http://www.homestead.com/ARAP/AV10.html The Ongoing Dissent over TWA 800 John B. Roberts II The American Spectator; FEATURE August,1999 The White House, with help from a Republican Senator, is sitting on evidence that could point to terrorism in the 1996 jet explosion. an FBI official has become a scapegoat in the cover-up. and the mystery remains unsolved. It was billed as an investigation of the investigators. On May 10, 1999, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) held a one-day hearing with witnesses offering damaging testimony about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's role in the TWA 800 probe. Grassley's opening remarks were particularly critical of former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom for failing to uncover the cause of the explosion that killed the jumbo jet's 230 passengers and crew on July 17, 1996. Grassley's hearing focused on two star witnesses. One was Andrew Vita, assistant director of field operations for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). The second was William A. Tobin, former chief metallurgist for the FBI. Both supported Grassley's claim that Kallstrom needlessly prolonged the probe. Vita testified that several months into the investigation the BATF concluded there was no evidence that high explosives caused TWA 800's mid- air disintegration. In late January, 1997, Vita put the BATF's views in an unsolicited, written report to be submitted to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). But, Vita testified, he "met resistance" from the FBI. Grassley says Kallstrom suppressed the report and never forwarded it to the NTSB. James Kallstrom, now retired from the FBI after an exemplary 28-year career, rebuts the charge as "a bald-faced lie." In a series of interviews for this article, Kallstrom shed new light on the investigation. Normally tight-lipped and unaccustomed to airing investigative detail in public, Kallstrom has been forced to defend the FBI probe and his personal integrity. He pointed to problems with the BATF report, which he rejected as " premature." At the time it was written, tons of TWA 800 still lay underwater. Kallstrom also had problems with the BATF methodology. "The report was sophomoric," he told me, "in its science and in its writing. " But his biggest beef with the BATF was that the flawed report would be poisonous in a courtroom. If the FBI eventually was able to identify suspects and bring them to trial, the report, because it had the weight of a government agency behind it, was precisely the kind of exhibit defense lawyers would parade before a jury to refute the prosecution. "A defense attorney would have taken that report and jammed it twenty feet up my (expletive deleted)," Kallstrom said. Then there were the eyewitness reports, eventually 244 in all, which seemed to the agents who collected them in the hours and days following the explosion to confirm a missile hit. Nonetheless, Kallstrom informed the NTSB about the report soon after he reviewed it. To his surprise, the NTSB already had a copy. The BATF had apparently delivered the report through back channels. Grassley did not explore one explanation for BATF's hasty conclusion and independent delivery of the report to the NTSB. The BATF opinion was written about three weeks before Vice President Gore's White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, formed just after TWA 800's explosion, submitted its February 12, 1997 final report. By January 1997, Gore's staff knew the watered-down draft security measures in the White House Commission's final report would be heavily criticized by passenger safety advocates. That criticism would become an acute political embarrassment if the FBI later found solid proof that terrorists destroyed TWA 800. The BATF report gave Gore political cover to back-track from tough security measures recommended in an interim Commission report of September 1996. With the FBI probe ongoing, Gore could fall back on the BATF report to explain why he didn't feel the need for stiffer security recommendations in the final report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. "ATF played a very political role," Kallstrom says. He calls the incident just one example of unusual collusion between the NTSB and other players in the TWA 800 investigation. Grassley's other star witness, former FBI metallurgist Bill Tobin, is even more problematic. Tobin testified that Kallstrom adamantly believed a bomb destroyed TWA 800. When traces of the high explosives PETN and RDX were found on the aircraft, Tobin says Kallstrom claimed it was proof of a bomb. Tobin thought otherwise. About six weeks into the probe, Tobin testified, he decided there was no evidence of terrorist act and told Kallstrom the crash was an accident. Kallstrom had problems with Tobin's analysis. There were two possible ways terrorists might have destroyed TWA 800. One was a bomb, and the other was a missile. Tobin, says Kallstrom, had no experience in the forensic damage caused by missiles. Nor did he have the expertise to analyze aircraft wreckage after deterioration from prolonged salt-water immersion. Tobin's experience was limited to bomb damage on dry ground. There was another problem. At the time of Tobin's conclusion, much of TWA 800 lay unrecovered. Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter- terrorism official directly involved in the Pan Am 103 case, says the volume of debris found by investigators in that case proved the bomb used was so small it could be "spread out on a kitchen table top." With tons of the plane still missing, Kallstrom felt Tobin's conclusion was unprofessional. Kallstrom says he dismissed Tobin from the probe. He didn't trust the judgment of an investigator who reached conclusions while so much aircraft wreckage still lay on the ocean floor. Grassley may not have known that Tobin's criticism of James Kallstrom could have been personally motivated. Nor did he seem aware that the BATF report may have been politically motivated. If he did know his witnesses' shortcomings, Senator Grassley didn't admit it. In a hearing that appears designed solely to get newspaper headlines, Grassley pronounced TWA 800 a closed case. Nothing could be further from the truth. The NTSB hasn't finished its investigation. While Grassley's hearing was underway, scientists commissioned two years ago by the NTSB were still working at CalTech and the University of Nevada to formulate a plausible explanation for the mysterious explosion of Jet A fuel in TWA 800's center fuel tank. This research is critical to the accidental explosion theory. According to a Boeing spokesman, the record of all 747 takeoffs and landings shows only one accidental detonation of a center fuel tank. If it was an accident, TWA 800's explosion was a one-in-12 million event. In the three years since TWA 800's crash, NTSB Chairman James Hall has not found the answer to the mystery of the center fuel tank's ignition. But he has found powerful congressional allies. On May 6, a few days before Grassley's hearing, Chairman John Duncan (R-Tenn.) and other members of the House Subcommittee on Aviation enthusiastically supported dramatic budget and staffing increases for NTSB. Like Grassley's Senate counterpart, the House hearing was used to silence NTSB critics and marginalize competing explanations of the crash as far-out conspiracy theories. Neither Grassley nor Duncan pressed Hall to answer still unresolved questions on Hall's and the vice president's roles in raising more than $500, 000 in soft-money contributions from the airline industry for the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort--at a time when the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security was considering security measures which could have cost the industry $1 billion. Grassley's headline-grabbing probe scapegoated Kallstrom as though he had operated on his own authority, depicting him as a rogue cop running out of control. At best, Grassley's portrayal of Kallstrom is a caricature. At worst, it is character assassination. Throughout the 17 months of the active FBI probe, Kallstrom operated with the full support of the Justice Department and the White House. On three separate occasions, Kallstrom personally briefed President Clinton on the probe. At key junctures, the FBI and the NTSB reached a deadlock. Each time, the impasse was broken by White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta acting in the name of the president. The summer of 1996 was tense at the White House. In the weeks leading up to the July 17 explosion of TWA 800, Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing and architect of a plot to blow up 12 U.S. jumbo jetliners on a single day, was on trial in New York. "We were in an extremely high state of threat," recalls James Kallstrom. " We had numerous generic threats." As the Atlanta Summer Olympics neared, the government's counter-terrorist apparatus went on high alert. Richard Clark, terrorism coordinator for the National Security Council, had reviewed an escalating number of terrorist threats. The NSC briefed the Transportation Department's aviation security team about the threats. Alarmed at the danger, the Federal Aviation Administration pressed for extraordinary security measures on airplanes and at airports. The FBI terrorism task force was placed on ready standby for immediate deployment. "The White House was extremely, extremely edgy," Kallstrom recounts. "They were dusting off the contingency plans." No single White House staffer was responsible for aviation security. Kitty Higgins, then assistant to the president and cabinet affairs secretary, stepped in to coordinate the numerous agencies involved. She convened an aviation security working group to meet at the White House, and the group's first meeting took place on July 17. At 8:19 p.m. that very evening, TWA 800 mysteriously exploded off the Long Island shore. Twelve minutes after the explosion, the FBI duty agent dialed the number for Kallstrom's beeper. Kallstrom was at dinner at the Friar's Club, celebrating the appointment of former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as undersecretary of the treasury. Kallstrom mobilized the terrorism task force, and within 24 hours fielded 1, 000 FBI agents and federal investigative personnel. The possible crime scene encompassed some 2,000 square miles, with more than 200 eyewitnesses and literally thousands of leads to examine. So began a contentious, three-year, $35-million government-wide probe carried out under White House oversight by the NTSB, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Transportation Department, the Coast Guard, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the BATF, and numerous state and local agencies and law enforcement organizations. >From the beginning, James Kallstrom thought that terrorists were responsible. The sudden halt to voice transmissions from the cockpit before the explosion was consistent with the pattern of Pan Am 103. So was the mid- air disintegration of the aircraft. Before he was arrested for the World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef had experimented with various techniques for destroying large passenger aircraft. These techniques involved placing a small bomb over the center fuel tank to ignite the low-volatility Jet A fuel and thus produce a catastrophic explosion. Yousef was experimenting with new, liquid-explosive bombs so difficult to detect they could be easily smuggled past airport magnetometers. Such bombs would leave little or no trace. Kallstrom knew time was the enemy. The longer aircraft aluminum remains in salt water, the more likely that resulting corrosion can mask evidence of an explosive. "Examination of the debris initially recovered showed an intense amount of salt water decay on the metal pieces," Kallstrom wrote in September 1997, explaining why parts of TWA 800 were washed with water as they came off the salvage ships. "The operation of the salt on the metal causes pitting, and there was concern that such pitting caused by the salt could obscure or be confused with the pitting normally caused by high explosives." >From the beginning, Kallstrom recognized that getting evidence that would stand up in court to prove a terrorist attack would be an extraordinarily difficult task. Then there were the eyewitness reports, eventually 244 in all, which seemed to the agents who collected them in the hours and days following the explosion to confirm a missile hit. Not long thereafter, former Kennedy press secretary and veteran ABC correspondent Pierre Salinger came forward with claims of inside information that TWA 800 was the victim of "friendly fire" from a U.S. Navy vessel. Kallstrom confirmed that Salinger had previously supplied "bogus information" in a terrorist investigation. Salinger's claims in the TWA 800 case proved equally unfounded, but because of the enormous media attention, Kallstrom was forced to give him serious attention. Kallstrom divided his investigative effort into three teams, each working a different scenario of the case. One probed the missile theory. Another looked at the likelihood of a bomb. One team was assigned to the accidental- explosion theory. One of the parties to the investigation praises Kallstrom as a "bulldog" who was "absolutely tireless." Despite the challenges of recovering the salt- water-damaged aircraft from ocean depths of more than 100 feet, in limited visibility and shifting sands, Kallstrom spared no effort in search of conclusive evidence. For the first eight weeks of the probe, Kallstrom and the NTSB team, lead by Robert Francis, got along well. Kallstrom is at pains to point out that he didn't take over the probe: The NTSB conducted its investigation, while the FBI did its job. Senator Grassley later criticized the FBI for dominating the probe. NTSB Chairman Jim Hall, in Duncan's House reauthorization hearings, said that the NTSB should have been exclusively responsible for the investigation until evidence of sabotage was found. But in the first days after July 17, 1996, only five NTSB crash investigators came to the site--far too few even to have collected the hundreds of witness statements. Eight weeks into the NTSB's probe, Jim Hall arrived at Calverton, scene of the TWA 800 salvage operation. This changed the relationship between the NTSB and the FBI. Kallstrom recalled: "Then it was clear who was really running the NTSB investigation." Soon thereafter the FBI and the NTSB clashed. Contrary to early press accounts, which attributed the friction to differences of bureaucratic culture, the clashes were substantive. The first was over whether TWA 800 would be reconstructed in the Calverton hangar. To gain a better understanding of what happened, Kallstrom wanted to assemble a "mock-up" of the plane. Jim Hall vehemently opposed him. The disagreement reached the White House, where Leon Panetta conferred with the president before siding with the FBI. It was not the last disagreement in the TWA 800 probe that had to be adjudicated at the highest level. In the context of these pitched White House battles the NTSB began colluding with other government agencies such as the BATF to undermine the FBI probe. {end of Part 1 - article continues in Part 2]
