They Flew for CIA Carriers, Now They Struggle to Get Benefits

In 1961, Sam Jordan had just finished a six-year stint flying helicopters in the Marine Corps when he saw a want ad for an upstart airline called Air America.

"They said they wanted pilots," he recalled. "They didn't say anything about where the flying would be."

Within months, Jordan was flying helicopters in Laos, carrying medical equipment and other supplies to refugees in remote mountain villages. In subsequent years, he flew airplanes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, scanning for radio signals from the ground and dropping provisions from the sky.

He and other pilots developed code words for their cargo: "Soft rice" meant food and "hard rice" meant arms.

In 14 years working for Air America, Jordan was never formally told who was footing the bill for his often-harrowing flights. But he and the other Air America pilots knew. They called their mystery client "the customer," Jordan said.

"And the CIA was always the customer."

Few Americans know it, but Air America is embedded in some of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War. In the famous photo of the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, the helicopters lifting stranded diplomats off the rooftop belonged not to the military but to Air America.

The company was shut down after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and the U.S. government subsequently acknowledged that Air America was a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA.

But more than 30 years later, the government is still grappling with where that leaves Air America's former employees. They worked for Air America, but does that mean they worked for the CIA?

Jordan and hundreds of other Air America pilots, mechanics, executives and workers have spent the last two decades battling to win recognition as CIA employees -- or at least federal employees -- a designation that would entitle them to pensions and other benefits.

The CIA has fought the effort, arguing that Air America employees were hired to take part in important missions but were never officially brought into the agency.

The distinction is important to the agency, where contractors now outnumber the official workforce. Officials fear that granting CIA status to Air America retirees would open the gates to thousands of similar claims.

Until recently, the Air America effort had seemed futile. A lawsuit filed in the 1980s was tossed out, and efforts to enlist help from members of Congress never got off the ground. But recent developments in Washington have given Air America workers new hope.

When Democrats won control of Congress in the fall, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) became Senate majority leader. Reid's state is home to some of the most vocal Air America retirees, and he has used his position to push legislation that would require the nation's top spy officials to take another look at the Air America case.

Though the legislation has yet to pass, the director of national intelligence -- a position created after the Sept. 11 attacks to oversee all 16 U.S. spy agencies -- has launched a review of whether Air America employees should win their claim and how much it would cost the government if they did.

A legendary role

It's hard to imagine that any other group of CIA contractors would get such consideration. But Air America occupies a legendary position in the annals of U.S. espionage.

For nearly three decades, Air America and its CIA sibling, Civil Air Transport, served as the circulatory system for clandestine U.S. operations in Southeast Asia. They moved supplies, weapons and spies across the treacherous terrain of China, Vietnam and Laos.

The CIA's air fleet was as large as those of major commercial airlines at the time. At their peak in the mid-1960s, the CIA "proprietaries" employed more than 15,000 people -- most of them foreign nationals -- and operated about 200 planes.