What did Kerry know, and when did he know it? (TWA Flight 800)

If there is any one serious person in America whose prior knowledge might have affected events of Sept. 11, that person is presidential aspirant, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On Sept. 11, 2001, as we have reported earlier, Sen. Kerry appeared on the Larry King Show. Kerry's honest admission to King bears scrutiny:

We have always known this could happen. We've warned about it. We've talked about it. I regret to say, as I served on the Intelligence Committee up until last year, I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it, but not really doing [sic] hard work of responding.

If Kerry talked about the fate of TWA Flight 800 before Sept. 11, he does not seem to have done so at the time of its destruction. However, his colleague of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, did go public with his concerns.

Hatch spoke with CNN on July 19, 1996, two days after the crash. He admitted to having "various conversations" with government officials. "I won't go so far as to say it was terrorism, but there was sabotage here," said Hatch. "We're looking at a criminal act. We're looking at somebody who either put a bomb on it or shot a missile, a surface-to-air missile."

Hatch was likely telling the truth here about the limits of his own knowledge. Indeed, we have yet to identify a single civilian, including those at work deep within the investigation, who knew beyond doubt what transpired on the night of July 17, 1996.

Hatch's recommended follow-up is fully consistent with his beliefs. "The National Transportation Safety Board should now turn the investigation over to the FBI because the crash was not related to an aviation problem," added Hatch. "It's very – almost 100 percent unlikely that this was a mechanical failure [italics mine]."

If there were ever a subject for review by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, this would seem to be it. But curiously, the committee's "Special Report" that covers the period of the crash and its aftermath dedicates not a word to TWA Flight 800.

The report does detail the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks earlier and even explores the much more questionable and controversial subject of the CIA-Contra-cocaine story that was then creating a firestorm in the left-wing media and, to a lesser degree, in the mainstream media. But the Committee's report, issued on Feb. 28, 1997, does not raise the subject of TWA Flight 800, even to dismiss it.

"After TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it," said Kerry on Sept. 11. Given the presence of a Democrat in the White House, Kerry would have had better access to serious talk than Hatch. Regardless, not a word of it surfaces in the public record.

Throughout the year of 1997, the CIA worked on the creation of the now-notorious video animation designed to discredit the eyewitnesses. On Nov. 18, 1997, the FBI previewed this video for a national audience. Again, one would think this a likely topic for the Intelligence Committee's next report, the one covering the period Jan. 7, 1997 to Oct. 21, 1998. But again, not a word.

These reports are well detailed. They discuss subjects of serious and obvious national import, including terrorist acts like the destruction of Pan Am 103, but they also delve into the speculative like the CIA-Contra story, Y2K and "the release of the JFK files." But not one public word about TWA Flight 800.

After Kerry's remarks to Larry King on Sept. 11, at least one person called his office for a clarification. After some back-and-forth, she was told that she must have misunderstood.

On Sept. 24,2001, there was no mistaking the meaning of Sen. Kerry's remarks. I personally watched him say the following to Chris Matthews on Hardball.

You know, we've had terrorism for a long time now. We've had the Achille Lauro, the Munich Olympics, the pipe bomb at the Olympics in Atlanta, the TWA 800, the bombing of embassies, and it's not going to disappear overnight.

As we have noted before, on Sept. 20, 2001, one mainstream newspaper broke the story of how the so-called Gore Commission failed conspicuously to address airline safety. The paper claimed that this failure "represents the clearest recent public example of the success that airlines have long had in defeating calls for more oversight."

The paper traced that failure to a series of campaign donations from the airlines to the Democratic National Committee in 1996 in the wake of the crash of TWA Flight 800, donations likely solicited by Al Gore himself. That newspaper just happened to be John Kerry's hometown Boston Globe.

Of course, it is possible that Sen. Kerry merely misspoke about a terrorist attack against TWA 800 on two occasions, and it is possible too that the Globe's entrance into the fray was merely coincidental. But given the brutal realities of Democratic presidential politics it is altogether possible that these revelations were calculated and perhaps even coordinated.

In our book, "First Strike," James Sanders and I make this arguably prophetic comment:

John Kerry seemed to have his sights on Al Gore's Achilles' heel. After the events of Sept. 11, the story of how Al Gore helped subvert the investigation into TWA 800 and undermine airport security may yet prove to be a career-killer. Kerry's "slips" may put Gore out of the race even before he gets in.

Two weeks after advanced copies of "First Strike" started circulating around Washington, Gore withdrew from the presidential race. It would be presumptuous of us to assert that these accumulating revelations caused Gore to withdraw. But if not, what did? Gore's withdrawal shocked Washington.

"We went through this flurry of activity, talking about it, but not really doing [sic] hard work of responding," said Kerry on Sept. 11. The shameful thing is that, even today, Sen. Kerry and his colleagues continue to play political games with a subject that is not at all amusing – the very survival of our nation.

The most likely culprit appears to be a U.S. Navy ship that was taking part in live-fire exercises off the coast of Long Island that night.

Except that:
(1) When doing live fire exercises, everything from missle prelaunch, to launch, to tracking the flight, to target acquisition, to hit (or miss) is recorded in multiple places on the ship and with the "umpires" who are running the exercise.

(2) The fire control team, the radar operators, and the bridge would know damn quick if that happened. And so would the umpires. And word would go through the crews mess like lightning. Heck, there are always extra guys hanging around - running coffee, manning the phones, etc. No way could they keep it quiet. Not possible.

(3) There is no "top secret" quick we screwed up pull out the "cover up" manual. The exercise would be terminated immediately, the umpires would be calling up one chain of command and the ship would be calling up another. Word would go out to the Coast Guard pretty damn quick. And the ship would immediately go charging out to see if there were any survivors at flank speed.

Nope. No way it was a live fire exercise mistake. That is tin hat stuff.

There's something I should point out as clarification here.

If TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a missile, then I am quite certain that it was not terrorists who had done it. The presumption that it was a missile is based on the numerous eyewtiness accounts from various points on the south shore of Long Island that evening.

If a surface-to-air missile was the cause, there are a couple of points to consider, all of which weigh heavily against a terrorist act:

1. TWA Flight 800 was flying beyond the range of any smaller, portable surface-to-air missiles.

2. Not only that, but Flight 800 would normally have been flying several thousand feet higher at that point in its eastbound departure from JFK International Airport (more on that later). There is no way someone could have predicted that it would be flying at that altitude that evening, so a terrorist who was interested in shooting the plane down would have attempted to do so from a point much further east.

3. Terrorists are not just interested in destruction -- they are interested in highly-publicized destruction that draws a lot of attention. As with #2, this would be a likely motivation for a terrorist to do something like this in a place where the "results" were more visible and could not be deliberately mis-identified as an "accident."

(Along these lines, ask yourselves what would have happened if only one passenger jet was flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I'd bet a paycheck that if this had happened, we'd be talking right now about the NTSB's finding that "faulty navigation equipment" on board the aircraft had caused it to fly into the building.)

4. This sounds counter-intuitive, but a 747 or any large passenger jet is actually harder to bring down with a surface-to-air missile than a fighter jet is (remember the near-miss of that El-Al flight back in December -- even though that plane had just taken off and was flying well within the range of even a second-rate missile?).

. . . .

I'm recalling a lot of these things from memory, but in all of our discussions here on FR there were a few items that definitely pointed toward a possible military involvement here:

1. The U.S. Navy uses a grid system to identify areas where naval exercises are held. The grid section immediately south of where Flight 800 went down (if I recall correctly, it is identified as "W-73" or something like that) was "active" that night. It took the Navy a long time to admit that.

2. The U.S. Navy also took many months to identify the correct number and locations of all its ships that were in the area that evening. Even now, a review of some surface radar data from that night shows at least one ship that has never been identified (this fact has led some to speculate that perhaps there were ships from other NATO countries involved in the exercise that night).

3. There is actually one major discrepancy in some of the eyewitness accounts of the "rising object" that was seen that night. The accounts indicate some confusion about where the object was actually seen in the sky, but all of the accounts place the object in one of two locations. This strongly supports the possibility that there were actually two objects involved -- a surface-to-air missile and a target drone.

4. There is a very plausible explanation for why such an accident would occur. The naval exercises were being held in an area where eastbound flights out of JFK International Airport would normally be flying beyond the range of the weapons that were being tested that night. Flight 800 had been ordered to reduce its altitude by several thousand feet just before the incident occurred to make way for a northbound flight (USAir, I believe) into Providence, Rhode Island that was behind schedule that night.

5. A variation of Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark" case is probably the most damning evidence. Related to Item #2 in this list -- the U.S. Navy vessels identified from the radar data that night began moving away from the area immediately after Flight 800 went down. This action in and of itself would be entirely inconsistent with the response of the U.S. Navy to a terrorist shoot-down of a passenger flight -- they would have pursued whoever fired the missile.

The most compelling argument came from one guy who not only laid out these facts, but seemed to have a pretty good idea what kind of ordnance was being tested that night -- a new anti-aircraft missile that tracks its target not by tracing the heat of the aircraft's engines, but by tracking the aircraft's constant radio signal. And the missile in question has a unique characteristic that seems to match the evidence found in the wreckage very closely -- instead of exploding like a typical missile, it contains a warhead that detonates near the target and throws off a cloud of tungsten-carbide cubes or pellets, shredding the skin of the aircraft from the outside.

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