FBI CHIEF LED REVIEW OF 1996 TWA CRASH

James Kallstrom, a New York FBI chief who painstakingly spent 16 months investigating why TWA Flight 800 exploded 12 minutes after takeoff and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1996, killing all 230 people onboard, died July 3 at his home in Fairfield, Conn. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Susan, said.

In his 27 years with the FBI, Kallstrom helped convict the bosses of New York City’s five Mafia families with cleverly concealed wiretaps and spiked meatballs. And he investigated the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, expanded the FBI’s surveillance purview to include cellphones and recovered a half-million dollars in diamond jewelry stolen by a baggage handler at Kennedy International Airport in 1995 and belonging to Sarah, the Duchess of York.

In the investigation of the crash of Flight 800, he became the face of the FBI in daily briefings as he and other authorities sought to understand what caused the explosion that sent the jetliner plummeting into the waves off Long Island on July 17, 1996 — one of the deadliest aviation incidents in American history.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ultimately concluded that it was a mechanical flaw in the jetliner’s center fuel tank that caused the explosion when it ignited fumes.

That barely quelled the conspiracy theories and bureaucratic infighting. The FBI was vexed that the ATF’s report had been finished before the FBI had completed its counterterrorism and criminal investigations. And the FBI itself was accused of temporarily withholding the report’s conclusions from the National Transportation Safety Board.

But in November 1997, when Kallstrom ended his investigation, ruling out a bomb, missile or sabotage as a cause of the explosion, he flatly rejected the suggestion that the marathon probe by as many as 1,000 agents had taken too long.

James Keith Kallstrom was born May 6, 1943, in Worcester, Mass. His father, Todd, was a professional trumpeter. His mother, Edna (Linn) Kallstrom, was a registered nurse.