A high-tech surveillance plane that repeatedly flew in the vicinity of CIA-linked attacks on boats near the Galápagos Islands this year had an unlikely first owner: a company based in The Villages, the retirement mega-community in Florida.
The company, Sunshine Aviation Capital, has no online presence or public profile. But corporate filings with the Federal Aviation Administration bear the signatures of members of the Morse family, the billionaire owners of The Villages and prominent longtime Republican Party donors.
The Galápagos attacks were part of a CIA “covert action” program that resulted in the disappearance of eight fishermen, The Washington Post previously reported. No government has claimed responsibility for the strikes.
This Post investigation used flight data and radio communications to trace the specially equipped business jet that flew near those strikes back to its origins. FAA filings and corporate documents revealed the Morse family’s role in the company that previously owned the plane — and a web of contractors that suggests the plane itself has ties to the CIA.
How, and why, the Morse family became involved with a plane that was later used in a CIA campaign in Latin America is unclear, as is whether family members had a financial stake in Sunshine Aviation. The plane appears to have never flown to the airport near The Villages where the Morse family maintains a private hangar, according to available flight data.
When Sunshine Aviation acquired the plane in November 2022, the Cessna Citation Longitude was already outfitted with unusual modifications such as infrared lighting and specialized cockpit interiors that allow pilots to don night-vision goggles, FAA records show. Additional surveillance modifications were made during the eight months the firm owned the jet, according to the records.
Sunshine Aviation delegated authority to manage the jet and approve those modifications to a mechanic who has worked for Triangle Aviation Solutions, a North Carolina-based firm previously known as Aero Contractors. That company had a well-documented role in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11, ferrying terrorism detainees around the globe.
In July 2023, several years before the action near the Galápagos, Sunshine Aviation transferred ownership of the plane — along with two other similar aircraft — to a trust at the Bank of Utah. Mark Morse, then CEO of The Villages, digitally signed the paperwork as manager of Sunshine Aviation.
FAA records show the aircraft was subsequently managed or inspected by two other individuals with employment histories at Triangle Aviation.
The CIA declined to respond to a list of questions about The Post’s findings. The Morse family and their representatives at The Villages did not respond to requests for comment. Triangle also did not respond, nor did the Bank of Utah.
Starting in November 2025, and continuing in the months surrounding the attacks, aviation data shows a series of flights across the southern United States and to and from El Salvador, each involving a Cessna Citation Longitude. Although the flights are recorded as having different registration numbers, The Post uncovered multiple overlapping “squawk codes” — transponder codes assigned by air traffic controllers — transmitted by the aircraft across some of the legs, showing that the seemingly unrelated flights were flown by a single plane.
The tactics mirror methods employed in the past to hide classified aviation activity, according to a former FAA official who worked with the CIA to disguise clandestine operations.
“One would have to believe that this is the agency hiding flights,” said the former FAA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I can’t think of any other explanation.”
The FAA did not return a request for comment.
In January, the surveillance jet was tracked flying in the direction of an Ecuadorian fishing boat that went missing a short time later, The Post previously reported. Flying under the call sign FENIX701, the plane appeared again in March when two other fishing boats were attacked.
Survivors of the attacks said small quadcopter drones either dropped munitions on the vessels or detonated by crashing into them. They described being detained aboard a vessel by English-speaking armed men before being transferred to the Salvadoran Navy. They were ultimately returned to Ecuador, without criminal charges or an explanation.
The secretive attacks were distinct from the Trump administration’s highly publicized military campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea. It is not clear whether other actors were involved in the Galápagos strikes, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.
A secretive spy air wing
The CIA has long operated a covert fleet of aircraft for logistics, transport and intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance purposes.
Starting in 1949, the CIA secretly funded — and later outright purchased — an airline that ballooned into the storied Air America, a so-called agency “proprietary” that was central to CIA’s secret war in Laos and Southeast Asia and once boasted 8,000 employees.
CIA aviation front companies, which functioned as legitimate commercial businesses in addition to undertaking secret operations, brought in “at least” $658 million in outside income to the agency through 1975, according to a document fully declassified by the Trump administration in 2025.
After the Vietnam War, the CIA downsized, obscuring its aviation activities behind a tangle of modest, formally independent firms operating out of small airfields, particularly in the Sun Belt.
Aero Contractors was founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, the renowned chief special missions pilot for Air America, to carry out operations on the agency’s behalf, according to prior reports and books on the company’s activities. Those included CIA-sponsored counternarcotics missions in Colombia.
Most notably, in the 2000s, Aero Contractors was associated with the rendition of over four dozen terrorism detainees to so-called CIA “black sites” abroad or foreign custody. A web of dummy firms and contractors were linked to the transit of suspected terrorists across the globe.
A 2005 New York Times investigation into Aero Contractors called it “a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret air service.”
Rhyne died in an airplane crash in North Carolina in 2001.
A partially declassified 2007 CIA inspector general report into the botched rendition of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen abducted by the CIA in Macedonia in 2004, refers to an Aero Contractors-operated plane that transported Masri to a CIA black site in Afghanistan as “an Agency aircraft.” In 2007, a German court issued arrest warrants for three pilots tied to Aero Contractors, alongside 10 other suspected CIA personnel working under aliases, with kidnapping Masri, but later decided not to seek extradition of the suspects.
In recent decades, the FAA has collaborated with the CIA and other federal agencies to prevent certain aircraft from being easily tracked, according to the former FAA official who worked with the CIA to obscure flights.
This enhanced FAA-CIA relationship became more critical after the widespread advent of plane-tracking technology that allows users to trace the movement of aircraft in real time, according to the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“It’s near impossible to obfuscate these days,” said a former CIA official who interacted frequently with agency-affiliated aircraft conducting renditions in the 2000s and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Villages connection
Far from the remote waters of the Eastern Pacific and the U.S. militarized counter-drug campaign is The Villages retirement community in central Florida, nicknamed “Disneyland for seniors.”
The 57-square mile development of homes, golf courses and shopping centers is home to roughly 150,000 residents and has played an outsize role in Florida politics. Long known as a conservative bastion, the retirement community has provided a major reservoir of votes for Republican candidates statewide and in federal elections. The vision of developer H. Gary Morse and presided over by three generations of the Morse family, The Villages has grown into the largest senior-living estate in the country.
President Donald Trump visited The Villages during his first term in 2019, during his reelection campaign in 2020, and again in May 2026. In 2020, former CIA director and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited The Villages for what was reported as a private meeting with the Morse family.
Pompeo declined to comment for this report.
Members of the Morse family have given nearly $1 million to Republican candidates and party-affiliated entities since 2016, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Why the Morse family had a role in a company that acquired planes outfitted with spy gear is unclear, and the family did not respond to outreach from The Post to discuss.
Sunshine Aviation was incorporated in Delaware in 2017. But the company’s address in purchase agreements filed with the FAA is a property located along Lake Sumter Landing, one of the town squares constructed within The Villages. The property is owned by The Villages Operating Company, which until 2018 listed it as its address in state filings.
In 2019, Sunshine Aviation acquired the first of four Cessna Citation Longitudes from Textron, the manufacturer, according to FAA filings. The combined value of the aircraft, including the three later outfitted with elaborate surveillance technology, likely ran over $100 million, according to market estimates.
It is not clear whether Sunshine Aviation arranged for the three planes it acquired in 2022 to be equipped with gear that is unusual for a civilian aircraft.
In March 2023, Kelsea Morse Manly, then a senior executive at The Villages and daughter of Mark Morse, signed a document on behalf of Sunshine Aviation giving Joe Galloway, a certified mechanic at the Georgia-based aviation leasing firm RGB Enterprises, authority to act on the company’s behalf for any maintenance, inspections, and modifications to the three planes. More recent FAA documents obtained by The Post identify Galloway as director of maintenance for Triangle Aviation.
Under Galloway’s supervision, the three aircraft were equipped with additional capabilities, including several specialized antennas and an anti-jamming GPS system, according to FAA documents. Galloway’s name appears on applications for special certificates permitting experimental test flights of aerial survey equipment. Galloway declined to comment.
The documents signed by Morse Manly also gave authority over the planes to Cheryl Bercegeay, who was described as general manager of RGB. Bercegeay’s name appears in FAA registration documents for all four planes, including the first purchased by Sunshine in 2019. Bercegeay did not respond to requests for comment.
In mid-2023, Galloway received approval from the FAA to conduct experimental test flights with the plane that later was tracked to El Salvador, according to filings. Flight data shows the aircraft then flying loops at an Air Force training range in Idaho where a nearby National Guard unit specializes in simulating electronic warfare threats for pilot training exercises.
After Mark Morse signed off on the sale of the planes to the trust at the Bank of Utah in July of that year, Galloway continued to manage the aircraft, according to FAA filings. The use of trusts is a common arrangement in private aviation that can shield the identity of a plane’s owner.
After the sale, FAA documents reviewed by The Post show the aircrafts’ connections to Triangle Aviation deepening.
In September 2023, the bank, operating on behalf of the trust that owned the planes, extended authority to manage the three aircraft to an “Andy Spears.” Spears is identified in Federal Communications Commission filings as general manager of Jamestown Companies, based out of Raleigh Regional Airport in North Carolina. Spears signs his name as “David Andrew Spears” in FAA filings.
A LinkedIn page for a David Spears lists Aero Contractors as his employer, an association that is corroborated through The Post’s review of public records and other online evidence. A 2018 Facebook post from an aviation training company celebrates Spears having been awarded the title of master technician. It identifies him as an Aero Contractors employee and shows an image of a celebratory cake ascribed with his name.
Another individual associated with Triangle Aviation, Richard Litka, conducted inspections on two of the aircraft over the span of more than a year, according to FAA filings. Litka’s LinkedIn page describes him as director of maintenance for Aero Contractors and more recently Triangle Aviation, stretching back more than a decade.
Spears and Litka did not respond to requests for comment.
The planes eventually caught the eye of aviation enthusiasts, who tracked them regularly at Raleigh Regional Airport in North Carolina, as well as at more unusual locations.
One was photographed in late 2023 flying in Fiji, where the U.S. embassy said in a statement the jet had been contracted to transport regional leaders. More recently, it and another of the planes were tracked flying in Eastern Europe, including in countries bordering Russia and Ukraine. An open-source aircraft research group JANN noted that the planes’ ownership and capabilities were unusual, and later used flight data — including one overlapping squawk code — to suggest that one of these three jets was FENIX701.
In November 2025, FENIX701 began conducting maritime surveillance flights near the Galápagos Islands. Two days earlier, Spears had signed documents adding a fully adjustable military-grade seat to the aircraft interior.
Meanwhile this summer, Brian Hudson, the general counsel of The Villages, dissolved Sunshine Aviation Capital, according to corporate filings. Hudson declined to comment.
Last month, the plane that had flown in the Galápagos began appearing over Colombia, where the U.S. is engaged in extensive counternarcotics activities.
Clara Ence Morse and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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