Eminentoes/Air America's Flyboys
Brock, David
EMINENTOES AIR AMERICA'S FLYBOYS W hen Ivar Gram asked one of his fellow ex-pilots if the small red insignia on his white polo shirt was a marijuana leaf, the joke did not go down well. "Canadian...
...Richard V. Secord was an alum, along with lesser figures like Eugene Hasenfus, the cargo handler captured by the Sandinistas after the crash of a private arms-laden plane, and William Cooper, a pilot who died in that crash—soon had groups like the crazed Christic Institute claiming that a "secret team" of ex-military and ex-CIA types had been running U.S...
...Shortly after his trip, he says he was fired by a CIA official...
...In 1976, the final report of the Senate select committee headed by Frank Church that investigated U.S...
...In August 1967, my husband was killed in a helicopter landing...
...For example, the following from a recent interview in the San Francisco Chronicle with Dan Melnick, producer of the forthcoming Carolco film Air America, starring Mel Gibson: "It's a funny, biting action comedy about something I care about...
...Another, and opposite, problem is getting the men to shut up...
...A sk Debbie Pirkle about the men's motives...
...troops from Saigon in April 1975—until the lights went out in 1979 after a three-year liquidation period...
...We want to put the record straight...
...My husband was a helicopter maintenance crew chief...
...Clyde Carter was the last president of the airline, presiding from the time of the last operation—the evacuation of U.S...
...It's just that, well, there are a few subjects about which they're a bit defensive, and involvement with drugs tops the list...
...The covert requirements of the enterprise have come back to haunt the club in its attempt to counter what McEntee calls the "trite innuendoes and outright lies" that characterize so many media portrayals of the CIA flyboys...
...The helipad had been overrun during the night in Luang Prabang by the Pathet Lao...
...Yet stories like his, from men of brief affiliation with the airline and whose testimony is of questionable veracity to boot, form the soft core of the left's case against Air America.0 SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3, CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WITS, 92.3 ELI BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WGCL, 1370 AM BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WAJI, 951 FM, FORT WANE, INDIANA CENTRAL OFFICE, BOX 62 BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA -17402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 Providing the Best nd Television Service 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989...
...The route was Vientiane to Saigon to Hong Kong to San Francisco...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 37 their embellished war stories do not jibe with the straight-arrow image the club's honchos want to project...
...Rife was with Air America, based in Bangkok, from 1964 to 1968...
...During the sixties, of course, there was plenty of official covert operations money around for just about anything the CIA wanted to do...
...There were plenty of opportunities to make money on the side, too...
...One can expect Air America to do for the 5,000 or so Air America vets precisely what Platoon did for Vietnam veterans: kick them in the teeth...
...As to the drug-running charges, there are more authoritative sources...
...And I kept copies...
...Many of the men suspected a CIA link in the 1960s when Air America's operations grew proportionately with the escalation of U.S...
...And so their sacrifices go unrecognized...
...She has come to the reunion from Florida, with her two children...
...For one thing, like any crowd of red-blooded Americans from places like Clearwater, Florida, they despise the adversarial sophists in the media...
...This is not to say that the group of 300 or so aging air vets gathered for an Air America reunion at a suburban Virginia Holiday Inn was humorless...
...When asked to spell the Laotian province of Luang Prabang, ex-pilot Jack Berg tells me: "In your ear...
...He set me straight on the point: "The company was formally disbanded on April 1, 1976...
...Claire L. Chennault, of "Flying Tigers" fame, and Whiting Willauer, a naval intelligence expert, with the mission of supplying Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in China...
...Nobody knows the whole story" LaShomb is working with the CIA to compile a definitive list of those who actually worked for the company...
...I brought the children so they could meet some of his friends, to help add something to who their father was...
...by David Brock B other myths are more difficult 1. 0 to debunk...
...Ironically, the accounts more damaging to Air America's reputation often come from people who have never worked for it (thus the importance of LaShomb's employee list...
...that they napalmed innocent civilians and collected dead or near-dead Americans for pay...
...Darusi, who did not take them in stride...
...In fact, it was frustration with their hopelessly defensive posture against all the negative attention directed at them by Congress and the press that led the Air America men to start the Air America Club in 1984...
...But many of the men, looking now like a convention of retired insurance salesmen, complete with badly done hair transplants, clearly relish the derring-do days of old, or at least the mystique surrounding them, and they like to talk, with each other anyway...
...The rest were too busy filming each other with shoulder-held videocams, remarking on how tasty the Holiday Inn stuffed chicken breast was, and arguing about whether the fat queen with the ponytail was the maitre d' or some poor soul's son...
...The accusation made the front page of the Los Angeles Times...
...They say we got $10,000 a pop for picking up downed pilots," says McEntee...
...the CIA took the unprecedented action of revealing that the man had never been one...
...involvement in Vietnam, but even among themselves they referred to the agency as merely "the customer...
...utive, told a reporter: "If someone out there is behind this, we don't know about it...
...One time he showed me a smuggler's belt and tried to get me to do it," Keith Vasconcellos, an Air America alum who now flies for TWA, says of Cavaleri...
...Also, we found not the slightest suspicion, much less evidence, that any Agency officer, staff or contract, has ever been involved in the drug business...
...intelligence activities endorsed the conclusions of an inspector general's report, which found "no evidence that the Agency or any senior officer of the Agency, has ever sanctioned or supported drug trafficking as a matter of policy...
...Air America's indirect links to Irancontras—Gen...
...But the bad rap comes not only from the tendentious restaging of Vietnam in Hollywood, but also from Air America's connection with the Reagan effort to beat back Communism in Central America...
...The pilots have been accused of running drugs, opium and heroin from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle to pay for the clandestine war in Laos...
...We know what happened, our detractors don't...
...Where they were was Asia, pilots and crew for the CIA's airline...
...A box full of checks," he was told, presumably collected in Cavaleri's drug operation...
...Brenneke claimed to have been an 18-year Air America employee...
...You have the same problem with Air America...
...It was often suggested that Air America in fact had never been disbanded, that it was still flying in Central America...
...With Vietnam, you didn't have one ten-year war...
...It was soon sold to the CIA, which over the next thirty years used the airline ("the most shot-at in the world") to haul freight, passengers, weapons, and supplies to anti-Communist armies in China, Korea, and Vietnam...
...The Church committee, of course, had not spoken with Jack Rife about the shoe box caper...
...Canadian maple leaf," the man answered gruffly and then walked off...
...Formed forty years ago in October, Air America was one of the several companies that were wholly owned by the agency but did business under commercial guise...
...Jeffreys, complied...
...Last year, for example, Richard Brenneke told a federal judge in Denver that George Bush flew secretly to Paris in October 1980 and agreed to pay $40 million for delaying the release of American hostages until after election day...
...Army, and Cavaleri's shoe box...
...We never got paid for a single one...
...I dropped off the papers myself in Dover, Delaware, on the way to visit my mother-in-law in New York...
...Even that will take years, he figures, and when it is completed, it will be added to the collection of declassified company documents in new archives at the University of Texas at Dallas, where there is also a 500-pound bronze plaque bearing the names of the 254 men who died on Air America missions.' "In the archives, we'll have the facts, not somebody's interpretation," says LaShomb...
...We actually lost money when we did...
...Somehow, the photos wound up in the hands of Mrs...
...Most of the fantastic accounts revolve around common themes: that the pilots were soldiers of fortune, involved in the enterprise for no higher reasons than cash, adventure, and cheap women...
...After handing over the box and collecting $2,000, Rife inquired about its contents...
...The airline was founded privately by Gen...
...But I wouldn't do it, and I don't know anybody who ever had anything to do with drugs...
...You had ten one-year wars, and everybody's experience was different," says Leon LaShomb, a diminutive Texan who has devoted his retirement to chronicling Air America's history...
...The men never had any doubts that what they were doing was working for their government, and what they were doing was right...
...ambassador to Thailand, the chief of staff of the U.S...
...Inevitably, 'This is a sore spot with many of Air America's vets...
...At first nobody would tell me what happened, just that he was killed, but I've pieced it together...
...One slightly sloshed woman offers to tell me all about McEntee, but when tracked down later, she demurs...
...I tell them we've got to stop telling stories," says McEntee, who is scrupulously tight-lipped about his own exploits...
...For instance, Jack Berg and Jack Rife, a former fixed wing pilot, exchange angry words about who is going to get to tell of the time a Japanese photographer showed up in a Bangkok strip joint and snapped some pictures of Tony Darusi bussing the navel of a stark-naked belly-dancer...
...Their dead were excluded from the Vietnam War Memorial in the capital because they were not in the military...
...Would he carry a shoe box from Vientiane to Bangkok and deliver it to Cavaleri's children...
...But they dismiss any suggestion of napalming, making fat fees for rescues, or trading in corpses...
...As incoming president Jerry McEntee, an ex-helicopter pilot from New York, puts it: "We were there, Charlie...
...An independent (and sympathetic) filmmaker, who has taken pains to point out that his production is in no way related to Carolco, hung a sign-up sheet outside the hospitality suite, seeking to schedule weekend interviews...
...Neither were they officially CIA...
...Undoing contrary interpretations, however, is not going to be easy for this group...
...We moved to Thailand in October 1966 with Air America...
...The men, most of whom came to the company from the military or commercial airlines, will vouch for having been well-paid, with pilots making about $1,000 a week in the late 1960s, much of it tax-free...
...Such stories are of no great moment...
...Air America was a CIA front...
...As late as 1970, George A. Doole, Jr., the legendary CIA agent and Air America chief execDavid Brock is a senior editor of Insight...
...They were using Air America as a way of financing the war Congress never made an appropriation for...
...Only one person, a Mr...
...An acquaintance, Maurice Cavaleri, an ex-medical student from France who moved to Laos and opened the Constellation Hotel (guests called it the Constipation), once asked Rife for a favor...
...and that Air America supported the drug trade in Southeast Asia, using the money to fund unauthorized covert operations...
...Berg says one pilot picked up $20,000 by flying several hundred pounds of matches into Dien Bien Phu during a match shortage...
...It was one of the more polite kiss-offs of the weekend...
...Characters like Rife, in fact, did not last long at Air America...
...The next Air America flight out, with Rife in the cockpit, had aboard the U.S...
...foreign policy for the past twenty-five years, financing their operations through shady dealings, with a wink and a nod from Langley...
Vol. 22 • December 1989 • No. 12
