A high-tech surveillance plane that repeatedly flew in the vicinity of CIA-linked attacks on boats near the Galápagos Islands this year had an unlikely first owner:
a company based in The Villages,
the retirement mega-community in Florida.
The company,
Sunshine Aviation Capital,
has no online presence or public profile.
But corporate filings with the Federal Aviation Administration bear the signatures of members of the
Morse family
-- the billionaire owners of The Villages and prominent longtime Republican Party donors.
The Galápagos attacks were part of a CIA “covert action” program that resulted in the disappearance of eight fishermen, The Washington Post previously reported.
No government has claimed responsibility for the strikes. This Post investigation used flight data and radio communications to trace the specially equipped business jet that flew near those strikes back to its origins.
FAA filings and corporate documents revealed the Morse family’s role in the company that previously owned the plane — and a web of contractors that suggests the plane itself has ties to the CIA.
How, and why, the Morse family became involved with a plane that was later used in a CIA campaign in Latin America is unclear,
as is whether family members had a financial stake in Sunshine Aviation.
The plane appears to have never flown to the airport near The Villages where the Morse family maintains a private hangar, according to available flight data.
When Sunshine Aviation acquired the plane in November 2022, the Cessna Citation Longitude was already outfitted with unusual modifications
such as infrared lighting and specialized cockpit interiors that allow pilots to don night-vision goggles, FAA records show.
Additional surveillance modifications were made during the eight months the firm owned the jet, according to the records.
Sunshine Aviation delegated authority to manage the jet and approve those modifications to a mechanic who has worked for Triangle Aviation Solutions,
a North Carolina-based firm previously known as Aero Contractors.
That company had a well-documented role in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11,
ferrying terrorism detainees around the globe.
In July 2023, several years before the action near the Galápagos, Sunshine Aviation transferred ownership of the plane
— along with two other similar aircraft
— to a trust at the Bank of Utah.
Mark Morse, then CEO of The Villages, digitally signed the paperwork as manager of Sunshine Aviation. FAA records show the aircraft was subsequently managed or inspected by two other individuals with employment histories at Triangle Aviation.
The Morse family and their representatives at The Villages did not respond to requests for comment. Triangle also did not respond, nor did the Bank of Utah.
Starting in November 2025, and continuing in the months surrounding the attacks,
aviation data shows a series of flights across the southern United States and to and from El Salvador,
each involving a Cessna Citation Longitude.
Although the flights are recorded as having different registration numbers, The Post uncovered multiple overlapping “squawk codes”
— transponder codes assigned by air traffic controllers
— transmitted by the aircraft across some of the legs,
showing that the seemingly unrelated flights were flown by a single plane.
The tactics mirror methods employed in the past to hide classified aviation activity, according to a former FAA official who worked with the CIA to disguise clandestine operations.
“One would have to believe that this is the agency hiding flights,” said the former FAA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“I can’t think of any other explanation.”
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.