In the late 1990s, Ted Gunderson — retired FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles field office — sat down with Eugene “Chip” Tatum for what became a sprawling, multi-session recorded interview. Gunderson had already hosted Tatum on his radio program for over forty-six cumulative hours of conversation. The video interview covered here runs the full scope: Vietnam-era false flag operations, CIA narcotics logistics through Central America, operational sub-groups answering directly to the Vice President, and the specific tradecraft used to kill people without leaving a forensic trail.
Three elements of the interview warrant particular attention for Duke Report readers: the Pegasus operation structure, the two-part cardiac poison, and the use of burundanga (scopolamine) as an assassination tool. Each of these represents a distinct method within what Tatum describes as a layered architecture of covert neutralization — a system designed to make state-directed killing look like anything other than what it is. If you want to get the full flavor, watch the whole thing or read Tatum’s books.
The Making of a CIA Asset
Tatum’s entry into the intelligence world followed the pattern familiar to anyone who has studied the Agency's recruitment of the military’s special operations community. He joined the Air Force in the early 1970s under a “Project Guarantee” promise that he would serve as an air traffic controller — preferably in an air-conditioned tower hundreds of miles from the fighting. The Air Force sent him to Army jump school and Special Forces training instead. He became a combat controller, completed over a hundred jumps behind enemy lines, and participated in a classified mission designated Operation Red Rock.
Red Rock sent a thirteen-man joint task force — briefed personally by Alexander Haig and CIA station chief William Colby — into Phnom Penh airport, Cambodia. The team parachuted in disguised as North Vietnamese sappers, accompanied by actual North Vietnamese prisoners of war. Their orders: destroy Cambodian military assets on the airfield to provoke Premier Lon Nol into abandoning his neutral posture and joining the American offensive against the Chinese-led North Vietnamese armies.
The mission originated with Henry Kissinger. Nixon approved it with the stipulation, as Colby later relayed to Tatum during debriefing, that “no one can ever know” what the United States had done to an allied nation.
Nixon then ordered that none of the thirteen men return alive.
Colby — who would later become Director of Central Intelligence — told Tatum during a hospital debriefing at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines that he had deliberately designed the betrayal with enough slack for the team to overcome it. The Montagnard escorts tasked with killing the team after the mission had been given a solvable problem. The team’s commander and platoon sergeant had left contingency extraction plans with trusted personnel at their base. Three of the thirteen survived captivity, torture, and a firefight with their captors. A Marine Recon patrol stumbled onto the prison camp and extracted the survivors.
Colby presented Tatum with two options: work directly for the CIA, or remain in the military under CIA operational control. Tatum chose the latter. From 1971 until 1992, the CIA controlled his assignments, his movements, and his missions.
Pegasus: The Code Name and the Architecture
“Pegasus” was Tatum’s personal operational code name within the Agency. When he left government service in 1978 — on Colby’s advice that Haig, Kissinger, and Nixon remained active threats — and relocated to Colorado to start a family and a sandwich shop, the code name followed him.
In 1980, two men in suits walked into his shop. They said “Bulldog” — his Vietnam-era field name. Tatum did not respond. Then they said, “Pegasus.” He knew he was finished with civilian life.
The Agency reactivated him and sent him to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where a covert aviation unit — the 160th Aviation Company — operated under National Security Council control without appearing on any standard military table of organization. The unit tested classified flight platforms and techniques. Oliver North entered Tatum’s operational world during a post-crash investigation at this unit, accompanied by an unnamed associate the team dubbed “the Snake.”
North briefed Tatum on his Central American assignment: he would serve simultaneously as a U.S. Army medevac pilot, a U.S. Embassy military attaché (CIA cover), and a Pegasus operator under direct NSC control. The medevac mission provided humanitarian cover under the Boland Amendment’s restrictions on Contra support. Tatum flew medical helicopters into Contra camps in Honduras and Nicaragua. The coolers going in contained C-4 explosives and grenades. The coolers coming out — marked as medical supplies — contained bricks of cocaine.
Tatum field-tested the product at Palmerola Air Base in Honduras and confirmed cocaine on multiple occasions. He documented every flight on the reverse side of his official flight plans — cargo contents, personnel aboard, destinations, operational details — and a trusted Honduran official, the brother of the Honduran army chief of staff, secured the documents. Tatum retrieved certified copies of those notes in 1985. The documents named individuals, described narcotics shipments, and identified persons targeted for assassination — some of whom died after the documents were sealed.
On March 24, 1985, Tatum learned that the cocaine moved through Panama and then into three domestic distribution legs: Dayton, Ohio; Lamar, Colorado; and two airfields in Arkansas — Little Rock Air Force Base and Mena. William Barr — who would later serve as Attorney General — called Vice President Bush via satellite communications that day to report the loss of over $100 million in “enterprise” assets. Barr also called Oliver North and the governor of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton.
Tatum describes personally flying coolers marked “donor organs” from Fort Campbell to Little Rock Air Force Base, where a man introduced as “Dr. Lassiter” — later identified as Dan Lasater, who would be convicted of cocaine trafficking in Arkansas and pardoned by Governor Clinton — received the shipments. On one occasion, Tatum opened the coolers and found a large sum of cash and three kilos of cocaine in one, and all cocaine in the other. A man who arrived in a stretch limousine with an unmarked police escort introduced himself as the governor of Arkansas and thanked Tatum for delivering the “donor organs.”
The Operational Sub-Groups and Jupiter Island
After 1986, Tatum transferred into the operational sub-groups under the Terrorist Incident Working Group. These sub-groups comprised eight intelligence officers drawn from American, British, and Israeli (Mossad) services, with Danish, Turkish, and Australian intelligence participating on occasion. The sub-groups answered directly to the Vice President — later the President — through the NSC.
Meetings in 1989, 1990, and 1991 took place on Jupiter Island in southeast Florida, at the home of an affluent woman, typically following G7 conferences and summits. George Bush attended in person or by teleconference. William Colby attended. Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois — who oversaw the sub-groups’ financial operations, including the $250,000 line of credit Tatum could draw on his signature alone from a bank in upstate New York — attended.
The sub-groups were tasked with addressing governments that resisted aligning with the planning objectives discussed at these meetings. Tatum gives the example of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The sub-group demanded that Ortega announce free elections. Ortega refused. The sub-group sent an emissary back to inform Ortega that his associate, Rafael, would die within two weeks. On the predicted date, Rafael died — by rocket fire and ground personnel — inside a compound protected by a large military contingent. Within two weeks, Ortega announced free elections.
The Heart Attack Gun: A Two-Part Compound
Gunderson asked Tatum directly about CIA methods for inducing heart attacks. Tatum described a two-part poison system designed to defeat forensic toxicology.
Part one is administered broadly. Tatum gives the example of spiking a punch bowl at an embassy reception. Many people ingest the first compound. It enters muscle tissue and the heart. By itself, it produces no symptoms and no identifiable toxicological signature.
Part two must reach the specific target within approximately three weeks. When the second compound enters the bloodstream and encounters the first, the combination triggers cardiac arrest. The target’s heart fails — not as a simulated event, but as an actual physiological heart attack.
Each compound, examined independently in tissue or blood, registers as unremarkable. A coroner performing a standard autopsy finds a heart attack, because that is precisely what occurred. No poison appears in the toxicology report. The cause of death is recorded as cardiac arrest from natural causes.
Tatum stated that this method had been used operationally. He noted that his own attorney in Rochester, New York — who managed the $250,000 operational line of credit — died of a heart attack, though he added that the attorney had pre-existing health issues.
Burundanga: The Voodoo Drug
The interview also covers a parallel assassination methodology built on pharmacology rather than toxicology.
In the Contra cocaine processing camps, Tatum observed small green pods mixed in with coca leaves and bazuco paste. He later identified these pods as belonging to the nightshade family — specifically, the orange-blossoming trumpet plant (Brugmansia). The CIA extracted from this plant a concentrated form of scopolamine, far more potent than any commercial preparation. Operatives called it burundanga — the voodoo drug.
Tatum describes the operational application: a target receives the drug in a drink or food, via any available vector. Under its influence, the target enters a state of complete compliance. The target will follow any instruction: withdraw money from a bank account, sign documents, walk into a building, fire a weapon, or turn a weapon on himself. When the drug clears the system — typically over a period of days — the target retains no memory of anything that occurred during the drugged period.
Tatum identified this pharmacological profile as the signature of certain political assassinations. He cited the killing of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: the assassin initially confessed to the shooting, then, within days, claimed to have no memory of the act or of making any statement about it. Tatum called this pattern — confession followed by complete amnesia — the operational fingerprint of a burundanga assassination.
He stated that the CIA had used burundanga extensively, and that by the late 1990s, Colombian criminal organizations had acquired the compound and were deploying it for bank fraud and robbery at scale.
The Insurance Policy
Tatum survived by documenting everything. Over twenty-five years, he compiled an archive of certified flight plans with handwritten operational notes, audio recordings of meetings (captured through a briefcase he carried as chief of security, sweeping rooms for bugs while running his own), and video clips of planning sessions and order transmissions.
In September 1994, Oliver North and Felix Rodriguez called Tatum and demanded that he surrender the documents. When Tatum refused, Colby got on the line. Colby told Tatum they would destroy his credibility. Tatum agreed to plead guilty to a fabricated wire fraud charge — $70,000 of his own money moved between his corporate and personal accounts — in exchange for a promise that his wife, Nancy, would not be targeted. The government broke that promise. Tatum published the documents as The Tatum Chronicles and sent copies to the White House, members of Congress, and George H.W. Bush personally.
When the government charged him with treason for possessing the documents, Tatum called in the Secret Service agents who had delivered the threat and handed them copies of documents he had already distributed to the press and published.
The Secret Service agents told him, “You just signed your death warrant.”
Tatum’s response: “Kill me, boys. Let’s go.”
The treason charge evaporated. The federal judge who presided over the CIPA (Classified Information Procedures Act) hearing ruled that the material Tatum presented was neither classified nor related to national security — a ruling that, by operation of law, freed Tatum to discuss everything he had submitted to the court.
What the Architecture Tells Us
The three methods Tatum describes — the two-part cardiac compound, the burundanga compliance drug, and conventional kinetic assassination — represent a tiered system of plausible deniability.
The cardiac compound produces a death that requires no cover story. The coroner writes the cause of death. The forensic record confirms it. No investigation follows because there is nothing to investigate.
Burundanga produces an assassin who believes — and testifies — that he acted alone, of his own volition, for his own reasons. Because he has no memory of receiving instructions, no interrogation can extract what he does not possess. The forensic record shows a lone gunman. The investigative record confirms a motive. The case closes.
Conventional assassination — the rocket into the compound, the bullet to the head — reserves itself for situations where the message matters more than the deniability. Ortega needed to understand that the people making demands could reach anyone, anywhere, regardless of the level of protection.
Three tiers. Three levels of visibility. One architecture.
The Tatum Chronicles and Nixon’s Darkest Secret (the Operation Red Rock account) were self-published by Tatum after mainstream publishers declined to publish them due to liability concerns over named, living individuals. The CIPA hearing transcripts from the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida, remain available to the public.
The full interview transcript between Ted Gunderson and Chip Tatum is the source document for this article.
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