TWA 800: Breaking -- Air Traffic Controller Tells All
As I hoped would happen, American Thinker’s
series on TWA Flight 800 has prompted individuals with first hand
knowledge to come forward. “Mark Johnson” is one. An air traffic
controller (ATC), he worked the night of July 17, 1996 -- the night TWA
Flight 800 was destroyed -- at the New York Terminal Radar Approach
Control (TRACON) located in Westbury, New York.
Johnson
has provided me with his real name, and I have confirmed that he was in
a position to know what he says he knows. He requested that I use an
alias because he has children who depend on him. The federal government,
he believes, “will seek revenge, retribution and/or any other remedy
they feel like. I would be fearful my pension would be at risk.” I have
heard this sentiment voiced by many people involved in this incident.
Although
Johnson was not responsible for tracking TWA Flight 800, he spoke
directly with the ATC who did. In fact, he asked him “plenty of
questions to prepare myself for the ‘suits’ who were beginning to
arrive.” Along with several other ATCs, he viewed the radar tape of the
incident. According to Johnson, “A primary radar return (ASR-9)
indicated vertical movement intersecting TWA 800.”
An
advanced radar system, the Northrop Grumman ASR-9 is able to detect a
“target” in severe clutter even when the target has no transponder. The
absence of a transponder is what distinguishes a “primary radar return”
from a “secondary” one. In others words, the radar picked up a small,
unidentified, ascending object intersecting TWA 800 in the second before
the 747 “disappeared from radar.”
After
Johnson and his supervisor watched the video tape replay with audio,
they turned to each other and said in unison, “What the f***!" Asked by
his supervisor if he had ever seen anything like this before, Johnson
said yes -- while in the Navy days doing missile test fires at sea.
A
day later, now knowing the full scope of the tragedy, Johnson asked if
he could take another look at the radar tape. “Can’t, it’s gone,” said
his supervisor. “We had better say nothing,” said Johnson, “or the
f***ing government will make us disappear.” The supervisor agreed.
I
asked Johnson what he and his colleagues thought in the days and weeks
to follow. He answered in one word, “cover-up.” As he explained, in
incidents involving fatalities, the FAA demands that the tapes be
preserved as evidence of fault or no fault. “So -- no tape, no fault.
What a sham!”
Word
spread quickly from TRACON. Within a half hour of the crash, Clinton
anti-terror czar Richard Clarke was summoning a high level meeting at
the White House. A civilian plane crash never before prompted this kind
of response. The eyewitness accounts had yet to come in. The radar tape
had set the wheels in motion.
CNN’s Christine Negroni provided the most detailed account of the radar’s reception in Washington in her book Deadly Departure,
an otherwise predictable rehashing of the government position.
Negroni’s primary source was Ron Schleede, then a deputy director of
aviation safety at the NTSB. On the morning after the crash, July 18, an
FAA official showed him a radar plot that got his complete attention.
“Holy Christ, it looks bad,” he said at the time. He told Negroni, “It
showed this track that suggested something fast made a turn and took the
airplane.”
That
same morning, said Schleede, “The FAA was working with people at the
top secret level. They were in a crisis room with intelligence people
and everybody else.” That same day, before the story could be
suppressed, authorities were telling the New York Times about “a mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane just before the explosion.”
Enter
the CIA. Its analysts were tasked with explaining away not only the
eyewitness testimony, but also, apparently, the radar. In a July 20
internal memo, a CIA analyst reported “no evidence of a missile” in the
radar data. By July 21, “experts” were telling the Times that the radar blip was actually “an electronic phantom image.”
Not
everyone was buying the spin. Jim Holtsclaw, a deputy regional director
for the Air Transport Association (ATA), arrived in Washington soon
after TWA 800 went down. There, a friend put Holtsclaw in touch with an
ATC in New York (not Mark Johnson) who had gotten hold of a copy of the
tape. The ATC promised to send it. “You decide what you are seeing,” he
told Holtsclaw.
Holtsclaw
knew something about radar. He served as LAX Control Tower manager and
ATC manager with American Airlines before moving on to the Air Transport
Association. As he would later testify under oath, his copy of the
radar tape showed “a primary target at the speed of approximately 1200
knots converging with TWA 800, during the climb out phase of TWA 800.”
About
a month after the TWA 800 disaster, retired United Airline pilot and
accident investigator Dick Russell received a phone call from Holtsclaw.
Russell wrote down what Holtsclaw had to tell him verbatim,
the
gist of which was that “TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy
guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from
the word go.”
Russell emailed this information to some select friends in the industry.
Although
recipients had vowed to keep the information among them, one of them
posted the information on the Internet, and it somehow found its way
through French intelligence on to Pierre Salinger.
Although
a former U.S Senator and press secretary to JFK, Salinger proved no
match for the Clinton administration and its friends in the media. In
the month of November 1996 alone the New York Times ran four articles with headlines that mocked Salinger.
A
year later, the FBI closed its case. Thanks to the “expertise” of the
CIA, the FBI’s Jim Kallstrom was able to assure America that the 258
eyewitnesses to a missile strike could not tell up from down and that
the “vertical movement” Mark Johnson saw “intersecting TWA 800” was
nothing more than “a ghost of Jet Express 18 which was at a different
location.”
It is all so easy for the White House that has the New York Times in its pocket.
series on TWA Flight 800 has prompted individuals with first hand
knowledge to come forward. “Mark Johnson” is one. An air traffic
controller (ATC), he worked the night of July 17, 1996 -- the night TWA
Flight 800 was destroyed -- at the New York Terminal Radar Approach
Control (TRACON) located in Westbury, New York.
Johnson
has provided me with his real name, and I have confirmed that he was in
a position to know what he says he knows. He requested that I use an
alias because he has children who depend on him. The federal government,
he believes, “will seek revenge, retribution and/or any other remedy
they feel like. I would be fearful my pension would be at risk.” I have
heard this sentiment voiced by many people involved in this incident.
Although
Johnson was not responsible for tracking TWA Flight 800, he spoke
directly with the ATC who did. In fact, he asked him “plenty of
questions to prepare myself for the ‘suits’ who were beginning to
arrive.” Along with several other ATCs, he viewed the radar tape of the
incident. According to Johnson, “A primary radar return (ASR-9)
indicated vertical movement intersecting TWA 800.”
An
advanced radar system, the Northrop Grumman ASR-9 is able to detect a
“target” in severe clutter even when the target has no transponder. The
absence of a transponder is what distinguishes a “primary radar return”
from a “secondary” one. In others words, the radar picked up a small,
unidentified, ascending object intersecting TWA 800 in the second before
the 747 “disappeared from radar.”
After
Johnson and his supervisor watched the video tape replay with audio,
they turned to each other and said in unison, “What the f***!" Asked by
his supervisor if he had ever seen anything like this before, Johnson
said yes -- while in the Navy days doing missile test fires at sea.
A
day later, now knowing the full scope of the tragedy, Johnson asked if
he could take another look at the radar tape. “Can’t, it’s gone,” said
his supervisor. “We had better say nothing,” said Johnson, “or the
f***ing government will make us disappear.” The supervisor agreed.
I
asked Johnson what he and his colleagues thought in the days and weeks
to follow. He answered in one word, “cover-up.” As he explained, in
incidents involving fatalities, the FAA demands that the tapes be
preserved as evidence of fault or no fault. “So -- no tape, no fault.
What a sham!”
Wordspread quickly from TRACON. Within a half hour of the crash, Clinton
anti-terror czar Richard Clarke was summoning a high level meeting at
the White House. A civilian plane crash never before prompted this kind
of response. The eyewitness accounts had yet to come in. The radar tape
had set the wheels in motion.
CNN’s Christine Negroni provided the most detailed account of the radar’s reception in Washington in her book Deadly Departure,
an otherwise predictable rehashing of the government position.
Negroni’s primary source was Ron Schleede, then a deputy director of
aviation safety at the NTSB. On the morning after the crash, July 18, an
FAA official showed him a radar plot that got his complete attention.
“Holy Christ, it looks bad,” he said at the time. He told Negroni, “It
showed this track that suggested something fast made a turn and took the
airplane.”
That
same morning, said Schleede, “The FAA was working with people at the
top secret level. They were in a crisis room with intelligence people
and everybody else.” That same day, before the story could be
suppressed, authorities were telling the New York Times about “a mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane just before the explosion.”
Enter
the CIA. Its analysts were tasked with explaining away not only the
eyewitness testimony, but also, apparently, the radar. In a July 20
internal memo, a CIA analyst reported “no evidence of a missile” in the
radar data. By July 21, “experts” were telling the Times that the radar blip was actually “an electronic phantom image.”
Not
everyone was buying the spin. Jim Holtsclaw, a deputy regional director
for the Air Transport Association (ATA), arrived in Washington soon
after TWA 800 went down. There, a friend put Holtsclaw in touch with an
ATC in New York (not Mark Johnson) who had gotten hold of a copy of the
tape. The ATC promised to send it. “You decide what you are seeing,” he
told Holtsclaw.
Holtsclaw
knew something about radar. He served as LAX Control Tower manager and
ATC manager with American Airlines before moving on to the Air Transport
Association. As he would later testify under oath, his copy of the
radar tape showed “a primary target at the speed of approximately 1200
knots converging with TWA 800, during the climb out phase of TWA 800.”
About
a month after the TWA 800 disaster, retired United Airline pilot and
accident investigator Dick Russell received a phone call from Holtsclaw.
Russell wrote down what Holtsclaw had to tell him verbatim,
the
gist of which was that “TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy
guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from
the word go.”
Russell emailed this information to some select friends in the industry.
Although
recipients had vowed to keep the information among them, one of them
posted the information on the Internet, and it somehow found its way
through French intelligence on to Pierre Salinger.
Although
a former U.S Senator and press secretary to JFK, Salinger proved no
match for the Clinton administration and its friends in the media. In
the month of November 1996 alone the New York Times ran four articles with headlines that mocked Salinger.
A
year later, the FBI closed its case. Thanks to the “expertise” of the
CIA, the FBI’s Jim Kallstrom was able to assure America that the 258
eyewitnesses to a missile strike could not tell up from down and that
the “vertical movement” Mark Johnson saw “intersecting TWA 800” was
nothing more than “a ghost of Jet Express 18 which was at a different
location.”
It is all so easy for the White House that has the New York Times in its pocket.
