We offer today our readers the personal account of former FBI special agent Neil Moran who was involved in the investigation for the explosion of flight TWA 800 since the very beginning.
We would like to thank Neil Moran for his kindness and availability.
Nastro di Mobius: Would you like to give us an overview of what your role in the investigation for TWA 800 was?
It was like that with TWA flight 800 as well. In the days following the crash, calls were coming in from everywhere. People were claiming: “I saw this”, “I saw that”, “I saw something shoot it out of the sky”, “I saw a boat in the Atlantic Ocean”, “I saw missiles go up in the air”, “It was the military”. So, all these leads obviously need to be tracked down. As with any disaster of this nature, the cause needs to be determined. Two federal violations that mandate the FBI’s involvement at the outset of an investigation like this are terrorism and crime aboard aircraft.
Did somebody place a bomb on board as has occurred in the past or was it a terrorist group that had not yet claim responsibility? The FBI and other agencies needed to nail this down, so each squad in the office had to devote many people at the outset. Several hundred FBI agents from the New York Office were assigned to varying roles immediately following the crash. Leads came in, usually over the phone. I spent the first couple of days interviewing people, primarily in Suffolk County, New York, as to what they saw. Dozens and dozens of agents doing the same, trying to find any pattern or any commonality that could make sense and lead the investigation in a certain direction.
After the first couple of days, more specific assignments began to take shape at the direction of those handling the case. People were needed to work with the Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy on the retrieval of parts of the downed aircraft. The FBI was being assisted in this effort by many federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. This was truly a collaborative effort by just about every law enforcement entity in the New York metro area. Personnel were also assigned at an airplane hangar in Calverton, New York, near the crash site where it had arranged to transport the parts of the aircraft that were being retrieved each day. People assigned to the airplane hangar were also designated to identify the belongings of passengers, where those items were being transported after being recovered from the ocean floor. Others were assigned to the morgue, and there were those agents continuing to run down leads and conduct interviews. That is how people like me initially were assigned. The first task I had after those initial interviews was working the overnight shift at the hangar in Calverton along with several other agents and members of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Military trucks would arrive fully loaded with parts retrieved from the ocean floor and literally dump those parts at the hangar. Everything needless to say was soaking wet. It was our job to identify to what section of the aircraft each part belonged and eventually, week by week, NTSB and FAA reconstructed the aircraft inside the hangar, as best they could, from those parts that were recovered.
After several weeks, the belongings of the deceased passengers began to accumulate and were gathered in another section of the hangar. That was another assignment that I had, once again during the overnight shift. I was asked to go through a big room full of belongings, most of which were suitcases, to try and identify possessions of deceased passengers, which were eventually to be given to loved ones.
When you work the overnight shift, you are normally arriving home at 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM in the morning. Whatever time you get home you might have something eat then go to bed. Working that shift is very different from being in the office or working during the day when perhaps several hundred people are coming and going to and from the hangar. You tend to hear more about any headway being made in the investigation, whereas in the overnight hours, things are decidedly quieter with far fewer people assigned. I became as curious as the public about the investigation because literally, I was “in the dark” working at night. So, I very much looked forward every afternoon to waking up and watching the daily press conferences, which were given by our then assistant director in charge Jim Kallstrom and NTSB chairman Jim Hall. They were broadcast nationally by CNN and all the big networks every afternoon at 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM and watching those briefings kept me abreast of what was going on, but they were often heartbreaking to watch.
As the weeks went on and things somewhat died from a media perspective, the case was no longer front-page news, so the news began to focus on people that were lost, the 230 passengers, and their backgrounds. One story I vividly recall was the sixteen students, who were members of the French Club at Montoursville Area High School, in Pennsylvania. The students and their five chaperones were traveling to Paris for their class trip. They were all killed in the crash. These were only teenagers and had all their lives ahead of them and suddenly they were gone.
One of the first nights that I was assigned to going through the passenger’s possessions, I had seen a piece on television about a woman named Pamela Lychner from Houston, Texas. They had shown a picture of her. I believe she was in her mid to late 30s and had two young daughters with whom she was traveling. Her husband had either missed the flight or had a business commitment at the last minute and was going to join them after their arrival in Paris. The three of them perished. I remember from watching the piece, that Ms. Lychner was attractive and had striking blond hair. A real estate agent in the early 1990s, she and her husband had bought a vacant house, which they put up for sale, when a prospective buyer contacted them. The couple met the prospective buyer and during the tour of the house while the husband was occupied in another area, the prospective buyer attempted to sexually assault Ms. Lychner. He was a convicted sexual offender. Criminal charges were filed against the individual and he got sentenced to twenty years in jail. Two years later, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice sent a letter to Ms. Lychner, notifying her that the state nominated the man convicted as a candidate for early release. She was outraged. Pam Lychner soon became an advocate for women who were victims of sexual assault and wound-up contacting members of the U.S. Senate, Senator Phil Graham and - you are not going to believe this – now President of the U.S., Joe Biden. The senators wrote legislation, which was subsequently passed by Congress and later called The Pam Lychner Act. This created a sexual offender database in the U.S., which is still in existence today. I watched the piece and was very moved by the whole story. Amazingly, either that night or the night after, I unzipped a suitcase at the hangar and found a wallet amid soaking wet clothing and there was Pam Lychner’s driver’s license and Texas gun permit. It was the eeriest thing I recall happening during my time working on the case.
Stories like this aired on television several other times. I had watched a piece one afternoon on a young couple who had just gotten engaged and were taking a trip to Paris. A day or two later I found the woman’s handbag with her identification.
I would often meet and speak with colleagues during the course of the midnight shift. People from ATF, the New York City Police Department Bomb Squad, FBI Bomb techs from Washington DC, and I was naturally curious about the progress of the investigation. I would ask, “What do you think? Are you seeing anything that is leading you to believe that there may have been a bomb planted on board or that someone fired a missile at the plane?” They would reply, “We haven't seen any bomb residue. This very well may have been mechanical, but we're really not sure.” None of them were certain at this stage.
After several months went by, the manpower in the investigation began to be dramatically reduced. This occurs in any big case where supervisors are asked to devote their people to another squad. Each unit in the office has its own caseload and when you do not have everyone devoting their time to that caseload, those investigations suffer. TWA Flight 800 was not being covered in the media with the intensity it had been in the early days and the investigation was in the hands of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, so gradually people like me began to spend less time working on the case.
It was finally determined that the cause of the aircraft explosion of Flight 800 was a spark that ignited the center fuel tank. The FBI was able to say that there had been no indication that the explosion could be linked to an act of terrorism. Our boss, Jim Kallstrom certainly could not appear on national television and say “This definitely wasn't terrorism” a week after it happened. The FBI wanted to be very careful about determining a cause and they wanted all the agencies involved to be on the same page, among them, NTSB, FAA, ATF, and the New York City Bomb Squad. This was certainly a multi-agency effort, there was no question about that.
Nastro di Mobius: How was the collaboration between different agencies? Was it smooth and easy or were there conflicts?
Neil Moran: I can’t speak from a higher level of the executive leadership of the various agencies, but from my perspective, as is usually the case the collaboration was good and that's usually the way a lot of these investigations proceed. The “worker bees”, the people like me sifting through soaking wet suitcases and airplane debris, that only days before were at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, generally get along very well with the people with whom they are working. Sometimes in these major investigations, at a higher-level of leadership, egos come into play, along with interagency jealousies and things can get a little bit testy, but I don't recall hearing any horror stories about agencies feeling that they had been mistreated or left out of the effort, although I am sure there were some.
Nastro di Mobius: How was this case unique compared to others you’ve been involved with throughout your career?
Neil Moran: Other big cases, like the one I mentioned earlier, the Lufthansa Robbery, didn't have 230 victims lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This investigation was much different; it’s something most FBI agents don't get to work on during the course of a career but working in the New York Office certainly affords FBI agents the opportunity to work on many significant investigations, which often garner national and international attention.
It was interesting talking to colleagues with whom I worked at that time as to what they were doing in their respective assignments. A fellow on my squad was assigned to the morgue, where bodies and body parts were arriving every day. I recall him saying that it was absolutely the worst that thing he's ever experienced and could not picture having a more depressing assignment. He said that he was having trouble sleeping at night because of the things he saw each day. This certainly was a very unique case, and not something that when you're going through your sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, that the instructors are preparing you for in the future. TWA Flight 800 was like nothing in which I was ever involved and no doubt any of the people that were assigned would tell you the same thing.
It was a very multifaceted case and you really did need the collaboration and cooperation of all the different agencies working together because I don't think that FBI agents will ever claim to be experts at putting planes back together.
Nastro di Mobius: What was the feeling among the investigators about the cause of the disaster before it was clear what the cause was?
Neil Moran: I'll go back to casual conversations I had with people at 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM in the morning on a coffee break at the hangar. I had worked with a fellow that got transferred from New York to Washington DC and I hadn't seen him probably in ten years. I wondered what happened to him with his career and it turned out he was an FBI bomb tech. We chatted over coffee in the wee hours of the morning and I remember asking, “What do you think?” and he replied, “We don't see any indication here of a bomb, we don’t see any bomb residue.” I also heard the same from a number of people, as I said, from members of the New York City Police Department Bomb Squad, ATF, and other FBI agents. Some people did say “This is probably some sort of a mechanical malfunction” and that's what it turned out to be.
Nastro di Mobius: Is it common in your experience that eyewitnesses give conflicting accounts?
Neil Moran: Absolutely, yes. When I was a new agent in 1975 New York was a hotbed in the country for bank robberies. The New York Office had two bank robbery squads to handle the hundreds of investigations at the time. These guys were working 7 days a week 365 days a year responding to bank robberies, conducting investigations, and making arrests. The bank robbery people had something called “Bank Robbery Rover”. I wasn’t assigned to the bank robbery squad, but in my first weeks as an agent I was assigned to the Bank Robbery Rover on several occasions. I remember showing up at a bank in the Bronx, not too far from the neighborhood where I was raised, on the other side of the Bronx River Parkway, and a senior member of the squad said, “I'm glad you guys got here, I really need help in separating these witnesses. Don't let them talk to each other or they are going to hear one another’s accounts”. Once we began interviewing the witnesses it was amazing to me the conflicting nature of what they observed. One would say, “He was a white male 5’10””and another would say, “No, I saw a light-skinned black man who was about 6’5””. “The gun was silver plated,” one commented, while another claimed it was black. The differences in height ranging from 5’1” to 6’5” is quite significant. As is a light-skinned black man as opposed to a white man, not to mention a silver gun compared to a black gun.
There's no question that people, in the heat of the moment, become confused as to what they saw or did not see, but in my experience, we often developed good witnesses, as well. When we would bring our prosecutions either to the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office or to the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, the first thing they would ask was “Is this person a good witness?” Sometimes they would just put their head in their hands and say, “Oh my God, this person's going to be horrible” and other times they would say, “I like this person, they have a real good eye for detail, and they'll be a good witness on the stand a year from now”. It really depends, but by and large it's my experience, especially with TWA Flight 800, that you would hear many different stories from many different witnesses, and I think my colleagues would say the same thing. It’s hit and miss as far as reliability is concerned.
Nastro di Mobius: In your opinion did the media pressure have an impact on the investigation? If so, a positive or a negative one?
Neil Moran: If you asked the assistant director who was on the phone with people in the highest levels of government and on TV every day he might say, “Sometimes, yes, we were pressured” but I don’t believe media pressure can force the investigators to come to a premature conclusion or for the FBI to say something that isn’t accurate. You have to think of the media of today compared to the media of 1996. Not to say that they were any less aggressive or hungrier for a story back in 1996 than they are now, but we didn’t have the 24/7 coverage that we have today.
It’s very likely that people at the highest levels of our government may have at one time or another reached out to the executive leadership of the Flight 800 investigation and said something like, “We need to come up with some answers on this case quickly because CBS is going with a big story tonight” or “60 Minutes is airing an investigative report into the case this weekend and they're going to be highly critical of our findings or lack of findings to date”. Once again, I would never believe our bosses in the New York Office would be pressured into saying something unless they could support their conclusions with evidence.
Nastro di Mobius: What "lesson learned" did you gain from this case?
Neil Moran: It is more of a personal lesson. I recounted the story of seeing that woman's personal belongings shortly after watching the piece about her on TV. I didn't know who she was and had never heard of her before and all of a sudden, I was going through all of the personal items in her suitcase and that made me realize how precious life is and how quickly it can suddenly end.
I opened a suitcase of one of the sixteen students from Montoursville, Pennsylvania, who was a young teenager. Whether he organized his clothes or whether his mother may have, they looked like they were being displayed in a department store. Everything was soaking wet, but all the clothes were neatly and carefully arranged. At the top was a windbreaker that read “Jason” or “Jacob” and on the other side was a winged foot. I ran track and cross-country in high school and in college, I was an avid runner for many years and when I saw the winged foot and I said to myself, “This kid was on the track team”. I took the windbreaker out, I looked on the side of the arm and it had 880-yard dash, an event in which I frequently competed. I just paused and said to myself, “This young boy had his whole life ahead of him and he's never going to get to run another race”. Once again, it had a big impact on me and made me realize that I should be thankful for each day and never take anything for granted. This case was proof positive that one’s life can end in an instant.
