Part 4, page 17

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

Well, I Had My Beretta...

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...that without any phony pride or ego. Anybody who tries to ape me skyjack is an out-and-out idiot. Like the hippie character at O'Hare in Chicago who jacked a [illegible] only to find that the entire crew had rabbited on him.

ANON: Rabbited?

COOPER: Ya, you know, slipped out when he was in back. It left him with a great big airplane but no pilot. Or the weirdo who jumped out a Hughes Airwest DC-9 at Denver. He busted up a few bones and was caught in a little over an hour. The "D.B. Cooper" of Dallas, a real psycho if there ever was one, was captured on the ground and one fellow in New York somewhere got his head splattered by a shotgun. An FBI marksman did that, it said in the papers. Some marksman. He let fly at about sixteen inches with buckshot. J. Edgar should give that [him] a medal, if he hasn't already.

ANON: Speaking of the FBI, aren't you worried that [continues — text cut off at column break]

ANON: And the money, the 200 grand, the largest ransom ever paid in a U.S. skyjack? What about that, will it turn out to be your Achilles heel?

COOPER: Never happen! You must read the papers, too. It would take up to five full pages in almost any newspaper to run the serial numbers of each of those 10,000 bills. But even with the odds in my favor—I mean, who's going to pick out one number out of 10,000?—I'm in no hurry to go on a spending spree. Oh, yes, something else, too. I know those twenties were Xeroxed before they were delivered to me on the ground at Sea-Tac as ransom money. How do I know that? Easy. I could smell the Xerox fluid on them. Quite a telltale odor. I'd say they were run through the copying machines at the banks where Northwest collected the loot.

ANON: May I ask why you picked on Northwest? Did you have a grudge against that airline or something?

[right column:] they got orders from the head man of Northwest himself, who told them to comply with all my demands.

Thankyou Mr. Nyrop, you did the right thing. It would be nice to think that they were being humanitarian, trying to take me alive, but that's a lot of bull.

ANON: What, then, was their rationale?

COOPER: Simple. They must have figured it this way: Why risk four lives—not including mine— and a $5 million airplane for a mere $200,000? It was lousy odds any way you look at that little equation from Northwest's point of view. Now if I had been too greedy, say, and asked for a million, there's no telling what they would have done. It would have raised hell with the Xerox operators, that's damn sure.

ANON: Did you, anywhere along the line, improvise during the skyjack itself, or did you stick to your original game plan?

COOPER: I tried to stay pretty loose, ready to adjust to any situation that might pop up. As it turned out everything followed my script almost to the letter. There was one pretty bad moment, though, that I hadn't planned for. (Long pause.)

ANON: That being...?

COOPER: It happened while we were still negotiating on the ground at Sea-Tac. I was getting pretty antsy anyhow, since the refueling was not being done and I guessed somebody was doing a lot of stalling, planning some kind of strategy or, hoping to get a man in close enough to sharpshoot me. That had happened to some poor boob back at [illegible] week before or [illegible] ago. The chief pilot of Northwest drove out on the grinder with the ransom money and the two parachutes I had ordered. One of the stewardesses—I was holding another [text continues onto next page]

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*Our Scoop*

The Flag's editor was first approached in late March by a friend of a staffer who claimed to have an 'interview' with the infamous D.B. Cooper. In defiance of expectations, we met an ordinary looking man of 20 plus years who said he had a taped conversation with D.B. On the chance it might bear fruit we accompanied him to an office where he brought out a tape recorder and a photograph. Before we were allowed access to either we signed an agreement of [illegible] to either [illegible]

[middle column of box:] over the picture and we saw a photograph of a twenty. "This bill," he said, "used to be in a local bank, then it was pulled out of a vault on Wednesday, the 24th of November, put in a case and taken to Seatac where it was delivered to D.B. Cooper, who some time later bailed out of a Northwest 727 with it in a sack tied to his body. There is no other way it could have gotten here without my meeting and talking to Cooper himself."

[right column of box — heavily degraded:] [illegible] the chief pilot of Northwest drove out on the grinder with the ransom money and the two parachutes I had ordered. One of the stewardesses—I was holding another [text continues]