from the University of Utah.¹ By then, he was back in Mexico City, where he had been working as a researcher at an anthropological institute. But he did not remain there, as Robert Schamay, who had been the FBI case agent in Salt Lake City, learned in October. “I was out hunting on a mountain in southern Utah in October of 1976, and a game warden knocked on the trailer. He said I had a phone call. I come off the mountain and find a pay phone in a little dinky town, and it’s Gene Peterson. I have to be in Minnesota as soon as possible.” Peterson, by now Soviet section chief at FBI headquarters, was continuing to supervise the spy case. He ordered Schamay to cut short his hunting trip and get moving. “Next morning,” Schamay recalled, “I was off the mountain, back home in Salt Lake, packing, and on Monday I’m on a plane to Minneapolis.” Two years before, while still a student in Austin, Lopez had told Aurelio Flores that he might be moving to Minnesota. Headquarters had plucked Schamay off the mountain because the bureau had learned that the PALMETTOs had in fact surfaced there.
