When a Southern Air Transport plane was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986, the world got a rare window into U.S. government covert activity. Southern Air Transport was founded as a small cargo airline in 1947, the same year the Office of Strategic Services evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency as the U.S. pivoted to its Cold War posture. The agency owned the airline outright from 1960 until 1973, at which point it was sold to the same man, Stanley Williams, who had run the company since the Kennedy administration.
The downing of the plane and the testimony of its lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, pulled a string that eventually unraveled the scandal known as Iran–Contra. Using Southern Air Transport planes, the CIA was shipping weapons to Iran, using Israel as a middleman, and deploying the profits to arm the Contras against the leftist Nicaraguan government.
None of it was legal, and Southern Air Transport was getting too hot. In 1995, the company relocated its headquarters from Miami, Florida, to Columbus, Ohio. The company rebranded by flying imported shipments of clothing from China. But for three years in Columbus, the airline was dogged by rumors it had been—or was still—involved in drug smuggling.
According to the veteran Columbus journalist Bob Fitrakis, who provided his historical reporting on the topic to Drop Site and The American Conservative, investigators in both the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office and Ohio’s Office of Inspector General were looking into Southern Air Transport amid ongoing public scrutiny of the Iran–Contra affair—and sources in both offices identified Jeffrey Epstein as having a pivotal role in relocating the planes.
At the time, Epstein was a relatively obscure financier managing the money and real estate investments of the Ohio-based fashion and retail mogul Leslie Wexner. Under his stewardship of the Wexner empire, the planes that previously carried arms to Iran and Nicaragua were repurposed to deliver clothes to feed Wexner’s network of retail chains, including Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch.
Southern Air Transport abruptly declared bankruptcy on October 1, 1998—exactly one week before the CIA Inspector General released its official findings on the Iran–Contra affair, linking the airline to allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking from Nicaragua. Per Fitrakis, under pressure from the governor’s office, Ohio officials dropped their inquiries, meaning that Epstein’s role never became public.
How did Epstein end up moving the former Contra planes to Columbus? Answering that question—or at least getting close—requires a closer look at the men behind the scandal that defined the second half of the Reagan administration and gave the public the clearest look inside the U.S. government’s clandestine global operations in a generation or more. Like a spy-service Forrest Gump, Jeffrey Epstein can be found there every leg of the way.
Hellbound and Down 