Flights on Company Business

The planes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco an...

The planes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero’s pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.

When the CIA wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.

Aero Contractors’ planes dropped CIA paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi right after the US Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantanamo Bay, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.

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While posing as a private charter outfit—‘‘aircraft rental with pilot’’ is the listing in Dun & Bradstreet—Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the CIA’s secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary CIA officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency’s Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.

Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the CIA has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001.

An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former CIA officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.

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The civilian planes can go places military craft would not be welcome. Some of the planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency’s practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the flights in the last two years. Italy has even launched an investigation into one such episode.

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Shane.