THE PEGASUS FILE

Part 1

A former CIA deep-cover agent turns whistleblower at great risk.
His shocking allegations expose powerful names controlling the international drug trade in very high places.

(Go to part 2)

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 4, #3 (April-May 1997).
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From sensitive, highly secretive (and hitherto largely unknown) Special Forces covert operations in Cambodia, to wandering CIA asset; through to "black ops" activities in Grenada and Oliver North's Iran-Contra "Enterprise", as well as membership in an international "hit team", Gene "Chip" Tatum has seen it all, done it all and is now telling it all.

Tatum claims to know where the skeletons are buried. Above all, he is aware that his testimony implicates serving and former US Presidents plus a whole list of high-level government officials and others in a welter of nefarious activities - including assassination, blackmail, coercion, gun-running, money-laundering and cocaine-trafficking.

Tatum, a lanky Floridian, turned whistleblower following his arrest on a treason charge in early 1995. The charge was both astonishing and patently ludicrous, and was later dropped and replaced by a fraud charge - a drastic step-down. Found guilty, he was sentenced to serve a 15-month sentence. In March 1996, an additional charge - conspiring to embezzle - was brought against him. Found guilty, he was incarcerated in Jesup Federal Correctional Facility, Georgia, where he is serving a 27-month concurrent sentence. Ensuing press interest resulted in one article appearing in the Tampa Tribune on 4 May 1996.

Many questions continue to hang over the conduct of the trial. His defence lawyer refused to call any of the 80 witnesses whom Tatum nominated for the defence. Later, his lawyer freely confessed to having come under pressure from the US Department of Defense. Tatum says the first charge was a set-up to discredit him following his "resignation" from "Operation Pegasus". The second charge he views with greater scepticism and concern.

Tatum's resignation from Pegasus followed his refusal to "neutralise" a leading US political figure in the 1992 US presidential elections. Tatum declares he will not "participate in assassinations of any sort, character assassinations or anything, of American citizens". He goes on to explain that back in 1994, in a telephone conference call involving Oliver North, Felix Rodríguez and the late William Colby of the CIA, he was warned to turn over incriminating documents and tapes he had accumulated for his "retirement". He wryly observes that had he done so, he would probably have been quickly "terminated" in an "extreme" way - a speciality of the Pegasus team of which he was once a member.

Countering this demand, Tatum volunteered to plead guilty on a fabricated felony count and serve a 12-month sentence - so that his credibility would be damaged in the event he ever decided to speak out. His incarceration for the second charge - and especially the six- month sentence of his wife, Nancy - led him to speak out about his life, almost 30 years of which he served as a "black" operative, and to reveal and destroy the command structure of Pegasus. It is an extraordinary story.

"OPERATION RED ROCK"

Tatum has written of his early career in the military, and his involvement in a highly sensitive and classified operation, in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Operation Red Rock". Joining the Air Force in February 1970, he went through Army jump school, escape and evasion training, jungle training, sea survival school and diving school and was assigned along with six others as "Combat Controllers" (the USAF equivalent of Special Forces), receiving his distinctive Special Forces burgundy-coloured beret. From there he was assigned to Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, and then on to Fort Bragg, North Carolina - home of the "Green Berets" - for training in C4 plastic explosives, mines, nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, plus indoctrination in electronic and psychological operations.

Posted to South-East Asia as Airman First Class (A1C) in December 1970, he was assigned as a radio operator on a Forward Air Control (FAC) aircraft attached to Task Force Alpha at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. In short order he was recruited (an involuntary "volunteer") to "Team Red Rock". The team was composed of eight US Army Green Berets, three US Navy SEALs and two "cowboys" - a euphemism for CIA paramilitary specialists. With Tatum attached, Team Red Rock totalled 14 in all, and was about to be tasked with an operation that came directly from the White House.

In January 1971 the team received a final briefing from General Alexander Haig, who had flown in specially, along with CIA Saigon Chief William Colby - nicknamed by the team as "Mr Peepers" because of his resemblance to a well-known character in a TV sitcom. Haig and Colby outlined the plan, stressing its importance and extreme classification. President Nixon, desperate to quell domestic riots over an increasingly unpopular war, sought to withdraw all US personnel from South-East Asia. Withdrawal would - and, in the end, ultimately did - cause a military vacuum, quickly leading to the defeat of South Vietnamese forces.

During those years, Nixon was also running a "secret war" in Cambodia and Laos. In Laos, a dwindling number of Meo tribesmen, together with covert US personnel employed by the CIA proprietary company, Air America, were battling against superior North Vietnamese ground forces. A much similar pattern was occurring in Cambodia, amid grave fears that the "domino theory" would result if either of these two nations were to fall to the Communist North Vietnamese. Nixon hoped that the vacuum caused by the withdrawal of US covert forces could be filled by native Cambodian forces. Lon Nol, the Cambodian leader, stubbornly continued to resist Nixon's diplomatic overtures to take up the slack, being anxious to hedge his bets and realistic about his chances of survival as Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces prepared to swarm in, unhindered by US air power.

A plan had been drawn up at the highest levels of Nixon's administration. Team Red Rock were to enter Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, in secret and attack the airport and military and civil installations, wreaking as much havoc as possible. The plan called for the team to parachute into the outskirts of Phnom Penh, carrying captured NVA "Sappers" with them. Taken in unarmed and alive, the Sappers would be "sacrificed" and their bodies left to be discovered by Cambodian forces. A furious Lon Nol would assume North Vietnam was to blame. It was hoped that such an act would stiffen Lon Nol's backbone. With nowhere else to turn, the US puppet would urgently seek US hardware to strengthen his forces and continue the battle.

The team members were not told that they, too, were to be sacrificed by their President to ensure that word of the operation never reached the light of day. A detachment of Montagnard tribesmen ("the Yards"), in the pay of the CIA, was assigned to liquidate each member of the team and dispose of the bodies. The attack went successfully, but the team's suspicion of "the Yards" foiled the betrayal. Using their knowledge of "escape and evasion" tactics, the team decided to trek to the Vietnamese border and back to safety with US forces.1

Casualties thinned out their numbers until only eight of them remained. Soon these, too, were captured by NVA regulars and underwent hideous torture at the hands of Chinese and Russian interrogators. Ultimately, only Tatum and one other team member survived the ordeal.

Convalescing, Tatum was debriefed by CIA station chief, William Colby, and told he would, in future, be kept close to "the Agency". Recruited into the CIA, the yawning door of future "black" operations creaked open. Life would never be the same again for Chip Tatum.

CIA DEEP-COVER AGENT

For the next 10 years or so, Tatum's covert activities were varied. For a while, he worked out of Homestead Air Force Base where he was NCIOC of the tower receiver sight and MARS station. This was the base which then-President Nixon used for his frequent visits to the Key Biscayne, Florida, "White House". Much of this period remains obscured behind a thick blanket of classification.

From there, he was stationed in northern Italy, tasked with visiting the border towns of Yugoslavia and Italy. Colby felt that as a young Air Force man, Tatum might be "approached" in these towns for "information". The idea was to make contact with foreign agents and covertly gather information about them and their operations. Later, he was tasked with infiltrating Yugoslavia in order to gather intelligence on potential successors to the then Yugoslavian President Tito.

Tatum was also sent to search for missing US POWs from Vietnam and elsewhere in South-East Asia.

By 1976, Tatum was operating out of Lamar, Colorado, in a communications facility called OLAB. His contact there was Don Holmes, president of Valley - a Savings & Loan bank.2 Tatum acted as his courier, shuttling between Lamar and Springfield, Colorado, with transaction files. From there he was transferred to MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida.

Shortly before his MacDill posting, Tatum received a call from Colby telling him he was resigning his position as Director, Central Intelligence, and recommending Tatum should deactivate his clandestine CIA activities. Colby continued, saying that remaining active without Colby there to protect him might place him in personal "jeopardy", as he had powerful enemies in Washington. This warning referred to Nixon, Kissinger and Haig, and Tatum's role in and survival from "Operation Red Rock".

Tatum took good notice of the warning and became deactive. Later, in 1979, he requested and was granted entry into a USAF Reserve program. Leaving active military service he moved to Gunnison, Colorado, and took up a position with Bo Calloway, owner of the Crested Bute ski area. The appointment was arranged by Colby.

During 1980 he received a visit from two men who informed him he was being reactivated, but into the US Army instead of the Air Force. He was sent to the US Army Flight School for rotary- wing training at Fort Rucker. From there he was assigned to the 160th Aviation Battalion/Special Forces at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Shortly afterwards, the 160th combined with others to form Task Force 160.

It was in this unit that Tatum played a "spooky" role in the US invasion of Grenada. A photograph of him standing in front of his MD-500 Defender gunship on the beach-head in Grenada, appeared along with a feature story in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Tatum will only say of this episode that he "wasn't there", in the same sense that he "wasn't in Cambodia".

At that time he was attached to the US Army's 160th air wing at Fort Campbell. Not only was the Hughes helicopter then not in the Army's inventory, but the 160th didn't officially exist. Jim Malone, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, finds this extraordinary. He has documents showing the 160th was stationed at Fort Campbell, even though officials in the Pentagon continue to deny it - as they deny the wing's role in Grenada. Malone, in a telephone conversation with this writer, advised that the 160th is now stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina - home of the famous Special Forces, the Green Berets. Their mission is to fly "Delta teams" on covert assignments, Malone added.

THE CONTRA COCAINE TRAIN

During 1983, Colby established contact again, advising Tatum he would shortly be contacted by "a man called North". This, as Tatum was to discover later, was none other than Lt Col. Oliver North - the central architect of America's Nicaraguan Contra campaign. Besides fighting a covert war, North was also the link-man in much, much dirtier work.

The "Contragate" years teem with well-documented accounts of illicit wholesale gun-running and dope-smuggling. The exposé series published in Autumn 1996 by the San Jose Mercury-Post, entitled "The Dark Alliance", openly finger-points at the CIA and the Reagan administration for turning a blind eye to massive cocaine smuggling. Moreover, the series of articles claims that the explosion of "crack cocaine" in Los Angeles resulted entirely from the Contra leaders-cum-dope peddlers who made vast personal fortunes from their activities. Today, the official argument remains that the Contras were "freelancing" without the knowledge or consent of their CIA "handlers" or North's so-called "Enterprise". Despite these assertions, mountains of hard evidence point in a different direction. Included in this evidence is an entry from North's own diary which shows his knowledge of cocaine shipments.

In stark contrast to these denials, Tatum says that North's "Enterprise" not only set up the cocaine factories and "ran" the Colombian cartels, but was also responsible for masterminding the massive shipments of narcotics into the US. Significantly, he is not alone in making these accusations. A number of those involved in Col. North's operations have subsequently come forward and spilled the beans. Almost all of these "whistleblowers" have been hounded and imprisoned. Some have died, whilst others have fled. The whole Contra thing, Tatum states, was also being used by an extremely covert group called Pegasus.

During February 1985, Tatum was piloting "Dustoff" (Medevac) flights for the US Army's 3/498th Medical Company, stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Two flight crews, including Tatum's, were transferred to Palmerola Air Base, Honduras. Each flight consisted of a pilot, copilot, medic and crew chief. Once familiarised, they assumed the Medevac mission for Joint Task Force Bravo. Previously, in 1984, Tatum infiltrated the 3/498th on the instructions of Lt Col. Oliver North who had established contact under the code-name "Jake" (North had "control" of the 160th air wing and was also deeply involved with the tactical planning of "black ops" missions in the Grenada invasion).

On 15 February 1985, during a flight to La Ceiba, Honduras, he was instructed to contact his local "handler", Major Felix Rodríguez - later to prove a major figure in the Iran-Contra investigation. Rodríguez informed Tatum that in addition to his Army "Medevac" duties he was to support covert "Pegasus" missions. These, he was told, would take priority over his other duties. He was also given his "chain of command": three individuals, any of whom could authorise Pegasus missions.

In addition to Oliver North and Felix Rodríguez, Tatum would henceforward take orders from Amiram Nir, a former Mossad agent and advisor to Vice President Bush. Aviation support for Pegasus missions operated out of Ilopango Air Base, Honduras (home of the CIA proprietary airline Corporate Air Services) plus numerous Contra camps located in the jungles and mountains along the Honduras-Nicaragua border.3 A common feature of all future Pegasus missions was the transport "of large white coolers in and out of the Contra camps".

On 26 February 1985, Tatum and his crew were instructed to fly two individuals to one of the larger Contra camps on the Honduran border. His flight log lists the names of the two individuals as Bill Cooper and Buzz Sawyer, both of whom worked for Corporate Air Services. Following a meeting between the CIA agents and Contra leaders, Tatum was given a sealed cooler, marked "Vaccine", weighing approximately 200 pounds, and instructed to deliver it to a USAF C-130 transport plane at La Mesa Airport, Honduras. Two crew members offloading the cooler accidentally dropped it, breaking the seal. Inside were over 100 bags of cocaine. Tatum resealed the cooler and later watched as it was transferred aboard the C-130, outward bound for Panama.

On his return to Palmerola Air Base, Honduras, Tatum phoned Col. North to advise him of his discovery. North replied that it was "a trophy of war" and that the "Sandinistas are manufacturing cocaine and selling it to fund the military". North closed the conversation by saying that "the cocaine was bound for the world courts as evidence" against the Sandinistas.

The whole incident struck Tatum as odd and reminded him strongly of earlier missions dating back to 1983-84 when he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as a Special Operations pilot. Regularly he would trans-ship white coolers, marked as "Medical Supplies", to Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas. On two occasions he carried similar coolers to Mena Airport, Arkansas. Deliveries of medical coolers to Little Rock AFB were picked up by Dr Dan Lasater - a close confidant of the then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

By now, almost two years later, Tatum had decided to document his discovery to safeguard his "retirement". Thereafter, he documented all Pegasus flights on the reverse of his flight logs.

This was a difficult time for Tatum, since he had three balls to juggle at the same time. On the one hand he was flying classified active-duty missions for the US Army; on the other, he was flying CIA missions arranged through Mil. Group A (CIA), located at the embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; and thirdly, he was flying Pegasus missions under the control of William Colby, Oliver North and George Bush following his recruitment into Pegasus by Colby in 1986.

Tatum completed numerous missions during his rotation out of Honduras. Picking up and trans-shipping coolers containing cocaine was a regular event. Extraordinarily, this included infiltrating Nicaraguan airspace (Tatum says it was not difficult to infiltrate any country and that "foreign powers" would kill to know how it is done), and landing at Bluefields Air Base with deliveries for placement aboard civilian C-123s and C-130s.4 This mission was followed by a brief stint in Colombia, where he was assigned to assist the Drug Enforcement Administration's "War on Drugs", only to discover the DEA was heavily engaged in narcotics trafficking.

THE "BOSS HOG" LIST

One of the most flamboyant individuals involved in the cocaine trail from Columbia through Honduras to Panama and on into the United States, was Barry Seal. Seal flew an assortment of aircraft, offloading shipments of weapons in South America and picking up deliveries of cocaine for his return flight to the US on behalf of Col. North's Enterprise. His primary base of operations was Mena Airport, Arkansas.

A CIA "asset", Seal was later arrested and became a DEA informer. Prior to his killing in 1986 - allegedly by a Medellín cartel assassination squad in revenge for informing on them - Seal openly boasted he had information that implicated high-level government officials, including then-Vice President Bush, in the Enterprise's narcotics-trafficking business.

Tatum would soon get to meet Barry Seal and become close friends. Tatum recalls being present during a meeting between Oliver North, Felix Rodríguez, Amiram Nir and General Alvarez from Honduras, when North stated that Vice President Bush was going to have his son Jeb arrange "something out of Columbia". This conversation focused on Barry Seal's increasingly notorious activities. When Tatum later heard Seal had died, he immediately understood who was behind the killing. The discussion also made it clear that VP Bush, Governor Clinton and his three respective "handlers" were knee-deep in the cocaine venture and making fistloads of money.

Unknown to all those present, Seal had earlier provided Tatum with a list of names of those high-level government officials deeply involved with or responsible for controlling the narcotics business. Seal called them the "Boss Hogs". Tatum has kept this list a tightly-held secret until recent weeks. The list cites the surnames only, and is reproduced above, as I received it, complete with misspellings as written. I have appended their full names and titles in brackets.

"BOSS HOGS" - UNITED STATES