Montecito author's book links '96 crash to al-Qaeda
Writer accuses FBI of obstruction, cover-up
9/11/04

By SCOTT HADLY

NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER

In his new book, Peter Lance claims not only that the 9/11 Commission's report fell short but that the FBI ignored a link between al-Qaeda and the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.

The Montecito author uses a series of internal FBI memos and other documentary evidence to make the allegation about the New York office of the agency. The flight blew apart at 13,000 feet and smashed into the ocean, killing 230 people.

It was a Faustian bargain, according to Mr. Lance, a willingness to bury information about the link to protect a massive federal case against dozens of New York mobsters.

"At the time they weren't thinking about al-Qaeda, they (primarily the New York office of the FBI) thought all this stuff would blow over," said Mr. Lance, whose new book "Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding About the War on Terror" came out earlier this week.

If true, it's the most troubling revelation in the book and lends credibility to the argument that had the FBI pursued the case the agency might have eventually stopped the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

The revelations also get to the core of Mr. Lance's thesis -- that the two-year investigation by the 9/11 Commission fell short because it depended on the work of the very individuals in the domestic and international intelligence agencies who had failed in their jobs. Fully half the 75 staffers working with the commission came from those agencies, said Mr. Lance.

Sitting for an interview in a State Street restaurant recently, Mr. Lance, an author and investigative reporter who exposed a litany of missteps and failures by the FBI leading up to the attacks in his bestseller "1000 Years for Revenge," describes his new work as a sort of "minority report" to the 9/11 Commission's investigation.

But it's clearly more than that.

"For the first time I'm offering an explanation for why these warnings and connections were missed," said Mr. Lance.

It wasn't blindness or ignorance, Mr. Lance said, but willful obstruction by top FBI and Justice Department officials, who were covering up their own failures.

"We're talking about the biggest mass murder in U.S. history, and they were allowed to cherry-pick information," he said.

Although he contacted the top officials he singled out in his book, none would agree to an interview or respond to written questions.

Back in the early and mid-1990s the focus of Justice Department officials and the FBI in New York was breaking the last big crime family in the city, according to Mr. Lance.

They couldn't afford to give any credibility to statements made by one of those mobsters, who had befriended the Islamic terrorist Ramzi Yousef while the two were in federal detention. Using the mobster as an informant would have destroyed their case against the mob.

In making the argument, Mr. Lance goes through a dizzying series of connections that paint a damning portrait of several FBI officials and top prosecutors in the the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York.

However convoluted the connection, Mr. Lance has produced evidence, including a diagram of an ingenious bomb and internal FBI memos days before the downing of the plane, that detail a plot. Despite this information being forwarded to the 9/11 Commission, there is no mention of the TWA 800 investigation in the commission final report.

The connection between that incident and Sept. 11 is clear and it comes down to one man, Ramzi Yousef, Mr. Lance said.

Dubbed the "Mozart of Terror" by Mr. Lance, the Pakistani national helped build the bombs used in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and ultimately was convicted for his role in planning to bring down 11 planes in one day in 1995. Mr. Yousef is also the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the plotters behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Yousef's so-called Bojinka plot to down the 11 airliners depended on the use of a cunning bomb that used a cheap Casio watch wired to nitroglycerin to trigger an explosion mid-flight.

He actually built and tested it on a Philippine Airlines flight in 1994, placing the small bomb under his seat. Mr. Yousef got off during a connecting flight and the bomb detonated in midair, killing a Japanese tourist sitting in the seat. Though it blew a hole in the plane, the blast narrowly missed the center fuel tanks.

"He missed it by a few rows," Mr. Lance said.

Mr. Yousef didn't get a chance to try it again. In January of 1995, while mixing chemicals for another bomb, he triggered an explosion in his small Manila apartment. A co-conspirator was caught, but Mr. Yousef was able to flee to Pakistan, where he was later arrested.

While Mr. Yousef was awaiting trial for the Bojinka plan, TWA 800 blew apart and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Although investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the center fuel wing exploded after leaking fuel vapors were somehow ignited by arcing wires, Mr. Lance presents compelling information that the plane was brought down as part of a plot by Mr. Yousef to get a mistrial.

A mobster housed next to Mr. Yousef began working as an FBI informant, according to Mr. Lance. While awaiting his own trial on racketeering charges, Greg Scarpa Jr. befriended Mr. Yousef and began transcribing and relaying messages between him and other suspected terrorists.

The notes, sent weeks and months before the downing of Flight 800, included plans to blow up a plane and detailed diagrams of the Casio watch bomb. One note dated more than a month before the crash was titled "How to smuggle explosives into an airplane" and included a list of six chemical compounds mixed to make the explosive.

Federal officials ultimately deemed the information a scam and a hoax, but Mr. Lance disagrees.

"Think about it," he said. "How's a guy like that know how to diagram a device like that? That (the Casio watch device) was Yousef's signature, his special thing. No one could have known about that, least of which a Mafia guy."

But what does this all have to do with Sept. 11? Mr. Lance says it shows that U.S. intelligence officials not only missed opportunities to capture and foil other terrorists, but also showed a willingness to bury information that would shine a light on those mistakes.

Mr. Yousef himself was captured only because of luck, Mr. Lance said. But his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who perfected the Sept. 11 plot, has yet to be captured, in part because of the same kind of mistakes and cover-ups, Mr. Lance said.

But none of this information was included in the 9/11 Commission's final report, he said.

"The American people were told they would get a full account," he said. "That hasn't happened."

COMING TOMORROW: Look for a review of "Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding About the War on Terror" in the Books section.