[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] im going to take off my jacket. We may have a few latecomers but they will come to the back. First of all we would like to welcome you to the twa museum. Sar prided joy. We hope you enjoy it. Also if you want to tour the museum youll have to go back out and around and we have a flight group that might be of interest to you. Its my pleasure to welcome jack to the museum for this presentation. He will be doing q a after his speech. So welcome, jack. [applause] thank you for having me and this is a great venue. I suspect its the first time booktv has ever done one from an airplane hangar. This is my tenth booktv. Let me just start with a little background. Many of you know on july 17, 1996 at 8 19 p. M. Twa flight 800 left jfk airport in new york bound for paris. 12 minutes later at 8 31 p. M. Off the coast of long island the popular south shore of long island it was blown out of the sky. 230 people were killed, 53 of them were twa employees. Many of you in this room knew at least some of those people. There is a memorial in their honor at the museum and if i were coming here just to spread some Conspiracy Theory i would be dishonoring their memory and i would be insulting you instead of telling you what happened on that july the mite of july 17, 1996 and the months and years thereafter. Their people in this room who know a whole lot more about aviation than i do and at the end of my conversation im going to take questions and answers because i know some of you have firsthand experience of the tragedy. Heres what we know. In the last few years researchers have found the motherload of new information found in all places the cia which raises the question what the cia is doing involving itself in an airplane crash. We have also got interesting videos. I have a lot of whistleblowers from inside the investigation that have come forward so the state of our knowledge today is much better than it was 20 years ago. When i say we i have to give credit to the people who do the Research Like my sometimes partner James Sanders. Christina borges and you came here and spoke former cbs producer, ray layer a former United Airline pilot and investigator attorney John Clark Roger aranov and hank hughes senior investigator and others. They deserve a lot of the credit for digging up information im going to share. It is one let that be known. Since the book is, ive heard from at least 100 individuals from within the military or the Aviation Industry supporting my being. Many of them worked for and at the investigation itself. Many of them are still angry about what they experienced. Here is what we know. According to an air Traffic Controller in fact he just emailed today saying he loved the book and he thanked me for treating his story accurately because i wrote about him. I did not release his name. He worked for 38 years as an air Traffic Controller, he wants to keep his pension. You have heard that from a lot of people but what he told me that night and this is a quote, he said a primary radar return indicated vertical movement intersecting twa 800. That is what precipitated the panic in washington d. C. That was the first notice. It wasnt the eyewitnesses. He came out of the air Traffic Control centers in new york something happened to his plan and seconds before it intercepted better plane that disappeared. Twa 800 dedication disappear. The supervisor comes over to the correspondent and he says have you ever seen anything like this before and he said yeah. It was a missile tests when i was in the navy. I saw all the time. It wasnt something unknown to him. The next day he comes back in and he wants to review the tape and he goes to the supervisor i want to take a look at the tape and the supervisor says no, its gone. This is a violation of all protocol. It is supposed to stay there for future adjudication. Now the only person who has spoken about what happened next in washington is Richard Clarke the former antiterror czar who is called a liar and a brighter. Its hard to sort through the information get the truth that we spent some time on this. Everyone else who writes about that period of time in that administration is completely silent about the event, not a word even though as the number one news story in 1996 and Richard Clarke titles the chapter the almost war of 1996. Clark and i think he telling the truth here convenes a meeting of the antiterror group in the situation room, and in the white house at 9 00, halfhour after the crash. I know from Hillary Clintons log from my sources in the white house at the clintons return to the white house about 8 30 after a routine fundraiser nearby. They retreated to the family quarters in there they stayed for the rest of the night. They did not come out of the situation room. My source is a very good source. I asked him who was with them and he could only come up with one name and that was sandy berger. Now berger, the Deputy National security adviser and blake was the National Security adviser. He knew when the conversation got political he left the room. Berger was the political guy in political positions were about to be made. Among them was the insertion of the fbi into the investigation. One of my most helpful people on this book and is going to come into the story later on, he was a former ntsb board member. There are only five members on the National Transportation board. A. Powerful position in vernon is one of the leading experts in the country. He was so knowledgeable that cnn called them amen that night to do on air interpretation, on air commentary. He spent the next six hours there and he goes i wasnt there for a couple of hours and already the fbi had taken over the investigation. Because as a former board member of the ntsb i knew this was unprecedented and illegal. The ntsb was set up as an independent at that point they sacrificed their independence and they yielded to the fbi. No one knew at that time that some other insertion was taking place on that very first day and this we know from the whole treasure trove of cia documents that we have unearthed and heres what we know. According to our own documents quote the director of intelligence became involved in the missile theory the day after the crash occurred. The cia has absolutely no business being involved in this kind of event especially since the year before in 1995 the department of justice sent out a memo also unknown is the wall memo and with that wall memo it says that there is a wall between the intelligence gathering of the cia and the criminal investigators of the fbi. They cannot collaborate because it would violate peoples rights who knows . George tenet in 2004 at that point was was the director of Central Intelligence, the head of the cia and he told the 9 11 commission that he was the first one to deduce that notion to the public about the wall. He wasnt the only one to talk about it but he was the first one to do it. Is the cia documents proved the cia and fbi for the next 16 months would collaborate on the twa investigation which they did not say outright. The collaboration was to subvert the twa investigation. The cia had no other role and that becomes incredibly clear when you read your documents than to make all talk of missiles go away because on the Opening Night for tall people were talking about within the fiercest first the ours. We know theres one amateur video taken of the complete sequence of events. Some of you may have seen it. It was aired on msnbc to the best of my knowledge probably two or three times. I talk to one of the fellows who is the technical director at msnbc and he said we showed it a few times in these three guys in suits came to pick up the copies and that was the end of that. The best collaboration of who we have seen i got from a 747 pilot and he was willing to give him his name and the use of his name which is a sign of some confidence. He was laid up in a hong kong hospital with that surgery and his wife came to visit and watch tv for several weeks. The start of the whole sequence of events and he said we watch the video over and over again. He said heres what we see. He said theres a bunch of people Milling Around on the deck and someone says look at the fireworks and a lot of other people would say the same thing. It has a red tip into grey smoky contrail. It disappears for second and theres a bright flash and a rather bright flash a big orange fireball in and the plane falls out of the sky. He saw the video 30 to 50 times. A nightfall, which is worth reading if you havent read it. Now we get into this cia document and they get real interested in it. On july 30, 13 days after the crash the cia analysts and i know the name of the head guy and i may or may not mention them will later come and meet with the fbi. Its a two or three man missile team and he headlines the memo to his superior holds a press or which is interesting. He tells his superior that he just met with the missile team. The missile team has already interviewed 144 excellent eyewitnesses to a missile attack on twa flight 8008 feet he said the evidence for a missile attack for surface to air missile is overwhelming. He said these people are mainly professionals and their testimony is too consistent for it to be anything but a missile attack. The cia analyst to brag to his superiors how he discourage the fbi from Going Forward with this report which was just about ready to be published and he was successful but that report never came forward. Between july 30 and august 17, someone gets to the fbi. They came intending to do it justice. Someone gets them before august 17 because on august 17, the fbi speaks for the first time to the New York Times about eyewitnesses. The fbi was almost exclusive with the New York Times. The New York Times became very dependent upon that relationship and in fact at the heart of this story im telling is a media scandal. More than a government scandal, more than anything else its a media scandal. So they meet with the New York Times and the story as reported on august 17 so they probably met on the 15th or the 16 for two weeks or so after the missile team met with the cia and the New York Times is told that there are fewer than a dozen credible eyewitnesses and the New York Times is allowed to interview just one of those eyewitnesses. Its a good witness. His name is michael russell. He is doing surveying work and is pretty knowledgeable anti seize that in the corner of his eye and bright lights flash. Then he saw the plane fall immediately out of the sky. There are two things at the ntsb would later denied happened but at the time it served a purpose. The purpose was to switch the scenario from missiles to bombs. Whatever reason the administration decided the bomb was the scariest missile. There is a lot at stake in keeping Airlines Flying come keeping commercial traffic here in keeping people away from feeling insecure about taking airplanes. Now, in total, the New York Times would interview before was through the fbi would interview 258 eyewitnesses who saw an object streaking up and hitting an airplane. 96 of them side come up off the horizon attracted all the way up. Of those 258 the New York Times would interview before the investigation was over, zero i talked to 20 or 30 of them. They are still there and they still want to tell their story, zero. There was not a single one of those 258 officials if the eyewitnesses. 750 people in all gave reports to the fbi. I know people who chose not to talk to the fbi. But between the 17th and the 23rd the New York Times kept running more stories about bombs the traces of missiles outside the plane and inside the plane. On the 23rd of august prime evidence found that it exploded in cabin twa 800. Pointing towards a bomb but we are not ruling out missiles. Clinton signs the wolf or reform bill. One of those headlines had to go and it was this one. The bombs started going away. The day before the 23rd the Justice Department was aware that the fbi had been talking too much so the head of the fbi investigation was called the washington call to washington for his first meeting washington. Heading up this meeting as the information suggests his Deputy Attorney general jamie chiarelli. Her name will come back and play her boss is janet reno. Reno was essentially a figurehead as attorney general and of course its quite embarrassing for them but they worked around them just like they worked around the National Security council through andy berger. There is no record of what to place in a meeting on the 22nd but we do know that all behaviors begin to change immediately afterward. From the 22nd on there would be no more interviews with eyewitnesses for several months and for the wrong reasons. They searched all over the world to see if they could find a day in a place where twa flight 800, the plane was used for a dog Training Exercise with training aids. It took them several weeks to find that. Between the 23rd and the 19th of december the New York Times didnt know quite what direction to take partly because the fbi didnt know which direction to take. In december 19 the stories which is to washington and now its the ntsb leading the direction. And what they say is that perhaps it was the mat mechanical failure after all. They said a mechanical failure alone might just explain what happened to flight 800. This was a problem still because we had all the exposes found all over the plane. How do we reconcile this . The next day the fbi put out a press release that the twa 800 plane had been used for Training Exercise in st. Louis six weeks before this happened. On the 21st of december the New York Times runs an article saying that very same thing and basically kills the investigation. The people, the investigators are saying its going to be hard for us to make our case. The dog Training Exercise was sloppy and spilled spilled explosives etc. Etc. By the 21st the New York Times that talk to the cops who did the training. The first person in the media to talk to that cop was me six years afterthefact. No one had talked to him in that time and what they decided was that he did his exercises. Hes an african wrecking guy and to use the language off to this day about what they did to him. But they did was to ruin his reputation. They ruined his his reputation to put even talk to him. They concluded that it was a sloppy exercise. The stuff that was found in the wing that dog was not capable of getting out there knowing that but that didnt matter. When the stuff is on the curtain separating the front and the back they just went with it. Heres what they could have found out within hours work of the investigation. Via the i, all this cop put on his report was the time of the exercise and wifi. He did do an exercise on the 747 on june 20 on a wifi indicated from 10452 0012 15 p. M. It the 800th plane left the gate. With the fbi did not say they were foreign to people on board. Some of you who have worked on International Flights no you cant do that in 15 minutes. The cops did this exercise on a completely sterile plain. There was no one on board his plane for the whole time he did the exercise. They could have proven that an hour. Now you cant dispute it. That plane looked at 12 45 with four to people ready to go to honolulu. The 20 minute period and an hour and a half exercise. It just doesnt make any sense. It is no way match the composition of the residue found on the plane nor does it match where they placed it. The placement is wrong, the composition is wrong and the plane is wrong. It was a total lyme. There is no euphemism to describe what they did and they or physis guys career to get it done. He still humiliated to this day. He got letters of may fta condemning cam etc. And yet to live with this but that was all the cover they needed. Now from that point on the government moved into a fully different mode and that was a mechanical failure mode. Some of you will remember that. I talked to a lot of twa people remembering it like getting punched in the stomach. A few people would have to bear the brunt of that story that theres something wrong with the fuel tank and a blew up. In fact when i get emails from people reading the book the fuel tankers were the angriest i will tell you that. At that point the ntsb had been totally shut out of the witness review. They were supposed to do the witnesses were supposed to review the saban and they were shut out. They were totally humiliated. The fbi wouldnt even look at them after they had done them. Instead the fbi handed the interviews over to the cia. Who else to examine interviews and decide what it is that the eyewitnesses saw. They not only had no experience they had no legal justification for this. The fbi was cited for her to do this. You could see that. They gave them, the witness statements in small doses and in time. They only gave them finally one third of the total eyewitness. They were only working for a third of them. Didnt matter. On december 31, 1996 the cia randolph house and ran off with you are watching give me a call sometime, came to the conclusion that all he needs to do to explain what these people saw is contained within one plane itself. He decides that the nose of the plane was blown off and the plane tickets 70 or 80 degrees and then aviators in this room know what a crock that says it shot up 4000 e. And in the course of that deceive people into thinking they were receiving a missile. Many people said this cant happen. And they went from 13000 feet to 17,000 plus feet. Now we will get back to that in the second because there also co