| TWA Flight 800 |
The "unfriendly fire" theory
BY MARK HUNTER
The most headline-grabbing explanation for the downing of TWA Flight 800 is that it was the work of "friendly fire," a notion popularized by Pierre Salinger but dismissed almost unanimously by investigators at the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board, as well as intelligence analysts and aviation security experts. However, the Salinger-created furor has masked a deep split among investigators as to the true cause of the crash.
The FBI conceded for the first time last week that it was "technically possible" that a shoulder-launched missile destroyed the aircraft -- in other words, it was the work of terrorists. But the agency is "closer to the mechanical failure theory now than we were on July 18," the day after the crash, according to an agent involved in the case.
Likewise, "a large majority of investigators for the NTSB" believe that mechanical failure will ultimately be revealed as the cause of the crash, according to Dario Cremades, the American representative of an international association of TWA 800 victims. That position was not changed by a report in the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise that residue on TWA 800's seats may have come from a missile's solid fuel. In a terse joint statement, the FBI and NTSB replied that "such a conclusion is not warranted by the evidence gathered to date."
Warranted or not, a growing number of aviation security experts are leaning to the idea that a bomb or missile destroyed the plane. "In my community, we believe a bomb took this plane down," said Israel Boim, president of Air Security International Inc. "The way this plane vanished from the air, till somebody proves me wrong, I will absolutely believe it was a bomb."
In fact, the investigation is stalled by a lack of physical evidence. Although government investigators say they have recovered 90 percent of the aircraft from the ocean, the missing pieces total about 25 tons of debris. In the most damaged section of the aircraft, around passenger rows 17 to 28, where the explosion that shattered the fuselage apparently occurred, only 40 to 60 percent of the wreckage has been recovered.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are riding on this gap. Aviation attorney Lee Kreindler, who is suing TWA and Boeing on behalf of many victims' families, contends that a failed fuel scavenge pump -- a device about the size of a soda can -- will ultimately turn out to be the source of the explosion. "Obviously," he notes, "it would be very useful to find the fuel scavenge pump."
Until they do, the terrorist theory cannot be discounted, even though no one has claimed credit for destroying TWA 800. "Of the 15 airline crashes caused by bombs, only six were claimed," noted Brian Jenkins, deputy chairman of an international security consulting firm, Kroll Associates.
Even the FBI has been forced to take the possibility of a terrorist attack more seriously. After initially dismissing eyewitness reports of "sonic booms" and "a pencil line streak of smoke" rising from the ocean toward TWA 800 just before the aircraft exploded, the FBI's chief investigator recently conceded, "There were too many people who describe strange events like flares and streaks of light in the sky."
What could have caused those "streaks"? Portable anti-aircraft missiles, such as the Swedish-made Bofors RBS-70, have sufficient range to strike an airliner at TWA 800's altitude of 13,700 feet. The London Times has reported that three such "Stinger-type" missiles were smuggled into Canada last spring. "It wouldn't be hard to do the smuggling," notes Thomas Moore, deputy director of foreign policy and defense studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Nor would it be hard for terrorists to obtain such weapons. Iran, which maintains ties to such terrorist groups as the Hezbollah, is said to possess 200 of these laser-guided weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists, an independent group that monitors defense issues. Other RBS-70s have been reported stolen in recent months.
If one of them was used to blow up TWA Flight 800, what was the motive? Some expert observers both within and outside the U.S. intelligence community suspect a link between TWA 800 and the truck bomb attack three weeks before on American forces in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Air Force servicemen. According to this theory, the crash might be part of a single terrorist campaign aimed at "leveraging us out of the region," said Moore.
That suspicion was originally aroused by a faxed warning on the day TWA 800 exploded to the London bureau of the Saudi-owned Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat. The fax, from the so-called "Movement for Islamic Change," demanded that American "crusaders" leave Saudi Arabia. The same group has claimed responsibility for the June 1996 attack on the Al-Khobar towers in Dhahran and for a bombing at Riyadh in 1995. Last Saturday's arrest of two Saudi nationals with alleged links to the Dhahran bombing in Canada, where missiles have been reportedly smuggled, has added fuel to these suspicions.
A spokesman for the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees U.S. Customs, labeled speculation that terrorist missiles may have been brought across the border from Canada as "tabloid journalism." And in the absence of definitive evidence, that's all it may be.
Still, the White House Advisory Committee on Air Safety in February recommended that civilian aircraft carry anti-missile defenses, only to back off under pressure from the airline industry. That suggests that, at the highest reaches of the American government, there is at least the suspicion that terrorists are capable of the kind of act that brought down TWA Flight 800.
March 26, 1997
Mark Hunter is a staff writer for the American, an international weekly. He has contributed features to Harper's, the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post. His story on the French National Front appears in the current Columbia Journalism Review.
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