Contra Backer Hull : An American ‘Don’ Falls in Costa Rica

In the mid-1980s, when John Hull was flying high, the jungle airstrip on his 1,600-acre ranch here was the busy hub of a frontier fiefdom. His name even appeared beside it on large-scale maps of Costa Rica--”John Hull’s Runway.”

Hull’s three single-engine planes were flying in investors to carve new farmland from the wilderness, rushing snake-bitten children to hospitals and delivering thousands of pairs of eyeglasses from Lions Club donors to the needy. To most local farmers, “Don John” was a benevolent patron and visionary pioneer.

Havens for Rebels

To the Contras resisting leftist Sandinista rule in Nicaragua, 30 miles away, Hull’s scattered farms were clandestine air bases for their wounded combatants and American-supplied weapons, rebel leaders recall. The tall, aging expatriate from Indiana was their patron too, their link to the CIA and the Contra-supply network run by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North.

Although his adopted country had neutrality laws to protect its security, Hull seemed immune. He had five CIA-paid bodyguards and a system of local informers, some of them police officers who would stop by his ranch for coffee. Once, when Costa Rica’s president ordered police to search Hull’s ranch for weapons, someone tipped him off. A smiling Hull greeted the raiding party on the front lawn, serving ice-cold lemonade.

“He was practically the godfather in the north of Costa Rica,” recalls Carol Prado, a former Contra officer. “Everything passed through him. We thought he was untouchable.”

But suddenly last January, Hull landed in jail. The government charged him with waging “hostile acts” against Nicaragua from 1982 to 1985 and allowing Contra pilots to smuggle cocaine through his airstrip to the United States.

The 68-year-old rancher says he was stripped to his undershorts in a cold cell, was deprived of his diabetes pills and fell ill with heart trouble.

Freed on $37,500 bail after two months in jails and hospitals, Hull found his runway closed by government order, his access to airplane fuel and bank credit cut off. He faces up to 21 years in prison if convicted.

Whatever the verdict, the criminal case, built on testimony by 17 witnesses, marks a dramatic turnabout in the colorful saga of John Hull. And it reveals what substantial power he wielded in this tiny nation until political shifts in Washington and Central America converged to bring him down.

Costa Ricans familiar with the case say that Hull became vulnerable here after the Iran-Contra scandal exposed North’s network in 1986. As President Oscar Arias Sanchez asserted Costa Rica’s neutrality and launched regional peace talks, he told aides to keep an eye on the gringo rancher.

Then, while the Reagan Administration drew to a close and the Contra insurgency fizzled, Hull got caught up, indirectly, in a new scandal, involving narco-dollar corruption in the Costa Rican government. Under the changing political climate, allegations of drug smuggling directed at Hull, first leveled in 1987 by two convicted drug dealers in U.S. jails, were too much for Costa Rican authorities to ignore.

To a reporter visiting his ranch last month, Hull introduced himself as a “political prisoner.” He said he felt persecuted in Costa Rica for his conservative views--and abandoned by Washington.

“I really feel uncomfortable in this situation,” he said. “I’m basically fighting a monster, this international communism, and I’m doing it alone. Here I am paying my own lawyers, all my own expenses.”

Hull admitted that he had arranged deliveries to the rebels through neighboring farms and provided them with clothing and food. He estimated that his rescue flights saved the lives of 50 to 60 wounded Contras. But he denied allowing drugs or weapons shipments on his own property.

Government OK

“I was talking almost weekly to the heads of the Rural Guard and Civil Guard, and anything I did was completely known and approved by the Costa Rican government at the time,” Hull insisted. The Arias administration, which took over in May, 1986, “is doing this to placate the Sandinistas,” he complained. “I feel singled out as a sacrifice.”

Hull says he did not come to Costa Rica looking for trouble. He arrived in the mid-1960s in a single-engine Cessna 180, he says, armed only with a soil-testing kit.

“The thing I was looking for was a place to invest that had a stable government and a friendly people and fertile land,” he recalls. He found all three here on a bluff overlooking the San Carlos River, where the mountains sweep down to a tropical plain.

His father was an army intelligence officer who took up farming and taught Hull to fly at age 16. In World War II, Hull was an Army Air Corps flight instructor. Two decades later he left his own farm and wife in Pakota, Ind., to seek his fortune here.

“There’s a kind of streak of insanity that runs through the family,” he said with a laugh.

Over the years, Hull and those he persuaded to follow him tamed Costa Rica’s wild frontier, dotting it with cattle, lumber and citrus industries.

Today he shares an airy four-bedroom ranch house with Margarita Acosta, 36, a former servant who bore his teen-age son. The area has electricity, plumbing and telephones--comforts lacking when he arrived--but still teems with iguanas and howler monkeys in the trees and alligators in the river.

When the Contras took up arms in 1982, Hull threw his pioneer spirit into their cause. “He got involved in an all-out war,” says Jim Reimer, an Illinois farmer transplanted here.

Hull was well connected and strategically located for the effort. Dan Quayle, then a U.S. senator from Hull’s home state, arranged for the rancher to meet North when Hull visited Washington in 1983. Hull then kept in touch with North’s courier, Robert Owen. North later testified that Hull is “a man who has done a tremendous amount for his country” by helping the Contras maintain a front along Nicaragua’s southern border.

At one time during the conflict, Hull says, he had interests in 10 farms covering 8,000 acres and six airstrips, all between here and the border.

To many of his neighbors, those who shared Hull’s fear of Sandinista encroachment on their farms, helping the Contras was a logical way to protect their investments, and many of them did so.

But some former employees and associates describe Hull as a con artist. They say he concealed the extent of his war activity by routing weapons through some farms that he managed but did not own and often pleaded wartime hardship as a screen for cheating absentee investors. According to former Contra allies, Hull was more ruthless in disputes among them than he was toward the Sandinistas.

Anti-Communist Image

Hull likes to cultivate the image of a crusty anti-Communist warrior. Bald and slightly stooped, he is still an imposing six-footer. But the sparkling blue eyes in his tanned, wrinkled face and the Indiana twang that overlays his Spanish give him a just-folks manner.

Asked what he did in the Nicaraguan war, he will spin tales about various alleged plots by the Sandinistas to kill him.

“One time they sent in a group called the Twelve Apostles on a bus,” he says. “The leader called himself ‘The Priest.’ Well, three of them went into a bar and had too much to drink. One of my informants overheard them,” he said, and the plot was foiled.

The rancher laughs as he embellishes these stories with vivid detail. But he is guarded and somewhat vague about his relationship with the U.S. government.

Hull says he got involved in the war at the request of Eden Pastora, commander of the Contras’ southern forces. Pastora says that he went to Hull after Joe Fernandez, then the CIA station chief in Costa Rica, identified him as “the man in charge of the northern part of the country for us.”

The rancher admits that he passed information to Fernandez and rented safehouses for the CIA in San Jose, the Costa Rican capital, but insists that he never drew a salary.

“My relationship was one that I think any patriotic American’s would have been,” he said. “You know, if the (CIA) people came here, they were welcome to have lunch, the same as you are, and if there was anything I could tell them, I was glad to do it.

“My part of the deal (with the Contras) was helping these poor devils who got shot up or stepped on a mine,” he added. “If other people wanted to offer their farms, they would talk to me because they trusted me more than they did the U.S. Embassy. Then I’d pass the information on to the embassy.”

The Costa Rican government’s criminal case pictures Hull as far more involved than that. According to prosecutors, Hull turned his own ranch here into a “logistics center” for Pastora’s forces and a farm that he managed, at Monico, into a terminal for weapons flown from El Salvador. He also allegedly recruited mercenaries to train Contras at a third farm, refueled rebel planes and personally made one airdrop to rebel troops in Nicaragua.

Juan Jose Sobrado, Hull’s lawyer, has reduced his defense on these counts to a simple interpretation of Costa Rican law: “Hostile acts,” the lawyer contends, means nothing less than shooting into Nicaragua and drawing retaliatory fire--something of which his client is not accused.

As for the drug charges, Hull says simply that his 1,600-foot runway is too short to accommodate the cocaine-laden planes that two smugglers, George Morales and Gary Betzner, claim were flown into and out of his ranch.

Details of Hull’s Contra connection began to surface after he maneuvered to help the CIA dump Pastora in May, 1984.

Hull says he had begun to wonder why Pastora, a Sandinista revolutionary hero who had defected, wasn’t seizing more territory in Nicaragua. He concluded that Pastora was still working for the Sandinistas.

The CIA gave Pastora an ultimatum to form a united front with Adolfo Calero, a more conservative Contra leader. When he refused, a bomb exploded at a Pastora press conference in Nicaragua, killing three journalists and five guerrillas.

Pastora, who was wounded by the blast and promptly abandoned the war, has charged that Hull and Owen helped plan the bombing. The Costa Rican prosecutors charge that Hull was involved in earlier plotting to have Pastora hanged and that he had one of Pastora’s helicopters hijacked for a rival rebel faction. Hull denies these charges.

Hull does say that he solicited and got $10,000 a month from Calero for five months in 1984 to feed Pastora’s disintegrating forces until they could be put under commanders loyal to Calero. He says he spent it all, plus $10,000 of his own money that was never reimbursed.

“You had thousands of abandoned, hungry men coming out of Nicaragua and selling their weapons,” he said. “At any country store around here you could buy an AK-47 (rifle) for $50 and grenades for $5 or $10 apiece. The trouble was, the Communists were buying those arms and sending them to the guerrillas in El Salvador.”

Prado, then Pastora’s top assistant, disputes that account. “He dismantled our army,” Prado said.

“Hull is the classic ugly American,” the former rebel official added. “He started out helping us but couldn’t resist trying to control us. Then he destroyed us.”

About that time, Hull was also falling out with of some of his business associates.

Bill Crone, a sawmill owner and the only other Indianan in this small town, hasn’t spoken to Hull in two years. He claims that Hull drew him into a local partnership to make ax and wheelbarrow handles, then mismanaged and abandoned the venture, owing him $5,000 for lumber.

Defaulted on Loan

The U.S. Justice Department began investigating the venture after Hull defaulted on a $375,000 start-up loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corp. and failed to account for most of the money.

An American and a Canadian who hired Hull to run their Costa Rican farms told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that he failed to buy property for which they gave him money and that he diverted equipment and cattle from their land to his own.

“There was a pattern this man followed,” Louella Hood, a landowner from Bradenton, Fla., told the panel. “He always had to have money right away. Extra money. And if he didn’t get it, he came up with stories about bodies floating in the river because of the Contra war and it was just so bad down there that nobody would be interested in buying our farm.” Hull dismisses these complaints as the whining of cheapskates.

While it is unclear whether any money of Hull’s unwitting investors went to the Contras, nobody has accused Hull himself of profiting from the war. Instead, it was apparently his boasting and combative style that got him in trouble.

“John said too much on open radio frequencies,” recalls a former Contra pilot who quit because of the lax security and testified against Hull. “Any gringo who came down here, John would tell him everything we were doing, even if John didn’t know him from Adam.”

Hull says he ended his Contra air operation in 1985 after Benjamin Piza, Costa Rica’s minister of public security, told him it was “bringing too much attention to the Costa Rican government’s involvement in the thing.”

But even as Hull became the object of investigations in the United States, officials in the Arias administration said that building their own case was difficult because people in northern Costa Rica were too supportive or fearful of “Don John.”

“I always suspected there was some link from Hull to the Contras to drugs, but he was hard to investigate because he had such a stockade of protection from the local police,” said Fernando Cruz, formerly the country’s chief prosecutor. “It is true that we had to rely on evidence from outside Costa Rica, but there was a long, very secret investigation to develop it here.”

The deception used to arrest Hull was a sign of respect for his local influence. Traffic police in San Jose summoned him to the capital for what was called “some minor problem about a vehicle registration” and put him in handcuffs. Maneuvering in the case has centered on whether Hull will be tried in San Jose or in Ciudad Quesada, the city nearest his ranch.

“The people up here are very, very anti-communistic,” Hull drawled as he drove his guest in a rusty Toyota station wagon to Ciudad Quesada to meet members of the John Hull Defense Committee.

Petition for Release

“Sure, we are all guilty of helping the Contras,” said Danilo Vega Rojas, president of the group, which collected 410 signatures on a petition to win Hull’s release on bail. “If this is what it’s about, they have to put us all in jail.”

Sheila Ugalde, Hull’s former secretary in Ciudad Quesada, is one of the few Costa Ricans around Hull to turn against him. She said she received threats from several associates of her former boss after talking to prosecutors.

“They told me that John has friends in the Mafia who are very powerful,” she said. “They told me I’ll never be able to visit the United States.”

Edwin Gonzalez Murillo, who once worked for Hull as overseer of the Monico farm, told investigators about arms trafficking and guerrilla training there, then retracted his statement.

“Most Costa Ricans feel that if the people in Washington want him convicted, he will be convicted, so they don’t risk getting involved,” Ugalde said. “They can’t be sure who will protect them if the United States is still protecting him.”

The U.S. Embassy says it has taken no special action on Hull’s behalf, an assertion seconded by Costa Rican Information Minister Guido Fernandez and Hull himself.

The CIA is no help now, the rancher says. The agency owes him $1,500 for rent payments on the safehouses, he claims and has withdrawn his bodyguards, leaving security at the ranch to a single armed sentry and an attack dog that once bit Hull.

The only hint of American protest came in a letter to Arias from 19 congressmen urging that Hull’s case “be handled in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations.”

Arias replied: “It pains me that you insinuate that the exemplary relations between your country and mine could deteriorate because our legal system is fighting against drug trafficking, no matter how powerful the people who participate in it or what external backing they might have.”

Boudreaux was recently on assignment in Costa Rica.