- A Boeing 747-100 en route to Paris from JFK
went down off the southern shore of Long Island
about 50 miles east of Manhattan.
[ominous music]
- It was a horrific scene.
It touched the psyche of the American public.
- 212 passengers and a crew of 17 were reported on board.
It is believed none have survived.
♪ ♪
- This is the first time
that the FBI ever reconstructed a huge plane like this.
- It was unprecedented.
Recovered over 96% of this aircraft
over a series of a year and a half.
- Unless it's criminal in nature,
the FBI's not gonna be brought in.
But we don't know what happened, right?
- From 1982, there were approximately 1,000 people
that were killed in airplane incidents involving terrorism.
- We were feeling, "My God," you know,
"We have another terrorist act here."
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪ ♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
♪ ♪
This is "FBI True."
[soft tense music]
- Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that included
organized crime and terrorism
and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
Coppola finished her career with the Los Angeles division
running two offices, supervising investigations,
and providing undercover security for special events.
♪ ♪
- I know you guys worked the TWA Flight 800 case together.
♪ ♪
And when I first came into the Bureau,
that had just recently happened
about six or seven months prior.
And there were, you know,
a lot of people still working on that case.
- You have an airplane that fell into the ocean
on a beautifully clear night.
[helicopter whirring]
The top story that night on all the news channels.
- Witnesses say they heard at least one explosion,
maybe two, and then some witnesses say
they saw in the sky something that looked like a fireball.
The jet had come from Athens, Greece to JFK.
It was on the ground in New York
for about three hours before heading to Paris.
20 minutes later, it vanished from radar screens
and at this point, there is no word
if the pilots made a distress call.
- And having seen it on television,
I called down to the office to see, you know,
if they needed any help.
And the next day,
they asked me to come out and give a hand
out in East Moriches where we had set up
a forward command post for the recovery effort.
- For over 20 years, Kenneth Maxwell served
in a variety of positions in the Bureau.
A member of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force,
he led investigations into
major international terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens.
Maxwell managed the FBI's immediate response
to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11.
- We immediately responded, as the Bureau always does,
in any type of major event,
especially one of this magnitude.
- Rescue workers worked through the night
recovering wreckage and human remains.
Now, the investigation this morning is being led
by a task force from the FBI and New York City police.
- There were 229 people on board the Paris-bound 747,
TWA Flight 800.
No survivors have been found.
[downbeat music]
♪ ♪
- It was a horrific scene.
It touched the psyche of the American public.
♪ ♪
- Neil Herman spent 25 years
working domestic and international terrorism cases
out of New York City.
He was a supervisor
on the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Herman is the recipient of the prestigious
FBI Director's Award for his counterterrorism work.
- Others might not know that unless it's criminal in nature,
the FBI's not gonna be brought in.
But we don't' know what happened, right?
- The fact remained we didn't know what caused this,
so we had to go into it with an open mind
and we ran an investigation
coupled with the National Transportation Safety Board.
- The National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB,
is a U.S. government agency responsible for investigating
civil transportation accidents.
As the NTSB investigate
whether a mechanical failure was responsible,
the FBI explore a more frightening possibility:
sabotage.
- A number of former investigators have said
you have to put the possibility of a bomb
or sabotage at the very top of the list of possible suspects
because as one said to me, Russ, just a short time ago,
747s just don't blow up in the sky without some help.
This is an airplane that has a very good track record,
a very good safety record.
- You gotta remember that
everything that touched that plane once it landed
from Europe at JFK International
was in effect part of that investigation.
[suspenseful music]
We had massive investigations into the airport,
we had agents shuttling in and out over long periods of time.
♪ ♪
- These things time, but I'm very, very confident
that we will, as I said last night,
get to the bottom of this.
- Jim Kallstrom, rest his soul,
took the bull by the horns and he said,
"I'm in charge of this investigation.
We have to have command and control,"
and everybody said, "You're right, Jim,"
and it went from there.
♪ ♪
- Federal investigators say
at least 65 bodies have now been recovered.
- We were pretty certain early on
that it was of a catastrophic nature,
the breakup of this aircraft
and the altitude it came down from,
it was highly unlikely there were gonna be any survivors.
♪ ♪
But a human body still can be powerful evidence
as far as blast damage, as far as explosive residue.
All of that had to take place
in those immediate first few days.
The dive teams, FBI dive team,
Suffolk County, NYPD, Nassau PD,
whatever law enforcement agency had divers.
- They were out there. - They were out there.
Recovering victims of this awful event.
♪ ♪
- I remember you had people
still strapped into their seats.
- It was amazing that
some of the victims' bodies were fairly well intact
and very recognizable.
The divers recovered them on the ocean floor.
♪ ♪
And others, you know, through time and sea life
and all the other environmental factors,
the bodies were no longer intact
and we were recovering body parts.
Then add to that when the weather got too bad
for all of our dive teams,
we leased three or four scallop trawlers
with four agents on each scallop trawler.
That was 24/7.
And the agents' job was
when those nets landed on the deck of the trawler,
they would separate airplane parts
and human remains from sea life,
and the crew took care of the sea life
and the agents maintaining the chain of custody.
I remember Jim Kallstrom relating to me
that Charlie Christopher,
who worked for him in special operations,
his wife was one of the flight attendants
who perished that night.
And Charlie calling Jim and just saying, "Please, Jim,"
you know, "Do whatever you have to do
to find out what happened to my wife."
It was devastating to all of the families,
but it took on that personal touch, if you will,
that one of our own colleagues
lost his lovely wife that evening.
♪ ♪
- We do not yet know what caused Flight 800 to crash,
whether it was mechanical failure or sabotage.
But we will find out.
- You have to remember, for 3 1/2 years
that led up this tragic event,
we had been working on the World Trade Center bombing.
- The explosion ripped through
the World Trade Center's Twin Towers yesterday,
apparently from a car bomb in an underground garage.
Five people were killed, more than a thousand injured.
- We had this ongoing investigation involving
what was known as Manila Air, or the Bojinka plot.
- Two bombs were supposed to explode simultaneously
aboard two United Airlines 747s.
One would be arriving from Los Angeles,
the other from Singapore.
- We were feeling, "My God," you know,
"We have another terrorist act here."
♪ ♪
Did someone on board commit a suicide bombing?
OR was there a bomb like Pan Am 103
that was set into the cargo bay?
- 52 minutes after departing London's Heathrow Airport,
Pan Am Flight 103 crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland.
All aboard are dead.
- People from 21 countries filled these coffins.
189 of them were American.
- From 1982 until the event of TWA Flight 800,
there were approximately 1,000 people that were killed
in airplane incidents involving terrorism.
♪ ♪
The first weeks and months, we were doing all that we could
to eliminate certain potential criminal acts.
- Every single passenger had to be vetted out,
because you're looking at
any variety of different causes here.
The law is very strict with an aircraft accident.
There's only two agencies that are allowed access
to the manifest: NTSB and the FBI.
The manifest is so important in events like this
with aviation disasters.
There may be suspects on there--look at 9/11.
- Sure, yeah. - You know?
And the manifests were key
in very quickly identifying the hijackers.
So there's a real solid basis for getting that manifest
and vetting it out fully.
- You have agents and analysts running their history,
their background, where they coming from,
what were they doing, you know, all that stuff.
- Right.
- Agents cross-reference the names on the manifest
with police reports from the surrounding areas
and review potentially suspicious internet traffic,
telephone calls, and letters from the days
leading up to the tragedy,
but they soon conclude that
none of the victims played a role in the disaster.
- But then at the same token, you're doing recovery,
you're doing the evidence portion of it,
and from what I remember, this is the first time
that the FBI ever reconstructed a huge plane like this, right?
[tense music]
[slide projector clicks]
♪ ♪
- You can't get a conviction, necessarily,
in any criminal matter
just based upon eyewitness testimony,
so you have to look to the evidence.
What does the FBI do very well?
Collect evidence and forensically analyze it.
- To reconstruct the aircraft,
the investigators set themselves up
in a former Grumman aircraft facility
in Calverton, New York.
Maxwell leads the FBI's daily operations at the hangar.
- Now think about this for a second.
What do we have here?
- Water. - The ocean.
- Rescuers said their job was made harder by three things--
the darkness-- there was no moon--
a five mile-long oil slick left by the burning fuel
in the fully loaded aircraft,
and the water, 120 feet deep.
- It was unprecedented.
Recovered over 96% of this aircraft
over a series of a year and a half
and then taking all of that debris,
millions of pieces of debris,
some as large as an almost intact wing of a 747,
to small bits of metal and fabric and personal effects
that all had to be collected and analyzed forensically.
- So you guys are collecting all this evidence...
- Yeah.
- Trying to reconstruct the plane
and in your mind you're like, "How are we gonna do this?"
- Yeah.
- How do you know what piece goes where?
Does somebody say, "Hey, we're gonna need help
from so-and-so," and you make a phone call?
What happens?
- The way the NTSB works,
when there's an aircraft accident,
they bring in anyone who has any type of role
in that aircraft.
That means the aircraft manufacturer, Boeing,
that means the airline itself, TWA,
that means people who knew where things belong
in the aircraft.
Gridding it out with the shape a 747, right?
Fuselage, the wings. - Yeah, I remember.
- And then we have separate rooms
for different parts of the airplane that were coming in.
It was a Herculean effort.
And not only the fuselage of the 92-foot section,
which was awesome in and of itself
to be able to do that.
Thousands of man-hours put into that.
We had another hangar
that was dedicated to the reconstruction of the cabin.
You know, row-by-row and galley by galley
and lavatory by lavatory.
We were fortunate that because the seats,
the numbers and letters were on the arm rests of the seats,
it really facilitated
the reconstruction of the cabin area.
♪ ♪
- Can you tell me what it was like
when the families were allowed to come out
to see the reconstruction?
- So the families arrived to view this incredible effort
to put together the airplane
where their loved ones were lost.
- Almost seven months after the crash,
family members were taken by investigators
to the hangar where the bits and pieces of the plane
had been reassembled.
- It was exceedingly emotional to witness this.
- We went in to see the seat that Jamie was sitting in,
and looking at that,
I know it was the last place that he had been
and we were given white roses
and each one of us put a white rose in the seat.
- And we were very aware of how hard this would be
not only for the victims' families,
but the law enforcement personnel.
- When you look at the empty seats
that are charred and busted up and mangled,
you immediately run through your mind,
"These seats were full at one time and they were full of life
"and full of people and children
and husbands and wives," and it's just so upsetting
to see them sitting there like that.
♪ ♪
- As the FBI continues its investigation,
the results from forensic analysis
seemingly confirm their worst fears.
- As a result of scientific analysis
conducted by federal examiners,
microscopic explosive traces of unknown origin
have been found relating to TWA Flight 800.
- It was discovered at Washington in our lab
that there were five separate-- five separate confirmations
of high explosive residue found among that debris.
The attorney general and the FBI,
they were gonna declare this a criminal act
just based upon that.
And then at the 11th hour, it came to the Bureau's attention
that the same aircraft was out of St. Louis
a month prior in June
and St. Louis Airport police bomb dog and the handler
used that aircraft for... both: Training.
- That's done often.
The bomb dog handler actually
planted different kinds of explosives
in the cabin area and the galley
just to see if the dog would find it.
When that news came in, they said, "Time out."
You know? "What do we got here?"
And so what we were able to determine
from the thorough interview of that police officer
was that four of the five confirmations
could have come from that training
because they were very similar explosive chemicals
that he had secreted.
One, however, to this day, remains unexplained.
- Investigators examining the wreckage of TWA Flight 800
have found traces of a chemical often used in explosives.
- RDX, which is a high explosive chemical
usually found in military ordinance,
was recovered off the aft cargo bay curtain.
You couldn't say, "Oh, those explosive residues
definitely came from that dog training."
But standing alone wasn't enough
to declare that it was a crime because the bottom line was
forensically, you couldn't match the residue
with any type of physical damage
to the metal structure of the plane.
- When you're looking at potential terrorism avenue,
it's ruled out, then.
You rule out that it-- - Right. It gets ruled out.
- But there were certain questions
that couldn't be explained that were left in the gray area.
For instance, in the missile theory...
- Another major theory investigators are following
is that Flight 800 may have been brought down by a missile.
- There were very compelling eyewitnesses
giving us detailed accounts of seeing something
ascend into the sky
and then seeing an explosion after following this trail.
- And more than one witness.
- Hundreds of people. - Right. Yeah.
People seeing the same thing.
- Right. Hundreds of people.
So of course, that was the starting point.
It was plausible that a missile could have risen
from the surface and taken this plane out.
- We do have some information
that there was something in the sky.
A number of people have seen it.
A number of people have described it very similarly.
- And we seen this white light, looked almost like a flare
glowing in the sky.
- Scores of witnesses tell the same story.
- It was going on a downward trail,
but very, very, slow.
I mean, it was moving, like, that slow.
And then it just, boom, just exploded.
- What was it?
- That is one of the principle anomalies
in this whole investigation.
What was it?
- There were some eyewitness accounts
that make it sound as if
a missile could have been involved.
There is precious else to support that at this stage.
Nothing in the radar leads anybody to believe
that there was a missile involved.
- The CIA had a group of their experts and analysts
look at all of our eyewitness accounts
and apply science to it
in terms of where was this person standing,
the distance from the horizon, and they came to the conclusion
that what they really saw at that distance
was the illusion of something ascending.
They really saw debris descending and falling.
- Falling, descending.
- So that theory was put to bed.
[tense music]
- The investigation began and lasted, in effect,
for almost a year and a half.
- And that's when the FBI withdrew
from the investigation, turned it over to the NTSB,
and let them draw the final conclusion.
- Each Boeing 747 is equipped with seven fuel tanks,
one in the belly and three in each wing,
and connected to the tanks are 14 electrically powered pumps.
Some investigators suggest
an electrical spark coupled with a fuel leak,
may have caused TWA 800 to explode.
- And they drew the conclusion
that the vapors in the center wing tank had heated up
and made those vapors more volatile
and that at a certain point,
a spark ignited the center wing tank
and caused the catastrophic breakup of the aircraft,
so the NTSB came to the conclusion,
"Well, it must have been some faulty wiring
that caused the ignition," because this was an aged 747,
one of the first ones off the line.
♪ ♪
Because of the age of the aircraft,
there had to have been some type of sparking event
that created the ignition for the explosion.
[somber music]
That's our probable cause.
Now again, that standard is different
from what the FBI would be required to do.
I'm not saying that they were wrong,
and I hesitate on saying this in a public venue
because there are still families out there
suffering from this, but from my perspective,
that's still an unresolved question.
There was a certain amount of anomalies
and strange phenomena that occurred here
that created such a doubt in my own mind
that I cannot, as a professional,
accept that final cause that's in the report.
And that's all I'm gonna say.
- Do you feel the same way, Neil?
'Cause you did not come to any resolution.
- It was very frustrating
because we went down so many avenues
and were unable to come to a conclusion
and in the end, there were these unanswered questions
that sort of left the doubt out there
as to what actually really caused this.
- 16 buses brought the families
from Kennedy Airport to the edge of the Atlantic,
the ocean where they lost their fathers and mothers,
their sons and daughters,
and then everyone walked down to the water's edge.
Wreaths were rowed out into the surf.
Some mourners waded in on their own,
ankle-deep in the waters
where many of their relatives are still missing.
They cast their sorrow into the sea.
- I've always said from the beginning
and I say it today that we really don't know
what caused the demise of these 230 lost souls
in a very definitive, final way.
Having spent a good deal of my life,
17 1/2 months on this investigation,
it'll haunt me to my grave not knowing in my own heart
what conclusively happened to this plane.