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The
first anniversary of the April 10 2006 seizure
in Mexico’s Yucatan of a American-registered DC9 caught
carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine passed
virtually unnoticed last week. It shouldn’t have...
Porter
Goss resigned less than a month later, the same day
the FBI executed a search warrant at the house of
the No. 3 official in the Central Intelligence Agency,
Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, soon
to go on trial for corruption with accomplice Brent
Wilkes.
Not
since the downing of a C-130 military cargo plane
over Nicaragua in 1986 with Eugene Hasenfus onboard—kicking
off the Iran Contra Scandal—has an aviation incident
been remotely as important or as fraught with significance.
And
not since the massive cocaine smuggling through Mena,
Arkansas
has the CIA’s hand been so flagrantly caught in the
cookie jar.
Shocking
details come as no surprise

In
a series of stories beginning today, and continuing
over the next ten days, the
MadCowMorningNews
will report the results of a year-long investigation
into the secret history of this operation.
Some of the highlights include:
·
SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL., the company which owned the DC9 airliner stuffed to the
top of the overhead bins with cocaine, was a CIA front.
·
SkyWay’s genesis
can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington,
Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed
out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence
Agency.
·
SkyWay was part of a network of companies, three of
which—L-3 Communications, Net Command Tech
Inc, and Triton Network Systems Inc.— were
cited by Elliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General
of New York State, for being used by Wall Street brokers
in “pump and dump” schemes which
cost unwary investors tens of millions of dollars.
·
The
suspicious involvement of L-3 Communications subsidiary
Titan Corp of San Diego, the biggest donor to Southern
California Congressmen convicted or being investigated
by fired San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam.
·
The
Israeli connection to SkyWay, including the involvement
of an Israeli tele-com firm, Tadiran, accused of being
involved in worldwide espionage, and which owned the
headquarters of SkyWay in Clearwater, Florida.
·
The
involvement of Gulf Arab financiers, including an
overseas bank, Banque Francaise de l'Orient,
long associated with the Saudi bin Laden family.
·
Evidence of Republican party involvement in
the network, which
included the free use of one of the smuggling aircraft
by the current head of fund-raising for the national
Republican party, U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who "traveled
to nighttime rallies in luxury," the St.
Petersburg Times reported, “on a DC-9 owned
by Skyway Global, a Clearwater security company whose
owners are Martinez supporters.”
Still more shocking details

Over
the next
ten days,
we’ll present
evidence for each of these heady claims, and attempt
to find the answer to what is still a major mystery:
Why haven’t U.S. authorities arrested the owners of
an American-registered plane busted with 5.5 tons
of cocaine?
The
story began here:
The
drug trafficking operation was flying an airliner
carrying 128 suitcases...but no passengers.
There was no attempt to camouflage their activity.
Mexican
soldiers unloaded the American-registered DC9, whose
cargo consisted of 128 identical black suitcases stuffed
with cocaine, onto the hot asphalt runway in Cuidad
del Carmen, an out of the way airport nestled in the
middle of the Yucatan jungle.
In what may have been someone’s idea of a joke, each
suitcase bore a stamp on its side, with the single
word “Privado.”
The
DC9 sported a distinctive Seal on its fuselage: blue-and-white
with gold trim surrounding an eagle clutching twin
olive branches, making it virtually indistinguishable
from official U.S. Government planes belonging to
the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.
Even
veteran plane-spotters were fooled.
This
was perhaps not much of a stretch: SkyWay’s Chairman,
Glenn Kovar, boasted of long-standing ties to the
CIA. And today he and his son are operating another
front company called “Homeland Security Tracking
Enforcement.”
Walking on water in Tampa

Although
owned by SkyWay, the airliner was
registered to Royal Sons Inc., a company
controlled by an aircraft broker from Tampa, FL. named
Frederic Geffon.
Geffon
partnered with SkyWay in the company’s three planes,
two DC9’s and a Cessna, then illegally appropriated
them when SkyWay went bankrupt in 2005, to the annoyance
of SkyWay’s Federal Bankruptcy Trustee, who filed
suit to get the planes returned.
“Geffon was under court order to not let the planes
leave the St Petersburg-Clearwater Airport,” stated
a source close to the Bankruptcy proceedings.
“The Airport Tower had even been ordered not to let
the plane take off."
"Geffon was in
direct violation of the court order when
that DC9 took off for Venezuela,” the source
stated last week.
Yet Frederic
Geffon has suffered no legal sanction at all, either
for violating the court order, or for owning a plane
busted with a plane filled with a box-car's worth of
cocaine,
evidence that, legally speaking, Frederic Geffon
walks on water.
It depends on your definition
of "is"

When
news of the plane's seizure reached Tampa, there was
a mad scramble to get out of the way. Even though
the FAA's website
stated that the airliner was registered to Frederic
Geffon, he denied it, claiming he'd already sold
it.
Geffon’s claim then received a big boost, one week
after the seizure, from an FAA spokesman, who stated
the FAA had received a copy of a letter from Royal
Sons, dated April 7, asking that the
plane be exported to Venezuela.
This
pronouncement was enough to quiet immediate suspicion…
The heat was off Geffon, at least for a while.
But the
spokesman hadn’t said the FAA received the
documents on April 7, just that the letter had been
dated April 7.
So we requested the plane's
registration documents from the FAA, where they are
mandated by law to be freely available.
Come in here, boy, have a cigar

After
stonewalling for more
than two months later, the FAA released the plane’s
records. They showed that Frederic Geffon didn't request
transfer of ownership and file export documents
to the FAA until the
day after the plane was busted.
The
FAA stamp shows they were “received,”
on April 11th. And since they were faxed,
not mailed, they clearly didn't get lost
in the mail.
In
the eyes of law enforcement, this would seem, would
it not, to be a clear case of: “Close, but no
cigar.”
But
Tampa, FL is Cigar City, where deals
are still made in smoky backrooms.
Law
enforcement officials in the U.S. and Mexico are today
apparently no closer to “identifying” the owner of
the plane than they were a year ago.
That terror flight school
again

Nor
has anyone been held accountable higher up than the
airliner’s unfortunate co-pilot, a Venezuelan paid
just $500 for the flight, which must have seemed small
recompense when he was left holding the bag by the
pilot who hired him, who somehow managed to "slip
away."
Geffon’s Royal Sons Inc has one other distinction
that needs to be mentioned: The firm occasionally
listed its address as 224 E Airport Ave at the tiny
Venice, FL airport, in a hangar belonging to terror
flight school Huffman Aviation.
For
the past three years the MadCowMorningNews
has been pointing out—to anyone who'll listen— that
the owner of Huffman Aviation, Wally Hilliard, during
the same month Mohamed Atta and Marwan
Al-Shehhi arrived to attend his flight school, had
his jet confiscated by DEA agents on
a runway at the Orlando Executive Airport, where they
found 43 pounds of heroin onboard.
Although over 60 percent of the world’s heroin comes
from Afghanistan--a country then being
run by Mohamed Atta’s boss--Atta's arrival
and the discovery of a huge amount of heroin happening
at the same time... is just a coincidence. Because
otherwise Wally Hilliard might today be in prison,
and of course, he's not.
And neither is Frederic Geffon.
"Get the picture?
Yes, we see!"

Six months ago we received an email alleging
that
Dusty Foggo and Barry Seal had more than a nodding
acquaintance in Honduras during the go-go ‘80’s.
Honduras
was known at the time as “The Trampoline,”
because drug flights from Colombia would refuel there,
then “bounce” back into the sky to fly to the
States.
And
Barry Seal, of course, was a long-time CIA pilot,
as well as what the U.S. Government, back in the 1980's
called "the biggest drug smuggler in American
history."
But
as we are seeing, time marches on, and
by now he has no doubt lost that distinction.
Of
course,
we already knew that Porter Goss
knew Barry Seal. Here’s a picture of the two of them
together, taken in 1963 in Mexico City. With them
in the photo are two other famous names in America’s
secret history: Felix Rodriguez, and Frank Sturgis.
But
Seal and Foggo was just a rumor. We needed confirmation.
Think "Snakes on
a plane" in a bar
Then
we read "Dusty Abroad" in
the Washington Babylon column by Ken Silverstein
in Harpers magazine online. It contained new information
on Foggo’s years in Honduras in the early 1980s, when,
according to the article, “the Agency was using the
country as a base both to support the Nicaraguan contras
and for a variety of other covert programs
in Central America.”
The
article, concerned with Foggo’s involvement in “a
brisk hooker trade,” revealed that while Foggo
was based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he had been
a regular at the Maya Hotel and casino.
Well bust my britches, or some equivalent, we said to
ourselves, when we read this. Because we knew that Barry
Seal had hung out there too.
While
researching
“Barry & ‘the boys’” five years
ago, we met a steely-eyed former NSA operative in
Central and South America named Russ Akin. “I first
met Barry Seal in the lobby of the Hotel Maya
in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in the late ‘70’s,”
he told us.
“Barry
was good friends with the owners of the
hotel, which was the center of intrigue in Central
America back then. And just by looking at each other,
we both knew what the other was doing, although neither
of us stated it openly to the other when we met, or
for a long time afterwards.”
So
Seal and Foggo were in the same place, at the same
time. It’s not definitive, and its not confirmation
that they knew each other.
But there were
so many intriguing
similarities... Both Seal and Foggo made a habit
of doing favors for politicians. Louisiana Governor
Edwin Edwards had enough of a personal friendship
with Barry Seal to borrow $10,000 from him at the
tables in Vegas, on an occasion when Lady Luck had
not been kind to “the Guv.”
Foggo’s largesse will presumably be explored during
his upcoming trial... Though we suspect it will be
in a more, shall we say, truncated form
than if Carol Lam were still running the prosecution.
Top Republican fundraiser

The
boys from SkyWay Aircraft also knew whose favor to
curry...
U.S.
Senator Mel Martinez visited SkyWay just before
it went bankrupt, and pronounced the firm’s non-existent
technology to be "awesome."
Martinez
was running for the Senate, and the boys returned
the favor: Martinez flew a SkyWay drug smuggling plane--presumably
vacuumed out first--in his barnstorming finish
in his successful 2004 campaign… for free.
"Martinez traversed the state, including a trip
to a nighttime rally with several hundred people in
downtown Delray Beach in luxury, on a DC-9 owned by
Skyway Global, a Clearwater security company whose
owners are Martinez supporters,” reported the Nov
2 2004 St. Petersburg Times.
A
story in yesterday's Miami Herald labeled Martinez
"the national
Republican Party's new top fundraiser."
Well, no
wonder.
Baptist poseur Asa Hutchinson
One
reason we found the idea that Foggo and Seal might
have known each other so intriguing is that it would
fit with what we know about the nature of covert ops.
A
US Customs Agent who spent twenty-five years watching
the merry-go-round in Florida and Louisiana explained
it to us one time. He said, "You know, there
aren't all that many 'players' out there.
You can count 'em, pretty much, on one hand."
“After
a while they get to know each other on a first-name
basis. No different than people that own stationary
stores going to the Holiday Gift Show every year.
Its just good business.”
When
Barry Seal was bringing cocaine back from Honduras
in a CIA military cargo plane to Mena, Arkansas, the
U.S. Attorney there was craven Southern Baptist manqué
Asa Hutchinson.
Whether
Dusty Foggo and Barry Seal knew each other or not,
it’s a safe bet that when Porter Goss mysteriously
“plucked him (Foggo) from obscurity” in the words
of the New York Times, and named Foggo to be the CIA’s
executive director, it wasn’t because Foggo
sings too loud in church.
SkyWay Aircraft was never a real business.
It was set up to make money, but not through selling
a product. The company didn’t have one, and its owners
were recently cited
for
criminal intent for pretending
they had one.
Even
the SEC, an agency not known for much except taking
long lunches, is investigating. Who knows? Maybe
Chris Cox is getting worried.
THURS: Mena, SkyWay, & the
Israeli connection.
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