Killing Ron Brown - Murder of the Bagman

The Death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown

Cilipi Airport, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2:10 PM, April 3, 1996:

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 T-43A 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 moderate rain.  They?re early because they?re anxious to greet the 35 Americans who at this moment are taking off from Tuzia, 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 U.S. 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 trick 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 make sure the plane never lands.  With a shaky hand, he picks up a scrambled 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 2,000 feet.  Sveti Ivan rises almost 400 feet 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 into the mountain. His timing will have to be perfect.  Money or no money, he begins to wonder if he?s doing the right thing.

Cilipi Airport, 2:48 PM:

Captain Schic climbs to the control tower to give IFOR-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 Shager, 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 just 100 yards.?   (Their portrayal of the weather is flatly denied by Aviation Week and 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 IFOR-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 degrees to 109 degrees, heading straight  into Sveti Ivan.  But the Cilipi control tower doesn?t know 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 the air traffic in the Bosnian conflict area losses track of IFOR-21 just after it passes over Dubrovnik.  (Being the military version of a Boeing 737-200, IFOR-21 is not easily lost.)  Because it is less than a mile off course at this point, no one on the AWACS notes any problem.

Srebreno, Croatia, 2:57 PM:

Villagers hear a plane roaring past unusually low and close.

Plat, Croatia, 2:57 PM:

Villagers Ana and Miho Duplica rush outside and see IFOR-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 of warning are far too little.  The plane?s left wingtip touches 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 gas burn.  Then a dead silence in the mist.

The tail section remains quite intact, but the rest of IFOR-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 in the ground.  All 35 people are dead except for stewardess Shelly Kelly, who, riding in the tail, sustains only minor cuts and bruises.

Cilipi, 3:18 PM:

U.S. authorities are notified that IFOR-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 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 it.

Cilipi, later that afternoon:

Niko Jerkuic goes home to collect his reward, but the reward is not waiting 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 of the Whitewater dead, Jerkuic is immediately labeled a suicide, even though there?s 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 of his 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 20 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 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 femoral artery.  It also shows that the incision came at least three hours after all her other cuts and bruises.   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 play.  Some of them have merely followed orders.  But most of them 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 of two 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:

-One desperate explanation was a nasty crosswind that ?blew? the plane sideways. Not credible:  This would require a wind 90 degrees off from the actual wind.

-Most of the press and officialdom have blamed poor visibility to some extent.  To do this, they have to take the ferocity of the rainstorm later that afternoon and evening and move it back in time to the crash hour.  But records show the weather from 2:54 PM to 2:58 PM was well within the normal limits for landing.  And NDR beacons never get blown off course.  In any case, pilots more than a few miles from an airport normally rely on a beam rather than visual sighting anyway.

-Pilot fatigue and strain?  Not likely on a 45-minute flight.

-Equipment malfunction on a rickety old plane?  IFOR-21 was the number two plane in the White House fleet:  in essence, Air Force Two.  It had carried Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Defense Secretary William Perry just the week before.  Everything about that flight was checked our and rehearsed a week in advance.

-Lightning or other troubles causing the pilots to lose track of the beam?  No, they were both drilled in the standard procedure for Cilipi:  If you lose the beam or miss the airport, you immediately veer TO THE RIGHT AND UP to make sure you avoid Sveti Ivan.  Indisputably, the pilots thought they were following the beacon, or they would have executed the standard right turn within seconds.  Plus, their landing gear was locked down, showing they expected to land at any moment.

In sum, none of the ?official? explanations to date have held any water.  And all of them ignore the glaring fact that IFOR-21 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 run-down?  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 control tower?  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.

More details:  Chief investigator for Pratt & Whitney, staying a Paris hotel, was told not to go--?There?s not going to be a safety investigation.?  For the first time in history, the Air Force had canceled the safety investigation of a crash on friendly soil.

Pentagon brass stated that there were no black boxes aboard.  It is difficult to imagine that America?s #2 VIP plane had no black box.  And a veteran Air Force mechanic who claims to have worked on just about every T-43A in the USAF says he never saw one without a black box.

Why would anyone want to murder Ron Brown?

Brown was up to his neck in major scandals.  At the time of his murder, Brown was under investigation by a special prosecutor in the Justice Dept., the FDIC, the Congressional Reform and Oversight Committee, the FBI, the Energy Dept., the Senate Judiciary Committee, and even his own Commerce Dept. Inspector General.

1.  How did North Vietnam recently get us to drop our trade embargo against them so suddenly?  Easy.  As a Vietnamese businessman and official later revealed to the press, the Communist government paid Brown $700,000 to do it.  The money went into a Singapore bank account, the embargo fell, and Clinton squashed a feeble FBI attempt to investigate.  He and Brown also neutralized a federal grand jury probe later.

2.  The 1/23/95 U.S. News & World Report broke the news that Brown had bought a $360,000 townhouse for his girlfriend, Lillian Madsen, a prominent political player and whorehouse madam from Haiti.

3.  Brown used to receive $12,500 a month as the PR flack for Baby Doc Duvalier, the much-loathed dictator of Haiti.  Brown also managed Baby Doc?s $50 million investment fund, most or all of which is now in Vietnam firms.

4.  Brown okayed the sale of a new U.S. gas turbine engine to China for use in its cruise missiles.

5.  Brown irked Congress and most of Europe by acting as point man for Clinton to bring Iranian Muslims and their weaponry into the Bosnia war.

6.  Janet Reno appointed Daniel Pearson to prosecute Brown in a grand jury probe of an Oklahoma gas company?s large money payments to Brown?s son, Michael.  The president of the company told a Tulsa grand jury that the money was to be routed to Ron Brown, who was expected to ?fix? a big lawsuit for the company.  When Reno gave Pearson blanket permission to investigate anything,  Brown angrily demanded that Clinton force her to withdraw Pearson.  When Clinton said he couldn?t comply, Brown angrily told Clinton he wasn?t going to take the rap.  He was going to finger Bill and Hillary instead.

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, scams, money laundering, cover-ups, participation fees, hush money, and side deals--all the way from one-man operations to vast multinational trade treaty fixes.

If the preceding data were widely known, America would realize that Bill Clinton is by far the most dangerous man ever to live in the White House.  His complex personality certainly has a genial side.  But a clear overall picture of this man must include the brutal nature of the hit team that carries out his muttered wishes and looks after his political fortunes.