DAY OF RECKONINGI had started talking to Jim Sanders after David Hendrix introduced us and told Sanders he could trust me. As a result, CBS was the first network to receive a copy of the documents smuggled out of the Calverton hangar. Since my executive producer, Linda Mason, had told me to offer all new information to CBS Evening News first,
I took the stack of papers consisting of a copy of the debris field and some other documents (including the NTSB "Chairman's Briefing/Status Report" of November 15, 1996) to Northeastern Bureau Chief Bill Felling. I also gave Felling a copy of a lab report Sanders had sent to me which detailed the analysis of red residue found on some of the jetliner's seats. Sanders was soon to become an international figure by announcing that the analysis showed that the elements in the residue were consistent with those in solid rocket missile fuel.
CBS Law Enforcement Consultant Paul Ragonese and I had met with Felling to talk about what we'd uncovered so far. First, there was the fact that an investigator on the inside was leaking documents to Sanders because he felt something fishy was going on. The debris field documents were among them and were interesting because they showed what fell off first and where it landed. Since what is hit first usually falls off first, it raised questions about where the initiating event had occurred.
Paul told Felling about his secret meeting with the FBI task force members who had told him that there were military exercises going on out there that night and that a drone had been involved. Felling asked Ragonese if his sources would be willing to come forward. I could practically hear what Ragonese was thinking (What? Is this guy stupid, or what?), but he calmly told Felling that this would not be possible because these guys would not only lose their jobs, but even worse things could happen to them. Meanwhile,
Felling didn't seem too interested in the documents I'd handed to him.When Jim Sanders was ready to go public with his "residue" story, he gave The Press-Enterprise, David Hendrix's paper, the print scoop and me the TV scoop.
CBS was going to be the first TV network to tell the story of an independent investigator who claimed he'd been given evidence of a missile hitting TWA 800 from "Hangarman," a government investigator inside Calverton.Since I "got" him, I interviewed Sanders. Sanders has a cheery manner of presenting things, and I couldn't help wondering during the interview if this man realized what he was doing. I remember, too, that an associate producer from my documentary unit had sat in on my interview with Sanders. Afterward, she told me that he gave her the creeps. I was taken aback by her remark but thought that maybe she was put off by the fact that he lacked some kind of title that would make him a more "legitimate" source. Personally, I was feeling a twinge of worry for the guy. To me, it looked like he was headed for big trouble after engaging in what I felt was either an act of courage or of supreme folly. Today, I realize it was an act of courage.
My interview with Sanders was in the can, and the documents he'd given me were on Felling's desk, yet no one at Evening News was using the material to put a story together. I couldn't figure out why, and I was getting antsy as other networks were calling him. Out of desperation, I finally did something very politically incorrect in any corporate environment.
I burst into a morning meeting of news executives sitting in the glass-encased conference room of the Evening News "fishbowl" and demanded to know why we weren't doing a story on Sanders and his documents. At the very least I felt that the fact that an NTSB investigator was smuggling documents out to him was newsworthy. As I stood there in front of a sea of white shirts,
someone I didn't recognize looked at me and said, "you think it's a missile, don't you?" "I don't know what the hell it is," I shot back, "but don't you think we should be doing a story that asks a few questions about this guy and his documents?" The silence that followed was deafening. I couldn't believe it.
When I'd walked in there, I genuinely thought that there had been some major oversight and that I was helping to correct it at a level where it could be corrected immediately. Their response told me otherwise. I walked out of there feeling like I'd cooked my own goose. As I headed down a hallway back to my office, one of the Evening News producers ran after me. She introduced herself and said that she had some good sources who were talking about friendly fire. I don't remember the rest of our conversation because my head was vibrating, but we had a few conversations after that, and it was clear she felt that the issue was worth looking into, but dangerous to a reporter's career. Obviously, she had better survival instincts than I.
Meanwhile, the story was getting very hot and other networks were clamoring for Sanders, so I was forced to give up CBS's exclusive and tell him he could go elsewhere for airtime. Of course, the minute word hit the fishbowl that the other networks were booking Sanders, Felling called me to ask me if I could bring him in again. Controlling my anger, I told him I'd try, but Sanders was already in NBC's clutches. I marched down to the fishbowl, and in front of all the producers yelled out to Felling: "We've lost him to NBC!" He just looked at me and shrugged: "So (as in so what)?" Unfortunately, I couldn't hide my contempt as I turned on my heel and went back to my office.
But CBS could no longer avoid the Sanders story. Felling called and asked me if I could get photographs of the red residue. Sanders FedExed them to me, and I gave them to Felling. That day, I went down to Felling's office to talk to him about the story and remind him of the Sanders interview that we had in the can. As I walked in,
Felling was on the phone with David Caravello, a producer in the Washington bureau. Felling signaled me to get on the phone extension to hear what Caravello was saying. I picked up right when an irate Caravello was telling Felling that Sanders wasn't credible and that he wasn't going to give him any airtime. I should have known. Caravello was producing for correspondent Bob Orr who had told me earlier that his top Pentagon contacts had assured him that the US military had nothing to do with TWA 800's demise and that it looked like a mechanical malfunction was responsible.
I couldn't help feeling that Orr was invested in the mechanical malfunction theory because he didn't want to contradict the sources that he depended on to do his job. I couldn't blame him. In the hard and fast TV news business, quick access to top sources is a bottom line.After hanging up from Caravello, I turned to Felling and told him that I thought the Sanders story should be done with a New York correspondent. For Orr to do a story that might rile his Pentagon sources would, I told Felling, be the equivalent of him
"shitting in his own nest." We could run two tracks on this story, I told him, the official Washington track and the New York track that raised more sensitive questions. Felling just looked at me and smiled a weak smile. What I realized later was that
there was no way CBS was going to air a story that would rile the Pentagon. Silly me.
CBS used a classic avoidance tactic to keep Sanders off the air while reporting his side of the story. On the Evening News, Dan Rather, reading off of a teleprompter, told America about Sanders's allegations. Rather's narration continued while the camera cut to a photo of the residue that Sanders had provided. Then it was time for the FBI's response to the allegations. The FBI's TWA 800 task force chief, James Kallstrom, appeared live. Looming large in a big-screen image,
Kallstrom told Dan that the red residue was glue. The fact is, Kallstrom lied to Rather, and Rather bought it hook, line, and sinker. Without one follow-up question, not even one asking how it could be that Sanders was able to get a piece of evidence from the hangar where security was supposed to be so tight, Rather thanked Kallstrom and moved on to the next story.Shortly thereafter, Sanders wanted to know if I wanted a sample of the seat foam with residue on it so CBS could have it tested and report the results. He still trusted me, and I still hadn't given up on the network, so I told him that I'd ask around and get back to him. I called Felling and asked him if CBS Evening News was interested. He told me he'd get back to me. He called back and said no. Given my previous dealings with him, I wasn't surprised, so I didn't ask why.
I went up to 60 Minutes (I was already developing some stories for them) and offered it to Senior Producer Josh Howard. I warned him that a federal grand jury had been convened to deal with legal transgressions connected to the TWA 800 investigation, including evidence being "stolen" (which is how the feds viewed the residue samples sent to Sanders) from the hangar. Howard wasn't fazed. "We've dealt with grand juries before," he said. I was elated. In the world of news, 60 Minutes, I told him, was the "last broadcast with balls."With Howard's permission (which he more recently told me he didn't recall giving to me, although he does recall getting the sample) in hand, I called Sanders, and he FedExed the sample to me. The minute it arrived I took it to Howard's office and put it in his desk for safekeeping until I could locate a lab. A couple of days later, my beeper went off. I dialed the phone number indicated. It was my executive producer,
Linda Mason. She sounded a little rattled. She said the FBI wanted to talk to me about some stolen evidence and that she told them I didn't have any. "Linda, we need to talk," I said.In her office, I told Linda about the sample in Howard's desk. I told her that I'd given it to him after Felling had declined to take it. She told me that Felling had spoken to CBS's lawyer, Jonathan Sternberg, and he had advised against accepting it. Felling hadn't said a word to me about consulting with CBS counsel, but I wasn't surprised he'd kept that information to himself. We weren't exactly on the friendliest terms. I won't go into the rest of my conversation with Linda because she asked me to keep it confidential.
She sent me up to see Sternberg, who told me that the government's lawyer, Valerie Caproni, was anxious to have me testify before her grand jury in Brooklyn about what I knew about Sanders's inside source, "Hangarman." The government was desperate to find out who he was. I had no idea who Hangarman was, although I would have given my right arm to know (although not for the purpose of telling the feds). Sanders had refused to tell me. Sternberg managed to convince Caproni that I wasn't the canary she was looking for. Linda arranged to return the sample to the feds, where it disappeared forever. I was deeply disappointed.
So just what was that red residue? To this day, I can't say for certain. But I can say this: physicist
Tom Stalcup oversaw the same test on the glue named by the feds (after soaking it in sea water from the same area where the jetliner went down) that Sanders performed on the residue. The results are clearly different: the glue -- a specific 3M brand adhesive (Scotch Grip 1357) -- contains no silicon (a common solid rocket fuel ingredient), while Sanders's sample contains 15 percent silicon. The 3M adhesive contains only trace amounts of calcium (the pyrotechnic that provides the burn when mixed with oxygen-providing perchlorate) -- 0.0220, while Sanders's sample contains 12 percent calcium. The 3M adhesive contains trace amounts of aluminum (aluminum powder fuels rockets) -- 0.0065, while Sanders's sample contains 2.8 percent aluminum. Other elements found in Sanders's sample were undetected in the 3M adhesive.
With the comparative test results in hand, Dr. Stalcup called the National Transportation Safety Board to inform them of his results. He spoke directly with their scientist in charge of chemical testing, Dr. Merrit Birky. Dr. Birky said he had not compared the adhesive with Sanders's sample because if they didn't match, "Well, you're not going to put the thing to bed." When Stalcup told me about this conversation, I couldn't help thinking about how the American public had not only paid for the investigation of TWA 800, but for the cover-up, too.One final note about the residue and explosives:
NTSB investigator aka "Hangarman," Terrell Stacey, told Sanders that the residue was found on seats in rows seventeen through nineteen. Interestingly, these rows were among the rows (fifteen through twenty-five) where the FBI admitted that traces of explosives PETN and RDX had been found. The FBI tried to explain away the explosives findings with a lie covered with a veneer of truth. They said that most likely those explosives were deposited there from a "spill" during a bomb-sniffing exercise carried out on the 747 when it was parked at the St. Louis airport a little more than a month before Flight 800's demise. Indeed, the 747 that was to become Flight 800 was parked at that airport. The lie here is that the bomb-sniffing exercise took place in the 747 that was Flight 800. Officer Herman Burnett of the St. Louis Police Department carried out the exercise in an empty TWA 747 jetliner. He told the FBI that he began the exercise at 11:45 AM and that it took him about another half hour -- until 12:15 PM -- to conduct the exercise and then take the dog and explosives off the plane. Burnett didn't note the tail number of the jetliner he had used, but according to TWA's records, the 747 at the St. Louis airport with the same tail number (17119) as the future TWA 800, left its gate at 12:35 PM with more than four hundred passengers on board. Big question: How do you load four hundred-plus passengers and crew along with their bags and food on an aircraft in just twenty minutes?