First Strike: Twa Flight 800 and the Attack on America - Hardcover

James Sanders, a police officer turned investigative reporter, has written two prior books on this subject, The Downing of TWA Flight 800 and Altered Evidence. In December of 1997, he and his wife, Elizabeth, a TWA attendant and trainer, were arrested for conspiracy to steal government property after receiving material from a whistleblower within the Flight 800 investigation.

Jack Cashill has written for The WSJ, Washington Post, Weekly Standard, and regularly in the American Thinker and WorldNetDaily. Recent books include Hoodwinked, Sucker Punch, and What’s The Matter With California. Jack has a Ph.D. from Purdue.

Chapter Two
Lost Opportunities

Had the year been 1997 or had anyone but Bill Clinton been president, it is likely that the American people would have known the truth about TWA 800 within twenty-four hours of the crash. But the year was 1996, a presidential election year. Bill Clinton was the incumbent running for a second term. And the White House, indeed the nation, was moved by his one, almost primal urge.

"All that mattered was his survival," Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos writes of his former boss. "Everyone else had to fall in line: his staff, his cabinet, the country, even his wife." Stephanopoulos speaks here of another circumstance. In fact, in his memoirs, All Too Human, Stephanopoulos devotes not a word to TWA 800, an event too large to be slighted by chance, given his deep involvement. But to understand this event and all its ramifications, one must first accept the logic that guided the investigation, and that is, as Stephanopoulos suggests, the logic of survival.

In another time, survival might have dictated a retaliatory response, the contingency plan now "dusted off." A president's star, after all, is rarely dimmed by decisive action. But as the president mulled his options during the early morning hours of July 18, he understood something few others ever would: The events off the coast of Long Island were not neat, not at all. They would take a good deal of explaining. And these explanations might very well expose his own Achilles' heel: his uncertain grip on the role of commander in chief. This was a chance he did not want to take.

Only a John Le Carr would put the refined, ineffable Robert Francis in the living quarters of the White House with Clinton that anxious early morning of July 18. In real life, his presence there does not seem likely. And yet it seems altogether likely that the White House communicated with Francis almost immediately, made sure he was the NTSB representative on the scene, made sure perhaps that he got to East Moriches before anyone else. The White House would tell him no more than he had to know, but the marching orders he received, unlike Anthony Lake's, had no hint of fife and drum about them. While Lake was being led to believe that terrorist missiles had taken down Flight 800, Francis was being told something different, something less.

There is only one message from the White House that makes sense of all the actions that follow, and it goes something like this: "Terrorists are ultimately responsible for the downing of TWA 800. We cannot respond for sure until we know exactly who they are. Until then, we cannot even let them or the American people know that we are aware it was a terrorist act. To accomplish this, we have to remove all talk of 'missiles' and all evidence of the same, at least for now." Francis was a good soldier. In the next months, the word missile would not freely pass his lips.

The president's public message on July 18 reinforced his private one. "We do not know what caused this tragedy," he protested, perhaps too much. "I want to say that again: We do not know as of this moment what caused this tragedy." He then cautioned the American people against "jumping to any conclusions."

The White House likely gave Francis one other assignment—to keep his eyes on the FBI, to shadow Kallstrom, and to report back. All that we have to confirm this order is Francis's behavior from the moment he arrived in Long Island, but there is almost no other way to explain it.

The White House did not much trust the ineffectual Louis Freeh and had no reason to trust James Kallstrom either. At the same time, however, the White House had little to fear from the FBI. The agency had no experience with airline crashes and had been badly compromised by several scandals of its own making. For its part, the Department of Justice (DOJ) had been politicized as never before in its history. From the top down, it was now Hillary Clinton's show. She had hard-core loyalists placed throughout the department. If need be, the White House could always reel Kallstrom in through the DOJ. Besides, the FBI's penchant for secrecy might just serve the White House well.

If the plan sounds well-conceived, it wasn't. Like much of White House strategizing, it was improvised, chaotic, even desperate. About twelve hours after TWA Flight 800 went down, a military officer, off the record, attested to this chaos. He told a very tired Fox News senior reporter on Long Island that "a major screw-up" had occurred and that the "White House" had ordered the military to "stand down" for forty-eight hours until policy decisions were reached. This did not surprise the Fox journalist. For hours the previous evening, Fox News had been involved in a bidding war for a videotape of the 747 being destroyed by what appeared to be missile fire. When the electronic bidding war reached $50,000, Fox was eliminated from the process.

The high bidder seems to have been NBC. Reportedly, late on the night of the crash, editors at MSNBC had the tape on their monitors when "three men in suits" came to their editing suites, removed the tape, and threatened the editors to within an inch of their lives if they ever revealed its contents. The threats worked all too well. The editors will not speak on record to this day.

What exact "policy decisions" the White House reached in those first twenty-four hours may never be known. The administration evoked "national security" considerations to protect critical information. Over the years, however, the outline and intent of the administration's strategy have become clearer.

In the beginning, with all their talk of this "painstaking process," Clinton and his innermost circle were stalling for time, probably just hoping to push everything back until after November 4, Election Day. They might have gotten away with this stall and still revealed the truth. In those first few months, most believed that the government was merely being prudent by refusing a rush to judgment.

Clinton must have sensed that the major media would allow him to buy time. For the last eighteen months they had been the rock on which he had built his comeback, even dubbed by them to be "The Comeback Kid." To be sure, they had favored his 1992 election—a now-famous Roper poll of 139 bureau chiefs and Washington correspondents revealed a stunning 89 to 7 percent preference for Clinton over the incumbent Bush—but for all of that, they rode him hard those first two years.

What solidified the media's support was the shocking sweep of the Gingrich-led Republicans in the 1994 congressional election. "Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage," lamented ABC news anchor Peter Jennings a week after the election. "The voters had a temper tantrum last week."

This stepped-up partisanship became evident at Oklahoma City. As soon as Timothy McVeigh was apprehended—just three months after Gingrich assumed power—the major media seized on this homegrown terrorist as the inevitable consequence of the "Republican revolution" and its primary organ, "hate radio."

As to President Clinton, he never looked back. He proved masterly at manipulating the victims' families and massaging his own ratings. With the media's help he climbed above 50 percent public approval at Oklahoma City for the first time in ages and never fell below again. The Republican revolution was buried in the rubble, and a politically revived Bill Clinton understood how and why. To be sure, the TWA 800 controversy would not have the partisan tinge of an Oklahoma City, a Travelgate, a Whitewater, let alone the impeachment. It is just that in the months leading up to this desperately critical election, with the nation's future at stake, no newsroom more influential than the Riverside, California, Press-Enterprise would dare to look beneath the surface, dare to challenge even the most transparent deceptions.

At their first meeting in East Moriches, on the morning of July 18, it is unlikely that Robert Francis discussed White House strategy with James Kallstrom. If anything, he might have shared concern that the investigation be tightly controlled for reasons of national security, that all information suggesting a missile attack be kept at least temporarily under wraps. In return, as Kallstrom would soon discover, Francis would keep the NTSB out of the FBI's way.

The law favored the NTSB, empowered as it is by Congress to direct an investigation after a civilian transportation disaster. Typically, the Safety Board takes control of the wreckage. In crashes at sea, the NTSB summons the United States Navy for assistance. In this case, the NTSB failed to honor its legal obligations. At that first meeting, Francis yielded the NTSB's lead agency status and agreed instead to a partnership with the FBI in which the NTSB would be subordinate in every meaningful way. If the evidence were to suggest a criminal act, the FBI could take full control at any time. And in those early hours an FBI takeover seemed imminent. As one federal official told the Times that first morning, "It doesn't look good," with the clear implication of terrorism.

But a criminal act would demand explanation and retaliation, neither of which much interested Clinton. A formal takeover could not happen and would not. So the FBI just took over informally, an arguably illegal maneuver that had the full blessing of the Justice Department.

As the plan was conceived, the FBI would interview the eyewitnesses, triage the wreckage, and monitor the autopsies, a rich source of likely criminal evidence. As to the NTSB, Patricia Milton notes ingenuously, it "would set up its own system to scrutinize plane parts after the FBI had done its job of checking for explosive residue or signs of a bomb or missile." Indeed, were some evil genius devising a mechanism for a cover-up, he could not have imagined something quite this neat and easy. The independent agents of the NTSB—the pilots, mechanics, and engineers who join NTSB teams only at the time of a crash—would be denied any meaningful role in ascertaining the cause of the crash, despite their superior knowledge. They would see only what the FBI wanted them to see.

The deal was sealed while the Coast Guard and officers from the large and sophisticated Suffolk County Police Department as well as scores of recreational boaters were braving the seas to search for survivors. Ultimately, the deal would undercut their gallant efforts and accommodate the corruption of the entire investigation.

The mood of that first twenty-four hours was well captured by Kallstrom's number two man, Lewis Schiliro, who arrived on-scene the night of the crash:

"Upon arrival, additional reports came in that changed the nature of our mission, including that there had been a large explosion and fireball, that all communications from the plane had been normal, that no distress calls had been issued, and that numerous eyewitnesses reported seeing flarelike objects and other events in the sky. It is against this background . . . at the same time that one of the world's foremost terrorists was on trial in Federal court charged with an audacious conspiracy to attack American airliners—that the FBI launched its criminal investigation of the TWA Flight 800 tragedy."

The surest sign of Kallstrom's sincerity early in the investigation and of his inflated self-esteem throughout was his vain attempt to question the military. On July 18, as Kallstrom related to Patricia Milton, he became aware that a Navy P-3 Orion had been flying almost directly above the disaster when it occurred.

The P-3 is a long-range, antisubmarine warfare patrol aircraft with advanced submarine detection and avionics equipment. It is a good-sized plane, 110 feet long with a 95-foot wingspan and four 4,300-horsepower turbo prop engines. In the Balkans, P-3s proved their ability to spot ships carrying contraband both at coastal sites and in transit, downlink these images to the battle group, and give the group commander an unprecedented real-time or delayed view of the situation.

Despite assurances from Gen. John Shalikashvili that friendly fire had not downed the plane, Kallstrom determined that the P-3 crew should be interviewed. At first, crew members told the FBI that they were flying a routine mission that night from Brunswick, Maine, to the coast off Lakehurst, New Jersey. There they were to rendezvous with a submarine for a training exercise. Despite their proximity to the explosion and their sophisticated electronic gear, crew members told the FBI that they saw nothing unusual and learned of the crash only when other pilots reported it.

Throughout the eighteenth, however, Kallstrom became more aware of the sightings of streaks in the sky and ordered his agents to reinterview the crew. On the morning of the nineteenth, they did just that, but this time the crew proved uncooperative. "Are you saying I'm lying?" Capt. Ray Ott responded brusquely to the agents. "Are you questioning my patriotism here?" Ott then informed the FBI agents that his mission had been classified and that he could not and would not discuss it until he had been ordered to do so.

Furious, Kallstrom contacted Adm. William "Bud" Flanagan. The admiral told Kallstrom, "They've given you all the information relevant to your search, sir. Anything else is outside what you need to know." Not one to be deterred, Kallstrom kicked up a fuss until his agents were allowed access to the crew and their mission.

What the agents were told on their third interview with the P-3 crew was that the plane was capable of carrying air-to-air missiles but was unarmed on the night in question. Its mission that night was to drop listening devices into the water off the coast of New Jersey in order to find the submarine USS Trepang.

According to the crew, the plane was flying at twenty-two thousand feet about one mile away and heading south when the first explosion occurred. When the crew members learned of the blast, they promptly circled back over the area for half an hour and offered to help. When the Coast Guard finally waved them off, Milton casually reports that the crew then "flew on to complete their mission," dropping the listening devices in an area eighty miles south of the crash site, there locating the Trepang, before returning to Brunswick at 2 a.m.

There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Milton's report. The FBI was told that this sophisticated surveillance plane failed to capture the midair explosion of a huge commercial airliner one mile away. The agents were also asked to believe that the plane would run a routine exercise off the New Jersey coast against the "background" Schiliro described to the Senate—that is, of a likely terrorist missile attack. That the agents were satisfied with the story, however, is a testament to either their complicity or their incompetence. The military was involved in the CSG meetings at the White House during the whole time of the exercise. It would surely have commissioned every available asset to search for the terrorists, and no asset was more available or more valuable than the P-3. The story rings false in every detail.

Before the third interview, the FBI had learned something else about the P-3. Its transponder, the homing device that enables radar to track the plane, was off during the flight. Captain Ott reassured the FBI that it had been erratic for months and that it had simply failed. NTSB witness group chairman Norm Wiemeyer later interviewed the crew and would report that the transponder broke "en rout [sic] prior to the TWA event."

The P-3 crew did, in fact, alert FAA Air Traffic Control in Bosto...