The Annals of Unsolved Crime (2 page)

Investigations that stop at the singleton killer may, for better or worse, leave open the door to an unsolved crime. When the stakes are high, as when a head of state is assassinated, the decision of whether to stop at the singleton killer or pursue a possible conspiracy may not be entirely free of political considerations. I first came across this political dimension when I interviewed the members and most of the staff of the Warren Commission in 1965. I was given this unique access to the Commission because my investigation—later published as a book,
Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth
—was of interest to Chief Justice Earl Warren. One of the first commissioners I interviewed was John J. McCloy, who had served as the U.S. High Commissioner of Germany. As we sat in his forty-sixth floor office in the Chase Manhattan building, he described how the Commission had wrestled over how to deal with the loner issue. He said that all the commissioners agreed that the evidence was overwhelming that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy. Their difficulty lay in resolving whether or not they could say that he was the sole author of the assassination. The chief justice, supported by most of the other commissioners, wanted to close the case by stating categorically that Oswald was a “loner.” McCloy said that he objected because the Commission did not have access to information about Oswald’s liaisons with the security services of Cuba and Russia, and therefore it could not rule out the possibility that Oswald’s connections with them made him more than a lone actor. He told the chief justice the Commission could say only that it had found no credible evidence of any other conspirators. As Warren wanted an unanimous report, he went along with McCloy and inserted a paragraph saying that, as it was not possible to prove a negative, the Commission could not rule out the possibility that Oswald had help. That qualification, though buried in the verbiage of the Commission’s report, as McCloy put it, “left the door ajar.” The “loner” issue has never really been resolved.

Political climates can also change, and when they do, what begins as a conspiracy could end up pinned on a loner. Consider, for example, the initial conclusions about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Immediately after the assassination, with the South still seen as the enemy, the Military Commission appointed by the new president, Andrew Johnson, concluded that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who was killed during his escape, was part of a conspiracy sponsored
by leaders of the defeated Confederate States. Four of his associates were hanged as co-conspirators, and an arrest warrant was issued for former Confederate States President Jefferson Davis. But when the political climate in America changed, and the reunification of the North and South proceeded, the government vacated the warrants against Southern leaders and abandoned the Military Commission’s conspiracy case. Instead, John Wilkes Booth was viewed as a deranged loner.

What makes this issue vexing is that there is no single answer. Some crimes are committed by loners operating on their own, others by a singleton working on the behalf of a group. In the realm of fiction, the public readily accepts that a lone murderer can be carrying out a contract for a conspiracy that does not expose itself. In the movie based on Mario Puzo’s book
The Godfather
, no fewer than six mob leaders are slain by a lone killer retained by Michael Corleone. In Frederick Forsyth’s book
The Day of the Jackal
, a group of French conspirators hire a lone assassin to kill President Charles de Gaulle, sure that the man cannot be traced back to them. Such arrangements also occur in the realm of reality. The 1967
CIA
Inspector General’s
Report on the Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
describes how the CIA hired singleton assassins, such as Rolando Cubela (code-named AMLASH), to kill Castro between 1961 and 1963. If Cubela (or any of the other assassins) had succeeded, the CIA would claim he was a disgruntled Cuban acting on his own. How common are such conspiracies in political crimes? From the perspective of U.S. prosecutors at least, conspiracies are not rare when it comes to political murder. The interesting issue is sorting out loners who act alone from loners who act for others.

Another category of interest is disguised murder. To protect itself against pursuit, a party can disguise a murder as a suicide or accident in such a way that the issue becomes: Was there a crime? My interest here was piqued by James Jesus Angleton,
the legendary counterintelligence chief of the CIA. In 1977, he described to me six connected suicides that had occurred in Germany in late 1968. First, on October 8, Major-General Horst Wendland, the deputy head of the BND, the German equivalent of the CIA, was found shot dead with his own service revolver in his own office. That same day, Admiral Hermann Ludke, the deputy head of the logistics department of NATO, was found fatally shot by a dum-dum bullet from his own Mauser rifle in a private hunting preserve in Germany’s Eifel Mountains. Then, within days, four more bodies turned up: Lt. Colonel Johannes Grimm, who worked in the German Defense Ministry, shot; Gerald Bohm, his colleague in the Ministry, drowned in the Rhine river; Edeltraud Grapentin, a liaison with the Information Ministry, poisoned with sleeping pills; and Hans-Heinrich Schenk, a researcher at the Economics Ministry, hanged. All were declared apparent suicides. After he reeled them off, Angleton made his point. These were not unrelated deaths. All six apparent suicides had access to highly classified secrets and were all under investigation as suspected spies or for leaks of NATO documents. The secret investigation of these men had proceeded from the discovery of a strip of film taken on a Minox camera of top-secret NATO documents. The camera had then been traced to Admiral Ludke. This discovery was of immense interest to Angleton, who in 1968 was a liaison with the BND, because Admiral Ludke had “need-to-know” access to the top secrets in NATO, including the location of the depots in which nuclear weapons were stored. Next, a Czech defector supplied a lead that pointed directly to Major-General Wendland and the German Defense Ministry. But before the investigation could go further, both Ludke and Wendland were shot to death on the same day, followed by four other suspects in the case suddenly meeting violent ends. How was such a coincidence possible? Angleton supplied one theory: the KGB had eliminated them to protect its espionage. I said, “But they were ruled suicides.”
He corrected me: “Apparent suicides,” and he added, “Any thug can commit a murder, but it takes the talents of an intelligence service to make a murder appear to be a suicide.” He pointed out that coroners look for a murder signature, such as rope burns or bruises, and, if those are not present, they declare the death apparent suicide or natural death. Those signatures can be erased, as Angleton explained, in what is termed in intelligence-speak “surreptitiously-assisted deaths.”

The death of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010 is also instructive in this regard. Since his body had no telltale signs of violence, the Dubai coroner initially concluded that he died from natural causes. But then security cameras revealed that al-Mabhouh had been under surveillance by a group of suspicious individuals shortly before his death and, at the insistence of Hamas, his body fluids were re-analyzed by a lab in Switzerland with highly sophisticated equipment. The lab discovered in the fluids minute traces of succinylcholine, a quick-acting, depolarizing, and muscle-paralyzing drug that would have rendered a person incapable of resisting. Then Dubai authorities came up with a new verdict: Mabhouh had been murdered by first giving him this drug, then smothering him to death with his own pillow. The coroner explained that it was a disguised homicide “meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep.”

A variation of disguised murder is the arranged accident. A plane, for example, disappears in the ocean and is consumed in a fire. There is no evidence found: Was it an accident or a crime? Even if possibly incriminating evidence is recovered from the wreckage, it requires interpretation. Consider, for example, the crash over the Atlantic ocean of TWA flight 800 on July 17, 1996, that resulted in the death of 230 people. Much of the wreckage was recovered from the ocean and, from it, the FBI lab in Washington, D.C., identified traces of three different explosives, RDX, PETN, and nitroglycerin, on pieces of
the plane. All three chemicals are used in bomb-making, and they could be interpreted as signatures of sabotage. They also could have been the result of prior security tests—airlines use live explosives on planes to test their sniffer dogs and other detection equipment—or of the transportation of troops during the 1991 Gulf War. When this discovery was considered in the context of other evidence, the National Transport Safety Board concluded that the latter had occurred and ruled that the crash was the result of an accidental gas leak, not sabotage.

It became evident to me how contentious and complex aircraft investigations could be when I went to Pakistan to investigate the plane crash that killed General Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator of that country, in 1988. Even with sophisticated forensic analysis by the plane’s manufacturer, it could not be determined why the plane had crashed, because crucial evidence was missing: the government had disposed of the bodies of the pilots before they could be medically examined.

Corpses do not necessarily stay in the ground in this ghoulish age of exhumation, especially if a historic case takes on a political dimension. Consider, for example, Simón Bolívar, the revered liberator of South America from Spain and then, in his own right, dictator of Venezuela. He died on December 17, 1830, after a prolonged battle with tuberculosis, according to the historical record. But in 2010, Hugo Chávez, the president of modern Venezuela, raised the issue of whether Bolívar died a natural death or whether he was murdered. After appointing a commission to reexamine his medical symptoms for any signs of arsenic poisoning, Chávez ordered Bolívar’s 180-year-old remains exhumed from his monument in Caracas so further forensic tests could be conducted. Exhumations often raise more questions than they answer. Eight years after Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, died on November 11, 2004, at the Percy Military Hospital in Clamart, France, his remains were exhumed, because his shoes
and other personal effects showed traces of polonium-210 (the same radioactive isotope that killed Litvinenko in 2006). Even though the 558 pages of Arafat’s medical records clearly establish that Arafat died from a cerebrovascular failure caused by cirrhosis, and not from any kind of radiation poisoning, the polonium-210 signature on his personal effects raised an even more intriguing mystery: How had Arafat come in such close proximity to an extremely rare isotope that could be used as an early-stage nuclear weapon trigger and in miniaturized surveillance devices used by intelligence services?

Then there are cases in which investigators simply cannot find clues to pursue. Such crimes enter the limbo of a police cold-case file, but they also generate a profusion of speculation. Consider the so-called Jack the Ripper case in late-nineteenth-century London. As the city was shrouded in fog and there was little illumination from street lamps, there were no witnesses (other than one fatally wounded victim who said he was attacked by two boys). Fingerprint matching did not yet exist, nor did analysis of blood, hair, or clothing fiber. The police had no evidence and never caught the killer or killers. The same absence of evidence allowed future writers to cast Jack the Ripper in the guise of any personage of the period, including a member of the royal family.

Even with modern forensics, police cannot pursue a case, or even prove there was a crime, if the putative victim is missing: For examples, New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, who vanished in 1930 (he remained in a missing persons file for fifty years) and labor leader James Hoffa, who vanished in 1975. Vanishings of course may be voluntary. Michael Hand, for example, who had worked closely with intelligence services, and whose Nugan Hand Bank conducted large scale money laundering for the CIA, disappeared without a trace in June of 1981. After his partner Frank Nugan was found shot to death in his Mercedes Benz and $40 million in
bank funds were found missing, Hand disguised himself as a local butcher in Sydney named Alan Glenn Winter, and under this false identify went to New York City. He was never found.

Next, there are crimes of state in which governments make a solution virtually impossible. What might be considered an “obstruction of justice” if performed by an individual may be done by a government on the grounds of national security. Documents can be sealed or expunged, witnesses can be sequestered or intimidated, physical evidence can be suppressed, and other measures can be taken to protect a state secret. State cover-ups can take many forms. In Thailand, King Ananda Mahidol was found shot to death in his bed in the Bangkok royal palace in 1946. When the official story of an accident failed to gain traction, the government charged, tried, convicted, and executed three young servants who were almost certainly innocent. That, together with strict censorship in which disparagement of the king is a crime, ended any further public discussion of King Ananda’s death in Thailand. Crimes of state can also become inseparable from the political context of crimes. For example, in December 2011, I went to Kiev to interview Leonid Kuchma, the ex-president of Ukraine, about the unsolved decapitation of a journalist in 2000. Kuchma had been implicated in the crime and was then facing a criminal trial. Also implicated was his former Minister of Internal Affairs, Yuri Kravchenko, who had been found dead in 2005 with two gunshot wounds to his head and a suicide note. Kuchma suggested to me in our interview that all the evidence against him had been forged by a foreign intelligence service to destabilize Ukraine and that Kravchenko’s apparent suicide was a disguised murder. Government concealment of such enterprises, and crimes, is a true art of the state.