Longer update here. Next one...hopefully tonight (U.S. EST)
(7)
April 29, 1996
9,288.
The signpost, marking the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, was the first thing Cokie Roberts saw when she stepped off the train in Vladivostok. Atop the sign sat the imperial double eagle, that old forbidden symbol of Russian power yanked down in the Soviet days, restored to its former perch. Indeed, the signs of revived imperial splendor were everywhere to be found from the moment she stepped into this mysterious city. Reliefs of country scenes plucked straight from folktales adorned the walls, recently uncovered and restored from the bland plaster of the Soviet era. A grand steam locomotive sat on the platform, and for a moment, those viewing it could almost picture the imperial dignitaries disembarking in their finest dress regalia to inspect the Tsar’s Pacific Fleet.
In the old days, one could hop a train here in Vladivostok and be in Paris in a hair under two weeks. It’d taken almost that long to get Cokie here from Moscow. Flights would’ve been far easier but risked too much unwanted attention from the western authorities. The FSB spared no effort to conceal the American’s arrival in the Far East, vanishing her outside of Berlin, disguising her, slipping her onto a train at Yaroslavsky railway station under clandestine guard, and occasionally switching her train as she made the long venture eastward to the port city. She did not mind; after all, the conclusion of the trip would be a visit to meet the father she long thought to be dead, and on the way, she might gain a good sense of what the new Russia looked like from the inside, something few of her counterparts in the United States could boast.
On her first day in the city, Cokie wandered through the shops and markets as she waited for a signal to move to her suite in the Hotel Vladivostok. She was anxious to meet her father, but several steps remained. She’d been informed that he’d been in the care of a very senior Russian official, though her ‘travel guides’ as they referred to themselves would not tell her who this official was. He was traveling to Vladivostok personally to meet with her – to vet her, one last time, before granting access to the man she’d assumed dead since she’d been almost fresh out of school – and would not hesitate to send her back if he felt she hadn’t earned the right.
Arriving at the hotel with a bag full of ceramic trinkets – some Russian, others, the cheap Chinese knockoffs that flooded the markets – she was told by the concierge that she could take anything to her room, “except explosives.” She greeted the news with nervous laughter, assuming it to be some form of grim Russian humor until five plainclothes policemen with dogs burst into her room later in the afternoon to search for any signs of weapons or bombs. At last, around eight thirty, a knock came at the door. She was to meet her contact at a restaurant not far from the hotel. She received only a business card with an address.
As she approached the front door, it became clear why. Emblazoned across the sign hanging proudly over the entrance were the words “RESTAURANT PYONGYANG.”
I’m meeting my Russian spy helpers at the North Korean restaurant, she thought with a smile,
I knew I always wanted to be a Bond villain.
The interior was even more surreal. Korean men wearing red flag pins decorated with the visages of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, the new leader of the DPRK, downed vodka heartily at the bar, talked, and sang. Women in traditional dress nervously paced to and fro among tables where burly Russian men in tracksuits and tacky pinstripes sat. In the corner, men in sunglasses, sportcoats and turtlenecks with sunken briefcases stood at attention. Whatever happened in here, it was about as far from Cokie’s experience as the surface of the moon. She felt her Russian hosts were sending her a message:
you are not safe here, not without our protection.
“Mrs. Roberts, please, follow me,” a Korean man in a waiter’s outfit told her, gesturing to a door in the rear of the main room. She followed him, only belatedly realizing that two more men in sunglasses with sunken briefcases followed her, stopping at the door to stand guard. The doors flung open to reveal a single round table with a man seated across from an empty place.
“Ah, Cokie Roberts! Sit down! Sit down! Please, you must be exhausted from your journey. Wine? I can have them bring us a bottle.”
She shook her head.
“I’m fine, thanks. A little surprised that you decided to bring me to little Pyongyang for this.”
“Hah!” the man exclaimed, lighting up a cigarette. “I would imagine that some of the more exotic elements of Vladivostok life are quite a shock to you. Tell me, Mrs. Roberts, have you ever had any Korean food?”
She paused from sipping water.
“Yes, I knew a family in the consulate during my earlier days at NPR. Cabbage, rice, that sort of thing. I enjoyed it.”
He raised his brow.
“But have you ever had
North Korean food?” he asked, and she shook her head no.
“The secret ingredient is desperation. You see, the southerners, they adulterate the spice. Too weak. Northerners don’t
have the spice often enough, so they make it count. It’s amazing what a little deprivation can do for quality, no?”
Servers delivered a flurry of small plates full of rice, beans, seaweed, cabbage, and a variety of other items Cokie hadn’t seen before. The Russian flung a clump of rice into his mouth and continued talking, unconcerned that he spoke as he chewed.
“You are probably wondering who I am. That is fair. My name is Aleksandr Karaschuk. I am…a special advisor to President Zhirinovsky. I have also been one of your father’s closest friends and confidantes for years.”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“My father wasn’t exactly the type to make friends with KGB agents, Mr. Karaschuk. He had enough problems with our own law enforcement, let alone the Kremlin’s secret state police.”
His grin extended ear to ear as he tapped ash into a tray emblazoned with a Korean Workers’ Party slogan.
“He certainly has a mind of his own, I’ll say that. I’ve grown quite fond of him. Very protective, you see.”
Cokie placed her fork on the table.
“He’s not your asset.”
Setting his cigarette down, the Russian leaned forward and glared straight into her eyes.
“Your father arrived here in the summer of 1975, just over two decades ago. Resourceful man. A fishing vessel picked him up in the nick of time just off the coast of Alaska. He’d have frozen to death quite quickly if he’d been out there too long clinging to that scrap of a Cessna. Hitchhiked his way all the way to Hokkaido and hid out for a few years before he worried that the Japanese were onto him. That’s when he came onto our radar.”
He gestured for a guard to bring him a folder. He opened the folder, studying its contents but revealing nothing to Cokie.
“Your father has quite a story to tell. Quite a story. There are many in your country who would love to help him tell it. If you wish to be the one, I will need certain assurances. I can always send you back from here empty handed. No one in the United States will ever believe you and you will never see him in the flesh.”
She steeled herself, glancing over the guard. A sunken briefcase at the back of the room revealed the outline of a submachine gun.
“I’m a journalist, Mr. Karaschuk. I’m not sure what sort of deal you’re intending to strike, here, but I’m not open for business…”
“There are several truths we must establish!” he cut in, face reddened with anxious fury, “your father has wanted for nothing, here. He has not been imprisoned. In fact, he has been free to leave the entire time. When
your government wanted him dead,
ours made sure he survived. He will not be a tool of American propaganda!”
She folded her hands, neatly placing a napkin beneath them.
If any of that’s true, she thought,
Daddy will be able to convey it to me. I can’t believe he wanted to stay in Russia all these years, so far away from us, so far away from his beloved House. I will trust Daddy, and I will tell this Russian whatever I need to tell him to see Daddy again.
“Fine,” she said. “I have no intention of turning this into an international incident. I just want to see my father and know he’s okay. Any interest I have in storytelling is strictly secondary. Regardless, it would be unethical for me to participate in a story involving my own father, especially when he’s supposedly been dead for twenty-five years.”
Karaschuk stood up, snapping his fingers for the servers to remove his plates. He forked a lump of cabbage from a plate as it was whisked away, then lazily tossed his utensil to the table.
“Eat up, then rest up. We take you to him tomorrow.”
~~
Eight hours on a plane, two-and-a-half weeks in a car and train, one strange night at a North Korean restaurant at the end of the world, and a long, frigid morning were worth it for Cokie Roberts if somehow she could see her father again. She’d had her doubts that it was really him; the Russians were known for these types of sleight-of-hand tricks. But when she saw the old, rounded face, the jowls buried beneath the weight of years, and the tear that ran down his face, she nearly collapsed with joy.
Daddy is alive.
For hours, they circled the
Ploschad Bortsov Revolutsky, in the shadows of a memorial to the Red fighters who captured Vladivostok for the Soviets during the Civil War. In so many ways, he hadn’t lost a step. He poked and pried for the latest news of Congress and the race for the White House. Politics was their blood. She covered it, he lived it.
“Now that’s just it,” she said. “Clinton
should be dogged by the old Broaddrick allegations, or at least you’d think, but he’s been relentlessly on-message. Over and over again, it’s about getting the guys out of Somalia and focusing on matters at home. He’s almost been able to outflank Gore and Bradley to the left, or at least create that perception. It’s all ‘we need to spend less time focusing on Mogadishu and more time focusing on Michigan.’ It’s a hit, and there just isn’t the same energy for Gore’s and Bradley’s message.”
He laughed as he held onto her arm to steady himself, breath floating in the cold spring air.
“Gore’s just like his father, sounds like. Liberal as hell, but damned boring, too. I think I woulda’ liked this Clinton, indiscretions aside. Doesn’t seem afraid to grab the bull by the balls.”
She smiled. “Yes, well, and he’s a hit with younger voters. You’d love this: he got on MTV a few weeks ago and played the saxophone, which sent the crowd wild. Gore’s wife can’t stand rap music, which hasn’t helped him a bit either.”
He looked dumbfounded. “M…T what? Who’d make music out of a damn rap sheet?”
She winced. She might never catch him up on all he’d missed living off of boiled eggs and week-old news updates on videotapes. That had to be okay.
“Daddy, I’ve got to ask you. In all these years…why didn’t you give us a sign? You do realize Momma’s going to kill you for this, don’t you?”
He halted in his tracks, heavy of breath, and sat down at the base of a statue.
“I…I just…I don’t know why…you’ve got to forgive me. I thought Hoover would kill you, too.”
“
Hoover?” she asked, “
that’s who you think crashed your plane?”
“Corrine, that plane did not crash. It exploded. There was a bomb on board, in a briefcase someone handed to Jonz. We got up for ten, I don’t know, maybe fifteen minutes at most and the damn thing erupted. Flung something at me – might’ve been a seat – and tossed me straight down into the water. That boat wasn’t there, I’d have been dead within the hour. No way Don or Nick or Nick’s man made it out.”
She held him against her shoulder, patting him on the head as she stared off into space, half expecting to wake from a wild dream.
“But how do you figure Hoover out of all of that? How does he decide he’s going to kill you? I get that you wanted him gone, but Daddy, you’ve got to admit it’s a leap.”
He wrenched himself free from her arms.
“A leap? A leap?! Corinne, do you understand just what was in my jacket pocket that morning? A whole mess’a stuff. And yeah, the water damaged some of it, but I brought what’s left here so you could see it yourself.”
He removed a stack of articles from his jacket. The first, a black-and-white photo of three men. She thought, knowing that this conversation would eventually turn to the Kennedy assassination, that it would be the now-famous “image” of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt allegedly standing on the grassy knoll on the day of the killing. It was not. Instead, it was an image of Hunt, plain as day, with Cord Meyer, another CIA agent whose wife, allegedly among JFK’s mistresses, was the victim of an unsolved murder.
“Turn it over,” Boggs said.
The back read plainly:
REUNION. NOV ’66.
“Now, this,” he said, producing a piece of paper torn from a notepad. Despite the faded ink and burnt edges, it remained legible.
DIVERT ITN’Y DALLAS. BIG EVENT THERE.
It carried the unmistakable signature of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
“We don’t have much time,” he said. “I’ll keep it quick. Johnson had Kennedy killed. He enlisted a group of wild CIA sons of bitches to do it. There was a meeting in August ’63 in Miami. One of the agents – Hunt, the gent in this photo – he went there. They said it out loud, Corinne. They said they were going to kill Kennedy.”
“Daddy, there’s no way to prove that…”
“Wrong! You’re wrong! You’re all wrong. They thought they’d swept the room clean, swept Hunt clean, but they didn’t! He set up a damn wire! But once he realized that they were killing people who said anything, he destroyed every copy of the tape he had. Every copy except for one – one he didn’t even know about. Hoover and the CIA bastards found out, that's why they made sure he went down for Watergate. That’s why they wanted me dead.”
She stared at him in disbelief. She knew he’d been a heavy drinker, and she’d heard the rumors about the drugs.
He miraculously survived a tragic accident. He had to believe it was all for something. This can’t be true. It would’ve surfaced by now…
“Corinne, there’s a little park on the west end of Alexandria, nothing more than a few swing sets and a water fountain. It's down by this street here, Four Mile Run," he said, pointing to a little folded map under his other papers. "If they haven’t built over it, go to the oak tree at the south end of the park. Dig at the south face of the tree. You will find the last copy of the tape. I promise you, on my honor as your Daddy.”
She just held him in her eyes. It was enough to know he was
real,
alive. She thought he was probably delusional, a tired, broken old man who’d seen one too many traumas. But he’d lived. He’d lived for her – to tell her this truth.
She would dig.
