Highly unlikely. While I've never been all that happy about the center fuel tank explanation... the keeping of a secret ~requires~ that there are only a few people that know that secret. A naval vessel has hundreds of people onboard, and then perhaps hundreds more ashore in the exercise that would all know what happened. Opsec in the Navy is pretty good... but its not that good. Somebody would squawk.
And yet we all know that their "investigation" was a pile of bullsh!t -- which obviously requires complicity on the part of many people. I don't know anybody who believes that nonsense about an "exploding center fuel tank."
George Will looked as if he was going to fall out of his chair. Subject was changed quickly and to my knowledge no one ever called Steph on his statement again.
I don't generally go in for conspiracy threories, and I also doubt that if the Navy had been involved everyone could have successfully kept quiet, unless the nature of the exercise was such that only a few people in command and control were in a position to know what happened with the missile (I don't have anywhere near the knowledge of how these things are done to speculate). Still, Steph's statement should have at least triggered an embarassed "uh...I mean blew up" or something to the effect. That it was quickly passed over and "forgotten" has always stuck me as very suspicious. That, and my understanding that simply hanging out in the sit room is not standard behaviour.
Somehow it just smells very strange, and I would never put anything past Clinton and his team. I suppose we'll never really know for sure unless someone does talk, maybe a deathbed confession or whatever.
I would make a couple of points in response to that:
1. You are assuming that every person -- or even most people -- on a Navy vessel are aware of everything that goes on at any given time. If an accidential shoot-down occurred during what would otherwise be described as "routine" naval exercises involving multiple vessels, and the aircraft was far enough away from the ship that fired the missile that it couldn't be seen clearly, then most crew members on the ship in question wouldn't even know exactly what happened.
2. An incident involving the military and civilian aircraft is not unprecedented. In addition to the well-publicized downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes in 1988, there was another intriguing case in the last 25 years that hasn't received much exposure at all.
An Italian DC-9 crashed in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Italy in 1980 under very mysterious circumstances, killing all 81 passengers and crew members. The formal investigation of that incident never really identified a cause, and the circumstances surrounding the investigation generated a lot of suspicion almost immediately. Information from the voice and data recorder was never made public, and data from air traffic control was conveniently "lost" during the investigation.
The case was never truly resolved, but by 1996 -- seventeen years later -- it was pretty much accepted in Italy that the aircraft had been accidentally shot down during an incident involving a Libyan fighter jet and military aircraft from one or more NATO countries. The secrecy surrounding the case was sufficient evidence in and of itself for this kind of speculation, and what made the whole thing particularly sensitive from Italy's standpoint was that the involvement of other NATO countries (naval vessels and aircraft from France and the U.S. were apparently involved to some degree or another) added an element of jurisdictional confusion that would not otherwise have been present.