R
Raymond
Guest
ONLY THE GODFATHER
CIA and Subsidiaries Exposed in Court Documents As Active Drug
Smugglers Using Military Aircraft Washed Through Forest Service
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December, 1998 Investigations Latest in Legacy of CIA's Drug
Operations and Corruption of Government
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Two Reagan Era Operators, Convicted in 1997, May Be Only The First To
Hit The Graybar Hotel
The Dark History - In 1976 Senator Frank Church submitted CIA General
Counsel Lawrence Houston to intense grilling over the Agency's
questionable and illegal operation of proprietary air transport
services. At that time, Houston admitted that the CIA had routinely
used the United States Postal Service and the U.S. Forrest Service as
covers for covert activities. Houston admitted that The Forest Service
had been infiltrated by CIA and that CIA shared an address with the
Forrest Service's Air Research and Development unit on Kent Street in
Alexandria, VA.
Houston also admitted that the primary company, responsible for all of
CIA covert air operations, was a holding company named Pacific Corp.
There is an Oregon based corporation known as Pacificorp which has a
multitude of sub entities with varying versions of the name including
Pacific Power & Light, Pacificorp and Pacific Harbor Capital. In 1993
a Seattle paper ran a story connecting Pacificorp to CIA's Pacific
Corp. Under oath, before the Senate in 1976, Houston admitted that
Pacific Corp, owned and controlled such CIA notables as Air America,
Southern Air Transport and Intermountain Air. In 1976 the CIA was
ordered to sell Air America and divest itself of all its holdings.
Since 1973 the CIA had been anticipating this and had moved quickly to
give all of its clandestinely owned aircraft to its alleged
proprietary, Evergreen International based out of Marana Air Park near
Tucson Arizona and McMinville Oregon, near Portland. Coincidentally,
Medford Oregon is the home base of aircraft broker Roy Reagan. Reagan
was convicted in 1997, along with another man on criminal charges
stemming from a scheme to fraudulently take $80 million worth of
airplanes from the U.S. government and place them in private hands.
Reagan was also the broker for Evergreen according to a lawsuit filed
by former CIA pilot Gary Eitel.
In the late 1970s and early 80s former military and CIA pilot Eitel,
also an attorney, became aware that the CIA was planning to move a
number of Australian C-130s under CIA control into the private sector
and transfer them to Bogota Colombia. "They were to be used for drug
smuggling," said Eitel. The attorney for the transfer was a man named
John Ford who in later years represented Pacificorp, Pacific Harbor
Capitol and who is currently said to be senior in-house attorney for
Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco (no connection). Several of
the Australian C-130's turned up in the drug trade and were moved
through facilities in Arizona and Mena, Arkansas, among others, on
their way into the cocaine trade.
Eitel has testified in Federal Court and confirmed to From The
Wilderness that CIA was flying drugs into Mena Arkansas as far back as
1971-5. Eitel began his relations with CIA in 1968 as a helicopter
pilot who was willing to fly risky combat missions in Vietnam. He has
since broken with the Agency and has proven that by giving sworn
testimony both in court and in Congress exposing illegal CIA
operations.
Eitel, who has testified as an expert witness in several civil and
criminal cases, is now representing the U.S. Government as a private
citizen in a civil action charging the Forest Service and CIA with
defrauding the American people of close to $80 million dollars in the
illegal transfer of 35 C-130 aircraft to a number of private firms.
These firms serve as contractors to the Forest Service. The aircraft
transfer program, begun in 1987, was intended to give private
contractors serviceable aircraft in exchange for worn out ones to help
the Forest Service fight fires as converted air tankers. Instead they
have turned up all over the world on covert operations. A few have
been caught full of drugs as recently as 1996.
THE AIRPLANE
The Lockheed C-130 Hercules first entered the inventory of the U.S.
Air Force in 1955. To this day it remains one of the most versatile
cargo aircraft ever built. The Air Force includes various versions of
the C-130 in its operational plans through the year 2015. It can fly
at cruise speeds of up to 350 mph, is capable of taking off from
short, unimproved runways and can haul loads of up to 50,000 pounds.
It is capable of dropping those loads from a rear ramp while literally
"on the fly". While new C-130s cost the government around $20-25
million, used aircraft are generally valued by the GAO at up to 3.5
million each. A GAO report lists the value of one propeller at
$100,000 and one engine at $250,000. It is the perfect drug smuggling
aircraft for long hauls.
Under United States law the C-130 is a military munitions aircraft
which is tightly controlled. It is forbidden to export one to a
foreign country without the prior approval of the State Department,
the Department of Defense, the FAA and the CIA. The CIA is the only
governmental agency with enough clout to secure permissions from all
of the preceding entities.
When used in a fire fighting application as an aerial tanker it costs
$3,300 per flight hour to operate a C-130 delivering 2,000 gallons of
retardant as opposed to $1,600 per hour for the same amount of
retardant delivered from a readily available DC 7.
The Scheme
Roy Reagan, no relation to Ronald, has a long and detailed history of
connections to CIA and covert activities. In the 1980s he was linked
both to Evergreen Air and a number of operations securing surplus
helicopters and weapons for Contra support operations. Evergreen Air
itself, during the contra era, has been documented as handling Contra
military supplies, including weapons, which were loaded onto C-130s in
Corpus Christi, Texas. One of Reagan's business partners, James
Patrick Ross, who worked with Reagan in Reagan Enterprises out of
their offices in Chico, California, was the same mechanic who signed
off on a mechanical inspection of a C-123 named The Fat Lady which was
later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 while on a CIA mission. Only an
ill-starred cargo handler named Eugene Hasenfus survived the shoot
down. The Fat Lady's death and Hasenfus' survival triggered the Iran-
Contra scandal. The Fat Lady had previously been the favorite personal
airplane of Barry Seal.
Fred A. Fuchs (pronounced Fox) is a former career Forest Service
employee who rose to the rank of Assistant Director. The Forest
Service fired him in 1993 for his role in this scheme. He was
subsequently re-hired and then allowed to retire in 1996. Fuchs lists
his home as Las Lunas, NM which is, coincidentally, the site of the
Mid Valley airport used by Albert Vincent Carone and his partner James
Robert Strauss for CIA drug missions throughout the eighties and early
nineties. Carone and Strauss have been previously documented in From
The Wilderness as being the primary bag men for Oliver North and
George Bush as well as providing liaison between the CIA and the Mafia
for transfers of drugs and drug profits.
In 1987 Reagan and Fuchs came up with a plan to literally steal
airplanes from the federal government which had a noble sounding
stated purpose. According to documents filed in an Arizona federal
criminal prosecution, which led to the conviction of the two for fraud
and theft in Oct. 1997, they said they were going to save the nation's
forests.
The scheme was simple. All around the country the U.S. Forest Service
had relied for years on the services of private contractors who owned,
operated and maintained air tankers used to drop water and retardant
on forest fires. The problem was that by 1987 most of the Korean War
and WW II vintage aircraft then in use were wearing out. They were not
capable of carrying the loads necessary and spare parts were hard to
find. If Reagan and Fuchs got their way, which they did, the Forest
Service would obtain surplus C-130s, Navy P-3 Orion anti-sub planes
and even jet powered A-10 Warthogs, used as tank killers during desert
Storm, and "trade" them to private contractors on a one-for-one basis
and place the aging aircraft in museums. The government would then
hire the planes as needed to fight fires and the title to the aircraft
would pass into private hands.
In reality, according to a lawsuit filed by whistleblower Gary Eitel
under the False Claims Act, (a little known civil war era statute that
allows citizens to file suit on behalf of the government), Evergreen
Air, as a behind the scenes player, was using Reagan in a scheme to
move as many as 50 C-130s into "private" hands for use in a variety of
covert operations. These included drug smuggling and the direct
enrichment of a number of private contractors including Reagan and at
least five private companies in California, Arizona and Wyoming. Eitel
has been quoted in news sources as saying that one purpose of the
conspiracy was to defraud even the CIA, which would help obtain the
aircraft. However, in an interview with From The Wilderness he
acknowledged that Evergreen Air had card carrying CIA officers on the
property and had admitted being a CIA contractor. "What happened also
was that Reagan was going to put about one out of every three C-130s
back in his own pocket for his own use."
The Law
From The Wilderness has obtained a copy of a Dec. 1989 memorandum to
Forest Service Associate Chief George Leonard from Assistant General
Counsel Kenneth Cohen, which seems to show that the Forest Service
knew it was having problems with the scheme all along. Listing
requirements from the Federal Property Management Regulations Cohen
laid out three specific requirements which had to be met before the
transfer could be deemed legal. First the transfer had to result in a
greater return for the government. That could hardly be the case if a
C-130 valued at $3.5 million were traded for a junk aircraft valued as
low as $19,000 which was inoperable. Second, aircraft and airframe
structural components were specifically prohibited from transfer.
Third, the items to be exchanged could not have been acquired for the
purpose of transfer and they had to have been used by the Forest
Service for a period of one year before being transferred out of
Forest Service inventory.
In spite of the fact that none of the above conditions were met the
transfers continued under the control of Fuchs and Reagan through
approximately 1989 when the last of the C-130's were placed in the
hands of five private air contractors. Out of 35 aircraft transferred
into private hands twenty-eight were actually re-titled. Some changed
hands several times before turning up in the control of drug dealers
in Panama and Mexico. Reagan and Fuchs tried to justify their actions
by stating that the C-130s, obtained from Air Force storage facilities
and active Air Reserve and National Guard units were historic planes
themselves and obsolete. That is hard to justify since the Air Force
currently has the C-130 slated for active duty until the year 2015.
Last year, in the Tucson criminal trial of Reagan and Fuchs, which was
prompted by Eitel's 1994 lawsuit, three Air Force generals testified
that when they approved of the transfer to the Forest Service they
believed the titles would remain with the Forest Service as they
approved the transfer out of military inventory."
Did the Forest Service know or suspect that the planes, under CIA
control, might be used for drug dealing? In the same memorandum
Kenneth Cohen states, "Apparently, DoD [Department of Defense] thinks
that by having the Forest Service as the intermediary, if any future
aircraft are used in drug smuggling, the Forest Service and not DoD
will suffer the adverse publicity."
He was right.
The Good, The Bad and The Private Contractors
All of the C-130s were moved out into private hands passing through
Evergreen facilities at Marana Airpark and through Davis-Montham Air
Force base in Tucson right next door. The first of the C-130s reached
private hands and titles were transferred in 1987. The five selected
companies were Hemet Valley Flying Service in Riverside County,
California (which received the first seven and showed Reagan as a
signatory on one of its contracts); Hawkins and Powers of Greybull,
Wyoming; TBM of Tulare, California; Aero-Union of Chico, California
(which shared office space with one of Reagan's shell companies where
Contra mechanic Ross worked) and T&G aviation of Chandler, Arizona.
T&G got in on the act after hearing of the bonanza and complaining to
Arizona Senators De Concini and McCain. T&G is owned by admitted
former Air America and CIA pilot Woody Grantham.
According to Eitel, Aero-Union has been documented as a CIA contractor
as far back as the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 when it served as a
cover for B-26 pilots who were prevented from flying air support
missions for the invasion. Also according to Eitel, the very first
C-130 delivered into private hands was flown into Hemet Valley by
James Patrick Ross, the CIA pilot-mechanic who had originally come to
the U.S. as a part of the Australian C-130 transfer in the mid 1980s
and who had serviced Barry Seal's C-123.
According to documents filed in the civil lawsuit by Eitel, Roy Reagan
wasn't particularly happy with Grantham's T&G muscling in on the deal
but he later approached Grantham with a sweetened offer that if he
obtained extra C-130s for T&G, he would receive a cash kickback and
arrange the financing through a client's company, Pacific Harbor
Capital. Grantham agreed. "Reagan also told Grantham he would arrange
several covert missions to be flown by T&G for Iran, Iraq and Kuwait
as a part of the deal," said Eitel.
The paper trail is black hole dense but it is certain that T&G
received at least three C-130s from Hemet Valley. Others it obtained
directly from Reagan and other sources. After a series of court
battles in California between Hemet Valley and financier Larry Wurth,
three C-130s were transferred to Wurth and then to T&G. Remember that
Roy Reagan showed up as a signing officer on one of Hemet Valley's
contracts acknowledging receipt of the planes. Approximately one
fourth of the 35 planes given over into private hands were eventually
stripped for (free) parts.
The record of the next ten years is as littered with lawsuits and
airplane transfers, sometimes between the various contractors, as the
killing fields of Cambodia were littered with Pol Pot's murder
victims. An entire book would be needed to document the suits between
firms like James Venable of Hemet Valley and Wurth which saw planes
held hostage and traded like helpless children in a brutal custody
battle which further clouded the issue of ownership. The suits and
custody battles may have been the actual intention of CIA when it
suspected that the illegal transfers might be discovered, challenged
and ordered corrected. It made it all the harder for the Forest
Service to recover the planes when it got caught with it pants down.
But in almost every case when planes changed hands they went back
through Evergreen first.
Of a certainty, the 35 C-130s, which actually changed hands in the
program, wound up doing many other things than fighting fires on
behalf of the Forest Service. They have been documented on covert
missions in France, Spain, Angola, South Africa, Central America, and
even Kuwait during Desert Storm. In June 1991 one of Roy Reagan's
C-130s crashed on a CIA mission in Angola killing the nephew of Rep
Curt Weldon, R-Pa who later participated in hearings looking into the
program.
"All of the contractors had unregulated air fields in remote places
that were not usually subject to any kind of Customs inspections. All
of the contractors were able to come and go virtually undetected so
they could have been doing anything. It was an ideal cover both for
drug smuggling and a variety of covert operations," Eitel observed.
In 1994, as he was investigating his lawsuit, Eitel was researching
various aspects of the Forest Service transfer at the Department of
Justice. He was allowed to view classified materials relevant to the
investigation. "I saw a three ring folder full of State Department
Export certificates for C-130 and P 3 aircraft allowing them to leave
the U.S. for foreign destinations. I logged 36 of the certificates and
noted that at least one was going to Panama for a company called Trans
Latin Air and at least one was going to a company named Aero Postale
de Mexico. Both aircraft were being sent from T&G.
"They were Forest Service aircraft", he added. "And what caught my
attention was the fact that the certificates were signed by an
attorney named John Ford. Ford was known to me as a CIA Australian
attorney involved in the C-130s transferred to Bogota in the 70s and
80s and he was also connected to C-130s moved through Central America
which came to the attention of U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica, Louis
Tambs during the Contra war. At the time State had protested the
transfer because of possible drug connections."
[NOTE: Louis Tambs was the same U.S. Ambassador connected to the
revelations arising from the La Penca bombing in Nicaragua and an
alleged plot by the CIA to murder Tambs using the services of CIA/
Oliver North asset John Hull and blame it on the Sandinistas.]
"I questioned DoJ about the drug links and was assured that the
transfers were above board and not drug related," Eitel continued. "I
accepted their explanation for a while but in 1996 I did a data base
search on a major drug trafficker named Luis Carlos Herrera-Lizcano
who was John Ford's partner way back to the original C-130 transfers
out of Australia in 83-84. Herrera was the owner and CEO of Trans
Latin Air and in 1994 he was indicted by the U.S. Attorney in Chicago
for using C-130s to move billions of dollars of cocaine into the U.S."
Herrera entered into a plea agreement in 1996 and admitted to having
trafficked in drugs since the early and mid eighties. According to
both American and Mexican newspaper accounts, as well as records in
federal court, Herrera's aircraft came from T&G and Woody Grantham.
The Trans Latin Air investigation led to an investigation of Aero
Postale de Mexico. In April 1998 stories the Mexican paper La Reforma
reported that the Mexican Attorney General had indicted three
officials of the private freight hauling company Aero Postale de
Mexico which routinely delivered mail and other goods throughout Latin
and Central America on charges that they had provided aircraft to the
drug cartel headed by the Arellano Felix brothers. That investigation
had commenced in 1997 and Aero Postale planes were reportedly hauling
multi-thousand kilo loads of cocaine during the period. One of the
C-130s was impounded at the Mexico City airport. Purchase of the
aircraft was financed by Mexican banker Carlos Cabal, who was assured
repayment of the loans by the U.S. Import-Export Bank. It is
impossible to believe CIA would not have noticed such a transaction.
Woody Grantham and T&G sold the planes to Aero Postale in 1993 at the
same time he sold planes to Trans Latin Air.
Riverside Press-Enterprise veteran reporter Dave Hendrix, who has
written many stories on the Forest Service and the C-130s (and who
contributed greatly to the research for this article) questioned
Grantham about the relationship. Grantham denied any knowledge of
wrongdoing and any knowledge of drugs. However, Gary Eitel in his role
as a federal independent counsel for the civil suit against the
contractors notes a discrepancy in Grantham's statements. "Grantham
tried to hide the C-130s in 1993 when he learned that the Forest
Service was going to be forced to take them back," Eitel said. "He
filed bankruptcy, hid the planes and then tried to sell them to
Herrera at Trans Latin Air. The planes had already been leased to
Trans Latin since 1990. He states that he had no further contact or
control over the planes after that. Yet Herrera admitted at his
sentencing that he had been dealing drugs uninterrupted at Trans Latin
from 1982 to 1994. Grantham's claims that he had checked this out with
DEA don't bear close scrutiny at all.
"And Grantham used the same law firm, Lewis and Roca of Tucson and
Phoenix, to file bankruptcy and transfer the planes to Herrera which
had handled the entire transfer of Air America assets to Evergreen
back in 1976." Asked how credible Grantham's denial of drug
involvement was, Eitel replied, "It stinks."
Grantham's history is littered with CIA wreckage. According to Eitel,
"When Grantham wanted to leave Arizona undetected he leased hangar
space at an Indian reservation where Customs didn't operate. He
frequently flew into Area 51 and on his trips back from Latin America
he would land at El Toro Marine Air Station in California.
Death of a Hero - The Murder of Jim Sabow
Marine Col. Jim Sabow was murdered at his home on the El Toro Marine
Air Station in January 1991. His death, ruled a suicide by the Navy
and the Marine Corps, has left a brave family virtually destroyed. As
opposed to the official military account that Sabow, despondent over
pending disciplinary actions for minor offenses committed suicide, a
lingering and persistent body of evidence persists which indicates
that Jim Sabow was murdered because he caught the CIA flying drugs
onto a base where he was Chief of Air Operations. Much of the evidence
indicates that the cocaine arrived on the same C-130s which had been
given to the Forest Service.
In a 1993 segment of her news program Eye to Eye, Connie Chung covered
the Sabow death in detail and showed evidence of the murder by
introducing statements from Sabow's brother, a medical doctor, that
Sabow had been unconscious and aspirating blood for minutes before a
shotgun was rammed so far down his throat that it sheared off the
uvula. In that same segment, veteran Air America and CIA pilot Tosh
Plumley stated that he flew loads of cocaine as large as 2,000 kilos
onto El Toro in the years and months prior to Sabow's death - for the
CIA. Plumley stated clearly that he was flying C-130s operated by the
Forest Service and their contractors. In later conversations with this
writer Plumley admitted that he routinely flew loads as large as 2,500
kilos onto military installations in California and Arizona for the
CIA.
Both Eitel and veteran investigator Gene Wheaton, who still works for
the Sabow family which has a pending and oft delayed lawsuit pending
in San Diego for next year, believe that the C-130s described in this
story are the same ones which led to Jim Sabow's murder. Wheaton, a
retired Warrant Officer from Army CID, has participated in and led
investigations ranging from the Cristic Institute lawsuit of 1987 to
the very suspicious crash in Gander, Newfoundland of an Arrow Air
flight in 1985 which took the lives of more than 250 members of the
101st Airborne Division. Arrow Air was, according to Wheaton, "One of
Ollie North's favorite airlines." He was also one of the first
investigators to uncover CIA drug smuggling in Mena, AK and is today
working with Sabow attorney Daniel Sheehan, formerly of the Cristic
Institute, on the Sabow case. He has also conducted extensive
investigations of the Forest Service C-130s and worked with Eitel on
the case.
"The Marines were supposed to keep flight refueling records of all non-
military flights in transit on through the base at El Toro," said
Wheaton. "Those are government records and would have shown that the
same Forest Service aircraft passed through the base at the same time
that Jim started complaining to his superiors about the drugs. The
base is closed now but the records should have been kept. They are
government documents."
Wheaton added, "They have all been destroyed."
Frogmen, Russoniello and... Gary Webb?!
In his series of articles for The San Jose Mercury News entitled The
Dark Alliance and in his brilliant book of the same name, author Gary
Webb described the interference of the CIA in the infamous "Frogman"
cocaine case of 1983. The U.S. attorney, a Reagan appointee, who
handled the case and ultimately returned more than $36,000 in seized
drug money to the CIA connected traffickers arrested in San Francisco,
was Joseph Russoniello. As disclosed in Webb's book and documented in
Volume I of the CIA Inspector General's report, the CIA had contacted
Russoniello in an effort to contain any adverse publicity linking the
arrested traffickers to the Agency. In the Agency's own cable traffic
CIA stated that Russoniello was, "most deferential to our interests."
Russoniello left the Department of Justice in the late 1980s and
entered private practice. In 1994 he became the attorney of record for
several of the fourteen defendants in the civil suit filed by Gary
Eitel - including Aero-Union of Chico California, Reagan's home base
and T&G. For the record Stuart Gerson, former Acting Attorney General
of Waco fame, represented Roy Reagan in the civil fraud case.
According to Eitel, "After a series of articles in Oregon newspapers
in 1997, Russoniello withdrew from the case because of the adverse
publicity linking him to Webb's stories."
Joseph Russoniello is now a senior corporate attorney for Pacific Gas
and Electric in San Francisco. He is at the same address and shares
the same complex of offices as attorney John Ford.
Clanging Jail Bars and Dangling Press Releases
The Forest Service had been backed into a position by the Eitel
lawsuit and the Arizona fraud trial of Reagan and Fuchs where it had
to take action. In April 1998 U.S. District Court Judge William
Browning sentenced Roy Reagan to 30 months and Fred Fuchs to 24 months
in a federal penitentiary for their roles in defrauding the
government. Eitel's civil suit, which has been joined by the
Department of Justice, is still alive but in early 1997 Judge Browning
issued a court order postponing the suit stating that the interests of
National Security outweighed the defendants' right to a speedy trial.
As a result of public pressure the Forest Service had begun to
retrieve some of the aircraft in 1995-6. Four of those had been
totally stripped, their remaining airframes and components being
auctioned out at a total of $725,000 by the Forest Service under the
direction of Assistant Director Ron Hooper who had been involved with
the program since its inception. Hooper has made no official objection
of the fact that airplanes, worth $12 to 15 million, illegally taken
from the government, had been stripped of $11 million in parts. The
low bidder was co-conspirator Hawkins and Powers and the high bidders,
which received the aircraft hulks, were the alleged co-conspirators
TBM and Aero-Union.
On December 2, 1998 Hooper gave an interview to the Associated Press.
Whereas Hooper had, in previous audits, declared the C-130s to be
worth as little as $10,000 to $20,000 dollars apiece, he now
acknowledged their value at $2-3 million each. The AP story indicated
that Hooper and the Forest Service were moving swiftly to secure the
immediate return of all 11 outstanding operable aircraft and that this
"confiscation" would not impair the nation's fire fighting
capabilities. This was true even though the Forest Service, according
to Hooper, didn't need and couldn't operate the planes.
Apparently, Hooper hoped that no one would notice the fact that just a
day earlier, on December 1, 1998, he had posted a press release on the
Forest Service web site which stated, "To ensure that we have the air
support necessary to aggressively manage wildfires, we have
successfully completed negotiations on a new three-year National
Airtanker Contract covering 1999 through 2001.
"The contract provides for continued operations as ownership is being
resolved and we are confident that the issues surrounding the
assertion of aircraft [ownership] can be worked out with the
contractors successfully."
"What Hooper was saying", says Eitel, "is that he had just awarded
paying contracts to the same contractors who had defrauded the
government in the first place. His statements to AP make it look as
though he was getting tough while he admits, the day before, that he
is still intending to leave the planes in private hands and reward the
wrongdoers."
Eitel filed complaints with the Justice Department on December 4 and
he has told From The Wilderness that, as of December 14, both the
Department of Justice and the Department of Defense now have active
investigations of Ron Hooper.
A spokesman for the Department of Defense would neither confirm nor
deny the existence of an investigation of Hooper. As of press time the
Department Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility has not
returned a call asking for verification. Forest Service spokesman Alan
Polk told From The Wilderness, "AP screwed their story up. The
contractors were always going to keep the planes while title remained
in Forest Service hands. We are now making sure that we know where the
planes are, what they are being used for and that they are not leaving
the country while ownership questions are resolved." Polk added that
he was unaware of any criminal investigations of Hooper.
A Tragic Footnote
In August 1994 14 firefighters burned to death in an out of control
forest fire in Colorado. The Federal Occupational Safety and Health
Administration subsequently cited the Forest Service for "inadequate
use of aviation resources." Where were all the tankers? According to
Eitel they were all out of the country doing anything but fighting
fires.
click image to enlarge
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/forest_service_c130s.html
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SOURCES: The Riverside Press-Enterprise, AP, The Arizona Republic, La
Reforma, The Dark Alliance by Gary Webb and the U.S. Forest Service
SPECIAL THANKS: To Dave Hendrix of the Riverside Press-Enterprise. You
are a true bulldog and a reporter of courage and tenacity.
SUGGESTED READING: To understand how the CIA has for decades
infiltrated various agencies of the United States Government, stolen
property and subverted the will of Congress there is one book which is
on my "must read" list. That book is The Secret Team - The CIA and its
Allies in Control of the United States and the World by L. Fletcher
Prouty (1973, 1992 & 1997). The book is extremely hard to find but
worth every ounce of effort. You can download a copy at
www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST.
CIA and Subsidiaries Exposed in Court Documents As Active Drug
Smugglers Using Military Aircraft Washed Through Forest Service
----------
December, 1998 Investigations Latest in Legacy of CIA's Drug
Operations and Corruption of Government
----------
Two Reagan Era Operators, Convicted in 1997, May Be Only The First To
Hit The Graybar Hotel
The Dark History - In 1976 Senator Frank Church submitted CIA General
Counsel Lawrence Houston to intense grilling over the Agency's
questionable and illegal operation of proprietary air transport
services. At that time, Houston admitted that the CIA had routinely
used the United States Postal Service and the U.S. Forrest Service as
covers for covert activities. Houston admitted that The Forest Service
had been infiltrated by CIA and that CIA shared an address with the
Forrest Service's Air Research and Development unit on Kent Street in
Alexandria, VA.
Houston also admitted that the primary company, responsible for all of
CIA covert air operations, was a holding company named Pacific Corp.
There is an Oregon based corporation known as Pacificorp which has a
multitude of sub entities with varying versions of the name including
Pacific Power & Light, Pacificorp and Pacific Harbor Capital. In 1993
a Seattle paper ran a story connecting Pacificorp to CIA's Pacific
Corp. Under oath, before the Senate in 1976, Houston admitted that
Pacific Corp, owned and controlled such CIA notables as Air America,
Southern Air Transport and Intermountain Air. In 1976 the CIA was
ordered to sell Air America and divest itself of all its holdings.
Since 1973 the CIA had been anticipating this and had moved quickly to
give all of its clandestinely owned aircraft to its alleged
proprietary, Evergreen International based out of Marana Air Park near
Tucson Arizona and McMinville Oregon, near Portland. Coincidentally,
Medford Oregon is the home base of aircraft broker Roy Reagan. Reagan
was convicted in 1997, along with another man on criminal charges
stemming from a scheme to fraudulently take $80 million worth of
airplanes from the U.S. government and place them in private hands.
Reagan was also the broker for Evergreen according to a lawsuit filed
by former CIA pilot Gary Eitel.
In the late 1970s and early 80s former military and CIA pilot Eitel,
also an attorney, became aware that the CIA was planning to move a
number of Australian C-130s under CIA control into the private sector
and transfer them to Bogota Colombia. "They were to be used for drug
smuggling," said Eitel. The attorney for the transfer was a man named
John Ford who in later years represented Pacificorp, Pacific Harbor
Capitol and who is currently said to be senior in-house attorney for
Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco (no connection). Several of
the Australian C-130's turned up in the drug trade and were moved
through facilities in Arizona and Mena, Arkansas, among others, on
their way into the cocaine trade.
Eitel has testified in Federal Court and confirmed to From The
Wilderness that CIA was flying drugs into Mena Arkansas as far back as
1971-5. Eitel began his relations with CIA in 1968 as a helicopter
pilot who was willing to fly risky combat missions in Vietnam. He has
since broken with the Agency and has proven that by giving sworn
testimony both in court and in Congress exposing illegal CIA
operations.
Eitel, who has testified as an expert witness in several civil and
criminal cases, is now representing the U.S. Government as a private
citizen in a civil action charging the Forest Service and CIA with
defrauding the American people of close to $80 million dollars in the
illegal transfer of 35 C-130 aircraft to a number of private firms.
These firms serve as contractors to the Forest Service. The aircraft
transfer program, begun in 1987, was intended to give private
contractors serviceable aircraft in exchange for worn out ones to help
the Forest Service fight fires as converted air tankers. Instead they
have turned up all over the world on covert operations. A few have
been caught full of drugs as recently as 1996.
THE AIRPLANE
The Lockheed C-130 Hercules first entered the inventory of the U.S.
Air Force in 1955. To this day it remains one of the most versatile
cargo aircraft ever built. The Air Force includes various versions of
the C-130 in its operational plans through the year 2015. It can fly
at cruise speeds of up to 350 mph, is capable of taking off from
short, unimproved runways and can haul loads of up to 50,000 pounds.
It is capable of dropping those loads from a rear ramp while literally
"on the fly". While new C-130s cost the government around $20-25
million, used aircraft are generally valued by the GAO at up to 3.5
million each. A GAO report lists the value of one propeller at
$100,000 and one engine at $250,000. It is the perfect drug smuggling
aircraft for long hauls.
Under United States law the C-130 is a military munitions aircraft
which is tightly controlled. It is forbidden to export one to a
foreign country without the prior approval of the State Department,
the Department of Defense, the FAA and the CIA. The CIA is the only
governmental agency with enough clout to secure permissions from all
of the preceding entities.
When used in a fire fighting application as an aerial tanker it costs
$3,300 per flight hour to operate a C-130 delivering 2,000 gallons of
retardant as opposed to $1,600 per hour for the same amount of
retardant delivered from a readily available DC 7.
The Scheme
Roy Reagan, no relation to Ronald, has a long and detailed history of
connections to CIA and covert activities. In the 1980s he was linked
both to Evergreen Air and a number of operations securing surplus
helicopters and weapons for Contra support operations. Evergreen Air
itself, during the contra era, has been documented as handling Contra
military supplies, including weapons, which were loaded onto C-130s in
Corpus Christi, Texas. One of Reagan's business partners, James
Patrick Ross, who worked with Reagan in Reagan Enterprises out of
their offices in Chico, California, was the same mechanic who signed
off on a mechanical inspection of a C-123 named The Fat Lady which was
later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 while on a CIA mission. Only an
ill-starred cargo handler named Eugene Hasenfus survived the shoot
down. The Fat Lady's death and Hasenfus' survival triggered the Iran-
Contra scandal. The Fat Lady had previously been the favorite personal
airplane of Barry Seal.
Fred A. Fuchs (pronounced Fox) is a former career Forest Service
employee who rose to the rank of Assistant Director. The Forest
Service fired him in 1993 for his role in this scheme. He was
subsequently re-hired and then allowed to retire in 1996. Fuchs lists
his home as Las Lunas, NM which is, coincidentally, the site of the
Mid Valley airport used by Albert Vincent Carone and his partner James
Robert Strauss for CIA drug missions throughout the eighties and early
nineties. Carone and Strauss have been previously documented in From
The Wilderness as being the primary bag men for Oliver North and
George Bush as well as providing liaison between the CIA and the Mafia
for transfers of drugs and drug profits.
In 1987 Reagan and Fuchs came up with a plan to literally steal
airplanes from the federal government which had a noble sounding
stated purpose. According to documents filed in an Arizona federal
criminal prosecution, which led to the conviction of the two for fraud
and theft in Oct. 1997, they said they were going to save the nation's
forests.
The scheme was simple. All around the country the U.S. Forest Service
had relied for years on the services of private contractors who owned,
operated and maintained air tankers used to drop water and retardant
on forest fires. The problem was that by 1987 most of the Korean War
and WW II vintage aircraft then in use were wearing out. They were not
capable of carrying the loads necessary and spare parts were hard to
find. If Reagan and Fuchs got their way, which they did, the Forest
Service would obtain surplus C-130s, Navy P-3 Orion anti-sub planes
and even jet powered A-10 Warthogs, used as tank killers during desert
Storm, and "trade" them to private contractors on a one-for-one basis
and place the aging aircraft in museums. The government would then
hire the planes as needed to fight fires and the title to the aircraft
would pass into private hands.
In reality, according to a lawsuit filed by whistleblower Gary Eitel
under the False Claims Act, (a little known civil war era statute that
allows citizens to file suit on behalf of the government), Evergreen
Air, as a behind the scenes player, was using Reagan in a scheme to
move as many as 50 C-130s into "private" hands for use in a variety of
covert operations. These included drug smuggling and the direct
enrichment of a number of private contractors including Reagan and at
least five private companies in California, Arizona and Wyoming. Eitel
has been quoted in news sources as saying that one purpose of the
conspiracy was to defraud even the CIA, which would help obtain the
aircraft. However, in an interview with From The Wilderness he
acknowledged that Evergreen Air had card carrying CIA officers on the
property and had admitted being a CIA contractor. "What happened also
was that Reagan was going to put about one out of every three C-130s
back in his own pocket for his own use."
The Law
From The Wilderness has obtained a copy of a Dec. 1989 memorandum to
Forest Service Associate Chief George Leonard from Assistant General
Counsel Kenneth Cohen, which seems to show that the Forest Service
knew it was having problems with the scheme all along. Listing
requirements from the Federal Property Management Regulations Cohen
laid out three specific requirements which had to be met before the
transfer could be deemed legal. First the transfer had to result in a
greater return for the government. That could hardly be the case if a
C-130 valued at $3.5 million were traded for a junk aircraft valued as
low as $19,000 which was inoperable. Second, aircraft and airframe
structural components were specifically prohibited from transfer.
Third, the items to be exchanged could not have been acquired for the
purpose of transfer and they had to have been used by the Forest
Service for a period of one year before being transferred out of
Forest Service inventory.
In spite of the fact that none of the above conditions were met the
transfers continued under the control of Fuchs and Reagan through
approximately 1989 when the last of the C-130's were placed in the
hands of five private air contractors. Out of 35 aircraft transferred
into private hands twenty-eight were actually re-titled. Some changed
hands several times before turning up in the control of drug dealers
in Panama and Mexico. Reagan and Fuchs tried to justify their actions
by stating that the C-130s, obtained from Air Force storage facilities
and active Air Reserve and National Guard units were historic planes
themselves and obsolete. That is hard to justify since the Air Force
currently has the C-130 slated for active duty until the year 2015.
Last year, in the Tucson criminal trial of Reagan and Fuchs, which was
prompted by Eitel's 1994 lawsuit, three Air Force generals testified
that when they approved of the transfer to the Forest Service they
believed the titles would remain with the Forest Service as they
approved the transfer out of military inventory."
Did the Forest Service know or suspect that the planes, under CIA
control, might be used for drug dealing? In the same memorandum
Kenneth Cohen states, "Apparently, DoD [Department of Defense] thinks
that by having the Forest Service as the intermediary, if any future
aircraft are used in drug smuggling, the Forest Service and not DoD
will suffer the adverse publicity."
He was right.
The Good, The Bad and The Private Contractors
All of the C-130s were moved out into private hands passing through
Evergreen facilities at Marana Airpark and through Davis-Montham Air
Force base in Tucson right next door. The first of the C-130s reached
private hands and titles were transferred in 1987. The five selected
companies were Hemet Valley Flying Service in Riverside County,
California (which received the first seven and showed Reagan as a
signatory on one of its contracts); Hawkins and Powers of Greybull,
Wyoming; TBM of Tulare, California; Aero-Union of Chico, California
(which shared office space with one of Reagan's shell companies where
Contra mechanic Ross worked) and T&G aviation of Chandler, Arizona.
T&G got in on the act after hearing of the bonanza and complaining to
Arizona Senators De Concini and McCain. T&G is owned by admitted
former Air America and CIA pilot Woody Grantham.
According to Eitel, Aero-Union has been documented as a CIA contractor
as far back as the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 when it served as a
cover for B-26 pilots who were prevented from flying air support
missions for the invasion. Also according to Eitel, the very first
C-130 delivered into private hands was flown into Hemet Valley by
James Patrick Ross, the CIA pilot-mechanic who had originally come to
the U.S. as a part of the Australian C-130 transfer in the mid 1980s
and who had serviced Barry Seal's C-123.
According to documents filed in the civil lawsuit by Eitel, Roy Reagan
wasn't particularly happy with Grantham's T&G muscling in on the deal
but he later approached Grantham with a sweetened offer that if he
obtained extra C-130s for T&G, he would receive a cash kickback and
arrange the financing through a client's company, Pacific Harbor
Capital. Grantham agreed. "Reagan also told Grantham he would arrange
several covert missions to be flown by T&G for Iran, Iraq and Kuwait
as a part of the deal," said Eitel.
The paper trail is black hole dense but it is certain that T&G
received at least three C-130s from Hemet Valley. Others it obtained
directly from Reagan and other sources. After a series of court
battles in California between Hemet Valley and financier Larry Wurth,
three C-130s were transferred to Wurth and then to T&G. Remember that
Roy Reagan showed up as a signing officer on one of Hemet Valley's
contracts acknowledging receipt of the planes. Approximately one
fourth of the 35 planes given over into private hands were eventually
stripped for (free) parts.
The record of the next ten years is as littered with lawsuits and
airplane transfers, sometimes between the various contractors, as the
killing fields of Cambodia were littered with Pol Pot's murder
victims. An entire book would be needed to document the suits between
firms like James Venable of Hemet Valley and Wurth which saw planes
held hostage and traded like helpless children in a brutal custody
battle which further clouded the issue of ownership. The suits and
custody battles may have been the actual intention of CIA when it
suspected that the illegal transfers might be discovered, challenged
and ordered corrected. It made it all the harder for the Forest
Service to recover the planes when it got caught with it pants down.
But in almost every case when planes changed hands they went back
through Evergreen first.
Of a certainty, the 35 C-130s, which actually changed hands in the
program, wound up doing many other things than fighting fires on
behalf of the Forest Service. They have been documented on covert
missions in France, Spain, Angola, South Africa, Central America, and
even Kuwait during Desert Storm. In June 1991 one of Roy Reagan's
C-130s crashed on a CIA mission in Angola killing the nephew of Rep
Curt Weldon, R-Pa who later participated in hearings looking into the
program.
"All of the contractors had unregulated air fields in remote places
that were not usually subject to any kind of Customs inspections. All
of the contractors were able to come and go virtually undetected so
they could have been doing anything. It was an ideal cover both for
drug smuggling and a variety of covert operations," Eitel observed.
In 1994, as he was investigating his lawsuit, Eitel was researching
various aspects of the Forest Service transfer at the Department of
Justice. He was allowed to view classified materials relevant to the
investigation. "I saw a three ring folder full of State Department
Export certificates for C-130 and P 3 aircraft allowing them to leave
the U.S. for foreign destinations. I logged 36 of the certificates and
noted that at least one was going to Panama for a company called Trans
Latin Air and at least one was going to a company named Aero Postale
de Mexico. Both aircraft were being sent from T&G.
"They were Forest Service aircraft", he added. "And what caught my
attention was the fact that the certificates were signed by an
attorney named John Ford. Ford was known to me as a CIA Australian
attorney involved in the C-130s transferred to Bogota in the 70s and
80s and he was also connected to C-130s moved through Central America
which came to the attention of U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica, Louis
Tambs during the Contra war. At the time State had protested the
transfer because of possible drug connections."
[NOTE: Louis Tambs was the same U.S. Ambassador connected to the
revelations arising from the La Penca bombing in Nicaragua and an
alleged plot by the CIA to murder Tambs using the services of CIA/
Oliver North asset John Hull and blame it on the Sandinistas.]
"I questioned DoJ about the drug links and was assured that the
transfers were above board and not drug related," Eitel continued. "I
accepted their explanation for a while but in 1996 I did a data base
search on a major drug trafficker named Luis Carlos Herrera-Lizcano
who was John Ford's partner way back to the original C-130 transfers
out of Australia in 83-84. Herrera was the owner and CEO of Trans
Latin Air and in 1994 he was indicted by the U.S. Attorney in Chicago
for using C-130s to move billions of dollars of cocaine into the U.S."
Herrera entered into a plea agreement in 1996 and admitted to having
trafficked in drugs since the early and mid eighties. According to
both American and Mexican newspaper accounts, as well as records in
federal court, Herrera's aircraft came from T&G and Woody Grantham.
The Trans Latin Air investigation led to an investigation of Aero
Postale de Mexico. In April 1998 stories the Mexican paper La Reforma
reported that the Mexican Attorney General had indicted three
officials of the private freight hauling company Aero Postale de
Mexico which routinely delivered mail and other goods throughout Latin
and Central America on charges that they had provided aircraft to the
drug cartel headed by the Arellano Felix brothers. That investigation
had commenced in 1997 and Aero Postale planes were reportedly hauling
multi-thousand kilo loads of cocaine during the period. One of the
C-130s was impounded at the Mexico City airport. Purchase of the
aircraft was financed by Mexican banker Carlos Cabal, who was assured
repayment of the loans by the U.S. Import-Export Bank. It is
impossible to believe CIA would not have noticed such a transaction.
Woody Grantham and T&G sold the planes to Aero Postale in 1993 at the
same time he sold planes to Trans Latin Air.
Riverside Press-Enterprise veteran reporter Dave Hendrix, who has
written many stories on the Forest Service and the C-130s (and who
contributed greatly to the research for this article) questioned
Grantham about the relationship. Grantham denied any knowledge of
wrongdoing and any knowledge of drugs. However, Gary Eitel in his role
as a federal independent counsel for the civil suit against the
contractors notes a discrepancy in Grantham's statements. "Grantham
tried to hide the C-130s in 1993 when he learned that the Forest
Service was going to be forced to take them back," Eitel said. "He
filed bankruptcy, hid the planes and then tried to sell them to
Herrera at Trans Latin Air. The planes had already been leased to
Trans Latin since 1990. He states that he had no further contact or
control over the planes after that. Yet Herrera admitted at his
sentencing that he had been dealing drugs uninterrupted at Trans Latin
from 1982 to 1994. Grantham's claims that he had checked this out with
DEA don't bear close scrutiny at all.
"And Grantham used the same law firm, Lewis and Roca of Tucson and
Phoenix, to file bankruptcy and transfer the planes to Herrera which
had handled the entire transfer of Air America assets to Evergreen
back in 1976." Asked how credible Grantham's denial of drug
involvement was, Eitel replied, "It stinks."
Grantham's history is littered with CIA wreckage. According to Eitel,
"When Grantham wanted to leave Arizona undetected he leased hangar
space at an Indian reservation where Customs didn't operate. He
frequently flew into Area 51 and on his trips back from Latin America
he would land at El Toro Marine Air Station in California.
Death of a Hero - The Murder of Jim Sabow
Marine Col. Jim Sabow was murdered at his home on the El Toro Marine
Air Station in January 1991. His death, ruled a suicide by the Navy
and the Marine Corps, has left a brave family virtually destroyed. As
opposed to the official military account that Sabow, despondent over
pending disciplinary actions for minor offenses committed suicide, a
lingering and persistent body of evidence persists which indicates
that Jim Sabow was murdered because he caught the CIA flying drugs
onto a base where he was Chief of Air Operations. Much of the evidence
indicates that the cocaine arrived on the same C-130s which had been
given to the Forest Service.
In a 1993 segment of her news program Eye to Eye, Connie Chung covered
the Sabow death in detail and showed evidence of the murder by
introducing statements from Sabow's brother, a medical doctor, that
Sabow had been unconscious and aspirating blood for minutes before a
shotgun was rammed so far down his throat that it sheared off the
uvula. In that same segment, veteran Air America and CIA pilot Tosh
Plumley stated that he flew loads of cocaine as large as 2,000 kilos
onto El Toro in the years and months prior to Sabow's death - for the
CIA. Plumley stated clearly that he was flying C-130s operated by the
Forest Service and their contractors. In later conversations with this
writer Plumley admitted that he routinely flew loads as large as 2,500
kilos onto military installations in California and Arizona for the
CIA.
Both Eitel and veteran investigator Gene Wheaton, who still works for
the Sabow family which has a pending and oft delayed lawsuit pending
in San Diego for next year, believe that the C-130s described in this
story are the same ones which led to Jim Sabow's murder. Wheaton, a
retired Warrant Officer from Army CID, has participated in and led
investigations ranging from the Cristic Institute lawsuit of 1987 to
the very suspicious crash in Gander, Newfoundland of an Arrow Air
flight in 1985 which took the lives of more than 250 members of the
101st Airborne Division. Arrow Air was, according to Wheaton, "One of
Ollie North's favorite airlines." He was also one of the first
investigators to uncover CIA drug smuggling in Mena, AK and is today
working with Sabow attorney Daniel Sheehan, formerly of the Cristic
Institute, on the Sabow case. He has also conducted extensive
investigations of the Forest Service C-130s and worked with Eitel on
the case.
"The Marines were supposed to keep flight refueling records of all non-
military flights in transit on through the base at El Toro," said
Wheaton. "Those are government records and would have shown that the
same Forest Service aircraft passed through the base at the same time
that Jim started complaining to his superiors about the drugs. The
base is closed now but the records should have been kept. They are
government documents."
Wheaton added, "They have all been destroyed."
Frogmen, Russoniello and... Gary Webb?!
In his series of articles for The San Jose Mercury News entitled The
Dark Alliance and in his brilliant book of the same name, author Gary
Webb described the interference of the CIA in the infamous "Frogman"
cocaine case of 1983. The U.S. attorney, a Reagan appointee, who
handled the case and ultimately returned more than $36,000 in seized
drug money to the CIA connected traffickers arrested in San Francisco,
was Joseph Russoniello. As disclosed in Webb's book and documented in
Volume I of the CIA Inspector General's report, the CIA had contacted
Russoniello in an effort to contain any adverse publicity linking the
arrested traffickers to the Agency. In the Agency's own cable traffic
CIA stated that Russoniello was, "most deferential to our interests."
Russoniello left the Department of Justice in the late 1980s and
entered private practice. In 1994 he became the attorney of record for
several of the fourteen defendants in the civil suit filed by Gary
Eitel - including Aero-Union of Chico California, Reagan's home base
and T&G. For the record Stuart Gerson, former Acting Attorney General
of Waco fame, represented Roy Reagan in the civil fraud case.
According to Eitel, "After a series of articles in Oregon newspapers
in 1997, Russoniello withdrew from the case because of the adverse
publicity linking him to Webb's stories."
Joseph Russoniello is now a senior corporate attorney for Pacific Gas
and Electric in San Francisco. He is at the same address and shares
the same complex of offices as attorney John Ford.
Clanging Jail Bars and Dangling Press Releases
The Forest Service had been backed into a position by the Eitel
lawsuit and the Arizona fraud trial of Reagan and Fuchs where it had
to take action. In April 1998 U.S. District Court Judge William
Browning sentenced Roy Reagan to 30 months and Fred Fuchs to 24 months
in a federal penitentiary for their roles in defrauding the
government. Eitel's civil suit, which has been joined by the
Department of Justice, is still alive but in early 1997 Judge Browning
issued a court order postponing the suit stating that the interests of
National Security outweighed the defendants' right to a speedy trial.
As a result of public pressure the Forest Service had begun to
retrieve some of the aircraft in 1995-6. Four of those had been
totally stripped, their remaining airframes and components being
auctioned out at a total of $725,000 by the Forest Service under the
direction of Assistant Director Ron Hooper who had been involved with
the program since its inception. Hooper has made no official objection
of the fact that airplanes, worth $12 to 15 million, illegally taken
from the government, had been stripped of $11 million in parts. The
low bidder was co-conspirator Hawkins and Powers and the high bidders,
which received the aircraft hulks, were the alleged co-conspirators
TBM and Aero-Union.
On December 2, 1998 Hooper gave an interview to the Associated Press.
Whereas Hooper had, in previous audits, declared the C-130s to be
worth as little as $10,000 to $20,000 dollars apiece, he now
acknowledged their value at $2-3 million each. The AP story indicated
that Hooper and the Forest Service were moving swiftly to secure the
immediate return of all 11 outstanding operable aircraft and that this
"confiscation" would not impair the nation's fire fighting
capabilities. This was true even though the Forest Service, according
to Hooper, didn't need and couldn't operate the planes.
Apparently, Hooper hoped that no one would notice the fact that just a
day earlier, on December 1, 1998, he had posted a press release on the
Forest Service web site which stated, "To ensure that we have the air
support necessary to aggressively manage wildfires, we have
successfully completed negotiations on a new three-year National
Airtanker Contract covering 1999 through 2001.
"The contract provides for continued operations as ownership is being
resolved and we are confident that the issues surrounding the
assertion of aircraft [ownership] can be worked out with the
contractors successfully."
"What Hooper was saying", says Eitel, "is that he had just awarded
paying contracts to the same contractors who had defrauded the
government in the first place. His statements to AP make it look as
though he was getting tough while he admits, the day before, that he
is still intending to leave the planes in private hands and reward the
wrongdoers."
Eitel filed complaints with the Justice Department on December 4 and
he has told From The Wilderness that, as of December 14, both the
Department of Justice and the Department of Defense now have active
investigations of Ron Hooper.
A spokesman for the Department of Defense would neither confirm nor
deny the existence of an investigation of Hooper. As of press time the
Department Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility has not
returned a call asking for verification. Forest Service spokesman Alan
Polk told From The Wilderness, "AP screwed their story up. The
contractors were always going to keep the planes while title remained
in Forest Service hands. We are now making sure that we know where the
planes are, what they are being used for and that they are not leaving
the country while ownership questions are resolved." Polk added that
he was unaware of any criminal investigations of Hooper.
A Tragic Footnote
In August 1994 14 firefighters burned to death in an out of control
forest fire in Colorado. The Federal Occupational Safety and Health
Administration subsequently cited the Forest Service for "inadequate
use of aviation resources." Where were all the tankers? According to
Eitel they were all out of the country doing anything but fighting
fires.
click image to enlarge
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/forest_service_c130s.html
----------
SOURCES: The Riverside Press-Enterprise, AP, The Arizona Republic, La
Reforma, The Dark Alliance by Gary Webb and the U.S. Forest Service
SPECIAL THANKS: To Dave Hendrix of the Riverside Press-Enterprise. You
are a true bulldog and a reporter of courage and tenacity.
SUGGESTED READING: To understand how the CIA has for decades
infiltrated various agencies of the United States Government, stolen
property and subverted the will of Congress there is one book which is
on my "must read" list. That book is The Secret Team - The CIA and its
Allies in Control of the United States and the World by L. Fletcher
Prouty (1973, 1992 & 1997). The book is extremely hard to find but
worth every ounce of effort. You can download a copy at
www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST.
