Posted on 04/07/2006 5:38:53 PM PDT by wagglebee
In Argentina, during the dark days, they called them "los desaparecidos," the disappeared. On April 10, 1996, Ron Brown was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery and then joined his fellow desaparecidos. So thoroughly has Brown disappeared from view that the only articles I could find on Google News about the 10th anniversary of his death were those that I had written myself.
What follows, unless new information breaks, is my last article on the subject. In it, I attempt to find the one scenario that makes sense of all the existing evidence. Although speculative in part, it follows the evidence in full. There are no loose ends.
Aviation systems manager Niko Jerkuic does not report in for work on the morning of April 3, 1996, but he has a busy day ahead of him. He is not looking forward to it. Just a day and a half earlier, embattled Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was ordered to fly to Jerkuic's airport in Dubrovnik, Croatia. A trip like this in a war-torn area would typically require weeks of security planning. Not this time.
Right after that change of plans, agents of the Croatian intelligence services gave Jerkuic an assignment he did not feel free to turn down. They needed to misdirect Brown's plane, and they required his assistance.
The project is not technically difficult. Jerkuic has seen a lot in his 46 years. He knows all about "meaconing" or "spoofing" as it is sometimes generically known. Since the 1940s, portable Non-Directional Radio Beacon stations have been available to military and civilian operators and have proved especially useful in war-torn areas like this one near the Bosnian border.
The agents with whom he is working have brought along a gasoline driven generator, a tunable transmitter, and a temporary antenna, all loaded into the back of a pickup truck. Together, they drive to an isolated spot just outside of Dubrovnik and only about three or four miles east-southeast of Kolocep Island, the site of the real Non-Directional Radio Beacon, the beacon on which pilots are supposed to fix in order to guide their planes into the Dubrovnik airport.
Jerkuic sets the frequency of his portable beacon at 318 kilohertz to match that of the Kolocep (KLP) beacon and encodes the KLP Morse code identifier. He cannot power it up, however, until all the earlier scheduled flights have landed.
Still about 100 miles away, a CT-43A, the military version of a Boeing 737 carrying Ron Brown and 34 others, is cleared "direct to the KLP NDB." The primary reason for Brown's trip is to broker a sweetheart deal between Croatia and the Enron Corporation. Croatia's anti-Semitic strongman Franjo Tudhman has agreed to the deal, one disastrous for Croatia, in the hope that by cooperating with Enron he can ingratiate himself to the Clinton administration and avoid indictment by the World Court for war crimes. He has cancer. He doesn't want to die in prison.
The pilots are told they are "number one for beacon approach." When the word comes from the Dubrovnik tower that Brown's plane has checked in at 2:46 p.m. local time and the other planes have landed, Jerkuic shuts down the normal NDB and activates the "rogue" NDB. The automatic direction finder in Brown's plane now points to Jerkuic's beacon near Dubrovnik.
At this distance, the needle shift is negligible. USAF pilots Ashley Davis and Tim Shafer scarcely notice. "Hmmm," Davis thinks to himself when he sees it, "the NDB's a little further east than I thought." But given its 318-kilohertz frequency, Davis naturally assumes the radio signal to be coming from Kolocep and flies toward it. The Dubrovnik tower has no radar. At this stage, the radio signal is the pilots' only real guide to the world below the clouds. In fact, Brown's itinerary was shifted to Dubrovnik only after the weather service confirmed that the next several days would be overcast in Croatia. These conditions were critical for the plan to work.
As the signal strengthens, Davis gradually aligns the automatic direction finder with the posted 119-degree setting. At 2:54 pm, he watches as the ADF swings back around to the bottom, now at a 299-degree reading. He has passed over the beacon and will navigate from the tail of the ADF needle.
"We're inside the locator, inbound," he radios the tower, and the tower clears his approach and landing. At that moment, the charts tell the pilots the airport is 12 miles straight ahead on a 119-degree course. They will be able to see the runway in about three minutes. In fact, however, the plane is now heading right toward St. John's Peak about eight miles away, as the AWACs plane hovering over head will later verify.
Word of the crash comes over Jerkuic's radio. He shuts down the temporary transmitter and reactivates the Kolocep beacon. Still, he has no stomach for this. The agents assigned to him sense his unease, but they have work to do, like finding the plane and making sure the person they were assigned to kill is dead.
They make their way to St. John's Peak and up the mountain. The bodies are scattered, and there are only a few black men among them. They pull out the photo of Brown and start checking. Brown is not hard to find. But what stuns the men is that he is farther from the plane than is anyone else. He appears to have crawled there.
The leader kneels down next to Brown and turns him over on his back. He is still not sure whether Brown is dead or not. He has no obvious fatal wound. The leader pulls out his pistol and fires skillfully into the laceration on the top of Brown's head. In this part of the world, no one even blinks at the sound of gunfire.
The men look around quickly for other survivors. Tech sergeant Shelly Kelly survived the crash in the rear jump sheet. But her back is broken, and she lies mutely amidst the rubble. The men don't see or hear her. They hustle back down the hill. Their colleague back at the airport has misdirected the search in the opposite direction, out over the Adriatic, for several hours. But the men on the hill do not want to hang around any longer than necessary. They exit the area with their portable beacon and deep six it. Kelly will die from that misdirection.
Three days after the crash, a memorial service is held at the Dubrovnik airport for those killed in the crash. Just hours later, Niko Jerkuic answers the knock on his door and greets the men who recruited him. He is still anxious, and they can see it. U.S. Air Force investigators will start interviewing airport personnel in two days. The Croatian agents cannot afford to let the Air Force talk to Jerkuic.
"We hate to do this," says the one agent as he shoots Jerkuic in the chest. They don't sweat the details as they know who will be investigating, Miroslav Tudjman, Franjo's son, the head of Croatian intelligence. Miroslav declares it a suicide.
Back at the Armed Force Institute in Pathology, in Dover, Del., pathologists discover the hole in Brown's head. By order of the White House, there is no autopsy, no forensic testing, no notification of the Brown family. Brown is quickly embalmed, and the head X-rays are destroyed.
In November 1996, just months after Brown's death and one week after President Clinton's re-election, Tudjman travels not to The Hague to be tried as a war criminal but to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to have his cancer treated. The Croatia-Enron liaison, Zdenka Gast, later shows up in the Croatian equivalent of People Magazine arm in arm with her buddy Hillary Clinton at Alexis Herman's intimate wedding reception at the White House.
By this time, Ron Brown has long since joined the ranks of "los desaparecidos."
Related special offer:
"Ron Brown's Body: How One Man's Death Saved the Clinton Presidency and Hillary's Future"
Related columns:
Part 1: Did Ron Brown die for Enron's sins?
Part 2: How 'minority capitalism' undid Ron Brown
Part 3: Competing against the Clintons for cash
Part 4: Clinton's new "bagman"
Part 5: Second 'black president' likely to build on legacy of first
Part 6: Some dare call it treason
Part 7: Wang Jun's excellent White House adventure
Part 8: Sun peeked through 'worst storm in a decade'
Part 9: The bullet hole that should have shaken Washington
Part 10: How Monica buried Ron Brown and saved the Clinton presidency
Part 11: Was Ron Brown murdered, and, if so, how and by whom?
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
WHY don't the pubs ever bring these people to bear - do they - the traitor party - really own that many judges?
Thanks, I was out the door to dinner. I'll check it out a little later as I have a few other things to do also.
I appreciate it.
I would instead say...Politicians don't think the American rank and file can handle the truth. Because THAT would shake the foundations of our Republic...and/or cost them their lofty good ol' boy positions.
FWIW
bump
That is one where JFK Jr probably did it to himself.
I am a pilot, so I know some about learning to fly.
He did his training in a Cessna 182. It is a forgiving airplane that doesn't fly too fast. I did most of my training in a Cessna 172. It is slower than a 182, but handles about the same.
I later bought a Cessna T210. It is a high performance airplane quite similar to the airplane he crashed.
He did not have many hours, and very few in the high performance airplane. He did not have much instrument time and did not have an instrument rating.
I have an instrument rating, so I know what it is like to fly an airplane in the dark with little visibility.
When you are over water as he was, the stars reflect off the water and so you cannot see the horizon. You cannot fly with visual references, and must use the instruments.
He was flying toward land and had few lights to use as reference. He got disoriented, and the airplane rolled upside down. When flying, you cannot tell which side is up without either visual reference or instrument reference.
The airplane went into the water upside down, which would shear off the top of the airplane. When they showed pictures of the airplane in the water, when they found it, it was still upside down.
When I transitioned from a lower performance airplane to a high performance airplane, it was almost like learning to fly again. That is why a pilot cannot fly a high performance airplane without the necessary instruction and endorsement by an instructor certifying that you were able to fly the airplane.
He had not flown the high performance airplane without his instructor before this flight.
He got a later start than he had planned on, and should have canceled the flight. It was beyond his capability.
After more time in the airplane, and more instrument training, he could have made the flight without a problem.
As a comparison, would you get into a high performance sports car and join the freeway traffic when it was foggy, and you had not driven the car before?
If you did, you may not be too successful either.
I believe he died of a .45 to the chest. Not a common round there and not a common place for a suicide to shoot himself.
Also wasn't TSgt. Kelly found alive and died in transport from a slashed femoral artery hours later? Something she would have died of within minutes of the crash?
I remember that day very well. The early morning news was headlined by the Brown crash. By noontime, the headlines were about the arrest of the unabomber. I remember reading reports somewhat later that the FBI had been staking said unabomber for weeks, hoping to catch him sending another package, yet they picked that day to go up to his shack and arrest him.
Every time I see his son on tv (last night in fact, on H and C) I wonder what he thinks of the clintons.
No, it is not Padilla. Those involved in OKC were former Iraqi Republican Guard.
bump for later
They showed pictures of the airplane taken from the search ROV. You could see that the airplane was upside down, and there was no evidence visible of any explosion.
The baggage compartment is behind the back seats, and is quite thin aluminum. Any explosion there would have made a bulge at least, and more than likely would have blown the airplane in two.
Birr Krintong happen to Lon Blown.
thru his toes maybe? - The hole was in the TOP of his head - could travel a long way before finding and exit opportunity - someone wanting to hide a bullet wound would avoid an obvious exit wound - and the wound already in the top of his head made it neatly possible
This is absolutely insane, and makes me automatically start to view Cashill's work on the TWA Flight 800 - which I previously believed in - as highly suspect.
Brown's plane crashed because the AF pilots, flying an obsolete version of a civilian Boeing 737, failed to properly coordinate their landing based on a seldom used obsolete beacon instead of the up-to-date system they were used to. In a hellacious thunderstorm when visibility was ZERO. Flying into an airport located in a narrow valley FLANKED by TWO MOUNTAIN RANGES!!
Unfortunately, just a tiny error in their course, multiplied over the course of miles, meant that they hit a mountain instead of gliding down to the airport.
This kind of thing has happened uncounted times - especially in Third World countries during a blinding thunderstorm. Remember the Army electronic surveillance plane that did the exact same thing in Columbia a few years ago?
Secondly, THERE WERE NO MEMBERS OF THE ENRON CO. ON BROWN'S FLIGHT!! Check the records. Or just ask me (more below).
Thirdly, Tudjman's cancer was not diagnosed until 1997.
Other than that, its a GREAT article isn't it?
Gee, Al, you say. How do you know so much about this? Well...one reason is...I was there. I was with Brown that entire morning at Tuzla. I briefed him on the local parties he would be seeing, while we were flying in the UH-60 on the way to the various meetings he attended that morning. I have a photo of him trying to figure out how to buckle his safety belts (they're not your standard airline lap belt when you are in a Blackhawk). I was with his party. I met them all. They all personally thanked me profusely for everything that I did to facilitate their meetings that morning, saying it had been the highlight of their trip. I can still see many of their faces - and I have photos I snapped of many of them, smiling, chatting, oblivious to the cruel twist of fate that awaited them but two-three hours later.
And what happened that afternoon after we saw them off - in a driving rain and a ceiling that was only about 250 feet - was the worst tragedy I have personally seen in my life. The weather in Dubrovnik was 10 times worse by the time they got there.
And don't tell me the weather was not that bad because - I WAS THERE AND YOU WEREN'T!!! I was in the US Army Command Center in Tuzla, and had access to all of the weather and other info in real time as this nightmare unfolded; I was next to and helping the CG that entire first, unreal, terrible night.
OK. The 'tinfoil hat brigade' can now have at me. Do your worst....
No doubt in mine either. He had threated Clinton - to his face - telling him that if he went down, Clinton was going with him.
And .. since Clinton believed it was okay to kill people who hurt you .. I would presume Clinton felt threatened enough to make it happen.
The real NDB beacon would also be transmitting a Morse-code version of its call letters, while the fake beacon described by Cahill probably would not. Did the crew check the Morse-code audio as part of their regular routine? The military is usually pretty rigorous on things like that, plus the crew would probably also be very motivated to do that in mountainous terrain.
Some, like their partner who was a banker, go to prison and still get killed.
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