Why the CIA Secretly Operated an Airline in Southeast Asia for Decades

Air America was designed with deniability in mind.

So don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the CIA-administered airline that employed more than 5,000 people, including hundreds of ex-military and bush pilots, to service America’s logistical needs throughout Southeast Asia campaigns from 1950 to the mid-1970s.

The CIA remained so tight-lipped about its biggest proprietary that for decades, many Americans only knew of Air America through press reports of daring pilots and alleged opium-running in Laos or via the eponymous 1990 action-comedy flick starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr.

However, a more comprehensive accounting of Air America, told eventually through declassified documents and carefully reported books such as William Leary’s Perilous Missions and Christopher Robbins’ Air America, shows how integral the CIA’s covert airline was to American servicemen and civilians in the region.

As it flew passenger flights out of Taiwan, Air America and its predecessor airline, Civilian Air Transport, also flew food and munitions to anti-communist forces in Korea, Laos and South Vietnam. The airline transported tens of thousands of refugees and supplied remote villages, but it also engaged enemy forces at times; it even bombed the Viet Minh during the 1954 siege of Dien Bien Phu.

Deniability was key. The United States was not supposed to be in Laos, for instance, per the 1962 Geneva Accords.

“When I went to work for Air America, as far as we were concerned, it was a private enterprise,” says Allen Cates, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who resigned his commission in 1966 to fly for Air America. “The question came about, ‘Why are we flying C-47s that are not FAA-registered?’ They said, ‘It’s best you do not ask questions like that, you may find yourself without a job.’”

Frank Snepp served as the CIA’s chief strategy analyst in Vietnam from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. “The arrangement was designed to provide the CIA and the U.S. government with deniability,” he says. “You had to be able to move around in a war zone, and Air America was equipped to do it. They could land on a dime, turn around and take off thereafter. It was sensational.”

After the U.S. pulled out of Laos in 1974, Air America pilots remained in Vietnam even after the departure of American troops during President Richard Nixon’s “decent interval,” when the U.S. maintained a presence in Vietnam to put space between the troop withdrawal and the eventual fall of Saigon. As most Americans now know, the city’s fall coincided with a chaotic evacuation for the remaining Americans and thousands of Vietnamese who risked persecution upon the North’s takeover.

With U.S. military helicopters not reaching Saigon until the afternoon of the final day—and many too big to land on the rooftops where evacuees congregated—a group of Air America pilots began the final phase of the largest refugee airlift in history. After secretly airlifting 600 Vietnamese under the guise of ferrying American journalists out of the city, Air America helicopter pilots made hundreds of flights between Saigon rooftops and staging areas near the coast, eventually landing on waiting aircraft carriers offshore.

The government dissolved Air America in 1976 upon America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia, but the public’s understanding of the covert airline was only beginning to develop. The New York Times extensively profiled Air America in a 1970 article that covered the airline’s purpose, ownership structure and activities in Laos. Two years later, a book titled The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia had a broader impact on the public’s perception of Air America.

In it, Yale University Ph.D. candidate Alfred McCoy described his trip to an opium-growing village in Laos, which he took to attempt to verify tips he had received that Air America was transporting illicit opium in Northern Laos. In Long Poc, the village’s chief district officer told McCoy that CIA-affiliated officers from the Meo tribe were being ferried to and from the village on Air America helicopters for the purpose of buying opium and flying it back to Long Tieng.

The veracity of McCoy’s opium trafficking claims is a point of contention among people who worked with Air America.

“You couldn’t get away with anything like that,” Cates says. “You couldn’t carry guns. You couldn’t carry anything they didn’t tell you to carry.”

Snepp, who analyzed Air America’s risk picture in Vietnam, said the allegations of Air America moving drugs in Laos were both true and false. “The Laotian forces we worked with were allowed to bring aboard whatever they bloody well wanted to,” he shares. “If they were moving drugs illegally, then Air America became complicit in moving those drugs.”

Drugs were everywhere in Southeast Asia at the time, Snepp explains, adding that there “wasn’t a real DEA operation” afoot in Air America at the time.

Maureen Ebersole, whose late father worked for Air America, remains skeptical. “Personally, having known these men, the idea that they were drug runners is funny to me,” she says, though she concedes that some of the younger pilots who worked in Laos told her they didn’t always know what was on their helicopters. “They were moving refugees from one side of the mountain to the other side; they had no idea what they were bringing,” Ebersole says.

According to a declassified CIA memo from April 1971, the agency outlined: “It has not been the policy of the Air America, Inc., complex to support, foster, or tolerate such smuggling aboard its aircraft or by its personnel.” Internal investigations revealed only one instance of Americans involved in opium-smuggling, when more than 400 pounds of the drug were found on an aircraft headed to Saigon in early 1968. “Appropriate disciplinary action…[was] taken against those individual American corporate employees who were proven to be substantially implicated in the scheme,” per the memo.

For decades, the CIA publicly denied any association between Air America pilots and the U.S. government. Yet, many Air America pilots experienced the conflicts in Southeast Asia of the late 1960s and early 1970s in a similar manner as enlisted service members—and many had been both. A total of 146 Air America employees were killed in action, and as Cates wrote on Air-America.org, “not one of them died with a gun in his hand.”

Cates remembers picking up wounded fighters no taller than their rifles. The memory of airlifting a disfigured boy stayed with him. “I had to get out of the aircraft and go walk around a little bit,” he explains. “You had to make yourself jaded. I think doctors do that. You can’t get too personal; it’ll kill you.”

Despite the similarities to their enlisted peers, Air America pilots have never received federal benefits as the CIA denied their employment by the U.S. government. But Ebersole, carrying on the work of her late father, is working with members of Congress to change that.

After more than a decade of attempts to pass legislation that granted federal benefits to Air America employees, the CIA in 2023 agreed to work with the Senate Intelligence Committee on drafting a bill that the agency would no longer oppose. At press time, H.R. 2192 awaits a review by the House Intelligence Committee.

Ebersole hopes that the CIA’s involvement in the legislation will help reduce the misinformation stemming from the agency’s initial denial of its ties to Air America. For instance, a 2009 CIA publication titled “The Airmen’s Bond” stated that Air America pilots were conducting search and rescue missions for downed military pilots out of a sense of duty to their fellow airmen. In fact, the State Department directed Air America pilots to fly those dangerous missions.

“It was very clever because it sounds like Mother Teresa,” Ebersole says of the pilots. “[The CIA] tried to distance them from the U.S. government because of the retirement credit question… The CIA has since toned that down a lot.”