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THE PEGASUS FILE
A former CIA deep-cover agent turns whistleblower at great risk.
His shocking allegations expose powerful names controlling the
international drug trade in very high places.
V ietnam Special Forces Air Combat Controller; 25-year CIA deep-cover agent; US
Army pilot flying classified missions during the US invasion of Grenada; Iran-Contra
pilot flying cocaine shipments labeled as medical supplies; and member of the ultra-
secret, international G7-run Pegasus "hit team"...this is the extraordinary story of Gene
"Chip" Tatum.
From sensitive, highly secretive (and hitherto largely unknown) Special Forces covert
operations in Cambodia, to wandering CIA asset; through to "black ops" activities in
Grenada and Oliver North's Iran-Contra "Enterprise", as well as membership in an
international "hit team", Gene "Chip" Tatum has seen it all, done it all and is now telling
it all.
Tatum claims to know where the skeletons are buried. Above all, he is aware that his
testimony implicates serving and former US Presidents plus a whole list of high-level
government officials and others in a welter of nefarious activities - including
assassination, blackmail, coercion, gun-running, money-laundering and cocaine-
trafficking.
Tatum, a lanky Floridian, turned whistleblower following his arrest on treason charges in
early 1995. The charge was both astonishing and patently ludicrous, and was later
dropped and replaced by a fraud charge - a drastic step-down. Found guilty, he was
sentenced to serve a 15-month sentence. In March 1996, an additional charge - conspiring
to embezzle - was brought against him. Found guilty, he was incarcerated in Jesup
Federal Correctional Facility, Georgia, where he is serving a 27-month concurrent
sentence. Ensuing press interest resulted in one article appearing in the Tampa Tribune on
4 May 1996.
Many questions continue to hang over the conduct of the trial. His defence lawyer
refused to call any of the 80 witnesses whom Tatum nominated for the defence. Later, his
lawyer freely confessed to having come under pressure from the US Department of
Defense. Tatum says the first charge was a set-up to discredit him following his
"resignation" from "Operation Pegasus". The second charge he views with greater
scepticism and concern.
Tatum's resignation from Pegasus followed his refusal to "neutralise" a leading US
political figure in the 1992 US presidential elections. Tatum declares he will not
"participate in assassinations of any sort, character assassinations or anything, of
American citizens". He goes on to explain that back in 1994, in a telephone conference
call involving Oliver North, Felix Rodríguez and the late William Colby of the CIA, he
was warned to turn over incriminating documents and tapes he had accumulated for his
"retirement". He wryly observes that had he done so, he would probably have been
quickly "terminated" in an "extreme" way - a speciality of the Pegasus team of which he
was once a member.
Countering this demand, Tatum volunteered to plead guilty on a fabricated felony count
and serve a 12-month sentence - so that his credibility would be damaged in the event he
ever decided to speak out. His incarceration for the second charge - and especially the
six- month sentence of his wife, Nancy - led him to speak out about his life, almost 30
years of which he served as a "black" operative, and to reveal and destroy the command
structure of Pegasus. It is an extraordinary story.
"OPERATION RED ROCK"
Tatum has written of his early career in the military, and his involvement in a highly
sensitive and classified operation, in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Operation Red
Rock". Joining the Air Force in February 1970, he went through Army jump school,
escape and evasion training, jungle training, sea survival school and diving school and
was assigned along with six others as "Combat Controllers" (the USAF equivalent of
Special Forces), receiving his distinctive Special Forces burgundy-coloured beret. From
there he was assigned to Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, and then on to Fort Bragg,
North Carolina - home of the "Green Berets" - for training in C4 plastic explosives,
mines, nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, plus indoctrination in electronic and
psychological operations.
Posted to South-East Asia as Airman First Class (A1C) in December 1970, he was
assigned as a radio operator on a Forward Air Control (FAC) aircraft attached to Task
Force Alpha at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. In short order he was recruited (an
involuntary "volunteer") to "Team Red Rock". The team was composed of eight US
Army Green Berets, three US Navy SEALs and two "cowboys" - a euphemism for CIA
paramilitary specialists. With Tatum attached, Team Red Rock totalled 14 in all, and was
about to be tasked with an operation that came directly from the White House.
In January 1971 the team received a final briefing from General Alexander Haig, who
had flown in specially, along with CIA Saigon Chief William Colby - nicknamed by the
team as "Mr Peepers" because of his resemblance to a well-known character in a TV
sitcom. Haig and Colby outlined the plan, stressing its importance and extreme
classification. President Nixon, desperate to quell domestic riots over an increasingly
unpopular war, sought to withdraw all US personnel from South-East Asia. Withdrawal
would - and, in the end, ultimately did - cause a military vacuum, quickly leading to the
defeat of South Vietnamese forces.
During those years, Nixon was also running a "secret war" in Cambodia and Laos. In
Laos, a dwindling number of Meo tribesmen, together with covert US personnel
employed by the CIA proprietary company, Air America, were battling against superior
North Vietnamese ground forces. A much similar pattern was occurring in Cambodia,
amid grave fears that the "domino theory" would result if either of these two nations were
to fall to the Communist North Vietnamese. Nixon hoped that native Cambodian forces
could fill the vacuum caused by the withdrawal of US covert forces. Lon Nol, the
Cambodian leader, stubbornly continued to resist Nixon's diplomatic overtures to take up
the slack, being anxious to hedge his bets and realistic about his chances of survival as
Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces prepared to swarm in, unhindered by US air power.
A plan had been drawn up at the highest levels of Nixon's administration. Team Red
Rock were to enter Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, in secret and attack the airport and
military and civil installations, wreaking as much havoc as possible. The plan called for
the team to parachute into the outskirts of Phnom Penh, carrying captured NVA
"Sappers" with them. Taken in unarmed and alive, the Sappers would be "sacrificed" and
their bodies left to be discovered by Cambodian forces. A furious Lon Nol would assume
North Vietnam was to blame. It was hoped that such an act would stiffen Lon Nol's
backbone. With nowhere else to turn, the US puppet would urgently seek US hardware to
strengthen his forces and continue the battle.
The team members were not told that they, too, were to be sacrificed by their President to
ensure that word of the operation never reached the light of day. A detachment of
Montagnard tribesmen ("the Yards"), in the pay of the CIA, was assigned to liquidate
each member of the team and dispose of the bodies. The attack went successfully, but the
team's suspicion of "the Yards" foiled the betrayal. Using their knowledge of "escape and
evasion" tactics, the team decided to trek to the Vietnamese border and back to safety
with US forces. 1
Casualties thinned out their numbers until only eight of them remained. Soon these, too,
were captured by NVA regulars and underwent hideous torture at the hands of Chinese
and Russian interrogators. Ultimately, only Tatum and one other team member survived
the ordeal.
Convalescing, Tatum was debriefed by CIA station chief, William Colby, and told he
would, in future, be kept close to "the Agency". Recruited into the CIA, the yawning door
of future "black" operations creaked open. Life would never be the same again for Chip
Tatum.
CIA DEEP-COVER AGENT
For the next 10 years or so, Tatum's covert activities were varied. For a while, he worked
out of Homestead Air Force Base where he was NCIOC of the tower receiver sight and
MARS station. This was the base which then-President Nixon used for his frequent visits
to the Key Biscayne, Florida, "White House". Much of this period remains obscured
behind a thick blanket of classification.
From there, he was stationed in northern Italy, tasked with visiting the border towns of
Yugoslavia and Italy. Colby felt that as a young Air Force man, Tatum might be
"approached" in these towns for "information". The idea was to make contact with
foreign agents and covertly gather information about them and their operations. Later, he
was tasked with infiltrating Yugoslavia in order to gather intelligence on potential
successors to the then Yugoslavian President Tito.
Tatum was also sent to search for missing US POWs from Vietnam and elsewhere in
South-East Asia.
By 1976, Tatum was operating out of Lamar, Colorado, in a communications facility
called OLAB. His contact there was Don Holmes, president of Valley - a Savings & Loan
bank. 2 Tatum acted as his courier, shuttling between Lamar and Springfield, Colorado,
with transaction files. From there he was transferred to MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa,
Florida.
Shortly before his MacDill posting, Tatum received a call from Colby telling him he was
resigning his position as Director, Central Intelligence, and recommending Tatum should
deactivate his clandestine CIA activities. Colby continued, saying that remaining active
without Colby there to protect him might place him in personal "jeopardy", as he had
powerful enemies in Washington. This warning referred to Nixon, Kissinger and Haig,
and Tatum's role in and survival from "Operation Red Rock".
Tatum took good notice of the warning and became deactive. Later, in 1979, he requested
and was granted entry into a USAF Reserve program. Leaving active military service he
moved to Gunnison, Colorado, and took up a position with Bo Calloway, owner of the
Crested Bute ski area. The appointment was arranged by Colby.
During 1980 he received a visit from two men who informed him he was being
reactivated, but into the US Army instead of the Air Force. He was sent to the US Army
Flight School for rotary- wing training at Fort Rucker. From there he was assigned to the
160th Aviation Battalion/Special Forces at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Shortly afterwards,
the 160th combined with others to form Task Force 160.
It was in this unit that Tatum played a "spooky" role in the US invasion of Grenada. A
photograph of him standing in front of his MD-500 Defender gunship on the beach-head
in Grenada, appeared along with a feature story in the Louisville Courier-Journal . Tatum
will only say of this episode that he "wasn't there", in the same sense that he "wasn't in
Cambodia".
At that time he was attached to the US Army's 160th air wing at Fort Campbell. Not only
was the Hughes helicopter then not in the Army's inventory, but the 160th didn't officially
exist. Jim Malone, of the Louisville Courier-Journal , finds this extraordinary. He has
documents showing the 160th was stationed at Fort Campbell, even though officials in
the Pentagon continue to deny it - as they deny the wing's role in Grenada. Malone, in a
telephone conversation with this writer, advised that the 160th is now stationed at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina - home of the famous Special Forces, the Green Berets. Their
mission is to fly "Delta teams" on covert assignments, Malone added.
THE CONTRA COCAINE TRAIN
During 1983, Colby established contact again, advising Tatum he would shortly be
contacted by "a man called North". This, as Tatum was to discover later, was none other
than Lt Col. Oliver North - the central architect of America's Nicaraguan Contra
campaign. Besides fighting a covert war, North was also the link-man in much, much
dirtier work.
The "Contragate" years teem with well-documented accounts of illicit wholesale gun-
running and dope-smuggling. The exposé series published in Autumn 1996 by the San
Jose Mercury-Post , entitled "The Dark Alliance", openly finger-points at the CIA and the
Reagan administration for turning a blind eye to massive cocaine smuggling. Moreover,
the series of articles claims that the explosion of "crack cocaine" in Los Angeles resulted
entirely from the Contra leaders-cum-dope peddlers who made vast personal fortunes
from their activities. Today, the official argument remains that the Contras were
"freelancing" without the knowledge or consent of their CIA "handlers" or North's so-
called "Enterprise". Despite these assertions, mountains of hard evidence point in a
different direction. Included in this evidence is an entry from North's own diary which
shows his knowledge of cocaine shipments.
In stark contrast to these denials, Tatum says that North's "Enterprise" not only set up the
cocaine factories and "ran" the Colombian cartels, but was also responsible for
masterminding the massive shipments of narcotics into the US. Significantly, he is not
alone in making these accusations. A number of those involved in Col. North's operations
have subsequently come forward and spilled the beans. Almost all of these
"whistleblowers" have been hounded and imprisoned. Some have died, whilst others have
fled. The whole Contra thing, Tatum states, was also being used by an extremely covert
group called Pegasus.
During February 1985, Tatum was piloting "Dustoff" (Medevac) flights for the US
Army's 3/498th Medical Company, stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Two flight crews,
including Tatum's, were transferred to Palmerola Air Base, Honduras. Each flight
consisted of a pilot, copilot, medic and crew chief. Once familiarised, they assumed the
Medevac mission for Joint Task Force Bravo. Previously, in 1984, Tatum infiltrated the
3/498th on the instructions of Lt Col. Oliver North who had established contact under the
code-name "Jake" (North had "control" of the 160th air wing and was also deeply
involved with the tactical planning of "black ops" missions in the Grenada invasion).

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