It has been four weeks since my book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy, debuted. Despite a two-week media hiatus due to the conventions, I continue to receive one or two new leads a day, many from inside the investigation.
I would encourage those with information to share to contact me in confidence through my website, Cashill.com. As one new source told me, he never knew before where to turn. Another, a retired international captain, said I was the first person in the media to listen to him after years of trying to break through.
As a quick reminder, TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996. A few weeks ago, I received an email from a fellow that, in a fairer world, would have been newsworthy in itself. Joe Johnson worked with the FBI missile team on the investigation as an industry partner. He concluded his initial email with the compelling line, “It would be better if we had a chat on the phone. I can prove that it was a missile.”
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In the course of our subsequent conversations, Johnson laid out the evidence to support a missile strike: the motion correction for small guidance errors, the smooth turn toward the target at intercept, the resistance of Jet A fuel to a spark, and for Johnson, most significantly, the radar data that showed “debris exiting the aircraft at a supersonic velocity.” In the excellent 2103 documentary, TWA Flight 800, physicist Tom Stalcup considered that radar data “the smoking gun.”
Johnson also added a bit of information that may prove more valuable in the long run, that is the likely identity of the FBI agent who boldly resisted the CIA’s attempt to corrupt the investigation. In my book, I called this otherwise anonymous missile team member “Lewis Erskine” after the character Efrem Zimbalist Jr. played on the hit TV show, The F.B.I.
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Johnson worked directly with a member of the FBI missile team named Steve Bongardt and vouched for his integrity. At the time of the confrontation with the CIA in April 1997 the missile team had only two members. Based on his future performance, Bongardt, a former U.S. Navy aviator, and Naval Academy grad, would seem the more likely of the two to have defied the CIA analysts. As Bongardt says of himself on his LinkedIn page, “His efforts to fight the FBI and CIA bureaucracy in the days leading up to 9/11, in order to pursue one of the 9/11 hijackers, has been documented in the public media.”
Bongardt does not overstate his role. In 2006, the year after Bongardt stepped down from the FBI, noted author Lawrence Wright wrote an extensive piece in the New Yorker highlighting Bongardt’s exploits subtitled “Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?”
In the summer of 2001, Bongardt became aware that known terrorist Khaled al-Mihdhar was in the United States. Citing the “wall” that allegedly prevented intelligence gatherers from cooperating with criminal investigators, FBI headquarters informed Bongardt that none of its many agents on the criminal side could pursue Mihdhar. Instead, that task was left to one lone FBI intelligence operative who was himself new to the job.
According to Wright, Bongardt called the wall a “bureaucratic fiction.” Bongardt was in a good position to know how fictional the wall could be. From July 1996 to November 1997 the intelligence operatives of the CIA worked freely, if uneasily, with the criminal investigators of the FBI on the TWA 800 investigation.
“Someday somebody will die — and, Wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective,” Bongardt emailed his superiors in 2001. That “someday” came just weeks later when Mihdhar joined eighteen other hijackers in their terrorist September 11 attack on America.
If Lawrence Wright had written about TWA 800, he might have subtitled his piece, “Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from telling the truth about TWA 800?” According to a CIA memo from April 29, 1997, an unnamed member of the FBI missile team — almost assuredly Bongardt — sent the CIA a blistering critique of the working CIA theory.
According to that theory, an internal explosion blew the nose off the doomed 747. The noseless fuselage then tilted back and rocketed upright for nearly a mile. According to the CIA, this zoom climb confused hundreds of credible witnesses into thinking they had seen a missile.
