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- <text id=89TT3299>
- <title>
- Dec. 18, 1989: Grapevine
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Dec. 18, 1989 Money Laundering
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 42
- Grapevine
- </hdr><body>
- <p> BYE-BYE, BLACKBIRD. It's the world's highest-flying
- (100,000 ft. plus), fastest (almost 3,000 m.p.h.), most secret
- spy plane. But the Air Force has decided to ground the remaining
- six or eight SR-71 Blackbirds and stuff them into museums. Over
- its 25-year operational life, the Blackbird succeeded in
- avoiding more than 1,000 attempts to shoot it down during
- operations around the perimeter of the Soviet Union and over
- China, Viet Nam, Cuba and the Middle East. Pentagon officials
- say advanced photo-reconnaissance satellites can do the
- Blackbird's job more cheaply and efficiently.
- </p>
- <p> CALIFORNIA, HERE WE COME. The end of the much vaunted
- Massachusetts economic miracle has become the Bay Area's gain.
- Silicon Valley firms are raiding top talent from such faltering
- firms as Wang, Data General and Digital Equipment that once
- reigned supreme on Boston's Route 128. But no matter how eager
- the Eastern refugees are to begin their new jobs, many must wait
- until next summer. The reason: a six-month waiting list for
- moving vans heading west.
- </p>
- <p> THANK GOD FOR STAR WARS. Whom does Vatican Secretary of
- State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli credit for the outbreak of new
- thinking in the U.S.S.R.? "Ronald Reagan obligated the Soviet
- Union to increase its military spending to the limits of
- insupportability," Casaroli told TIME. "He made everyone
- understand that rearmament was a dead-end street." The
- Cardinal's statement represents some new thinking in Rome. Never
- an admirer of Star Wars, Casaroli once urged Reagan to moderate
- his enthusiasm for a military buildup -- and the space shield
- in particular -- for fear of a war breaking out.
- </p>
- <p> DOUBLE TROUBLE. The mysterious hijacker D.B. Cooper became
- a legend in 1971 after he bailed out of the rear door of a
- Northwest Airlines jet, probably over Washington State, with
- $200,000 he had extracted by making a bomb threat. He and the
- money vanished. Four months later, Richard Floyd McCoy, a former
- Green Beret, hijacked a United Airlines jet and bailed out of
- the rear door over Utah with $500,000. Both men scribbled the
- phrase "No funny stuff" and forced the planes to land so that
- money and four parachutes could be brought on board. Now two
- former federal agents in Salt Lake City are hawking a manuscript
- claiming that McCoy was also Cooper. Ex-FBI agent Russell
- Calame, who originally investigated the case, and ex-probation
- officer Bernie Rhodes, who spent four years reinterviewing
- people, say they have evidence linking the two men. McCoy was
- killed in a gunfight with FBI agents in 1974 after escaping from
- a federal prison in Pennsylvania, where he was serving a 45-year
- sentence for skyjacking.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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