George Pettie
George Pettie is the son of Marion Pettie, founder of The Finders, and a confirmed former employee of Air America, the CIA proprietary airline that operated in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. His Air America employment was acknowledged by his father in a 1993 interview.
George Pettie is the son of Marion Pettie, the founder and leader of The Finders, and a confirmed former employee of Air America, the CIA proprietary airline that operated in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. His employment at Air America was acknowledged by Marion Pettie himself in a 1993 interview with U.S. News & World Report.1
Air America Employment
Air America operated under CIA direction throughout the Vietnam War era, providing covert transportation and logistics support across Southeast Asia, and was documented in multiple journalistic and congressional investigations to have been involved in transporting opium and heroin from the Golden Triangle. George Pettie's employment at the airline placed a direct family connection between The Finders' leadership and one of the most operationally significant CIA proprietaries of the Cold War period.12
The specific dates, role, and posting of George Pettie's Air America employment have not been established in accessible primary sources. His father confirmed the employment in the context of investigators' questions about the family's intelligence connections, alongside confirmation of his wife Isabelle Pettie's CIA employment. Whether George Pettie maintained any contact with CIA-connected networks after Air America's dissolution in 1976 has not been established.1
Relationship with His Father
By 1985, George Pettie had broken contact with his father and the group. At the time of the February 1987 federal investigation, he was operating a home inspection business in Northern Virginia. In a 1987 press interview, he described the circa-1971 gatherings at his father's Glover Park house as "the beginning of a new life" for Marion Pettie and his followers, a characterization suggesting familiarity with the group's early formation but detachment from its later operations.3
He is not known to have given any further public statements on The Finders or on his Air America service. He does not appear as a subject of investigation in the 2019 FBI Vault document release beyond references to his employment as one of several CIA-adjacent connections in the Pettie family.4
Sources
- Witkin, Gordon, Peter Cary, and Angel Martinez. "Through a glass, very darkly: Cops, spies and a very odd investigation." U.S. News & World Report, December 27, 1993 / January 3, 1994. ↩
- Robbins, Christopher. Air America. Avon Books, 1979. Also: Corn, David. "The CIA's Illegal Airline." The Nation, June 8, 1987. ↩
- Fisher, Marc and John Mintz. "Finders Group Has Its Roots in Popular '60s Hippie Refuge." Washington Post, February 7, 1987. ↩
- FBI Vault, "The Finders," FOIA case number 1372462-0, vault.fbi.gov/the-finders (released November 2019). ↩
Local network
George Pettie's direct connections. Click any node to navigate, drag to pan, scroll (or pinch) to zoom. + 2‑hop expands the neighborhood one level further.