More from 1979 Washington Post article:
"It has been a trauma. Some people say I am a manipulator, a master of disguise. I am a real person. I wasn't hatched. I breathe air. I drink water," he said in a recent interview. He speaks with the trace of a Spanish accent. His face is oriental, with high cheek bones, quill straight black hair and dark engaging eyes. Around his neck he wears a Star of David and on his little finger a Mexican gold coin. He is muscular with a large circular scar on his back. The middle and ring fingers of his left hand are mere stubs.
Again he is calling himself "Jim Sheker" but he says he does not recall the last time he said his real name aloud.
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It was in early 1960 that a military transport from Okinawa touched down in California with a dark-skinned 30-year-old passenger aboard. His name then was James Sheker. From California he took a Greyhound that let him off on U.S. 1 in Alexandria. When he stepped off the bus, he was wearing a Navy commanders uniform, carrying a duffel bag and holding his military orders in his hand, recalls his first wife, Arlene. She was startled. She knew he had not been in the military. He told her it was the quickest way he could be with her.
A year earlier they had met in Okinawa and fallen in love. "Jim" she remembers, was an exciting man and a person of mystery. He told her he was an engineer in the U.S. government. She heard him speak French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, English and Phillipine dialects. He was a gourmet cook with a flair for curries and other oriental dishes. He was a world traveler, and he was an incurable romantic. In their year apart he had mailed blades of grass with "I love you" incised in painstaking detail.
He told her he was born in Montreal. Unknown to Arlene, the only connection he had with Canada was his engineering certificate, which belonged not to him but to a Canadian engineer. Why he left Okinawa when he did is unclear, but Lynn Larsen, a close friend of his who also lived on Okinawa recalls his telling her that he had to leave the island in a hurry, that he was "under some kind of cloud"
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Arlene recalls that by mid-1965 Sheker refused to discuss his work with her, saying it involved construction for the government at a top-secret site. Sheker returned home wearing government identification tags and voice printouts he said were necessary to enter underground facilities.
Each Saturday he put on a Navy commander's uniform and disappeared for the day, saying he would report to Patuxent Naval Air Station to flight exercises. Arlene was afraid to ask questions. Things didn't jibe, she said. Their marriage was disintegrating. In mid-1965 she called the FBI and told them of her husband's naval activities.
On June 24, 1965, two FBI agents interviewed Sheker at his home at 6260 Frontier Dr. in Springfield, VA. According to the FBI report, Sheker told the agents he was not a U.S. citezen. In his wallet they found two Defense Department identification cards. Sheker told them he recieved the cards as a civilian employee on U.S. military bases in Okinawa in the 1950s.
He told the agents he bought the Navy uniform in a pawn shop, that he wore it because he liked the way people looked at him when he was in the uniform. The FBI ran an extensive check of Sheker's background. They found no record of his birth or of military or civil service.
But the FBI brought no charges against Sheker. Agents said federal prosecutors would be reluctant to bring the case to court unless they could show Sheker had benefited monetarily from his impersonation. Sheker continued to wear his Navy uniform undisturbed for the next 10 years.
He told friends the CIA had intervened on his behalf and had cautioned the FBI "to leave him alone." His story of a CIA connection was nothing new. Since Okinawa days he had been telling friends that the agency provided him new identities whenever needed as well as the military identification necessary to carry out his assignments.
Sheker never forgave Arlene for calling the FBI. In 1978, 13 years after the FBI incident and their divorce, he wrote to her from an Alexandria, VA jail where he was being held for kidnapping Speer. "You started this whole nightmare when you called the FBI about my Naval activities...From that time you started a chain reaction blowing my cover. I left the agency (CIA) without any choice. It finally led to this."
