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A mysterious missionary
support organization flying weekly "relief flights” to
Haiti from the Airport in Venice, FL. may be providing
"cover" for CIA
covert operations in the Caribbean, the
MadCowMorningNews has
learned.
Run by an ordained Southern
Baptist minister,
Agape Flights
is a fundamentalist Christian operation which has been involved
in some highly un-Christian activities,
like flying
shipments of food and
“religious supplies” on a
regular basis to a man
accused of plotting a coup in Haiti after being caught importing
an M-16, a Beretta, and a
camouflage uniform emblazoned with the words "God's Army."
Coming on the heels of
revelations of a million dollar unpaid loan
to recently-deceased televangelist
Jerry Falwell from
Wally Hilliard, owner of terror flight
school Huffman Aviation, the news marks the second time
fundamentalist Christian groups have
surfaced recently in unexplained operations at the
Venice Airport.
An agenda other
than that of the Almighty?

What is there that
suggests U.S. covert intelligence involvement in Agape
Flights?
Absent a CIA parking pass on the dashboard of one of
the SUV's in Agape's parking lot,
a web of connections offers clues that Agape may be
serving agendas other than that of the Almighty:
· The
group's links to the controversial Summer
Institute of Linguistics, accused in the Latin
American press of being funded by American
intelligence to export a virulent brand of Christian
fundamentalism to undermine the social cohesion of
aboriginal communities and eliminate obstacles to
natural resource exploitation.
·
Suspected involvement in the aforementioned CIA-backed coup in
Haiti, explored more fully in our next story.
·
U.
S. Treasury Dept. permission for Agape to fly
regularly to Cuba. (Michael Moore, take note.)
·
Oddly, Mohamed Atta's flight instructor at Huffman
Aviation, Mark Mikarts, flies for Agape. Even more
oddly,
Mikarts
used to be someone else.
Spies often use aliases,
don't they?
Tangled webs, well-woven

A close look at a recent dramatic event involving the
group illuminates some connections...
Tropical Storm Alberto was
the first tropical
storm of the 2006 Atlantic
hurricane season. It lashed Florida's west coast with
rain and wind while bearing down on Tampa, Florida. As
the storm reached peak intensity, on June 12,
forecasters at the National Hurricane Center predicted
Alberto would soon attain hurricane status.
It was raining
so hard that Cynthia Tate, a Tampa homeowner,
was watching the Doppler radar on TV to see how bad
things might get.
Then she heard a strange
sound. “It sounded like a missile,”
she told the Tampa Tribune.
Into the teeth of a
hurricane...

“It was gone for a split
second, and then it was twice as loud. All of a
sudden, in my window, in my view, was the airplane. It
was coming right at me.”
As she watched in horror through
her living room window, a small plane, later
identified as a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90,
headed straight for her, crashing into her yellow
wood-frame house between the sunroom and a bedroom and
then exploding in a blast of fire.
“You could smell and taste
the fuel,” Tate said.
The pilot, Steve Huisman, who
also worked for Agape Flights, died instantly.
“This has been a pretty
overwhelming time," Agape’s Charlie Gardner said,
adding that staff members at Agape Flights were
visiting with Huisman's wife Sonja and his four
children, all younger than the age of 10.”
Spraying for Med-flies...
in a
hurricane?
The
men had been flying a mission from Sarasota,
newspapers reported, to release
sterilized Mediterranean fruit flies.
But because there
was no flight plan filed for the flight, investigators
said it wasn't clear where they'd flown before the
crash.
The explanation for
why the plane was flying in the first place
sound a little thin. We could, if given
time, come up with reasons to take off into
near-hurricane conditions...
But spraying for Med flies
isn’t one of them. Nor were we alone in our
suspicions...
“Many people are asking why a
small plane that crashed while attempting an emergency
landing near Tampa was flying on a day when a
hurricane churned in the gulf,” reported the Tampa
Tribune.
“Witness Bill Povey told
police he heard the plane just before the crash, and
thought it was flying low, and wondered: "Who is
flying in this weather?
Sharing Christian faith in
Afghanistan

At the time of the crash
Huisman was flying for a company called Dynamic
Aviation, while still flying for Agape.
If we are correct in our
hypothesis, both companies work for THE Company,
making them virtually interchangeable.
Huisman was “a tall,
straight-shooting, family man with four kids, a hearty
appetite and a faith that literally motivated him to
fly,” with an "infectious
smile and a life-long desire to share his Christian
faith.”
“Huisman, 41, grew up in
Papua New Guinea, the son of missionary Wycliffe Bible
Translators. He trained to become a missionary pilot
at Moody Bible Institute… He had moved to Florida five
years ago to work for Agape Flights in Sarasota, where
his work brought him to Haiti and the Dominican
Republic.”
“Part of what attracted
Huisman to Dynamic was the opportunity to fly to
Afghanistan for the company,” the Tampa
Tribune reported.
“On those flights, he carried
supplies as well as passengers. And while the Middle
East trips did not have a religious function, friends
said Huisman always found ways to minister to those
around him.”
Secret History
Weather-Watch
Strangely,
the plane that crashed
was photographed by one of the
ubiquitous
plane-spotters, who wrote:
"Call me paranoid, but I think someone or something is
staring back at me from the last window."
Huisman's trips to Afghanistan
would be something of a red
flag, CIA-wise. Then, at Dynamic Aviation's company website
we found their
rather grandiloquent and very Homeland Security-ish
motto:
“PARTNERS SAFEGUARDING EARTH.”
Does Pilot Huisman’s
involvement with Dynamic Aviation, of Bridgewater, VA
help penetrate the façade to the real secret history?
Another
intriguing tidbit about Dynamic Aviation is that in
1996, the company purchased the U.S. Army's fleet of
124 non-pressurized BE-90s, enabling the company to
significantly broaden its scope of operations, to
include fire management and airborne data acquisition.
The Pentagon had
out-sourced its airline of small planes to Dynamic
Aviation.
White Man's Burden, 2007
Husiman’s biography
also offers
clues to what's being hidden.
“Huisman, 41, grew up in Papua New Guinea,
the son of missionary Wycliffe Bible Translators.”
Sounds innocuous enough.
But
“Wycliffe Bible Translators” is the polite name for
a notorious organization known as the Summer Institute
of Linguistics (SIL) which has been accused in
numerous articles in the Latin American press of being
funded by American intelligence.
SIL is, according to the book
“Thy Will be Done,” “the vanguard of the
destruction of both the rainforests and their native
inhabitants...in military fashion, a scouting party
that surveyed the Amazonian hinterlands for potential
sources of opposition to natural resource exploitation
(read cattle ranching, clear-cutting and strip mining.)
A sweetheart of a
sweetheart deal

Another significant sign that
something is being concealed from view is the fact
that Agape has had its path smoothed regularly by the
government.
According to aviation
observers quoted in local newspapers, for example,
Agape got a
real sweetheart deal at the Venice Airport, paying
significantly less than the fair market
rate.
From the Sarasota Herald
Tribune:
“When the City Council
agreed in December to lease Agape Flights a hangar
and office space at the Venice airport for $2,114
per month, the humanitarian relief organization
heaped on the praise.
"Venice is really the right
place for us," said Charlie Gardner, Agape's
executive director. "The community is very
supportive."
“Supportive may be an
understatement. Under the approved deal, the city
allowed Agape to sublease some of its office space
to two other companies, who pay a total of $5,000
per month. Before the doors are unlocked on the
first of each month, Agape has already netted a
profit of $2,886.
Though practically unheard
of at other general aviation airports in the state,
deals such as these aren't unusual at Venice
Municipal Airport.”
Praise the Lord. And gimme
a Cuba Libre.

Ask yourself: When was
the last time the government offered you
a deal that cleared you $3000 a month for doing nothing?
At their former home base at
the Sarasota Airport, Agape had also been the grateful
beneficiary of unexplained largesse, this time from the
Florida
State University Foundation, from whom they subleased
land for a song.
And at the same time Wally
Hilliard was passing out
Presidential Rolexes to Fidel’s top lieutenants, Agape received special
permission from the U.S. Treasury Department to fly
regular flights to Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1999,
Agape Flights moved to Venice
from nearby Sarasota two years ago, where, after being
involved in a number of controversies, the group had
apparently worn out its welcome.
Shortly thereafter, we began
to hear rumblings from aviation observers at the
Venice Airport that things weren't quite right
about the group.
Their operation didn’t make sense.
Dept of 'Things That Don't
Make Sense'

We heard the sentiment
expressed several times, including by an 86-year old pilot who’d
kept a plane at the airport for more than 30 years.
“I’ve been planning to call
those folks at Agape with a real cost-saving idea,” he
told us.
“They’ve got a million dollar
hangar, a million dollar plane, three pilots on staff,
and a dozen SUV’s sitting in the parking lot every
day,” said the wizened veteran with a shrug.
“They could save millions
just by shipping their stuff UPS. So… why don’t they?”
“I wouldn’t want even want to
venture a guess as to what they might be doing,” said
another pilot in Venice. “But I can tell you this:
I wish I’d figured out
a ‘hustle’ like that.”
“Pilots are always looking
for places to fly their planes to," the aviation
executive continued. “Look at Angel Flights.
They’ve got pilots standing in line to volunteer their
planes."
"If you just pay for gas, pilots are happy to
fly to South America for free... But these guys keep a
million dollar Cessna Grand Caravan, and three pilots
on the payroll."
"Something doesn’t make sense.”
Covert ops 101

We were in familiar territory.
Terror flight school Huffman Aviation hadn't made
sense, either. It wasn’t in the flight
school business, for example.
Already losing $40,000 a
month at their Naples FL flight school, Huffman
Aviation principals Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard
had blithely decided to buy a second flight school in
Venice, paying twice what it was worth...
In cash. Their actions made no
business sense.
A former Huffman Aviation
executive told us darkly, “Sometimes when things don’t
make business sense, its because they
do make sense...just in some other
way.”
Agape Flights may present a
similar situation.
Coy Jacob, owner of a Mooney
airplane distributorship at the Venice Airport, shared
a hangar with Agape when they first moved to the
Venice Airport.
Secretive nonprofit: a
contradiction in terms?

Asked about the experience,
Jacob shakes his head...
“I couldn’t believe what I
was seeing. Its obviously a very well-funded
operation, but the stuff they’re flying down to Haiti
is junk,” he told us bluntly.
“Stuff that didn’t sell at
garage sales. Used silverware and plates, used
bedding. Every so often we’d see a new coffeepot, or a
portable generator. But it was mostly all junk.”
“With the price of aviation
gasoline today, it costs them between $6000 and $8000
just to fly down and back to Haiti. And for what?
A
couple hundred bucks worth of toasters?”
Jacob made the mistake of
questioning Agape honcho Charlie Gardner about it. “I
guess I was a little too nosy,” he told us. “I said
'What are you doing flying junk to Haiti?’”
Gardner became visibly
uncomfortable, Jacob recalled, with the notion that
someone could see what was going on.
“What was really
strange—especially since its supposed to be a
Christian missionary organization—was how secretive
they were,” Coy Jacob stated.
“For example, they insisted
on always keeping the hanger doors down. Just imagine
how hot that gets in Florida.”
Like another company in
Lynchburg VA
This was reminiscent of what
we had heard about Britannia Aviation, a
CIA front which used to be housed inside the Huffman
Aviation hanger at the Venice Airport which
inexplicably won a large government contract which
raised eyebrows at the Lynchburg Airport.
Consternation in Lynchburg
had not diminished in the months after Britannia moved
in, we had learned from Lynchburg aviation executive
Jim Lampman. Instead, suspicion grew, because of the
“secretive nature” of the operations going on at the
facility.
“No one knows anything about
this group,” Virginia Aviation’s Lampman told us.
“They took over a sizeable maintenance facility and
all they’re doing is working on a few old, broken-down
Jetstreams."
"But they keep their hangar
doors down and closed. They stay strictly to
themselves and keep their shades pulled down. Their
activity consists of one plane coming in and one plane
going out every few weeks.”
Agape is as agape does

Agape Flights’ secretive
nature has caused considerable comment at the Venice
Airport. There is widespread suspicion about what the missionary group
is trying to hide.
“We refurbished an airplane
for a woman who was a director of a major Fortune 500
company,” Mooney Mart owner Coy Jacob told us.
“When she came to pick up her
plane, which was parked on the apron in front of the
hangar, Gardner refused to let her walk across the
hangar to get to her plane. It was unreal.”
Agape is Greek for spiritual,
selfless love. But try telling that to Agnes Imregh,
who said she’d been incredulous at Gardner’s actions.
“I was having the inside of
my plane re-done,” she explained. “When the work was
finished I came to pick up the plane, which was parked
in front of the hangar.”
“When I walked into the
hangar, this officious man came up and demanded to
know who I was in an accusatory tone, and if I had a
security pass.
“I told him I was merely
there to pick up my plane, so he could stop acting
like the Grand Inquisitor.”
“He said, ‘Can you prove its
your plane?’”
No Agape going on
at all
"I
told him yes, I showed him my I.D., which matched the
registration in the cockpit.
"But the guy would
not let me
cross the floor of the hangar to get to my plane. I
couldn’t believe it! He was being totally heavy-handed
and trying to intimidate me to keep me out of his
area.”
"So I walked down the road
100 yards to the FBO (Fixed Base of Operations),
through their door and out onto the field, and then
walked back to where my plane was parked.”
“And the asshole was standing
there waiting for me next to the cockpit! I told him
if he tried to keep me from accessing my property I
would call the police. And I also told him that
despite the name of his supposed Christian charity, he
didn’t seem to me to have much “agape” going on at
all.”
When her plane needed a tow
to jump-start the battery, one of Agape’s personnel
came out to help, she said, and apologized for what he
called his boss’ irrational behavior.
Monica Goodling,
faith-based hire

In the aftermath of last
week's testimony by the shockingly-unqualified
“faith-based hire” Monica Goodling, the role played by
fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. Government has
become the subject of some controversy.
Former Justice Department
official Goodling was one of some 156 Bush
Administration appointees who are graduates of Pat
Robertson’s Regent Law School, rated in the bottom 10%
of law schools in America.
The Big
Question:
“Islamic
fundamentalist” Osama bin laden reportedly cloaked
covert activities under the cover of religious
charities.
Where do you
think he learned to do that?
NEXT: How many missionary
groups does it take to pull off a coup?
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