Part 53, page 18

Transcript

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

[terviews?], ~30 minutes of filmed interviews and still photographs. "His intermediary signed a contract (saying the $30,000 would be used for Cooper's legal defense) with his real name and left his fingerprints all over the contract." The story was to have been in the opening issue of LA. To avoid charges of aiding a fugitive from justice, Fleming turned his material over to the F.B.I. 10 days before publication. (He had told Cooper not to tell him anything he didn't want the police to know.) Included were Xerox copies of the $20 bills Fleming had been shown as proof of Cooper's identity. The serial numbers matched those on the list of ransom bills, but F.B.I. documents experts said that the photo-copies indicated that the bills were counterfeit. With all the information Fleming's subjects had supplied, the F.B.I. had no trouble rounding them up. (The meeting with Fleming, according to police reports, took place at the Swept Wing Inn near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.)

WITH THE trial scheduled to begin November 27, Fleming says he still finds it "difficult to accept" the possibility that he was duped. "I asked that guy questions no con man could have 'prepared for," he says. "I went over him like a vacuum cleaner." He has an ingenious, mirror-within-mirrors theory of his own.

"I'm not saying that the F. B. I. was wrong," he said, "and I would never suggest that they would deliberately distort the facts -- though if I, one lonely reporter, could get the story when 8,000 F. B. I. agents couldn't, then that's not the kind of publicity that J. Edgar Hoover, then alive, would want for the F.B.I." Noting that "Cooper" was aware the information would be published and get to the police, Fleming said, "it is very, very difficult for me to accept the fact that a mind brilliant enough to concoct a story as sophisticated as the one this guy told me would be stupid enough to turn around and expose himself to capture this way." "I don't exclude the possibility that he was both smart enough to pull off the hijacking, sell me the story and spread enough false clues in the story so it would not look right and the F. B. I. would say he isn't the hijacker," Fleming said. "So, if he does do any time, it's for fraud, not for hijacking. And when he comes out, the $200,000 is still there."

account of how a reporter got duped, as Part Three indicates, or perhaps it would be both. Fleming may have some

IN THAT CASE, of course, Fleming's series would be a true account of the hijacking, as readers of Part One might have thought, not the

lingering doubts about the man he interviewed, but Platypus Publications, publisher of LA, appears to have none. It has filed a $30,000 civil

suit against the men arrested by the F. B. I., charging that it was defrauded because the men were not the people they purported to be.

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DB Cooper-22356