Chapter Two
Lost Opportunities Had the year been 1997 or had anyone but Bill Clinton been president, it is likely that the American people would have known the truth about TWA 800 within twenty-four hours of the crash. But the year was 1996, a presidential election year. Bill Clinton was the incumbent running for a second term. And the White House, indeed the nation, was moved by his one, almost primal urge.
"All that mattered was his survival," Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos writes of his former boss. "Everyone else had to fall in line: his staff, his cabinet, the country, even his wife." Stephanopoulos speaks here of another circumstance. In fact, in his memoirs,
All Too Human, Stephanopoulos devotes not a word to TWA 800, an event too large to be slighted by chance, given his deep involvement. But to understand this event and all its ramifications, one must first accept the logic that guided the investigation, and that is, as Stephanopoulos suggests, the logic of survival.
In another time, survival might have dictated a retaliatory response, the contingency plan now "dusted off." A president's star, after all, is rarely dimmed by decisive action. But as the president mulled his options during the early morning hours of July 18, he understood something few others ever would: The events off the coast of Long Island were not neat, not at all. They would take a good deal of explaining. And these explanations might very well expose his own Achilles' heel: his uncertain grip on the role of commander in chief. This was a chance he did not want to take.
Only a John Le Carr would put the refined, ineffable Robert Francis in the living quarters of the White House with Clinton that anxious early morning of July 18. In real life, his presence there does not seem likely. And yet it seems altogether likely that the White House communicated with Francis almost immediately, made sure he was the NTSB representative on the scene, made sure perhaps that he got to East Moriches before anyone else. The White House would tell him no more than he had to know, but the marching orders he received, unlike Anthony Lake's, had no hint of fife and drum about them. While Lake was being led to believe that terrorist missiles had taken down Flight 800, Francis was being told something different, something less.
There is only one message from the White House that makes sense of all the actions that follow, and it goes something like this: "Terrorists are ultimately responsible for the downing of TWA 800. We cannot respond for sure until we know exactly who they are. Until then, we cannot even let them or the American people know that we are aware it was a terrorist act. To accomplish this, we have to remove all talk of 'missiles' and all evidence of the same, at least for now." Francis was a good soldier. In the next months, the word missile would not freely pass his lips.
The president's public message on July 18 reinforced his private one. "We do not know what caused this tragedy," he protested, perhaps too much. "I want to say that again: We do not know as of this moment what caused this tragedy." He then cautioned the American people against "jumping to any conclusions."
The White House likely gave Francis one other assignment-to keep his eyes on the FBI, to shadow Kallstrom, and to report back. All that we have to confirm this order is Francis's behavior from the moment he arrived in Long Island, but there is almost no other way to explain it.
The White House did not much trust the ineffectual Louis Freeh and had no reason to trust James Kallstrom either. At the same time, however, the White House had little to fear from the FBI. The agency had no experience with airline crashes and had been badly compromised by several scandals of its own making. For its part, the Department of Justice (DOJ) had been politicized as never before in its history. From the top down, it was now Hillary Clinton's show. She had hard-core loyalists placed throughout the department. If need be, the White House could always reel Kallstrom in through the DOJ. Besides, the FBI's penchant for secrecy might just serve the White House well.
If the plan sounds well-conceived, it wasn't. Like much of White House strategizing, it was improvised, chaotic, even desperate. About twelve hours after TWA Flight 800 went down, a military officer, off the record, attested to this chaos. He told a very tired Fox News senior reporter on Long Island that "a major screw-up" had occurred and that the "White House" had ordered the military to "stand down" for forty-eight hours until policy decisions were reached. This did not surprise the Fox journalist. For hours the previous evening, Fox News had been involved in a bidding war for a videotape of the 747 being destroyed by what appeared to be missile fire. When the electronic bidding war reached $50,000, Fox was eliminated from the process.
The high bidder seems to have been NBC. Reportedly, late on the night of the crash, editors at MSNBC had the tape on their monitors when "three men in suits" came to their editing suites, removed the tape, and threatened the editors to within an inch of their lives if they ever revealed its contents. The threats worked all too well. The editors will not speak on record to this day.
What exact "policy decisions" the White House reached in those first twenty-four hours may never be known. The administration evoked "national security" considerations to protect critical information. Over the years, however, the outline and intent of the administration's strategy have become clearer.
In the beginning, with all their talk of this "painstaking process," Clinton and his innermost circle were stalling for time, probably just hoping to push everything back until after November 4, Election Day. They might have gotten away with this stall and still revealed the truth. In those first few months, most believed that the government was merely being prudent by refusing a rush to judgment.
Clinton must have sensed that the major media would allow him to buy time. For the last eighteen months they had been the rock on which he had built his comeback, even dubbed by them to be "The Comeback Kid." To be sure, they had favored his 1992 election-a now-famous Roper poll of 139 bureau chiefs and Washington correspondents revealed a stunning 89 to 7 percent preference for Clinton over the incumbent Bush-but for all of that, they rode him hard those first two years.
What solidified the media's support was the shocking sweep of the Gingrich-led Republicans in the 1994 congressional election. "Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage," lamented ABC news anchor Peter Jennings a week after the election. "The voters had a temper tantrum last week."
This stepped-up partisanship became evident at Oklahoma City. As soon as Timothy McVeigh was apprehended-just three months after Gingrich assumed power-the major media seized on this homegrown terrorist as the inevitable consequence of the "Republican revolution" and its primary organ, "hate radio."
As to President Clinton, he never looked back. He proved masterly at manipulating the victims' families and massaging his own ratings. With the media's help he climbed above 50 percent public approval at Oklahoma City for the first time in ages and never fell below again. The Republican revolution was buried in the rubble, and a politically revived Bill Clinton understood how and why. To be sure, the TWA 800 controversy would not have the partisan tinge of an Oklahoma City, a Travelgate, a Whitewater, let alone the impeachment. It is just that in the months leading up to this desperately critical election, with the nation's future at stake, no newsroom more influential than the Riverside, California, Press-Enterprise would dare to look beneath the surface, dare to challenge even the most transparent deceptions.
At their first meeting in East Moriches, on the morning of July 18, it is unlikely that Robert Francis discussed White House strategy with James Kallstrom. If anything, he might have shared concern that the investigation be tightly controlled for reasons of national security, that all information suggesting a missile attack be kept at least temporarily under wraps. In return, as Kallstrom would soon discover, Francis would keep the NTSB out of the FBI's way.
The law favored the NTSB, empowered as it is by Congress to direct an investigation after a civilian transportation disaster. Typically, the Safety Board takes control of the wreckage. In crashes at sea, the NTSB summons the United States Navy for assistance. In this case, the NTSB failed to honor its legal obligations. At that first meeting, Francis yielded the NTSB's lead agency status and agreed instead to a partnership with the FBI in which the NTSB would be subordinate in every meaningful way. If the evidence were to suggest a criminal act, the FBI could take full control at any time. And in those early hours an FBI takeover seemed imminent. As one federal official told the Times that first morning, "It doesn't look good," with the clear implication of terrorism.
But a criminal act would demand explanation and retaliation, neither of which much interested Clinton. A formal takeover could not happen and would not. So the FBI just took over informally, an arguably illegal maneuver that had the full blessing of the Justice Department.
As the plan was conceived, the FBI would interview the eyewitnesses, triage the wreckage, and monitor the autopsies, a rich source of likely criminal evidence. As to the NTSB, Patricia Milton notes ingenuously, it "would set up its own system to scrutinize plane parts after the FBI had done its job of checking for explosive residue or signs of a bomb or missile." Indeed, were some evil genius devising a mechanism for a cover-up, he could not have imagined something quite this neat and easy. The independent agents of the NTSB-th...
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
