Chris Farrell - Did the government hide the truth about TWA Flight 800?

Nearly 30 years after TWA Flight 800 crashed, newly highlighted FBI documents are raising fresh questions about what really happened. Was key evidence overlooked or concealed? Chris Farrell is Director of Investigations and Research at Judicial Watch. He joins the show to discuss the new findings, the documentary examining the disaster, and why the case continues to generate controversy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hey, welcome back to the Lawrence Lawrence Show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails in a moment. First, though, I want to talk to Chris Farrell, who is Director of Investigations and Research at JudicialWatch. That's the outfit, Tom Fitton's outfit, that's been going around America making sure that all those jurisdictions like Los Angeles have to take all their phony voter registrations off the rolls. But this is about something entirely different. And I've actually got a small personal tie to what happened. So 30 years ago or so, TWA Flight 800 went down, and all of us were told it was mechanical failure. If I remember correctly, they said it was a fault in the pumps inside the fuel tanks on board that airplane. So there is some new information, though. And the question is: did the government hide the truth from 230 victim families for almost 30 years? Chris, welcome back to the program.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Laura, it's great to be with you. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Now, I try not to jump into conspiracy theories with both feet, but back in the day after TWA 800 went down, there were lots and lots of theories about what happened. And I even found the most persuasive one was the long technical one I read that had to do with pumps and electrical faults in a fuel tank and those kinds of things. Is it the fact that perhaps there's new information that suggests it really was something else?

SPEAKER_00 1:25

There is. We have an FBI document that we uncovered where the FBI has a cable and electronic communication. Back in 96, of course, the world communicated it a little bit differently than we do now. But the FBI record states, as a simple declarative sentence, that they have faxes from Cairo claiming credit for downing the aircraft. And uh we're obviously pursuing that. We want to know more of those sort of basic interrogatives about who went when, where, how, and why the FBI got them and what they did, and you know, all the follow-up you would imagine. But this was really a pretty astounding discovery because anybody who even suggested terrorism, you know, they basically got their head chopped off. That was not even permitted to be discussed. Terrorism was out of the question.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

I had a friend who was on that flight, uh police detective that I knew I knew she and her husband as well, and they died on TWA Flight 800. Uh, but I'm wondering what would be the incentive? I I don't understand why, if the government suspected it was terrorism, why wouldn't they be, you know, at you know, at least willing to tell the public it it was possible terrorism? What would what why would they have held it back?

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Unfortunately, this is where politics gets involved. And uh two days later, the Atlanta Olympics were starting. Um you had had the uh Coboy Tower bombing the year before, you had a domestic level, you had Oklahoma City, you had the downning of Pan Am 103 over Lockheed, Scotland. Um, you had the Bojinka plot, which was one year before, where they wanted to knock down 11 U.S. flag carriers over the Pacific. So there had been a string of both real and imagined, both foreign and domestic terror events, all kind of sitting in the lap of the administration. This is July, the election was November, and there's people that did not want to have 230 people killed five miles off the coast of Long Island, and uh you know, no ability to strike back or to have America look further victimized. Uh yeah, part of the problem, of course, with this entire thing is that no 747 before or after ever experienced what happened with Flight 800.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Meaning that the likelihood that it was a fuel tank and fuel pump problem or an electrical fault was extraordinarily unlikely based on that safety rate.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

In fact, in in the documentary that we put out uh this past weekend, we have the the chief uh TWA 747 pilot for all of the long-haul flights, the transatlantic, trans-Pacific flights, the number one guy in charge at the time, and we've interviewed him at length, and he says, anybody who talks about this spark of unknown origin igniting an empty fuel tank knows nothing about aviation and about that aircraft. That it is it is an impossibility. In fact, they even tried to replicate uh those situations, those circumstances in England and were unable to do so. Um and he explains why and how far better in a much more articulate way than I can. But the other thing that's crazy is they never even grounded the 747 fleet. You know, Boeing had problems with the Dreamliner and they grounded all the planes until they checked them out and inspected them and did repairs. No 747 was ever grounded. If these things are supposedly flying bombs, don't you think that they would have grounded the aircraft and had them inspected and double-checked the wiring and everything else? It was never done.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

So tell me this. Is there a way to get the government to actually set the record straight, even though it's 30 years later, and say, we'll make an official finding?

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Yeah, my good friend and colleague Tom Fitton, who I've worked with for the last 27 years, has communicated with Secretary Duffy and said, Look, you need to have the NTSB reopen this case because now we know from the FBI that there was a plausible terror claim made. The FBI reported that it was made. Uh, and we it really, 30 years later, we're in a very different environment, a different world, and we need to take a serious look at what happened and and run these facts down to ground. Uh you know, 230 folks died. You have friends, obviously, you were lost. I have a uh a friend who's a was a flight attendant for TWA for years. Her brother was on the way to Paris with a w uh an engagement ring in his pocket, right? And that never happened. Uh so there's lots of stories like that, and there's never been a convincing explanation. The NTSB only offers a theory. They don't say that they have a cause for the for the explosion. They have a theory about what might have happened. That's it. Except that now we have an FBI document saying that, you know, and there's also radar tracks.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

You know, that's another very old thing that we didn't. I think that's a lot of people citing that as evidence. And and then if it was really launched from a seaborne platform, that means that they were aware it may have been taken down by terrorism. They were aware that the people who may have launched the terrorist attack were still out there and heading up to the Olympics at the time said we're just gonna let them be out there because of politics.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

I mean, this is hard to resolve, right? I mean, I I I mean, I wish I was able to wave a magic wand to give a perfect answer on this, but continuing continuing to ignore it is certainly not the right answer. We now have new information, and I think we need to act on it.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah, and I wonder how much physical evidence is left at all. Is there?

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Very little. The the uh the FAA decided they had reconstructed a huge amount of the aircraft based on debris that was recovered from the sea, and they kept that wreckage uh in a hangar literally for you know for years, and then just about four and a half, five years ago, they decided to destroy all of it. And I never quite understood why there was a need to do that, but they did. But we still have substantial information and leads that can be tracked down, and I think uh we owe it to the uh to the surviving family members.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

And Chris, I feel a bit guilty because I read a lot about that at the time and the coverage and the NTSB reports and all that, and I was convinced that it was the fuel tank theory. So if I was wrong, I'll be happy to correct that. That is Chris Farrell, Director of Investigations and Research at Judicial Watch. Send your emails to talk at larrislarsen.com and check out our feed on Instagram.