The FBI's Great Unsung Hero

Steve Bongardt Fought the CIA on Both TWA 800 and 9/11

Without knowing it at the time, I chose as the hero of my 2016 book, TWA 800: Behind the Cover-Up and Conspiracy, the same FBI agent that Lawrence Wright chose as hero in his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book on 9/11 The Looming Tower. In each of these incidents, the FBI’s Steve Bongardt fought a valiant, if ultimately unsuccessful, battle against the corrupting powers of the CIA, and yet not one American out of a thousand knows his name.

When I wrote TWA 800 in 2016, I did not know Bongardt’s name either. “Despite institutional pressure to yield,” I wrote, “one unnamed FBI agent refused to accept the CIA narrative. For simplicity’s sake, let us call him Special Agent Lewis Erskine. Erskine was part of the FBI’s two-man missile team.”

I took the Erskine name from the lead character in the long-running ABC series The F.B.I. Some years earlier, I had come to know the actor who played Erskine, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., through our shared interest in Intelligent Design. Like most people close to the FBI, Zimbalist would not talk about TWA 800. Only after my book came out did a contact from Raytheon clue me into Erskine’s real identity.

As I wrote in 2016, “According to an internal CIA memo from April 29, 1997, Erskine’s FBI partner was ‘completely convinced’ by the CIA analysis. If true, this suggests he had been gotten to.” That zoom-climb “analysis” was laughed at by every sentient aviator in America. In order to dismiss all missile sighting, the CIA imagined a 747 ascending 3500 feet after a spontaneous fuel tank explosion blew its nose off.

The identity of Bongardt’s CIA-friendly partner I had confirmed only two months ago and then by the most unlikely of sources, John Gotti Jr. The FBI agent in question was Ted Otto. Believing Otto had manufactured evidence to secure his indictment on old racketeering charges, Gotti walked me thought what he saw as Otto’s corrupting role in the TWA 800 case. He convinced me.

“In April 1997,” I wrote in 2016, “[Erskine} sent the CIA a blistering critique of its zoom climb scenario and demanded answers to more than a dozen salient questions. He wanted to know why the analysts failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object ‘hit the aircraft’ or the numerous witnesses who saw the object move from east to west, the opposite direction of TWA 800. In all, Erskine cited some thirty ‘problem witnesses’ whose accounts did not square with the ‘agency scenario.’ With some precision, he also challenged the aerodynamics of the CIA’s zoom climb.”

John Gotti Jr.

The most precise of all those “problem witnesses” was witness 73. As I later came to see, on that same April 29, 1997 day that Bongardt was challenging the CIA in Washington, he and Otto were interviewing 73 in her North Carolina home. Or so says an FBI 302 naming Otto and Bongardt as the interviewers.

In this second interview 73 confessed to having drunk a few Long Island iced teas before 800 exploded and wasn’t quite sure what she had seen. Witness 73 was still fuming when I talked to her in 2009. “I don’t even know what a ‘Long Island Ice Tea’ is,” she told me. “Could it have been another drink?” I asked.

“No,” she told me. “I don’t drink, not at all. There was no second interview. They made it all up.” Gotti was convinced that Otto was the one who manufactured this second 302 and slipped it into the file to fortify the CIA case. He convinced me too.

In any case, the CIA prevailed. They sold a complicit media on the zoom-climb, and the FBI closed the criminal case in November 1997. For his efforts, the lead CIA analyst, Randolph Tauss, received the Intelligence Medal of Merit, an award given “for performance of especially meritorious service or for achievement conspicuously above normal duties.”

Defeated but undaunted, Bongardt continued his lonely fight against the powers that be. In late August 2001, he was accidentally copied on an email alerting him that known terrorist Khaled al-Mihdhar was in the United States. Citing the “wall” established by Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick that prevented gatherers of intelligence from cooperating with criminal investigators, FBI brass ordered Bongardt to delete the email.

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From fighting the CIA on the TWA 800 case, Bongardt knew how porous that “wall” could be, The next day, in a call with a CIA supervisor, Bongardt was again told to “stand down.” He and other FBI criminal investigators were not allowed to track Mihdhar. “If this guy’s in the country, it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!” he said. In a follow-up e-mail, he added, “someday somebody will die — and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective.” That “someday” came just weeks later when Mihdhar joined eighteen other hijackers in their suicidal attack on America.

Having blown the whistle twice without response, Bongardt left the FBI. “I am back on my own consulting on security, cybersecurity and even doing some speaking,” Bongardt emailed me in 2017. “I appreciate the sentiments in your article. I hope you don't mind—I am keeping my powder dry for now.”

On LinkedIn, Bongardt cites his strengths as “Cybersecurity, Security, and Crisis Response Innovator and Leader.” He says of himself, accurately enough, “Committed truth finder and communicator. What you need to hear will always be more important than what you want to hear.”