Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “Terrible,” Lauren agreed coldly.

  Across beers at Kitty Hawk’s they just stared at each other. By this time, they both carried guns. Their necks were constantly on swivels.

  There was a ton of stuff that Cooper and Lauren unearthed that no one wanted to print at the time. Kook stuff, some called it. Cooper kept scrapbooks. Notes in files. Thoughts written on the backs of envelopes and jacket pockets. In the years that ensued, it was the stuff of books, some scurrilous, and late night tv talk shows and some nut periodicals that dealt in conspiracies.

  For example, when JFK arrived with his wife on the morning of November 22, 1963, a full-page advertisement appeared in the Dallas Morning News. It accused Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party. When the ad was shown to the president that morning, he was appalled. He turned to Jackie, who was visibly upset. Then, recovering, the President said, "Oh, well, you know… we're heading into nut country today."

  Cooper also discovered that Kennedy had been frequently warned not to make the trip. The mood in Dallas was no secret. A dark streak of casual violence had gripped the city. Texas led the United States in homicides per capita and Dallas led Texas. It was a dangerous turbulent place. Evangelist Billy Graham had attempted to reach Kennedy about his foreboding. And Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas had pleaded with Kennedy: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn't go there. Don't you go.”

  Locally in Dallas, retired U.S. army major general Edwin Walker ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” Walker was a white supremacist and called himself a “super patriot.” He also had an ax to grind with Kennedy as the President had censured him for forcing John Birch Society literature on his troops in Germany.

  A poster with JFK's face on it was circulated in Dallas, announcing, "This Man is Wanted" for—among other things—"turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist-Controlled United Nations" and appointing "anti-Christians...aliens and known Communists" to federal offices. The Warren Commission traced the posters to General Walker.

  The last words Kennedy probably heard spoken to him came from Nellie Connally, the governor's wife. Delighted by the enthusiastic crowds along the motorcade route, she turned around in her seat and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you."

  Then the first bullet hit the motorcade. Seconds later, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was dead, part of his skull lying in the street and Secret Service Agent Clint Hill was crawling on the back of the presidential limousine to block Mrs. Kennedy with his body.

  So, over the years that followed, Cooper arrived at one dark conclusion: Dallas's toxic political climate had been a factor in the assassination. Add in the CIA soreheads, the vengeful Mafia guys, the belligerent ex-army officers and the disgruntled Cubans. Then someone threw some money at an unhinged the already violent and unstable Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “Hey, Lee! Want to take a shot with some other guys at the commie pinko President from Massachusetts? Make some money?”

  “Well, sure, sir.”

  Then there was the Cuban connection.

  Firebird. Pájaro de fuego.

  Anti-Castro guys furious that JFK hadn’t finished off Castro?

  Pro-Castro guys furious that JFK had tried to finish off Castro?

  A rogue KGB sector upset that the CIA had murdered….

  Who knew? Fewer and few people. They were already starting to die off. More strange stuff went down:

  Diego Ramirez, the former Marine guard, went to sea in a small sailboat one day in May, 1977. A larger boat rammed his small craft and sank it. Accident. Diego drowned even though he was an expert swimmer. Around the same time, a former George Wallace financial guy named Deke Moreland took a trip to Uzbekistan to check on some dealings in the petroleum business. He disappeared from the face of the earth. A defection? A crime victim? No one ever knew.

  The New York Eagle went bankrupt. It published its final edition in March of 1975. The problem wasn’t circulation. The problem was advertising. Stores didn’t want Eagle readers. Eagle readers were usually shoplifters in most New York retail establishments, or so the owners thought. The notion was toxic.

  So both Lauren and Cooper were out of work. Lauren caught on immediately with a newspaper in San Francisco. She moved west where promotion followed promotion.

  Late in 1976, Cooper gave up his rent-controlled apartment on West 96th Street. The landlord had never repaired the bullet damage or bloodstains on the third-floor landing. Why bother?

  Cooper moved west as well, picking up on a writing-editing job in San Jose. No more Irish Comics. Cooper edited national news and wrote a once a week column. It was, for once, dignified. He finally married. It was a comfortable and secure life, made even more secure by the fact that he knew he had found the one woman in his life that he had ever truly loved.

  Better yet, most of his enemies were now distant or dead or no longer angry. So no one shot at him anymore, which he came to appreciate. By and large, he and his wife lived quietly.

  The United States House of Representatives established in 1976 a Select Committee on Assassinations to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The committee issued its final report in 1979, concluding that Kennedy was probably assassinated via a conspiracy which included a second gunman in Dallas. A Russian or Soviet involvement was examined, collusion was suspected, but nothing was proven.

  Walter Winchell’s words echoed over the years. “Truth,” Walter Winchell had once angrily ranted over a fourth Scotch. “What the hell is truth, anyway? Truth is relative. Truth is what people choose to believe. Fuck the truth.”

  Once, to amuse, Cooper had a Times Square souvenir place print up t-shirts with that phrase. Then he distributed them among his friends in journalism.

  Nine years later in 1988, a Justice Department memo to the House Judiciary Committee, the Assistant Attorney General formally reviewed the recommendations of the HSCA report and reported a conclusion of further investigations.

  This time it was concluded that data did not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman. “So as far as the 1977 conclusion was concerned, never mind,” Cooper muttered to his wife.

  Cooper frequently thought back of how Winchell had helped him. Then he also thought of what Winchell had once said when asked by an underworld source if he really wanted to know the inside account, the truth, about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Winchell had answered, “No.” Some things were better left unknown. The truth could be a poison pill. His mentor Walter had taught him that, too.

  But Cooper did want to know about Firebird. He couldn’t let it go. Then there was a conversation in 1990 that rearranged all the furniture in the room

  Marty Friedkin had been permanently re-assigned to London by 1990, but still visited New York a couple of times a year. A World War Two veteran, he was by then getting on in the years. Cooper would fly to New York when he knew Friedkin would be in town. Often, they had dinner at Max’s Kansas City. They would talk over old times.

  “Oh, and this should interest you, Cooper,” Friedkin said on one such evening, “since you won’t give up on that flaming bird thing. Do you remember all those reports about Oswald taking a potshot at Edwin Walker?”

  “Sure, I do,” Cooper said.

  “Know what the provenance of that was?”

  “It was in the Warren Report.”

  “Right-o. But here’s where they got it. On November 29, 1963, one week following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an article appeared in a small German newspaper, Die Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung that accused reputed JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, of having committed the attack on Major General Edwin Walker. Oswald's widow, Marina Oswald was asked about the report during a two-week-long detention for interrogation by federal investigators, and she said she believed the report was true.”

  “So?” Cooper asked.

  “So she contradicted herself many times,” said Fr
iedkin. “They were also threatening her with deportation. How would you like to be a widowed female being sent back to a state that threw twelve million of its own people into cannon fodder in World War Two, or had a fake famine in Ukraine and starved another six million people? Marina Oswald knew she would have been raped for a few weeks then shot if she was sent back to the Workers’ Paradise. Why wouldn’t she have said anything to save her skin? That’s the Russian way of doing things. Pravda. Istina. See what I mean?”

  “Sure. But where are you going with this?” Cooper asked.

  “Tell me this, Frank,” said Friedkin. “Why does the original report surface in a German newspaper that had been founded by the CIA as an American propaganda publication? And for that matter, how does a European newspaper with no significant presence in the United States receive information about a rather obscure crime that occurred on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean?”

  “I have no idea,” said Cooper.

  “Me, neither,” said Friedkin. “And who the bloody hell does? But you know,” he continued. “There was never any hard evidence connecting Oswald to the attack on Walker. All you had was something that Maria Oswald agreed to under harsh questioning after the original story popped up in a CIA-financed German paper that had no sources in the United States. Then you had Jack Ruby, a local far right mob guy who used to run night clubs for Al Capone and who somehow got the basement doors open access to Dallas police headquarters through the basement. Oswald was conveniently dead by the time the story surfaced. Light that one up and smoke it, lover of coincidence.”

  “Thanks,” Cooper said, not entirely grateful.

  “I got another one for you,” Friedkin said. “A little scrap for you to chew on for the rest of your life. This one’s a beauty.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Maria Oswald was born Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova in Severodvinsk, Northwest section of western Russia, near Arkhangelsk. Red army town. End of the damned world, if you ask me. Anyway, she lived with her mother and stepfather until 1957. Then her family shipped her off to Minsk to live with her uncle, Ilya Prusakov. Prusakov was a colonel in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. KGB most likely.”

  “Well known so far.”

  “Yeah, well, here’s the part that will kill you, Frank. “I was in a vodka joint in St. Petersburg a year ago. The St. Pete in Russia, not the one with all the daffy senile citizens in your Florida. I was doing a piece on currency dealing, gas smuggling and some other juicy black-market stuff by some of Yeltsin’s pals behind Uncle Boris’s back. And this one black market guy, an older fellow, was getting completely blotto from the booze and kept jabbering to me in English, mostly just to show off how well he could talk my language. Talked my ear off, he did. Almost made it seem like we were in a free country. Turns out he was from Minsk and claimed he grew up with a girl named Marina Prusakova. Knew the whole family, he said, including Ma Prusakova and her unofficial old man, the uncle, the Interior Ministry-KGB bloke.”

  Cooper waited.

  “Turns out the stepmother was a pretty fair amateur dancer in her younger days. Ballets Russes. The old man had all these pictures of her all his life. Their apartment was decorated with them. Turns out his wife, Marina’s step-mom, used to dance the role of the princess in the Firebird. The Tsarina. See? Firebird, and the Prusakov family. Hell of coincidence, isn’t it? Almost suggests that whoever that defector, the Lukashenko guy, was—”

  “—was someone who knew the family,” Cooper said. “Or was very close to it. And that someone might have even known Oswald personally.”

  “Right-o, old man.”

  “This all could be just coincidence, though, you know. After all, Firebird is one of the best-known roles in the greatest Russian ballet. The Firebird emerged from an egg in a coffin, too. I figured that coffin part would appeal to an old death page guy like you.”

  “It does,” Cooper admitted. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. My blabbermouth kept talking because I was paying for the booze. He also started talking about another young man who was friendly with the Prusakov family. Ukrainian bloke. Former Red Army. Mid-level officer later in his career. Used to hang around after Marina arrived. Word was he was sweet on her. Heart was broken when she went off with her dysfunctional U.S. Marine. Then he must have been turned inside out when she resurfaced in America with the man who killed Kennedy.”

  “What happened to him?” Cooper asked.

  “He disappeared,” Friedkin said. “Rumor was, he was quite a marksman. A sniper in the Great Patriotic War. Went into something very secret for the U.S.S.R.” There was a long pause. “Ah, forget it, mate. Don’t really mean to torture you like this, but I knew you might be interested.”

  The two men stared at each other across the dark mahogany table.

  “Keep in mind, Minsk is in Byelorussia. Byelorussia is independent now. But back in the Sixties, it was a big part of the Soviet empire. White Russia. East of Poland and west of Moscow.”

  “And this other guy, the marksman, was a Ukrainian. Right?” Cooper asked.

  Friedkin finished his drink. “Hey. Bloody hell,” he said while Cooper sat speechless. “All of this might be the keys to your kingdom, Frank. And it might be just hearsay from a drunk in a bar.”

  “Jesus Christ, Marty!” Cooper said when he finally straightened up. “Want to work on the story with me?” Cooper asked. “Come on! You have to!”

  “You think I’m batshit crazy?” Friedkin laughed. “Of course not! No!”

  “Aren’t you intrigued?”

  “Intrigued, yes. But it’s a dead story, Frank. Let it go.”

  “As if I could,” Cooper said.

  “You’ll be a happier man if you do.”

  “No doubt about that,” Cooper said.

  “Listen. I’ll keep my ear to the ground, that’s all.”

  But nothing more came up out of the ground. No more magical eggs from enchanted coffins. Cooper made some long-distance inquiries and even jerked his CIA and journalistic contacts for a few months. But the trail, if there had ever even been one, was as cold as an undiscovered tomb.

  If Oswald had been the dupe of a Cuban connection, pro-Castro or anti-Castro, why would they have gone to such lengths to cover the tracks? Why did Lukashenko revel in the code name ‘Firebird’ and claim he had the secret of the century? Why the Golitsyn-Nosenko intrigue which had sought to absolve the Kremlin in the JFK killing? Why Popov-Goleniewski?

  “The only credible explanation could be that the KGB launched Oswald as a killer, but knew he was unstable,” said Lauren on day in 1995 when she walked with Frank Cooper on a promontory above a beach at Half Moon Bay in California. Lauren had bought a bag of stale bread to feel the gulls and seals. They stopped at a railing above some low jagged rocks. At intervals, she hurled crusts and more to the birds and marine mammals.

  They went to this place often to relax. They continued to discuss the intrigue that had almost cost them their lives when they had worked at the Eagle in New York in the 1960’s. Cooper always brought her up to date on anything new, such as Friedkin’s revelations, since they had worked together so diligently.

  “The Russians put him out there as a sleeper, maybe,” she suggested. “When others took him over and gave him an assignment,” she continued, “they didn’t want their fingerprints on it in any way.”

  “And similarly, if Firebird had been a young man enamored of Marina Prusakova…” Cooper said.

  “….He would have gone through hell and high water to try to get to the west,” she said, finishing his thought and agreeing with it. “It would have been enough to prompt his desperate dash to defect to the Americans. And the Oswald file would have been the biggest secret of the Sixties.” She paused. “So then? David Charles?” she said.

  “The CIA’s signature was all over the botched Cuban operations,” Cooper said. “From the poisoned cigars to the exploding conch shells to the Bay of Pigs. They didn’t want any blowback on their activ
ities. They had no idea yet how much blowback they’d get over the years.”

  “And Misha?’ she asked, working it to a conclusion. “KGB or CIA?”

  “As a very wise observer of the world scene once said to me, ‘Ukrainian assassins. They’ll work for anyone.’ So, who knows? Maybe both?”

  And at this point, remembering her terrified face in the apartment the night the noble Jonas Halász had shot Misha, he cringed and shuddered. Yes, he had been the Plutarch of the obit page, the James Joyce of the Irish comics. But were any politics worth the destruction of another human being? He thought of the air attacks that Curtis Lemay had run over the skies of Japan, incinerating thousands of civilians. And he thought of the bullets that had flown in his apartment house that night immediately following the election of 1968. Was there any real difference?

  “How is Marty Friedkin?” she finally asked.

  “He’s doing fine. Finally married Elizabeth. You knew that, I think.”

  “How good of him,” she said with a laugh. “Do you remember the time he cited the lines from the Merchant of Venice in the office. The lines about vengeance. Talk about shooting over someone’s head.”

  They laughed. They held each other’s hand. They walked back to the parking lot.

  And there it remained. There was never anything else new. But for the rest of his life, Cooper was obsessed with Firebird. It was never far from his consciousness or even his subconscious.

  “Or, Frank,” as Marty Friedkin once acerbically asked when they got together in London a final time in 2003 and when Friedkin was an old man and when Cooper brought up the subject, “does anyone care anymore?”

  “The President of The United States was murdered and the Russians, as part of their century-long effort to compromise the west— “

  “But does anyone really care anymore?” Friedkin interrupted. “Face it, Frank. It was two generations ago. No one even knows who Jack Ruby was. No one gives an airborne fornication.”

  Cooper fell silent. That was it. The last time he spoke publicly about the case.