The National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, has secretly sent a large part of the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 to a Long Island junkyard for recycling. Millions of dollars were spent recovering the wreckage from the ocean and transporting it to Calverton, where the fuselage was assembled as a mock-up to impress the public with what a thorough job the investigators - the NTSB and the FBI - were doing.

That was for show, but there was other wreckage that they didn't want shown. Journalists and private investigators were not allowed inside the Calverton hangar to inspect the bulk of the recovered wreckage, but even members of the official investigating team were not allowed into a special area where the FBI secreted items that they didn't want the representatives of the NTSB, TWA, Boeing, and the interested unions to see.

The fuselage mock-up will be preserved, together with one of the four engines. The destruction of the rest was carried out in July and August of this year. The recycler says that he had to pledge to keep it secret to get the contract. Long Island's News Channel 12 learned about it only recently. The NTSB claims that all interested parties were told what they intended to do. The parties who are most interested, those who have carried out their own investigations and are convinced that the government's explanation of the cause of the crash is bogus, were not notified.

The NTSB denies they kept it secret, but it's clear that they did so. They knew that there were many people interested in the TWA 800 case who would have strenuously objected to the destruction of evidence that they believed would prove that the NTSB and FBI had covered up the real cause of the crash - hits by missiles which had been seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses. The FBI was so nervous about what some of the recovered wreckage revealed that they would not allow non-FBI members of the official investigation team to see it. It was kept in a special room that only the FBI special agents could access. Other investigators complained that evidence was taken to that room and never seen again. Now we will never know what vital bits of evidence were hidden in that room.

One of them may have been part of the tail assembly of a drone manufactured by Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical, TRA, in San Diego. We know from a misdirected fax that the FBI asked TRA to send an official to Calverton to see if he could identify some bright orange wreckage. After seeing it, the official asked his office to send him a parts list and drawings of the tail assembly of the BQM-34 Firebee 1. When I questioned him, he first said it was just junk, but he then switched and said he saw a part similar to a TRA product and that he sent for the drawings to prove that it wasn't theirs. If it wasn't from a Firebee, it must have been from another drone, evidence the FBI hid and the NTSB has destroyed.

Major Fritz Meyer was piloting an Air National Guard helicopter when he saw TWA Flight 800 struck by missiles. Later he viewed the wreckage in the Calverton hangar and was struck by the heavy damage done to a nose wheel and tire. An NTSB official with him remarked that experts told him that was caused by a bomb. The "bomb" must have been attached to a missile. That was also evidence that had to be destroyed.

When part of the leading edge of the right wing was tested for explosive residue by an Egis machine, 12 positive hits were registered. Maj. Meyer flew it to Washington to be retested by the FBI crime lab, which reported that all but two of the 12 hits were false positives. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, the FBI's top explosives expert until he was assigned to a different job when he became a whistleblower, says that the lab failed to follow proper procedures in retesting the wing. In any case, there were two positive hits for explosive residue, evidence that a missile had exploded near the plane. That evidence was a serious threat to the government's theory of the cause of the crash.

The destruction of so much evidence that could be used to prove that the government has covered up the real cause of the crash of TWA 800 may have been legal, but those who ordered it apparently feared they might not have been allowed to get away with it if they did so openly because it is morally outrageous.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org

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