KEYNOTE - Cold Case Cyber Investigations: Catfishing Cooper and Other Ops - Jim Christy

good morning everyone and welcome to b-sides LV 2018 the biggest and best besides Las Vegas ever I'm winter this is oz next year will be better last year was better but what we can tell you is that it has been 10 years since the house that Jack built first opened its doors to a handful of talks and this year besides LV will host 130 talks and training for over 200 hours of combined educational programming and that's all given away for free folks that's beautiful because of the dedication and support of the sponsors and people like you the sponsors this year that we have to thank our rapid7 top of the list we got Amazon here this year o auth tell

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discovery with matthew e-version so that's gonna be that's gonna be now at 11:30 today and then from CTF to cv8 CDE unfortunately has been cancelled so that would have been the talk directly before that if you were looking for it all right check my check the replies might check my check Mic Check Mic Check Mic Check hello thank you thank you for giving me your attention the whole entire room hello now but I can still hear you too and I should be able to hear you I should only hear me hello my check all right if I call my check that means I'm asking the whole time for him to be quiet and do nothing but listen to the voice is

calling Mic Check Mic Check I'm still hearing voices in our mind Mic Check thank you if you wish to talk please go out into the hallway track this is not for conversation this is for paying attention what's going on the stage that includes our lovely lovely sponsors will not be having conversation for the next hour or so horrible Corbett said besides Las Vegas I like being able to speak yeah lose my voice before Def Con thank you for your attention if you wish to continue your conversations please do so elsewhere otherwise welcome to your attention to the stage cheers Thank You banshee everyone Banshee so having said that there's just a couple of other little pieces of business if you've been

here in years previously you may have known that the raffles rent on really really long during the ending ceremonies that we were picking numbers and nobody was there so it works a little bit differently this year in your bags that you received at registration there's probably a couple of tickets you'll notice that they weren't separated we're going to do a raffle draw during the happy hour today the happy hour tomorrow and tomorrow before or during the closing ceremonies so the idea is go past the raffle and son action portion of the the table over here once we get it set up and then you'll be able to say that oh if I'm gonna if I want to bid on this stuff or

if I want to put my raffle ticket in to win this I know that it's being drawn at this happy hour so that we're only pulling tickets from the people that are there so we'll be collecting the tickets at that point in time if that didn't make any sense because it's early and I was really it was a late night then you can meet us over at the silent auction table and we'll discuss out with you later beyond that we've got public grounds yeah and just just a quick note on we've got all the support as we mentioned before for besides this is an amazing conference and the price is totally phenomenal right so we really

depend on the support of everyone that comes here as well so please go over buy a raffle ticket or tan support the silent auction buy a t-shirt because this is really a community driven driven event that we have here yeah we have a new thing this year that we're just announcing now the public ground so for years we've been building bridges into public policy they're hearing public grounds and dying to meet you so your opportunity to engage and maybe hack our futures it's gonna be over in platinum sponsored by Hewlett Foundation and organized by I am the cavalry and this is designed to be a safe space for security researchers and public policy people to build bridges

together understand where each other is coming from and engage some of our teammates and some of the ambassador's from the other side office hours will be held by congressional staffers hackers and lawyers homeland security the FDA think tankers Mozilla and other ones as well very excited to meet you that they're going to have some topics like should companies be liable for software vulnerabilities when people get harmed very interesting and unsolved question there how is coordinated vulnerability disclosure understood in Congress or is it understood at all let's let's find out from the from some of our congressional representative and staffers about that and should companies have immunity if they do the right thing and if they respond to coordinated

disclosure in a timely and Renner's and responsible manner so that's I think is really worth checking out for anyone interested in those policy questions that's a brand-new thing this year and we really want to thank the Hewlett Foundation for putting this together for this thank you so much so just the final things we're about to get going here a quick notes that there's a few evening events there's a queer con mixer at 8:00 till midnight tonight at the Tuscany pool and also at 9:30 there's the new hacker pyramid which will be here in this room and tomorrow night of course is the is the big pool party but basically I don't know if you guys knows

or if you've met wint or anything like that we're just a couple of people from different countries who have decided that we would come out down to the States and help out host this conference because things here right now man yeah it's just an interesting situation and it just feel like the the American emcee industry seems to be struggling so I'm sorry we've just been told that by Presidential Decree there's now a tariff on foreign emcees we have to reduce our we're done we can't enjoy ourselves we're out of town we had we had a bunch more here but we've been 25% of our emceeing is being cut right now so we're just gonna have to yeah I better get off

stage before DHS gets here all right keynote Andreas yeah so let's move on quickly I'm super excited to introduce this first keynote speaker today because this he's gonna be speaking about something that has fascinated me for a very long time so our first keynote speaker is retired special agent Jim Christie some quick biographical information he was most recently until until 2013 the director of futures exploration which explored strategic relationships between the US government and the private sector in academia so stuff that a lot of us are really interested in before that from oh three two oh six he was the director of the defense cybercrime institute from 2001 to 2003 the director of operations of

the defense computer forensics lab and from 89 to 96 chief of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations computer crime investigations unit so to translate that into our language he's a badass and that was recognized by Hollywood he actually wrote the infrastructure attacks for the movie Lu free or die hard so he's gonna be talking today about the DB cooper cold case he was brought on to work on that cold case brought out over time in 2016 which is just an absolutely fascinating case if you're not familiar with it you we react very very interested if you're familiar with it he's got some new information to talk to us here sorry so once again please don't talk 25% less

all right good morning how y'all doing so I'm a form of government guys so this is our agenda okay so a common operating picture so what does cyber mean anyway right I got to tell you working for the Department of Defense for 42 years 43 years when cyber first came out there was much debate and probably 27 different definitions flying around depending on the service or the organization one of the jobs I had I got detailed to the to Senator Nunn on the permanent Subcommittee for investigations back in 1996 and we held up investigations and hearings on through cyber threat to national security and one of our first witnesses was john deutsch when he was

director of the CIA at the time and my job as a staffer was to write all the questions for the senator what the possible answers were of what the follow-up question was so that the senator would look like he knew what the hell he was talking about right and being a senator and being a lawyer you never ask questions you already don't know the answers to right well in the middle of John deutsches testimony he asked john deutsch so what was i'm going the wrong direction here so what is cyber mean anyway and john deutsches face went pale I mean this is 1996 he's a senior guy he doesn't know what the hell cyber means and so he he pauses

he says we have a moment and he turns to his straphangers in the back and they have a huddle for about thirty seconds and he comes back and says sorry senator I'll have to get back to you on the answer so the very next day he sends this letter to John to Senator nine so I'll read it for you says dear senator nunn during yesterday's hearings on foreign information warfare capability you asked a rather indelicate question what is cyber mean anyway I must admit that your query caused a great deal of discomfort here while everyone had used the term no one had heretofore felt any need to know precisely what the hell it meant yeah I

I put hell and he didn't say it in light of my promise to keep Congress fully and currently informed I pressed for an answer Central Intelligence Agency's CIA's research revealed that the term cybernetics was coined by the father of cybernetics Norbert Wiener in 1948 and mr. whiners words we have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory whether in a machine or an animal by the name cybernetics which we formed from the from the Greek Cybernet ease or steersman that's enlightening Department of State concurred with CIA's findings but wish to point out that the Greek cybernet EES is related to the Latin gubernatorial Anor governor the Defense Intelligence Agency remember Flynn you

know national security adviser right here an DIA the Defense Intelligence Agency is not yet ready to make a judgment and is exploring the possibility that cyber may come from the Greek szybist etre or divert from which we also derived the word szybist etre or a genis of large diving beetles I hope this clears up any confusion so now you all know what the hell cyber means right so as a criminal investigator you know we look at motives you know when you're trying to solve a case and they've run the gamut from you know sex politics activism ego hate you name it anything can possibly be the motive and every tool known to man so far to make life

easier more efficient more effective they have somebody has turned that tool around to make it holy [ __ ] what's going on here every tool has turned around to become a weapon so it shouldn't you know a rock a hammer a golf club pots and pans you name it turned into a weapon so we shouldn't be surprised when when computers turn into weapons and weapons can play three roles in a crime they can be the victim of a crime a system that's hacked for instance a witnesses of crime could just be an innocent bypassing system near that that the hacker went through or it could be the target the subject of the crime you know and be the

victim so tools of the trade today you need reliable communication whether you're an executive a spy terrorist and some say executives and our spies or terrorists so reliable communication your documentation plans partners contact information you need access to all this stuff so what better place to use things to use but the the Web smartphones laptops tablets oh and they do I think that defending against a cyber attack is the opposite of defending against a nuclear attack to defend against a nuclear attack we know that some [ __ ] who have nukes right right we spend a lot of time and Intel knowing who's got him and we surveil them and we have great platforms to

surveil these guys with nukes so if somebody was to launch an attack within a fraction of a second we would know that there was a large we probably know they're prepping for it know what when it was launched and within a few seconds the trajectory and possible targets of that attack and in the meantime we're going to nuke up until they glow pretty significant deterrence to defend against a cyberattack you can't surveil everybody because anybody can launch a cyber attack so you have to sit back and wait for the attack to occur and then work backwards for attribution much more difficult and what makes it even more difficult is that in in the US the

difference between the responsibilities and authorities of the Intel community and law enforcement community so if the attacks are occurring in the United States the intelligence community can't play only law enforcement can play so hopefully the law enforcement guys will communicate coordinate with the Intel guys but that's not a given okay we're locked up here so if you know there's a difference between law enforcement in detail community we now have a cyber attack don't go far all right so I'll skip a lot of slides how's that holy [ __ ] well I'm never buying a Chromebook let me tell you holy [ __ ] okay speed speed counts right Oh oh my god jurisdiction there are over

well as I don't even care about that [ __ ] so attribution is the this a holy grail for for a cyberattack gotta get some bitch's fingers on the keyboard all right so we're skipping through skipping through how many you know about the hannover hacker case red okay that was my case okay so cliffs an old lady marsh worm everybody knows marsh worm all right no I worked that case and his father was even on my meat the Fed panel one year you know he says you'd look for me I said yeah because I where I worked your son's case you guys don't want to talk about the elections and all that [ __ ] so we'll just keep on going so

what I would like to talk about is the law enforcement and the intelligence community the intelligence community has done a tremendous disservice to us in America the only thing that counts to the intelligence community is offense and they don't share any information with law enforcement or the private sector if because they want to use it offensively and I think that it's far more important to do defense when it comes to cyber then then offense okay so yeah they classify everything it's just it said so so I think digital forensics with the proliferation of digital devices digital forensics is the key it answers you know DNA we've been using DNA in criminal cases since about 1986 and it can answer the who question

but digital forensics can answer all the traditional who what where when why and how question but we just can't do it in 10 minutes like they do on TV all right come on come on move so they're they're different disciplines within the intelligence community you have sigit human all the different ents i think that we should have created a thing i call digital forensics intelligence and the reason might come up in a minute or so holy [ __ ] that'll make it go faster

so so if you look at the Venn diagram three different disciplines the National Security that's the Department of Defense the intelligence community Public Safety that your law enforcement carry and then the economic sector private sector okay where they all overlap is what I call digital forensics intelligence so now it goes to what a piece of [ __ ] this is screw digital forensics talk about a case I had back in 1991 dependant wife of an Air Force member she was found in the front seat of a pickup truck and she had been stabbed 42 times husband was a suspect but had an alibi and he was on base at the time of the murder she was

murdered off-base so about three days later the agents went to interview and this was in the Philippines and they went to interview him as a witness not as a subject and so they went to his office they walked into his office and they started talking to him and all of a sudden he jumped up from the desk reaches down to a box next to his desk pulls out a pair five and a quarter inch floppy disk and a pair of pinking shears and he began mutilating the diskettes so the agents said that you know they had to they couldn't jump him right away because he was fending them off with the with the scissors but once once they cut

the scissors away then he started picking up the pieces and they called me in DC and said hey you know obviously there's something on these discs that he doesn't want us to see you know because they were detectives so so they said we're sending them to you you need to get all that you need to find out what's on the disk so while they were in transit I'm talking to all the different law enforcement agencies nobody had a tool or a technique to recover the data I went to the private sector they didn't have a tool or a technique I finally went to the intelligence community NSA was up there for a while and they said

well you know we've got theories on that but we've never tested a theory so it'll take a long time meanwhile our boys been arrested for homicide and we have a speedy trial issue so I went to my buddies over CIA and they said yeah we can we can get the data for you said cool so they said no but we can't tell you how we did it and I said well what the hell good is that and they said well you can you know we're give you the data but we're not going to divulge a classified technique in open court it's a criminal court to murder I said okay well you give me the data and I'll figure that out so I

figured if he gives me the data that the bad guy knows what's on there if I show it to him maybe we can get a confession and trick him into confessing so that was the plan so they had my disk for about two weeks and they called said okay you can come get your damn disks listen what does that mean they said well we can't talk about it on the phone okay so my deputy touches and I we drive around a beltway over to CIA headquarters and we pick up our disk I said so what's going on well we can't get that we can't get the information off the disk so why did you just tell me that well we don't want the

bad guys to know they might be listening that we can't get that data say go okay God thank you so we grabbed our desk we start back around the Beltway and it says to be okay you let all the big boys have a shot you're gonna let me have a shot I said well what are you gonna do he says that long go to scotch tape them back together I said you can't scotch tape disks back together because in a floppy disks you know the head rides right onto Mylar right so if it hits a piece of tape that's going to rip the read/write heads off he says well [ __ ] we don't know if we don't try so we get

back to the office we grab a disk throw some date on it we cut it in quarters tape it on one side throw it back in the jacket and then he whips out my laptop with my external five and a quarter drive and he says we're going to read it I said you ripped my rewrite heads office won't know if we don't try so turned it on and you could hear it crunching and then all of a sudden you could hear the heads flying around on the inside of the chassis won't go into what I said at that point so we pulled it out and when we pulled it out on the top where this place was

that was still nice and smooth on the backside where the tape was the tape was frayed tape is what ripped right read/write heads off so we started brainstorm and I said well what if we take another blank diskette and we sandwich the tape between two two so we tried that so we got a disc put some data on it cut it in quarters taped it on one side covered it up with another blank diskette put them back in the jacket and we'd gone up to the small computer tech Center guys stack of disk drives because we figure a rip the [ __ ] out of them and we turned it on and we were able to do fiscal

reads of the data off the top diskette well cool now we have to flip it over and you know do the backside so we did that we were able to get the data from the backside so now we had to technique the guy had crumpled the disk up so the the real evidence pieces we had to figure out how to deal with them so we had to iron them so we tried irons we tried you know we tried a bunch of techniques didn't work so finally we took a soldering iron put it on a rheostat so we got just the temperature took a piece of brushed aluminum tubing slid over the heating element and then

we rolled it so if you need to do this at home 112 degrees works great okay and would take the creases out also remember the pieces we actually had to diskettes when we started putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle we actually had to diskettes and 23 pieces and we only had two-thirds of each diskette I guess it was kind of an afterthought to get them all you know and so we had two pcs together and some of them didn't have an outer edge or an inner hub so we didn't know how to orient them so I found this stuff called Magnus II it's a real fine ferrous powder suspending an alcohol-based solution you shake it up

throw it on magnetic media the alcohol evaporates and the particles line up with the tracks and sectors and you can actually see your data so we use that and you could actually see the data we could orient them tape them in place and then with a little alcohol brush off the ferrous powder so using that technique we were able to recover anywhere from 85 to 95% of data off each and every piece what we found on the disk was that our boy his wife had actually divorced them and left them and moved back to the United States we found the love letters that he was sending to his ex-wife saying how much he loved her wanting her

to come back and remarry him and then we also found the letters that he was sending to his Filipino girlfriend say I hate how he hated his ex-wife how he loved her and oh by the way will you hire a hitman for me the local police interviewed the girlfriend and on the seventh interview I think she was water martyred she finally confessed that she had two of her cousins and a third guy they split $105 and killed his wife so what we got all that information we presented it to him and and he played he confessed pled guilty of a sentence to life in prison so it's even changed the thoughts and sizes this is really great

uh-huh anyway forensics files did an episode on it so called sheer luck which i think is [ __ ] okay now I want to talk about the cold case so back in 2016 I was asked to join the DB cooper cold-case team how many of you remember DB Cooper okay he's an American legend folk hero right except he's really not so there's been movies there's been songs over the years so DB Cooper is actually his name was Dan Cooper he purchased a ticket the day before Thanksgiving in 1971 from Portland to Seattle for $20 and you can see he actually filled it out Dan Cooper so the press nicknamed him DB cooper by accident so it was actually Dan Cooper

he hijacked a Northwest orient flight 305 the day before Thanksgiving and if today it's still the only unsolved u.s. hijacking he had a bomb on onboard he showed it to the flight at time the stewardess at the time and and demanded two hundred thousand and four parachutes to regular parachutes and two reserves and and then he let the passengers go once they landed in Seattle once the money came onboard and the parachutes he checked the parachutes he let the passengers go and a couple members of the crew kept about four of them and said okay we're going to fly to Mexico and they said well we can't we can't go that far we have to refuel so say okay

well we're going to refuel in Reno and then go on to Mexico and somewhere along the way they think in Washington state they were flying a 727 hasn't stairwell in the back in the ass-end of the aircraft they felt a shaking he was asking how to open stairs he opened the stairs and disappeared and never been heard from again so eight years ago seven years ago Tom Colbert who's our lead investigator comprised the team of over forty law enforcement professionals pellagra firs criminologist FBI agents Intel couple judges handwriting experts forensics experts and they went on this probably a five-year investigation and it culminated with the History Channel airing a four hour episode in July of

2016 so you can catch the reruns it comes all about three or four times a year well the team believed at the time that they had identified who DB Cooper was suspect was Robert rack straw he was 73 years old in 2016 I had an illustrious military career until it wasn't FBI identified him as a suspect as being DB Cooper in 1978 he was kicked out of the army for fraud in 1971 actually what he did was moved up the ranks in the army to a first lieutenant and he beat his wife multiple times they investigated and while they were investigating they found out that you know he lied to get in the army he was actually a high school

dropout so they kicked him out he while he was in the army he was airborne jump school he was a helicopter pilot and you can see his military ID on the left and the DB cooper picture on the left and pretty similar so he does resemble DB Cooper holy God so he was an explosives expert pilot both fixed-wing and helicopter I can't even read it you guys heavy smoker he trained the Shah of Iran's helicopter pilots he was acquitted of murdering his stepfather guy was a real real nice guy felony convictions for check hiking kiting and plane theft and illegal explosives was sentenced to two years in prison and served a bit of jail time in 1964 he

enlisted in the army was an infantry jump school at 67 battered his wife at 68 she was going to divorce him and then some of the seniors in the military went to his wife and convinced her not to not to do that because it would ruin his career so she she stayed with them he did psyops training in helicopter school of 68 deployed to Vietnam for two tours two Distinguished Flying crosses and a Silver Star and promoted to first lieutenant and he did sport jumping with the Vietnamese so besides jump school he was actually a sport parachutist as well so in 1971 he battered his wife they ran the investigation he was kicked out of

the army he disappeared in June and just dropped off off the map there and the day before thanks twenty-fourth is when the hijacking occurred so in the investigation we actually think we know where he was for those three months and it's a whole Bazaar hold another set of circumstances it's really interesting but while he was being arrested by who's in jail and going trial for the explosive explosives and the fraud he was asked by one of the media if he was DB Cooper and he said no I'm afraid of heights so he said well you know you really could be DB Cooper are you DB Cooper he says it could have been could have been you know

so he's never actually denied being DB Cooper so kind of an interesting guy so the on a July of 2016 when the History Channel aired their documentary the FBI closed their case that had been open for 45 years that day so kind of interesting so case until that point had no cyber nexus I wasn't involved in it at all but there are several Cooper DB cooper web sites out there where people are trying to figure out you know civilians loose trying to figure out who DB cooper was and our team was surveilling these web sites and to bloggers with no online history began posting and seemed to have information that only our team had that

we hadn't made public in the documentary yet our team had over 110 at the time unique pieces of evidence that pointed to our guy rack straw and the theory was that rack straw or somebody he was controlling were doing the blogging so they came to me and asked me if I'd put a coat a cold-case team cyber team together for them to see if we could identify who the bloggers were so I joined a team I put an undercover team together four of us from the Army Navy and Air Force with about 130 years investigative experience and we created identities and joined these these websites and so we coordinated the scripts what we were all

going to say to each other hoping that everybody else was watching and would enter into conversation and we draw these bloggers in with us and they we created a document with with to help us surveil and and he took the bait and he downloaded our document and we set up monitoring we can only reconcile it down to a zip code so it didn't help us a whole lot but while that was ongoing we had this guy who was a 32 year old male for Mississippi contacted Colbert and said hey you know I've catfished Robert rack straw and he thinks I'm a 53 year old nurse he said you know are you interested so Colbert said hey would you run this I

said sure so I started running this guy and trying to keep the two opps completely separate so our boy had created a Facebook persona Kelley 53 year old 52 year old nurse from Mississippi said her father had been stationed with rack straw and that she liked military men even 73 year-old men sent flattering messages sent a friend request and and asked him if he was a DB cooper after a month racks drawl accepted her friend request and they started to interact and he had several phone conversations or texting so so I I finally called the guy we were doing an email and text I finally called the guy I said I want to know what your

motivation why are you doing this and turns that he was just bored and was looking for something to do he was married had three kids his wife had actually divorced him because of doing this kind of [ __ ] on the on Facebook but they had actually gotten back together so he didn't have a Facebook persona a real one so he had to do this catfishing so he could still do this [ __ ] so so by the way DB cooper calm if you're interested we have all our interviews all our evidence is on there the whole thing so I had my ex-wife is a private investigator so she did a background investigation on the

guy Kelly and all the information that he had provided me was actually accurate he was he was married three kids thirty two years old he had provided his real address in Alabama and he was a pastor of a church and so was his father I mean okay amen so he was actually she he was actually able to get some some pictures that we didn't have so he started texting and so I said you know I just want you to you know flatter him you know but you know let's keep it clean right well that lasted for a little while so Rex trout had provides Kelly said she would her father had been stationed with Iraq

straw when he was in Fort Benning he said this picture when he was 35 and if you can't see it but he's a lieutenant colonel with all these medals well lieutenant Colonel's up here and a first lieutenant is down here you know so he faked this photograph you know many many years ago and he was kicked out you know in 71 so he so lots of different interactions but he told her that he had actually worked for CIA when he was in Vietnam and we went back to his commanders former commanders and they said that he was actually doing stuff off the books with the CIA and Thailand and Cambodia you know running black ops so that was

helpful he also sent pictures of his yacht that he lives on in San Diego invited her to come stay if you can read the name of his boat it's poverty sucks and in the stateroom on the far right he actually has that lieutenant colonel picture on his walls guy's a piece of work so then all of a sudden my boy starts sending me all these texts that he's exchanging with wrack straw and it got it went from flattery to sexting very quickly and I told him I said listen you know I'm really not interested in in the sexting you know it's not real helpful to the investigation because I was talking to about 20 guys before and

they'd all say they were DB cooper if they thought they were going to get laid you know so so I informed him that if he didn't I was going to terminate him and I wasn't better communicate with him anymore he kept up sending me stuff and I've terminated him as a as a an informant but he continues today to so that he said here's here's a picture of her and a picture of him so this you can't get out of your mind a picture of a 73 year old DB Cooper's penis you know so in other briefings I made it bigger because because of the legend but so I I terminated him a source and then two

weeks later we're running to remember our first op we're still monitoring these Cooper websites my catfisher Joyce the website under his real name and starts to go and have a meltdown about all the stuff and how he catfished Rach straw and we're trying to I'm communicating with them and he's ignoring me saying hey you see don't do that you know because he may be watching well he ignored me and so I called the SIS up and assisted men and I had him kicked off the board and I had the blogger's eye that we thought were rack strong I had them kicked off so they couldn't monitor if what was going on until I got ahold of

him and the way I got ahold of my called his flipping father and told his father what he was doing and say if you don't get him to stop I'm going to tell his wife so that day that seemed to work so sorry about the fonts they were okay when I started but the boys got some some real issues unfortunately we couldn't collude conclude definitively from the cyber portion who DB cooper was but what happened was when the FBI closed the case when they have a case open we're asking for information and yes you know law enforcement is not going to share any information they have in an open case well once they closed the case we said hey you closed the case

so we want access to the case file and they said no so we said okay so we sue them and we want so in we sue them in September we won in January and in February we started to get a hundred to 200 documents out of the case file every month and we still get them today so the investigation continued FBI started releasing these documents so in jail so we start we won a case in January 2017 so we had a couple press releases and a couple had seen the History Channel documentary about the same time in a rerun and they came forward and said hey we have something we want to share with you the husband was in a narrow Club it

was a pilot and his wife was a retired deputy sheriff up in Washington State and rust the husband was confided in by three other members of the Aero Club who were in their late mid to late 70s at that time that they had actually helped DB cooper escape and they had staged this area had worked it out had surveilled it had had a drop zone a plain Cooper was picked up after he jumped out of the 727 and what the pilot took DB cooper rat we don't know they don't know RAC straw so if he's so to separate at this point so the pilot picks up Cooper 50,000 in cash and his bomb they take off and fly and they dump

fifty thousand cash and the bomb in this huge Lake so there were hoping that people would find that and think that he was killed in two jump meanwhile two other guys picked the parachute up in 150 K and they drove out into the wilderness and buried it so once the guy that confided in him had passed away they decided the wife convinced the husband they need to come forward so in 2007 they came forward to the FBI and they blew him off so when they saw the documentary they saw somebody who was interested and they contacted us so I don't know if you could see this but this is the the path there in red the

path and the black is the airliner path and the red is where he jumped out where they dropped the the fifty thousand cash and a bomb and escaped so we thought we could find where where they said they had buried the parachute and the money so we put a dig together a year ago in August and we set a team up there and they were up there for a week and they literally found what we believe are parts of the straps off of a parachute and we we took those we collect we had a couple of retired FBI agents in the dig they collected it as evidence we documented it and we gave it to the FBI and we've

heard nothing since because the case is closed another guy of Vietnam veteran Rick Sherwood was also a member of the same Army Security Agency that rack straw had been in and he was looking at the letters Cooper had sent letters to the afterwards after the hijacking to newspapers Polk and the FBI in the eye for not being able to catch him well there were codes on the bottom of these letters and nobody ever broke the codes so don't know whether they tried but nobody broke the codes well this guy spent months working on the codes and says that he broke them so in the 9th of February this year we had a press conference to close the case and of

course we thought it would be appropriate to do it on the steps of the FBI so so we had a press conference there and if you remember one of the details was that he told our catfisher was that he did CIA operations for the National Security Agency National Security Council so I remember when we were talking to the lead investigator he had he had told me that he had interviewed one of rax drawers former son in laws and he told them that rack straw had actually flown for this for CIA in iran-contra in the 80s ok so my theory is while he was in jail in 70 a t14 first murdering his stepfather and then for the explosives and fraud that

the FBI had him as a suspect I think they solved the case back then and so I think in return for dropping the case he had to fly iran-contra for the CIA so I went to my Intel sources so I'm still pretty connected and my source came back to me and said okay I want you to pay attention to my words we cannot confirm okay that was it so they didn't say we cannot deny or confirm confirm or deny he said we cannot confirm that's code for yeah so our lead Colbert he went to his Intel sources and got the same thing so I think there's a lot of folks that you know avoid jail time you know for a ran

contra okay it's kind of how the government operated in those days so tomorrow what we're going to do is we're going to have a press release how the code is broken so if you guys are interested in this go to DB cooper comm tomorrow and you will be able to and if there's members of the press I have a pre press release and if you promise to hold the story until tomorrow we'll give you the story today okay so and if you're interested in this case in 2016 Colbert wrote this award-winning book on the last master outlaw and this is it I mean it's in depth how do him growing up interviews with his sisters is all this

former you know it's a it's really good book you can get it off DB cooper calm as well so probably the most bizarre complex and I'm only I'm only touching the surface you should really go to the website and see the interview see the newspaper articles see our documentation it's it's really overwhelming I think you'll be convinced as well that Robert Rock straw is DB Cooper I've read several blogs periodically for symmetric so I've written a couple on Cooper and stuff like that so if you're interested you can go to symmetric calm and boy this is just screwed everything so anyway

holy [ __ ] so what we're going to do is if there's any questions what we're going to do is we're going into breaking ground afterwards and I'll try to keep everybody on schedule and so I answer your questions until you don't have any more and I keep going but this thing is locked up again so thanks [Music] you