CRASH OF PLANE CARRYING 12 WATERGATE PEOPLE SUSPICIOUS
[From *The Spotlight*, Feb. 14, 1994]

What really happened during the infamous "Watergate plane crash"
at Chicago's airport on December 8, 1972?

United Airlines flight 553 out of Washington, D.C. exploded while
landing in Chicago. Aboard were 12 people who were connected in
some way to the burgeoning Watergate scandal. Among the victims
was Dorothy Hunt, wife of former CIA man (and Watergate burglar)
E. Howard Hunt.

Evidence indicated the plane was sabotaged, but independent
investigator Sherman Skolnick made headlines when he charged
thatthe sabotage had been covered up by the government.

Skolnick discussed his findings when he was the guest on the
December 23 broadcast of *The Spotlight*'s nightly radio call-in
talk forum, Radio Free America, with host Tom Valentine.

At the time of the crash, Valentine was a journalist working in
Chicago and became acquainted with Skolnick during the furor over
the loss of flight 553.

According to Valentine, "It was the flight 553 affair that really
convinced me this government was corrupt. I was a meat head and
believed in our government. I knew the medical establishment
was corrupt, but this really convinced me the government was
corrupt."

Skolnick, who has been a regular guest on Radio Free America, and
who is an adviser to Liberty Lobby's Populist Action Committee,
has a recorded five-minute commentary (changed several times a
week) that people may call 24 hours a day at regular long-
distance rates. The number is (312) 731-1100. Skolnick's recorded
message brings periodic updates on matters the investigator and
his research team are working on.

An edited transcript of Valentine's interview with Skolnick
follows.

 VALENTINE: The Watergate plane crash is the first investigation
you and I worked on together.

SKOLNICK: This subject is one of the great forbidden subjects of
this country. You are not supposed to talk publicly about
airplanes that have been sabotaged. If sabotage is ever brought
up, it's always in some foreign country where a bomb blows up the
airplane.

VALENTINE: Then the loss of the United Airlines flight 553 was
not just fog or pilot error or something like that.

SKOLNICK: In the history of aviation there have been a number of
situations where there was actual sabotage -- not necessarily a
bomb -- and that sabotage put the plane down and killed people
for political reasons.

I started writing a book about airplane sabotage right after the
plane crash. I called it "The Watergate Plane Crash." The reason
why was because on this one plane were 12 people connected with
the Watergate affair.

The disaster happened exactly one month after Richard Nixon had
been re-elected. The Watergate affair had started, but it was not
widely known at the time.

Former CIA man (and Watergate burglar) E. Howard Hunt, part of
the so-called White House Plumbers, was under arrest. It later
came out that Hunt was threatening to blow the lid off the White
House if Nixon didn't take care of him. Hunt wanted $2 million.

What Hunt reportedly had was information tending to show that
Nixon, who was in Dallas at the time John F. Kennedy was
murdered, was complicit in the assassination. Hunt's wife Dorothy
was carrying around "hush" money to various witnesses in an
effort to silence them about the Watergate affair.

She was on flight 553, and this time she was traveling under her
own name. She was so concerned about the baggage (which contained
$2 million worth of cashier's checks and money orders, which some
astute people could have traced back to the Nixon White House)
that she bought an extra first class seat for her baggage (and
the valuables therein).

The press later said there was only $10,000 in her possession,
but that was false. We know about this because of records of the
National Transportation Safety Board which had the manifest of
the airplane.

A year after the crash, an air baggage robbery gang was
prosecuted in the case of *U.S. vs. Joseph Cirelli*.

I was the only journalist who covered the hearing. There an FBI
document came out showing that this criminal mob, a Mafia family,
had somehow penetrated the crash zone, stolen Mrs. Hunt's
luggage, and were fencing $2 million worth of valuables for $5
million.

Why? How? Because these money orders could be traced back to
the Nixon White House and as a consequence were worth more as
blackmail information.

The plane was steered into the ground. It's not technically
accurate to call it a "crash." The plane was pancaked and then
caught on fire.

Now bear in mind that every airport has what they call the "outer
marker" which enables the plane to know his altitude. The outer
marker was working for the plane ahead of flight 553 and for the
plane behind flight 553, but as 553 approached the marker, it
mysteriously went out.

Now here's the mystery. There were 150 FBI agents waiting on the
ground. The government's own documents show that the fire
department responded within a minute and a half. The FBI
headquarters in Chicago is in downtown Chicago, 12 miles away. If
they got on a helicopter off their headquarters roof they
couldn't have made the 12 miles faster than the fire department.

However, when the fire department came near the crash zone, the
FBI had cordoned off the zone and kept the firefighters from
approaching the plane. A number of police officers were also held
back and kept in a nearby park and not allowed to approach the
plane.

The only ones who were able to approach the plane were the FBI. I
found out about this later, and for several months thereafter
some of the press called me a liar, but finally a letter came
from the acting director of the FBI, confirming that I was
correct, and that there were a large number of FBI people there.

He cryptically put in his letter that it was justifiedcause
they were investigating "airline piracy." Which means, in other
words, was somebody trying to steal luggage on that plane, *en
route*, and therefore the FBI was waiting?

We believe the FBI was waiting there to arrest Mrs. Hunt because
of the blackmail scheme. I went to the National Transportation
Safety Board [NTSB, which investigates crashes], and they set up
shop in Chicago and held a hearing in the spring of 1973. They
concluded there was ice on the plane's tail.

I interviewed a number of their witnesses and found the NTSB did
not bring out the correct facts. I brought a lawsuit against the
NTSB, and, unknown to United Airlines, my friends liberated the
entire government file of 1,300 documents and pictures, and we
knew it was sabotage from the government's own records.

I got on a lot of radio talk shows at the time, but I didn't tell
them that we had the entire file. United Airlines got upset about
me being on radio saying these things, and they demanded that the
NTSB reopen the hearings to prove that I was a liar.

At the two days of hearings in June, 1973, at which time they
expected to prove me a liar, some 250 reporters showed up from
all over the world. CBS had closed-circuit video coverage for
their higher-ups since one of their reporters, Michelle Clark,
had been sitting next to Mrs. Hunt.

SKOLNICK: At the two days of hearings in June, 1973,
at which time they expected to prove me a liar,
some 250 reporters showed up from all over the world. CBS
had closed-circuit video coverage
for their higher-ups since one of their reporters, Michelle
Clark, had been sitting next to Mrs. Hunt.

Now remember, United Airlines didn't know that my friends had
swiped the NTSB files on the crash. So when they turned on all
the lights for the videotaping process (for the CBS executives),
at that moment I opened up my suitcase at the hearing and spread
all of the documents on a great table before me.

There was a panel of five NTSB members there. I said,
"Now here's your entire file. I admit that I swiped it. If you want
to arrest me, do it right now in front of all of these reporters."

For two entire days I showed from their own records that they
knew it was sabotage.

The *Chicago Tribune* took a picture of me at the table, but they
chopped off the portion of me pointing at the documents, and they
ran a headline saying "No proof whatsoever of sabotage."

The Associated Press's national wire ran an objective story, to
their credit, saying that I presented a "heavily documented case
of sabotage regarding a flight where Watergate figures died."

Only one newspaper in this country, however, ran that AP story.
It was a newspaper in Seattle. All of the other newspapers
disregarded that major story carrietional wire
(known as the "A" wire, which carries all the major stories).

The reason for this is simple: United Airlines was the largest
airline in North America, and were this to have been publicized
they could have lost their certificate to fly. Edward Carlson,
United Airlines board chairman, was very close to Nixon.

Now as I mentioned, CBS News reporter Michelle Clark was on the
plane beside Mrs. Hunt. She was also a friend of Rep. George
Collins (D-Ill.) who also died on that crash. At the later
hearings, we had the chief assistant of Congressman Collins.
Apparently Collins had somehow found out about the Watergate
affair before the break-in and had told Michelle Clark about it,
and she knew about it.

What happened was that certain people decided to sit on matters
for their own financial gain. Here's briefly what happened. I had
a mutual friend who knew Ms. Clarke's family. They said that
since Michelle had died in the crash, they were going to blow the
lid off United Airlines, which is owned largely by the
Rockefeller family's Chase Manhattan Bank. They were also going
to use this information against CBS (Michelle's employer) which
was part of the cover-up.

Using my material they got what was said to be as much as a $5
million settlement from CBS by remaining silent about what the
family found out. Cardiss Collins, the widow of Congressman
Collins, took his place, and from my information she was in favor
of squelching the whole affair.

Another one that I think shook down the Federal Aviation
Administration [FAA] and the Nixon administration for a large
amount of money was William F. Buckley Jr.

Buckley had not only served in Mexico City under E. Howard Hunt
in the CIA (years before), but since Hunt was a convicted felon
(as a consequence of the Watergate affair), Hunt could not be the
executor of his wife's estate.

Buckley, as the godfather of Hunt's children, brought a lawsuit
in the federal courts in Chicago against the FAA and in cryptic
language said that the FAA allowed this crash to happen. The
lawsuit didn't quite allege sabotage but in a way referred to
what we had uncovered, and [they] were using it for their own
financial gain.

In other words, they strong-armed the FAA and the Nixon White
House to get money out of them. The press didn't cover the fact
that Buckley had brought such a lawsuit.

Now in the NTSB reports that we had uncovered, we reviewed the
toxicological reports. These reports showed that Dorothy Hunt and
the other Watergate people on board the flight had a very high
cyanide level in their body -- higher than they could have
breathed into their body in a fire. In other words, it had to
have been injected.

We went to the leading toxicologist in the country, and he said
that the cyanide had to have been injected.

In any case, after two days of hearings, I told a joke that was
used against me. I said, "I am here to admit that I have
absolutely no proof whatever that Richard Nixon himself or
EdwardCarlson, the chairman of United Airlines, was on the plane with a 38 and
shot Dorothy Hunt."

Do you know that the Chicago paper had a banner headline saying
that "Skolnick admits no proof whatsoever."

They left out the part of the sentence that was a joke.

Now there was a very interesting man on that plane who survived
the crash. He was sitting right near the tail near the door. His
name was Harold Metcalfe, one of the top narcotics agents in the
United States working directly for the Nixon White House. When
the plane crashed, he opened the door and got off at the tail. He
was in a jumpsuit like he was going to parachute or something.

What happened was that he was supposed to testify before a grand
jury in Indiana. An associate of mine found him and confronted
him and said, "You survived the crash and came out of a plane in
a strange jumpsuit. You knew that plane was supposed to crash."

Metcalfe turned purple and started blurting out, "It wasn't
supposed to happen that way."

We brought that up at the special hearing.

Finally, after two days of hearings a reporter for the Hearst
newspapers came up to me, and I'll never forget what he said. He
said, "All of your documents are worthless. You didn't prove that
the plane was blown up with a bomb."

I said, "We're living in a modern world. Of those planes that
have been sabotaged, not all have been blown up that way."

He said, "Without a bomb, you have no case."

That was the opinion of the top reporter of the Hearst
newspapers.

I confronted the members of the NTSB panel with conflict of
interest charges in that most of them were stockholders in the
airline industry, but they refused to disqualify themselves. The
panel came out with a revised verdict that the prophetically
named Capt. Whitehouse (on the ill-fated plane) had committed
pilot error, and that's why the plane crashed.

In so doing they came out with a new set of documents. But I had
their file, and I was able to show that their new documents were
falsified and not the original records of what had happened.

Whitehouse had been one of the best pilots in North America and
had been a stunt pilot. If there was anybody under heaven who
could have landed that plane, he could have.

The plane's electrical system had been sabotaged, too. But to
protect United Airlines, they covered up what really happened. My
book on the affair [which Tom Valentine was scheduled to co-
author] was supposed to be published by Pinnacle Press, but the
lawyer for Chase Manhattan Bank (which, as we said, owns part of
United Airlines) said that the book was "not documented," even
though we had all of the documents from the NTSB.

VALENTINE: After my magazine *Newsreal* was going to publish your
story, but our distributor, Fawcett, was purchased by CBS, and
that was the end of that.

SKOLNICK: There have been a lot of mysterious plane crashes over
the years. One of them was the disappearance of the plane (in
Alaska) carrying Rep. Hale Boggs (D-La.), just a month before
Nixon was re-elected.

I talked to a lot of people who investigated it, and there is
reason to believe the plane was found. Boggs had begun making
statements that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping
members of Congress. Boggs had also been a member of the Warren
Commission that said Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in the
JFK assassination.

Now his daughter, Cokie Roberts, who is a top reporter for ABC,
recently said that she agreed with her father that "Oswald acted
alone." The fact is that her father had begun to have misgivings
in 1972 about the Warren Commission, and it was at that point his
airplane disappeared.

End. Extracted from Conspiracy for the Day
Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org

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