BY DOUGLAS PERRY

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Thomas J. Colbert has spent years chasing leads in an attempt to figure out the identity of the famed skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper.

Today, the chase will end -- outside the entrance to the FBI’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. There, Colbert plans to level serious charges against the federal law-enforcement agency.

“As we suspected, records show the Bureau has been stonewalling, covering up evidence and flat-out lying for decades,” he told The Oregonian this week via email.

Colbert believes he finally has all the proof he needs to make such a brazen statement about the FBI’s handling of the Cooper case. So he says that, at about 11 a.m. Eastern time today, he will stand outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building and publicly lay out his evidence, point by point.

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Photos: Oregonian archive

For the uninitiated: On Nov. 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 out of Portland. After taking on parachutes and $200,000 in ransom at Seattle’s airport, “Cooper” jumped out of the Boeing 727 somewhere over the Pacific Northwest -- and disappeared. The FBI determined that in all likelihood the skyjacker died from the dangerous nighttime leap, but no one outside the bureau wanted to believe that. The mystery man became an outlaw legend, the subject of folk songs, books and a hit Hollywood movie.

Colbert, who put together a large team of retired law-enforcement officials to pursue the cold case, is convinced he has identified the man who took over Flight 305 that long-ago November day. He says it was a conman and former U.S. Army paratrooper named Robert W. Rackstraw, who’s now 74 and lives in the San Diego area.

Rackstraw denies he's Cooper. He has told Colbert he plans to sue him for defamation, but so far no legal action has been taken. Rackstraw has not responded to phone calls and emails from The Oregonian.

In 2016, Colbert produced a TV documentary and a book about the Cooper case, both of which point at Rackstraw. But only last November did he come upon what he considers the definitive evidence. That was when Colbert team member Rick Sherwood, a veteran of the Army’s signal-intelligence corps, broke an encrypted code from a letter that was sent to newspapers just weeks after the hijacking. The letter, signed “D.B. Cooper,” offered details of the crime that hadn’t been made public. The code on it, Sherwood concluded, revealed Rackstraw’s military units.

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Rackstraw (Courtesy of Thomas J. Colbert)

“[W]hat are the odds that these digits would add up to this?” Sherwood told The Oregonian last month. “Astronomical. A million to one. Rackstraw didn’t think anyone would be able to break it.”

MORE: "Sirs, I knew from the start that I wouldn't be caught." Read about the decryption of the letter.

Early in January, Colbert told The Oregonian that the FBI refused to reopen the Cooper case and pursue the evidence his team had discovered because it didn’t want to admit that a group of volunteer sleuths had accomplished what the bureau couldn’t. “This is obviously about embarrassment and shame,” he said.

The FBI has had little to say about the case since closing it in 2016, insisting that it has received no useful fresh information.

Cooper-case expert Bruce Smith, author of "D.B. Cooper and the FBI," says Colbert's years-long investigation has produced reams of invaluable information, but he worries that the documentary filmmaker's "obsession [with Rackstraw] warps his judgement."

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Despite such criticism from fellow “Cooperites” -- and the FBI’s apparent disinterest in his efforts -- Colbert has persisted. And he says he can now prove that the FBI is covering up the truth about the case. Over the past few weeks, he says, his team has decrypted codes on four more “Cooper” letters (all acquired from the government through the Freedom of Information Act) and tracked down corroborating evidence.

“One decrypted message points to the apparent reason for Rackstraw's continued freedom -- he claimed he was working for the CIA at the time,” Colbert said. “That stunner has been backed up now by court records, eyewitnesses to his mission departures and old spooks.”

MORE: "He could be anybody -- because he was nobody": All the D.B. Cooper suspects.

Colbert is convinced Rackstraw had a black-ops career that stretched from the Vietnam War to at least the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, leading the intelligence community to protect him.

Has Colbert really discovered both D.B. Cooper’s real identity and a “Deep State” conspiracy that’s protecting the skyjacker? Today, he is in the nation’s capital to publicly insist he has. But certainty about the case remains elusive -- possibly even to the FBI.

-- Douglas Perry

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