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Kallstrom's quest for redemption
Editor's note: James Sanders, a former police officer turned
investigative reporter, co-writes this report with Jack Cashill.
Sanders is the author of "The Downing of TWA Flight 800" and "Altered
Evidence," among other books.
By Jack Cashill
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
FBI agent James Kallstrom has been named head of anti-terrorism for
New York. He was chief investigator of the explosion aboard TWA 800.
He's just weeks away from concluding that the World Trade Center
collapsed due to mechanical failure.
– Comedian Argus Hamilton
Sept. 11 had to be a day of agony for James Kallstrom. He had spent
more than 20 years of his FBI career in the New York City office, the
last four of those years as bureau chief. How many good people he
knew among the dead and wounded, we do not presume to calculate.
Yet the burden Kallstrom bore that day went deeper than the loss of friends and
colleagues. As the FBI agent in charge of the TWA 800 investigation starting five
years prior, he had had the opportunity to prevent an even
t like this from happening. But he did not. The lessons that might have been learned
– and the changes that might have been made – were not.
The corruption of the Flight 800 investigation was not Kallstrom's idea. It came from
the top. But, reluctantly or otherwise, Kallstrom let it happen. He allowed the
investigation to become a farce, an unfunny running
gag, an open sore in America's psyche, and the source of an unprecedented and deeply
felt cynicism among its aviation community. To verify the depths of that cynicism,
just ask any TWA pilot or mechanic or Boeing enginee
r what brought down that doomed airliner. "Mechanical failure" will not be among the
answers.
The case of TWA 800 also served as a "turning point" in the Islamic jihad. In his
authoritative book, "Bin Laden, The Man Who Declared War on America," Yossef Bodansky
argues that in its "ability to suppress terrorist exp
lanations and 'float' mechanical failure theories" about the demise of TWA 800, the
Clinton administration opened a hellish Pandora's Box.
"To avoid such suppression after future strikes," Bodansky prophesied,
"terrorism-sponsoring states would raise the ante so that the West cannot ignore them."
Bodansky wrote this in 1999. As the director of the Congressional Task Force on
Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, he knew whereof he spoke. For the record, he is
also the director of research of the International St
rategic Studies Association and a senior editor for the Defense & Foreign Affairs
group of publications.
In his book on Bin Laden, Bodansky unequivocally cites the crash of TWA 800 as a
terrorist act. Although imprecise on the specifics of the act itself, he details the
events leading up to it and the claims of responsibilit
y afterwards. The intelligence we (Sanders and Cashill) have received since Sept. 11
strongly supports his claim. (The actual terrorist scenario, however, differs from
what most people believed. More on this when fully
confirmed.)
Having spent 25 years in the highly Catholic culture of the FBI, Kallstrom surely
understands guilt. His actions suggest as much. A month after the destruction of the
World Trade Center, he abandoned a comfy sinecure as
executive vice president at credit card giant MBNA Inc., and assumed the gritty top
job at New York state's new Office of Public Security. The new job may well be his
own attempt at atonement. He has much to atone for.
Unlike the hacks at the National Transportation Safety Board – Chair Jim Hall and
Vice-Chair Robert Francis – Kallstrom could find no easy refuge in willful ignorance
or political opportunism. In 1996 at least, James Kall
strom was a serious man with an admirable record. As a young Marine platoon commander,
he had served in Vietnam near the DMZ and fought in the grueling battle of Khe Sanh.
As an FBI agent, he worked on the 1993 World Trad
e Center bombing and led his office in its successful assault on John Gotti and the
New York mob. In sum, he had established a worthy record for himself long before he
ever knew the name "Bill Clinton," a name that today
, he must regret ever hearing.
The Clinton pattern now seems clear. Right after the crash, the White House pressured
investigators into silence under the guise of national security. But Kallstrom was
savvy enough to recognize political expediency whe
n he saw it, especially in the run up to a presidential election.
Unlike Clinton, Kallstrom truly felt the pain – in his own words – "of walking into a
Ramada Inn on day two or day three, and seeing a thousand plus people that have just
lost their daughter or their son, a mother or fath
er in some cases, the entire family." In reviewing the record, one finds an impulse
towards truth telling on his part that is unique in the investigation.
"We do have information that there was something in the sky," he told the press soon
after the crash. "A number of people have seen it. A number of people have described
it similarly. It was ascending." No one at the NTSB
dared even imply as much.
His instinct to tell the truth warred with the pressure to remain silent. A few months
after the attack, for instance, TWA attendant Marge Gross, whose brother was killed in
the crash, heard a reporter yell to him, "You c
an't tell me it was anything but a missile that took that plane down." According to
Gross, Kallstrom shot back, "You're right, but if you quote me, I'll deny it." Denial
would become his MO.
With all talk of missile off the table, Kallstrom focused the FBI's energy on a bomb –
an explanation that, technically at least, may prove defensible. (Indeed, on Sept. 11,
on ABC TV, Clinton aide George Stephanopolous r
eferred to the incident as "the bombing of TWA 800.") For months, Kallstrom pushed
this theory in spite of the overt resistance of the NTSB and covert resistance from
the White House. In the process, he made few friends a
nywhere.
Kallstrom was the only official, for instance, to acknowledge that the U.S. Navy had a
significant presence in the area of the crash. The Navy had, in fact, claimed that its
closest ship was the Aegis-missile cruiser Norm
andy, 185 miles to the south. When asked about the three vessels within six miles of
the crash site by Reed Irvine of Accuracy In Media, Kallstrom answered, "We all know
what those were. In fact, I spoke about those publ
icly. They were Navy vessels that were on classified maneuvers." This response is
tape-recorded.
Revealing, too, is Kallstrom's take on the likely residue trail that James Sanders and
TWA pilot and investigator Terry Stacy had identified within the cabin of the
airliner. Dr. Bernard Loeb of the NTSB told a House Avi
ation Subcommittee, "One thing I can say categorically is that there is no such thing
as a red residue trail in that airplane." A few days earlier, however, Kallstrom had
told The Riverside Press-Enterprise, "There is a
red residue trail."
Kallstrom's instinct may have been to tell the truth but, somewhere along the way, he
seems to have lost it. To observe him in his final year at the FBI is to see a man
whose self-loathing finds a tortured outlet in incr
easingly brutish, dishonest behavior. Unlike his ultimate boss, Kallstrom was not a
very good liar.
"I watched a news conference," Jim Lehrer once asked him on his show, "Newshour." "It
seemed to me you got a little hot when the reporter asked you about why it took so
long."
As the investigation progressed, Kallstrom often got hot – or worse. On one
well-documented occasion, in full view of the press, Kallstrom yelled "Remove him"
after a reporter asked a tough but appropriate question. His
agents grabbed the man by his arms and did just that.
If Kallstrom came clean about the three naval vessels, he insisted on lying about the
fourth, telling Reed Irvine that the critical "30 knot track" represented a
helicopter, a preposterous speculation.
Kallstrom helped spread the lie that a dog-training exercise in St. Louis was the
source of the explosive residue found on the plane, a fabrication that humiliated the
officer in question. When flight-safety advocate Vict
oria Cummock questioned this assertion, Kallstrom tried to browbeat her into
submission. "It's absolutely confirmed that it was that plane," he reportedly told
her. In fact, the exercise did not take place on the Flight
800 plane, and he knew it.
On another occasion, Kallstrom informed Jim Lehrer – a few months after the
crash of TWA 800 – the streak of light a Pakistani pilot had seen
"ascending" from the ocean was likely a "meteorite shower," an explanation
that is laughable on the face of it.
Most egregiously, although Kallstrom acknowledged that there was a "red residue trail"
across the cabin of the plane, he claimed that it was nothing but "glue." This
falsehood would lead to the conviction of Sanders and
his wife, Elizabeth, on conspiracy charges.
Kallstrom's downward spiral culminated in the November 1997 press conference in which
he showed the now notorious CIA animation and announced the FBI's withdrawal from the
case.
"That's correct, not one scintilla of evidence after all these months and all the
investigation." Kallstrom told Jim Lehrer after the press conference. "We left no
stone unturned. In fact, we looked under every rock mult
iple times. We owe that to an investigation of this magnitude and this much tragedy."
To watch Kallstrom at this sad phase of his career is to see a man so badly bruised
and compromised, it takes one's breath away. No stone unturned? The FBI interviewed
Major Fritz Meyer, the National Guard helicopter pi
lot who stared the attack on Flight 800 in its face, for all of five minutes and took
no notes.
The FBI gave Navy Master Chief Dwight Brumley one quick, cursory interview. The FBI
agent had no aviation experience and used no navigational aids. Brumley was an
essential eyewitness. He had watched a small private pl
ane miss US AIR 217 – on which he was a passenger – by a few hundred feet and then saw
a likely missile rise up off the surface 10 seconds later and destroy TWA 800.
More troubling still, the CIA based its animation – a "super job" in Kallstrom's words
– squarely on an FBI "interview" with Philadelphia mechanic Mike Wire that never took
place. This needs to be repeated. The most cri
tical FBI interview in the investigation was manufactured out of whole cloth.
When these and other key eyewitnesses protested that they were being silenced,
Kallstrom tried to bully them into submission, "I have no idea why they say what they
say," he told the press. "It's nonsense. It's stupid.
It has no base in fact at all."
When journalists and researchers tried to peek under Kallstrom's frequently turned
stones to confirm his veracity, his agency argued "national security" and feigned the
loss of a massive number of critical documents. By a
lleging "not one scintilla" and then thwarting all efforts to confirm those
allegations, Kallstrom betrayed the idea of "integrity and public service" at the
heart of the FBI mission.
To protect his legacy – or at least its façade – Kallstrom silenced even the NTSB. He
sent a four-page letter to Jim Hall on the eve of the NTSB's first public hearing in
December of 1997 demanding that the Board not dis
cuss eyewitness reports, explosives, residue trails, or any other "raw investigative
details of the criminal investigation." These details were to remain under wraps at
least "until the NTSB has definitively determined a
n accidental cause for the crash," which Kallstrom knew would be never. For good
measure, Kallstrom also banned the showing of the "super" CIA animation. In the two
weeks since its debut, the video had become the laughin
gstock of the aviation community.
To further silence all protest on the eve of the NTSB hearing, Kallstrom had Jim and
Elizabeth Sanders arrested for conspiracy – "Conspiracy Theorist and Wife Arrested" in
the memorable words of the FBI press release. Ka
llstrom quit the FBI days afterward. One senses in him at this time a self-disgust not
apparent in the squirrelly behavior of his NTSB colleagues. Unlike them, unlike the
Clintons, Kallstrom knew his behavior was indefen
sible.
Predictably, after the FBI's departure, the NTSB squandered several more years and
some 40 million dollars in its pursuit not of the truth, but of a plausible scenario
that did not involve terrorists.
To preserve this possibility, the administration had to lose, suppress or corrupt that
radar data, the satellite imagery, the explosive residue, the debris field, the red
residue trail, the flight data recorder, the cockp
it voice recorder, the metallurgy, the autopsy reports, witness drawings, flight-path
calculations, missile tests, fuel-tank tests, ignition sources – indeed, every salient
bit of evidence within the investigation.
While the NTSB was busy wasting the taxpayers' time and money, the White House was
busy spinning the story of mechanical failure, one that imposed no demands on the
economy. As to the FBI, which has counter-terrorism res
ponsibility for the United States, it was forced to pretend that the only terrorists
worth worrying about were American right wingers.
"Did you not get even a scintilla of a smell," Jim Lehrer asked Kallstrom about TWA
800 in that culminating interview, "that this might have been a terrorist act?"
"You always get a few smells when you – I mean, you always get information, and I
don't want to make it sound like we didn't get any information," Kallstrom stumbled.
"We didn't get anything that we put much credence in.
We didn't get anything with real specificity. We didn't get any golden nuggets or any
grains of gold, quite frankly."
Kallstrom is too good a man to be too good a liar. Now he takes this job with New
York state to put the lies behind him, to wash away the slime of the Clinton years, to
seek the forgiveness of the 5,000 or so Americans w
hose lives he might have saved.
As Kallstrom knows, however, there is no redemption without contrition. And there will
be no redemption for America until someone exposes from within the dark heart of the
Clinton years. It will hurt him, but James Kallst
rom may be the one man with honor enough to do it.
Related offer:
Purchase Jack Cashill's stunning documentary video, "Silenced: Flight 800 and the
Subversion of Justice" from WorldNetDaily's online store.
Related columns:
Why John Kerry talks about TWA 800
Deception for dollars
Exposing FBI's red herring: Parts 1 and 2
The fight goes on
Cracks appear in fuel-tank charade
The incredible shrinking climb
All the AG's men
Demise of the TWA 800 cover-up?
Silenced no more!
Ashcroft imprisoned by Reno legacy?
Exploding hypotheses: Parts 1 and 2
Imaginary flagpoles
The collapse of American journalism
Psychology of a cover-up
Feds muffle voice recorder data
Fateful 4 seconds
Unraveling the cover-up
TWA 800 controversy heats up
Cashill's five-part series, "Silenced: Flight 800 and the subversion of justice":
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Related stories:
Justice Department rips Flight 800 video
Haunting evidence of missile attack
'Deadly Departure'
New evidence of missile attack
TWA 800 and official lies
Investigator testifies to Congress
U.S. Stinger chief suspect
Donaldson called conspiracy theorist
Were missile parts hidden away?
Is there proof of a missile?
Was there a government cover-up?
How government stopped probers
What happened to TWA Flight 800?
TWA Flight 800 was 'shot down'
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer
with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
End<{{{
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