February 25, 1998

Before Monica Lewinsky overtook the national headlines in January 1998, Washington was shaken over new revelations in the death of former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. A month earlier in December 1997, two military medical examiners, Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Cogswell and U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Hause, asserted that a suspicious skull wound on Brown was the result of a .45 caliber gun, and not from the impact of the plane crash. Their analysis was later corroborated by two other colleagues with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. But before any official inquiry could be started, the Lewinsky affair buried this shocking revelation for more than a year. However, now that Mr. Clinton’s impeachment trial is over, there is a renewed interest in finding the truth about what really happened to Ron Brown….and why. It's only about possible sabotage and the suspicion of murder.

Not since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal plummeted out of a 16th story window at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda nearly 50 years ago has a prominent presidential Cabinet Secretary died under such mysterious circumstances. And while 1949 officialdom in Washington footnoted Forrestal to irrelevance, no one should forget Ron Brown. For it is Brown who was Clinton’s principal partner-in-crime --- from illegal foreign fundraising to high-level bribery and racketeering. And it was Brown, under investigation by 5 federal agencies, who was about to tell all about the darkest secrets of President Clinton until his most (un)timely death in 1996.

There are still serious questions which cannot be dismissed by government authorities as conspiracy lore. And there are important questions which have yet to be answered and may provide clues to the events and motives surrounding the fateful plane crash in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where Brown and 34 others apparently perished.

• What caused the plane to veer so far off course? The Air Force blames pilot error. However, both pilots were well-experienced and the plane was well-maintained with no mechanical problems.
• Did the outdated non-directional beacon (NDB) at Dubrovnik Airport play a role? Due to the cloudy weather that day, the pilots were reliant upon this beacon for landing. Strangely, Niko Jerkuic, the chief maintenance officer in charge of the beacon, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot three days after the crash and only moments before he was to be interviewed by Air Force investigators. Mr. Jerkuic’s family and colleagues do not believe he committed suicide.
• Was the landing manual doctored? The manual, made by Jeppesen-Sanderson, Inc., details precise procedures for assisting pilots on landing approach at Dubrovnik. Jeppesen is currently facing civil legal action for negligence by the victims’ families. However, the Air Force acknowledges that this manual was removed from the mishap aircraft the night before and hand-delivered to the pilots who were staying at a hotel in Zagreb.
• Were a “black box” and other critical items removed from the wreckage? The Air Force maintains that Brown’s CT-43A aircraft was not equipped with a flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder, automatic direction finding receiver, nor a global positioning system. It begs the imagination to believe that this particular plane, which only weeks before shuttled around Hillary Clinton and former Defense Secretary William Perry, would not be equipped with these vital avionics instruments.
• What happened to Shelly Kelly, a flight attendant who survived the crash? Who carried her away from the crash site? And who arrived first at the scene----Croatian or American military personnel? According to the Air Force, Ms. Kelly was the “lone survivor” taken to local hospital by the Croatians, but died en route from a broken neck sustained in the crash. Independent reports, though, say she was airlifted by a U.S. military helicopter and bled to death from a cut to her main femoral artery.

Whatever transpired on that tragic day in Croatia, only a proper investigation will tell us. The truth needs to be told----for the sake of the victims’ families and for the American people.