Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “So who is it?”

  “Someone beyond my security level. Do yourself a favor. Don’t mess with it. You’ll only come out on the short end.” Molloy paused. “That’s the way this place has been structured since the days of Allen Dulles. Not much any of us mid-level folks can do about it.”

  Cooper accepted the David Charles file and with it, the instructions and the situation. Molloy departed. Cooper sat down and opened the file. Within it, were several sub-files, all individually sealed in official CIA envelopes.

  Cooper opened the first. For several heartbeats, he felt as if he had hit pay dirt. The file was only two pages. David Charles was identified as someone who worked occasional assignments for the CIA, often getting a clearance to just do one mission. The practice dated from the old OSS of James Donovan, where the smart young Ivy educated types would perform a service for their country. Always they were people who’d been vouched for by someone with unimpeachable credentials. They frequently screwed things up rather well, Cooper knew, but were saved by their contacts and social credentials and “retired” with prestige.

  Lyndon’s Man. So Johnson had continued the use of these special agents.

  David Charles. University of Texas. Magnum Oil. In this case, it was clear that the man had a soft spot for Soviet affairs.

  In any case, David Charles wouldn’t be accepting any more assignments. He’d been on assignment one time, from February 4,1965 until March 7, 1965. Paris. He had retired to private life and business thereafter, but things had not gone smoothly. He was currently “engaged out of town,” in Agency parlance. David Charles had died of multiple fractures to the skull in a Baltimore motor vehicle accident on a snowy February morning in 1966. Cooper found the death certificate, signed by a Dr. Schmidt, the assistant medical examiner in Baltimore County.

  Motor vehicle accident. Multiple skull fractures. Cooper focused on the two phrases.

  “This man is dead, which means he is likely to remain so,” concluded Cooper’s new best friend, GTH. There the file abruptly ended.

  Chapter 40

  It was two fifteen in the afternoon when Peggy Hubbell locked the front door to her home in Fort Myers, Florida. She walked to the pale blue 1965 Chevrolet Chevelle in her driveway.

  The Florida sun was relentless, but that was the trade-off in living in her newly adopted state. No snow in the winter, no icy sidewalks, and no astronomical oil bills. Just the occasional hurricanes in the autumn and a scorching summer with humidity that served as a mosquito propellant. These were the facts of her new life.

  Her husband, Jim Hubbell, operated a profitable string of three hardware stores in Lee County—two in Fort Myers and one in Cape Coral. Jim had good managers in each store and could afford three weeks of vacation this year. Peggy had parents in Maryland, Jim in Ohio. Both sets of grandparents always welcomed visits.

  Today there was shopping at the supermarket. Then she would need to pick up her step-daughter, Jenny, who was seven, after school.

  The garage of her ranch-style house was still open. Peggy climbed into the driver's seat of her automobile and turned on the ignition. The car's air conditioning came to life. She backed her car out of her driveway, pulled onto the street and stopped at her mailbox. She was about to put the mail on the seat next to her when noticed a postmark: New Castle, Delaware.

  Peggy Hubbell looked at the envelope for a second time. It was plain white, business size, and Peggy's name and address were typed. But she knew who it was from.

  Why couldn't Allan stay out of her life? Couldn't he leave her alone? That part of her life was finished. She entertained the impulse to tear up the letter unread. But she didn't. She might be better off, she reasoned, at least knowing what he wanted this time.

  She looked in the rearview mirror. There was no traffic. She switched on her four-way flashers, opened the letter. She grew angry. Allan wanted to see her again. He assumed she was happily married, he wrote, and of this he maintained that he was glad. “Yet there is something important we need to talk about,” he had typed. “I cannot put it in a letter. You used to be a professional person, same as me. Surely you understand.”

  No, she didn't. But it was signed in his handwriting.

  She folded the letter back into its envelope. Peggy wanted no part of this man. And she wanted no part of having to explain the past to her new husband. Her anger fused into resentment. This letter didn't merit a response. She crumpled it.

  She switched off her flashers and pulled onto the road without looking. For a moment there was a screeching noise and then a loud horn. A passing car skidded to a complete stop. The other driver rolled down his window and unleashed a torrent of obscenities. She stared at him, first coldly, then flustered. Her heart pounded at the near miss. All she could do was meekly wave back in apology. Had they collided, it would have been her fault. The other driver held her in a withering stare for several seconds. Then he cooled down and slowly went on his way.

  “Bastard!” she muttered. “Driving too fast! Nearly killed us!”

  Why, oh why, she asked herself, couldn't the past remain dead? What was done was done! And as far as what governments did, she wished to not be included. But there seemed no way of letting go of the events of the past, just as the events had no way of letting go of her.

  Chapter 41

  While Frank Cooper snooped through files in Langley, Lauren was in Cooper’s office at the Eagle, working at his desk. Abruptly, she had the sense that she was being watched. She looked up. She was startled to see a man in a trench coat. He was standing at the office door. The man was unannounced, having glided past security, and he looked rough. Then she saw there was a second man behind him. Between them, they spelled trouble.

  “Hey. How’s tricks?” the man said.

  Recovering quickly, she asked, “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Frank Cooper,” the first man said. “This is his office, isn’t it?”

  They wandered into the office.

  The first man was tall, clean-cut, square-shouldered, and in his forties. Lauren didn't like the look of him. There was an obvious air of menace. The second looked even more thuggish, like a bouncer in a Queens night club. The second man stood with arms akimbo. He was looking through the unruly maze of unrelated photographs and clippings that adorned Cooper's wall. He was unable to wrest his eyes away from a clipping about a beach volleyball tournament in California showing a tall blond woman in a one-piece bathing suit leaping high to block a shot.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” Lauren asked. “Mr. Cooper is out of town on an assignment.”

  “For how long?”

  “That remains to be seen.” She eyed them back and forth. The more she saw of them, less she liked them. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “No,” the man said flatly. “Just dropped by to say hello. Visiting from out of town.” The man smiled. “You know Frank?” he asked.

  Lauren leaned back. “We work together.”

  The visitor stepped forward. “Frankie and I go way back,” he said. “I’m his cousin Kevin. From Chicago.”

  Kevin stepped forward and offered his hand.

  Lauren searched her memory of Cooper’s family talk. She hit the reference fast.

  “Uncle Eddie’s son?” she said.

  The man smiled. “That’s me.”

  He offered a handshake. Lauren eased and accepted it. He turned to the goon with him.

  “Smart lady, huh, Matty?”

  Matty smiled. “Yeah.”

  “I’m Lauren. I work with Frank. Will you be in the city for long?”

  “No, no. Just here taking care of some old business. Do me a favor. Just tell ‘Frankie Fists’ that I stopped by.”

  “’Frankie Fists’?”

  “Ask Frankie about that one. He’ll tell you a good story. Wanted to say a fast hello if I could. Touch base, you know.”

  “I know,” Lauren said.

  “You Frankie’s secretary?
”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  “You’re a nice-looking doll. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frankie was romancing you some.”

  “No comment,” Lauren answered.

  “Got to blow town now, okay?” Kevin said. “We’re driving back to Chi-town. You won’t forget to tell Frankie we were asking, right?”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “And don’t mention that you saw me to no one else, okay?”

  “Got it,” she said.

  The visitors turned. They were gone as quickly as they had appeared. Lauren heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  Chapter 42

  At four in the afternoon, Cooper opened the final file of the day. Like one earlier, it centered on Stanley Rudawski and any work he did during his tenure with the Department of State. Fifteen minutes into the file, however, Cooper stopped short.

  There before him was a three-by-five-inch photograph of labeled “David Charles.” Cooper stared at it for a moment. Then he turned the photograph over. It was inventoried in dark blue ink with the item number and file code. He wondered if it was a plant. But it looked as if it had been misfiled.

  “Damn,” Cooper said softly to himself. Mr. Ludlow glanced up. Cooper put the picture back in the file. But a bad idea was now upon him.

  He raised his eyes and stared at Ludlow. It took Ludlow less than five seconds to sense the presence of treasonous thoughts somewhere in the room. The archivist raised his eyes and was glaring back.

  Cooper looked again at the backside of the photograph. He memorized the index numbers as well as the way they were written. He closed the file and returned it to Mr. Ludlow with another set of files that he wanted to recall the next day. The next day was a Saturday. Ludlow confirmed that the reading room would be open, and the file would be available. Molloy also confirmed that he would be there till one p.m. the next day.

  He left Langley in late afternoon and drove to a telephone booth. He telephoned Lauren in New York. Four rings. Nothing. Then, midway into the fifth ring, a click and a pick-up.

  “Hello?”

  Images rose up in the forefront of his tired mind. He pictured her. Pretty. Short dark hair. Long legs. A way of carrying herself that could catch a man's eye. Much too young for him. All of this he knew, but now it was too late. Who cared? What did anything traditional matter anymore?

  “You alone?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  “How’s Sam doing?”

  “Still stable. The police have visited him. They’ve left a guard at the hospital.”

  “That’s good. Is he taking other visitors yet?”

  “No,” she said. “We sent over flowers and balloons from the newsroom. In another day or so, we’ll send some bagels from that place he likes in Park Slope.”

  “Is your phone secure?” he asked.

  “Why wouldn't it be?”

  “Who knows?” he said. “Listen. I need you to do some things,” he said.

  “Go ahead,” she said. In her office at the Eagle, Lauren picked up a pen and a note pad.

  “Go over to the computer room. See if you can access anything in there on David Charles. My source here says that the man is dead. Also, call the State Department again in Washington. See if we can get some sort of contact with Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen. He was the ambassador in Paris when Firebird was trying to defect. Ask the smart questions, see what you can find. Run up Ken Siegelman’s phone bill as much as you want.”

  On her end of the line, Lauren laughed. Cooper liked the sound of it.

  “Okay,” she said after writing down everything. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. The last is most important,” he said.

  He told her of the files he'd read. He told her of the scarcity of Lukashenko's name as well as that of David Charles. Then he moved to the point of the call.

  “Right now, go to the photo department of the Eagle right now. Get a head shot of a man. He should be dark haired, no glasses, no facial hair. He should look straight in a 1965 way. Have the photo lab run up a three-by-five print if you can’t find a three by five to steal. Tell them to put it on the oldest paper they have. You still writing this down?”

  She repeated it to him, word for word.

  “All right,” he said. Then he gave her the name of his hotel and the name under which he was registered. “Somewhere down in that lovely neighborhood where you live, you must know someone with a car who’d like to make a hundred dollars overnight. Have him or her drive down. Get the photo to me by nine a.m. and I’ll hand over a hundred dollars. If you need a car, I have an extra key to mine in the rear of the second drawer on my desk.”

  “I’ll bring it myself. It’s Friday after all.”

  “Jesus,” he laughed. “I forgot.”

  “Okay. Anything else?” she asked.

  He thought about it for a moment. “How are you at locating people?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Lauren Richie laughed. “One summer I worked for a collection agency in Hartford, Connecticut,” she said. “I did ‘skip traces' on deadbeats.”

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  He gave her an assignment. He asked her to find Lt. Diego Ramirez, last heard of at the United States Embassy in Paris in 1965. He was the one who may have had the last best look at David Charles. Margot's father had claimed the young soldier had taken the acting ambassador to the airport. After that, Charles seemed to have disappeared, at least in that incarnation.

  “Anything on your end?” Cooper asked.

  It was at that time that Lauren brought Cooper up to date on the visit from a relative from Chicago. From what Cooper could hear, it sounded legit. “Frankie Fists,” was an accepted codename, stemming from the brawl that Cooper had participated in outside Toots Shor’s more than a decade earlier.

  Cooper laughed. He was sorry he’d missed Kevin’s visit. His cousin usually got into some sort of hell or mischief when he was in New York. Cooper wondered what it was this time.

  Chapter 43

  Cooper returned to the Soviet Reading Room, prowled through a few remaining documents and followed them on a whim. He found a file titled Suspicious Premature Deaths Connected To The Murder of President John F. Kennedy. It was a rat bastard of a file. It ran from1963 to the present day. It examined the earthly deaths of several people connected to the assassination, and of the forty-nine deaths listed, some stood out.

  On November 20, 1963, a woman named Rose Cherami Marcades was struck by a car outside Eunice, Louisiana. She was taken to a small local hospital. Cherami appeared to be in a drug-induced stupor. About an hour later she began experiencing withdrawal. She then told police that she had been riding with two drug dealers who said they were on their way to Dallas to assassinate the President. Things went off the rails when the two men accompanying her got into an argument with another man at a bar called the Silver Slipper. Cherami later claimed she was thrown out of the bar and had to hitchhike, eventually being struck by motorist Frank Odom. Two days later, the attending nurses were watching TV in her hospital room. As JFK’s motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, Cherami announced, “This is when it’s going to happen.”

  Then the shots were fired.

  On September 4, 1965, Cherami was yet again struck by a car, this time just east of Big Sandy, Texas. The driver was identified but no name was recorded. Police ruled out foul play when no relation could be established between driver and victim. By the oddest coincidence, Rose had been scheduled to testify in a new inquiry into JFK’s death two days after she died.

  A Dallas resident named James Richard Worrell was a close-up-and-personal eyewitness to Kennedy’s assassination. In November of 1963, Worrell, a high school student, had skipped classes to see the President. He watched as the motorcade passed him. Worrell heard something. He looked up and saw a rifle barrel protruding from a sixth-floor corner window of the Texas Book Depository. He looked back to Kennedy’s vehicle. He heard the second shot and saw the President slump over. He looked bac
k up and saw the third shot’s muzzle flash, then began running in a panic around the Depository and onto Houston Street, where he heard a fourth shot. He later said he saw a man run from the rear exit of the Depository and gave a description that fit Lee Harvey Oswald. Almost three years later, November 6, 1966, Worrell was riding a motorcycle in Dallas, along with a passenger named Lee Hudgins, when the vehicle went out of control at a high speed, jumped a curb and crashed. Both Worrell and Hudgins died.

  Dorothy Kilgallen was a journalist for various mainstream American publications. She was a Broadway columnist, but best known as a panelist on the tv game show, What’s My Line?

  In 1962, Kilgallen published an article alleging a sexual relationship between Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Two days later, Monroe died of an apparent drug overdose. Bad luck. In 1964, Kilgallen claimed to have interviewed Jack Ruby in the courthouse during his trial for Oswald’s murder. She had also acquired a copy of Ruby’s testimony to the Warren Commission and published it two months before the Commission published its own report.

  In reaction, John Edgar Hoover had one of the great hissy fits of his professional life. The FBI was supposed to be securely holding such documents. Now they were all over the tabloids. He sent FBI sent agents to Kilgallen’s home to inquire who her contacts were. She refused to say. Then in 1965, she published an article about the similarities between the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and the assassination the following year. By that point, Kilgallen was a pesky critic of J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission. On November 8, 1965, a day after her last appearance on What’s My Line? Kilgallen was found dead in her home in New York City. More bad luck. The cause was an overdose of barbiturates with alcohol.

  Lieutenant William Pitzer was a United States Navy officer who worked in the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Pitzer controlled the hospital’s closed-circuit television cameras. It was widely rumored that Pitzer secretly filmed the Kennedy autopsy and then hid a copy of the recording at home., Allegedly, he showed it to friends. Pitzer claimed that it did not support the report’s official conclusions.