From Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump
George A. Doole, Architect of Air America
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Evan Thomas wrote Doole's obituary for Time Magazine, which revealed more about Doole's life than had ever been disclosed while he was alive:
...At the Chevy Chase Club, a Wasp bastion in a well-to-do Maryland suburb, Doole sometimes liked to while away afternoons playing bridge and back-gammon... Doole lived in one of the most elegant apartment buildings in Washington, the Westchester, but he never invited any guests there, and he refused to give the management a key. ...
Winning a commission in the Army in 1931, Doole learned how to fly airplanes. He later became a pilot for Pan Am, at first flying old Ford Tri-motors on the Guatemala-to-Panama run. Along about 1953–no one seems quite sure when – Doole made an unusual career move. He went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Officially, the CIA says it has no record that Doole ever worked there, but among old agency hands, he is a legend. Operating out of a small, nondescript office on Connecticut Avenue, he founded and ran a far-flung network of airlines that the agency used to carry out its covert operations all over the world. Owned by a holding company, the Pacific Corp., that was itself a CIA front, Doole’s empire included Air America, Civil Air Transport, Southern Air Transport, Air Asia and dozens of small puddle-jumper lines. Together, at their peak in the mid ’60s, these CIA “proprietaries” added up to an airline that was almost the size of TWA, employing nearly 20,000 people (as many as the CIA itself) and operating some 200 planes. Even the CIA was not sure just how many. Asked by then Deputy Director Helms to account for all the planes in Doole’s regime, a staffer spent three months on the project before confessing that he could never be more than 90% certain. The problem, explained the exasperated staffer, was that Doole was forever leasing planes between his shell corporations and changing their markings and tail numbers.
Traveling around the world, orchestrating his vast air armada, Doole kept his airplanes busy. Under the cover of legitimate freight and charter services, Doole’s airlines supplied a 30,000-man secret army in the mountains of Laos for a ten-year war against the Pathet Lao, dropped scores of agents into Red China, and helped stage an unsuccessful revolt in Indonesia. Not surprisingly, all this flying about aroused curiosity. In 1970 a New York Times reporter asked Doole if Air America had any connection with the CIA. “If ‘someone out there’ is behind all this,” Doole airily replied, “we don’t know about it.”
Doole’s pilots, who flew in and out of tiny jungle fields in abysmal weather and sometimes under enemy fire, were a raffish lot. They referred to the CIA as “the customer,” the ammunition they dropped as “hard rice” and being under heavy fire as “sporty.” Brushes with death were described as “fascinating.” To be “absolutely fascinated” meant scared witless.
Doole would appear from time to time at CIA bases from Vientiane to Panama City, but he stayed aloof from the pilots, many of whom regarded him as a bit of a snob. “I never saw the man without a tie on,” scoffs one. Doole played bridge, flew airplanes and did business deals the same way: slowly and deliberately. “The Chinese liked to negotiate with him,” recalls a former CIA official. “He was polite; he never showed any excitement. But he was tough.”
When the extent of the CIA’s covert operations was revealed by newspaper exposes and congressional hearings in the early ’70s, the agency was forced to dismantle Doole’s huge aerial empire and sell off the various planes and airfields. It was done at a profit; the agency turned over $20 million to the U.S. Treasury. Doole also did well by himself. Though he earned a government salary as a CIA employee, he augmented his income by investing, shrewdly, in the stock market. His estate when he died was worth “several million dollars,” according to a sister.
In 1971 Doole retired from the CIA. Formally, that is. He kept his hand in the aviation business as a director of Evergreen International Aviation, a company that refits and charters airplanes. Though Evergreen bought Intermountain Aviation, one of Doole’s CIA “proprietaries,” in 1975, the company insists that it has had nothing further to do with the agency. Perhaps. But when the dying Shah of Iran wanted to fly from Panama to Egypt in 1980, he flew on a chartered Evergreen DC-8. Doole arranged the charter.
The airfield in the Arizona desert where Evergreen opened its huge hangar last year, the George A. Doole Aviation Center, was once owned by the CIA. Today Evergreen workmen repair and refit commercial airliners from Pan Am, American and Emery Air Freight. It all seems perfectly ordinary and unexceptional, rather like the George Doole who enjoyed playing bridge at the Chevy Chase Club and dancing with wealthy widows. There is probably nothing remarkable about those two unmarked black Chinook helicopters that took off from a far corner of the airfield not long ago and headed south.
Managing Drug-Importing Airlines
George Doole's death left his proprietary empire in disarray, crumbling in the hands of Oliver North and his minions--men far less capable than George Doole had been. Their mismanagement of the secret airlines resulted in its exposure three decades after Doole had helped to create it.
Evan Thomas wrote an obituary for Doole in 1985, but--although it was written after Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12356 [April 1982], as implemented in HR 10-24(c)4, which required a reporter seeking access to classified files to sign a secrecy agreement and allow the CIA to review and redact what the reporter wrote before it was published--Thomas did not have full access to CIA files at the time he wrote Doole's obit. Even if he had such access, he would never have been cleared to expose the documents he found. Years later in 1996, Thomas described the process he went through in "A Singular Opportunity: Gaining Access to CIA's Records," an article that appeared in Studies in Intelligence.
Doole's path from Pan Am to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953 was likely similar to that many other military and aviation intelligence operatives followed as the U.S. began its cold war strategy against The Soviet Union, our former ally. Jack Crichton, for example, had been stationed at Coolidge AFB in Antigua in 1944, according to the flight manifest we discovered when doing Jack Crichton's genealogy, still an ongoing research project.
From Doole to Wexner
It took me years to notice something quite fascinating, though it may be merely coincidental. The year George Doole died--1985--is the same year Leslie Wexner was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein, and it was that same year, Bob Fitrakis tells us, that Les Wexner and Epstein combined forces with others in Wexner's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to move the allegedly "privatized" formerly CIA-owned airline, Southern Air Transport, from Miami to Columbus. Fitrakis aptly labeled the airline "Spook Air," in his article that appeared in the Columbus Free Press in 2018, originally published at Columbus Alive 4-22-1999.
Shortly after meeting Epstein, Wexner began the development of a new city, New Albany, northeast of Columbus, where the small town of that name then existed. At the same time he signed up to establish the old Southern Air Transport CIA airline at Rickenbacker (cargo-focused) International Airport south of Columbus. Assistance came from the McCoy family of Banc One.
John G. McCoy, followed by his son John B. McCoy, helped
"Banc One ... [to become] one of the country’s largest banks after acquiring First Chicago Bank for $21 billion. After the merger, the bank moved its headquarters to Chicago. John B. McCoy resigned in 1999 after the bank had earnings shortfalls. Jamie Dimon was hired as chief executive in 2000.
JPMorgan Chase – by then led by Dimon – bought Banc One in 2004. Chase later changed the name of its two-million-square-foot corporate offices in Columbus to the McCoy Center."
"If Langford is correct, that would mean that JPMorgan Chase has financial transaction files on Epstein dating back 40 years–which would certainly open a window into who provided Epstein’s early seed money and who his largest financial funders were over the decades." (italics added)
As we stated at the beginning of this blog post, 1985 was the critical year--the year that George Doole died just before Iran Contra exploded in the news; the year Leslie Wexner met Jeffrey Epstein, and the two men began working together to move Southern Air Transport to Columbus, Ohio. It was also in 1985 that Barry Seal was arrested in Florida and began, as we said in Gangster Planet to "work off his beef," only months before he was murdered. Before his death, Rodney Stich wrote:
Reed described how Oliver North and William Barr authorized him to start a CIA proprietary in Mexico posing as a high technology trading and consulting firm. Reed moved his family to Mexico, thinking the operation was legitimate and of long duration. Reed worked closely with Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, and Barry Seal. Before long, Reed discovered that the CIA front company he operated was being used by the CIA for gun-running and drug smuggling and this was confirmed in July 1987. He advised his CIA handler that he wanted out of the operation, and under cover of darkness, Reed moved his family back to Arkansas where he went into hiding. He then became targeted for retaliation by one of Arkansas’s state police officers who was on Governor Bill Clinton‘s staff.
There's Something Hinky about Columbus
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.
Once lauded as a coup for central Ohio development, landing Southern Air Transport’s business at Rickenbacker eventually turned into a nightmare, as the enterprise became mired in massive debt and was closed under a cloud of suspicion about its true activities.
the same powerful players who brought Epstein to prominence were largely responsible for the rise of JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon.
It was only when she found substantial evidence against "Epstein’s primary bank, JP Morgan Chase, alleging that the bank facilitated and profited from Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking enterprise," that she filed the civil lawsuit, and four days later "George was abruptly dismissed from office on December 31, 2022, by Governor Albert Bryan, Jr. who appointed her and later expressed his dismay over the J.P. Morgan lawsuit," according to her website. Despite her being fired, the lawsuit was allowed to continue under a different attorney.
Wexner's Bankers
From Bush's Russo to Reagan's Earl Brian
Back in Columbus, Ohio
Southern Air Transport
905. Background. Southern Air Transport (SAT) carried a variety of equipment, supplies and humanitarian aid for the FDN during the 1980s.
Robert Gates, left
906. Allegations of Drug Trafficking. A January 21, 1987 memorandum from ADCI Robert Gates to Morton Abramowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, stated that the U.S. Customs Service had advised CIA that the Customs office in New Orleans was investigating an allegation of drug trafficking by SAT crew members. The Gates memorandum noted that the source of the allegation was a senior FDN official. The memorandum indicated that the FDN official was concerned that "scandal emanating from Southern Air Transport could redound badly on FDN interests, including humanitarian aid from the United States."907. A February 23, 1991 DEA cable to CIA linked SAT to drug trafficking. The cable reported that SAT was "of record" in DEA's database from January 1985-September 1990 for alleged involvement in cocaine trafficking. An August 1990 entry in DEA's database reportedly alleged that $2 million was delivered to the firm's business sites, and several of the firm's pilots and executives were suspected of smuggling "narcotics currency."
Morton Abramowitz, diplomat
908. Information Sharing with Other U.S. Government Entities. As previously noted, a January 21, 1987 memorandum from ADCI Robert Gates to Morton Abramowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, reported that U.S. Customs had informed CIA that the Customs office in New Orleans was investigating an allegation of drug trafficking by SAT crew members. ***
1081. CIA only disseminated three finished intelligence products during the 1980s that related at all to potential Contra involvement in narcotics trafficking. These were: (i) a 1985 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concerning the international narcotics trade; (ii) an April 1986 Memorandum for Vice President George Bush; and (iii) the January 1987 Memorandum from Acting DCI Robert Gates to Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Morton Abramowitz. ***
1084. 1986 Memorandum for Vice President Bush. On April 6, 1986, a Memorandum entitled "Contra Involvement in Drug Trafficking" was prepared by CIA at the request of Vice President Bush. The Memorandum provided a summary of information that had been received in late 1984 regarding the alleged agreement between Southern Front Contra leader Eden Pastora's associates and Miami-based drug trafficker Jorge Morales. Morales reportedly had offered financial and aircraft support for the Contras in exchange for FRS pilots to "transship" Colombian cocaine to the United States. CIA disseminated this memorandum only to the Vice President.
1085. DI/OGI analyst who drafted the Memorandum says that there was no follow-up. Furthermore, the analyst recalls no further DI discussion of the Contras' alleged involvement in drug trafficking until the Memorandum that was written for Assistant Secretary of State Abramowitz in 1987.
1086. 1987 Memorandum for Abramowitz. The most comprehensive discussion of alleged Contra narcotics trafficking was included in a January 21, 1987 Memorandum from Acting DCI Robert Gates to DoS Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research Morton Abramowitz. The genesis of this Memorandum, entitled "Assessment of Alleged Connections Between Drug Traffickers and Anti-Sandinista ('Contra') Groups," was a January 9, 1987 memorandum from Abramowitz to then-Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gates indicating that Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams had expressed concern about the possible involvement of Contras in narcotics trafficking and had requested an Intelligence Community study "on an urgent basis." The memorandum from Abramowitz indicated that Abrams wanted the study "to pull together all foreign and domestically-generated information that is available, rumors and all, and provide an assessment of the credibility of the charges." Further, the memorandum to Gates indicated:The Assistant Secretary believes that it is essential that we know before the rest of the world if any of those whom we have funded are engaged in this business so that they can be expelled from the ranks of the resistance."1087. The Memorandum to Abramowitz was written under the auspices of the NIO/Narcotics and was drafted jointly by officers from the DO and the DI's Office of African and Latin American Analysis. In addition to DO reporting, the assessment relied heavily on DEA information. Six topics were addressed, including:
- Allegations discussed in three disseminated DO reports of October, November and December, 1984 concerning Pastora, Adolfo Chamorro, Gerardo Duran, David Mayorga, and Jorge Morales;
- Statements to FBI and DEA undercover agents by Orlando Bolanos, who claimed to be in command of an anti-communist movement in Nicaragua called the "Internal Front," that he planned to smuggle cocaine into the United States;
- The Frogman Case, which involved Nicaraguan drug traffickers who had been apprehended in early 1983 while swimming ashore near San Francisco, including information indicating that an unnamed suspected drug trafficker had placed 51 calls to a telephone in the FDN office in San Francisco that was later learned to have been listed to one of the defendants in the case. The defendant's name was not given;
- "Suspicious activities" at Ilopango air base in El Salvador;
- An allegation that Roger Herman, political director for the Contra group, KISAN, was involved in cocaine smuggling into the United States; and
- Allegations that the ranches of "two [unnamed] U.S. nationals" in Costa Rica, were used to smuggle weapons to the Contras and cocaine into the United States.
1088. The Memorandum prepared for Abramowitz concluded that there was "no indication that anti-Sandinista groups that have received or now are receiving support from the U.S. Government have engaged in drug trafficking to fund their operations." Moreover, according to the Memorandum, DEA and FBI officials, along with Intelligence Community leaders, said that "no credible information exists to support" allegations of Contra involvement in drug trafficking that "have surfaced over the past four years, particularly when renewed funding for the Nicaraguan insurgency was under consideration in the U.S. Congress."
1089. The Memorandum also concluded that, if Contra organizations had unwittingly received donations from sympathizers who derived the funds from drug trafficking:
". . our best judgment is that the donations probably reflected personal decisions on the part of the donor rather than an organizational effort on the part of an anti-Sandinista group."Further, the Memorandum stated that "we have no information suggesting Pastora's personal involvement" in the alleged agreement between his associates and Miami drug trafficker Morales, but "he may have been aware of them given his apparently close association with these individuals."1090. A January 21, 1987 transmittal letter that ADCI Gates attached to the Memorandum when it was sent to Abramowitz indicated that the Memorandum was being released with two qualifications:
- DEA Headquarters planned to follow up on the matter of the adequacy of a DEA investigation of alleged drug trafficking at Ilopango.
The transmittal letter concluded with the observation that: ". . . as future drug trafficking cases surface it is likely that we will see more assertions of Contra connections. Such assertions may take the form of self-serving stories by traffickers for use in their legal defenses as well as allegations by the Sandinistas to discredit the insurgents. "
"Background. According to the December 1988 Kerry Report, one of the pilots who flew Contra resupply missions for SETCO was Frank Moss. The Kerry Report also noted that Moss had been under investigation since 1979 for drug trafficking but reportedly was never indicted. In 1985, Moss formed his own company, Hondu Carib, which flew supplies to the FDN. The Kerry Report indicated that the FDN's arrangement with Moss and Hondu Carib was based on a commercial agreement between Moss and Mario Calero, the FDN's chief supply officer. Under that agreement, Calero was to receive an ownership interest in Moss' company. "
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| "I've done nothing illegal. All I ever wanted to do was fly," Frank Moss said. |
"... FDN has been particularly active in central Nicaragua, astride the Rama-Managua road that serves as a crucial artery in the transfer of weaponry from the Soviet Bloc to the Sandinista regime. On the Atlantic coast, the Indian resistance -- which dates from the regime's repression and forced relocation of the Miskito Indian population in 1981-82 -- continues harassment actions against the Sandinistas. The Indian umbrella organization KISAN, with about 1,000 combatants, relies heavily on donations of supplies from the FDN. Eden Pastora's forces have dwindled to some 600 men and have largely been sidelined since the Sandinistas drove them from their base camps in southern Nicaragua during the summer. Sandinista Response Managua has responded to the increased pressures by seeking additional economic and military assistance from the Soviet Bloc, cracking down on domestic opponents, and stepping up its counterinsurgency efforts. Only a massive increase in financial support from the Soviet Bloc is keeping the economy afloat."
Approved For Release 2009/09/16: CIA-RDP87M00539RO01802780006-7 Approved For Release 2009/09/16: CIA-RDP87M00539RO01802780006-7 TOP SECRET
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