Without Honor Read Free Page A

preliminary questioning. The wives of the two slain Americans went crazy. They wanted to be with their husbands. The crew only got them calmed down after a long time, Maria Gonzales said. She and first officer Hernando Prañdo managed to administer Valium from the aircraft’s first aid locker, and when they got back to the States the next day they were placed in Miami’s Mt. Sinai Hospital. The following day they were flown to George Washington University Hospital, and by that evening they were home with their families: Bernice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Janice in Georgetown, away from the press so that an agency psychologist, Charles Ruff, could have the time and the privacy for a proper debriefing.

    Each of the other passengers was questioned by the authorities through the following two days. They all stayed at the Miami Airport Hilton at Aeromexico’s expense but under FBI supervision.
    Everyone agreed that the Cuban authorities had treated them with the utmost kindness and understanding during their twenty-four-hour stay at a nearby hotel. The questions were routine, the food passable, and their hosts polite.
    Now back in Miami, the DC-10 was literally stripped in an effort to find out how the weapons were brought on board. The crew was thoroughly questioned, and in Washington files on every single person aboard (so far as such files were available) were gone through with a fine-toothed comb. It wasn’t until the beginning of the second week, however, that it was discovered how Manuel Lopez, the Aeromexico maintenance employee, had brought the weapons onto the plane. But by then he was long gone. It was theorized that the very evening of the hijacking he had made his way to Cuba. Someone thought they recognized him in Havana, but it was another dead end. One of many for Trotter’s team, such as the origin of the Soviet assassination devices both men carried.
    By this time the hijacking was old news. Mines had been placed in the Strait of Hormuz, the Israelis were talking seriously about going back into Lebanon to stop, once and for all, terrorist strikes on their settlements. And there were new rounds of talks with the Russians about the Star Wars defensive measures which Reagan was asking Congress to support with billions in research funds.
    Through all of this Trotter became a very dissatisfied man. He did not like loose ends, and although he was forced by the press of other important business to order most of his investigative team to
stand down from the hijacking and to spend more and more of his own time on an ever-increasing work load, hardly an hour went by when he did not give serious thought to Lawrence Danielle and what his old friend had not told him. Jules and Asher were agency operatives on their way to assignment in Mexico City. That much Danielle would verify. But beyond that there was nothing as to the nature of their assignment, or if they were killed because of it. Trotter was enough of an old hand to know when to stand down, when not to poke his nose into areas closed to the bureau, but it galled him nevertheless that he had been used to take all the heat away from Langley. His career hadn’t really suffered for not having brought the hijackers’ real motives to light, but there was a blemish on his record. And if there was anything Trotter despised, it was lack of precision.
    Â 
    The last of the hijacking business, at least as far as concerned the bureau, came late on Friday, November 15, a full thirty-three days after the hijacking, in the form of a meeting of the minds, in a manner of speaking. It was a meeting that nevertheless was on an informal basis and was therefore never recorded. Lawrence Danielle, who had become quite aloof from the FBI’s investigation after the first few days’ flush of information and speculation, showed up at the Alexandria home of an angry Trotter who was willing, able, and just about ready to bring pressure to bear on the