Trotter drove immediately from his home in Arlington to his office, where he began gathering his staff, who in turn began feeding him the first bits and pieces, just as they came in.
“Don’t worry about analysis, or any sort of sophistication. I want, I need, details. Now!”
The media had gotten on to the business, of course, and already the networks were not only reporting the hijacking and the mysterious killing of two Americans, they were all trying to analyze what this meant in terms of the very complex U.S. relationship with Cuba.
Trotter was of no mind for such nonsense. He had begun his investigative career some years ago in the CIA, transferring to the bureau during the shake-up in the Carter years, when pragmatism was a dirty word. He had a very good idea, early on, that Jules and Asher could very well be Company men using AID as their cover. Two telephone calls to the State Department, including one to a very angry under secretary, produced the grudging admission that Jules and Asher may have been more than anyone was being told. A third call, this one to Lawrence Danielle, deputy director of operations at Langley, verified the fact that Jules and Asher were indeed Company operatives who had been on their way to Mexico City where they were to have taken up AID posts at the embassy.
“Is there a connection between their identities and their murders?” Trotter asked. “I just want to know that much, Larry, because it looks goddamned suspicious to me.”
“We’re working on it, John, believe me. Donald has got this place secured like a fortress. We’re at war here. Can you understand that?” Danielle said it as if he were out of breath.
“Apparently the Cubans themselves shot them down right on the runway. Them, as well as the hijackers. What the hell was going on down there?”
“We had no indications, I assure you. Otherwise we would have made different arrangements to get them to Mexico City.”
Trotter sighed deeply. “I’m taking charge of this investigation from here. Personal charge. You and I will have to liaise on this.”
“Don’t go charging off in all directions. Donald is going to want to talk to you,” Danielle said hastily. Until Donald Suthland Powers had been appointed director of Central Intelligence by the president, Danielle had been acting director. There was universal agreement in Washington (in itself a rare thing) that Powers was the right man for the job at the right time. Things were getting done.
“We’ll have to set up a common ground,” Trotter said.
“It’ll be on your turf. We have to keep the investigation out of our corner. At least for the time being,” Danielle said. “I’ll talk to Donald now.”
The anonymous little man from across the river showed up that night. He was given clearance and a security badge, over Trotter’s signature, and the nonpublicized collaboration between the FBI and the CIA began its intense, eight-day run. Trotter was in charge, with the help of his “expert,” as Danielle came to be known, and if anyone could produce results it would be such a team. Within the first twenty-four hours they had brought together most of the facts, leaving the refinements and their ramifications to be worked out on the run.
In one sense, the hijacking could not have happened at a more propitious time for the United States. We had bungled the Bay of Pigs business in the sixties; we had muffed the rescue of our POWs from the hellish prison camp outside Hanoi in the seventies; and of course the Iranian hostage situation was still painfully fresh in everyone’s minds. But America was on the road back. The Reagan administration had taken a hard-line stand with a hostile world. Had the Iranians grabbed our embassy in 1985, the hostages would have been freed within twenty-four hours; probably over a lot of dead bodies, but freed nevertheless. We were beginning to stand tall, and this incident seemed tailor-made to show our new strength of purpose. In another, larger sense, however (certainly no one could have predicted this), the hijacking ultimately resulted in arguably the most sinister and certainly most tragic of consequences.
The actual hijacking itself was an incident whose moment-by-moment details few of the passengers seemed able to agree upon. The consensus collated from the testimony of everyone on board did, however, allow investigators to come to a number of generalized conclusions and quite a few reasonable assumptions.
It went smoothly. All seemed to agree on at least that singular fact.
“We didn’t really know anything was happening, at first,” and variations on that theme were quite common statements.
The woman with the Instamatic shot one frame of the hijacker who had been seated near her. It showed him with a large, ugly-looking automatic in his left hand. Analysts later were able to identify the gun as a Graz Buyra, the KGB’s weapon of assassination. But it was eight days before they realized how the two hijackers got their weapons on board, information which was, of course, never made public. An Aeromexico employee, Manuel Garcia Lopez, had brought the guns onto the aircraft the day before, while it was down for maintenance in Mexico City, stashing them in the waste paper-disposal compartment in the aft, port-side head. Lopez was never apprehended. It was believed he made his way to Cuba the very evening of the hijacking.
The most serious conclusion, at least in the early days, was that the two hijackers had had help. Organization. Backing. Planning. One of them had been tentatively identified (from the woman’s photographs) as Eduardo Cristobal Valejo, a small-time hood who had overseen a wide variety of illicit transactions out of Mexico City … anything from smuggling a few grams of cocaine to an occasional truckload of marijuana across the border at Piedras Negras into Texas. This hijacking was too big for him to have planned it. And how did a small-time hoodlum come to possess a Soviet assassination device in the first place? The other man was never identified. The woman’s photographs of him were unclear and showed only the back of his head. Nor were the Ident-a-kit drawings made from descriptions by the crew of any help. So, for a time before the investigation began to be overshadowed by other, larger concerns, the second hijacker came to be known simply as the mystery man, a title that perhaps did him too much justice, for almost certainly he, too, was a small-time hood and not some international terrorist.
The actual time of the hijacking was one of the few facts that was nailed down solidly. At exactly 3:23 P.M., when flight 451 had flown nearly a hundred miles out over the Gulf of Mexico off Florida’s west coast, the two hijackers (who had already retrieved their weapons) got to their feet.
Valejo, seated near the rear of the plane, walked to the aft galley where he showed his automatic to the two stews there, telling them the flight would be diverted to Havana. There was no noise, no fuss or bother, and none of the passengers, at that point, suspected anything untoward was happening.
At the very same moment, the second hijacker, the mystery man, got up from his seat, moved carefully through the first-class section, and opened the door onto the flight deck. The door had been left unlocked in flight, contrary to regulation. He closed and properly locked the door, pulled out his weapon, and announced in clear English but with a Mexican accent that this plane was being taken over and would head immediately for Havana’s José Marti International Airport.