FBI's nightmare - D. B. Cooper

The FBI is still searching for D. B. Cooper, the protagonist of the only unsolved airline hijacking in American aviation history. In 1971, this man jumped from Boeing 727, carrying $ 200,000 of ransom money in his bag - and simply disappeared. 

The good guys from the FBI absolutly hate it when someone commits a very serious and very well-known criminal offense and then just – disappears. Then they have to scan the available evidence hundreds of times, year after year, and sometimes they are waiting for several decades only to start the investigation from scratch. Their working motto can be summed up in just one sentence: the suspect cannot be allowed to disappear so that no one can find him. 

Well, one man has done just that. And no one – how about that, FBI guys? –hasn’t found him. Neither him nor his money.

On the eve of Thanksgiving in 1971, a certain Dan Cooper – probably a false name – arrived at the international airport in Portland, Oregon. When he approached the flight counter of "Northwest Orient Airlines", he had with him just a black attaché case. He bought a one way ticket on Flight 305 - a 30-minute trip to Seattle, Washington. With the purchased ticket, Cooper entered the "Boeing 727-100" and took seat 18-C, which was near the tail. He lit a cigarette - then, in those happy times, you were allowed to do that - and ordered a bourbon and soda.

According to witnesses, he looked quite relaxed. The witnesses also said that he seemed to be in mid-forties, and about 180 centimeters tall. He was wearing a raincoat under which was a nice dark suit and nicely ironed white shirt.

When the plane took off – around 2:50 pm, local time – Cooper approached the flight attendant Florence Schaffner and thrust a piece of paper into her hand. Beautiful Florence, who was often approached by lonely businessmen, thought that he was just giving her his phone number. Without looking at it, she put the paper into her bag.

“Miss, you'd better look at that note.” - Cooper leaned towards her and began to whisper. Decisively, not at all erotic.

On the piece of paper, written in capital letters, it said: “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.”

Schaffner did what he asked of her, and then quietly asked to see the bomb. Cooper opened his black bag just enough for Florence to see a red infernal machine.

“I want $200,000 in unmarked 20-dollar bills. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” – he said quietly. 

Flight 305's pilot, William Scott contacted Seattle-Tacoma Airport air traffic control, and they alarmed the local police and the Feds. Dan Cooper wasn’t nervous and behaved very politely. He ordered another bourbon and soda, paid the bill (while insisting that Schaffner keeps the change) and ordered a good lunch for the crew when they land in Seattle.

At exactly 4:39 pm, Cooper was informed that his demands are accepted. Six minutes later the plane landed. The kidnapper got what he wanted, and allowed all passengers, Schaffner, and another flight attendant, Alice Hancock, to leave the aircraft. He then went to cockpit and agreed details with the pilot and co-pilot:

“We’ll fly southeast, toward Mexico City, with a speed below 190 kilometers per hour and altitude below 3,000 meters” – said Cooper. “We’ll land in Reno, Nevada to refuel, so that we can get to Mexico.”

At 7:30 pm, “Boeing 727” took off again. Two F-106 fighter jets followed him at a safe distance. At 8:00 pm red light flashed in the cockpit – the sign that the pressure in the passenger compartment has suddenly changed. They offered help to Cooper through the intercom, but there was no response from him. Neither at that point nor in the next two hours.

At 10:15 pm, the plane landed in Reno. It was immediately surrounded with FBI agents, the sheriff, local police officers… After long deliberation, they decided to enter the plane. The crew was all right, but there was no sign of Cooper. 

He jumped from a plane with $ 200,000 in his bag, right into the vastness of the State of Washington. His body was never found. Nor money, of course. The weather was terrible that night, so everyone assumed that he died. No man couldn’t survive that. Especially if no one is waiting on the ground to provide him with assistance, drive him where he needs to…. But, what if he indeed survived?

The story of D. B. Cooper – how he would be called later – is the only unsolved airline hijacking in American aviation history. It is also the only one where no one doesn’t know the identity of the kidnaper, nor his motives. Thanks to that, Cooper became part of American folklore, some kind of Billy the Kid and Jesse James. He is the hero in movies, series, and he is also the guy according to which the main character of the legendary “Twin Peaks” is named. He is a daring thief for whom everyone who has ever heard of him is cheering.

Even those Americans, who have no problem with their state or the law, love such outsiders.

“Here is a little guy who all by himself hijacked an airliner and got away with $200,000 of a big corporation's money, tweaked Uncle Sam's nose and has gotten away with it” - Ralph Himmelsbach evaluates today, a retired FBI agent, and one of many who, having given up looking for Cooper, wrote a book about his unsuccessful mission.

This case is probably still open because Cooper managed to embarrass one entire organization. The sum he took as ransom is not huge, even for standards at the time of the hijacking.  No one died, and no one was even hurt in his campaign - except FBI’s pride, something that this organization never publicly admitted.

In 2008, the Feds once again began to dig through the memory of Dan Cooper. 

“Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely.  And we have reignited the case.” - said a senior FBI official, and invited general public to visit the official website of the Bureau, where are, for the first time, uploaded sketches of Dan Cooper as he looked on that day, and how he would look today, 40 years later. There are also several 20-dollar bills that one boy found in 1980.

In these forty years, FBI has investigated more than 1,000 people and had, at one point, a list of ten suspects. Eventually, none of them completely fit Cooper’s description, or had a very good alibi. The case is now in the hands of agent Larry Carr, who is born in Seattle and was only four years old when  Cooper went on his mission, from which he emerged as a winner or a dead man, or maybe both.

The choice is yours, and there are plenty of versions. If you believe to a taxi driver who collects his customers from San Diego airport, D. B. Cooper was a gambler who died from cocaine overdose in California 15 years ago. If you believe to a persistent real estate agent, D. B. Cooper was her late husband, a heavy smoker and a former prisoner, who told her his most kept secret as he lay dying in Pensacola hospital. If you believe the FBI, D. B. Cooper died on that very night.

The best “lead” the Feds ever had was a Vietnam veteran named Richard McCoy. Just a few months after the famous November of 1971, he tried to imitate Cooper, but this time over Utah. Everything went according to plan - a bit gluttonously, he demanded $ 500,000 instead of "modest" 200,000 that D.B. Cooper took.  But when he jumped from the plane, he was caught and arrested. He was convicted, but he didn’t served his sentence for very long, because, in 1974, he was killed by prison guards for allegedly trying to escape.

In 1991, former FBI agent Russell Calame wrote a book in which he brought “strong evidence” that Cooper and McCoy were the same person. His former colleagues were not so convinced in his story, mainly because the descriptions given by both aircraft flight attendants did not match.

Then there is the Lyle Christiansen, Minnesota resident who spent years trying to convince the FBI that Cooper was, in fact, his deceased brother, Kenneth Christiansen, a former paratrooper. From 2003 and onwards, he regularly sent letters to the Feds, bringing new evidence that would substantiate his thesis. FBI never believed him. Just like they eliminated Duane Weber, who said on his deathbed that he is, in fact, Cooper. However, DNA tests showed that he was lying.

Mr. Carr, who is now in charge of the investigation, will say that a lot of things happened on that November, but that only a fraction from what was later told is actually the truth. In the first place, he actually doesn’t believe that Cooper was still alive when he fell on the ground.

“We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper” – says agent Carr. “We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve 'chute was only for training, and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”

If everything went according to his plan, Cooper would have landed somewhere in the Cascade Mountains, a mountain range of western North America  and southern west of Canada, where the highest peak is  about 4,300 meters above sea level. That part of America is far away from civilization, but not that much far that it is necessary more than 40 years for someone’s body to be found.

What is interesting is that, in 1980, near the Columbia River, a boy found a bundle of 20-dollar bills - the same ones that Cooper received on that November afternoon at the Seattle-Tacoma airport. But there was only $5.800 - What about the rest?

“Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream. Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle.” – said Carr.

If investigators find just a bone that belongs to Dan Cooper, that will be enough for them to close the case with DNA analysis. But, as long as there is no body, the thought that he is still alive somewhere – or that he was alive for many years after 1971 – and that he is enjoying the Caribbean sun and drinks cocktails while watching movies and reading books about himself, will not disappear. And even agent Carr doesn’t want to write off this possibility.

“If he's alive today, he'd be about 85 years old. Maybe one day I'll be sitting at my desk and I'll get a call from an old man who says, 'You're not going to believe this story'”.

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John – the man who located Bin Laden.

To CIA's shame, Associated Press has recently published a profile and several photos of certain John, an agent that was most likely the main link in the capture of the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden. 

The scene is almost cinematographic – A middle-aged CIA analyst begins to inform the gathered crowd that the Agency is almost certain that in one complex in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, Osama Bin Laden, leader of the terrorist group al-Qaeda, is hiding.

When he finished with his presentation, President Obama asks him how sure is he that Bin Laden is still there.

About eighty percent - says John, pointing out that they never managed to capture him with satellite surveillance, but, nevertheless, he was never so sure about Bin Laden’s location like he was now.

The rest is history.

Obama accepts his opinion and asks Admiral Mullen whether the army is prepared to complete this mission. Mullen answers affirmatively and sends a command to the commander of a special unit, known as SEAL Team Six, which finished the job.

If mentioned names were different, this little story would look like some scene from a spy novel – and our John is matching perfectly to some main character of such novel. The news agency Associated Press has recently published a great story about him – he is a CIA veteran who has for the last ten years searched for Bin Laden everywhere around the world. And he was undoubtedly confident that he would find him.

His name is fictional, but he is a man who proved himself while working in the CIA’s departments for the Balkans and Russia.

After the terrorist attack on America, on 11 September 2001, John was transferred to the anti-terrorist department. From that point, his analytical hunt for Osama Bin Laden began. In those ten years, John had several offers for promotion, but he decided to stay in that department until they achieve their goal and found the most wanted terrorist. It was he who played a key role in all significant arrests of terrorists (Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi bin Alshib, Hambali and Faraj al-Libi). But the main target was still at large.

He and his team were reading and analyzing thousands of documents in order to find any type of clue - the last one they had was a hideout in Tora Bora, the mountainous part of Afghanistan. Besides that, John dealt with all aspects of Bin Laden’s  life in order to find an answer to his key question: what kind of shelter would a man like Bin Laden seek? He constantly repeated to his team members to check any information on all family members and associates who might be in contact with Bin Laden.

“He's there somewhere. We'll get there.” – was his favorite line.

His reputation in the Agency's grew with each year. And then, finally, a breakthrough. In 2007, one female agent whose identity is not revealed, tracked Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, Osama’s trusted courier. This made everyone in the team absolutely convinced that they will reach their goal.  In August 2010, they finally located Bin Laden in Abbottabad. The CIA sent a team to a house near Bin Laden’s complex and waited for the final confirmation.

But the confirmation didn’t arrive until Obama was completely convinced in their story. Meanwhile, John was warning the members of his team: “Right up to the last hour, if we get any piece of information that suggests it's not him, somebody has to raise their hand before we risk American lives.”

No one got such information. Two days after the operation, John appeared in front of Senate Intelligence Committee. He was calm and restrained like always. But then he finally gave in - when he began to present details of the operation, he suddenly choked, paused and started crying.

John's identity came out in the open the way it shouldn’t have. At least when it comes to “top secret” operations. It was, in essence, very simple: the editor of “NY Observer”, the weekly edition of reputable daily "Guardian", has managed, thanks to certain blogger John Young, to find out the name of this agent, and then all that he needed to do was to google John’s name and his name appeared in Northern Virginia Division.

Then other details emerged. The guy played basketball in college and had an unusual shooting style, for which he was remembered by his coaches. He also had a respectable college G.P.A. Recently his wife launched a charity campaign to help the school in which their children are attending. The reporters also discovered and that his son is a good athlete. 

The journalists were able to learn all that, and the U.S. officials could only scratch their heads and wonder - how?

Spied on KGB – Created Putin’s profile

This CIA’s analyst has gained fame when he made a profile of then new Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In fact, at the beginning, many perceived this former KGB agent as just another interim solution when Yeltsin's rule ended. But John conducted a thorough analytical work and concluded that Putin is a person who will firmly take control and manage Russia for many years. At that point, John proved his greatest quality - the ability to perceive important from something that might look unimportant.

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Stasi – secret service that was better than its mother, KGB

East Germany’s secret service monitored every suspicious activity, they made small holes in the walls of houses for easier surveillance, and they even had a division for garbage analysis that looked for any suspicious material or food that came from the west.

Stasi (abbreviation from Staatssicherheit – State Security, full name was Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – Ministry for State Security) was formed in 1950 on the model of then Soviet’s MGB (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti - Ministry for State Security), which was a predecessor of the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti -  Committee for State Security). Very quickly Stasi emerged as the most important service in the system of KGB and the generals from the Red Square in Moscow. Although, formally, Stasi was an independent agency of East Germany, in reality it was operating in the framework of KGB because the Russians had their people in all directorates of German secret service.

Crucial year for Stasi was 1957 when Erich Mielke was appointed at the head of the service and Markus Wolf, one of the most famous spies on the east side of the Iron Curtain became head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA - General Reconnaissance Administration). Wolf cemented his name in the history of spy business because he managed to infiltrate a large number of his men in the political life of West Germany, including Günter Guillaume, head of the cabinet of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. When he was instructed that Guillaume works for the communists, Brandt refused to believe it and said that he had his outmost confidence in him. However, when that turned out to be true, in May of 1974 Brandt was forced to resign from his position.

Stasi infiltrated every pore of East Germany’s life, and it was a service that is perhaps the closest to the realization of Orwell's vision in the book "1984." In every building there was at least one tenant who was in charge of monitoring what was happening in the house council. Every suspicious activity was monitored. In the walls of houses small holes were found that the agents of Stasi used for surveillance of their targets. Stasi even had a Division of Garbage Analysis that was responsible for analyzing garbage for any suspect western foods and/or materials. Stasi was probably the most effective and most brutal secret service of the communist regime. Their ideological enemies disappeared like they never had walked on earth. 

Ten years ago, German "Der Spiegel" revealed that one of Stasi’s methods of liquidation was radiation exposure of prisoners in order to cause cancer. One of the recent movies that has very convincingly demonstrated a police state and Stasi’s mechanisms of monitoring and enforcement is Oscar-winning work of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, "The Lives of Others".

From the year of its foundation, the number of Stasi’s informants constantly grew, and it reached its peak during the wave of student protests in 1968. If we take into account all the people who in one way or another worked for the secret police, Stasi is certainly a record holder, because, according to the data that was released by the BBC several years back, at one point every seventh citizen of the GDR worked for them.

After the revolution in 1989, officials and agents of the secret police were desperately trying to destroy records in order to hide traces of their activities. They did not know where to begin with the destruction. Around 130 kilometers of files on paper were destroyed and over 50 kilometers on celluloid strip. They left behind 16 000 bags that contained files torn to pieces.

During the revolution in 1989, demonstrators broke in to the Stasi offices, but, by then, a great number of data from their archives had been destroyed. According to official estimates, about five percent of the files were destroyed. Some ten years later began the reconstruction of those documents and it still lasts. About 45 million pages of paper needs to be reconstructed, and that will cost about $ 30 million. However, the rest of the files that weren’t destroyed were unavailable to public for a long time. Even after unification with West Germany and democratic elections, the liberals from East Germany had to lead a great fight to gain access to those files.

The question arose whether the opening of the files would be an intrusion in the privacy of individuals, and that was a consequence of the fact that those files were an integral part of people's lives. The biggest opposition came from the people of West Germany where they claimed that they did not want to feel the breath of those files.

It was said that with the opening of the secret files, the political freedom that was so heavily gained would be jeopardized, and there was also a fear that the disclosure of the names of informants could provoke massive retaliations. The first and only democratically elected Prime Minister of East Germany, Lothar de Maizière, publicly warned that, if those files are opened, a wave of killings will occur. However, after the opening of the files, not a single case of revenge was recorded. On the contrary, there were cases where people wanted to meet agents who followed them and ran their case.

Stasi was formally disbanded in 1989, on the eve of German reunification. Today there is a joke about why did the most notorious and the most infiltrated secret service so peacefully managed to disappeared. They say that when the demonstrators broke in to the Stasi offices, agents were not allowed to shoot at the crowd – in order to avoid killing someone who was their own.

One spy per 165 people

Between 1950 and 1989, Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people. In its final moments of existence, Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and 2,000 unofficial collaborators. About 13,000 soldiers and over 2,000 Army officers worked for the service, and it is estimated that there was about 170,000 informants in East Germany and about 1,500 in West Germany. It is recorded that there were also 10,000 juvenile informants. These figures came from official archives that were discovered when Stasi was disbanded.

However, since part of the archive is destroyed, it is estimated that Stasi had as many as 500,000 informants and it is believed that at least at one point about two million people worked for Stasi. Stasi had one agent per 165 people, while KGB had one agent per 580 people and Gestapo, during WWI, one agent per 2000 people.

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