6 Luis Ochoa, Penonome, Panama, at villa next to river. Previous Vesco and Rojas prop. 6-9- 83 Plumlee says that Jorge Luis Ochoa, a Medellin Cartel member, sometimes stayed at a villa between Rio Hato and Penonome when he was sending shipments out of Panama. Plumlee’s impression at the time he wrote this note was that the villa was actually owned by members of the regime of former President Antonio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator ousted by the Sandinistas in 1979. Black Crew scuttlebutt had it that the villa had been owned previously by Nixon crony Robert Vesco, the financier who secretly contributed cash to underwrite the Watergate break-in. / LJtb 1 : K < < « ^~ O ' - * < ^ W ' ' \ . TM ' / CM*I* t ' t M « \ I -K-VA. n * a Ke M* <o *? • A - < J w W S<smp< Swamp P^ftjWQ "~*- Kanai fw KSxmwsst^tffe ^ n ^ p s sw t t m u t o f i m La ..^ \ i r ocean ■^o n g ships .... f e W ' i r t w w ^ t 'M W W w h . f . ^ , , , . 1 C ^ « l . ■ ' " , ■ . A Cap tai - M oft astatic c« r<HiA'»*4>> ;M e X__ ‘ faW fr tt tk tfatohr.io *nrt Schr^>-u>ui E i i /u gv« a i^ r i c tw rha t f ta ^ f e ^ ^ ' -V . >V . '■ CorrU^w* te c ^v f tc ^ fra q a Re»f> • r. <» ih 545^1 (J .^A .■»«>»> ' K-~^ wZv 5 J ^ 4 1 : f - ™ - - -»>•«■ A , , , ^ , , , ^ '?• f?JVW : wcaui$;»to»> St^Vs. JX»„.A-,«^* .... l ’ ' d u The note is significant to Plumlee because it refers tangentially to Barry Seal, a veteran of the Black Crews who was assassinated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1986. The official U.S. government story on Seal is that he was a drug runner arrested by the DEA in 1983, and, in return for leniency, began working as an undercover narc. Plumlee says that actually Seal had been working for years undercover as a Black Crew operative in military intelligence, though he mignt have been profiting on drug running simultaneously, and that he was a victim of the interagency feuds in which the CIA, DEA and FBI occasionally arrested each other’s watercarriers. One fact about Seal isn't in dispute: He had gained the trust of the highest members of the Medellin Cartel by 1984 and was considered the most important agent the DEA had. In the end, Seal may have been sacrificed to the Reagan-Bush administration’s implacable hatred of the Sandinistas. In 1983, Tosh Plumlee, Barry Seal and other Black Crewmen installed a camera behind the bulkhead of a cargo bay on the Fat Lady, a C-123 transport plane that Seal often flew on gun-and drugrunning missions to Central America. The U.S. government wanted photographs of Jorge Luis Ochoa and other Cartel members helping to load cocaine into the plane. And the plan succeeded; the photos were taken. Plumlee says he saw the pictures on two different occasions. After meeting with Ochoa and another Cartel member in Panama, where they were hiding out after ordering the murder of a senior Colombian government official, Seal reported to the DEA that Manuel Noriega was providing protection for the drug tycoons. In 1984, when the CIA learned that Seal had been meeting with Cartel member Pablo Escobar in Nicaragua, the agency hatched a plan to link the Cartel with the Sandinistas in a drugsmuggling scheme. The agency hoped that if the American public could be convinced of Nicaraguan drug dealing, aid to the Contras might be legalized. The DEA protested that using Seal in this way would blow his cover and ruin any chance of busting the Cartel. According to several recent books and newspaper articles, DEA officials were summoned to the White House in 1984, and pressured by Oliver North to release photos of Seal’s plane in Nicaragua being loaded by Cartel members. The DEA refused. The published accounts say that soon after, North leaked a story to the Washington Times, implicating Nicaraguan leaders in drug smuggling. DEA officials eventually told congressional investigators that the allegations of Nicaraguan drug dealing were untrue. But at the time, the White House was pressing hard for money for the Contras; President Reagan went on national television in March of 1986 with blow-ups of Seal’s photographs, which Reagan claimed had been taken in Nicaragua during a drug loading operation. The President pointed out one man in the pictures, Frederico Vaughn, calling him a close associate of one member of Nicaragua’s ruling junta. Shortly thereafter, Congress reversed itself and voted $100 million in military aid to the Contras. Seal, who had been pulled out of the field by the DEA when the phony Washington Times story broke, eventually was compelled to testify about the Cartel before a federal grand jury in Miami. Barry Seal was machine-gunned to death on Feb. 19, 1986, about a month before President Reagan’s television appearance. Two Colombians shot Seal in his car in front of a halfway house where he was doing time on a drug charge. The Colombians are now serving life sentences in Louisiana, and a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Ochoa and Pablo Escobar, for letting the contract on Seal. As for those photographs Reagan made so much of, they weren’t shot in Nicaragua, Plumlee claims,” .’he / were shot in Panama.” Freddie Vaughn, it turns out, had close ties to the National Security Council and Oliver North. The drug-running documented by the photographs was taking place with the assistance of an ally, who only became a casualty to the drug war when his help in the Contra war was no longer needed. 7 Bill Cooper, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Sept. 1, ‘86, call Four Aces, Palmdale, Harry D. Bill Cooper was a pilot friend of Plumlee’s who, along with Buzz Sawyer, died in the crash of a Clinton St.—Spring 1990 9
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