January 22, 1963, Mexico City — Only extant photo of CIA assassination squad Operation 40. Barry Seal, third from left. Felix Rodriguez, front left, Porter Goss (Book & Snake) with hand on Felix. William Houston Seymour, front right. To Seymour’s left, hiding his face, is Frank Sturgis.

 

 

The War of ‘82

 

by Daniel Hopsicker
From Barry and 'the boys' — The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History

 

The most talked-about event in Barry Seal’s much-talked about life concerns the persistent rumor, around since shortly after his assassination, that he had been murdered when he threatened to make use of a videotape of a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) cocaine sting which had netted George Bush’s two sons, Jeb and George W.

Rumors are just that — rumors — still, when something has been whispered about for as long as this has, its very persistence becomes a story in itself. And this one has all the makings of a major box office thriller ….

Governor and Presidential contender George W. Bush and his brother, Florida’s Governor Jeb Bush, allegedly caught on videotape in 1985 picking up kilos of cocaine at a Florida airport in a DEA sting set up by a vengeful Barry Seal.

Seal was said to have been angry over what he considered Vice President George Bush’s shabby treatment of him. In the deal the two had cut, Seal felt, Bush was to take care of his (Seal’s) legal difficulties; in exchange, Seal had gone to work for Bush and North at Mena, Arkansas.

Now he felt double-crossed by Bush, so the story goes; his reaction had been to use his DEA cover to set up a sting that ended up netting two very red-faced Bush boys.

Seal then stepped in and ‘took care’ of things. The Bushies were now supposedly in his debt. Plus he hung on to the videotape shot of the sting for insurance.

In retaliation, Seal was very publicly executed for his impudence less than a year later. When caught, members of the hit team all tell their lawyers that once they got to the US their actions had been directed by a military officer whom they all very quickly figured out to be National Security Council (NSC) staffer Lt. Colonel Oliver North.

Where are the tapes? What evidence was there for this story?

The evidence, if it existed, would have been in the three boxes of documents, audio and videotape that Seal had his employees move with him where-ever he went, and that were confiscated by the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Baton Rouge office who showed up on the scene less than ten minutes after Seal’s slaying.

Whatever Seal was carrying around with him when he died was so hot that, to get it, the FBI broke the law and violated both the rules of evidence and the US Constitution in their haste to recover Seal’s files.

Was this why Barry Seal died?

Our investigation into persistent reports that there exists an incriminating videotape of Republican George W. Bush caught in an aborted (by Seal) DEA cocaine sting was unable to turn up anything to prove the allegation.

But what the search did uncover was almost equally shocking.

We discovered, first, that the plane from Seal’s smuggling fleet suspected of being flown in the alleged incident had somehow, after Seal’s death, ended up in the possession of the person who had supposedly been caught flying it in 1985, George W. Bush.

It was his favorite plane.

Small world? Or just coincidence?

We know what Bogie would have said ….

“Of all the planes in all the world, he had to fly in mine.”

 

An even bigger shock awaited. The FAA ownership records of the turboprop King Air 200, which was part of Barry Seal’s smuggling fleet of aircraft, and which was supposedly caught on tape in the sting, led directly to some of the major perpetrators of the financial frauds of the 1980’s, Iran Contra, and the Savings and Loan Scandal.

Intrigue swirled around the successive owners of this particular Beech King Air 200 … intrigue of a characteristically spooky kind.

The plane, in just the five years between Seal and the State of Texas Motor Pool, where it was Bush’s favorite, had been involved with owners who found it necessary to make the papers on a regular and unflattering basis ….

The intrigue includes Greek shippers paying bribes to obtain loans from American companies which would never be repaid ....

An American executive snatching the charred remains of a payoff check from an ashtray in an Athens restaurant ….

Swiss police finding bank accounts used for kickbacks and bribes … .

In trying to explain to ourselves how this plane went from being part of Barry Seal’s smuggling fleet to becoming, according to Texas officials, a favorite airplane of Texan Governor George W. Bush, we had stumbled onto hard documentary evidence of Barry Seal’s CIA involvement.

It was a major find. The FAA records confirm that Seal, with whom the CIA has (natch) consistently denied any relationship, piloted and controlled airplanes owned by the same Phoenix, Arizona, company, Greycas, which owned the majority interest in CIA proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport.

“Barry had a lot more to do with Southern Air Transport than has ever come out,” we had been told by numerous sources.

Thanks to trying to track down an unsubstantiated rumor about those wastrel Bush boys, we had clear evidentiary proof that the biggest drug smuggler in American history flew CIA planes.

 

It had started with a lead into the history of the aircraft (a 1982 Beechcraft King Air 200 with FAA registration number N6308F - Serial Number BB-1014) found in records kept by Barry Seal’s widow Debbie.

Through these files, and other “hard paper” records left by Seal after his assassination including leasing agreements, insurance policies and maintenance records we discovered a deliberately confusing paper trail of convoluted ownership exactly like those unmasked in the Iran Contra hearings and leading to the most interesting places.

Unraveling the King Air’s tangled and colorful history first requires a look at the year the plane came into service … 1982 was a momentous year. The plane was spanking-new. And President Reagan had just introduced “Project Democracy,” which he called a “crusade for freedom.”

It became, instead, a license to steal.

Here’s how it started … .

 

The detonations rumbled along the rocky course of the Rio Negro in Nicaragua throughout the night of March 14,1982.

Concrete bridges groaned under their own weight, and came crashing in avalanches of dust in a dark landscape seen through night-vision goggles. In certain quarters of Washington. D.C, it was time to uncork the champagne.

War was breaking out in Central America.

 

Two days later, Barry Seal took possession of the first of many planes supplied to him through CIA Director Bill Casey’s “off-the-books” Enterprise, a King Air 200.

By March of 1982, more than 100 U.S. advisers were in Honduras. The chief of the Honduran Army, Barry’s pal General Alvarez, said that his country would agree to U.S. intervention in Central America, if it were — but of course! — the only way to “preserve peace.”

Some Generals will say anything to make a buck.

“Up to March 1982 you could still change your policy,” recalled a member of the NSC later. “The issue was still the question of support for El Salvador’s rebels. If that ended, so could pressure on Managua. But once the first forces of Nicaraguan exiles were trained and set in motion, any real negotiating became much harder. The blowing of the bridges was an announcement.”

Democrats, fearing that Reagan was pushing the US into another Vietnam-style quagmire throughout early 1982 tried to cut off aid to the contras. And at precisely this time — at the height of CIA Director Bill Casey’s frenetic efforts to ward off these Congressional efforts — Barry Seal acquired two brand new multi-million dollar Beech Craft King Air 200’s.

The ownership of the planes was deliberately obscured through convoluted transactions involving Phoenix-based corporations which we were “fronts” for Phoenix-based General John Singlaub’s “Enterprise.”

In early 1982 Singlaub had organized an American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), with a loan from Taiwan. Seal’s King Air 200’s came from sources close to these efforts.

Jack Singlaub has a long history of involvement in covert operations, beginning with the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He served as CIA desk officer for China in 1949 — yet another China hand — and deputy station chief in South Korea during the Korean War. During Vietnam he commanded the Special Operations Group Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group, deeply involved in the CIA’s Operation Phoenix assassination program.

Seal and Singlaub’s covert efforts in 1982 were made necessary by the CIA’s recent history. It had been forced, after the shocking scandals of the 1970’s, to make drastic reductions in “official” CIA capabilities in the Carter years.

Until then, the CIA had controlled a huge network of planes, pilots and companies for use in paramilitary situations. But after the public revulsion at disclosures of out-of-control CIA covert operations, many of these assets, like the infamous Air America, were dissolved or sold off.

The Contra war put everything back into high gear; the Reagan Administration sought to expand covert paramilitary operations in Central America and elsewhere.

So the CIA and the Army jointly agreed to set up a special aviation operation called “Seaspray,” New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh revealed in 1987. And the Agency rebuilt its capabilities illegally, relying on assets like Barry Seal.

This is old news to local and state police in areas, like Mena, affected by these extra-constitutional government operations. They more than most had seen the cynical manipulation of this operation to flood America with a river of drugs.

When law enforcement authorities debriefed convicted “drug smuggler” Seal in late 1985, one of the cops present brusquely began by stating, “We already know about ‘Seaspray.’”

 

The spring of 1982 was an extraordinarily busy time. The boys were getting ready to go to war ….

Between March and December 1982, according to law enforcement records and Seal’s own archives, Barry fitted nine of his aircraft with the latest electronic equipment, paying the $750,000 bill in cash...reminding us of an old Saturday Night Live gag about Chico Esquela, a clueless Latin ballpayer, changed only slightly:

“National security been berry berry good to me.”

 

Early in 1982 a new cover unit of the Armed Forces was also set up. Known as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), it became a separate entity in the Army’s secret world of special operations, with its own commander, Col. Jerry King. The secret operation ferried undercover Army operatives to Honduras where they trained Honduran troops for bloody hit-and-run operations into Nicaragua.

The Army went to outside businessmen and arms dealers to make off-the-books airplane purchases, with funds that had been “laundered” through secret Army finance offices at Fort Meade.

$325 million was appropriated for this Special Operations Division of the Army between 1981 and the autumn of 1983.

Through private front companies like the ones which supplied Barry Seal with his fleet of smuggling aircraft, Operations Seaspray and Yellow Fruit ferried weapons like rapid-fire cannons to CIA operatives busily mining Nicaragua’s harbors.

All of this was in violation of Congressional legislation barring the Defense Department and the Agency from any action aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas.

More importantly, they ignored the manifest wishes of the American people, who strongly rejected war with puny Nicaragua. According to a 1987 New York Times report by Seymour Hersh, had these operations become public, they would almost certainly have caused enormous damage to the Reagan Administration.

But that’s why God made Special Forces...or so, at least, goes the rationale. Whatever the reason for the Central American war, Seal’s drug enterprise grew to become a truly formidable ‘funding engine.’

Vast fortunes were made, covertly, during the 1980’s...and these are some of the people who made them, giving them a ‘leg up’ in achieving the coveted distinction of being ‘global oligarchs.’

Seal’s planes flew from Mena to airstrips in the mountains of Colombia and Venezuela. After making a refueling stop in Panama or Honduras, they would return to Mena. En route, the planes would drop parachute-equipped duffel bags loaded with cocaine over Seal-controlled farms in Louisiana... .

“His well-connected and officially-protected smuggling operation based at Mena accounted for billions in drugs and arms from 1982 until his murder four years later,” said Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton in Partners in Power.

They reported that coded records of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) showed Barry Seal on the payroll beginning in 1982.

The effects of the Barry Seal-directed efforts to take weapons one way and bring drugs the other soon began to become visible, in ruined lives in the U.S. and maimed bodies in Central America.

“My investigation established a conspiratorial period, chronologically, with a first overt act and a last overt act. The first overt act was April 12, 1982,” stated Arkansas state criminal investigator Russell Welch.

Of course, Seal’s operation was not alone. When private planes began to bomb the Nicaraguan capital, resulting in the crash of a Cessna 404 at the Managua airport, an account of how three Cessna’s were secretly transferred from the New York Air National Guard to Central America for the raid on Managua leaked out.

Custody of a number of planes moved from the U.S. Air Force to a top-secret Joint Chiefs operation code-named “Elephant Herd,” and then on to the CIA, through a Delaware company where they were first armed and then transferred to the Contras.

This company, Summit Aviation, was doing business with Barry Seal, proved by records in his widow’s possession. According to congressional sources, Summit did “contract” work for the CIA, had former CIA personnel on the payroll, and had been linked through ownership records to the Cessna that crashed while bombing Managua.

And the downed Cessna’s ownership records were equally as convoluted as were Barry Seal’s King Air’s. The ‘fake paper’ desk was doing a crackerjack job... .

The Cessna was purchased by Summit in October 1982 from Trager Aviation Center in Lima, Ohio. They covered their tracks on the same day, selling it to Investair Leasing Corp. of Mclean, Va. Investair, which had an unlisted telephone number, and also did contract work for the CIA, according to congressional sources.

The deal was “put together” by Patrick J. Foley, Summit’s “military director,” a Seal associate whose name and number are in Barry’s files.

In addition to work for Investair, Summit maintained and modified planes for Armairco, another company involved in covert Government projects. Armairco, organized in 1982, also bought several multimillion-dollar Beechcraft King Airs like Seal’s, purchased directly from Beech in a procedure used only for military projects, according to Beech officials and aviation experts.

They were all, in other words, mil-spec planes.

When asked whether Armairco’s government work included activities in Central America, an Armairco official said, ‘’That may well be.’’

The convoluted paper history of the airplane which once belonged to Barry Seal, and which was until recently the favorite plane of George W. Bush, begins when the title to the new aircraft was first recorded by Portland, Oregon, dealer Flightcraft, Inc, in early 1982.

Flightcraft’s President, David Hinson, a former military and commercial airline pilot active in the Republican Party in Oregon, at the time was, according to The Oregonian, under consideration to head the FAA. The paper stated Hinson met with Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole to express interest in the job, even travelling to Washington to promote himself for the post.

Helping Bill Casey subvert the will of Congress and the American people presumably did nothing to hurt his chances ....

The King Air, N6308F, was spoken for even before it arrived at Flightcraft’s facilities ... FAA records show a defunct Lake Arrowhead, California firm entered into leasing agreements with developer Eugene Glick in February of 1982, two months before the manufacturer’s title was transferred to Flightcraft.

On paper the plane was ‘owned’ by a Greyhound Bus Lines subsidiary, Greycas, which in turn leased it to a mysterious Phoenix firm close to John Singlaub’s Enterprise operations named Systems Marketing, Inc.

AP reporter Bryson Hull reported to us recently that some digging had revealed that Systems Marketing was a wholly-owned subsidiary of yet-another company, called... Military Electronics.

Can you say “Iran Contra?” (We knew that you could.)

Military Electronics, through its cutout, Systems Marketing, then leased the plane to Continental Desert Properties, a firm owned by Gene Glick ....

In the final step, Glick turned the plane over to Barry Seal. Insurance policies found in Seal’s private papers confirm that he signed for an insurance policy on the aircraft.

What was the purpose of this convoluted ownership? What was it designed to conceal?

The answer lies in the very definition of “tradecraft,” a term for what it is that spies and covert operators do: operate in the dark. The ‘front’ companies were in place to act as “cut-outs,” layers of insulation, between the spy agency, in this case Bill Casey’s CIA, and the covert operative, in this case, Barry Seal.

Gene Glick lived in the exclusive Hope Ranch, very near Ronald Reagan’s Rancho Del Cielo Ranch in Santa Barbara, California. He leased not just this but several other Barry Seal’s planes and helicopters as well, during the time Seal was most active in drug and weapons smuggling.

Other documents we uncovered revealed that Glick was also actively helping Seal purchase ocean-going vessels, for use in drug smuggling activities, and as stationary platforms for the CIA to use off the coast of Nicaragua.

FBI agent Del Hahn, who had dismissed Glick’s importance to us, had instead fueled our suspicions.

“He’s just a money launderer,” said Hahn, Special Agent in Charge of an Inter-Agency Organized Crime Drug Task Force looking into Barry Seal’s organization in the mid-’80s.

Not quite, Delbert …. He was a cut-out.

The circle was completed when we discovered that the Beech King Air, as well as several others used by Barry Seal, had been in reality owned all the time … by the CIA, through the company revealed in 1998 bankruptcy proceedings to have owned Southern Air Transport (SAT). Southern Air was owned by an entity called Finova, which was disclosed when no one was looking when SAT went into bankruptcy in 1998.

Southern Air is a legendary CIA proprietary — second only to Air America — connected to Secord, Singlaub, Rodriguez, Casey and Vice President George Bush.

The company that supposedly ‘owned’ Barry Seal’s King Air’s is an Agency front, set up in Arizona and headquartered in Canada to escape American financial disclosure requirements.

 

Among its dubious achievements Southern Air owned the C123 used by Seal in the Nicaragua sting operation; the same aircraft that was later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986. When lone survivor Eugene Hasenfus was captured by Sandinistas, it had precipitated what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Back then, no one knew — or admitted knowing — just who owned Southern Air Transport, although Government officials swore up and down that it wasn’t the CIA.

On June 14, 1984, after passage of the second Boland Amendment and the consolidation of Contra operations under Oliver North, the plane was sold twice in one day, first to a Morgan B. Mitchell of Vale, Oregon, and then to Chevrolet Dealer Merrill Bean of Ogden Utah, who curiously gave the Dover, Delaware, address of the “Prentis Hall Corporation” on his FAA registration.

Students of the CIA have long been aware of the agency’s affinity for hiding its assets in Delaware corporations. But many other companies do so for reasons of convenience. In an interview Bean stated that he had incorporated in Delaware as a legal necessity because of the needs of his investors.

“Delaware is a very convenient place for many kinds of corporations to incorporate and many large corporations and multi-nationals do so,” Bean said. “Because other companies I was in partnership with were incorporated there I chose to do so also. It was much easier that way and it was a requirement of the partners who were investing.”

A good answer. Unfortunately Delaware officials state that Bean’s company, Prentis Hall, does not exist. And in the FAA records connected to Bean’s ownership of the plane there are other gaps in the FAA records.

When major mechanical repairs are made on an aircraft, the mechanic is required to complete an FAA form; in December 1989, an FAA certified mechanic installed routine de-icing equipment on the plane, and, reviewing exact ownership documents, listed the owner as United Insurance of Ogden, Utah.

Nowhere in FAA title paperwork does United Insurance appear as an owner. And a spokesman for the Utah State Department of Insurance said there had never been a ‘United Insurance’ licensed to do business in the State.

 

So we took a closer look at Merrill Bean, and discovered that he, too, had been involved in — what else? — major financial fraud, in what The Salt Lake City Tribune called “the worst financial disaster in Utah since the Great Depression.”

The disaster was the en massé failure of Utah thrifts—hybrid financial institutions that offered high interest rates and consumer loans—and the collapse of the insurance fund that was supposed to protect their deposits. And because Utah’s thrifts were essentially uninsured, the failure of Bean’s thrift left a trail of broken hearts and people.

One example will suffice:

“We had just moved to Utah from California two years ago,” 58-year old Irene Culver told the Salt Lake City Tribune in 1986. “My husband Kent was an aircraft mechanic but he has Parkinson’s disease. We put half our savings in there (Western Heritage) and bought a little fixer-upper with the other half. When the state closed everything, we were ruined.”

“We were going to put a new roof on and install a gas furnace, because the electricity’s expensive. Now we can’t do it, so we’ve got half the house closed off.”

Bean told us, “I was Director of that failed Thrift. I came aboard when it was almost going under. And I poured some money into it to try to save it and it didn’t happen. I was hoping that my $75,000 that I put into it would help revive it.”

How does a savvy businessman with aircraft and car dealerships believe that $75,000 will turn around a failing Savings & Loan?

The answer may be in The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush, where Texas journalist Pete Brewton documented how much of the S&L scandal was connected to illegal covert operations of the CIA....

In many of those schemes a $75,000 or similar “buy-in” might have purchased a seat at a highly-lucrative but completely-criminal feeding frenzy.

The ‘paper trail’ of Barry Seal’s King Air 200 revealed other connections to the unsavory perpetrators of the major financial frauds which — like the S&L scandal — marred the 1980’s.

The plane’s ostensible ‘owner,’ Greyhound Leasing, or Greycas, for short, was also at the center of a huge and seemingly-inexplicable financial fraud which, like the half-trillion dollar S&L scandal, no one ever seemed too concerned about unraveling.

The corporation was openly and eventually very publicly looted. Afterwards, company management pretended to be “baffled.”

It went down like this: Greycas Inc. and another Greyhound unit, Greyhound Leasing, were bilked out of over $75 million by Sheldon Player, a Utah resident assumed to be in the machine and oilfield equipment sales business. He gained the money through fraudulently obtained loans from Greyhound.

Obligingly, Greycas then devised an elaborate cover-up scheme to prevent disclosure of details about the losses, which eventually topped one hundred million dollars.

It began with a $600,000 loan. Player would sell Greycas heavy machine tools, lease them back, and then pretend to sublease the expensive devices to end-users. In most cases the machines, collateral for the loans, were non-existent.

By 1984 Player had borrowed $8 million from Greyhound in the scheme. So he asked for $40 million in new loans to continue his transactions, and $23.5 million had been disbursed before the company got suspicious and confronted Player, telling him they wanted to inspect the machinery which they supposedly owned.

Player resisted, leading some company executives — not in on the joke — to question the “integrity of the transactions with Player.”

But, remember, this was a company controlled by CIA-front Finova. So despite the company’s doubts about Player’s credibility and integrity, and in spite of Greycas’ inability to obtain inspections of the equipment, the company lent Player another $24 million in new loans!

Anyone who has ever borrowed money for a car or home must admire the chutzpah of Sheldon Player, whom the business press took to calling an “admitted con artist” though he had no history of financial fraud that we could discover, which took place at the same time officers of a Swiss-based subsidiary of the company were also massively defrauding Greycas, of another $120 million, in a (supposedly) unrelated scandal.

“Many borrowers failed to make even the initial monthly payment,’’ court documents stated, about this second scandal. The company’s accountants wrote that “fraudulent and dishonest acts resulted directly in a loss of $119,684,598.” Not so, said the company’s hapless general counsel, responding weakly that the loss was a mere $72 million.

The double looting was an Iran-Contra ‘bust-out’ which left hapless shareholders holding the bag. The fraud included checks written as bribes on napkins in Swiss restaurants and then set afire, the reported possibility that one of the participants was blackmailing the company, and angry lawsuits filed by upset shareholders. But the real question, which puzzled business reporters were never able to answer, was: why were they were giving money away down at Greyhound during the 1980’s?

The criminal trial of Sheldon Player is an illustration of our thesis that being connected means never having to say you’re sorry. When Player was sentenced, he received just a five-year sentence. That’s just one year for each $13 million he stole. This is clearly a deal which, if offered to regular Americans, would have them lined up around the Phoenix Federal Courthouse to sign up.

After receiving his ‘draconian’ sentence, Mr. Player was then given additional time to settle personal affairs before entering prison, which, for Mr. Player, consisted of the Lompoc Camp, a minimum-security facility known as one of the “country club” institutions in operation around the nation, according to Dick Murray of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Even funnier is what happened to the President of hapless Greycas. Robert Bertrand, lucky fellow, never went to prison. Instead he resigned at Greyhound in 1986, and was appointed new president and chief executive officer of Finalco, an equipment finance and brokerage company based in Mclean, Virginia. That’s the home of the CIA, folks. Probably just coincidence.

Completing the Barry Seal-to-George W. Bush plane chronology, Merrill Bean sold the plane in May of 1990 to Corporate Wings of Salt Lake City, which flipped it two days later to Gantt Aviation of Georgetown, Texas, which a month later sold it to the State of Texas Aircraft Pool, where it resides today.

Johnny Gantt, President of Gantt Aviation, said he probably knew that the State of Texas had a bid out when he acquired the plane. At the time the Governor of Texas was Bill Clements. His good friend, George W. Bush, was owner of the Texas Rangers.

It was Author Terry Reed who first announced that a videotape might surface during the 2000 presidential campaign “showing George W and Jeb arriving at Tamiami airport in 1985 to pick up two kilos of cocaine for a party.” Statements in Reed’s 1995 book Compromised recount how Seal bragged about how he had video of “the Bush boys” doing coke. Other witnesses have refused to go on the record. Are the rumors true? Did the Bush drug sting really happen? We must state honestly: we don't know.

 

What we do know is that by looking we connected the owners of this one plane to an incredible string of drug and money-related activities, activities carried out, in the normal course of things, by people who are properly called by a name many of them profess to hate:

“Spooks.”

© 2001 Daniel Hopsicker - www.madcowprod.com
from the book Barry and 'the boys' — The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History
ISBN 09706591-0-5 (MadCow Press)

 

**

 

Daniel Hopsicker broke this story first in his book Barry and the boys, and in a article on the Internet (10/99). Just after Hopsicker's book was in print, AP ran this official story:

From: Corpus Christi Caller-Times (9/10/2000)

TEXAS-OWNED PLANE ONCE OPERATED BY INFAMOUS DRUG RUNNER

Colombia cartel paid Adler ‘Barry’ Seal a reported $1 million for each flight

By C. Bryson Hull, Associated Press

HOUSTON — The state of Texas flies a plane that earned its wings at the hands of famed drug smuggler, government operative and eventual assassination victim Adler “Barry” Seal.

State officials have flown aboard N6308F, an 18-year-old twin turboprop that seats up to 10, on official business since Texas bought the plane in 1990. The Beech King Air is one of 53 in the state’s fleet.

Gov. George W. Bush took office five years after the plane became Texas property and was unaware of its history. “We’re glad to hear that the plane is on the straight and narrow and has landed on the right side of the law,” Bush spokeswoman Linda Edwards said.

Airborne Smuggling

Seal leased the N6308F seven years before Texas brought it to ferry government officials, according to an Associated Press comparison of Federal Aviation Administration records with insurance and leasing documents.

In the early ‘80s, Seal was a top DEA informant by dint of his work as airborne smuggler for Colombia’s Medellin cartel. He earned a reported $1 million a flight, hauling guns south and drugs north.

Seal, a former member of the Army’s special forces and a one-time Trans World Airlines pilot, leased and operated the plane for at least a year, beginning on March 21, 1983, according to a leasing document.

B. Don Wineinger, who handled the insurance policies for Seal while working for a Kansas insurance firm, verified his signature on the documents and authenticated the lease.

Many Owners

The plane’s owner at the time is unclear. Leasing records show the lessor as Continental Desert Properties Inc., a California real estate firm. But FAA title records show the owner to be Systems Marketing Inc., a now-defunct Arizona computer leasing business.

Continental Desert Properties owner Gene Glick has since died. The former owner of Systems Marketing was unavailable for comment.

N6308F passed through five other owners before it came to the state, but belonged for most of the time to a Utah Chevrolet dealer named Merrill Bean. Of the other owners, three were aircraft brokers and one was a leasing subsidiary of Greyhound Bus Lines called Greycas Inc. None, save Bean, owned the plane for more than 30 days.

Violent Death

The State of Texas Aircraft Pooling Board, which owns a fleet for use on official state business, purchased N6308F in May 1990 from Gantt Aviation, a Georgetown airplane broker.

Seal, 46, was machine-gunned to death in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge, La., halfway house on Feb. 19, 1986. Three Colombians were sentenced to life in prison for the killing, which occurred shortly before Seal was to testify in the Miami drug trial of Jorge Ochoa, a top Medellin cartel lieutenant. Medellin leader Pablo Escobar and Ochoa had offered $500,000 to have Seal killed and $1 million to have him brought back alive to Colombia, according to testimony at the trial.

Iran-Contra Connection

This is not the first time one of Seal’s planes resurfaced in an unlikely place. In 1984, Seal flew his C-123K military transport plane, dubbed “The Fat Lady,” to Nicaragua on an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation.

Using hidden cameras installed on the plane by the CIA, Seal snapped photos showing him taking bags of cocaine from Escobar and a corrupt Sandinista government official. President Reagan later used the photos during a nationally televised plea for support for the Contras.

But the plane that bore those public-relations fruits eventually gave Reagan fits. “The Fat Lady” was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986 while carrying a load of weapons bound for the Contras. That crash and the Sandinistas’ capture of the sole survivor, CIA operative Eugene Hasenfus, led to the unmasking of the Iran-Contra scandal.

**