TWA 800—It's What They Don't Say That Tells the Tale

The Memoirs of the Culpable Give the Game Away

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.

Given the gravity of the situation in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, and the fact that TWA 800 was voted number one news story of that year, one would have expected Clinton and his advisors to feature this saga in their respective memoirs. Yet save for the self-serving Richard Clarke, they did not, not at all. So suffocating was the shroud of silence that cloaked the TWA 800 investigation that the individuals most deeply involved all but refused to talk about it.

In his bestselling 2004 memoir, Against All Enemies, Clarke provided the most detailed account of the behind the scenes maneuvering after the 8:31 p.m. destruction of TWA Flight 800. At the time, Clarke served as chairman of the Coordinating Security Group (CSG) on terrorism. Within thirty minutes of the plane’s crash, wrote Clarke, he had called a meeting of the CSG in the White House Situation Room.

This involved the FBI, the CIA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the departments of State and Defense, the Pentagon, and the Coast Guard. “The investigation [looked] at almost every possibility including a state actor,” said CIA Director Leon Panetta. From the beginning, no one considered this an ordinary plane crash. So charged was the atmosphere following TWA 800’s destruction that Clarke called this moment in history, “The Almost War, 1996.”

In his 957-page 2004 memoir, My Life, Bill Clinton spent one paragraph on TWA 800 and that a thoroughly dishonest one. “At the time everyone assumed—wrongly as it turned out—that this was a terrorist act,” Clinton wrote. “There was even speculation that the plane had been downed by a rocket fired from a boat in Long Island Sound.” A “rocket’?

No, the 56 certified NTSB witnesses who claimed to see an object ascend from the horizon all traced its provenance to the Atlantic Ocean, south of Long Island. The Sound is north of Long Island.

In her 2003, 528-page memoir, Living History, Hillary Clinton does not mention the three agonizing hours spent consoling the family members of the deceased. In fact, she spent just one-third of a sentence on TWA 800, which, for her, was merely one out of several “tragic events” that summer.

In his 2005 memoir, My FBI: Bringing Down The Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror, former FBI director Louis Freeh mentioned TWA 800 in passing as a footnote to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudia Arabia. No investigation during Freeh’s tenure generated more news coverage or demanded as much FBI attention, and yet Freeh begrudged it only two sentences.

In his 2004 memoir Off With Their Heads, presidential advisor Dick Morris teased his audience but did not deliver. He cited TWA 800 as one of “three attacks” in the “terror summer of 1996.” He did not shy from speaking in detail of the other two“attacks”—Khobar Towers and the Olympic Park bombing—but about TWA 800 he had nothing to say beyond listing it with the other two.

I got the Morris treatment first hand when he and I were phone-in guests on Paul Schiffer’s Cleveland radio show. Three times I asked Morris to elaborate on his TWA 800 remarks. Three times he responded as though he had not even heard my question.

On the morning of 9/11, live on air with with ABC’sPeter Jennings, Clinton advisor George Stephanopolous excitedly blurted out the details of the Situation Room meeting after the “TWA Flight 800 bombing.” Bombing or not, he did not spare the incident a single word in his 1999 memoir All Too Human.

Although he oversaw the CIA’s illegal management of the TWA 800 investigation as acting director, George Tenet failed to even mention the disaster in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.

Clinton’s then chief-of-staff (and future CIA Director) Leon Panetta called the president with the news of the plane’s downing. “The concern at that moment was that this might very well be a terrorist act,” Panetta would tell CNN. The concern was apparently not memorable enough to earn even the slightest mention in Panetta’s 2014 memoir, Worthy Fights.

TWA 800 and the ensuing investigation would seem perfect fodder for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee’s “Special Report” for that period of time explored the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks before the TWA 800 disaster and a variety of other intelligence-related stories in the news. The report, however, was fully silent on the subject of TWA 800. This was all the more troubling given the CIA’s own acknowledgement that “the DI [Directorate of Intelligence] became involved in the ‘missile theory’ the day after the crash occurred.”

Tim Weiner covered TWA 800 for the New York Times. In his 2008 bestseller, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, he had the opportunity to make amends for the paper’s failure to smoke out CIA mischief during the course of the investigation. To no one’s great surprise, he chose not to even mention TWA 800.

As the lone White House chronicler of the TWA 800 aftermath, Richard Clarke had a reason to come forward beyond the financial rewards for Bush bashing. His testimony on TWA 800 buttressed the administration case just when the 9/11 Commission might have been tempted to scrutinize it. Unfortunately, little of what he wrote was true.

“The FAA,” he reported, “was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft.” In fact, if the FAA had no explanation, its people would have likely contacted the NTSB. Clarke was summoned precisely because the FAA did have an explanation: the radar data showed an unknown object approaching TWA 800 just before it blew up. It was the radar data, not the eyewitness reports, that prompted Clarke’s meeting.

Clarke attributed the “17,000 feet” reference to the FAA, but the FAA knew the plane climbed no higher than 13,800 feet. Ir was the CIA that would imagine the noseless aircraft climbing to 17,000 feet after an inexplicable fuel tank explosion. As the man who “shot” Liberty Valance reminded us, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

If the failure of any high ranking Navy personnel to fess up to a tragic Naval mishap proves there was no mishap, what then does the silence of their political masters prove? It proves, if anything, that involved parties have much to fear, and it’s not just their pensions.

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