Ollie's Folly

As you near Manuel Antonio National Park, you pass a curious structure as the road winds up over the hills: there is a large airplane – a Fairchild C 123 cargo plane - resting in a parking lot under a metal roof that covers its wings and fuselage. It’s faded, dented, and has been made into a combined bar, restaurant and coffee shop, a use about a hundred light years from its clandestine past.
About a century ago, in 1984, when the USSR was still in one monolithic piece, the Democratic-led US Congress passed a piece of legislation designed to stop any more American government money being spent to overthrow the communists in Nicaragua. Administration officials decided that this didn’t mean ALL money from every source, and started a strange three-cornered deal where they sold overpriced weapons to a country (Iran) they had sworn not to deal with, and re-invested the profits in aircraft to carry weapons to the anti-Sandinistas, and flew them in to a secret airfield on a privately owned ranch in Costa Rica… and flew out drugs, ‘cause that’s what their pilots did for their day jobs.
No one is saying exactly where the profits from the dope went.
There were two Fairchild ‘El Avion’ cargo planes doing this shuffle. In 1986, one of them was shot down by the Nicaraguans, and a CIA agent on-board captured. With the proverbial waste hitting the air circulation device, the other future restaurant was flown to the San Jose Airport and immediately abandoned thereafter, as everyone onboard went back to being whatever name was on their most current sincere passport, and left the country.
Lt.Col. Oliver North took one for the Gipper, and became the public face of this scandal. This was easy enough as he had been involved in it up to his eyebrows, and he refused to pass the buck up the line to those in the Regan Administration who had okayed this operation. The fuss received world-wide attention. (Google Fawn Hall and her shredding of documents, appearance in Playboy, etc.). North eventually did three years… except he didn’t, as his sentence was suspended. There were fines, probation and community service, also set aside in the 90’s.
In 2000, the remnants of Air Ollie were purchased, taken apart and hauled to their current location, reassembled and restauranted, if that is a word, and the computer doesn’t think so. You can sit down in a piece of recent history, and raise one in commiseration to Ollie. Unlike you, he is persona non grata for life in Costa Rica, which is the last country from which I’d ever want to be banned.