Tag Archives: Dynamic Aviation

2016/06/24

Guy Cannady: Sanctions-Busting Teflon-Coated Double Agent

By FAReport

So George Guyton “Guy” Cannady was indicted and sentenced for 3 counts (22 counts were dismissed) on November 25, 2014. He got 3 years of supervised release and was fined, but he should have cash saved up from his previous, unpunished covert aviation ventures. While the trial was taking place, he was rehired by Dynamic Airways as their “Chief Strategic Officer” – a remarkable act of faith in a fellow standing trial on bribery and fraud charges.

But even before all of that took place, Cannady was a busy businessman in other suspicious enterprises. Following the release of the Panama Papers, we learned that a company named FlyGeorgia was being used as a conduit to circumvent economic sanctions against Iran. An Iranian national named Hosshang (or Houshang) Hosseinpour has been targeted by the U.S. Treasury Department as part of a broader effort to enforce the sanctions. Hosseinpour and two others set up a number of front companies, some based in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, to facilitate their plan. To quote from the Irish Times article cited above:

The files show that [Farhad] Azima and Hosseinpour appeared on corporate documents of a company that planned to buy a hotel in the nation of Georgia in 2011. That was the same year treasury officials asserted that Hosseinpour, who co-founded the private airline FlyGeorgia, and two others first began to send millions of dollars into Iran, which led to sanctions being taken against him three years later.

Farhad Azima is one of the infamous middlemen involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, the Savings and Loan scandal, and other weapons trafficking incidents. Unnamed in any of the Panama Papers reporting on FlyGeorgia is George Cannady. But he is right there lurking in the shadows of Azima and Hosseinpour.

An entry in the Business Registry of Georgia shows that Cannady was a partner in Georgia Transport Management with Levan Tskhadadze. Tskhadadze had formerly been a manager at manager at Hosseinpour’s front company FlyGeorgia. Other people who list FlyGeorgia as an employer are Ursula Freseman, Lalit Dang, and Iranian former intelligence officer General Ali Asgari Reza. Freseman and Dang also list Heavylift International Airlines as a former employer. Heavylift is one of Farhad Azima’s many companies with which notorious weapons trafficker Viktor Bout was at one time affiliated.

One has to wonder why Cannady was partnering with someone like Tskhadadze. Was he simply going for the big profit? Was he opposed to the sanctions and attempting to express his stance by circumventing them? There have to be less risky ways of pursuing those goals. Or was he a variety of double-agent who wanted to get inside information on the sanctions-busters with whom he dealt? If so, on who’s behalf was he working?

We would hazard a guess here: It’s possible that Georgia Transport Management in the country of Georgia is connected to the one in the state of Georgia. Actually, it has to be since George Cannady is intimately connected to both of them. The company in the U.S. was Atlanta Air Service Inc from 2002 until 2006 when it became Atlanta Air Service LLC and became Georgia Transport Management LLC in 2015. Cannady was the owner of AAS where he partnered with Ronnie B. Powers. And now we are connecting back into previous stories which shed some light on their covert activities. To restate our question: For whom has George Guyton Cannady been working?

One journalistic investigation into this operation only piles on more question marks. Emanuele Ottolenghi did some good gumshoe work for his in-depth piece in Tablet magazine on the sanctions evaders. Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and has advocated for regime change in Iran. Ironically, the FDD’s Long War Journal has promoted Gryphon Airlines, another business in which Cannady had a management role and a business which has also produced a terror suspect.

So, what’s going on here?

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2016/01/22

Drone Warfare Contracting in Rural Virginia – part 2

By FAReport

In an earlier post, we reported on DoD contracts in Bridgewater, Virginia (population about 6000) which showed the small rural town might be involved in airborne systems necessary to the well-known drone strikes of the last decade. In April 2015, Jeremy Scahill wrote in The Intercept, an online publication focused on the Edward Snowden leaks, about a leaked “U.S. intelligence document ... [which] confirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program.” The document itself is linked here.

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Relevant to the contractor Dynamic Aviation in Bridgewater is the image of the Beechcraft C-12 Huron (the military designation of the King Air 200) Guardrail labelled “MARSS SIGINT/FMV” on the second page. This aircraft was used for the U.S. Army’s Aerial Common Sensor, but this program was terminated in 2006.

So if the C-12 Huron Guardrail (ACS) program was terminated, how is it related to MARSS and why is it showing up in this document from July 2012? In a word: Outsourcing. Here’s an article on that trend as it relates to MARSS. Dynamic Aviation is one of the aviation companies who has benefitted from military programs being “terminated” and then contracted out in the name of cost-cutting and efficiency. It also doesn’t hurt that the drone assassination program itself is diffused in multiple layers of government intelligence agencies, DoD departments, primary contractors and subsequent subcontractors. Getting a handle on that spider’s web is a challenge, but we try to do what we can.

An article on the Army’s website sheds some light on EMARSS (Enhanced MARSS). Search down in the page to find the reference, but first notice the photo of the Dash-8 in the slideshow at the top. That’s a Dynamic Aviation aircraft (tail number N8100V).

Next up: Shedding some light on the other C-12 labelled “LIBERTY SIGINT” and it’s connection to a disappeared L-3 Communications executive. Things get spookier.

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2014/07/21

Dynamic Update

By FAReport

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2014/03/14

Drone Warfare Contracting in Rural Virginia?

By FAReport

Numerous defense contract listings on a Department of Defense website show the importance of small private military companies in the U.S. drone wars. While “drone wars” is the popular reference for what is taking place in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, it is really a misnomer. Missiles fired by fighter jets and battleships are also part of the weaponry used, and other manned aircraft are used in collecting information on high-value targets.

In a previous post, we highlighted Dynamic Aviation in Bridgewater, Virginia. In this post, we will list some contracts which are being “performed” in part at that location.

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The story, if any, behind these contracts is left to our readers to piece together, but we will point out that General Atomics is the maker of the Predator and Reaper drones.

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2013/08/26

Former Dynamic Airways Executive Charged in Contracting Fraud Case

By FAReport

George Guyton Cannady of North Carolina has been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice along with two other U.S. Air Force contractors for 34 counts including “conspiracy, bribery, theft of government funds, disclosing or obtaining contractor bid and proposal information, honest services mail fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and making false statements.” In 2010 after selling Prescott Support Company (an air cargo company contracted by the U.S. Government to fly “extraordinary renditions” – see here and here) and Atlanta Air Services, Cannady was hired by Dynamic Aviation as the Vice President of Operations for their Dynamic Airways subsidiary. A few months later, he was promoted to Chief Operating Officer. In late 2011, Cannady left employment at Dynamic Airways.

 

Two other contractors were also indicted – John Norman Sims and Ronald Benton Powers. Powers was an associate of Cannady at Atlanta Air Services. Sims was the “inside man” at the Pentagon who allegedly took bribes from Cannady and Powers “so that he would continue to steer valuable USAF contracts to [their] companies.”

 

A trial date will be set soon so stay tuned…

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2013/07/05

Special Operations in Rural Virginia

By FAReport

The town of Bridgewater, Virginia has a nice “lawn party” every summer. If you like old tractors and trucks, it’s a good place to visit on a hot July day. If your interests or needs are more in the area of “special operations” or “laser targeting” of insurgents, you still might be in the right place. Just head south out of town, cross the bridge over the North River and make a left onto Airport Road. Eventually, you’ll come to the Bridgewater Air Park – the home of Dynamic Aviation.

If you are lucky you might see a plane taking off or landing, but the extra-fortunate will get to see one of Dynamic’s “gray ghosts” – Beechcraft King Airs and Bombardier Dash-8s loaded up with sensor pods and cameras and painted to not draw attention to themselves (at least in locations where that matters). If you want to record the hard-to-read tail number on one of these planes, you’ll have to use your memory since there is a sign by the road that forbids photography of the premises – a prohibition which would probably be enforced by the airport’s own police force.

If on the other hand, you want some “Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance” services and have a lot of cash and political connections, you might be welcomed right on in. Since Dynamic is a subcontractor for Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) through SAIC’s Special Projects Division, you might get to meet one of their spooks. It needs to be noted that SAIC happens to be the company that developed the NSA’s PRISM software which was exposed by Edward Snowden and the Guardian newspaper. SAIC has had it’s share of former CIA and NSA directors working for them including Bobby Ray Inman and Robert Gates. At SAIC, the revolving door between government and business spins faster than the propeller on a Dash-8! SAIC is controversial enough to have earned themselves an episode of WNET’s Exposé series in 2007 called Friends in High Places.

The next step in your adventure might involve talking to some of the good folks from “Special Operations Solutions LLC (Sole Proprietorship).” From the looks of things, these folks will be an integral part of your ISR mission. Remember, the money is all coming from the war, er, defense budget, and it’s big enough for many contractors to get a piece of it.

Note: Either all of these companies are using the same generic pictures of Dash-8’s or the Dash-8’s all belong to Dynamic Aviation (and someone really should brush up on their photoshopping skills). We are betting on the latter.

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2012/08/07

Desert Rock Airstrip Activity – N8300G Flights

By FAReport

A plane (above) has shown up on flight tracking websites that has been visiting a very interesting and remote airstrip in the Nevada Test Site called Desert Rock Airstrip. This was noted by a user named “gariac” on the ATS website. The NTS is operated by the U.S. Department of Energy and has been used for nuclear testing since the early 1950’s. In 2002, the airstrip was used for a purpose unrelated to nuclear blasts. According to Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the Central Intelligence Agency flew anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles to Desert Rock for the purpose of training them in preparation for “conducting covert operations within Iraq as part of a larger effort to overthrow Hussein’s government.” The planned operations, called “Anabasis,” were intended to provoke Hussein into retaliating and giving the United States justification for invading Iraq. Some of the planes that flew into Desert Rock for this operation were also used for “extraordinary rendition” flights according to Trevor Paglen in Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. Aircraft registered to Tepper Aviation, Path Corporation, One Leasing, and Premier Executive Transport Services among others showed up at Desert Rock before making appearances in Guantanamo Bay or Kabul with “detainees” aboard.

So Desert Rock Airstrip is a place where “black” stuff happens. Unfortunately, none of that history reveals exactly what N8300G is doing there now. It is registered to Dynamic Avlease, a subsidiary of Dynamic Aviation in Bridgewater, Virginia. A recent article on the Flightglobal website sheds some light on their operations. The plane has made one stop at Creech Air Force Base which is used for drone piloting and training.

Curious.

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2011/12/13

“Bringin’ in a Couple of Keys”

By FAReport

In our previous report on the Samaritan’s Purse “Torture Taxi” (N874SP), we noted that one of the signatures on the FAA registration form (page 3) belongs to Virgil Gottfried, Director of Aviation for the charity. His signature also appears on the FAA records for two other planes with suspicious ownership histories.

According to the FAA airworthiness records for N391SA (a Beechcraft King Air 200), in 1999 Gottfried worked for a company named Dynamic Aviation in Bridgewater, Virginia where he was the Director of Maintenance. The plane had tail number N256AG and had been purchased from AGES Aircraft Sales and Leasing of Boca Raton, Florida who had just acquired it from the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command in Huntsville, Alabama. In October of 1999, it was sold to Stanford and Associates in Fredericksburg, Virginia and the tail number was changed to N391SA. Bates Properties, Inc. in Monterey, California bought it in May 2000. During its ownership by Dynamic Aviation, Stanford and Associates, and Bates Properties, it had a number of upgrades and modifications done to it. No further work shows up in the FAA records through 2011 when we obtained them.

Then things take a curious turn. In August 2004, Bates sold the plane to Sky Way Aircraft, Inc. in St. Petersburg, Florida. One month later, it was sold to Mario Gonzales Restrepo of Caracas, Venezuela. Two months later, N391SA – bearing the false tail number of N168D – was found on an airstrip in Nicaragua loaded with cocaine and some AK-47s.

Bill Conroy of Narconews.com has been following the story of this plane (and others like it) for years:

On a fall evening in a cotton field in Nicaragua, a group of armed men placed a series of torches in a line of planters along a makeshift runway. About half an hour later, around 9 p.m. that evening, Friday, Nov. 26, 2004, a twin-prop Beechcraft King Air 200 touched down on that rural runway and came to a stop. The assembled men began to unload the plane, which was packed with cocaine, while holding the sole witness to the event, a local field hand, captive.

Go ahead and read Conroy’s article. Then do an internet search on N391SA…

Done yet? Spooky things going on, eh? And maybe the spooky turn took place earlier in the chain of ownership… Remember that all of the modifications to this plane took place while it was owned by Dynamic Aviation, Stanford and Associates, and Bates Properties.

Another odd part of this story is that the fake tail number used in Nicaragua – N168D – actually belongs to a plane owned by Devon Holding & Leasing in North Carolina. That plane is alleged to have been used in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. Remember James J. Kershaw, President of Stevens Express Leasing? He is also the president of Devon Holding & Leasing.

It may be that it is just a combination of bad luck and coincidence that these companies owned a plane that ended up in a drug deal (and an odd one at that), but something similar happened again to another plane – N258AG – that had the same chain of ownership up to Stanford and Associates.

More on that plane later.

 

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