[continued from Part 1] NTSB Chairman Hall's high-level background briefings for reporters also undermined the FBI. Hall and other NTSB senior staff ridiculed competing theories of the case, misleading the press and public to believe that only the accidental-explosion theory--for which there still isn't any conclusive evidence--could explain TWA 800's destruction. Despite the salt-water immersion, traces of military high-explosives components PETN and RDX were found on the plane's wreckage. Kallstrom thought he had the evidence he'd been searching for, especially after his agents checked the aircraft logs for TWA 800 and found no sign of recent use of the plane to transport explosives or conduct canine bomb-detection tests. The FAA subsequently claimed that logs of canine bomb tests are not maintained by individual airplanes, but by local police agencies. A check with the St. Louis Airport Police showed a test was carried out on a wide- body jet on June 10, 1996, about a month before the TWA 800 explosion. No records of the test were kept. The sole policeman who carried it out was seen by no other aircraft crew or witnesses. He did not note the tail number of the aircraft. Two months later, when interviewed by the FBI on September 20, 1996, he recalled it was a 747 jet. One of the explosives used in the test was a 1.4 pound block of C-4, a military high explosive. The patrolman told the FBI that the plastic wrapping for the explosive was partially disintegrated. There were two wide-bodied jets parked nearby on June 10. Because the patrolman did not note the plane's tail number (TWA 800, parked at Gate 50, was 17119) it is possible he confused the planes. It is hard to reconcile the patrolman's timeline for the dog test with the records of when the aircraft departed Gate 50. If the patrolman is correct, it means after his test was complete the pilot and crew boarded the aircraft, conducted all pre-flight procedures and checklists, completed boarding and seating passengers, and pulled away from the gate in less than half an hour. Even assuming that the test was indeed carried out on TWA 800, the mystery remains how such casual contamination could leave traces of explosive after weeks of immersion in salt water. Both FBI laboratory and independent scientific tests show that within 24 hours salt water washes away all traces of high explosives. After Kallstrom won his White House battle for permission to re-create the airplane at Calverton, the FBI and the NTSB sought outside experts to examine the damage patterns. All agreed that the center fuel tank had exploded catastrophically. The question was, how? Salinger's sensational theory about a missile strike had unfortunately obscured and discredited the very real prospect that a MANPAD (man-portable air defense system, better known as a shoulder-fired rocket) hit TWA 800. In more than 100 cases around the world, shoulder-fired rockets have been used to down large aircraft. At first the probability that TWA 800 was struck by such a missile seemed remote. The plane's altitude of 13,700 feet was at the outer limit of a MANPAD "footprint," the necessary flight path the missile would have taken to hit the plane. But it was a possibility that Kallstrom took seriously-- more seriously than has ever before been disclosed. FBI Special Agent Steve Bongart worked the missile team. An FBI agent was assigned to accompany the salvage teams as parts of the aircraft were identified and then removed from the ocean floor. Each agent was issued a nine-page "Trawler Operations Manual" featuring debris unique to a missile, including the ejector cans that would be left after a Stinger launch, the expendable battery, and a picture of the distorted shape a small rocket body might take after passing through an aircraft the size of a 747. "Twisted like a corkscrew," one observer put it. The manual instructed the agents to pick up every piece of man-made debris found in the search field. But no "eureka" piece from a missile was found. As the wreckage at Calverton took shape, the FBI called on military experts from the Defense Department to help analyze the probability that a surface- to- air missile hit TWA 800. The military teams had far more experience in air crashes involving rockets than either the FBI or the NTSB had. In fact, as Kallstrom found early on, no one in the world had a good forensic, courtroom- evidence-standard database of the damage missiles do to large aircraft. In addition to Navy teams from China Lake, whose active presence in the probe has been acknowledged publicly, the FBI drew on other centers of military expertise including Missile & Space Intelligence Center at Huntsville, Alabama, and Air Force teams from Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Using computerized DOD databases, the military experts concluded that a Stinger could have hit the aircraft even at its 13,700- foot elevation. Cummock says the Clinton appointees "had a ton of secret meetings" with airline industry representatives. At the same time, the Clinton-Gore campaign and Democratic Party received more than $500, 000 in political contributions from the airlines. In the late fall of 1996, the military teams analyzed the wreckage at Calverton. Immediately, suspicions arose about damage to the left wing. The area around the left forward wing root, a potential impact point, is missing. The left side of the center fuel tank displays unexplained damage. "Attempting to find forensic evidence on this kind of a missile hit is very hard," says one expert with first-hand knowledge. "The result of a missile impact from a shoulder-fired SAM (surface-to-air missile) is not always clearly discernible, especially when critical pieces just don't seem to be available for inspection." Agent Bongart reviewed the eyewitness statements with the military teams. A subset of approximately 25 to 30 eyewitness accounts, says a source familiar with the statements, were "very, very consistent if someone fired a surface- to-air missile at the aircraft." Using this subset of eyewitness accounts, the missile team plotted a grid which pinpointed a location where the firing would have to have taken place if the eyewitness accounts were correct. According to the expert, the location placed TWA 800 within the "launch footprint" of a shoulder-fired rocket. Kallstrom wanted a thorough dredging operation to recover as much of TWA 800 as was humanly possible, as well as to search for missile parts. Again, NTSB Chairman Hall opposed him. After the principal Navy salvage operation to bring up the main debris from the aircraft ended, Hall wanted further underwater recovery efforts called off. Again, the dispute rose to the White House for resolution Leon Panetta sided with Kallstrom. FBI-supervised dredging continued for months, but was ultimately hampered by nature. During the early weeks of the probe, Long Island's shoreline was battered by two different hurricane- force storms. After dredging some areas as many as 20 times, the FBI suspended the operation. They concluded that underwater currents from the storms either buried debris too deeply, or simply dispersed the debris so widely across the ocean floor that full recovery was impossible. Today, Boeing says five to seven percent of the aircraft remains unrecovered. That leaves about eight tons of debris, approximately equivalent to a medium- sized truck, lost at sea. On November 18, 1997, the CIA produced an animated video simulating TWA 800's final flight. The video explains the 244 eyewitness accounts, many of which suggested that a missile was fired into the aircraft, as mistaken. Because light travels faster than sound, the CIA concluded that witnesses actually saw a flame trail from burning jet fuel before they heard the sound of the plane's explosion, and naturally were convinced that the streak of light leading to the plane occurred before the explosion. What the CIA did not explain in November was that its video was altered after consultation with the NTSB. In a letter from CIA Director George Tenet to Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio) dated January 13, 1998, Tenet acknowledges that more than forty changes were made to the video animation at the NTSB's suggestion. After the changes were made, Tenet says the CIA showed the video to "NTSB managers" who approved its release to the general public. The official status of the FBI probe into TWA 800 remains "pending- inactive." Kallstrom says there is still a small chance unrecovered debris might point to a bomb or a missile. "We left it open," Kallstrom says. "If anything comes up, we'll jump right back in." A recent federal appeals court ruling may shed light on some of the political mysteries surrounding TWA 800. On June 18, 1999, a three-judge panel affirmed Victoria Cummock's lawsuit against Al Gore and the Department of Transportation (see "Dissent of Flight 800," TAS, July 1997). Two years ago Victoria Cummock filed suit, claiming Gore pressured her to abandon a call for counter-terrorism measures, and refused to publish her 42- page dissent from the final report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. She demanded access to confidential files kept from her and to a secret annex to the commission's final report. In early discovery, Cummock was given limited access to commission records. One document she found was a memo from a CIA staffer assigned to CIA Director John Deutch, who sat next to Cummock at most commission meetings. The CIA memo, written by an officer who intelligence sources say is normally assigned to clandestine services, drew on psychological profiling of Cummock. It said Cummock could be "kept in line if she believes progress could be made" but warned Deutch that she "could become a major problem" if she thought otherwise. The existence of this memo is puzzling. Why did the CIA analyze its ability to control Commissioner Cummock? Is there any relationship between the CIA and the NTSB collaboration on the TWA 800 video animation, and the profiling memo on Cummock? Who ordered the assessment? Cummock became an aviation security advocate after her husband, John, died in the Pan Am 103 bombing. Clinton personally asked her to serve on the commission while he was flying to New York to meet with the grieving TWA 800 family members. The commission was no ordinary citizen-advisory committee. It was a high- powered group, resembling a mini-Cabinet. Transportation Secretary Federico Pe, CIA Director John Deutch, NTSB Chairman Jim Hall, Vice President Al Gore, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Laura D'Andrea Tyson were among government officials serving on the commission appointed after the TWA 800 catastrophe. After a lower-court judge sided with Transportation Department attorneys and dismissed her case, Cummock appealed. On April 24, 1999, her appeal was heard by a three-judge panel. "They were stunned at the government's position," Cummock says, noting that administration lawyers didn't deny her fundamental charge that information was improperly withheld or that Clinton appointees to the commission met often in secret. The government attorneys simply said such conduct was permissible under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. "The judges were pretty outraged," Cummock told me shortly before the appeals court ruled. "They couldn't believe how the government interpreted the federal commission act." As Cummock's lawsuit goes forward, she may gain access to documents which would clarify the relationship between the commission's secret meetings and Clinton-Gore campaign fundraising. Cummock says the Clinton appointees "had a ton of secret meetings" with airline industry representatives. At the same time, the Clinton-Gore campaign and Democratic Party received more than $500,000 in political contributions from the airlines. The disturbing prospect of a quid pro quo whereby the Gore Commission withdrew its preliminary security policies in exchange for 1996 campaign contributions remains open. John Cummock's widow is nothing if not persistent. "What I want now is to see the classified report," she said, "and write a dissent, classified or not. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but it's a matter of morals, and values, and ethics." About the time Grassley's hearing was taking place, the Kosovo war prompted concern at the Defense Department about the vulnerability of cargo aircraft to shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. At the Pentagon, corridor talk has it that the TWA 800 scenario has come up in recent high-level meetings. For Pentagon planners, the case serves as a source of "lessons-learned" to reduce vulnerability of large aircraft to rocket attack. Kallstrom is disappointed that FBI Director Freeh didn't speak out against Grassley's hearing, which Kallstrom calls a "Kangaroo Court." He is not alone. Two weeks after Grassley's hearing, on their own initiative, some 400 FBI agents and professional support staff from the New York office sent Grassley a letter protesting the hearing as "one-sided, incomplete and distorted." "Your portrayal of the FBI's performance with a broad negative brush is not only contrary to fact," the letter said, "but a great disservice to the many men and women of the FBI who contributed so much of their energy, time and emotion to this investigation." Grassley's hearing to discredit the FBI probe was a prelude to final " sunshine hearings" the NTSB plans in a few months. Although the NTSB says the case will be reviewed publicly, the public isn't likely to see the Defense Department video simulation of a successful shoulder-fired rocket attack on TWA 800 or learn the nature of the terrorist threats received by the White House in 1996. At the end of the sunshine hearings, NTSB Chairman Hall, a longtime Gore ally, will bring the gavel down on TWA 800. Jim Kallstrom's replacement has already signaled Congress that he will close the FBI's " pending-inactive" file when the NTSB announces a "probable cause" of TWA 800's destruction. Hall wants the case sewn up before the campaign season gets underway with the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses. But there is too much debris from TWA 800--lingering questions, elusive answers--for the mystery to disappear quietly. [end article] * * * * * "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". The key to unlocking the mass of mess created by Kallstrom�s unprofessional kneejerk approach to the investigation of the Flight 800 disaster is to focus in on WHAT the streak witnesses saw and WHERE it was in both the SKY and in the TIMELINE of events when they saw it. Assuming the accuracy of the above quote - and that Kallstrom made that comment recently, as author Roberts clearly implies, Kallstrom either still doesn�t understand that the streak did not even EXIST until 30 seconds or more AFTER the initial event started tearing the 747 apart at 8:31:11 at 13,780 feet, or Kallstrom is now deliberately trying to obscure that fact in a desperate effort to divert attention from the enormity of his foul-up and its horrendously adverse consequences to the investigation and the taxpayers. But it�s a Catch 22 situation for Kallstrom because he has to focus attention on the observations of the streak witnesses in his efforts to justify his conduct and focusing attention there mandates that the truth about WHEN they saw the streak in the TIMELINE of events and WHERE it was in the SKY at that time will become ever more widely known - which will in turn focus attention ever more closely on WHEN Kallstrom knew OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN precisely what the TIMELINE of events was. Probably never in history has one man had more sources of information READILY AVAILABLE AT THE OUTSET than Kallstrom had from the moment he first heard about the disaster. Kallsltrom himself contends that he had 1000 agents deployed within 24 hours. His agents immediately picked up the Air Traffic Control tapes from surrounding airports and it�s only common sense that they also promptly obtained the tapes and related records of radar observations, 911 calls to police and fire agencies, radio reports to and ship to ship transmissions monitored and recorded by the Coast Guard and Navy, etc., etc. Various police agencies were conducting at least brief witness interviews from the beginning and needed only to be notified where to send copies by fax for those reports to become immediately available. The initial reports included references to the huge fireball which obviously might have been [and was] detected by satellites. The inescapable conclusion is that the TIMELINE of the major events surrounding the disaster should have been glaringly obvious to Kallstrom within that first 24 hours. The TIMELINE of those major events was LESS THAN 60 SECONDS. [end of Part 2 - continued in Part 3]
