THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 71 SEPTEMBER 4, 2019
ever said such things they were
wisecracks about his public repu-
tation, not factual admissions.
Colbert advanced his theory
over several years, assembling
a body of clues with the help of
dozens of retired police, military
vets, former government lawyers
and others he’d cultivated during
his media career. They lent their
expertise on a volunteer basis;
he came to refer to them as his
Cold Case Team. “My pitch was,
‘I’ve found Cooper, I just need to
nail him down.’ ”
In July 2016, three years after
he ambushed Rackstraw, Colbert
had amassed what he describes
as 95 pieces of “physical, forensic,
direct, testimonial, founda-
tional, hearsay and documentary
evidence.” Unable to get his own
documentary off the ground
without Rackstraw’s commit-
ment, Colbert agreed to appear
on a History Channel special
about the Cooper phenomenon
called D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?
which followed former assistant
FBI director Tom Fuentes as
he sorted through a number of
suspects who’d gained traction
over the decades. Some of these
men, and one woman — a recre-
ational pilot and former Merchant
Marine who had undergone one
of Washington State’s first gender
reassignment surgeries in 1969 —
had been fingered for the crime by
self-appointed sleuths who, like
Colbert, had dropped down their
own rabbit holes.
The head of the FBI’s Seattle
Division announced on air that
the FBI was done investigating
— unless key physical evidence
turned up. Meanwhile, the agent
directly overseeing the Cooper
case, Curtis Eng, explained that
he’d reviewed the evidence inde-
pendently amassed by Colbert
and that “it didn’t prove that his
suspect was Dan Cooper.” Late in
the program, a stewardess who’d
dealt most directly with the sky-
jacker was shown old photos and
video of Rackstraw. She said she
didn’t recognize him as Cooper.
Colbert was left wringing his
hands, admitting that his case
is ultimately circumstantial and
— humiliatingly, since he saw
himself as shepherding his own
ad hoc law enforcement agency of
professionals — denying that he’s
just another Cooperite obsessive.C
olbert’s linked goals —
proving that Rackstraw
was Cooper and profit-
ing from it by selling his
project about the pursuit
— had been foiled by the History
Channel fiasco. But this wasn’t
something he was willing to
accept. Colbert came to believe
the FBI “bushwhacked” his team
because they’d come close toproving that the bureau should’ve
long ago brought a prosecutable
case against Rackstraw. “I’m from
the Reagan generation,” Colbert
says. “I’ve leaned conservative.
I’ve always been a red, white and
blue guy. I went in there, coat-
and-tie, and suddenly the FBI is
messing with us. I was naive.”
Colbert and his crew — whose
years of experience had been,
Colbert felt, disrespected by
the bureau — pursued multiple
tracks. They discovered what
they believed to be parts of thehis position. Ken Overturf was
Rackstraw’s Vietnam commander
in late 1969, when Rackstraw was
a helicopter pilot for an intel-
ligence unit in the Army’s 1st
Cavalry Division. By Overturf’s
account, Rackstraw’s demeanor
along with security clearance
issues ultimately led, by early
1970, to his exile to a less-sexy
unit, flying maintenance sup-
port — “ash-and-trash missions.”
It was during these doldrums, at
the Phuoc Vinh Base Camp near
the border with Cambodia, that
Rackstraw fell in with a man well
known among the U.S. mili-
tary there to be a CIA operative.
Overturf remembers observing
Rackstraw accompanying the
agent twice out of Phuoc Vinh and
not returning for several days.
Colbert also offered up Jim
Christy, a former high-ranking
official in the Air Force Office of
Special Investigations, who had
a contact float the Rackstraw
theory by a CIA source: “He said,
‘Listen very closely. We cannot
confirm.’ Usually the answer is,
‘We cannot confirm or deny.’ It
was code, of ‘yes.’ ”
Colbert insists “I don’t do
conspiracies.” Yet since the
embarrassment of the History
special, he attributes his run of
bad luck in advancing his work
to a hidden hand — a “blackout”
orchestrated by the FBI in collu-
sion with the CIA attempting to
shield Rackstraw.
By Colbert’s logic, all of this
explains the mere lip service
Hollywood gatekeepers have
subsequently paid to his pitch for
a Rackstraw-is-Cooper co-pro-
duction. Colbert cites his decades
of experience fielding and vetting
pitches in the news trenches to
contend that, while he’s used
to hearing standard pass lines
(“Wrong demo,” “The boss isn’t
into it”), this is different. “When
the arrows all start pointing in
the same direction,” he says,
“my radar goes up.” By February
2018, he’d grown so convinced
that he held a press conference in
front of the FBI’s headquarters to
announce that the bureau “has
been covering up, stonewalling,
and flat-out lying” about why
Rackstraw was cleared in order to
protect his decades of black-ops
history with the CIA.parachute in a remote area of east-
ern Washington State and turned
the materials in to the bureau in- Then, in 2018, after success-
fully suing the FBI to release much
of its now-closed file, Cold Case
Team member Rick Sherwood,
who’d served in an intelligence
unit during the Vietnam War,
decrypted code in letters Cooper
had sent to media outlets after the
skyjacking, in which he’d appar-
ently given away his identity.
According to Sherwood’s
cryptography, the results of
which Colbert publicized, one
decoded letter included the
phrasing IF CATCH I AM CIA.
Colbert contends he’s established
evidence that Rackstraw was
a longtime CIA asset and now
believes that collusion explains
why the FBI stopped looking into
him back in the 1970s as well as
why, after the charade of keeping
up an investigation for decades,
it closed the case when his team
grew too hot on its tail.
Colbert connected THR with
multiple sources to back up
1 Tom Colbert was photographed Aug. 1 at his
Ventura County home. “One of the guys in [my
former newsroom] got me a license plate frame
that said, ‘Living for Monster Breakers.’ I can’t tell
you how many surfers stopped me. I’d explain,
‘No, breaking stories.’ ” Inset: His self-published
book lays out the case that Rackstraw was
Cooper. 2 Rackstraw at the 1978 trial for his
stepfather’s murder. 3 The hijacked Northwest
Orient flight landed safely in Seattle.
2