Stalcup spoke with several who had not previously gone public, including Greek pilot Vassilis Bakounis, who was interviewed in Cyprus. A veteran Olympic Airlines pilot, Bakounis was in the U.S. in 1996 working on his commercial pilot’s license. On the night of July 17 he was flying along the south shore of Long Island at about two thousand feet when he saw “a light coming out of the sea.” It caught Bakounis’s attention. “I followed that light for many seconds before it makes, kind of veers to the right,”4 said Bakounis using his hands to illustrate the turn. The gesture, in fact, looked like an upside down Nike swoosh. “Then I see an explosion,” Bakounis continued, “then its flame was falling down like an umbrella of flames.” Bakounis elaborated that the streak of light started “very, very low” and then “climbed past his altitude.” The FBI ignored Bakounis. This was not easy to do. Several witnesses reported seeing his plane. He gave an interview to a Greek publication five weeks after the crash. Independent researchers, including one that the FBI was monitoring, translated the interview and put it on their web sites. No matter. The CIA disregarded Bakounis’s testimony as well.

  Stalcup and Borjesson did a much better job than the CIA or NTSB in aligning witness testimony with the location of TWA 800 at the time of its destruction. Their animation of the disaster tracked three missiles, each exploding in close proximity to the doomed airliner. Politically savvy, the producers avoided saying who fired those missiles or why the authorities undermined the investigation. The informed viewer, however, had to suspect the one navy capable of a missile strike this sophisticated and so close to shore.

  In June 2013, a month before the scheduled airing of the video on the crash’s seventeenth anniversary, Stalcup and his colleagues petitioned the NTSB to reopen the investigation. They had some high level supporters. One was Vernon Grose. Over the years, Grose had been CNN’s go-to guy on aviation safety. He had done more than 170 media interviews on TWA 800 alone. “I am convinced by the evidence that a missile—not the center wing tank explosion—brought it down,” said Grose. “It’s time to take a fresh look at all the evidence, much of which was withheld by the FBI.”5

  Given the quality of the documentary, the guardians of the TWA 800 orthodoxy knew they had a problem on hand and sent their fixers out to resolve it. These included Peter Goelz and Jim Kallstrom. Soon after the petition was filed both veteran spinmeisters appeared on national TV to reassert the official narrative. Predictably, the pair dismissed their critics in the crudest of absolutes. When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Goelz about Stalcup’s argument, Goelz answered, “There is no evidence whatsoever that supports his theory.”6 The next day on Fox News, Kallstrom told Bill Hemmer that the documentary’s thesis was “preposterous, pure fiction.”7 Casual viewers had no reason to disbelieve either of them.

  The very nearly identical riffs by Goelz and Kallstrom strongly suggest one unseen hand prodding them both. When Tapper raised the issue of the eyewitness testimony, Goelz said, “Almost all of the witnesses say this: ‘I heard a sound. I looked up and then I saw a streak of light or firework and an explosion.’” When Hemmer asked about the witnesses, Kallstrom also claimed, “The vast majority of those people looked up when they heard the bang.” Kallstrom added, “The plane had already exploded, and [the witnesses] were seeing the plane falling apart.” Goelz spun the same yarn. According to him, the witnesses saw only “the last six seconds” of the forty-plus second break-up of the aircraft. “No witness saw the first event forty seconds prior to that,” he insisted.

  Were I to chart a TWA 800 hierarchy of lies, this orchestrated bunkum would rank near the top. As mentioned earlier, the FBI did not even bother to ask seven of the forty best witnesses about sound. Another nineteen told the FBI they heard nothing at all. In only fourteen of the forty summaries did a witness admit to hearing a sound, and in only three of those did that person report hearing a sound before looking up. In fact, these forty witnesses saw all or most of the entire sequence. That sequence began, as Bakounis affirmed, with “a light coming out of the sea” and ended nearly a minute later with the shattered plane “falling down like an umbrella of flames.”

  More curious still, before July 2013 the FBI had not endorsed the CIA’s bogus sound propagation analysis, nor had the NTSB. The FBI’s final summary made no reference to sound. At the final NTSB hearing in August 2000, David Mayer all but rejected the CIA thesis, telling chairman Jim Hall, “Our [witness] analysis is not based on sound.” It seems likely that Goelz and Kallstrom resorted to this argument for the same reason the CIA had: it sounded scientific. With it, they could intimidate their interrogators. Kallstrom, in fact, made a caustic remark about the “basic physics” of the crash in setting up his thesis. Try as they might, Tapper or Hemmer were in no position to contradict such authoritative sources, certainly not in the three to five minutes a typical TV segment runs.

  Two days after Kallstrom’s appearance, I was beamed in from a Kansas City TV studio to talk about the documentary on CNN’s New Day with Alison Kosik.8 For balance, CNN enlisted Jim Polk, a “Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist” who had contributed to CNN’s 2006 special report on TWA 800. Kosik set up this segment by claiming with much more confidence than the NTSB ever had that “a spark from faulty wiring” caused the plane’s center fuel tank to explode. To reinforce the point, she played an interview from the 2006 report with Eastwind pilot David McClaine. “I didn’t see any missile at all,” said McClaine who had seen the crash from above. In a feint at fairness, Polk told Kosik in studio, “There was a helicopter pilot who says he did see a missile before the explosion.” And that was it for the witnesses.

  “Jack,” asked Kosik, “what do you think happened if it wasn’t an internal explosion like [McClaine and his co-pilot] saw?” I might have answered that one of the great scandals of the investigation was that it took nearly three years for the NTSB to interview McClaine and that when its investigators finally did, McClaine demolished the CIA’s zoom climb theory. McClaine also told the NTSB he was not necessarily in position to see a missile: “The fuselage and the wing could have blocked that out.”

  Time being precious,
I took another tack. “Well, unlike what Jim says, there were two hundred seventy eyewitnesses to a missile strike,” I said, relying here on the FBI count. “Ninety-six of them, this is FBI eyewitnesses, saw it from the horizon ascend all the way up to the plane.” Using hand gestures to make my point, I continued, “They all described it the same way: that it was a red tip, a plume trail after it, gray, and then it gets near the plane and it arcs over, zigzags, hits the plane, blows up.” I then explained how the FBI recruited the CIA to create the zoom climb animation that discredited the eyewitnesses. “When the CNN did its animation ten years later—ten years after the crash, they eliminated that zoom climb altogether,” I said. “So I ask Jim [Polk] this, why did you eliminate the zoom climb if the CIA—and what was the CIA doing involved in this in the first place?—if the CIA used that to expressly discredit the eyewitnesses?”

  This was not a question Polk wanted to hear. “I would agree with you the CIA animation is controversial,” said Polk with an eye on the 2013 understatement-of-the-year award. “We did not make [TWA 800] climb in our animation because, frankly, the transponder disappeared on the radar at the time of the explosion. So there’s no altitude readout on the rest of the flight and so there’s no supporting evidence for the CIA’s animation.”

  No supporting evidence for the CIA’s animation? As Polk must have suspected, all evidence—starting with McClaine’s testimony—showed the zoom climb to be an intentional fraud. As mentioned earlier, even the CIA conceded privately that the 747 could not climb a few hundred feet let alone a few thousand. “It all ended right there,” said McClaine of the blast. “And everything went down.” Polk had access to McClaine’s NTSB testimony but since it did not fit into the approved storyline he simply ignored it. He should not have. The eyewitnesses saw something ascend for as many as thirty seconds. If that something was not a flaming TWA 800, it was surely a missile. Polk and CNN had done enough research to tell the great, untold story of our time, but they apparently lacked the courage to tell it.

  After the commercial break, Kosik asked me with a hint of condescension, “if there was an external blast, who shot [TWA 800] down, why would anybody shoot it down, and why would there be this cover up?” Not perfectly sure who shot the plane down, and having only a minute or so to speak, I focused on a subject I knew well. “Let me address the cover-up,” I answered. “Five weeks after the crash, the New York Times had this headline above the fold right: Prime Evidence that Explosive Device Found in or Destroyed TWA Flight 800. That’s a paraphrase, but it’s close.” The actual headline was this: “Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800.” This article ran on August 23, 1996. According to the Times, only the FBI’s uncertainty about whether the device was a bomb or a missile kept Kallstrom from declaring TWA 800’s destruction a crime.

  “Above the fold left,” I continued, “was ‘Clinton Signs Welfare Reform Bill on Eve of Democratic National Convention.’ One of those headlines had to go.” I pantomimed dropping the right headline from the screen. “This was Bill Clinton’s Benghazi moment,” I added. “They [the Clintons] just wanted to kick this can down the road until after November so it would not affect the outcome of the election.”

  The answer was that simple and that obvious. In June 2013 everyone who followed the news knew what I meant by “Benghazi moment.” Bill and Hillary Clinton had no more noble a goal in July 1996 than Hillary and Barack Obama had in September 2012 when they lied about Benghazi. In each case, that goal was to get beyond the November elections by whatever means necessary.

  Like Obama, the Clintons would not have shared their motives with anyone beyond their most intimate circle, Sandy Berger, say, and maybe Jamie Gorelick and Robert Francis. Political people like Tenet, Panetta, Goelz, and Clarke were savvy enough not to ask too many questions. As to the military officers involved, their Christmas came in July 1996 with an unexpected CYA authorization from the White House. They did not need to know any more than that. More difficult to explain were the actions of Kallstrom, Mayer, Hall, Loeb, Dickinson, and a few other non-political people who obstructed the investigation but had nothing obvious to gain by doing so. Stalcup leaned particularly hard on Mayer whom he fairly accused of “corruption, malfeasance, and possible illegal activity.”

  Here, I speculate, but the message these actors received, the one that Gorelick would have first articulated at the August 1996 meeting with Kallstrom in Washington, might have gone something like this: “An enemy aircraft attacked TWA 800. As of now, we don’t know which enemy. We may never know. The Navy attempted to shoot down the aircraft but failed. If we alert the American people, they will demand retaliation, and that may lead us into a war we don’t want and don’t need. They will also hesitate to fly, and that could cripple the economy. For reasons of national security, we need your help to put this incident to bed.” At the 9/11 hearings, Berger and Clarke elevated the White House’s near paralysis to a virtue.

  On September 11, 2012, I doubt if Hillary shared the TWA 800 playbook with Obama, but she followed the script, and he followed her lead. Their political futures, at least at this moment, tracked together. That endless night Obama avoided the White House Situation Room much as the Clintons had on the night of July 17, 1996. Where exactly Obama holed up has never been revealed, but spokesman Jay Carney did acknowledge he was in touch with Hillary: “He spoke with the secretary of state at approximately 10 p.m.,” said Carney. “He called her to get an update on the situation.”9

  About that same time Hillary released a statement blaming “inflammatory material posted on the Internet” for the attack on the Benghazi consulate. She was referring specifically to the absurd trailer for the would-be film, The Innocence of Muslims. Said the secretary piously, she who gave a standing ovation to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”10 Hillary was not confused. She was lying. Shortly after the sending the press release, she informed the president of Egypt. “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest.” Later that night, in an e-mail to daughter Chelsea, she pinned the attack on an “Al Qaeda-like group.”11 Her fingerprints were all over the blame-the-video strategy, however, and Obama made sure the media knew it.

  That strategy almost came undone five weeks later at a CNN presidential debate famously “moderated” by Candy Crowley.12 At the pivotal moment in this town hall style debate, Crowley bypassed the audience and asked Obama a question of her own. Obama looked much too well prepared for it. Walking confidently towards Crowley as she asked, “Does the buck stop with the secretary of state?” Obama had his answer ready. “Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job, but she works for me,” he said. “I’m the president, and I’m always responsible.”

  Obama vigorously defended not only his administration’s response to the Benghazi crisis but also his own comments in the Rose Garden the day after the attack. “I told the American people and the world that we were going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror, and I also said we are going to hunt down those who committed this crime,” said the president.

  This was more than Romney could endure. He knew well that Obama had endorsed Hillary’s video fraud in his Rose Garden speech. “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” said Obama, “we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”13 Like Hillary, he strongly implied that four Americans were killed in a spontaneous outburst devoid of strategy and provoked by the offending video. There was no other way to have interpreted this comment.

  “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you are saying,” Romney pressed Obama, telling Crowley he just wanted to get Obama’s respo
nse on record. After a moment’s hesitation, Obama shouted out, “Get the transcript,” and the camera panned to Crowley waving a piece of paper. “He did in fact, sir, call . . .” said Crowley hesitantly to Romney, “so let me call it an act of terror.” Obama jumped back in, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy.” She obliged, “He did call it an act of terror.” So saying, Crowley and CNN preserved the political future of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

  I hesitate to equate what CNN did to me with what the network did to Romney, but the impulse, I suspect, was much the same. Someone at CNN apparently did not like my Benghazi remark. When CNN released the transcript of the show the next day, it jumped from Polk’s final comment to Kosik awkwardly saying, “Well, the good thing is—I have to cut you guys off. But the good thing is that there’s a documentary about this.” I promptly wrote an article for American Thinker titled “CNN Edits Out Comparison of TWA 800 and Benghazi.”14 CNN apparently caught just enough flak to reinsert the missing section. This allowed me to write a follow-up article titled, “What CNN Cut Out of TWA 800 Interview.”15

  On at least one occasion CNN got the TWA 800 story right, even if by accident. Kudos of sorts goes to CNN host Anderson Cooper. On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over the Ukraine by a surface-to-air-missile, likely by pro-Russian insurgents and almost assuredly by accident.16 In discussing the tragedy that evening, Cooper referred back to “July 17, 1996, when TWA Flight 800 was shot down off the coast of Long Island in New York [emphasis added].”17 Cooper had TWA 800 on the brain. He served as host of a CNN special report on the subject, Witnessed: The Crash of TWA Flight 800, that would air two days later.18 Bizarrely, CNN’s Witnessed split the difference between the CIA’s 3,500-foot zoom climb and the perfectly flat trajectory of CNN’s No Survivors, the 2006 report Jim Polk and I discussed a year earlier. On air, former NTSB Board member John Goglia claimed that TWA 800 “rose and continue[d] to fly for a few thousand feet more ending up in the 16,000 foot range.” In the Witnessed animation, borrowed from the NTSB, the viewer saw Flight 800 ascend for about 2000 feet in great sweeping loops, then nose over and fall more or less straight down.