Former CIA Pilot Tells of Guns and Drugs Shipments : Veterans Today

Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, former CIA pilot, reported the illegal shipments of guns and drugs to Congress. Plumlee said he flew into former MCAS El Toro, CA, a number of times, in unmarked C-130s in the early hours of the morning.

Colonel James Sabow, USMC

However, the death of Marine Colonel James Sabow is not some crackpot conspiracy tossed around by those with nothing else to do.

Last week’s tragic shooting of two guards at the Pentagon was definitely the result of a mentally unbalanced individual who apparently was consumed with the death of Marine Colonel James Sabow at MCAS El Toro in January 1991.

Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, Santa Elena, Costa Rica, mid-1980s

The truth is that experts outside of the Defense Department believe that the forensic evidence supports that Colonel Sabow was murdered. According to Dr. David Sabow MD, his brother, the motive was to prevent him from telling about the shipments of cocaine into the U.S. to fund the Contra war in the 80s.

Independent investigations by others and the overwhelming forensic evidence strongly suggests murder. There was no reason in the world after Vietnam, 27 years in the Marine Corps with an outstanding record, the rank of colonel and a wife and children, that Col. Sabow would commit this act.

Michael A. Jacobs, attorney and retired supervisor of the Orange County District Attorney’s Homicide Trials Division, believes that homicide is supported by:

(1) compressed fracture to the right rear occipital skull and the resulting hemorrhaging beneath the skull and

(2) the large amount of aspirated blood found in the alveoli of Colonel Sabow’s lungs.

Jacobs told Congressman Duncan Hunter that “Colonel Sabow’s death could not have been a suicide but had to have been a homicide inflicted by the hands of another.”

Former Lt. Col. Anthony Verducci, a Marine Corps JAG [attorney] who was stationed at MCAS El Toro in 1991, wrote Dr. Sabow, “I have reviewed x-rays, crime scene photos, and letters submitted by forensic pathologists and other experts about Col. Sabow’s death… these materials lead me to believe that Colonel Sabow did not die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound [my emphasis]. As a Marine, former prosecutor, and citizen, I believe that an impartial law enforcement agency must review this case.”

Deadly Setup for a Whistleblower

Colonel Sabow, Assistant Chief, MCAS El Toro, had been removed from his position a few days before his death, pending the outcome of an investigation for a minor infraction relating to the carrying of personal items on an official military flight.

Friends close to Jim Sabow say the charges were concocted strictly in an effort to keep him from blowing the lid off clandestine federal drug running that he became aware of, with the planes actually landing at El Toro.

Dr. David Sabow, a retired neurologist and the younger brother of Colonel Sabow, said his brother was pressured to retire but told others that he would accept a court martial, since he had nothing to do with the shipment of cocaine in civilian aircraft to the U.S. In doing so, Dr. Sabow said his brother unknowingly signed his own death warrant.

A former CIA pilot, Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, is very familiar with the events surrounding Col. Sabow’s untimely death. He says that the word being spread from military personnel at El Toro through his group, was that Col. Sabow had discovered illegal flights coming into El Toro Marine Air Base at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., obviously carrying illegal contraband, and that he intended to blow the whistle. He had also heard that Col. Sabow was going to be relieved of his duties because of his intention to report the drug shipments.

Plumlee is convinced that Col. Sabow was murdered to silence him.

“These trips were approved by military intelligence personnel attached to the Pentagon, with CIA logistical support. They were made in total secrecy to the extent that other government agencies were not aware of the existence of these flights, or of the operation. The pilots were given a specific coded transponder number to squawk so their aircraft would not be challenged by U.S. Customs aircraft when patrolling the U.S. border.” – Former CIA pilot Tosh Plumlee

“It is highly probable that Col. Sabow became aware of the night flights into El Toro, as his base housing was on the landing flight path. A serious hitch in the operation came when a new loadmaster assigned to El Toro complained about the unregistered planes landing at night and demanded that they be registered, but a senior officer ordered him to shut up and to stop insisting on registration. The loadmaster complained to the inspector general, which prompted the IG to come to El Toro for an investigation.”

Plumlee said, “He was willing to expose the operation that sent American weapons into Latin America on American cargo aircraft, and he would prove that he had no hand in bringing illegal drugs into the country on return trips.”

Col. Sabow’s wife Sally Sabow, told her brother-in-law that the day before her husband was killed, a senior officer entered Col. Sabow’s home, and was observed shaking his finger in Col. Sabow’s face, shouting, “You will never go to a court martial…”

Drugs, Weapons and El Toro

“These trips were approved by military intelligence personnel attached to the Pentagon, with CIA logistical support. They were made in total secrecy to the extent that other government agencies were not aware of the existence of these flights, or of the operation. The pilots were given a specific coded transponder number to squawk so their aircraft would not be challenged by U.S. Customs aircraft when patrolling the U.S. border.”

He says it began in the 1980s, when the U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne were sent to Costa Rica for maneuvers. A large number of weapons were sent with them.

“However, some of the weapons did not return to the United States and were later taken off the books by the military, marked as either lost or destroyed and reported to the Government Accounting Office as such”.

“When the weapons were repaired and tested at China Lake and Twentynine Palms, in California, they were staged and once again flown back from El Toro Marine Air Base to Latin America, via Mexico, to be supplied to the Contras, the American-financed rebel group seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua”.

“These flyways and airstrips were secretly recorded by undercover flight crews and reported to various government interdiction agencies in the United States. In 1986, an early operation known by the code name, ‘Penetrate,’ was shut down because of the politically explosive Iran-Contra matter.”

According to Plumlee, an American DEA agent from Guadalajara, Mexico, by the name of Kiki Camarena, was killed because of his knowledge concerning the “CIA-Mexico” thing, as it was widely known among the covert civilian pilots.

Tosh Plumlee emailed a copy of a February 1991 letter from former Senator Gary Hart to Senator John Kerry, Chairman, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications and a redacted summary transcript of his testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from August 1991. The Senate report shows that Plumlee was a “former deep-cover military and CIA asset from 1956 to 1987 with a long history of CIA activities in Central America, Cuba, and Mexico.”

A little less than a month before Gary Hart’s letter to Senator Kerry, Marine Colonel James Sabow was found dead by his wife in his backyard at MCAS El Toro. Although there’s no connection to his death, the letter does describe in some detail the illegal arms and narcotic shipments made to fund the Contra war.


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