Manuel J. "Pete" Fernandez
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Manuel John "Pete" Fernandez (b. April 19, 1925 - d. October 18, 1980) was the third-leading American ace in the Korean War.[1]
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[edit] Early life
Pete Fernandez was born in Key West, Florida on April 19, 1925.[2] A working-class youth, his grandparents emigrated from Spain, though they also spent some years on the island of Cuba before finally arriving in the United States. Fernandez was raised in Miami, where his father was chief radio operator for Pan American World Airways. Pete learned to fly before he could drive, earning his private pilot’s license at age fifteen.
[edit] Military career
In June 1943, at the height of World War II, Fernandez enlisted in the Army Air Corps as an eighteen-year-old private. Though small in stature and just a high school graduate, Pete became a flying officer through talent, determination and the enormous manpower needs of total war. Fernandez saw no action in World War Two, but Pete ultimately proved to be one of the best combat aviators of his generation. During an eight-month tour of duty in Korea in 1952-1953, Captain Fernandez shot down fourteen and a half enemy jets to finish as the Korean War’s third-leading American ace.
Fernandez was a crack marksman in the tricky art of deflection shooting, one the best in the Air Force at that time. Pete used stealth and cunning to stalk MiGs rather than attacking impetuously as other leading aces often did. His modus operandi in battle was to maneuver skillfully and trigger his guns only when he had attained an optimum firing position. Like all high scorers in Korea, Fernandez routinely violated Chinese air space by crossing the Yalu River into Manchuria to hunt the elusive MiG quarry. Unlike other top guns, Pete had a reputation for taking good care of his flight members and never putting his wingmen at unnecessary risk. Such selflessness was exceptional among the five highest scorers. The war's other four leading MiG Killers (Joe McConnell, James Jabara, George Davis and Royal Baker) were all tremendous combat fliers, but also had reputations for occasionally flying their wingman into mortal danger while attempting to pump up their own personal tally.
[edit] After Korea
In the spring of 1953, Fernandez returned home at the same time as his friend Joe McConnell, the "ace of aces" who had finished the war with sixteen kills. The two fighter pilots enjoyed a hero’s welcome, and were feted in city after city with parades and ceremonial keys. Even the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, wanted to bask in their reflected glory. Their next duty stations were in California. McConnell got into flight testing, a coveted billet for its excitement and career-enhancing potential. Unfortunately, he was tragically killed in a 1954 test accident. Fernandez was stationed near Los Angeles at the time, and he was an obvious choice to be technical advisor for a major Hollywood production, The McConnell Story. This 1955 film about his late buddy starred Alan Ladd and June Allyson. After production ended, Fernandez visited Allyson and her husband, actor/director Dick Powell, at their California ranch. Pete shared his battle experiences with filmmaker Powell, whose next project was a Korean War air combat picture entitled The Hunters, starring Robert Mitchum, and eventually released in 1958.
In 1956, Fernandez won aviation’s prestigious Bendix Trophy by maximizing his speed and fuel consumption with old tricks learned while at war over Korea and China. (The famous Bendix long distance event, along with the shorter Thompson Trophy pylon sprint, had once defined air racing during its golden era of the 1930s.) There was a level playing field in the 1956 Bendix run, as all six aviators in the competition were veteran fighter pilots. (Second-place finisher Robert Maddan was a Korean War vet who had spent fifteen months in a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp.) The aviators also rode the same mount, the F-100 Super Sabre. Always the thoughtful tactician, Pete stayed up late the evening before the event, meticulously plotting his flight profile to wring everything he could manage from each ounce of fuel. The chosen route was Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, 1,118 miles from start to finish. Though aerial refueling was approved for the first time in race history, no USAF tanker planes were available, so the competing pilots did without. This situation made their pre-race calculations all the more critical, as there would be little margin for error. On August 31, the six aircraft lifted off from Victorville, California at dawn, one after another, with Fernandez leading the way. When Pete’s F-100 rolled past the finish line in Oklahoma City less than two hours later, there was just twenty gallons of fuel remaining in its tanks, enough to stay airborne about a minute. As in Korea, careful planning was critical to Fernandez’s Bendix triumph.
After these colorful postwar achievements, in an effort to make rank, the jet ace sought assignment to flight testing. As a reserve officer, Fernandez would be forced to leave the service after twenty years unless he was tracked for higher command and given a regular commission. Hence, there was significant career pressure. Given a break due to his war record, Pete was chosen in 1957 to try out for Test Pilot School at Nellis Air Force Base, though he was underqualified with just a high school degree. Further complicating matters, Fernandez got caught up in a campaign then underway to “professionalize” the USAF by washing out officers who had no higher education. (Pete’s advancement from Miami teenager to military aviator had only been permitted due to the Air Corps’ massive manpower needs during World War Two, as it expanded from an auxiliary Army branch into a modern air service.) The Floridian had arrived at a critical crossroad that would change the rest of his life. Finding himself scholastically unprepared for the academic challenges of Test Pilot School, whose curriculum had just begun to emphasize aerospace engineering, Fernandez cheated on one of the entrance requirements, a calculus research project, and got caught. This desperate act by the veteran combat flier, who wanted to rise as far as he possibly could in the officer ranks despite his working class educational background, instead sank his future with the Air Force permanently. Pete was subsequently posted as a recruiting officer in Miami, then shipped to Argentina as a military trainer. He retired with the rank of major upon reaching twenty years’ service in June 1963.
[edit] Civilian life
In civilian life, unable to get work with the big passenger carriers due to his lack of a college education, the ace switched from fighter jets to multiengine propliners. Fernandez piloted C-46s, C-47s and bigger DC-6s and DC-7s with a variety of transport companies. Most of Pete's flying after he quit the military was done from a notorious ramshackle section of Miami International Airport known as Corrosion Corner. This infamous airdrome was home to a colorful array of fly-by-night cargo outfits, smugglers and CIA contract agents. Deciding it patriotic, and perhaps to get the adrenaline jolt he missed from his Air Force days, Fernandez plunged into this dangerous intrigue. In a mission whose details are still hidden in the shade, he was soon contracted by the CIA in 1965 to steal an unidentified aircraft (possibly a MiG-17) from an unidentified Latin American country (possibly Cuba). He pulled off the heist and used the money he earned for the job to buy his first home, in the Perrine section of Miami, not far from Homestead Air Force Base. At Homestead, Pete was able to keep connected with old buddies, occasionally stopping in the officers’ club for a drink. Additionally, he kept his small sailboat at the Homestead AFB dock.
In 1972, Fernandez was contracted by the CIA to steal another Soviet-model aircraft, this time from Lima, Peru. To prepare for the job, he first cultivated a relationship with a Peruvian air force officer. This contact became his ticket onto the airbase's restricted tarmac area. The targeted plane was an Antonov-26, a model Fernandez had never seen before, let alone flown. The twin-engine turboprop was in itself unremarkable, but it contained a computer module that permitted its crew to drop cargo with extreme accuracy. (The Air Force intelligence officer who wanted a close look at the Antonov's gear was Major Richard B. Gadd, then an obscure specialist in clandestine airlift. After his 1982 retirement from the Air Force, Dick Gadd would go on a to unwanted publicity when he was exposed as a black operator in the Iran-Contra scandal. During that affair, Gadd’s company, Eagle Aviation Services and Transport, worked closely with retired Air Force officer Richard Secord, implicated in secretly resupplying CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan contra insurgents then trying to start a rural insurgency against Nicaragua's socialist government.)
Fernandez’s constant crewmate while flying with three separate transport companies in the 1960s and 1970s (Argonaut Airlines, Airlift International and Conner Airlines) was Howard K. Davis, himself a paramilitary pilot who had flown guns to Raúl Castro during the 1957-1958 Cuban Revolution that ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista. After the Castro brothers took power in January 1959, Davis switched sides and began conspiring against them as a founding member of a private commando operation based in the Florida Keys called the Intercontinental Penetration force, or InterPen. Funded by the Mafia and the CIA, allies in an endeavor to murder Fidel Castro, as well as ultra rightwing American groups such as the Minutemen, InterPen trained Cuban exiles in guerrilla tactics for use in infiltrating their homeland on missions of sabotage and assassination. Years later, after InterPen had broken up, Davis was Fernandez’s cockpit mate for his day job, but the paramilitary pilot was still secretly working on covert operations. In 1969, he and a crew of operators targeted the bloody tyranny in Haiti ruled by dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Davis took part in an ad hoc bombing raid on the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, intended to kill the monster in his lair. While Papa Doc escaped with his life, six civilians living in a slum just outside the dictator's compound were tragically killed when one of Davis’ fuel bombs slammed into their wooden shack and exploded in flames. He was eventually convicted of violating the U.S. Neutrality Act and sent to federal detention at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base.
A close associate of Howard Davis in those days who would play a critical role in shaping Pete Fernandez's final years was Gerald P. Hemming, a strapping soldier of fortune and sometime CIA asset who was also a cofounder of InterPen. Former marine Hemming–whose colorful and extensive biography is too long to recapitulate here–eventually got Pete Fernandez involved in black operations in Peru, namely the 1972 Lima contract job boosting the Antonov for Major Gadd. Later, and more ominously, Gerry Hemming pulled Fernandez into drug smuggling activity in the mid-1970s. Their goal in this hazardous work was to infiltrate Bahamas-Colombia trafficking networks and gather intelligence on them for a Miami federal antidrug task force. Casualty rates in clandestine dope runs were higher than they had been in Korean jet combat squadrons, and this extracurricular activity led Fernandez to his early grave. The federal unit that the jet ace ultimately worked for, the South Florida Drug Interdiction Task Force, was based in Miami and involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. Customs and the Internal Revenue Service. (Two years after Fernandez’s death, this powerful drug squad would come under direct and high-profile control of George H.W. Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice president.)
During their years working for the South Florida Task Force in 1977-1980, the last years of Fernandez’s life, he and Hemming provided key intelligence that led to the federal task force breaking up the “Black Tuna Gang” in 1979, then the biggest Colombian marijuana smuggling ring in the United States. The deep cover pair also provided critical background information for other long running investigations, even when the actual busts went down some time after Hemming and Fernandez were gone from the work. These later-bearing fruits included Operations Grouper, Banco and Tiberon, all coordinated by the DEA, and most importantly, Operation Greenback, a milestone narcotics sting quarterbacked by the IRS that pioneered new tactics in the then still young Drug War. Thanks to hard intelligence provided by undercover operatives, drug traffickers’ bank accounts were targeted for the first time. As it turned out, their narcodollars proved harder to hide and more vulnerable to federal interdiction than their dope. Lessons learned during Operation Greenback changed the way drug investigations are carried out.
In April 1980, Fernandez’s life began its final spiral downwards to disaster. That month, he ended up imprisoned in a Colombian jail, an ordeal that lasted for seven weeks. He had been arrested in Barranquilla with two DC-6 crewmates who were involved in drug trafficking. Though Miami DEA agent Jim Harmon assured Pete’s wife Jill that his agency would get Fernandez home, nothing happened. It was probably better that way, for had the U.S. government come to Pete’s aid, it could have blown his cover and he might well have never gotten out of Colombia alive. In the event, Jill Fernandez had to use the family’s life savings to pay a “fine” (read bribe) in order to get her husband released from the squalid Barranquilla prison before conditions there broke his health. Once back in Miami, the tired and aging Fernandez was now broke and in debt after a lifetime of work. Friends insisted afterward that he felt some bitterness about it all, though sunny-dispositioned Pete always had a new joke ready to keep everyone smiling. Whatever confluence of emotions he felt, facts show that Fernandez began planning what would be his last mission, with financial assistance from an associate, Delta Air Lines pilot James Killough. The men obtained a twin-engine Piper Geronimo for a long-range cannabis run to Colombia via the Bahama Islands. The Piper’s stock motors were pulled and replaced with bigger ones. The blunt nose section was sawed off and a longer fiberglass extension attached to carry more cargo. The factory landing gear was replaced with stronger struts and tires meant for rough terrain. Finally, to extend the aircraft’s range, extra gas tanks were affixed below each wing.
Fernandez left Homestead Airport on his last flight on the morning of October 17, 1980, telling his wife he would be picking up some lobsters. All went well with the marijuana pickup. After that, what is known for sure is that while flying alone on the return leg, laden with hundreds of pounds of “Colombian Gold,” Pete crashed and died in the early morning darkness of October 18 while attempting to land on a remote section of the main highway on Grand Bahama Island. Former FBI agent Harold Copus, a South Florida Task Force veteran who recruited drug pilots as informants, says of the fliers he handled, “We used to have a saying about them: there are old pilots and are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. They were real cowboys, they would do things that were unbelievable! It was like the Wild West for them: bringing in drugs was like buying candy. The skies were full of these guys. And they went down. Fernandez crashed going into the Bahamas? A lot of guys crashed going into the Bahamas. We had reports of crashes in the Bahamas, we had reports of crashes in Jamaica. Crashing was part of their business. It’s what those guys did!”
Gerry Hemming and Pete Fernandez willingly flew these drug runs with no proof of their true identity hidden away in a government file somewhere, and paid a tremendous price for this decision. Fernandez died in disgrace, labeled by the media a common dope smuggler, and Hemming would do hard time for nearly a decade in a very tough Florida prison nicknamed "The Rock" for its Alcatraz-like atmosphere. Why did these men run such a risk? Hemming puts it simply: the identity of undercover informants were "being sold out the back door" by federal employees to Colombian narcotraffickers. It is a fact that government agencies, especially the DEA, were ridden with security problems in that era. Two DEA agents in Boston was selling the identity of informants directly to narcotraffickers, court testimony later revealed, as was an agent in Miami. The Miami office was particularly suspect: another DEA agent there, a supervisor who headed up Operation Grouper (which used intelligence provided by Hemming and Fernandez) was later convicted of drug dealing. In a more general critique of the agency, a 1992 Government Accounting Office report catalogued widespread and systematic problems in the DEA regarding unfettered computer access to secret data bases. The problems at Drug Enforcement, the GAO report warned, also compromised other agencies who worked with them on joint task forces through their communications with the DEA.
Given such realities, which of course street-level operatives like Hemming and Fernandez were well aware of, the men chose to work under extreme deep cover to prevent Colombian traffickers from discovering their activities and retaliating against them or their families. The danger of such a position, however, is obvious. If caught, operatives can be left to twist in the wind if their sponsors decide it convenient. When Pete suddenly died on Grand Bahama Island, it must have proved easier for federal agents who knew better to say nothing and let his death be simply drug-related. (Gerry Hemming was busy with his own problems at the time, having been arrested with a pot load in West Palm Beach a few months previously. Though he told all at his trial about two decades of undercover work for federal agencies, no one stepped forward to vouch for him and the incident eventually cost the big paramilitary eight years at Florida State Prison at Raiford.)
After Fernandez died, a flurry of “war hero gone bad” headlines were generated about his fatal last mission, though rumors also quickly spread that Pete was not simply a drug trafficker, but had actually been gathering intelligence on airborne dopers for the U.S. government. In 1980, two major obituary articles about the jet ace’s demise, in the Miami Herald and The New York Times, both mentioned such innuendo. After this final ripple of publicity surrounding his death, Fernandez’s name soon slipped into obscurity, where it remains today.
Of the five top American aces from the Korean War, four perished violently in crashing vehicles of one sort or another. Though Fernandez died at the relatively young age of fifty-five, he lived longer than the other four high aces from that war, surviving until 1980.[3]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Korean Aces The Department of Defense 50th Anniversary of the Korean War Commemoration. Retrieved 3 October 2006.
- ^ Manuel "Pete" Fernandez - The Search for the Hispanic Ace of the Korean War Acepilots.com, 2003. Retrieved 3 October 2006.
- ^ Werrell
[edit] References
- Werrell, Kenneth P. (2005). Sabres over MiG Alley: The F-86 and the Battle for Air Superiority in Korea. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 1-59114-933-9.
[edit] External links
- Brief biography through 1963 with two photographs
- Marriage announcement, Time, Nov. 30, 1953
- Photograh of Fernandez in jacket and cap, Sabres and Aces: These rare color images present some of the pilots and aircraft that made history in the Korean War, Air Force Magazine, Sept. 2006, p. 81.
