Gangster Planet was published a year after Daniel Hopsicker's death. Linda Minor had been working with him on that project during the last four years of his life, while he fought prostate cancer. It was during the era of Covid-19, which made the project both easier and more difficult, as it focused the two writers. Those of us who lived through that time understand what I mean. After publication, Minor (me) continued her research, which would occasionally track back to Doole. One of those occasions appears at another post in this blog.
Below is a chapter Daniel Hopsicker and Linda Minor sent to their publisher, Trine Day Publishing, which later appeared in print without the pictures.
SPOOKS DON’T FLY SOUTHWEST
“As
the logistics man for Wexner, Epstein arranged the arrival of Southern Air
Transport (SAT) to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio. The airline,
formerly Air America, was infamous as an illegal gun- and drug-running
operation. SAT filed for bankruptcy in Columbus on October 1, 1998, the same
day the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General issued a report linking
the cargo hauler to allegations of drug-running in connection with U.S.-backed
Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s.”
Bob
Fitrakis, “Jeffrey Epstein: There’s Much More to the Story,” 2020[1]
Part
One of Gangster Planet is a tale of CIA-pedigreed drug planes I spent a big
chunk of my life researching. It was personal for me. Don’t ask me why. I don’t
have an answer. It just was. My search gave me a reason to get up every day and
at the same time, it kept me from
sleeping.
Everyone
who knows that feeling of obsession is blessed.
Simultaneously,
it’s a curse to find a question that nags you so much you can’t move on until
it’s answered. People all around you don’t see the world you live in. In
Florida, life is about fun and sun. They don’t get it. They don’t even want to
get it. They hate being woke to the world as it really is.
In
2005, it was estimated that the global trade of illegal drugs topped over $400
billion dollars, or roughly the same amount that is spent on food.
Drug
trafficking is the most widespread and lucrative organized crime activity in
the US, accounting for an estimated 40% of their business.
In
2006, the estimated street value of cocaine seized by the United States Coast
Guard was estimated at $3.1 billion dollars. Who knows what it is today, with
inflation and all?
“One
Big Goddam Masked Ball”
General
and business aviation—the method of choice for the transportation of illegal
drugs—SHOULD mean that aircraft ownership, acquisition and registration records
are the best means of identifying the traffickers. But, surprisingly, the
government knows a lot more about who owns automobiles than it does about who
owns multi-million-dollar aircraft that can transport multi-ton loads of
cocaine.
Automobiles
are registered within the county where the owner lives, but because airplanes
can move around with such great speed, and possibly because there are fewer of
them than there are cars, aircraft owned by U.S. residents and companies are
all registered in one place—the Federal Aviation Administration.
The
FAA’s commitment to combating illegal activities is, however, often
questioned. Its registration procedures
are lax and riddled with loopholes that you could fly a DC9 through. This is
not by accident, but by design.
Meaning:
the government wants things that way.
Why
would that be? Perhaps because general aviation is crucial to the government’s
covert activities, most of which involve moving things in and out of countries
without being detected. The best way to do that is by using planes. People,
money, passports, weapons, drugs, and diamonds.
At the tiny Venice Airport, for example, there are no prying
eyes in the control tower. Because there isn’t a control tower. Jets fly in and
out at all hours of the day and night, and there’s nothing but 400 miles of
water between Venice and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
A
frustrated-beyond-disillusionment state cop in Arkansas once asked
rhetorically, “What do you do when you find out that the biggest drug smuggler
in the country… is the country?”
Even
today, most Americans probably believe the Securities and Exchange
Commission—to cite an example that bleeds untold billions from Americans
through the simple expedient of looking the other way—referees the markets like
a line judge in football, watching for a foot stepping out of bounds on a
kick-off return.
A
long-time pilot—let’s call him Nick—in Florida said angrily, “The field of
general aviation is one big goddamn masked ball.”
“The
FAA’s job is to create doubt about the provenance of any American-registered
airplane threatening to become a part of the current unpleasantness.”
“Everybody
knows the best way to be shady is in a plane. Not a commercial plane, though,
right?”
Nick
sneers. “Spooks don’t fly Southwest.”
The
Whittingtons and World Jet
Start
with World Jet, in Fort Lauderdale, owned by the Whittington brothers—Don and
Bill—notorious drug smugglers who in their early 1980’s heyday commanded fleets
of fishing trawlers, sailboats, cigarette boats, and jets.
Tons
of marijuana, and oceans of cash, flowed freely from the World Jet hangers at
Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport through the streets and canals of Fort
Lauderdale.
When
federal indictments put the Whittington Brothers out of the game, their prized
Learjet—at that time still something of a rarity—was “sold” to Barry Seal, soon
to be the biggest drug smuggler in American history.
Was
this just coincidence? Or are these
vital clues to a vast but hidden. and still-unnamed, global network? The
global financial network Prime Minister Tony Blair said had financed terrorists
who pulled off 9/11, perhaps?
Hilliard’s
Lear jet was carrying what is known in the drug trade as “heavy weight.” In
fact, it was the largest heroin seizure ever in Central Florida, said the
Orlando Sentinel. And although Hilliard had purchased the Lear less than a year
before, it had already made over thirty weekly runs down and back to Venezuela,
the pilot admitted to the DEA. So even though Hilliard lost his plane through
seizure, he undoubtedly got his use out of it.
While
we’re no experts on heroin trafficking, we figured that 43 pounds for one haul was
a little steep for an individual. We figured that much dope no doubt belonged
to an organization, a drug trafficking organization.
Wally
Hilliard—Part of an Elite Network
We
suspected, in fact, that the transfer to Hilliard of the Learjet before it was
confiscated was not by accident. It was, instead, an exchange of assets within
the organization.
And
sure enough…when we looked up the previous owner of Hilliard’s Lear jet, we
discovered a name we had already run across during research for Barry &
the boys:’ the CIA, the Mob, and America’s Secret History.
The
man who owned the Learjet that ended up in Wally Hilliard’s hands was an avid
pilot and auto racer named Gary Levitz.
Old
people still remember TV ads for a nationwide furniture chain from the 70’s
featuring a mindless jingle with a stupid but memorable chorus— “You’ll Love It
at Levitz”—that, once it got in your head, it seemed you could never get it
out. You’d have to have that jingle surgically removed.
Wally
Hilliard got Gary Levitz’ Lear because Levitz didn’t need it anymore.
He
was dead.
Levitz
fatally flew into a pylon during the National Championship Air Races in Reno,
Nevada in 1999, crashing his souped-up P-51 Mustang. It wasn’t the first time
such a thing had happened at Reno, as we’ll see later.
CIA
Tell #1—Good PR
If
you’re taking notes, this is our first “CIA tell.” They are scattered
throughout the book. Guys who are “connected” always get great PR. It must be a
corporate benefit.
“Gary
was a pretty amazing man,” one of his managers told reporters.
“He
was a larger-than-life character. He would run the company day to day, and he
flew warplanes and was a big-game hunter.”
Big-game
hunter. Flying warplanes. Guys like that used to be called—in more innocent
times— “soldiers of fortune.”
What
Gary Levitz also was... was a big-time drug smuggler, at least by ‘70s standards. His brother, Mark Levitz, turned
him in so he could get out of working for the Nicodemo D. “Little Nicky” Scarfo
gang in 1986.[2]
He’d
already been convicted of money laundering, admitting in court to “helping the
Whittingtons disguise narcotics profits by investing in legitimate business
ventures.” [3]
Twenty
years later, the Whittington brothers will be selling a Learjet—which is soon
busted—to Wally Hilliard. Is this the Great Circle of Life, or just another Day
at the Office…, if you need to work off a beef for the Feds?
Hilliard’s
purchase of Gary Levitz’s Lear, after Levitz’s death, from the Whittington
Brothers—whose own Lear, when they went into “timeout” had been purchased two
decades earlier by Barry Seal—can be seen as the work-a-day machinations of a
secretive global organization at work…
Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Gary Levitz had also been in business with people at the Venice
Airport.
“Ben
Bradley’s a DEA informant at the Venice Airport,” said Coy Jacob, owner of a
Mooney dealership there, and no friend of Bradley, who, he said, “set people up
in Fort Lauderdale. Gary Levitz got into the drug trade, then rolled on the
Whittingtons. So did Ben Bradley. When his life was threatened, he moved to
Polk County, and moored his boat in
Venice.”[iv]
And
the man who SOLD Gary Levitz his P-51 warbird air-racer, which he crashed at
the air races in Reno in 1976?
His
name was Kenneth G. Burnstine from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a city which is
famous for a lot more than inventing Spring Break. By the time I’d learned
about Kenny Burnstine, I then knew for a fact that the field of general
aviation operates with no effective adult supervision.
After
more than two decades of specializing in an arcane area—drug trafficking
through Florida—I’d just realized there was a whole other drug kingpin I’d
never heard of. Either that, or I’d forgotten everything I’d learned—which was
even worse.
What
I knew about my chosen subject still didn’t amount to much. Maybe all the
information keeps leaking out, or maybe they keep changing the rules without
telling us.
On
any given day, there are dozens—hundreds?—of pilots flying drugs or laundered
money around the world. We just can’t seem to keep up.
During
the Iraq War under President George W. Bush, Houston was home to three general
aviation charter companies flying extraordinary renditions for the CIA, a fact
I only discovered while investigating the ownership of the luxury jets which
ferried Saudi Royals out of Las Vegas and Lexington, Kentucky, six days after
the 9/11 attack.
Houston
is also home to another aviation company that has become crucial in keeping the
names of plane owners secret—Aircraft Guaranty Holdings & Trust of Houston—founded
in 1997 by a Lieutenant Colonel (retired) in the Army named Connie L. Wood, formerly
a senior FAA official. Despite its tiny size, his company, Aircraft Guaranty,
was the registered “owner” of more than six hundred American aircraft. “Offshore
Aviation Trust” was his brainchild.
The
legality of getting around disguising a plane’s ownership is set out in a brief
history which rationalizes the act.[5]
According
to the Transportation Code, “only aircraft owners who are citizens of the
United States are permitted to register an aircraft,” the writer tells us. The
shareholders of a publicly traded entity (such as a U.S. airline) are constantly
changing as its stock is traded. It’s therefore impossible at any given moment
to know if the shareholders are citizens, so the public airline corporation
does not technically qualify to be registered. See the legal conundrum
here?
The
FAA made a decision in the ‘70s to allow a corporation to register if “non-US
citizen beneficiaries [do] not have more than 25% interest in the aircraft.”
The FAA extended the regulations later to allow registration of aircraft owned
by a trustee.
Lawyers
do this type of thing all the time for clients with money and/or power,
preferably both.
Aircraft
Guaranty first achieved notoriety during the Iraq War when plane-spotters began
noticing the company “owned” a large number of planes being used in CIA
“extraordinary renditions.” They also saw American Guaranty Holdings planes
downed in Central and South America plane crashes or drug busts... Or, more
likely, plane crashes followed by drug busts.
The
ownership became progressively less certain once Aircraft Guaranty took title
to them.
“According
to the Federal Aviation Agency in the United States, the aircraft is owned by
Aircraft Guaranty Holdings & Trust of Houston,” The Miami Herald
reported about a Venezuelan co-founder of Smartmatic voting systems based in
Boca Raton, who died when his plane crashed into a house near Caracas airport
in 2008.[6]
Well, not exactly. The downed plane was merely registered to
Aircraft Guaranty, possibly a proprietary company whose job was to deliberately
disguise ownership of planes into the wider world of general aviation—by
holding title in trust for the real, unidentifiable, owner—often the CIA.
The process is called sheep dipping, after the practice of
bathing sheep before they are sheared. This leaves unanswered the question,
“Who’s getting sheared in this process?”
The
term is commonly used for disguising a spy's identity with a day job. The
agent—or airplane—is cleaned up, and subtly altered, so that nobody knows where
he's been.
Instead
of laundering money, they’re laundering protoplasm. The military even brags
about it.[7]
Plausible deniability (or lying) is considered a good thing.
It’s
“a boon for well-heeled U.S. owners seeking personal liability protection and
ownership anonymity,” Lt. Gen. Wood told “Mooney Pilot, an aviation magazine.[8]
“Soon,”
he predicted, “full FAA-approved and legal Off-Shore (as in the Cayman Islands)
Aviation Trusts will be THE way most liability conscious and financially
established owner/pilots to take title to their aircraft… It promises to be far
better than a typical corporate entity in protecting the beneficiary from
personal liability exposure.”[9]
He
was touting “licenses to non-residents outside the U.S. without the applicant
ever entering the U.S.,” but claimed his
“team of attorneys” were well-versed in all the U.S. laws to protect individuals
behind the entities his company would set up.
Real
world examples were strewn across the aviation landscape, not the least of
which was the fact that Aircraft Guaranty “owned” a Lear Jet (N35NK)—that was
previously registered to Huffman Aviation flight school owner Wally Hilliard’s
aviation charter company “Plane 1 Leasing.”
The
Lear made frequent flights to Rum Cay in the Bahamas, a sleepy little isle
which suddenly was drawn into Big-Time Drug Trafficking when work was completed
on Rum Cay’s new 5000-foot runway—that could take medium jets.[10]
After
Hilliard was charged in 2004 for flying unauthorized flights for unspecified
“Saudis,” he sold the Lear to Aircraft Guaranty, which used it on flights into
and out of Guantanamo. It became briefly famous after a plane-spotter snapped
its picture during a rendition flight in Portugal.[11]
It
also regularly flew into Caribbean hot spots that were known drug transfer
points: Venice, Florida; Treasure Cay, San Salvador; Marsh Harbor in the
Bahamas, St. Maarten, the Netherlands Antilles, and Toluca, Mexico. Toluca was
the ultimate hot spot at that time because the Mexican government controlled
the airport. Toluca was, you may recall, where the DC-9 in the Yucatan with 5.5
tons of coke was supposed to be offloaded.
None
of this is an accident.
Bill
Pawley’s Excellent Adventure
William
Douglas (Bill) Pawley, at 32 years of age, had already enjoyed more adventure
than most men ever see.
Born
in South Carolina in 1896 to an eighth-generation South Carolinian father,
Pawley had few if any ancestors who’d ever lived anywhere else after arriving
on colonial soil. Bill’s dad, notwithstanding bankrupting his cotton business
by short-selling cotton futures, moved his family to a small island near
Guantánamo, Cuba in 1903, soon after the U.S. had signed a treaty with Spain
that gave us the Spanish colonies of Cuba and the Philippines.
E.P.’s
contract to supply the naval base with a variety of commodities came with his
designation as consul at Guantánamo, but in 1910 his business license was
revoked on a technicality. He had to move again—200 miles southeast to
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
Bill
and his brother E.P., Jr., four years younger, were sent to Gordon Institute’s
military academy (equivalent to high school) in Barnesville, Georgia, but it’s
not clear whether he graduated. The highest level of education he received was
the time he spent there. He seems instead to have dropped out in favor of
forming a trading business in Venezuela.[12]
Nevertheless,
he was in Georgia when he registered for WWI in 1918, claiming to be
self-employed at age 22, but he did not enlist, nor was he drafted.
Pawley
instead married Annie Dobbs from Marietta, Georgia a year later, and after
living briefly in Quebec as a gold miner and in Delaware in the milk and tire
business, he lived in Atlanta for a while before deciding to become a land
developer in Florida during its big boom.
Hosting
a huge party at Coral Gables Country Club in 1925 for his 29th
birthday, according to his biographer, Anthony R. Carrozza: “He announced his
retirement at the party, but ‘they begged me to stay until January 1st.’ His
decision turned out to be costly because within four months the boom market
bottomed out and Pawley lost $800,000.”[13]
Three
lean years from that point to the time he was hired by the “Glenn Curtiss
interests” did not daunt his enthusiasm. He began promoting air races in Miami
as a sideline to buying airfields and starting flying schools in 1928 for
Clement Keys, who had bought out Glenn Curtiss in 1920.
After
opening a municipal airport that would grow into Miami International, he flew
to Washington D.C. to convince top military brass to send air race teams to the
air show to dedicate the airport the following January.
Much
of the story that follows alternates between sublime adventure and mundane and
tedious recitation of detail. I caution the reader not to ignore the mundane. Therein
lies the answer to the riddle of how things really work. Pay close attention to
the math and the legalese.
It's
the four-eyed accountants and lawyers who do the dirty work of hiding things in
plain sight while all the spectators are watching flying trapezers and sexy
pilots doing nose-dives.
Annual Air Show in Miami
The
first ever Miami Air Races were in January 1929 and became an annual event
thereafter. Pawley, who tried to return to Miami for each race after the one he
organized in 1929, had “missed the 1933 and 1934 shows,” Carrozza wrote.
“At
the January 1935 air show, however, when Capt. Claire Lee Chennault led his
‘Men on a Flying Trapeze’ trio of acrobatic fliers in a spectacular
performance,” Pawley had made a point to attend, bringing guests from China
along. [14]
“Meeting
the army aviator after the show, Pawley began a relationship with Chennault
that lasted for years,” Carrozza continued. “Stormy and contemptuous, they were
often at odds with each other, but together they were to achieve a shining
moment in U.S. military aviation history.”[15]
Whether
“shining” or not, it was indeed an historic moment. It was, in fact, that
introduction which would rescue Chennault from an embarrassing early retirement
two years later.
Intercontinent Aviation in Cuba and China
Before
his auspicious meeting with Chennault, Pawley found himself in 1929 bidding
against 27 others for the contract to carry mail between Havana and Santiago.
Fulfilling the terms was less easy. Pawley moved back to Cuba where he had
spent the first decade or so of his life, and he spent the next three years
constructing an airport, expanding the airline from one route to eleven, and
flying mail between fourteen airports—all by 1932.
Clement
Keys had earned his first air-mail contract in 1925 (New York to Chicago), and,
determined to build a worldwide mail distribution network, he hired Bill Pawley
three years later to create mail routes inside Cuba. Keys had arranged $10
million in financing in 1928 through Dillon, Read & Co., whose attorneys
set up Intercontinent Aviation, Inc. as a subsidiary under the Curtiss
corporate umbrella[16].
Pawley’s
business in Cuba was a sub-subsidiary called Companie Nacional Cubana
Curtiss. Like a game of hide-the-pea, the umbrella seemed to keep moving.
Who knew where the pea would end up?
Keys
had to build his own airfields in China and provide his own planes at great
expense, but “on October 21 China Airways at last was able to open service.
Three days later came Black Thursday. All stocks fell, but aircraft stocks
nose-dived. Curtiss-Wright stock value dropped to $106 million…. Keys, his
fortune nearly wiped out by the stock-market crash, relinquished control of
Curtiss-Wright.”[17]
When
Pawley traveled to China in 1933 for the first time, negotiations were ongoing
between North American and Juan Trippe of Pan Am, the proposed buyer of
Curtiss-Wright stock. Once a price was agreed to, attorneys for the
banker—Dillon, Read & Co.—drafted documents to give Pan Am 50,000 shares of
Intercontinent. CNAC, Intercontinent’s new subsidiary, was paid 3,000 shares of
Pan Am stock.
Intercontinent’s
Cuban subsidiary (Cubana Curtiss) had just been sold by Pawley’s apparent boss
when he returned from Cuba to Florida. In January 1933 he headed off to China
to sell airplanes on commission to the Chinese government.
A
small item on page four of the Miami News announced in September that in those
nine months, he’d sold 36 planes. The next time he went to China he had a
different mission. Not simply to sell existing American aircraft made in
America, Pawley’s task was to build and operate factories at the site of where
Chinese pilots would be trained.
Under the name CAMCO—Central Aircraft
Manufacturing Co.—Pawley and at least three of his brothers and one or more of
his sons worked to establish these factories. Because China was at war with
Japan all through the ‘30s, they had to keep moving the factory to safer
locations. The last plant was built in India, close to the location where the
Flying Tigers would take off to fly over the Hump to supply the Nationalist
Chinese flyers.[18]
China
National Aviation Corp.’s job was to carry mail, and initially its stock was
wholly owned by the Nationalist Chinese government, according to Chinese law.
Pawley’s job was to provide an airport and planes for their operation and to
supervise pilot training. That’s what he’d brought Chennault in for, but the
two men were often at odds because of their perspectives on how to do the work.
China Lobby’s Favorite Family
When
Pawley arrived in China and met the finance minister, H. H. Kung, it was only
the first of many introductions to members of the nepotistic Chinese
government. The whole family was involved—as blatantly as Trump’s kids and
spouses would be in his administration.
Kung
introduced him to Madame (Mei-ling) Chiang, wife of Generalissimo
Chiang-Kai-shek. Kung was married to Madame’s sister. The sisters were
daughters of Charlie Soong, the first of a long line of American-educated
members of the Soong family.
Historian
Sterling Seagrave, who grew up as the son of a missionary surgeon on the Burma
Road, wrote several important books on China’s history. The Soong Dynasty
gives an inside peek at “Charlie” Soong, an 1885 graduate of
then-Methodist-affiliated Vanderbilt in Tennessee.
Soong
studied two years at Trinity College in North Carolina, living with the family
of Julian Carr, the face of “Bull Durham” tobacco, sold in 1898 to the American
Tobacco Company for a small fortune. A staunch Methodist, his money had helped
found Duke University, and his network helped in bringing Charlie’s six
children to universities in the United States.
Seagrave’s
description of the grifting Soongs gives us insight into the reality of what
was happening in those days as the Luce Press, a major part of the “China
Lobby,” perpetually whipped up anti-Japanese propaganda in support of trade
with the Chinese, seen as more amenable to Christianity than their communist
counterparts.
In
1938 Mei-ling Soong, a graduate of Wellesley, and
her husband were announced as Time’s Man & Wife of 1937: “Today
Generalissimo & Mme Chiang have not conceded China's defeat, they long ago
announced that their program for as many years as necessary will be to harass,
exhaust and eventually ruin Japan by guerrilla warfare. If Generalissimo Chiang
can achieve it, he may emerge Asia's Man of the Century.…
“Her
brother, Mr. T.V. Soong, today China's greatest financier, informed General
Chiang as courteously as possible that a husband with concubines was scarcely
acceptable as a suitor in the Chinese Christian family of Soong. Mei-ling's
father, famed ‘Old Charlie’ Soong, had made his fortune as a pioneer in
printing and selling Bibles to Chinese as fast as the missionaries created a
demand. Investing his profits at about 40% Chinese interest, he died a merchant
prince.
“Old
Mrs. Soong had not forgotten that her late husband had tumbled another of her
daughters unceremoniously into the arms of old Dr. Sun Yat-sen (who also had
another wife at the time) and that the marriage had been a master stroke for
the House of Soong.
“Venerable
Mother Soong therefore told General Chiang that if he would become a Christian,
he could marry her attractive, Wellesley-graduated Mei-ling. The Conqueror
replied that he would not adopt a new religion merely to win a bride, but that
if Miss Soong would marry him, he would agree to study Christianity, and then
do as he saw fit.
“No
ordained Christian pastor could be found who thought General Chiang free to
marry Miss Soong, so a lay Y.M.C.A. secretary united them in holy matrimony.
From the day General Chiang thus took his No. 2 wife, both his character and
his fortunes rapidly commenced to take on a certain grandeur. Eventually he
also became a Christian.
“Chiang
Conquers All. The marriage of General Chiang was important because it made him
the post-mortem brother-in-law of the Kuomintang's late sainted Sun;
brother-in-law of Big Banker T.V. Soong; and brother-in-law of Dr. H.H. Kung,
famed descendant of China's greatest sage Confucius, who also married a Soong
girl.”[19]
Miami’s
Air Races 1935
During
Miami’s seventh annual Air Races in January 1935, after their performance the
three trapezers met with “Col. Mao Pang-chu, Chinese Air Force, along with
several members of the Chinese Commission on Aeronautical Affairs, [who]
attended the January show as Pawley’s guests,” according to Carrozza.[20]
“Pawley
invited the trio to a party he hosted for the Chinese aboard his yacht in Miami
harbor. Mao, impressed by their precision flying, offered all of them positions
as flight instructors at the Hangchow aviation school. Williamson and McDonald
declined because they hoped to receive U.S. Army Air Corps commissions, but
after being passed over, both accepted and left for China in July 1936.”[21]
When
Chennault publicly applauded his “boys,” in their endeavors in China, Army
brass, not amused, transferred him from Alabama to Shreveport, Louisiana, in
1936, to await retirement. It didn’t help that he was confined to a Louisiana
hospital bed—suffering from low blood pressure, partial deafness, and chronic
bronchitis.[22]
At
the hospital Chennault received a letter from Lucius Roy Holbrook, Jr. offering
him a three-month job—to evaluate, on behalf of the Chinese Commission of
Aeronautical Affairs, the capabilities of the Chinese air force. Holbrook was
then working for Pawley at CAMCO, as well as having a consulting contract with
Kung, soon replaced by Madame Chiang.
Chennault
accepted the offer and immediately agreed to retire. In the meantime, a new
offer came from Madame Chiang herself, who offered to put Chennault in charge
of training Chinese pilots for the airline her husband had placed under her
supervision.
Again,
he did not hesitate. This was his big chance to rejoin Billy McDonald, one of
the Trapezers from Maxwell Field, who had been hired in China two years earlier
by William Pawley.
The
two aviators arranged to meet at Chennault’s last stop before reaching to take
a quick tour around Japan, gathering whatever intelligence they could on the
Japanese military, the KMT’s enemy in the second Sino-Japanese war. McDonald,
like Chennault, was understandably wary about entering Japan—essentially as a
spy—and needed a cover story to prevent capture.[22]
What
happened next is told in the book “Shadow Tigers” with a wide-eyed innocence
which subsequent events would seem to have made difficult to maintain. Their
cover story was a version of the circus coming to town.
Drinking
in a bar in Shanghai, MacDonald had supposedly “ran into” an old fraternity
brother, a guy who now was the manager of a circus troupe filled with Russian
singers, Chinese jugglers, and from the Philippines, a trio called the Dixie
Girls.[24]
And—what
luck! The guy said the troupe was on its way to Japan for a few shows. And—way
cooler even! —McDonald could come along, posing as the manager.
Chennault
tagged along. After finishing up backstage, McDonald would slink away to meet
with him, and pass along whatever intel he’d gathered. It was their idea of
fun.
Holbrook
met up with the men in Shanghai to escort Chennault to meet Madame Chiang at
the French Concession in Shanghai, and from there to Hangchow. It was the
summer of 1937, four and a half years before the United States was officially
at war with Japan and bound by the Neutrality Act.
“While
Chennault was evaluating the Chinese Air Force, Pawley was steadily becoming
the main source of military aircraft for the Chinese,” according to Carrozza.
But Chennault was employed by the Chinese, and they were at war against what
was then a superior power, Japan, with which we were legally neutral. Talk
about sticky wickets!
Chennault’s
job was to train Chinese pilots in the 14th International Squadron
all the tactics of flying he knew. That was as far as he could go. The problem
was, according to Carrozza, that the “mercenaries channeled into the squadron
seemed more interested in paychecks and the $1,000 bonus for every Japanese
plane they downed than the honor of fighting for the defense of China.”[25]
One
would have thought if the Chinese really wanted capitalism to flourish in
China, they would not have had to hire mercenaries, right? The truth was that only
a small percentage of Chinese even considered economic systems at the time, and
those were the ones who had been propagandized by Americans, either missionaries
in China or in schools in the United States.
This
mercenary Chinese squadron committed suicide in March 1938 when the idiots in
charge left all their planes lined up, bomb-loaded the night before they were
to make a raid. Before they could take off the next morning, there was a
Japanese attack. It destroyed all their planes in one go. At that point, Pawley
put his three brothers in charge of managing CAMCO.
The
French, pressured by Japan, closed the Burma Road to war matériel, so Pawley
hauled his shipments back to Haiphong and loaded themt on ships to Rangoon, Burma.
Factory crates were unloaded on the Burmese docks, reloaded onto railroad cars for
a journey to Lashio. From there the crates were taken by barge and elephant to
their final destination at CAMCO’s new factory at Loiwing.”[26]
Hundreds
of Chinese workers at each factory site assembled each American plane from a
kit Pawley purchased from American corporations with a 20% discount.
“In
the three factories he operated in China, Pawley built and repaired $30 million
worth of aircraft for the Chinese, resulting in profits as high as $1 million a
year.”[27]
He certainly didn’t pass the discount on to the Chinese. That’s true
capitalism.
Chennault
and Pawley constantly argued over whether the planes his CAMCO factories put
together met the manufacturer’s specs. The State Department kept getting
complaints that they hadn’t been allowed to bid on the contract. Pawley’s deal
with Kung was called a “squeeze.”
The
solution to this problem wouldn’t come for several years, as the U.S. inched
closer to ending its neutrality with the Japanese. Chennault was getting letters
and Christmas cards from pilots he’d worked with in the States. Elwyn Gibbon, “a
former pilot with the Fourteenth International Squadron,” sent him a card, to
which Chennault replied: “write W. D. Pawley, Intercontinent Corporation, Hong
Kong, for job as a pilot in a special squadron.”[28]
The
squadron began coming together as early as January 1940 by allowing the Chinese
to purchase planes with credit established with American banks and obtain fifty
Army and Navy pilots if the U.S. government allowed them to be recruited.
“Intercontinent
would employ the pilots through a private contract with China ‘without any
direct participation by the United States Government.’”[29]
It
was not a simple negotiation process. China’s finance minister, T. V. Soong,
lobbied for aid in a manner that wouldn’t upset currency stability, with
help from FDR’s assistants, Lauchlin Currie and Joe Alsop, a cousin in the
press. Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran “would steer the Chinese minister
through the quagmire of governmental policies….”[30]
“Soong’s
initial request was for a $50 million credit against tungsten exports to
purchase nonmilitary supplies and improve conditions along the Burma Road, a
vital supply route to southwest China during the Japanese invasion. But when
Soong met with Secretary Morgenthau on July 9, the ante was raised to $140
million in credit and Soong now wanted to purchase three hundred fighter planes
and a hundred light bombers.” By November Soong’s request was upped to $200
million.[31]
The
conduit for the money was Universal Trading Corporation, originally set up in
1938 to receive monies and credit from a loan processed between the RFC and
Soong’s bank. It had been repaid by exports of metals from China to the U.S.
Like Intercontinent Aviation, its headquarters was 30 Rockefeller Center. The
president of Universal Trading was Archie Lochhead, the first head of the U.S.
Exchange Stabilization Fund. Chennault’s partner Whiting Willauer was
secretary.[32]
By
the time the terms of the contract were finalized, CAMCO had moved its plant
from Yunnan to Rangoon in Burma. On April 15, 1941, Roosevelt signed a “secret,
unlisted executive order” authorizing a private corporation holding a contract
with a foreign government to hire U.S. military officers.[33]
The contract was between the Chinese and CAMCO, and the officers they hired
became the American Volunteer Group (AVG), better known as the Flying Tigers.
Whatever
the source of the symbol—perhaps a Chinese proverb about “giving wings to the
tiger” has been suggested—Disney Studio in Hollywood designed a logo of a
winged Bengal tiger with outstretched claws which got promoted in Time magazine
three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. That was when the United States went
to war for real against Japan. After that there was no further need to worry
about violating the Neutrality Act.
Sticky Wickets Aren’t Cricket
Trippe
himself answered only to his board of directors, chairman of which was
Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney, the largest investor from the time it was
founded, who’d always been a director, along with America’s other wealthiest
men like William Rockefeller and William H. Vanderbilt—his first cousins.
Sonny’s
palatial home on Long Island, was at Old Westbury, almost next door to Poppy
Bush’s maternal grandfather, Bert Walker, a close friend of Sonny’s dad, Harry
Payne Whitney. When Sonny was 26, his father named him as his replacement as
director on numerous boards, including the Guaranty Trust. He did very little
actual business, though he did play lot of polo, got married and divorced a few
times. Things like that. Even got into the movie business with his cousin Jock.
Unfortunately
for Juan Trippe and his fellow Pan Am board members—cousins Sonny and Jock
Whitney, Sloan Colt, Bobby Lehman, E. O. McDonnell, FDR’s first cousin Lyman
Delano, and Sherman Fairchild, for example—on October 1, 1949, the Central
People’s Government of China proclaimed itself the real Chinese
Government. To get Pan Am’s investment back required a lawsuit and an appeal.
CNAC’s
Chinese president had absconded, quickly transferring his allegiance to the new
Communist Government in Peking. He’d abandoned the Nationalist government of
Chiang, which was even then being forced onto the most southern Chinese island
of Formosa (Taiwan).
Chiang’s
government announced its new name and, at the same time, claimed to own the
aircraft CNAC’s president had handed over to the Reds. A tug of war ensued.
The
cricket term “sticky wicket” indeed fit the situation. If you’ve ever watched a
cricket match, you know the two plus years it took to reach a result was about
average. The Supreme Court of Hong Kong, still a British colony at that time,
in 1951 decided in favor of the Red Chinese.
Pan
American Airways found itself temporarily in partnership with the Reds! While
the appeal was pending, title to the aircraft was in limbo. A number of the
aircraft had to be “pickled” in Hong Kong, placing CAT itself in a bit of a
pickle.
They
couldn’t use the pickled planes to deliver mail under the contract, and they
were in desperate need for money. Harry S Truman’s new CIA came to the rescue.
Documents transferring the ownership of CAT and its
assets to the Central Intelligence Agency were drafted—but classified as
secret—and not disclosed until after Watergate in the Church hearings of 1975.
The first step, however, was in figuring out the value of the two Chinese
squadrons, while factoring in the 20% interest Pan Am acquired in 1943 when it bought out the
Curtiss-Wright interest in China Airways.
The
negotiation process was discussed in Robert Daley’s book about Juan
Trippe:
“There
was only one way for the Nationalist [Chinese] government, as majority
stockholder, to unblock the airline's frozen dollar assets, and that was to buy
out Pan American's 20 percent share. Negotiations began in November 1949 and
lasted most of the month. T. V. Soong represented China; [William Langhorne] Bond
and a company lawyer spoke for Pan American. Most negotiating sessions took
place in Soong's luxuriously appointed apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking
Central Park.
“Bond
had his instructions from Trippe. CNAC's assets had recently been appraised,
and 20 percent of these assets came to just under $2 million. This was to be
Bond's asking price. Soong's first firm offer was $1 million. Bond said he
could not even take such an offer back to Trippe. After much haggling, Soong
agreed on a purchase price of $1.25 million, adding, "Tell Mr. Trippe I
wouldn't give that to him—not to anybody else in the world, Bondy, but you.”[34]
The
CIA officially took over the airline as a proprietary in a document signed
November 1, 1949, agreeing to pay $1,200,000 each year to maintain it. Thomas
G. Corcoran, who had been involved in all sorts of legal sleight-of-hand since
Franklin Roosevelt’s first days in office, now got help in doing the legal work
from Paul Helliwell, a Florida lawyer then in the OSS.[35]
The
Miami lawyer would later go on to set up Southern Air Transport (SAT) and Air
Asia as CIA proprietaries.
George
Doole’s Spook Airline
George
Doole, who had been a civilian employee of PanAm for years, transferred over to
CAT, which later became known as “Air America, Inc.” In the aftermath of Church
Committee revelations about the CIA’s assassination and mind control programs,
the Agency was under strong pressure to sell off the front companies used to
hide their fleet of planes.
George
Doole was just your average farm-bred boy in western Illinois until he
graduated from the University of Illinois in Urbana. Born in 1909, a year
already ushering in a new age of transportation technology—airways—he dreamed
of making a new niche for air transport.
He
received his sheepskin in general agricultural in 1932, at the same time he was
awarded a commission in the Army Reserves, having been in ROTC. Though his
dad’s middle name was “Andrew,” and George had a different middle name—Arntzen,
his mother’s maiden name—shown in his military records and on his gravestone,
he was often known simply as G. A. Doole, Jr.
Eight
months of regular pilot training during his senior year of college (likely at
Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas) qualified him for an additional four
months of advanced pilot training at Kelly Army Air Corps base in San Antonio.
Designated
as a flight cadet, Doole was technically a civilian when hired by Pan American
Airways Corporation at the end of his advanced training, and he shipped off to
Honolulu in October 1932. Pan Am was a private corporation, cooperating with
the federal government toward a dual purpose—building a commercial
transnational airline service that could be converted to military purposes in
the event of war.
For
income in the meantime, Pan Am’s corporate directors would use contacts with
the political power structure to gain concessions and contracts with the
federal government—to ferry mail, materiel or even to transport charter
passengers if needed. They agreed to
convert to military use in event of war, a provision of the contract that
enabled the company to be subsidized by the feds.
Doole
was a mere grunt in the operation in those days, with assignments in Panama and
Brownsville, Texas in addition to Hawaii. Pan Am flew only to certain countries
in South America at first, leading up to its goal of expanding to China and the
Far East.
Most
of us never heard of Doole at all until 1975, when his name came up in
Congressional House and Senate Reports after hearings had been held to
investigate the CIA’s aviation activities—and abuses—worldwide. By that time,
Doole was the head of Air America, known by some as “Spook Air.” How did Lt.
George Doole rise to the top?
We’ve
tracked his life to Hawaii in 1933, where generals, colonels and majors in the
Army Air Corps got to spend their peacetime years right alongside admirals,
captains, and commanders in the Navy. They all preferred to keep military use
of airplanes within their own branch’s control, though there was another more
powerful force that wanted to create a separate air force with a separate
leadership, which finally won out.
What
the directors of Pan Am wanted was to use every funding stream possible to
build up their commercial enterprise—including whatever income they could
finagle from military connections. Between 1932 and 1936 a great many of those
connections were enjoying life in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, building up
Pearl Harbor and the Hickham air base, initially under Army control.
While
making jaunts between San Francisco, Panama, and Honolulu, Doole found his way
to Brownsville, Texas, where one of his Pan Am colleagues with a slightly
higher rank than his was Henry C. Kristofferson—the father of later Rhodes
Scholar and country pop musician, Kris—cohort of the legendary Willie Nelson
and the Highwaymen.
In
mid-November 1936 Doole was a member of a reserve unit designated as the 42nd
Reserve Bombardment, which was being given $30,000 from the federal government
to build a new hangar adjacent to an unused municipal airport in Brownsville,
near the border with Mexico. Doole was then the communications officer, while
Kristofferson was assistant engineering officer. Later that month both men were
transferred to Panama.
From
Panama their paths would separate. During war years Doole’s status changed from
reserve to active, as he served in the Air Force Transport Service in the
India-China-Burma Theater. For several years Kristofferson would ferry
executives of Saudi Aramco from place to place on Pan American Airways planes,
even living in Saudi Arabia himself in 1962. We see his service as a model of
how the plan’s design worked for Doole as well.
In
1943-45 Doole was captain of a Pan Am plane, busily transporting Naval Air
troops between New York and Ireland, Portugal, Bermuda, and Brazil. Brazil was
a fueling stop on the way to the Far East Theater—Philippines, Kunming and
Indochina—dominated by Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers and the OSS forces
there.
There
were many characters in our book who found themselves in that area during those
same years: David Breed Lindsay, Sr. and Jr., Lucien Conein, Mitchell
Livingston WerBell III.
More
Proprietaries
Claire
Chennault’s CAT may have been the first CIA proprietary created, but it was far
from the last one. Air America itself actually started as two private companies
founded by pilots trained to fight in World War II and the Korean War. One of
those pilots headed back home after the war to McMinnville, Oregon, the home
base for Evergreen Helicopters, Inc. founded in 1959. It sustained its
existence by doing contracts with the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management—fighting fires and reseeding forests using helicopters.
Similarly,
Intermountain Aviation leased space at a county-owned airport in Pinal County,
Arizona, also contracting with federal agencies in need of helicopters, in a
desert area 90 miles southeast of Phoenix.
Marana,
Arizona was a remote airbase which seemed to appear out of an unbroken vista of
cactus and tumbleweed. One journalist trying to unravel the mystery of how the
Agency hid, or “sheep-dipped,” planes acquired by the CIA from early days
through the Vietnam War thought he found the key there in the desert.
The
Watergate scandal opened up a Pandora’s Box of covert activities that had been
going on for decades, so secret it shocked even hardened members of Congress.
Nixon’s “smoking gun” tape—reminding the CIA about the “whole Bay of Pigs
thing,” released shortly before he resigned in 1974—gave Congress an excuse to
investigate all sorts of covert intelligence activities, just as the snakes
began to slither into the brush for deeper cover.
So
the CIA’s new director told the public that, since there was no further need
for Air America, Southern Air Transport, Air Asia, and other CIA-owned
airlines, they would sell them off. What they didn’t say is that they would
just modify the form of ownership and not disclose how it was done.
A
decade later we observed that new form of sheep-dipping when Eugene Hasenfus
appeared out of nowhere in Nicaragua, claiming to be working for the CIA. One
more Congressional Report revealed not only the new ways to hide intelligence
agency ownership, but also how funds can be disguised through Swiss banks and
Caribbean entities.
William
J. Casey, Stanley Sporkin and William P. Barr, to name only three lawyers, were
there to give the Agency, as well as that era’s Republican Administration, tips
on how to extort funds from foreign nationals to fund an illegal war.
When
the Marana base was privatized in 1975, top CIA aviation officers, including
the Agency’s legendary George A. Doole, Jr., “retired” and went to work for the now-private Evergreen International—the company resulting from the
merger of Evergreen Helicopters and Intermountain Aviation.
The
CIA’s far-flung aviation operations, which span the globe, would continue to be based there. Thousands of airplanes sitting parked, waiting to be
reactivated. Inside the largest hanger hangs a plaque dedicated to Doole, who
died in Washington, D.C. in 1985.
The
subsequent privatization of government assets into private hands had the same
result as it did when Russia began to privatize 15 years later. The aviation
wing of American crony capitalism was born. Soon retired Generals, like Richard
Secord and John Singlaub, became instant corporate CEO’s, running aircraft
charter and aviation companies that continued doing the CIA’s bidding.
Who’s
been doing their bidding ever since? Suffice
it to say it’s a bit murky at this time.
As
you read this, my work is done. I have, as Shakespeare said, “shuffled off this
mortal coil.”
The
next generation must pick up where the boomers leave off.
All
I have to leave you with is a clue. Reread the excerpt at the beginning of this
chapter. Then start digging.
Hasta
la vista, Baby.
[1]
Bob Fitrakis, “Jeffrey Epstein: There’s Much More to the Story,” Columbus
Free Press, June 18, 2020. https://columbusfreepress.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-there%E2%80%99s-much-more-story-2
[2]
Believe it or not, “Little Nicky” will be mentioned again later in connection
with Donald Trump’s associate, Leslie Greyling.
[3] “WHITTINGTONS, LEVITZ PLEAD
GUILTY, FORFEIT MILLIONS IN SMUGGLING CASE,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, March
15, 1986.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1986/03/15/whittingtons-levitz-plead-guilty-forfeit-millions-in-smuggling-case/
[4]
Interview with author.
[5]
Tracey Cheek, “The History of Aircraft Trusts,” March 28, 2018. https://agcorp.com/2018/03/the-history-of-aircraft-trusts/
[6]
Smartmatic had earlier merged with Sequoia Voting Systems, and it was regularly
accused by the CIA of rigging elections. “Venezuela election bets on Florida
voting machine,” Tampa Bay Times, 20 Jul 2004, Page 31. Also see crash
report in The Miami Herald, 01 May 2008, Page 29.
[7]
Blake Stilwell, “‘Sheep Dipping’ is the worst name for the military’s best job,”
We Are The Mighty Military News, December 29, 2022. https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-culture/sheep-dipping/
[8]
Volume I Issue III December 2000 Mooney Pilot 39.
[10]
Daniel Hopsicker, “Terror Flight School Owner’s Lear Flew Saudis on
Unsupervised Flights, May 4, 2004. https://www.madcowprod.com/2004/05/04/terror-flight-school-owners-lear-flew-saudis-on-unsupervised-flights/
[11]
https://www.shannonwatch.org/content/aircraft-linked-cia-extraordinary-rendition-flights
[12]
Anthony R. Carrozza, William D. Pawley: The Extraordinary Life of the
Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Cofounded the Flying Tigers
(Potomac Books 2012).
[14]
Anthony R. Carrozza, William D. Pawley: The Extraordinary Life of the
Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Cofounded the Flying Tigers (p.
14). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[16]
Daley, Robert. An American Saga - Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire .
Riviera Productions Ltd.. Kindle Edition.
[18]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 53). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[19]
“Man & Wife of the Year,” Time magazine, Monday, Jan. 03, 1938. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,847922-5,00.html
[20]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 39). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[21]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 40). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[22]
Carrozza, Anthony R (p. 38). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[23]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 42). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[24]
William C McDonald III and Barbara L Evenson, The Shadow Tiger: Billy
McDonald, Wingman to Chennault (July 24, 2016).
[25]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 53). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[26]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 53). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[27]
Carrozza, Anthony R (p. 54). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[28]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 61). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[29]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 62). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[30]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 64). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[31]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 64). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[32]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 70). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[33]
Carrozza, Anthony R. (p. 81). Potomac Books. Kindle Edition.
[34]
Daley, Robert. An American Saga - Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire. Riviera
Productions Ltd. Kindle Edition.
[35]
Alfred T. Cox, “CIVIL AIR TRANSPORT (CAT): A PROPRIETARY AIRLINE,” Clandestine
Services History, April 1969. Search . https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/%28est%20pub%20date%29%20civil%20air%20%5B15503623%5D.pdf
Murphy Baxter was engaged as early as 1953 in the oil industry in Midland, Texas, and his office that year was in the V & J Tower at 114 N. Big Spring. That building (now a parking lot) was directly across the street from where the Bush-Overbey oil company was located within the Midland National Bank, which fronted on W. Texas Avenue at the corner of N. Big Spring (see inset). Undoubtedly the two oilmen would have bumped into each other during the years they were both in Midland. A few years later both Baxter and Bush would relocate to Houston.
By the time Louie Steven Witt testified in September 1978, one might assume there was nobody left to pressure him to make up an absurd story such as he told to Josiah "Tink" Thompson--that he was protesting Neville Chamberlain's 1938 appeasement policy. 
By the time Louie Steven Witt testified in September 1978, one might assume there was nobody left to pressure him to make up an absurd story such as he told to Josiah "Tink" Thompson--that he was protesting Neville Chamberlain's 1938 appeasement policy. 
