SECRETS OF LOSING A REPUBLIC

From Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump

 

The Jeffrey Epstein files have been the topic at the top of the news cycle for months now, if not years. Sex attracts the public's interest, it seems, long after those following the flow of drugs for weapons have fallen by the wayside. Having following the theme of CIA Drugs for the last nearly 30 years, I've concluded sexual blackmail is simply another component of a conglomerate of power-seeking that also includes controlling weapons, using addictive drugs as the commodity by which to acquire the craved power.

 

Part of the control mechanism within a democratic nation requires that those craving power keep the public distracted, which they do by corporatizing the ownership of professional sports teams, combining that with advertising media and concessions, sponsorships and the like--rolling them all into one category, "entertainment," just another word in today's world for distraction from reality.

 

Although it has been a gradual progression, the loss of independence has been a threat since even before Benjamin Franklin declared the oft-repeated mantra: "A republic, if you can keep it." Ben Franklin, before he was a Founding Father, was a newsman. He was a friend of Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. Even without "social media," they knew how to inform the public about the importance of liberty and independence. They began their fight, not solely against their colonial rulers, but against the biggest corporation of that time--the British East India Company--then known as a joint-stock company, which had a government-granted monopoly on trade.

 

America lost its way when we lost our ability to free and open debate about the issues. Debate that is financed by special interests and paid propagandists with unlimited funds and deep pockets is not independent journalism. It was lost when we began equating national security with secret intelligence agencies during and after World War II. When the CIA budget and spending practices were shielded from the public, and leaking of such secrets became a crime. When Dollar-a-Year men were put into positions of trust within the government and allowed to set up the infrastructure for the Central Intelligence Agency and all the three-letter agencies like the CIA, which are today being protected by those whose names are redacted in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

 

Perhaps it began with the sons of the tycoons in the railroad industry used their inherited funds to invest in the new airline industry at the time of WWI, and then escalated when bankers who managed inherited wealth got into the game in the years between the two wars. It expanded globally when Wall Street's bankers and attorneys accumulated political power and learned how to keep certain financial transactions away from public scrutiny. Democrats like FDR and Harry Truman, excited by the promise of power perhaps, started the ball rolling. One of the first front companies they created is the subject of what follows. 

 

 George A. Doole, Architect of Air America

We found George Doole captaining a Panam World Airways flight in March 1945, listed on a Flight Manifest from Brazil to New York. Doole was a civilian pilot, who later operated deep within the bowels of the civilian aviation intelligence conglomerate known as Air America. 

Click image to enlarge.

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." 

 

 

Although it has been claimed that Jeffrey Epstein first became a JPMorgan client in 1998, a retired FBI agent named Shaun O'Neill stated in a report read by Russ and Pam Martens that "William Langford, an anti-money-laundering (AML) executive at JPMorgan Chase" stated under oath in a deposition in connection with SDNY Case No. 1:22-cv-10904-JSR that Epstein's relationship with the bank actually began in 1985. The report at footnote 14 cited Langford's Deposition as Exhibit 3, adding that "Epstein became a JPMC client in 1985, yet some 25 plus years later JPMC AML [Anti-Money Laundering (AML)] Group was unable to identify Epstein’s source of wealth or his clients, effectively rendering useless their KYC [know your customer] compliance component as it regards Epstein. On January 14, 2011, the primary JPMC AML Investigator looking into Epstein emailed senior management, 'Here is why I would like to know who his clients are' in response to an article about whether Epstein was running a Ponzi scheme." [Langford Dep. Ex. PM11 (JPM-SDNYLIT-00152808)]. 

 

From this the Martenses concluded: 

"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

Bob Fitrakis zeroed in on the men Wexner and Epstein gathered around them to build a civilian airport south of Columbus where an Air Force base once operated, stating:

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. 

Whitney Webb and Ed Berger clearly realized what was going on. It was money laundering and blackmail, and she revealed in 2023 at her website that:

the same powerful players who brought Epstein to prominence were largely responsible for the rise of JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon.  

Evidencing the power JP Morgan Chase wielded worldwide is the fact that the US Attorney Denise George, who brought the bank into a RICO lawsuit along with Epstein and others, was almost immediately fired, even though by November 2022 she had settled a case against Epstein's Estate, bringing more than $105 million into the coffers of the Virgin Islands, while "all 150 victims’ claims against Epstein were satisfied in separate private settlements with the Epstein Estate." 

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 

Whitney Webb dug much deeper, examining "top executives and directors of Bank One, which boasts incredibly close ties to The Limited’s Leslie Wexner and his right-hand man for many decades, Columbus-area real estate developer John W. Kessler."

 

Also called Banc One, its directors were called out in 1986 for being involved in a pay-to-play fund-raiser Leslie Wexner hosted for Democratic governor Richard Celeste's re-election campaign. It was only a coincidence that all those men on the host committee just happened to be doing business with the State of Ohio, in addition to being Republicans, according to his opponent in the primary, whom UPI reported as saying, "We all know that Celeste expects people doing business with the state to kick into his campaign and to front for him."

 

 

 From Bush's Russo to Reagan's Earl Brian

 

Perhaps it was that very expose that prompted Vice President George Bush to spur his Houston friend and landlord, Joe Russo, to partner with a Mexican media magnate, Mario Vasquez Rana, in buying UPI out of Chapter 11, which it had been forced into in April 1985. Russo's and Vasquez' competitor in the bidding was none other than Earl W. Brian's Financial News Network. 

 

All the sale managed to do was delay Earl Brian's acquisition, forcing him to buy from Vasquez and Russo in 1989. During that time, as we know, Brian also got all knotted up in Iran Contra and the Promis software scandal, forcing them back to bankruptcy court. What remained of UPI's corpse was scavenged by the Saudi-owned group (ARA International) in 1992. 

 

By 1998, almost nobody remembered that UPI had once been "a major presence in the global news business, a training ground for a generation of journalists that included Walter Cronkite," according to Forbes. 

 

Back in Columbus, Ohio 

Alan D. Fiers Jr., according to Fitrakis, who had been a member of the "1961 Ohio State University football team and a Buckeye assistant coach in 1962, who later became the chief of the CIA Central American Task Force." Fiers was also connected to the move of the airline, as was "retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, head of air logistics for the CIA-owned Air America’s covert action in Laos between 1966 and 1968, and air logistics coordinator in the illegal Contra resupply network for Oliver North in the ’80s."

 

Fitrakis subtly added: "According to the recent CIA report on Southern Air Transport [Volume II of the Hitz Report], Fiers informed U.S. Senate investigators that the CIA told the DEA early on about Contra leaders being involved in drug smuggling. Secord, who is a 1954 graduate of Columbus’ South High School, pleaded guilty in 1989 to a felony charge in connection with the cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair." [Note: Volume I of the report dealt with the drug operations taking place in South Central Los Angeles, California under the guise of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), commonly known as the Contras.] 

 

When Fitrakis cited the October 1998 CIA report on Southern Air Transport, he was referring to Hitz's Volume II, which contained the paragraphs excerpted below, which referenced Southern Air Transport:

 Southern Air Transport

Robert Gates, left

905.  Background. Southern Air Transport (SAT) carried a variety of equipment, supplies and humanitarian aid for the FDN during the 1980s.
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."

Morton Abramowitz, diplomat

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."
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 U.S. Customs Service was investigating allegations by Mario Calero that crew members working for Southern Air Transport might have been involved in drug trafficking.

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. "

Adolfo Calero had been dealt with earlier in the report at Paragraph 891:  

"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. "

The airline, Hondu Carib, owned one of the many airplanes that shipped drugs to Port Charlotte, Florida, just a few miles from Venice, where Daniel Hopsicker lived when he began researching drug planes there, shortly after he finished Barry and 'the boys'.  Port Charlotte drug smuggling had been prolific in the area, as we indicated in Gangster Planet.

"I've done nothing illegal. All I ever wanted to do was fly," Frank Moss said.

Frank Moss, a SETCO pilot, was mentioned in Peter Dale Scott's book, Cocaine Politics, which on page 58 stated that the DC-4 plane Moss used "was listed to Hondu Carib in a 1983 Customs report that linked the aircraft to several individuals said to be 'involved in large-scale narcotics smuggling.' The plane was also being watched because an informant said it dropped narcotics on the isolated Louisiana farm of Adler 'Barry' Seal, an American who managed the Colombian cartels' shipping operations into the United States."

The KISAN group referred to above was described in a CIA document released in 2009, which stated: 

"... 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

It All Leads Back to Columbus, OH in 1985. We will pick up there in a subsequent post.

 

 

Military Intelligence in Dallas in 1963

Umbrella Man

Photo, as enlarged, of "umbrella man"

A few years ago JFK researcher Russ Baker wrote a piece on his website called "JFK Umbrella Man--More Doubts," as a follow-up to a previous article he entitled "NY Times' Umbrella Man Exposed." Baker is a well educated journalist, whose book, Family of Secrets (Bloomsbury Press 2008), attempted to reveal the secret background of the life of George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush (Presidents 41 and 43).

Baker does not take anything published in the mainstream media at face value. He questions all facts presented, researching for himself the sources behind a reporter's story. He is often critical of the conclusions the reporter arrives at given the "facts" laid out. 

You Tube video

Such was the case when he viewed the Errol Morris' "umbrella man" video that showed up in the opinion section of the New York Times website on November 21, 2011, the day prior to the 48th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Baker delved into who Louis Steven Witt, the man who testified before the HSCA hearing on September 22, 1978, was:

Here are some things you should know about the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and tell this ludicrous Neville Chamberlain story:

• His account of his activities that day don’t track with what Umbrella Man actually did, raising questions as to whether this man who volunteered to testify to the assassination inquiry is even the real umbrella-bearer, or someone whose purpose was to end inquiries into the matter.

• The man who came forward, Louie Steven Witt, was a young man at the time of Kennedy’s death. How many young men in Dallas in 1963 even knew what Neville Chamberlain had done a quarter-century before?

• In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina.  Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.

• A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

Compare this photo with those shown at WhoWhatWhy of umbrella man.

 

Witt had actually been born in October 1924, making him 18 years old in 1942, the year he joined the military in Omaha, Texas, a farm town located a mere 15 miles from where D. Harold Byrd in 1936 formed a business with three other partners.


In Baker's original story about Witt, Baker wrote:

In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina. Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.

A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

It’s worth considering the roles of military-connected figures on the day of the assassination. These include Dallas Military Intelligence unit chief Jack Crichton operating secretly from an underground communications bunker; Crichton’s providing a translator who twisted Marina Oswald’s statement to police in a way that implicated her husband; and members of military intelligence forcing their way into the pilot car [see below] of Kennedy’s motorcade, which inexplicably ground to a halt in front of the Texas School Book Depository (where Lee Harvey Oswald’s employer, a high official with the local military-connected American Legion, managed to find a “job” for Oswald at a time when his company was otherwise seasonally laying off staff.) Oh, and it’s worth contemplating JFK’s titanic, if under-reported, struggle with top Pentagon officials over how the US should interact with Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the world.

 Rio Grande National Life Insurance Company

The Rio Grande insurance building on N. Field at Elm was 18 stories high, and the insurance company was housed in the top three floors. The entire 9th floor was leased to the U.S. government agencies Baker mentioned. Rio Grande's chairman, president and three vice presidents (father and four brothers) had the last name Baxter. All other vice presidents appear to have been their assistants.

Robert Wylie Baxter, of Harlingen, had been one of three incorporators of the company in 1928. By 1930 he had moved to Dallas but retained the name that connected the business to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. In 1939, he traded the original building in Harlingen for one in Dallas. Then in 1948 the company purchased the lot on Field and Elm to build a new building. By then the sons were out of college and the military, with families of their own. The three eldest were employed by Rio Grande, while Murphy soon moved to Midland to pursue a career as an oilman. Bill, the youngest, became a rancher in Tioga.

In Dallas the senior Baxter was also associated with other businessmen as a sponsor of presidential candidates. In August of 1960 an AP wire story alleged that Baxter had been named in 1958--along with Harry W. Bass Jr. and Toddie Lee Wynne, Jr., son of one of the powerful Wynne brothers--as sponsors of an appreciation dinner for Senator Lyndon Johnson, which later turned into a committee supporting LBJ for President during the primary, before he lost the convention vote to John Kennedy. After JFK was nominated, the Dallas men then threw their support to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, joining others who were already active in Republican politics. They rejected Kennedy, the article said, because he planned to lower the oil-depletion allowance.

Dallas directory, 1963

Less than two weeks following the assassination, Baxter was shown as treasurer of the Wadley foundation, set up by J.K. and Susan L. Wadley to raise funds for research into leukemia. Members of the foundation's board included some of the city's most powerful bankers--Robert H. Stewart III,  J. Rawles Fulgham, and R. L. Thornton. The wife of Robert G. Storey, Jr. headed the women's division.

Thornton, who headed the Mercantile National Bank, had also been a Dallas mayor. Both Stewart and Fulgham were officers of the Dallas Bank which in 1973 became First International Bancshares, Inc. This bank would later place George H. W. Bush in charge of its London subsidiary when newly elected President Jimmy Carter refused to keep Bush on as Director of the CIA. 

 

By 1982, Fulgham was a member of the board of directors of the Bush-connected corporation, Dresser Industries, as well as being executive director of Merrill Lynch Capital, Inc., when he criticized the sanctions imposed by the Reagan administration against a subsidiary, Dresser France, the company furnishing parts for a pipeline being built from Siberia to furnish natural gas to Europe. 

We know the 4th U.S. Army Intelligence Corps was located in Room 912 and that Immigration & Naturalization Service occupied most of the 14th floor of the Rio Grande Building.

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.

In October 1967 Murphy H. Baxter filed a lawsuit in Dallas County's 116th District Court against his father and oldest brother, as Rio Grande's two highest executives, alleging they had begun a campaign to market life insurance to military personnel, ignoring commonsense business practices, and resulting in the loss of millions of dollars to him as an 11% shareholder of the company. A month after the lawsuit was filed, Rio Grande agreed to merge into Kentucky Central insurance of Lexington, Kentucky. The merger became effective on January 1, 1968, absorbing all that was left of the Texas insurance company and abandoning the name. The same month as Witt's testimony Kentucky Central was fighting a takeover engineered by American General insurance company in Houston, originally organized by Gus Wortham, a member of what has been called the "Suite 8-F Crowd," one member of which was George R. Brown, who had financially supported Lyndon's Johnson's presidential bid in 1960, when he came in second to John F. Kennedy. American General in 1978 was headed by Andrew Delaney, who had worked with the company's top executives since 1953.

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. 

 

In 1975 his directory listing showed him to be records supervisor at the the Oak Cliff Savings & Loan, when he stepped forward to take credit for standing in front of the TSBD, holding a black umbrella, as the shots were fired that killed Kennedy. Oak Hill Savings in 1972 had been absorbed, through mergers and acquisitions, into First Texas Financial Corporation, and one year after Witt's testimony, it no longer employed him.

Jack Crichton and Dallas Military Intelligence

 

If the intent of Witt's testimony was to mislead the HSCA investigation, one possible clue to that motive might have been the fact that in 1950, while still single, Louie Witt had been employed as a "parts layout man" for an aircraft manufacturer, renting a room southwest of downtown Dallas, less than 8 miles from North American Aviation's aircraft factory. As the linked article states: "Chance-Vought, one of the four divisions of United Aircraft, Incorporated, took over the North American plant in May 1949 to produce and experiment with jet aircraft. The Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Company was organized to utilize the facilities of what by then had become one of the world's largest centers of aircraft production.... After the North American facility (later Ling-Temco-Vought), the Fort Worth General Dynamics or 'Convair' plant was completed in 1941. This firm, noted for bomber production and its controversial TFX contract, ranked first in the nation in the export of defense weapons in 1965."

 

Daniel Hopsicker and I had a chapter in Gangster Planet devoted to the same area that, according to TSHA "had become one of the world's largest centers of aircraft production." If memory serves, we called the chapter "Busting Out All Over."

 

Jack Crichton

After discussion of the umbrella man, Russ Baker jumped to the subject of Jack Crichton, who in 1963 was chief of the 488th Army Reserve intelligence unit in Dallas, relying to some extent on the previous work of Peter Dale Scott. Scott himself, who revised some of his own views of the role of military intelligence after reading Baker's book, had years earlier sat in an interview of sorts held by the man in charge of the HSCA investigation (Robert Blakey) in September 1977 as part of a group of acknowledged JFK assassination experts--known as the "Critics Conference." Scott had by that time already written much about Jack Alston Crichton, chief of the 488th reserve unit of military intelligence, which answered to the 4th Army commander based at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. As we stated earlier, however, the 4th Army Intelligence Corps also had an office in the Rio Grande office building in Dallas, the same building where Louie Steven Witt worked.

Scott knew that half of the 100 members of the intelligence unit had careers within the Dallas Police Department (DPD). In a paper presented in 2010 at COPA he spelled out numerous false flag scenarios that had taken place in Dallas, which he had testified about at the Critics' Conference. He mentioned as an example an army cable sent by Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow of the Intelligence Section of DPD, whose superior officer was Captain W.P. Gannaway, a member of Army Intelligence Reserve.  A warrant officer of the 112th Intelligence Group, Ed Coyle, testified to the Assassinations Records Review Board in 1996 that all the officers in the DPD’s Intelligence Section were in army intelligence.

 

Scott had concluded that "they were almost certainly in the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas: Jack Crichton, the head of the 488th, revealed in an oral history that there were “about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department,” citing his previous books, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 276 and Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba, 78.

History of U.S. Military Intelligence 

Historically, all military intelligence groups of today can track their origin to 1940. Mother Jones published an article by Adam Hochchild in its first 2018 issue about Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, tracing all military intelligence groups to an organizing meeting held a year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, at which all intelligence gathering was divided up by Van Deman and his protege, J. Edgar Hoover:

On May 31, 1940, Hoover gathered in his office high officials from the Army, Navy, and State Department to divide up intelligence-gathering territory. “This was like the pope dividing the unexplored world [between Spain and Portugal] in 1493,” says McCoy. “The FBI got counterintelligence at home—and operations in Latin America. Military intelligence, out of which the OSS and then the CIA evolved, got the rest of the world.” 

Peter Dale Scott's COPA paper disclosed that Crichton commanded the 488th and that Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin was also a deputy commander of the 488th under Crichton. He drew a picture of Jack Crichton as "the kind of figure Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point described as a “connector….people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” He then listed a number of contacts among whom Crichton acted as a hub, such as:

• His superior in the Army Reserves, Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, who rode in the pilot car of the Kennedy motorcade in front of President Kennedy. 
• DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin was also in the pilot car, which made an unexplained stop in front of the building leased by the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD).
• The Lessor/owner of the TSBD building was D.Harold “Dry Hole” Byrd, who was a director since 1961 of Dorchester Gas Producing, headed by Crichton.
• Lt. Col. Frank Brandstetter, a fellow 488th member, with whom Crichton seemingly conducted “a study of Soviet oil fields,” in the late 1950s. Hungarian by birth, Brandstetter worked in hotel management for eleven years in New York (in 1940 managing a small hotel, ironically, only three doors down from Jeffrey's Epstein's later home on E. 65th Street). He went from being a hotelier to serving in Army Intelligence, and was sent to England to the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters, where he asked to train with the 506th Airborne Infantry Regiment "Band of Brothers," and dropped with that unit into Normandy on D-Day. He founded the Las Brisas Resort in Acapulco while still on active duty for the Pentagon, but he most likely teamed up with Crichton in oil exploration in countries where he could help as a translator. (See Adorable Times blog and obituary).
• Ilya Mamantov, a Russian emigre who arrived with his parents from Latvia, and spent his career with Sun Oil Co., (owned by the Pew family of Pennsylvania), which got its start at Spindletop, where it also was engaged in building a distribution pipeline through Louisiana, when Crichton was growing up there before 1934. Crichton knew Mamatov well enough in 1963 to recommend him to translate for Marina Oswald. 

Before joining the military, Crichton had graduated in 1937 from Texas A&M at College Station, Texas, with a B.S. in petroleum engineering. His name was also listed in the Boston Globe in 1938 as a recipient of an M.S. in petroleum engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Still single in 1938, he returned to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he found Norris McGowen, founder of United Gas Corp. was very active. In fact, Jack was hired to work for United's subsidiary Union Producing Co. at that time, not long before Union acquired the old Youree mansion on Fairfield Avenue in Shreveport to start construction of a seven-story headquarters for Crichton's employer. A few years later the 1525 Fairfield Avenue home office became the Louisiana State Office Building in Shreveport. 

 

Jack's aunt, Jo Crichton Mercer, lived at 1022 Fairfield with her husband, William D. Mercer, less than a mile north of the new headquarters, and he lived with them in 1940 while working for United Gas. Jo and her son, John F. Mercer, were tax collectors for Caddo Parish. 

Cold War Plans

President Truman transferred the activities of the Research and Analysis Branch and the Presentation Branch of the Office of Strategic Services to the State Department, effective as of October 1945. That transfer, according to Truman, represented "the beginning of the development of a coordinated system of foreign intelligence within the permanent framework of the Government. Consistent with the foregoing, the Executive order provides for the transfer of the remaining activities of the Office of Strategic Services to the War Department; for the abolition of the Office of Strategic Services; and for the continued orderly liquidation of some of the activities of the Office without interrupting other services of a military nature the need for which will continue for some time."

Therefore, from October 1, 1945 until the Central Intelligence Agency's creation by Truman's administration, former OSS operatives not released from service transferred over either to the State Department as civilians, or to the Department of War (renamed Defense), possibly as military officers. Since it has been asserted that Crichton was in OSS, he most likely went back into military intelligence until his discharge in 1946.

From there he went to work for Degolyer & MacNaughten's office in Dallas. 

 

George Doole, Pan Am, and Air America

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 29^th 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 14^th 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.

[9] Ibid.

[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).

[13] Ibid.

[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.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Daley, Robert. An American Saga - Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire . Riviera Productions Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

[17] Ibid.

[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