Original subtitles

A Malaysia Airlines plane, with nearly 300 people on board,

has crashed in Ukraine near the Russian border.

Flight MH17 took off from Amsterdam just after midday local time.

It was bound for Kuala Lumpur.

I woke up one morning

and there was a Malaysian plane splashed across the TV.

Instantly, I thought it was MH370

and then I saw MH17 and I went,

"Hold on." "Can't be another Malaysian plane."

US intelligence has concluded it was shot down

by a surface-to-air missile.

The odds of losing two airplanes within a six-month period

is unprecedented.

And both 777s too.

Again it happened to Malaysia Airlines plane.

Again it happened to my colleagues.

And...

it just so happened that this time, they can bury their loved ones.

Because we also...

Yeah.

We also want to bury our loved ones.

I just went numb. Completely numb.

And...

I just couldn't believe it.

We kept thinking, "There is probably some kind of plan

to destroy our credibility."

A series of actions trying to bring us down.

Ukrainian president called the downing of a Malaysian Airlines

passenger plane an act of terrorism.

It turned out that it was a Russian army unit

under the command of Russia's military intelligence.

Malaysia Airlines hadn't had a major accident since the '90s

and now within a span of four and a half months, they'd lost two, big 777s.

I had to wonder,

"Is this just a coincidence?"

And if there was a link between the two of them,

the underlying truth had to be way darker

then anyone had anticipated at that point.

We don't have the answers.

This is one of the great mysteries in aviation history.

Australia will lead the search in the Indian Ocean

for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.

In the months that followed the shoot-down of MH17...

As I thought about

the idea that maybe the Russians had caused both of these events,

the search for MH370 was already underway.

Experts say the jet going down in the Indian Ocean,

more than 1,800 kilometers

off the West Australian coast.

It's a vast area, a huge responsibility

for Australia as they try and find any trace of flight 370.

Tonight, there are 43 ships,

58 aircraft,

from 14 different countries, all working together to try to find clues.

The area they're searching is far larger

than the continental United States.

We're not searching for a needle in a haystack,

we're trying to define where the haystack is.

The search team still insists the debris field

is here on the ocean floor,

a location they say satellite data points to.

The official account

was that the plane definitely went south into the southern Indian Ocean.

Because that's where the last electronic signals had been detected.

The Inmarsat data says the plane went south.

I can't imagine someone I loved

lost in the southern Indian Ocean in 4,000 meters of water.

I mean, that's just...

inconceivable.

There was 239 families who were desperate for answers.

And...

I made a promise at that time

that I'd do everything I could, as an individual,

to bring their loved ones home.

But it was a very, very difficult area to search.

What you hope for is a nice, flat, soft plane.

But there were

volcanoes, underwater mountains,

every bit as big and wide as the Grand Canyon.

The weather at times is appalling down there.

They measured a wave of 24 meters.

It was definitely not for the faint-hearted.

So, we knew the chances were it would take a long time.

This is what a year of grieving looks like.

The relatives of the missing have experienced denial, anger, sadness.

But with not a single trace of the plane,

acceptance is a long way off.

This is why I am here speaking to you today.

This is why I'm here going through this heart-wrenching episode,

talking about my feelings. It's not easy.

I think, for everyone, it had been a very difficult year for the next of kin.

When I decided to then address the public on that day,

I was just speaking to them as a daughter missing her mother.

But I'm doing it because I need to know

that I've done everything that I can for my mother.

Even if she's not here.

I think I still lived my days

thinking my mom would walk through the door any minute.

Because we had not discovered any debris, there was absolutely nothing.

So my daughter asked me,

"Where is Papa?"

"If Papa died,

where is his grave?"

She asked me again and again.

"Why Papa work on airplane?"

"Why didn't Papa go work somewhere else?"

"If Papa go worked somewhere else, Papa wouldn't go missing."

A whole year

had gone past

and we were still no further ahead

than we were from March 8th.

Just seemed surreal to be standing there still, 12 months on.

And all I had

is him

walking out that door and kissing us goodbye.

And that was still,

a year on, all I had.

Planes go up.

Planes go down.

What planes don't do is just vanish off the face of the earth.

I remember when it was missing for a week and we were all incredulous.

You know, we said to one another,

"I can't believe it's been a whole week and we still haven't found this plane."

And then, after a month, "We still haven't found this plane."

And then a year later...

"We're still looking for this plane?"

The profundity of this mystery,

and the incompetence of the Malaysian authorities

to answer anybody's questions

had presented a vacuum.

And there was a lot of people out there

who were claiming that they had solved it.

On social media, conspiracy theories

about the missing plane are going viral.

The real Malaysian Airlines flight was hijacked

and flown to Iran

in preparation for a terror attack.

Theories are bouncing off the walls. Everyone's got an idea.

Fire from lithium batteries in the cargo hold brought the plane down.

Speculation is rife.

News has broke that a fisherman from Indonesia

claims he saw the damaged plane covered in smoke as it flew overhead.

Another conspiracy,

an outrageous insurance scam.

Some of these people showed up outside my office,

would chase me down in a car park.

It was quite scary. I remember spraining an ankle once trying to escape

one of these people who really just wanted to bring their theory to me.

Four days after flight disappeared,

there was a patent issued for a new semiconductor technology.

Others wonder, "Did it land on the US military base

known as Diego Garcia?"

We're trying to sift through this waterfall

of misinformation and speculation...

and nonsense.

The totally bizarre. A meteorite hitting it.

Perhaps, some suggest, North Korea took the airplane.

Does this mean an alien was on the plane?

And abducted everyone on board.

It gets even weirder.

Sometimes you just feel like you're drowning in horseshit.

Because there's just so many baseless ideas.

If you want to believe in a theory,

make sure that it concurs with the Inmarsat data

that told the scientist how far

the plane was from the satellite.

This is the key clue of the entire mystery

and people are choosing to just say, "Fuck it."

And yet the plane wasn't where

the data said it was supposed to be,

in the southern Indian Ocean.

That seemed to me something that had to be grappled with.

We had to address the issue

of why wasn't the plane where it was supposed to be?

Where had we gone wrong?

The story was so incredible.

I decided to suggest to Le Monde,

a French daily newspaper,

to revisit the story for the one-year anniversary.

Just saying,

"Guys, this plane has been completely missing for a year."

I'm a journalist and I've been a reporter

covering Asia-Pacific for the last 30 years.

The fact that there was not a single piece of debris

was the biggest issue.

There was nothing tangible, credible,

that the families could relate to.

And the captain was made the potential villain.

I realized that we had to start from scratch again.

And I need to have my own

understanding of who this man is.

There was a very consistent

and hostile campaign related to

his private life, his mental health.

There were also accusations that he may have had

political motivations

to disappear MH370.

He was a fan of Anwar Ibrahim,

who was the leader of the opposition party.

Zaharie attended Anwar's pro-democracy rallies and meetings.

Local press are now asking,

"Did Zaharie purposely down the plane to make a political statement?"

But he left no message, uh,

whatsoever, political,

uh, or goodbye to his family, or any suicide note.

None at all.

And the more I looked at his life,

the less I could see a reason for him

to be angry or to be unhappy.

Hi everyone. Uh...

This is a YouTube video that I made as a

community service.

This was a man

who was doing YouTube videos to help

sealing your windows

or fixing your air conditioning.

This is the cheapest solution that you can do.

And it's very effective.

In my opinion, he was certainly not an extremist.

What I did was line up interviews with members of his family.

My very first encounter

was with his older sister, Sakinab.

He's a very gentle, very caring

person.

Sakinab, when I met her, was obviously very upset.

First, because she lost this precious little brother that she loved so much,

but also because she had to endure

these insinuations that he was responsible for this disaster.

Captain Zaharie is

known as one of the best pilots at Malaysia Airlines.

And all the crews

definitely don't agree with

that kind of accusation towards Captain Zaharie.

When the spotlight focused on Captain Zaharie,

I took offense to that.

Because I know him personally. I know him very well.

And he's a person who is very professional.

There's no way he could have done this.

If there's no proof, then you shouldn't assume

someone did that.

Especially maybe because I'm a criminal lawyer,

and being innocent until proven guilty is very important to me.

People say everyone may have a darker side.

Okay. Maybe, then.

But, as far as I'm concerned,

based on all the information I gathered and I read,

my answer is, "No."

"He's, he's not guilty."

So, it's a year on.

It seems to me increasingly problematic

that the plane has not been found, no debris has been found.

All... The entire search effort at this point

is based on the satellite data.

But...

ships and planes from 12 countries had been scouring

millions of square miles of ocean and found not so much as a seat cushion.

So the entire edifice is resting on this

rather scant set of electronic signals

and the fairly advanced mathematics that was used to understand them,

by the Inmarsat company.

At the time, I was still working with my colleagues in the Independent Group.

They were this kind of amateur band of self-styled experts,

who are obsessed with data and facts.

We exchanged information,

about 18 of us, where we were working around the clock on it.

I became very, very involved on a daily basis,

corresponding with people in the Independent Group.

And also people at CNN and other news organizations.

I know it's complicated,

but what do you see as the biggest problem?

The biggest problem is that Inmarsat hasn't released enough detail

to allow outsiders to confirm any of their analysis.

Really, all the faith has been in this data.

Finally, the Malaysians did release all of the data

gotten from the Inmarsat company.

Inside the report was a paragraph that said,

this piece of equipment

that controlled the plane's communication with the satellite

had been turned off when everything else was turned off

and then it came back to life.

That, to me, changed the entire tenor of the subject.

Because if you wanted to abscond with an airplane,

and if you wanted to turn it off and make it disappear from a screen...

why would you turn the system back on?

Maybe there was something really wrong

with that Inmarsat data.

Maybe it had been tampered with.

So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out

how could you turn the box off and back on again?

And I quickly learned that

most airline pilots are not trained how to do it.

The airlines don't want them to do it.

So there is no on and off switch in the cockpit.

So this is the main equipment center of a commercial airliner.

This is where essentially all the brains and the electronics...

The 777 uses electronics to do everything.

All of this resides inside the electronics bay.

Effectively, the electronic brain of the whole plane.

...equipment racks where...

And, in there, you can switch off this equipment.

And you can deactivate the system by pulling those. You've got relays.

So the question is, then, "How do you access the electronics bay?"

And this is the part that really blew my mind.

The electronics bay is under an unlocked hatch,

under a piece of carpet at the front of the first-class cabin.

Effectively anybody on that plane can pull up a carpet...

and have control of the airplane.

There's a hatch that leads to the avionics compartment,

or the E&E bay, as we call it.

And that hatch is in between the first class and the cockpit.

So, there is a possibility that

somebody could have got into the avionics compartment.

And they can disable the communication system.

Suddenly, it's not so clear that it was the pilot after all.

It's like an Agatha Christie mystery.

Everyone in the manor house is now a suspect.

We were starting to think,

"How can they tell us they don't know? It's impossible."

When you follow the story closely,

you can only conclude that none of it makes sense.

We're not being shown proof of the radar sighting.

"We can't find the plane. We can't find debris."

We're not being shown anything. Nothing.

We're asked to believe in pure nonsense.

Someone I knew told me,

"Mr. B would like to meet you."

This person had information.

He's someone who's very connected.

Connected to the secret services.

The first time I met him,

the first thing he told me...

"The Americans know full well what happened."

"Because there were two American AWACS

that were monitoring the area at the time the plane disappeared."

These AWACS are Boeing planes with a huge radar like a mushroom on top.

And this radar basically monitors everything underneath the Boeing.

It's like a small satellite above

the Earth that sees everything that's happening in a 600-km radius.

Mr. B said these two planes must have

perfectly tracked the MH370, regardless of its state at any moment.

They know where it crashed. They know where it is.

It's difficult when you receive information

saying the Americans are involved.

I know that if I say it, people won't believe me.

But when I understood there was a "pact of silence,"

that we were being lied to and that we had to do something,

I told myself, "Time to communicate."

Ghyslain Wattrelos, good morning.

You're fighting to understand what happened...

I accepted every single interview

to say "We're being lied to. Journalists must join in."

It's obvious that, given the information I've received,

there are people whose job is to keep me away from the truth.

Until one day I thought,

"I'm not performing at work, so let's quit and go all in on the investigation."

So that's what I did.

Good evening, Ghyslain Wattrelos.

You have lost your wife and your two youngest children...

We're being fed nonsense.

We can't get any information.

We have to get together to do something ourselves.

So that's when we started coordinating with the families.

The families... um...

from different countries gathered,

which was very important.

In doing so, we could make up

for the deficiencies of the non-transparent investigation.

Uh...

and information coming from Malaysia.

It was pretty risky.

It was an investigation.

But we were going against more powerful forces than us.

We're here to hand a petition in to the president

because it's been a year

and they have said nothing and done nothing.

What we did was, we pressed charges for "act of terrorism."

Why an "act of terrorism?"

Well, because terrorism ranks highest

on the hierarchy of judicial matters.

In France, the moment you press charges, judges are assigned

and the judges have to conduct an investigation.

Hello, how are you?

- Very well, and you? - Very well.

The thing you need to realize is that,

across the globe, there's only one source of judicial information.

It's here.

There's a truth to uncover. It's not a mystery.

We owe it to everyone.

Not only to Ghyslain but also to those

who didn't get that opportunity to have investigating magistrates

in their own countries. We owe it to everyone.

I find myself in a fight,

and this fight keeps me going.

I'm just trying to get to the truth, for myself and everybody else.

Many times, the name of Ghyslain Wattrelos,

the French man, the angry French man,

uh, was put out to me.

And eventually, I decided to see for myself what he had to say.

One day,

someone from the newspaper Le Monde contacts me and tells me,

"I'm the correspondent for Le Monde. It would be great if we could chat."

Ghyslain told me that he had been approached by

a senior member of the intelligence service,

who told him that the Americans knew

exactly what had happened.

And that two US AWACS planes were involved.

When I met this source,

I established for myself that he was a credible,

a genuine member of the intelligence community.

He was just one more voice

telling me that

the true story of MH370

is completely different than the official narrative.

There were some kind of fringe characters who were

making noises about maybe the Americans had covered it up.

Um, but especially after what happened to MH17,

it seemed much more likely that the Russians were involved.

Now, originally, thanks to the Inmarsat data,

there were these two routes, north and south.

I started to worry about the possibility

that somebody aboard the plane,

who was sophisticated and had malicious intent,

could have deliberately changed the Inmarsat data,

in order to make the plane look like it went south,

when it really went north.

It turns out

that on Boeing airplanes,

it is physically possible to alter the data,

which allows you to determine which of these two routes is right.

It was a eureka moment.

Because now we have an alternate explanation

for what happened to this plane.

If the plane went north,

it would have wound up

at the final ping in Kazakhstan.

A poor country in Central Asia that is not capable of a sophisticated hacking attack,

but which is a client state of Russia.

Now, remember that Russia had shot down MH17,

a sister airplane of MH370.

It had been blasted out of the sky over eastern Ukraine.

So, my prime suspect

was that the same intelligence service was also involved in MH370.

That, in fact, there was potentially a link

between these two very similar aircraft accidents.

At that point,

I looked in the passenger manifest

and I saw that there were three ethnically Russian men on board the plane that night.

When I looked at the seating diagram,

my eyebrows went up,

because one of them was sitting

about 15 feet from the unlocked hatch into the electronics bay,

at the front of the first-class cabin.

The next question was, "Well, what would the motive be for Russia doing this?"

Reports have surfaced of Russian troops landing in Crimea.

Moscow has indeed gone ahead with an armed invasion of...

MH370 happened in the context

of Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014.

The crisis in the Ukraine has escalated and taken a new turn this morning...

Several hundred Russian troops have landed in the Crimea region.

The networks, the newspapers, the mainline media, everyone

is lasering in on this event.

And when MH370 happened

it had the desirable effect of stopping anybody from talking about that.

Sir, where is the focus of your search right now?

Can you confirm if the plane has turned back?

You can't deny

that the disappearance of MH370

was a perfectly timed and spectacularly convenient distraction

for Russia from the condemnation it was facing from the rest of the world.

As crazy as it seemed, even to me,

I had to keep going

as long as this possibility existed.

So eventually, I laid it all out.

This is how I think it went down.

It's 1:15 in the morning.

Zaharie is flying over the South China Sea in the dark of a cool, calm night.

Passengers, tired and anticipating

a boring overnight flight.

The three Russians aboard the plane

begin their operation.

Somewhere over the South China Sea,

someone's making a ruckus

near the first-class compartment.

The flight attendants hurry to see what's going on.

As this happens,

the Russian in first class slips forward.

He lifts the carpet...

raises a hatch

into the electronics bay.

Down in the hatch,

the Russian is surrounded by banks of computers.

He's in the nerve center of the airplane, the electronic brain.

He plugs into the computer of the plane's flight control system.

The plane moves closer and closer to the edge of Malaysian airspace.

Malaysian 370 contact Ho Chi Minh, 120 decimal 9.

Good night.

Uh, good night, Malaysian 370.

The people on board the plane

still have no idea what's happening or why.

Now the plane is in this operational no man's land,

where nobody's looking at them.

Inside the electronics bay,

the Russian agent turns the equipment on.

The plane vanishes from air traffic controllers' radar screens.

He now has complete control of the aircraft.

The captain and the co-pilot are confused as the lights blink on their display.

And none of their communications equipment is working.

And then even more shockingly...

the plane suddenly banks violently to the left.

The plane is in maneuver that neither one of them has commanded.

Down in the electronics bay,

the Russian agent

has started to depressurize the airplane,

letting the air out of the cabin.

At the same time, he turns a knob on an oxygen bottle stowed on the wall,

which cut off the emergency oxygen systems that the pilot and the co-pilot rely on.

In the cabin,

the masks fall down from the ceiling.

The flight crew suddenly realizes that they can't breathe.

In the minutes that follow,

the captain and co-pilot lose consciousness.

And the cabin falls quiet.

The Russian agent in the electronics bay has turned the plane towards the northwest

and deliberately altered the Inmarsat data.

Now, if anyone looks at the

trail of digital breadcrumbs that the plane's about to leave,

they'll misinterpret the signal as meaning that the plane has gone south.

When in fact, their plane is actually going north.

MH370 proceeds onward through the night,

receding gradually from its phantom twin.

And ultimately winding up

over the deserts of central Kazakhstan.

For the hijackers, it's mission accomplished.

I knew that it sounded crazy.

I knew that it was far-fetched.

I knew that people would have a hard time swallowing it,

but even though it might torpedo my reputation,

I felt like I had to go public.

I had to bring people's attention to the problem

that this plane possessed a vulnerability.

He thinks it's possible Russian hijackers sent the plane north.

Do you really think it went to Kazakhstan?

Well, it's not something I believe. It's a hypothesis that I pieced together.

I went on TV and it was scary.

I felt like my ass was hanging out the window.

What reaction are you getting from this theory?

It's a lot to swallow, I grant you.

Are you getting calls from people saying this seems realistic?

In the comments sections, a lot of people are outraged, furious.

Some people are very angry at me.

Nobody goes into the E&E bay,

reprograms the BFO, lands in Kazakhstan!

I'm intimately familiar with

how that satellite system works, as are a number of my colleagues,

and we're absolutely certain that the plane turned south and not north.

It was surprising that Jeff decided to

take off on this route.

I was correct in thinking that

I would get a frosty reception from some quarters.

The Independent Group,

which had staked its reputation on the idea that the plane went south,

did not want to brook any opposition from me.

They kicked me out.

Jeff's work, in my opinion,

is simply a fiction that he has woven

and convinced himself is feasible.

But it's all based on fantasies.

It's not based on reality.

I knew the weaknesses of my own case.

And I knew the strengths of my own case. But the proposition that I was making

was easy to ridicule.

You think that somebody possibly tampered with the satellite data.

But the company that is behind this system...

- I think it's called Inmarsat? - That's right.

...says they haven't used this in the past to track planes.

The idea that now it's being used and then also tampered with

feels far-fetched to them.

The idea that someone, um, predicts

that we would analyze this data in this way,

um, when we'd never done it in the past before,

doesn't seem particularly credible at all.

Anyone who gets into the hatch

can disable the transponder

and disable the communication systems.

But it is impossible to fly the aircraft from the avionics compartment.

It is impossible.

I've gone deep on this.

I know that.

I know it sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel.

But the fact is,

even if there's no way that anyone

could fly a plane from the electronics bay,

we know for a fact that it is physically possible,

from inside of it, to turn off all the electronics

that make the plane visible to the outside world.

So my scenario,

as crazy as it might seem,

at least attempted to explain

the disappearance of MH370.

That all gets lost.

And I'm just lumped with the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.

But, the fact is, if the data was right

and it had told us where the plane went,

how come they hadn't managed to find a single piece of it?

If your data is right, the plane should be there.

Where is the plane?

Where is the wreckage? Show me the plane.

This is CNN breaking news.

And we are following breaking news just in to CNN.

It is too soon to confirm right now, but we can tell you at this point

that some debris has been found in La Réunion...

La Réunion island is being checked for any connection

to missing Malaysian flight 370.

The piece was found on a rocky beach on the French territory in the Indian Ocean.

Boeing's investigators believe it is, in fact, a piece of a wing.

Perhaps a flap from a Boeing 777...

Everyone's wondering,

"Is this a remnant of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370?"

When the flaperon was found

I was not surprised.

This is exactly what I had said would happen,

that the first piece of this plane would be found by someone walking on the beach

somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

New developments involving that piece of debris

discovered off eastern...

I knew immediately

I wanted to be the one to solve it.

I wanted to find the plane wherever it was.