Cocaine Airways

[question everything]

Cocaine Airways

A former CIA pilot says secret flights to El Toro could explain a Marine officer’s ‘suicide’
By NICK SCHOU
OC Weekly
Thursday, September 14, 2006

(snip).

William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee was a CIA contract pilot. He worked where the agency sent him. That meant that he ran guns to Fidel Castro in the 1950s, and then, when Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista, Plumlee ran guns to Castro’s opponents. In the 1980s, he flew guns again, in and out of military bases including Orange County’s El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, March Air Force Base in Riverside, and Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The weapons were destined for the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing army aiding the agency’s war on communism. On return flights — and this is where Plumlee’s story becomes really interesting — he says he flew cocaine back to the bases with Uncle Sam’s approval. Plumlee figures he made at least three weapons flights to El Toro in the mid-1980s and says it’s possible there were drugs in some of those crates as well. Other pilots he knew told him about off-loading tons of drugs at El Toro.


(snip)

One of Plumlee’s partners in running guns to Castro and his cohorts was a man we’ll call “Carlos,” an M26-7 member whose sister, along with several others, had been gunned down by Batista’s agents in a raid on a Havana safe house. Convinced a Batista agent masquerading as a revolutionary had aided the attack, Carlos spent two years establishing the mole’s identity and then lured him onto a gunrunning flight from Florida’s Marathon Key to Cuba. Plumlee copiloted the plane. “Somewhere between Cat Cay, southeast of the Keys, and the Cuban coast, the door light went red in the cockpit, meaning the cargo door had been unlatched,” Plumlee says. He went back to the cargo area to investigate. The suspected Batista agent had disappeared, and Carlos was re-latching the cargo door. “My copilot told me to get back in my seat,” he says. “He told me it was a Cuban affair.”


(snip)

When he first started flying drugs into the United States, Plumlee says he was certain the information he collected — flight routes, drop points and cargo loads — was being passed on to federal drug agents, along with the tons of cocaine he was ferrying. “The whole thing was set up as an interdiction program operating through Mexico,” he says. “We were transporting weapons and drugs on C-130s. I was flying drugs into this country and weapons back into Mexico. We were working undercover to log and record the aircraft ID numbers and where the landing strips were. The object was to log these staging points and flyways. But then Iran-Contra came along, and we started flying guns back and forth and drugs into the southwest U.S.”

(snip)

At some point in all the excitement, however, it became apparent to Plumlee that the drugs he and other pilots were transporting into the U.S. weren’t actually being seized by the DEA. Nor was anyone in a hurry to close down the Mexican airstrips used for running drugs and guns. And no one seemed eager to use Plumlee’s intelligence to throw a net over the cartels. Plumlee’s suspicions — and those of other pilots involved in the Reagan administration’s war in Central America — helped to spark one of the darkest and least-known chapters of the Iran-Contra scandal. Dozens of pilots, including Plumlee, would eventually testify in top-secret hearings on Capitol Hill that they flew massive amounts of cocaine into the U.S., and that those flights often arrived at U.S. military bases.

(snip)

In 1983, Plumlee contacted staffers for U.S. Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado) and told them everything he knew about the phony drug-interdiction program and how it had been used by the CIA as cover for the agency’s secret — and illegal — shipment of arms for the Nicaraguan Contras. “I didn’t do that for publicity, but to protect myself,” he says. “This was before the fact—before the Iran-Contra hearings.” Once the scandal broke, Hart passed Plumlee to John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator investigating accusations that the CIA was involved in drug smuggling. Kerry took Plumlee’s testimony under oath — and then sealed it. Plumlee’s testimony will remain classified until 2020, although his name is still listed on the Kerry commission’s official list of witnesses, available on microfiche at public libraries.

(snip)

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/news/cocaine-airways/25835/

[TomInTib]

1. I have always wondered how this has been tamped downd for so long

We used to escort some guys from Southern Air Transport into Laos to meet with opium traders in the hills.

When I came home, I called every media outlet in Houston. Nobody gave a shit and I eventually gave up.

[question everything]

3. And, probably too complex for the lazy "reporters" to follow

A political scandal, yes, this they want. But something so convoluted and, apparently, still classified, they are too lazy to touch.

[acmejack]

2. Always been an interesting story, no?

We've been gamed so damned long, that if we ever find out it the whole truth...