by Jack Cashill
The reader will recall that in November 1997 Kallstrom claimed he “looked throughout the government” to find the people best able to analyze “all the known data about Flight 800 in conjunction with the eyewitness reports.”16 He allegedly found those people at the CIA, but on this point the chief analyst demurred. That assignment, he admitted, was “beyond the CIA capabilities.”
Erskine raised one more concern unvoiced in any other official document—the “possible ‘missile self destruct/proximity’ theory.” He chided the analyst for claiming that the apparent lack of physical evidence disproved the missile theory. He reminded the analyst that a missile blast triggered by a proximity fuse “would likely leave little or no evidence of a hit on the aircraft.” In his response, the CIA analyst referred only to the damage a “portable SAM” would have caused. Refusing to even consider the possibility of a naval misfire, he implied that since a shoulder-fired missile could not have wreaked such catastrophic damage, a mechanical failure must have.
In his conclusion, Erskine hit the CIA hard. He recommended that “the Agency withdraw its conclusions” until it could meet several conditions, any one of which would unravel the CIA scenario. These included the integration of radar data, the validation of key witnesses, and the reconciliation of the thirty “problem witnesses” with the zoom climb scenario. The CIA analyst did not seem overly worried. He knew that Tenet and Kallstrom had already signed off on his analysis. “CIA will continue to look at problematic witnesses,” he responded, “but we believe we have adequately explained all of them within the agency scenario.” The analyst got to work quickly. The very day he sent this memo, April 29, 1997, Witness 73’s new 302 magically appeared in her file.
At Kallstrom’s direction, the FBI did proceed to re-interview witnesses. At the congressional hearing in July 1997, he claimed that his agents interviewed “most of [the witnesses] more than once.”17 That was just one lie out of many that day, but the FBI did record about thirty additional interviews with witnesses. Of course, some of these interviews were provably apocryphal. That did not stop Kallstrom from testifying in July 1997 that the second interviews, when combined with the CIA’s “sophisticated analysis,” would soon provide a “clear understanding of these critical eyewitness observations.”18
On reading statements such as this, I find myself feeling sorry for Kallstrom. He helped construct a case he knew to be fraudulent, and he had to sense just how fragile the construction was. If it collapsed, the CIA analysts could run and hide. The NTSB bureaucrats could plead ignorance. The Clintons could seek executive privilege, and he alone would have to answer to the victims’ mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Nothing the courts might throw at him would wound that deeply.
Five days before TWA 800’s demise, an amateur videographer captured an apparent missile test in progress off the coast of Long Island. Although not visible in this still, the video also captured burning debris falling from the sky. Federal Bureau of Investigation
Chapter: NINETEEN
THE SMOKING GUN
No one ever expected the video to show up, least of all in a batch of miscellaneous FBI documents secured through a FOIA request. I refer here to the video of the missile strike that MSNBC reportedly aired on the night of July 17, 1996, the one around which Nelson DeMille wrote his novel, Night Fall. But then one day, nineteen years after James Sanders began his lonely quest for the truth, a Las Vegas postman delivered a video to his house that had all the appearances of being “the” video.
The video came with no explanation as to what it was. A skeptic by nature, Sanders watched it through and could not believe what he was seeing. The light seemed right. The place seemed right. The Long Island accent of the videographer seemed right. There was a new moon hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, and yes, when Sanders checked, there was a new moon on the night of July 17. And as to what was happening out at sea, there was no denying that seemed right too. For Sanders, this video had the potential not only to vindicate his efforts, but also to erase the criminal stain on his and Elizabeth’s records. Sanders made copies and sent one to me. By this time, I was well into the research on this book, which was good. Had I not been, I might have failed to understand what I was seeing.
After days of waiting, a neatly packaged jump drive arrived at my office. I inserted the drive in my Mac, opened up the document, and hoped that my computer would be able to show the video. Everything worked. The view seemed to be from a deck not far from the ocean. That was good. My best correspondent on this subject, the 747 pilot who watched the video over and over in a Hong Kong Hospital bed, said it was shot from a deck, but he also said there was a party going on. There was no party here. It was just a guy and his buddy trying to master what seemed to be a new video camera.
Then, sure enough, a smoke trail emerged from the horizon zigzagging its way up at about a seventy-five degree angle in an east to west direction. “It must be a rocket or something going up,” said the one fellow matter-of-factly. “Uh, oh,” I said to myself. This may not be what we hoped it was. I remembered the document that Ray Lahr had received years earlier about the existence of a video shot at dawn on July 12, 1996, by a fellow on Long Island trying to capture the sunrise. According to that document, he reportedly said, “They must be testing a rocket.” That quote was much too close to what the fellow actually said on the video to be a coincidence. The light was deceptive. I could not tell whether it was dusk or dawn. So I found a helpful web site called “Moon Page.” I loaded in the date, the time, and the time zone. I then compared the morning moon on July 12 to the evening moon on July 17. No question. Yes, each moon was new, but the July 12 moon was waning exactly as was the moon in the video. The July 17 moon was waxing.
Before calling Sanders with the news, I looked carefully at the video and the assembled stills. Yes, he would be disappointed, but this video had powerful evidentiary value of its own. It was amateurish but clearly genuine. All the agencies were aware of it. As mentioned earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency had advised the FBI on July 23, 1996, that the imagery captured on the video “appeared to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a MANPAD.” The video, however, showed much more than an exhaust plume going up. It showed something coming down. As Sanders and I now understood, by July 23, just six days after the crash, the authorities were already pulling their punches.
In fact, the CIA started talking down the possibility of a missile strike of any sort within days of the crash, if not hours. In a July 20 memo, an analyst reported “no evidence of a missile” in the radar data.1 That same memo argued that the aircraft was beyond the range of virtually all shoulder-fired missiles. In no memo was there any mention of a possible naval misfire even though one memo acknowledged the Navy was reportedly “conducting an exercise in the area.”2 The analyst mentioned this only because he was interested in seeing if any of the ships had raw radar video recordings to share.
As noted earlier, a July 30 CIA memo warned that the FBI was preparing a report pointing to a missile strike. After interviewing 144 witnesses, “mainly professionals,” the FBI agents involved were convinced a shoulder-fired missile destroyed TWA 800. That same CIA memo held another surprise. After TWA 800 went down, the FBI received reports from four other witnesses claiming to have seen “a similar surface-to-air something” launched on July 7. “If true,” said the CIA analyst, “the FBI would now have witnesses reporting seeing something race towards the sky on the 7th, 12th and 17th.”3 Assuming these sightings to be genuine, the analyst reviewed the various reasons as to why a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile might have wanted to shoot off a missile on three separate occasions, each five days apart. There was no talk of the Navy.
As with virtually all evidence that threatened the government scenario, the authorities eventually discounted the July 12 video. An internal memo from October 21, 1996, spoke of how the CIA came to this conclusion. According to the analyst, officials from still another intelligence agency, t
he National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), “believed, at least initially,” that the ascending plume in the July 12 video “might be a MANPAD smoke trail.” Upon further review, however, they concluded, “The trail appears to have most likely been a contrail from a very far away aircraft.”
The deception was that easy—at least until someone either carelessly or craftily sent Sanders the July 12 video. To be sure, the camera work on this video makes analysis difficult. The action appears to be farther out to sea than was TWA 800’s, and the cameraman, unaware of what he was seeing, continued to readjust the lens and scan the horizon. That said, the video’s irregular, ascending smoke trail does not resemble any aircraft contrail I have ever seen. It is too thick, dark, and irregular. In fact, it almost perfectly matches the direction and angle of attack of the smoke trail that Joseph Delgado sketched for investigators.
The video shows a secondary action, however, that betrays the deceit at the heart of the NIMA analysis: very near the point where the smoke trail ends, flaming debris falls out of the sky. In none of the CIA memos was the falling debris mentioned. This added detail renders the idea of a terrorist missile even more preposterous. The ascending object—or another one unseen—appears to have hit something and destroyed it. The target object might have been a drone, a test missile, or possibly even a terrorist plane packed with explosives as envisioned in the Bojinka plot. On close examination, the smoke trail left by the falling debris seems to intersect the vestiges of the ascending trail. This makes sense. The target object continued east as it fell. The Delgado drawing captured this same phenomenon with TWA 800. If there was a climatic explosion on July 12, the cameraman missed it, but, then again, the target of this apparent missile would not have had a fuel tank nearly as large as that of a 747.
On July 17, 1996, a Long Island woman by the name of Linda Kabot shed some unwitting light on the possible nature of the target. That evening Kabot was taking photographs at a fundraising party for her boss, Vincent Cannuscio, the Republican Town Supervisor of Southampton. The event was held outdoors, at Docker’s, an East Quogue restaurant with a deck that overlooks Shinnecock Bay. Kabot was facing north with her back to the ocean a few blocks away when she snapped one photo with the potential to rewrite history. At the time, however, she did not notice anything unusual.
A few days later, Kabot picked up the developed photos. In one, she saw what the New York Times described as a “long cylindrical object high in the sky,” its left end tilted downward, its right end “brightly lighted.”4 Good citizen that she was, Kabot called the FBI. At this stage, just days after the disaster, the FBI was still serious about seeking the truth. Agents interviewed her and other guests at the event, took the negatives, but left Kabot with the original. The Times did not use the word “drone” in its August 26 coverage of the Kabot photo, but a drone was likely what Kabot captured on film. The ever-incurious Times never mentioned Kabot or the photo again.
Witness 150, Lisa Perry, had likely seen the same object. In an interview on July 23, 1996, she told the FBI she saw an “unusual object traveling at high speed north to south.” She described it as “cylindrical, tubular, and bullet shaped” with no wings, no vapor trail, and a slight upward trajectory.5 She followed the object for several seconds when she saw it approach a “large commercial airliner” traveling at roughly the same altitude. Although she saw no collision, she described the break-up of the aircraft with impressive accuracy.
The media ignored Perry’s testimony and allowed the Kabot photo to fade from memory. On November 18, 1997, however, the FBI resurrected the photo in its closing summary of the case. For analysis the FBI had turned the photo over to an entity it called the “CIA National Imagery and Mapping Administration (NIMA).” Upon reading this I did a double take. Nowhere in my research on NIMA did I get the impression NIMA was affiliated with the CIA. This was the same bunch that insisted the smoke trail in the July 12 video was an airplane contrail. Here, they were advising the FBI that the object in the photo was “not a missile” and “not a drone.”
The reason drones were ruled out smacked of tautology: “No drone exercises conducted near Long Island July 17, 1996.” Nearly a year before this press conference, the stubborn NTSB witness group had requested to see the Kabot photo and the FBI’s analysis of the same. In its Factual Report from October 1997, the Witness Group noted that the requested material “has not been received.”6 No matter. In its case-closing press conference, the FBI assured America the Kabot photo was one of many things that were not what they appeared to be:
•The apparent drone in the Kabot photo was determined to be “an aircraft” of indeterminate type.
•The apparent missile trail on a July 17 photo taken by a woman named Heidi Kreiger was determined to be “debris on the film surface.”
•The apparent missile on Dick Russell’s radar tape was determined to be “a ghost of Jet Express 18 which was at a different location.”
•The apparent missile residue on the seat cushions, the testing of which led to the indictment of the Sanderses, was determined to be glue, a “chlorinated polymeric material, commonly used as contact adhesive.”
•The apparent PETN and RDX found inside and outside the fuselage were determined to be the sloppy after effects of a “canine explosives training aboard the victim aircraft.”
•The witness observations, once thought “overwhelming” proof of a missile strike, were determined to be a collective optical illusion thanks to the “brilliant and professional” work of the CIA.
•“The vast majority” of the witness observations were determined to be “consistent” with the CIA analysis, although admittedly there remained “a few” that could “not be fully explained.”
These were just the anomalies that the FBI breezily explained away in its final summary. There were, of course, many more.
•The FBI determined that there was no strategic retagging of airplane parts, including engine No. 3, given that “the logged recovery location of all debris from the wings and the cabin structure was verified.”
•The summary made no mention of the serious charges brought against David Mayer and others for changing tags.
•The summary made no mention of the P-3 video.
•As to the reported “foreign object damage” to engine No. 3, the FBI summary added no new information.
•“The [cockpit voice recorder] review disclosed no evidence of a criminal act,” no evidence of anything for that matter. Ditto the flight data recorder. Said the NTSB’s John Goglia earlier, “The data was missing and it’s unexplainable, it’s just missing.” The FBI was as silent as the CVR on this issue.
•The “infrared sensor information from a U.S. satellite” that allegedly helped the CIA establish the zoom climb scenario went unmentioned.
•Unmentioned was the large mystery ship fleeing the scene at up to thirty-five knots, the one suspicious vessel the FBI inexplicably failed to identify.
•Unmentioned was the sound propagation analysis around which the CIA based its analysis. In fact, the word “sound” does not appear in the FBI summary.
•Unmentioned were the “116 pieces of debris” FBI lab director Donald Kerr said were sent to the FBI lab in Washington for further testing.
•The FBI claimed “there were no missile firing [sic] for two years prior to July 17, 1996, in the Whiskey 105-106-107 areas,” which meant the July 12 video could not have shown an ascending missile, nor could the July 7 witnesses have seen one.
•Finally, there was no mention of the July 12 video. To acknowledge this video would have been to concede the very real possibility that there had been a “missile firing” just five days prior to the destruction of TWA 800.
There was one other bit of evidence that the FBI chose not to discuss. This was the fax Long Island resident Dede Muma received from an employee at San Diego’s Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical in May 1997. The employee, Eric Hittinger, had intended to send the fax to his superior on assignment at
Calverton but transposed the last two numbers. As fate would have it, the fax went to Muma. She in turn forwarded it to the Southampton Press.7 The Press ran the illustration shown in the fax through the highly authoritative Jane’s Information Services, and Jane’s determined the object pictured to be a Teledyne Ryan BQM-34 Firebee I, a target drone about 23 feet long capable of flying more than 700 miles an hour.
Although the FBI would not talk to the Press, Hittinger did. He said the FBI had contacted Teledyne Ryan to identify pieces of wreckage that looked like parts of a drone. He faxed the illustration to help his superior on the scene at Calverton make the identification. When the Press caught up with Hittinger in July 1997, he assured the reporter the part in question did not belong to a Firebee and that “it was all put to bed some time ago.” Accuracy in Media’s Reed Irvine talked to the Teledyne employee on the scene, Walt Hamilton. According to Irvine, Hamilton said the part did, in fact, look like a Teledyne Ryan product. He requested the drawings to make sure it wasn’t. “If it wasn’t from a Firebee,” wrote Irvine, “it must have been from another drone, evidence the FBI hid and the NTSB has destroyed.”8
