ush and Company night and ditched. This operation was officially closed, and the four crewmen went their separate ways back home to the States. Fifty-two-year-old Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, who has lived in the San Diego area off and on since 1976, has decided to come forward with details of his work as a pilot in Central America - during the time the U.S. government was secretly arming the Nicaraguan Contras. From 1979 to 1986, between his assignments— ferrying cargo and people into the jungles of Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama, sometimes returning to the U.S. with shipments of cocaine and marijuana— Plumlee had a bluecollarjob in San Diego as a plumber for the Ehrling Rohde Plumbing Company in La Jolla. Owner Mike Glancy made a deal with Plumlee when he hired him in 1985: " ‘As long as you finish the job you’re on, you can come and go.’ He’d be gone for two weeks, a month at a time, then be back here for two, three months before he was gone again. Sometimes, all of a sudden he wouldn’t show up, and the next day I’d get a call from Costa Rica. It’s Bob, saying, ‘Hey, Mike, I gotta be down here for a few days....’ ” Plumlee sometimes talked about his other life with a couple of the guys around the plumbing office. “And I thought at first he was a bullshitter, until stuff came out in the papers just like he said,” remarks co-worker Norm Isbell. When the existence of Santa Elena broke publicly in 1987, it was big news, since military aid to the Contras had been illegal at the time the airfield was most heavily used. “Tosh had been talking about Santa Elena for years before that,” Isbell reports. But as the gun-running mutated into drug- running, ostensibly for the purpose of collecting “ intelligence” on the drug cartels, Plumlee became increasingly disenchanted. "It really bothered his conscience," Isbell recalls. “When he found out what was really going on, it started to get to him. That’s why he stopped.” Today Plumlee is living in Cardiff, California, and trying to put his past behind him; he’s starting a business that prepares pilots for FAA licensing examinations. But the official subterfuge he saw in Central America and the way it changed his perceptions of the U.S. government continues to dog his conscience. “ I believed in the Contra war at first," he explains. “And before that, I believed in what we were doing in El Salvador. We wanted to get that fucker Castro out of Central America, and we had to do it covertly, and we didn’t need some congressman’s nose up our ass while we did it. But along about 1982, the drug running and the Contra war eventually became a business. I ended up running drugs on behalf of the U.S. federal government. Period.” Plumlee says he made drug deliveries all over the American Southwest. And like that Air Force cargo plane he saw leaving Santa Elena, he says he delivered cocaine on four different occasions to Homestead Air Force Base. (At least one other pilot, Michael Toliver, has testified in federal court that he flew drugs into Homestead as part of the Contra resupply effort. Toliver is now in prison in North Carolina on an unrelated marijuana-smuggling conviction.) Flying CIA-supplied airplanes, Plumlee was able to cross the border into the States unimpeded by U.S. customs, which lifted inspection requirements for such government-sanctioned aircraft. He and his colleagues, many of whom had flown for CIA-backed airlift operations in Southeast Asia (and some of whom, including Plumlee, had even worked together 30 years ago running guns to Cuba), believed that they were working on sting operations for the DEA. “We’d deliver the drugs, and then we'd wait for the bust, and we waited and waited, but the busts never came," Plumlee says. "Come to find out, the drugs were being sold to support the Contras, and our government knew it. Our government is crookeder than shit. N earby, a U.S. Air Force cargo plane was emptied of its shipment of weapons, and the drug cache was put aboard that aircraft. The Air Force plane then took off for Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. Every facet. We're a network of greed.... “Our job was to gather facts related to military affairs, at first. Then we were asked to start gathering information on drugs. Then these same agencies that asked us for the intelligence on drugs started sacrificing our men, busting us, calling us a bunch of mercenaries, rogue elephants. I figured, if they’d hang out certain guys to dry like John Hull, Eugene Hasenfus, or Barry Seal, what would they do to me?” In the spring of 1983, Plumlee, who had a residence in Denver, approached then-Senator Gary Hart with information about government involvement in drug running in Central America. Plumlee also expressed his concerns that this information had been passed up through proper channels and nothing had been done about it. He met with Hart staffer Bill Holen, giving him a copy of a map of Central America marked with notes, aircraft IDs, staging areas, weapon drops, and Contra crossover points from Honduras into Nicaragua. At the time, most of this information was a secret being withheld from Congress. The map on which Plumlee continued to make notations for four years, until he quit flying to Central America in 1987, was a form of security for him. He figured that since a copy of it was in Hart’s hands, the map would protect him if he were ever shot down in Central America and the government tried to discredit him and deny his activities. Several of the names Plumlee wrote on the map would be revealed years later to be principal players in the Iran- Contra scandal (Robert Owen, Felix Rodriguez, Richard Secord), including some who figured prominently in the recent trial of former National Security Adviser John Poindexter who was convicted on all counts. But at the time Plumlee jotted them down, these notes and names were his private picture of a dirty secret. Hart, who spent four years on the U.S. Intelligence Committee and is now a practicing lawyer in Denver, says he recalls that Plumlee's information was passed on to the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, "and from there it went nowhere. But I think it should have been taken seriously." Hart says he has no reason not to believe Plumlee’s stories, given the later revelations about the Contra war. “ Do I believe the CIA flew guns, legally or illegally, to the Nicaraguan Contras? Of course I believe it. Do I think they flew drugs back? I think it’s possible." In 1985 and 1986, Plumlee estimates that 60-80 percent of his return flights from Central America were drug runs. He figures that he alone delivered some four tons of drugs to this country, flying CIA-funded aircraft on protected flights. And about 50 pilots flew in circumstances similar to his. Plumlee saw and heard about suitcases full of money that were flown south and delivered to the Contra leaders. These were ignominious circumstances in which to end his 30 years of working for the government as a member of the Black Crews, the super-secret operatives attached to the White House as far back as the Eisenhower presidency. "I don’t want to get involved in any way with the government again,” Plumlee announces. “ I am flat-ass done with this shit.” MAP NOTES For this story, the samples of Plumlee’s map notations have been numbered and his spelling corrected. These numbered notes provide a personal view into the Contra war, the inter- — agency feuds, the drug dealing, and the offic government lies. The dates and routes marked on map appear to support recent contentions of at least Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism that the upsurge in the importation of cocaine and marijuana in the 1980s paralleled operations in the U.S.-funded Contra war. Although this subject was scrupulously avoided during the Iran-Contra hearings that made Oliver North a hero, the Kerry Subcommittee report has since confirmed the Contra/drug connection and has also stated flatly that senior officials in the Reagan-Bush administration were aware of and may have even encouraged drug trafficking as a way of funding the Contra war. “We’re spending billions for a drug war that could have been stopped in 1982," Plumlee alleges, "and George Bush knew it." “W e ’re spending billions for a drug war that could have been stopped in 1982,” Plumlee alleges, “and George Bush knew it.” 1 Ck DEA, Mex. Police staging area at ranch This is the Delgado Ranch, a few miles south of San Felipe, Mexico. This ranch was owned by Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who allegedly masterminded the 1985 kidnapping and torture-murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena. Plumlee says he made “four or five" stops at this drug transshipment point on his way back from delivering CIA- supplied weapons to the Contras and once saw Quintero himself help unload a shipment of marijuana Tosh had brought up from Panama. Plumlee found it intriguing that “the ranch was always heavily protected by Mexican police." Clinton St.—Spring 1990 7
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