Wednesday November 24, 1971. The Flight of D. B. Cooper

On this day in 1971 a man wearing as suit and tie, typical travel attire for the era, checked into a short flight from Seattle to Tacoma, Washington, something only requiring thirty minutes of flying time.  Once the plane was airborne, he slipped a note to a stewardess seated nearby, who at first ignored it, thinking he was trying to pick her up. He then told her to read the note, which claimed he had a bomb in a briefcase.

At the time no search of carry ons was conducted, and the stewardess asked to see the bomb, which the man proceeded to show her. And then a several hours long ordeal unfolded in which the man, who had checked into the airplane as Dan Cooper, ordered that he receive $200,000, two reserve parachutes and two main parachutes, and that the plane take a route in which Mexico was the declared ultimate destination.  The money and the parachutes were provided in Tacoma, where Cooper also released most of the passengers and all of the stewardesses save for one.  Showing very advance knowledge of the aircraft, a Boeing 727, he instructed the pilots to fly it at 10,000 feet, keep the wheels down, and to set the flaps at a certain angle, all of which made sure that it was flying very slowly.

Once airborne, he parachuted into the night near Mount St. Helens during a severe thunderstorm, leaving via the 727's unique integral downloading back staircase.  The man, misnamed by the press as "D. B. Cooper", was not apprehended and most of the money has never been found.

This has, of course, been one of the most enduring air mysteries and crime mysteries of all time.  The serial numbers of the bills involved were microfilmed, but only a small number of them have ever been located, and those by campers on the Columbia River in 1980.  The bundles they found were, moreover, badly deteriorated but their bundling was not, with a small number of bills missing in a manner which raised questions as to how that could have occurred.  Given that the money did not resurface, the official speculation is that Cooper died parachuting into the forest, in a thunderstorm, at night.

There's plenty of reason to suspect that is the case.  He obviously was extremely familiar with the aircraft, its systems, and knew something about parachuting.  Nonetheless, he wasn't dressed for a hike through the wilderness and, dropping at night, he could not possibly have had anything but a remote idea as to where he'd be coming down. While some discount the chances of his death, night drops are always risky, let alone one in which a military parachute was used (which it was) and in which he was badly dressed for the endeavor.  The fact that the money never resurfaced strongly suggests he was killed in the attempt.

In spite of the massive effort to capture him, he was not located alive and no body was ever found. . .to date and, more oddly, nobody was ever reported as missing.  The knowledge that he displayed was quite distinct and therefore the number of suspects would seem rather limited, but nonetheless there's never been any solid leads.

The mystery remains an enduring one not only because Cooper wasn't captured, but also because there are so many clues regarding him, and yet he remains elusive.  Suffice it to day, if the event occurred today, which it would not as airline security has changed so much, Cooper would have been captured or found dead.

Cooper in fact left many clues as to his background, and therefore his identity. There was, of course, first of all his appearance.  He had "olive" skin and therefore a "Latin" appearance, something that gave him somewhat of a minority appearance for a Caucasian.  He was smoking heavily, although that could have been to steady his nerves, and therefore was a smoker at any rate, although at that point a little over 40% of all Americans smoked weekly, with that likely meaning that well over 50% of men did.

More tellingly, however, Cooper demonstrated a knowledge of parachutes, and expressed a request for military parachutes rather than sporting ones.  A comment from the air noted that he recognized the Air Force base at Tacoma.  And he had an extremely advanced knowledge of the features of the 727, knowing how slow it could go, knowing how to precisely set the flaps to slow it further, and knowing that it uniquely had a real loading under fuselage staircase that could be opened in flight.

Indeed, the 727 had seen military use in Vietnam due to its rear loading staircase for that very reason, with the Central Intelligence Agency using them for air drops of material.

These combined facts strongly suggest that Cooper had a military background of some sort, but they also, when combined with other factors, discount his having been a paratrooper, as is sometimes suggested.  

Cooper did not ask for the static line T-10 model of parachute in use then and now, but rather one that could be deployed manually, as would have been necessary for the drop.  That was a necessarily choice, but otherwise Cooper seemed to display an ignorance as to actual dropping.  He wanted the plane low, 10,000 feet, which makes sense, but military parachutes have a very violent deployment which meant that getting his stolen loot to the ground would have been difficult.  Beyond that, keeping his shoes on would have been difficult as well.

Landing safely would have been extremely difficult.  Deploying into the night, and in a severe thunderstorm, the odds would have been against him making it to the ground and landing uninjured.  Even if he did come down in the storm without injury, military parachutes of the era required, for good reason, the wearing of protective footgear, which his dress shoes were not in any fashion.  Moreover, his leaving in the night meant that he was risking coming down in trees experienced parachutists desperately seek to avoid as they are so strongly associated with death and injury to them.  

Finally, his clothing wasn't close to being suitable for a hike out of the forest.

Indeed, the entire concept of parachuting out of the plane, at night, seems to have been intentional, but it also seems to have been reckless in the extreme for a plot which was otherwise very well planned out.  Cooper's plan either seemed to discount the dangers and difficulties with making his departure from the plane to the ground safe, and his escape complete, or he just didn't care, trusting to luck at that point. And that also gives us an interesting hint as to his potential identity.

Combining all fo these up to this point, what this suggests is that Cooper had military experience involving parachutes and airplanes, but not that of being a paratrooper.  Being a pilot or a cargomaster seems the most likely candidates.

Analysis of  his tie, however, conducted years later suggests that he worked in heavy industry, and in some managerial capacity.  The aircraft manufacturing industry itself would seem to be a good candidate, as his clip on tie contained metals and substances that were used in that industry at the time, and which were unlikely to be picked up accidentally.

Combining all of these, it seems likely that Cooper was or had recently been an employee of an aircraft manufacturing company, perhaps Boeing the maker of the plane, and in that capacity he had become very familiar with the 727.  He likely had some prior military experience, or at least was aware of the military use of the plane.  He knew too much about the 727 for that knowledge to be casual, and if he had picked up any studied knowledge for the attempt, it would have been as to the use of the parachutes, and not the aircraft.  That knowledge would have been easier to obtain, and perhaps could have been obtained on the job.

Indeed, the oddity of it can't help but cause a person to have at least some question as to a possible connection with service in the CIA, and that has been suggested.

Of course, suggesting a CIA connection to things is commonly done with certain big events, with some reaching the absurd level. The claims, for instance, that the CIA was involved in the 9/11 attacks provides such an absurd example.  But here, there's at least some credibility to those claims.

The OSS of the 1940s and the CIA of the 50s and 60s was truly populated, in part, with characters who were "spooks".  And examples of servicemen and espionage characters going rouge are not too difficult to find.  Not really analogous, the example of Jonathan Pollard certainly comes to mind.  But beyond that, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine Corps veteran, turned defector, turned lone assassin.  Timothy McVey was a serviceman who turned against his own society. The recent January 6 Insurrection featured a serving Army intelligence officer.

While, once again, none of those ins analogous, it's not beyond the pale to think that a former member of the CIA went to work for Boeing and then used his knowledge to develop this scheme. Such a former member would have most likely been a pilot or crewmember of the 727 effort over Vietnam, with both positions being ones that would have been much less spy like than simply a rarefied form of government service.

Such a connection has been suggested as the reason the crime has never been solved, and while that sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory, it's at least partially credible as well. The CIA of the 60s and 70s did all sorts of things that it kept secret that are of an iffy nature, and the Government intelligence branches weren't above doing that, even coming up with bogus UFO reports to gaslight an individual.  If there was a CIA connection in 1970s, it's not at all impossible to imagine the CIA realizing a former member was involved and acting to cover the entire matter up.

That doesn't prove that by any means, however.

Other possibilities simply include a Boeing employee, or that of a contractor, who knew enough about the 727 and went to learn enough about parachuting to pull that part of it off.  It's also possible that it was done by a pilot form another airline who possibly had prior military experience or who simply studied up on parachutes before attempting the plot.  Indeed, this is quite plausible.  It's even possible that Cooper was a member of the one Air National Guard unit using a militarized version of the airplane at the time.

While we don't know, my guess is that he was a former or current Boeing employee who had some prior service connection, but not as a paratrooper.

If that's the case, then the question would be why he wasn't discovered.

It's simply possible that, in spite of the extremely long odds, he pulled it off.  It's hard to imagine a person walking to a forest road dressed in a suit and hitching a ride to town, but then it's also possible that the suit covered up a second set of clothes.  Maybe under that we was wearing a pair of Levis and a flannel shirt, although dress shirts are thin.  Still, it seems unlikely, but it's not impossible.  Perhaps he landed safely, hiked to a road, with or without most of the money, and made good his escape, returning to work after the holiday.  As careful as he was, chances are that he wouldn't have spent any of the money right away, or knew how to fence it without getting caught, which would not have been difficult at the time.

More likely, in my mind, he has already quit his job with Boeing, perhaps a year or more ago, and didn't have work to return to, which would explain a lot.

The careful part of the plan was getting the money and getting out of the airplane. Beyond that, very clearly, much was left to chance.  Perhaps to Cooper his chances in life had run out and therefore what happened beyond that point didn't really matter.  If he made good his escape, he had the money, if he didn't, he wasn't going to have to worry about it.

Any number of things come to mind.  Reported to be ni his mid 40s, he was smoking like a train which always raises the possibility that he had lung cancer or some other serious health issue.  If so, Cooper may have needed the money for something, and if the end came in the jump, that something wouldn't have mattered.

And then there's the myriad of things that seem looming at the time and prove not to be. Debts, legal and illegal, failed relationships, or whatever.

So why didn't they figure it out?

Assuming, of course, no CIA cover up, which we will assume, although as we noted, as wild as that sounds, it's not completely beyond the pale.

Assuming that, the ability to simply disappear in 1971 was much better than it is now.  Now, it's nearly impossible, but at the time, that wasn't the case.  DNA testing didn't exist at the time. Finger printing did of course, but not everyone had finger print data and even where it did exist, it often didn't lead to leads for a variety of reasons, including bad prints and bad police data.  Photo databases were in hard copy and microfilm form.  Most people operated mostly on a cash and check basis at the time with credit cards being rare and even somewhat disdained.  Millions of men  had been in the Army, fo course, but that meant millions of paper records that had to be accessed by hand.  Employment records operated the same way.  Social Security cards were easy to get, and like now, they didn't feature photographs. Driver licenses did, but pulling those records would also have required near knowledge that the one being sought was of the guilty person.

So searching for people was much more difficult.

And indeed, this explains the reason that a person's becoming a lifelong fugitive from that era is not all that uncommon. Just recently, for example,  to identify of a 1969 bank robber was revealed.  Theodore Conrad was a 20-year-old bank teller that year, just two years prior to the year we're considering, when he robbed his own employer of $215,000 in cash.  It turns out that he was Thomas Randele, having relocated from Ohio to Massachusetts, where he had subsequently lived a quiet life.  Interestingly, his posthumous identify was revealed due to ongoing FBI work on the robbery, which has supposedly ceased on the 1971 skyjacking. . .

Another example would be Abbie Hoffman, who is remembered for being a radical anti-war protestor but who was arrested for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, a charge he was was a set-up, in 1973.  He fled in 1974 and turned himself in, in 1980, at which time it was fairly clear nobody was really looking for him anymore.

Randele was young and employed when he scooped up a bunch of cash on his way off the door and became a lifelong fugitive.  Cooper appears to have been a middle-aged, highly intelligent, and experienced man when he went out the back of the 727.  If he was at that time an unemployed, for whatever reason, loner, living in an apartment or even a rented house, he could well have just disappeared forever, even if killed.  He may well have had no work to report back to, or maybe it was minor work, in which case he would have just been replaced as an employee for failing to show back up.  Or if he was medically retired, and living modestly but alone, even if he never showed back up it might well not have meant much.  

Of course, if he did show back up, people likely would never have taken notice.

So could he be found now?

That's an interesting question.

Randele was.  The FBI claims it closed Cooper's file, but Randele's was even older and unlike other recent cold cases, it didn't involve DNA.  Cooper left a ton of really interesting leads that still exist.  There's all that there originally was and now, more.  Moreover, the computerization of records has reached a state where it's reaching back into the past.

Given all of this, in my view, there's enough to take a second look, and some people have. For example, there's the work of Citizen Sleuths, which goes much further than what I've noted here:

Citizen Sleuths Analyze the D.B. Cooper Case

With all of this in mind, there's one other thing to keep in mind.

The most likely outcome of this mystery isn't a happy one, even assuming that a happy conclusion can be made from what was, after all, a terrible terroristic crime.  Cooper, whatever his real name was, likely went crashing into a forest canopy unprepared and at fairly high speed, given the military parachutes in use, and was likely hung up in the trees or killed right on the spot.  If not, his chances ankle injury were outstanding.  

No body has ever been found, but this very year a body of a hunter was discovered in Wyoming that had been out an equivalent period of time.  People go missing into the forest even now and are never found.  Cooper's body likely was hanging in the trees for years and has since decayed and fallen to the ground, to be distributed by wild animals.  His loot was probably distributed by the impact, assuming that it didn't get blown off his body when the parachute opened.  Only bits and pieces of the chute likely exist today, and nobody looks up in trees for those, and they likely couldn't be seen anyhow.

Also on this day. . . 

Ian Smith at the Convervative Monday Club in 1990, complete with Rhodesian flags.

Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith and British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home signed an agreement lifting British economic sanctions in exchange for Rhodesia outlawing racial segregation, with the eventual goal of the country gong to majority black rule. 

The agreement was shortlived and really didn't go anywhere.  It is an interesting reflection, however, on politics of the time.

Rhodesia had declared independence unilaterally in 1965 over the objections of the United Kingdom.  It was one of those area of the British Empire/British Commonwealth which had a reputation of being more English than the English, but only if a person considered the English minority population of the country.

The move came about due to Harold MacMillan's policies, as Prime Minister, of divesting the UK of its colonies, something that had become inevitable but which the UK had struggled with since the Second World War. That the British Empire could not survive in that form had been obvious since before the Boer War, and the British had developed the commonwealth concept as a means of trying to evolve outright rule of its colonies into an association of English influenced nations.  The concept is hard to express now, but basically it was based on there being a certain Britishness, and once a colony became mature, it joined in the commonwealth as part and parcel of the British nation, looking to the King or Queen as the sovereign, and not really fully independent, at least as to foreign affairs.  Canada was the first former colony to achieve this status, obtaining it in 1867.  This was followed by Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa and the Irish Free State.  In 1926 the dominions were given authority over their foreign affairs.

By the time the Irish Free State was given dominion status, which followed its treaty with the United Kingdom gaining its independence, the entire concept was in trouble.  Ireland didn't want dominion status in the first place.  It wanted outright independence and simply terminated its dominion status in 1937 unilaterally.  South Africa proved to be a problematic dominion at best as the Afrikaans population of the country resented the English both in the UK and in South Africa.  Meanwhile, in places like Rhodesia, being English continued to be a huge matter of self identity.

World War Two made the entire colonial/dominion enterprise untenable even while it was the last great gasp of empire.  The United States obviously closely supported the United Kingdom even while making it known that it did not support the ongoing maintenance of empire.  Ireland sat the war out as an official belligerent. South Africa entered the war, but barely supported it.  Following the war, the United Kingdom struggled for a time to maintain the system, but following the Suez crisis of 1956 it became clear to the UK that the day of empire and even commonwealth was simply over.  In 1960 the winds of change speech was delivered in South Africa, and the UK essentially announced that it was going to recognize independence movements in its colonies and divest itself of them.

This created a firestorm of concern in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, which had been self-governing since 1923.  Recognizing that white minority rule was untenable even before the Suez Crisis, the British had attempted to create a larger political entity in 1956 by creating the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland,  It proved unstable right from the onset, with Rhodesia having outsized influence upon it.  It broke up in 1963 and its other regions headed rapidly towards independence.  Concerned that the British would force Rhodesia into a racial equality, the white controlled government declared independence in 1965.  No nation every recognized it.  For that matter, the British South African Police, which formed the policing body of the nation, nearly refused to recognize the move, while the army in the region did, leading to a rather odd tense situation.  Ultimately the BSAP came around, reluctantly.

This resulted in a hostile relationship between Rhodesia and the United Kingdom with Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson very much opposed to the unilateral move.  In 1970, however, Edward Heath became the Conservative Prime Minister and the position for Rhodesia improved.  The agreement noted above was negotiated with the thesis that it would move the country towards eventual full democracy.

The agreement was really moribund from the onset, being of the nature of too little too late.  By 1971 colonial constituents everywhere were no longer willing to wait for Europeans to eventually recognize them as political equals.  Such proposals elsewhere featuring slow evolution of this type, such as in Algeria, had likewise met with failure.  Added to it, as the Cold War was now raging, it became fairly easy for independence movements to secure funding and arms against colonial governments or, in this case, one that looked back toward the United Kingdom in an old-fashioned, and very English, way.  The proposal met with no acceptance by black nationalist movements and rapidly failed.  For that matter, Heath would be back out of office by 1974 and Wilson back in.

The ultimate results were not surprising, but perhaps what would be to a current audience is the degree to which Rhodesia, even though it did not gain political recognition anywhere, nonetheless retained some sympathy.  It obviously had it with conservatives in the United Kingdom, which were willing to acquiesce to the concept of eventual political rights to Africans, but not immediate ones.  It had a fair amount of support in South Africa, for obvious reasons, as it was also attempting to maintain a whites only rule.  Even in the US, however, a fair number of people supported it.  The nation was a pariah of a type, but only of a type.

All of that has since obviously changed and it's nearly impossible to imagine any of this occurring now.  South Africa only had 250,000 white residents and a black population of 5,000,000.

U.S. Air Force F15s flying over Okinawa.  Thirty-two American military bases remain on Okinawa.

Japan's diet recogized on this date the Okinawa Reversion Act which sought to vest control of the island back in Japan.  Somewhat controversial in the US, the treaty with the US returned Japanese control to the island that had been the scene of bloody fighting in World War Two.