6.4 KiB
| title | aliases | created | updated | category | tags | summary | |||||||||
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| George Morales |
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2026-05-17 | 2026-10-08 | Organized Crime |
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Major Colombian drug trafficker who provided aircraft, money, and weapons to Eden Pastora's ARDE Contra faction with the knowledge and approval of CIA operatives, according to sworn congressional testimony. |
George Morales was a major Colombian cocaine trafficker who operated during the early 1980s. In early 1984, despite having just been indicted by a federal grand jury on conspiracy and cocaine trafficking charges, Morales was approached by Central Intelligence Agency-linked Contra officials seeking financial and logistical assistance for Eden Pastora ARDE Contra army.1
Support to the Contras
In March 1984, three Contra officials with close CIA ties (Octaviano Cesar, ARDE logistics chief Adolfo Chamorro, and ARDE air force commander Marcos Aguado) met with Morales at his offices in Fort Lauderdale and asked him to contribute to Pastora's army. Morales testified before the Senate subcommittee on July 15, 1987 that the Contra leaders "represent themselves as CIA agents," and on April 7, 1988 that "they told me that they were CIA agents. Two of them said they were," naming Cesar and Aguado.23 Cesar assured Morales that if he assisted the Contras, his legal problems from the pending cocaine indictment would disappear: "He told me he had plenty of friends, being him, the CIA, can advise the superiors about my financial support and airplane and training and therefore they will finally, eventually, will take care of my problem, which they did." During the entire time Morales worked with the Contras on drug deals, no action was taken on his pending indictment. When he started talking to U.S. Senate investigators about his Contra dealings two years later, the case moved quickly to trial and conviction.1
The subcommittee report instead says that Marta Healey introduced Morales to Chamorro, Aguado and Cesar at a meeting in Miami, when Morales was under indictment for marijuana smuggling, and that each of the three denied knowing of the indictment when they first met him at Healey's house.4 The Justice Department Inspector General records Morales saying that after Healey's May 1984 approach he met Cesar, Chamorro and Aguado in Miami.5
Morales later passed a DEA-administered lie detector test about his drug dealings with the Contras. Two pilots who flew the Contra drug missions for him - Fabio Ernesto Carrasco and Gary Betzner - confirmed his story under oath as U.S. government witnesses.1
Drug Flights
Morales and his pilots flew planeloads of weapons to a ranch in northern Costa Rica owned by CIA operative John Hull, which served as a training area and hiding place for Contra soldiers. After dropping off arms, large green duffel bags full of cocaine belonging to the Contras were loaded aboard and flown back into the United States, usually to the public airport at Opa Locka, Florida. "Every one of the flights I make to Costa Rica, the cocaine was the Contras', not mine," Morales testified. "I have my suppliers in Colombia. I don't need to go to Costa Rica."1
Aircraft Donations
Morales gave the Contras an aged C-47 cargo plane stored in Haiti, and the Senate subcommittee found that $10,000 was given to Chamorro to cover the cost of flying it to Ilopango.4 The airplane was officially transferred from Morales to Marcos Aguado for $1 on October 1, 1984. Between October 18, 1984 and February 12, 1986, the C-47 moved 156,000 pounds of material from Ilopango Airbase in El Salvador to airfields in Costa Rica. Investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny obtained the refueling receipts and confirmed the plane "was repeatedly piloted into and out of Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador by Marcos Aguado." Morales contended the C-47 continued from Ilopango to Colombia, where it was reloaded with drugs before flying back to Florida.1
When Aguado quit the war in May 1986, he sold the airplane to Norwin Meneses for $30,000. In 1997, Aguado said the C-47 was still being used by Meneses in Venezuela.1
Aguado and the Cocaine Flights
The Justice Department Inspector General's account of the Morales debriefing records that in June 1983 Contra pilots Aguado and Gerardo Duran flew a group that included members of the Medellin Cartel into Opa Locka airport, and that John Hull accompanied the group without taking part in the meeting. Morales said that Aguado refused to fly the cocaine shipments because of his "CIA connections."5 A Customs Service record given to the subcommittee showed Morales entering the United States from the Bahamas on October 13, 1984 with Aguado, Cesar and Chamorro, carrying $400,000 in cash and checks, which the three declared and said were returned to Morales after clearing customs.4
Footnotes
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 11: "They were looking in the other direction" ↩︎
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U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy: Hearings ... May 27, July 15, and October 30, 1987, Part 1 (1988), testimony of Jorge Morales, July 15, 1987, https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41152832_0003 ↩︎
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U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy: The Cartel, Haiti and Central America, Part 3, hearing of April 7, 1988, testimony of Jorge Morales (pp. 297 to 300) and videotaped depositions of October 31, 1987, https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41152832_0005. Gary Webb, in Dark Alliance (1998), dates the "CIA agents" statement to 1986 congressional testimony, and his chapter notes give April 7, 1986 and March 27, 1987. ↩︎
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U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), pp. 37, 50 to 52, https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎
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U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), Chapter XI, section on the debriefing of George Morales, https://irp.fas.org/agency/doj/oig/c4rpt/ch11p1.htm ↩︎