Son of Air America
Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated
air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.
Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of
its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according
to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by
corporate records.
"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S.
government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the
University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.'s air operations. Mr.
Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire
in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a
friend's new plane at Johnston County Airport.
Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort
Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower
from which Aero's operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.
"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out
in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked
not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a
newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy
agreement.
While flying for Aero in the 1980's and 1990's, the pilot said, he ferried
King Hussein, Jordan's late ruler, around the United States; kept
American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and
food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and
retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former
Soviet republics in Central Asia.
Ferrying Terrorism Suspects
Aero's planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives
for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina,
dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often
at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash
strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed
from job to job.
He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them
'snatches,' " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was
to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A.
team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by
Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.
Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the
C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004,
according to Dun and Bradstreet.
Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or
who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is
striking.
When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a
Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in
Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business
Jet, also flying from Washington.
Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were
the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad
since the beginning of the war.
Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture
of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest.
They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on
March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg,
Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational
chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.
A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003,
after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a
propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of
Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.
Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports.
Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan
intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation
cell.
Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him
and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to
one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on
Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan
agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the
Johnston County Airport, flight records show.
The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government
inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan,
Indonesia and Gambia.
Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from
Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and
returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the
Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The
Los Angeles Times.
Mysterious Companies
As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a
major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership
can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation
Administration's online registry.
So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies
whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.
On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear
to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers'
offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases,
seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary
identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house
purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia,
Maryland and Washington, D.C.
But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box
addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the
companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for
instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services
and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts
address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.
No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office
boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon,
in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was
issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as
1949.
Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such
name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an
element of one entity to lead to others."
He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask
real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very,
very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.
Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J.
Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the
1980's because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the
American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more,
he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.
Aero's president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a
North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called
Stormin' Norman's. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only:
"Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we
can't say anything about it."
Secrecy Is Difficult
Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as
the United States Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the
value of the C.I.A.'s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned
whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment
appears prescient.
When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary
should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is
C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency's general counsel, objected.
In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody
knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately
the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."
He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."
Ford Fessenden contributed reporting for this article