Eye of the Storm

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles

May 20 Document LAO-00511873

From: SA Max Kanofsky

To: SAC D.C. Rolston

Re: Explanation of breach in X-ray weapons detection for Flight 246

In reply to your inquiry of May 17, LAO-00511741, regarding the security breach at Gen. Rafael Buelna International Airport in Mazatlan.

As reconstructed by our Mexico City office with information from their counterparts in the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) as well as the Federal Aviation Authority (USFAA) and the Secretaría de Comunicaciónes y Trasportes (SCT):

At about 7:00 pm on Monday, the 13th of May, the two hijackers presented tickets under the names J. Rivera and H. Rivera for Airmex Flight 246, departing Mazatlan at 7:50 pm for Hermosillo. They checked a duffel and a large suitcase onto the flight. A few minutes later one of the men, instead of proceeding through metal detection with two heavy carry-on bags, exited the terminal. He walked 100 meters to the Aeronáutica Civíl terminal, where he passed through to the ramp as though departing on a private plane. Then within the security fence, he made his way back toward the main terminal building, where the passengers were filing out to board Flight 246, a Fairchild Metroliner. The gate is at ground level, open to the air, approximately 40 meters from the aircraft door. He and his partner could see one another through the cement grillework that serves as a wall between terminal and ramp, so it was a simple matter to time his appearance beside the agent at the gate just as the partner handed both boarding passes to her. As they were together, she assumed both men had come out the door from the terminal’s secure area. Thus the contents of his pockets and the two bags he carried (containing at least two handguns and an uncertain array of radio receivers), bypassed security altogether.

Descriptions of the two match those obtained from passengers and First Officer Vogel on Tuesday. Photo identifications of J. and H. Rivera are presumed to have been stolen or forged. Subsequent to questioning by the SSP, the gate agent has not been charged criminally. Mexican authorities and Airmex Airline’s security department were unable to obtain evidence as to whether flight attendant Esperanza San Martín knowingly witnessed and failed to report the breach of security.

-- M. Kanofsky, SA

1 Monday evening, 7:15 Mountain Time

I wish I could say I thought they were up to no good the moment I laid eyes on them, but to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, there were no ominous chords on the sound track when they boarded. No dark shadows. No furtive glances, no stubbly beards. In fact, if the younger and better dressed of the two had been cast in a movie, he’d have played the hero, not the bad guy. Trim, with a dark mustache like Zorro, in an expensive-looking beige suit over a chocolate colored knit shirt, he peered into the cockpit as he boarded. He actually bent down between our seats, checking out the panel. But it’s not uncommon for pax to do that, the ones who are pilots themselves or know something about planes; though they usually make some sort of chummy remark. This guy said nothing.

In short, I can’t say there was anything out of the ordinary about him. Nothing alarming anyway. He did seem to scan the panel as though the eyes hidden by those dark glasses were looking for a specific piece of equipment. That was what made me tag him later, along with the chunkier, pockmarked guy behind him, as our invisible captors. My glance at both of them had lasted only a second.

McGuire was in the left seat and I was in the right, running through our pre-start checklist. I’d already briefed him on the half dozen gauges and backup systems that the previous crew noted as inoperative or intermittent—no more than usual for these aging Metroliners—and we were running through the settings of switches and controls. We had that routine down to the syllable, because nearly half my trips since hiring on with Airmex eight months ago had been under his command and tutelage. Not by chance; I’d purposely continued to request this route. Bud McGuire could be taciturn, but never an asshole like some captains. He shared what he knew without making you feel dumb. I’d learned more from him than from all the other Airmex captains I’d had, combined—about what it was like to drive everything from jet fighters to twin turbos to jumbo jets, and about the unions and management and the FAA and you name it.

Waiting for our flight plan clearance, I asked McGuire if he’d spent his three off days in Mexico or gone back home to Los Angeles. Cuernavaca, he said. I didn’t ask who he’d taken to Cuernavaca. Foreclosing that line of discussion—we both knew I didn’t want to hear about it—he asked about the two overnights I’d worked back to back, after just one day off. They hadn’t been eventful.

Stand-up overnights, we call them, same as small carriers in the U.S. do. In both countries, regionals operate on a close budget. They hire minimum crews and work everyone the maximum number of days, with few backup personnel available if someone gets sick or suddenly quits. A crew that departed Mazatlan, our hub, on their first leg at 7:00 or 8:00 pm would fly a couple of legs, wait at an overnight station till 5:00 am, fly another leg or two back to Mazat and then go off duty for twelve hours. You get used to sleeping during the day, so if you flew nothing but those trips your only problem would be adjusting back to normalcy for your four days off after six wacky nights. However, it rarely works that way. Usually you’ve got a couple of those stand-up overnights mixed in among flying days and sleeping nights. Pretty soon you can’t sleep at all when you’re supposed to, and you’re lucky if you stay awake in the cockpit.

This would be my third consecutive stand-up overnight: Mazat—Hermosillo—Chihuahua at night, then back to Hermo and Mazat in the morning. You don’t request such schedules for the money; the money sucks. You do it for the hours, building flight time. Sometimes it feels like you’re doing time—like I imagine an Army tour of duty.

The story of my life: waiting. For a plane to be refueled, passengers to board. Waiting for Centro to issue a departure clearance. Or waiting for the next flight. Waiting for something to happen that would shake me and Debbie out of our rut. Waiting for the right woman to take her place. Mainly, waiting for those hours to build so I could get on some kind of real career track. This was getting old, humping aluminum around a circuit of Mexican cities no one ever heard of. I had another year or more, before I’d qualify for jet training with a major airline. Or maybe something with variety and a challenge, like U.S. Customs or the Drug Enforcement Agency. I was entertaining that idea, anyway.

I’d slept today, in theory: I dozed in the shade by the motel pool a couple of hours, then watched some TV and took another siesta in the room. Added to the midnight nap on the couch in Wa-wa, you could say I got the same amount of sleep as anyone else in the course of 24 hours. I felt like shit, thanks, which was why I wasn’t sure if I’d really seen what I saw on the news or dreamt it. I asked Bud: Did you catch anything on the tube about Mirandel’s granddaughter being kidnapped? I’d been channel surfing when my attention was caught by the Airmex logo in a news segment. The grandchild of our company president had been kidnapped. Cameras showed the house—I didn’t know if it was Señor Mirandel’s or the house of the daughter whose child was missing—with black sedans coming and going.

I haven’t seen TV or a paper for days, Bud replied, his mind elsewhere. He was watching the ground crew push out the 727 ahead of us. I knew he’d flown 2s just like it for Braniff. It had to hurt when he stepped down from those sleek jets, to this twin turboprop commuter.

That’s what I heard, unless I was dreaming. I wasn’t. I remembered thinking when I saw the house on the news, it doesn’t always pay to belong to the aristocracy. That’s why they all have bodyguards. You had to wonder, with so many servants and half of them armed, how anyone got close enough to the child to snatch her.

Not that I’d know anything about their life style. I’m not Mexican, let alone rich. Born and raised in Texas. Still, Spanish was literally mi lengua materna and good enough to get me hired down here at $29,000 a year while most guys with fresh multiengine commercial tickets were still instructing for sixteen bucks an hour or less, and lucky if they could log fifteen hours in a six day week.

And most fledgling pilots, when they did get a first officer job, wouldn’t be seated beside a Bud McGuire. He was in his late forties with 13,000 hours. He’d flown in the Navy, then with Braniff, lost his ride when they shut down, and took this left seat with Airmex because, he explained, he liked Mexico better than the States. Maybe so, but he continued to live in Los Angeles and he’d never learned Spanish worth a damn. Although all our flights were within Mexico, it was like he was flying international while based in L.A. He commuted on a company pass, and I suppose he had the best of both worlds, but if I ever got to the point where I knew as much as Bud, I’d want to be paid a hell of a lot more than Airmex’s scale.

On our briefing for this flight, the area forecast had shown low pressure over San Diego with a warm front extending east from there to western Texas, expected to move north. It would bring instrument meteorological conditions across northern Mexico and southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico, with likelihood that at least 40 per cent of the area would get thunderstorms and rain through the evening hours.

A convective bulletin warned of surface winds greater than 50 knots, embedded thunderstorms in cumulonimbus with tops as high as 40,000 feet, severe turbulence and hail. Happily, all of that was forecast well north of Hermosillo, mostly over the United States. We might encounter instrument conditions and light to moderate turbulence on our approach to Hermo, but we’d be clear of the storms themselves.

The pax were aboard and seated. Esperanza pulled up the airstairs and secured the door. Show time, Bud said. I started the right engine, then the left. She shut the bi-fold door behind us. I locked it and heard her make her pre-takeoff announcement in Spanish and English.

Esperanza San Martín was our cabin crew, as usual. Bud and I drew the same assignment about half the time—he bid for longer stretches off than I did—but lately Esperanza and Bud had been pulling identical trips. I assumed this was no coincidence. On overnights they’d begun disappearing together, but they kept it private. I never saw them touch, let alone kiss. They didn’t present themselves as a couple. Having once rebuffed me, I guess she was being discreet.

It wouldn’t be like Bud to say anything about it—at least not to me. That one word reply, Cuernavaca, had been a lot of sharing for him. As friendly as we were, I still didn’t really know him. Nor he me. We were buddies here in the cockpit with small talk and some mutual joshing that was fun, but the only thing between us that meant anything was the training he gave me on every flight.

We taxied to the runway 26 hold short line and completed our run-up. Now we were waiting for the good word from tower. Sterile cockpit, meaning no chitchat until we were launched. My mind was 512 nautical miles away, in El Paso, where the time was 8:25 and Debbie would be coming in the door from work. Mondays the store was open until 8:00. Her dinner would consist of whatever Master Robbie hadn’t consumed of the plain cheese pizza from Domino’s that was his standing order.

I was not, I told myself for the umpteenth time, not in love with Debbie. There was an Esperanza in my future somewhere. I just hadn’t met her yet. Unless ... but I didn’t let myself think about that. Either way, I was in a waiting game.

In the background, Esperanza rattled off her final pre-takeoff announcement. As she strapped into her jump seat, she was face to face with the man in seat 1A.

Tower cleared us for takeoff, right turn to a 290 heading with initial climb to 4,000 feet. I was the pilot flying. Two minutes later, the controller handed us off. McGuire called Mazat Center, saying, Airmex 246 out of nineteen hundred for four, into a gorgeous sunset.

The center controller responded, "a la puesta del sol, then climb and maintain sixteen, uno seis thousand." I continued the climb to 16,000 feet. As we leveled off after ten minutes, McGuire punched the button to turn off the seat belt lights in back.

On cue, Esperanza’s dulcet voice asked the pax in Spanish, then English, to keep their belts fastened when seated. She promised cafe o refrescas pronto.

2 Monday evening, 8:00 Mountain Time

To call her a dark haired beauty with a figure other women would kill her for wouldn’t do her justice. Even her flaws were flawless, like the beauty mark just above one corner of her mouth. And she was a woman of mystery. Your name is a mouthful, I’d said in Spanish, the first time I tried to flirt with her. "Tu nombre es un bocado, Es-per-an-za. ¿Como te llaman tus amigos?"

My friends call me Esperanza, she had answered. In English.

And recently, when I asked why she was flying with Airmex instead of a major line, the real reasons must have been more interesting than the explanation she gave me. She said her widowed mother had depended on her—emotionally more than financially. ("Mi madre era viuda, she sighed. Como la mia," I echoed—mine’s a widow, too.) But most girls in a situation like that would sign the first contract they could get with an international. The bigger companies were all hiring. She was bilingual. And she was a knockout. What held her back? Even before she fell for Bud McGuire, there had to have been more going on with her than she’d let on. She was alluring; I, for one, was allured. Truth be told, I couldn’t get her off my mind.

She was my age, too—a year or two younger, in fact—too young for McGuire. But I guess a captain possesses a special attraction. Maybe it was those greying temples or his blue eyes.

Whenever I began to speak Spanish with her she always answered in English. Those four words about her mother being a widow had been almost the only exception, the one time she let me take her to dinner—and no further. It was a month ago—she and I had flown this same leg with a captain neither of us liked—when our plane was suddenly grounded in Hermosillo, the Chihuahua leg cancelled. We ditched Capitan Jaime and she asked me to escort her to the Chinese restaurant near the hotel. Pinch me, I thought, I’m dreaming.

Esperanza San Martín must have been the only flight attendant on Airmex who didn’t have a husband and kids to go home to after every trip. And that widowed mother was past tense; she had died last year of cancer. Any girl who wasn’t married or otherwise tied down would choose a cabin job for Mexicana or a U.S. company, with their long overseas trips and good benefits. So the line Why’s a gorgeous single woman working for a short-hop, low-pay company like this? was totally appropriate. But it got me nowhere.

I’ll tell jou, she said, and then didn’t. She didn’t explain but she did tell me the brief story of her life and I told her mine, which was about as far as we got. The first thing I thought of when my mother died: Now I can travel as much as I want, jou know? No family at all to worry about. But I haven’ decided if I maybe go back to school and become a medical doctor. For that I need one jear of courses that I could take while stayin’ with the company part time, flyin’ short hops.

That’d be smart. Do it, I thought: med school, then a residency in brain surgery and you can support us both. So how long had she been a widow? Did your father die recently or when you were a kid?

Oh. Furrowing her pretty brow, as though I’d asked more than a simple factual question, she weighed the pros and cons of giving me the whole answer. Then, for some reason—was it the glass of Sangría or was there a brief moment when she considered we might share more than the dinner?—she honored me with the truth. Not that long ago, actually. In fact, he isn’ dead. We’re jus’ not good at keepin’ in touch.

I got the idea her folks had been divorced, but she went on to explain. Her mother wouldn’t have been the legal viuda even if the father had died, because she wasn’t the legal marida. He had another wife. I wasn’t sure where to go with that. Are you fond of him?

Oh, he’s a swee’heart. But I don’ expec’ we’ll stay in touch unless I take him up on his offer to pay for medical school. I know his phone number but I don’ know who’s gonna answer, and I don’ have anywhere to write to him withou’ raisin’ questions. I thing about when he gets sick, jou know, he passed eighty jears, if he’s dyin’ or somethin’ I don’ thing any of his other chil’ren or granchil’ren would call me or write to me, if they even know I exis’.

Do you think they know?

She laughed. Well, some of them do because about five jears ago he was with us and he couln’ breathe. My mother and I took him to the hospital. His lungs were all full of blood and they’re goin’ to take him into surgery, jou know? So he told me to call one of his sons and say I was an emplojee of the hospital. So then a whole buncha his sons and daughters and one or two granchil’ren who are about my age came right away to visit him in his room. And there’s me and my mother—her eyes twinkled—cryin’, holdin’ his hand.

You’re kidding.

"It was