In January, the surveillance jet was tracked flying in the direction of an Ecuadorian fishing boat that went missing a short time later, The Post previously reported.
Flying under the call sign FENIX701,
the plane appeared again in March when two other fishing boats were attacked.
Survivors of the attacks said small quadcopter drones either dropped munitions on the vessels or detonated by crashing into them.
They described being detained aboard a vessel by English-speaking armed men before being transferred to the Salvadoran Navy.
They were ultimately returned to Ecuador, without criminal charges or an explanation.
The secretive attacks were distinct from the Trump administration’s highly publicized military campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea.
It is not clear whether other actors were involved in the Galápagos strikes, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries. A secretive spy air wing:
The CIA has long operated a covert fleet of aircraft for logistics, transport and intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance purposes.
Starting in 1949, the CIA secretly funded
— and later outright purchased
— an airline that ballooned into the storied Air America,
a so-called agency “proprietary” that was central to CIA’s secret war in Laos and Southeast Asia
and once boasted 8,000 employees. CIA aviation front companies, which functioned as legitimate commercial businesses in addition to undertaking secret operations,
brought in “at least” $658 million in outside income to the agency through 1975,
according to a document fully declassified by the Trump administration in 2025. After the Vietnam War, the CIA downsized,
obscuring its aviation activities behind a tangle of modest, formally independent firms operating out of small airfields,
particularly in the Sun Belt.
Aero Contractors was founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, the renowned chief special missions pilot for Air America,
to carry out operations on the agency’s behalf,
according to prior reports and books on the company’s activities.
Those included CIA-sponsored counternarcotics missions in Colombia.
Most notably, in the 2000s, Aero Contractors was associated with the rendition of over four dozen terrorism detainees to so-called CIA “black sites” abroad or foreign custody.
A web of dummy firms and contractors were linked to the transit of suspected terrorists across the globe.
