David Hagberg
Without Honor
Honor is like an island, rugged
and without a beach; once we have
left it, we can never return.
They were men without honor …
PART ONE
1
Flight 451 left Miami International Airport at two-fifty in the afternoon. On time. It was Tuesday, October 13. The weather was warm, in the high eighties, under clear blue skies with a gentle wind from the southeast. Signs were posted here and there throughout the busy airport warning that it was a federal offense even to joke about air disasters or hijackings. But it had been months since any incident had happened anywhere in the world, and even longer for Miami, so there was only a simple, relaxed watchfulness among the security people.
By three the DC-10 had climbed out over the Florida peninsula, the sun glinting on its silvery tail and wings, the cocktail cart beginning to move up the long aisle.
There were only ten persons in first class, among them two Mexican government employees returning from vacation; a professor of languages from the University of Mexico who had come to Miami to attend a conference on ancient cultures; three businessmen from AT&T (one of them of Mexican descent) on their way to talk some sense into the Mexican minister of communications about joint funding of a new satellite that would improve telephone service between the two countries; and two American couples on their way to Mexico City on assignment with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had gotten a new start six months earlier.
They were served by two stews. One of them, Maria Gonzales, a pretty young girl from La Paz, clearly remembered the American couples because they seemed to be in such high spirits. They joked and laughed across the aisle with each other. And Senor Arthur Jules, the older of the two men, tall, husky, balding, was telling the most outrageous jokes about American-Mexican relations, which even the somewhat taciturn language professor seemed to find amusing.
No, she had not actually been close enough at any time to hear exactly what was being said by Senor Jules (he and his wife, Bernice, were seated in 3A and 3B), or by the other AID employee, Ted Asher (he and his wife, Janice, were seated across the aisle in 3C and 3D), but overall her impression of the two American couples was that they seemed pleasant, very aware, and apparently genuinely interested not only in each other, but in the other passengers in first class, especially the Mexican gentlemen.
Had she any idea why the two Americans in first class had been singled out by the hijackers? She would not even venture an opinion. The very same question was, of course, also asked of the other passengers, most of whom had not even the slightest awareness of the goings-on in first class.
There were three couples from Des Moines, Iowa, who had been vacationing together for the past four days in Miami and Key West, and were on their way to Mexico City on a lark. They had never done anything like this in their entire lives. Howard S. Morgan, the farm implement dealer in Saylorville (a suburb to the north of Des Moines) had come up with the idea in a bar in Key West the night before. They knew nothing about the happenings in first-class. None of them had ever gone first class in their lives and had no interest in ever doing so, but they all saw the killing.
Marjory Dillard, a woman from Duluth on her way to see her son in Mexico City, sat one row behind and across the aisle from one of the hijackers. Throughout the first part of the incident, she had been busy taking photographs with her Instamatic. The flash unit on the camera did not work, but technicians were able to produce images from the film nevertheless, which proved to be of inestimable value. She never gave first class a thought, and later she was so frightened that one of the two men who had taken over the aircraft would find out what she had done and kill her that everything seemed to pass her by in a blur.
Donna Anderson, just forward of the smoking section, who also saw the killing, was traveling with her two young children on the second leg of her trip to Acapulco, where her estranged husband was said to be living on company funds he had stolen. She was going to him, with the children, in an effort to make him see the light of day and return home to Tallahassee with her. The company was willing to forgive, if not forget, should he return of his own accord and promise to make restitution. Throughout most of the hijacking she was so concerned about the safety of her children that she, too, had little or no awareness of anything or anyone outside her own personal sphere.
Of the others, all of them were naturally aware that they had been hijacked, but only half of them actually saw the shooting take place twenty-five yards from the plane on the runway outside Havana.
By four that afternoon, while flight 451 was still fifteen minutes away from landing at Havana, the FBI Miami office had secured the passenger and crew list from the airline (via computer) and had immediately transmitted the list to its headquarters and archives in Washington, D.C. Who aboard the hijacked aircraft could be the hijacker … or hijackers (it still was not known how many were involved)?
A scant fourteen minutes later, as the DC-10 was on its final approach, the passenger list had made its way from FBI Headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building to the State Department on 21st and C streets. This transfer of information was done for two reasons. First, many of the passengers aboard the Aeromexico flight were foreign nationals: did State have anything on any of them? Second, two of the American passengers, Arthur David Jules and Theodore Alvin Asher, were employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a State Department operation.
Both men’s names were flagged in State’s computer. It was true, in a technical sense, that they worked for AID: But that simply was their cover. In actuality both Jules and Asher were field operatives for the Central Intelligence Agency.
During those first few critical moments it very nearly leaked that the two Americans were undercover. However a bright supervisor of some years experience at State, whose name was never mentioned on any report, picked up the telephone and called his friend Robert LeGrande, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of Operations at Langley, to advise him that a couple of “friends” were involved as passengers in a hijacking. Even as they spoke, the State Department supervisor was deleting the flags from the operatives’ names, assuring their anonymity at least for the moment. State would continue to make all the appropriate noises as if the two were in fact AID employees, but the CIA would take their debriefing in hand if and when they were returned, which of course never happened because they were murdered.
Stewart Burger, a junior AID official working out of the Miami office, was immediately dispatched to the airport to take charge of Bernice Jules and Janice Asher. He knew nothing other than that they were the wives of the two murdered AID employees, although Albert Thompson, a CIA operations man who happened to be in Atlanta that afternoon, was flown by military jet to Miami where he tagged along, unobtrusively, to ensure nothing was said by either woman.
By early evening of that same day, a special investigative unit of the FBI was set up under the direction of John Lyman Trotter, Jr., who was acting assistant director of the bureau’s Special Investigative Division. Trotter was a fairly rare breed in that he not only had the slick political savvy necessary for survival in Washington, but he had genuine talent as well, though over the past few years he had found himself bending his own principles with increasing frequency in order to satisfy an insatiable bureaucracy. He was tall and thin (almost cadaverous), and anything but good-looking, behind thick, wire-rimmed glasses perched atop a huge, misshapen nose. By way of compensation for his looks he had very early on become good at what he did … which was finding out things that had to be found out. His wife, who had killed herself three years ago (or so the rumor went) had done so because she could not bear the strain of living with such a highly charged man. He literally drove her crazy, which in some odd, perverse way, had increased his reputation as a power in Washington; as a man with such a devout, all-consuming singleness of purpose that not even his private life came before his work.