Thursday, August 3, 2006
By Jack Cashill
Since the airing of CNN's trumpery on TWA Flight 800 on July 17,
I have received more serious input on what did happen in that
disaster than in previous years. The sheer propaganda of the CNN
presentation disturbed a lot of people.
Among them is a genuinely humble Long Island systems engineer,
Chris Fidis. If on the night of July 17, 1996, Fidis paid even
more attention to the news of that doomed flight than the average
Long Islander, he had good reason. As a 15-year-old, he took a
TWA flight bound for Athens – a 747 no less – that had to circle
back to Dulles after one of its engines caught fire. Although
the plane managed to land safely, the incident inspired the
technically-minded Fidis to pay heed to aviation safety.
Following the TWA Flight 800 disaster, Fidis began his own
investigation. In time his research would breach the wall
between the official and the unofficial and reveal the depth of
the government's desperation to find some rationale for the
disaster other than the obvious.
Given his own experience on the Athens trip and the limited
information about TWA 800 then available, Fidis first looked at
the possibility of mechanical failure. After scouring the FAA
archives, he learned Boeing aircraft did have manufacturing
defects, specifically in regards to how the wiring was routed
through the fuselage. He came to the independent conclusion that
TWA 800, as well as other Boeing planes, had the potential to
explode if a short or induced flux current were to arc over from
the high-voltage to low-voltage cable as it passed through the
fuselage of the plane.
Fidis began to distribute his theory to the media and
interested government parties, a hit or miss proposition given
his lack of access. In the meantime, he continued his
exploration of the crash. The more he learned, however, the more
he began to doubt the explanatory capability of his own theory.
He was particularly troubled when trying to deduce the source of
the massive over-pressurization necessary to blow off the nose of
the plane. From the reports he had seen, the center wing tank
was not half empty – as Richard Clarke reports in his book,
''Against All Enemies'' – but completely empty. As such, it
offered no real source of pressure. The inward defamation of one
of the wing tanks and the bent landing gear likewise suggested an
external event as the source of the plane's destruction.
Fidis also began to investigate the U.S. Navy P-3 Orion plane
that had flown over TWA Flight 800 a minute before the crash. He
questioned whether it might have dispatched High Intensity
Radiated Field (HIRF) emissions either to a sub below or in
mapping the ocean floor. He wondered out loud whether these
emissions might have pierced the plane and triggered the
explosion.
An honest investigator with no agenda, Fidis included all of
his research in a report he sent to the FBI, at the FBI's
request, in July 1997, a year after the crash. The FBI seemed
particularly intrigued by his P-3 research. Fidis heard back
that the report was read at the highest levels in both the FBI
and the NTSB. Apparently, the fact that an inspired amateur was
crafting tighter theories than the professionals caused some
degree of inter-agency embarrassment.
In October 1997, Fidis heard from a well-placed source in the
media that the NTSB was prepared to go with his initial wiring
theory even though Fidis himself had moved beyond it. In early
November, Fidis got a heads-up call from an FBI agent alerting
him that the FBI was going to close the criminal case before the
month was out and that his report was the most credible the
agency had received to date.
On November 19, 1997 the FBI did indeed close the criminal
case with a press conference and a showing of the CIA's now
notorious zoom-climb video. Yes, the government did run with his
wiring theory. But more troubling to Fidis was that they had run
with his break-up sequence as well. ''As a novice,'' Fidis tells
me, ''I had the plane flying even without the nose.'' By the time
he saw the CIA animation, Fidis knew he had miscalculated. That
did not seem to bother the CIA.
After the press conference, Fidis fired off a frustrated
e-mail to some key contacts. ''I was told by a highly reliable
source within Washington that the NTSB went with my wiring
theory,'' he lamented. ''Well my wiring theory was used as the
alibi theory to explain to the American public what happened!''
Fidis continued:
''I was told directly by a congressional office, 'Mr
Fidis, your theory is the one that will come out in
the end but I can assure you that you will find it was
military intervention of some kind that brought this
aircraft down.' ''Guess what, they were right!''
For the next five years, Fidis has attempted to refine
his theory of what did happen.
We will save that for next week.
Related special offer:
Get
Jack Cashill's groundbreaking exposé, "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America"
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
© 2006
[To see the CIA/FBI "zoom-climb" video as posted on You Tube,
Click Here
- The Archivist]