Cocaine Airways

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Cocaine Airways

Postby rocco33 » Sun Sep 17, 2006 9:13 pm

A former CIA pilot says secret flights to El Toro could explain a Marine officer’s ‘suicide’<br>By NICK SCHOU<br>Thursday, September 14, 2006 <br><br><!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://www.ocweekly.com/images/stories/02Lede_tosh.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center"><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>When we first spoke, a decade ago, the fear in his voice—the staccato pace, the tremor—was unmistakable.<br><br>“I can’t talk to you,” he said. “This is all classified.”<br><br>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.<br><br>Then he hung up the telephone.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Over the course of the next several days, the man told me his life story.<br><br>* * *<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>He doesn’t know the identities of those cargo handlers. But he’s pretty sure they weren’t military.<br><br>“I was CIA,” Plumlee says. “So why wouldn’t they be too?”<br><br><snip><br><br><br>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.”<br><br>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.”<br></em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> </div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br>Click link for the rest.<br><br>Note- This was the COVER STORY!<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.ocweekly.com/news/news/cocaine-airways/25835/">www.ocweekly.com/news/news/cocaine-airways/25835/</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
rocco33
 
Posts: 81
Joined: Sun Aug 13, 2006 11:35 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

ahh, back on solid ground again...

Postby robertdreed » Sun Sep 17, 2006 9:28 pm

No 911esque mysteries about this... <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://home.comcast.net/~fernandezjetace/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html">home.comcast.net/~fernand...html-.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>except for, as of now, this: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://home.comcast.net/~fernandezjetace/wsb/html/view.cgi-html2.html--SiteID-2027861.html">home.comcast.net/~fernand...27861.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>"AUGUST 2006: The article formerly posted here has been pulled for a rewrite using updated new information. For a brief synopsis of the life of triple jet ace Pete Fernandez, I have temproarily put here a Wikipedia entry I recently wrote.<br>My time is presently occupied preparing a full-length Fernandez biography; I hope to have a completed manuscript in early 2007. Thanks for your patience. (Check this space for updates.)" <p></p><i></i>
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

in the meantime...

Postby robertdreed » Sun Sep 17, 2006 9:32 pm

Wouldn't you know, I happen to have saved a copy of the text of the original draft of the Fernandez article linked above, apparently presently in the process of being rewritten:<br><br>MiGs to Marijuana: Manuel J. "Pete" Fernandez, Jet Ace and Undercover Drug Pilot for the U.S. Gov't. <br> <br>BAHAMA ISLANDS, 1980<br><br><br>The aviator was tired. He had already passed many hours airborne, and at 55 years old, he was no longer a young man. Once, he had been a national hero, the “Little Tiger” of the 334th squadron in Korea. He bagged 15 MiGs and lunched with President Eisenhower in the White House then, but that was more than a quarter century earlier. Now, he was a “doper” in the slang of the 1970s, a drug pilot participating in the massive airlift of narcotics from Columbia to the United States, feeding North America’s insatiable appetite for stupefaction. Hundreds of tons of the stuff needed to be flown up from South America annually, and the old ace was one of the blue collar airmen who kept the pipeline flowing. <br><br>Not only was the flyer was putting in a long day, but he was doing it solo. Normal procedure for these missions called for two pilots in the cockpit, to provide a spare set of hands on the controls for relief, but today the aviator was alone. He had departed Miami early that morning and navigated his way over a thousand miles of Caribbean Sea to the Perija Mountains, near Santa Marta in northern Colombia. There, he executed a clandestine landing, loaded up with marijuana, then took off again for the return trip. He touched down quickly on Great Inagua Island, just north of Cuba, where he showered, changed clothes and refueled. Then he was off again. <br><br>His aircraft, a souped up twin-engine model, was heavy with its full load of dope, and hours of inhaling the thick stench of bundled pot bales nauseated him. He reached the Bahama archipelago by nightfall: that put him on the home stretch. His destination this evening was Grand Bahama Island, one of the largest in the Bahamas and the closest to Florida, where he lived. After unloading on Grand Bahama, his part in the smuggling operation would be over, and it was then a short flight back to his family in Miami. <br><br>As he approached Grand Bahama’s coast, the airman attempted to make radio contact with his accomplices on the ground using a powerful walkie-talkie. Having no luck, he executed a slow turn and peered out the window. Straining his eyes to see into the darkness below him, he looked for his “airstrip.” Actually, it was just a seldom-traveled backroad which dopers found perfect for their needs. <br><br>One method the smugglers used for illuminating a secret location at night was to outline it with plastic glowsticks, a child’s toy that when crushed and activated, gave off a soft green florescence for several minutes. Another field-expedient trick was to turn on automobile headlights in the final moments, when aircraft engines droning overhead signaled a plane’s arrival. But the flyer saw nothing, and noted with frustration that once again the Bahamians -- who had a reputation among dopers for poor performance -- were screwing up the job. <br><br>The most hazardous part of this game was not a double cross, nor getting caught by the authorities, but rather, incompetence. At night, an aviator’s life hung on how well his collaborators on the ground marked out a landing site. If the men doing this critical work were too careless or stoned to get it right, the airman paid the price. Since the 1960s, thousands of drug airlift pilots have died keeping North America well supplied with dope. These Colombian smuggling runs were the most difficult missions ever flown by the ex-fighter jock in a lifetime of aerial danger.<br><br>The aviator had no idea why his confederates were not in position; all he knew was their absence left him in a sticky situation. Although he had plenty of fuel remaining, and Miami is only a half-hour’s flight from Grand Bahama Island, heading home was not an option in a plane packed with marijuana. Maybe a year or two earlier he could have gotten away with it, when local conditions in South Florida were different. Those days were over: just six months previously, the chief of his smuggling team had been busted when he had landed in Florida with a pot load. <br><br>As the old ace circled and pondered what to do next, he noted that even in darkness, he could see the ribbon of the main highway that stretches from one end of Grand Bahama to the other along its southern coastline. He decided to put down there. This certainly was not standard operating procedure, but it was the middle of the night in an uninhabited part of the island, and no cars were visible for miles. His options after touchdown were few: he could try to contact his ground crew on foot, but if he was unable to do that, he figured to just leave the plane behind and make for town. There, he could hide out, call his people in Florida and sit tight. They would get him home. <br><br>The flyer followed the highway a short distance until he spotted a straight section ahead. He sized up the layout: on one side of the road stretched power lines; on the other, a thicket of Yellow Pine, the skinny-trunked trees that grew everywhere on the island. Turning into position for final approach, the airman slowly descended and felt his landing gear thump as it came down and locked. It would be a tight fit between the telephone poles and scrub pine, but he had pulled off more ticklish landings than this one. Besides, at this point he was committed. Concentrating hard on the obstacles to his left and right, he glided down to treetop level. <br><br>Then suddenly, something directly ahead made his heart race: a single power line strung across the highway rather than alongside it. Instinctively, he pulled hard on the yoke and kicked desperately at the rudder pedal in a final reflexive manuever. But at such low altitude, there was no margin for error. “Too late,” he thought as he slipped past the power line. His last sensation was feeling his wingtip clip a tree: in an instant, he lost control and slammed into the pine and palmetto, about a hundred feet from the highway. Marijuana and gasoline spewed in all directions from his plane’s ruptured fuselage. The crumpled wreckage immediately ignited and would still be smoldering when discovered the next morning, putting out such a thick cloud of pot smoke that police investigating the crashsite got high off of the burning weed. They would find the aviator dead along the roadside, where he had been thrown by the impact.<br><br><br>CROSSING THE YALU<br><br>The demise of Korean War jet ace Manuel Jose “Pete” Fernandez Jr. in a drug-laden airplane on the night of October 17-18, 1980, was hardly the first occasion in which the veteran flyer decided that rules are for fools. He had learned as a young fighter pilot in the crucible of combat that following regulations often got you nowhere. To tally up MiGs and find glory during the 1950-1953 shooting war in Korea, one had to violate procedure. When hunting communist planes, American F86 Sabrejets routinely flew across the Yalu River, the border separating North Korea’s war zone from the Chinese mainland, though this was officially prohibited. Sabre pilots were following the same logic as bandit Willie Sutton who, when asked why he robbed banks, gave his famous reply, “Because that’s where the money is.” If you wanted MiGs, you had to go where they were plentiful. What this meant, in military terms, was defying your chain of command in order to buzz Manchuria and bushwhack the enemy over his own airbases. In the final two years of the war, a desire to shoot down MiGs overwhelmed even the most disciplined professional officers of the U.S. Air Force. <br><br>Those flyers who strictly adhered to the rules didn't bag many communist planes; it was the “cowboys” who disobeyed orders and risked starting World War Three that racked up the big scores. “I’m determined to get a MiG as are most of the boys around here and it seems there is only one positive way of doing it and that is to go north of the Yalu,” Sabre pilot Thomas Sellers wrote to his wife in a June 1953 letter. Just a few weeks later, he was shot down and killed over China. (Fifty years later, bodies of U.S. airmen continue to turn up across the river. In October 2004, an American F86 brought down over Manchuria was excavated just outside of Dandong, China. The remains of its pilot, Troy Cope, were still inside.)<br><br>Today, half a century after the shooting stopped, histories of the Korean War still refer to the fiction of communist “sanctuaries” in China, enemy airbases that were off limits to the Americans. This factual distortion simplifies the narrative and serves an agenda of selective historical interpretation: that Americans fight modern wars with one hand tied behind their backs. Television documentaries -- the digital age’s popular memory bank -- also avoid messy details of disobedient dogfighting over Manchuria, but that is how it really happened. <br><br>Jet ace John Bolt, a fighter pilot who was in Korea at the same time as Fernandez, spelled out how flyers hoodwinked their commanders to accomplish clandestine penetrations of Manchurian airspace. “It sometimes took considerable collaboration from a normal flight to conceal the illicit excursions into China from air traffic controllers. Some pilots developed a code-word system that they would use when they were out of voice control range of the ground stations and were only being tracked on radar by the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) signal, or ‘squawk,’ of the flight leader. Upon receipt of the proper code-word, the leader who was going over the Yalu would ‘choke his parrot’ and turn off his IFF, while one of the aircraft staying south of the river would activate his. While the flight leader and his wingman went off to stalk MiGs, the other two aircraft, including the one squawking IFF, would stay over North Korea and wait to link up with the returning hunters, who would be gone only a few minutes. The flight would then return together, and none would be the wiser.”<br><br>Bolt’s practice of turning off his IFF, or “choking his parrot,” was typical for MiG-hunting across the river. John Lowry, a Sabre pilot who flew with Fernandez in the 334th squadron, recalled Pete using the same method for poaching enemy planes over communist airbases in China. “Pete got most of his kills at high altitude....He always cruised at forty-five to forty-eight thousand feet, running at .9 Mach. Then his flight would turn off the IFF and head directly into Manchuria for a few miles before making a carefully executed turn, never more than a fifteen degree bank, back to the south. This would often put him at the six o’clock [rear] position on the MiG flights coming out of [the Chinese airbase at] Antung as they were climbing and heading south. They wouldn’t even know he was there until he hit them. Pete said that occasionally he wound up in the MiG formations. He emphasized that by cruising at .9 Mach, he never had a MiG on his tail.” <br><br>On one occasion, Fernandez’s penchant for high altitude flight allowed him to avoid catastrophe. Pete found himself surrounded by comunist planes after making a power dive into a formation of aggressive MiGs “honchos” -- Korean War slang for talented enemy pilots. To escape, he maneuvered wildly until his fuel was exhausted and his engine flamed out. Steadily losing altitude all the way, he then glided over 80 miles back to his base for a “dead stick” landing. <br><br>As for the ferocious nature of Fernandez’s suprise attack upon an unaware enemy, he was merely adapting bird-of-prey techniques pioneered decades earlier in biplanes to a new age. The mechanics of attack were remarkably similar, though at considerably greater speeds. Fictional World War One pilot Rocky Thorne sums up his flying philosophy to a squadron mate in the1933 movie, Ace of Aces: “All you gotta do is go up there alone in the sun and look down....Well, you just sit and wait and when Heinie comes along, he looks up: all he sees is the sun. You come down out of it, zowie, on his tail. You chalk up another one....It’s the only way, if you want to stay healthy.” When his comrade suggests that such methods are not very sporting, Thorne laughs, “Sporting! Which one of the knights of the Round Table are you?” <br><br><br>A NATIVE FLORIDIAN, BORN TO FLY<br><br>Pete Fernandez was born in 1925 on the island of Key West. His grandparents were immigrant Spaniards who had lived in Cuba prior to arriving in the United States. At that time, many families on the last of the Florida Keys were of Cuban descent. Havana is only ninety miles away, and Key West’s main industry in the early 20th Century was rolling cigars from the world’s finest tobacco leaves, shipped over from Cuba’s Viñales Valley. Jose Marti, the great Cuban patriot, had visited the émigré cigar-rolling colonies of Key West and Tampa numerous times in the 1890s to solicit money for funding Cuban expeditions back to the homeland to fight for independence from Spain. Fernandez was proud of his Latino blood and his “Conch” roots on Key West. By the time of Pete’s birth, however, Key West’s tobacco industry and its Cuban identity were in decline and would soon be gone. Tourism, the new business in town, was just getting underway. <br><br>Fernandez’s family moved from the Keys to Miami when he was a small child, and there he grew up, crazy for airplanes. His father, Manuel Sr., was the communications chief for Pan American Airlines, a company then pioneering air routes from Miami throughout Latin America. It was the 1930s, a golden age of air travel, and young Petey took in aviation as if it was his mother's milk. “Clearly for many Depression-trapped youth,” aviation film historian James Farmer has written, “the airplane became a special lure. As one of the twentieth century’s more romanticized creations, the plane was a magic carpet....to romance, adventure and a better world.”<br><br>Fernandez built model planes as an adolescent, enjoyed the era’s many air adventure movies at the local bijou and visited his father whenever he could at Pan Am’s main terminal to watch the Sikorsky Clipper flying boats arrive and depart from Latin America. (This terminal building, an art deco gem, today serves as Miami’s city hall.) <br><br>Fernandez was an extrovert, always testing out new jokes on his friends. In high school, he was voted the wittiest member of his senior class. “Everybody liked Petey,” classmate Vince Manze later remembered. “What he was really crazy about was airplanes. When he was a junior, he started to take private flying lessons at Sunny South airport. He used to go at 4:00 o’clock every afternoon.” <br><br>Military airmen today are university educated, but Fernandez -- one of the top combat flyers of his generation -- came from a working class background and did not attend college. In June 1943, seven days after his high school graduation, he enlisted as an 18 year-old private in the Army Air Corps. <br><br>The United States in 1943 was embroiled in World War Two, and Fernandez was quickly accepted into the Army’s pilot training program. He got his wings, but in the first of a long line of teaching assignments, he spent the war years as an instructor in Texas. Trained as a fighter pilot, he first flew piston-driven P47 Thunderbolts, then switched to jets in 1948. By then, the Army Air Corps had become the U.S. Air Force. That same year, his squadron embarked on ships and sailed from their base in the Panama Canal Zone to Scotland. Subsequently, they flew on to Germany. There, they escorted big transport planes during the 1948-1949 Berlin Airlift. These were tense times in the Cold War: Soviet aircraft occasionally buzzed the aerial supply convoys in a threatening manner, though they never actually risking war by attacking. This in turn provided Fernandez, piloting an F80 Shooting Star, his first close-up look at Russian fighter jets.<br><br>In May 1949, the U.S.S.R. reopened overland routes into West Berlin, thus ending the need for the airlift. Fernandez’s squadron returned to the United States, where Pete was assigned to Nellis Air Force Base, just outside of Las Vegas. There, he served as a aerial shooting instructor, preparing pilots for combat. One of his trainees, Joe McConnell, became his friend while at gunnnery school and later would be his main rival in Korea for the most MiG “kills.” Fernandez also flew with an aerobatics stunt team at Nellis called the Mach Riders, Mach being the name of the velocity scale used to measure supersonic speed. <br><br>But in 1950, the Cold War had turned hot in Korea. By mid-1951, Air Force pilot James Jabara had been credited with his fifth MiG and returned to the States a hero, feted as the world’s first jet ace. (Recent research has brought into question whether Jabara actually reached the magic number of five in 1951, or actually left the theater with “only” four enemy planes to his credit. At any rate, Jabara returned to combat duty in the spring of 1953, and would have 15 red stars painted on his fuselage when the fighting ended that summer.)<br><br><br>KOREA<br><br>Pete chafed at his Stateside assignment during a war, like any fighter pilot worth his salt. After much effort, he ovecame the obstacle of his “advanced” age of 27 and managed to secure orders for the war zone in September 1952. Captain Fernandez joined the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Kimpo forward airbase, located near the fighting in the northern part of South Korea. The 334th was equipped with the swept-wing F86 Sabrejet, the Air Force’s hottest fighter. <br><br>Wasting no time, Fernandez destroyed his first enemy plane on October 4, 1952. It was a tough fight, for his foe was Lt. Kapranov, a Russian flyer from the Soviet Union’s 578th Naval Aviation Regiment. Kapranov perished in the dogfight. <br><br>Fernandez got a second MiG in November, and another in December. “Pete’s eyesight is the clue,” his commanding officer said at the time. “He can see more looking through a small gunsight than most people can with their heads out of the cockpit.”<br><br>One of two Soviet-piloted MiGs lost on January 14, 1953 was shot down by Fernandez: it was his fourth “kill,” the name given to an enemy plane destroyed in air-to-air combat. Pete was now on the edge of destiny: the magic number necessary for a fighter pilot to be awarded the profession’s most coveted title is five confirmed kills.<br><br>The aerial ace is a phenomenon that began and ended in the 20th Century. The tradition started during World War One, when knocking down five or more planes in combat first marked a fighter pilot as one of the best in this deadly business. 110 Army flyers achieved elite status as aces during that war, and they became celebrities. In World War Two, with its exponentially bigger air forces, over 1,200 Americans reached the five-kill benchmark. During the Korean conflict, 40 more men joined the exclusive club, as the first jet aces. (Fighting against the U.S. Air Force over Korea and China, 30 Soviet aviators also became jet aces.) Only two American airmen emerged from the Vietnam War with five kills, one from the Navy and one from the Air Force, due to a sparsity of aerial adversaries. There was plenty of danger for combat aviators over Southeast Asia, but it was due to antiaircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles rather than enemy MiGs.<br><br>Hence, the last conflict that produced dozens of evenly matched aces on both sides -- an essential element for Dawn Patrol-type drama -- was Korea. This high altitude death struggle was also the valedictory of classic dogfighting, where a pilot first skillfully outmaneuvered his foe, then clawed him to earth with machine gun fire. We will never see the likes of these sky duels again, for after Korea, the impersonal air-to-air missile took over. <br><br><br>HONCHOS AND STUDENTS<br><br>On February 18, 1953, Fernandez reached the mark, shooting down his fifth and sixth MiGs to become an ace. Coincidentially, his old gunnery student Joe McConnell, flying from the Suwon airbase with the 39th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, also got his fifth plane that day to reach acehood. <br><br>In the spring of 1953, during a three-month rampage after he made ace in February until he was grounded in May, Pete knocked down ten MiGs and was arguably the hottest Air Force pilot flying.<br><br>On March 9, 1953, Fernandez claimed his seventh MiG; on March 14, Pete shot down and killed a Soviet Air Force lieutenant named Sedyshev. A week after that, Fernandez got two more MiGs; he was now a double ace. <br><br>Several of Fernandez’s aerial foes were Soviet pilots flying their best plane, the legendary MiG15. During the first months of combat on the Korean peninsula, the U.S.S.R. secretly sent its own top gun World War Two veterans to China, where they provided air cover for Chinese and North Korean armies fighting on the ground. <br><br>This Korean War clandestine operation deployed by the Soviets was set up in a similar way to the American “Flying Tigers” squadron ten years earlier, who had fought the Japanese from Chinese bases in 1940-41. Like the Flying Tigers, Russian airmen were ostensibly stationed in China as volunteers rather than as an authorized part of their country’s air force. They dressed in civilian clothes and, in a further effort to conceal their presence, they were supposed to speak only Chinese over their aircraft radios lest the Americans surmise the truth upon hearing their native tongue. This last proved impossible in the heat of battle, and it was audio transmissions in Russian -- as well as superb plane handling -- that tipped the U.S.A.F. to whom they were fighting. American government officials, informed by their generals about the secret communist operation, decided to hide this information from the general public for political reasons. Given the hysteria they had generated on the homefront with red-baiting McCarthyism during this period, pressure for war with the Soviet Union would have been great had it become common knowledge that Russians were fighting in Korea. <br><br>MiG-Sabre battles over Korea and China were the last time U.S. pilots flew against a well-trained adversary on anything like even technological terms. The MiG15 matched up well with the F86. “When the MiG is properly manned,” The New York Times reported in 1953, “Sabre pilots will say frankly that it can outmaneuver the Sabre and shoot it down. Many have seen such battles and they call such skilled MiG pilots ‘honchos,’ pidgin Japanese for Chief. Less skilled pilots they call students.” The flying ability shown by these honchos was formidable. Several of the war’s best combat airmen were Soviets, including the two top overall aces, Nikolay Sutyagin and Yevgeny Pepelyayev, who shot down 21 and 19 American aircraft respectively. The leading American ace, Joe McConnell, claimed 16 communist planes. <br><br>Some reports of direct air combat with foreign pilots were available to U.S. citizens, even before the war ended. In May 1953, for example, an American press agency reported, “A survey of high ranking Air Force officers disclosed that proof of Caucasian pilots flying swept-wing MiGs has been in military hands for ‘almost two years.’ One top ranking officer, who declined use of his name, said proof had been recorded on tape by military units which constantly monitor Communist aviation channels.” In December 1954, more than a year after the war ended, an article appeared in U.S. News and World Report entitled, “Report From Manchuria: Russians Did Fight In Korea.” Much later, in 1978, Larry Davis published MiG Alley. The book -- a collection of firsthand accounts by American jet combat veterans -- frankly dealt with the actual role of Manchuria in the air war, as home base for Soviet pilots and as target for U.S. air raids. <br><br>In spite of such hints, however, the full history of Soviet involvement in the fighting was not revealed until the 1990s, when Russian archives were opened to researchers. This bonanza of new information released from the enemy’s files has profoundly changed the possibilities for studying the air war in Korea. Some of the fruits of this work are posted on the internet at AcePilots.com. Regarding Pete Fernandez’s air victories, the website notes, “According to Stephen Sewell, a member of the Korean War Forum of Kansas University, who has researched Russian sources matching U.S. and Soviet records, at least two of Fernandez's kills were scored against Soviet MiG pilots. On October 4, 1952, the victim of Fernandez's first MiG was Lt. Kapranov, from the 578th Naval Aviation Regiment. On March 14, 1953, Pete shot down Lt. Sedyshev of the 518th Regiment, 216th Division. Both Soviet pilots perished. Additionally, two MiGs of 224th IAP were lost on January 14, 1953, one of them probably shot down by Fernandez. But it must also be noted that one of his claims (March 9, 1953) is evidently an overclaim, because though the Soviets admit losing two MiGs that day, those were scored by other U.S.A.F. Sabre pilots. All Fernandez’s remaining claims were most likely against Chinese MiGs, and we probably will never know how many of them are actually confirmed.” <br><br>When U.S. pilots came up against the honchos, resulting dogfights could indeed be jousts between equals. But once the majority of Soviet pilots were pulled out of combat in early 1953, the nascent Asian air forces had to pick up the slack. Rushed into combat by necessity, North Korean and Chinese “students” often could not even maneuver in a dogfight, let alone shoot anyone down. In hot competition for the title of top “MiG-Killer,” Fernandez and his mates ruthlessly machine-gunned these trainees out of the sky. For veteran American fighter jocks, racking up aerial kills against such opponents became more cold-blooded murder than chivalrous dueling. <br><br>In this, they came to resemble bloodthirsty German aviators in the classic World War One film, The Dawn Patrol. The movie’s storyline has dozens of under-trained British replacement pilots blithely sent into battle before they have time to learn their trade. Proficient Hun aces then butcher them without pity as soon as they arrive at the front. “He doesn't know anything,” Flight Commander Scott explains to his squadron leader about a new flyer. “He can’t even do a half loop and roll out. Did you hear that? He can’t even roll out! Do you think he’s going to bring down any Boche planes? No! They’ll slaughter him.” <br><br>This Hollywood fiction from the 1930s was analogous to the Korean situation in the spring of 1953. Forced unprepared into battle by their commanders, Asian student pilots would often panic in the first moments of combat and either bail out or, if they tried to fight, go into uncontrollable spins. In this unpleasant scenario, centrifugal force pinned a pilot in his cockpit until the fatal crash. In a May 1953 article on the air war, The New York Times reported, “Communist pilots seem unenthusiastic and poorly trained. Frequently, they miss opportunities to jump on Sabrejets, and their cooperation with one another is faulty....The MiG pilot often takes no violent extreme action when a Sabrejet gets on its tail, or goes into a straight climb, not an effective way to avoid being shot down....Frequently, MiGs go into spins that result in crashes just as a dogfight begins, and often, especially lately, communist pilots have been bailing out of their ships when they have barely been damaged.” <br><br>In the spring of 1953, the Times twice mentioned Fernandez pushing hapless MiGs into deadly spins without opening fire. An April article stated, “Capt. Manuel Fernandez Jr. became the hottest active jet ace by bagging his eleventh MiG. He maneuvered it into crashing without firing a shot.” In early May, a Times reporter noted, “Capt. Manuel J. Fernandez Jr., who tied the record yesterday by shooting down his twelfth MiG, may have forced two other enemy jets to crash during the battle above northwest Korea, but he was too busy to watch, he said. The Air Force did not credit him with the other two kills. Captain Fernandez, 28, of Miami Fla., said he saw one MiG blow up in front of him yesterday. Two others were last seen in tight spins at 15,000 feet, apparently out of control.” <br><br>Fernandez commented at the time, “Sometimes I don’t think the enemy has any motivation to fight, although on occasions, they turn up some very good pilots.” <br><br>Encountering easy marks over North Korea’s war zone was a matter of luck. But by 1953, when the pickings were slim over the Korean Peninsula, American aviators -- hungry to paint kill stars on their fuselages -- did not wait for good luck to arrive. They instead chose to disobey orders and cross the Yalu River into Manchuria, where they learned to bushwhack rookie MiG pilots at low altitude over Chinese airbases. <br><br>This happened just as most veteran communist pilots were pulled out of the fighting to be replaced by new squadrons. “At the same time,” wrote Chinese air war historian Xiaoming Zhang, “Sabre pilots became more aggressive about crossing the Yalu, hemming in Communist MiGs when they were low on fuel and in their landing pattern over their airfields....At a time when attacks on MiGs during landing and takeoff became more aggressive, the Soviets withdrew 40 percent of their aircraft from the Korean front.” Concurrent to the Soviet pullout, Chinese leader Mao Zedong ordered seasoned flyers out of combat to save them for training future students-pilots. This left untested Chinese and North Korean novices to make up the bulk of communist air forces by Spring 1953, leavened by remaining Russian veterans of the Soviet Air Force. <br><br>Gunning down inexperienced airmen as they were taking off was more grim-reaper work than glorious. Ace John Bolt’s description of entering Manchurian airspace to ambush helpless students from behind as they were trying to get airborne sounds like the narrative of a proficient technician rather than a swashbuckling fighter pilot. “All of the sudden I saw them, four MiGs taking off from Antung....Nosing down, I rolled into a Spilt S with the dive brakes cracked. As was my custom on entering a firing position, I test fired my guns, turned on the windshield defroster and triggered my G-suit. The four MiGs were at about 500 feet and going full bore. Leveling off, I blacked out momentarily, coming out of it at about 1,500 feet behind the MiGs. Our closure rate was so high that I was getting transonic wing roll. Closing to 600 feet behind the second MiG on the left, I let go with four short bursts of fire. The MiG started to smoke, rolled over and crashed into the hills....All of the sudden, this other dude, the MiG leader, drifted over my way. I pulled up the nose and closed within 500 feet. I managed to get a few shots into him on the turn, and when he rolled out, I got a prolonged burst into his tailpipe. He began to burn and I was so close that I was nearly blinded by the dense smoke. I pulled out and got out of the smoke just in time....The whole show had taken five minutes and 1,200 rounds; we got a pretty good return on the investment.” <br><br>While not very sporting, high speed dives through vunerable formations of enemy planes was seminal “dogfighting,” as plane-to-plane combat is called. It dated back to the First World War, when airborne assassins such as German aces Oswald Boelcke and Manfred von Richthofen favored aerial tactics that were hardly chivilrous. During battle, they hid high in the sun as events unfolded, picked out an inexperienced enemy novice below, then swooped down in one powerful pass to machine gun their victim to the ground. Until he perished in 1916, Boelcke was Richthofen’s mentor, and he remains the patron saint of fighter aces to this day. Richthofen, a.k.a. the Red Baron, used Boelcke’s ruthless “Hun in the sun” trick to become the war’s top overall ace before he too was shot down and killed in 1918. <br><br>Fernandez reported the result of his own poaching over Antung airbase in May 1953, and there was nothing even-handed about it. “I was leading a flight of four when we sighted four MiGs. I went into the MiGs and they started evasive action. I hit one from 1,200 feet. Large pieces began falling off the plane as fire started in his tailpipe. He went over on one wing, went straight down and exploded as he hit the ground.” Pete wanted the plane, not necessarily the pilot’s life. “I always hoped the poor dumb fool would jump,” he noted in later years. But this was war, and one way or another that MiG was going down. <br><br>Air combat in Korea was grueling. High G forces generated by hard turns at hundreds of miles an hour produced “blackouts” and “red-outs” that wore the airmen out. Gene Miller, a Sabre ground crewman at the Kimpo base, recalled Fernandez returning from missions so exhausted that after unbuckling his safety harness, he would often sit slumped in the cockpit for several minutes until he regained enough strength to climb out of his aircraft. Added to the physical strain was the emotional stress of combat. As a result, Pete intensified his habits of hard drinking and heavy smoking in Korea, which continued for the rest of his life.<br><br>Victor Rodriguez, another Sabre crewchief at Kimpo, marveled at Fernandez’s piloting ability. One time, Rodriguez saw “Pistol Pete,” as he called him, bringing back a flight of four planes, all dangerously low on fuel. Fernandez let the other three land first, and as the last one touched down, rather than going around on another sweep and possibly running out of gas, Pete did a 360 degree loop right over the airstrip and landed immediately. “I never saw anyone else do that in an F86!” Rodriguez exclaimed. Clearly, Fernandez was a crackerjack pilot who was not afraid of taking chances.<br><br>Rodriguez recalled that while other flying officers were often haughty with enlisted men, Fernandez would pass much time on the tarmac talking with his mechanics and learning the nuts and bolts of his airplane. Pete was a “regular guy,” known by his comrades as very unpretentious and easygoing. His humble upbringing as a working class kid who knew how to get his hands dirty fixing engines was likely the reason for this. Fernandez also enjoyed practicing his rusty Spanish with Mexican-American Rodriguez as he watched Victor work. Pete’s fluency in Spanish would be of great importance during the final years of his life.<br><br><br>PETE AND JOE<br><br>It was in Korea that Fernandez’s name become forever linked with his old gunnery student, Joe McConnell, who would finish the war as the leading American ace. The competition between the two friends began heating up in March 1953, a month in which Pete tallied four MiGs, giving him ten kills altogether. By the end of March, McConnell had a total of seven enemy planes to his credit. The other leading contender at that time, Captain Harold Fischer, ran into a honcho over China and was gunned down on April 7, thus ending his run at ten. <br><br>Fischer got too aggressive and ran out of luck. While he was cherry-picking a Chinese MiG as it landed at Dabao airbase in Manchuria, a 20 year-old novice named Han Dechai -- with only 100 hours flying time in jets -- snuck in behind the veteran Sabre jock and pumped cannon shells into the F86 until it caught fire. Fischer ejected just before his bird exploded; he actually came down right on the airfield and was immediately captured. (Fischer really must have been tempting fate, for he was being shot at from all directions when the last of his 170 combat missions ended. Two Soviet pilots, part of a second group of MiGs returning to the base, responded to the Chinese squadron’s call for help and both also claim to have fired the shots that brought the American raider to earth.<br><br>Fischer was only ace to fall into enemy hands, for the war “crime” of having been shot down over China, he would not be released until two years after the fighting ended. “Although negative accounts about Chinese pilots in Korea abound in Western literature,” writes historian Zhang, “the shooting down of a U.S. double ace was a glorious moment in the PLAAF’s [Peoples Liberation Army Air Force] combat history.”<br><br>McConnell got his eighth kill on April 12 after engaging in a ferocious dogfight with Soviet top gun Semyon Fedorets. (This battle was chronicled by Diego Zampini and Igor Seidov in a November 2005 Aviation History article, “Clash of Titans.”) The two aces shot each other out of the sky. Fedorets parachuted behind communist lines; McConnell rode his badly damaged F86 over the ocean, where he ejected and was quickly fished out of the freezing water by an Air Force rescue helicopter. Undaunted by his close call, Joe went back into combat the next day and bagged his ninth MiG within a week. <br><br>On April 24, McConnell got another to tie Fernandez and Fischer at ten. Then Pete got his eleventh on April 27 to retake the lead. On April 30, Fernandez brought down number twelve: he was now only two behind the all-time leader, George Davis. (Davis had been shot down and killed the previous year with fourteen enemy planes to his credit.) On May 10, Fernandez brought down two more MiGs, bringing him even with Davis. He was now the U.S.A.F.’s all-time leading jet ace. McConnell, still on his own killing spree, again tied Pete on May 12. That same afternoon, Fernandez flamed another MiG to take the lead back. <br><br>By May, McConnell was also poaching enemy planes over Manchuria. John Bolt, who flew with him, remembered, “I was assigned to Joe McConnell’s Dog Flight, known as ‘the hot dog flight.’ My first eleven missions were flown on Mac’s wing. But after Mac left, in May 1953, I was given command of Dog Flight. We had been crossing the Yalu on a rather regular basis, with the greatest risk to us coming from our own brass rather than the MiGs. During the tail end of Mac’s tour, we were getting most of our kills over and around Antung, which lies about thirty miles north of the Yalu. We used to try and provoke the MiGs into taking off by ‘booming’ the airfield, or simply skimming across the field at treetop level. You were supposedly setting your watch by the clock on the Antung control tower. If you were lucky, a couple of MiGs would scramble and you’d get to nail them....The Chinese were yelling and screaming about the ‘pirates’ that were coming over there, but that's where the actions was.” <br><br>Stateside newspapers reveled in the seesaw battle between Pete and Joe, and reported on the fighter jocks’ exploits like they were covering a home run competition between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. Film crews and print journalists made their way to Kimpo and Suwon to interview the fighter pilots. Through it all, the aces remained close buddies. When asked by a reporter in May about possibly winning the MiG title, the jocular McConnell retorted, “Oh, I don’t know, I kind of like being neck-and-neck with Old Pete!”<br><br>Things were about to come to a head in the Fernandez-McConnell duel. On May 13-18, 1953, in a major aerial offensive, the recently formed Chinese Air Force sent large formations of MiGs across the Yalu into North Korea. These were almost entirely made up of green flyers who had never seen battle, which made for fat hunting among the American top guns. Historian Xiaoming Zhang chronicled this decision by the Cinese high command. “With the reopening of truce talks at Panmunjom in April 1953, the CPV’s [Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers, the Korea field army] leaders believed an armistace was likely and they hoped to get as many troops combat experience as possible before the ceasefire went into effect....The CPV’s headquarters ordered air force units to actively defend the area north of Pyongyang. Six fighter divisions [were]....supported by three second-line North korean aviation divisions. Despite its numerical advantage, the PLAAF’s combat ability was still hampered by its pilots’ inexperience and deficiencies. Most Chinese air units were going into action for the first time.”<br><br>“800 to 900 MiGs in action,” The New York Times headlined on May 19. Newsweek magazine reported that “May 18 climaxed a six-day jet holocaust in which U.N. pilots bagged 36 MiGs, including one with a dragon insignia and possibly bearing a Red air force big-wig.” On May 20, the Times added, “The Chinese Red Air Force, which suffered heavy losses in six days of blazing air battles, refused combat yesterday [May 19]....The Red Air Force had been hurling hundreds of jets across the border into North Korea, but the few MiGs sighted yesterday scurried beyond the Yalu River when Sabres hove into view.” <br><br>The U.S.A.F. brass chose this moment, during some of the heaviest air action of the war, to abruptly end the friendly rivalry between Fernandez and McConnell. On May 17, Fernandez was summarily grounded one sortie short of his assigned 125 missions. The wing’s commanding officer ostensibly had issued orders to withdraw both top aces from combat at the same time. Pete’s injunction reached Kimpo immediately on the evening of May 17, and Fernandez unhappily packed his gear and reported to Fifth Air Force headquarters the next day. <br><br>However, vague “delays” in getting the word to McConnell at Suwon airbase enabled Joe to fly two more missions on May 18. This of course was the decisive day of one of the war’s largest air battles: the extra trigger time proved critical. McConnell made the most of his opportunity, shooting down three enemy planes to take the lead. <br><br>A New York Times article datelined May 18 noted Fernandez’s absence from combat on the final day of the race. “There was a drama of a different kind in today’s kills....Recently, the competition reached a fever pitch between Capt. Manuel J. Fernandez Jr. of Miami Fla., and Capt. Joseph P. McConnell Jr. of Apple Valley, Calif., the two leading jet aces of the Korean War....Late yesterday, the commander of the Fifth Air Force, Lieut. Gen. Glenn O. Barcus, invited Captain Fernandez to come to Fifth Air Force Headquarters. This morning, in the plotting room at headquarters, the ace watched model airplanes moving up into MiG Alley, in Northwest Korea, as flight reports were received from each squadron. The air was full of MiGs, and Captain Fernandez bit his lip and waited. Finally, the phone rang and General Barcus answered. He listened for a while, and then said, ‘I can’t tell him that. If I do, I won’t be able to keep him on the ground.’ Then the general hung up. ‘Pete, McConnell got two this morning’....Captain Fernandez smiled, but his smile was thin. ‘Good show,’ he said. Before the ideal flying day was done, Captain McConnell had knocked down a third MiG. It was a remarkable performance by the Californian....It was bitter medicine for Captain Fernandez.” <br><br>“The air was full of MiGs that day,” Fernandez later said. “I felt like a grasshopper on a hotplate, I wanted to get in the air so bad.” <br><br>McConnell’s grounding finallly took effect after he returned from his second May 18 sortie. After the earlier lethargy in “getting the word” to him, the brass now moved with alacrity. Not content to wait, they had Joe helicoptered from Suwon to join Fernandez in Fifth Air Force Headquarters before he could even change out of his flight suit. “I want that man home before you read the period at the end of this sentence,” General Barcas reportedly hissed to an aide as McConnell deplaned after his last mission amidst the reporters and photographers.<br><br>The following morning, May 19, both aces were hastily flown to Japan, which froze their final score at 16 to 15, though one of Pete’s two kills from May 10 was still pending confirmation by the Air Force high command. The war’s first American triple aces were given medals in Tokyo, then immediately shipped off to the United States for a hero's welcome and a personal “debriefing” by President Eisenhower at the White House. During the meeting with their commander-in-chief, the two aces brashly asked for permission to return immediately to the war zone to fly more missions. It was not to be.<br><br>Several Korean War air combat historians have speculated that once Fernandez became the top U.S. ace in early May 1953, Air Force brass deliberately sabatoged him to prevent his finishing first in the MiG competition, due to prejudice against his "foreign-sounding" name.1 This suspicion arose because Pete was grounded on May 17 at the height of a big air battle, with one mission still remaining on his tour. Meanwhile, McConnell was allowed to fly on May 18, a perfect day. Then, after Joe went ahead by one, both men were quickly rotated out of the combat zone. Though twice previously, on April 24 and May 12, the aces had been tied for the lead, May 18 was the only day McConnell ever led outright. <br><br>Adding to Fernandez’s disappointment, the Air Force gave half credit for his pending May 10 kill to another flyer, thus reducing Pete’s final tally to 14 1/2. Fernandez would ultimately finish as the number three MiG-Killer. Major James Jabara, who had been the first American jet ace back in 1951, got permission to fly a second combat tour at war’s end, the only ace to receive such dispensation. Piloting the same F86 that Fernandez had used before his grounding, Jabara brought down his 15th enemy plane in July 1953, just a few days before the armistice, thus securing second place in the race.<br><br>Clearly, the shared May 10 air victory should have been all Pete's. The other pilot was shooting from such a distance that Fernandez was able to fly behind the MiG to shoot it down, actually between it and the other Sabre blazing away, because Pete was positive his comrade was far out of range. Fernandez later described the dogfight. “I was leading the flight, Lt. Richard Moroney on my wing. The mission commander was Major Foster Smith....[A]bout 48 MiGs hit us....I pulled in behind one of them trying to break through. He and his wingman pulled up and to the left in a futile attempt to evade us. I put the pipper [gunsight] on the lead MiG’s fuselage and gave him a good heavy burst. He immediately caught fire and exploded. Breaking away, I lined up on the MiG wingman and put a good burst in his tail. He also started streaming smoke and fire. I then heard Moroney call, ‘Dog Lead, I’ve got a MiG on my tail! And he’s firing!’ I broke off from behind the number two MiG (an unofficial kill) and went to help Moroney. I started calling the breaks. ‘Dog Two. Break right!’ Moroney broke right and the MiG followed. Then I saw another F86 far behind the fight and completely out of range, but firing furiously. When Moroney and the MiG broke right, I pulled up high to lose forward speed and came down behind the MiG. The other F86 was behind me but not close enough in range where I would be threatened by his guns. I gave the MiG a good short burst which killed his engine. But again I had to break off because Moroney had another MiG chasing him. Moroney was right beside the MiG when I hit him and saw everything....When we got home, Major Smith said it was he that was in the other F86 firing over my head at the MiG and that he was claiming half of the kill.”<br><br>Major Foster Smith was desperate to become an ace, which in 1953 was the biggest ticket punch possible in the career of a fighter jock. In the end, Smith fell just short and finished the war with 4 1/2 kills. One sees why he was grabbing every possible claim he could get! The Air Force's gift to Smith kept Fernandez from officially being listed as the third U.S. triple jet ace of the war. This half-kill incident happened at the same time the decision was being made to ground Pete before the end of his tour and send him home. <br><br>334th squadron crewchief Victor Rodriguez insisted that Fernandez lost the competition with McConnell as a result of not being allowed to fly on May 18, when everyone knew MiGs would be in the air. “It was one of the hottest weeks of the entire war. Other guys [in the squadron] also felt Pistol Pete got a raw deal.” <br><br>Rodriguez then shared a colorful and almost unbelievable anecdote about Fernandez deliberately shooting the tail section of an F86 piloted by wing commander Colonel James Johnson. According to Rodriguez, Colonel Johnson, who finished the war as a double ace, had the unseemly habit of stealing MiGs from lower ranking airmen. He would wait until an inexperienced enemy flyer had been maneuvered into position for the kill by a comrade, then order the other pilot off so he could administer the coup de grace himself, afterward claiming the entire MiG as his own. Rodriguez insisted that when the colonel pulled this stunt on Fernandez, Pete refused to yield. When Johnson tried to shoulder his Sabre into position anyway, Fernandez fired a quick burst, punching a few non-lethal .50 caliber holes into his vertical stabilizer. When it was suggested to Victor that such actions could have been provocative at a time when Air Force brass were already unhappy with having a Latino leader in the race for most MiGs. Rodriguez laughed and responded, “Naw, people did crazy stuff like that all the time over there.”<br><br><br>MAKING MOVIES AND WINNING RACES<br><br>Despite any tampering by the high command to alter Fernandez’s final score, there were no hard feelings between Pete and his buddy Joe. After they returned home from Korea, McConnell stood up at Fernandez’s November 1953 wedding to a pretty airline stewardess named Jean Eberman. Pete in turn served as technical advisor on Warner Brothers’ film biography about McConnell entitled Tiger in the Sky, a tribute to the war’s top ace. Stationed at an Air Force base just outside of Los Angeles, Fernandez piloted “Joe’s” Sabre for the cameras, stunting dogfights over Southern California that he had flown for real in Manchuria. <br><br>The movie had not yet been completed when McConnell, by then a test pilot, was killed in 1954 while trying out a new version of the F86. Like Fernandez, Joe had brought home shot-up aircraft during the war for deadstick landings, and this experience made him try the same technique when his engine flamed out during a test flight. Soaring high over the Mojave Desert, McConnell tried to glide his valuable prototype to a landing. In †he end, he stayed with the plane well beyond a safe margin; moxie was not in short supply among the aces. When Joe finally gave up on the ship and ejected, he tragically was at such low altitude that his chute failed to open. <br><br>After the accident, Warner Brothers quickly reworked Tiger in the Sky’s ending and renamed their movie The McConnell Story. The cinematic result was a doomed romance between Joe and his wife, Pearle. Alan Ladd and June Allyson play the star-crossed Joe and Pearle McConnell in the picture. Adding a sublime element to their work, the actors actually fell into their own forlorn and brief love affair during the film’s production, though both were already married at the time. You can see the poignancy in their performances, especially Ladd's.<br><br>On the studio set, Fernandez met June Allyson's husband, actor/director Dick Powell, a 1930s song-and-dance man who had retooled himself into a movie tough guy in the 1940s. After filming ended on The McConnell Story, Allyson and Powell invited Pete, along with his wife and their infant daughter, to visit the stars at their ranch in Mandeville Canyon, California. By the mid-1950s, Powell was focusing his energy on directing films rather than acting in them, and during Fernandez’s visits to Mandeville, Dick was preparing his next project for the big screen. It would be The Hunters, an action adventure about the jet war in Korea starring Robert Mitchum. Though Fernandez didn't participate directly in the making of The Hunters as he had with The McConnell Story, his counsel with Powell at Mandeville prior to shooting certainly influenced the movie’s extremely realistic scenes both at the forward airbase and in the sky. Pete attended the film’s 1958 premiere, along with Korea aces James Jabara and Royal Baker. They were by then the three leading MiG-Killers still alive. <br><br><br><br>In the mid-1950s, Fernandez went on to win U.S.A.F. gunnery contests, and in 1956, flying an F100 Super Sabre from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, he took home air racing’s famous Bendix Trophy. The Bendix winner was decided by averaging the speed traveled over the distance of the course; by taking risks and using tricks he had learned in battle, Pete pushed the outside of the envelope and when his jet rolled past the finish line in Oklahoma City, there were just two minutes of fuel remaining in its tanks. Fernandez had hoped to be the first to win the prestigious trophy at supersonic speed, but headwinds kept his average velocity at 666 mph, just under Mach One. (Interestingly, Marine Corps flyer John Glenn would come to national prominence for the first time the following year in the Defense Department’s Project Bullet, accomplishing a supersonic coast-to-coast flight. As with the MiG-Killer title, Pete showed a knack for finishing as runner-up in historic firsts.)<br><br><br><br>Despite his colorful achievements, Fernandez’s career in the Air Force did not make much headway. While other top Korea aces were being groomed for high command, Pete’s progress stalled. It was several years after the war before he was promoted even one rank, from captain to major. He was chosen for flight test school, but afterward did not receive one of the prestigious test pilot jobs. Instead, Fernandez spent 1958-1960 as a recruiting officer in South Florida, not exactly a coveted billet for a fighter pilot. <br><br>Pete finished out his Air Force service in Argentina from 1960 until he resigned his commission in 1963. There, he was based in the Mendoza airbase, where he was able to act as both flight instructor for the F86 and military advisor. Always a crack shot and a good teacher, Pete formed the first Argentine Sabrejet gunnery team, which promptly visited Nellis AFB in Nevada and won the Top Gun shooting trophy.<br><br><br>CORROSION CORNER<br><br>Returning to civilian life, Fernandez successfully made the switch from piloting small swift Air Force planes to pushing big multi-engine transports through the sky. He was unable to get work with the major airlines because of his advanced age and lack of a college education, so he freelanced whatever cargo someone would pay to ship. Most of Pete's flying after he quit the military was done out of a notorious run-down section of Miami International Airport known as Corrosion Corner. <br><br>During the second half of the 20th Century, “The Corner” provided a home for low-budget transport services flying all over Latin America in antiquated planes that should have been in museums. A tour of duty there was as adventurous as anything Fernandez had done before. Corner veteran Pete Fusco recorded in his irreverent book, Moondog’s Academy of the Air, “Pilots who flew from The Corner shared much in common with the aircraft they flew. Both operated on the edge of mainstream aviation, faced an uncertain future and took their chances a day at a time. There was nothing boring about The Corner.....lawless operators and smugglers; unpaid vacations in squalid Third World jails; long trips into the night in junk aircraft over vast stretches of shark-infested ocean to places with unpronounceable names; little pay in return for hard work.” <br><br>To support the mushrooming Latin America-South Florida economic expansion of that era -- and due to a shortage of available air transport -- the Federal Aviation Administration chose to wink and nod as wrecks that should have been grounded for scrap continued flying. The men of The Corner provided South Florida with a makeshift air cargo infrastructure during the 1960s and 1970s which in turn permitted Miami to propel itself from a vacation town into an economic colossus that today dominates the entire region. On Corrosion Corner’s oily tarmacs, Pete Fernandez, a war hero celebrity of the 1950s, became just another one of many faceless aviators who, on guts and talent, kept this rust bucket air corps flying when there was no one else to do the job. (Corrosion Corner will apparently remain a relic of the last century, for during the late 1990s, chop-axe scrap operations based there that made the airdrome a final stop for antique aircraft were moved from Miami International to Opa-locka Airport, 10 miles to the north. Much of The Corner’s old home along NW 36th Street was demolished to build a modern air cargo terminal, and the area no longer resembles the ramshackle legend that came before.)<br><br>Day and night, decrepit cargo planes flew in and out of The Corner from all over the hemisphere. The Air Cargo News chronicled the infamous airdrome. “Once upon a time at Miami International Airport, there was a collection of old Curtiss C46s, Lockheed Constellations and other itinerant, even more mysterious aircraft, which shifted uneasily with the tide of a cargo construction boom at the airport, moving in and out every night on little cat’s feet. Corrosion Corner, situated at the northwest corner of the field, is where in the early afternoon nacelles for reciprocating piston engines were strewn about the hardstand as mechanics labored under the intense South Florida sun patching up dogged old sky wagons for one more assignment as air cargo carriers. During the dark time early morning hours while everyone else slept, Corrosion Corner Miami was wide-awake like Twelve O’ Clock High, with cargo on the move. Here, loadmasters bark out instructions in Spanish to ground crews, as half century old cranky, sputtering engines come to life. Later a parade of vintage aircraft moves slowly away like silver ghosts glinting in the moonlight, laughing in throaty growls at having once more cheated a nearby crane that relentlessly chops up the less fortunate.”<br><br>“The Corner in the late 1960s,” Fusco remembered, “was something of a final roll call for all the great, near great and not-so-great propeller-driven aircraft discarded by the airlines of the world. Few of these aircraft escaped a stop in The Corner on their way to oblivion. Like a well-run whorehouse, The Corner had something for everybody: a sampling of Lockheeds, from the stately long-legged Constellations to virile Lodestars; hulking Boeing 307s and their bulbous and awkward sons, the Stratocruisers; anything with propellers ever built by Douglas, up to and including the DC7, grande dame of all the propliners; irrefutable Curtiss C46s; exotic, bewildering immigrants such as the Vickers Vanguard and Bristol Britannia; even a few early jets, most notably the lovely but star-crossed deHaviland Comet, which had a tendency in its airline days to implode in flight. Obsolescence ruled The Corner.” <br><br>Beyond moving legitimate freight, many of The Corner’s rogue pilots were also involved in the nefarious and closely related activities of smuggling and contract work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Pete Fernandez got caught up in this intrigue, quite possibly due to an addiction to excitement he found courting danger in the sky. <br><br>Here began the final phase of Fernandez’s flying career, a path that ultimately would end his life in public disgrace. <br><br><br>BLACK OPERATIONS<br><br>The family of Pete Fernandez was shocked at his death in October 1980, not so much that he was killed in an airplane, but by the details. Running dope seemed extremely out of character for Fernandez, who had expressed a virulently anti-drug attitude all his adult life. Pete’s two oldest children from his first marriage had both struggled with substance abuse problems as teenagers in the 1970s, adding to his strong feelings against illegal narcotics. <br><br>Of course, anything is possible, and the fact that Fernandez was experiencing financial trouble in 1980 could have driven him to go against his principles and fly a load of dope north. According to this theory, the flight was a one-time effort intended to resolve his economic problems. It would be naive to dismiss the possibility out of hand; certainly, pilots in South Florida are not lacking for offers to cash in on their aerial skills by smuggling. Due to geography, such temptation always exists in that part of the world. Yet, beyond a sense of denial at their sudden and tragic loss, the Fernandez family had solid reasons to suspect that there was more to that last flight than simple drug-running. <br><br>Immediately after Pete died, there had been a flurry of lurid national headlines about a war hero gone bad. A more thorough investigative piece appeared in the Miami Herald in November, mentioning a “black operation” Fernandez had pulled for the CIA in the early 1970s, the theft in Peru of a Soviet model plane. (Black operations, sometimes shortened to “black ops,” is a term used by intelligence agents to describe clandestine missions so secret that they are carried out off the books, with no records kept nor budgetary expenditures noted.)<br><br>The Herald reporter, Fitz McAden, speculated that Fernandez’s background in black ops made it possible that Pete was working undercover on the dope run, but in the end, McAden concluded the ace had smuggled drugs due to his dire financial situation. This article was picked up by several newspapers across the country, further spreading Fernandez’s infamy. Once the media spasm subsided, Fernandez became a forgotten man. He is mentioned in print histories of the Korean air war, but cable-era television documentaries that have proliferated since the 1990s entirely ignore his accomplishments. <br><br>However, rumors of an alternate version of events began to emerge immediately upon Fernandez’s death. This story went that rather than simply profiteering on the drug trade, Pete was actually gathering intelligence on dope smuggling for the U.S. government. In the Herald article, McAden quoted a Broward County narcotics detective working on the case, Nick Navarro, as saying that Fernandez had been “helpful” in past drug investigations. Mysteriously, Navarro then refused to elaborate further. One of Pete’s nephews, who in 1980 was a police officer, contacted the Drug Enforcement Agency and learned that a file existed on his uncle, but that it was classified. <br><br>The Fernandez family knew that Pete had worked clandestine black ops for his government before, and not just the Peru job mentioned in the Herald article. The first plane Fernandez stole for a U.S. intelligence agency -- about which reporter McAden knew nothing -- was in 1965. Details remain sketchy regarding this affair, but what is known is that after retiring from the Air Force and divorcing his first wife, Fernandez was living with his mother and involved in a bitter custody fight for his two young daughters. Pete quickly needed money buy a house before the judge hearing the case would allow him to have his kids. <br><br>Always well-informed by the Corrosion Corner grapevine, an American intelligence agency -- exactly which one is unknown -- heard about the old ace’s dilemma and offered Fernandez just enough cash to make the down payment on a home if he would steal a Soviet-model jet from somewhere in Latin America. They needed a hot pilot who spoke Spanish, and Pete was their man. Fernandez did not disappoint them: he pulled off the heist, though not without some difficulty. To get through security and aboard the aircraft inconspicuously, Pete boosted the jet dressed in civilian clothes. After he took off, fighters were scrambled to chase him. He maneuvered wildly and escaped his pursuers, but flying without a G-suit permitted the intense gravitational forces to burst the blood vessels in and around his eyes.<br><br>Fernandez’s second wife, Jill Bellamy, was aware of what her husband had done to buy their home. “He did it for his kids,” she stated at the time of his death. Another of Pete’s nephews, David Griffith, also knew about his uncle’s “intel” job. Griffith was living in Miami in 1965 and spending a lot of time with Fernandez. He visited his uncle in the hospital after the plane theft and saw firsthand the physical toll the effort took. (Forty years later, Pete’s family still lives in the same Miami house he risked his life to obtain for them.) <br><br>To summarize, given Fernandez’s well-known negative opinions regarding drugs, the cryptic comments of Detective Navarro, the existence of a DEA file and finally, the actual track record of intelligence work for the U.S. government, it was logical for Pete’s family to wonder what was really behind his fatal crash on Grand Bahama Island. But until hard evidence surfaced in 2004, confirming what had been suspected for over two decades -- that he was working undercover -- Fernandez’s reputation has remained under a cloud. <br><br><br>GERRY HEMMING<br><br>The richest source of information regarding Pete Fernandez’s last years in the air as a deep cover infiltrator of the drug trade comes from his case officer
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

On Col. Sabow's suspicious death...

Postby robertdreed » Sun Sep 17, 2006 9:33 pm

<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.militarycorruption.com/sabow-2.htm">www.militarycorruption.com/sabow-2.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby isachar » Mon Sep 18, 2006 3:17 am

That explains a lot.<br><br>Gary Webb is validated and vindicated. <p></p><i></i>
isachar
 
Posts: 950
Joined: Thu Nov 03, 2005 2:23 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby robertdreed » Mon Sep 18, 2006 7:43 am

"...Special Operations Group chief Conein had arranged a deal whereby the DEA would lay claim any CIA asset busted for narcotics smuggling was on a deep-cover DEA assignment. “The deal was,” Hemming told Hopsicker, “that anybody involved can be busted, but not convicted, because we weren’t law enforcement, we were intelligence.”<br><br>Hopsicker added, “Hemming then gave the most understandable rationale we’ve heard for why American intelligence became involved in a massive way in the drug business in Central and South America during the 1970s... ‘You cannot allow that kind of capability to remain freelance. There is too much money. Some tinhorn asshole comes in, takes over and ends up ruling a subcontinent. [Besides,] we figure, who’s using the dope? Leftists! This is not a fact that messes up my chess game.”..." <p></p><i></i>
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby heyjt » Mon Sep 18, 2006 1:29 pm

I wrote extensively about Evergreen Aviation in the early '90's for some lefty papers in Portland. Evergreen's corporate offices are in McMinville Oregon. We even produced a video for cable-access tv about Evergreen and a copy was requested by the Air Force Office of special Investigations.<br> During that time, I interviewed Daniel Sheehan (he lied to me)<br>and recieved an unsolicited phone call from Gene Wheaton, who spun a few yarns. I do believe they derailed the Sabow murder investigation as well as the Christic Institute lawsuit.<br><br> Did anybody else notice that the Southern Air Transport pilot was not Bill Cooper, it was Eugene Hasenfus? <p></p><i></i>
heyjt
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby robertdreed » Mon Sep 18, 2006 2:16 pm

The pilot of the SAT plane in the incident in question was a man named William Cooper. He died in the crash. Recalling without a handy reference, I think another person may have died in that crash, also.<br><br>Hasenfus, who was either the co-pilot or the navigator, survived. <p></p><i></i>
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby robertdreed » Mon Sep 18, 2006 2:23 pm

Those stories about Evergreen Aviation reveal the same modus operandi spoken of by Terry Reed and John Cummings in the book <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->- CIA Covert Ops finding ways to transfer government resources from other agencies for clandestine purposes like the Contra effort, notably aircraft and small arms. <br><br>In her book <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Bluegrass Conspiracy</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, Sally Denton at one point also alludes to a similar operation out of China Lake Naval Station in California, embezzling things like radar equipment and transponders. And the Edwin Wilson case has the hallmarks of such an operation all over it. <br><br>I wonder- is Wilson still in Federal prison, despite the recent court ruling where the judge found that the activities for which he was convicted- attempting to smuggle a large quantity of C4 explosive back in the 1970s, to one-time high-media-profile US "nemesis" ( and present-day "ally" ) Mohammar Qaddaffi- were in fact sancrioned by higher authority in the Federal government? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 9/19/06 3:30 am<br></i>
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby chiggerbit » Mon Sep 18, 2006 9:16 pm

Eugene Hassenfus, of Iran/contra fame, I assume. OMG, these names just keep circulating, over and over again.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Q261TsBqgz4J:www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/sheehan.htm+Eugene+Hasenfus%2BF.+Lee+Bailey&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1">72.14.203.104/search?q=ca...=clnk&cd=1</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=chiggerbit@rigorousintuition>chiggerbit</A> at: 9/18/06 7:33 pm<br></i>
chiggerbit
 
Posts: 8594
Joined: Tue May 10, 2005 12:23 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby chiggerbit » Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:22 pm

Huh?<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:UjToK-xqYY4J:www.mail-archive.com/ctrl%40listserv.aol.com/msg28823.html+Louis+Gifrada&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3">72.14.203.104/search?q=ca...=clnk&cd=3</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
chiggerbit
 
Posts: 8594
Joined: Tue May 10, 2005 12:23 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Cocaine Airways

Postby chiggerbit » Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:36 pm

So, what's this about Christic Institute? Any new info on them?" Wiki here:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christic_Institute">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christic_Institute</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
chiggerbit
 
Posts: 8594
Joined: Tue May 10, 2005 12:23 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Christic / Sheehan

Postby heyjt » Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:15 am

The last I heard of Danny Sheehan was when a friend sent a video tape where he was on a big UFO story.<br> Kinda' fits the M.O., doesn't it?<br><br> On the other hand, one of their chief lawyers, Lanny Sinkin had moved to Hawaii last I heard, and Father Bill Davis was still around and active. Both of those guys were good men. Of course, this was over ten years ago. <p></p><i></i>
heyjt
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Christic / Sheehan

Postby robertdreed » Tue Sep 19, 2006 5:28 am

The last time I heard Sheehan, it was around 2002 or 2003. He was on Caroline Casey's astrology show, talking about the 2012/Mayan synchonicity concrescence, or whatever it is. And pumping up John Kerry for President. I seem to recall that he provided some occult justification for why Kerry was supposed to be The One in 2004.<br><br>It's tough to know whether such people are conscious put-on artists, or merely terminally sloppy thinkers. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>
robertdreed
 
Posts: 1560
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 11:14 am
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to Deep Politics

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests