TWA 800 Read online

  Although the phrase has been much abused, there is none better than “cover-up” to describe what followed. Like many initiatives the Clinton White House choreographed, this one was highly improvisational. Before it was through, the TWA 800 investigation would make several sharp course corrections. To be sure, the great majority of those working the investigation had little or no idea it was being misdirected. Some who did harbor suspicions bravely resisted the misdirection, but they had almost nowhere to turn with their protests. Had there been a vigilant media to hear these individuals, or even a mature Internet to share their objections, the truth would have surfaced. To make sure it did not, the CIA, the FBI, and the White House largely avoided the subject of aviation terror for the next five years. As the nation learned in the aftermath of 9/11, the “wall” that was breached all too easily to protect the secrets of TWA 800 held much too firmly when it came to the secrets of our enemies.

  Chapter: TWO

  CONSPIRACY THEORIST

  I never intended to become a conspiracy theorist. In the fall of 2000, when I first dipped my toe into the murky headwaters of the TWA 800 intrigue, I thought myself something of a skeptic, the Socratic nitpicker who rained on the paranoid parades of others. At the time, I was working as an independent writer and producer, mostly in advertising. A variety of new technologies had allowed me to quit the agency world ten years earlier. By the year 2000 I was also doing a fair amount of writing unrelated to advertising. I contributed the odd piece to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and the Weekly Standard. Locally, I wrote occasionally for the Kansas City Star and regularly for the regional business magazine, Ingram’s. That year too I had my first and only novel published, a moderately successful, dystopian political fantasy called 2006: The Chautauqua Rising. In writing the novel I discovered how useful the Internet could be. Over time I came to appreciate it much more than did the FBI or the New York Times. For the curious citizen, the Internet was an equalizer.

  I anticipated none of this on that September evening when I headed off to a local country club to hear a presentation by James Sanders. A veteran cop turned investigative reporter, Sanders had authored the 1997 book, The Downing of TWA Flight 800, and paid a high price for doing so. As he explained, fifty-three TWA employees were on board that doomed aircraft, most of them deadheading back to Paris. His wife, Elizabeth Sanders, had served as a trainer for TWA flight attendants. She knew many of those who had died on the plane, attendants and pilots both, and attended more memorial services than she had ever hoped to.

  At one of those services she encountered a friend named Terry Stacey, a 747 pilot and manager. Stacey had been working at the investigation site in Calverton on Long Island and harbored deep suspicions about the direction of the investigation. Knowing that James Sanders was an investigative reporter with a couple books to his credit, Stacey asked Elizabeth to introduce them. Her role in what followed would not go much deeper, but for the authorities that was deep enough.

  Elizabeth’s life began to unravel in March 1997 when California’s Riverside Press-Enterprise published a front-page article headlined, “New Data Show Missile May Have Nailed TWA 800.”1 The story described in some detail Sanders’s inquiry into the TWA 800 investigation over the preceding five months. A still unknown individual working at Calverton had removed a pinch of seatback material from the plane and sent it to Sanders by Federal Express for testing. That person was Stacey. For the FBI this was a problem much greater than a pinch of foam rubber might suggest. If that pinch had escaped the hangar, who knew what else had?

  Once the story broke in the Press-Enterprise, the Clinton Justice Department (DOJ) had little choice but to hunt down the conspirators. The Sanderses were not hard to find. Two DOJ prosecutors told them if they did not reveal their source within the investigation, both would become grand jury targets themselves. Lest she be forced to give up Stacey, Elizabeth went into hiding for the next eight months in an Oregon trailer park. That exile almost cost Elizabeth her sanity. James refused to cooperate.

  The FBI honchos pursued the removal of the TWA 800 evidence with more passion than they pursued the evidence itself. Soon enough, agents soon found their way to Stacey, arresting him and the Sanderses. “Conspiracy theorist and wife charged with theft of parts from airplane,”2 the FBI announced much too proudly on the New York office’s website. Despite Sanders’s two previous books, the DOJ decided that was not enough output to merit standing as a “journalist.” Denied that standing, the Sanderses were tried as thieves, Elizabeth the Bonnie to James’s Clyde. To save his considerable pension, Stacey pled guilty to a misdemeanor. The Sanderses went to trial in a Long Island federal court and were convicted of conspiracy to steal airplane parts.

  This was the story James told to a large crowd at the country club. Not until I recalled that Kansas City was the ancestral home of TWA did the size and intensity of the audience make sense to me. The company had shifted its hub to St. Louis some years back, but its overhaul base remained in Kansas City, as did many of its retired employees. Almost to a person, the TWA people in the room appeared to endorse Sanders’s argument that TWA 800 had, in fact, been shot down. This surprised me. At the time, I thought this theory among the more improbable then in circulation. Admittedly, though, I had paid little attention to the investigation. I could not recall, for instance, where I was when I first heard about the plane’s demise.

  Being on the board of the group that invited the Sanderses, I went to dinner with them afterwards at an Italian restaurant on Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. We sat at a long table, and I found myself at the end of it seated next to Elizabeth. We had a chance to talk. As she related, when she and James first met, he was a police officer and accident investigator in Orange County, California, and she a Polynesian dance instructor. Of Filipino descent, she looked the part. She was sweet, soft-spoken, and agelessly pretty.

  Looking for a more substantial job, Elizabeth signed on with TWA, first as a flight attendant and then as a senior trainer. Losing her job pained Elizabeth more than being arrested or convicted. She loved her work and thought of her colleagues as family. This, I gleaned, was not an unusual sentiment among TWA employees. By evening’s end, I had begun to reassess Sanders’s missile theory. I figured if agents of the government were willing to arrest someone like Elizabeth Sanders for conspiracy, they might, in fact, have had something to hide. Hoping to probe a little deeper, I asked the Sanderses if they could meet me the next morning for breakfast, and they agreed.

  Later that night I went online to research TWA Flight 800—and quickly sobered up. The debate had apparently been settled. Three years earlier, in November 1997, the FBI essentially closed its criminal investigation into the disaster. At a press conference that day, the FBI declared emphatically, “No evidence has been found that would indicate that a criminal act was the cause of the tragedy of Flight 800.”3 For its part, the NTSB wrapped up its investigation in August 2000, a month before the Sanderses’ appearance in Kansas City. At the final NTSB hearing, Bernard Loeb, the agency’s director of the Office of Aviation Safety, said confidently, “The physical evidence indicated indisputably that a missile did not strike the airplane.”4 Neither the FBI nor the NTSB was sure exactly what electrical source sparked an explosion in the plane’s center fuel tank (also known as a “center wing tank”), but each agency vigorously rejected the idea that a bomb or missile might have been responsible. Words like “no evidence” and “indisputably” left little room for argument.

  Knowing how hard the media rode “conspiracy theorists,” I had no interest in becoming one. At the time, it was hard for me to imagine that the FBI and the NTSB would have colluded to conceal the true cause of so public an event in so visible a place. Journalists, I could see, were equally dismissive of so unlikely an intrigue. At least three years earlier, the mainstream media had written off as cranks and kooks anyone who challenged the official explanation. So, for the most part, had the conservative media. The f
ear of being called a conspiracy theorist paralyzed the respectable right. Although not one to worry about respectability, agenda-setting radio host Rush Limbaugh had another issue. Jim Kallstrom, the head of the FBI investigation, was a friend. “I don’t know of anybody with more honesty or integrity,” said Limbaugh of Kallstrom.5 If anyone of consequence on the right or left felt otherwise about TWA 800, that person was keeping quiet about it.

  My idea was to do a video documentary, one that would make a case this complex at least reasonably comprehensible. At breakfast that next morning, I shared my idea and my reservations with the Sanderses. They liked the idea and understood my skepticism. To address it, they invited me to their home in Florida to review the data they had collected. Before heading south, I explored the literature on this particular disaster. There was a ton of it, much of it technical and some of it impenetrable. I could see why the complexity of any given plane crash could intimidate journalists. With so much information to absorb, the temptation was to trust the experts and yield to their authority. In the four years following TWA 800’s destruction, the media had done just that.

  By this time, two mainstream books had been written on TWA Flight 800. In 1999, Random House published Pat Milton’s In the Blink of an Eye. Three years earlier, Milton led the Associated Press’s coverage of the disaster. According to Milton, the book “resulted from the willingness of the FBI to open itself up to a journalist.”6 Kallstrom trusted her, and she rewarded his trust with something like adulation. The New York Times reviewer commended Milton for avoiding “the pitfalls of conspiracy mongering,”7 high praise from the Times. HarperCollins followed in early 2000 with a book from CNN’s Christine Negroni called Deadly Departure. The book’s subtitle pretty well summed up Negroni’s thesis: “Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again.” Not surprisingly, Negroni left CNN soon after the book came out to work for a high-end personal injury law firm that specialized in suing airlines and aircraft manufacturers.

  I read these books before going to Florida. They almost made me rethink my trip. At the time, I had little up-close insight into the way the national media worked. I had to assume that two reporters with great contacts working for top-flight media outlets had a pretty good grasp on the facts. Each apparently knew enough to have a book accepted by a major publisher, and a book is not a solitary adventure. A successful one requires a collaboration of sorts among author, agent, publisher, editor, attorneys, and reviewers. All parties seemed to line up behind both books, especially Deadly Departure, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” Sanders, by contrast, was an off-brand reporter and convicted felon living in a low-end Florida apartment complex hard by a smelly canal from which alligators occasionally emerged to eat neighborhood dogs. I owed him a visit, but I expected little.

  I underestimated the Sanderses. During our few days together, James impressed me with his relentless, good-spirited energy. In his mid-fifties when we met, he called to mind the cops I grew up around back in Newark, New Jersey—my father, my uncle, several of my cousins. He saw the world as it was and did not flinch from its occasional injustice. As I came to appreciate, he was as much a bulldog as his nemesis Kallstrom. They shared a first name, were of roughly the same age, the same medium height, the same stocky build, the same cop pugnacity. The difference was that Kallstrom, head of the FBI’s New York City office, controlled all the levers of power, and Sanders controlled none, not even his ability to come and go. He still needed permission from his probation officer to travel. This power disparity fazed Sanders not at all. The truth emboldened him, just as he believed it enfeebled Kallstrom.

  Three intense days with James and Elizabeth in March 2001 left me convinced they had a much better handle on the facts of the case than did Milton, Negroni, or the New York Times newsroom. Two things persuaded me. One was the willingness of the Sanderses to confront the evidence and follow where it led. They hid nothing. They fudged nothing. They offered no improbable rationales. Kallstrom, I came to see, could not do the same.

  The Sanderses’ integrity was just the half of it. For all their good intentions, I would not have embarked on this excellent adventure had they not shown me one particular swath of evidence: the eyewitness testimony. I could scarcely believe there was so much of it, and that it was so consistent and so credible. As something of a news junkie, I had to scold myself for being so unknowing. There was an untold story here, a big one. After three days and a contemplative flight home, I started imaging how I would look in a tin-foil hat.

  Chapter: THREE

  THE BEST PEOPLE

  In the early 1990s, my producing partner Michael Wunsch and I decided to canoe down an industrial river in the midst of Kansas City and record our adventure. We funded the subsequent documentary ourselves. KCPT, the regional PBS station, picked it up, and the airing of Blue River Blues attracted the attention of a local foundation as we hoped it might. The foundation commissioned us to create a history of Kansas City and transformed us in the process from commercial video makers to documentarians.

  By the decade’s end, I had produced at least half a dozen additional long form videos, several for KCPT, a few for cable networks, a couple for ourselves, each with a different funding formula. After meeting with the Sanderses, I convinced Wunsch that their story had enough merit to risk my time and his studio overhead on an hour-long documentary. My goal was to make the video as simple and straightforward as possible. In a story as visual as this one, a video could have an impact print could not.

  Fortunately, the networks and their affiliates had lost their monopoly on video imagery. The technology that broke the network stranglehold was not the Internet, but the underestimated videocassette recorder. The VCR allowed producers to create products that went straight to consumers unfiltered by the networks’ anxious lawyers and activist suits. Our plan was to recuperate our costs through direct sales of our video to the individual consumer. We had no illusions that a network would want in.

  A little naïve at the time, I found it hard to believe that broadcasters would leave so powerfully visual a story on the table for shoestring producers like us to take up. But leave it they did. On the up side, we had an open field. On the down side, the networks had produced few visuals for us to use in constructing the documentary. Although CNN named the TWA 800 tragedy the number one domestic news story of 19961—Clinton’s reelection was number two—the various TV stations shot very little footage beyond the wreckage recovery. Much more helpful was Accuracy in Media, a D.C.-based watchdog group founded by the tireless Reed Irvine in 1969 and still managed by him more than thirty years later. Irvine and his associates tracked down eyewitnesses, recruited technical experts, videotaped conferences, and routinely dug up stuff the major media tried to bury.

  Thanks to the various sunshine laws, the U.S. government proved surprisingly helpful. Once the NTSB wrapped up its case in August 2000, we had access to a mother lode of data, much of it visual. This included an animation of the crash created by the CIA, NTSB animations, hours and hours of video from the NTSB hearing, all seven hundred or so of the FBI witness interviews, scores of eyewitness drawings, and a vast library of charts and photos and technical data.

  In a totalitarian country, authorities can suppress information at will. In America, the media have to collaborate in that suppression. During the Clinton era, the White House did a superb job convincing the media to do just that. This was not a new phenomenon. More than fifty years earlier, former communist Whittaker Chambers discovered how seamlessly self-censorship worked. At the time, Chambers was a reluctant witness to the treason of his former friend and comrade, Alger Hiss. A highly respected Harvard Law grad, Hiss had insinuated himself into the upper reaches of the State Department. Despite the enormity of the evidence against him, establishment worthies refused to believe this popular Democrat was a Soviet agent. “It was, not invariably, but in general, the ‘best people’ who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to
go to any length to protect and defend him,” wrote Chambers in his 1952 masterwork, Witness. “It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.”2

  So it was with TWA Flight 800. Minds snapped shut early on in spite of the evidence. The fact that TWA 800 went down during the reelection campaign of a popular Democrat contributed mightily to the ensuing psychosis. This was less a media conspiracy than a collective pathology, as unwitting as it was unhealthy. The “best people” of the late 1990s could no more acknowledge their susceptibility to groupthink than the “best people” of the late 1940s could theirs. So locked were they into their delusions they mocked those who did not share them.

  They directed much of their mockery at Internet users. Still in its embryonic state in July 1996—the New York Times went online that same year—the Internet challenged the traditional arbiters of information in ways as unwelcome as they were unprecedented. Most critically, the Internet reduced the information imbalance between “the best people” and what Chambers called “the great body of the nation.” He referred here to those ordinary Americans who, unlike their betters, kept their minds open, “waiting for the returns to come in.” Thanks to the Internet, those everyday citizens had much quicker and more complete access to the “returns” than they ever had before.