An American pilot on a covert anti-Castro mission for the CIA vanishes in Latin America.

Geoffrey Sullivan

Missing: Gender: Male DOB: 1935 Height: 5’11” Weight: 180 lbs.

CASE DETAILS

On September 23 rd , 1963, in Waterbury, Connecticut, 28-year-old Geoffrey Sullivan, a former Air Force pilot, prepared to depart on a secret mission. Sherry Sullivan is his daughter:

“The way my mom relates it, my father was supposed to come back in five days. I don’t know if he was nervous, but he gave her his St. Christopher medal which he wore all the time. He explained to her that this would be his last trip. And not because he wasn’t coming back, but because he didn’t want to be involved in this type of operation anymore. He took off that morning, and that was the last time she ever saw him. He never came back.”

Four days later, Geoffrey disappeared somewhere over the Caribbean. Sherry was only seven years old when she lost her father. Years later, she became a private investigator. She said that one of her toughest cases has been uncovering the truth about her father’s disappearance:

“No one wanted to say he wasn’t coming back. As it rolled into the years, it was the kind of thing that just wasn’t talked about. No one knew what to say. None of us were ever allowed to go through a grieving process because as far as we were concerned, he wasn’t dead.”

Geoffrey had earned his Air Force wings in 1957. After receiving an honorable discharge in 1959, he became a freelance commercial pilot. At about that time, Fidel Castro’s revolution swept through Cuba. The communist threat was now only 90 miles from American shores.

Once Castro took power, the United States government and several Cuban exile groups launched campaigns to overthrow his regime. It was the shadowy world of these covert operations that may have cost Geoffrey his life.

In 1961, a suspected CIA operative named Alex Rorke hired Geoffrey as a pilot for secret missions against Cuba. Their covert actions ranged from distributing anti-Castro leaflets to dropping homemade bombs.

At the Bay of Pigs that same year, US-backed Cuban exiles failed in their attempt to invade the island and overthrow Castro. Eighteen months later, Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. For seven days, the world was on the brink of nuclear war. According to author William Turner:

“After the missile crisis, operations against Cuba were still carried on by the U.S. government. But they were trying to be more discreet about it. They did shed some of the more loose cannon operations, and I think Alex Rorke’s could have been classified as such.”

The U.S. government issued a public warning aimed to stop men like Alexander Rorke and Geoffrey Sullivan in their operations against Cuba. Eight days after the warning was issued, Geoffrey left Connecticut. The next day, he was seen in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with Alex Rorke. There, Geoffrey and Rorke met with two men. One of them was Frank Sturgis, who would become well-known for his role in the Watergate scandal years later. Sturgis, who had also been named in the public warning, described their meeting:

“Rorke told me he did buy a B-25 bomber and that he wanted to take the B-25 to Nicaragua. He wanted to sit down and talk with General Samosa in order to have a base of operations in Nicaragua for bombing missions inside of Cuba.”

Sturgis convinced Rorke to meet with Nicaraguan officials and clear the way. The four men rented an airplane and planned to leave for Nicaragua the following day. That morning, Rorke’s wife drove him to Opa-Locka Airport in Fort Lauderdale. On the way, they picked up another man. According to Geoffrey’s daughter, Sherry:

“Mrs. Rorke didn’t know who this gentleman was. He spoke broken English. But she drove the both of them to the airport where my father was, and dropped them off.”

The twin-engine plane took off from Ft. Lauderdale with Geoffrey, Rorke, and the mysterious stranger. Sturgis and his associate stayed behind. Geoffrey’s activities over the next 48 hours still cannot be fully explained. According to the FAA investigation, his flight activities were highly unusual. He returned to Ft. Lauderdale three times. For some reason, on his third trip to the airport, the plane’s landing gear remained up. After the control tower warned him not to land, Geoffrey did not attempt to return to Ft. Lauderdale again.

Geoffrey finally landed at North Perry Airport, a mere thirty miles away from Ft. Lauderdale. But he took a suspiciously long time getting there. What should have been a twenty-minute flight had taken nearly five hours. No one knows where the plane was during that time. After refueling, Geoffrey and his passengers took off again around 1:30 P.M. The flight plan listed Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as their final destination.

A little more than two hours later, Sullivan radioed the Tower at Miami International Airport. This time, he filed a new flight plan, with Tucuman, Panama, as his destination. Search party member Howard described the unusual radio calls:

“Sullivan attempted to file a flight plan for a destination that was some two hours beyond the normal range of his aircraft. When he was informed of this by the air traffic controller on duty, he then changed his destination. However, this destination was also well beyond the range of the aircraft he was flying.”

Seven more hours passed with no contact from the plane. Finally, at 10:22 P.M., Sullivan again radioed the Miami Tower. This time, he filed a flight plan for Belize, British Honduras. The FAA says that Sullivan refueled just after midnight in Cozumel, Mexico. This was the last sighting of the plane. Geoffrey and his companions were assumed lost at sea. Despite a massive search, no trace of the plane or its passengers was ever found.

More than two decades later, Sherry Sullivan and her attorney petitioned the government for information concerning her father. They have received over 5,000 pages of documentation from fourteen federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA.

More than a third of the 800 pages received from the FBI were censored. According to Sherry, information found in these documents indicates that at least 400 more pages exist, but were withheld for National Security reasons. For Sherry, it was the confirmation she was looking for.

In the FBI documents, Sherry found the name Floyde Park. When she finally reached him by phone, Park told Sherry that he had seen her father two days after he supposedly disappeared. But Sherry explained that she had a hard time getting any further information from him:

“Floyde Park had indicated that he had seen my father and Alex and the Spanish fellow in Belize. We have not been able to verify the identity of Floyde Park, who he is and what he was involved in during the sixties, how my father would have known him, why they would have stopped to see him. We weren’t really able to get those answers from him.”

Sherry only talked to Park once and has not been able to reach him since. But Park did say that her father and Rorke might have been taken prisoner in Cuba. According to Sherry:

“Fidel Castro, from what I’ve heard, had a bounty out on my father and Alex because he knew what they were involved in. He knew they were going in and out of his country. So it’s a very good possibility that they could have ended up in Cuba.”

In 1986, during her investigation, Sherry spoke with journalist Marty Casey. Marty said that he was in Cuba two years after her father disappeared:

“I was with two Cuban exiles from Miami, and they met a fellow that they knew from the area. He was working in the compound. He recognized my American accent even though I was speaking Spanish, and he asked me, “You know Rorky?’ And I said, “What, do you mean O’Rourke?'”

According to Marty, he asked the man if he was talking about the pilot:

“He said, ‘No, no, the other guy was the pilot, Sullivan.’ And I said, “Well, how do you know them?’ And he said, ‘I was in jail here with them two years ago.'”

Another name Sherry found in the FBI documents was Enrique Molina Garcia. Garcia was supposedly a double agent for Castro’s government. Sherry believes Garcia was the mysterious third man on the plane and that he tricked her father and Rorke into flying to Cuba. Unconfirmed reports have placed Garcia in Havana years after Sherry’s father disappeared.

Today, Sherry believes that her father was most likely jailed in Cuba and either died there or was executed. On the 40th anniversary of Geoffrey Sullivan’s disappearance, a commemorative grave marker was unveiled in the Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery in Augusta, Maine. The Veterans Administration is the first and only government agency to officially recognize Geoffrey as “missing in action.”

Sherry Sullivan has not given up hope that she will some day discover her father’s fate.

---

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season three with Robert Stack and in season six with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

SUBMIT A TIP