15.

"We Changed the Rules"

The USS Iowa was an awesomely potent weapon.

Launched August 27, 1942, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the huge battleship with its crew of fifteen hundred was armed with the biggest, most powerful guns of any U.S. warship ever: nine 120-ton leviathans, each sixty-eight feet long, capable of lofting 2,700-pound explosive projectiles onto targets nearly twenty-three miles away.

The giant rifles with their sixteen-inch bores could be fired twice a minute in a complex series of steps requiring a five-hundred-page manual to describe. They were safe, too. Through several wars and innumerable engagements across decades of service, not a single sailor inside a sixteen-inch gun turret on any U.S. naval craft had ever been killed due to a misfiring.

Not until April 19, 1989.

That morning the Iowa was conducting routine gunnery exercises in the Caribbean, about three hundred miles north of Puerto Rico. Turret One fired four times without incident. Then it was Turret Two's turn to fire.

Instead at 9:55 a.m., before it discharged a single round, Turret Two was rocked by an enormous blast that annihilated all forty-seven sailors working inside.

The navy at once placed Rear Admiral Richard D. Milligan, a former battleship captain himself, in charge of investigating the unprecedented explosion.

At first, the official probe was entirely technical, focused on how the fatal explosion might have occurred. But in early May, a letter from Ohio abruptly redirected everyone's attention.

Kathlene Kubicina, introducing herself as the sister of twenty-four-year-old Gunner's Mate Clayton M. Hartwig, one of the forty-seven who'd perished, informed the navy that her dead brother had taken out a double-indemnity life insurance policy. The beneficiary, wrote Kubicina, was Kendall Truitt, another sailor aboard the Iowa. Kubicina was curious to know if Hartwig's family qualified for part of the $100,000 benefit, too.

Kathy Kubicina's letter came just as the navy's technical investigators were reporting that although they did not know what had caused the fatal detonation, the how apparently was no accident.

Confronted with the possibility that the navy now should be searching for a who, quite possibly Clay Hartwig-gun captain in Turret Two that day-Admiral Milligan called on the Naval Investigative Service for help, asking the NIS to probe Hartwig's past for any possible clues. NIS investigators crisscrossed the country in search of both physical evidence and anyone with a connection to Hartwig, from Kendall Truitt to the dead sailor's boyhood pals.

Meantime, agent d.i.c.k Ault at the BSU received a call from an old acquaintance, NIS commander Tom Mountz.

Ault, a former marine whose specialty at the BSU was spies and espionage cases, had met Mountz in the course of interviewing more than thirty traitors for a secret government research project. Now Mountz wanted to know if the BSU would do an equivocal death a.n.a.lysis on the Iowa explosion.

Ault, who had done several such a.n.a.lyses in partnership with Hazelwood, approached Roy to join him. In what would prove a fateful decision for both agents, Hazelwood agreed to team up.

Roy had already learned from the Tawana Brawley fiasco (see Chapter 19) that the search for simple truths in a complex criminal investigation is easily subverted, and then overwhelmed, when other agendas intervene. In the Iowa case, Ault and Hazelwood would discover the price of promulgating an unpopular point of view, especially at their level in the federal food chain.

"I knew at the time what probably was going to happen," Roy recalls.

"Either we would make the navy unhappy, or the politicians and the media and Hartwig's family would attack us. We were going to get hammered one way or the other."

Hazelwood and Ault's a.s.signment was essentially interpretive; they were to create for the navy what the late Dr. James Brussel called an "inferential mosaic" from evidence supplied to them by the NIS. Neither Hazelwood nor Ault took any part in the field investigation or witness interviews.

Nor did either agent ever consider the possibility that the explosion aboard the Iowa was an accident. The navy confidently informed them it was not. Their only concern was whether enough behavioral evidence was available for Hazelwood and Ault to decide among three possible options: Had Petty Officer Hartwig committed suicide, or homicide, or a suicide/homicide? If so, for what reason?

As gun captain in Turret Two on April 19, Clay Hartwig was stationed near the gun breech, the perfect spot to do mischief. Later forensic investigation would show that Hartwig was bent at the waist, peering upward through the open breech, when 660 pounds of gunpowder packed in five silk bags exploded back down the barrel at him.

Accelerating to nearly twice the speed of sound at a temperature of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the blast reached Hartwig in about one-twelfth of a second. He was killed in an instant.

Clay Hartwig didn't feel a thing.

He was the third of three children in the family of Evelyn and Earl V. Hartwig, a navy veteran. Both of Clay's older siblings were girls.

One sister told the navy that her younger brother was considered a loner within the family, that Clay spent most of his boyhood by himself in his room. She described him as nonathletic, friendless, and estranged from his family, but not overtly hostile toward them, either. She could not recall a time where Clay ever had lost his temper.

This description of Clay Hartwig wouldn't vary in significant detail among the many people who spoke to the navy interviewers. They uniformly characterized Hartwig as aloof and immature-a disgruntled loner.

He collected combat-style knives and guns, and read Soldier of Fortune and similar men's magazines. Young Clay also purchased many books about World War II, with specific interest in warships.

In his junior year in high school, Clay befriended Brian Hoover, then a ninth grader. Hoover would tell the NIS of how the older boy described making pipe bombs and blowing up trees with them. Hoover said that he and Hartwig together built a makeshift Molotov c.o.c.ktail from detergent and gasoline. They detonated the device in an open field.

The NIS investigators uncovered little to suggest that Hartwig ever was interested in girls. The one female friend from his youth they did find was four years his junior, a seventh grader he met about the same time he met Brian Hoover.

The violent subtext in Hartwig's personal history included a self-destructive streak. Hoover once walked into Hartwig's room to discover his friend intently stroking a sharp knife blade across his wrist.

Hoover told investigators that he took the knife away, and that Clay believed his friend's intervention saved his life. So grateful was Hartwig that he wrote out an informal will, leaving Brian Hoover everything he owned. NIS investigators later found the doc.u.ment tucked in one of several Bibles in Clay's old room at home.

According to those who knew him, self-dramatizing gestures of this sort were typical of Hartwig, who also was apt to bear bitter grudges against those he believed had wronged him.

When he joined the navy out of high school in 1983, Hartwig began sending Hoover two hundred dollars a month. He kept up the practice for eighteen months, until Brian disclosed to Clay that he'd had s.e.x with a girl of their mutual acquaintance.

Hartwig immediately suspended the monthly stipend to Hoover.

The young sailor's s.e.xual orientation became a public issue within weeks of his death when a television network reported he was h.o.m.os.e.xual. The questions had been raised before.

There were whispers on board the Iowa that Hartwig and Kendall Truitt, his life insurance beneficiary, were physically intimate, rumors that Truitt has repeatedly denied.

Hartwig's rumored h.o.m.os.e.xuality is not an idle question for the purposes of understanding what occurred in Turret Two, however. Statistics indicate h.o.m.os.e.xual males commit suicide at a substantially higher rate than do heteros.e.xual males in the same age group.

In any event, Hartwig apparently had scant s.e.xual experience with females. A woman in Norfolk, Virginia, the Iowa's home port, told the NIS that Hartwig impulsively proposed marriage to her on their second date. They'd gone to bed together, but he had kept his pants on and nothing happened between them.

Another of Hartwig's very few known female acquaintances said she had notified Clay by letter that she expected them to consummate their relationship on his next return from sea. Reticent as he was about the subject, her demand for s.e.xual performance may have unnerved him.

It was not Clay Hartwig's habit to discuss intimate matters directly with anyone. Instead, he wrote letters and notes, hundreds of them, to both men and women he regarded as friends.

Hazelwood and Ault read a wide a.s.sortment of them.

"One thing about me is I show very little emotion," he wrote in an undated note to Truitt, ". . . and I never express my feelings out loud. But it's different when I write it down. It's much easier for me to do it that way."

When Clayton Hartwig did talk about himself, he was given to exaggerations and outright lies, confecting a fantasy life altogether different from the world Hartwig actually inhabited. He wore unauthorized insignia on his uniform, and showed off a navy SEAL membership for which he did not qualify. On and off the ship, Hartwig bragged about the hush-hush high-level a.s.signment in London he'd been promised if he reenlisted.

No such special a.s.signment existed. In fact, his performance reviews suggested he lacked the aggressiveness to be a good leader.

Hartwig persevered nearly to the end of his six-year enlistment in the navy, even though he appears not to have succeeded particularly well, or to have enjoyed navy life.

He was scorned and ridiculed by shipmates, according to Kendall Truitt. Another Iowa seaman recalled Clay calling the warship "a d.a.m.n pig."

Nor did his fascination with violence subside. Hartwig owned two handguns. Found in his possessions after the explosion was a technical manual, Improvised Munitions. His sister Kathlene reported that in the summer of 1988 Clay came home on leave with what he described as explosive materials from the Iowa, substances used "to shoot the big guns," he said.

Reportedly, Hartwig also said when he was home that if an explosion occurred inside the Iowa's gun turrets, there'd be no survivors.

After her brother's death, Kathlene found in Clay's typewriter a list of all the crewmen a.s.signed to Turret Two. NIS investigators also discovered in his room an alb.u.m devoted to newspaper accounts of ship disasters.

Death seemed to have been yet another preoccupation.

According to Truitt, when Clay discussed death it was in a context of extreme violence, including mutilation.

In December of 1988, ten months after Hartwig took out his double-indemnity life insurance policy naming Truitt as beneficiary, his younger friend married.

Aware that Hartwig disliked his fiancee, Kendall did not invite Clay to the wedding. Hartwig's response to what he must have considered a painful snub is unrecorded. However, just as he had suddenly shunned Brian Hoover, Hartwig ceased all communications with Truitt, although he did not drop or otherwise alter the insurance policy.

Two seamen reported to the NIS that Hartwig told them he wished to die in the line of duty.

Another shipmate who was working through some personal problems of his own said that he, too, had discussed death with Hartwig. The two sailors decided that the quickest way to go would be in an explosion.

"He just said he imagine[d] that he wouldn't feel a thing and he'd never know it," said the seaman. "He said he kinda knew what I was going through, because he had tried to commit suicide at one time. So we kept talking and talking and he confided in me that . . . he still thinks about it sometimes."

Still another shipmate reported he'd seen an electronic detonation device in Hartwig's locker.

In all, the remarkably consistent behavioral evidence left little doubt that Clay Hartwig had the mind-set, the ability, and abundant motive for committing suicide, as well as both the expertise and the opportunity to blow up Turret Two.

There was no one else aboard the Iowa that day in which all these critical factors were so richly present. If the blast was deliberate, then Clayton M. Hartwig was the man who did it.

Hazelwood and Ault in their report to the NIS described Hartwig as "a troubled young man" with low self-esteem "who coveted the power and authority he felt he did not possess."

They opined that he'd been "emotionally devastated" by "real and perceived rejections of significant others" and was facing a "mult.i.tude of stressors"-from a young woman's s.e.xual demands to his unavoidable exposure as a sham. That there was no special a.s.signment waiting for him would be clear at the close of the Iowa's cruise.

Suicide, which appears not to have been far from his mind in any event, now might appear as an escape route, even a morbid form of affirmation, the kind of death he'd read about in Glorious Way to Die: Kamikaze Mission of Battleship Yamato, April 1945, a volume Hartwig had checked out of the library two years before.

Even the month, April, seemed propitious for such a deed.

Hazelwood and Ault believed that the combination of stressors in Hartwig's life "virtually a.s.sured some type of reaction."

And they were unequivocal in what they believed it was.

"In this case," they concluded, "it was suicide."

The agents submitted their a.n.a.lysis on June 16, 1989.

On September 7 Admiral Milligan called a press conference to announce the navy's determination that "a wrongful intentional act" had caused the explosion in Turret Two. Milligan added that Clayton Hartwig "most probably" had committed the act.

"We have an FBI profile by FBI psychologists with the opinion he took his own life and hoped it would look like an accident," said the admiral.

The expected reaction was swift.

"I never believed it from the start," Hartwig's sister, Kathy Kubicina, told a reporter. Of Milligan's press conference, she added, "I didn't really hear anything I didn't hear before."

The Hartwig family lawyer called for a congressional investigation.

"I think the navy is at a loss," said Kendall Truitt. "They are looking for scapegoats."

The allegations touched a chord both in the press and on Capitol Hill, and in retrospect it is simple to see why. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Reagan administration's secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan contras, when significant numbers of people still doubted that Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray acted alone, it was not difficult to believe the U.S. Navy capable of conspiracy, too.

When hard scientific evidence of sabotage aboard the Iowa was not forthcoming, both the U.S. House and Senate announced their own investigation of the explosion, no doubt mirroring const.i.tuent sentiment.

Although there were dark variations on the theme, the thrust of the skepticism was that the technical experts couldn't figure out exactly what had happened, so instead of accepting that there might be something intrinsically amiss aboard the Iowa, the navy chose to place the onus on a dead man.

Clay Hartwig looked like a convenient patsy.

This idea surfaced everywhere in the press.

The New York Times unloaded several salvos, lambasting the navy's "unproven, probably unprovable charge that one dead crew member was the culprit."

Syndicated columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, a former colleague of mine at Newsweek, derided Hazelwood and Ault's a.n.a.lysis as "quack evidence."

The intelligent and thoughtful Lester Bernstein, a former editor for whom I worked at Newsweek, turned up during the Iowa debate as an angry voice in Newsday, accusing the navy of scapegoating Hartwig as a consequence of the service's "hidebound commitment to its four half-century-old battleships."

In still another fusillade from West Forty-second Street, the Times scolded the navy for its decision to "smear a crewman's memory on flimsy evidence" and for relying on a "libelous psychological profile of Mr. Hartwig."

Members of the House Investigations Subcommittee were hardly more polite. While the FBI was accustomed to taking its licks in the press, deserved or otherwise, Capitol Hill usually was friendly territory, particularly for the BSU.

It hadn't been too many years since Roy, John Douglas, Roger Depue, Ken Lanning, and others from Quantico had come before another House committee, testifying under the legislators' beneficent nods to the encouraging progress the BSU was making toward identification and apprehension of aberrant criminals.

The agents' presentations had been earnest and professional and highly persuasive. The Reagan White House and a Democratic Congress responded with a $4 million appropriation to fund VICAP, the BSU's computer-based Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

But the beneficence soured to balefulness by December 1989, when Hazelwood and Ault sat down before the subcommittee, accompanied by a.s.sistant FBI director Anthony Daniels, then in charge at Quantico.

Roy read into the record a summary statement which laid out the eight main factors, plus b.u.t.tressing evidence, that had led him and Ault to their conclusion.

1. "Hartwig was a loner" with only six known friends, the doc.u.ment explained. "Hartwig believed that four of the six individuals had rejected him, and the fifth was applying pressure on him for an intimate relationship that he was not capable of."

2. "Hartwig was dissatisfied with life." Here, Hazelwood and Ault reviewed the evidence, from Hartwig's subscription to Soldier of Fortune to the false intimations he made about his expected rea.s.signment to naval security work in London to the amateur "war games" he and others played while stationed at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. "He had a fantasy life that went far beyond the realities of his true life," the agents noted.

3. "In the writers' opinion, Hartwig believed that he had good reasons for not returning from the cruise." If he killed himself, he wouldn't have to face discovery of his lies, or the pending s.e.xual demands. Finally, there'd be relief from the onboard ostracism, as well as the rejection he felt.

4. Clay Hartwig had a revenge motive. He disliked the ship and his shipmates. He had also been disciplined aboard the Iowa, taken before a so-called captain's mast and reduced one grade in rank.

5. "Hartwig had a history of immature reaction to change in his life and interpersonal problems. He was also known to carry a grudge against those who he believed wronged him."

6. "Hartwig was experiencing a number of stressors at the time of his death." Besides all his other unsolved problems, he was broke, his car needed repair, and his telephone had been turned off.

7. "It is the opinion of the writers that Hartwig had suicide ideation." He had talked of suicide, and seemed to be thinking seriously about it the day Brian Hoover discovered him in his room, playing with the knife.

In what proved to be his last letter to the woman in Norfolk, Hartwig closed with "Love always and forever, Clayton" instead of his usual "Clay," and added, "I'm sorry I didn't take you home to meet my mother!"

To another woman, who accused Hartwig of "hiding" aboard the Iowa, he wrote on April 9, 1989, "I don't think the 1200 men that went down on the USS Arizona* were hiding, or the 37 sailors that were killed on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf in 1986! I could become one of those little white headstones in Arlington National Cemetery any day!"

8. "Finally, Hartwig possessed the knowledge, ability and opportunity to ignite the powder in the same fashion that occurred on the USS Iowa."

Nothing contained in the agents' thirteen-page summary report or their testimony seemed to make much of an impression with the lawmakers.