COCAINE AIRWAYS

A former CIA pilot says secret flights to El Toro could explain a
Marine officer's `suicide'

When we first spoke, a decade ago, the fear in his voice--the
staccato pace, the tremor--was unmistakable.

"I can't talk to you," he said. "This is all classified."

He answered just one question: if he told me what he knew, he'd go
straight to federal prison for violating U.S. national security laws.

Then he hung up the telephone.

Two weeks ago, I tracked the man to his home in rural Pennsylvania.
This time, he didn't hang up on me. The terror in his voice was gone,
replaced by the cheerful nonchalance that maybe just comes with being
69 years old and knowing that your kids have finished college, you're
well into retirement, and it's too late for anyone to ruin your life
for talking to a reporter about matters that powerful people would
rather keep secret.

He laughed when he recalled our conversation a decade ago. He
apologized for not answering my questions. He asked me what I wanted to know.

Over the course of the next several days, the man told me his life story.

William Robert "Tosh" Plumlee was a CIA contract pilot. He worked
where the agency sent him. That meant that he ran guns to Fidel
Castro in the 1950s, and then, when Castro overthrew Fulgencio
Batista, Plumlee ran guns to Castro's opponents. In the 1980s, he
flew guns again, in and out of military bases including Orange
County's El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, March Air Force Base in
Riverside, and Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The weapons were
destined for the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing army
aiding the agency's war on communism.

On return flights--and this is where Plumlee's story becomes really
interesting--he says he flew cocaine back to the bases with Uncle
Sam's approval. Plumlee figures he made at least three weapons
flights to El Toro in the mid-1980s and says it's possible there were
drugs in some of those crates as well. Other pilots he knew told him
about off-loading tons of drugs at El Toro.

There have been rumors of such activity for two decades, and they
have everything to do with one family's suspicions about a
high-ranking Marine officer who commited "suicide" at El Toro in 1991.

All of Plumlee's landings were late at night, and the unmarked
airplanes--massive C-130 cargo carriers--were painted dark green. And
though Plumlee landed at military installations, the men who unloaded
his planes were dressed just as he was--in civilian attire, sporting
long hair. Plumlee says he guesses they could have easily passed for
drug dealers.

He doesn't know the identities of those cargo handlers. But he's
pretty sure they weren't military.

"I was CIA," Plumlee says. "So why wouldn't they be too?"

He was born in Panama City, Florida, in 1937, where his father worked
as a pipe fitter in a paper mill. His family moved to Dallas when he
was six months old. At 14 and a half, he forged a birth certificate
and joined the Texas National Guard; six months later he leapt to the
U.S. Army, which promptly discovered he'd lied about his age and
booted him with an honorable discharge, adding that if he stayed in
Dallas and came back in two years--this time with his parents'
consent--he could re-enlist.

After rejoining the military, Plumlee received flying lessons and was
assigned to military intelligence. "They were experimenting with a
lot of young people who weren't coming out of prison, but who didn't
have a lot of family ties. Basically juvenile delinquents who liked
adventure," Plumlee says. "I started flying for a series of
companies--Southwest Aero Charter, Intermountain Aviation, Riddle
Aviation in Miami, and a few others."

Plumlee would only later discover his employers were funded, if not
completely run, by the CIA. His first major assignment: running guns
from the Florida Keys to Fidel Castro and a group of students at the
University of Havana known as the Movement of the 26th of July, or
M26-7. The group was supported by the CIA in its effort to overthrow
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. "I was making hit-and-run raids in
Cuba," Plumlee says. "The CIA was funding it and sending guns and
hardware to them, and I was flying those guns in and out of Cuba."

On one such raid, in the mountains of northern Cuba near Santa Clara,
Plumlee's DC-3 airplane lost an engine. "We couldn't get out of
there," he says. "We made a weapons drop there at a site that had
been secured and we landed and couldn't get enough power to get out.
We abandoned the aircraft and they took us to Raul Castro's compound.
Raul Castro got me off the island. I had coffee with Fidel Castro in
the mountains. Fidel Castro gave me a fatigue hat. I thought he was
democratic and patriotic and still to this day believe we drove him
into this communist deal. All he wanted was tractors."

One of Plumlee's partners in running guns to Castro and his cohorts
was a man we'll call "Carlos," an M26-7 member whose sister, along
with several others, had been gunned down by Batista's agents in a
raid on a Havana safe house. Convinced a Batista agent masquerading
as a revolutionary had aided the attack, Carlos spent two years
establishing the mole's identity and then lured him onto a gunrunning
flight from Florida's Marathon Key to Cuba. Plumlee copiloted the
plane. "Somewhere between Cat Cay, southeast of the Keys, and the
Cuban coast, the door light went red in the cockpit, meaning the
cargo door had been unlatched," Plumlee says. He went back to the
cargo area to investigate. The suspected Batista agent had
disappeared, and Carlos was re-latching the cargo door. "My copilot
told me to get back in my seat," he says. "He told me it was a Cuban affair."

In 1961, two years after Castro took over Cuba, Plumlee went to work
running guns to Castro's right-wing opponents. He says he was
attached to the CIA's Miami station in a project known as JMWAVE, the
agency's codename for anti-Castro operations. "JMWAVE was the first
time I knew I was CIA," Plumlee says. He got to be friends with
various members of Alpha 66, a group of anti-Castro extremists
recruited by the CIA to carry out terrorist attacks inside Cuba. One
of those operatives was Frank Sturgis, who later turned up as a
Watergate burglar. "Sturgis and I made flights to Cuba together,"
Plumlee says. "He was a good friend of mine in the Cuba days. We
dropped some leaflets over Cuba together and made an air raid over
Santa Clara. But when Watergate happened, I hadn't seen him in years."

Plumlee made numerous flights to Cuba in support of Alpha 66 and
other agency-backed groups. "My end was mostly supply stuff," he
says. "We would take people out and in, make drops, land and remove
people. There was a situation where we removed some missile
technicians--defectors--out of Cuba before the missile crisis." He
says he was asked to retrieve a few freelance counterrevolutionaries,
private citizens who'd launched raids on Cuba. And he flew ABC
reporter Lisa Howard into Cuba, where she created a back channel
between Robert F. Kennedy and Castro after the Cuban missile crisis.
"There was an arm [of the CIA] out there trying to talk peace with
Castro during the assassination attempts," he says.

As an ostensibly civilian pilot, Plumlee says he was told to fit in
with Miami's anti-Castro contingent. "Nobody actually said
`infiltrate,'" he explains. "But I was undercover, a `cut-out' used
by various agencies, but most of the time the CIA provided logistical
support. I got heavily involved with organized crime in Florida. The
next thing you know, one of my good friends was John Martino. Johnny
Roselli was a good friend of mine. I flew Roselli in and out of Cuba
many times."

Martino was a Cuban mob-tied bookie and casino operator who escaped
to Florida after being jailed by Castro. Roselli was a Chicago
mobster who became involved with the CIA's anti-Castro campaign and
later wrote a book claiming the Cuban-tied mafia murdered President
Kennedy. (Other books have claimed Roselli was involved in the
alleged plot.) His decomposing corpse was discovered in an oil drum
floating off the Florida coast in 1976, shortly after he testified
about the assassination to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. He had been stabbed to death and his legs had been sawed off.

Plumlee's story stretches credulity. His Zelig-like appearances
during many of the most exotic moments of covert U.S. government
activity seem implausible. And there's more. On Nov. 22, 1963--the
day of Kennedy's assassination--Plumlee says he was standing in
Dealey Plaza--next to Sergio Rojas, a military operative.

But what seems to start as a yarn best served from a barstool quickly
gains the look and feel of real history: the CIA had received
information "that a couple of Cubans were going to fire a bazooka at
Air Force One in West Palm Beach," he says. "This information came
from the FBI. They had information that two Cubans had been arrested
with a bazooka. There was talk about Austin, Texas--there was
supposed to be a hit on Kennedy."

Both the CIA and FBI, Plumlee adds, were desperate to track down
anyone, especially Cubans, who might be plotting an assassination
attempt during Kennedy's tour of the southern U.S. And so they sent
their Cuba team--including Plumlee--to Dallas.

"We were dispatched to Dallas to check for spotters, to see if we
could abort any assassination," Plumlee says. Plumlee flew Roselli
and several other CIA assets familiar with the Cuban mafia crowd to
Redbird Airport. They stayed at a safe house, he says, and were
assigned positions along Kennedy's limousine route.

"This was standard, routine stuff," he says. "Nobody really thought
too much about it. Our main task was the south parking lot, south of
the [grassy] knoll. The object was to look for the best possible
location for shooters, and go unnoticed because we were not supposed
to be there. We didn't see anything suspicious."

Seeing is one thing; hearing another. Just as Kennedy's limousine
passed the Texas Book Depository, Plumlee recalls that he and Rojas
heard a shot from behind them.

"I am familiar with gunfire, and I've said it to Congress and anybody
who has a concern about this thing," he says. "We both felt there was
a shot that came over our left shoulder where we were standing, from
either the parking lot or the triple overpass."

Plumlee doesn't think the CIA or FBI had a hand in Kennedy's
assassination, but that gunshot convinces him Oswald wasn't acting
alone. "There is no doubt there was a team there to kill the
president," he says. "And the fact that there was an abort team tells
me there was prior knowledge. But there are people on the Internet
saying I flew Roselli and a team to Dallas to kill Kennedy. And to go
on a limb and say the dirty CIA planned it all? No, there were
elements of the FBI and CIA that tried to stop the assassination."

Things got weirder for Plumlee a week later. He returned to Florida,
where he was arrested and extradited to Denver to stand trial on a
$50 forged check. Despite the relatively nominal money at stake, and
despite the absence of evidence, "the judge sentenced me to an
indefinite stay in jail," Plumlee says. "Then I was sent to the
reformatory and the FBI came out telling me if I didn't shut up about
what I knew about the Kennedy assassination, I'd never get out of there."

In September 1964, two weeks after the Warren Commission released its
report saying Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, Plumlee says he
walked out of prison a free man. "No checks were ever produced
written by me," he says. "And I was never asked to testify to the
Warren Commission. I never talked about it for years, until the
1970s." That's when investigators for the Church Committee met with
Plumlee in Phoenix and took his testimony about the Kennedy assassination.

Plumlee stayed in Colorado throughout the '80s, flying as a
commercial pilot with several airlines. Some of his work put him in
close contact with people who were suspected of smuggling drugs
around the country. When he wasn't flying, he fielded telephone calls
from Kennedy assassination researchers and flirted with the idea of
publishing a book about his experiences. FBI records from the 1970s
document that Plumlee told the agency about his involvement with
Roselli and other Cuban mobsters--and about his presence in Dealey
Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. But his dream of writing a book on the
subject went up in smoke. "My house burned down in Colorado in 1981,"
he recalls. "The house was firebombed. I got beat up in a bar. There
were a lot of papers taken out of the house, and later, I had the IRS
all over me. I blamed it on the Cubans."

The fire that destroyed Plumlee's book project drove him back into
the dark world of CIA gunrunning. When friends in Arizona law
enforcement learned about his problems, they offered him a job:
posing as a drug pilot in an effort to infiltrate the Colombian and
Mexican drug cartels then establishing themselves as middlemen in a
broad conspiracy to smuggle cocaine from South America into the United States.

According to Plumlee, he and other pilots were secretly working for
the Arizona-based Tri-State Drug Task Force. "My contact was the
Phoenix organized crime detail," Plumlee says. "The federal agents
didn't know about my existence." Plumlee flew under an assigned fake
name: William H. Pearson. "All of us ops guys used aliases," he says.

When he first started flying drugs into the United States, Plumlee
says he was certain the information he collected--flight routes, drop
points and cargo loads--was being passed on to federal drug agents,
along with the tons of cocaine he was ferrying. "The whole thing was
set up as an interdiction program operating through Mexico," he says.
"We were transporting weapons and drugs on C-130s. I was flying drugs
into this country and weapons back into Mexico. We were working
undercover to log and record the aircraft ID numbers and where the
landing strips were. The object was to log these staging points and
flyways. But then Iran-Contra came along, and we started flying guns
back and forth and drugs into the southwest U.S."

Iran-Contra, as the covert operation Plumlee had stumbled into would
later be known ("Iran" being a reference to the Reagan
administration's secret missiles-for-hostages exchange with the
Iranian government), began as a covert effort to arm the Nicaraguan
Contras. The Contras were a right-wing army partly created by the CIA
to topple the country's Sandinista rebels, who took over the country
during a popular uprising in 1979. When the U.S. Congress banned any
aid to the Contras, Oliver North, then a lieutenant colonel in the
Marine Corps working for Reagan's National Security Council, secretly
continued arms shipments. In 1986, the crash of a C-123 aircraft in
Nicaragua that was owned by Southern Air Transport and piloted by a
friend of Plumlee's, Bill Cooper, exposed the covert operation.

"The drug interdiction program was used as a cut-out for the CIA,"
Plumlee says, referring to the Tri-State Drug Task Force. "We had a
meeting in the Oaxaca Cafe in Phoenix, and I was asked if I wanted to
fly C-130s. The next thing I know, I was working for the CIA . . .
The way that happened is that I was the last person who would ever be
thought to be CIA because of all the past stuff that had happened
with me not getting along too well with the FBI or CIA."

Plumlee says all the pilots involved in the CIA's guns-for-drugs
exchange were given special numbers to push on their aircraft's
transponder, codes that would give them the greenlight as they
entered U.S. airspace; a U.S. Customs balloon on the Mexican border
functioned as the traffic cop. "Someone was sanctioned to clear us
across that border," he says. "It takes quite a coordination to do
that." There were times, he says, when the balloon was conveniently
brought to earth--just as Plumlee or some other CIA pilot neared the
border--and other times when they'd simply broadcast the specified
numbers on their transponders. "We don't see anybody within 50 miles
of us," Plumlee says. "I say that's CIA."

Nothing about the deal was conventional. Even the source of weapons
was masked: in the early 1980s, the U.S. Army's 82nd and 101st
Airborne Divisions staged maneuvers in Honduras to prepare for an
unlikely invasion by neighboring Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista
government. "The [Army] took military equipment and certified it was
destroyed in airdrops," Plumlee says. Although the military told the
Government Accounting Office (GAO) that the weapons were a total
loss, the equipment was in fact transported back to the U.S and
retrofitted before being flown back to Central America and into the
hands of the CIA's Contra army.

The weapons "were taken back to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station
and the U.S. Army Proving Grounds near Yuma, Arizona, because they
needed to be repaired," Plumlee says. "There were weapons, helicopter
parts, stinger missiles. I remember three specific trips to El Toro
and one, possibly--I'm not really sure--of drugs going in there."
He's sure of a few things: "These flights were all between 1 and 4
a.m.; that's when the [control] tower was thinly staffed. The planes
were dark olive drab with camouflaging. We didn't fly marked
aircraft. If we got hit with customs interdiction aircraft, we didn't
want any photographs of tail numbers."

Plumlee says the pilots officially worked for civilian air charters
under contract to the CIA, including the infamous Southern Air
Transport and Evergreen International Airlines. He was always paid in
cash, usually about $5,000 per flight. Once he landed at El Toro,
Plumlee says, he'd taxi the C-130 to the southwest side of the field,
close to Interstate 5.

"I had long hair in those days--bushy hair," he says. "I looked like
a drug runner. There was nobody in uniform offloading our aircraft. I
figured they were CIA spooks. When you see people like that on a
military base in the early morning, unloading, I say that's CIA. It's
an assumption on my part, but it is based on a preponderance of evidence."

At some point in all the excitement, however, it became apparent to
Plumlee that the drugs he and other pilots were transporting into the
U.S. weren't actually being seized by the DEA. Nor was anyone in a
hurry to close down the Mexican airstrips used for running drugs and
guns. And no one seemed eager to use Plumlee's intelligence to throw
a net over the cartels. Plumlee's suspicions--and those of other
pilots involved in the Reagan administration's war in Central
America--helped to spark one of the darkest and least-known chapters
of the Iran-Contra scandal. Dozens of pilots, including Plumlee,
would eventually testify in top-secret hearings on Capitol Hill that
they flew massive amounts of cocaine into the U.S., and that those
flights often arrived at U.S. military bases.

"At the time, there was open war between the CIA and the DEA," he
says. "They weren't sharing any information." Pilots who broke the
code of silence were set up as drug smugglers whose claims that they
worked for the CIA would be treated as lies--stupid lies. "A lot of
guys were picking up documents to protect their asses," Plumlee says.
"People were being indicted."

In 1983, Plumlee contacted staffers for U.S. Senator Gary Hart
(D-Colorado) and told them everything he knew about the phony
drug-interdiction program and how it had been used by the CIA as
cover for the agency's secret--and illegal--shipment of arms for the
Nicaraguan Contras. "I didn't do that for publicity, but to protect
myself," he says. "This was before the fact--before the Iran-Contra hearings."

Once the scandal broke, Hart passed Plumlee to John Kerry, the
Massachusetts senator investigating accusations that the CIA was
involved in drug smuggling. Kerry took Plumlee's testimony under
oath--and then sealed it. Plumlee's testimony will remain classified
until 2020, although his name is still listed on the Kerry
commission's official list of witnesses, available on microfiche at
public libraries.

A copy of a Feb. 14, 1991, letter from Hart to Kerry confirms
Plumlee's story. "In March of 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver
Senate Office and met with . . . my Senate staff," Hart wrote.
"During the initial meeting, Plumlee raised certain allegations
concerning U.S. foreign and military policy toward Nicaragua and the
use of covert activities by U.S. intelligence agencies. . . . He
stated that he had grave concerns that certain intelligence
information about illegal arms and narcotic shipments were not being
appropriately acted upon by U.S intelligence and law enforcement agencies."

That meeting was three years before the U.S. public knew anything
about Iran-Contra.

"Mr. Plumlee stated that he had personally flown U.S.-sponsored
covert missions into Nicaragua," Hart told Kerry. "In [later]
meetings, Mr. Plumlee raised several issues, including that covert
U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling
and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military
operations against the government of Nicaragua. He provided my staff
with detailed maps and names of alleged covert landing strips in
Mexico, Costa Rica, Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, and California where
he alleged aircraft cargoes of drugs were off-loaded and replaced
with Contra military supplies."

El Toro Marine Corps Air Station is closed now, its runways headed
for the shredder, its acres of residential homes and amenities slated
for civilian conversion or the bulldozer. The question of whether
drugs and weapons were secretly flown through El Toro is central to a
mysterious death at the base more than 15 years ago. On Jan. 20,
1991, Colonel James E. Sabow, assistant chief of staff at the base,
was relieved of command while investigators weighed evidence that he
had diverted military aircraft for personal use. Investigations by
the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the U.S. Department
of Defense concluded that, two days later, a despondent Sabow walked
into his back yard, put a shotgun barrel in his mouth and blew his head off.

But South Dakota neurologist Dr. David Sabow, the colonel's brother,
didn't buy the suicide theory. He says the Orange County coroner's
original investigation provides the best evidence of foul play.
Specifically, the autopsy report stated that a large amount of
aspirated blood was discovered in Sabow's lungs, suggesting that he
had somehow taken several deep breaths after he shot himself in the
head. According to Dr. Sabow and several neurologists who reviewed
the evidence on his behalf, breathing would have been impossible for
a man whose brain stem--including the medulla, which regulates
breathing and other bodily functions--had been vaporized by the shotgun blast.

Dr. Sabow is certain that a rogue element at the base whacked his
brother over the head with a blunt weapon, rendering him unconscious,
then placed the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He believes
his brother was about to blow the whistle on illegal drug flights at
the base. He points to a Defense Department Inspector General report
that included statements by a military policeman (MP) at El Toro who
claimed to have witnessed unmarked C-130 cargo aircraft landing and
taking off in the middle of the night just months before Sabow died.
"Through binoculars, the crew appeared to have shoulder-length hair,"
the report quoted one MP as saying. "He assumed they were civilians."

In 1993, two years after Colonel Sabow's death, Dr. Sabow appeared on
Connie Chung's Eye to Eye. "I think my brother was murdered," Sabow
told CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg. "Cold-blooded, calculated,
premeditated murder . . . There's no question in my mind that this
was ordered by the military, [and] it was carried out by the military."

Also appearing on the program were Gene Wheaton, a retired U.S. Army
intelligence officer who also believed Sabow was murdered--and who
offered to help Dr. Sabow prove it in court--and Tosh Plumlee. "I
flew into three separate military bases that I can recall," Plumlee
told Goldberg.

"You're flying cocaine?"

"We're flying cocaine. . . . These are all military bases."

"Does it sound plausible to you that if a high-ranking Marine knew
something about covert operations and somebody was afraid he might go
public with it--is it plausible that somebody might try to kill him?"

"Well, to me, yes," Plumlee answered. "It would be extremely--I mean,
it would really be plausible."

In January 2000, with Wheaton's help, Dr. Sabow sued the Marine Corps
at the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana. His lawyer was
Daniel Sheehan, a crusading attorney who, in the 1980s, had
unsuccessfully sued the CIA for its ties to drug traffickers. I
covered the trial and watched as a federal judge tossed the case out
of court (see "Who Killed Col. James Sabow?" Feb. 7, 2000).

Sheehan needed only to prove the very narrow claim that Marine Corps
officials had threatened Dr. Sabow--intentionally inflicting severe
emotional stress. But he was after bigger game, a chance to redeem
himself, and used the Sabow trial to go public again with his
assertion that the CIA was running drugs to raise cash for the Contras.

Plumlee waited at a Santa Ana hotel, thinking he would be called to
the stand. That never happened. He says he later grew to regret
having anything to do with the case, and thinks that Wheaton and
Sheehan derailed it. "I haven't talked to Wheaton in years," he said.
But given that Colonel Sabow was stationed at El Toro from 1984 to
1986 (he returned to the base in 1989 after a stint in Arizona),
Plumlee remains suspicious about the colonel's death.

As a high-ranking Marine officer in charge of an entire air wing,
Plumlee says, Sabow would have known about takeoffs and landings at
El Toro and other air bases. "I dropped drugs into areas around
Borrego Springs [in San Diego County], Lake Havasu, and outside Eagle
Pass, Texas," Plumlee says. "I never saw drugs being unloaded in El
Toro," he adds. "The only thing I saw being offloaded from our
aircraft were crates with weapons, but there could have been kilos in
there too. There was talk about drugs going into El Toro. A lot of
pilots talked about it. But I know for a fact that Colonel Sabow was
in command at El Toro when this happened. There is no way he could
not have known about it. He would have to sign off on refueling of
these C-130s. He would have to have been briefed, because he was a
wing commander at El Toro. . . . I think he was murdered."

Whatever Plumlee has told the government about secret CIA flights
involving weapons and drugs that involved military bases, including
El Toro, during the 1980s, remains a secret, his testimony
classified. So far, no document has emerged showing that his
under-cover-of-darkness landings in Orange County ever took place.

But I may have nearly had that document one chilly winter morning 10 years ago.

That day, I found myself shivering in California's high desert,
standing beneath the wing of a hulking B-52 bomber at March Air Force
Base's Historical Aircraft Museum near Riverside. The sky was clear,
and the glare of the sun off the silver fuselage above us was
blinding. At my side was Gene Wheaton, a retired U.S. Army
intelligence officer with leathery skin, silver hair and a scraggly
beard. We were waiting to meet a mysterious source who claimed to
have top-secret government documents proving that drugs and weapons
were flown in and out of U.S. military bases during the 1980s.

He was late. Wheaton grumbled impatiently. Suddenly, an overweight,
middle-aged Latino in a faded U.S. Army parka and dark aviator
sunglasses marched toward us. He was breathing heavily. In his right
hand, he clutched a black walkie-talkie. He was not happy.

"Which one of you is the reporter?" he barked.

I lifted my hand, waving slightly.

"You didn't mention anything about bringing a partner."

"This is Gene Wheaton," I answered. "He used to work in Army
intelligence. I brought him here to make sure your documents are the
real thing."

"Hi there," said Wheaton.

The man didn't answer. Instead, he glanced around, peering beneath
the belly of the B-52, and raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth.

"Perimeter. Status?"

"Perimeter. Check," a voice squawked. "All clear."

Satisfied, the man told us he also used to work in Army intelligence.
He hinted at a top-secret background in black-box operations,
including, he said, covert drug flights sponsored by Uncle Sam. With
his free hand, the man pulled a folder from his pocket and handed it
to me. Inside was a piece of paper stamped with the logo of the U.S.
Department of Defense. It looked like an uncensored version of what
had been faxed to my office a week or so earlier: instructions from
the Pentagon to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and March Air Force
Base not to record landings or takeoffs by two civilian airlines.

This time, the names of the airlines weren't blacked out: Southern
Air Transport and Evergreen International Airlines. The man with the
walkie-talkie didn't demand anything--except that I take the paper
from his hands. But the document wasn't stamped "declassified." It
could be stolen, Wheaton warned, and if I accepted it, I could go to
federal prison for violating national security laws.

Spooked, I followed Wheaton's advice and refused the gift. The
thought dawned on me that I had just narrowly avoided being set up.
The guy's bizarre appearance and behavior suggested he might have
been a fraud--even though his paperwork looked like the real thing. I
would later hear from reliable sources that Wheaton was wrong, and
that I could have taken the document without fear of being arrested.
I gave the man my business card and told him if he was determined to
give me the document, to stick it in the mail and call me at work to
let me know it was coming.

The strange man stomped off with his walkie-talkie. He passed through
the shadow of the B-52 and disappeared into the bright sunlight. I'm
still waiting for his call.