by Noel Hynd
FIREBIRD
A Spy Saga of the 1960’s
Based on several true stories.
By Noel Hynd
Being a southerner is no longer geographic. It's a philosophy and an attitude.
George C. Wallace, 1964
"… Wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it."
William Shakespeare
King Henry IV, Part One, act 1, scene 2
Chapter 1
New York City, August 1968
At eight twenty-two a.m. on a hot muggy morning in August of 1968, the editorial offices of the New York Eagle were quiet. It was a perfect moment for Frank Cooper to begin his “daily deathwatch.” Like every other working day of late, Cooper, laboring in a quiet corner office of the Eagle Building, would have the last word on the lives of several fellow human beings.
Cooper was forty years old. Seated at a cluttered steel desk, with a pack of Kool cigarettes to the left of his typewriter and a bottle of Bushmill’s in a bottom desk drawer, he was smack in the center of a surly middle age. His brown eyes remained as sharp as his wits. His body was strong, both from physical exercise and years of journalistic combat: six feet one and a fit one hundred ninety pounds. He hit the West Side YMCA twice a week on his way home.
Yet, he was also many things that he never dreamed he would become. Foremost among them: Cooper was the main obituary writer for a new 10%-serious, 90%-trashy, newsy, gossipy, editorially conservative twenty-cent morning tabloid: The New York Eagle.
“Fast format” was the polite term for it. Dull, gray and respectable it was not. The Eagle was New York's newest daily, and it had a circulation of, as Cooper indelicately put it, “half a million mouth-breathing morons every morning.”
The truth was this: there was nothing that Frank Cooper could do so skillfully as put into perspective the life of someone no longer living. It was a bizarre talent, being a first-string Death Page Man. Sometimes it led him in some very strange directions.
The Eagle had come into existence a year earlier to compete with the Daily News and the Post after the World-Journal Tribune had gone belly-up following uninspired ownership and lengthy labor problems.
The Eagle now maintained a “clippings” morgue that comprised an underused room full of withered file clippings and microfilm references from seven defunct New York papers. Underused, because it was in an isolated corner of the basement, and because back upstairs on the second floor across from Internal Administration there was a new mainframe IBM WLE 2000— “Big Wally” the Eagle staffers called it—that could summon the most extensive American newspaper files on almost any human being living or dead within a few minutes.
Cooper hated the new computers. He remained the only Eagle writer who had successfully resisted learning how to use Big Wally. Instead, Cooper took his daily prowl through the basement clippings morgue with a list of names that he'd plucked from the day's death notices. Once again today, he had on his agenda a handful of men and women who had died within the last twenty-four hours.
Cooper did not write normal obituaries. Tomb-cold dead is what most obits were, stiff and formal and complete with the deceased's accolades, titles, club memberships, marriages, and surviving family members: the print version of a tasteful embalming. But Cooper left the morgue each day rattling bunches of photocopies from which he would find warts and sin, loves and hates, and flesh and blood until he had a portrait as vibrant as a Copley or a Wyeth.
This had all started one memorable evening, soon after his hiring at the Eagle. An urge had been upon Cooper and he had printed a candid obit for an old pal:
DERRICK LUCAS, 49
SKIRTCHASER AND DEADBEAT
“October 10. Derrick Lucas of Yonkers, described by friends and foes alike as a world-class profligate, expired today of a massive and long-anticipated heart attack at the Maui Inn, a tacky mock-Hawaiian bar on Arlington Boulevard in Westchester. When the end came, he had a blonde on one arm and a glass in the other hand. Both had had help from a bottle…”
The write-up amused Lucas’s friends and family. Frank Cooper was off and running as an obit guy. Poets, plumbers, loan sharks, crooks, bank vice presidents, mechanics, pimps, and arbitrage traders: they all received equal treatment. The Eagle's obit pages coursed with humanity, giving Cooper a bizarre sort of daily following. Cooper had even picked off an occasional prize for daily newspaper writing. Each year he had the last word on approximately two thousand lives—as well as a certain grudging autonomy around his publication.
The Eagle had prewritten obituaries on the famous, the wealthy, and the noteworthy. Cooper tinkered with what was already on file. But with notices like this day’s, he had a free hand. In his quiet corner of the fourth floor, he settled in at his desk. He looked at all the archived material on today’s subjects. He was gaining momentum when his phone rang.
“Go away,” he muttered. But he answered. “Frank Cooper,” he said.
“Hello, Frank.” It was a woman’s voice. Silky and sweet. From the recent past. He couldn’t immediately place it. “Busy?”
“Not for you,” he said, feigning recognition.
He placed the voice: a pretty brunette named Margot Bradford, a woman he had met two year earlier at a press-and-publishing gathering at the Hotel Carlyle. The event introduced a new volume of Pablo Picasso’s works. The edition would include the artist’s salacious erotic sketches, the latter available for the first time for hitherto-deprived American audiences. Picasso himself was there, clad in a cape and with his latest mistress. The originals of several of the erotic works were there, too, which established a pleasantly promiscuous mood.
Margot, sleek and sophisticated, attired in pearls and a pert low-cut little black dress, had drawn Cooper to her the way a compass needle points north. She had told him that she was a stringer for a European press service based in London. Her reports were features on art, books, theater, and films in the United States and Europe. Further, she said, she had often written features in those fields for the Washington Post.
Cooper had glanced at her hand to see if she was married or engaged. No ring of that type, but he did recognize the ring she was wearing. It was from an elite private girls’ school in Connecticut.
Like most boarding schools, Margot’s school had its own lingo and idiosyncrasies. A freshman was a “new girl,” a senior was an “old girl.” An alumna was an “ancient.” Students wore their rings with the school crest facing out to represent their openness to capturing every experience lived at school. Alumnae wore them with the initials facing in, as if to trap those experiences, which was how Margot was wearing hers.
“Nice ring,” he said. He named the town in Connecticut where the school was located.
She did a double take and recovered quickly. “I should have worn gloves,” she said. “You don’t miss many little details, do you?” she had asked.
“I try not to,” he answered.
A bond formed. Margot respected street savvy. Cooper was intrigued.
Afterwards, he nosed around. Her articles turned up in various European papers, including the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Her writing was impressive. She knew her way around the world of privilege and was on the cozy fringes of his profession. That was fine. But he also knew that she didn’t sell enough articles to make a living at it. She had mentioned that she had a real estate broker’s license. He traced her name through the public real estate records. He discovered she was rarely involved with more than two transactions a year. Yet she was financially comfortable and independent.
Cooper ran into her a few months later at George Plimpton's annual Paris Review party at Art d'Lugoff's Village Gate. He asked her out
for lunch. She accepted. When he asked her out for dinner, she explained that she was flattered, but skittish of personal relationships. She asked if they could remain friendly.
He surprised her by saying, “Sure. Why not? No hassle.” Thereafter, with any romantic attachment off the radar, they got to know each other better.
She was divorced. Late thirties but didn't look it. She maintained an apartment in New York on Sutton Place. She had a teenage son away at boarding school. Anthony, or Tony. The kid’s wealthy but ne’er-do-well father had slipped the leash on child support, or so Margot said. She came and went as she saw fit. But she had this one anchor: she made a point of being in the East, she said, when Tony had his vacations. She had dough, Cooper concluded. Cooper figured it was family and barely gave it another thought.
So there it was. Most of it, anyway. When he heard her voice on the phone, all the various recognition factors tumbled into his suspicious newspaperman’s mind like file cards. The most important cards fell face-up on top, which is what they do when things are going well.
“What’s up, Margot?” he finally said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.” Then, “I want to talk to you about a man's obituary,” she said.
“Whose?” he asked.
“A man named Stanley Rudawski. Former State Department official from early in the Eisenhower administration until just recently.”
He reached for a notepad and a ballpoint. “When did Rudawski die?”
“He hasn't yet.” A pause, then, “He's my father, Frank,” she said. “He's terminally ill.”
“Ah! Oh, Lord, Margot,” he answered. “I never knew your family name, so I didn't recognize it. I apologize.”
“No need. Here's a favor I need to ask. My father has maybe a week to live. He wants to talk to you. No one else. You. He has a story to tell,” she said.
“Yeah, okay, but why me?”
She blew out a breath. “You write the notices for the Eagle,” she said, as if it were self-evident. “He likes the way you do them. He wants…” Her voice broke off. She finally said. “There’s something he needs to have officially recorded, okay?”
“All right,” he said. “We don't normally do auditions for my page. But we can meet. I’ll listen. I can’t guarantee that the Eagle will carry his write-up, but we’ll see.”
“How about some night this week? Maybe around eight o'clock? It’s urgent.”
Margot’s father lived in Westchester County, she explained. But it wasn't far. She would meet Cooper at his apartment building with her car. “How about tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yeah, I can do that,” Cooper said.
The call ended.
Distractions, distractions. Where had he been? He lit his third Kool of the day. He refocused. He made a rough layout of the page on top of his desk, complete with photographs when he had some. Photos were always important. By five p.m. the work day was almost finished. He sent his copy to the Managing Editor, S.W. Murphy, via a dependable twenty-something copy boy named Topher Wilson. Wilson was a Harlem native and CCNY grad. He was one of the few non-white faces in the office.
Music: Cooper loved jazz; he was still in mourning over the closing of Birdland three years earlier. But tonight, Coleman Hawkins was playing tenor sax on West 52nd Street at Jimmy Ryan’s. Cooper walked to the office of Sam Rothman, the sports editor and his best friend on the paper. He talked Sam into going along. Sam invited along a young woman who worked for him and upon whom he had a crush. Her name was Lauren Richie.
Lauren was twenty-four years old and a journalism graduate from Northwestern University. She had short dark hair, a shape that took Sam's breath away, and wore her skirts mid-thigh. Sam loved having her around. Cooper felt it would do Lauren good to tag along, listen to The Hawk play tenor sax, sip beer or whiskey at the smoky bar and munch sandwiches with a couple of old goats who could explain life to her. Plus, a woman in her twenties would improve the atmosphere at Ryan’s and would make them look better at the same time.
Cooper also liked Lauren. She had some sass and New York smarts to her, though Cooper knew her mostly from a distance. As for Coleman Hawkins, he was in his mid-sixties and on the schneid, battling booze, heroin, several dozen women he’d slept with and creditors. But recently he had been in fine form. Somewhere there must have been a new woman looking after him, otherwise he would have been dead.
Half an hour later, Topher Wilson dropped off the day’s galley proofs at Cooper’s desk. Cooper proofread his page. The day’s copy worked. He made some minor corrections, ironed out some rough spots and made a few subtle improvements in his text. He marked it final and sent the material back to Murphy. He celebrated with a well-deserved belt of Bushmill’s from the bottom drawer of his desk. A few minutes later Lauren opted out on Birdland. Sam followed her in flaking. Cooper decided he would go, anyway.
Tonight, The Hawk was on his game, playing brilliantly, Cooper suspected he was Riding the Horse. He got close enough to see the man’s pupils and they were pinpoint. Cooper sipped more Irish whisky, stayed at Birdland till eleven thirty, then found an uptown cab on Broadway and stumbled home, mildly buzzed.
Home was an apartment building West 96th Street. He stopped at his mailbox in the lobby. He felt eyes on his back and he knew who they belonged to. Jonas Halász, the building’s live-in superintendent and manager, was watching him through the peephole of the door to his first-floor apartment.
Halász was the building watchdog, a refugee from Hungary twelve years earlier. He was a quiet, suspicious but efficient soul who lived alone. He assumed the worst of everyone’s human nature and was correct more often than he was mistaken. Through his peephole, he watched everyone who came and went, no matter what the hour.
Cooper re-locked his mailbox. He heard the front door open.
He glanced in its direction and watched a pretty girl bounce through the entrance, allowing the door to slam behind her. Her name was Cindy, an Off-Broadway actress currently appearing in Columbus Circle as a waitress at a burger joint. She, too, was coming home from work. She had reddish hair and wore a green micro-mini with an orange t-shirt and Frye boots. Her attire was defiantly young and come-and-get-me. Cooper gave Cindy a smile and a nod. Maybe he’d get lucky one day.
Cindy reciprocated with the smile and bolted up the steps, a jaw-dropping flurry of bare arms and legs, skipping her mailbox and the bills it contained. When she disappeared, Cooper went to the elevator, pressed the button for the fifth floor, his floor, and finally was home. Another drink, and he was asleep within twenty minutes.
Chapter 2
The year 1968 had begun with a tiny fray in the Iron Curtain.
Alexander Dubček had been chosen as the leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, ushering in the Prague Spring, but the liberalization in Czechoslovakia raised concerns among Warsaw Pact leaders.
Czechoslovakia bordered Austria and West Germany, which formed part of the Western bloc. The leaders of the Soviet Union feared that ideas from the West would filter into the East through the Czech border. Warsaw Pact leader Leonid Brezhnev sent repeated warnings to the Czech government to end its reforms. Czech president Dubček asserted that Czechoslovakia remained committed to communism. Brezhnev knew a subversive when he saw one and worked his KGB Director, Yuri Andropov, appointed the previous year, heavily into the picture.
Years before, Andropov had been Soviet Ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He had watched from the windows of his embassy as his officers of the Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. He knew that the Workers’ Paradise could only survive when supported by armed force.
Civil unrest was in the air all over the world. In March, a student revolt in France led to a worker’s revolt. In May, one French million citizens marched through the streets of Paris. Dramatic civil violence followed in Spain, France, China, Japan, England and Italy.
In Asia, all hell continued to break loose. The North Koreans had captured
an American spy ship called The USS Pueblo and had imprisoned the captain and crew. And in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive had begun against American troops. By the end of January, Việt Cộng soldiers were directly attacking the US Embassy in Saigon. Pursuant to the fighting, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the South Vietnamese National Police Chief, publicly executed a Viet Cong officer named Nguyễn Văn Lém with a pistol shot to the head. The photograph by war correspondent Eddie Adams became the iconic image of the America war effort: billions of dollars and thousands of young lives to prop up summary executions on the streets of Saigon.
To the average American, the whole word seemed unhinged. During the previous year’s Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, Israel had attacked an American ship, the SS Liberty, leaving thirty-four American sailors dead and one hundred seventy-one wounded. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula. The American and Israeli governments agreed that the attack was unintentional, but many survivors insisted that it hadn’t been. The dead crew members were unable to offer an opinion.
It was a confusing time, with friends turning into enemies and enemies finding new friends. There were race riots in American cities, revolts on college campuses, and a new permissiveness and sexual liberation that further distanced one generation from the previous one.
The “Prague Spring” ended in August. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Warsaw Pact troops, seven thousand tanks with eight hundred airplanes invaded Czechoslovakia—the biggest military operation in Europe since World War Two. What had begun as a glimmer of hope was quickly evolving into yet another crisis for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, which already had no shortage of crises.
LBJ wasn’t on much of a roll that year, either. He had dropped out of his race for re-election after he had barely edged out antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Shortly thereafter, Vice President Hubert Humphrey dropped into the race, as did U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the late President’s brother.
