20.2 Just Another Non-Existent Terminal

In the first week of June 1972, Tyler stopped on Velutina Drive in Tempe, Arizona, 10 yards from the lawn of 1712. Engine idling and revving up constantly. He who turned detective paused to spy on Candice Staverton who would show up at her place.

In the forefront of this single-storey house, there stood two big velvet mesquite trees, a low parapet that decorated a small plot of desert plants in pots and a roof covered of dry leaves, gates that accessed to the backyard on one side and a makeshift workshop on the other. Tyler captured the whole scenario on his camera.

A parrot green Plymouth Barracuda with a black top passed by and stopped in front of 1712. A tall woman in a white dress and red lipstick climbed down. She could be 5’ 9” tall, with golden blonde hair, wearing ivory cream gloves and rancher boots. She could be in her sixties and a glamorous woman. Tyler carried on taking photos using his zoom lens.

When the coast was clear, he stepped down from his Torino with a handheld vacuum and approached the Plymouth. He opened the door and ran his vacuum on the seats and the floor mat. Then he returned to his car and drove off. He was able to collect a ball of hair.

Tyler Friesen returned to Las Vegas and booked a room facing east at Hacienda Hotel. This hotel opened in 1954 and the casino added in 1956. A terrific neon-lit horse and rider displayed by the entrance from Las Vegas Boulevard. Here, six independent wings point outwards around the swimming pool like a clock and Tyler chose the middle one that lay in a north-south direction on the northern half of the court. Room 120 on the third floor was spacious and in shade of afternoon sun. All day Tyler sat on the watch for the Janet. That apron lay exactly half a mile from his balcony.

As the night lingered on, Tyler lay on the double bed covered with a white sheet and staring at the white ceiling, sipping his vodka. For no particular reason, Tyler switched on the television that brought news about the Watergate break-in. It seemed on the previous night, five of the burglars were arrested.

Briskly, Tyler Friesen sat upright in bed. He just saw the yellow shirt on TV and recognised him at once.

The construction site that he observed in Foggy Bottom was the Watergate complex. Five units of condos and office rooms were completed by 1971. Land claimed in Foggy Bottom raised a memorial centre opened on 8^th September 1971 as The John F Kennedy Memorial Center for The Performing Arts.

2:30 am on 17^th June, five burglars were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, Room 214, at the Watergate block of offices. It was learnt later that they burglarised the place in May to steal secret documents and bug the place in a forceful campaign to re-elect President Nixon by the CRP – Committee for the Re-Election of the President – that became mocked by the acronym CREEP following the crime. The wiretaps failed so five burglars returned to replace them in June.

It later came to light that President Nixon was in fact involved in this immoral affair as he arranged hush money to the burglars and not being honest. His attempts to obstruct justice by thwarting the investigation would lead to televised political hearings and to his downfall in the end. President Nixon resigned on 8^th August 1974.

It became the hottest news on every channel and every paper. It also brought to light of the heroic efforts of the reporters, particularly the key roles of Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post in unfolding this deep-seated scandal that won the paper another Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

There stood a Hasidic Jew with a brown beard as the Camaro approached the gate. He wore a shtreimel and a black garb, jingling a bell in his hand and shouting, “The bells of Salazar, the light of Ibiza, magic of the Kabbalah, ride your Merkabah!”

Bradley stopped the car right outside the gate as the Jew blocked his path. He leaned over the window and cried, “I’m Doctor Maxwell from Moscow. This is for you, Lieutenant Bradley.” He passed an envelope and began to sound the bell deliberately to neutralise Bradley’s voice. He hurried on towards the opposite direction yelling like a mad man.

Bradley opened the packet. In it he found a black and white photograph of him with Jair Sivils and Randall Gumper during a trip to Ibiza. It was an authentic picture, he knew.

When John Adams compared the hair sample to the hair found at Turner & Sons on the day Howard Tuner was murdered, it shockingly happened to be of the same person. And a size 13 footprint of a high heel shoe traced at Turner & Sons explained a tall woman. At this juncture, that .22 murder weapon was missing. Candice Staverton became a suspect but John Adams wanted to investigate further to find her connection to Gumper and Makarov at the Russian Embassy. It was an extraordinary find and an unlikely link but a true mystery. If Gumper was Maxwell and the Russians didn’t know about it, the only plausible explanation would be that Makarov and Staverton had a contract of their own.

Where was Staverton that day? How could he unearth Gumper’s bank accounts and find a link to his Swiss accounts? Was he still holding his share of Macedon Air? How did Staverton and Makarov observe the dead drops? There were lots of questions and John Adams assigned a team to find out.

In 1974, Tyler Friesen released his eleventh book that narrated his own version of Turner’s homicide case trying to become a Woodward. John Adams was angered. Tyler described his impractical theory that linked Randall Gumper, alias Robert D Maxwell, to Andrey Makarov and Candice Staverton. Nothing in his book was true when it finally came known in 1976 due to the FBI investigations. Though, miraculously, one thing stood right on edge. His fiction described the murder weapon as a very rare silver-plated Whitney Wolverine semi-auto pistol of .22 calibre – precisely.

When John Adams asked about it how he figured the weapon, Tyler answered, “I took the impression of the woman to a weapon of choice. I felt a strong vibration in the brains.”

A year later, in 1977, John Adams learned that Tyler Friesen had revised his book and done corrections based on FBI findings. He was mad – Tyler Friesen taking credit for it. Nonetheless, there was this one thing – Tyler Friesen had been of great help for the FBI investigations to solve the mystery. When Tyler recognised the burglar as the yellow shirt, in June 1972, he called Adams at once. This burglar by profession was a lawyer and an FBI agent who was after the Maxwell moles before he was arrested. The FBI discovered their background from this man who was identified only as the ‘yellow shirt’ in Tyler Friesen’s publication.

Tyler Friesen made frequent trips to Las Vegas with a passion of birdwatching. South wing of Tropicana still gave an unobstructive view to the third floor over the roof of the convention hall. Howard Johnson or Hacienda were his other preferable choices if a room on the south wing of Tropicana Hotel was sold out. In 1986, Tropicana opened its Island Tower with spacious and comfy rooms. His favourable observation point became the 18^th floor, affordable on his budget and the two floors above were suites. And Tyler came with the necessary gadgets, good photography equipment armed with a 500 mm telephoto lens and binoculars.

Janet flights carried workers from Las Vegas to Area 51, the Tonopah Test Range, Edwards Air Force Base and other ghostly areas. The fleet increased to five or six aircrafts, a couple of Beechcraft and two Boeing 737. And the fascinating thing about those 737s was that they were painted white with a red stripe around the body, no marking of an operator, only the tail number. Callsign is ‘Janet’ that stands for ‘Just Another Non-Existent Terminal’.

There were hundreds of people employed there and where…as commuters climbed in street clothes, each carrying a duffle or a bag. Each employer would maintain a Top-Secret Security Clearance based on a Single Scope Background Investigation. The parking area lying next to Haven Street filled with cars. Melville Bradley had retired as a lieutenant in 1976 subsequently to the FBI probe on the moles. In the night, the Janet Terminal and apron lit up in yellow sodium lighting.

Tyler Friesen turned eighty in the Las Vegas heat and desert around the paradise, watching the Strip rise with hotels and casinos in different themes and the birds fly over McCarren International Airport on an airlift.

– End –