A scant eleven minutes after 230 people settled in for a sleepy, seven-hour night flight to Paris from New York's JFK International Airport on July 17, 1996, their Boeing 747-100 burst into a fireball and plummeted, two-and-a-half miles into the Atlantic ocean, off Long Island. No one survived.

Over two years later, the known facts of the TWA Flight 800 calamity remain sketchy. Investigators have no idea what cause the explosion. They do say, however, that they know what did not cause it: conspiracy!

Did a missile, fired by U.S. Navy vessel, blast the civilian airliner? Did the government cover up the accident? Or wasn't it an accident? That was the conspiracy theory, and thanks to the Internet and the growing spell it casts over the mainstream media, the TWA 800 "missile theory" became one of the most frantically publicized and publicly debated conspiracy theories ever.

Unlike most pre-Internet conspiracy theories, the missile theory made a swift impact on the major media. In mid-September, with little else besides the rampant discussion of the theory on the Internet to go on, reporters began quizzing crash investigators about the "friendly fire" scenario.

Of course, it was not the first time major media have fed off the conspiracy-theory underground. Time magazine's controversial 1992 cover story alleging that the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was somehow connected to a U.S. undercover operation grew out of a theory that had been circulating for more than three years. The missile theory took less than two months to surface. As powerful a medium as the Internet is, it still takes a mainstream source to get a conspiracy theory off the ground. The net, however, facilitates the synergy between the two spheres.

Though conspiratorial murmuring began almost immediately after the crash, it was an article in the Jerusalem Post three days later that fueled the theory. The Post posed a "what if" scenario to anonymous sources in the French Defense Ministry. The sources said that if the plane were indeed brought down by a missile, then it would have to be a U.S. military missile. A terrorist weapon just wouldn't have the punch. They gave no further support for their hypothetical assertion.

In the past, a single article in an Israeli would have had little effect on the American Zeitgeist these days thousands of newspapers have web sites. The Jerusalem Post is one of the thousands. Digitized dittos of the Post story were flying around cyberspace within hours.

Using a quick survey of Internet web sites and news-group postings as a political barometer, it appeared in August 1996 that President Clinton was not only headed for a crushing defeat in November but probably for federal prison and the gas chamber. Clinton is a certified conspiracy-theory superstar, as his repeated presence in this very book attests.

TWA 800 conspiracy theorizers certainly didn't spare the ubervillain from Hope. On July 23, 1996, J. Orlin Grabbe - best known for his thirty-seven-part web-published series on Vince Foster - confidently asserted on his web site that Syrian-backed terrorists shot down the plane. Not "friendly fire" at all but a friendly cover-up. Clinton suppressed the truth, Grabbe said, because he wanted to blame Iran or Iraq so he could triumphantly bomb one country or the other as an election-commandeering October Surprise. As if he needed one.

Grabbe didn't pause long enough from his omniscient narrative to explain how he knew all this.

The next day, a Usenet posting, attributed to Gene Hilsheimer of Panama City, Florida, revealed that two Arkansas state troopers were on TWA 800, on their way to Paris to spill dirt on Clinton in an interview with the French daily Le Monde. The source of this ante-upping information: The Miami Herald. But after a week of giddy on-line debate over "TWA Troopergate," the Herald ran a story exposing the posting as a "cyberhoax." The Herald never published such a story, and there were no troopers on the plane.

But the missile theory really got moving in November 1996. Pierre Salinger, the stogie-chomping expatriate and ex-newsman, set flight from his Paris pad and launched himself into the national U.S. headlines.

Salinger, the respected journalist and onetime press secretary to President Kennedy, was seventy one years old at the time, and like many seventy-one-year-olds, he didn't do much Internet surfing.

It was a weird incident that, if nothing else, shows why journalists need to get their toes wet in cyberspace (though many of them take a perversely smug pride in their Internet illiteracy). Salinger announced that he had a government document proving that TWA Fight 800 was blasted out of the sky by a U.S. military missile in a catastrophic training accident. The document, Salinger told French television and the numerous U.S. reporters who called him at his hotel in France, "was written by an American, but it was given to me by someone in French intelligence in Paris."

Well, leave it to the French. If, in fact, it was a French intelligence agent who passed on the document, then the United States really shouldn't worry too much next time it catches a French agent snooping because the allegedly explosive document had been floating around on the Internet since late August. But Salinger unwittingly passed it off as exclusive suppressed information.

The document, penned by former airline pilot and crash investigator Richard Russell, is the Rosetta stone of the "friendly fire" theory. In a nutshell, the document claimed inside knowledge of the investigation - and that the higher-ups knew the true cause of the TWA 800 crash. A missile, natch.

In an interview with me, Russell copped to authorship of the document - a fact also noted in Newsweek and USA Today. He said that he wrote it as a private E-mail using his America Online account and fired it off to a dozen or so friends. Apparently, one or more of them must have fired it off to a few friends of their own, because before you could say "kaboom" the message was all over the Internet, posted in several Usenet news groups, e-mailed from coast to coast and around the world, and even faxed into major newsrooms.

Russell claimed that he based his message on high-level sources, but he won't name them, and no one has come forward, even anonymously, to corroborate the information. As for Russell, he seemed a bit tired of the whole affair (and this was just a few months after the crash; the controversy continues even now!), saying, "I'd rather be a nonentity in this thing."

Can't say the came for Salinger, however.

A World War II vet, Salinger, in addition to his stint as JFK's spokesman, had a run as a U.S. senator and media personality. He appeared as Lucky Pierre on the Adam West Batman series. But drawing on his experience as a bon vivant and connoisseur or large cigars, he found that his large network of contacts in high places would serve him well as a reported. ABC gave him a job, and Salinger has since been out front on numerous international stories. His 1992 book Secret Dossier is a minor classic for the way it spelled out the behind-the-scenes conspiring between the CIA, Kuwait, and Iraq that led up to the Gulf War.

So when Salinger announced that he had proof of this heinous "friendly fire" accident and subsequent, massive coverup, the world listened. Unfortunately, Saligner put his foot deep into his mouth. In a phone call after he made his startling announcement, a CNN producer who had received the Russell document by fax about two months earlier read it to the veteran foreign correspondent and transcontinental jet-setter. "Yes. That's it. That's the document," said an astonished Salinger. "Where did you get it?"

Well, Pierre, if you'd get a little Net savvy, you'd figure it out.

After that egg-in-the-face episode, one would imagine that Salinger would be loath to pursue the matter further. But there he was again, in March 1997, waving his latest article for Paris Match magazine. In this one, Salinger presented stills from a radar videotape, said to have been recorded off an air-traffic-control system monitoring the doomed flight. That tape, Salinger says, shows an unexplained blip heading directly toward the plane at high velocity and converging with the plane right at the time when the blast would have, well, blasted.

Needless to say, the immediate reaction to Salinger's "new evidence" was not exactly warm and welcoming. FBI mouthpiece James Kallstron's retort was pretty typical, calling Salinger's salvo "a joke" filled with "inaccuracies, distortions, and inventions."

There are a couple of curious aspects of the affair. All of a sudden, Salinger was working with self-proclaimed "nonentity" Russell. The missile-theorizing former pilot, who claims to have access to inside info, was, in fact, the source of the radar tape. According to the New York Times, Russell tried to pawn the video off on ABC News - for a million bucks. Russell wasn't taking phone calls, so the Times didn't confirm that rather damning assertion with Russell himself. But what is known is this: The FBI subpoenaed the tape, went down to Florida, and seized Russell's copy.

While Salinger was generally being presented as a lone nut, as many as 150 eyewitnesses were convinced that they saw a streak of light headed toward the plane seconds before it exploded. Add that to an Associated Press report that a National Guard helicopter pilot, Captain Chris Baur, was in the air near the explosion and upon returning to his base "told officials immediately he thought he saw a missile." Apparently, Baur repeated that claim to officials numerous times but wouldn't comment publicly (so at least no one can say the guy's just out for publicity).

The usual response to the missile eyewitnesses has been to bring out the old saw which holds: "Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable." But isn't that kind of a misleading argument? The testimony of any single eyewitness is often unreliable, but a preponderance of corroborating eyewitnesses, many of whom have no direct contact with each other, is powerful evidence. Ask any cop.

Let's be honest. We'd have loved to hitch our every-rising star to Salinger's caboose (on second thought, yuk!) and join in the TWA missile hunt, but dammit, I know my readers expect integrity. (Koff! Koff!) So all we can say is that the TWA "friendly fire" missile theory is at best an open question in our minds.

We are certain that our friends in "the corporate media" weren't exactly giving it a fair airing. Take, for example, the March 12, 1997, CBS Evening News report on the missile theory. There were three sources, all of them government investigators, quoted in the all-too-brief report. No alternative point of view; for that matter, no nongovernmental point of view. If we were strident, altraleft, angry-at-the-world types like Noam Chomsky, we'd call that propaganda! But we're not, so we won't.

We do know for a fact that CBS had ample opportunity to present a nongovernmental point of view because the producers of the same report sent a camera crew to 70 GCAT's (70 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time) spacious East Coast headquarters and spent considerable time interviewing a highly placed source within the 70 GCAT braintrust. But they just ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Perhaps the best investigative piece supporting the missile theory to appear in print in the months following the crash came from the Riverside Press-Enterprise on October 4, 1996. The piece noted that all of the friendly-fire allegations had been unambiguously denied by everyone in a position to deny them, including allegations (in the Russell document and elsewhere) that special "warning zones" off Long Island had been activated on the night of the crash, July 17. If those zones were activated, it could mean that naval exercises were taking place in that area, possibly firing live missiles.

An "ex-navy officer who used to supervise warning areas" told the paper (anonymously, of course) that "the plane was the victim of an exercise gone awry." But even that nameless source characterized his own information as secondhand. And, of course, it was denied. But more intriguingly, the Press-Enterprise uncovered "documents showing the activation of vast military exercise areas…that contradict earlier official denials."

Those navy and Federal Aviation Administration records showed, according to the Press-Enterprise story, that "scheduled operations July 17 turned large chunks of airspace into danger zones for civilian aircraft." When the paper showed copies of those records to navy spokesmen, the navy stopped talking to the Press-Enterprise and bounced all calls to the FBI and National Transportation Safety Board, the main agencies in charge of the crash investigation.

While the Press-Enterprise article was almost entirely speculative, very thin on workable fact, it notes that "a special 7,790-square-mile area became off-limits at 8:00 p.m., about the time TWA 800 was backing away from the passenger gate." That area is known as W-105 (and, interestingly, is mentioned in the Russell message).

There was, the navy acknowledges, a P-3 submarine-detecting plane flying through the area at that time. The article asserts that W-105 would not have been activated for something as simple as a "P-3 fly through." Quoting a "retired senior Pentagon officer" - again nameless - as saying "this had to be a command and control exercise or exercise to qualify somebody to do something or whatever" (How's that for specificity?), the Press-Enterprise speculates that the exercise involved "the Army's special forces" or something similarly sinister. Such exercises could have involved dummy or low-yield missiles, one of which could have hit the plane.

Shortly after Salinger's radar tape went public, a writer named James Sanders turned up another piece of, as they say in the conspiracy biz, "best evidence." As reported in his 1997 paperback The Downing of TWA Flight 800, Sanders uncovered a few pieces of foam from the destroyed 747's seat cushions. On the foam there was a mysterious reddish stain. Upon analysis, Sanders asserts, the stain turned out to be missile fuel.

So what happened to that evidence? Sanders received it from an inside course he calls, slipping into X-Files mode, "Hangar Man." Then he sent it on to a trusted producer at CBS News. CBS, always hot for a good story, promptly turned it back over to the FBI. And that was the last anybody has heard of it. Sanders also says that the FBI searched his house and he feared for his safety.

All pretty damning stuff, at least on the surface. But the government investigators didn't think so. More than fourteen months after TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island, investigators, not exactly moving with the speed of a heat-seeking missile, were close to a final solution to that vexing question of what caused the 747 to erupt in a catastrophic fireball at eleven thousand feet.

And the answer is - ready now? - nobody did it! And, oh, yeah, that mysterious "streak of light" you saw, if you were one of 244 witnesses who gave statements after the crash - that was just a leaky fuel tank.

The latest move toward this definitive answer in which no one is to blame came when the CIA and FBI, one of those Marvel Comics-like team-ups, issued a joint report on the so-called missile theory that has generated nearly a year's worth of press and on-line speculation. In the joint report, the two spook agencies said that while it's true that all those people saw a "streak" that appeared to be headed for the plane, what they really saw was the plane itself, already in the process of inexplicably falling apart. The light streak was actually fuel that ignited as it streamed out of the aircraft.

After fending off questions about the TWA 800 missile theory for more than a year, the FBI, with help once again from the CIA, finally closed down their criminal investigation of the exploding 747 in late 1997. The spy agency produced a computer-animated video showing, hypothetically, how the plane blew up (no missile in sight), and that was that.

But wait! The CIA cartoon didn't convince everyone. Hard to believe, we know. But there are always a few nuts, crackpots, and lunatics out there who just like to contradict everything! In this case the nut was former Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman Adm. Thomas H. Moorer!

You may not have heard this story, though on the face of it Moorer, one of the nation's top retired navy men, who made missile warfare his area of expertise during his distinguished career, would merit some media attention. Not that a spiffy resume makes the man right, but at least it ought to earn him some ink. Imagine if Colin Powell had come out and said that he believed that "all evidence would point to a missile" in the TWA disaster. Although that's exactly what Moorer said, his comments garnered no more than a few hundred words (if that) in a January 9 squib on the Gannet News Service wire.

But that wasn't good enough for Moorer, who, according to the Gannet story, "expressed grave suspicion over the FBI's 18-month investigation of the disaster."

"It absolutely deserves more investigation - a lot more," the admiral opined. "This time I wouldn't let the FBI do it."

Why didn't Moorer's comments attract a little more attention? Probably because the media was sick of the story and the conspiracy stigma that hangs all over it like a dirty shirt. If Moorer's plea leads to calls for a new "missile theory" investigation, mark our words, Sunday morning pundits will first offer sonorous proclamations about the need to "put this behind us." Then they'll write Moorer off as a crank and shake their heads over how badly he's lost it since he was JCS chairman.

The lengths to which the government and its pals in the press have gone to debunk this whole missile problem will no doubt only further the suspicions that have been floating around since the plane went down. And who knows? Perhaps with good reason. Is the government covering up the fact that the navy downed the plane with a training rocket? The way this investigation's gone, it's almost as if they're simply covering up for everyone, navy or not. The investigators still say there is no hard support for any hypothesis - missile, onboard bomb, or the government's favorite, "mechanical failure." The latter appears to be the most blame free, but someone's got to be responsible for a technological screwup. We're frankly surprised that the investigators haven't opted for the "meteor theory," which has also found some adherents. Heck, if a meteor brought down the 747, then it really is not anybody's fault. And we can all go home.

The CIA-FBI report may or may not be a definative debunking of missilophilia, but it raises or ignores as many questions as it answers. What about the other pilots who have also reported missiles or at least "streaks" near their own planes. In September 1996, 220 miles south of the TWA crash site, an American Airlines pilot reported seeing a missile whiz by his 757 aircraft. Then, in November, a Pakistan Airlines pilot flying very near the Long Island crash scene swore he saw a "streak of light" whiz by his plane. That same night, a TWA flight was flying behind the Pakistani plane and verified the report. But officials dismissed the streak of light as - a meteor! (This is no joke folks!)

And just why the heck did the CIA suddenly surface as a player in the crash investigation? I'm no expert, but last I checked, the CIA wasn't supposed to be involved in domestic affairs. Maybe the fact that this was an international flight gives the spy bureau some jurisdiction. But we hadn't heard of their involvement up to this point.

Finally, with the glut of Internet conspiracy theories about pretty much everything lately (I'm thinking, in particular, of the Princess Diana no-brainers), it's worth mentioning that this "friendly fire" theory does conform to the exact standards of what constitutes legitimate conspiracy theorizing. Unlike the Diana theories, which arose ex nihilo after a not-unusual event (the violent crash of a speeding car), there is actually something to spark speculation in the TWA case. A streak of light! The solid safety record of the 747! The plodding, seemingly aimless investigation!

Is that "evidence?" Sure - at least enough evidence to ignite a conspiracy theory. Whether the evidence turns out to be legit or not, I cannot say.

Guess we'll just have to trust the CIA.

           

Copyright © 2000 CarpeNoctem. All rights reserved.
Revised: April 2003.
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