The death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was it murder?by Nicholas Guarino
Former TV host: Commodities week; Former Arkansas Businessman
Captain Amir Schic lands a twin engine corporate jet carrying the Croatian Prime Minister and the American Ambassador.
It is one of five planes to land routinely on Runway 12 in the hour preceding the scheduled 3:00 arrival of IFOR-21, the Boeing T43-A carrying Ron Brown and his upbeat entourage of American industrial deal makers.
Cilipi Airport, 2:15 PM:
Businessmen begin to straggle into the lobby, a few carrying umbrellas to ward off the very light to moderaterain.
They're early because they are anxious to greet the 35 Americans who are at this moment taking off from Tuzla, Bosnia, 130 miles to the northeast.
Outside a perfect breeze blows at 14 mph from east to west, perfect because at 120 degrees from north, it is only one degree off from being an exact headwind for the landing pattern of IFOR-21.
Contrary to some US news reports, it is not a dark and stormy night. It is the middle of the afternoon.
The radio shack of Cilipi Airport, about 2:30 PM:
Maintenance Chief Niko Jerkuic, 46, nervously fiddles with the dials on his NDR (nondirectional Radio) beacon, the only instrument he has that can guide approaching planes. In a couple of hours, he will be a rich man, the two American operatives told him, if he can quietly send IFOR-21 into Sveti Ivan (St. John's Hill), one of the highest mountains in the area at 2400 feet.
Jerkuic will simply shut his beacon down at the same moment that a decoy beacon is turned on by an American operative sitting near the base of Sveti Ivan. This is an old truck dating back to pirate days.
He inspects his terrain map again and again. If he miscalculates ... well, the Americans did not look like men who would forgive someone who botches a serious assignment like this one.
All Jerkuic knows is that there is someone on the plane who is very dangerous to the American President, and it is his job to be sure that the plane never lands. With a shaky hand, he picks up a walkie-talkie and rechecks with the American agent who is sitting in a jeep at Sveti Ivan with another NDR in a suitcase beside him.
Jerkuic glances out at some broken clouds scudding by 400 feet above. They will have no effect. He will have to depend on the main cloud cover at 2000 feet. Sveti Ivan rises almost 400 into this overcast. Jerkuic calculates that the new signal will alter the plane's course by a full ten degrees and send it far off course to the north and into the mountain. His timing will have to be perfect.
Money or no money, he begins to wonder if he is doing the right thing.
Cilipi Airport, 2:48 PM
Captain Schic climbs to the control tower to give 1FOR-21 a friendly radio greeting and reassurance that all is well.
He describes the Cilipi weather: Visibility eight kilometers (5 miles), winds still at 14 mph, all flights arriving normally. Flying at about 10,000 feet and 40+ miles away, co-captains Ashley J. Davis, 35, and Tim Shafer, 33, thank Schic for his words of welcome.
These conditions are later described by Newsweek and others as "the worst storm in ten years" with "visibility at 100 yards." (Their portrayal of the weather is flatly denied by Aviation Week & Space Technology.)
In the clouds over the Adriatic Sea, 2:50 PM:
IFOR-21 reports in to Cilipi routinely. It is the last time their voice is heard.
Split, Croatia, 2:52 PM:
The main regional radar station loses 1FOR-21 from its screen.
Cilipi Airport, 2:52 PM:
The main regional radar station loses 1FOR-21 from its screen.
Cilipi Airport, 2:52 PM:
Jerkuic stops monitoring the control tower to detect any other planes in the landing pattern. There are none, so he calls the American at Sveti Ivan again. They count down: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Simultaneously, Jerkuic shuts down and the American powers up.
Kolocep Island, 2:54 PM:
IFOR-21 is on course as it passes over Cilipi's first beacon 11.9 miles from the airport. It then locks onto the second and final beam that is being transmitted from Sveti Ivan. This changes the plane's actual direction from 119" 109", heading straight into Sveti Ivan. But the Cilipi control tower does not know that the plane is now off course. It has no radar.
Aboard an AWACS plane, 2:56 PM:
The U.S. Air Force plane keeping track of air traffic in the Bosnian conflict area loses track of IFOR- 21 just after it passes over Dubrovnik. (Being the military version of a Boeing 737-200, 1FOR-21 is not easily lost.) Because it is less than a mile off course at this point, no one on the AWACS notices any problem.
Srebreno, Croatia, 2:57 PM:
Villagers hear a plane roaring past unusually low and close.
Flat, Croatia 2:57 PM:
Villagers Ana and Miho Duplica rush outside and see 1FOR-21 looming "like a ghost out of the clouds."
Velji Do, Croatia, 2:58 PM:
Everyone in this tiny collection of stone huts at the base of Sveti Ivan hears a plane go directly overhead in the clouds, then rev its engines mightily for one instant. Aboard the plane, the klaxon of its ground-proximity warning device suddenly blares, jolting Captain Davis. He immediately jerks the plane upward and to the left. The two to three seconds ofwarning are far too little. The plane's left wing tip touches the ground, spinning it directly into the rocky hillside, making an earth shaking explosion.
There is the crackling hiss of a huge fireball as the plane and its large load of fuel bum. Then a dead silence in the mist.
The tail section remains quite intact, but the rest of 1FOR-21 is all over the hill, making later identification of many of the passengers impossible. The nose of the fuselage is just a blackish smudge on the ground.
All 35 people are dead except stewardess Shelly Kelly, who, riding in the tail, sustains only minor cuts and bruises.
Cilipi, 3:18 PM:
U.S. authorities are notified that 1FOR-21 is down, location completely unknown. However, they are to suffer 11 1/2 hours of confusion before arriving at the scene.
Republic of South Africa, approximately 4:00 PM:
News reports say that an attempt has been made on the life of Ron Brown's law partner, Tommy Boggs, by unknown assailants in a staged car accident in Capetown. Later, Boggs refuses to discuss Cilipi, later that afternoon:
Niko Jerkuic goes home to collect his reward, but the reward is not waiting for him. It comes three days later: a bullet through the chest, administered just shortly before he is scheduled to be grilled by the U.S. Air Force accident investigation team.
The hit squad wraps his hand around the gun and departs. The Americans do not want a live witness who could spill the beans later.
Like many ofthe Whitewater dead, Jerkuic is immediately labeled a suicide, even though there is no evidence - and a chest wound is a rather rare cause - especially with a large caliber pistol (unusual in Europe.)
The quick official reason given for bachelor Jerkuic's death is despondence over romantic troubles with his girlfriend. At this point, however, we have not been able to find any verification for this. Instead, what we have found is neighbors and friends who all agree that Jerkuic was not depressed. Like many ofhis friends who had survived the years of the Bosnian war, he was excited that life was finally getting better.
Crash site, 7:20 PM:
Four hours and twenty minutes after the crash, the first Croatian Special Forces search party arrives on the scene and finds only Ms. Kelly surviving. They call for a helicopter to evacuate her to the hospital.
When it arrives she is able to get aboard without any assistance from the medics.
But Kelly never completes the short hop. She dies enroute. According to multiple reports given to journalist / editor Joe L. Jordan, an autopsy later reveals a neat three inch incision over her main femoralartery. It also shows that the incision came at least three hours after all her other cuts and hruises. This datum, of course, creates in one's mind a horrifying scene in the back of the chopper, as one Special Forces operative holds down the struggling woman and muffles her screams while another slices her leg.
Further necropsies will probably not happen. At this writing, Clinton has ordered the cremation of all victims. It's hard to perform autopsies on ashes.
Ever since the crash most reporters and officials have refused to even consider the possibility of foul plan. Some ofthem have merely followed orders. But most ofthem have instinctively fled from the highly disturbing possibility that Ron Brown was assassinated by people close to his own President.
So confronted with the total impossibility oftwo experienced pilots following an NDR beam to a crash site 1.6 miles off course, they all shrug their shoulders in bewilderment. None of their theories have come even close to explaining how a beacon that is accurate to within two feet at the landing point could lead the plane so far astray. But they have tried:
In any case, pilots more than a few miles from an airport normally rely on a beam rather than visual sighting anyway.
In sum, none ofthe "official" explanations to date have held any water. And all ofthem ignore the glaring fact that IFOR-2 1 did not simply stray off the path at the last moment; by all accounts, it went straight as an arrow to its doom the moment it left the Kolocep Island beacon and picked up the Cilipi beacon. The problem had to be the Cilipi beacon, which was shut down at the airport while a substitute transmitter at Sveti Ivan was turned on.
Could the problem have been that technician Niko Jerkuic had let his equipment become rundown? No, thousands of landings had taken place while his equipment was running, some just minutes before the crash. To transmit an NDR beacon that's ten degrees off, it takes more than an accident.
Obviously, this explanation could do double duty by aiding the suicide theory. In this scenario, Jerkuic simply felt so bad about his shoddy work that he shot himself. Unfortunately for the theory, you can't just accidentally bump a knob and make the whole apparatus line planes up with Sveti Ivan. It takes a sustained effort by a qualified engineer. Plus, other planes had landed just before IFOR-21. So Jerkuic had to shut off his beacon at the last minute.
The question arises: Could not the whole issue be resolved by a quick review of the tapes at the controltower? They probably could - if the tapes had not suddenly disappeared.
And couldn't the air traffic controller shed some light on things? Certainly. But now he. too. has "committed suicide" - which, by the way, is a rare event for such a cause in Croatian culture.
I repeat: No official anywhere is facing these facts. As a result, their "explanations" are laced with words like mysterious and unknown and inexplicably.
The unanimous opinion ofour informants: This information, if widely known, would eliminate any chance of Clinton's re-election.
Because Pratt & Whitney always sends an investigator when a plane powered by their engines has a mishap, the man called his boss in America, and said, in effect, "We've just had a crash in Croatia. I think I'd better get down there." The response was, "Go pace.
But as the investigator was packing at his hotel, the boss called back. "Don't go," he said to the astonished employee. "There's not going to be a safety investigation."
Sure enough, the Air Force had,for the first time in its history, canceled the safety investigation of a crash on friendly soil. There would only be a quick token legal investigation designed to enable a committee to blame the pilots or some remote general and go home.
At this time it's an open question whether the black boxes will play a role. Within hours ofthe crash, the Croatian Ministry of Transport announced that they had the black boxes. One and a half days after the crash, Croatian TV (plus Russian and French TV) announced that the FDR (flight data recorder) and the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) were safely in the hands of the U.S. Marines. They said that soon "the cause of the crash will be assessed to find out what happened."
The U.S. European command in Stuttgart, Germany, also stated that a black box was aboard.
Later, the Pentagon brass stoutly disputed all this, stating that there were no black boxes aboard. They claimed the actual recovered boxes were designed to hold soda pop and toilet paper. (The Croats, who feel they can tell a reel of tape from a roll of toilet paper, are keeping mum.) Also, black boxes are usually painted bright orange, and they can't be opened with a thumb - or hardly at all.
It is difficult to image that America's #2 VIP plane had no black box. And a veteran Air Force mechanic who claims to have worked onjust about every T-43A in the USAF tells us he never saw one without a black box.
By all accounts, Ron Brown was a charming fellow who worked very hard and very effectively to promote U.S. business.
Why, then, would anyone want to kill him? And who would have the resources to do it by bringing down a large White House airplane?
The answer, in brief, is that Ron Brown was going to prison - no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Also, Bill Clinton's presidency was surely going down with him. And that the President would not allow.
To anyone who has followed the story closely, this conclusion is obvious. Brown was up to his neck in numerous major scandals: Whitewater, the Denver airport mess, Mena, the Keating Five, Lillian Madsen and her Haitian prostitutes, etc., etc. Small wonder that 22 congressmen wrote Clinton in February of 1995, demanding that he fire Brown.
At the time of his murder, Brown was under investigation by:
But in case you missed the piecemeal accounts in the papers, here is an extremely condensed summary of 11 of Brown's woes (which were shortly going to become Clinton's woes, as I'll show below) :
The money for the arms was most likely from Commerce and Agriculture, slush fund money channeled to U.S. manufacturers, thence to U.S. friendly nations and firms overseas, thence to Iran. The arms included:
. . and other quality weaponry, most of which will remain on the European scene for decades to come, keeping the area destabilized.
As one leading munitions dealer put it: "Iran/Contra was slingshots and cap guns compared to the quantities and size of arms given the Croatian Serbs."
That is why the Croatians were enthusiastically hosting Brown's planeload of executives. They felt gratitude for the free arms as well as a desire to do deals.
First Int'l owned Corridor Broadcasting, which had defaulted on massive government loans of $40 million. the loans were passed to the FDIC, which was unsuccessful in collecting anything from Hill, even though at that time the firm was making large contributions to the Democratic party and paying hundreds of thousands to Brown through shell corporations.
These payments to Brown (three checks for $45,000 each) were the core of evidence gathered by Rep. William F. Clinger, Jr., that forced Reno to hire Daniel Pearson as special investigator of Brown's crimes. They were cashier's checks, all cut on the same day in 1993 with sequential numbers even though the money supposedly came from three contributors acting independently.
Brown never disclosed or paid any taxes on these amounts.
There is little chance you heard about this deathknell, grand jury case. It was reported on radio station KTOK in Oklahoma on March 28 and on the front page ofthe Washington Times March 29. But then a lock was put on the story; the AP and New York Times wire services blocked any further release of the information. (Welcome to the New World Order.)
Final proof: the 2/8/96 Washington Post reported that Brown had retained top legal gun Reid Weingarten, a former high official in the Justice Department, as his criminal attorney. You don't pay his prices ($750 an hour) unless you know a criminal indictment is coming and you're probably going to jail.
Janet Reno appointed Daniel Pearson as Brown's special prosecutor. When she gave him blanket permission to investigate anything, Brown angrily demanded that Clinton force her to withdraw Pearson. But Reno couldn't do that; she had been backed into a corner by Rep. Clinger, who is chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Clinger had copies of Brown's First International checks, among other incriminating documents.
When Clinton said he couldn't comply, Brown went ballistic. His fatal mistake - according to Brown confidants who requested anonymity - was telling Clinton that he wasn't going to take the rap. He wasn't going to let his wife and son take the rap, either. (Both had received hundreds ofthousands ofdollars in under-the-table payments themselves.) He was going to finger Bill and Hillary instead. That would have sunk the re-election campaign on the spot.
From that point on, Brown was dead.
Like Vincent Foster before him, he knew too much. More than any man in Washington, he knew where all the money went for the payoffs, bribes, seams, money laundering, cover-ups, participation fees, hush money, and side deals - all the way from one-man operations to vast multinational trade treaty fixes.
The phony suicide fakeout used on Foster could not be repeated, of course. But an airplane "whack," in the jargon of the intelligence community, is always viewed as an accident. So agents were sent - not directly by Clinton, but through a White House staffer - to a standing network of high-level killers, sometimes called the "Octopus."
If the frequently-stormy weather at Cilipi had not co-operated, there would always be another trip - somewhere, somehow - and soon.
Carolina Tribune
September 26, 1996