As he drove through the small hours of the Californian night, Gary Devore
insisted to his wife Wendy: “I’m pumping pure adrenaline.”
“This was not a normal phone call… I felt he was warning me,” Wendy later
recalled. “I love you,” she had said, expectantly.
“See you later,” Gary mumbled. It was the last time Wendy Oates-Devore would
ever speak to her husband, the 55-year-old Hollywood screenwriter who’d
worked on major projects with stars such as Kurt Russell, Christopher Walken
and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had vanished. Swallowed, it seemed, by the
desert highway.
Gary had been returning from actress friend Marsha Mason’s New Mexico
residence where he had just finished a screenplay he’d told his wife would
be the hardest-hitting piece of film Hollywood had ever seen. A year later,
in the summer of 1998, his car was located by a police dive team in a
shallow aqueduct following a tip-off from an ‘amateur sleuth’. Inside the
vehicle, belted into the front seat and dressed in Gary’s cowboy clothing,
sat a skeletal corpse.
The Californian Highway Patrol wrote a 158-page report declaring it an
accident: case closed. And that was that… except for the fact that many of
those who knew Gary Devore remain convinced that the official investigation
was a whitewash, that Gary was murdered, and that the US government itself
has been trying to wipe clean its fingerprints from the case.
Gary’s script, a remake of the 1949 heist movie The Big Steal, was to
be an action thriller set against the backdrop of the 1989 United States
invasion of Panama and the overthrow of its dictator, former CIA asset
Manuel Noriega. It was to be Gary’s directorial debut and expectations
were high. Gary was being assisted in his research by his old friend Charles
‘Chase’ Brandon, veteran CIA case officer, first cousin to Tommy Lee Jones;
also the Agency’s new public face in Hollywood and – according to Gary’s
publicist Michael Sands – “the real Jack Bauer”, referring to the fictional
super-agent of the television show 24.
However, the screenplay was acutely critical of US foreign policy,
presenting a picture of a country ravaged by the US military and in which US
Army intelligence organises the theft of Noriega’s drug money. An early
draft obtained by the authors gives its main characters lines like: “Shit,
we’re really kicking the crap outta this little bitty country to get one man
[Noriega]. It’s embarrassing.”, “Starting a war you can’t lose is good for
morale.”, and “a little scrimmage to make the varsity look good”.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE
The official ‘accident’ explanation of Gary’s death is certainly creative,
if nothing else. By the police’s own calculations, in order to have ended up
in the aqueduct, Gary would have had to have driven in excess of 110km/h
without headlights – they had been deliberately turned off, the
investigation found – the wrong way up a major highway for 3.2km, unnoticed,
and through the only gap in the road rail – a mere 5m wide – all without
causing any damage to either rail or car. “Evel Knievel on his best night
couldn’t do that,” snorts Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield.
Officially, the wreckage was discovered following some savvy sleuthing by a
laid-off accident specialist from aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. Gary’s
ex-wife – and Babylon 5 star – Claudia Christian finds the
circumstances suspicious, telling us via email: “My friends (one of whom is
an ex-marine) took infrared equipment to the aqueduct where he was found
days after he was missing and found nothing… so they were convinced that his
car and that body was planted there.”
A number of things were missing from Gary’s car – the laptop computer
containing The Big Steal, the gun and ammunition he always carried
with him on long trips… and his hands.
Following protests from Wendy, police discovered hand bones on the back seat
and in the silt at the bottom of the car, but none of them included Gary’s
deformed pinky finger, which would have confirmed the body’s identity. Still
unsatisfied, Wendy commissioned a second autopsy by Dr David Posey
(assisted by Dr Robert Byrd), but she claims their report never turned up
and she has since been in a state of limbo, unsure even whether the body was
that of her husband.
We secured a copy of Posey’s report, which states the body was indeed Gary
Devore’s. It also confirmed startling rumours that the hand bones provided
by the authorities had been over two hundred years old. What did these old
hands imply? A cock-up at the original coroner’s office? A police tactic to
ease a grieving widow’s mind? Or signs of a professional assassination?
Posey agreed with the original verdict that exact cause of death was
“undetermined” but with the chilling addendum: “homicide”.
BAD COMPANY
The discovery of Gary’s vehicle was punctuated by another sinister moment –
the presence of a mysterious, unmarked black helicopter. The incident was
recalled by Mike Burridge, then public information officer for the Santa
Barbara Sheriff’s Department: “As we were wrapping up for the afternoon, I
was standing next to the cameraman from a national network [CNN], and he
tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘Hey, is that your helicopter?’”
Burridge looked up to see a chopper approaching, “at a high rate of speed,
almost as if it was following the path of the aqueduct, and very low”.
“That’s not ours,” said Burridge, “is it yours?”
“No,” replied the cameraman, “we don’t have a helicopter like that.”
Burridge was able to see “somebody in the back who was taking pictures”, and
suggested to the cameraman that he respond in kind. However, “as soon as he
put the camera back on the tripod, and panned down that way, and began to
record, the helicopter took off. He [the cameraman] told me when he looked
at it, it didn’t have any markings, there was no tail number, no end number,
everybody inside the helicopter was wearing dark clothing, it was completely
black. I could see the majority of that with my naked eye, it was that
close… That obviously raised suspicions, about… who was in that aircraft.”
Even stranger, the next day Burridge received an unsolicited phone call from
a man named ‘Anderson’ identifying himself as an Air Force Public
Information Officer. According to Burridge, “Anderson said that they [the
Air Force] were receiving a lot of radio interference from that area out at
[Edwards Air Force Base]… so they sent a crew over to check it out.” Thus
was explained the presence of the mysterious chopper. Soon after, however, a
media agency learned of the incident and decided to call the number
‘Anderson’ had given to Burridge, but the number didn’t check out. Puzzled,
Burridge decided to enquire with the Air Force Public Information Office,
which replied, “No, we’ve never heard that name [Anderson] and we don’t know
what you’re talking about.”
This wasn’t the only blind alley Burridge trod during the Devore
investigation. In further testimony – corroborated by Wendy and her friends
– he explains how the CIA’s ‘Chase’ Brandon showed up at Wendy’s house just
days after the disappearance and shut himself in Gary’s office. A friend of
Wendy’s had gone into the room to find a sweater and saw Brandon bent over
Gary’s computer. Shortly afterwards, they discovered that the computer had
frozen indefinitely, and thus vanished the entirety of Gary’s research and
earlier drafts of The Big Steal.
Concerned about Brandon’s actions, Burridge decided to ask some questions.
However, the Sheriff’s Department “had a very difficult time communicating
with that individual [Brandon] to the point that he actually refused to
return our telephone calls and our letters”. In exasperation, Burridge
enlisted the help of the FBI, who agreed to interview Brandon –
astonishingly – at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, about the events
that took place in Wendy’s home. The FBI reported back to Burridge that
there was no need to follow up this avenue of enquiry.
What was Brandon doing in Gary’s office? Taking a quiet moment to remember
an old friend, as he explained to Wendy? Conducting his own investigation
into the disappearance, mindful, perhaps, that close family are often the
most likely suspects? Or was he frying sensitive information he’d provided
to Gary about CIA activity in Panama?
SPY GAME
According to Wendy, Gary had become “very disturbed” by his research into
Panama, especially over US weapons-testing and alleged money-laundering. He
had once told her that the US had used illegal laser weapons to split a bus
full of Panamanian civilians from front to back and then buried them in
unmarked graves. To this day, Wendy can’t shake the memory of her husband in
his dimly lit office one evening, uncharacteristically hunched at his desk,
head in hands: “The deeper you look, the dirtier it gets,” he had said.
It is well established that the US piloted newly developed technologies such
as the Stealth Fighter, the Apache Attack Helicopter and laser-guided
missiles in Panama. But there also exists multiple witness testimony
describing the Pentagon’s use of experimental particle beam weapons attached
to military aircraft. Professor Cecilio Simon of the University of Panama
describes combatants who “literally melted with their guns”, lasered
automobiles, and “poison darts which produce massive bleeding”. Former US
Attorney General Ramsey Clark was outraged by the Pentagon’s “use of
sophisticated weaponry merely to test it”. “Above all, though,” said Clark,
“there was a use beyond any conceivable necessity of just sheer fire power…
just an excessive use of force beyond any possible justification.”
Curiously, during the year that Gary was missing, three men in civilian
clothes with a ‘military look’ approached Wendy, out of the blue, as she was
emerging from a driving test and said in no uncertain terms that the subject
of Panama, as a “dangerous and dirty event”, was best avoided, before
leaving abruptly.
Remembering her brother, Gary’s sister Judy says: “Since the time he was a
small boy he wanted to be, and fantasised about being, a cowboy.” But Gary’s
self-styled cowboy image went deeper than his frontier-style getup: beneath
the Stetson was a genuine tough guy, not to mention ladies’ man. But who
really was Gary Devore, and what was the true nature of his relationship
with the US intelligence community?
Wendy says she once saw “strange symbols” on her husband’s computer. When
she asked what they were, Gary said they were “encryption codes”, but, not
being computer literate at the time, she asked nothing more. Claudia
Christian makes a similar claim: “I recall when we were married I walked
into his office unannounced and saw what appeared to be Cyrillic writing on
his computer. He was furious at me for disturbing (catching?) him.”
A few months after Gary’s disappearance, Wendy received a visit from an
alleged retired employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) – the highly
secretive intelligence agency specialising in intercepting communications
and deciphering encrypted information. He expressed to her his view that
Gary’s disappearance was somehow connected with high-level public spy
scandals dating from the mid-1990s, such as the selling of state secrets to
Russia by the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen. He told
Wendy: “We never kill our own,” but expressed his concerns that Gary might
have fallen into the hands of Russian mobsters linked to US intelligence. He
advised Wendy to look more deeply into Gary’s background and, upon checking
her missing husband’s finances, she discovered a million dollar pension fund
in government bonds. “We all get that,” said the NSA man, cryptically.
The NSA informs us that Gary did not work for them, but refuses to release
any intelligence information relating to him either, citing a series of
statutes relating to espionage, security and encryption.
STEALTH
In the early 1990s, Gary went to a military base in the Nevada desert while
he was working on an abandoned film called Stealth for the producer
Walter Mirisch. Wendy only found out about her husband’s trip when she
stumbled across a photo in their attic of Gary sitting in a Stealth plane in
a quonset hut structure. In his autobiography, Mirisch claims he himself
took a trip to Tonopah Test Range in the desert in connection with the same
film. The base, also known as Area 52, was known for housing Lockheed’s
F-117 Nighthawk, which was used to great effect in the 1991 Gulf War. It
seems likely that Gary’s trip to Nevada was also to the Tonopah base,
raising more question marks about his level of security clearance.
Taking us even further into the Twilight Zone is Wendy’s friend Karen
Prisant Ellis, a psychic who had worked with the police on various cases. It
was through Ellis, shortly after Gary’s disappearance, that Wendy was
contacted by a Columbian man; here we will refer to him only as ‘Carlos’.
After months without any leads, intrigued and desperate, Wendy agreed to
meet with Carlos in the presence of Ellis at a retreat in Escondido. There,
Wendy listened as Carlos told her how he had met Gary while working at an
underground facility operated by defence contractor Rocketdyne where locator
chips had been implanted in each of their right pectoral muscles. Carlos
claimed he had been recruited by the CIA based on his expertise in
electromagnetics and that it had taken him 10 years to disengage from the
Agency after having his chip illegally removed. Carlos told Wendy he had
been watching the Devore case unfold on TV, that he was dying of cancer due
to the nature of his work at Rocketdyne, and that he wanted her to know that
he thought Gary was a good man. “Many weirdos came out of the woodwork at
the time,” Wendy explains, “so I didn’t take much notice of Carlos. But the
man was clearly close to death… Why would a dying man spend his final days
telling me, a total stranger, a false life story?”
One of Rocketdyne’s biggest claims to fame – or rather notoriety – is the
partial nuclear meltdown which occurred at the company’s main Santa Susana
facility in 1959, along with numerous toxic spills before and since that
time. A state-funded study estimated that the meltdown released up to 300
times more radiation than the infamous accident at Three-Mile Island and may
have triggered in excess of 260 cancer cases among Rocketdyne employees. If
the cancer-stricken Carlos really had worked for Rocketdyne in California,
then he almost certainly would have spent considerable time at the Santa
Susana facility. Might Carlos have been among those contaminated?
On the subject of underground bases, Gary’s car was discovered at the very
heart of America’s military-industrial-complex – Southern California’s
‘Aerospace Valley,’ so dubbed by locals for its numerous sensitive military
and corporate aerospace installations. Only a 10-minute car ride from the
scene of Gary’s ‘accident’ sits the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, birthplace
of the U-2, SR-71 and F-117. To the north sprawls the sensitive Edwards Air
Force Base, a stone’s throw from which is the Denny’s Diner where Gary ate
during his last known movements. It was in the diner’s unmonitored car park
that Wendy suspects her husband was accosted. At the extreme east of the
valley, McDonnell Douglas maintains an electromagnetic research base, and to
the west, allegedly plunging 42 levels deep into the foothills of the
Tehachapi Mountains, sits Northrop’s mysterious ‘Anthill’ facility where –
according to people who claim to have worked at the base – hovering orbs
patrol the corridors keeping tabs on employees and force fields operate in
place of doors.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
If there is even a shred of truth in stories of Gary’s links to black
projects and the NSA, then the motives for ‘disappearing’ him will surely
never be known.
Then there’s the CIA. How close was Gary to the Agency? His relationship
with Brandon goes back to 1986, when Gary was best man at Tommy Lee Jones’s
wedding, and he spoke with Brandon frequently by phone in the weeks leading
up to his disappearance. Brandon told entertainment website UGO.com: “I’ve
been an Agency officer for 30 years, 25 years of that undercover… It’s not a
job or a career. It’s a lifestyle, a life of deception. You have to go out
and procure information and find people who are willing to work for you.
You’re not an agent, but rather an officer who finds agents to provide
information.” Was Gary one of Brandon’s recruits? If so, he certainly
wouldn’t have been the first Agency man in Tinseltown (see “The CIA in
Hollywood”).
But would the intelligence services really murder an established
screenwriter over a movie? It would be highly irregular. And yet, to the
Agency, with a newly bolstered presence in Hollywood, Gary Devore’s Big
Steal might have represented a sudden and inconvenient shift in
political stance from a cowboy with a reputation for sticking to his guns.
What was to stop Gary from blabbing to the press during the promotion of
The Big Steal? And if the film was a success for the new director, then
what might he be tempted to make next?
On the other hand, maybe it was, as the authorities insist, just a terrible
accident. Maybe Gary, after a gruelling 12-hour drive, had made a series of
foolhardy decisions (turning off his headlights, driving the wrong way up
the highway at speed). Maybe; but this official version of events will never
satisfy many of those who knew Gary best.
“I think he was killed,” says Claudia Christian. “He never would have fallen
asleep on the road, he was a long distance driver, that’s what he did to
think out scripts… he would drive for days on end.”
The local and national print media stopped asking questions when Gary’s car
was discovered. A few television programmes have since discussed the case,
though nothing has been broadcast about the intelligence service link. In
2001, E! Entertainment made an episode on Gary as part of its Mysteries
and Scandals series, which included frank discussion proposing the
possibility of CIA involvement. The filmmakers say that the show was pulled
from broadcast at the last minute. We contacted the then head of E! for an
explanation, but, although initially open to discussion, she abruptly cut
off contact when we mentioned the CIA.
As for Wendy Oates-Devore, she never used to believe in conspiracy theories,
but the nature of Gary’s disappearance haunts her. She has asked countless
questions but received no satisfactory answers. “You don’t want a
Rashomon ending,” she says, referring to the multiple interpretations of
what has actually transpired in Kurosawa’s famous film. Sadly, in the case
of Gary Devore, a Rashomon ending is all we have; that, and one
seemingly inescapable truth – as the man himself once said: “The deeper you
look, the dirtier it gets.”
THE CIA IN HOLLYWOOD
The CIA has had a long history in Hollywood. During the 1950s, CIA asset
Luigi G Luraschi used his position as head of censorship at Paramount
Studios to bring film content in line with the Agency’s ideals. Scenes that
portrayed the US in a bad light were cut; films such as High Noon
(1952) were prevented from receiving certain industry awards; and well
dressed ‘negroes’ were placed in lavish on-screen environments to suggest
that the US didn’t have a race problem. In order to tame or otherwise
subvert their content, the CIA also covertly assisted on the film
adaptations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and
Animal Farm (1955), as well as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American
(1958).
In the mid-1990s, the Agency established its entertainment liaison office,
headed by Chase Brandon, supposedly as part of its more ‘open’ remit. In
truth, the CIA’s role in Hollywood remains decidedly clandestine. In the
case of CIA-assisted productions like Bad Company (2002), 24
(2001–), and Spy Game (2001), not even isolated comments exist from
anyone involved to indicate what happened on set (although we do know the
CIA withdrew its endorsement from the latter). Others are less bashful, as
with Alias (2001–6) star Jennifer Garner, who appeared unpaid in a
recruitment ad for her friends at Langley.
The CIA may even have used entertainment for psychological warfare purposes
and to develop real-world scenarios, as Texas State Professor Tricia Jenkins
heard in a series of sensational interviews for her forthcoming book For
Our Spies Only. Michael Frost Beckner, creator of the TV series The
Agency (2001–03), recalls that Brandon phoned him to suggest a plotline
involving biometric identification technology. When Beckner questioned
Brandon on the story’s realism, Brandon told him to “put it in there,
whether we have it or not. Terrorists watch TV too. It’ll scare them.” For
another episode, Brandon suggested using a Predator drone outfitted with a
Hellfire missile to kill a Pakistani general, asking Beckner to “see how it
plays out, how you could make it work”. One month after the show aired, the
CIA assassinated a Pakistani general using Hellfire missiles from a
Predator drone. “I’m not a big conspiracy theorist,” says Beckner, “but
there seems to have been a unique synergy there.”