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Swiss records list Jean de Senarclens, 70, a prominent Geneva lawyer, as the chairman of C.S.F. as well as of the Stanford Technology affiliate in Freiburg. He told TIME that he knows Hakim well but has not met Secord. The Geneva branch of Stanford Technology was liquidated in 1984, he said, adding that the Freiburg branch exists but is "dormant." C.S.F. has a branch in Bermuda, which the London Times described as the eventual recipient of the alleged $18 million in arms profits. From there the money theoretically could have been used to help supply the contras.
There is at least circumstantial evidence linking C.S.F. financing to the contras. Several buyers, including one identified as Secord, are known to have bought three or four Maule aircraft, which are designed for short takeoffs, from Maule Air, Inc., in Moultrie, Ga. The planes cost about $60,000 each. At least one check to pay for the planes was from C.S.F. Investments Ltd. in Bermuda. After the purchase, one of the planes was registered with the Federal Aviation Agency as belonging to American Marketing and Consulting, Inc., a firm in Landover Hills, Md., headed by Secord with former NSC Staffer Lilac as a vice president. Several Maules were spotted by reporters at Aguacate, an airstrip in Honduras known to be a staging point for contra supply operations.
One apparent front for gunrunning to the contras was a firm called Corporate Air Services, which has a small office at a rural grass-strip airport in Pennsylvania. At least some of the private American pilots and crewmen who have been dropping arms and other military supplies to the contra forces this year got paychecks from this company. The crewmen included Eugene Hasenfus, who was seized and imprisoned by the Sandinistas after a C-123K cargo plane was shot down in Nicaragua on Oct. 5 and two other Americans were killed. Hasenfus claimed that the CIA directed the extensive resupply operation, which contra leaders say possibly involved up to 70 flights at a cost of nearly $3 million. Hasenfus said two men identified to him as CIA agents managed the military supply missions out of Ilopango air base, a tightly secured military airfield in El Salvador.
Telephone records in San Salvador show that numerous calls were made from a safe house used by the American gunrunners to Secord's office at Stanford Technology as well as to a number formerly used by North at the NSC and to a CIA agent at the U.S. embassy in San José. Says a Western diplomat in the region about the CIA field agent: "If he was involved in the operation, then people higher up were too."