The Christian with Four Aces
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008[Quote:]
At one point Robertson told viewers he was buying a Lockheed L-1011 jumbo jet and planned to transform it into a “Flying Hospital” equipped with state-of-the-art surgical gear. He conducted a weeklong phone-a-thon to raise funds for refurbishing the huge plane. “Imagine a hospital plane that is also a flying ambassador for the gospel wherever it goes,” an announcer said. “The Operation Blessing hospital plane will be a beacon of hope soaring on wings of healing to those in need.” Robertson urged viewers to send in generous pledges. Premiums were offered for different levels of giving: a lapel pin for $100, a desktop model of the plane for $250, a bronze model for $1,000, a gold-plated one for $5,000.
Ultimately, Operation Blessing spent a staggering $25 million to buy and outfit the Flying Hospital, which was rolled out with considerable fanfare at Dulles International Airport in May 1996, complete with a keynote speech by former president George H. W. Bush. The plane, it turned out, was too large to reach the remote, medically underserviced areas where it was needed, and the cost of using it was largely prohibitive anyway. By 2001, it was sitting unused in the Arizona desert.
In the meantime, however, Robertson told viewers he had acquired some cargo planes and implied that they were being used to ferry doctors and medicine into Zaire’s teeming refugee camps. “We actually carved an airstrip,” he said at one point, showing his co-host some photos. “This is a 3,000-foot airstrip carved by hand in two weeks by natives with machetes and mattocks. They were so excited . . . The whole village came out, because they were so thrilled to have a little airport.”
What Robertson didn’t tell viewers was what I learned from two pilots who flew the planes: The airstrip was actually built so the planes could bring in equipment to dredge diamonds from a remote jungle riverbed for the African Development Company, a for-profit owned by Robertson and registered in Bermuda, where there is no corporate income tax and business regulations are lax. The three planes, two of which were registered to Operation Blessing, were used almost exclusively for a mine deep in the jungle, the pilots told me. Only one or two of more than forty flights were charitable. Chief pilot Robert Hinkle, a former Peace Corps volunteer, said he became so embarrassed by what he considered the duplicity of the operation that he had Operation Blessing’s name removed from the planes’ tail fins. His account was backed up by notes he kept during most of the flights. On one day that Robertson was a passenger, the notes read, “Prayed for diamonds.”
