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[INLINE]
~ Special Report ~
The Downing Of TWA 800
By James Sanders
[INLINE]
Chapter 1
ANATOMY OF A TRAGEDY
As the evening of July 17, 1996 began, Eastenders on Long Island's
south fork had no idea that only a few miles away a joint naval
task force was assembling for a critical test of a top secret
weapons system. In towns like Westhampton, Mastic Beach, and along
the Shinnecock Bay Inlet, as midweek parties began, as recreational
boaters set out into the warm night, the could not have foreseen
the light sow that would soon light up the skies. At 2000 hours,
July 17, 1996, a world away from the town of Southampton's resort
beaches, military zone W-105, thousands of square miles of ocean
located south and southeast of Long Island, was activated by the
United States Navy. Within minutes, from different locations around
the sector, military activity increased as the various units
participating in the operation deployed their aircraft and surface
vessels. The 106th New York Air National Guard put a C-130 and
HH-60C helicopter in the air. The Coast Guard cutter "Atak"
patrolled just south of Long Island's Gabreski Air National Guard
base, her sailors catching the last few rays of deep orange before
the sun finally disappeared for the night.
Over the horizon, to the East, in zone W-105, U.S. Navy AEGIS
guided missile warships prepared for the final evaluation of a
multibillion-dollar upgrade to their software, radar, and Standard
IIIA and IV antiaircraft/antimissile missile. The AEGIS radar and
target management system was the pride of the U.S. fleet, so
powerful that Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser personnel
were said to have bragged that a ship like the USS Normandy could
single-handedly fight a nuclear war with a small country, and win.
"AEGIS arrogance", they called it, a pride supported by the
stubbing Tomahawk cruise missile tubes and the surgically accurate
antiaircraft and antiship weapon that Bristled form the cruiser's
deck. AEGIS warship protected the fleet and could fight battles on
land, sea, or air, and in just a few short weeks, the USS Normandy
herself would steam into the Adriatic to relieve the USS Arleigh
Burke AEGIS destroyer and take up station to bombard the Bosnian
Serb rebels with a barrage of Tomahawks. But that was still months
away. Tonight, the system itself had to be tested as the surface
vessels sailed into position. At the same time, a Navy plane, with
newly upgraded electronic equipment designed to work with AEGIS,
slowly cruised. The plane was the key to the new top secret and
highly complex radar tracking system that was in its third year of
testing. The aircraft's onboard computer hardware, weighting 535
pounds, was the platform for a new software upgrade linked directly
to the AEGIS warship's radar system. If all ran like clockwork, the
computer link and integrated radar and communications net would
make it possible for a defensive envelope to be extended more than
thirty miles over the horizon even in the most dangerous of costal
battle theaters, despite the foulest of weather and the darkness of
night. But would it work?
Zone W-105 was selected for this final pre certification test
because of the complexity of the area. It was as close to a
simulated Persian Gulf environment as the Navy could get without
leaving U.S. coastal water. Long Island offered dense
ground-clutter, and the constant flow of commercial air traffic out
of JFK gave the navy the «neutral» radar blip it needed to test the
discrimination skills of the targeting software. Meanwhile, navy
planes were approaching the exercise area to present "friendly"
electronic signatures for AEGIS to track and compute into the task
force battle array. A "hostile" presence would soon appear in the
form of a BQM-74E Navy drone missile launched in the vicinity of
Shinnecock Bay, east of Riverhead, Long Island. The 106th New York
Air National Guard and Coast Guard units would be "traffic cops"
for the Navy drone as it briefly passed over land en route to zone
W-105.
The drone, the friendliest, the neutrals, the task force surface
naval vessels, the National Guard aircraft, and the interlocking
radar were all part of a test of the Navy's new Cooperative
Engagement Capability or CEC, and integrated radar network designed
to be fully compatible with the Army's missile defense system in
order to give the battlefield zone closest to the water
comprehensive protection from cruise and ballistic missiles. The
Army's antimissile development was controlled by a command called
Force 21, with a headquarters at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, just
outside of Eatontown, near the Jersey shore. Attached to this Army
program was a senior Navy Officer named Admiral Edward K.
Kristianson, whose expertise in computers and integrated data
management system arrays made him the perfect candidate for
senior-level liaison with the Army for this multibillion-dollar
21st-century warfare.
At about the same time as the naval units were heading into
position, the gate agents for TWA's New York to Paris Flight 800
were announcing final boarding. As families said good-bye, fathers
bugged their daughters, and husbands and wives promised to call one
another as soon as the plane landed safely, the TWA cabin crew was
checking seatings assignments on the computer printout. Out of the
tarmac, the baggage handlers were putting the last of the luggage
aboard, while in the cabin, Captain Steven E. Snyder and his first
officer Ralph G. Kevorkian completed their preflight checklist.
Earlier that day, TWA Flight 800 had flown in from Athens and had
to be cleaned, checked, put through maintenance, refueled, and
resupplied for the return flight to Europe. The area around the huge
747-100 was like a small silty as the ground crew fought against
the clock to get the plane airborne on schedule. Even as children
at the departure gate pressed their noses against the glass to
watch the train of little baggage trucks wind away from the landing
gear, no one could have known the fate that awaited Flight 800.
Not in their most terrifying nightmares could anyone, neither
passengers nor crew, have conceived of the engine of destruction
that was assembling itself just offshore, or of the resulting
fireball that would consume everyone onboard when the plane's path
brought it near the hot zone W-105.
For several days before the final test on July 17, an Army unit had
been deployed at the Long Island site, participating in several
training missions that included the launch of several drones.
Shortly before 2030 hours on July 17, an all-clear signal was given
to the drone's launch platform. No general aviation or commercial
aviation traffic was in the area. Is was safe. The missile launch
unit fed in the trajectory instructions to the drone's computer and
watched as the automatic launch sequence counted off to ignition.
Within minutes of the all-clear, the drone was airborne.
At about the same time as the all-clear signal, Linda Kabot from
Westhampton Beach on Long Island was snapping off party photographs
at the Republican fund raising event from an outdoor restaurant deck
overlooking Shinnecock Bay. Linda was focusing her camera at the
smiling faces of local Republican politicos and friends, not
realizing that in the background high overhead in the purple sky,
that little streak of light she'd seen would turn out in one of the
photos to be an image of the Navy BQM-74E Navy drone, quickly
descending to its altitude coordinates shortly after its launch.
In its preprogrammed trajectory, the Navy drone reached its
preset altitude, it then dropped to thirty feet above sea level and
accelerated to more than 500 mph as it began a long left turn away
form the clutter of Long Island's land mass. The drone settled into
a east-southeast heading toward the Navy AEGIS surface task force
cruising on station just over the horizon. As the missile shot
through the darkness at the speed of an airliner, the passengers
aboard Flight 800 were just settling into a routine in the minutes
after their late takeoff. Seat belts began unfastening as the cabin
flight attendants began preparations for the long service through
the night and into the braking dawn over Europe, eight hours away.
High overhead at 20,000 feet a Navy P-3 Orion deployed form
Brunswick Naval Air Station, Maine, turned its infrared tracking
system on as it assisted the hundreds of millions of dollars in
Navy high-tech tracking equipment spread along the shore from
Virginia to Long Island, installed to monitor the ongoing
development of the Navy's CEC warship defense system. Tonight the
P-3 would be part of the invisible eyes ot the network, monitoring
along whit the land-based equipment, every phase of what the navy
expected to be perfect shoot down of the drone missile already on
its way into the heart of the AEGIS task force.
The Navy had invested a lot of money in the development of CEC,
even before the disastrous Exocet missile attack on the USS Stark
in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war, when American
warships escorted oil tankers up and down the Strait of Hormuz
while under hostile Iranian shore batteries. Amid the flights of
commercial airliners form both adversaries, U.S. and allied
military aircraft, and hostile aircraft from Iran, is was next to
impossible to discriminate between targets, neutral, friend or foe.
The heavy traffic, Saddam Hussein maintained, was how the Stark was
attacked by his fighter pilots in the first place. It was part of
the reason for the deployment of CEC.
Because of the complexity of modern electronic warfare, in which
the front lines obliterate traffic of all types, CEC was designed
to be an almost surgical radar tracking, evaluating, and targeting
system which would make it possible for the Navy to enter hostile
environments like the Arabian Sea. CEC could identify and track all
commercial traffic, and friendly military surface and air traffic
in and out of the countries bordering the Sea, while remaining on
the lookout for a hostile cruise missile launch form any direction.
The Navy believed this system would allow them to discriminate
electronically among friend, foe, and background clutter and still
fight a battle. At least that's what the Navy thought as their
warship and planes glided into position on the night of July 17,
turned their combined radars on, and began sweeping the area for
the commencement of this final precertification test.
Deep inside the electronic brain of a second Navy P-3 working with
CEC, the radar communications equipment in the plane linked to the
AEGIS-CEC transmitted signals along a downlink to the vessels AEGIS
radar computers. They began to decipher images from among the land
clutter, friendliest, neutrals, and the hostile BQM-74E Navy drone
missiles rapidly heading toward the task force. It was as if
combined radars and computers suddenly took an electronic snapshot
of the entire area and identified friend from foe while eliminating
neutral aircraft. Then, almost instantly, the interlocking
software of each AEGOS-CEC platform acquired the target drone, but
were suddenly jammed by electronic interference. One radar broke
through the interference, however, computed a shot through the
thickening fog of multiple "hostile" electronic jammers, plotted
its trajectory, and commanded the software to automatically select
the platform best positioned to make the shot.
The computer software then launched a Navy Standard IIIA or IV
antimissile missile, specifically altered to function with this new
equipment, toward the oncoming drone. Form over the horizon, no one
except Navy personnel could see the whoosh of the rocket launch as
the missile took off from its tube. The antimissile missile climbed
high into the evening sky and rocketed west in the general
direction of the low-flying cruise-missile drone, toward a position
where its onboard computer was expecting to receive a midcourse
correction. This signal was supposed to fine-tune the Standard
missile's trajectory in order for the inboard semi active radar
homing device to lock onto the target as the Standard missile began
its plunge toward the drone a few thousand feet below. At least
that was the plan.
Commercial planes rising into the sky from JFK were unwitting
participants in this final test of 21st century technology. As TWA
Flight 800 climbed towards 14,000 feet, heading eastbound over the
water for Paris, it was about twelve miles off the south coast of
Long Island over the horizon to the west of the military exercise
as it crossed into the warning zone and technically became a
"neutral". At the same time, the electronic receiver onboard the
Navy Standard missile began sweeping its secure radio frequency,
waiting for the course correction commands form the AEGIS computers
to direct the weapon, now at its predesignated point, to where it
was supposed to attack its prey.
But prior to the mandatory midcourse correction the last AEGIS-CEG
radar still tracking the missile and the drone through the heavy
electronic jamming suddenly went completely blind. The drone and
Standard missile could not be tracked. In two earlier tests all but
one radar had been put out of action by electronic jamming. On July
17, the Standard missile was no longer under the control of the
AEGIS-CEC system. Following its internal programming, it continued
on its westerly course at 3000 feet per second actively searching
for a target.
In an instant, the Standard's internal radar acquired TWA Flight
800 at well above and to the west of the target drone. The
antimissile missile's radar turned sharply to the right, aimed its
inert war hear at the 747, and painted an electronic bull's-eye on
an area just in front of the right wing. The missile leveled off in
a direct line to its impact point, and then at full speed slammed
into the fuselage several feet below the passenger cabin.
There was no instant explosion, as the dummy war head missile
sliced through the huge plane a sheet of paper, depositing a trail
of reddish-orange residue in its wake. It roared through the
fuselage and exited through the left side of the plane, just
forward of the left wing,n where it left a hole large enough to
walk through. After the missile exited, passengers, seats, galleys,
food carts, and suitcases were sucked out of the interior through
the hole in the left side, leaving a 4700 foot trail of debris
along the sea bottom during phase one of the three phase breakup.
On its way through the interior of the 747, the missile seriously
weakened the front of the nearly empty center fuel tank. The plane
went into a dive, and eight seconds and 4700 feet after the initial
missile impact, a small explosion occurred, beginning approximately
in the middle of the center fuel tank. The top of the fuel tank
bowed upward, but at this stage of the breakup, did not rupture.
This caused the floor of the passenger cabin also to bow upward,
breaking loose seats in the center rows 21, 22, and 23. The
explosion completed the separation of the front of the plane from
the fuselage, initiating phase two.
The force of the explosion followed the path of least resistance:
forward, blowing out the weakened front of the center wing tank.
The explosive force caused the forward fuselage to separate a few
feet in front of the missile's path, where the fuselage had been
greatly weakened. This blast propelled row 15, seats 1,2 and 3,
about six-tenths of a mile to the left, while a large piece of the
fuselage above the R2 door sailed six-tenths of a mile to the
right. The front end tumbled end over end off to the left as the
remaining section of the plane continued on in a steep dive.
The pilotless stump of the 747 began to roll to the left until the
left wing tip pointed toward the water below. The fire from the
center wing tank spread rapidly up the right side of the fuselage
and right wing. At about 7500 feet the inner right wing tank
exploded. The engines and about ninety-eight percent of the center
wing tank came to rest on the ocean floor more than 12,000 feet
east of the missile's point of impact.
As quickly as it happened, it was over. Flight 800 was gone, spread
across the water in a flaming swath. Moments earlier, a Long Island
FAA radar technician staring into his electronic view screen
thought he had seen something approaching TWA Flight 800 just
before it disappeared from the radar. He saw "conflicting radar
tracks that indicated a missile." Then he filed his report and the
paper trail had begun.
A short time after the incident, the White House Situation Room was
advised that preliminary assessment of FAA radar data indicated
that a missile had shot down TWA Flight 800, en route from JFK to
Paris with 230 passengers aboard. By 2 a.m. on July 18, key federal
intelligence and investigative personnel were informed via White
House teleconference that TWA Flight 800 was brought down
accidentally by a friendly missile during a Naval exercise. They
had on their hands, they were told in the blamelessly antiseptic
world of military corporatese, a "situation." The Department of
Justice Command Center and FBI Strategy Information Operations
Center also came to life as Flight 800 information began to trickle
in. Each was connected by a video teleconference system (VTS) to
the White House Situation Room. The initial talk in the room
focused not on a bomb, but on a missile. Some eyewitnesses thought
they had seen something bright arching toward the jet just before
it blew up. At the next video conference, about dawn, an FAA
representative said there was indeed a "strange radar blip."
But there were far too many people crowding into these
teleconferences to let the missile analysis stand. So word was put
out that "at air traffic control on Long Island, FAA officials
reviewing radar tapes were unable to find even the mysterious
blip".
The radar tape did not remain on Long Island for long. It went to
the FAA Technical Center in Washington, D.C. The FAA Technical
Center team, headed by the FAA's Tom Lintner, concluded that there
was an "unexplained blip" on the radar tape. U.S. military missile
experts told the FBI that a missile with a semi active radar homing
system would show up on an FAA radar set in transponder mode, but
that a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile would not.
According to Newsweek , writing in the aftermath of the crash, when
news of the disaster had been reported in almost every newspaper
and magazine in America, the possibility of a missile bringing down
Flight 800 was the topic of conversation at the 6 a.m. VTS
teleconference. They said that the Stinger theory - the Stinger is
a shoulder-fired, American-manufactured missile - resonated with
the FBI, which had picked up intelligence that some terrorists had
been shopping for the lethal weapons. As the 6 a.m. meeting got
underway in the VTS room, there was "a lot of breathless talk"
about attacks by missiles, or MANPADS. Still, some experts were
dubious. The Stingers handed out to the Afghan and Paki "muj" by
the CIA were at least a decade old, and probably junk by now. The
Pentagon cast further doubt on the Stinger theory with some simple
math. The effective range of a Stinger is just over two miles, and
its sensor can't lock on aircraft much above 11,000 feet.
The Pentagon had a growing problem. They had temporarily halted the
CNN nonstop coverage of a possible missile by having a high-level
source "leak" disinformation, that the blip was an "anomaly", which
CNN then authoritatively passed on to the public. But now they had
the potential for a bureaucratic leaking sieve if they didn't get
the missile talk under control. So a coordinated program of leaks
began to appear, and gradually began to neutralize the few clues
being unearthed by a few intrepid reporters.
Whether the president or vice president actually knew about these
events in the hours immediately following the crash or even whether
they knew about the cause of the crash itself is a matter of
conjecture. Nevertheless, somewhere within the topmost echelons of
the military establishment, whether it was for national security or
purely political reasons, a cover-up was initiated to conceal the
real cause of the crash from the American people. Maybe the
identities of the ships of the ships in the task force had to be
hidden. Maybe it would be too embarrassing to reveal with the
Democratic convention only a few weeks away. We only know that the
true details of some of the most critical evidence assembled on the
floor of the hangar at Calverton have never been revealed to the
public.
This cover-up would have been easier to maintain had there been no
witnesses. But witnesses were everywhere, and they had to be
discredited or dismissed. Thirty-four civilians at various
locations along the flight window across Long Island saw the
missile rise out of the ocean and intercept Flight 800. After
extensive FBI and military debriefings, these thirty-four people
were found to be highly credible, too credible to be dismissed as
flaky. Each, from a different location, had seen a missile exit
zone W-105 and intercept Flight 800. For example, an on-duty Air
National Guard pilot saw a missile going from east to west slam
into TWA Flight 800. The Air National Guard put out a press release
the next day saying only that an unknown object, going from east to
west, was seen by the captain. A woman on a boat south of Long
Island was taking photos while facing the east. One of the photos
shows a missile trail rising out of zone W-105.
The missile itself had left tangible evidence of its flight path
through the aircraft in the form of a solid fuel residue deposited
on the seats in rows 17, 18, and 19. It also left a red trail
attached to airplane parts that fell off into the ocean during the
first eight seconds of the plane's breakup.
Knowing that the United States Navy shot down the plane with a
missile, a plan of action was developed to remove evidence from the
scene that would implicate the United States Government. Coast
Guard MPs from a closed facility with only a skeleton crew
maintaining and guarding it were brought over to guard a dock when
sensitive debris was brought to shore.
One source described a Coast Guard MP team that observed this
happening. The story is partially confirmed by the New York police
officers who observed a highly sensitive diving operation in the
Red Zone during the first days after the crash. They were
prohibited from the area during the multi-day course of the
operation. Debris was brought to the surface and placed on the
boat, but it did not go to Calverton hangar, they said.
But the source of the Coast Guard MP team story went further. He
said that not only was the recovery of airplane wreckage a
clandestine operation, but that the team was debriefed by
intelligence personnel - they identified themselves as CIA - and
warned that anything they say to the media or to any other sources
would be a violation of national security and that they would be
punished accordingly.
A team of Navy divers was brought in to dive in a particularly
sensitive area of the Red Zone. No divers from any other
organization were allowed to approach this area.
The Navy divers brought debris up and placed it on a ship which
delivered the cargo to the dock guarded by the Coast Guard MPs, who
watched as missile parts were off-loaded and placed on a truck.
Pieces of the 747 that had red residue attached were also loaded
onto the truck, which then drove off to an unknown location.
Unbeknownst to those charged with removing the evidence from the
crime scene, they missed some of the reddish-orange residue.
On August 3, 1996, a seat was recovered from the ocean floor with a
significant amount of reddish-orange residue attached to its back
side. Over the next few weeks, as the seats in rows 17, 18, and 19
were recovered, FBI investigators at the Calverton hangar saw the
residue trail extend entirely across the cabin, scorched into the
backs of most of the seats in these rows. The FBI took five samples
of the reddish-orange residue for analysis. But, once tested, the
results became part of a criminal investigation and the FBI
declined to release their findings.
As the cover-up moved forward, it took the form of a lengthy
process of creating new truths while systematically hiding the
evidence. A series of nightly leaks to the press by unnamed
government "sources", the content of which became increasingly
illogical, kept conditioning the American population into believing
whatever the NTSB suggested. Ultimately, they settled on a
"mechanical" finding. But the real cause all along was a terrible
lack of judgment on the part of the Navy, who had used innocent
civilians as human guinea pigs as they rushed a multibillion-dollar
weapons system into its final certification test before it was
ready.
Copyright 1997 James D. Sanders.
