Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/042792/04279927.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 33

GANDER

Different Crash, Same Questions


Officials blamed the 1985 tragedy on icy wings. Was it really
sabotage aimed at some of the plane's passengers?

By ROY ROWAN


    Flying home for Christmas in 1985, three years before the
Pan Am bombing, 248 American soldiers and eight crew members
died when their chartered DC-8 jet plunged to earth just after
taking off from a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland. It was
the worst U.S. military air disaster ever. Icing of the wings
was immediately suggested as the cause, although Islamic Jihad
terrorists just as quickly boasted of blowing up the jet.

    It wasn't until 1989 that an Iran-contra connection to the
tragedy was revealed. Arrow Air, the charter company, turned out
to be one of Lieut. Colonel Oliver North's regular arms
shippers. Although most of the crash victims belonged to the
U.S. 101st Airborne Division, returning from six months' duty
with the multinational peacekeeping force in the Sinai, more
than 20 Special Forces personnel trained for counterterrorist
missions were also on board. Suspicions have recently deepened
that they, like Charles McKee and the members of his
hostage-rescue team on Pan Am Flight 103, were the target of an
attack.

    Both the U.S. and Canadian governments seemed determined
to literally bury any evidence that might point to such a
conclusion. Major General John Crosby, then the U.S. Army's
deputy chief of staff for personnel, arrived in Gander within
hours of the tragedy. He was quoted by the Arrow Air maintenance
chief as wanting to "bulldoze over the crash site immediately,"
although Crosby has denied it. Just as quickly, White House
spokesman Larry Speakes assured the world there was "no evidence
of sabotage or an explosion in flight."

    In 1988, after interminable foot dragging and infighting,
the nine-member Canadian Aviation Safety Board issued a split
verdict. Five attributed the crash to ice formation and not to
an explosion. But four, including two aeronautical engineers,
disagreed so vociferously that a former Canadian supreme court
justice was appointed to see if a new investigation should be
opened. The evidence, wrote Justice Willard Estey, "does not
support ice contamination." Nevertheless, he advised that
further probing would be unfair to the victims' families. "It's
for their sake that the case should be reopened," counters
George Baker, the Liberal Party Member of Parliament from
Gander, who lives one mile (1.6 km) from the crash site.

    A new book titled Improbable Cause, written by Les
Filotas, one of the dissenting air-safety board members,
promises on its cover to expose the "deceit and dissent in the
investigation." Filotas does that with a devastating
accumulation of evidence spanning 553 pages. "Many of the
experts involved in the investigation," says Filotas, "didn't
realize they were participating in a cover-up."

    Even sharper accusations are being leveled by M. Gene
Wheaton, the private investigator appointed by the Families for
Truth about Gander, Inc. The organization was founded in 1989
by Dr. J.D. Phillips and his wife Zona of St. Petersburg,
Florida. As father and stepmother of one of the victims, they
charged the U.S. with "failing to conduct a full inquest, or
even revealing the facts it does possess."

    As he pored over the forensic evidence, Wheaton became
convinced that the plane had suffered a precrash explosion --
and that there had been a U.S.-Canadian conspiracy to conceal
the cause of the accident. "If the truth about this crash had
gotten out in 1985," he says, "it would have exposed the
Iran-contra scandal one year before it became public."

    Wheaton knew many of the Iran-contra conspirators
personally and had tracked their planes and pilots, making him
a valuable source for congressional investigators trying to
unravel the secret arms deals of Oliver North. Arrow Air,
Wheaton instantly recognized, was a CIA-operated company.

    To him, the evidence of a precrash explosion is
overwhelming. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police obtained sworn
statements from five witnesses who saw the DC-8 spewing flames
before it fell. Judith Parsons, an airport rental-car agent, was
warming up her automobiles out in the parking lot when she saw
the sky light up. Suddenly "a large orange oval" appeared above
the ground, she reported. "It just blew up and went everywhere,
burning like cinders falling to the earth."

    Rescue workers described charred bodies hanging from
unscorched trees, indicating that some of the victims were
already burned when they fell out of the sky. Autopsies also
disclosed lethal doses of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide
in body tissues, proving that the fire and explosion occurred
while the passengers were still breathing. I. Irving Pinkel, a
former NASA expert who also investigated Apollo 1's fatal fire,
found two fuselage holes with an "outward pucker," indicating
an explosion from within. Finally, four members of the refueling
crew swore there was no icing problem before the plane took off.

    Although the U.S. government stated that no explosives
were aboard, fire fighters heard small arms popping all over
the place and saw debris flying into the air from delayed
explosions. "There were 30 to 40 such explosions," the Gander
fire chief reported. Later, live rocket rounds were found among
the wreckage, as was an 80-lb. (32-kg) duffel bag stuffed with
U.S. currency.

    As Wheaton probed deeper, he discovered that six heavy
crates, which he suspects contained contraband arms, had been
loaded into the jet's cargo bay in Cairo without military
customs clearance. To squeeze them onto the plane required
removing some of the soldiers' duffel bags. Gerald De Porter,
the former Army customs inspector there, who is now working as
a pharmacist in Fayetteville, North Carolina, says, "I couldn't
check the cargo because I wasn't issued a pass to go out on the
tarmac."

    Wheaton also located witnesses who confirmed that weapons,
including tow antitank missiles, were being stockpiled in the
Sinai. When he scrutinized Arrow Air's manifest, he discovered
a mysterious Company E, consisting of 22 men who were not part
of the 101st Airborne. All had the same MOS (Military
Occupational Specialty) 11-H, indicating they were tow gunners.

    "At that moment the U.S. was in the process of selling
thousands of tows to Iran," says Wheaton. "Since it's unlikely
that we'd sell such sophisticated weapons without providing
instructors, Company E may have been part of the
arms-for-hostages deal."


    Also aborad the doomed jet were about 20 members of Task
Forces 160 and 163. These elite counterterrorist units included
helicopter pilots, crew chiefs, mechanics and other support
personnel often used on hostage-rescue missions. Zona Phillips
picked up an intelligence report suggesting that they belonged
to Seal Team 6, the commando unit poised to recapture the
Achille Lauro off the Egyptian coast before the cruise ship's
hijackers surrendered.

    "Task Force 160 may have actually attempted but failed to
free the hostages," says Wheaton. He points out that North had
precise intelligence on the hostages' location. Five of the six
Americans were being held in Building No. 18 in the Sheik
Abdullah barracks in the Baalbek region of Lebanon. "Very
possibly," adds Wheaton, "North ordered the raid after irate
Iranian officials threatened to retaliate for a shipment of the
wrong Hawk missiles." In fact, three days before the Gander
crash, North revealed both his determination to continue the
Iranian arms shipments and his concern for the hostages' safety.
"To stop now in midstream," he wrote, "would ignite Iranian
fire. Hostages would be our minimum losses."

    Another mystery surrounding the Gander crash are the
lingering ailments that plague many of the fire fighters and
other rescue workers, whose liver enzyme rate was found to be
abnormally high. They had been warned to watch out for nerve-gas
canisters. However, Wheaton says, "the real hazard was possibly
radiation poisoning from nuclear backpacks, portable units with
timing devices that Special Forces personnel sometimes carry to
blow up bridges and block their pursuers."

    The suspicious symptoms of the rescue workers have been
hotly debated in Canada. A Health and Welfare department study
attributed the illnesses to "mass hysteria," "post-traumatic
syndrome" and "eating too much moose meat," since many of the
men were avid hunters. But M.P. George Baker claims that the
investigating physicians took no blood samples or X rays,
attempting merely to compile what he called a "theoretical
study." He also asserts that two of the three doctors refused
to sign the final report. The threat of radiation poisoning may
explain why General Crosby wanted to bulldoze over the wreckage
so quickly.

    While the wreckage in Lockerbie was meticulously sifted
for bomb clues, no such effort was made in Gander. Yet there
was good reason to take seriously the Islamic Jihad's boast
that it had blown up the Arrow Air jet. Telephone calls
claiming responsibility for the crash were immediately received
by both the U.S. consulate in Oran, Algeria, and Reuters news
agency in Beirut. The Beirut caller even knew that the plane had
been delayed for five hours in Cologne, and explained that was
why it blew up over Canada instead of over the U.S. He said the
Shi`ite Muslim extremist group planted a bomb on board to prove
"our ability to strike at the Americans anywhere."

    A bomb, Wheaton contends, could have been planted on the
plane in the Cairo airport, where a 30-minute blackout occurred
during loading and where, he says, Egyptian baggage handlers
were unsupervised by Americans. One month after the crash, the
American embassy in Mauritius received a letter signed "Sons of
Zion." It described how the Arrow Air jet was "sabotaged" by a
"cold-blooded, premeditated act . . . a few hours before
take-off with the complicity of several Egyptian and Libyan
mechanics."

    Repeated efforts by the Families for Truth About Gander to
open FBI files about the crash have failed. Democratic
Congressman Robin Tallon of South Carolina has tried to help.
Two years ago, he persuaded 103 other members of the House of
Representatives to petition President Bush to initiate an
"investigation to explore all possible crash theories." Bush
never responded. Tallon, who says that up until then he had
frequently visited the White House, says he was never invited
back. "The FBI and CIA have also sealed me off," Tallon
complains. "They don't even answer my phone calls."

    The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal
Justice held a two-day hearing on the crash in December 1990.
It ended without a call for action, despite surprising
revelations of FBI apathy. Last week Tallon announced that he
would introduce a bill to establish a commission with full
subpoena power to investigate the crash the way it should have
been examined seven years ago.

    At that time the FBI's forensic team had flown to
Newfoundland on the day of the crash, then sat in a Gander
motel, the subcommittee found, awaiting "whatever reports or
conclusions Canadian authorities saw fit to share with them.
After a mere 36 hours the agents accepted a declaration that
`terrorism was not involved,' and returned home." The FBI
claimed the Canadians did not allow its agents to visit the
crash site or to participate in the investigation. But nothing
prevented the bureau from launching a worldwide hunt for
terrorist involvement, as it did after the Pan Am bombing.