Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Together, they felt as if they had participated in all the larger events until the events reached out and sucked them in and nearly killed them in the bargain.

  Nothing of that sort had happened, of course. They had been wounded in some way but had survived, same as Sam. But it was a sense that they felt. An eerie spiritual contamination.

  And yet at the same time, they felt as if they had indeed touched the larger events. Frank and Lauren and all who sailed with them at the New York Eagle. Popov and Goleniewski. Golitsyn and Nosenko. The fake ambassador, David Charles. Misha, the assassin.

  They had been so close to finding some larger answers. They felt as if he had stood before the gates to the greatest story of the century, but the gates had not opened to him because he didn’t have the password.

  On February 5, 1969, three weeks after Nixon’s inauguration, Walter Winchell announced his retirement. He planned to leave New York and go west. He had a home in the Edgemont section of Greenburgh, New York, a placid suburb neighboring Scarsdale. He had put it up for sale.

  Many people may have had reason to hate Winchell, but to Frank Cooper he had always been a solid friend. Cooper was saddened. He phoned Walter at home.

  “Have lunch with me before you leave,” Cooper said. “I want to thank you.”

  “For what, kidster?” Walter snapped. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m bringing Lauren. Just so you know in advance.”

  “You can bring the Queen of England for all I care. I’m always happy to see a pretty lady. Plus, I’m glad you called. I got one thing to tell you about, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  A date was set, but as the meeting drew closer, Cooper realized that it would not be a happy occasion. As Lauren had remarked once before, two careers had intersected, Cooper on the way up, Winchell on the way down. But worse, Cooper knew that Winchell’s world was coming apart.

  Walter and his wife Magee had had three children, a son and two daughters, Walter, Jr., Gloria and Walda. Gloria had died of pneumonia years ago at the age of nine. Walda had recently spent time in mental health facilities. But more painfully and more recently, Walter Jr. had committed suicide in his family's garage on Christmas night, 1968. Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Walter Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, California, but listed himself as a freelancer who for a time wrote a column in the Los Angeles Free Press, an alternative newspaper that had started up in 1964.

  For what would be a final time before Winchell left New York, Cooper met with Walter at Joe’s Tavern Bar on 25th Street and 10th Avenue. It was half past four on a dull cold day in late February: icy sidewalks and a sharp wind. Lauren came along.

  Winchell was seated in a remote table at the rear, laying low and nursing a Johnny Walker. He was trying to be inconspicuous for once. He managed a smile when Cooper arrived and extended a hand of friendship. To Lauren, he leaned forward, took her hand and kissed her on the cheek. Then they sat, all of them.

  The conversation began uncomfortably. Winchell spoke wistfully of his late son and sorrowfully on the declining health of his wife, Magee. As for the future, Winchell was having a tough time seeing one. Cooper and Lauren expressed sympathy and tried to keep the mood light. It wasn’t easy. A young journalist named Larry King had already replaced Winchell in several newspapers.

  Winchell fell into a dialogue with Lauren, picking her mind about writing and the newspaper business. “Your lovely lady here is sharp as a tack,” Winchell said, turning his eyes to Cooper. “I’d keep her if I were you. Don’t let some other hack run off with her.” Then he turned sharply back to Lauren and gave her similar advice. “Frank’s a man among men,” Winchell said. “Grab onto his arm and hold it tight.”

  “Walter always was good at dating advice,” Cooper said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Damn right, I was,” Winchell said. “I know a good team when I see one.” He took another sip of Scotch and turned more seriously back to Cooper.

  "Lauren has been appointed the assistant editor of the sports section on The Eagle,” Cooper said. “First woman in New York to be so honored.

  “I heard,” Winchell said. He stayed with Lauren.

  “You’ll be great,” he concluded.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Are you a child or something? Call me ‘Walter.’”

  “Thank you.”

  Winchell turned back to Cooper. “I need to tell you something important, Frank,” Winchell said. “Maybe no one reads me anymore but that doesn’t mean I don’t hear things. Nothing recedes like success, you know. May I talk openly in front of your lady?”

  “I’ll leave the table if you need me to, Frank,” Lauren said.

  Cooper quickly put his hand on hers. “Anything Walter needs to tell me I want you to hear,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  He turned back to Winchell. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Winchell began. “Do you remember maybe about fifteen years ago you were in a fight in front of Toot’s Shor’s? You roughed up a couple of wise-ass dagos who were menacing a family member of yours.”

  “Ha! I remember it quite well,” Cooper said.

  “They did, too. When they were both finally out of Attica on some truck hijacking charges, they discovered who had beaten the shit out of them. Some prison punk who had a grudge against you ratted you out. And they decided to set an ambush at a warehouse in Brooklyn.” Winchell paused. “Their names were Tommy Russo and Jimmy Lugio. A couple of no-good goombahs. They shot your pal Sam by mistake.”

  Cooper’s jaw dropped open.

  “The mob guys over in Kings County were incensed that these two palookas had tried something like that on their own and were even angrier that they’d bitched it up. So they leaked word to some Micks in Chicago. See where this is going?”

  Cooper required less than three heartbeats to understand. “So that’s what my cousin Kevin was doing in town? Paying back an old debt?”

  “The wise guys in Brooklyn got rid of a couple of hotheads free and clear and made peace with the Irish in Chicago. See? These things all work out. It’s a done deal now, so don’t touch it.”

  A moment as it sank in, then, “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Cooper said.

  Winchell’s gaze returned to Lauren. “You never heard me talk about this, right?” the old man said with a wink.

  “I haven’t heard a word you said,” Lauren said. “In fact, I’m not even here.”

  “Wise lady,” said Winchell in praise. “You know how it works.”

  “Thanks to Frank,” she said.

  “And I learned from W.W.,” Cooper said. Cooper leaned back.

  “So! Case closed. Zippo,” said Winchell. “How’s Sam, by the way?”

  “Recovering well,” said Cooper. He’s going to start work again in March.”

  “Good to hear it,” Winchell said. “Give him my regards.”

  “He doesn’t like you.”

  “I know. I stole a girlfriend from him thirty years ago. A floozy red-head named Kiki. Sam’s never forgiven me, the stubborn old coot. Give him my regards anyway. Oh, and tell him he was smart to sit on that story about the harness race driver who was beaten up out on Long Island. If he’d printed that one, he would have been whacked long before the storage warehouse.”

  Cooper was still shaking his head.

  “Thanks for letting me know, Walter,” Cooper said. “About the warehouse. I keep trying to put the pieces in place. It’s good to know the truth.”

  “Truth,” Walter Winchell mused over the end of his third drink. “Truth! What the damned hell is truth, anyway?” Winchell asked.

  A fourth drink arrived without being requested. A few people still loved cantankerous old Walter and at least one of them worked behind the bar at Joe’s.

  “Screw the truth, Frank. Fuck the truth. Truth is relative. Truth sometimes is a lie. Truth is what you make of it. Truth is the last thing someone told you. The truth wil
l set you free, but first it will piss you off. Truth is what people choose to believe. Truth is what you see when you’re peeping over a transom. You can quote me. Nobody can think any more, you know. Most of them won’t be smart enough to understand what I mean. The country’s going to hell.”

  “How soon are you moving west, Walter?” Cooper asked.

  “Next week. The house will sell faster without me in it.”

  “God bless you, Walter. Take care of yourself.”

  Their meeting ended with a long embrace.

  Chapter 95

  One year after Cooper and Lauren met with Walter Winchell at Joe’s in Chelsea, Elizabeth June Magee, Walter’s wife, died at a Phoenix, Arizona hospital while undergoing treatment for a heart condition. It was the final blow to a once-proud once-powerful man. Winchell, who had once had an audience of millions, was now alone and shattered. His famous line about success receding was never more apt than in his case. Eventually, he moved into the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy had been murdered several months earlier. He lived as a recluse. Cooper tried to contact him, but Walter wasn’t returning calls.

  His mind slipped. In his final months, Winchell was typing out mimeographed sheets with his column and handing them out free to passers-by at a corner near his hotel. Later, he contracted testicular cancer. His life ended on February 20, 1972. Walter Winchell was buried in Arizona, a long way from Hollywood and Broadway. One person came to his funeral: his daughter, Wanda.

  Affectionately, Cooper wrote an obituary that was picked up by the major wire services. It appeared in more than three hundred newspapers. It would have been in more than a thousand back in another era, but already “All News Radio” and television were killing printed news.

  Newspapers were dying quickly and so were the people who had made them relevant.

  Chapter 96

  The newspaper promoted Lauren to sports editor when Sam retired in June 1972, another first for a female writer. Topher Wilson transferred from obituaries to general assignments in the same month, another well-deserved promotion, then a year later left for Newsday. The Eagle had acquired a reputation for hiring top young talent. Who knew?

  Up until early 1973, Cooper used to see Marty Friedkin around New York when the latter visited on assignments. Occasionally they would have drinks at the White Horse Tavern and guffaw about time spent on the Eagle. Lauren always joined them when possible. Elizabeth, Friedkin’s lady friend, moved in with him. She later followed him when he returned to England, still in the employ of the Guardian. They married in London in 1974.

  Together Cooper and Lauren worked unofficially on Firebird for years, never being able to fit together the complete puzzle. Cooper figured no one else would ever be able to, either. Like the deaths of Lincoln and Harding, the Kennedy slaying would remain an enigma.

  In his mind and on yellow legal pads in his office and at home, Cooper continued to work on various syntheses of all the plots to murder John F. Kennedy, and the many people who were involved. It was all part of an overall view of Soviet efforts to destabilize the west, starting with Joseph Stalin’s printing counterfeit American twenty-dollar bills in the 1920’s, and continuing with sending missiles to Cuba and beyond.

  Lauren contributed equally, though their regular writing, editing and reporting time occupied heavy work days. Yet, as time permitted, and as time passed, Frank and Lauren would try to put together all the pieces of the Firebird puzzle. They would move them around, in or out, and try to force them together. They still couldn’t come up with a neat fix, nor could anyone else.

  In further research into Kennedy’s death, Cooper had drinks with some of the newsmen in New York who had been assigned to Washington in November of 1963. He made a point of meeting with them when he visited New York. Or they would have coffee, for those wise souls who were no longer drinking. The best answers Cooper could ever come up with began to take shape through various tidbits mentioned in these sessions.

  “We were three years into the Kennedy’s first term, you know,” one Dallas reporter recalled in 1972. “And kooky stuff was happening daily in Dallas. You’d have thought the Civil War had never ended and no one had ever heard of Civil Rights. There were huge billboards that screamed, 'Impeach Earl Warren.' Jewish stores that had been there for generations were smeared with painted swastikas. Just as the radical left distributed hateful polemics in New York and San Francisco, the radical right distributed their hate stuff all over Dallas, including the public schools as well as private Christian academies. Crazy times.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper said. “They were.” He might have added, “They still are,” but didn’t.

  “In Texas, Kennedy was hated,” a woman from the New Orleans Times-Picayune told Cooper and Richie at the Lion’s Head. “Kennedy’s name was booed in public school classrooms in the Nineteen Sixties. At some companies in Texas, mostly financed by the oil industry, corporate junior executives were required to attend radical right seminars. If they wanted to stay with the company, much less advance in it, they knew they better attend. Most of them embraced the hate stuff. They were comfortable with it. And these were the cities. You can imagine what it was like out in the panhandle or in the oil fields.”

  “The fierce hateful underbelly of American society was alive and kicking,” said an old friend, a reporter from the New York Times. “In a wealthy Dallas suburb, when it was announced that the President had been murdered, a fourth-grade class erupted in applause. There were similar responses all over Dallas, Frank. And do I have to remind you that most of the Dallas Police Department were members of the Ku Klux Klan?”

  “Ever heard of something called ‘Firebird’ in relation to JFK’s death?” Cooper would ask whenever he was discussing the case with other reporters.

  Heads would shake. No, was the reply. A ballet? A car?

  “No, not that Firebird,” he would answer. “Firebird was…. a spy. Or an Operation. Or a state of mind. Hell, I’ve never been able to figure it out.”

  Weeks turned into months. Months, as they inevitably do, became years.

  As time passed, more of the players died, sealing their versions of the story forever. Some of the deaths were more than strange. They echoed the files that Cooper and Lauren had once seen in Langley.

  There was a gentleman, to use the term loosely, named Joseph Adams Milteer, the president of the Georgia chapter of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who hated Kennedy. He often held public rallies during which, through a bullhorn, he told everyone within earshot that the country would be better off with a “nigger hater” in office instead of a “nigger lover.”

  Two weeks before the assassination, Milteer was in Miami talking to a man he thought was a fellow racist, but who was actually an undercover police officer. Milteer claimed that Kennedy’s murder “was in the working,” and that Milteer envisioned him being shot “from an office building with a high-powered rifle,” and “they will pick up somebody within hours, just to throw people off.” Milteer’s prophecy proved eerily accurate: Lee Oswald was arrested seventy-five minutes after the assassination. There was a newspaper photograph that showed a man in the Dallas crowd who looked like Milteer, watching with arms folded as Kennedy’s car approached. Milteer burned to death at home in 1974 when a Coleman portable heating stove inexplicably exploded.

  On May 15, 1972, a man named Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate George Wallace. Wallace survived the shooting but was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The man who had stolen so many voters from Richard Nixon was out of national politics. There were reports that a Nixon White House aide named Charles Colson ordered E. Howard Hunt to break into Bremer's apartment to remove incriminating documents. This took place at the same time that the White House 'Plumbers,’ the unit that would precipitate the Watergate scandal, were trying to cause problems for Democratic candidates for president. Cooper could never trace down the end to this story. Wallace, however, literally nursing his wounds, did have one final mo
ment of glory and happiness when Lisa of The Taylor Sisters, the perky duo who sang for his campaign, became his third wife in 1981.

  Representative Hale Boggs was perhaps the most high-profile person connected to the assassination to die under mysterious circumstances. A longtime Louisiana Congressman, he was House Majority Whip when Kennedy was killed. He became House Majority Leader in 1971. In 1963, he had been appointed to the Warren Commission. The Commission ultimately concluded that Oswald acted alone, but three of its members disagreed—Boggs and Senators Richard Russell and Sherman Cooper. Russell, who died of natural causes in 1971, publicly stated his “lingering dissatisfaction” with the investigation. Boggs had been more pro-active. He intuited a Soviet connection and “a second shooter.” He accused J. Edgar Hoover of “lying his eyes out” during the hearings. While alive, Boggs never stopped talking about Kennedy’s death.

  On October 16, 1972, Boggs was flying from Anchorage to Juneau with Alaskan Congressman Nick Begich and two others. They never arrived. The cause of the crash was never discovered. The wreckage of the plane was never found, nor were the bodies of the dead.

  Later that same month, October of 1972, there was also bad news about a Cooper and Richie acquaintance named Jim Hubbell. He blew his head off with his shotgun. Suicide, the police said. No note, but everyone said he had been despondent since the loss of his wife. And then there was Albert Grady. Grady walked into a Pikesville, Maryland, liquor store one week later. A pair of masked hold-up men came in five seconds later. They killed him and the clerk, shots to the back of the neck, then took only a handful of money from the cash register.

  “Strange crime. What bad luck,” Cooper muttered, “that Grady happened to be in that place at that time.”