Ilopango Airbase

Ilopango Air Force Base is a military airfield outside San Salvador, El Salvador, that served as the hub for Oliver North's illegal Contra resupply operation and a center for Contra-connected cocaine trafficking during the 1980s. Situated atop a plateau surrounded by imposing cliffs, the base had a restricted military side tightly guarded by the Salvadoran military and a civilian side used for private aviation.¹

Contra Resupply Hub

According to Gary Webb, the Contras had been using Ilopango with Salvadoran Air Force commander General Juan Rafael Bustillo's blessing since 1983, when Norwin Meneses's friend, the pilot Marcos Aguado, arranged to base Eden Pastora's ARDE air force there.² The CIA Inspector General gives Aguado a Sandinista Air Force and Aeronica career until his 1983 defection and records him as Chief of Air Operations for the Sandino Revolutionary Front and ARDE by September 1984.³ Most accounts date the Contras' intensified use to September 1985, when North wrote to Felix Rodriguez asking him to use his influence with Bustillo to secure hangar space. Rodriguez "greased the skids" with Bustillo and became overseer of North's Contra resupply operation. Rodriguez recruited Luis Posada Carriles as his day-to-day manager, operating under the alias "Ramon Medina."¹

In October 1986 the Christian Science Monitor reported that the Contras had used Ilopango "at least since 1984, and probably earlier," to ship supplies to Pastora in Costa Rica, and that Bustillo "has been a major contact person for aiding the contra shipments, according to diplomats and other informed sources."⁴ Senate subcommittee records show some 156,000 pounds of material moved from Ilopango to Costa Rican airfields between October 18, 1984 and February 12, 1986 on a C-47 that had been transferred to Aguado for one dollar, on 24 flights, eleven of them to La Penca.⁵

The operation was run openly. The assistant regional security officer for the U.S. embassy in San Salvador told Iran-Contra investigators in 1991: "The woman selling tortillas at the gate of Ilopango could tell you what was going on. Anyone who ever flew into or over Ilopango air base could see something like that was going on. When looking down at Ilopango from the air, one could see one side of the airfield having a ragtag operation of inferior planes, dilapidated buildings and the like. On the other side of the airport were nice facilities, lift trucks unloading supplies from more sophisticated and bigger aircraft, and gringos running around." The modern facilities "all belonged to the American operation."¹

Hangars 4 and 5

Gary Webb wrote that Central Intelligence Agency records showed Hangar No. 4 was used by the Agency for covert Contra operations until it was turned over in 1985 to the National Security Council and Oliver North's illegal arms network, "The Enterprise." CIA agent Felix Rodriguez also used Hangar No. 4 for his helicopter-based counterinsurgency program. The adjoining Hangar No. 5 continued to be used by the CIA in support of the Contra project.¹ The CIA Inspector General's report gives a different sequence. In 1984 the CIA occupied a newly constructed warehouse and hangar, Hangar 5, and moved to it activities that had been conducted in the smaller Hangar 4. The report states that "After CIA had moved out of Hangar 4, it was used in 1985 and 1986 by NHAO and the Private Benefactors in support of their Contra-related operations."⁶

Webb wrote that in March 1986 a cable from the Costa Rican DEA office reported that a pilot named Carlos Amador intended to fly into Ilopango, pick up cocaine at Hangar No. 4, and transport it to Miami. The Inspector General's report describes a cable of April 1986 that reported a March 18, 1986 DEA report that Amador had recently flown from Costa Rica to San Salvador, where he had access to Hangar 4.⁷ The report also records that the drafter of one 1986 cable was not certain of the nature or affiliation of another entity that had operated from Hangar 4, and surmised that it "may have been associated either with Oliver North, the Private Benefactors, or the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO)."⁸ Amador had been working with the CIA for years, flying missions for the Costa Rican Contras. The CIA had collected information for at least a year indicating Amador was also flying drug planes between Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, and Miami for a pair of major cocaine traffickers, the Sarcovic brothers, at the same time he was flying for the White House.¹

Drug Trafficking

DEA agent Celerino Castillo's informant Murga, who wrote flight plans for private planes on the civilian side of the base, reported that Contra pilots were brazenly flying drugs to the United States and money to Panama, sometimes leaving with kilos in plain view or arriving with boxloads of money. When Castillo ran pilot names through DEA computers, nearly all came back as documented narcotics traffickers. Among the busiest pilots was Francisco Guirola Beeche, who was later observed zooming in and out of Ilopango hauling drugs in and carrying cash to the Bahamas.¹

Former Meneses aide Enrique Miranda testified at the 1991 Nicaraguan trial that cocaine from Colombia arrived at various Costa Rican airstrips, including one on CIA operative John Hull's farm, and was placed aboard Contra planes flown into Ilopango. There, according to Miranda, Aguado and Meneses supervised loading the cocaine onto U.S.-bound aircraft owned by the Salvadoran Air Force and, on occasion, the Miami-based CIA contractor Southern Air Transport. Miranda said Meneses told him U.S. military hardware stockpiled at Ilopango was loaded onto Salvadoran transport planes and flown south, where guns were traded for cocaine and flown back.¹

In February and March 1988 a CIA station cable reported that the Guatemalan suspected trafficker Reyner Veliz Cruz flew into Ilopango with Aguado in a twin-engine aircraft, the second time after customs officers had left, and that customs personnel at Ilopango "assume that Aguado has connections with drug trafficking."⁹

The Justice Department Inspector General reports that on December 14, 1988 Bustillo met DEA agent Celerino Castillo to discuss Castillo's suspicions that Salvadoran Air Force officers were using Ilopango for drug trafficking; Castillo named, among others, Air School Director Lieutenant Colonel Manfredo Koenigsberg, and according to a State Department cable of January 3, 1989, Bustillo said he would investigate and seek to transfer the officer. After DEA agent Richard deTriquet was detailed to Guatemala in 1989, he and Castillo went to El Salvador to investigate reports that cocaine moved through hangar five; a Salvadoran security officer denied them access, and the CIA chief of station told them there was no drug activity associated with hangar five.¹⁰

CIA Obstruction of Investigations

When Celerino Castillo's investigation began probing the hangars, the CIA sent an April 1986 cable from its El Salvador station to the Costa Rican office asking if the DEA could be persuaded to back off: "El Salvador Station would appreciate Costa Rica Station advising DEA not to make any inquiries into anyone re: Hangar No. 4 at Ilopango since only legitimate CIA supported operations were conducted from this facility." The CIA official who wrote that cable later conceded "the language in the cable could be read to suggest a meaning he did not intend" but acknowledged that was the effect it had.¹

U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr sent a secret "back channel" cable to the State Department requesting an internal DEA review of Castillo's allegations. The DEA informed Corr that Castillo's information was "totally inaccurate" and Castillo was told to close his investigation. When he continued, Corr personally ordered him to "stop the witch hunt." Three years later, when Castillo opened another investigation into drug trafficking at Hangar No. 5, the CIA refused to allow him on the base.¹

Alan Fiers Jr., the former CIA official who headed the Contra program from 1984 to 1988, acknowledged: "We had a capability and indeed a responsibility for reporting what had been happening at Ilopango." The DEA later claimed under FOIA that it had no reports from Castillo about drug trafficking at Ilopango, a claim the Justice Department Inspector General exposed as false, having found and quoted from the reports liberally.¹

Bombs from the Airport Battalion, 1992

Five 500-pound bombs were taken from a battalion at the San Salvador airport on February 26, 1992. Semana reported on April 12, 1992 that the arrested men, among them a Salvadoran army colonel, Roberto Antonio Leiva Jacobo, confessed that members of the Cali cartel had hired them and paid four million dollars for the bombs, and that the bombs were meant for a plan to kill Pablo Escobar in the Envigado prison.¹¹