The Misadventures of el Patron

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr

"Costa Rica is like Tangiers or Casablanca. There are spies everywhere."

-- John Hull, rancher

The locals call him el Patron. A tough-talking, leathery native of Indiana, he came to Costa Rica in the early 1960s and carved out his own Central American Xanadu, 40 miles south of the Nicaraguan border. The 1,500-acre ranch where he raises cattle and grows oranges is the centerpiece of six properties he owns or manages. Once a week the modern-day feudal baron and his Costa Rican wife Margarita ride out on horseback to check on the 100 workers in their employ. El Patron also enjoys climbing into his blue-and-white Cessna and taking off from one of his half-a-dozen or more airstrips to survey his fiefdom from a God's-eye view.

But lately there has been trouble in John Hull's paradise. The threat of assassination has prompted the 66-year-old rancher to ship his two children to the U.S. Barricades have been installed along the perimeter of his main estate. The ranch-house roof has been reinforced to resist mortar attack; large mesh screens cover the windows to repel grenades. Until recently as many as five bodyguards, paid a total of $800 a month, watched over Hull and his wife. This protection, says Hull, was provided by his stateside patron: the CIA.

Hull, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Costa Rica, says the U.S. intelligence community once counted him among its most valuable assets along Nicaragua's southern border. When Congress was constraining the Reagan Administration from supporting the contras' war against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, Hull was a leader of the network that helped sustain the rebels' "southern front." His airstrips were used by planes that supplied U.S. weapons, food and clothes to the contras, his ranch house was the site of delicate negotiations among contra factions, and he was a conduit for money used to support rebel activities. Directly across the San Carlos River from Hull's ranch sits a powerful radio transmitter for the Voice of America, which broadcasts daily into Nicaragua. Though Hull claims he was never on the CIA's payroll, he admits he was an agency liaison, "providing information to my government."

The CIA support evaporated when the Iran-contra scandal broke last year, says Hull, and now el Patron is the target of major investigations and a controversial lawsuit in the U.S. "In the news media and absolutely nowhere else, I have been accused of being a CIA agent, a drug smuggler and an assassin," declared Hull in a statement he says he made last summer to the office of Iran-contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. "I can assure you that if the assassination charge were true, there are people walking the streets today that would have long since been six feet under."

The latest inquiry into Hull's activities began two weeks ago, when the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Affairs opened hearings in Washington to probe U.S. Government loans to Hull and examine charges that contra suppliers operating from Hull's ranches had been flying shipments of cocaine and marijuana into the U.S. Said Subcommittee Special Counsel Jack Blum: "We will continue hearings into the question of how the ((contras')) war was used as a cover for narcotics operations."

Hull admits the CIA warned him that certain contra leaders were involved in the drug trade but maintains he knew nothing about his land being used for narcotics trafficking. He angrily disputes allegations by Senate investigators that his motive for helping the contras was to make a profit. If the Sandinistas are not overthrown, he wrote in a position paper forWalsh that he provided to TIME, "Central America will be lost and North America will cease to be a world power and eventually fall under the yoke of Communism." To Hull, Senate Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry and his colleagues are Communist dupes. "When you castrate our own intelligence service," he says, "politicians such as Kerry are helping the KGB."

The congressional investigators expect their probe to tie up some of the loose connections of the Iran-contra affair. Hull greatly admired former National Security Council Aide Oliver North, the contras' aggressive champion. When North's associate Robert Owen appeared before Congress's Iran-contra committees last spring, he read a treacly ode to the Marine colonel penned by none other than John Hull. The contras gain sustenance, the poem read, from the "knowledge that on this troubled earth there still walk men like Ollie North . . . In our lifetime, you have given us the legend."

Both Owen and North, however, suspected that contra suppliers were dealing in narcotics. After a conversation with Owen on Aug. 9, 1985, North scribbled a message in the spiral notebook he used as a diary: "DC-6 which is being used for ((contra supply)) runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S."

Hull, never summoned to appear before the Iran-contra committees, says he did talk to Walsh's investigators under a grant of limited immunity. Hull told them that in 1984 and 1985 he received $10,000 a month from Contra Leader Adolfo Calero to finance rebel support activities. Though he insists he answered the independent counsel's questions honestly, Hull is concerned that Walsh might try to indict him for perjury.

Kerry's subcommittee is also looking into a $375,000 loan that Hull and a handful of partners received in 1983 from the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp., purportedly to revamp a sawmill. The owner of the mill, Rancher William Crone, testified that almost none of the $375,000 was used for its designated purpose. Embarrassed opic officials conceded that collateral for the loan was valueless and said they had asked the Justice Department for a fraud investigation. Senate probers suspect the money was used to finance some of the covert operations that North described during the Iran-contra hearings.

Crone, a U.S. citizen, testified that Costa Rican officials told him contra suppliers were running drugs, but the fearful witness refused to name names in public. In fact, Crone had pleaded to be allowed to give his testimony in private session. "I may be subject to some harassment from Mr. Hull in Costa Rica for the information I have given you," he explained. When asked outside the hearing room if he believed his life was in danger, Crone replied cryptically, "There have been those who have been killed or disappeared."

In Miami, Hull figures in a federal grand jury investigation of possible violations of criminal laws stemming from contra activities in Central America. The jury has heard testimony that he was involved in an abortive contra scheme to blow up the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica and pin it on the Sandinistas. The resulting furor, the plotters hoped, would force the U.S. to declare war on Nicaragua.

Hull is also a defendant in a civil lawsuit brought in Miami by the liberal Christic Institute, a Washington-based public-interest law group. The plaintiffs allege that Hull helped plan an assassination attempt on onetime Contra Leader Eden Pastora Gomez. As early as in 1983, Hull traveled to Washington to argue that Pastora should be replaced because he was a secret Communist sympathizer. On May 30, 1984, a bomb exploded at a Pastora press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, killing five and wounding 27 others, including Pastora. At the time of the bombing, Hull claims, he was meeting with Owen and the CIA's Costa Rica station chief in a San Jose hotel room. Hull contends that Pastora himself orchestrated the attack to generate anti- contra publicity.

Hull has even been implicated in a real estate con game in Costa Rica, and is being sued there for diverting money from ranches he was managing for absentee owners. At the recent congressional hearings, two North American investors accused Hull of pocketing their profits and taking over land and equipment they owned. "I happened to see a television interview with Hull on his ranch," Canadian Financier Douglas Siple indignantly told the Senators, "and realized that Mr. Hull was standing on my land."

Despite his travails, Hull has lost none of his cocky swagger. By his own account, he did not even bother to bring a lawyer along with him for his meeting with Walsh's investigators. When Robert Owen's high-priced attorney offered to represent him, Hull told the man, "On my ranch, I pay my workers 60 cents an hour. I guess I could afford to pay a big Washington lawyer as much as $10 an hour." Recalling the incident, el Patron grins: "He didn't ask me for my business again."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Ciudad Quesada