Torture Airlines: Based in Portland?
OK, BlueOregonians, we need your help unraveling a mystery. As reported in the Oregonian today, the mystery involves...
a secretive Oregon company whose airplane allegedly was used to fly terrorism suspects to Third World countries to be tortured for information.
Though the company, Bayard Foreign Marketing, is filed in Oregon, its owner (Leonard T. Bayard) doesn't appear to exist:
A search of commercial databases turned up no information on Leonard Thomas Bayard: no residence address, no telephone number, no Social Security number, no credit history, no automobile or property ownership records - in short, none of the information commonly associated with real people.Much suspicion abounds that it's a CIA front. Early reporting was done by the Washington Post.
So, here's what we know.
- Bayard Foreign Marketing is HQ'd at 921 SW Washington, Suite 755.
- His lawyer, who ain't talking, is Scott Caplan
- The Gulfstream jet is serial number 581. and FAA tail number N44982
- The jet used to be owned by Premier Executive Transport Services Inc. of 339 Washington St., Dedham, Mass. and was assigned FAA tail number N379P and later, N8068V.
- There are even photos of the plane.
So... there's lots of folks out there working the angles on this story. Blue Oregonians, it's up to you to help unravel the Oregon connection.
A couple of blogs that have carried the story forward:
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January 13, 2005 |
Kari Chisholm | Comments (9 so far)
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Comments
Posted by: John Mulvey | Jan 13, 2005 10:40:22 PM
At this point, never mind Bayard... concentrate on Scott Caplan. There is plausible reason to believe that he's guilty of multiple counts of filing false corporate documents as well as violating various FAA regulations, all of which could get him jail time and disbarment.
You'd better believe that if he was a liberal activist --or someone who might have represented a Muslim at some point--his office would've been shut down by an army of police with warrants and subpoenas in hand.
Sec. Bradbury should act immediately in order to preserve any evidence that might be going into the shredder right now, and this crook should be in front of a grand jury asap.
John
Posted by: Jack Bog | Jan 14, 2005 12:03:33 AM
Last I heard, "dishonesty" in any form, even in connection with government undercover operations, is an offense under Oregon state bar rules.
Posted by: Tenskwatawa | Jan 14, 2005 2:40:45 AM
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Times that this subject has come up and people get in conversations about it, I get the impression that the 'news' part of it, to them is, not the specific facts but the fact that 'it could happen here.'
There's a sense of this don't-look-at-the-man-behind-the-curtain in Jeff's earlier post:
No Apologies, No Mistakes, No WMD -- Jeff Alworth
"I know we're an Oregon-focused blog, so I try to stay away from national politics and foreign policy. But when wars are waged, they affect us at home."
We cannot "stay away." We are affected "at home" in our everyday life (and death), by congress blinking in D.C. There is such a gulf of misunderstanding to cross in order to talk about this around the watercooler, in the cafes, with people you meet who don't get what the news means. On a dozen different occasions in the last couple years, a dozen different people have volunteered 'a retired CIA guy lives there,' around Portland, when we would be talking about housing or property developments or something. For petesake, hundreds of 'locals' kept two years of war-work they did secret, for the Manhattan Project at Hanford, right up the river.
Those years in the 1940s, the Hanford employment might have amounted to a couple percent of the Washington's total state income, and that's a big chunk. I have heard stories from Jack Abramowitz, who managed costs at Boeing in the '40s and invented Learning Curve theory from it, (which takes on the order of billion-$ in a year's time under one person's gaze before the statistical effect of cost savings by human learning is detectable).
There has been a pork-barrel of dollars through the Dept.of Defense, (invented in 1947, you recall, replacing the Dept. of War in the Constitution; Sept.11, 1947, the Pentagon cornerstone laying, if you like ironic), dollars on the order of trillion-$, fed into Washington's state economy. The early chunkchecks to Boeing is what bought the computers that were 'around' in Seattle environs for Gates and Allen to play with as teenagers. In 1970-days, a computer system for a business was on the order of a $10 million cost -- the computers in the first internet -- and not many businesses had one, let alone local regions and economies of the country. (When c.1970 "mini-computers" under $1 million started, I left the 'big iron' market and was installing computers in smaller companies -- the newspaper typesetting system at The Oregonian, 1972, for example. But all along the way, the mother's milk of computer tech, right here 'at home,' has been 'military defense' dollars.)
I mean, to me the importance of this post is seeing it as a factual instance of the longer wider pattern, which it takes several instances to see the scope of, and (this) one more gives me hope and help to close the communications gap between me and people. Because, I've noticed, people's reaction to some things I say is like I'm too goofy to hold a conversation with. 'Tinfoil hat brigade,' was the wording, I think. In one earlier comment on this blog, I mentioned that Albany's Wah Chang is a significant manufacturer of land mines, getting on the order of billion-$DoD for it, and keeping Albanians dutifully employed. And one response was like 'Really? They make land mines in Oregon? How come I didn't know that?'
It is no surprise CIA airplane dealings go on around here, when you know Evergreen Airlines in McMinnville was flying worldwide missions out of that nondescript airport since before Vietnam. In Korean War days The Company was running Flying Tigers missions over the Himalayas, and Evergreen Airlines was an offshoot. The background on all this is here, a link to "The Secret Team," a real book (free!), (also, suppressed!), by Fletcher Prouty, on the history of the CIA by someone who was present and involved at the conception. The precedents in the book make Abu Ghraib no surprise, Osama and Saddam no surprise, media false stories and WMD lies no surprise, I mean, it is the reality thing, the real deal, for people who may have missed it in a cloud of cannabis smoke, which is the exact reverse of the finger-pointing charges that are usually made the other way -- the stoners saying the rocket scientists sound like they are high and wacky, and maybe too paranoid. But it is not deluded paranoia to see an attorney in downtown Portland laundering airplane records for the CIA. These are our neighbors, living right next door. Who are the two PPD officers right now on the JTTF assignment and who gets their reports and gives them orders? These are the issues of our community government, right in our City Council chambers.
Another aspect of the military-industrial complex 'at home' in our daily life (and death), is seen in connecting the facts that Oregon is the highest unemployment state and Oregon is the only state without a military base.
Or, in the cutting taxes/raising taxes partisan political brawling, consider the wider numbers. On $50,000 wages in the 20% bracket, (fed.income tax), the $10,000 check to Uncle Sam goes half to the Pentagon. The upper middle class worker, (the $50K head of household doesn't think of themself as 'upper' middle class, but they are; median, remember, is $30K), pays $5000 taxes to the Pentagon for things like invading Iraq on a lie or stealth lawyers in Portland not upholding justice, and then scream 'Immoral sin!' before they will pay 1% more ($500) state income taxes in a state with no sales tax. What's wrong with this picture is that it turns out Oregon has no schools but the kids have good long career prospects going around the world killing people. 'Long' if they don't get killed themselves, that is.
The real insanity is that if our congressional representatives cut the CIA and Pentagon to zero -- just zero out the DoD line item and Mr. and Mrs. $50K get a $5000 tax relief, (now that's Blumenauer bringing home the bacon) -- there. would. be. no. effect. on. national. security. There is no bogeyman. There is no 'enemies massing at the border.' Oh, there are places where 'the people' disagree with America, but 'they' are not coming to get us. (Even if 'they' were, paying for hundreds of military bases and millions of mercenaries around the world is not the way to stop 'them.') Not the communists, for forty years. Not the oil terrorists today. These 'threats to national security' are inventions. Figments. Made-up excuses for getting tax money out of us and jobs for jocks. If there are armies massed at the border to march in and fly in and take over America (as if), then let's see some satellite photos of the camps. And if there are missiles aimed at us, then what do we need soldiers and bullets and armored SUVs for? Diplomacy, statecraft, and good will works, and is cheaper. And the strongest 'national security' is citizens learned in the ways of the world and human nature and history. (And science, got to get in a plug for science.) The most dangerous enemy to American national security is us, our own people, going totalitarian on us. Either way -- being foreign brainwashed by idealistic communist false promises or being domestic brainwashed by consumer advertising into wage enslavement -- the strongest protective 'security' is educated citizens keeping in touch, sharing information, thinking for themselves, staying vigilant against brainwashers and mass media liars.
Anyway, that's some of the way I see it -- we took the wrong path after WW II, (with a false guide, the CIA, pointing us this way), and have had no national security ever since. I see more, (actually, I've got it traced back to Lewis and Clark who started it all when they didn't understand the natives saying 'humans can't own the land, or the water, or the air, with printed paper money; humans own with their labor, ('sweat equity'), done in good health, which no one can take away'; but I'm not as bad as Thom Hartmann, who drags us 200 years farther back, to 1628, for a better view of our modern world, link here), but I'm trying to write shorter comments. Because people are telling me it's too long and hard to read and study and learn when I don't put in any juicy sex and spurting blood.
Do, though, read Prouty's book, "The Secret Team," (and see www.prouty.org), if you happen to get a chance, in order to have a backstory context for the Torture Airlines in Portland internationale. Read, read, read. (But don't read long stuff on the screen -- print it out to read it. Maybe next time I can tell about the case of radiation poisoning rash I got from reading monitors too much. Besides, printout paper is a local industry; buy Oregon products.)
In my own reading opportunities I'm grinding through Mike Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon", which is choked with (CIA) facts. Ruppert explains that brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles "designed" the CIA. (Not in his book but elsewhere I was intrigued to learn the Dulleses were the p.r. firm for the 1948 Dewey campaign, who planted in the Chicago Tribune the false headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" which appears in that famous photo of Truman, elected, holding that newspaper high over his head.) From "Crossing the Rubicon": After the assassination of JFK in 1963, Allen Dulles became the staff director and lead investigator of the Warren Commission .... When asked about how he could have offered the Warren Report, full of inconsistencies, to the American people with a straight face, Dulles is reported to have said, "The American people don't read."
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Posted by: iggi | Jan 14, 2005 11:32:30 AM
as long as they're paying the taxes, let 'em stay...we need all the money we can get.
Posted by: Sid Anderson | Jan 14, 2005 1:36:44 PM
I think focusing on Caplan and his law firm is exactly what needs to be done. I've written a little about one of the partners of the firm here
They're definitely not progressives. Caplan is returning calls to a reporter friend of mine who's organization has assigned her the story, and he's told her that he will talk to Leonard T. Bayard and ask him to call her. That's totally wierd, if you ask me. What are they gonna do, get some old fart to call and pretend he runs some international marketing company.
If Caplan knowingly falsified state incorporation papers, he can be fined $1,000 and six months in jail.
I think we think our state can't investigate this because it's the CIA. The whole reason they moved the operation from Massachusetts to Oregon is because state offficials and congress people started sniffing around.
Maybe they'll move it from Oregon to another state, but I say a snowball rolling down the hill just gets bigger.
Posted by: Tenskwatawa | Jan 18, 2005 5:33:49 PM
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Maybe the infernal optimism trying to meet the transaction half way, Ruppert's site has up a first digest of his full-bandwidth, heart-dagger book, Crossing the Rubicon -- Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney, by Michael Kane, to wit:
January 18, 2005 (FTW) - In an argument of over 600 pages and 1,000 footnotes, Crossing the Rubicon makes the case for official complicity within the U.S. government and names Dick Cheney as the prime suspect in the crimes of 9/11. ...
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Posted by: Tenskwatawa | Jun 11, 2005 2:02:21 PM
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Some part of 'going native' in Oregon implies knowing the economy around McMinnville, and resident recent-retirees, derived from Evergreen Airlines, which was a CIA 'front' airlines as far back as the early 1950s, really, when Korean War vets 'came home,' and throughout the '60s and '70s was take-off base for surreptitious flights around the world, including forays to Vietnam and Africa.
The 'mothballing but not de-commissioning' of CIA assets and extent, (following the Soviet Union's 1989 quitting the Cold War), in the '90s in McMinnville provoked the whole Create-An-Air-Museum scheme to make lemonade out of the lemons at that airport, whereby instead of becoming a storage expense and burden into the future, now the materiel pile is a profit center charging public admission to look at CIA assets in broad daylight.
Audacious-most is displaying the Spruce Goose of Howard Hughes, who was recently conjectured to have been a CIA-type during his whole life and ultimately the spy-est of them all when, after 20 years out of media sight (said to be a 'crazy and recluse in a Las Vegas hotel penthouse'), reappears with a new identity -- Richard Helms -- and becomes CIA director in the '70s, in plain public view and no one wise to it. Quite the theory. I endorse it.
Anyway, the continuing saga in the dead threads morgue:
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May 31, 2005
C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights
By SCOTT SHANE, STEPHEN GREY and MARGOT WILLIAMS
This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Mr. Shane.
SMITHFIELD, N.C. - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.
When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.
Aero Contractors' planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.
While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.
Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.
The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.
The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.
"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."
Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.
Inquiries From Abroad
The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.'s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.
Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.
The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.
Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients' identities. "We've been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don't talk about it," said Robert W. Blowers, Aero's assistant manager.
A Varied Fleet
But records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency's aviation wing.
The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.
Most of the shell companies that are the planes' nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as "the Farm." Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.
But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.
"To tell you the truth, I don't know what they do," said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers "good neighbors," always ready to lend a tool.
Son of Air America
Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.
Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.
"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.'s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend's new plane at Johnston County Airport.
Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero's operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.
"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.
While flying for Aero in the 1980's and 1990's, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan's late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
Ferrying Terrorism Suspects
Aero's planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.
He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them 'snatches,' " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.
Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.
When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.
Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.
Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.
A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.
Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.
Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.
The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.
Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.
Mysterious Companies
As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration's online registry.
So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.
On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers' offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.
No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.
Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an element of one entity to lead to others."
He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.
Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980's because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.
Aero's president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin' Norman's. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we can't say anything about it."
Secrecy Is Difficult
Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.'s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.
When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency's general counsel, objected.
In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."
He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."
Ford Fessenden contributed reporting for this article.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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Posted by: Just Passing Through | Jan 20, 2007 12:01:08 AM
Re: the name Leonard Thomas Bayard. Being a student of medieval history I immediately recognized Bayard as England's King Edward the I's favorite horse, who at the Siege of Berwick leaped (flew) over the earthen defenses of the city.
Secondly, Edward was a Plantagenet, whose family coat of arms included variously lions and leopards.
The CIA loves a good puzzle, don't they!
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Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Jan 13, 2005 9:45:59 PM
Quick update. Over at New Frames, they've got the phone number...
It's 503-284-0841. No matter how many times you call, Leonard T. Bayard is never available, as the Chicago Tribune discovered, and someone with a southern accent answers the phone.