By ROGER FRANKLIN
NEW YORK - With so many conspiracy theories jostling for space in America's paranoid imagination, there is little chance the 4th anniversary (July 17) of the destruction of TWA Flight 800 will draw much interest beyond the band of buffs for whom the disaster is a consuming obsession.
Which is a pity because 230 people are dead, their loved ones still don't know why, and questions - so very many questions - go begging for answers. Indeed, according to those who accuse US officials of concealing the fact that a missile blew TWA Flight 800 out of the sky, many of those questions are too dangerous to ask.
Paranoia? Perhaps.
But in the light of the grief inflicted on former cop James Sanders, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the full weight of the law is poised to crush anyone who persists in pointing out some very obvious holes in the official explanation. And there are an awful lot of holes.
According to the skeptics, Sanders' real crime was daring to notice them.
Now it may be that the 52-year-old maverick is no better than the grave-robbing ghoul who was convicted last year of stealing evidence from the hangar where the jumbo's shattered fuselage was painstakingly pieced together. The law was intended to punish looting after natural disasters, so it seemed a stretch when Sanders was charged with the illegal possession of two small squares of fabric from a pair of economy class seats, each dusted with a mysterious red grit.
The story of how Sanders came to possess the material begins with his wife, Elizabeth, a TWA stewardess and friend of TWA Capt. Terrell Stacey, the last pilot to fly the jumbo before it took off for Paris from New York's Kennedy Airport and exploded off Long Island ten minutes later. As a union rep, Elizabeth Sanders had heard that FBI agents were leaning on TWA employees, warning them that people who spread "rumours" or challenged "official findings" were likely to end up behind bars.
So when Capt. Stacey, one of TWA's liaisons with the federal probers, called to let her know that he, too, had misgivings about the investigation, she suggested he talk to her husband, who was using the investigatory skills of a police detective to begin a new career as a freelance journalist and researcher. The two met and Stacey agreed to provide samples of the seat coverings and their mysterious red powder.
Sanders sent one swatch to a private lab, which found traces of magnesium, calcium and other chemicals entirely consistent with a solid-fuel rocket. This was not what the feds wanted to hear.
Within days of the disaster, officials had begun preaching that the plane was most likely downed by an explosion in its overheated main fuel tank. Those 260-odd witnesses who told of a missile rising from the sea atop a pillar of fire, were simply mistaken. What they really saw, officials explained, was a massive eruption of burning fuel from the ruptured tank. When the sound of an explosion reached the shore from some ten miles out to sea, the easy but erroneous conclusion was that the "missile" had struck home. To quell doubts, the CIA produced an animated video purporting to show just how easy it would have been to get the wrong impression.
Sanders' lab report, which he released late in 1977, ruffled a coop full of feathers. The missile scenario roared back into the picture and conspiracy buffs began receiving invitations to appear on TV talk shows. Some insisted that terrorists had launched the missile from a black speedboat seen loitering beneath the jet's flight path. Others, like John F. Kennedy's former press secretary Pierre Salinger, theorised that a US Navy test had gone tragically wrong.
Officials moved quickly to counter Sander's scoop.
Although the flow of information from the investigation had been glacial, the FBI took less than 24 hours to summarise what it said were the results of its own tests on the red residue.
According to FBI chief prober James Kallstrom, it was nothing more dangerous than fabric glue.
The media dropped the story and began reporting the Sanders' arrests.
When CBS was asked to hand over the second stolen fabric sample, which James Sanders had sent to a "60 Minutes" producer, the network's news executives meekly complied. James Sanders was clearly "a nut," a network executive explained, so there would have been no point in fighting to retain "bogus evidence."
Meanwhile, the Sanders lost everything. Their life savings, their home, cars and retirement accounts all were sold or cashed in to meet legal expenses. Convicted early last year, the couple quickly launched an appeal that has been slowly wending its way through the court system.
And this time, as the Sanders fight to clear themselves, there can be no denying what observers are seeing.
The government scientist who tested the seat fabric denied under oath ever identifying the red residue as 3M glue, which is green in any case and contains none of the pyrotechnic compounds he and Sanders' analytic chemist each noticed.
Recently unsealed radar records, which the federal probers had insisted showed no military activity, actually reveal that the area was buzzing with Navy ships, planes and helicopters.
The most intriguing blip is a surface vessel that speeds away from the crash scene just seconds after the explosion. To those of the Salinger school, it is a Navy destroyer fleeing the scene of its tragic blunder; to those who favour terrorists, it is that sinister black speedboat.
But perhaps the most damaging admission is the one that is almost the most obvious: Despite four years and $US40 million, the feds have yet to make a 747 fuel tank explode. They've tried charging a test model with static, cooking it over an electric heater and deliberately short circuiting the wires on a whole series of fuel pumps.
Yet, no matter what, the tank just sits there.
Finally, as the Sanders' appeal awaits its climax, there is one last, newly unearthed document which the couple regard as their supreme vindication: At the same time the FBI was scoffing at talk of terrorism, it was also paying Long Island scallop fishermen to drag the crash scene for a shoulder-fired Stinger missile launcher.
If the Sanders win their appeal and the court-imposed gag order is lifted, the ex-cop's friends say he will be back on the missile beat with a vengeance.
"For the Sanders, the truth is a crusade," a friend said last week, "For them, there is absolutely nothing left to lose."
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