Thank you for having me and this is a great venue. I suspect the first time book tv has ever done one from an airplane hangar. This is my 10th book tv. Its one that is closest to my heart for a variety of reasons. Let me start with background and many of you know, on july 17th, 1996, at 1819 p. M. , twa flight 800 left jfk airport in new york bound for paris. 12 minutes later, 8 31 p. M. Off the coast of long island, popular 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 here at the twa 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, im here to tell you what happened on the night of july 17th, 1996, in the nights and days and months and years thereafter. There are 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 cause i know some of you have firsthand experience with this tragedy. Here is what we know. In the last few years researchers have unearthed a motherload of new information, from of all places, the Central Intelligence agency, the cia, which raises the excellent questions with the cia is doing involving itself in a domestic airplane crash. Well get to that in a minute. And weve also gotten some interesting videos and some a lot of whistle blowers from inside the investigation have come forward. So the state of our knowledge today is much better than it was 20 years ago. When i say we, ive got to give credit to the people doing a lot of research here, like my sometimes partner james sanders, businesss tom stalkup. Some of you know these people. And christina, a former cbs producer, ray lahr, a former pilot. Investigator john clark. Accuracy in media. And including roger, and hank hughes, as an investigator and others. So they deserve a lot of the credit for digging up the information im going to share. I wanted that to be known. As the book came out, ive heard from at least a hundred individuals from within the military or aviation interest supporting my thesis. Many of them worked for and at the investigation itself. Many of them are still angry about what they experienced and what happened to them. Here is what we know. Now, according to an air Traffic Controller, in fact, this is who contacted me after the book came out and emailed me saying he loves the book and he thanked me for treating his story accurately because i wrote about him and i did not release his name. He worked for 38 years as an air Traffic Controller and he says, i have dependent children and you hear 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. Thats what they saw on their screens in wesbury and thats what precipitated the panic in washington d. C. , it wasnt the eyewitnesses, it came out of the air traffic contollers in new york that something happened to this plane and the seconds before it intersected that airplane, it disappeared. And the twa 800 notation disappeared from the screen. The supervisor comes over to my correspondent and he says, have you ever seen anything like this before . And he said, yeah, it was a missile test when i was in the navy, saw it all the time. So it wasnt something unknown to him. And the next day he comes back in and he wants to review the tape and he goes to the supervisor, can i take another look at that tape . The supervisor says, no, its gone. Its been taken, this is a violation of all protocols, the tape was supposed to stay there for future adjudication. Now, the only person who spoke about what happens next in washington is Richard Clark, the former antiterror czar. Hes both a liar and a bragger so its hard to sort through his information and get to the truth. He spent time on this. And everybody else who writes about that period of time in that administration is completely silent about the event. Not a word. Even though it was the number one news story in 1996. And it was Richard Clark titled the chapter the almost war of 1996. Clark and i think hes telling the truth her, convenes a meeting of the his antiterror group in the situation room in the white house at 9 00. A half hour after the crash. I know from Hillary Clintons logs and from my sources in the white house, that the clintons returned to the white house just about 8 30 after a some routine fundraiser nearby. They retreated to the family quarters and there they stayed for the rest of the night. They did not go in the situation room. My source who is a very good source, i asked him who was with them in the family quarters, he could only come up with one name, sandy berger. Now, berger, the deputy security advisor and tony and elsewhere, he knew when the conversation got political, he left the room. Berger was the political guy, political decisions 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 hes going to come into the story later on, ill tell you about it. He was a former n. T. S. B. Board member, theres only five members on the National Transportation board and its a pretty powerful institution. One of the leading experts on plane crashes, so knowledgeable cnn called him in that night to do onair interpretation of events. Onair commentary and he spent the next six hours there. As he tells me, i wasnt there a couple of hours and already the fbi had taken over the investigation. He goes, as a former board member of the n. T. S. B. I knew this was unprecedented and illegal. The n. T. S. B. Was set up to be independent and at that point they sacrificed their independence and they yielded to the fbi. Now, what vernon gross or no one know at that time some other insertion was on the very first day and this we know from the whole treasure trove of cia documents weve unearthed. Here with is what we know. According to their documents, the di, thats 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 often known as the wall memo. And what the wall memo says is that theres a wall between the intelligence gatherers in the ceo and the criminal investigators in the fbi and never the twain shall meet. It cannot collaborate because it would violate peoples rights, who knows. And george tenet in 2004 at that point was the director of Central Intelligence, the head of the cia, and he told the 9 11 commission that he was the person who introduced that notion to the public about the wall. And he wasnt the only one who talked about it, but he was the first one to do it, but as the cia documents proved, the cia and the fbi, for the next 16 months would collaborate on the twa investigation what they do not say outright is the collaboration was designed to subvert the twa investigation. The cia had no other role, it becomes incredibly clear when you read their documents and to make all talk of missiles go away, because on the opening night, thats all people were talking about. When within the first few hours. We know there was at least 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 talked to one of the fellows who was the technical director at msnbc and he said, yeah, we showed it a few times and then three guys in suits game and took all copies and told us to keep our mouths shut or else. That was the end of that. And as a best elaboration of what was seeing, i got from a 747 pilot and he was willing to give me his name which allowed me to use his name, which is a sign of some confidence. He was laid up in a hong kong hospital with back surgery and his wife came to visit him. And they had nothing to do, but watch tv for several weeks, during this whole sequence of events. He said we watched the video over and over again. He says here is what we see. He said theres a bunch of people Milling Around on the deck and someone says, look at the firework. And then they see and this is a lot of those people would say the same thing, they see this object come up off the horizon, it has a red burning tip and a gray smoky contrail on headed out to sea and arched over and then theres a bright white flash, another bright white flash and a fireball and a plane falls ouf out of the sky. And. There is is book written about this, night wall. If you read it. And we get into the cia documents and they get interesting. On july 30th, 13 days after the crash. The cia analysts and i know the name of the head guy, i may or may not mention it later, and its a two or three man missile team and he headlines the memo to his superior and the names are redacted, hold the presses. Which is interesting. Which is interesting. He tells his superor that he met with the missile team. The missile team has interviewed 144 excellent eyewitnesses to a missile attack on twa flight 800. He says the evidence for a missile attack for surface to air missile is overwhelming. Their words. He said these people are mainly professionals and their testimony is too consistent for it to be anything, but a missile attack. Now, the cia analyst bragged to his superior how he discouraged the fbi from having forward with this report, which was just about ready to be published and he was successful because that report never came forward. Between july 30th and august 17th, someone gets to the fbi. They came to the job intending to do it justice, someone gets to them before august 17th because on august 17th the fbi speaks for the first time to the New York Times about eyewitnesses. Now, the fbi would speak almost exclusively to the New York Times. The New York Times became very dependent on that relationship. 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 and at the heart of the media scandal is the New York Times. They meet with the New York Times and the story is reported on august 17th so they probably met on the 15th or 16th for about 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, named Michael Russell on a barge doing some surveying work and hes pretty knowledgeable and sees out of the corner of his eye a bright white flash and sees the plane fall immediately out of the sky. Now there are two things that the n. T. S. B. Would deny happening, at the time it served the purpose. The purpose then was to switch the scenario from missile to bomb. For whatever reason the administration decided it could live with a bomb because it bomb it wasnt as scary as a missile and this crash took place started two days before the start of there was keeping people away from feeling scared about taking airplanes. In total, the New York Times would interview before it was through the fbi would interview 258 eyewitnesses, who saw an object streaking up and hitting the airplane. 96 of them saw it coming from the horizon and tracked it up. Of those 258, the New York Times would interview before investigation was over zero. Ive talked to 20 or 30 of them. Theyre still there, they still want to tell their story. Zero, they would speak to not a single one of those 258 official fbi witnesses. Now, 750 people in all gave reports to the fbi, thousands more saw it because i know people who chose not to talk to the fbi and they had good reason as it turned out. Between the 15th, the 17th and the 23rd. The New York Times kept running more stories about bombs. Rdx found on the play. Pcn found on the plane. Trac traces missile residue inside and outside the plan on 23rd of august, above the fold right, crime evidence found that the device exploded in cabin of twa 800. Thats above the fold in the New York Times, prime evidence found and theyre pointing towards a bomb, but theyre not ruling out missile. It exploded in the cabin of twa 800. Above the fold left, clinton signs welfare reform bill and Democratic National convention. One of the headlines had to go and it was this one and then the bomb talk just started going away. The day before the 23rd, im sure the Justice Department was aware that the fbi had been talking too much. So the head of the fbi investigation is called to washington for his first meeting in washington. Heading up this meeting, as best of the information suggests, is Deputy Attorney general jamie garelli. Her name will come back to play in this so keep track of that. Her boss is janet reno. Afterwards. From 20 seconds on, no interviews with eyewitnesses for several months, and those are for the wrong reasons. We know that on the 23rd, the faa started searching all over the world to see if they could stay in a place where twa flight 800 planes used for a Training Exercise. It took several weeks to find that and things began to happen. Between the 23rd, 19 september, the New York Times didnt know what direction to take because the fbi didnt know. By september 19th, the story reached washington and the ntsb in that direction. What they say is perhaps it was a mechanical failure after all. Mechanical failure alone might just explain what happened to twa 800. This is a problem still because all the resident traces of explosives found on the plane, headlines were found, how do we reconcile these things . The next day the fbi puts out a press release that twa 800 plane had been used for a Training Exercise in st. Louis six weeks before this happened. On 21 december the New York Times runs an article saying the same thing and basically kills the investigation, the people, the investigators saying it is hard to make our case that the Training Exercise was sloppy, etc. By the 21st neither the fbi nor the New York Times talk to the cops were training. First person in the media to talk to the cop is me six years after the fact, no one talked to him in that time and what they decided was he did his exercises, and africanamerican guy, who was, excuse the language, pissed off about what they did to him. They ruined his reputation. They concluded it was a sloppy exercise, still training age and what accounted for the explosive residue found on the plane, stuff found on the wing, not capable of getting out and doing that but that didnt matter. Separating the back, the front, they ran with it. Here is what they could have found out with an hours worth of investigation. The fbi, the cop put on his report the time of the exercise and wifi. He went to an exercise on a 747 in st. Louis on a wifi and from 10 45 to 12 14 p. M. Here is what the fbi do. At 12 30, the twa 800 plane left the gate. What the fbi did not say is 400 people on board were bound for hawaii. You know you cant do that 15 minutes. The cop did the exercise in a sterile plane. There was no one on board his plane the whole time he did the exercise. They could improve that in an hour. It is not even disputed. 400 people ready to go to honolulu. They were supposed to believe in a 20 minute period, an hour and a half exercise. In no way they matched the composition of the residue found on the plane. Nor does it matter where they placed it. The composition is wrong, there is no euphemism to disguise what they did. They sacrificed this guys career to get it done and he is still humiliated to this day. He gets letters from the fda condemning him and had to live with this. That was all the cover they needed. From that point on from september 21st on, the government moved into a fully different mode, the mechanical failure mode. Some of you remember that. I talked to a lot of twa people who remember getting punched in the stomach when they heard that, the fuel tank people have to bear the brunt of that if there was something wrong with the fuel tank and it. Up. I get emails from people reading the book, the fuel tank makes them angry. At that point too the ntsb has been totally shut out, supposed to do supposed to review the statements. They were sent home. Wouldnt even look at the interviews after the fbi had done them. Instead the fbi headed interviews over to the cia. Who else . To examine interviews and decide what it is, they have no experience with it, no legal justification for this. The fbi wasnt eager to do this. You can see that which they gave them, the cia, the witness statement in small doses and they only gave them one third of the total eyewitness base. They are only working on december 31, 1996, the cia analyst, give me a call sometime. And explain what people saw contained in the plane itself come all they saw was flight 800. He decided the nose of the plane was blown off and the plane took 90 up, 70 or 80 , and aviators know what a crock this is. And in the course of that, deceived people into seeing a missile, i talked to many aviators. This cant happen. It went to 13,000, 17,000 plus feet. That is what confused them. We will get back to that in a second. They contracted with creating a video to show that and that closed the case. That was december 31st. By february 1997, george tenet who has been promoted to the director of Central Intelligence, the number 2 guy when it started, and john deutsch signs off on it. The plane falls off, shoots up right, this is what it is. One heroic character from the fbi stands up, i identified this guy by name but not sure i should mention it. He is basically the head of it. There are two men on the fbi team, that tells you on april 29, 1997, he meets with the cia, and he says i dont buy this for a moment. We have at least 30 eyewitnesses coming in the opposite direction, the triple slice they saw, we have eight eyewitnesses