Manuel J. Fernandez - Civilian Life

Civilian Life

Once a civilian, the ace switched from fighter jets to multiengine propliners, but was unable to get work with the big passenger carriers due to his lack of a college education. Fernandez piloted Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commandos, Douglas C-47 Skytrains and bigger Douglas DC-6s and DC-7s with a variety of transport companies. Most of Pete's flying after he quit the military was done from a notorious ramshackle section of Miami International Airport known as Corrosion Corner. This infamous airdrome was home to a colorful array of fly-by-night cargo outfits, smugglers and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contract agents. Deciding it patriotic, and to get the adrenaline jolt he missed from his Air Force days, Fernandez plunged into this dangerous intrigue. In a mission whose details are still hidden in the shade, he was soon contracted by the CIA in 1965 to steal an unidentified aircraft (possibly a MiG-17) from an unidentified Latin American country (possibly Cuba). He pulled off the heist and used the money he earned for the job to buy his first home, in the Perrine section of Miami, not far from Homestead Air Force Base. At Homestead, Pete was able to keep connected with old buddies, occasionally stopping in the officers’ club for a drink. There, he also cultivated a relationship with a CIA contract agent named Gerald P. Hemming that would greatly influence the future course of events.

In 1972, Fernandez was contracted by the CIA to steal another Soviet-model aircraft, this time from Lima, Peru. To prepare for the job, he first cultivated a relationship with a Peruvian air force officer. This contact became his ticket onto the airbase's restricted tarmac area. The targeted plane was an Antonov-26, a model Fernandez had never seen before, let alone flown. The twin-engine turboprop was in itself unremarkable, but it contained a computer module that permitted its crew to drop cargo with extreme accuracy. The mission was successful.

Fernandez’s constant crewmate while flying with three separate transport companies in the 1960s and 1970s (Argonaut Airlines, Airlift International and Conner Airlines) was Howard K. Davis, himself a paramilitary pilot who had flown guns to Raúl Castro during the 1957-1958 Cuban Revolution. After the Castro brothers took power in January 1959, Davis switched sides and began conspiring against them as a founding member of a private commando operation based in the Florida Keys called the Intercontinental Penetration force, or InterPen. A key comrade of Davis in InterPen was future Fernandez associate Gerry Hemming. Funded by the Mafia and the CIA, then allies in an endeavor to murder Fidel Castro, as well as ultra-rightwing American groups such as the Minutemen, InterPen trained Cuban exiles in guerrilla tactics for use in infiltrating their homeland on missions of sabotage and assassination. Years later, after InterPen had broken up, Davis flew cargo with Fernandez as his regular job, but was still secretly working on covert operations.

Howard Davis' comrade in arms and fellow cofounder of InterPen, former Marine Gerry Hemming, would exert important influence over Pete Fernandez's final destiny. A strapping soldier of fortune and sometime CIA asset who was also an aviator, Hemming eventually got Fernandez involved in black operations in Peru, namely the 1972 Lima contract job stealing the Antonov for the CIA. Later, in the mid-1970s, Hemming pulled Fernandez into drug smuggling activity. Their goal in this hazardous work was to infiltrate Bahamas-Colombia trafficking networks and gather intelligence on them for a Miami federal antidrug task force. Casualty rates in clandestine dope runs were higher than they had been in combat squadrons in Korea. According to Hemming, he and Fernandez ultimately worked for the South Florida Drug Interdiction Task Force. This task force was based in Miami and included the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs and the Internal Revenue Service.

During their years working for the South Florida Task Force in 1977-1980, the last years of Fernandez’s life, he and Hemming provided key intelligence to the feds that led to their breaking up the “Black Tuna Gang” in 1979, then the biggest Colombian marijuana smuggling ring in the United States. Under deep cover, the pilots also provided critical background information for other long running investigations, even when the actual busts occurred some time after Hemming and Fernandez had left the work. These later-bearing fruits included Operations Grouper, Banco and Tiberon, all coordinated by the DEA, and most importantly, Operation Greenback.

In April 1980, Fernandez was imprisoned in a Colombian jail, an ordeal that lasted for seven weeks. He had been arrested in Barranquilla in a DC-6 that was "clean," though his crewmates were known to be involved in drug trafficking. He languished in rough conditions, using his jacket as a pillow on the concrete floor and surviving on plantains. Though Miami DEA agent Jim Harmon assured Pete’s wife Jill that his agency would get Fernandez home, nothing happened. In Gerry Hemming's opinion, it was probably better it turned out that way, for had the U.S. government come to Pete’s aid it could have blown his cover and he might well have never gotten out of Colombia alive. As it turned out, Jill Fernandez was compelled to use the family’s life savings to pay a “fine”—effectively a bribe—in order to get her husband released from the squalid Barranquilla cellblock before conditions there broke his health. Whatever confluence of emotions he felt after the Colombian ordeal, facts show that Fernandez soon began planning what would be his last mission. With financial assistance from an associate, Delta Air Lines pilot James Killough, he obtained a twin-engine Piper Geronimo for a cannabis run to Colombia and back via the Bahama Islands. The Piper’s stock engines were replaced with bigger ones, and the blunt nose was lengthened to carry more cargo. The factory landing gear was replaced with stronger struts and more durable tires meant for rough terrain. Finally, to extend the aircraft’s range, extra gas tanks were affixed below each wing.

On the morning of October 17, 1980, Fernandez left Homestead Airport on his last flight, after telling his wife he would be transporting lobsters. Apparently, all went well with the marijuana pickup, but while flying alone on the return leg, laden with hundreds of pounds of “Colombian Gold,” Pete crashed and died in the early morning darkness of October 18 while attempting to land in a remote part of Grand Bahama Island.

Former FBI agent Harold Copus, a South Florida Task Force veteran who recruited drug pilots as informants, says of the fliers he handled,

“We used to have a saying about them: there are old pilots and are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. They were real cowboys, they would do things that were unbelievable! It was like the Wild West for them: bringing in drugs was like buying candy. The skies were full of these guys. And they went down. Fernandez crashed going into the Bahamas? A lot of guys crashed going into the Bahamas. We had reports of crashes in the Bahamas, we had reports of crashes in Jamaica. Crashing was part of their business. It’s what those guys did!”

Pete Fernandez and Gerry Hemming willingly flew these dangerous drug runs with no proof of their true identity hidden away in a government file, and paid a tremendous price for their decision. Fernandez died in disgrace while Hemming spent nearly a decade Florida prison nicknamed "The Rock." Why did these men commit major felonies without a guarantee somewhere of their true purpose? Hemming puts it simply: the identity of undercover informants were "being sold out the back door" by federal employees to Colombian narcotraffickers. In this he is correct. In that era, government agencies, especially the DEA, were ridden with security problems. Two DEA agents in Boston were selling the identity of informants directly to narcotraffickers, court testimony later revealed, as was an agent in Miami. The Miami office was particularly suspect: another DEA agent there, a supervisor who headed up Operation Grouper (which used intelligence provided by Hemming and Fernandez) was later convicted of drug dealing.

Given such realities, which street-level operatives like Hemming and Fernandez were well aware of, these men chose to work under extreme deep cover to prevent Colombian traffickers from discovering their activities and retaliating against them or their families. Such undocumented operatives could be left to twist in the wind if their sponsors decide it convenient upon their exposure. When Pete suddenly died on Grand Bahama Island, it must have proved easier for federal agents who knew better to say nothing and let his death be simply drug-related.

After Fernandez died, he received obituaries in the Miami Herald and the New York Times, both of which mentioned widespread rumors that held the old ace had been working undercover. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.