The Dog Training Psy-Op That Saved the Clinton Presidency

The New York Times is a sucker for a good hoax.

On July 17, 1996, TWA 800, a Paris-bound 747, blew up ten miles off Long Island’s south shore, killing all 230 souls on board. In the days leading up to the anniversary, I will share some fresh insights on this tragedy and the much too successful cover-up that followed.

The New York Times is a sucker for a good hoax. On January 8, 2021, the Times reported that “pro-Trump rioters” struck Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with a fire extinguisher, causing Sicknick to be “rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” On October 23, 2020, the Times told its readers that the Hunter Biden laptop “prompted concerns about Russian disinformation.”

And who can forget the 2018 Pulitzer the Times won for its “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Overlooked among these journalistic coups is the role that the Times played in the corruption of the TWA Flight 800 investigation. That role was critical. The FBI spoke exclusively to the Times and led its reporters crumb by crumb to the August 23, 1996, front page headline, "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800."

On September 19, 1996, two months after the July 17 disaster, the FBI/ White House used the Times to signal a change in direction. "Convinced that none of the physical evidence recovered from T.W.A. Flight 800 proves that a bomb brought down the plane," Matthew Wald reported, the NTSB was planning tests "to show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical failure alone."

The balance between bomb and mechanical failure lasted exactly one day before the weight swung fully the way of "mechanical." On Friday, September 20, the FBI released a statement claiming that the TWA 800 aircraft had "previously been used in a law enforcement training exercise for bomb-detection dogs." On September 21, the Times Matthew Purdy filled in the details. Reportedly, on June 10, 1996, the St. Louis police used the TWA 800 plane to train a bomb-sniffing dog and left explosive residue all over the plane.

The following day, September 22, the Times published what would prove to be the investigation’s obituary. “Can you imagine what a defense lawyer would do to us?” one investigator told Don Van Natta. “This pretty much knocks out the [explosive] traces, unless we get something much more concrete.”

The temptation is to write off these radical changes in direction to incompetence. That is until one sees just how many lies it took to sell the dog training story to the public. The shift also required victims. One was the St. Louis police officer who did the dog training, Herman Burnett.

So willing were the Times reporters to believe the FBI that they failed to confirm a story that could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny. Taking its lead from the FAA, the FBI had agent Jim Van Rhein interview Burnett on September 21, 1996. . Incredibly, the FBI and the Times broke this story nationwide before a reporter or even an agent spoke to Burnett.

Six years after the incident I caught up Burnett. As he told me, I was the first person in the media to call him. Burnett had a story to tell. In fact, the FBI had no proof he had ever done a training exercise on the plane that would become TWA 800—because he didn’t.

The FBI eventually admitted that Burnett “made no notations regarding the tail number of the aircraft, as it was not his policy to do so.” Nor was it Burnett’s policy to note the gate number. What Burnett did list on the form were specific start and stop times, the date, and the notation “wide body.” That was all the information anyone had to go on.

The lack of documentation should have nipped the story in the bud. To repeat, no known record put Burnett and his dog at gate 50 or on the Flight 800 plane. The FBI claim that Burnett remembered the gate number after three months was unbelievable on its face.

Yes, a 747 bearing TWA #17119, the number for the Flight 800 plane, was parked at gate 50 that day. According to the FBI, the plane was there “from shortly before 700 hours [7 AM] until approximately 1230 hours [12:30 PM] on that date.” No one disputes this. The FBI also acknowledged that Burnett “began the placement of the explosives at 10:45 AM.” No one disputes this either, but these time details undercut the whole FBI construct.

On that June day, as usual, Burnett placed the training aids throughout the passenger cabin in a “zigzag” pattern. He let the explosives sit for a while, as FAA regulations dictate, and then returned to his car to retrieve Carlo, his dog. “At 11:45 AM,” again according to the FBI, “the patrolman began the exercise by bringing the dog into the aircraft. The exercise lasted 15 minutes, and the dog located all the explosives.”

Carlo’s mission accomplished, Burnett led him out of the plane and back to the car. Burnett then returned to the plane to retrieve the scattered training aids. He placed each aid on the galley counter and carted them all back out. Burnett estimated this activity to have taken fifteen minutes. Based on the FBI’s own timetable, Burnett could not have left the plane earlier than 12:15 p.m. Yes, the Flight 800 plane was at gate 50 until 12:30 as the FBI indicated.

There was a reason the plane left the gate. As clearly documented in several places including Captain Vance Weir’s “Pilot Activity Sheet,” Weir and his passengers took off for Honolulu in that very same 747 at 12:35 p.m. Burnett did not leave the plane until 12:15 p.m. at the earliest and saw no one. To clean the plane, stock it, check out the mechanics, and board several hundred passengers would have taken more than the 15-minute window of opportunity offered in the FBI’s own timetable. Hours more.

As it happened, another 747, a veritable clone, was parked at Gate 51. This second plane—bound for JFK International as TWA Flight 844—would not leave the gate until 2:00 p.m. This later departure would have allowed Burnett and Carlo plenty of time to execute the training undisturbed.

What seems obvious is that after the Times August 23 headline dropped, federal officials began searching the nation, and probably the world, to find an airport at which a dog exercise had taken place on a day when the Flight 800 plane was parked there. At the end of the search, someone made an executive decision not to scruple over the details.

Of course, all of this improvised public debate between a bomb and a mechanical failure was done to distract the public from the real cause of the crash until at least election day. The White House knew the cause the night it happened, a US Navy missile misfire. Its operatives just did not want anyone else to know, which meant silencing the hundreds of eyewitesses.

As was obvious from the beginning, Burnett did not put his training aids anywhere near where the explosive residue had been found. Nor did the training aids contain either PETN and RDX, the elements of Semtex that the FBI had reported finding inside and outside the plane.

To defend the FBI’s conclusions, the director of the investigation, Jim Kallstrom, lied shamelessly. When asked at a congressional hearing whether the locations of the training aids failed to “match the part of the plane where the precursors of Semtex were found?” Kallstrom snapped back, “That’s not true.”

“The test packages that we looked at,” Kallstrom continued, “that were in very bad condition, that were unfortunately dripping those chemicals, were placed exactly above the location of the airplane where we found chemicals on the floor.” In fact, Kallstrom elaborated, “An incredible amount of this chemical leaking out of these packages fell into that spot.”

The “tightly wrapped packages” of September 1996 were dripping chemicals less than a year later exactly where Kallstrom needed them to be dripped. This was a multi-tiered lie. No euphemism can paper over what Kallstrom said and did.

Officer Burnett, an African American, never forgave him. “I am pissed off to this day,” he told me. “I never lost any. I never spilled any. There was never any powder laying loose.” As with the J6 fire extinguisher hoax and the Hunter Biden laptop hoax and the Steele dossier hoax, if the Times had to swallow a hoax to advance its agenda and ruin a reputation or two along the way, so be it.