(Ken Silva, Headline USA) So much for fighting the Deep State.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisc., have both introduced legislation that would ensure retirement benefits for the roughly 1,000 U.S. employees of Air America, a CIA front company widely suspected of being involved in drug trafficking.
When Grothman announced the bill last year, he touted the Air America workers as national heroes.
“According to now-declassified documents, we now know that Air America was not a private company and, in fact, acted as a top-secret arm of the executive branch in implementing Cold War policies under the management of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Grothman said in a press release.
“Air Americans saved tens of thousands of lives in search and rescue missions for downed U.S. military pilots, evacuations of allied refugees, and the final evacuations of Danang and Saigon in 1975.”
Grothman said his legislation was inspired by his constituent, 85-year-old Neil Hansen, who flew for Air America during the Vietnam War era.
“I flew the last plane out of Cambodia,” Hansen told The Washington Times in March 2021.
However, Air America has a dark past that hasn’t been mentioned by Congress.
According to historian Alfred McCoy, the CIA used Air America to smuggle drugs to fund its black ops.
The CIA has denied such allegations, but CIA officer Anthony Poshepny reportedly admitted to the drug trafficking to historian Douglas Valentine.
“Poshepny said he knew it was wrong for America’s allies to sell U.S. government weapons on the black market and for the CIA to engage in drug trafficking,” Covert Action Magazine reported last May.
Air America was dissolved in 1976, but many of its pilots went on to fly for the CIA during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.
One of those pilots, Barry Seal, achieved fame as a firearms and cocaine smuggler in Arkansas. According to the book Compromised, written by Iran-Contra whistleblower Terry Reed, Arkansas’ then-governor, Bill Clinton, was involved in the cocaine-smuggling operation.
Iran-Contra was exposed publicly when a former Air America pilot, William Cooper, was shot down and killed while smuggling arms into Nicaragua in 1986.
But don’t tell any of that to Congress. Grothman and Rubio’s legislation has at least 35 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle.
“The brave men and women of Air America deserve an immense token of appreciation for their service to our nation. I am proud to lead this bipartisan bill to ensure our fellow Americans who honorably served our great nation receive the recognition they deserve,” said Rubio.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
