Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Charles was in his office when all hell broke loose. Someone up high in the nosebleed section of the State Department was on the Red Line. Charles was sacked. He was to get out to Orly, get on a Pan Am jet at one o'clock that day, and get back to Washington.

  “I've never seen anything like it,” Rudawski said. “They were acting on Johnson's orders as Commander-in-Chief. An hour later, LBJ was personally screaming into the phone. A lot of the embassy staff overheard it. Charles was to get out to the airport and onto that airplane without communicating with anyone. The Marines were ordered to enforce the command.”

  Rudawski had a distant look in his eyes for a moment, then flashed back to his story. “There was this one kid marine. Diego Ramirez. He was a Lance Corporal. Nice kid from Puerto Rico. Smart with a chip on his shoulder, but at the same time he was in awe of what he was doing. Here he was, twenty-two years old, and he was babysitting an acting U.S. ambassador on the orders of the President.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Normally it might have been. But not for Diego. He was the soldier everyone trusted, the guy who could get things done, keep his eyes open and think.”

  Cooper furiously made notes through this part. Then, “Did you talk to Charles between the time he was ousted and the time he was out the door?” Cooper asked.

  “No. Never spoke to him or saw him again in Paris, never breathed a ‘Firebird’ word to anyone else. Figured it might be career poison, if you know.”

  “I know,” Cooper said.

  “But here's the best kicker,” Rudawski man said. “Who came through the main embassy gates just as Charles was on his way out: Ambassador Bohlen, looking fit and refreshed. Bohlen was back in the saddle by evening that same day. He'd been in the air over the Atlantic just as the lynch mob was forming for Charles.”

  Cooper thought about it, looking up and ceasing to write. “Was an explanation offered?” he asked. “About the D.C. and Lukashenko situation?”

  “No one knew about it. Look, there must have been a hundred forty of us in that station, plus the CIA people and the USIA people. But one isn't supposed to gossip. And, understand this: I may have been the only one aside from David Charles who knew about Lukashenko.”

  “Your name wasn't on the memo that went to Washington?”

  “I wrote it as David Charles in the first person. He signed it.”

  “And you weren’t mentioned as having met the Russian?”

  “Charles told me to leave myself out of it for personal safety. I did.”

  “And they thought that Charles was capable of drafting that memo himself?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Rudawski said. “Let’s face it. The CIA people miss the obvious all the time. No one ever came by to ask me the time of day. And I never communicated with Charles again. Never dared to while the State Department employed me. I stayed in government until a few months ago,” Rudawski said. “Did my last tour in Spain. Then I got sick and came home. Margot, my darling here, has been taking care of me.”

  “So? The big question?” Cooper asked at length.

  “Lukashenko? A week later, curiosity was upon me. So I went to a public kiosk. I phoned the Soviet consulate. Asked for Comrade Lukashenko. Just wanted to hear his voice.”

  “And?”

  “The first time I called there was a long pause. Then a voice wanted to know who was calling. I claimed I was a promoter who wanted to know about a Soviet violinist. There was another long pause. They told me to wait. I did. Six, seven minutes. The unidentified voice came back. Said Comrade Lukashenko was indisposed. I called back a day later. The same voice asked sharper questions and wouldn't put me through. Said to call back in two days. I did. Some security hood came on the phone, could barely speak English and told me there was no Pavel Lukashenko. Never had been. Then they put me through to a Comrade Kuzmich. Kafkaesque stuff: Kuzmich claimed he'd been the chief cultural attaché for several years.” He paused, fatigue wearing him down. He skipped a beat. “I even ran a little test on Kuzmich. I asked if we'd be seeing Boris Godunov in Western Europe that spring. Kuzmich said he would check to see if Comrade Godunov was making concert appearances and get back to me. Some cultural attaché! I gave him a fake number and rang off.”

  Cooper glanced to Margot. She lowered her gaze.

  “Lukashenko disappeared off the face of this earth.” Rudawski concluded. “I heard things through the grapevine, though.” He paused again, this time for several seconds. “See, I had a close friend who was in the CIA station at the embassy. His name was Brett Molloy. We'd get together for drinks. I'd hear things. We’d trade little bits of gossip and shop talk, even though we weren’t supposed to.”

  Cooper had a long list of names. He added this one. Margot watched him write.

  “Do you know if Brett Molloy still works there?” Cooper asked.

  “I think he’s in Langley now,” said Rudawski. “But Molloy told me that on the same day that Charles was recalled to the U.S., an unscheduled Soviet plane left Orly. Crew of six. But only three passengers including a man on a stretcher. 'Returning to the USSR for medical treatment,' they said. `Heart attack.' Rubbish! They sent their sick to western hospitals. And the two 'doctors' who 'escorted' him? CIA recognized them. They were a couple of KGB thugs, the same toughs in leather jackets who we used to see standing near the doors at diplomatic functions.”

  There was a long silence as Cooper's host stared straight at him.

  “Were you told this, or did you see it?” Cooper asked.

  “I was told this. But I had no reason to doubt it,” Rudawski answered. “And word got back to us within a few days via the West Germans. There had been an execution in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. That was the place the political prisoners were sent. A former diplomat, said to have been in Paris. Clear, huh? They liked to make examples of people. Bunch of barbarians if you ask me. Never trust official Russians.”

  “Can’t say I disagree with you,” Cooper said.

  Rudawski continued. “I tried to get in touch with David Charles after I'd retired from the State Department. I'd had a successful career as a diplomat thanks to his keeping my name off the official accounts of Paris in 1965. Went through the State Department and their records,” the man said. “Sued under the Freedom of Information Act. Went through every telephone book in Texas. Contacted everyone anyone had ever heard of in the oil business. Phoned people in the Foreign Service whom I hadn't spoken to in years. No David Charles. No one existed under that name. Never had. His whole cover. The friendship with Johnson was a fabrication. Lyndon's Man, huh? Spook central! Who even knows if he was an oilman or not? I never figured it out.”

  “Anyone can be traced,” Cooper said. “Dead or alive.”

  “Think so?” It was said as a challenge. “Well, here’s the kicker. I walked straight into Mr. Charles about two years ago in New York City,” Rudawski said. “Him of the ghost of him. Margot was with me. We were going into Grand Central Station. The revolving door on 42nd Street, Vanderbilt Avenue side. He was coming out, we were going in. Catching a train, you know? I yanked the door to a stop. Caused a big pile up. Charles stared back at me, then pulled his hat down. People surged behind us and the door started to move again.”

  “Dad wanted to get a better look. And to show me,” Margot said. “I didn’t get a good look. Dad grabbed me by the hand and we went back through the door. By the time we were out of the station and onto Vanderbilt Avenue, he was gone.”

  There was a pause. “All right. Now it’s on you, Mr. Cooper,” Rudawski said. “If this is of any interest to you, it's my gift. Or my curse, depending how it works out. Thank you for coming. You've eased things for a dying man, just being able to tell my story.”

  Rudawski looked to his daughter. He offered Cooper a hand in trust and friendship. Cooper rose, stepped forward and accepted it.

  Chapter 8

  A few minutes later, Frank Cooper settled into the passenger side of Margot’s Mercedes. “Well, that was a hell of
a story,” he said.

  “Think you can do anything with it?”

  Cooper blew out a long breath. “Don’t know,” he said.

  It was two a.m. The sky was dark. Margot pulled her Benz out of her father’s driveway. Cooper glanced again at Margot's school ring, the one with the crest facing outward. He had done some asking around town.

  Margot had been a diplomat’s daughter at her fancy girls’ school in Connecticut, nestled in there with the future wives of Presidents, trust fund managers, and Wall Street bankers. It made her current endeavors, which his persistent snooping had uncovered, more amusing.

  Margot had arrived in New York in the late 1950s after graduating from Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She worked at Mademoiselle Magazine for a few months, and then at Cosmopolitan. After contributing to a series of early columns on sex and health, she decided that the managerial side of the business was a better fit.

  She had built a discreet business grooming a few dozen beautiful young women from the world of top prep schools and private colleges. To these, she added a few ambitious young women from the fringes of the film, fashion and business worlds, with a sprinkling of pretty foreign students in New York looking for extra cash. Margot zeroed in on frustrated models and actresses, the ones who just had missed the entry into the upper echelons of the business.

  “Just because you were bypassed in these impossible professions,” she told them, “doesn’t mean you aren’t fabulous, beautiful, and highly desirable. Leave it to me. I can connect you with some wonderful men who will pay generously for your companionship and favors.”

  Requirements included natural beauty, good breeding and manners, a drug-free lifestyle, unflappable poise and a familiarity with history, literature and world events. Talent in bed was essential. This was assessed by Margot’s testers, male acquaintances of similar class and breeding who took candidates for their test runs and reported back to the boss. Accordingly, Margot called her young ladies, “kittens.” The term “call girls” she deemed offensive.

  She worked with nothing more than a telephone and coded black book of wealthy contacts. Her girls were discrete. They charged three hundred dollars a night in cash. Margot kept thirty percent. Nightly, she would be visible at the night spots favored by her urbane clientele. Johns had to meet the same high standards as the Margot’s kittens. No diamond pinkie rings, please. Qiana shirts, no way. Margot had twenty regular girls and as many part timers.

  Until recently, she had trolled for clients at a place named Pedro's on East 85th Street, a small reverse-snobbism dive bar with a shuffleboard machine and potent Banana Daiquiris just a few strides away from one of the city's skuzzier streetwalker havens on Second Avenue.

  However, Cooper knew Margot had recently moved closer to the bigger money. She hung out at L'Interdit, a club in the basement of the Gotham Hotel on the southwest corner of 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. L'Interdit had low lights, great drinks, a large dance floor and French chanteur Gilbert Becaud crooning Et Maintenant on the speakers. Its décor was international traffic signs. One night recently, Gilbert Becaud had turned up in person. He was playing a two-week gig at the Cort Theater on Broadway and had heard about the club.

  With the image of Becaud singing along to the speaker system and Margot arranging dates for her kittens, Cooper closed his eyes. He slept for several minutes. The next thing he knew, Margot had pulled to the curb before his building on West 98th Street. He blinked awake.

  “You're home,” she said. “Safe and sound. How’s that?”

  “Excellent,” he said. He checked his gun. He fought hard to become alert.

  There was an open parking space in front of his building. She pulled into it.

  “How much more do you know about what went down in Paris?” Cooper asked.

  “What he told you, he told me,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Okay,” he said. He reached for the door handle to get out of the Benz.

  He felt her hand land on his arm. “I assume you know what I do,” she said.

  He laughed. “Of course I do,” he said.

  “Two things in life sell,” she had once said. “Sex and food. And I was not meant to sling hash in anyone’s damned kitchen. Would you like one of my girls to treat you?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I’d prefer it to be you,” he said.

  She laughed. “You’re a flirt. I’ll think about it. Maybe someday that would be fun.”

  She kissed him on the cheek.

  In his apartment several minutes later, Cooper stood at his dark living-room window, staring down at the street, watching for movement. A panel truck pulled to the curb and turned its light off. No one stepped out. After two minutes, the driver of the truck rolled down his window and threw a brown bag, a sandwich wrapper, and two soda cans onto the sidewalk. Then he rolled up the window, put his lights on again, and rumbled away.

  Cooper returned his pistol to the safe. He left the safe's door open by the bed. It would be a quick reach to the loaded gun if he needed it. He had practiced many times. He settled into bed. He lay very quietly, listening to the pace of his heartbeat as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Then he closed them.

  Someday, he mused, he should write his own obit and keep it on file. Just in case. The thought was barely complete when he plunged off a fatigue cliff and crashed into sleep.

  Chapter 9

  Frank Cooper had earned his paranoia the hard way. For many years, he had been an investigative journalist for the now defunct New York Daily Mirror.

  Cooper had been born in Illinois in 1928, gone to university at Northwestern, then done military service, where he first learned how to make trouble. The Korean War had begun in June of 1950 when communist North Korea invaded the South with six army divisions. North Korean forces, backed by Soviet tanks, racked up several quick victories until the United States intervened in the defense of the South. The Truman administration obtained a United Nations resolution calling on member countries to militarily assist South Korea. General Douglas MacArthur took command of the joint forces.

  Frank Cooper was in the U.S. Army at the time, a Second Lieutenant assigned to Japan. His regiment, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, the same unit in which George Armstrong Custer once served, airlifted to Korea. The Seventh was poorly commanded, not for the first time. North Korean forces outmaneuvered the Americans by targeting US lines from the rear.

  As the conflict continued, two million refugees streamed across the battlefields. Fearing North Korean infiltration of South Korea, the US leadership panicked. On July 26, the US 8th Army issued orders to stop all Korean civilians. 'No, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines. Movement of all Koreans will cease immediately.'

  There was a stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri that spanned a small stream. On the day that the US 8th Army delivered its “stop refugee” order, more than four hundred Korean civilians gathered by the bridge and underneath it. As they attempted to continue southward, gunfire began. Cooper was two miles away with the Seventh. He was close enough to hear the gunfire and subsequent strafing by what he knew to be U.S. Aircraft.

  The “firefight” went on for three days. Elements of the Seventh withdrew. When parts of their units re-assembled, soldiers talked. No one knew exactly what had happened at the bridge, who gave the command, or how many Koreans died. Were the dead refugees or infiltrators?

  “All I knew was that all hell broke out and we were under orders to fire from the top of the bridge,” one soldier told Cooper.

  “Did you get return fire?”

  “I think we got some,” the soldier said. “But we didn’t know if they were soldiers or kids. It didn’t matter. Some were above the bridge on the railroad tracks. Our planes strafed the rest of them. More were killed under the arches. The floor under the bridge was a mixture of gravel and sand, bodies and blood. Eight to eighty, crippled or crazy. We shot them all.” The soldier paused. “It was fucking God-awful. A lot of our guys were barfin
g. Body parts everywhere.”

  “Holy Jesus,” said Cooper.

  Cooper saw combat. He won two purple hearts, one with shrapnel in his shoulder the other with a bullet wound that grazed his left thigh. Yet the events of the bridge at No Gun Ri haunted him. “If it’s Korean from six to sixty, shoot it,” was a command repeated by many soldiers, most of whom were scared young draftees. Soldiers spoke off the record of targeting refugees well after No Gun Ri. In August 1950, they said, there were orders detailing that refugees crossing the Naktong River be shot. Other rumors emerged. In August 1950, several dozen civilians were killed seeking sanctuary in a shrine by the village of Kokaan-Ri.

  After ten months in a war zone, Cooper transferred to Hawaii. He began asking what had happened in Korea. He heard a lot of stuff that disgusted him. There were reports of hundreds of civilians killed by US naval artillery on the beaches near the port of Pohang in September 1950. Dozens of villages across southern South Korea reported the repeated low-level strafing by US planes during July and August 1950.

  Cooper made a noisy pest of himself. Eventually, he was ordered into the office of an angry Major Lansing in Honolulu. Lansing showed him the official record in the form of a classified document. “Here you go, Lieutenant,” the major said. “Read it and fucking forget about it. If civilians got in the way of fighting, that’s too damned bad.”

  Cooper read. The official version stated that it was never the policy of U.S. forces to harm civilians. Further, it said, US forces were not even in the area of No Gun Ri at the time of the killings, specifically The Seventh.

  “Well,” said Cooper, “I know that last part’s a lie because I was there. So was my unit. I knew good men who died there. I assume the rest of your report is bullshit, also.”

  The major stared at Cooper, then replied. “Are you a Communist? Soviet sympathizer?”