Decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal or Not, Such Questions

Posted on October 9, 2017October 9, 2017 by Denise Simon

We know that the Trump administration has already certified Iranian compliance once, yet now there is a question as to whether it will be certified again or the White House will move to terminate the whole JCPOA.

Is Iran complying with the ‘spirit’ of the agreement? Hardly, yet should it be ended completely? There are implications and Iran for sure is not a partner that can be trusted as it continues to export terror throughout the Middle East and has it hands in other regions of the globe including Latin America.

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Arab News reports in part:

Through its military forces, the Islamic Republic is actively engaged in intervening in the domestic affairs of other nations in the Middle East. For example, in Syria, Iranian leaders have admitted that their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its elite branch, the Quds Force, are fighting on the ground alongside Bashar Assad’s forces. In addition, Iran is providing financial, weapons, advisory and intelligence assistance to the Syrian regime apparatus.
Putting their direct military intervention aside, Iranian leaders have successfully formed powerful proxies and Shiite militias in Syria in order to serve the revolutionary and geopolitical interests of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his gilded circle.
The Iranian leaders’ plan is a long-term one — to make political realities out of these militias, ensuring Iran’s infiltration and domination of the nation in case Assad falls. In other words, Iran’s plan is to make itself a winner whether the Syrian president is toppled or remains in power, as Tehran would continue to have influence and control in the security, political and intelligence infrastructure of Syria. Furthermore, under the aegis of the IRGC, Iran’s leaders believe they have ensured their presence in Iraq for decades to come, as well as being capable of dictating Iraq’s future policies by setting up the People’s Mobilization Forces (PMF). The PMF is a conglomerate of more than 40 Iraqi militia groups, which act in favor of the Iranian regime’s interests and enjoy close ties with the head of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani. More here.

As for compliance to the JCPOA, how about violations? Seems there are indeed violations as reported by a segment of German Intelligence.

Iran tried to obtain illicit technology that could be used for military nuclear and ballistic missile programs, raising questions about a possible violation of the 2015 agreement intended to stop Tehran’s drive to become an atomic armed power, according to three German intelligence reports obtained by Fox News.

The new intelligence, detailing reports from September and October and disclosed just ahead of President Trump’s planned announcement Thursday on whether the U.S. will recertify the Iran deal, reveals that Iran’s regime made “32 procurement attempts … that definitely or with high likelihood were undertaken for the benefit of proliferation programs.”

According to the document, the 32 attempts took place in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The report lists Iran as a nation that engages in proliferation, which is defined as “spreading atomic, biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction.”

Missile delivery systems are also included in the definition of illicit proliferation activity in the report.

The North Rhine-Westphalia agency accused Iran of using front companies in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China to circumvent international restrictions on its nuclear and missile programs.

The intelligence report, which covered the year 2016 — the Iran deal was implemented on Jan. 16, 2016 — calls further into question Iran’s compliance with the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

In a second intelligence report obtained by Fox News, the German state of Hessen said Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and Sudan use “guest academics” for illegal activities related to nuclear and other weapons programs. “An example for this type of activity occurred in the sector of electronic technology in connection with the implementation of the enrichment of uranium,” the document reads.

The intelligence officials also cited an example of foreign intelligence services using “research exchanges at universities in the sector of biological and chemical procedures.”More here.

Most will say the JCPOA should be decertified or terminated. Yet, as a matter for consideration, if that action is taken rather than to work to amend the deal, such that if that fails then terminate, the United States’s reputation will be such that it cannot be trusted failing other attempts….just consider….frankly, this site is fine with termination given aggressive repercussions.

Perhaps Israel should get a voice this time around.

US Shuttering Diplomatic and Tourism Operations in Cuba

Posted on September 29, 2017September 29, 2017 by Denise Simon

Twenty-one U.S. diplomatic personnel assigned to Cuba have been severely affected by some health condition with the cause still unknown officially. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson has issued travel warnings to Cuba for civilians and has ordered a large number of government personnel to leave the island. Cuba is allegedly cooperating in the investigation and for more than a year, there have been no clues or resolutions. The FBI additionally sent an expert team to Havana to investigate all associated locations including the housing where these attacks have occurred. The housing for diplomatic personnel is provided by Cuba and as with all laws and standards, the host country must provide safe conditions and be approved by the U.S. State Department.

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So, what are the likely explanations for U.S. personnel and Canadian personnel suffering from hearing loss, brain damage and even speech complications?

Well as submitted by former CIA official John Sipher, who has served in some hostile nations does offer some explanation(s) as to what those nations have history done to U.S. facilities.

During my time overseas, I have had personal experience with several of these “attacks.” In the 1980s and 1990s, the Soviet and then Russian intelligence services deployed doses of nitrophenyl pentaden (NPPD) against American diplomats whom they suspected of managing espionage operations against Russian interests. This so-called “spy dust” was an invisible electromagnetic powder with a customized chemical identifier. It was smeared onto door handles, furniture and cars of suspected American spy handlers. It was a tagging agent used by Russian security elements to covertly monitor their own community by revealing unreported (and potentially espionage related) contacts between Russian and American officials. It was somewhat ingenious. After deploying the invisible material on a suspected U.S. intelligence officer, Russian counter-intelligence would snoop after-hours through the offices of Russian government employees looking for traces of the material. Discovery of the powder in the office of someone who had not reported contact with the American provided significant proof of suspicious activity.

What was not ingenious, however, were the threats to human health. There were concerns at the time that the material was carcinogenic and could be harmful to American diplomats. Following studies, the United States determined there was no specific evidence of a threat to the U.S. diplomatic community since it was only used against a handful of people. As someone who was “dusted,” that explanation didn’t really make me feel much better. However, the substance was at least a step up from earlier Russian tracking devices like radioactive nails hammered into the tires of U.S. diplomatic vehicles, allowing Russian surveillance vehicles to hang back unseen and follow along by using special equipment to track targets’ tire residue.

The Russian security services were also known to flood the U.S. embassy in Moscow with electromagnetic radiation. They would beam concentrated microwaves and electronic pulses at the Embassy in an attempt to eavesdrop on U.S. typewriters and conversations. In the 1970s, a U.S. Ambassador contracted and died of a blood disease that many assumed to be a result of the attacks. The State Department detected high levels of radiation in the embassy staff, and provided hazard pay to personnel who worked in Moscow. A variety of electronic attacks continued over the years to include mobile Russian vans that acted as a giant x-ray that could be directed at diplomats all over town. In a similar fashion, high frequency devices can be used to pulse other devices, perhaps turning on or off collection devices in homes or offices.

Similarly, the Russian security services undertook a massive effort to bug the new embassy building in Moscow with all sorts of technical gear, some of which could potentially affect the health of Americans. Indeed, the new embassy construction was even abandoned in 1985 due to the sheer volume and sophistication of electronic eavesdropping equipment that was found throughout the walls, concrete floors and underground. A second attempt to improve the security of the building also faltered when the United States found an equally aggressive and sophisticated attack, which included building listening devices directly into the steel beams holding the building upright. Even the sidewalks and streets throughout the neighborhood were embedded with electronic collection gear which was designed to turn the embassy building into a giant antenna. The United States lost hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix the problems, and eventually tore off the top several floors of the Embassy and rebuilt it with specially imported materials put together by American-only labor – an effort the U.S. called the “Top Hat” solution. The decades-long process displayed the remarkable expertise of the Russians in the use of technical sensors and surveillance gear. Russian technology was consistently underestimated by the U.S. and often our best scientists had difficulty understanding what the Russians were up to. Full article here.

photo courtesy CBS

Could Mr. Sipher be missing something or omitting something? Yes.

There is something called vibroacoustic syndrome—the effect of infrasonic output not on your hearing but on the various fluid-filled parts of your body, which can affect hearing and loss of balance.

The low frequency of infrasonic sound and its corresponding long wavelength makes it much more capable of bending around or penetrating your body, creating an oscillating pressure system. Depending on the frequency, different parts of your body will resonate, which can have very unusual non-auditory effects. For example, one of the ones that occur at relatively safe sound levels (< 100 dB) occurs at 19Hz. If you sit in front of a very good-quality subwoofer and play a 19Hz sound (or have access to a sound programmer and get an audible sound to modulate at 19Hz), try taking off your glasses or removing your contacts. Your eyes will twitch. If you turn up the volume so you start approaching 110 dB, you may even start seeing colored lights at the periphery of your vision or ghostly gray regions in the center. This is because 19Hz is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. The low-frequency pulsations start distorting the eyeball’s shape and pushing on the retina, activating the rods and cones by pressure rather than light.* This non-auditory effect may be the basis of some supernatural folklore. In 1998, Tony Lawrence and Vic Tandy wrote a paper for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (not my usual fare) called “Ghosts in the Machine,” in which they describe how they got to the root of stories of a “haunted” laboratory. People in the lab had described seeing “ghostly” gray shapes that disappeared when they turned to face them. Upon examining the area, it turned out that a fan was resonating the room at 18.98Hz, almost exactly the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. When the fan was turned off, so did all stories of ghostly apparitions. More here.

Going back as far as 1998, the Foreign Military Office at Fort Leavenworth published a short summary of what was described then as ‘wonder weapons’. In part:

A recent edition of U.S. News and World Report highlighted several of these “wonder weapons” (acoustics, microwaves, lasers) and noted that scientists are “searching the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums for wavelengths that can affect human behavior.” ³A recent Russian military article offered a slightly different slant to the problem, declaring that “humanity stands on the brink of a psychotropic war” with the mind and body as the focus. That article discussed Russian and international attempts to control the psycho-physical condition of man and his decision making processes by the use of VHF-generators, “noiseless cassettes,” and other technologies.

An entirely new arsenal of weapons, based on devices designed to introduce subliminal messages or to alter the body’s psychological and data processing capabilities, might be used to incapacitate individuals. These weapons aim to control or alter the psyche, or to attack the various sensory and data-processing systems of the human organism. In both cases, the goal is to confuse or destroy the signals that normally keep the body in equilibrium.

This article examines energy-based weapons, psychotropic weapons, and other developments designed to alter the ability of the human body to process stimuli. One consequence of this assessment is that the way we commonly use the term “information warfare” falls short when the individual soldier, not his equipment, becomes the target of attack.

A 2014 study in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that low-frequency sounds below the audible range could disrupt little whistles made by the ear, called spontaneous optoacoustic emissions, in response to noise. (How that mapped to symptoms, however, wasn’t clear.)

In this instance, one possibility is that the infrasound stimulated the part of the ear not dedicated to hearing — the vestibular system that controls balance, Liberman said. In that instance, the symptoms wouldn’t appear immediately.

“You could imagine them being very slow onset and very persistent,” Liberman said. “It might take days before you even notice any funny sensations.”

Sonic weapons

While the idea of a silent sonic weapon sounds like something out of James Bond, Inspector Gadget or the reject pile of DARPA, the idea of using sound as a weapon has a long history.

For instance, studies show that animals exposed to high-intensity, focused ultrasound can experience lung and brain damage. And a cruise line circling the pirate-infested waters off the Somali coast has taken to using a military-grade “sonic weapon” to deter would-be hijackers, the BBC reported. This long-range device, also known as a sound cannon, can cause permanent hearing loss at distances of up to 984 feet (300 meters), according to the BBC. Other companies have developed a magnetic acoustic device, commonly referred to as a sound laser , that deploys incredibly painful, focused beams of sound to deter people from an area, NPR reported. The Israeli army has also used a device known as “The Scream,” which damages the inner ear, causing nausea and dizziness, Wired reported. More here from FNC.

There is more going on than is being reported. Further, I would be asking all allied nations to Cuba that have access to Cuba what they know and I would be challenging all SIGINT communications on the island…surely there is chatter about this very event. Since there are some Canadian personnel involved, has Canada made any inquiries and launched investigations? Crickets…

Lies in the Sky, Terror on the Ground Part 2

Posted on September 27, 2017September 27, 2017 by Denise Simon

Part one of this investigation, go here.

Additional information regarding the requirements by TSA, go here.

Could 9/11 happen again? The answer is yes but it would not follow the same model as that fateful day. Follow this narrative to see the gaps.

Then, the new director of the FBI gave some compelling testimony this week about the drone threat.

The FAA was warned in 2009 that people with terrorist ties were licensed to fly and repair aircraft. Eight years later, it is, incredibly, still the case.

Nader Ali Sabouri Haghighi’s own pilot certificate, it turned out, had been revoked years earlier for providing false information, but the Federal Aviation Administration conveniently mailed him a new one. Haghighi had called the FAA hot line claiming to be a professional pilot named Daniel George who had lost his license. He then recited George’s license number and other personal details that he’d obtained from their business dealings. Without asking further questions, the FAA agent sent Haghighi a license with George’s name on it.

It ought to have been difficult for the black-haired, brown-eyed Iranian to use a pilot’s license belonging to a fair-skinned, gray-haired American nearly 20 years his senior, except for one factor: FAA pilot licenses do not include photographs of the pilot. Haghighi was able to pull off his ruse for nearly four years until Danish police found the license in the rubble of the crash.

Almost a decade after Haghighi’s brazen identify theft, the FAA still does not include pilot photos on its licenses, and the agency does not fully vet pilot information before issuing them credentials. Last year, a leading congressional overseer of the FAA, then-Representative John Mica, called US pilot licenses “a joke” and said that a day pass to Disney World in his native Florida contains more sophisticated security measures.

FAA officials defend their licensing practices, noting that pilots are also required to carry a government-issued ID such as a driver’s license to prove their identity. The pilot certificate, they say, is more an indicator of the pilot’s level of training than a security tool, and commercial airports and airlines generally issue their own IDs for access to tarmacs, planes, and other secure areas.

But the flawed airman licenses are part of a troubling pattern of lax oversight of more than 1 million FAA-approved airmen — including pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, and other aviation personnel — that has made the agency vulnerable to fraud, and the public vulnerable to those who mean to do harm, a Spotlight Team review has found.

After the 9/11 attacks, Congress called on the FAA to overhaul its licensing for more than 600,000 US-certified pilots. But the FAA’s changes so far have been modest, such as making licenses with higher-quality materials to reduce forgeries. Today, FAA security procedures remain geared more toward the convenience of pilots than the needs of a nation engaged in a “war on terror,” often failing to challenge airmen’s claims on their applications and seemingly unaware of deceptions.

Haghighi, for example, continued to finagle help from the FAA even after he went to jail in Denmark for flying without a valid license and endangering his passenger. After his release, the FAA issued him a medical certificate that helped him land a job at an airline in Indonesia in 2014. All he had to do was change one letter in the spelling of Sabouri and alter his birth year. An official at another federal agency eventually tipped off the FAA to Haghighi’s duplicity.

Or take the case of Richard Hoagland. Beginning in 1994, he purchased homes, registered a plane, obtained a pilot license, and even got married under the name Terry Symansky, according to court records. The ruse wasn’t discovered until Symansky’s nephew was doing family research on Ancestry.com and found that his late uncle was listed as alive. The FAA never caught on that the real Terry Symansky had been dead since 1991, issuing Hoagland a new private pilot certificate in Symansky’s name as recently as 2010. Hoagland is now serving a two-year sentence in federal prison for identity theft.

FAA procedures also make it easy for pilots to hide damaging information, by simply not reporting it. That’s because the agency relies on them to self-report felony convictions and other crimes that could lead to license revocation. Among the licensed pilots currently listed in the airman registry are Carlos Licona and Paul Grebenc, United Airlines pilots who were sentenced to jail in Scotland earlier this year for attempting to fly a commercial airliner with alcohol in their blood. Under FAA rules, an alcohol-related offense, especially related to flying, can be grounds for license revocation or suspension, though the FAA decides on a case by case basis.

But as of Sept. 1, Grebenc and Licona were still listed in the FAA’s active airman registry. Agency records showed that as of January, four months after the men were arrested, there were no reported incidents or enforcement actions related to the pilots.

FAA officials stress that they are not the police officers of the skies, leaving that job to an alphabet soup of agencies including the Transportation Security Administration, Homeland Security, and the FBI. The FAA merely issues the airman certificates and keeps the database that helps these investigators do their work. And, while FAA officials admit they don’t routinely investigate information that pilots, mechanics, and others list on license applications, the TSA says it continuously reviews the FAA database against the Terrorist Screening Database, additional terrorism-related information, and other government watch lists. Since 2010, the TSA has completed 28 million airman threat assessments.

But it is hardly a fail-safe system. Outside reviewers have repeatedly found that the FAA’s Airman Registry is riddled with errors and gaps, making it difficult for law enforcement officials to rely on. More than 43,000 pilots received licenses even though they did not provide the FAA with a permanent address, according to a 2013 audit by the Department of Transportation inspector general. Two years earlier, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general found that 8,000 of the Social Security numbers on file belonged to dead people, in part because the FAA doesn’t purge its files of dated information. Another 15,000 didn’t match the airmen’s personal information on file.

When asked whether the FAA vets the information on airman certificate applications, officials did not answer directly. The FAA issued a statement reading, “Pilots are expected to provide accurate and complete information on all FAA forms.”

Agency officials also said that, when pilots apply for medical certificates — a crucial document needed to fly — they conduct a one-time check against the national drivers’ database for drug- or alcohol-related convictions.

The lack of accurate information can have serious consequences. Last October, when a student pilot from Jordan intentionally crashed a twin-engine plane near a major defense contractor in East Hartford, Conn., law enforcement officials initially feared terrorism and converged on the Illinois address he had given the FAA. But the student, Feras M. Freitekh, had listed the address of a family friend, a place where he had never lived, so law enforcement descended on a house nearly 900 miles from his actual home.

Most worrisome, even with ongoing TSA vetting, people with suspected or proven ties to terrorism still keep active airman certificates.

FAA-Approved offenders

Mark Schiffer couldn’t believe what he was finding.

Schiffer, the chief scientist for a company that helps banks detect fraud, was simply testing an algorithm to check names against publicly available watch lists that included suspected terrorists and other bad actors. In April 2009, he was using data from the FAA Airman Registry for his test because the list was large and readily available.

But he kept turning up terrorists.

There was Fawzi Mustapha Assi, who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list for five years before being convicted of providing material support to Hezbollah in 2008. Though imprisoned, he had an active pilot’s license, which never expires. His release was expected in a few years.

Also on the list was Myron Tereshchuk, an FAA-certified mechanic and student pilot, who was convicted in federal court in 2005 for possession of biological agents or toxins that could be used as weapons. Tereshchuk was also in prison, but he, too, was expected to be released in a few years.

And there was Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Scottish authorities released him in 2009 on compassionate grounds after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He still had a valid aircraft dispatcher certificate from the FAA.

“Holy cow,” Schiffer said to himself.

In all, Schiffer and his company, Safe Banking Systems of New York, confirmed eight matches between FAA-approved airmen and various watch lists.

“The results were as unexpected as they are chilling,” Safe Banking Systems said in a June 2009 report distributed to nearly 40 lawmakers and top government officials, including the FAA administrator and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But no one responded until a New York Times reporter asked the Transportation Security Administration about the certified airmen with terror ties listed in the Safe Banking Systems report. The following day, in June 2009, the TSA advised the FAA to revoke airman certificates for six of the eight names that SBS gave to the reporter.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, in an 18-month investigation released in July 2011, found that the TSA’s ability to screen airmen for national security threats is hampered by the quality of information the FAA provides. The TSA could not properly vet thousands of airmen because of missing or inaccurate data within the FAA’s registry, according to the report. From 2007 to 2010, the TSA recommended the revocation of 27 licenses, but that number would likely have been larger had all of the information been complete.

The inspector general also found that the TSA doesn’t screen for broader criminal activity, allowing airmen who “have outstanding warrants or are known fugitives” to escape detection. The IG said that one US-approved pilot was actually a “drug kingpin” serving 20 years in a foreign prison.

Since then, the TSA and FAA have stepped up their screening for national security threats, reviewing the FAA database four times a year to ensure accuracy.

The Spotlight Team wanted to check whether the heightened scrutiny has improved the FAA’s record in preventing bad actors from having pilot’s licenses. At the request of the Globe, Safe Banking Systems tested the public part of the airman registry and again found problems.

Running the same name-matching program in January 2017, SBS found five active airmen on watch lists with possible ties to terrorism or international crime, including Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh, a former Air Force mechanic who bought a one-way ticket to Turkey in 2015. His packed bags included flash drives with maps, a letter to his wife about jihad, and his Federal Aviation Administration airman certificate, according to court records. When he was arrested, Pugh was headed to Syria to offer himself as an aircraft mechanic.

In May, Pugh was sentenced to 35 years in prison for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State, though he is appealing.

On Aug. 1, Pugh’s name still appeared on the FAA’s list of active airmen. But Pugh was removed by Sept. 1, days after the Globe requested his records. FAA officials now say that Pugh’s license was actually revoked in 2015, though on Friday, they could not explain why his name continued to be on the active list for another two years.

In addition, SBS turned up a long-time American Airlines mechanic who attempted to broker a deal that would have moved seven Airbus A300s to Iran, which the United States has identified as a state sponsor of terrorism; a Florida businessman who was planning on illegally shipping navigation systems used for steering planes, ships, and missiles to Turkey; and an Irish pilot sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control for his connections to a company and plane that were also sanctioned. The mechanic and Florida businessman both have been released from prison, while the Irish pilot has not been charged with a crime.

In August, when the Globe requested information about the airmen identified by SBS, FAA records contained no indication that any of the five had faced FAA enforcement action.

“Have things really changed? Does the government know who they are dealing with?” said David Schiffer, Safe Banking Systems’ chief executive officer (and Mark Schiffer’s father). “The fact that some are licensed while still incarcerated is unbelievable. We certainly view this as a very serious threat to national security.”

A History of Deceit

Long before the crash in Denmark, Nader Haghighi had spent years duping the FAA. When his name came across the desk of federal investigator Robert Mancuso in late 2008, Haghighi had already racked up a significant criminal record for stealing a plane, had had his pilot’s license revoked, and had even been deported from the United States in 2006, according to federal investigative reports and court records. And the FAA was receiving two new calls per month about Haghighi’s scams.

Mancuso, a special agent for the US Department of Transportation Inspector General’s Computer Crimes Unit, began investigating a report that Haghighi had tried to illegally obtain a pilot’s license online using Daniel George’s name. Mancuso quickly discovered that George was just one more victim of a con man who used at least a dozen aliases and falsely claimed to have a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a job at Lockheed Martin.

But Haghighi made a mistake when he initially tried to get George’s license. He had collected George’s personal information when he hired the professional pilot to fly a plane for him. But when Haghighi entered the stolen information online to get a copy of George’s license, Haghighi neglected to change the e-mail address on the account, so George received notification about the new license and contacted the FAA. The agency intercepted the certificate before it was sent out.

And Mancuso thought that was the end of it, though he kept investigating Haghighi.

Then, when Haghighi crashed with George’s license in his possession a few years later, Mancuso made a stunning discovery: Haghighi had found yet another way to get a license. He called the FAA directly, posing as George and complaining that he had never received the certificate he had requested weeks earlier. The FAA, without further investigation, mailed out a new copy to Haghighi’s post office box in Texas, something an FAA employee told Mancuso was “not uncommon for our office to do, based on a phone call from the airman.”

“I was shocked,” said Mancuso, who traveled to Denmark to testify against Haghighi. “I assumed that some type of fraud alert would be placed on Mr. George’s record to prohibit this from happening, especially when it was sent to the same bad address.”

The FAA said pilots today can no longer request duplicate certificates by telephone, but they can get them online or by mail.

During his trial in Denmark, Haghighi tried yet another scam, insisting that his real name wasn’t Haghighi or George but the one on another passport recovered from the crashed plane. But the judge didn’t believe him and sentenced Haghighi to 10 months in prison for endangering passengers, including children, flying without a valid license or a required co-pilot on multiple occasions.

Even then, Haghighi was not through tricking the FAA. A year after his release from prison, in February 2014, he contacted the agency to secure another medical certificate, which is needed for pilots to fly.

On his application, he changed his name from “Sabouri” to “Saboori” and his birth year from 1972 to 1973. According to a US Department of Transportation investigative report, Haghighi lied repeatedly on the form, claiming that he had not visited a medical professional in three years, even though emergency responders had found him unconscious inside a crashed plane just two years earlier.

His word was good enough for the FAA, which gave Haghighi a new certificate that he promptly used to land a job with Susi Air, an Indonesian airline.

Flying again

Haghighi is an extreme example, but his case is by no means isolated. At least one other pilot on the FAA registry, Re Tabib, won his license back after he went to prison for attempting to smuggle aircraft parts to Iran and was formally declared a security threat by the TSA.

In 2006, federal officers seized thousands of aircraft parts, some packed in suitcases, and “shopping lists” from the California home of Tabib, an Iranian-born FAA certified pilot. He was arrested on charges of attempting to illegally export parts for F-14 Tomcat jets to Iran.

Tabib, a veteran airman who at one time piloted private flights for the designer Gianni Versace, pleaded guilty and served time in federal prison from July 2007 until January 2009. Yet, according to court records, the FAA issued him an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, the highest-level license for pilots, just three months after his release, allowing him to fly large jets.

Unlike other pilots with a criminal record, Tabib made no attempt to hide his past, alerting the agency about his felony conviction on an application form that calls on candidates to disclose any previous arrests or convictions. But the FAA — which can suspend flying privileges for anyone with an ATP license it judges not of “good moral character” — did not revoke or suspend his license.

As of August, FAA records revealed no incidents or enforcement records connected to Tabib. The agency declined to comment further on Tabib’s case but said it examines possible violations of the “good moral character” standard on a case by case basis. The agency said that a criminal conviction is not automatic grounds for action against an ATP license.

In June 2009, just months after Tabib received his new certificates from the FAA, Safe Banking Systems, the New York fraud detection company, matched Tabib’s name to public watch lists and passed it along with others to The New York Times.

The TSA responded to the story by advising the FAA to revoke Tabib’s certificate. Tabib’s airman certificates gave him “insider access” that, combined with his connections to Iran, could render him a security threat, according to a 2010 decision by an administrative law judge.

Tabib fought the decision for years and finally reached a settlement with the TSA in 2012. His attorney, Robert Schultz, said the law permitting the TSA to revoke airman licenses is unconstitutional because it treats airmen as presumed guilty without proper due process.

“Mr. Tabib was a professional pilot who was denied the right to earn a living for years based on mere suspicion,” Schultz said, referring to the TSA threat assessment. Last year, the FAA issued him new commercial pilot and flight instructor certificates.

This time, Tabib’s name was kept out of the FAA database of active airmen that the public can download to review the full list of pilots and mechanics. As a result, his name did not appear this year when Safe Banking Systems checked for airmen who had been on terror watch lists. More than 350,000 airmen were excluded from the public database at their request.

Recent social media posts show Tabib in front of a King Air C90 turboprop aircraft. A photo from this spring shows him wearing an aviation headset in the cockpit of a plane at the Azadi airport in Iran. His Facebook page says he’s now a flight instructor and pilot at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif. Tabib is flying again.

Con air

Mario Jose Donadi-Gafaro, a US-licensed pilot, died along with six others in a horrific plane crash in Venezuela in 2008 when his plane plummeted into a bustling neighborhood a few minutes after takeoff. He never made a distress call, and questions still remain nine years later about the cause of the accident.

But another mystery is how Donadi-Gafaro, a pilot who also moonlighted as a drug trafficker, kept a US pilot’s license as long as he did.

Donadi-Gafaro’s criminal career began at least a decade before the crash. His initial US felony drug conviction in 1999 for importing cocaine into Miami International Airport should, under FAA rules, have immediately triggered agency scrutiny of his license.

But even after the pilot was convicted a second time — this time in Venezuela — in 2006 for attempting to transport cocaine on an aircraft, the FAA did not revoke Donadi-Gafaro’s license. Instead, the agency gave him a promotion. He applied for and was issued his Air Transport Pilot’s License, the gold standard of US airmen ratings, on July 23, 2007. Almost a decade after the crash in Venezuela that killed him, the FAA still listed Donadi-Gafaro as an “active” pilot, including him in its database as recently as March 2016.

The agency finally deactivated his license in 2016 after the Globe began asking questions about it. The FAA declined to comment on whether Donadi-Gafaro had reported his conviction, saying that information is protected under the Privacy Act.

‘We don’t know who they are’

A frustrated John Mica held up a plastic card as he addressed a 2016 hearing of his House subcommittee on the topic of “securing our skies.” The card, borrowed from then-Representative Tammy Duckworth, a pilot, was an example of a modern FAA certificate.

“An airline pilot has access to the controls, flying the plane,” said Mica, but a US pilot’s license lacks basic security features and includes only a decorative picture. “The only photo on this license are the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Orville and Wilbur, I blew it up here. OK?”

To make his point, the congressman held up an entry pass for Disney World. The card, decorated with Minnie Mouse, has a magnetic strip that is capable of linking identities to fingerprints. This allows Disney to track when cardholders enter or leave the park. The FAA license is primitive by comparison.

“This is Minnie Mouse,” said Mica, referring to the Disney pass. Then, nodding to Duckworth’s certificate in his other hand, he added, “and this is Mickey Mouse.”

Congress long ago called on the FAA to implement significant changes. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 mandated not only pictures of pilots, but also that pilot licenses include biometric capabilities such as fingerprints or iris scans.

“Fifteen years later, we see a system that has not complied with the laws that we have passed multiple times,” said Mica. “We have pilots that are flying planes. We don’t know who they are.”

The FAA said that it has made some improvements. In 2003, the agency switched from paper licenses to new “security-enhanced airman certificates,” the FAA said. The plastic documents include an FAA seal and, according to the FAA, are resistant to tampering, alteration, and counterfeiting.

But lawmakers have repeatedly challenged the agency on why the FAA has not followed congressional mandates regarding the licenses. Mica, in particular, voiced his concern publicly about the licenses in letters and hearings in 2010, 2011, 2013, and most recently, last year.

In 2017, the former congressman says he’s still concerned about the lack of progress and failure to have a “credible” document.

“We tried to get them to comply, but they never did fully comply,” Mica said. “Any credit card in your wallet has better capability.”

Many pilots and flight instructors opposed the photo IDs, some complaining that it could add to the cost of licensing without improving national security. In written comments to the FAA, pilots said the photo on the license was unnecessary because they are already required to carry other photo IDs — and because airport officials never ask to see pilot certificates anyway.

“Many of our members describe this effort as ‘security theater,’ putting a photograph on a document that authorities never ask for,” said Doug Stewart, chairman of the Society of Aviation and Flight Educators, in a 2011 letter.

“What is most critical in the issuance of an FAA pilot certificate from a security standpoint is the accurate establishment of the pilot’s identity, background descriptors, and qualifications,” wrote Robb Powers, chairman of the national security committee at the Air Line Pilots Association, International. “Presently, FAA does not verify the identity of the person requesting a pilot certificate other than through visual inspection of the individual’s driver’s license or passport.”

As of last month, the agency said it, along with the Department of Transportation, is “still evaluating options for including a photo,” a project expected to cost about $1 billion.

While the FAA has pondered additional security requirements for more than a decade, special interest groups have worked to quietly relax regulation for pilots. In a victory for advocates of general aviation, Congress eased the medical requirements for pilots seeking a basic license, requiring only a visit to the family doctor and participation in an online course provided by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. And the FAA reauthorization bill now in the Senate includes an amendment to roll back some commercial pilot training requirements enacted after a 2009 regional airline crash that killed 50 and was blamed on pilot error.

‘What a nightmare’

Early into his new job, officials at Susi Air in Indonesia grew suspicious of Nader Haghighi and discovered that his passport number belonged to someone else. They alerted the United States.

Robert Mancuso, the Department of Transportation investigator who tracked Haghighi for years as the con man fooled authorities while using many aliases, including Nader Schruder, learned about the latest escapade and sent an e-mail to FAA officials.

“Hello all! It’s my yearly e-mail regarding Mr. Nader Schruder. He seems to have popped back up in Indonesia with his revoked FAA certificate . . . Can you also run a search for any pilots with the name ‘Nader Ali Saboori’ to make sure he doesn’t have another certificate.”

The FAA responded the next day: “I do show a record for SABOORI; Nader Ali with a First Class Medical certificate issued 2/27/14 . . . It’s probably the same airman.”

Haghighi soon after found himself without a job. He left Indonesia and was detained during a stopover in Panama after US authorities put out an alert. In November 2014, Haghighi pleaded guilty in US District Court in Houston to four counts of identity theft.

George, the man whose identity Haghighi stole, wrote a letter to the judge detailing the personal toll — hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue from potential pilot positions and thousands of hours spent trying to figure out where Haghighi would turn up next.

“What a nightmare this man has been to me personally and professionally,” George wrote.

After Haghighi was released from federal prison in October 2016, he was deported to his native Iran — ending roughly 15 years of deception.

“It’s sad it went on this long. He was putting the public’s life in danger,” said Mancuso, now a special agent at another federal office of the inspector general.

Haghighi, in Facebook messages to a Globe reporter, expressed no remorse for his behavior and described the FAA in bluntly critical terms: “know the right person, pay the right amount in a right way and then the sky turns green.”

The Globe could find no evidence that Haghighi has a US pilot’s license today, but a Facebook photo update in March suggests he hasn’t given up hope: He was smiling from the cockpit of a plane with his hand inches away from the controls.

For full access to photos and videos go here.

Lies in the Sky, Terror on the Ground

Posted on September 25, 2017September 25, 2017 by Denise Simon

BostonGlobe: The United States remains an easy mark for drug dealers, terrorists and others who prize anonymity when registering aircraft or getting licensed to fly. So much for the lessons of 9/11.

As he sought to unspool the story behind the tragedy, Asnaldo Del Valle Gonzalez would come face to face with what he calls “the monster,” the web of secrecy that surrounds thousands of planes like the one that devastated his family, making it nearly impossible to identify a plane’s real owners and hold them accountable.

A Spotlight Team investigation has found that lax oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, over decades, has made it easy for drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and even people with links to terrorism to register private planes and conceal their identities. With the US stamp of approval — signified by a number on the tail fin that always begins with the letter “N” — owners often find more freedom from scrutiny and anonymity while traveling. This has allowed criminals and foreign government officials to mask illicit activities or keep wealth hidden from their home countries.

The registered owner of the crashed twin-engine Piper, a company called Aircraft Guaranty, is part of a nearly invisible private industry that sometimes operates from computer terminals inside FAA offices in Oklahoma, busily registering planes on behalf of foreign nationals — and working in a system that allows them to hide their names from the public. More than 1,000 planes are registered in Aircraft Guaranty’s name at an address in a Texas town of 2,500 that doesn’t have an airport. But it’s enough to give clients both anonymity and coveted US registration for their planes.

Gonzalez never did figure out who really owned the plane that crashed into his home — even when the name of the client Aircraft Guaranty had on file, Luis Nuñez, was revealed during court proceedings. A court official who visited the listed Miami address for Nuñez found cobwebs on the doorknob and a package addressed to someone else. A private detective working for Gonzalez’s attorneys spent a year searching for additional clues and for Nuñez, before concluding that he was nothing more than a “phantom person.” The Globe also was unable to locate Nuñez.

More than 16 years after aircraft were used as weapons in the worst terrorist attack in US history, the FAA still operates more like a file clerk than a reliable tool for law enforcement, enabling secrecy in the skies here and abroad. The price to register a plane is still just $5 — the same as in 1964, even though the agency has the power to raise it — generating little revenue that could be used to expand oversight. And the FAA does so little vetting of the ownership and use of planes listed in its aircraft registry that two of the airliners hijacked and destroyed on 9/11 were still listed as “active” four years after. And that’s prompt compared to this: The FAA didn’t cancel the registration for one TWA cargo plane until 2016, 57 years after it crashed in Chicago, killing the crew and eight people on the ground.

Today, thousands of planes are registered using practices that can allow for anonymity of ownership. A Spotlight review shows that one out of every six aircraft is registered through trusts, Delaware corporations, or using post office box addresses, techniques commonly used to make it hard to discern the true owner. The number is likely even higher because the FAA acknowledged that it does not verify the validity of documents filed for the registry’s more than 300,000 planes.

There are 314,529 aircaft with N-numbers in the FAA’s registry.

54,232 of those aircraft are registered using known secrecy tactics.

7,610 are registered to companies known for providing trust services to non-U.S. citizens.

Critics, including federal investigators who’ve scrutinized the aircraft registry, say it is little more than “a big file cabinet” in which precious little information has been verified, leaving the door open for people with bad intentions to hide behind a US registration.

FAA officials essentially agree. They stress that they have a “robust oversight system” that includes a team of special agents to investigate fraudulent plane ownership, but say they don’t have the resources to determine whether information on US plane registration forms is accurate.

“The FAA is constantly working to strengthen the integrity of Registry information,” according to an FAA statement to the Spotlight Team that came after months of correspondence about the registry’s shortcomings. “The agency is developing a plan to significantly upgrade and modernize the aircraft registration process.”

But that’s no guarantee reforms will come swiftly, if at all. The FAA has a reputation for making change at a snail’s pace even when problems are clearly identified: The agency, for example, still doesn’t put a photo of the pilot on airman’s licenses 13 years after Congress called for it.

“It is like walking through thick glue. They just don’t move very quickly at the FAA, and it’s a chronic problem,” said former North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan, who served as chairman for the Senate aviation panel in 2009 and 2010. “I would have thought after 2001 that we would have made more progress by now with respect to verifying the ownership of aircraft.”

Today, the public often only discovers the gaps in US oversight when something goes wrong or criminal investigators get involved:

The Venezuelan air force shot down a US-registered, drug-loaded plane near Aruba in 2015, leaving a trail of bodies and cocaine floating in the bright blue sea. Records showed the aircraft was registered to a Delaware shell company and managed by Conrad Kulatz, a Fort Lauderdale attorney in his late 70s.

Federal agents investigating US-registered planes that bore the hallmarks of drug smuggling in 2013 found that three had been illegally registered here in the name of a Mexican national. He fooled the FAA simply by listing a Texas strip mall near the Mexican border as his address and claiming to be a US citizen.

Early this year, US officials labeled Venezuela’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, a foreign narcotics kingpin, freezing access to his US assets, including a luxury jet. The Treasury Department charged that the jet, registered at the FAA in the name of a shell company, was actually controlled by El Aissami, who, in addition to drug trafficking, also has been accused of aiding Islamic extremists. But, at the FAA, the jet’s registration remains valid in the name of 200G PSA Holdings.

In 2015, federal authorities broke up a scheme to deliver US airplanes registered through trusts to an Iranian airline that US officials say helps to transport troops and materiel to the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria. Though the sale was stopped, the names of the people who planned to sell the airliners to Mahan Air were not revealed publicly.

Photo, Mohammed Atta, 911 attacker crop duster

With so little oversight, there may be more dangerous people in control of American-registered planes whose names have not come to light. The 9/11 conspirators considered using private crop-dusting planes to launch terror attacks before deciding to hijack commercial planes instead. Three months before the World Trade Center attack, terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was trying to acquire crop dusters in Oklahoma. There is no reason to think his efforts would have been blocked or even noticed by the FAA’s Aircraft Registry just a few miles away in Oklahoma City.

Responding to the Globe’s findings, US Representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat who has long promoted corporate transparency, said the public urgently needs to know whether there are other potential terrorists among the thousands of unknown individuals who control US-registered planes.

“The FAA has basically abdicated their responsibilities,” said Lynch, who in July filed a bill requiring that the real owners of US-registered planes be publicly disclosed. “We have all these aircraft being operated by who knows who and for what purpose. . . . It’s not the exception, it is the rule, and I think it is important to hold the FAA accountable.”

Family pictures, fitness schedules, sticky notes, and birthday balloons decorate the computer terminals inside the FAA Civil Aviation Registry’s public documents room in Oklahoma City.

This is where members of the public can look up information on US-registered planes, but the terminals at the back are rarely used, according to the man at the desk, and when a Globe reporter tried one, it was slow and balky. Most of the other terminals — many of them seemingly better machines equipped with double monitors — are used by the same people day after day, and they’ve dotted their workstations with personal items.

They work for aircraft title companies, law firms, and companies that create trusts — the way for foreign nationals to register their planes here legally and without attracting public attention. Companies actually lease terminals in the document room, allowing Aircraft Guaranty to boast to potential clients that it has an office inside the FAA’s Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center.

For anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, the agents will create a legal trust to “own” private aircraft on behalf of their actual owners, whose names are typically not disclosed to the public. The registration form itself is even easier to complete — less work than registering a car in most states. Once the paperwork is done, agents can turn it in at the cashier’s window in the corner of the document room, paying a $5 registration fee whether the plane is a $20,000 Piper Tomahawk or a $20 million Learjet.

Then, the FAA is supposed to review the registrations for completeness, but a 2013 outside review found that the FAA is not very thorough. The Department of Transportation inspector general audit estimated that records for more than half the aircraft registered to non-US citizens through trusts were incomplete.

In part because US plane registration is so cheap, easy, and often anonymous, it is extremely popular for people registering internationally. Two-thirds of business jet owners worldwide register their planes in the United States, according to a 2014 estimate on the website Corporate Jet Investor. Another bonus: US-registered planes are believed to attract less attention when traveling internationally.

Defenders of these “noncitizen trusts” say they’re an important tool for businesses, especially companies that include foreign nationals among their owners or executives. US corporations conducting global business might have key officers who do not meet the FAA’s citizenship requirements. Additionally, noncitizens who plan to relocate planes from the United States sometimes set up trusts so that the plane has a legal owner while in transit.

Under US law, foreigners can’t legally register a plane here unless they have a US citizen or US-based legal entity to serve as their representative in dealing with the FAA. It is a longstanding safeguard that, in practice, safeguards nothing.

Champions of the trust system also point out that the FAA has tightened up the rules in recent years, requiring the trustees to disclose agreements with their clients to the FAA at the time of application for registration. The trusts don’t have to keep the names of their clients in the FAA’s permanent record, but they are supposed to make the information available to investigators when asked.

The FAA checks for the completeness of the paperwork, and trusts are often reviewed by the agency’s legal counsel’s office. However, the agency does not verify that the trust information is accurate, nor are they required to under the law. When the Department of Transportation inspector general tried to get the names of the real owners directly from trust companies in 2013, investigators said some trustees either refused to provide the information or took months instead of the two days allowed by the FAA to turn over the names.

The FAA, similarly, puts few restrictions on who can hang out their shingle as a trust company set up to register aircraft. As a result, the industry is a hodgepodge of banks, businesses, and individuals, including several lacking recognizable websites or phone numbers. At least three operate offshore in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — even though the whole point of such trusts is that they are supposed to provide a US contact for the FAA.

A Georgia-based trust company called Plane Fun Inc. exemplifies the elusiveness of several of the trust agents contacted by the Spotlight Team. Plane Fun lists a modest, split-level home in Snellville, Ga., as its headquarters, with more than 200 planes registered to the address.

But the home is owned by Kathleen Schumacher, who told the Globe she is not involved with the business. “I handle nothing on it; my son does,” Schumacher said. Despite repeated attempts, the Globe was unable to reach Schumacher’s son, Kenneth, who she said is the operator of Plane Fun.

Aircraft Guaranty, with offices in Texas and Oklahoma, is much bigger and more visible than Plane Fun. The nearly 30-year-old business describes itself as “one of the most well respected and trusted Trustee Service providers in the aviation industry.” But, like the manager of Plane Fun, Aircraft Guaranty owner Debbie Mercer-Erwin didn’t want to talk about her work.

Only after numerous attempts to interview Mercer-Erwin, including a visit to the single-family home in Oklahoma City where she has an office, did the Globe receive a statement from the company’s attorney.

Aircraft Guaranty “fully complies with all US laws and FAA and other regulations in providing this specific service to its customers,” wrote attorney Wallace C. Magathan III of Miami. He noted that the firm voluntarily follows federal “know your customer” rules, which require company officials to collect “personally identifiable information” from clients that may include name, date of birth, address, and identification number.

Magathan added that Aircraft Guaranty “is not in the business of thoroughly investigating its customers’ private business affairs.” He declined to answer the Globe’s questions about individual clients.

But detailed information about some of Aircraft Guaranty’s more unsavory past clients has come to light. One of them, Fausto Veliz Urbina, was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison for cocaine trafficking before being deported to Mexico in 2010. According to federal court records in Florida, he registered a plane through Aircraft Guaranty on behalf of a Mexican shell company, Consorcio Melun SA de CV, in 2012, something investigators discovered while looking at a fleet of planes suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.

A former Guatemalan vice president, Roxana Baldetti, has been indicted in the United States on federal drug charges and is currently jailed in her homeland. According to media reports, she regularly jetted around in a Raytheon 400A that FAA records show was registered by Aircraft Guaranty on behalf of a Panamanian company, Best Advisors Group Inc. Baldetti resigned and was arrested on fraud charges in 2015 amid media reports of her many luxury purchases, including multimillion-dollar homes.

And there’s Luis Nuñez, the “phantom person” whose plane — registered through Aircraft Guaranty — crashed into Asnaldo Gonzalez’s house. Gonzalez’s inability to find the real owner prevented his family’s attorneys from suing for damages to rebuild his family’s life.

Analysts say there’s a good reason that trust companies like Aircraft Guaranty are attractive to shady characters: Anonymity is good for business.

“Criminals find that US planes allow them to fly under the radar far more easily than if using some dodgy Russian aircraft,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, an expert in arms trafficking and executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project. “The simple act of flying out of US airspace — where regulatory standards are perceived to be high — conveys a level of legitimacy on its aircraft and its operator. The American flag also makes it easier for corrupt officials to wittingly turn a blind eye.”

In 2009, a jet registered on behalf of a foreign owner through Wells Fargo crashed in a remote area of the Bahamas, triggering scrutiny of the FAA’s noncitizen trust policy. FAA officials briefly shut down the option for foreigners to register through noncitizen trusts, amid concern that some plane owners were making side agreements that made ownership hard to trace, especially in an emergency.

“There was a frustration that everybody had,” Joe Standell, counsel to the FAA’s Aeronautical Center at the time, recently told the Globe. “You let them register airplanes as an owner trust. But look what that does; nobody is accountable.”

Trust companies such as Aircraft Guaranty teamed up with businesses to ensure the survival of noncitizen trusts, arguing they are crucial to companies with multinational executives who want to own American-registered aircraft. In all, a dozen associations along with 70 companies and law firms combined forces to deluge the FAA with comments.

“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” advised Conrad Kulatz, the Florida attorney linked to the drug-laden plane shot down off Aruba in 2015, in a 2012 e-mail to the FAA. “I have never had a problem arising from trustee registration of aircraft in over 30 years practicing law in South Florida.”

The FAA eventually backed off, allowing foreign plane owners to use noncitizen trusts as long as they met some new conditions: share the trust agreements with the FAA and agree to provide ownership information within 48 hours when requested.

A bright orange fireball erupted on the screen of Jeroen Lucas’s video camera while he filmed a commercial for his media firm in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2015. His frame captured the Aruba skyline twinkling at dawn as a flaming streak twisted and turned over the Caribbean Sea.

Minutes before the flash appeared, a business jet had failed to respond to air traffic controllers, and soon the Venezuelan Air Force marked the private jet in its crosshairs. A shot transformed the white and green Challenger 600 into a Roman candle spiraling through thick gray clouds. The plane crashed in the water, killing three people. More than a ton of cocaine floated on the waves.

The aircraft was obtained by two Colombian drug kingpins, Dicson Penagos-Casanova and Juan Gabriel Rios Sierra, who worked as key members of an international drug trafficking ring that supported multiple cartels bringing cocaine to the United States, federal prosecutors said in the indictment.

But the aircraft’s tail number, N214FW, told a different story, tracing the ownership of the plane to a company incorporated in Delaware, a state that often requires minimal public disclosure about the owners of a business. FAA records showed that the cocaine-packed plane was owned by Dinama Aircorp Inc., formed in Delaware less than two weeks before it purchased the airplane in 2013. According to FAA records, the president and sole officer of the firm was Kulatz, the Fort Lauderdale attorney who, a few years earlier, sent an e-mail to the FAA opposing efforts to make plane ownership more transparent.

There are nearly 200 other planes registered to the same address as Dinama Aircorp in Delaware, including a jet that was seized in 2014 by the Dominican Republic, according to a Globe analysis. Kulatz and another attorney are listed as the key officers of the firm that registered the seized plane.

Kulatz did not respond to repeated calls and correspondence from the Globe. At one point, a receptionist at his office said Kulatz had retired. In July, the Florida bar association listed him as ineligible to practice law because he did not meet the continuing legal education requirement.

Penagos-Casanova and Rios Serra are like many drug traffickers who actively seek American planes because they believe they can more easily “fly under the radar,” according to Benjamin Barron, an assistant US attorney in the Central District of California, who prosecuted the pair. To ensure success, they paid aircraft owners a fee of about 30 to 35 percent of the cocaine shipment and bribed Venezuelan military and government officials, according to federal court records. Kulatz has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the case.

“They hope they will attract less suspicion particularly by using expensive jets that are US-registered and might appear to be something that a corporation might use,” Barron said. “It’s all a way of avoiding detection and getting the cocaine safely from point A to point B.”

But Delaware makes hiding especially easy for corporations of all kinds, setting some of the nation’s most lenient rules. For as little as $90, people can create a Delaware-based company to “own” anything they don’t want to be associated with by name. Delaware goes further in protecting privacy than most states, not requiring a list of officers for some types of firms.

Transparency International, a global anticorruption organization, calls Delaware a haven for transnational crime and “a place where extreme corporate secrecy enables corrupt people, shady companies, drug traffickers, embezzlers, and fraudsters to cover their tracks when shifting dirty money from one place to another.”

More than one-third of all US aircraft — 122,336 — are registered to corporations. Of those, nearly 11,000 are registered to firms in Delaware.

A review of FAA records by the Globe found that about 3,500 aircraft are registered to more than 2,000 companies located at a single Wilmington address that is home to a business incorporator.

It is impossible to know how many planes are registered to non-US citizens through trusts because the FAA does not keep track. The Globe identified several businesses that provide the service. Together they have more than 7,500 aircraft registered across the country.

Law enforcement officials say these easy-to-create shell companies can be significant roadblocks in trying to convict criminals. A Los Angeles DEA agent who investigates narcotics-related aircraft said the dummy ownership makes it harder for him to draw a direct connection between drug dealers and their product.

“If I can’t demonstrate the individual who owned the aircraft or whose name was on the registration paperwork received money to knowingly and intentionally purchase this vessel in a drug transaction, then almost always there is no prosecution,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.

Penagos-Casanova and Rios Serra acquired a second drug-loaded plane that crashed in the Caribbean Sea due to engine failure in May 2015, according to court papers. In all, authorities recovered more than $70 million worth of cocaine from the two planes.

Both men pleaded guilty in US District Court in Los Angeles to “conspiracy to possess cocaine on board a United States-registered aircraft with intent to distribute.” They are awaiting sentencing.

Colombian kingpins are not the only suspicious users of aircraft registered to corporations set up by Kulatz, the Florida attorney. He and his wife are listed as officers of Delaware-based Secure Aircorp Inc., which owns the Gulfstream American 2 jet that was seized in 2014 by the Dominican Republic, according to FAA records.

N522HS was seized as part of an investigation by the Dominican Republic’s Justice Ministry Anti-Corruption Department into possible money laundering and embezzlement by one of the country’s senators, Felix Bautista. According to Dominican media reports, authorities said Bautista attempted to evade prosecution and the forfeiture of his aircraft by changing the plane’s tail number about two months before he was indicted. While businesses and individuals may request specific tail numbers to act as vanity plates, criminals utilize the tactic to evade detection, much like switching a license plate on a car.

FAA officials in a statement said such number changes are routine: “The Registry does not generally deny requests for a number change,” in part because they can still track planes by their serial numbers.

Likewise, FAA officials appeared to have no idea that plane N214FW had been shot down off Aruba or that it was controlled by alleged international drug lords. About 15 months after the plane crashed, the agency sent a notice to Dinama Aircorp reminding the company to renew registration for N214FW. Over several months, the agency sent multiple letters to the same address and all came back to Oklahoma City marked “Return to sender.”

30 years of frustration

Ronald Reagan was president when Congress took the FAA to task for not doing enough to keep criminals from secretly acquiring US-registered planes as well as pilot’s licenses.

At the 1988 hearing held by the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation, members wanted to know why the FAA so rarely revoked aircraft and airmen certifications for individuals knowingly violating controlled substance laws in the Aviation Drug-Trafficking Control Act of 1984. Over a four-year period, the FAA revoked the certifications of only three aircraft and six airmen.

Law enforcement officials explained that criminals were able to hide behind a veil of anonymity created through fictitious owners, fake addresses, post office boxes, illegible signatures on documents, repeated changes in ownership, and the switching of tail numbers. These administrative issues — found on paper and documents — created hurdles for law enforcement officers attempting to fight the US war on drugs.

“Aircraft identification and registered owner identification is an elusive veil, behind which the smuggler finds refuge,” testified Carol Knapik, then a detective with Florida’s Broward County sheriff’s office. “All to his advantage that there is no true piece of identification required for the registration of an aircraft.”

Congress directed the agency to make information in the aircraft registry more reliable, prompting common-sense reforms at the FAA such as using computer software to validate addresses and requiring that signatures be legible.

But after 9/11, the continuing weakness of FAA oversight — and the urgent need for reliable information — became increasingly obvious. An internal agency audit of the aircraft registry in 2010 found unreported address changes and sales that left the ownership of about one-third of the more than 300,000 aircraft on the registry in question. In response, the FAA required reregistration of all aircraft with mandated renewal.

Three years later, the inspector general at the Department of Transportation identified a concerning pattern among trusts set up on behalf of foreigners: 5,600 of the aircraft records maintained by the FAA were incomplete, often lacking key information on owner identities. And, in a follow-up letter, the investigators identified several trust-owned aircraft that should have set off alarms:

An FAA inspector was unable to obtain information about who was flying a US trust-registered Boeing 737 in the United Arab Emirates. The plane was suspected of not following US regulations and possibly being used for illegal activity.

Hours before the United Nations Security Council met in 2011 to approve a no-fly zone over Libya, a US plane registered to a trust approached the Tripoli International Airport without a landing permit.

And one aircraft was registered in a trust arrangement on behalf of a Lebanese politician who was “backed by a well known US government-designated terrorist organization.”

It wasn’t until March 2017, after months of questions from the Globe, that FAA officials sat down with the inspector general to address its seven major concerns. After the meeting, the inspector general said the FAA had addressed three of them, tackling issues of data integrity and security.

‘A crown jewel target’

Today, US air security is a study in contrasts. Since the attacks of 9/11, the government has made enormous changes to security procedures in commercial air travel, creating a whole new agency to screen passengers before they board. Since hijackers seized and weaponized four commercial airliners that September morning in 2001, the public has gotten used to a host of small indignities, from removing shoes to whole-body scans and dogs sniffing their carry-ons, all in the name of safety on planes.

But there have been far fewer security improvements for planes used in general aviation that, collectively, represent three-quarters of all US air traffic.

Partly, that may reflect some security analysts’ view that private planes can do far less damage as tools of terror than airliners.

But private planes have been used in attacks such as Joseph Stack’s 2010 suicide crash into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas, which killed an IRS agent and injured 13 others. Stack had posted a suicide note about the “greed” of the IRS on the same day he burned down his own house and deliberately flew his Piper Dakota into the four-story office building.

The 9/11 conspirators had bigger ambitions for small planes. Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the masterminds who had looked into buying crop-dusters in Norman, Okla., and possessed “a computer disk containing information related to the aerial application of pesticides” when he was arrested, according to his 2001 indictment. The indictment said that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta made similar inquiries in Florida in 2000 and 2001.

In June, all these years later, the head of US Homeland Security called commercial aviation “a crown jewel target” for terrorists.

“The threat has not diminished. In fact, I am concerned that we are seeing renewed interest on the part of terrorist groups to go after the aviation sector,” said John Kelly, then-Department of Homeland Security secretary and now President Trump’s chief of staff, during remarks on enhanced aviation security for commercial flights in June.

Scars that won’t heal

For Asnaldo Gonzalez, the failed oversight of US-registered planes had a devastating effect. The federal lawsuit filed on his behalf by Podhurst Orseck, a Miami-based firm, against the plane’s owner was dropped partly because the true owner couldn’t be found to hold accountable. To this day, nine years later, Gonzalez still cannot afford to rebuild his shattered home.

“Absolutely everyone is in total and absolute silence,” said Alfredo Jose D’Ascoli Centeno, an attorney for the Gonzalez family in Caracas.

Before the crash, Gonzalez’s own multistory dwelling was the largest home on the block. It served as an imposing reminder of an accomplished dream — a house built to fit his entire extended family.

Now the cement walls peel with black and gray scars. The bedrooms, once filled with the laughter of his grandchildren, resemble oversized emptied ashtrays. An old couch, two plastic chairs, and wall decorations of homes shifted sideways are among the only family items left behind in the uninhabitable house.

“What I’m looking for is for everyone involved in this tragedy to be held responsible,” said Gonzalez, who continues to pursue the case in Venezuela. “My family and I are fighting without any type of economic resources, and we will fight to the end. “

As Gonzalez recounts his nightmare, voices of children echo from the elementary school across the street as they change classes and play at recess. His wife, Carmen, folds her hands inside of her lap and presses her lips together. The story makes her breathe in hard.

Gonzalez’s grandson, Joecruz, who was rescued from his burning crib and is now 9, paces in the background as he listens to the familiar story that always ends with the same terrifying climax: The explosion. The terror. The deaths.

Joecruz wears his baseball cap low, covering his dark hair and a burn scar that stretches across his forehead. Below his deep brown eyes on both of his cheeks are two more scars, constant reminders he’s unable to erase.

Part Two, coming soon.

The Rest of the Questions/Conditions Regarding North Korea

Posted on September 25, 2017September 25, 2017 by Denise Simon

The Beijing government knows full well all the ins and outs of North Korea including all banking relationships, cyber attacks, illicit activities, counterfeiting and gets assistance from China on how to skirt international sanctions. Still, China has the ability to make the world safer from the rogue Kim regime including outside assistance from Syria, Venezuela, Iran and Russia. Whatever the future holds for global security and equilibrium, Beijing is responsible.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is fixated on obtaining a serious nuclear arsenal, and continues to thumb his nose at the U.S. and other world powers. The latest round of United Nations Security Council sanctions approved Monday are not going to change that. But one aspect of them — new measures to interdict ships breaking trade embargoes against Pyongyang — could be baby steps toward much stronger sanctions enforcement.

The new resolution gives the U.S. and other countries the power to inspect ships going in and out of North Korea’s ports but, unfortunately, does not authorize the use of force if the target ships don’t comply. Equally bad, the inspections would need the consent of the countries where the ships are registered. This is a far weaker regime than what was initially proposed by the Donald Trump administration, which would have empowered U.S. military vessels to “use all necessary measures” to force compliance. That the language was watered down to avoid a veto from Russia or China.

The fact is, the only way to keep the Kim regime from violating UN sanctions would be a stringent naval blockade. While a full-on blockade would require a Security Council resolution, it would be possible for the U.S. to immediately start putting in place the rudiments of a comprehensive inspection regime on the high seas, which could be easily adapted over time as more allies, partners and ultimately geopolitical competitors like China and Russia can be persuaded to sign on. Indeed, the Trump administration has already been thinking along these lines.

Such a blockade would serve three key purposes: definitively cutting off North Korea’s access to oil imports from the sea; stopping Korean exports, especially textiles and seafood (which are of significant hard currency value to the regime); and ensuring that high-tech machinery and raw materials that might support Kim’s nuclear-weapons and missile programs are not allowed into the Hermit Kingdom.

While China might continue to provide such supplies across the long Chinese-North Korean land border, a naval blockade would increase pressure on Beijing to comply with existing UN sanctions, as any illegal imports would be obvious proof of Chinese violations.

Setting up a naval blockade is a tactical challenge, even for the U.S. North Korea operates commercial and military ports on its east and west coasts of the peninsula, including Nampo on the Bay of Korea and Hungnam on the Sea of Japan. It also has ports in the far northeast of the country on the edge of Russia, which has been one of Kim’s apologists on the world stage. Shutting down the entire flow of goods into and out of North Korea would significantly tax the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

But it wouldn’t be impossible. The blockade would probably be commanded and controlled tactically out of Seoul, at the headquarters of the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, Army General Vincent Brooks. (An odd legacy of the Korean War is that Brooks is also the commander of UN forces on the peninsula.) At sea, the Navy would probably operationalize the blockade under the overall tactical control of the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, which is based across the Sea of Japan in Yokosuka. The flagship of the fleet, the USS Blue Ridge, is optimized for complex combat operations and would be the seagoing base for the blockade. The fleet has a new commander, Admiral Phil Sawyer, who was brought after the collisions of two Navy destroyers, the McCain and Fitzgerald, with commercial ships this year. More here from Bloomberg.

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There is an international program to practice and plan for anything that North Korea may have in process militarily.

North Korea’s intensifying experiments appear to have prompted the Formidable Shield exercise, which is the first time that Nato allies have practised defending against incoming ballistic missiles with no prior warning in Europe.

It launched the day after the US sent bombers and fighter jets over waters east of North Korea to send a “clear message that the President has many military options to defeat any threat”.

Donald Trump appeared to threaten regime change in the country over the weekend, causing the North Korean foreign minister to accuse the President of “declaring war” in a speech at the United Nations.

American forces are leading the exercise off the coast of the Scotland, alongside troops from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) hailed Formidable Shield as “one of the most sophisticated and complex air and missile exercises ever undertaken in the UK”.

A Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer and two Type 23 frigates are being joined by 11 other ships, 10 aircraft and 3,300 personnel for the month-long exercise.

They will work together to detect, track and shoot down live anti-ship and ballistic missiles. More here.

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Earlier this month CIA Director Mike Pompeo suggested “the North Koreans have a long history of being proliferators and sharing their knowledge, their technology, their capacities around the world.”

My research has shown that North Korea is more than willing to breach sanctions to earn cash.

A checkered history

Over the years North Korea has earned millions of dollars from the export of arms and missiles, and its involvement in other illicit activities such as smuggling drugs, endangered wildlife products and counterfeit goods.

North Korean technicians allegedly assisted the Pakistanis in production of Krytrons, likely sometime in the 1990s. Krytrons are devices used to trigger the detonation of a nuclear device.

Later in the 1990s, North Korea allegedly transferred cylinders of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Pakistan, where notorious proliferator A.Q. Khan shipped them onward to Libya. UF6 is a gaseous uranium compound that’s needed to create the “highly enriched uranium” used in weapons.

The most significant case was revealed in 2007 when Israeli Air Force jets bombed a facility in Syria. The U.S. government alleges this was an “undeclared nuclear reactor,” capable of producing plutonium, that had been under construction with North Korean assistance since the late 1990s. A U.S. intelligence briefing shortly after the strike highlighted the close resemblance between the Syrian reactor and the North Korean Yongbyon reactor. It also noted evidence of unspecified “cargo” being transported from North Korea to the site in 2006.

More recently, a 2017 U.N. report alleged that North Korea had been seeking to sell Lithium-6 (Li-6), an isotope used in the production of thermonuclear weapons. The online ad that caught the attention of researchers suggested North Korea could supply 22 pounds of the substance each month from Dandong, a Chinese city on the North Korean border.

There are striking similarities between this latest case and other recent efforts by North Korea to market arms using companies “hidden in plain sight.”

The Li-6 advertisement was allegedly linked to an alias of a North Korean state arms exporter known as “Green Pine Associated Corporation.” Green Pine and associated individuals were hit with a U.N. asset freeze and travel ban in 2012. The individual named on the ad was a North Korean based in Beijing formerly listed as having diplomatic status. As was noted when the Li-6 story broke, the contact details provided with the ad were made up: The street address did not exist and the phone number didn’t work. However, prospective buyers could contact the seller through the online platform.

This case – our most recent data point – raises significant questions. Was this North Korea testing the water for future sales? Does it suggest that North Korea may be willing to sell materials and goods it can produce in surplus? Was the case an anomaly rather than representative of a trend? More here.