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Investigators Crack DB Cooper Code, Identify Suspect With Possible CIA Connections (seattlepi.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the not-so-cold-cases dept.

An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: A private investigative team announced Thursday morning that members now believe D.B. Cooper was a black ops CIA operative possibly even involved with Iran-Contra, and that his identity has been actively hidden by government agents. The 40-member cold-case team comprised of several former FBI agents and led by Thomas and Dawna Colbert made its latest reveal after a code breaker working with the team found connections in each of five letters allegedly sent by Cooper in the days following the famed hijacking in 1971.

What's more, several people who knew Colbert's top suspect, a man named Robert W. Rackstraw, have noted possible connections to the CIA and to top-secret operations, Colbert said. "The new decryptions include a dare to agents, directives to apparent partners, and a startling claim that is followed by Rackstraw's own initials: If captured, he expects a get-out-of-jail card from a federal spy agency," Colbert said in a news release... In a brief phone call last year, Rackstraw only told SeattlePI to verify Colbert's claims; he didn't issue a denial, or comment further on Colbert's investigation...

Late last year, Colbert's team obtained a fifth letter allegedly sent by Cooper that Colbert said supports a possible FBI cover-up, but also included random letters and numbers. A code breaker on Colbert's team was able to decode the letters and numbers and find they pointed to three Army units Rackstraw was connected to during his military service in Vietnam. The code was meant to serve as a signal to his co-conspirators that he was alive and well after the jump, Colbert said... Another letter, in which Cooper claimed to be CIA openly, also had the letters "RWR" at the end -- the initials of Robert W. Rackstraw, according to Colbert.

13 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Code cracked? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    A short ciphertext can decrypt to anything your'e motivated to make it say. All of this is very thin.

    1. Re:Code cracked? by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed on the thinness of evidence, but also remember this was 1971, before personal computers or even the first public key cipher. Assuming for sake of argument the people behind this latest "solution" to the mystery are correct, then the text would have been ciphered by hand using some rudimentary shared-secret cipher. An expert wouldn't need much text to recover the key -- and in fact this might have been necessary if the sender had no secure channel to transmit the key over.

      The problem with "solving" the D.B. Cooper mystery is the double-edged role of imagination in understanding the world. You need imagination to connect sparse evidence into some kind of coherent picture, but that emotionally convincing "aha" feeling you get when you manage to do that drops you right down into confirmation bias territory. That's how conspiracy theories get started.

      Making Cooper out to be an ex-spook with CIA paramilitary experience connects a some of dots in an emotionally convincing way: Cooper's ability to manipulate others, his ability to make a convincing bomb and use a parachute. But it leaves others unconnected, like the titanium particles found on his tie. But that's real life, isn't it? Sometimes dots don't have any connection to the picture (e.g. contamination of the evidence after it is collected).

      The letters aren't a slam-dunk even if the decryption is valid. They could be a prank. They could be a spook taking advantage of the highly publicized event for his own purposes. What's more there is nothing really to connect this Rackstraw person to the letters, and the known details of his career don't really match up (which of course they wouldn't).

      In the end this is Yet Another D.B. Cooper Theory: a few very suggestive connections topped with a mountain of conjecture. Particularly suspect is tying it down to a specific person. That's a major leap of faith.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    2. Re:Code cracked? by timholman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Agreed on the thinness of evidence, but also remember this was 1971, before personal computers or even the first public key cipher. Assuming for sake of argument the people behind this latest "solution" to the mystery are correct, then the text would have been ciphered by hand using some rudimentary shared-secret cipher. An expert wouldn't need much text to recover the key -- and in fact this might have been necessary if the sender had no secure channel to transmit the key over.

      In 1971, any publicly broadcasted cypher would have almost certainly been encoded with a one-time pad. They were routinely used in espionage in the early days of the Cold War, and are still used today (e.g. the "numbers stations" on shortwave radio). Given that the cyphers in question were a few 10-character alphanumeric strings, a one-time pad would be the obvious means to send a short, unbreakable message ... assuming that's what it really was, a not simply a random string of characters put together by the letter writer to make it appear mysterious.

      Realistically, this entire "investigation" is just another example of a lot of people with too much time on their hands looking for patterns in what is effectively random noise.

  2. Re:conspiracy theory by Entrope · · Score: 2

    So which talking points misspelled Nunes's name? That's about the fifth time I've seen it wrong, usually by people who want to derail a thread.

  3. More books, videos, interviews by p51d007 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The guy "outed" isn't the one. It's been disproved. He's 15 years younger than "DB Cooper" for one thing. If the person didn't die jumping from the plane, he would be over 85 years old today. Most likely he died in the attempt, or has long since died. These "hounds" pop up about every year of the anniversary, to hawk their books and what not.

  4. Re:Your tax dollars and mine at work by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know reading TFA is hard, but at least read the summary. These were private investigators doing this in their own time. The team includes a whole bunch of former FBI and other former government people, but none of your tax money is going to this.

  5. Robert Rackstraw is Amazing by techsoldaten · · Score: 2

    Robert Rackstraw stories always amaze me, mostly because we forget so much about what life was like during the Vietnam Era. There's a lot of context missing from this analysis, like how so many people went around claiming to be D.B. Cooper during the 70s and how a good number of them had similar military training. This is back when Soldier of Fortune was a guide to being manly and a life of adventure that didn't involve a snowboard was still to be had.

    You could apply the same logic the author does to the cases of Ted Mayfield, Richard McCoy, and a few others to reach the same conclusions. Robert Rackstraw is undoubtedly a badass and someone I'd love to have a beer with, just the stories about his Silver Stars are pretty incredible.

    But, when you consider all the other things he's done, for Rackstraw to be DB Cooper is outside-the-realm-of-possibility amazing. Apply some common sense: how could he have done this without some help from the FBI? Why would the FBI protect someone who also stole an airplane trying to fake his own death?

    I think the author watched too much A-Team as a kid and has a fascination with Murdock.

  6. Re:I Dunno... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes. For $200K, the CIA could just rifle a couch somewhere or sell Iran a fake surface to air missile. Or something less obvious than creating the month's biggest news story.

    Motive? I don't get it. Opportunity? OK, sure, but it's awfully convoluted. Payback? Small coin.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  7. There is a simple test to verify this hypothesis.. by DrTJ · · Score: 4, Informative

    A quick look at the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper) reveals that in 2007, FBI secured DNA traces from the hijacker's tie.

    If this DNA matches the suspect, this would be hard to explain.

    This is not the first time Rackstraw is under investigation. He appeared already in 1978 in the investigation, but this is far from the only suspect that has been identified. The Wikipedia article lists ten other individuals that - on the surface of things - appear just as likely as him.

    I'd say that this is another hypothesis generated by the famousness of the case, like other famous crime cases in the past. The "Jack the ripper" suspect list on Wikipedia counts no less than 29 persons.

  8. Re: conspiracy theory by c6gunner · · Score: 3

    When Trump declassified the JFK files it showed that the CIA promoted conspiracy theories to distract from the fact that Oswald was a communist in an effort to avoid an escalation of the cold war.

    Nonsense. The articles which make this allegation all then go on to point out that the CIA withheld some information, and that this withholding of information led to conspiracy theories. In other words they're shit articles with insanely misleading titles. There's zero evidence in any of the released documents that the CIA created or encouraged conspiracy theories.

    When you hear far out conspiracy theories they could well be coming from the government itself.

    That raises the question; since you yourself are pushing a conspiracy theory alleging that the government created the conspiracy theories, does that mean you're a government agent promoting conspiracy theories?

  9. Why now? by EricTDuckman1414 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Gee, I wonder why somebody suddenly wants to call attention to this outlandish story that alleges the FBI is riddled with corrupt yet devilishly competent conspirators who have been able to conceal the real identity of the most famous hijacker in history for over four decades?

  10. Re:conspiracy theory by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It does flow into a predictable pattern of when someone has no evidence, they explain it away as a conspiracy. The earth is flat and no one has taken a picture of the edge because the world's governments have set up patrols to keep people from visiting the edge. It's completely circular logic.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  11. Re:Not just thin, but trillions to one against by Aighearach · · Score: 2

    You don't have nearly enough information to know if you can multiply those here, or not.

    It may actually be true that all DB Coopers are black ops CIA, and the chances of being both are only "one in 200 million" meaning that there are only 38 DB Coopers in the whole world.

    Just because you have probabilities for two events doesn't mean you have a probability for them to both happen. That would require additional facts.

    But I'm actually going to go out on a limb and say that chances of being DB Cooper are much lower than 1 in 200m. Maybe even as low as 1 in 7.6b.

    The chances of you being you are exactly equal to the chances of you being DB Cooper, if we assume that the identity of DB Cooper is totally unknown. The chances of you being Santa Claus could easily be over 1 in 50k! And that assumes we only count Santas that have graduated from some sort of Santa College!