““Pierre is a sort of naif,’’ says a former colleague at ABC News. Salinger retired in 1993. After a few years with a public-relations firm, he was at loose ends last September, when ““Prime Time Live’’ senior producer Ira Rosen proposed bringing him back to the network as a consultant on terrorism. But the ABC brass wouldn’t have him. ““Pierre is a loose cannon,’’ says a network reporter. In the early 1980s, Salinger claimed the Carter administration bungled opportunities to free the American hostages who were held in Iran. Later he charged that the United States tricked Iraq’s Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in 1990. And he floated a baroque theory that Pan American Flight 103 had been blown up over Scotland in 1988 because a U.S. drug-enforcement sting had gone awry, allowing terrorists to put a bomb on the plane.
His source for the TWA story turned out to be a spurious memo that has been circulating on the Internet since August (NEWSWEEK, Sept. 23). But Salinger had dug his teeth into the story as if it were one of his trademark cigars, and he vowed to pursue it. ““I want to see if I can come up with more information for the FBI,’’ he declared. So far, however, his shoot-from-the-hip brand of journalism seems only to have increased public confusion–and cynicism about the government and the media.
