Part 19 (1/2)

After wondering aloud what made BSU agents any better at making psychological evaluations than, say, teachers or insurance agents, Indiana Democrat Frank McCloskey asked if it was unusual for someone working around explosives to believe he or she might die in an explosion.

”No sir,” Hazelwood agreed. ”But it is unusual for them to say 'I want to die in the line of duty,' not 'I may die,' not 'I'm in danger of dying,' but 'I want to die in the line of duty' to two different people. That is unusual, yes sir.”

The final subcommittee report excoriated Hazelwood and Ault's a.n.a.lysis for ”doubtful professionalism” and declared ”the false air of certainty generated by the FBI a.n.a.lysis was probably the single major factor inducing the Navy to single out Clayton Hartwig as the likely guilty party.”

Curiously, Roy remembers one hectoring questioner raised the reverse possibility, that Hazelwood and Ault had gone into the tank for the navy. At that Anthony Daniels rose to ask for a clarification. Was the congressman accusing the agents of lying? Daniels asked. No, came the quick reply.

As Roy told the committee, a BSU profile or a.n.a.lysis ”can be used or discarded or discounted” by the requesting agency, in this case, the navy. That Petty Officer Clay Hartwig deliberately blew up Turret Two ”is simply our opinion,” he added.

The House committee also asked the American Psychological a.s.sociation to form a committee to review the evidence as well as Hazelwood's and Ault's findings. Of the fourteen panel members, several were dubious of the FBI a.n.a.lysis, although only three a.s.serted that Clay Hartwig was probably guiltless in the matter.

The other members were generally supportive. Dr. Roger L. Greene of the psychology department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock said he detected ”a number of potential problems with the logical links between the evidence and the conclusions drawn in the FBI equivocal death a.n.a.lysis.”

This was a not unreasonable academic criticism of purely practical exercise in speculation.

Dr. Elliott M. Silverstein, a forensic psychologist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wrote, ”Presuming all the evidence is true, the psychological profile drafted by the FBI is very plausible.”

Dr. Alan L. Berman of the Was.h.i.+ngton Psychological Center was less equivocal. ”It is most reasonable,” wrote Berman, ”to conclude that Hartwig sacrificed his own life in a planned suicide-ma.s.s homicide to accomplish a variety of ends.”

Hazelwood and Ault's next engagement was with the Senate Armed Services Committee, where the reception was only marginally more civil.

William Cohen, then a Republican senator from Maine and later to be Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, was patently skeptical of both agents.

”Let me ask you,” said Cohen, ”is it abnormal for members of the navy to have subscriptions to Soldier of Fortune magazine?”

”I recall very few of my fellow marines who subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine,” d.i.c.k Ault replied.

”Very few of your fellow marines were driven to violence? Don't they teach you a lot of violence at marine boot camp?”

”They teach us to hate the enemy.”

Cohen pressed on. ”You indicated that [Hartwig] only had three close women friends . . .”

Ault completed the senator's sentence: ”. . . with whom he never had any s.e.xual contact, as far as anyone could tell. He proposed to one woman on their second date. She turned him down.”

”Well,” asked Cohen, ”what's so unusual about that?”

”She was a dancer in a strip joint,” interjected Hazelwood.

Cohen was undeterred.

”Another factor I think that you drew some significance from was that he said he could hide his hurt inside and never reveal it.”

”That's what he said, yes sir,” Roy answered.

”Is that unusual?”

”When you combine that with the fact that people never reported seeing him angry, never seeing him violent, that to us is a danger sign.

”We've seen it on too many occasions where they've just stored it up and then went out and murdered fourteen people at a college, or blew up a s.h.i.+p Yes, sir.”

Cohen, like McCloskey, also fixed on Hartwig's expressed desire to die on duty.

”Is that unusual?” he asked.

”I was in the army for eleven years, and never once did I or any of my friends make the statement, 'I'd like to die in the line of duty,' ” Hazelwood replied. ”No sir. I didn't want to die in the line of duty.”

The closest any of the questioners came to sympathy for the FBI men was John Warner, Republican of Virginia.

”Thank you, gentlemen,” said Warner at the close of the session, and then he appended a small marvel of understatement: ”Tough job that you've had to perform.”

The FBI stood by its own.

After the hearings, Hazelwood and Ault both received personal telephone calls of support and congratulations for a good job well done from Director William Sessions and a.s.sociate Director John Otto.

Roy stands by the a.n.a.lysis.

”I'm as convinced today as I was then that we were correct,” he says.

”As I told one of the senators, it would take new forensic evidence to convince me otherwise.”

Several subsequent rea.n.a.lyses of the technical data, plus a wide array of other experiments, were undertaken by both the navy's Naval Sea System Command (NAVSEA) and the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.

None of the tests could scientifically establish whether the explosion in Turret Two was an act of suicide or an accident. However, there was unexplained foreign matter recovered from the gun's barrel. This material was consistent with a chemical detonator being used to ignite the powder. But it didn't prove it.

Despite the lack of hard new evidence, on October 18, 1991, Admiral Frank B. Kelso, chief of naval operations, announced at a Was.h.i.+ngton news conference that the navy had changed its mind.

After spending $25 million in an unsuccessful search for conclusive evidence, Kelso announced, ”There is no certain answer to what caused the tragedy. Accordingly, the opinion that the explosion resulted from a wrongful intentional act is disapproved.”

Asked about Admiral Milligan's previous announcements on several public occasions that the blast was deliberately set, Kelso explained, ”I had a different set of evidence than he had, and we changed the rules.”

The navy's final conclusion, said Kelso, would be ”exact cause cannot be determined.”

The admiral also issued an apology. ”I extend my sincere regrets to the family of Hartwig,” he said. ”We're sorry Clayton Hartwig was accused of this.”

Admiral Kelso's choice of October 1991 for reversing course would later strike both Hazelwood and Ault as ironically apt. Within days of Kelso's p.r.o.nouncements, NAVSEA issued its own final report, rea.s.serting that the navy had been right all along.

”The review of the original investigation,” read the report's executive summary, ”has not produced any information, data, or a.n.a.lysis that supports any material change to the conclusions of the original technical report.”

The summary continued: ”In the absence of a plausible accidental cause and having found material consistent with a chemical device, the NAVSEA team concludes that an intentional act must be considered as a cause of the incident.”

A month earlier there had been what would prove to be another watershed event in Admiral Kelso's career.

September 1991 was the month of the infamous Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, where drunken navy fighter pilots allegedly groped, molested, hara.s.sed, and verbally abused scores of women.

Kelso had attended the convention.