They are the 16 and 45 of the 7 January 1950. In the B-2 dormitory of the prestigious West Point military academy, a telephone rings insistently. Peter Hains, a young cadet left in the dormitory that occupies the north side of that imposing structure dating back to the American Revolution, still "guarding" America from the west bank of the Hudson River, responds. The voice on the other end of the receiver is agitated and unfriendly, looking for Richard Colvin Cox, a cadet of the 1949 class born in Mansfield, Ohio.
Cox is out - "Well, when he comes back, tell him that George called - we met in Germany, that he passes me in the hotel."
On his return Cox receives the message, signs the B-2 register indicating that he would have dinner off campus and meets 'George' in Grant Hall, the area open to visitors. RC Cox in the 1950 has 21 years, is good-looking, with a subtle sly grin, small protruding ears and a long scar on the left elbow. It is ambitious and well seen by everyone. She has a girlfriend, a girl named Betty, also from Mansfield, Ohio, and promised to marry her.
After graduating from the 1946, he served in the 6th Constabulary Reggiment of the Army, section S-2 (Intelligence), stationed Coburg, in that West Germany a few steps from the 'Iron Curtain'. The duties of the Constabulary Regiment, according to the military journalist H. Maihafer, who was a cadet at West Point in the 1949, consisted basically in "supervising the checkpoint from the border and patrolling the occupation zone "located a few hundred meters from the barbed wire fence and mined fields guarded by the Soviets night and day.In the 1947 Cox asked to be admitted to West Point, accepted, after two years of service in Germany is being repatriated to start following USMA (United States Military Academy) preparatory courses.
Saturday 7 January 1950 'Dick' Cox meets his old friend George, but the two do not go to dinner, remain in the man's car parked near the forest to drink whiskey, they drain an entire bottle. On his return to the B-2 Cox is visibly drunk, signs the attendance register, takes a shower to dispose of the effects of alcohol, and then does a strange thing: it falsifies the time of its exit on the register. The 19.23 become the '18.23', as if to make believe that he actually had dinner with the other cadets. This 'detail', however, will only be discovered years later by an agent of the US Army's Criminal Investigation Command.
The following day "George" returns to visit Cox. He told his classmates that the man was a former Army ranger who loved to boast of killing many Germans during the war (some later emasculated for disfigurement); they had met during the occupation. The man had also put a German woman in a belt but then killed her before delivery. Although the man appeared as a company not recommended, even for the same Cox, the following week returns to visit him and Cox, although against wanting him, meets him for a third time on January 14.
At the 18.20, the Cox cadet crosses the imposing corridors before him by Patton and Eisenhower, cuts off the fresh frost meadow that had rowed Grant and Lee, and leaves that rough stone fortress built by Washington himself to go to dinner. with his mysterious friend 'George'. Nobody sees him leave the academy in which he will never return. RC Cox disappears into thin air and becomes the protagonist of one of the most mysterious cases of disappearance in history.
As soon as the disappearance of the police and the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps, ed) start the research. The entire campus is sifted, research covers the entire wooded area around the USMA and the nearby town of West Point, the ponds are drained and the banks of the Hudson repeatedly beaten by airplanes engaged in the search for the missing cadet . The comrades of the B-2 dormitory are interrogated by the investigators to find out as much as possible about 'George', the friend of the days of Germany whom Cadet Cox was supposed to meet. There is no trace of him. Among the personal items left in the dormitory are found 87 $, private correspondence waiting to be sent and the wristwatch. In the cadet's annual register, next to the name RC Cox, serial number A-21, these words are still readable: "Mysteriously disappeared, 14 January 1950". In the 1957 Richard Colvin Cox is declared legally dead.
But what was really about Richard C. Cox? Cox is considered the first 'Jason Bourne' of American history: a covert undercover agent serving the CIA, which in the 1947 under the reins of Truman, took the place of the OSS: the secret service for espionage operating during the second conflict world. But this is just one of the hypotheses that investigators and public opinion have developed in 35 years of investigations and research. Among the hypotheses that were considered for some time, the escape for a possible homosexuality that Cox would no longer be able to hide and which would have precluded his military career was supported for some time. The mysterious George would have been considered a lover, or in other cases a murderer with passionate motives.
The second hypothesis was centered on the track of the kidnapping by a Soviet cell active on the American continent. Because of his counterintelligence activities during his stay in West Germany. The mysterious George other was not a Russian spy who would have led Cox out of the United States to translate him into the Soviet Union.
More simply, the mysterious visitor was assimilated to a murderer who would have killed the cadet only because he was the only accomplice of the murder in Germany that he had told the current.
In the 80 years, George, the former ranger Cox met 3 twice in two weeks was associated with the figure of Robert W. Frisbee: an alleged murderer who suspected he had murdered a rich widow and changed his identity to Robert Dion . Frisbee had served under the name of Dion in Fort Knox and was known to belong to a turn of identity falsifiers. Hence further speculations about the visitor: it was an agent six services?
The possibility that Cox was assassinated by the US secret services themselves so as not to be silent forever about the anti-communist espionage activities he had led to Coburg is plausible as its opposite. In the records of the Vorkuta gulag in the 1950 appears an American prisoner named Cox, although he did not respond to the name of Richard.
That the KGB has succeeded through a double agent to question him and then deport him to Siberia? Whichever track was taken the mysterious figure of 'George' acts as a key element in the disappearance of the Cox cadet. The profile of the character, as presented in the 'Studies in Intelligence' extract available on the website of the Central Intelligence Agency, could however approach, rather than that of the murderer or the kidnapper, with that of an OSS recruiter, as already mentioned become CIA.
At that time the secret services used to recruit their agents, evaluating their personal and contextual characteristics: subjects who had lived in occupied territory, as members of the Resistance or as Intelligence officials, perhaps operators who had worked in the countries occupied during the war, they were perfect elements to start from. Patriotism and loyalty were further components sought in the individual who was eventually selected on the basis of personal characteristics such as family, ethnicity, religion and their habits. Many of these qualities could be found in Cox, who by chance had entered West Point and was called a model cadet.
The hypothesis that Richard Cox has disappeared to start a life under cover, abandoning family and affections without leaving any trace, has never convinced his mother, who was very close and who has always expressed the belief that 'if the child he was still alive and in freedom, somehow, he would get in touch with her. '
The disappearance of Cox, which occurred at the height of the Cold War, is however approached by alleged involvement in counterintelligence activities already at the time of Germany's service. Involved in a secret CIA espionage program, Cox would have embarked on the secret agent's career by getting a new identity from the agency and operating at the highest levels of secrecy for the good of his country, supplanting everything, including his previous life.
According to the conclusions of the book "Oblivion", written by Marshall Jacobs and Harry Mailhafer after 12 years of investigations into the disappearance of the cadet, Richard Cox was engaged in espionage activities to monitor the Soviet nuclear program for the duration of the Cold War. He would die of cancer, still under a false name, in the early 90 years. According to the information found in the FBI files after the entry into force of the Freedom of Information Act (1966) It is assumed that two people met Cox after his death: in the 1954, Ernest Shotwell, who had met Cox during his military service in Germany, told the FBI he had met him at a bus station in Washington DC. The meeting had taken place in the 1952, two years after his death, but as Shotwell was not aware of the disappearance he had never told it before. Shotwell has reported that his old fellow soldier was not happy with the meeting and just two minutes later greetings took leave without too many ceremonies.
In the 1960, an undercover FBI agent came into contact with a certain "RC Mansfield" - RC as Richard Colvin's and Mansfield's initials as his home country - only later did he recognize himself as "Richard Cox" . When the agent linked the name with the missing cadet immediately contacted "Mansfield" for a second meeting, but this never became alive again.
According to a Life magazine statistic in the 50 years, every year a million Americans have been declared disappeared: most, dead or alive, were always found. If Richard Colvin Cox is at the bottom of the Hudson, murdered for a passionate motive or because he is an inconvenient witness to sensitive data. If he is buried in a mass grave in Siberia, because he is caught as a spy, or if he was the first undercover secret agent of the CIA, we will never know. How we will never know the identity of all the "Bourne" in history.
(photo: web / Universal)
