TWA 800

by Jack Cashill

  To further confuse its viewers, Witnessed featured Eastwind pilot Captain David McClaine returning to make the case he had been making from day one. At the moment of the explosion, “[TWA 800] went down, not up,” said McClaine. “The wings fell right off the airplane right away. So how is it going to climb, or what if it had no wings?” Never did CNN try to reconcile the CIA’s 3500-foot zoom climb with the NTSB’s 2000-foot corkscrew or with the flat trajectory of its own creation, let alone with McClaine’s eyewitness account.

  Although Cooper had told the truth about TWA 800, media watchers knew it had to have been a slip, Freudian or otherwise. To no one’s surprise, he confessed his apparent error before the show ended. “I just want to correct something I said regarding the plane crash, earlier I said that today was the anniversary of flight TWA 800, crashing off the coast of Long Island in 1996,” Cooper regretted. “I believe I said that it was shot down. Obviously the government said it was a center fuel tank explosion. Although some people indicated they saw a rocket, there was no evidence of that. It was ruled to be a center fuel tank explosion. So I apologize for misspeaking about that anniversary.”19 No evidence? At least not at CNN.

  Chapter: EIGHTEEN

  PROCRUSTES

  Tom Stalcup was not easily put off. Recognizing this, the authorities continued to chip away at his credibility with all the means at their disposal. One was the carcass of TWA 800, then and now on display at the NTSB Training Center in Virginia. Nothing said, “no stone unturned” quite like a painfully reconstructed aircraft. On July 2, 2013, the NTSB staged a media briefing with the plane as prop. Despite her stellar media credentials and her obvious interest in the crash, the NTSB would not allow Kristina Borjesson to attend. In fact, no members of the TWA 800 Project team were invited, not even the relatives of the victims. The only family members invited were those the NTSB could count on to stick to the script. And stick they did. In its account of the briefing, Reuters gave one of those selected family members the final word, “I was convinced by the NTSB findings when the report came out,” he said. “Hearing talk of a movie coming out and reigniting conspiracy theories that we as family members heard about years ago is opening up old wounds.”1

  Stalcup did not give up easily. Two weeks after the briefing, he sent NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman a formal request asking her to correct the misinformation presented at the July 2 briefing as well as the spin from Jim Kallstrom and Peter Goelz. In September of that year Stalcup sent another letter to Hersman detailing David Mayer’s perfidy. In that same communication he sent three separate animations showing the discrepancy between the FAA radar evidence and the imagined debris trajectory plotted by the NTSB. In January 2014, Stalcup, Hughes, Young, and eyewitness Joseph Delgado journeyed to the NTSB’s Washington offices. The brass sent a few flak catchers down to meet them. No one assigned to review the TWA 800 Project’s petition attended the meeting. Later that month, Stalcup sent a follow-up letter summarizing the meeting. He dropped in one little nugget culled from his FOIA requests: an acknowledgement by former CIA Director George Tenet that Mayer “worked closely” with the lead CIA analyst responsible for the zoom climb animation.

  Stalcup persisted, and the NTSB continued to stonewall. He requested a presentation by the TWA 800 Project team before the full NTSB Board, which proposal the NTSB general counsel soon rejected. That same month, March 2014, more than twenty family members asked the NTSB to reconsider. Three months later, in June 2014, the board formally denied the family members’ request. Once that request was denied, Stalcup and Hughes wrote what they called an “open letter of protest” to the board’s general counsel.2 Attaching an affidavit from Hughes, they hammered home the conflict of interest implicit in having Mayer’s subordinates review a petition accusing Mayer of “malfeasance.”

  On July 2, 2014, a week after Stalcup’s open letter, the NTSB coldly rejected his team’s request for a re-opening of the investigation. “None of the physical evidence supports the theory that the streak of light observed by some witnesses was a missile,” read the one-page release. “The NTSB determined that an explosion of the center wing fuel tank was the probable cause of the accident.”3 The NTSB case was even weaker than the word “probable” suggests. Its experts spent four years desperately trying to find the cause of the explosion other than the obvious, and the best its expert could conclude was that “the source of the ignition for the explosion could not be determined with certainty.”4 An expert on wiring, former NTSB board member Vernon Grose insisted: “There could not be an [internal] ignition source.” If there were, he added, the authorities would have grounded 747s—starting with Air Force One—and demanded changes. They did not.5 In contrast to the NTSB TWA 800 investigation, the Dutch Safety Board took only a year to conclude definitively that the “detonation of a warhead” above the left hand side of MH 17’s cockpit destroyed the plane.6

  “Probable,” however, was win enough to inspire Peter Goelz’s Twitter equivalent of an end zone dance. “For those involved,” he tweeted, “#TWA800 was a tragedy of infinite pain. Shame on the conspiracists who made it a topic of self aggrandizement and gain.”7 The TWA 800 Project tweeted back, “Sir, please explain this ‘gain.’ The filmmakers lost a huge amount of money making this film.” Goelz’s line of attack was a common one. Over the years, scores of critics have insisted I was into TWA 800 “only for the money.” Let me assure past and future critics that if money were my motivator I would have stayed in advertising.

  Among the new findings Stalcup shared with the NTSB—or at least tried to—was a score of FBI witness statements that had somehow been omitted from the official record. He had managed to secure these through FOIA requests. The NTSB conceded the evidence was new but insisted these 302s did not differ substantially from the other seven hundred or so already in the official record. This was more or less correct. Stalcup, however, dug up additional witness information of much more consequence. Attorney John Clarke requested the same information from the CIA and posted it on Ray Lahr’s website in September 2015. These memos show in unseemly detail how the CIA sausage-makers cooked up the zoom climb animation. No one who reads them can doubt for a second how fully and deliberately the CIA and its enablers sabotaged the investigation.

  On February 28, 1997, CIA analysts presented a comprehensive PowerPoint titled, “A Witness by Witness Account: A Review of the TWA 800 Witness Reports.” The audience was unspecified, but it likely included need-to-know representatives from the CIA, the FBI, and MSIC. Each slide showed the CIA interpretation of a single witness summary. Surprisingly, most of the very best ones were there: the man on the bridge, Mike Wire; school administrator Joseph Delgado; helicopter pilots Fritz Meyer and Christian Baur; UA 217 passenger Dwight Brumley; and even Witness 73. Ignorance offered no possible excuse for what these analysts had done. They took the accounts of the most observant witnesses, siphoned out all conflicting details, and presented the residue as fact.

  In constructing their presentation, the analysts so simplified and homogenized witness observations they made it difficult to align the CIA summaries with the FBI 302s. The CIA also assigned the witnesses numbers different than the ones the FBI assigned, and that did not help much either. In several cases, however, the detail was specific enough to compare the two. Among the newly found 302s, now unredacted, was that of Charles Le Brun, an assistant fire chief for the Air National Guard (CIA 152).8 On the evening of July 17, he was heading south by boat in Moneybogue Bay when he saw a flare-like object ascend. Given his location, the FBI reported, “Le Brun knew it originated from the ocean.” The object ascended vertically for about fifteen seconds, then burst into a yellow flash slightly larger than the light of the flare. This yellow flash remained illuminated and descended. It then burst into a huge fireball “about twenty times the size of the yellow flash” and fell toward the sea.

  In their summary, the CIA analysts acknowledged the fifteen-second ascent “straight up in the sky” and the fireball twenty times t
he size of the original flash, but they failed to mention the object’s climb “from the ocean.”9 Given Le Brun’s credentials and his location, as well as the fact that he saw one object go up and another come down, the analysts could not dismiss his testimony with a glib, “observations limited to end event” as they did with others. Instead, they discounted his testimony because the ascending object “was not white as most observations,” a pointless caveat in that they discounted all the rising “white” lights as well.

  The CIA analysts so liked Mike Wire they designated him witness “1.” As stated earlier, they had to fabricate a second interview with Wire to make his testimony work, but once they did, whether Wire knew it or not, he was their guy. The object Wire saw was moving from west to east, as was TWA 800. This gave the analysts enough wiggle room to conclude that Wire’s observations were “consistent with aircraft trajectory.” In sum, he only saw a crippled TWA 800. More useful still, Wire heard the sound of the blasts at the appropriate time. Of course, the analysts could not explain how a low energy fuel-air explosion could shake a bridge ten miles away, but that was one of the many anomalies they chose to overlook.

  FBI Witness 364 (CIA 47) served up another anomaly. This former Marine helicopter crew chief saw an object ascend vertically. He watched for thirty seconds as the object “rose from the east to the west on a steep angle.” Concluded the analysts, “Observations consistent with aircraft hypothesis except for east to west motion” (italics in original). That was a big “except.” This witness saw these objects moving towards each other. In fact, he told the FBI he thought he had seen “a missile hitting the airplane.” The analysts simply ignored the collision. Kallstrom ignored the witness’s reference to a missile. “No one ever said a missile,” he told a congressional committee in July 1997, “none of the witnesses.”10 In fact, several had.

  The analysts worked even harder to make the testimony of FBI Witness 550 (CIA 7) fit their narrative. Out fishing that evening, the witness saw what “looked like a smaller plane coming from the northeast on a dead course heading towards the nose of the larger plane.” The two objects then “crunched up” before the larger plane blew up and “became a big fireball which then broke into four pieces.” The CIA analysts concluded with startling dishonesty that the witness heard a “series of sounds when two planes passed each other” (italics added). They then disqualified the witness account because the “sound doesn’t work.” In a just world, transforming “crunched up” into “passed each other” would be crime enough to earn an orange jump suit.

  Witness 73 (CIA 39), she of the upside down Nike swoosh, saw events so clearly the CIA felt compelled to turn her into a drunk. Three days after the crash, she told the FBI that she saw “the front of the aircraft separate from the back.” The mapping of the debris field had long since confirmed her observations. This was no secret. The analysts knew how solid was her account. They conceded she saw “two objects,” or at least claimed to, and that “the red object hit the aircraft.” The best disqualifier they could summon was that the red object did “not follow realistic missile trajectory.” That was it. Two months after this presentation, someone saw to it that Witness 73 had a new 302 in her file.

  Another act of overt fraud involved FBI Witness 32 (CIA 106), Dwight Brumley, a U.S. Navy master chief. At the climactic moment, Brumley was looking out a right side window on US Air 217, a plane heading northeast thousands of feet above TWA 800’s path. As recorded on his original 302, Brumley told the FBI he saw a flare like-object moving from “right to left,” very nearly perpendicular to the path of TWA 800. According to the CIA analyst, however, Brumley “observed flare ascending which moved left to right” (italics added). This supposed flare, the analyst concluded, “matches aircraft trajectory.” In other words, what Brumley saw was TWA 800 in crippled flight. He was said to have admitted as much “in a second interview.”11

  As was the case with Witness 73 and the man on the bridge, Brumley’s second interview was created out of whole cloth. Careless or reckless or both, authorities left Brumley’s original 302 filed in the NTSB docket and manufactured a new one with the original date for his CIA file. It was only after the CIA file surfaced that the fraud became obvious. As was true with Witness 73 and Mike Wire, no one spoke to Brumley after the first week of the investigation. “There was never a second interview with me by either the FBI, the CIA or any other government official,” Brumley firmly told Tom Stalcup in a recorded interview. “I always maintained that the object moved from my right to left, and I never said otherwise.”12

  The analysts had more trouble still with Delgado, FBI Witness 649 (CIA 47). He too saw two separate objects, but his ascending object was moving in a southwesterly direction, not towards the east, as was TWA 800. This object made a “dramatic correction” at the last moment and exploded in a “white puff” next to the aircraft. The plane then devolved into a ball of fire and fell behind the tree line. The CIA’s deconstruction of Delgado’s account hurts the brain. The analysts concluded that the ascending object was actually TWA 800 after a second explosion. The fact that this object was going in the wrong direction did not overly trouble the analysts. Nor did Delgado’s highly specific drawing of two objects with distinct trajectories. With a bravado born of impunity they concluded Delgado “did not observe two objects around the initial event” (italics theirs). Like the mythical Greek highwayman Procrustes, who stretched or chopped captives to fit a certain height, the CIA analysts had a one-sized scenario and stretched or slashed the truth to make the witness accounts fit. If anyone objected there was always a Peter Goelz or a Jim Kallstrom ready to shout “conspiracy theorist.”

  As a quick reminder, Goelz, Jim Hall’s man at the NTSB, claimed on national TV 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. Of course, they did. One of the witnesses just cited saw an ascent of fifteen seconds. Another saw an ascent of thirty seconds. All saw a descending object for another twenty or thirty seconds. As late as February 1997, the CIA analysts were accepting the duration of these sightings. Goelz’s “last six seconds” claim has no known provenance.

  The CIA presentation did not convince everyone, at least not the representatives from the DIA’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center then working with the FBI. In an undated document, likely soon after this February 1997 presentation, the MSIC reps submitted their concerns in writing to the CIA. For one, the reps could “not agree with the CIA conclusion that no witness saw the initial event.”13 They insisted that several witnesses could not “be lightly disregarded” and might possibly “have seen something other than the aircraft.” They noted too that several of these witnesses saw an object moving in the opposite direction of TWA 800 prior to the explosions. The testimony of these witnesses could “not be explained as seeing any portion of the aircraft trajectory proposed by the CIA or other sources,” said the reps firmly.

  What the CIA analysts lacked in integrity they made up for in nerve. Their exchanges with MSIC and other agencies leave the impression that the White House had the agency’s back, and everyone knew it. Among equals, these exchanges would have provoked warfare. They were that insulting. Yes, more than 90 percent saw something other than the zoom climb, said the CIA analysts, but what they saw was likely “a fuel related event in the final seconds of the aircraft’s descent toward the water.” As to the imagined objects heading west toward TWA 800, those sightings too were “likely related to fuel burning.” MSIC seemed to sense the power disparity and yielded without much fight. All that the reps could say in return was, “Continue re-interviewing the witnesses.”

  Despite institutional pressure to yield, one unnamed FBI agent refused to accept the CIA narrative. For simplicity’s sake, let us call him Special Agent Lewis Erskine. Erskine was part of the FBI’s two-man missile team. According to an internal CIA memo from April 29, 1997, Erskine’s FBI partner was “compl
etely convinced” by the CIA analysis. If true, this suggests he had been gotten to. Erskine, however, had “concerns.”14 That was something of an understatement. In April 1997, he sent the CIA a blistering critique of its zoom climb scenario and demanded answers to more than a dozen salient questions. He wanted to know why the analysts failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object “hit the aircraft” or the numerous witnesses who saw the object move from east to west, the opposite direction of TWA 800. In all, Erskine cited some thirty “problem witnesses” whose accounts did not square with the “agency scenario.” With some precision, he also challenged the aerodynamics of the CIA’s zoom climb.

  The CIA analyst, likely Randolph Tauss, responded with his usual obfuscations, but he made one surprising concession, namely that he had no physical proof a zoom climb after the initial “pitch up” of the aircraft. No one denied the plane might have appeared to pitch up after the nose was blown off. Ray Lahr described the phenomenon as “putting two people on one side of a teeter totter.” As witness Lisa Perry saw it, “The tail section fell backward.” For Joseph Delgado, the plane “arched upward.” But not a single witness saw the 747 ascend after this initial convulsion. The CIA analyst did not contest this point. “Whatever happens after these first few seconds,” he responded to Erskine, “is not understood by the CIA and would require extensive modeling of the aircraft beyond the CIA capabilities.” A point that bears repeating is that two years later, in a March 1999 memo, a CIA analyst would privately concede that the “maximum calculated altitude” for TWA 800 post-explosion was 14,500 feet.15 Publicly, the agency said nothing to correct the record. All this said, the FBI went ahead and showed the CIA’s zoom climb video to the nation seven months after the CIA conceded to Erskine that it had no supportive data.