Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (43 page)

There is no path. There is no story. What have I done? What have I found? Proof that the Cooper Curse has gotten me too?

I reread the story I wrote about Ken Christiansen in
New York
that was published three years ago. Maybe there is a clue in here I missed? A follow-up I’ve forgotten? I scroll down to the section where the readers can write in to discuss the piece. There is one comment.

The whole deal was a Spec Ops “black” bag job. My proof is that I was actually in prison in Walla Walla until the week in question, then let out on a “furlough” … Go figure
.

The post is a crank, right? But how can I leave it alone? I go to the magazine’s tech department, where they trace the e-mail address of the poster. I send him a note. He replies:

The facts are that DB was a “bag” job, because I participated in it.… I had a barn, a vehicle, a “catch” team and a local driver, if and when we picked up the jumper
.

He was a professional mercenary, involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, other high-profile covert assignments.

“Same folks all the way into Watergate,” the poster writes about his colleagues. “Well, actually all the way into the White House.”

He wants anonymity. I agree. From now on I’ll call him Jake. Some topics Jake and I discuss are so sensitive he demands we have “one-pad” conversations. I don’t know what the term means.

“One pad” is individual message cryptography, used only once between sender and receiver. It is a very simple system, but almost unbreakable. I understand that some dark groups have some code crackers, but it takes a while
.

At Jake’s instruction, I set up an e-mail account in the Philippines. His rules: I type a draft e-mail, he responds in the draft. The draft is deleted. The message is never sent.

I learn about Jake. He was introduced to the mercenary world in a logging camp in Alaska, where he had run away as a troubled boy. His contact was an ex-Marine who he claims had his fingernails ripped off during an interrogation by North Koreans.

Jake’s specialty was transportation. “I can get a team safely from
one place to another and back better than anyone on the planet. I was useless as tits on an Orchard boar on projects that did not require those particular kinds of capabilities.”

In the fall of 1971, Jake was serving time in Walla Walla state prison for forgery, though the backstory is complicated. A few months before November 24, he claims, he was approached in prison.

“The folks that contacted me were ‘suits.’ Names didn’t matter, but who they referenced for creds was a guy that I did some work for in Valle Verde in Bolivia in ’67. That guy’s resource team was out of Virginia … organized, managed and controlled by the same folks that contracted out operations to Air America in Camp Pong, Cambodia, and the GT up around Khan Falls.”

Jake was offered a deal, he says: In exchange for his help in the hijacking, Jake would get parole.

He agreed. He left Walla Walla prison the day before the hijacking—November 23, 1971, he says—and was given his orders in the field.

Mine was to acquire a target (a male, no description provided), contacting me through a specific one pad code (that I can’t and won’t provide), transport target to a specific location, stop and evaluate target’s condition, providing medical and other assistance as necessary, then transport target to a transfer point in East Portland
.

On the night of the hijacking, Jake was with his catch team, waiting for the one pad from the jumper.

My grid [or pickup area] was from Cedar Creek off the Cowlitz River, east to Yale Bridge Road, south on the Amboy Road to Yacolt and east to the old Amboy road that went to La Center. My actual extract point was the old Bucomb Hallow camp boat ramp at Lake Merwin
.

I check the location. It is in the heart of the flight path.

Jake and his catch team waited all night for the hijacker to respond,
he says. The one-pad message never came. After his Thanksgiving furlough, Jake returned to Walla Walla, and his parole came through.

DB Cooper was a media event, staged to coincide with the expansion and funding of the secret war in South America. Financial, and Organizational legislation was moving through the Congress, and a big splashy case of Air Piracy on the national media would help the legislative process get laws passed that dealt with Transportation Security, among many other things
.

If Jake was really a military-trained mercenary, I wonder if he can illuminate the mysterious items Jo Weber found after Duane Weber’s death.

I send him a photo of the San Marino Sanitarium that Jo found in Duane’s ostrich-skin wallet. Does Jake know what it means?

“The photo is easy,” Jake writes back. “San Marino was the closest R&R facility to Edwards [Air Force Base] for contractors who were in route or recovering and couldn’t be sent to a regular hospital or VA facility … very good medical OR staff and equipment. It was a go-to ‘off the books.’ If your guy [Weber] stayed there, guaranteed it was an Ops cover.”

I press him for the identity of the hijacker.

“I have no idea who the jumper was, didn’t ask and wasn’t told,” Jake writes. “I can guarantee you he was the most nondescript, unassuming ex-military contractor they could muster. He wasn’t operationally very bright, or he wouldn’t have taken the gig.… Did he get handled into the jump? Without a doubt.”

I ask him about the gobbledygook message of newsprint that Jo also found in Duane’s wallet. Does he know what “bombproof and crowded with oxygen” means?

He does. It is code.

“The first sentence is a one-pad cipher,” he says.

And what about “terrace, volcallure at casa Cugat, Abbe Wants Cugie Gets”?

“The second sentence references the House of Cugat, which on first glance seems to refer to an actual casa de familia ‘safe house’ on the outskirts of Havanna [
sic
], as you may already know.”

I don’t. But what’s Cugie?

“ ‘Cugie’ is the cutout’s actual name … that was an actual person, not a company.… So the last sentence seems to be a validation signature.”

And what about John C. Collins? Ever hear the name?

“I have heard it, that’s about it, don’t know if he was the same one … some serious people thought he was a legit asset, and brought him to my attention. That’s a long time ago and I never heard anything about him until you brought it up.”

How can I be sure what he is telling me is true?

Check the prison records in Walla Walla, Jake says. In the paperwork from his prison sentence, there must be evidence of his “furlough” before the hijacking.

Using Jake’s real name and Social Security number, I file a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Corrections in the state of Washington. The file I receive is over a hundred pages long. I see his mug shot. Jake has long sideburns. A sharp nose. An intimidating gaze. I check the facts.

It is true. As a boy, Jake was a runaway. And he did work at a logging camp in Alaska. His timing was also accurate. In the fall of 1971, Jake was in the state prison at Walla Walla. And just like he said, the charges were three counts of forgery. And it’s true: Jake received a “furlough” in November 1971, during Thanksgiving weekend.

I leaf through more pages. Eventually, I find the furlough forms.

The documents are not clear. I find one file that claims Jake was approved for a furlough on November 23, 1971, the day before the hijacking. Another document claims he left the prison on November 24, 1971, the day
of
the hijacking. And yet another claims he left Walla Walla on November 25, the day
after
the hijacking. Which one was it?

I confront Jake about these discrepancies. Is the file off? Or is
he using his Thanksgiving furlough to feed me another bullshit D.B. Cooper story?

“I am incredibly surprised there is any record at all,” he says.

I check my saved phone messages.

“Geoff, it’s Jo. I
need
to talk to you.”

“Geoffrey Gray, this is Jo Weber. I … I don’t know what’s going on. I had some strange communications this week. A man sent me five pictures and of course I recognized two and two others possibly but they could be anybody.”

“Geoff, Jo. I had a long conversation with a man yesterday. When you asked me if Duane could have been an informant, I always thought he was a Mafia informant for another organization, that he wasn’t CIA, but one of those offbeat kind of groups … I didn’t know what to believe but when he started talking about a priest, it hit me.”

“Geoff! They stole it! They came in the damn house! They took everything!”

“Geoff, ignore my other call. I’ve been revealing so much I’ve become totally, totally paranoid. I have to get on a plane. I have to find Tina. I have to bury this thing once and for all.”

I put down the phone on the kitchen counter. It is winter. I am now living in a cabin. It is located on the top of a mountain in the northern Catskills, upstate New York. I moved here to be alone and focus on the case. I haven’t paid any bills. I have been living out of the same pair of sweatpants since I arrived. I went to the store on Monday for groceries and I don’t know what day it is now and it doesn’t matter because Cooper sleuths do not stop the hunt for weekends.

I am reading conspiracy theory books about the 1960s and 1970s, the Bay of Pigs, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy. I am rereading e-mails Jake sent me.

There are a lot of other stories out there that aren’t as dangerous as this one
.

I go over the facts again. What is true? What am I projecting? I scan the documents from the FBI case files. They are dog-eared and coffee-stained.

I find it! I had overlooked it, all this time.

The SR-71. The spyplane. It was the fastest, highest, most advanced surveillance vessel the government had built. So why was a CIA spyplane looking for Cooper? Maybe Cooper was a spook after all. Maybe that’s how he knew about the Boeing 727’s aftstairs—built for the CIA’s black ops subcontractor, Air America.

I call the Pentagon. The media liaison has no idea how to answer my question. I don’t even know if I’m asking a question. I’m ranting about covert ops. He hangs up on me, just like the feds first hung up on Jo Weber when she called in her tip.

I’m running out of sources. I need ex-Boeing engineers, ex-CIA operatives, SR-71 experts. I write in desperation to the operator of an on-line museum dedicated to the spy plane. I ask if it would be unusual for the Blackbird to be used by law enforcement to hunt for a missing hijacker.

“VERY unusual … and a poor and highly expensive use of this national asset,” the curator of the site writes back. “The Pentagon, and in some cases much higher authority, provided approval for these missions.” Much higher authority? How much higher?

I think of Duane L. Weber. I look at more photos that Jo sends me. Weber had a full head of hair. And it was wavy, almost marcelled, like witness Robert Gregory had said. I think of the one-legged man. The man with the cupid lips. The man with the horseshoe-shaped diamond ring. Kissy-Kissy. Reading about the Bay of Pigs and mercs, I see that the characters in the books all wind up the same way: dead.

I lock my cabin windows. I place a few washed-out tomato cans in
the doorways—my own homemade alarm system. I think about hiding a steak knife under my mattress. If the Cooper hijacking was an inside job, and I know about it, whoever was behind it (“the suits,” as Jake call them) will surely come after me too, right?

In bed one night, I hear footsteps outside my window crunching in the snow.

Who knows I am here? I sneak down the stairs, careful not to make any noise. I don’t turn the lights on in the cabin—that way I can see them out there, and they can’t see me.

I put on my boots. I walk outside. The moon lights up the snow as bright as a living room. I circle the house. I look in the snow for footprints. I see them. They are my own.

The next night, a blast of light fills my bedroom window.

I look at the clock. It’s after 4:00 a.m. I hear an engine revving. A big engine. I spring out of bed. Where is the steak knife? I run into the bathroom and look out the window.

A massive pickup is in the driveway. It is moving toward the cabin. What the fuck is going on? Who is driving the pickup? The handlers of John C. Collins? Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. back from the grave? Or maybe it’s Jake, who has traced our clandestine e-mail exchange in the Philippines? Or maybe Jake’s handlers? The suits? Kissy-Kissy?

I am ready to fight. I won’t be taken alive. I go downstairs for the steak knife.

I change my mind. Better I hide. Where should I go? Under the bed, in the closet, in the attic? I feel like a coward. Why can’t I be brave like Dan Cooper the comic book hero? Why can’t I stand up and face
them
, whoever they are? And isn’t that what Cooper, whoever he was, is all about?
To stand on their own feet, to be men, to face their God.…
Am I seeing my own face in the Cooper sketch?